Foucault, Politics, and Violence 0810128020, 9780810128026

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F O U C A U LT, P O L I T I C S , A N D V I O L E N C E

F O U C A U L T, POLITICS, AND VIOLENCE

Johanna Oksala

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2012 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2012. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oksala, Johanna, 1966– Foucault, politics, and violence / Johanna Oksala. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8101-2802-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8101-2803-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984—Political and social views. 2. Political science—Philosophy. 3. Violence—Political aspects. 4. Political violence— Philosophy. I. Title. JA71.O37 2012 320.01—dc23 2011037650

o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Abbreviations for Works by Foucault

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Introduction

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The Politicization of Ontology

15

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Foundational Violence

36

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Dangerous Animals

51

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The Politics of Gendered Violence

66

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Political Life

80

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The Management of State Violence

103

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The Political Ontology of Neoliberalism

117

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Violence and Neoliberal Governmentality

134

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Terror and Political Spirituality

147

Notes

157

References

177

v

Acknowledgments

This book turned out to be a lot more difficult an endeavor than I imagined. The support and help I received was invaluable. Acknowledgments are due to the three institutions I was affiliated with while working on it: the New School for Social Research, the University of Dundee, and most recently, the University of Helsinki. I would like to thank my colleagues and students in the respective philosophy departments of these schools. I have also been a member of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. I am grateful to the members of the research team Politics of Philosophy and Gender for the many occasions to discuss my work. In particular I would like to thank Jay Bernstein, Simon Critchley, James Dodd, Rainer Forst, Simon Glendinning, Jane Goldman, Margret Grebowicz, Rachel Jones, Tuomas Nevanlinna, Denise Riley, Pilvi Toppinen, and Laura Werner. They have either read and commented on parts of the typescript, or discussed it with me in detail. Paul Mendelson, Joan Nordlund, and Julia Honkasalo have provided me with excellent editorial assistance. I also want to use this opportunity to thank the two anonymous readers for their exceptionally detailed and perceptive comments. Whoever you are, I really appreciate the time you took to engage with my project. The revised version of the typescript has benefited enormously from your reports. The Academy of Finland funded an eighteen-month period of the project, and a three-month sabbatical granted by the University of Dundee was crucial for its completion. Parts of this work draw on previously published articles: J. Oksala, “The Management of State Violence: Foucault’s Rethinking of Political Power as Governmentality,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28, no. 2 (2007): 53–66; J. Oksala, “Foucault’s Politicization of Ontology,” Continental Philosophy Review 43, no. 4 (2010): 445–66; J. Oksala, “Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity,” Foucault Studies, no. 10 (2010): 23–43; J. Oksala, “Lines of Fragility: A Foucauldian Critique of Violence,” in Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from This Widening Gyre, ed. Christopher Yates and Nathan Eckstrand

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(London: Continuum, 2011); J. Oksala, “Violence and Neoliberal Governmentality,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 18, no. 3 (September 2011), 474–86.

Abbreviations for Works by Foucault

Books and Articles in English AK

The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

BB

The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

DP

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991.

EWF1

Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: The New Press, 1997.

EWF2

Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: The New Press, 1998.

EWF3

Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others. New York: The New Press, 2000.

FE

The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

FIR

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, ed. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

FL

Foucault Live, Interviews 1961–1984, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston. New York: Semiotex(t), 1989, pp. 95–104.

“FM”

“Foucault, Michel, 1926–,” in Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 314–19.

FR

The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. J. Harari. London: Penguin, 1984.

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x AB B R EV I AT I ONS

FOR

WO RK S

BY

FO UCAULT

HS1

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1978.

OT

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 1989.

P/K

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester, 1980.

PPC

Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan and others. New York: Routledge, 1988.

PT

The Politics of Truth, Michel Foucault, ed. S. Lotringer and L. Hochroth, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997.

RC

Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault, ed. Jeremy R. Carrete. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

SMD

Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, English series ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. David Macey. London: Penguin, 2003.

“SP”

“The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1982, pp. 208–26.

STP

Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

UP

The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990.

Books in French DE1

Dits et écrit I, 1954–1975, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.

DE2

Dits et écrit II, 1976–1988, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.

HSf

Histoire de la sexualité, 1: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.

IFDS

Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France (1975–1976). Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997.

NB

Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France 1978–1979. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004.

STPf

Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France 1977–1978. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004.

F O U C A U LT, P O L I T I C S , A N D V I O L E N C E

Introduction

Multiculturalism and terrorism are arguably the most hotly debated political issues today, provoking misunderstanding, fear, and anxiety across a wide spectrum of society. The Enlightenment has not delivered its promise of a universal and rational political order. Instead it has irrevocably placed us in an agonistic society where groups with conflicting understandings of the world and the good life struggle for power, sometimes with violent means. The aim of this book is to study the philosophical issues underlying the debate on multiculturalism and terrorism—agonism and political violence. It is my contention that what must be at stake in the philosophical attempts to respond to the current political situation is our ontological understanding of the nature of politics. The question is not idle armchair metaphysics. It is crucial in order to open up a space for political critiques of violence. The attempt to expose the ontological commitments underlying the tradition of Western political thought is a journey into the heart of darkness. Similar to the revelation of Joseph Conrad’s most famous protagonist, the irreducible violence of “forgotten and brutal instincts” traverses our political imagination. It is the problem of violence that political order is, in different forms according to different thinkers, understood to address. Whether this means forming a social contract in order to move from the state of primordial war to an ordered society, or accepting violence as the irreducible essence of the political, the problem remains the Archimedean point of political thought. Thinkers from Plato to Hobbes, Machiavelli, Sorel, Clausewitz, and Schmitt have built their understanding of the political on the recognition of the irreducibility of violence in human affairs. More recently scholars such as Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Žižek have emphasized the ineliminability of violence from the political domain.1 The study at hand poses once more the fundamental question about the relationship between violence and the political. It is my contention that the post-humanist forms of thought characterizing our time give this question a renewed urgency, as well as making new responses theoretically possible. My aim is to show that the connection between violence and the political is not internal or essential, but contingent: violence is not an ineliminable part of politics. This requires, first, bracket3

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ing all beliefs about human nature—both positive and negative. Second, it entails understanding, analyzing, and partly reconceiving the meaning of violence and of the political. I show that arguments for the ineliminability of violence from the political are often based on excessively broad, ontological conceptions of violence that are distinct from its concrete and historically specific meaning. Violence is treated as an extremely wide-ranging term that covers everything from the use of physical force to damage bodies to the forms of semantic exclusion involved in issuing a meaningful sentence. It is my contention that such width serves an uncritical ontologization of violence: violence comes to be understood as ineliminable and as an essential aspect of politics. On the other hand, the arguments often rely on a restrictively narrow and empirical understanding of the political as the realm of the state and its political institutions. While contesting all essentialist claims about violent human nature and sociality, my inquiry nevertheless defends an agonistic conception of politics. In arguing against the ineliminable violence of politics I am thus not claiming that it is a harmonious realm of rational consensus. The inquiry has therefore important consequences for the current debate between agonistic and deliberative accounts of politics. Agonism is generally understood as a conception of politics that places contestation at the heart of politics, while deliberative theories of such thinkers as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas emphasize the search for consensus. The ontological presuppositions underlying the debate are often unclear, however, and this has led to serious misunderstanding of the central issues at stake. My focus will be on the agonistic political theories. I will show that they rely on differing ontological commitments regarding the conditions of possibility for agonism. While they reveal the essentially conflictual character of politics, they often build upon a problematic ontology of violence. While I am sympathetic to the reasons why such ontologizing claims about violence are made—they are typically made to unmask the pretensions of liberal political theory to have eliminated conflict from politics—it is my contention that they confuse conflict and power with violence. My claim is that the agonism intrinsic to the political is derived not from the aggression and hostility of human nature, but from the inevitably exclusionary and power-laden nature of the constitution of reality. In other words, we live in an agonistic society because the social sphere is a hegemonic field of contestable interpretations and values, and not because it is made up of violent individuals. My study outlines an agonistic conception of the political based on a post-structuralist denial of all essentialist political ontologies. There is a troubled and contentious relationship between ontology

5 I N T R O D UCT I O N

and politics in current philosophical discussions. While some political theorists see a broad ontological turn taking place in political philosophy, other prominent thinkers have recently argued for the strict separation of political and ontological categories.2 It is my contention that for the theoretical rethinking of politics to amount to an effective response to practical political problems, it cannot avoid ontological investigation. More specifically, my thesis is that ontological inquiry is essential for countering and exposing forms of political violence. In order to see what the philosophical issues in this debate are, it is important to be clear about what is meant by ontology, and political ontology in particular.3 In defending the importance of political ontology I am not advocating an inquiry into the fixed essence or specific nature of politics. Instead, I am putting forward a politicized conception of reality. My aim is to problematize the relationship between ontology and politics by showing that reality, as we know it, is the result of a political struggle over truth and objectivity. This allows me to conceptualize the political as an ontological domain without essentializing it. I follow Michel Foucault’s lead in sketching an ontology of the present in the sense that my aim is not to question what human beings and politics really are, but to find out how we have come to think about what they are.4 It is also important to emphasize that the word “ontology” has two distinct meanings: it commonly refers both to the fundamental building blocks of reality and to the systematic study of them.5 I will show that the first sense must be understood in the context of Foucault’s thought to comprise a diverse set of competing background beliefs about reality that are always politically and socio-historically bound. These ontological grids organize and establish what counts as true in first-order, empirical discourses about reality. The second sense of ontology refers to the self-reflective, theoretical activity of exposing these normally takenfor-granted background beliefs and of critically questioning their constitution.6 I will argue that politics should be recognized as the activity that mediates between these two different senses of ontology. Ontology as the taken-for-granted background is political in the sense that it is always an outcome of political struggle. Ontology as the self-reflective and critical investigation of our present, on the other hand, is political in the sense that it is the means of revealing the forgotten political institution of reality—or at least aspects of it—and of thereby explicitly politicizing aspects of our reality. Hence, everything is a candidate for politicization, but not everything is, or can be, politicized at once. My approach to political ontology thus differs significantly from that of such influential thinkers as Stephen White, who also emphasizes

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the importance of ontology for politics. For White, ontology concerns the fundamental conceptualizations of self, other, and world that must “prefigure practical insight or judgment” (White 2000, 11). While the “weak ontology” that White advocates cannot simply be translated into politics or provide a secure foundation for political practice, he nevertheless regards ontology as being prior to politics. My claim is that, on the contrary, ontology itself is the outcome of political practice: it is politics that has forgotten itself. In making the further ontological move of severing the essential connection between physical violence and politics I suggest that Foucault can help us, too. His account of productive power grounds an agonistic conception of politics that does not build upon an ontology of violence. He suggested that when it came to thinking about power, one had to be a nominalist: power is not a substance, but a name for a complex network of practices. I suggest that we try to think of political violence in similar terms, as historically constituted practices with context-dependent rationalities, ends, and means. The central aim of his thought was to question the ontological necessity of many of the phenomena that we take for granted, and to “historicize to the utmost” (FL 99). A Foucaultian approach to violence would thus question the ontological necessity of it— all views advocating that it is either an anthropological constant or an essential feature of human nature, human sociality, or the political, for example. Violence cannot be thought of in such terms in his framework, but must always be analyzed as contingent, historically specific practices. We must not simply accept its eternal existence, but should attempt to understand its meaning and specific forms in the particular historical and cultural contexts that produce and sustain it. My analysis is Foucaultian not only in terms of its approach, but also in terms of the textual material that I appropriate in my attempt to elucidate the relationship between violence and the political. I rely on a detailed explication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, focusing in particular on those from 1975 to 1979: Society Must Be Defended (1975–76), Security, Territory, Population (1977–78), and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79). These three lecture series represent Foucault’s most explicit engagement with the questions of political violence and power. I show that their recent publication provides original conceptual tools for understanding the political, as well as for opening up new possibilities for rethinking its relationship to violence. While ontology is often understood as idle armchair philosophy par excellence, my aim is to defend its importance mainly for practical and political reasons. Western democracies have recently allowed or actively participated in systematic torture, secret detention centers,

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and extraordinary rendition. By inquiring into the causes of agonism and into the relationship between violence and the political I aim to respond to current political challenges by opening up a theoretical space for political critiques of violence. I want to create a theoretical opening that will function as a call for a collective search for nonviolent ways of governing our conduct. A key question for such critiques must be whether the relationship between violence and the political is internal and therefore necessary and ineliminable, or whether it is external, contingent, and dissolvable. The answer to this question is determinate for any further critique and action against current forms of political violence. For a critique of violence to make robust sense rather than merely to amount to wishful thinking, it must establish as a preliminary move that political violence is not necessary. Conversely, the acceptance of an ineliminable ontological link between violence and the political would mark the end of all radical critiques of violence. The only valid questions left for us to ask about violence would concern the possible ways in which to channel it, the conditions for its legitimacy, and its acceptable forms and extent. While a critique of violence would seem to be more imperative than ever in today’s world, it is easy to succumb to the utter hopelessness of such a task. The weight of historical evidence suggests that conducting such a critique at the beginning of the twenty-first century could only be an utterly foolish and naive project, undertaken by someone who is ignorant of the violent facts of history as well as of the brilliant but failed attempts to alter them. The murders of great twentieth-century figures such as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi seem to mark the tragic end of the critiques of violence that were conducted within the humanist tradition of thought. These pacifist thinkers not only grounded their hopes for a nonviolent world on the benevolence of a Higher Power, they also appealed to the inherent goodness of human nature.7 This same faith in the goodness of human nature also underlay many of the twentieth-century anarchist critiques of violence. The belief in the natural goodness of man was tied to the radical denial of state and government.8 It is this humanist optimism that many find difficult to hold on to today. The death of man also seems to have to have marked the end of hope for nonviolence. I suggest that we inquire into the possibility of a Foucaultian, posthumanist critique of violence that suspends all assumptions concerning human nature. I adopt his methodological principle of systematically questioning all anthropological universals with regard to political violence: all views advocating that man is by nature evil or good, dangerous or violent.

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First (methodological choice) is a systematic skepticism with respect to all anthropological universals—which does not mean that they are rejected from the outset, only that nothing along those lines must be allowed if it is not rigorously indispensable. In the realm of our knowledge, everything presented to us as having universal validity, insofar as human nature or the categories that can be applied to the subject are concerned, has to be tested and analyzed . . . The first methodological rule . . . is thus the following: to circumvent anthropological universals to the greatest extent possible, so as to interrogate them in their historical constitution. (“FM” 317)9

While a Foucaultian critique thus suspends all assumptions about human nature, it would obviously still have to rely on the normative ideal of nonviolence. This ideal does not have to derive from any natural or pre-given order of things, however. Indeed, it could be argued that it already forms part of the historically and politically constituted idea of a civil society characterizing modernity. John Keane (2004, 75), for example, argues that the striving for civil society as opposed to uncivil society—a type of social order torn apart by extreme forms of violence—has become encoded within our historical tradition to the extent that we mostly take it for granted. He suggests that the mosaic of overlapping and often contradictory tendencies that we loosely call modernity includes not only unprecedented forms of violence, but also imaginative attempts to invent and deploy new nonviolent methods of checking and regulating the institutions promoting it. My project relies on such an unquestioned belief that violence is prima facie objectionable, and my aim is not to put forward philosophical arguments that would attempt to conclusively prove the political or ethical value of nonviolence. It is my contention that such an undertaking would be impossible not only in Foucault’s framework, but in any philosophical framework. The violation—sometimes even annihilation—of bodily integrity and personal autonomy that physical damage and pain causes is generally held to be objectionable beyond philosophical argumentation. What is contested in the philosophical and political debates revolving around questions of violence is, therefore, not usually the normative level of justification, but the analytical level of diagnosis: what counts as violence and whether or not it is unavoidable in certain situations. While one of the central aims of my book is to show that our conception of reality is produced through political struggle and is thus always contingent and contestable, this argument implies that the definition of violence itself is also both an outcome as well as a weapon in this struggle. I therefore adopt as my starting point a very narrow definition

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of violence as intentional bodily harm that reflects the sense in which violence is generally held to be categorically objectionable. This definition does not incorporate even the physical destruction of non-living beings, for example, but leaves open the debate about their significance. Classifying acts of sabotage or vandalism—burning police cars, squatting empty buildings, or looting—as forms of violence often functions as a way foreclosing any debate about their political meaning or justification. Neither does my narrow definition incorporate forms of power. Our instinctive objections to political violence are often related to its intimate links to power and therefore to its role in the production and maintenance of inequality. Instead of taking such links for granted and attempting to argue that they make political violence intrinsically objectionable, my aim is to try to analyze and expose the specific connections between political violence and power in different historical contexts. A Foucaultian critique of violence should thus not be restricted to specific practices only for the purpose of denouncing them. Neither is the task simply to expose forms of violence: it is rather to uncover their implicit, or sometimes explicit, rationality. This means understanding violence not as purely instrumental, but as having a rationality that is always historically and culturally specific. Political theorists such as Hannah Arendt (1970) have argued against any necessary connection between violence and politics by emphasizing the purely instrumental nature of violence: violence can only be the means of politics while being devoid of any intrinsic meaning of its own. I contend that we cannot understand the relationship between a type of governmental rationality and political violence as purely instrumental and external. Rather than understanding political violence uniformly as an instrumental means of consolidating various forms of power—whether male domination, the penal system, or the hegemony of neoliberalism—I argue that we have to understand the specific and distinct rationality that practices of violence attain in different power networks in order to effectively criticize them. It is precisely the meaning and rationality of violence that are the crucial site for its political contestation. One of Foucault’s important contributions to political thought was to show that there is no incompatibility between violence and rationality. What is most dangerous about violence is its rationality. Violence itself is certainly terrible. Yet violence finds its deepest anchor and draws its permanence from the very form of rationality that we employ. Some have claimed that, if we lived in a world of reason, we would be able to rid ourselves of violence. This is totally false. Violence and rationality

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are not incompatible. My problem is not to put reason on trial, but to determine the nature of such a rationality that is compatible with violence. (DE2 803)10

His thought can therefore help us to critically analyze the forms of violence that have accompanied the triumph of modern governmental rationality. Exposing the rationality that produces and sustains various forms of political violence means subjecting it to political debate. It also makes it possible to imagine concrete alternatives and to instigate change. While his thought effectively questions the acceptance of irreducible physical violence as an ontological constant, it attempts to analyze and expose its historically and empirically specific forms. My overall argument in this book has thus two interlinked objectives. The first is to inquire into the nature of the political in order to show that its connections to physical violence are historical and contingent. This initial move whereby violence is rendered contingent leads the way to its critique. My second aim is to critically expose and analyze specific forms of violence and the political rationalities to which they are attached. I will show that such an approach allows us to better understand the distinctive forms of violence that characterize our political landscape: the violence of twentieth-century totalitarianism, gendered violence and its relationship to male domination, the relationship between state violence and the law in the post-2001 world, the connections between neoliberalism, violence, and violent resistance, and the significance of terrorism for our contemporary understanding of the political. I do not intend to engage in political criticism of any specific instances of violence, however. Instead, I argue for the importance of a philosophical analysis of governmental power technologies and their rationality for such a critique. I am thus only attempting to prepare some of the groundwork for more specific critiques. Their final shape remains one of the greatest political challenges of our time. The first chapter, “The Politicization of Ontology,” explicates a politicized conception of reality. I contend that Foucault’s idea of productive power incorporates a radical, ontological claim about the nature of reality: reality as we know it is the result of social practices and struggles over truth and objectivity. His genealogies of power problematize the relationship between ontology and politics. Rather than translating the true ontology into the right politics, he reverses the argument. The radicality of his method lies in showing how the ontological order of things is in itself the outcome of a political struggle: ontology is politics that has forgotten itself. This politicized conception of reality provides the agonistic ontological framework that allows me to make more specific claims about politics and political violence in the chapters that follow.

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Chapter 2, “Foundational Violence,” distinguishes two distinct forms and meanings of violence: the first is the ontological violence of language—the idea that language by necessity imposes a partial order—and the second is physical violence. I argue that these two meanings should not be conflated even when we argue that they are interconnected. I refer to Foucault’s lecture course Society Must Be Defended (1975–76) in order to show how, alongside the political tradition that links the persistence of political violence to the hostile and aggressive nature of man, runs another strand that also insists on a strong connection between politics and violence. This connection is historical rather than natural, however, and is crucially tied to the birth of the state. Foucault’s lectures represent an important break with the Hobbesian legacy in political thought: they expose the violent origins of states, which are covered over by theories of timeless war and legitimate contract. The real wars of conquest are transferred into a fictional state of war. I show how Foucault’s engagement with Hobbes has important implications for the efforts to historicize political violence and to envisage agonistic conceptions of politics uncoupled from it. In chapter 3, “Dangerous Animals,” I focus on Chantal Mouffe’s thought in order to critically examine some of the ontological commitments of agonistic political theories. The argument is that Mouffe’s agonistic theory is based on two contradictory ontological frameworks. It is grounded both on an anti-essentialist political ontology derived from post-structuralism and on a vaguely formulated essentialist ontological presupposition about the irreducible role of violence in human affairs. The latter is based upon two influential accounts of violence: Réne Girard’s work on generative violence and Carl Schmitt’s theory of the political. Mouffe, like Girard and Schmitt, continues a Hobbesian legacy that sees containment of the violent capacities of others as the ultimate purpose of political order. By exposing this legacy I aim to argue for a consistently anti-essentialist approach to the political that refuses to accept violence as an irreducible and universal given. A politicized ontology and the struggle over meaning that it implies, and not any essentialist ontology of violence, should underline the agonistic conceptions of politics. Chapter 4, “The Politics of Gendered Violence,” studies the relationships between power, violence, and the subject through a discussion of violence against women. It is my contention that a Foucaultian approach to gendered violence accomplishes two things: it refuses to explain men’s violence against women in terms of inherent male aggression, yet it makes it possible to argue that it is not just incidental, but has structural and large-scale political aspects. The analysis will not only help us to understand gendered violence, it will also advance the overall argument of the

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book by illuminating the mechanisms through which practices of power and violence become entangled. Foucault drew a distinction between power and violence, but argued that the rationalities upholding practices of domination were often compatible with practices of violence. Culturally and historically contingent practices of violence must furthermore be understood as constitutive of specific forms of the subject. My second aim in this chapter is to problematize the possibility of providing any ahistorical or context-free definitions of violence. The example of domestic violence demonstrates that the very question of what is defined as and what counts as violence are central issues in politics. Chapter 5, “Political Life,” studies the relationship between political violence and biological life in the thought of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Foucault. I follow Foucault in arguing that understanding political violence in modernity means rethinking the ontological boundary between biological and political life that has fundamentally ordered the Western tradition of political thought. I show that while Arendt, Agamben, and Foucault all see the merging of the categories of life and politics as the key problem of modernity, they understand this problem in crucially different terms and suggest different solutions to it. This results in different understandings of the relationship between violence and the political. My contention is that the horrendous violence of modern biopolitical societies is not due to originary and hidden de jure ties between sovereign power and biopower, as Agamben claims. Sovereign states have de facto used biopolitical methods of violence, but this violence is not an originary or necessary aspect of political power. In order to criticize the forms of violence specific to modern biopolitical societies we must expose the points of tension, as well as of overlap, between two types of power—biopower and sovereign power. Understanding their distinctive rationalities is crucial for developing effective strategies against current forms of political violence. Chapter 6, “The Management of State Violence,” evaluates Foucault’s rethinking of political power in connection with the question of state violence. The focus is on his lectures Security, Territory, Population (1977–78). I argue that he significantly reassessed his understanding of power in these lectures on governmentality. The idea of governmentality complements and extends the central insights of disciplinary power to the realm of the state. I appropriate the idea of governmentality in the context of state violence, and analyze some examples of it in the recent political reality. I discuss the detainee camp at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the interrogation of Palestinian detainees during the First Intifada, in order to show how the governmentalization of state violence

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has resulted in forms of violence that can be characterized not as strictly illegal, but as extralegal. They are politically sanctioned, but not through elections or the usual rule of law. Instead, they are grounded on effective policy, professional management, and expert knowledge, and they are legitimized by the deployment of the law as a tactic. Chapter 7, “The Political Ontology of Neoliberalism,” argues that neoliberalism should not be understood only as an economic doctrine, but that its key ideas have migrated from economic theory to our social imaginary and political ontology: it must be understood as a comprehensive framework for understanding ourselves and the social reality we live in. I contend that Foucault’s thought, and his lectures on neoliberal governmentality in particular, The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79), provide a valuable and original set of tools for a philosophical analysis of neoliberalism. Despite its name, the lecture series deals almost exclusively with liberal and neoliberal forms of governmentality. It forms an integral part of Foucault’s critical ontology of the present that attempts to understand the historically specific ways in which power relations intersect with the production of truth and subjectivity. My analysis proceeds in three stages following the three axes of knowledge, power, and subjectivity that Foucault saw as central for any ontological inquiry into our present. I argue that neoliberalism is grounded on a specific regime of truth; it has effectively appropriated the rationality of biopower; and it has produced a new form of subjectivity. This ontological analysis of neoliberalism forms a necessary background for the explicit study of the relationship between neoliberalism and political violence undertaken in chapter 8. Chapter 8, “Violence and Neoliberal Governmentality,” poses the question of the relationship between neoliberalism and political violence. I argue, with the help of Foucault’s understanding of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, that if we are to understand its distinctive relationship with political violence we must not see the relationship as purely external. If we treat political violence solely as an instrumental means of consolidating power, we fail to understand the historically specific developments that neoliberal governmental rationality has introduced into practices of violence. It is my contention that what is distinctive, and most dangerous, about neoliberalism’s relationship with political violence is not its permanent need for instrumental coercion, but the fact that it effectively depoliticizes such violence by turning it into an essentially economic issue: it is removed from a moral and political framework and viewed as a more or a less costly or profitable means to an end. Chapter 9, “Terror and Political Spirituality,” engages in a rethinking of the relationship between violence and the political in response

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to forms of terror. While terrorism forces us to critically reevaluate our current conception of the political, the implication should not be a strengthening of the boundary between terror and political violence proper. Instead, we should try to imagine different responses to terror. I discuss Benjamin’s idea of divine violence and Foucault’s notion of political spirituality as pointing us toward such an alternative. My focus is on Foucault’s controversial writings on the Iranian Revolution. These texts have not received the critical attention they deserve, but have either been passed over in embarrassed silence or labeled as infantile leftism. I make the seemingly strange claim that they should not be read as an intervention on the political future of Iran, but as an intervention on the political future of Europe. I argue that these texts suggest an understanding of the political according to which political spirituality and not political violence would form its irreducible condition. Attempts to defend nonviolent politics are too often simply dismissed outright as naive. While the implicit value of nonviolence obviously underlies this book, I hope to show that it does not translate into naive and dogmatic pacifism: it rather implies a sustained effort to question the inevitability of violence and to criticize its current forms. It calls for patient labor: philosophical analysis, political imagination, and activism that are conducive to a profound but not impossible change in our culture and conduct. Even if we did ultimately have to accept the permanent possibility of violence as something that is inherent in our bodily vulnerability, we are still left with the choice of working against its actuality.11 It is this choice that opens up the realm of the political: an enormous space for political imagination and action. We should accept violence as our predicament only to the extent that it commits us to the relentless exploration of this imaginative space, in philosophical thought and political action.

1

The Politicization of Ontology

I begin by making two claims about political ontology that at the outset seem to contradict each other. First, I argue for the importance of ontological inquiry in political philosophy. Many prominent thinkers agree that current political events indicate that we urgently need new ways of thinking about politics, but they sometimes argue for the strict separation of the political and the ontological. Simon Critchley, for example, argues in his seminal book Infinitely Demanding (2007) that if we are doing politics we should not pin our hopes on any ontology, because politics is a disruption of the ontological domain and separate categories are required for its analysis and practice. My claim is that, on the contrary, for the theoretical rethinking of politics to amount to an effective response to practical political problems it cannot avoid ontological investigation. Politics cannot shun ontology because ultimately the two cannot be separated. My second aim is to argue against any essential definition of “the political” that attempts to defend its autonomy and specificity vis-à-vis other social domains. The importance of ontological inquiry in political philosophy is often established through an emphasis on the distinction between “politics” and “the political”: political science deals with the empirical field of “politics,” whereas political philosophy is not about the facts of politics, it is about the nature of “the political.”1 Chantal Mouffe (2005, 8–9), for example, explicates the distinction by borrowing the vocabulary of Heidegger: “politics” refers to the ontic level and deals with the manifold practices of conventional politics, while “the political” has to do with the ontological level and concerns the very way in which society is instituted. Mouffe argues that it is the lack of understanding of “the political” in its ontological dimension that lies at the heart of our current incapacity to think politically.2 While the distinction between “politics” and “the political” has become commonplace, efforts to define what constitutes “the political” in its ontological dimension have repeatedly run into difficulties. Whether we think of Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political as always referring to the friend/enemy distinction, or of Hannah Arendt’s contested distinction between the social and the political, the problem with defining the political as a distinct and autonomous ontological domain is that it 15

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places certain questions, issues, and experiences outside of politics.3 To put the problem in more provocative terms, purely ontological investigation turns out to be a political act itself, establishing the boundaries of the realm of proper politics. In emphasizing the importance of ontological inquiry in political philosophy I am thus not advocating inquiry into the fixed essence of politics. Neither am I advocating any form of regional ontology, inquiry into the region of reality understood as political. Such an inquiry would be not only politically but also theoretically problematic. Distinguishing some realm of reality as “political,” and then attempting to clarify the ontology pertaining to it, would imply that a prior ontological distinction between what belongs to the political domain and what does not has already been made and is securely in place. What I am advocating is an ontological inquiry into the way in which reality is instituted that reveals this institution as a political process. My claim is that political philosophy does not need ontological inquiry in order to define and circumscribe a distinct region of reality as the political domain. There is a more fundamental need to understand how all ontology—our understanding of reality—is achieved in social practices and networks of power rather than being simply given. This ontological inquiry inadvertently results in an implicit understanding of the political: it is not a distinct domain of social reality, but its precondition. It concerns the contestation and struggle over the institution and disclosure of reality. Hence, what I mean by political ontology is a politicized conception of reality. My aim is to problematize the relationship between ontology and politics by putting forward such a conception with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project. I argue that Foucault’s famous slogan “power is everywhere” means no more and no less than that the extension of the political cannot be securely limited. His thought amounts to an effort to politicize regions of reality that have been depoliticized, and this is his most important contribution to philosophy as well as to politics. I argue that Foucault’s thought accomplishes the politicization of ontology with two key theoretical moves. The first is the contestation and provocation of all given and necessary ontological foundations. Foucault affirms the ontological view that there is a discontinuity between reality and all ontological schemas that order it, and a subsequent indeterminacy of reason in establishing ultimate truths or foundations. After this initial step whereby ontology is denaturalized—made arbitrary or at least historically contingent—the way is open for explanations that treat the alternative and competing ontological frameworks as resulting from historical, linguistic, and social practices of power. The second key

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move is thus the exposure of power relations and their constitutive role in our conception of reality. The important philosophical idea behind Foucault’s hybrid notion of power/knowledge is that social practices always incorporate power relations, which become constitutive of forms of the subject as well as domains and objects of knowledge. They are not subjects and objects existing in the world as pre-given constants, but are rather constituted through practices of power. This is a radical, ontological claim about the nature of reality: reality as we know it is the result of social practices always incorporating power relations, but also of concrete struggles over truth and objectivity in social space. The effect is the profound exposure and a critical rethinking of ontological commitments and background beliefs concerning social reality.

The End of Metaphysics Foucault is commonly read as a “postmodern” thinker who reiterated the mantra of the end of metaphysics. It is claimed that he firmly resisted all attempts to think about anything resembling ontology.4 When the word “ontology” is used as nothing more than a convenient label for a mistaken and parochial search for timeless essences or substances, it is hardly worth debating whether Foucault ridiculed such a task. An important strand going through the whole of his thought is his continuous emphasis on the contingency of the present as opposed to the search for any ahistorical necessities or essences. His intellectual project is characterized by systematic skepticism with respect to all anthropological universals, and by an incessant attempt to consider how that which is could be otherwise. He stated provocatively: “Nothing is fundamental. That is what is interesting in the analysis of society” (EWF3 356). Recognition of the ontological contingency of the present is in no way original, nor is it specific to Foucault’s thought, however. Its intellectual forerunners can be traced to at least three significant developments in nineteenth-century German thought—the Marxian, the Nietzschean, and the historicist. Nor does the idea that the social order exists only as a contingent product of human activity in itself mark the end of metaphysics. It is rather intrinsic to the metaphysical worldview with which we are lumbered by virtue of being modern: most of us believe that our social and political order is the outcome of a contingent series of events without higher purpose, direction, or meaning. The ontological commitment to the contingency of the human realm as opposed to a permanent divine order, for example, is in many ways as much the unquestioned

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starting point of philosophical inquiry today as the existence of God was the unquestioned starting point of philosophy in the Middle Ages. Bernard Flynn (1992) argues that political philosophy was not simply deduced from metaphysics in the works of the great thinkers of the past. Nevertheless, metaphysics, understood as the discourse that established the ultimate grounds, did provide the fundamental concepts that defined the field of the political: it structured the horizon of precomprehension through which classical philosophy approached it. The “true world” revealed by metaphysics merged with Christianity to become both the theological and the political foundation of pre-modern Europe. For Flynn, the end of metaphysics refers to the process in which the foundations of classical strategies of philosophical and political justification became contestable, thereby revealing the phenomenon of the political. He emphasizes the importance of the work of Claude Lefort, who has argued that modern democracy was instituted and sustained precisely through the dissolution of the metaphysical markers of certainty. The French Revolution inaugurated a history in which people experienced a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law, and knowledge, as well as to the basis of relations between the self and others, on every level of social life. Without the firm markers of certainty no one had any definite answers to the questions that arose in social and political practices. What distinguishes modern democracy from totalitarian forms of government is thus precisely the fact that in democracy the lack of a necessary foundation of society is not covered over, but institutionally recognized.5 We could thus contend that the end of metaphysics, understood as referring to the acceptance of the indeterminacy of reason and the fundamental contingency and singularity of the present, was indispensable as far as a new understanding of the political in philosophy was concerned. It is precisely the incessant questioning of every necessity that opens up the possibility of a radical philosophical investigation of the present, and indeterminacy, not metaphysical certainty, must characterize modern political thought. Hence, while the idea that the right ontology would furnish a basis for the right political order has had disastrous consequences—Plato and Heidegger are often used as clichéd examples—only the lack of firm ontological foundations seems to open up a truly political dimension of thought. Against this background it would seem important, but also somewhat trivial, to argue that there is no pre-given, essentialist, or foundational ontology in Foucault’s thought: it would betray his principal aim of investigating the fractures in the present. Yet, on a deeper level, to argue for the contingency and indeterminacy of the present, of course,

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is precisely to make an ontological claim. When we argue against one metaphysical schema—the existence of absolute foundations, for example—we cannot help but adopt another. The end of metaphysics cannot therefore amount to a simple denial or inversion of foundationalism in favor of naive empiricism. Even the idea that all ontological orders are nothing but contingent, empirical arrangements cannot be established by empirical sciences, but must be argued for philosophically. Modern thought has become irreversibly aware that all thinking necessarily relies on ontological commitments of some kind, and exposing them to a clear view has become one of the critical tasks of philosophy, including political philosophy. Shying away from ontological inquiry can therefore only constitute a position of hypocrisy for us: not mentioning the word “ontology” does not mean that questions concerning it will disappear. Moreover, if ontology is understood as the framework that functions to constrain all our political theorizing and action within the limits it sets, it also forms a fundamental limit to our efforts to overcome oppressive attitudes and practices. If Foucault’s thought does not contribute anything to ontological questioning, then neither does it ultimately contribute anything significant to political philosophy.

The Denaturalization of Ontology The modern political predicament of having to slice ontology open for contestation has meant its profound denaturalization. Foucault’s radical nominalism is one form that this denaturalization has taken. While Foucault’s archaeological works are sometimes seen as apolitical and as constituting a distinct phase from his genealogical works, it is important to see that they in fact lay down the nominalist ontological premises that make possible the politicization effected by his genealogies. To be able to argue that entities such as homosexual, delinquent, and pervert are not natural phenomena which human sciences could simply discover, describe, and refer to objectively, but effects of power relations and political struggles, requires a profound denaturalization of ontology: we have to sever any direct, natural, or necessary link between scientific concepts and their referents. If the dissolution of the firm markers of certainty shook our metaphysical worldview profoundly, the crisis was irrevocably deepened by the linguistic turn that structuralism and post-structuralism represented in French thought: reality is not only linguistically mediated, but also, to varying degrees, linguistically constituted. Every linguistic description is

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already the imposition of an ontology, but there is no direct referential correspondence between words and objects. The reference of our words is radically indeterminate and makes possible a number of interpretations, the acceptability of which depends on historically varying conditions, both discursive and non-discursive. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) the idea that discursive practices systematically form the objects of which they speak, as well as the ontological order on the basis of which they become possible, is put forward through an analysis of statements and discursive objects. Discursive practices constitute their objects of study through rule-governed transformations, and do not simply articulate the already existing and ordered things themselves. Archaeology must therefore “substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse” (AK 47–48). It must attempt to analyze the historical set of rules that govern the formation of discursive objects. As Beatrice Han describes Foucault’s archaeological reduction of traditional metaphysics, it rests on a double postulate: Firstly, the nominalist thesis that it is not through reference to “things” that one defines “words,” but through “words” that one can conceive of “objects” produced by discourse. Secondly, the quasi-structuralist claim that since the identification of these “objects” can no longer be achieved through their hypothetical “correspondence” with things, the only way of understanding their identity is to start from the “set of rules” that allows their formation. (Han 2002, 54)

While Foucault’s archaeology studied the rules of formation for scientific discourse on a purely discursive level without raising questions of the referent, it is a mistake to see it as a form of discursive idealism. The idea is not that language somehow exhaustively brings things into existence. Neither is archaeology an extreme form of nominalism that would deny any correspondence at all between language and being. We must assume that reality lends itself more readily to some interpretations rather than others, otherwise nominalism would leave our interaction with and description of the world a complete mystery.6 In bracketing the question of correspondence Foucault does not deny that there is any; he rather problematizes the possibility of simply pairing up true sentences and objective reality. He does not deny extra-linguistic reality, but he does deny that it comes naturally ordered into facts or states of affairs, which we could then simply hook up with true statements. Knowledge is always produced in practices, in the disjunction of language and visibility.7 Foucault politicized his archaeological nominalism in his genea-

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logical texts of the early 1970s by his explicitly linking it with Nietzsche. Instead of studying the conditions of acceptability for true interpretations on the level of the discursive rules of formation, he turned to the Nietzschean thesis that things only have the meaning that the dominant interpretation gives them. His guiding question in a series of lectures delivered in Brazil in 1973 was how domains of knowledge had been formed on the basis of social practices: how social and political practices engendered domains of knowledge and brought into being new objects, concepts, and forms of subjects. Before engaging in a historical inquiry into social practices—in this instance juridical practices—he devoted the first lecture to a rare discussion of his ontological premises. He suggested that Nietzsche’s thought presented the best philosophical model upon which to draw in trying to understand how social practices engender reality (EWF3 9). Foucault credits Nietzsche with having made a crucial break in the tradition of Western philosophy by cutting knowledge and things apart. He now attributes to Nietzsche the claim that there is no natural or necessary resemblance, no a priori affinity between knowledge and the things that are known. Any ontological schema, any interpretation of reality, is an imposition, not a pure description of the given. Foucault’s starting point is Nietzsche’s text “On Truth and the Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” and the distinction between the words Erfindung—invention—and Ursprung—origin—that he employs in it.8 The significance and provocation embedded in this distinction lies in Nietzsche’s claim that knowledge is an invention, not an originary discovery. Knowledge is produced, manufactured by a series of mechanisms and obscure power relations. It is not inscribed in human nature, and even more radically, it is not even inevitably connected to the world to be known (EWF3 6–7). According to Foucault, Nietzsche thus effected a significant double break with the tradition of Western philosophy: a break between knowledge and the world, as well as between knowledge and human nature. Foucault claimed that Western philosophy since Plato was characterized by the idea that things to be known and knowledge itself were in a relation of continuity: knowledge was “characterized by logocentrism, resemblance, congruence, bliss and unity” (EWF3 12). The persistent and haunting question that followed was the skeptical challenge. What assurance was there that knowledge had the ability to truly know the things of this world instead of being indefinitely prone to error, illusion, and arbitrariness? The history of philosophy had suggested a series of different answers. For Descartes, God was the principle that ensured harmony between knowledge and the things to be known, which is why Descartes

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had to prove His existence. While Kantian critique questioned the possibility of knowledge of a truth or reality in itself, it nevertheless advocated the belief that there was a universal nature of knowledge secured by its universal conditions in experience. Nietzsche no longer found the assurance offered by the existence of God or eternal and universal human nature acceptable, however. If the relation between knowledge and the things to be known was arbitrary, the existence of God at the center of the system was no longer indispensable—and vice versa, the death of God resulted in the breaking apart of the orders of knowledge and things (EWF3 9–10). Neither was knowledge tied to human nature, but it was the historical and circumstantial result of conditions outside its domain. It was an invention, an event that fell within the category of an activity, not a faculty or a universal structure (EWF3 12–14). In Kantian terms, his claim was that the conditions of experience and the conditions of the object of experience were completely heterogeneous (EWF3 9). Foucault sums up Nietzsche’s position with broad strokes: Knowledge must struggle against a world without order, without connectedness, without form, without beauty, without wisdom, without harmony and without law. That is the world that knowledge deals with. There is nothing in knowledge that enables it, by any right whatever, to know this world. It is not natural for nature to be known—there can be no relation of natural continuity between knowledge and the things that knowledge must know—Knowledge can only be a violation of the things to be known, and not a perception, a recognition, an identification of those things. (EWF3 9)9

With Nietzsche, knowledge thus becomes fundamentally perspectival and finite, and reality, as we know it, disturbingly contingent and arbitrary.10 It also becomes importantly historical and political. Foucault argues that when Nietzsche speaks of the perspectival character of knowledge he is not claiming that knowledge is always bounded by certain limits derived from human nature, the human body, or the structure of knowledge itself. He is rather pointing to the fact that there is knowledge only in the form of a certain number of actions by which human beings violently take hold of things, react to certain situations, and subject them to relations of force. Knowledge is always a certain strategic relation in which man is placed. This strategic relation is what will define the effect of knowledge; that’s why it would be completely contradictory to imagine a knowledge that was not by nature partial, oblique, and perspectival. The perspectival

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character of knowledge derives not from human nature but always from the polemical and strategic character of knowledge. One can speak of the perspectival character of knowledge because there is a battle, and knowledge is the result of this battle. (EWF3 14)11

Foucault brushes aside the possible objection that this politicization of knowledge cannot in fact be found in Nietzsche, but is produced through his own obsession with power relations. He claims that it is irrelevant whether this summary and simplified account is the Nietzschean conception of knowledge. What he is looking for is a philosophical model for conducting his own historical analyses of truth games—discursive practices capable of producing truths and engendering reality (EWF3 13). In sum, in the 1970s Foucault was increasingly looking for theoretical ways to account for the lacunae in his archaeological analyses: the political conditions and effects of knowledge. He was clearly not satisfied with seeing the relationship between power and knowledge as external—it was not simply a case of censorship or incitement. Rather, the critical questioning of truth and objectivity had to proceed all the way down to the level of ontology, to their constitution. He did not change or even substantially modify his archaeological nominalism in his later writings on power. Instead, the double theoretical foundation of the initial nominalism deployed in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the subsequent Nietzschean idea of the strategic character of knowledge were important steps on his way to introducing the full-fledged conception of productive power in Discipline and Punish in 1975.

Productive Power Foucault’s denial of ontology is often seen as a consequence of his methodological focus on practices: instead of natural objects or things, there are only practices that are constitutive of discursive objects.12 The focus on generative practices should be read as an ontological commitment, however, not as a denial of ontology. The focus on generative practices rather than supposedly natural objects amounts to a critique of forms of natural realism, and it also points to the methodological failure of the philosophy of the subject or of consciousness: the constitution of experience cannot be understood through radical self-investigation—by analyzing the intentional acts of the solitary subject. Foucault’s analysis of social practices thus does not amount to sociological or even conventional historiographical study, but to historical

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ontology. It does not study some metaphysical principles or essences under or above concrete practices. It denotes a specific philosophical perspective on practices, however. As Paul Veyne (1997, 168) notes, the step of disqualifying the natural object is what gives Foucault’s work its philosophical—rather than simply historical—stature. Hence, when Foucault’s commentators label him a nominalist they generally refer to some form of social constructivism.13 Social practices, not pure language, bring into being, or institute, a world of significations, and reality as we know it is the result of such an institution. All knowledge, both scientific and the taken-for-granted common-sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social practices, but comes to be understood as the given, objective reality. The contingency and political struggle embedded in its constitution is forgotten and reality appears as mere objective given. Foucault’s thought thus formed a significant strand in the effort to theorize the social construction of reality that became prominent in the 1960s and 1970s.14 It is my contention that his most original and important contribution to this project was his conception of productive power. As his arguably most famous single sentence states: “Power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (DP 194). The idea that power produces reality can be understood in different ways, however. While some of Foucault’s critics have dismissed it as an outlandish notion attributing to power metaphysical properties of genesis, commentators more sympathetic to his thought have sought to explain it in more rational, but widely varying ways. Ian Hacking (1984 and 2002) has argued that in order to understand the constitutive role of power and knowledge one has to limit the scope of Foucault’s analyses, thereby making them compatible with naturalism. He argues that Foucault’s account should be limited to explaining the constitution of only certain kinds of entities understood as social or political, such as the objects of the social sciences. According to Hacking, Foucault restricted his analysis to human sciences for the reason that only in those do truths have constitutive effects on the subjects under study. In the natural sciences our invention of new identities and categories does not “really” change the way the world works. Even though we may create new phenomena, which did not exist before our scientific endeavors, what happens in our experiments is constrained by the world: if we do certain things, certain phenomena will always appear. In the social sciences, however, we may generate kinds of people and kinds of action as we devise new classifications and categories. Categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people

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come into being to fit those categories and there is a two-way interaction between these processes (Hacking 1984, 122). Hacking thus understands constitution according to the naturalist model as causal interaction between empirical facts and conscious agents who are affected by them. Social sciences, unlike natural sciences, are interactive with their objects: concepts, practices, and people interact causally. While Hacking calls this position “dynamic nominalism,” he acknowledges that it could equally be called “dialectical realism” (Hacking 2002, 2). He wants to retain a robust natural realism while accepting that in the social realm cultural practices may have constitutive effects on the agents. It is my contention that Foucault’s radical nominalism and his continuous emphasis on the constitutive role of social practices make it problematic to ground his thinking on forms of naturalist metaphysics, however. Despite his qualified acceptance of the label “positivist” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the explicit critique of naturalism put forward only a couple of years earlier in The Order of Things makes it clear that the label should be understood primarily as ironic (AK 125; OT 303–44).15 Hacking’s model also relies on a strict dichotomy between the social and the natural, an ontological distinction in itself, which is not absolute or given, but an important point of political contestation. Neither do all of Foucault’s analyses neatly fall into the category of the social: his interest also encompasses life sciences such as biology and medicine, for example. Beatrice Han (2002) offers a compelling transcendental reading of productive power. In contrast to Hacking’s naturalist reading, she claims that its constitutive role is not reducible to empirical claims about practices and institutions causally affecting the people involved in them, but should rather be understood as providing the historical conditions of possibility for producing true discourses.16 Genealogy studies the powerknowledge nexus, a collection of practices, discursive and non-discursive, in which truth is produced. As in archaeology, the approach is transcendental in the sense that Foucault wanted to identify the historical conditions of acceptability for statements to be considered true or false. In contrast to archaeology, however, he recognized in his genealogies that it was not possible to define these conditions on a purely epistemological level. Genealogy had to question the allegedly neutral and disinterested character of scientific practices by showing that they obey imperatives that have nothing to do with theoretical or epistemological demands, but were shaped by political interests such as the disciplinary control of the human body. Furthermore, the circular relationship between power and knowledge meant that while the historically varying conditions of

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acceptability determined when truth could be predicated in the first place, when it was actually predicated, it in turn influenced its own conditions of acceptability. In other words, it was not only as a function of epistemic rules, but also in reference to what was effectively recognized as true, that the field of acceptability of propositions was constituted and transformed (Han 2002, 104).17 A transcendental as opposed to empirical reading of productive power is able to account for the contextualist insight that the social and political context of scientific knowledge can shape its content irrespective of whether it takes human behavior as its object of study. Socially and historically determined background beliefs will inevitably shape the evidential relations in scientific practice, for example.18 It is my contention that the productive effects of the intertwinement of power and knowledge are thus not restricted to subjects internalizing norms and identities produced by human sciences and behaving accordingly. Power also produces reality by shaping the conditions of acceptability for true discourses. In any society the production of truth responds to a certain number of imperatives and conditions that are not purely theoretical, but also practical and political. Our understanding of reality is inevitably the effect of power relations also in this sense. Han’s (2002, 142–44) critical claim is that a transcendental reading of the power-knowledge nexus means that, far from being a contingent and historically given configuration, it turns into an independent quasi-metaphysical entity capable of determining the possible forms and domains of knowledge and transforming itself in history. She claims that despite Foucault’s explicit denials, secretly there is a metaphysics of power at work in his thought. Power-knowledge becomes an essence definable in itself, returning Foucault to the sort of metaphysics that genealogy sought to combat by giving primacy to perspective and interpretation against any essentialist ontology. While Han acknowledges that the other possibility would be to accept Foucault’s explicit description of power-knowledge as an analytic grid, a mere theoretical tool designed to clarify the conditions of acceptability of a system, such acceptance would only land him in even more serious trouble. While he would avoid the metaphysics of power, the problem with a mere analytic grid is that it is deprived of any foundation.19 It is my contention that it is exactly in the light of Foucault’s politicization of ontology, however, that we can understand the ontological status of his own analyses. Power-knowledge is a mere analytical grid and an ontological concept because ontology consists of mere analytical grids. In reading Foucault’s claims about power we must take seriously the consequences of his politicization of ontology for all theoretical activity, including his own. There can be no pure theory, because the cate-

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gories that we use to think about reality are the products of our society. There exists no place outside of language, power, society, and history from which one could construct a theory of them. The ontology that we are trying to understand, deconstruct, critically unveil, dismantle, or modify is the result of a process of sedimentation, but it is also partly our own doing. What gives philosophy a privileged role in the paradoxical quest for ontological understanding is that it is—or should be—aware of the way it is restricted and implicated. It can and must be critically self-reflective of its own concepts, categories, and definitions, their power effects on the one hand and their contingent and provisional nature on the other. As Han (2002, 102) herself notes, the theoretical justification of genealogy could be connected to the honesty with which genealogy reflexively interrogates the perspective presupposed by its own questioning, following the paradox according to which the only possibility for an interpretation to be authentic lies in the explicit illumination of its interpretative character. Foucault’s idea of a constitutive power/knowledge nexus must be understood, in the light of his ontology, as another analytical grid, fighting for hegemony in the game of truth. It is an uncertain and contingent attempt to make our world understandable from a distinctive theoretical and political perspective. It is a move in a truth game, a weapon in the struggle over objectivity and truth: what there is in our world and how it is, what counts as real and what counts as incoherent fiction. The difficult question thus does not, in my view, concern the ontological status of Foucault’s analytic grid. It concerns our criteria of truth for ontological statements. If all ontological orders are violent impositions fighting for hegemony, bound by political and socio-historical conditions, why should we understand reality through the grid that Foucault proposes rather than maintain our comforting belief in naive realism, for example? Why should we accept that there is no direct referential correspondence between words and things or that social practices constitute contingent orderings, which we take for granted and understand as objective reality? It is precisely because Foucault’s analyses are philosophical or ontological, however, and not positivist or empirical that the difficult question of their truth arises. Nor does this question concern only Foucault, but is equally pertinent to any distinctively philosophical analysis of political reality. The truth of ontology is necessarily beyond empirical verification because it conditions it. In philosophy we are inevitably beyond the realm of true or false in this sense, but in everyday life we also constantly operate on the basis of assumptions that cannot be empirically proved or disapproved.

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Governmentality Commentators often read Foucault’s lectures on the history of governmentality, Security, Territory, Population (1977–78) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79), as another major turning point in his thought: they represent a shift to more traditional political theory in being concerned with the development of the modern administrative state. The lectures have inspired many influential studies, mainly in the social sciences.20 While not wishing to discredit this original and groundbreaking work in any way, I nevertheless contend that what is often overlooked in discussions on Foucault’s history of governmentality is its distinctively philosophical focus. While the lectures represent his most explicit engagement with the question of politics, they continue his critical ontology of the present in crucial respects and build upon the ontological premises elaborated in his earlier work. In the first lecture of the series The Birth of Biopolitics in the year 1979, Foucault confirms that “the question here is the same as the question I addressed with regard to madness, disease, delinquency, and sexuality” (BB 19). The thread that goes through all these investigations is his historical nominalism: “The point of all these investigations . . . is to show how the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of truth form an apparatus [dispositif] of knowledge-power that effectively marks out in reality that which does not exist and legitimately submits it to the division between true and false” (BB 19). In all these cases, it was not a question of showing “how these objects were for a long time hidden before finally being discovered”—the position of natural realism. Neither was it one of discursive idealism—a matter of showing how they were “only wicked illusions or ideological products to be dispelled in the light of reason finally having reached its zenith.” It was a matter of showing by what conjunctions a whole set of practices—from the moment they become coordinated with a regime of truth—was able to make what does not exist (madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality, etcetera), nonetheless become something, something however that continues not to exist. (BB 19)21

Foucault’s distinction between “existing” (exister) and “becoming something” (devenir quelque chose) in this paragraph marks the distinction between the two ontological positions of historical nominalism and natural realism. According to his historical nominalism, madness, disease, delinquency, and sexuality do not exist as natural objects, but this does not mean that they are illusions or errors. Foucault emphasizes that

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they are part of reality, they are nevertheless something, because they are established in a set of real practices which imperiously mark them out in reality. While continuing his ontology of the present the lectures nevertheless introduce new terminology, as well as move to a new domain of inquiry. In these lectures “government” becomes Foucault’s preferred term for power while “governmentality” functions as his main theoretical tool for analyzing its rationality, techniques, and procedures in modernity. Foucault discusses a range of individual political thinkers and theories in his lectures, but his main interest lies again in understanding the larger institutional and epistemic context in which these theories became possible. Governmentality denotes the underlying political rationality, the historical conditions—epistemic as well as institutional—for political thought and practice in the modern period. These conditions are examined through historiographical study, but they cannot be reduced to empirical, institutional facts about politics. Foucault’s notion of governmentality emerged in his fourth lecture in the year 1978. The word “governmentality” is not only ugly—as Foucault himself noted22—it is also ambiguous. As Michel Senellart (2007, 387–89) explains, its meaning progressively shifts from a precise, historically determinate sense to a more general and abstract meaning. Whereas in the 1978 lectures it denotes the techniques of government that underpin the formation of the modern state, from 1979 onward it receives a more general meaning as the analytical grid for relations of power. The initial definition of “governmentality” that Foucault provides in the fourth lecture of Security, Territory, Population is already ambiguous, however. He explains (STP 108–9) that it refers, on the one hand, to a distinct regime of power that emerged in the eighteenth century and that can be distinguished from both sovereign power and disciplinary power in terms of its rationality, its aims, and its means. On the other hand, it also refers to the tendency that has led to the development of a series of specific governmental apparatuses and forms of knowledge. Third, it refers to the actual historical process through which Western societies became governmentalized: the state of justice of the Middle Ages became the administrative state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Techniques of governmental management developed, spread, and came to dominate our political landscape.23 It was this historical development, “the history of governmentality” or “the genealogy of the modern state,” that he attempted to expose in his lectures. He wanted to articulate and to reveal, through a historical analysis, the development of a specific type of political ontology as well

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as power technology that was fundamental to the exercise of modern state power. He wanted to identify the historical conditions—such as Christian pastoral power and the birth of political economy—that have produced the modern administrative state: a historically specific form of power with a distinct rationality. In short, Foucault’s focus is still on the political and historical constitution of reality, but he is now interested in the constitution of those entities that are commonly understood to belong to the political realm. His nominalism is now applied to the state. Foucault criticized not only the tendency to demonize the state in political thought—to see it as the simple enemy and the root of all political problems—but also the attempts to theorize its essence: “The state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power . . . the state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities” (BB 77). Martin Saar (2010) argues in his persuasive study of the methodological and historical presuppositions of Foucault’s lectures that one of their key challenges to traditional political historiography is the nominalist claim that the state cannot be a neutral and natural given of political thought. It too is an element and a product of political struggle: the effect of discursive and practical negotiation. The idea of governmentality thus radically historicizes the state and dissolves its fixed identity into a multiplicity of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflection, calculations, and tactics. “The state is a practice . . . inseparable from the set of practices by which the state actually became a way of governing, a way of doing things” (STP 277). Saar also emphasizes the distinctiveness of the level on which Foucault’s historical analysis operates. As a form of genealogical history it relates discourses and practices, the textual and the social. Practical texts like edicts on trade and commerce, the political tracts of the physiocrats and the programmatic statements of jurists and economists form the material from which Foucault draws his conclusions about the practice as well as the theoretical articulations of the new, liberal form of government. Understanding the historical conditions of the modern state requires that the intellectual and the social are not seen apart from each other, as two different realms of reality, but as parts of a conglomerate. Such a history of governmentality is less concerned with what there is in the realm of supposedly neutral historical “facts” and focuses instead on the processes and procedures that “make” and produce facticity and normativity in a given historical, epistemological, and social field. Foucault’s history of governmentality is therefore neither history of politics nor history of political ideas, but of politics- as-reality: a historical tracing of the many ways in which institutional and epistemic

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conditions shape what people can effectively do and think as political agents (Saar 2010, 38). Governmentality thus functions as a way of bringing together discourses and practices of government by showing how they condition each other. Foucault is interested in identifying a particular regime of truth that conditions politics as we understand it today: it is a realm that is limited and shaped by truths, particularly the autonomous laws and regularities of economics. In trying to understand the historical emergence of this particular, liberal regime of truth he is not trying to identify “an epistemological threshold on the basis of which the art of government could become scientific” (BB 18). He is not interested in determining the truth value of certain propositions about the economy or the population. He is interested in the historical conditions that make it possible to predicate such truths and to make them constitutive of practices of government. His analysis focuses on “the articulation of a particular type of discourse and a set of practices, a discourse that on the one hand, constitutes these practices as a set bound together by an intelligible connection and, on the other hand legislates and can legislate on these practices in terms of true or false” (BB 18). In the new, liberal regime of truth, practices of government are not assessed any longer on the basis of whether they conform to moral or divine laws, but on the basis of whether they conform to scientific truths. To understand what politics is today we have to grasp how our modern conception of economy emerged “though a series of complex processes that are absolutely crucial for our history” and how it came to designate “a level of reality and a field of intervention for government” (STP 95). Exercising political power has come to mean governing a population on the basis of new forms of knowledge such as economics. Foucault was thus not attempting to write another political history of European states or to trace the intellectual history of political ideas about government. He wanted to expose the institutional and epistemic conditions that constitute and limit our understanding of politics and our practices of governing: what people do and think as political subjects. The modern conception of economy as a separate sphere of society as well as an autonomous object of scientific knowledge emerged relatively late in our political history and resulted in completely new practices of government. In the chapters that follow I examine Foucault’s lectures on governmentality in more detail and appropriate them for my question of political violence: how contemporary societies are governed and what forms of political violence are compatible with our modern rationality of government.

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The Ubiquity of the Political While many strands of political thought emphasize and valorize pluralism—forms of liberalism as well as the work of Arendt and her followers, for example—the understanding of pluralism they advocate often relies on unproblematized ontology. Reality, or the common world in which we live, is simply assumed as given, while plurality refers to the diversity of interests, needs, and values of individual subjects. Foucault’s political ontology takes a step back in questioning the grounds of pluralism. According to him, the common world is already a sedimentation of power relations and not simply a given and objective space containing the plurality of individuals who inhabit it. It is already fundamentally plural on the level of its institution. Political thinking that relies on forms of naive realism is thus blind to the political dimension of the constitution of everyday reality. It is also blind to the agonistic nature of politics. If the ontological order of things is inevitably the expression of hegemonic power relations—including acts of domination and exclusion—then the differing interpretations of the world, social order, and human life cannot, in principle, be reconciled in a harmonious and homogenous unity.24 The constitutive nature of power strongly implies that the plurality of interpretations about everyday reality, social order, and human life cannot be eliminated in politics. Objectivity can only be the fragile and temporary victory of an ongoing political struggle, and ontology is the sedimented effect of it. While political conflict is traditionally understood as conflict over the distribution of resources—economic and social equality—or over fundamental values, my claim is that Foucault considerably broadens the range. Politics is not only a struggle over resources and values. It is a more fundamental battle for truth and objectivity. Politics discloses a world: it becomes essentially a struggle to realize a unique world through the definition of what there is. Is there such a thing as a superior race? What about marital rape? Or pathological sexuality? The somewhat disquieting consequence of Foucault’s ontological view is the ubiquity of the political. If politics is ultimately concerned with what there is, its scope cannot be easily demarcated. Rather than trying to maintain the specificity of the political, Foucault explicitly embraced its ubiquity and coined the expression “politics of truth.” He noted that because power relations are rooted in the whole network of society, political analysis cannot be reduced to the study of a series of institutions that would merit the name “political” (SP 224).25 The political

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must rather be understood as a historically variable zone of rationalization and division of power that is coextensive with society. It is my contention that his broadening of the meaning of the political does not amount to a depoliticizing and totalitarian gesture, however. It does not imply that everything is political in the same way, or that all areas of life are already and in advance under the rule and rationality of state politics, for example. The constitutive power network can translate into a variety of political possibilities, but philosophical analysis and political activism must make the translation: they must expose and analyze the power relations that are immanent in our practices and institutions, unmask the ensuing forms of domination, violence, and exclusion, contest their inevitability, and demand change. While many of the social practices that we engage in every day might seem completely apolitical—treating the sick, doing household chores, traveling to work— they can and have been politicized by revealing and contesting the power relations operative in them: the power of doctors over patients, of men over women, of capitalists over workers. Foucault’s analyses have effectively opened up new domains for political criticism and activism in refusing to secure the limits of the political in advance. His aim was to imagine and bring into being new schemas of politicization: by uncovering new kinds of relations and mechanisms of power he brought into the political debate new questions and areas of experience such as insanity, delinquency, and sexuality. In exposing concepts, categories, and practices as sedimentations and expressions of power relations he attempted to reveal the exclusion, domination, and violent treatment of those at the losing end of the struggle for objectivity and truth: how their views have been branded as false and irrational and their behavior as abnormal and pathological. The effect is a fundamental politicization of truth as well as a problematization of violence, exclusion, and marginalization. In the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, as well as in his interviews in the 1980s, Foucault introduced the concept of “problematization,” a notion he claimed was common to all his work since Histoire de la folie.26 It refers to the way that certain forms of behavior, practices, and actions can emerge as possible objects of politicization, redescription, and, ultimately, change. He explains that for a practice, a domain of action, or a behavior to enter the field of political problematization it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have first made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a number of difficulties around it. This is the result of social, economic, and political processes, but their role is only that of instigation. Effective problematization is

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accomplished by thought. When thought intervenes it does not assume a unique form that is the direct result or the necessary expression of the social, economic, or political difficulties. It is an original or specific response, often taking many forms, sometimes contradictory in their aspects (FR 388–89). The notion of problematization can thus be understood as the possibility of contesting and transforming ontology understood as the sedimented and normally taken-for-granted background. The politicization of ontology is not just a process of unmasking, but also one of redescription. Thought is capable of problematizing itself, of taking a step back from the practices in which it is embedded and exposing the hidden grammar, the rationality, that regulates them. It allows one to take distance from forms of behavior, and to reflect on them as a problem. The politicization of ontology thus does not mean its replacement or denial, but its problematization: “Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem” (FR 388). As I noted in the introduction, it is important to emphasize that the word “ontology” has two distinct meanings: it commonly refers both to the fundamental nature of reality and to the systematic study of this nature. The first sense must be understood in the context of Foucault’s thought to comprise a diverse set of competing background beliefs about reality, and the second refers to the self-reflective, theoretical activity of exposing them and of critically questioning their constitution. While ontology in the second sense is an individual activity, always partial, sociohistorically bound, and fallible, in the first sense it cannot be the exclusive achievement of an individual at all. Ontology understood as the analytical grid of intelligibility that forms the normally taken-for-granted background of all thought is always formed in a web of social practices. It is not a unified and closed system. It is thus not through the supreme mental effort of the philosopher—such as the epoche or some ingenious moment of vision—that the truth about reality can be revealed. While philosophy can contribute to the creation of new concepts, theoretical tools, and ways of conceiving of the world, no one person can create an ontology in this sense. The idea that practices engender reality does not eliminate the role of the individual, but it does limit it. The web of practices in which we are embedded necessarily shapes our thought and understanding. Nothing we do can change the totality of it, but equally nothing we do is insignificant either. In sum, I have suggested that Foucault’s critical project could be read as a serious attempt to problematize the relationship between ontology and politics. Rather than translating the right ontology into the

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right politics, he reverses the argument. The task of philosophy is not to secure knowledge about the true nature of reality that could then be converted into the right political order. The radicality of his method lies rather in showing how the ontological order of things is itself the outcome of a political struggle: ontology is politics that has forgotten itself. His genealogies make visible the historical struggles over truth and objectivity; how our understanding of reality is constituted in a piecemeal fashion in historical practices that always incorporate power relations. In short, all ontology is always already political ontology.

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Foundational Violence

The hackneyed expression “violence of language” usually refers to the idea that language by necessity imposes a partial order: it simplifies experience by dividing it into manageable units through categories and common nouns, and artificially objectifies the referent by cutting it loose from its context. As I argued in the previous chapter, any interpretation of reality is always a form of violence in the sense that knowledge “can only be a violation of the things to be known,” not a simple recognition or identification of them (EWF3 9). Several philosophers following Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida have emphasized and explicated this fundamental violence of language. What remains less comprehensively theorized in many of the discussions on the “violence of language,” however, is its relationship to physical violence. While the ontological violence of language does, in significant ways, sustain, enable, and encourage physical violence, it is a serious mistake to conflate them: to unreflectively slide from the inevitability of violence understood as the violence of language—semantic exclusion involved in issuing a meaningful utterance—to ontological violence understood in a second and completely different sense as the fundamental hostility and aggression of human beings. It is my contention that such a slide characterizes many of the recent theoretical defenses of violence. Violence is understood to be ineliminable in the first sense, and this leads to its being treated as a fundamental constant in the second sense, too. Slavoj Žižek, for example, discusses the violence of language in the sense delineated above in his book Violence (2008). He argues against the idea that language is a medium of peaceful coexistence and insists that we should recognize that there is always “something violent in the very symbolization of a thing, which equals its mortification” (Žižek 2008, 52). He concludes that we cannot therefore “wholly repudiate violence when struggle and aggression are part of life” (ibid., 54). Chantal Mouffe makes a similar theoretical move when she argues that violence is the inevitable precondition of any consensus. By refusing to recognize that violence is therefore ineradicable, political theory has become incapable of grasping “the nature of the political in its dimension of hostility and antagonism” (Mouffe 2000, 132). While consensus is always a form of violence in the sense of being exclusive of some interpretations, its 36

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hegemonic nature does not imply the ineradicability of physical violence understood as the fundamental hostility of human beings. Sometimes, but not always, consensus is also the result of physical acts of violence: what are supposed to be free elections, for example, turn into a practice of organized violence and intimidation. I will give a more detailed analysis of Mouffe’s position in the following chapter. While the ontological violence of language and physical violence thus cannot be conflated, neither is there a necessary causal link between them. The linguistic stereotyping of Jews and blacks, for example, has undoubtedly justified and sustained anti-Semitic pogroms and lynching, but it does not, by necessity, cause them. While these historically specific practices of physical violence have, for the most part, fortunately disappeared, the offensive stereotyping has not. Conversely, no matter how sympathetically we name, describe, and characterize different groups of people, the ontological violence of language nevertheless remains. It is my contention that while the “violence of language” is precisely ontological in the sense of being a necessary feature of thought, physical violence is contingent, historically specific, and context-dependent. This does not mean that ontology—understood as the framework of competing background beliefs about reality—is completely separate and free from physical violence. On the contrary, my aim in this chapter is to show the extent to which it is constituted by it. As I argued in the previous chapter, ontology is the sedimentation of political practices— including horrendously violent practices, foremost among them war. The legacies of violence have thus sedimented into the structures and the meaning of our world. Reality as we know it reflects the outcome of past wars and is not an objective or politically neutral realm waiting to be truthfully described. My central claim is, however, that the investigation of the constitutive role of physical violence must be thoroughly historical and must not rely on any ontologized notion of originary violence as such. Political theorists such as Hannah Arendt (1970) have argued against the idea of constitutive violence by emphasizing the purely instrumental nature of violence: it can only be the means of politics and is devoid of any intrinsic meaning of its own. James Dodd (2009, 11) calls this “the stupidity of violence principle”: in its barest form it states that violence is and can only be a mere means. It remains trapped within the confines of a very narrow dimension of reality defined by the application of means. Violence as such is senseless; when taken for itself it is ultimately without direction. The practices of violence, however traumatic and extreme, fade into indefinite superficiality unless supported by a meaningful cause or end. Dodd argues that such an understanding of

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violence is the counterpart and a rejection of another influential philosophical view on violence: violence as an originary source of meaning. In Carl Schmitt’s thought, for example, pure violence must be understood as a radically constitutive event: existential violence defines a moment in which the political will of the nation as such comes into being. I will examine Schmitt’s position in more detail in the following chapter. My aim here is to argue that while violence is constitutive of meaning, its constitutive function must always be understood through concrete historical practices of violence, not in terms of pure or originary violence as such. I will turn to Foucault again in my attempt to show how, alongside the political tradition that links the persistence and constancy of political violence to the hostile and aggressive nature of man, runs another strand that also insists on a strong connection between politics and violence. This connection is historical rather than natural, however, and is crucially tied to the birth of the state.1 Foucault’s lecture course Society Must Be Defended makes an important contribution to this tradition of thought. The lectures represent a major break with the Hobbesian legacy in political thought, while forming Foucault’s most explicit engagement with the question of political violence. They expose the violent origins of states, which are covered over by theories of timeless war and legitimate contract. I argue that his engagement with Hobbes in these lectures has strong implications for the efforts to historicize political violence and to envisage agonistic conceptions of politics uncoupled from it.

Leviathan versus the Discourse of War Foucault introduced his lecture course by noting that he would like to begin a series of investigations into whether war could provide a principle for the analysis of power relations. He summed up his previous efforts to rethink power by noting that “until now, or for roughly the last five years, it has been disciplines,” but for the next five years, it would be “war, struggle, the army” (SMD 23). As we now know, this large-scale project never materialized. The lectures ultimately represent a failed attempt to rethink political power according to the model of war, and Foucault himself explicitly criticized the model in his late definitive essay “Subject and Power.” Pasquale Pasquino (1993, 86), who worked closely with Foucault at the time the lectures were delivered, claims that he would never have wished them to be published, for he regarded his courses as working hypotheses. From a concern with war Foucault moved to a more fruitful study of biopower and governmentality.2

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It is my contention that these lectures have contributed to the serious misconception that Foucault performs an ontologization of violence in his thought. The eventual abandonment of the war model has significant consequences for his position on political violence: it made it possible for him to conceptually distinguish between violence and power and to treat violence as thoroughly historical. In his later writings he makes clear that violence should not be understood as a constant aspect or essence of power the way the model of war suggests, but must be theorized in a variety of forms depending on the specific configuration of power relations to which it happens to be connected. While the war model was thus ultimately abandoned, what nevertheless remains significant for the question of the political in these lectures is that it was not abandoned in favor of an understanding of the political based on consensus or contract. The idea of power as the governing of conduct—a set of actions upon actions—and the practicebased account of political rationality conveyed by the notion of governmentality and developed in the lecture series following Society Must Be Defended meant that political power was still understood as essentially agonistic and strategic.3 Moreover, while forming Foucault’s most explicit engagement with the question of political violence, these lectures also make a definitive break with the Hobbesian legacy in our conceptualizations of violence in political thought. The essential distinction that structures and organizes the disparate body of texts that the lectures cover is the opposition Foucault sets up between the favored “historico-political discourse” and the “juridicopolitical theory of sovereignty” as exemplified by Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. His central claim against Hobbes is that political power should not be analyzed in terms of contract, laws, and the establishment of sovereignty, but in terms of a shifting, historical struggle, a movement that makes some dominant over others. In other words, he wanted to replace theories of contract with theories of actual conflict.4 In the first lecture he famously inverted Clausewitz’s dictum that war was the continuation of politics by other means, and chose as his working hypothesis the claim that politics was the continuation of war.5 He distinguished this model from the juridical contract schema represented by Hobbes and his contractarian followers by claiming that the essential opposition was not between the legitimate and the illegitimate, but between domination and submission—or winners and losers—in the concrete struggle that would establish the legitimate (SMD 17). The central concept of war thus does not refer to the abstract, Hobbesian war of every man against every man, it refers to a concrete, historical struggle in which groups fight groups. As Foucault polemically formulated the aim, it was to show how the birth of states, their organization, and their

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juridical structures are not the result of a contract, but arise from and are maintained in the blood and mud of battles. The law is born of real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests, which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes; the law was born in burning towns and ravaged fields . . . This does not mean that society, the law, and the State are like armistices that put an end to wars, or that they are the products of definitive victories. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even the most regular . . . (SMD 50)6

The task of unmasking the violent foundations of the state and the law attaches Foucault to a long lineage of thinkers, including figures such as Max Weber and Walter Benjamin. The way he accomplishes this hackneyed task is strikingly original, however. His multilayered analysis moves through a complex and compressed set of historical material from sixteenth-century England to fascism. It is thus thoroughly historical, or to be more precise, genealogical. In these lectures he was not presenting a philosophical theory of power or a political history of states, but was offering a series of investigations into a specific discourse on the political history of England and France. He was charting the genealogy of historiography with the aim of revealing its connections with power: how it had been used as a weapon in political struggles and what power effects it had had. To briefly sum up the argument, Foucault claimed that up until the sixteenth century history was written by power to justify power: it was a record of the glory of power. At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century there emerged a radically new type of discourse in England and France, however, a counter-history that was used to contest power. Foucault called it “historico-political discourse” and argued that it was based on a new model for thinking about power and the origin of states: the present political order was the result of a past war and those holding power held it for no other reason than that they won the war. Its central thesis was thus the idea that war, rather than a contract or a natural right, formed the ineradicable basis of all relations and institutions of power. The historically specific facts of war found the political order of the state and power relations as they functioned at that time. This new “historico-political discourse” functioned as a counterhistory to the mainstream political history. With it a new historical practice emerged, characterized by the principle of heterogeneity: the history of some people was not the history of others. It revealed that history

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was in fact “a divisive light that illuminates one side of the social body but leaves the other side in shadows or casts it into the darkness” (SMD 70). Foucault shows how this discourse was used in different ways to further the political aims of different groups. In the process he rewrites much of the history of historiography. He argues, for example, that the French historian Boulainvilliers—a mostly forgotten and controversial figure because of his claim that aristocracy constituted a distinct and superior race—was in fact a highly significant historian because he opened up the historico-political field in France. Boulainvilliers evoked the memory of the war between the Franks and the Gauls and argued for the original right of the Franks—and the aristocracy as their descendants—to power. Hence, in his hands history became knowledge that was deployed and functioned within the field of political struggle. Boulainvilliers’ importance lay in his realization that historiography not only analyzed and interpreted political events but also deployed and modified them. Foucault’s lectures thus operate and attempt reversals on various levels. On the level of historiography he is defending a practice of counterhistory that is always perspectival, the discourse of a combat position rather than a supposedly neutral view from nowhere. He identifies the emergence of this historiographical counter-discourse and traces its developments in the truth games of historiography and its uses for political life. He does this with the help of controversial figures such as Boulainvilliers, and attempts to reconfigure, even completely overturn, the accepted assessments of their significance in historiographical research. On a philosophical level, Foucault’s historiographical arguments support several theoretical insights. Although he did not invent the model of war as a tool for understanding political power, which rather emerged from historical discourse, he clearly approved of and even praised it. He found in it a number of benefits compared to the juridical model of sovereign power. First, it was able to provide a concrete analysis of the multiplicity of power relations that manufacture subjects, rather than presupposing subjects and rights that existed already. The juridical model of sovereignty presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights and primitive powers. Foucault, on the other hand, argues that we should not attempt to study power on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but should focus on the relationship itself. The power relation determines the elements on which it bears. Rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, Foucault asks us to consider how relations of subjugation manufacture subjects (SMD 265).

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Second, this type of analysis could reveal relations of domination in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, and their reversibility rather than identifying a sovereign as the single form or central point from which they spring. Foucault suggests that these relations should be studied as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, conversely, come into conflict, and strive to negate each other. Third, rather than taking the law as the fundamental manifestation of power, this model could identify the technical instruments and techniques of constraint that would guarantee the functioning of the relations of domination (SMD 266). While the contract theories following Hobbes thus represent attempts to explain the genesis of sovereignty in terms of three basic elements—subject, unitary power, and law—Foucault wanted to offer an alternative way of thinking about political power that did not assume any of these elements as given (SMD 44–46). He was continuing his critique of sovereign power in these lectures, but he was no longer content with the idea of disciplinary power as a complement to it: it was not enough to show that there were modern forms of power that escaped the sovereignjuridical model or functioned at the interstices of it.7 He now wanted to overturn this model completely by questioning it in terms of how it represented the foundations and origins of the state, its institutions and power mechanisms. He summed up his lectures by writing that in order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, one must completely abandon the juridical model of sovereignty (SMD 265). The hypothesis was that the discourse of war could offer an alternative. As we now know, Foucault never completely abandoned the juridical model of sovereignty: instead, he ultimately abandoned the war model. His lasting contribution to political philosophy lies in his critique and rethinking of sovereignty, not in any supposed move beyond it. His war lectures showed that sovereignty was not the result of contract and rights, but was an ongoing battle, both physically and discursively.

The History of Violence versus the Primal State of War While Foucault clearly aimed to unmask irreducible violence through the model of war—violence that is foundational and indispensable for the functioning and existence of the state—it should be noted that this violence is not naturalized in his historico-political discourse. In challenging Hobbes’s view of the origin of political power, Foucault can be

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read to be challenging the idea that violence is a universal constant, an inevitable feature of the state of nature. Instead, he moves the discourse on war and violence to a thoroughly historical level: the origin of states lies in a history of violence, and not in a natural state of war. Foucault concedes that, at first glance, Hobbes appears to be the man who said that war was both the basis of power relations and the principle that explained them. More fundamentally, however, his thought announced the beginning of the modern master discourse on law and sovereignty, which covered over the empirical realities of war and the violent facts of history. What Hobbes calls the war of everyman against everyman is not a real historical war—a direct confrontation of forces marked by blood, battles, and corpses—but a play of representations, which were played off against each other. Instead of real war there was an unending diplomacy between rivals who used mutually intimidatory tactics, calculated presentations of strength, and expressions of a pronounced will to wage war. The establishment of sovereignty was ultimately the result of this diplomacy and not of actual war (SMD 89). There are no battles in Hobbes’s primitive war, there is no blood and there are no corpses. There are presentations, manifestations, signs, emphatic expressions, wiles and deceitful expressions . . . We are in a theatre where presentations are exchanged, in a relationship of fear in which there are no time limits; we are not really involved in a war. (SMD 92)8

Hobbes makes a distinction between two categories of sovereignty: commonwealth by institution—sovereign power that is based on a contract—and commonwealth by acquisition—sovereign power that is acquired by force.9 Commonwealths by institution are clearly founded on a contract according to which the sovereign represents the people. However, in the case of commonwealths by acquisition, it seems that there must have been a real battle: winners and losers of an actual war. However, Foucault argues that in this case the establishment of sovereignty takes place after the war and, in a sense, independently of it. The foundation of sovereignty lies in fear and the will to prefer life to death, and this leads to a contract. The insignificance of any real war becomes evident when Hobbes adds a third form of sovereignty—the type that binds a child to his or her mother—and states that this type is very similar to the institution of sovereignty by acquisition that appears after the end of a war, or after the defeat. The child has to obey its mother because its life depends on her, not because of violent coercion. There is no essential difference between

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the way a child consents to its mother’s sovereignty in order to preserve its life and the way the defeated give their consent when the battle is over. Whether there has been a real war or not is not the decisive issue. Sovereignty is established out of fear of death, the will to live, and the consent that follows. Foucault thus claims that for Hobbes the only difference between commonwealth by institution and commonwealth by acquisition is that, rather than choosing their sovereign due to their fear of one another, people chose him due to their fear of him. Sovereignty by acquisition is therefore as juridical and legitimate as the sovereignty that was established through the mode of institution and mutual agreement. The historical reality of war and its outcome is completely eliminated from this explanation of the genesis of sovereignty (SMD 94–97). This is significant because against this background Hobbes’s theory appears first and foremost as an attempt to legitimize and defend the sovereignty of the state against the civil struggles that were tearing it apart in England at the time. Foucault claimed that by advocating a general and abstract discourse of contract and sovereignty, the historical reality of war that Hobbes was trying to cover over was the Norman Conquest. His discourse was directed against its adversarial counter-discourse at the time—political historicism—that could be heard in the demands of the parliamentarians and in the more extreme positions of the Levelers and the Diggers. These groups contested the absolute power of the monarchy by evoking the historical knowledge of war, namely the Norman Conquest. They argued that the power of the monarchy was not the result of a legitimate contract, but an outcome of a violent conquest and therefore a state of non-right in which all laws and property relations were invalidated. Rethinking the basis of political power through the reality of war functioned as a form of resistance for these groups: a way of contesting the legitimacy of the monarchy and the existing relations of power. It was in the analysis of the historical discourse on the juridical meaning of the Norman Conquest that Foucault identified the first implicit formulation of the war model as the analyzer of power, and as a counter-discourse to Hobbes’s theory (SMD 109).10

Power versus Violence The formulation of power as a relationship of force in these lectures is philosophically ambiguous, and is indicative of their transitory status in Foucault’s attempts to fundamentally rethink prevailing conceptions

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of power. The notion of force is used in frustratingly elusive and even contradictory ways. Sometimes it is used as a noun: it is not an inert substance, but it is nevertheless something that can be used and possessed to empower. Boulainvilliers’ counter-history, for example, analyzed and interpreted the forces of the people and was also a force itself, “the strangest of all those forces that were fighting one another within the social body” (SMD 168). At times Foucault restricted himself to the more relational formulation of “relations of force,” but used it in differing ways: sometimes it seems to be a synonym for “the play of power,” sometimes power is “the play of relations of force” (e.g., SMD 169). This means that the understanding of the political that Foucault relies on is not very clear either. He clearly understood the political sphere as agonistic, an essentially open, even limitless field of shifting struggles or forces, but the exact ontological status of these competing forces remains unclear. The substantive formulations could suggest Nietzschean metaphysics,11 while “relations of forces” echoes a Marxist conception in which politics is understood as a realm in which the forces of history can play themselves out. The notion of force would thus seem to take Foucault back to advocating some form of essentialist political ontology, albeit a different one from the one he detects in Hobbes’s thought—a position that I suggest his political historicism was intended to question. We could also see the novelty of Foucault’s notion of force as lying exactly in the fact that it accommodates the materiality of violent coercion, while not being reducible to it. He stated in his lectures that an army of the king could be a force, but so could the history of the people. With his notions of war and force he could thus be read as breaking the ontological boundary between the discursive and the non-discursive: the hegemonic institution of meanings, identities, and systems of thought is intertwined with the violent inscription of bodies.12 The political order is a crystallization of power relations and an outcome of a concrete combat; objectivity is the result of a struggle between conflicting interpretations and is constituted through a silent “war,” and importantly, the two are inseparable. As Beatrice Hanssen (2000, 15–16) formulates Foucault’s aim, it was to show how the role of political power was perpetually to use a silent war to reinscribe the relationship of force established through concrete war in institutions, economic inequalities, and the identities of individuals. Politics sanctions and reproduces, through symbolic practices, the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war. The model of war, as well as the notion of force, would thus articulate the intertwinement of the physical combat over life with the interpretative combat over truth and objectivity. Our political history, as well as the present political order, reveals how the imposition of hegemonic

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meanings, identities, and interpretations has been inseparable from physical violence—the historical facts of wars. Violence is fundamentally constitutive of the very fabric of our world in the sense that reality as we know it reflects the outcome of past wars and is not an objective or politically neutral realm waiting to be truthfully described. I argue that Foucault must have come to see the dangers that the complete merging of these two meanings of force—physical and symbolic—would lead to, however, and he later abandoned the war model. If his initial question was: “To what extent can a relationship of domination boil down to or be reduced to the notion of a relationship of force?” (SMD 46), he later answered it unequivocally by denying that power could ever be reduced to force or violence. The violent inscription of bodies fuses with the inscription of meanings in the functioning of modern political power, but these aspects cannot be completely superimposed without committing a fundamental ontological error. In his seminal essay “Subject and Power” from 1982 Foucault poses the classic question of political philosophy—the same one as Hannah Arendt did in On Violence, for example—namely whether violence is simply the ultimate form of power: “that which in the final analysis appears as its real nature when it is forced to throw aside its mask and to show itself as it really is” (“SP” 220). He also follows Arendt in his negative reply, and puts forward an oppositional view of the relationship between power and violence.13 They are opposites in the sense that where one rules absolutely the other is absent: “Where the determining factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains” (“SP” 221). Foucault distinguishes power from violence by arguing that a power relationship is a mode of action that does not act directly and immediately on others, but rather acts upon their actions: it is a set of actions upon other actions. This means, first, that the one over whom power is exercised is thoroughly recognized as a subject, as a person who acts. Second, he or she must be free, meaning here that when faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of possibilities—responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions—may open up and be realized. Violence, on the other hand, acts directly and immediately on the body. It is not an action upon an action of a subject, but an action upon a body or things. Foucault now also criticizes the war model explicitly by writing that the relationship proper to power should not be sought “on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government” (“SP” 221).

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The war model was thus ultimately abandoned, but not in favor of an understanding of political power based on consensus or contract. The idea of power as the governing of conduct—a set of actions upon actions—and the practice-based account of political rationality conveyed by the notion of governmentality and developed in the lecture series following Society Must Be Defended meant that political power was still understood as essentially agonistic and strategic. I will show in chapter 5 how the idea of governmentality introduces a further refinement and development of his conception of political power, and how it opens up an original perspective for analyzing its specific connections with violence. It is also important to emphasize that the agonism that Foucault advocates, even in his Society Must Be Defended lectures, is not rooted in any kind of essentialist claims concerning violence. The fact that the social space is agonistic does not derive from a primal state of war or the aggressive nature of human beings: it rather derives from the ontological view that all political realities are contingent and contestable because they are constituted by historical practices of power and violence. The historical reality of war means that what acquires the status of reality rather than fiction is determined by victory, not truth in any absolute or simple sense, and bodies are used, killed, and injured to create and confirm truths. However, while some practices and strategies prove to be hegemonic and thus reify momentarily into relatively stable political structures, this incites counter-struggles ensuring that the power game moves on. No victory is final.

The State versus Government In thinking about the possibilities of uncoupling any essential connection between violence and the political it is also crucial to make a distinction between political power and the state. While it seems clear that we are not in a situation in which we can anticipate the immanent dissolution of the state, it is still important to keep in mind that it is a historically contingent form of political power and not its eternal or essential form. A continuous strand in Foucault’s thought is his attempt to find ways of thinking about political power which do not equate it with state institutions. The radical historicization of the state undertaken in his lectures on governmentality, for example, implies that the modern territorial nation-state is only one historical form of government, that might prove to be passing. His criticism of the modern state is perhaps most explicit in “Subject and Power,” however, and the forms of resistance that

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he sets as his model are “anarchistic struggles” (“SP” 211). He characterizes the relationship between power and the state by overturning their order of primacy. It is certain that in contemporary societies the state is not simply one of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of power—even if it is the most important—but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is because power relations have come more and more under state control. (“SP” 224)14

It is thus impossible to understand the functioning of power relations without analyzing the state, but this is not because they are derived from it. Rather, the state is a historically contingent organization of power that has spread its reach over an increasing field of experience (“SP” 215).15 In terms of the question whether political violence is ineradicable, this means that while Foucault’s thought clearly affirms the truism of political philosophy that there are no states without monopolized violence and histories of actual and potential wars, this platitude does not yet imply that violence is an irreducible feature of the political. If politics is not equated with the establishment and maintenance of the state, but is understood to cover all the dense capillary networks of actions upon action in a society, then it is not difficult to imagine forms of political practice that are not tied to the use of violence—legitimate or illegitimate. This does not mean, however, that politics without the oppressive state would become a harmonious realm of deliberation and consensus. It is quite possible that agonism would take dramatically more violent forms in the absence of the state, as has arguably happened in many instances. The point is only to deny its inevitability. The disputes could be ongoing and unsettled, erupt in violence, or be dissolved through different procedures. Only actual politics can ultimately decide this. The affirmation of agonism implies the ineliminability, not of war and violence, but of conflicts and power relations. What the mechanisms for establishing, changing, regulating, limiting, and criticizing them should be are political questions par excellence. The agonistic ontology of practices is also the reason why Foucault repeatedly refused to offer any overall theory of resistance: resistances are formed of varying strategies in varying practices. They “cut societies on the diagonal” and aim at specific transformations.16 While state power inevitably implicates us in violence in being both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power, Foucault does not envisage any radical overthrow of the state, no final or global liberation. Instead the anarchistic

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struggles he promotes are specific, immediate, and transversal. They are struggles that question the status of the individual by promoting new forms of subjectivity and by questioning the ways in which knowledge circulates and functions in its relations to power (“SP” 212).

Lines of Fragility The apparent tension between history and philosophy, or historiography and ontology, comes to the fore in Foucault’s attempt to rethink political power and its relationship to violence in his Society Must Be Defended lectures. Initially he approached the theoretical question guiding the lectures—whether war could provide a principle for the analysis of power relations—by studying the historical development of a specific discourse that utilized such a model. He traced the history of such a historiography from the sixteenth century onward, and showed how it became a standard weapon in political struggles. His account of political power and violence was thus thoroughly historical, and all abstract political theory was subsumed under this methodological choice. We are immersed in a history of violence, and it is only from this perspective—in the midst of the mud and blood of battle—that we can attempt to understand society, political power, and ourselves. The methodological choice to discard abstract theory in favor of an analysis that was as historically specific as possible was paramount in these lectures. The recognition of the need for clear and cutting conceptual weapons seems to dominate in his late writings such as “Subject and Power,” however, and culminates in the question of resistance. It is easy to contend that all neat conceptual distinctions between different levels of power, force, and violence quickly become blurred when we inquire into the historical reality of politics. The conflictual nature of social reality has manifested itself in Western political history not as the peaceful coexistence of competing interpretations of reality, but as a tendency of politics always to aim at hegemony through violent means. However, for resistance against this tendency to be a viable option for the future, we cannot accept its inevitability. We have to be able to separate the realm of the actual from the realm of the possible—the realm of political imagination. Foucault seemed to recognize the problem acutely when he asks in the opening paragraphs of his essay whether we need a theory of power. Since a theory assumes prior objectification, it cannot be asserted as a basis for analytical work. He immediately adds, however, that the ana-

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lytical work cannot proceed without an ongoing conceptualization, one that implies critical thought and constant checking. As I have argued in chapter 1, the inevitable ontology that any theory imposes must thus be checked and critically reflected on, but cannot be completely avoided. The contingency of the present and every ontological order imposed on it is, after all, our only guarantee that the violence of our past is not to be the inevitable predicament of our future. I have therefore suggested that it is probable that Foucault acknowledged the dangers that the ontological blurring of the boundaries between different dimensions of force and war would cause, and that he was therefore prepared to overstep the limits of his modest historicism when analyzing political violence. Foucault’s vision of modernity is no doubt pessimistic. As Beatrice Hanssen writes (2000, 19, 27), he constructs a genealogy of modernity saturated with violence, and his thought announces the end of all transcendental critiques of violence. She is wrong to claim that it relies on anthropological pessimism, however. I have attempted to show that in opposing Hobbes, Foucault is making a significant break with the political tradition that builds on anthropological pessimism. Even if we had to accept that violence was so universally pervasive that it appeared necessary for human societies, this very observation, just like the positing of any social objectivity, could only be made as a historically perspectival and politically charged claim. In the realm of the political there is always an undefined space for freedom in the radical contingency of the present. These “lines of fragility in the present” do not, perhaps, make space for utopias of a world free of violence, but they do open up a space for political imagination, limited hope, and patient labor.17

3

Dangerous Animals

Agonism is generally understood as a conception of politics that places dissent, rather than the search for consensus, at its heart. It is often defined in opposition to deliberative democratic theories. William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, and Chantal Mouffe, most notably, have argued for an agonistic account of the political against the deliberative models of thinkers such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. They have challenged the deep-rooted belief that the legitimacy of a political regime relies on a consensus among rational citizens, and have attempted to show that deliberative models cannot adequately theorize the constitutive role of agonism in political life. The political space must be understood as essentially plural, conflictual, and contentious rather than as always ultimately aiming at consensus.1 While agonism has thus become a theoretically influential paradigm in contemporary political thought, it has remained divided on the crucial question of its grounds.2 Connolly’s and Honig’s conceptions of the agonistic dimension of politics are influenced by Nietzsche and Arendt, for example, whereas Mouffe relies on the thought of Schmitt and Girard. The supporters of agonism have tended to focus on its strategic and political importance: the affirmation of dissent and difference is crucial for securing the future of liberal-democratic institutions against forms of fundamentalism, extreme individualism, and political apathy. Thomas Fossen (2008) argues that in order to understand why political theorists advocate agonism we have to uncover their normative commitments. As he points out, the attempt to ground agonistic accounts simply on the normative commitment to pluralism encounters obvious difficulties, however. This argument would appear to be viciously circular: dissent and contestation are valuable and therefore society is irreducibly agonistic. Second, the normative commitment to pluralism in itself does not necessarily distinguish agonistic theorists from deliberative thinkers. The adherents of both positions readily recognize the value of pluralism in modern society, but seem to disagree on the most conducive means by which to achieve it: whether we should always strive for reasonable consensus or, alternatively, accept the irreducibility of dissent. The difference between them would thus not concern normative commitments,

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but would be merely a practical question of the most effective strategy. Fossen ends up arguing that agonism is defended primarily because of its emancipatory potential.3 He cites Bonnie Honig, for example, who has noted that her affirmation of agonism is animated by the conviction that “the displacement of politics with law or administration engenders remainders that could disempower and perhaps even undermine institutions and citizens” (Honig 1993, 14). It is my contention that the defense of agonistic conceptions of politics has to be ultimately grounded on an explication of the ontological and not only the normative commitments underlying it. While we have to accept that the ontological and the normative cannot be neatly separated, agonism should not be read as a prescriptive theory. I will therefore critically examine the ontological commitments that inform it by focusing on Chantal Mouffe’s thought. Mouffe has explicitly contended that while her main focus is on the empirical field of current political practice, more fundamentally, for her, it is the lack of ontological understanding that lies at the heart of our current incapacity to think politically.4 I will show that Mouffe’s agonistic theory is based on two contradictory ontological frameworks in her recent work, however. It is grounded both on an anti-essentialist political ontology derived from poststructuralism and on a vaguely formulated essentialist ontological presupposition about the irreducible role of violence in human affairs. The latter is based upon two influential accounts of violence: Réne Girard’s work on generative violence and Carl Schmitt’s theory of the political. In her early work with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), agonism was related to the Marxist idea of class antagonism, but in her subsequent books she has moved away from explicit engagement with Marxism. The turn to thinkers such as Schmitt and Girard has led her to adopt an ontologized conception of violence as well as an understanding of the political that is essentially tied to it. Mouffe—like Girard and Schmitt—is continuing a Hobbesian legacy that sees containing the violent capacities of others as the ultimate purpose of political order. In exposing this legacy I aim to argue for a consistently anti-essentialist approach to the political that refuses to accept violence as a pre-given ontological constant. While the pervasiveness of violence seems to imply the naïveté of all rationalist or deliberative accounts of the political, it should not lead to defeatism, to the easy acceptance of violence as an inevitable feature of human sociality. On the contrary, it should make us more determined than ever to look for ways to make critiques of violence an essential part of political thinking.

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Chantal Mouffe and Pluralist Democracy Chantal Mouffe is arguably the foremost theoretician of the agonistic conception of the political: a continuous theme in her thought has been her insistence on the conflictual character of politics. Instead of engaging in a futile search for an inaccessible consensus, she suggests that we should envisage modern democratic politics as an agonistic confrontation between conflicting interpretations of constitutive liberaldemocratic values. Pluralist democratic politics consists in pragmatic, precarious, and necessarily unstable ways of negotiating conflicts. This is not due to its present state of imperfection, but what is specific and valuable about modern liberal democracy is exactly that it creates a space in which confrontations and conflicts are kept open, power relations are always being called into question, and no victory can be final. Such “agonistic” democracy requires acceptance of the fact that conflict and diversion are inherent in politics.5 Mouffe’s argument for agonism proceeds from various theoretical premises and operates at different levels. This makes it difficult at times to tease them out. On the level of political theory she clearly argues that modern liberal democracy is irreducibly agonistic because it is informed by two distinct traditions of political thought affirming two different and mutually conflicting principles: the democratic tradition based on the principle of popular sovereignty on the one hand, and the liberal tradition advocating individual liberty on the other. She draws on Carl Schmitt’s diagnosis of liberal democracy in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, arguing that the two logics are incompatible and can never be perfectly reconciled.6 The conflict between democracy and liberalism consists of the irreconcilable opposition between the liberal grammar of equality, which postulates universality and reference to humanity, and the principle of popular sovereignty, which requires the political moment of constituting the “people” and thus the discrimination between us and them. Liberal-democratic politics must thus remain a paradox, but in Mouffe’s view it is a productive paradox: pluralistic democracy must consist of an agonistic confrontation between conflicting interpretations of the liberal-democratic values. This is the best way to acknowledge the tension between its constitutive elements and to harness it in a productive way. We should relinquish the idea that there could be such a thing as a “rational” political consensus. To present the institutions of liberal democracy as the outcome of a pure deliberative rationality is to reify them and to render the democratic challenging of them illegitimate.7

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In addition to the acute diagnosis of the paradox of liberal democracy and the strategic argument for agonism that it implies, in many respects Mouffe’s work could also be read as drawing out the implications of Foucault’s political ontology, as presented in the previous chapters, for the theoretical understanding of modern democracy. Her argument for agonism relies on adherence to the core tenets of Foucaultian ontology: the contingency of all ontological orders and the radically constitutive nature of power. She acknowledges this explicitly by noting that her aim is to appropriate non-essentialist approaches to politics informed by post-structuralism: a critique of ontological essentialism must form the necessary condition for understanding the political struggles in the present stage of liberal democracy (Mouffe 2000, 11). According to Mouffe, the post-structuralist denial of a universal human nature and a universal canon of rationality through which that human nature could be known does not jeopardize the democratic project, but enhances it and ultimately makes possible a genuinely pluralistic democracy. Pluralism must be understood ontologically as the end of any substantive idea of a good life due to the dissolution of the firm markers of certainty (Mouffe 2000, 17–18). All forms of political thinking that rely on an objective ontology in which objectivity is seen as somehow belonging to the things themselves necessarily lead to the reduction of plurality and dissent, and ultimately to their negation. Envisaged from an anti-essentialist perspective, on the other hand, pluralism is not merely a fact, but is constitutive, at the conceptual level, of the very nature of modern democracy. Furthermore, her central claim is that all social objectivities are constituted through acts of power. Any political order is an expression of hegemony, a specific pattern of power relations. The constitutive nature of power implies that neither exclusion nor conflict can be eliminated in politics. The social order is always instituted politically through hegemonic configurations. This implies the inevitability of domination and exclusion, and the permanence of conflict and dissent. Radical democracy must question “the objectives of unanimity and homogeneity, which are always revealed as fictitious and based on acts of exclusion” (Mouffe 2000, 19). Mouffe also reiterates Foucault’s understanding of the subject in arguing that power should be conceived of not as an external relation that takes place between pre-constituted political identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves. Political practice cannot be envisaged simply as representing the interests of pre-constituted identities: it constitutes those identities in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain (Mouffe 2000, 99–100).

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The ineradicable character of agonism raises the crucial question of whether violence is also ineradicable. Mouffe seems to accept that it is, and it is this easy acceptance of the inevitability of violence that I find problematic in her theory. She argues that we need a distinction between “politics” and “the political.” Politics is an ensemble of practices, discourses, and institutions that establish a certain social order and organize human coexistence. “The political,” on the other hand, is given an essential but vaguely formulated definition as “the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations” (Mouffe 2000, 101). Politics must domesticate this fundamental hostility and defuse the inherent antagonism. The specificity of modern pluralist democracy “does not reside in the absence of domination and of violence, but in the establishment of a set of institutions through which they can be limited and contested” (ibid., 22). Mouffe’s agonistic theory is thus based on two ultimately contradictory ontological frameworks. In addition to relying on anti-essentialism and the constitutive role of power, she also claims that the agonistic character of politics derives from a foundational ontology, referred to as “the political” and denoting the irreducible hostility and violence inherent in human sociality. Her view of agonistic politics is thus grounded both on an anti-essentialist political ontology derived from post-structuralism as well as on a vaguely formulated essentialist ontological presupposition about the irreducible nature of violence in human affairs. The latter is based upon two influential accounts of violence: René Girard’s work on fundamental anthropology and Carl Schmitt’s theory of the political. I will take a brief look at these theories next for the purpose of uncovering their essentialist presuppositions concerning violence. I will then return to Mouffe to conclude this chapter.

René Girard and Generative Violence In the conclusion to her book The Democratic Paradox, Mouffe reveals the grounds of her argument for agonism by briefly referring to the thought of René Girard. She notes that while the philosophers of the Enlightenment presented an idealized and optimistic view of human sociality, seeing violence as an archaic phenomenon that does not really belong to human nature, Girard’s theory of generative violence reveals the conflictual nature of mimetic desire and thus the foundational role of violence in human society. She concludes that politics must remain agonistic because the violence inherent in human sociality can never be erased (Mouffe 2000, 130–35).

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While Girard is famous—or notorious—for his explicit criticism of post-structuralism and for his grand aim of presenting what he calls “fundamental anthropology”—a universal theory of what human societies are always fundamentally about—this theoretical framework and its ontological commitments seem to be at odds with Mouffe’s emphasis on anti-essentialist approaches to political theory. If violence is an ontological constant, a permanent feature of human sociality that can never be eradicated, but only channeled in different ways, we seem to be back in a framework delineated by very firm markers of certainty. In his monumental and provocative study Violence and the Sacred (1977) Girard combines anthropological data with detailed studies of literary texts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to present a distinctive theory of the origins of human society. The key for understanding human behavior and culture is violence, which, on the one hand, constantly threatens the cultural order, but at the same time founds and sustains it. Human beings must protect themselves from primordial violence, which is coextensive with humanity as a species. Primitive religion and mythology are means of controlling this destructive force, but also ways of concealing the terrifying truth of our violent nature. On the basis of various ethnographical data Girard argues that the ultimate danger for primitive societies was the threat of uncontrollable violence: the slightest outbreak of violence could bring about a catastrophic escalation because violence always called for vengeance. The constant threat was that one act of vengeance would initiate a chain reaction the consequences of which would quickly prove fatal to any society of modest size. Violence is thus potentially always an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. It is a force that ultimately threatens the existence of mankind. In primitive societies religion, and more specifically sacrifice, was a way of channeling the constantly threatening violence outside the community. The idea was to inflict upon a relatively indifferent victim, a sacrificable victim, violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members.8 Violence could thus not be repressed, but it could be diverted to a dispensable object. Sacrifice was the ritualistic channeling of destructive violence, which thereby turned into positive, generative violence, giving rise to social order and peace. Unanimous, sacrificial violence was radically generative in that, by putting an end to the vicious and destructive cycle of reciprocal violence, it simultaneously initiated another constructive cycle, that of the sacrificial rite—which protected the community from the same violence and allowed the culture to flourish. Violence thus constitutes “the indirect origin of all those things that men hold dear and that they strive most ardently to preserve” (Girard 1977, 93).9

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The fundamental difference between primitive societies and ours resides not in the elimination of the foundational violence in our society, but in the means we have for controlling and channeling it. Girard argues that we have become blind to the way human relations are permeated by violence because we have managed to deflect the vicious circle of vengeance through our juridical system. This system does not suppress vengeance; it rather effectively limits it to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a sovereign authority specializing in this particular function. The judicial system is able to deal with the problem of violence because it possesses a monopoly on the means of revenge. Public vengeance is thus the exclusive property of well-policed societies, whereas primitive societies are characterized by the absence of a judicial system. They have therefore no certain way of dealing with the outbreak of violence, which is why preventive measures such as sacrificial rites take on such importance (Girard 1977, 15–17). If Girard’s view of the human condition is thus rather pessimistic, his view of modern society and of the efficiency of the judicial system in eliminating violence seems overtly optimistic. Despite the fact that his book was written during the Cold War, he claims that although violence undoubtedly also existed in our society, it did not exist “to such an extent that the society itself is threatened with extinction” (Girard 1977, 14). He also claims that in “policed societies” the relationships between individuals, including total strangers, are “characterized by an extraordinary air of informality, flexibility and even audacity” (ibid., 20). There are plenty of reasons to suggest the contrary: not only are social relations in many urban areas of modern liberal democracies over-determined by fear, but the emergence of the modern state has resulted in the development of standing professional armies and the multiplication of unprecedented forms of exploitation and violence, such as colonialism and genocide. Girard’s account has been widely criticized in the light of empirical evidence in various fields. Scholars of religious studies have argued that his view of religion is totalizing and simplistic. They have pointed to religions practiced by groups such as the Australian aboriginals and the Siberian shamans, who do not have any sacrificial rites.10 Moreover, the ethnographical data available on violence in primitive societies can be interpreted in different ways. Pierre Clastres (1994), for example, describes how the ethnographical discourse on violence and war has operated through at least three types of explanatory discourse: a naturalist discourse arguing that violence is a zoological property of the human species, an economist discourse accounting for primitive war as the weakness of productive forces, and an exchangist discourse represented by Claude Lévi-Strauss and his followers, who argue that war is the accidental failure of the exchange that essentially characterizes human societies.

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Clastres opposes all these discourses and, in contrast to Girard, explains the quasi-universality of primitive war as the means of preventing the emergence of oppressive state institutions in these societies and thereby as a way of guaranteeing their members’ autonomy.11 As well as considering counterarguments on the empirical level, we should question philosophically the theoretical framework according to which Girard’s account operates. In his thought, and perhaps with some reservations it is fair to say in modern discourse more generally, culture is repeatedly understood as a secondary layer attempting to control a primordial nature. More specifically, a deep-seated presupposition in political philosophy has been the Hobbesian premise that political order rests upon a state of nature—a war of everyman against everyman—and that its ultimate purpose is therefore to contain the violent capacities of others. Girard’s account clearly continues this tradition of thought. Neither Hobbes nor Girard simply affirms violence as a universal given under the assumption that aggression is an essential feature of human nature. Contrary to popular misconception, Hobbes did not understand the state of nature as being one of continual war because humans were inherently evil or violent. They were naturally selfish and partial to their own interests, however, and these natural predilections placed in the context of the competition for scarce resources would lead to a spiral of violence. For Girard, too, violence is inevitable because people desire the same objects, but conflict does not arise because of the accidental convergence of two desires for a single object. He claims that desire itself is already necessarily mimetic: the subject desires the object because the rival desires it.12 Violence is permanent and universal due to the mimetic nature of desire, and only cultural order can prevent multiple desires from converging on the same object. Mimetic desire thus explains why violence is the essential substratum that culture as a variable overlay attempts by different means to control. Despite the fact that these cultural means vary historically and geographically—in primitive societies they are tied to religion and in our “civilized” society to legal punishment, for example—violence itself remains essentially the same: throughout Girard’s analysis of varied textual material violence is understood as a primordial impulse and a destructive force. The model is universal: modern society functions through the same principles as primitive religious societies. Violence is the permanent and generative foundation of all human culture.13 In her surprising turn to Girard, Mouffe makes explicit her reliance on the same modernist explanatory framework. She also presupposes violence as a primordial given that culture, in the form of a democratic pluralist society, attempts to limit and control. She argues that because

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antagonism and hostility can never be eliminated, it is preferable to give them “a political outlet” within an agonistic democratic system (Mouffe 2000, 114). The agonism that Mouffe advocates is therefore not violent confrontation between enemies, but essentially nonviolent conflict between adversaries. In order to grasp the meaning of her distinction between “adversary” and “enemy” we must next turn to the thought of Carl Schmitt.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Ontology Mouffe’s debt to Carl Schmitt is much more carefully elaborated and complex than her reliance on Girard. Her objective is to “think with Schmitt, against Schmitt, and to use his insights in order to strengthen liberal democracy against its critiques” (Mouffe 1993, 2). According to Mouffe, Schmitt can help us—in spite of himself—to grasp the tension between democracy and liberalism and to think through it. His diagnosis of the paradox inherent in the principles of parliamentary democracy is crucial for contemporary efforts to safeguard the future of democratic politics. What makes Mouffe’s appropriation of Schmitt problematic in my view is, again, her emphasis on the hostility and violence inherent in politics. According to her, it is Schmitt who can make us aware that “the dimension of the political is linked to the existence of an element of hostility among human beings” (Mouffe 1993, 2). Ultimately it is this fundamental hostility, and not the constitutive nature of power, that entails that the field of politics can never be reduced to a rational process of negotiation. I argue, on the contrary, that despite the undeniable merits of many aspects of Schmitt’s scholarly work, his political ontology is a deeply problematic framework within which to theorize the agonistic character of politics. The fascination and renewed interest that he currently evokes in the intellectuals of the Left should, in my view, be critically curbed.14 In his famous essay The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt sets out to study the essence of the political in the sense of what is specific to it. He presents his well-known definition: the essential distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. The friend and enemy concepts are not metaphors or symbols. Schmitt is not concerned with abstractions or normative ideals. Neither do they refer to individuals. An enemy exists when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The political condition arises from the struggle of groups.

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For Schmitt, the political is the most fundamental antagonism because to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat. Just like the term “enemy,” the word “combat,” too, must be understood in its literal meaning. It does not refer to competition, pure intellectual controversy, or symbolic wrestling. Schmitt’s message is clear and his tone chilling: “The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing” (Schmitt 1996, 33). Only in real combat is the true meaning and the extreme consequence of the friend-enemy distinction revealed. It is precisely from this extreme possibility of being prepared to kill one’s enemy in combat that the specifically political meaning of human existence is derived. Violence, in the ultimate sense of killing, thus becomes definitive, not of human sociality as such, but of the specific meaning of the political as a distinctly human form of existence. For something to be political, and not purely economic or aesthetic, means that it can group men according to the friend-enemy distinction and make them prepared to kill each other and to be killed. A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without politics. It is conceivable that such a world might contain many interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings. (Schmitt 1996, 35)

Schmitt does not wish to put forward any political ontology, but merely to give a descriptive account of the actual political reality confronting him. He explicitly tones down his militarism by writing that “the definition of the political suggested here neither favors war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism” (Schmitt 1996, 33). He does not map out social ideals or even possibilities, because for him the political is a reality that must be reckoned with in concrete situations and cannot be measured against any ideal. Yet, his philosophical position could be characterized as a mixture of existentialist and crypto-essentialist discourses. On the one hand he argues that the political has no substance of its own.15 It does not describe a substance, but rather refers to a quality of association: its intensity (Schmitt 1996, 38). A group or a people becomes a political entity only when it has defined itself against an enemy and is prepared to combat this enemy. This decision in the form of the ability to determine, by itself, the distinction between friend and enemy makes

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a political association something specific and different vis-à-vis other religious, cultural, and economic associations, for example. “By virtue of this power over the physical life of men, the political community transcends all other associations or societies” (ibid., 47). The political thus requires a decision, it is an existential act of self-definition that forms a people and shapes its destiny. It characterizes the intensity of identification, the existential leap of faith that alone can make one ready to die for one’s country. On the other hand, Schmitt’s discourse is crypto-essentialist. For the friend-enemy distinction to have such definitive power there must already be an essence of the people binding it together. If this essence is lacking no amount of decision or social construction can bring it about. It is this essence, the substantial unity of the people, that the political defines and brings forth at those critical moments in history when the only political questions worth asking are: who are you ready to kill and who are you ready to die for? The ontology upholding Schmitt’s account is thus not essentialism concerning human nature, it is essentialism concerning a people. There is a substantive homogeneity of a group: its substance is brought forth by its decision to draw a distinction between friend and enemy. While Schmitt sees inter-state relations as profoundly antagonistic, there is a political unity and harmony in a people manifested in its political will as a collectively authentic essence.16 There is also a hidden essentialism concerning human nature that is operative in his account, however. Schmitt is careful to refrain from making any explicit anthropological claims about human nature, but he notes that one could effectively test all political theories according to their anthropology and thereby classify them as to whether they unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or good. He accepts that the conception of man is thus decisive for the presupposition of every further political consideration. After discussing different views about human nature without explicitly siding with any, he notes, revealingly, that what remains remarkable is that all “genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being” (Schmitt 1996, 61). The ultimate ontological presupposition of Schmitt’s theory is his thesis of man’s dangerousness. Leo Strauss’s commentary on Schmitt’s essay was written as early as 1932, but it remains a pertinent exposition and critique of the anthropological presuppositions of his view. Strauss attempts to show that, despite Schmitt’s reservations, the opposition between the negation and the affirmation of the political must be traced back to the quarrel over human nature. In the final analysis the thesis of man’s dangerousness,

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understood not in the moral sense of evil but in the sense that he is by nature a violent and dangerous animal prone to threatening any order, is the ultimate presupposition of his view on the political. Even though Schmitt himself qualifies this presupposition as only having the status of an anthropological confession of faith, his understanding of the political presupposes it. His affirmation of the political is ultimately an affirmation of the Hobbesian state of nature (Strauss 1996, 103).17

The Politics of Adversaries Mouffe seriously questions the essentialist strand of Schmitt’s position— his understanding of the homogeneity of the people as the way in which the friend-enemy groupings are constituted. She readily acknowledges that, for Schmitt, there is no possibility of pluralism in the sense of legitimate dissent among friends. She sees the very distinction between friend and enemy as essential for a true understanding of the political, however. We must be able to trace a line of demarcation between those who belong to the demos—and therefore have equal rights—and those who, in the political domain, cannot have the same rights because they are not part of the demos. Such a democratic equality—expressed today through citizenship—is the basis of all other forms of equality. She therefore agrees with Schmitt that the central concept of democracy is not humanity, but the concept of the people. This means that the logic of democracy implies a moment of closure, which is required by the process of constituting the people. The creation of a “we” necessarily requires opposition to a delimiting “them.” It is this closure that implies the impossibility of establishing a rational consensus without exclusion.18 To equate the delimiting function of “them” with Schmitt’s concept of “enemy” as the irreducible given of political thought is not only a contestable reading of Schmitt’s position, it also leads to a problematic ontology of violence. If we take seriously the essentialist implications of Schmitt’s view of the political unity of the people, we would have to turn Mouffe’s argument around. It is not the enemy who defines who we are, but it is who we are that must define the enemy. It is the substance of the people that must come forth and determine who the enemy is. Furthermore, and more important for my argument, the concept of enemy carries with it the ontology of violence inscribed in this notion. The readiness to physically kill someone is the ultimate criterion for belonging to the enemy. The argument for the necessity of exclusion morphs into an argument for the necessity of hostility and violence.

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It is my contention that we do not have to accept Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy to argue that democracy necessarily implies exclusion, “a moment of closure.” As Mouffe effectively argues through a post-structuralist framework, like any other regime, modern pluralist democracy constitutes a system of relations of power. Consensus in a liberal-democratic society is—and always will be—the expression of hegemony and the crystallization of power relations.19 Consensus is the effect of physical violence, however, only when this hegemony is established through violent means. The frontier that establishes the distinction between inclusion/exclusion is always a political one, but is not necessarily the result of physical violence. The democratic-liberal society is a contingent and hegemonic articulation of the “people” through a particular political regime of inclusion-exclusion, but it is not founded on the ontological necessity to distinguish the enemy. As I argued in the previous chapter, the foundational violence of modern states is historical and contingent, not ontological. The conceptualization of necessary exclusion in terms of friend and enemy leads, moreover, to a problematic narrowing of the political arena. The agonism that Mouffe advocates cannot be, understandably, violent confrontation between enemies. For Schmitt, the hostility inherent in the friend-enemy distinction ultimately leads to the transformation of the political into war because no amount of discussion, compromise, or exhortation can settle issues between enemies.20 To avoid this, Mouffe has to introduce the important distinction between “antagonism” and “agonism.” Antagonism takes place between enemies, that is, persons who have no common symbolic space and who are therefore perceived as negating each other’s identity. Agonism, on the other hand, involves a relation not between enemies but between “adversaries.” Adversaries share a common symbolic space, but they want to organize this space in a different way.21 The aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism by “providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary” (Mouffe 2000, 103). In other words, agonism does not result in violence because the democratic-liberal state and the possibilities it offers for legitimate opposition prevent antagonism from escalating into violent conflict. Mouffe defines an adversary in terms of two substantial features in addition to sharing a common symbolic space. The first one is normative: adversaries share an adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy—liberty and equality. They must agree on the importance of “liberty and equality for all” while disagreeing about their

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meaning and the way in which they should be implemented. The second one is formal: adversaries are recognized as having the right to defend their beliefs and ideas. They comprise the legitimate opponent whom we are not entitled to coerce, exclude, discipline, or punish. An adversary is somebody “whose ideas we combat, but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question” (Mouffe 2000, 102). Both features raise important questions for political theory and practice. The unproblematic acceptance of liberty and equality as the pre-given ground of politics raises the question of whether the questioning of their ultimate value, through nonviolent means, necessarily makes one an enemy. Should we not also give a recognized political voice to the critics of these essentially Western political values instead of labeling them terrorists? Would an open political contest not strengthen and reinvigorate rather than weaken these values? The assumption that adversaries are already in the position of a legitimate opponent in the political field, on the other hand, compels us to ask whether political struggles are ever simply debates between existing interpretations of our underlying values and principles, and not simultaneously struggles for one’s voice to be heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate partner. Should asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, prisoners, and nomads be excluded from the political debate because they have no legitimate position in it? Who has the right to be recognized and heard as an adversary in this political debate? Mouffe’s binary logic of enemy versus adversary ultimately becomes a limiting framework for conceptualizing political conflicts and struggles. The agonism she advocates is essentially embodied in the confrontation between the political left and right. She has repeatedly argued against “the illusion” that democratic politics could organize itself without them, in terms of some kind of “third way,” for example.22 Instead of understanding agonism as characterizing the field of myriad conflicts over varied issues and identities—at times organized on clear platforms, but also consisting of fragmented and vaguely formulated dissent, activism, and lifestyle choices—politics is understood very traditionally as the party politics of citizens who are entitled to vote. Although Mouffe does not explicitly ground her problematic distinction between enemy and adversary on the question of violence, it is my contention that it is upheld by this “constant” of her political ontology—the hostility and violence inherent in politics. The category of the “adversary” becomes the key to envisaging the specificity of modern pluralist politics because it is the only means of removing the ever-present hostility and violence from the sphere of politics. The narrowing of the range of the political thus becomes the price we pay for having to keep

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the irreducible violence at bay. The category of adversary does not eliminate violence from modern democracies, however. It only shifts it to the margins, to corrective institutions and detention centers. While Foucault’s thought effectively questions the idea of foundational physical violence on the level of the ontological, it exposes it on the level of the ontic. In chapters 5, 6, and 8 I go on to argue that he fundamentally challenges the idea that the liberal-democratic state only aims to positively channel primordial hostility into legitimate opposition in the form of conflicts between adversaries. Instead, he claims that the state produces and sustains historically specific practices of violence through its monopoly on it. Violence in modern societies has largely been eradicated from open encounters between enemies, but it is practiced in the name of improvement in institutions of discipline, correction, and punishment. The reason why conflicts between adversaries do not escalate into violence in modern democracies is thus not because there are effective and legitimate channels through which they are defused—such as democratic political participation—but because the state has an insurmountable monopoly. A lot of conflicts are not defused, but in fact are produced, and then simply contained within prison walls. It is my contention that a consistently anti-essentialist approach to political thinking would mean understanding violence nominalistically, and not as a primordial, irreducible essence. Appropriating Foucault’s thought, we should then also question “the repressive hypothesis”23 in connection with political violence: the idea that political order functions only to repress a primordial hostility. Instead, it effectively produces and sustains historically specific practices of violence.

4

The Politics of Gendered Violence

While the present study attempts to demonstrate that violence is only contingently, not necessarily and inevitably, connected to political power, there are violent dimensions to almost every historical, particular example of political struggle. Violence and power are often tightly coupled, and there are cases in which violence is the ultimate threat by means of which power relations are upheld. It could be objected that a theoretical approach to violence that refuses to treat violence as an inherent characteristic of the subject and focuses instead on the analysis of historically specific and contingent practices fails to explain how violent individuals are invariably able to establish and maintain relationships of power. Not analyzing violence on the level of the subject seems to leave open important questions about its relationship to power. In this chapter I want to respond to such an objection by studying in more detail the consequences that a Foucaultian approach to violence has for our understanding of the relationships between violence, power, and the subject. I will do this through a discussion of gendered violence. It is my contention that a Foucaultian approach to gendered violence accomplishes two things: it refuses to explain men’s violence against women in terms of inherent male aggression, yet it makes it possible to argue that it is not just incidental, but has structural and largescale political aspects. The analysis will not only help us to understand gendered violence, it will also advance the overall argument of the book by illuminating the mechanisms through which practices of power and violence become entangled. Foucault drew a distinction between power and violence, but argued that the rationalities upholding practices of domination were often compatible with practices of violence. Culturally and historically contingent practices of violence must furthermore be understood as constitutive of specific forms of the subject: violent subjects are the effects of specific cultural practices and relations of power.

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Gender and Violence While violence against women is a widely acknowledged problem of global magnitude, theoretically the question of the relationship between gender and violence remains complex, contentious, and emotionally charged. This holds true not only in our culture at large, but also within feminist theory. The positions in the feminist discussion vary widely and are characterized by provocative rhetoric and, perhaps due to the empirical nature of most of the research, strong personal involvement. At the same time the theoretical premises underlying the debate are surprisingly vague and underdeveloped. In contrast to the large amount of empirical research on domestic violence, for example, there is astonishingly little philosophical discussion on the topic. While numerous feminists have appropriated Foucault’s understanding of power, for example, the implications of his views on violence have not to my knowledge been studied at all. It is my contention that feminist theory needs to find ways to theorize forms of gendered violence, such as domestic violence, as political violence without reducing them to a manifestation of some kind of war between the sexes or as the unchanging foundation of patriarchy. In order to understand in what sense men’s violence against women could be understood as political we must attempt to understand the nature of men’s power over women and its relationship to violence. In other words, how is male domination—a fact that all feminists appear to agree on—related to violence? The key question in feminist debates on gendered violence has been whether male violence is essential or only instrumental in the process in which gender difference becomes constituted as gender hierarchy. I will show that this way of posing the question of male domination and violence is misleading. We have to ask a more fundamental question of whether violence is constitutive of gender difference in itself. The idea that violence against women is the foundation of patriarchy was implicit in many of the radical feminist texts of the early 1970s. It was clearly asserted by Susan Brownmiller in her classic book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975). Brownmiller argued that the threat of sexual violence was a way of intimidating and thereby curtailing the activities of all women, even those who had never personally been the victims of it. It was essentially terrorizing: the violence perpetrated against a few women was an effective way of exercising power over many. The anti-patriarchal arguments following Brownmiller rest on the premise that men’s violence against women should be understood not as incidental or as an expression of personal pathology, but as essential for

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the maintenance of patriarchal power. Drawing on research that demonstrates the historical and systematic nature of male violence, these feminists have contended that violence is part of the system of coercive control through which men maintain dominance over women.1 Male dominance is founded on a continuum of force ranging from misogynistic murder to rape, battery, and sexual harassment. Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft (1996), for example, sum up the idea provocatively by writing: “Battering can no more be explained by proximate causes or characteristics of participants than can lynching be explained by the characteristics of the lynch mob or its victims” (Stark and Flitcraft 1996, 26). In today’s political climate such anti-patriarchal analyses are rapidly losing ground, however. Researchers from other substantive traditions, family sociology for example, have argued that feminist scholars who focus on the importance of patriarchy in their explanations of phenomena such as domestic violence ignore the impact of other factors such as income, unemployment, and age. Gender is just one variable in a complex constellation of causes. These writers contend that violence is primarily linked to socio-demographic positions: both men and women who occupy low-status positions within the economic structure of society are more likely to perpetrate violence.2 The growing awareness of women-to-women sexual violence has also forced feminists to question the relationship between gender and violence further. Lori Girshick argues in her pioneering sociological study, Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape? (2002), that lesbian partner violence is approximating the same frequency and the same abuse types as heterosexual marital violence.3 Girshick notes that if she had substituted the pronoun “he” for the “she” in the stories she collected, she is certain that every reader would have thought that they were about marital sexual abuse (Girshick 2002, 65). According to her, this suggests that feminist analyses have been wrong all along. Instead of gender privilege being the source of power and control for men, power and control are equal-opportunity variables, available to both women and men (ibid., 99). Philosophically the crucial question in this debate concerns the way we understand the relationship between power and violence. While researchers at one end of the spectrum, such as Girshick, assume that this relationship is incidental, in the anti-patriarchal analyses, on the other hand, it is presupposed that the true nature of male power is ultimately violence. The theoretical question I therefore suggest that we have to ask is this: is male violence inseparable from male domination, or is the relationship between male domination and violence external? It is my contention that the answer to this specific question will also help

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us to understand the connections between power and violence more generally.

The Rationality of Violence At first glance it seems that a Foucaultian perspective does not lend any support to anti-patriarchal analyses. As I have discussed above, Foucault explicitly distinguished power from violence and denied that the essence of power would be violence.4 While many feminists have also noted that the characterization of society as a whole as a patriarchy is too totalizing and static a notion, Foucault’s view on power seems to further undermine the usefulness of this conceptualization.5 Against such a total view of monolithic power held by a clearly identifiable group, Foucault argues that power relations form a dense network that traverses the whole of society.6 Thinking according to the formula of a generalized patriarchy and its interests means reducing the multiplicity and variety of power relations to a simplistic opposition between two groups. We need to study the myriad ways in which subjects are constituted in different but intersecting networks of power, and must not be seduced into thinking that power functions only through repression and negation. The subordination of women consists of numerous micro-practices of male domination that operate through different mechanisms and affect different individuals in different ways.7 We can also appropriate Foucault’s late emphasis on governmental rationality to the question of gender oppression. He took as one example of a governmental practice—understood in a broad sense as the control and regulation of an individual’s conduct—the power exerted by men over women, and noted explicitly that it did not involve instrumental violence. As for all relations among men, many factors determine power. Yet rationalization is also constantly working away at it. There are specific forms to such rationalization. It differs from the rationalization peculiar to economic processes, or to production and communication techniques; it differs from that of scientific discourse. The government of men by men—whether they form small or large groups, whether it is power exerted by men over women, or by adults over children, or by one class over the other, or by a bureaucracy over a population— involves a certain type of rationality. It doesn’t involve instrumental violence. (EWF3 324)8

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Foucault’s view here seems to explicitly support a gender-neutral view on violence: men have power over women in our society, but their power is not based on or upheld by violence. To govern is not to physically determine the conduct of passive objects. Government involves rationality, offering reasons for the governed to do what they are told, and this means that they can also question these reasons. Neither is male domination a static feature of society: it consists of a dynamic network of practices that always incorporate resistance. While power relations thus permeate the whole body of society, they are denser in some areas and less dense in others. There is no patriarchy understood as a rigid system of coercive controls. Society is a fluid network of changing power relations traversed by resistance. A more careful reading of Foucault’s writings on power and violence complicates the picture, however. He argued that even though power relations were essentially fluid and reversible, what usually characterized power was that these relationships had become stabilized through institutions. This means that the mobility of power relations is limited, and that there are strongholds that are difficult to suppress because they have been institutionalized in courts, codes, and so on. In other words, the strategic relations between people have become rigid (EWF1 169). In one of his final interviews in 1984 he also distinguished between power as strategic relationships between individuals and power as states of domination. Strategic relationships refer to the ways in which individuals try to determine the conduct of others, and they are not necessarily harmful in any way as long as they are reversible and based on mutual consent. States of domination, on the other hand, refer to situations in which individuals are unable to overturn or alter the power relations (EWF1 229). While Foucault argued that power as a strategic relationship could be clearly demarcated from violence, he held that domination and violence, on the other hand, were often essentially coupled. As Thomas Flynn (2005, 244–45, 250) writes, for Foucault, all violence is attached to relations of power, but not all relations of power necessarily entail violence. It is rather the species of power that Foucault calls “domination,” and which Flynn labels “negative” power, with which violence is necessarily associated. Patriarchal power, or power of men over women in our society, provides clear examples of institutionalized and rigid power relations or states of domination. The ongoing feminist struggles have made it obvious that the subordination of women is difficult to eradicate because it is often codified in economic and institutional structures. The fluidity and reversibility of the individual power relations between men and women have, in many cases, been effectively blocked. In a situation in which

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a woman is unable to leave her violent husband because of economic reasons and child care arrangements, for example, the power relation is clearly a form of domination that is, furthermore, linked with violence. Moreover, Foucault’s analyses of governmental rationalities open up a wider perspective on the issue of gendered violence. The practices and institutions of power are always enabled, regulated, and justified by a specific form of reasoning or rationality. The analytics of power technologies concentrates not only on the mechanisms of power, but also on the rationality that is part of the practices of governing. It is important to point out that while practices of power have rationality, so do practices of violence. Foucault repeatedly emphasized that there was no incompatibility between violence and rationality, but “what is most dangerous about violence is its rationality” (DE2 803). On this basis we could argue that what is most dangerous about gendered violence are those aspects of it that make it look like perfectly rational behavior. Even though male domination and male violence against women should not be theoretically conflated, feminist analysis must study the extent to which rationalities upholding male domination and those supporting forms of male violence against women are interrelated, mutually supportive, or even identical. When a form of rationality according to which a husband’s responsibility is to provide for but also to control his wife and children is coupled with the acceptance of physical force as a means of control, for example, the patterns of domestic violence are set. The rationalization of domestic violence is often not an attempt to legitimize violence as such, but is rather an attempt to legitimize men’s hierarchical control of women. Kathleen Ferraro (1993, 165), for example, has shown that historically violence is recognized and condemned most often when it violates existing power and institutional hierarchies. Violence inflicted by dominant groups, such as white, male property owners, against their subordinates, such as slaves, wives, and children, has been rationalized and accepted as socially necessary and morally just. From a Foucaultian perspective, therefore, it is important to take seriously the feminist insight that inequality between men and women is a key factor in explaining phenomena such as domestic violence.9 The belief that women and children should fall under the social authority and economic responsibility of men upholds both practices of male domination and practices of male violence against women and children. Domestic violence is effectively depoliticized when it is viewed in genderneutral terms and reduced to an individual pathology. What is required is a careful analysis of the functioning, maintenance, and legitimacy of the power technologies on which it rests. To view domestic violence as

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a political question does not imply treating it as a monolithic phenomenon of men as a class intimidating and violating women as a class. It consists of varied and specific practices of violence operating according to specific rationalities. To conclude this section, I have suggested that we should try to think of gendered violence in Foucaultian terms, as historically constituted practices with context-dependent rationalities, ends, and means. Foucault drew a distinction between power and violence, but argued that the rationalities upholding practices of domination were often compatible with practices of violence. This emphasis on rationality makes it possible to argue that men’s violence against women is not just incidental, but has structural and large-scale political aspects, without reducing power to forms of violence. We should not view domestic violence, for example, as irrational acts signifying a pathological personality and loss of control. From a Foucaultian perspective, domestic violence is a specific practice upheld by specific power relations and a specific rationality. This suggests that, despite Girshick’s claim that lesbian partner violence is essentially identical to heterosexual family violence in being primarily a form of control, the rationalities and the attached cultural meanings are not identical. Just as butch and femme couples are not copies of heterosexual couples, neither is lesbian partner violence a copy of heterosexual marital violence. This does not mean that it is any less painful or any less serious as a social problem. As Girshick notes, in many ways it is more serious because of the lack of appropriate services for the victims, for example. The fundamental difference lies on the level of rationality, however. It lacks an important form of legitimization, namely the historical and cultural framework that sees men’s natural role to be the head of the family whose responsibility is to provide for, but also to control, his wife and children. Limiting the discussion on partner violence to gender-neutral and individual, psychological explanations means excluding the important feminist task of contesting this framework. Foucault’s thought should also alert us to the danger of uncritically embracing anti-patriarchal analyses. As Girshick’s study shows, women are not only and always the victims of violence, they are sometimes the perpetrators of it. Domestic violence is not a monolithic phenomenon of men as a class intimidating and violating women as a class. Neither is all male power over women ultimately reducible to violence or even to the threat of it. In fact, most of the everyday manifestations and instruments of male domination in our society do not involve any kind of violence or force. At the same time, they are extremely effective in keeping women in a subordinate position and reinforcing men’s superior social status.

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The Constituted Subject While Foucault’s understanding of power, domination, and violence thus provides crucial conceptual insights into the ways that power relations between men and women function and are upheld, his analysis nevertheless appears to have an important lacuna when it comes to theorizing the structural connections between male power and violence. Whether we look at violent crime statistics or prime-time television, it is hardly an exaggeration to claim that men have a monopoly on violence in our culture. Men’s use of violence is not only tolerated, it is actively encouraged in many contexts. The same is not true for women—a violent woman is an aberration. In our culture idealized forms of masculinity importantly contain at least some capacity for violence: it is generally accepted that there are situations in which a man must be able to stand up for himself and his family and use physical force. In contrast, idealized forms of femininity do not typically include the competence to engage in physical combat. This means that practices of violence become culturally constitutive of our understanding of the gender difference itself. Even if we argue that violence must be theoretically demarcated from power, domination is nevertheless often coupled with it. It is characterized by the fact that either the actual use or the threat of violence is often the ultimate means by which the relationship is established and maintained. When it comes to analyzing power, therefore, it is not irrelevant which social group has the monopoly on the use of violence. The question could be formulated in terms of the distinction between power-over and power-to. Amy Allen argues in her seminal book The Power of Feminist Theory (1999) that despite many of its undeniable merits, Foucault’s conception of power is ultimately inadequate for feminist theory because of its exclusive understanding of power as power-over.10 The feminist interest in empowerment and resistance requires that we also understand power in a second sense, as power-to. Power-to is understood as a capacity that individuals have to do something rather than a dominance that is wielded over others. Allen emphasizes the importance of this second sense of power mainly in order to theorize empowerment. She argues that feminists must be able to account for empowerment and solidarity in order to understand how members of subordinated groups—such as women—retain the power to act despite their subordination. We could argue, however, that the same also holds true in the opposite sense. In connection with violence, power understood as power-to

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would make it possible to understand why women sometimes lack the power to act and engage in forms of resistance against their subordination. They do not have the same capacity to use violence that men have, and this has concrete implications for their abilities and sense of empowerment. Many feminist theorists have contended that to be a woman in our society means that one’s life is circumscribed and controlled by the threat and fear of violence. An important aspect of men’s domination and sense of power over women, on the other hand, is the potential use of violence. It is true that Foucault insisted that power was a relation: powerover in the sense that it always entailed relations between individuals and groups. He noted: “Let us not deceive ourselves: if we speak of structures or mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others. The term ‘power’ designates relationships between partners” (“SP” 217). Capacity, on the other hand, refers to a force that we exert over things, our ability to modify, use, consume, or destroy them. Violence is thus clearly a capacity in this sense, it is a force we exert over bodies and things, and it must therefore be demarcated from power. Foucault’s refusal to theorize power as a capacity of the subject can be read as a consequence of his denial of the subject as the foundation and the starting point of philosophical analysis. We must instead adopt a relational analysis of power that does not start with a pre-given conception of the subject, but understands the subject’s capabilities as effects of power relations. Abandoning the deeply rooted framework of subject philosophy thus means that the distinction between power-over and power-to is misleading if we try to apply it to Foucault’s thought. Power in Foucault’s understanding is not power-over any more than it is power-to if the distinction relies on a fixed understanding of the subject. It means overlooking the crucial feature of his understanding of power: its constitutive relationship to the subject. Foucault claimed that to be a subject, a socially recognized individual with intelligible intentions, capabilities, desires, and actions, was only possible within the power/knowledge networks of society.11 All identities and subject positions are constituted through practices of power and knowledge. Rather than existing between subjects with predetermined identities, power relations are constitutive of the subjects themselves. We only become gendered subjects, for example, through specific discourses and relationships of power. From a Foucaultian perspective therefore, the key feminist question is not whether male violence is instrumental in the process in which gender difference becomes consti-

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tuted as gender hierarchy. We have to ask the more fundamental question of whether violence is constitutive of gender difference in itself. Foucault’s focus on practices rather than on the subject means that not only should violence be thought of as a practice, so should gender. If violence is something we do, so is gender. Judith Butler made this point most famously in Gender Trouble (1990), arguing that gender is an accomplishment that is continually enacted and performed. We construct the illusion of a stable and natural gender core by taking part and reiterating the normative practices of our culture that are appropriate to one’s sex category. Gendered subjectivity is constituted through the practices that form the power/knowledge networks of society. As for my question of gendered violence, the essential idea is that practices of violence and practices of gender overlap in significant ways: practices of violence are an important means for doing masculinity in our culture. Boys are not merely taught to express aggression: they must do or accomplish masculinity by participating in practices of violence. James Messerschmidt, for example, has studied the connection between violence and the social production and reproduction of masculinities in his criminological study Masculinities and Crime (1993). He argues that masculinity is accomplished, it is not something done to men or something settled beforehand. Masculinities are constructed through practices that maintain certain types of relationships between men and women and among men. Idealized forms of masculinity are, furthermore, always constructed in a specific historical setting. Masculinity is defined in contemporary Western industrialized societies, for example, through work in the paid-labor market, heterosexism, competitive individuality and independence, and also, importantly, through the capacity for violence. This implies that practices of violence are an important means for doing masculinity. Moreover, they constitute a major resource that may be summoned when men lack other resources with which to accomplish gender (Messerschmidt 1993, 82–85). Despite Foucault’s bracketing of the question of the subject’s capabilities in his analysis of power, the constitutive relationship between power and the subject means that analyzing forms of the subject is essential for understanding the functioning of power. Given the different ways that male and female subjectivities are constituted in our culture, a substantial difference in their capabilities is culturally built into the very forms of gendered subjectivities: gender difference is largely marked as the difference between those who are capable and, to a certain extent, socially sanctioned to use violence and those who are not. As Messerschmidt shows, male subjectivity is constructed and performed through

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the participation in violent practices. Female subjectivity, correspondingly, must be understood as a performance that is accomplished by displaying nurturing and caring behavior, for example. Feminist psychologists have demonstrated that gender differences in aggression, for example, appear after children develop a sense of gender identity, when male children increase their aggression and female children start to inhibit their aggressive reactions.12 This is obviously highly relevant in terms of the institutionalization and stabilization of power relations: violence or the threat of violence establishes and transforms power relations into states of domination. As long as violence, understood as a social practice, is an essential and a socially sanctioned means for doing masculinity and not femininity, gender difference in itself is already a gender hierarchy. The consequences of this insight for feminist theory are somewhat pessimistic. As the question of feminist empowerment cannot be reduced to the capabilities of the subject, the solution to the problem of gendered violence cannot be merely to increase women’s capabilities, simply to teach women combat skills, for example. The major challenge facing our culture is to sever the strong link between practices of violence and the construction of masculinity on the level of what I have called political ontology in this work. This would be the crucial step toward not only a more peaceful society, but also gender equality. The optimistic consequence, on the other hand, of Foucault’s understanding of power and violence is that a radical transformation of power relations without violence is possible. Because power is never reducible to violence we do not have to teach women combat skills or to hand them weapons. The feminist movement, for the most part, could instead be viewed as a model for a remarkably successful but nonviolent liberation struggle.13 In sum, it is important to acknowledge that power and violence can be deeply connected not just on the level of cultural practices, but also on the level of the subject understood as the effect of those practices: practices of violence are importantly constitutive of forms of subjectivity. Because violence is often the ultimate threat through which a power relation is established and upheld, it is not insignificant what those forms are. The fact that in our culture practices of violence are highly gendered has important consequences for the power relations between men and women, as well as for the way gender difference itself is experienced. The way we do violence—the norms governing participation in violent and nonviolent practices—must be understood as an important factor in the process that establishes the difference between idealized forms of masculinity and femininity.

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Feminist Critiques of Violence I want to finish by briefly considering the implications that the Foucaultian perspective on violence has for feminist critiques of violence. It is my contention that it should caution us against constructing critiques that simply denounce violence, or that directly or indirectly revert to some form of essentialism by simply placing the blame for it on the fact that the perpetrators are male. The feminist aim must rather be to uncover the implicit, and sometimes explicit, rationality that upholds gendered practices of violence. This means treating with suspicion all general and context-free definitions of it. When we analyze power on the level of individual acts we are often able to make fairly clear distinctions between acts of power and acts of violence. When we move to the level of governmental practices, however, the distinction becomes more problematic. In our attempts to think of the power network as a practice or a game, as Foucault suggested, we have to analyze both the implicit as well as the explicit rules to which the practice conforms.14 On this level it is difficult to start with a clear distinction between violence and power because the rules, to a large extent, determine what is understood as acts of power or as acts of violence in the specific game. Moreover, different rules or rationalities are compatible with different forms of violence. Take the game of ice hockey, for example. To anyone not familiar with the rules and aims, it probably appears to be a succession of random acts of violence. It is only when one understands the rules and the aims that one is able to classify the actions of the individual players as either legitimate moves or punishable acts of violence. Similarly, we could argue in the case of domestic violence that it is only in a certain cultural and historical context that it even exists. Forms of behavior that we now conceptualize as domestic violence have only very recently been understood as forms of violence at all. Indeed, the very term “domestic violence” is fairly recent, and has been deemed a highly problematic notion by many feminists.15 Jeff Hern (1996) notes that in the United Kingdom, for example, the legal reform that made men’s violence against women within marriage a crime came into force as late as 1878, two years after the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. Prior to 1878, the “rule of thumb” had operated in the courts, whereby husbands were not permitted to use a stick broader than a thumb. Despite the reform, in practice there was little shift in the nature of men’s authority over women in marriage. Their day-to-day domination was routinely reinforced by the state in its avoidance of police intervention in so-called “marital disputes.” Violence by

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husbands against wives represented a form of social control legitimated by conventional law and morality. Even when it became judicially recognized as a form of violence, in practice it continued to be conceived of as marital disputes. Hern (1996, 25) argues that in attempting to make sense of the connections between gender relations and violence it is thus important to consider the problem in a historical context. This applies in particular to understanding how men’s violence against women has been accepted, condoned, normalized, and ignored by both individuals and institutions. It is only by considering the dismal historical context of men’s violence to women that it becomes possible to understand the way in which men generally perceive and define violence in everyday contexts. As far as men who are violent to women are concerned, the construction of what is meant by violence is part of the problem. The naming and defining of violence is a social rather than a natural process, and attempts at allinclusive definitions have to be treated with caution because they are located in gendered social processes. The process of contesting definitions of violence is thus an essential element of critiques and interventions related to it (Hern 1996, 27–29). Hence, my claim is that, on the basis of Foucault’s analytics of power, it is ultimately impossible to secure any categorical, context-free definition of violence. On the contrary, the implication is that we must be wary of all such definitions. We must be mindful of Nietzsche’s assertion that “only that which is without history can be defined” (Nietzsche 1996, 60). All definitions of violence, including the one that I have provided in the introduction to this book—violence is intentional bodily harm—must be understood as political acts, and their extension and validity must be open to constant contestation. In my view, Foucault’s legacy is ultimately not so much in providing us with a philosophically accurate distinction between power and violence, but rather in demonstrating how all definitions and social objectivities, including the significance of violence, are constituted in power/knowledge networks, and are therefore matters of contestation and struggle. Feminist analyses and critiques of violence must therefore take extremely seriously the political effects of their own discourse and definitions. The ability to name something a form of violence—as the example of domestic violence shows—is an effective way of politicizing an issue. In my view, this should not imply that we should call all forms of injustice that women face violence, however: on the contrary, it should be a reason to abstain from using definitions that are too broad. I would thus argue against feminist critiques of violence that insist on an integrated analysis covering not only its physical forms, but also forms of symbolic and struc-

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tural violence, as well as extremely varied forms of social injustice and harassment such as competitive work environments and obscene telephone calls.16 In my view, such an integrated analysis means losing a clear analytical focus on the issue of power as well as violence—phenomena that are already complex and diffuse enough. It means treating them as partaking in some kind of general substance of violence rather than being specific practices with specific rationalities. I therefore contend that we should try to be as exact as possible in our analysis and criticism of violence—for theoretical, but also moral reasons. People who have experienced serious physical violence could find an integrated analysis deeply insulting. My choice of opting for a very narrow working definition of violence at the beginning of this study should be understood against this background. I do not want to exclude other possible and theoretically fruitful definitions or deny their validity categorically. However, it is my contention that for the important feminist task of exposing the mechanisms of male domination as well as gendered forms of violence, it is counterproductive to view all forms of domination on a continuum of violence. When everything is violence, then nothing is.

5

Political Life

A. S. Byatt’s intriguing novella Morpho Eugenia tells the story of a young Victorian naturalist, William Adamson, whose objects of study are social insects and their highly specialized behavior patterns. The story follows his inner turmoil as he observes the ferocious violence of ant life and the disconcerting parallels between their stratified society and his own Victorian class society. Yet, when he is questioned on what we might learn from a comparison between human societies and those of social insects, he is quick to insist that analogy is a slippery tool: “Men are not ants.” Nevertheless, the story raises haunting questions fundamental to Western political thought: Why are men not like ants? Why is human political violence not just another deterministic struggle for survival in which individuals carry out their biologically predestined functions for the survival of the species, their individual lives dispensable and endlessly replaced? The classical philosophical answer has been to insist on the specificity of the political. Ants might be social insects, but only man is a political animal. Whereas human bodily existence and biological life are inextricably tied to the violent struggle for survival and the cycle of birth and death, the defining feature of the Western tradition of political thought has been the separation of the political from the biological. Aristotle famously connects the specificity of human politics to our ability to speak, arguing in the first book of Politics that human society is distinguished from that of “bees or other gregarious animals” in that it is founded on a political community that is capable of speech. Through language it is possible to express not simply what is pleasant and painful, but what is good and evil as well as just and unjust: “it is the peculiarity of man, in comparison with other animals, that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust, and other similar qualities; and it is association in these things which makes a family and a city” (Aristotle 1995, 11). Thus, according to the ancient conception, politics is not about the pure preservation and enhancement of natural life, but it makes it possible to live a life according to moral values and political principles. Politics is the means of separating and placing in opposition human society to other animals, but also to its own biological existence.

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An influential strand of contemporary political thought claims that what characterizes modernity is the disappearance of the boundary that separates a political community from its biological existence. Foucault famously presents biopolitical power, or biopower, as the overturning of the ancient categories of biological and political existence that have organized Western political thought: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being into question” (HS1 143). His claim is that modern politics does not exclude life, but takes it as its primary object: politics has become biopolitics. My aim in this chapter is to follow Foucault and argue that understanding the relationship between violence and the political in modernity means rethinking the ontological distinction between biological and political life that has fundamentally ordered the Western tradition of political thought. I will begin with a brief discussion of Hannah Arendt’s and Giorgio Agamben’s positions, but my focus is on Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics. I will show that whereas Arendt, Agamben, and Foucault all see the merging of the categories of life and politics as the key problem of modernity, they understand this problem in crucially different terms and suggest different solutions. This results in different understandings of the relationship between violence and the political. In conclusion I argue that it is vital to fully understand the governmental rationality of modern biopolitical societies in order to develop effective strategies against their specific forms of political violence.

Arendt and Instrumental Violence Hannah Arendt’s contested notion of “the social” has been understood in varying ways by her commentators and critics alike.1 On the one hand, she describes its rise in terms of de facto historical development connected to the birth of the modern bureaucratic state and consumerist mass society.2 The rise of the social was made possible by the birth of the nation-state in which it found its political form: politics became equated with the “nation-wide administration of housekeeping” (Arendt 1998, 28). Private matters and interests assumed public significance and economic concerns became central issues of politics. The social also functions as an ontological concept, however. It denotes a distorted domain in which the life process has been brought

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into the political realm. The social is not strictly public or private, but is a hybrid realm in that it is concerned with the public administration of biological life: the life of the individual body and the propagation of the species. Arendt claims (1998, 46) that in the social sphere man does not exist as a human being, but only as a specimen of the animal species mankind. Modern society is like ant society: a society of laborers and jobholders whose activities are centered around the maintenance and improvement of life itself: “Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public” (ibid.). The crisis of modern politics is due to the rise of the social: the fact that concern for biological life has taken over the public realm. Modern society is not a properly political organization, it is a public organization of “the life process itself” (ibid.). Life itself has become the supreme standard and the highest good to which everything else is referred. In Arendt’s threefold schema of labor, work, and action, labor is the activity that corresponds to the biological process of the human body— the satisfaction of its vital needs, its metabolisms and necessary consumption. It is the activity that man shares with other forms of animal life because all life depends on it. Her central claim in The Human Condition is that in the modern age labor, and with it the maintenance of biological life, has become the most important activity: the whole of society has become a laboring society aiming solely at increased consumption, economic growth, and material well-being. We are not satisfied with securing the necessities of life in order to be free to engage in higher, specifically human pursuits. Freedom from need does not mean that we have more free time for other things than consumption, the satisfying of increasingly sophisticated and complex appetites. “Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world” (Arendt 1998, 134). The exclusive emphasis on labor in modernity means that an authentically human way of life devoted to politics, action, and speech is not possible for us. Arendt repeatedly insists that in ancient Greece the sphere of politics, the polis, excluded from its sphere of public concern the biological necessities of life, which were confined to the private sphere of the household, oikos. The distinction was essential not just for maintaining the distinctiveness of the political as a sphere of public deliberation and speech, but also, by negation, for excluding the inevitable violence of biological life.3 The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that it was ruled by necessity. Men lived together in a household, just as ants

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lived together, in order to master the necessities of life and survive as individuals and as a species. Violence was justified and inescapable in this sphere, but it was pre-political as opposed to political violence. The realm of the polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of freedom untainted by the necessities of life: language and not violence belonged essentially to politics. She notes that “the Greek polis, the city-state, defined itself explicitly as a way of life that was based exclusively upon persuasion and not upon violence” (Arendt 1990, 12): To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence. In Greek self-understanding, to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside of polis, of home and family life. (Arendt 1998, 27)

Arendt’s carefully qualified understanding of the political cuts any deterministic tie politics might be thought to have to violence. It opens up the realm of specifically human communality, the political: the realm of freedom, spontaneity, and creativity as opposed to the realm of necessity, violence, and survival. She carefully safeguards the political as a realm of nonviolence, speech, and action by cutting it loose from the body and from biological life. In her thought the unprecedented violence of modernity can therefore be seen as another consequence of the dominance of the social over the political: the violence intrinsic to survival comes to dominate the sphere of the political in different forms. She argues that every attempt to solve the social question by political means has inevitably led to terror (Arendt 1990, 112). The French Revolution is her paradigmatic example. In On Revolution she famously attributes its failure to found a stable political regime, as well as the horrendous violence that accompanied it, to the fact that “the poor, driven by the needs of their bodies, burst onto the scene of the French Revolution” (ibid., 59). Poverty is more than deprivation, it is a state of constant want and acute misery whose ignominy consists in its dehumanizing force; poverty is abject because it puts men under the absolute dictate of their bodies, that is, under the absolute dictatorship of necessity as all men know from their most intimate experience and outside of all speculations. It was under the rule of this necessity that the multitude rushed to the assistance of the French Revolution, inspired it, drove it onward, and eventually sent it to its doom, for this was the multitude of the poor.

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When they appeared on the scene of politics, necessity appeared with them, and the result was that the new republic was stillborn; freedom has to be surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself. (Arendt 1990, 60)

When the hungry mob appeared as the revolutionary agent the political ideals of freedom and democratic rule had to be compromised. The political demands of the people were made on behalf of sheer survival, and their decisions were determined by the overwhelming and necessary needs of their bodies. The objective of the revolution was no longer to liberate men from oppression or to found freedom; the primary aim was now to rid the life process of scarcity and to guarantee the satisfaction of needs and the happiness of the people. Arendt notes that what she refers to as “the social question” could therefore equally well and more simply be called the existence of poverty. For her, it is the source of “the politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age, namely that life is the highest good, and that the life process of society is the very centre of human endeavor” (Arendt 1990, 64). Politics, in the true sense of the word, becomes possible only when the irresistible needs of the body are satisfied. The promise of a revolution, an absolutely new beginning, cannot be fulfilled by the violent acts of hungry bodies, but requires concerted action of citizens. It requires their common deliberation on a set of shared principles, as well as the pledging of mutual promises that binds them together. Revolutions will inevitably fail to constitute political power as long as they identify it simply with the monopoly of the means of violence. Political power can only come into being when and where people act together and “bind themselves through promises, covenants, and mutual pledges” (ibid., 181). In other words, political power rests only on deliberation, reciprocity, and mutuality, not on violence. The distinction between the social and the political thus closely parallels Arendt’s distinction between violence and power. In her late essay On Violence she explicates the categorical distinction between power and violence, vehemently arguing against what she claims was the consensus among political theorists from Left to Right at the time that violence was nothing more than the ultimate kind of power.4 Her pamphlet was directed at its apologists, such as Sartre and Fanon, whom she saw as glorifying violence by treating it as a positive, liberating action. She argues that whereas power—the concerted action of a group—forms the essence of all government, violence is always instrumental. It is undeniably part of politics because it can be used as a means of pursuing vari-

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ous political goals and causes but, crucially, it is ontologically apolitical. As a mere means it always needs justification through the political end or cause that it espouses. On its own violence remains apolitical: it lacks direction and inherent meaning. The reason why violence is understood as a political question at all is because it is so often fused with power, even though by its very nature it is fundamentally antithetical to power. Under threat of violence the capacity to realize the human possibility of acting in concert is diminished and potentially destroyed. “Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance” (Arendt 1970, 56). Violence can destroy power and politics, but it can never produce them.5 To sum up this section, Arendt’s key concern was to redeem the intrinsic value of the political. Politics should not be reduced to an instrumental means to the apolitical ends of natural life: survival, pleasure, and happiness. It has to remain an end in itself and therefore to retain its specificity as public action and speech. The distinction between the social and what is truly political is thus fundamental for her philosophical response to the crisis and decline of the public realm of politics in modern societies. It is a resurrection of the ancient answer to the question of why men are not ants. The restoration of the ancient distinction between polis and oikos could restore not only the specificity but also the dignity of politics, and by the same token separate it from the realm of biological life and inescapable violence. Arendt’s understanding of the political thus provides an agonistic account of political action that is nevertheless irreducible to violence. This fortification of the political does not imply the strengthening of the state, but rather heralds the revitalization of public life, political debate, and participation. The price we pay is the radical narrowing of the realm of the political, however. All issues belonging to the social—such as poverty, sexuality, and gender—are economic, biological, or technological questions rather than appropriately political questions. Political and social equality must remain distinct issues. As her critics have pointed out, in protecting the sui generis character of her politics and the purity of the public realm, Arendt effectively prohibits the politicization of issues of social justice.6 While alerting us to the dangerous merging of life and politics in modernity, she would nevertheless insist that biopolitics must remain an oxymoron, the merging of two ontologically incompatible concepts.

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Agamben and the Originary Violence of Sovereignty In their respective analyses of biopower, both Foucault and Agamben follow Arendt in maintaining that the political realm in modernity has become more and more preoccupied with the management of biological life. They both deny, however, that we should or could restore the classical political categories, as proposed by Arendt. This denial brings violence back to the heart of politics, but in fundamentally different ways. Whereas Foucault considers the birth of biopower a contingent historical fact, which he dates to the second half of the eighteenth century, Agamben sees it as an originary phenomenon contemporaneous with the entire history of Western metaphysics. Agamben’s analysis of the relationship between political power and biological life in his influential book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life builds on some of the key ideas of Arendt and Foucault, but the way he appropriates them for his own theory is highly original and challenging. He begins by confirming Arendt’s claim that “today politics knows no value . . . other than life” (Agamben 1998, 10). The politicization of life as such constitutes a decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of ancient thought. He breaks sharply with Arendt, however, in denying that the distinction between biological and political life has, ever since its very inception, held fast. Life has always been a definitive object of politics. The explicit preoccupation with life in modern politics only brings to light the way in which politics has always been founded on power over natural life. In taking biological life as its primary target the modern state only exposes the hidden but originary bond between sovereign power and bare life. Agamben acknowledges that politics was, since the time of Aristotle, explicitly separated from natural life. The ancient distinction between zoe and bios, natural life and political life, grounded the idea that politics was concerned with something more than just the perpetuation of biological life. It was fundamentally defined by such specifically human characteristics as justice, morality, language, and self-reflexivity. According to Agamben, the distinction between bare life and political life was always an unstable distinction, however, a distinction that could never be fully maintained or eliminated. The exclusion of bare life outside of the political has to be understood at the same time as an inclusion in being a founding act: it is the very act that establishes the community as political. He calls this inclusive exclusion a relation of exception: it is the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through

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its exclusion (Agamben 1998, 18). “There is politics because man is the living being who, in language separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (ibid., 8). Bare life, through its exclusion, is the hidden foundation of politics. It is what political, properly human life is not, and politics must therefore repeatedly enact its exclusion. This means that Agamben’s concept of bare life does not simply denote biological, animal life. While he sometimes uses the term as a synonym for biological life as opposed to political life, bare life is strictly neither natural nor political life, neither the public life of a citizen nor the natural life of an animal. Agamben’s examples of it include detainees of refugee camps, brain-dead patients in hospital wards, and inmates on death row. In these exemplary sites human life is in different ways reduced to bare life, to the simple fact of living common to all living beings. Bare life is thus something that cannot be clearly demarcated and then simply negated.7 It is biological life that has been politicized in being included in the political community, but only through its exclusion. The idea of exception is also central to Agamben’s conception of sovereignty, which is decisively Schmittian: the sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception.8 Schmitt argued that any legal system had to rest upon a decision that could not itself take the form of law. This holds true to both its limits as well as its origin: the judicial system requires a political decision to give it limits as well as a set of fundamental principles and values. The sovereign must have the power to set these limits and thereby provide the ungrounded ground of the law. He must have the power to decide when the normally valid legal system operates and when its validity is suspended in a state of exception. In establishing the threshold between the legal and the non-legal he defines them both. Similar to the way that the exclusion of bare life founds the realm of the political, the exclusion of sovereignty from the realm of the law founds the legal order. The state of exception is not anarchy or chaos because an order still exists, even if it is not the order dictated by laws. The exception is outside the law, but it thereby defines its limits and creates the normal situation in which the law can be in force.9 Sovereignty understood in this way thus corresponds crucially to bare life. Bare life is the exception within the political order because it forms the zone outside of the law and of political rights. The exclusion of bare life from the realm of politics establishes sovereign power as the power that decides on that exception: bare life is the essential referent of the sovereign decision. In other words, the exclusion of bare life as the exception forms the condition of possibility of politics, and

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also of sovereignty. The state of exception excludes bare life from the political community, but by the same token also captures it within it as the exception. It is the permanent state of exception that constitutes the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rests (Agamben 1998, 15–29). For Agamben, the defining feature of political power in the West is precisely its ability to suspend the law and by the same act to produce a sphere of bare life: beings without political rights or properly human qualities. Because the exclusion of bare life forms the foundation of sovereignty, and sovereignty in turn produces bare life, the necessary counterpart of the sovereign in Agamben’s thought is homo sacer—an ancient figure in Roman law who was without any political rights and who could be killed by anybody without fear of any legal punishment. Similar to homo sacer, the sovereign must be outside the law, he must necessarily stand outside the legal system in order to be able to decide on its suspension. He is excluded from the political realm in the same sense that homo sacer is excluded from it, and this constitutes their hidden and originary bond. The sovereign is one who can kill without legal punishment—he is the point of indistinction between violence and the law—and homo sacer is one who can be killed without legal punishment. They both are within and without the legal order. At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. (Agamben 1998, 84)

Bare life and political power, homo sacer and the sovereign are “the two poles of the sovereign exception” irrevocably tied together (Agamben 1998, 110). Homo sacer represents the bare life that must be excluded and negated in order for the political community to become more than an ant society. Andrew Norris (2005b, 10) illuminates the importance of the figure of homo sacer in Agamben’s account by comparing it to Réne Girard’s superficially similar account of sacrifice. Whereas for Girard the victim is a scapegoat for the murderous desires of the community, for Agamben the stakes are considerably higher. Instead of an act of selfprotection on the part of the community, the killing of sacred life is the performance of the metaphysical assertion of the human: homo sacer must die so that the rest of the political community may affirm the transcendence of their bodily, animal life. Agamben’s account also significantly relies on Foucault’s concept

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of biopower, but the way he appropriates this idea is different. Foucault’s analysis of biopower in the final section of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 is short and fragmentary, but the key distinction that he makes is between sovereign power, or juridico-institutional power, and biopower. Whereas classical sovereign power was essentially repressive and deductive, biopower has a fundamentally different rationality. Its purpose is to exert a positive and productive influence on life, to optimize and to multiply it. It is an important tool in Foucault’s attempt to rethink power: to find ways in which to theorize it that are not caught up in the narrow juridicoinstitutional framework of sovereignty that has dominated Western political thought. Although Agamben shares with Foucault the view that modern Western societies are biopolitical, he challenges the idea that this is a historically recent development: “Biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception” (Agamben 1998, 6). More fundamentally, he also denies that the two forms of power can be theoretically distinguished. Foucault’s key distinction between biopower and sovereign power is, in fact, a false one because these two forms of power essentially intersect and depend on each other: they are intrinsically and originally tied together. The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power. What this work has had to record among its likely conclusions is precisely that the two analyses cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power. (Agamben 1998, 6)

Foucault’s thesis about biopolitics has to be corrected: what characterizes modern politics is not the inclusion of life—the fact that life as such has become the principal object of the projections and calculations of state power. The decisive fact is rather that the realm of bare life—which was originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and inclusion and exclusion, outside and inside enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. Bare life used to be exceptional and excluded from public life, but in modernity it has become coextensive with the political realm as a whole. The boundary between bios and zoe that was always indeterminate and blurry has now been completely eliminated and they are no longer distinguishable from each other at all. Agamben’s provocative claim is that the rise of this zone of indistinction in modern societies corresponds to the fact that the state of exception has gradually become more and more the norm: the excep-

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tion has become the rule. He (2005a) argues that the obfuscation of the distinction among legislative, executive, and judicial powers became a working paradigm of government in Western democracies in the course of the twentieth century. Although the state of exception was initially meant to be a provisional measure, it has in fact become a lasting characteristic of government. This transformation of an exceptional measure into a permanent technique of government has resulted in the gradual erosion of the legislative power of parliament: it is often limited to ratifying measures that the executive issues through administrative decrees that have the force of law. “The state of exception . . . ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself” (Agamben 1998, 168). As a result, “exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter a zone of irreducible indistinction” (ibid., 9). Sovereignty thus produces bare life by establishing a state of exception with no temporal limits. We are all living in this state of exception, in a zone in which our life is subjected to the unmediated power of various police sovereigns and managers of life. We are all effectively reduced to the status of homo sacer. As citizens of modern democracies we are obviously not excluded from the political realm or the legal system as such, but when the state of exception becomes the norm or the rule, the legal order operates only by suspending itself. In the state of exception the suspension of the law has become the rule and the law is “in force without significance” (Agamben 1998, 51). The law is not absent—we do not live in a lawless state—but it is emptied of concrete meaning and suspended in its effective application. In this situation sovereign power becomes unmediated power over those whose existence is reduced to bare life. Politics has been “totally transformed into biopolitics” (ibid., 120) when it is impossible to distinguish our biological life from our political existence anymore and when the resulting bare life can be destroyed by sovereign power at any moment. Hence, although the biopolitical logic of modernity places the highest value on life, it also, paradoxically, contains the exceptional power to take it away in an arbitrary fashion. It produces human beings that are reduced to bare life without any political protection. Agamben sees the concentration camp as the paradigm of this political predicament of modernity: it is the exemplary biopolitical space in which politics has been completely transformed into biopolitics and bare life has been subjected absolutely to sovereign power. The camps were opened when the state of exception had become the rule in Nazi Germany. He notes that “the Jews were exterminated exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice,’ which is to say, as bare life” (Agamben 1998, 114). The dimen-

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sion in which the extermination took place was neither religious nor legal, but biopolitical. Because the people sent to the camps were lacking almost all the rights that are normally attributed to humane existence, and yet they were biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone in which they no longer had anything but bare life. They moved in “a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any sense” (ibid., 170). The concentration camp was the most absolute biopolitical space that had ever been realized: it was a space in which life was reduced to the bare minimum and sovereign power reached its maximum. It is therefore the exemplary place of modern biopolitics, “the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity” (ibid., 123). Agamben regrets that both Arendt and Foucault overlooked this crucial site. Arendt’s mistake in her pertinent analysis of the totalitarian states of the postwar period was to omit any biopolitical perspective. What escaped her was the way in which the radical transformation of politics into biopolitics had legitimated and necessitated total domination. Foucault, on the other hand, missed the most glaring manifestation of biopower that confronted him. His error was to overlook the most exemplary place of modern biopolitics, the politics of the great totalitarian states. Agamben’s criticism of both Arendt and Foucault ignores crucial texts, however. I will discuss his criticism of Foucault in more detail in the following section, but his charge that Arendt fails to take a biopolitical perspective on totalitarianism is problematic too. Arendt analyzes the role of the law in totalitarianism, particularly in the last chapter of Origins of Totalitarianism, in very similar terms as Agamben. She notes that the Nazi government did not simply discard the rule of law in favor of complete lawlessness. It did not overturn positive laws, but more fundamentally changed the meaning of the law. Positive law no longer expressed the framework of stability within which human action could take place, it became an expression of the necessary laws of nature. The Nazi government was not lawless, but claimed to obey strictly and unequivocally the laws of nature from which all positive laws originated: race laws were the expression of the law of nature in man, for example. Arendt also discusses the introduction of purely objective criteria into the selection of the SS troops: the candidates were selected from photographs according to purely racial criteria, not according to their merits or political convictions (Arendt 1976, 468). For her, this example shows how political subjects were reduced to their biological existence in fascism. Agamben’s provocative claim is, nevertheless, that contemporary

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political thought has failed to situate the totalitarian phenomenon in the horizon of biopolitics and therefore ultimately to make sense of it (Agamben 1998, 119–20, 148). Until this is done Nazism and fascism will remain with us. The camp is not just a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past, it is the hidden matrix of the political space in which we are still living (ibid., 166). For many readers, this emblem of the camp has come to stand in for Agamben’s complex account of biopolitics. It has fueled a lot of criticism against him: he has been accused of constructing politically debilitating metaphysical fictions and morbid intellectual pontifications. Michel Dillon (2005, 38) argues that he ontologizes political modernity and then “iconicizes” this ontologization in the compelling, but politically debilitating figure of the camp. Andreas Kalyvas (2005, 112–13) observes that he “gives us no explanation for the sovereign’s repeated victories and unstoppable march toward the camp.” His commentators have also pointed out that his understanding of bare life is theoretically ambiguous and his notion of sovereignty disturbingly ahistorical: the originary bond between bare life and sovereign power not only survives antiquity, but extends unchanged over a period of twenty-five centuries right through to the modern age. Sovereign biopolitics has uninterruptedly accompanied the ancients and moderns alike, remaining unaffected by significant political events, such as the birth of the ancient Greek democratic city or the emergence of commercial capitalism. Agamben thus operates with a conception of history that does not bring forth anything new, but is uniform and one-directional.10 It is important to note that Agamben’s claims about politics are precisely ontological and not ontic, or that they are concerned with the history of metaphysics, not political history. For him, metaphysics is the pivotal political question of our time. The radicality of his project lies in the attempt to fundamentally disturb the metaphysical categories that he claims are upholding our conception of the political: bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion. He shows how the construction, blurring, and finally eradication of the distinction between biological life and political life has determined the political destiny of the West.11 Instead of defining the political through a focus on life that is recognized as just and good—the form of life proper to human community—he focuses on the other side of this fundamental dichotomy: on bare life, the forms of life that in one way or another fail to achieve what is understood as truly human life. He wants to show that our conception of the political is not constituted solely by the idea of a community inclusive of beings capable of morality, self-reflexivity, and speech, but by the exclusion of life that is unworthy of politics. Sovereign decision is the moment of this

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fundamental and constitutive separation and exclusion. Sovereignty can therefore not be thought of as a historically specific political formation contemporaneous with modern nation-states. It has to belong essentially and originally to our understanding of the political. In sum, Agamben’s answer to the question of the relationship between violence and the political is to acknowledge the irreducibility of sovereign violence over bare life. In relation to the sovereign we are all ants. The political has inevitably been founded on violence since its inception because of the fundamental bond between sovereignty and bare life. This is an originary political bond or structure, which implies that political power, at least in the forms we know in the West, is inseparable from violence because it cannot be separated from the sovereign’s originary power to kill. Arendt’s attempt to resurrect the ancient meaning of the political as defined by speech and not violence is a doomed attempt because it was never in fact achieved. The way of life in the Greek polis was not based on the eradication of violence, it was founded on the exclusion and killing of bare life. This inclusive exclusion founded the political community and sovereign power. The first foundation of politics is thus life that may be taken away, a body that can be killed. Life is politicized irrevocably through its capacity to be destroyed by the sovereign. This means that, for Agamben, we cannot sever the originary bond between violence and the political by any nostalgic restoration of ancient metaphysics. The loss of politics is not a modern problem, but happens already in the ancient polis where zoe and bios were originally separated. The only genuine possibility for breaking this essential bond would require a move beyond the metaphysical categories of bare life and political life to a sovereignless political community. This coming community would not be based on national or religious identity, stable juridical or parliamentary institutions, or political rights.12

Foucault on Sovereignty and Biopower If Agamben has been criticized for operating with an ahistorical notion of sovereignty, Foucault has been accused of eradicating the notion completely and replacing it with distinctively modern forms of power such as discipline and biopower. While it is true that he never developed any kind of explicit theory of sovereignty, the notion is nevertheless indirectly theorized as the consistent contrast to his alternative conceptualizations of power. In Discipline and Punish sovereign power forms the contrast to

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discipline, and in The History of Sexuality the central distinction organizing the argument is between biopower and sovereignty. In his lectures on governmentality, practices of government are introduced as an alternative to both discipline and sovereignty. Rather than replacing sovereignty with these alternative forms of power, it is my contention that Foucault was working toward a more complex and politically grounded conception of it. He thus contests traditional approaches to theorizing political power based solely on juridical and institutional models, and advocates a radical rethinking in order to understand its historical changes and specific forms in modernity. His idea was that sovereignty had to be analyzed as a power formation that had undergone fundamental transformations in Western political history. It has been challenged, modified, and undermined by competing counter-discourses and new techniques of power. In his lectures on governmentality he argues that the form of power that had sovereignty as its modality or organizing schema was not up to governing the economic and political body of a society that was undergoing both a demographic explosion and industrialization at the turn of the nineteenth century. Too much escaped the old mechanisms of sovereign power, on both the detailed and the mass levels. There was an acute need for new power technologies focusing on individual bodies as well as on the species body (SMD 249). Sovereign power was not comprehensive or flexible enough to respond effectively to new capital formations and demographic changes. Foucault explicitly notes, however, that charting the genealogy of modern forms of power such as biopower is not a simple case of substitution. Mechanisms of biopolitical governmentality did not simply replace juridico-institutional mechanisms. The old sovereign right to take life or let live was not replaced, but was rather complemented with a new right to make live and let die.13 He attempted to identify a turning point in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the management of population took preeminence without replacing sovereignty and law. These two forms of power thus permeate each other and exist together forming a “scientifico-legal complex” (DP 23). This coexistence is not necessary or originary, however, as Agamben claims. For Foucault it is historically contingent. Foucault’s short but influential discussion of biopower at the end of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 begins with a summary definition of sovereign power: it is a form of power that was historically founded on violence—the right to kill. Its characteristic privilege, since Roman law, was the right to decide life and death. In its limited modern form, as in its ancient and absolute form, it is dissymmetrical: the sovereign exercises

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his right of life only by exercising his right to kill or by refraining from killing. In other words, he demonstrates his power over life through the death he is capable of requiring. Sovereign power was exercised mainly by means of deduction: it consisted of the right to appropriate a portion of the nation’s wealth, a tax on products, goods and services, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself. It culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it (HS1 136). The obligation to wage war on behalf of the sovereign and the imposition of the death penalty for going against his will were the clearest forms of such power. Foucault’s claim is that the West has undergone a very profound transformation of the mechanisms of power since the seventeenth century. Deductive and violent sovereign power has been gradually complemented and partly replaced by biopower, a form of power that exerts a positive influence on life, “that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (HS1 137). Deduction or violence is no longer the predominant form of power, but is merely one element among others, working toward a new objective under a new rationality. Biopower is bent on generating and ordering forces: the aim is to increase them rather than to impede or destroy them. In short, its logic or rationality is not violent deduction, but positive production. The era of biopolitics is marked by the explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and control of populations: techniques that coordinate medical care, normalize behavior, rationalize mechanisms of insurance, and rethink urban planning, for example. The aim is the effective administration of bodies and the calculated management of life through means that are scientific and continuous. It is power whose highest function is no longer to kill but to “invest life through and through” (HS1 139). What essentially characterizes biopower in Foucault’s account is thus not the fact that it is unmediated power over bare life, but the fact that the mechanisms of power and knowledge have assumed responsibility for the life process in order to optimize, control, and modify it. In other words, the exercise of power over living beings no longer carries the threat of death, but implies the taking charge of their life. Life and its mechanisms are brought into the realm of explicit calculation in the regimes of knowledge-power. The rationality of biopower is markedly different from that of sovereign power in terms not just of its objectives but also of its instruments. A major consequence of its development is the growing importance of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law. The law is always armed and is based on violence, whereas biopower takes charge of life with the help of continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms

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based on knowledge. Foucault argues that the rise of biopower means that we have entered a phase of juridical regression. I do not mean to say that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical and administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life. (HS1 144)14

Biopower uses administrative policies, strategies, and tactics instead of laws as its instrument, or it uses laws as a tactic. Biopolitical rationality treats the law as one administrative technique among others that can be utilized to regulate and improve the life of the population. Biopolitical techniques do not typically result from sovereign parliamentary decisions, but are part of the administrative and managerial procedures legitimized by expert knowledge. Both Agamben and Foucault thus claim that we live in a society in which the power of the law has subsided. Whereas Agamben sees this as a result of the sovereign state of exception that has become the norm, Foucault claims that it is the power of sovereignty itself that has been undermined. Biopower is not political power in the traditional sense because it is not reducible to the power of a democratically elected sovereign body, whether individual or collective. It penetrates such political power, but it is essentially the power of life’s experts, interpreters, and administrators. The key problem with biopower is thus not the foundational violence of the sovereign, but the depoliticized violence of expert knowledge. Because Agamben connects sovereignty and biopower with an originary bond, his framework makes it difficult to diagnose the profound tensions that exist in modern societies between these two fundamentally different rationalities and types of power. Whereas the essential feature of sovereign power is its license to kill, for biopower killing presents a problem: it does not celebrate death and violence, but seeks to exclude or at least to hide them. Foucault notes that death has ceased to be a collective and spectacular ceremony in modern biopolitical society, but has become something to be hidden away: it is “not so much sex as death that is the object of a taboo” (SMD 247). This obviously does not mean that modern biopolitical societies are nonviolent. On the contrary, violence is harder to detect because it has to be hidden. Foucault readily acknowledges the unprecedented

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violence of modernity: the biological conception of politics has made killing possible on an unprecedented scale (HS1 136–37). Biopower is thus clearly capable of utilizing violence, but only under very specific conditions and restricted by defined limits. The violence it uses has to be hidden away or called something else because it presents a problem in the rationality of biopolitics, the explicit aim of which is the optimization and enhancement of life. The connection with violence has to be mediated: biopolitical violence must pass through the regime of knowledge/power and it must be given a scientific legitimacy compatible with the aims of biopolitics. In arguing that Foucault does not analyze the politics of the great totalitarian states, Agamben overlooks his last lecture in the series Society Must Be Defended (1975–76), in which he referred to the phenomenon of state racism in Nazi Germany as an example of the paradoxes in the exercise of modern biopower. He anticipated Agamben’s argument by acknowledging that Nazi Germany could be seen in many ways as the extreme development of biopower: there was no other state in which “the biological was so tightly, so insistently, regulated” (SMD 259). However, he posed the question of how a political system so completely centered upon biopower could unleash such murderous power and in fact utilize the old sovereign right to kill. “How can power such as this kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings?” (SMD 254). His answer was biological racism, which provided a way of separating the different groups that exist within a population and then establishing a biological relationship between them. This was not an adversarial relationship between enemies—the inferior group was not the enemy threatening the nation’s existence in the Schmittian sense. It was rather a biological relationship of abnormality: the inferior group had to be eliminated as a biological threat to the population and its improvement. The death of the inferior race would make life in general healthier. The objective to improve life for its own sake could thus legitimize killing within the rationality of biopower. The logic of biological racism was the condition that made killing acceptable in biopolitical societies. In the biopolitical system . . . killing, or the imperative to kill, is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race . . . Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State. (SMD 256)15

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It is thus highly significant that the racism of Nazi Germany was essentially different from “ordinary” racism, which takes the form of mutual contempt or hatred between races. The specificity of modern biopolitical racism is bound up with a technique of power that allows biopower to work. When racism becomes the racism of a biopolitical state, “it is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise sovereign power” (SMD 258). In biopolitical societies a sovereign power cannot simply assume unmediated power over bare life if it wants to kill its own citizens, but must pass through the regime of power/knowledge and gain bio-scientific legitimacy. Biological racism provided a pseudo-scientific discourse that was compatible with biopower, and through which biopower could be transformed into sovereign power. The Third Reich thus became a monstrous combination of biopower and sovereign power, exercising sovereign means for biopolitical ends. Genocide was carried out in the name of care and the improvement of life. We have, then, in Nazi society something that is quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two mechanisms—the classic, archaic mechanism that gave the State the right of life and death over its citizens . . . and the new mechanism of biopower—coincide exactly. (SMD 260)16

Foucault agrees with Agamben that the tension between biopower and sovereign power was dissolved in the Third Reich and the two coincided exactly. This coincidence was not originary and necessary, however, it was historically contingent. It was made possible because of two crucial factors. First, biological racism worked as the mechanism that harmonized the opposing rationalities of biopower and sovereign power, and masked the fact that a biopolitical society was killing its own people. Second, the Third Reich was also a society in which the sovereign power to kill ran through its entire social body. It was granted not only to the state, but also to a whole series of individuals, such as members of the SA and the SS. “Ultimately everyone in the Nazi Sate had the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing, which effectively meant doing away with the people next door, or having them done away with” (SMD 259). It was sovereign power, as well as biopower, that was taken to its extreme limit. For Foucault, the seamless coincidence of sovereign power and biopower in Nazi Germany was thus a historically contingent conglomera-

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tion of factors, “the paroxysmal point” in the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower geared toward the protection and enhancement of life (SMD 260). The concentration camp was not the exemplary unmasking of an originary connection between violence and political power in modernity, but “a demonic combination” of two fundamentally different rationalities of power—biopower and sovereign power. As Mika Ojakangas (2005, 15) observes, Foucault considered these two forms of power to have become intermingled, modern states being the resulting combination. This is not the case, however, because there are hidden de jure ties between sovereign power and biopower, as Agamben claims. It is rather that sovereign states have de facto used biopolitical methods, just as modern biopolitical societies have de facto hinged on principles of sovereignty.17

Biopolitical Violence Both Foucault and Agamben describe modern biopolitics as a political system that is characterized by the indistinction of tactics and laws, norms and facts. They both warn us that “in the biopolitical horizon that characterizes modernity, the physician and the scientist move in the noman’s-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate” (Agamben 1998, 159). However, they differ in their views on the grounds of modern biopower as well as the possible forms of resistance against it due to their fundamentally different understandings of sovereignty. Foucault has a more historically and politically grounded conception of sovereignty than Agamben, but it is theoretically very rudimentary. He understands sovereign power essentially as a repressive and coercive form of power, which operates through legal prohibitions. This narrow conception leads him to claim that sovereignty fails to account for the modern biopolitical techniques of power that function largely outside of the law. We need an understanding of political power that can account for the way that sovereignty has incorporated elements that are productive of life: forms of power that administer and manage life outside the juridical realm. Agamben, on the other hand, relies on a Schmittian understanding of sovereignty according to which sovereignty is irreducible to the law because it must form its constitutive condition: it can issue policies that are nothing other than politically driven sovereign decisions. Therefore it is exactly sovereignty that must account for those modern biopolitical mechanisms that fall through the grid of the juridical realm.

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Agamben’s account can be understood as a reconceptualization of sovereignty, which Andreas Kalyvas has aptly called “bio-sovereignty” (2005, 109). Bio-sovereign does not simply exercise external control over its subjects or limit itself to the juridical regulation of social relations. Its powers are not confined to mere repression and coercion, and it does not rule solely through legal prohibitions. It is capable of producing, administering, and managing life itself, and ultimately deciding on its value or non-value. By assimilating all power relations and political rationalities to this comprehensive, ahistorical, and ontologized notion of sovereignty, Agamben’s account makes it very difficult to imagine forms of resistance, however. He does not offer us tools for the analysis of the theoretical tensions, political struggles, and historical transformations that have characterized sovereignty in modernity. In Foucault’s framework biopower and sovereign power cannot be assimilated into one comprehensive power formation such as biosovereignty. Biopower is opposed to sovereign power not only in terms of its productive aims and rationality, but also in the sense that it is essentially not the power of a democratically elected sovereign body. It is typically the power of experts: managers and administrators of life. This opposition is important in terms of imagining possible forms of resistance against biopolitical violence. Rather than attempting to eradicate sovereignty, we are left with the option of trying to break apart bio-sovereignty—a form of sovereignty in which biopower and sovereign power coincide seamlessly—and strengthening the power of popular sovereignty. His analysis thus leaves open the possibility that a viable way to resist biopolitical violence would be to reinstall legal protections and democratic mechanisms of accountability rather than launch a wholesale critique of sovereignty aiming at its eradication. There is no originary sovereign violence for Foucault because state violence must always be understood as a set of specific practices connected with a historical power formation. However, the rise of biopower in modernity means that the sites for practices of state violence unregulated by juridical mechanisms have potentially increased. As I will show in the following chapter, biopolitical practices of violence are typically grounded in effective policy, professional management, and expert knowledge, or legitimized through the deployment of the law as an administrative tactic. They are practices of violence that are not strictly illegal, but they are extralegal. Hence, even if we do not accept Agamben’s analysis that we are living in a permanent state of exception, the fact that techniques of biopower often fall outside, or through the grid of politically accountable sovereign power, implies that they can, for this very reason, easily revert

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to exceptional sovereign power in the Schmittian sense: biopower can become sovereign power in a state of exception uncontrolled and regulated by any law. The biopolitical practices of violence are often hidden within various institutions in which petty sovereigns can reign, uncontrolled by parliamentary or judicial restrictions. Hence, even if we deny any de jure connection between biopower and sovereign power, we have to be mindful that the growing importance of the former in modernity means that the hidden sites for exceptional sovereign violence— violence that is direct, unregulated, and arbitrary—have therefore also multiplied. Although Agamben’s analysis of the originary intersection between sovereign power and biopower is thus inconsistent with Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics to the extent that it ontologizes the biopolitical violence of the twentieth century, it should nevertheless be credited as a stark and radical exposure of the dangers of biopower. The modern dominance of this distinct rationality of power centered on the care and protection of life has opened up sites for unprecedented forms of violence. It is my contention that if we want to understand the specific forms that political violence takes in modernity we therefore need a careful analysis of the points of tension, as well as the points of coincidence, between sovereign power and biopower. By such an analysis Foucault exposes a form of power that does not threaten us with violence, but is nevertheless an effective way of controlling and directing people’s lives. The effectiveness of biopower lies precisely in the fact that it explicitly refrains from killing and instead grounds its demands in scientific truth and the goals of well-being and care of the population. Without an understanding of the rationality of biopower, it would be difficult to explain how we willingly partake in the profound and violent disciplining and medicalization of our lives that characterizes modern societies and their specific forms of biopolitical violence. Because violence is the inverse logic of biopower, biopolitical violence is in some ways even more dangerous than sovereign violence because it is harder to detect and to regulate. To conclude, Foucault would agree with Arendt that what characterizes modernity is that we have become ants. He contends, however, that the reason we have become ants is not that we mistakenly comprehend our biological life in political terms. We become ants precisely at the moment when we are no longer able to pose questions concerning our biological life in political terms. Political power in biopolitical societies has evaporated and has been replaced by purely administrative and economic power. Complex biopolitical techniques aim at making our life as long and happy as possible with the scientifically most advanced

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means available. There are no political decisions or debates left when the aims of biopower are unanimous and its means scientific. The crisis of politics in modernity cannot be resolved by depoliticizing biological life in the sense of returning it to the private sphere. On the contrary, it must be explicitly politicized by dispelling its naturalness and revealing its historically specific connections with the biopolitical regime of power/knowledge.

6

The Management of State Violence

Some of the most disturbing images of violence haunting contemporary political thought have been instances of state violence, be it the irrevocable memory of the Holocaust or more recent pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. State violence has always presented a challenge for critiques of violence because it is by definition legitimate violence: unlike criminal violence, it is understood as the necessary instrument for preserving and enforcing the law. This means that it is generally experienced as problematic only in instances when citizens believe that the laws that it is used to uphold are unjust or unnecessary, or when it is used not only against people who break the law, but indiscriminately so that it is also used against those who do not. While both of these instances are clearly problematic, my concern is that theorizing state violence exclusively in the juridico-sovereign framework makes invisible forms of state violence that are not strictly law-preserving at all, but concerned with the management of things and people. It is my contention that an effective critique of the configurations of state violence requires that we rethink not only what political violence is, but also what political power and the state are. If we restrict our understanding of power to its traditional forms—sovereign and juridical power in Foucault’s terminology—then state violence is always legitimate violence. However, if we follow Foucault’s attempt to theorize the state—through his idea of governmentality—as a set of varied and concrete practices of governing, these practices are interlinked with various practices of violence whose aim is not to enforce the law, but to ensure the smooth functioning of government: the preservation of order, control, security, and productivity. These practices of violence are often hidden inside of various institutions. They are politically sanctioned, but not through elections or the direct rule of law. Instead, they are grounded on effective policy, professional management, and expert knowledge. They are often legitimized through the deployment of the law as an administrative tactic in order to achieve certain policy aims. I will show how a Foucaultian rethinking of political power as governmentality makes it possible to subject such practices of state violence 103

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to critical scrutiny and to view lives and bodies devoid of explicit political and legal rights as being nevertheless deeply political. I begin by briefly discussing Foucault’s well-known idea of disciplinary power, and argue that he significantly reassessed his understanding of power in the lectures on governmentality, Security, Territory, Population, he gave in 1978. The idea of governmentality complements and extends the central insights of disciplinary power to the realm of the state, and opens up a critical perspective on the rationality of state violence.

Disciplinary Violence Instead of attempting to define the specificity of the political, Foucault expressly embraced its ubiquity. According to him, power relations are rooted in the whole network of society, and therefore the analysis of power cannot be reduced to a study of institutions or practices that would merit the name “political.” His well-known polemic against sovereign power—the suggestion that we should finally cut off the head of the king in political philosophy—was not a denial of forms of sovereignty in political reality, however. It was a gesture in moving away from the restricted analysis of political institutions to a broader study of the capillary power networks that penetrate the extremities of society, such as families, workplaces, educational institutions, health-care facilities, and, paradigmatically, prisons.1 Foucault’s study of the prison, Discipline and Punish, could be read as a history of violence: a genealogical investigation into the statesanctioned violence of the modern penal system. While the book opens with a graphic description of the shocking violence inflicted on the attempted regicide Damiens, its actual focus is on the more subtle forms of violence connected with the emergence of disciplinary power. Foucault’s characterization of disciplinary power is strikingly similar to his later definition of violence: it is power that acts directly upon bodies.2 It oversteps the rules of law and right, and is addressed to bodies, to “manas-body.” It is exercised through constant surveillance and examination, but also through more manifestly violent means of manipulating bodies through a tight grid of material coercion. Foucault sets disciplinary power in opposition to juridical power. He argues that the establishment of an explicit, coded, and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime in the eighteenth century, was

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accompanied by the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms. They constituted the other, dark side of these processes of democratic progress (DP 222). While juridical power operates with the binary legal/illegal framework, disciplinary power is capable of making more nuanced distinctions through the functioning of norms. It operates on the sliding scale of healthy/sick and normal/abnormal. The contrast to juridical power is illuminating in terms of understanding the fusion of disciplinary power with violence. While juridical power is founded on violence, and the threat of violence forms its necessary condition of possibility, the relationship between power and violence at least appears instrumental. The exercise of police violence, for example, is intended to be protective and punitive, and is reserved for those who break or contest the law. The sharp distinction that Arendt, among others, makes between power as an end in itself and violence as merely the means for securing it seems to hold in the case of juridical power.3 What characterizes disciplinary power, on the other hand, is that it makes the dividing line between power and violence permeable, and at times totally indistinguishable. Disciplinary violence is not only punitive and restrictive; it is also corrective, rehabilitating, and restorative. It is productive of subjectivity. In several interviews on the present and future roles of the penal system, Foucault repeatedly took up the question of its double role: aiming both to punish and to correct, it mingles juridical with anthropological practices. He argued that the intervention of psychiatry in the field of law, which occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was part of the gradual shift in penal practice from a focus on the crime to a focus on the criminal. The new idea of the “dangerous individual” referred to the danger that was potentially inherent in the individual, which implied that the aim of the penal system was not solely to punish, but more important, to correct (EWF3 194). The change in the aims of the penal system, in its rationality or immanent logic, resulted in the birth of new types of carceral institutions and practices. The new rationality could not function in an effective way in the existing penal system without the emergence of a technical knowledge system—criminal psychiatry, for example—capable of characterizing the criminal individual in himself, beneath his acts. It also resulted in the emergence of new forms of violence: in a disciplinary society violence is, to a considerable extent, eradicated from public spaces, but it reappears in the name of improvement, health, and security in corrective institutions. While the functioning and existence of the modern prison institu-

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tion are obviously tied to the juridical system, its rationality also requires and supports practices of violence that reach beyond the domain of the law. As Foucault noted, The disciplinary mechanism is characterized by the fact that . . . outside the legislative act that establishes the law and the judicial act that punishes the culprit, a series of adjacent, detective, medical, and psychological techniques appear which fall within the domain of surveillance, diagnosis, and the possible transformation of the individuals. (STP 5)4

Practices of violence operate as part of a complex disciplinary apparatus consisting of security procedures, scientific evaluations, observation, and examination. The analysis of discipline—the microphysics of power— provides important theoretical tools for making visible the functioning of the insidious, modern techniques of productive violence operative inside corrective state institutions.

Governmentality and the Recession of the Law While Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary power provided interesting avenues for enlarging and reconfiguring the domain of the political, in his attention to specific practices and techniques he failed to address some of the more general, strategic issues of power involved in politics.5 His lectures on governmentality could be read as a response to such lacunae. His analyses of disciplinary power were restricted to specialized institutional contexts, whereas the idea of power as government widened the scope of his rethinking of power to the domain of the state. In studying modern state power he was able to transport his understanding of power to the domain of politics, as it is traditionally understood. Foucault makes it clear that this genealogy is not simply an account of how mechanisms of governmentality replaced disciplinary mechanisms, which would have replaced juridico-legal mechanisms. What changed was the system of correlation between the three. Governmental technologies focusing on the population had to utilize the existing armatures of law and discipline while also introducing their own distinct organization and rationality. Discipline was never more important or more valorized than at the moment when it became important to manage a population, and this also rendered all the more acute the problem of the foundation of sovereignty (STP 219).

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Foucault’s move from discipline to government was thus not a conceptual substitution, but an extension. It mirrors the earlier shift from sovereign to disciplinary power in important ways. In his analysis of disciplinary power he had moved the emphasis from repressive institutions to productive practices. In his analysis of governmentality he was, in a similar fashion, attempting a move from portraying the state as a repressive institution to analyzing governmental practices.6 He criticized the tendency to demonize the state in political thought, to see it as the simple enemy and the root of all political problems. The state not only exercises repressive, negative power over the social body, but should rather be understood as one historical modality of “government.” It is a new political form of power that has been continuously developing since the sixteenth century, and this development reflects changes in the rationality of governmental practices. His method thus entailed “going behind the institution and trying to discover in a wider and more overall perspective what we can broadly call a technology of power” (STP 117). So, in short, the challenge of the lectures I would like to give this year will be this . . . Just as for the prison we tried to go behind penitentiary institutions in the strict sense so as to seek out the general economy of power, can we carry out the same reversal for the state? . . . Is it possible to place the modern state in a general technology of power that assured its mutations, development, and functioning? (STP 120)7

As in his study of disciplines, Foucault also distinguishes governmental technologies by setting them in opposition to sovereign power. He discusses Machiavelli’s The Prince as a paradigmatic example of the rationality of sovereign power. For Machiavelli, the prince stood in a relation of singularity and externality to his principality. In other words, the sovereign presided over a territory and its inhabitants as the selfgrounding and external basis for the rule of law, and there was no fundamental or natural connection between the ruler and the ruled. Because their relationship was external, it was also fragile and continually under threat. The sole objective of the exercise of political power was therefore to maintain the power of the sovereign: the end of sovereignty was the exercise of sovereignty (STP 204–10). In contrast to the external and transcendent power of the sovereign, governmentality implied that practices of power had to be founded on principles of governing inherent in the state itself: the state, like nature, had its own proper form of rationality and it had to be governed accordingly. This meant, first, that practices of government had to be multifarious because they were founded on different forms of knowledge,

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and concerned many different people—the head of the family, the superior of an institute, the teacher of a school. Different practices of government, furthermore, had a plurality of specific aims: the increase of wealth, the efficiency of production, the growth of the population and its welfare. Achieving these aims required various strategies and tactics. Foucault singled out the introduction of political economy into political practice in the seventeenth century as an essential development: government came to denote the correct way of managing things—individuals, goods, and wealth (STP 95). I think this marks an important break. Whereas the end of sovereignty is internal to itself and gets its instruments from itself in the form of law, the end of government is internal to the things it manages; it is to be sought in the perfection, maximization, or intensification of the processes it directs, and the instruments of government will become diverse tactics rather than laws. Consequently, law recedes; or rather, law is certainly not the major instrument in the perspective of what government should be . . . the ends of government cannot be effectively achieved by means of the law. (STP 99)8

Practices of government employ tactics rather than laws, or use laws as tactics, to arrange things in such a way that certain ends may be achieved. The procedures of governmentality are thus importantly irreducible to the rule of law. They utilize administrative apparatuses and managerial techniques that are, for the most part, extralegal. They also rely heavily on forms of knowledge. As Thomas Lemke (2002) points out, however, governmental knowledge is never pure, neutral knowledge, which simply “represents” the governed reality. It is rather an element of government itself that helps to create a discursive field in which exercising power is understood as “rational.”9 Governmentality implies the emergence of a particular, circular relationship between power and knowledge, or government and science. In sum, Foucault used the notion of governmentality in an attempt to identify and chart a crucial change in the rationality of political power that corresponded to the historical shift from a society of sovereignty to one of governmentality. He describes a new regime in which political power is exercised in the form, and according to the model, of economics. Its object is not territory, nor are its inhabitants understood as juridical subjects: it is a complex composed of men and things. In the eighteenth century this complex came to be understood as population: an object of statistical analysis and scientific knowledge with its own intrinsic regularities. Its governance required tactics, strategies, and forms of knowledge that were specific to it—rates of death, birth, and disease;

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life expectancy; labor capacity and wealth. The population and its welfare came to form both the field of intervention of modern governmental techniques as well as its ultimate end. It is not a question of political power primarily adopting the form of sovereign power—an individual or communal sovereign ruling juridical subjects with the instrument of laws: we live in a society in which a complex managerial and administrative apparatus governs a population by means of policies, tactics, and strategies based on various forms of scientific knowledge.

The Governmentalization of Violence Understanding power as governmentality implies that we can also view state violence, its forms and extent, as a question of effective tactics and the successful management of security issues and populations. The troubling consequence of this is that the rationality and efficiency of violence often become its basis of legitimacy. Because technologies of governmentality operate through managerial techniques and administrative institutions that are legitimized through specific policy aims rather than direct elections or the rule of law, the use of violence also becomes a matter of effective tactics. It is often monitored and sanctioned by medical professionals, military officials, and administrative personnel rather than by parliamentary institutions or courts of law. James Ron (1997, 283–84) argues that the realm of state violence, like trade tariffs and budget management, has undergone a significant process of regulation and rationalization on a global scale. There is a dense body of conventions defining “legitimate” state violence and the structures states should adopt in order to control and supervise their coercive agents. This process of rationalization and regulation is strongly linked with the process of legitimization. According to Ron, the world polity’s understanding of “legitimate violence” strongly resembles Foucaultian discipline, or as I would suggest, governmental management: it is violence that is professionalized, rationalized, and bureaucratized. The state must erect a network of legal, psychological, and medical expertise around the application of violence. By dispensing advice on what should and what should not be done, these professional experts lend the process of state violence an aura of rationality, dispassion, and justice. Expert knowledge constitutes the necessary, but essentially extralegal structure of accountability. When practices of violence are monitored by professional administrators, military officials, and medical experts they are thereby controlled processes rather than arbitrary punishments, yet they are not necessarily legally controlled at all. As Ron

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notes, states that manage to legitimate their use of violence through these processes of professionalization can nevertheless hope to be accepted into the realm of legitimated states and to gain access to the accompanying benefits. Ron’s case study concerns the methods of state violence used in Israel. In the course of his interviews with Palestinian detainees and Israeli prison guards he discovered that at some point during 1991–92 something substantial changed in the way Israel’s security agencies interrogated Palestinian detainees. The change was not in the number of detainees interrogated; on any given day in 1993 some 400–600 Palestinians continued to be interrogated by either the General Security Services or the military. Nor was the change one of interrogation results: the conviction rate of Palestinians in the military courts remained above 96 percent, most of them based on confessions obtained during interrogation. The changes were in the type of interrogation techniques employed, the manner in which they were controlled by the state, and the way in which state representatives explained and justified their use (Ron 1997, 275). Early studies demonstrated that prior to this time interrogators readily resorted to intense physical force, enjoying considerable leeway from their superiors. During the first years of the Palestinian uprising the majority of interrogation subjects were subjected to severe beatings, many of which involved broken bones and hospitalization. Under the new system the intensity of the direct physical force had considerably weakened. Interrogators introduced and refined a complex package of methods including beatings that left no marks, painful body positioning, and sensory disorientation. The second change was on the level of state control over the process. The entire interrogation system was standardized and rationalized. The right to use violence was taken away from individual security personnel and was instead nested within a wider system of hierarchical control: some agents were authorized to use it and others were not. A system of detainee classification evolved specifying which categories of suspects could be subjected to particular methods, in increasingly precise detail. The Israeli authorities also publicly discussed interrogation in a new way: they portrayed it as a controlled humane process in which violence was admittedly used, but only in a calibrated and calculated manner (Ron 1997, 275–76). Foucault’s understanding of governmentality opens up a perspective from which to expose the political rationality behind the legitimate practices of state violence: in liberal democratic states legitimate forms of violence must be rationally moderated and professionally regulated. Governmentality thus represents a new form of political legitimacy. It makes it possible to erect a veil of pseudo-legality around the applica-

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tion of violence and to enforce highly dubious notions of legitimacy. It operates through the logic of efficiency, professionalism, and successful management, not judicial legitimacy. It deploys administrative decrees, bureaucratic procedures, and managerial tactics that effectively have the force of law without being laws. Governmental technologies are concerned not with ruling political subjects, but with managing populations by means of their own intrinsic and statistical regularities. They are not reducible to the law, but operate where it does not reach. Consequently, violence is also used as a tactic of management, not as a legal instrument. It is a matter of policy, a tactical means for achieving a specific aim. While current political rationalities can be contested and disputed in an agonistic society, to criticize them requires that we understand them.10 This means rethinking our current ways of understanding political power. We must appropriate the conceptual distinction between sovereignty and governmentality in order to perceive clearly the nature and stakes of state violence. Those who resist or rebel against a form of power cannot merely be content to denounce violence or criticize an institution. . . . What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake. The criticism of power wielded over the mentally sick or mad cannot be restricted to psychiatric institutions; nor can those questioning the power to punish be content with denouncing prisons as total institutions. The question is: How are such relations of power rationalized? Asking it is the only way to avoid other institutions, with the same objectives and the same effects, from taking their stead. (EWF3 324–25)11

I have suggested that in order to criticize practices of state violence in the modern administrative state, we must analyze the shift in our political thought and practice from a moral-juridical framework to a managerial-functional framework: how questions of legitimacy are increasingly turned into questions of efficiency. A critique of current practices of state violence must thus target not solely the violent individuals, the institutions, or even the state, but the political rationality upholding these practices.

Guantanamo: Law as a Tactic Governmentality thus denotes an extralegal form of power to the extent that it depends on administrative apparatuses and managerial tech-

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niques. It is crucial to note, however, that while this implies that the importance of the law recedes at the expense of norms and tactics, it does not mean that the law is simply suspended or that institutions of justice are displaced. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of governmentality is not its refusal to recognize the law, or to operate where it does not reach, but its tendency to deploy it as a tactic to achieve certain policy ends. The deployment of law becomes instrumental: it functions as means to predetermined policy ends and not as the ground of their legitimacy. This is particularly troubling for critiques of state violence. If the only problem was its extralegality, then the solution would seem fairly straightforward: we would have to strengthen the rule of law and introduce tighter mechanisms of legal accountability. But if the administrative apparatuses are themselves using the form of law to pursue their ends, then appealing to the rule of law in order to curb their discretion will not help. I will attempt to illustrate this problem through a discussion of the Guantanamo detainee camp. Political theorists and activists have presented powerful critiques of the detainee camp of Guantanamo Bay and the idea of indefinite detention. Judith Butler’s impassioned critique appropriates Foucault’s and Agamben’s thought in arguing that we should not see sovereign power and governmentality as mutually exclusive, but that the two forms of power can exist simultaneously. She suggests that the configuration of state power in Guantanamo took the form of such a coexistence: sovereignty, under emergency conditions in which the rule of law was suspended, reemerged in the context of governmentality as the exercise of prerogative power. This prerogative power was reserved for managerial officers with no clear claim to legitimacy, yet they assumed the power of the judiciary: they decided fundamental matters of justice, life, and death (Butler 2004, 53–54). Because our historical situation is marked by governmentality, and this implies, to a certain extent, a loss of sovereignty, that loss is compensated through the resurgence of sovereignty within the field of governmentality. Petty sovereigns abound, reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions mobilized by aims and tactics of power they do not inaugurate or control. And yet such figures are delegated with the power to render unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without any legitimate authority. The resurrected sovereignty is thus not the sovereignty of unified power under the conditions of legitimacy, the form of power that guarantees the representative status of political institu-

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tions. It is, rather, a lawless and prerogatory power, a “rogue” power par excellence. (Butler 2004, 56)

The suspension of the rule of law in Guantanamo allowed for the convergence of governmentality and sovereignty. Sovereignty was exercised in the act of suspension of the rule of law, but also in the self-allocation of legal prerogative: “governmentality denotes an operation of administrative power that is extra-legal, even as it can and does return to law as a field of tactical operation” (Butler 2004, 55). Regarding the deployment of state violence in Guantanamo, its most disturbing aspect, in my view, was precisely not its lawlessness—the suspension of the rule of law in favor of some extralegal form of vigilante justice—but the return to law as a tactical operation. In his recent book Torture Team (2009) Philippe Sands examines the new interrogation techniques that were introduced at Guantanamo in December 2002 from a legal point of view. His provocative argument is that they constituted torture not outside the law, but under it: they were devised, reviewed, and overseen by lawyers. The lawyers advising the administration thus played a decisive role in subverting the system of international rules that should have protected the detainees from cruel and degrading treatment. In the highly charged political climate following the September 11 attacks, the U.S. administration decided that new approaches to national security threats were needed. The United States faced a unique circumstance: al-Qaeda was a different kind of enemy and posed a qualitatively different kind of threat from conventional armies. Guantanamo could therefore not be seen as a detention center for criminals or prisoners of war, it was a strategic intelligence center. The rationale of its existence was to provide essential information that could be used to prevent other large-scale attacks against the United States. The existing interrogation rules used by the military were set out in the U.S. Army field manual, and they conformed to international accords against torture such as the Geneva Convention. The problem was that they were seen to be ineffective in the new kind of war. In December 2002 the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, approved a list of eighteen new interrogation techniques—including waterboarding—based on techniques used by the Israeli military. They were later withdrawn and are now widely considered to have constituted torture according to its accepted legal definition. The crucial fact that enabled the new interrogation techniques to be devised and introduced at Guantanamo was President Bush’s decision that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the detainees there. This opened the way for new, considerably more aggressive interroga-

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tion techniques that could be approved solely on the basis of domestic criminal and military law. While the president’s decision was clearly an instance of sovereign power, it was not a unilateral decision to simply suspend international law in a state of exception dictated by emergency conditions. Instead of defying international accords, the U.S. administration accepted unequivocally that it was bound to the Geneva Convention. However, its legal view was that no one at Guantanamo was entitled to protections under any of the rules reflected in it. The president’s decision was based on the counsel of the senior lawyers of the administration who demonstrated with legal arguments that the Geneva Convention did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees. It did not apply to al-Qaeda fighters because they were not part of a state, and so could not claim rights under a treaty that was binding only on states. It did apply to the Taliban, but by Geneva’s own terms Taliban fighters were not entitled to prisoner of war status because they had not worn uniforms or other military insignia. The upshot was that it applied to no one at Guantanamo, but the argument allowed this refusal of rights to be presented as the safeguarding of international law. It is thus important to note that what made the new, considerably more aggressive interrogation techniques possible was not the suspension of international law, but an interpretation of it that made it consistent with pre-given policy aims: the effective gathering of intelligence for national security. Similarly, the eighteen new interrogation techniques were reviewed and approved by a military lawyer before being signed off on by Rumsfeld. Although their unstated rationale was clearly efficiency—they should be approved because they would work—they did go through a legal review. This was done exceptionally fast and on a very low level, however. Diane Beaver, a relatively inexperienced military lawyer at Guantanamo, concluded that the new techniques were lawful “so long as the force used could plausibly have been thought necessary in a particular situation to achieve a legitimate government objective, and it was not applied maliciously or sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm” (quoted in Sands 2009, 79). Legality was thus subsumed under efficiency and professionalism—the effective achievement of government objectives by professional interrogators who possessed an appropriate intent.12 The law was respected by the state, but it was used instrumentally: the policy should have been drawn up around the law, but instead the legal advice was fitted around the policy. The administration sought to portray its decisions as an application of the law, but in fact it was using the law as a tactic to remove constraints on aggressive interrogation. Governmentality thus does not only denote an extralegal field of policy, but, as the case of Guantanamo demonstrates, it can also mean

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the instrumental use of the law: the law is deployed as an instrument for controlling and monitoring of a population. This means that introducing more rule of the law—new legal decrees and tighter legal controls, for example—will not alone help to curb and monitor problematic practices of state violence. We also crucially need mechanisms of political, democratic accountability that are able to recognize and flag a difference between an instrumental use of the rule of law—the instances when the interpretation of the law is fitted around a policy—and the non-instrumental use that complies with the law irrespective of its compatibility with desired policy aims. These mechanisms should typically include the press, media, and judicial and political research such as Sand’s book, but they should also incorporate forms of direct political participation—mechanisms through which people with firsthand experience of state violence could report on and influence the policies regulating it.

What Is Political Violence? While Guantanamo made the convergence of governmentality and sovereignty disturbingly visible and extreme, we must ask to what extent it in fact takes place every time governmental professionals use technologies of violence as a tactic. The case of Guantanamo is obviously particularly troubling because we are literally dealing with sovereign power over life and death, and also because of the violation of the international rule of law. In June 2006 the Supreme Court overturned President Bush’s decision on the Geneva Convention, ruling it to be unlawful: it applied to all Guantanamo detainees. Hence, the violence there was ultimately not just extralegal, it was in fact illegal. However, structurally similar problems—the lack of legal accountability resulting in the reign of petty sovereigns and the instrumental use of the law to legitimize pre-given policy aims—potentially riddle all governmental practices of violence. They are not limited to exceptional detainee camps on foreign soil, but also plague minor, everyday practices of state violence taking place in our hometowns. As I was writing the conclusion to the paper on which this chapter is based, the inquest into the death of Adam Rickwood at age fourteen— the youngest person to die in U.K. custody—had just concluded. Adam Rickwood hanged himself after being restrained by four adult caretakers at Hassockfield Secure Training Centre, one of the four institutions opened in the 1990s in the United Kingdom as a more professional al-

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ternative to local children’s homes. The restraint involved a technique known as nose distraction, which has variously been described as a squeezing, tweaking, flicking, or karate-like chop to the nose. Adam bled for an hour before killing himself six hours later. The jury ruled that the staff had not been at fault in their treatment of him. Between October 2004, the time Adam died, and September 2005, the nose-distraction technique was used 437 times in the four secure training centers in the United Kingdom.13 Perhaps it is unnecessary to engage in a philosophical investigation in order to ask what kind of professionalism consists of mastering a technique that sounds a lot like hitting a child on the nose. The nosedistraction technique seemed to be a perfect example of the governmentalization of state violence, however. It was an extralegal practice in the sense that while the law clearly prohibited the beating of a fourteenyear-old by four adults, it allowed restraining him by means of a professional technique. Had Adam Rickwood not hanged himself within hours of the incident, there would have been no grounds for judicial repercussion and no questions of legal accountability. Adam Rickwood’s tragic case could also be seen as an illuminative example of the dangerous depoliticization of violence that I will discuss in chapter 8 in connection with neoliberalism. Criticism of the repertoires of state violence is effectively depoliticized when it is reduced to highlighting incidental cases of mismanagement rather than analyzing the functioning, maintenance, and legitimacy of the power technologies on which it rests. While the violence inflicted on Adam was discussed and investigated as a possible case of mismanagement and not as a form of political violence, it seemed clear that the most relevant questions that his death should have prompted us to ask had to be highly political. In the name of which political principles could his treatment be justified? Do we truly want to live in a society in which fourteen-year-olds are routinely hit on the nose by state professionals? Should we rather conclude that his death points to a need for a radical transformation of our political rationality?

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The Political Ontology of Neoliberalism

The factual, empirical account of the rise of neoliberal hegemony is fairly uncontested. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 meant that in a floating currency system it was no longer possible to control capital flows or financial markets. The years 1978–80 represented a further turning point: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were elected, Paul Volcker took command at the U.S. Federal Reserve, and Deng Xiaoping took decisive steps toward the liberalization of China’s economy. The economic and political decisions taken by these key actors took the world economy in a new direction. The goal of a pervasive welfare state with the objective of full employment was systematically replaced by the objective of creating an institutional framework that supported free domestic markets, free international trade, and individual entrepreneurial conduct. Even though the actual process of implementing these objectives has varied widely in different parts of the world and has in many countries been only partial, on the level of historical and economic facts it is possible to identify a worldwide neoliberal turn in the 1970s.1 On the level of historical ontology—the level conditioning our thought and experience of the world—the spectacular rise of neoliberalism is harder to understand and to account for. Rather than being the achievement of a few key actors, it was rooted in much deeper structural and systemic changes in our conception of the political and the practices of governing. It is my contention that in order to engage in any kind of critical evaluation of neoliberalism it is important to study it on this level, too. It is to be understood not merely as an economic doctrine, but also as a comprehensive framework for understanding ourselves and the political reality we live in. My aim in this chapter is to argue that a Foucaultian ontology of the present provides a valuable and original set of tools for such a philosophical analysis of neoliberalism. While I hold neoliberalism to be politically pernicious on several grounds—it has dramatically increased social inequality, exploitation of the most vulnerable workers, and environmental degradation, for example—my aim here is not to engage in political criticism of neoliberalism per se. The

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philosophical analysis of it in this chapter is intended to set the stage for the investigation of the specific relationship between neoliberalism and political violence conducted in chapter 8. I will show that the political ontology of neoliberalism can be effectively explicated along the three axes of power, knowledge, and subjectivity, which Foucault considered central to any critical inquiry into our present. My reading of his lectures on neoliberalism delivered at the Collège de France in 1979 is that they comprise an integral part of his historical ontology, the aim of which was to diagnose the present by analyzing how power relations intersect with the production of truth and subjectivity. Diverging from interpretations that treat these lectures as economic or social history, I want to emphasize their philosophical character. As Foucault describes his objective in the first lecture, his interest was in the construction of reality: the focus in his research is to understand the coupling of a set of practices with a regime of truth in order to follow the effects of its inscription on reality (BB 19). His philosophical claim, in essence, is that neoliberalism functions as an apparatus of knowledge and power: it constructs a particular kind of social and political reality. We have come to understand the world around us in a distinctive way through the matrix of neoliberalism, and this framework delimits our political rationality as well as our implicit self-understanding. Foucault’s usage of “neoliberalism” in these lectures is nonstandard from the current point of view because he traces its earliest form to 1930s Germany. The lectures analyze the neoliberal program in two forms. The initial German form was represented by proponents of the Freiburg school of economists such as Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke, also called “ordoliberals” after the journal Ordo. It was strongly linked to the critique of Nazism and, after the war, to postwar reconstruction. The other, American form was the neoliberalism of the Chicago school, which was derived from the former but was in some respects more radical.2 My argument proceeds in three stages following the three axes of knowledge, power, and subjectivity. In the first part I claim that neoliberalism can be viewed as an extreme form of the liberal regime of truth regulating our current governmentality. Second, I show how neoliberalism is compatible in significant ways with the rationality of biopower: the “health” of the markets implies the health of the population. In the final part I discuss the particular form of subjectivity—the homo economicus—it produces.

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Truth It might seem difficult to argue for the significance of Foucault’s thought to an analysis of our contemporary economic reality because he is often read as a thinker who, to his detriment, largely ignored questions of political economy. Jeffrey Nealon (2008, 11), for example, argues in his book Foucault Beyond Foucault that Foucault has very little to say to today’s readers about the economic present, which is not primarily geared toward a standardized and normalized mass society, but is instead supersaturated with neoliberal practices of individual self-creation. According to Nealon, Foucault expended most of his political and theoretical energy smoking out the hidden indignities of a form of governmental power that has decisively lost hegemony in the decades since his death, namely the welfare state. Making his thought relevant today would therefore require constructing a productive dialogue with Marxism. This, in turn, would mean acknowledging his affinities with certain of its core tenets—such as the persistence of class struggle—rather than viewing his relationship with Marxism as wholesale rejection (ibid., 81–82). It is my contention that while traditional Marxist theory remains a pertinent analysis of many of the essential mechanisms of capitalism, it is at pains to identify what is specifically at stake in the rise of neoliberalism. I claim that Foucault’s approach to neoliberalism is not only incompatible with traditional forms of Marxist analysis in crucial ways, but it provides an original perspective precisely because he refuses to theorize it in terms of ideology and class struggle.3 A traditional Marxist response would explain the hegemony of neoliberalism in terms of antagonism between classes. David Harvey (2005), for example, argues that the neoliberal turn was a deliberate and highly successful attempt to restore the power and the wealth of the upper classes.4 Reagan and Thatcher placed themselves at the head of a class movement the determined aim of which was to restore its power. By capturing the ideals of individual freedom and turning them against the interventionist and regulatory practices of the state, capitalist class interests were able to protect and restore their position. It was the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonderfulsounding words such as freedom, liberty, choice, and rights to hide the grim realities of this restoration of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally. The IMF and the World Bank functioned as conspiratorial centers for the propagation and enforcement of “free market fundamentalism” and “neoliberal orthodoxy”—forms of ideology with highly questionable scientific rigor (Harvey 2005, 21). For Harvey, resistance

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to neoliberalism thus requires unmasking the truth: we must expose it for what it truly is, namely a covert attempt to restore class privilege. We also have to rejuvenate class politics: class is not a meaningless or defunct category, but must remain the central conceptual weapon in the struggle against neoliberal hegemony (ibid., 202–3). It is my contention that instead of treating neoliberalism as an ideological mask for a hidden truth, we should respond to it on the level of the production of truth. Foucault was deeply suspicious of the notion of ideology. For him, the key philosophical question did not consist in drawing a line between what falls within the category of scientificity or truth and what comes under the suspicious label of ideology.5 His interest lay rather in the production of truth in two distinct ways. He wanted to identify the political effects of truth and how they were produced historically. On the other hand, he also wanted to analyze the regimes of truth: the conditions that made it possible to utter true statements about governance or the economy, for example. Neoliberalism must be understood as a distinct regime of truth in this sense: its political ontology forms the conditions for making reasonable political judgments in today’s world. Foucault’s lectures chart the historical development, the genealogy that has established the neoliberal governmental regime of truth that conditions our current practices of politics. Before explicitly turning to neoliberal governmentality in his lectures, Foucault begins his investigation by going back to the eighteenth century. He shows how a new liberal form of governmental reason began to be formulated, reflected upon, and outlined around the middle of the century, and how it found its theoretical expression and formulation in political economy.6 Physiocrats such as Francois Quesnay in France had already given the economic domain a high degree of internal consistency, but it was crucially Adam Smith who established economics as a neutral, economic science. Through him the modern conception of the economy emerged as a separate sphere of society as well as an autonomous object of scientific knowledge in political history, and this was highly significant in terms of our conception of good government and, more generally, of our understanding of the political. Foucault argues that with the development of political economy a new principle for limiting governmental rationality was established. Whereas up until then the law had functioned as an external limitation on excessive government, the new principle—political economy—was internal to the very governmental rationality. This meant that government had to limit itself not because it violated the liberty or the basic rights of men, but in order to ensure its own success. Up until the middle of the eighteenth century there had been a multitude of imposed eco-

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nomic practices such as tax levies, customs charges, and manufacturing regulations. All these were conceived of as the exercise of sovereign or feudal rights, the maintenance of customs, or techniques for preventing urban revolt. With the birth of the new governmental rationality based on political economy the meaning of all these economic practices profoundly changed, however. From the middle of the eighteenth century it became possible to establish a reasoned, reflected coherence between them by means of intelligible mechanisms. This, in turn, made it possible to judge them as good or bad, not in terms of law or some moral principle, but in terms of truth: propositions subject to the division between true and false. According to Foucault, governmental activity thus entered into a new regime of truth (BB 18). The market had been a site of jurisdiction in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the sense that it was invested with strict regulations ensuring that prices were fair, and that there was no fraud, theft, or crime. It was also a site of distributive justice: the rules of the market ensured that the poorest could also buy things. Entry into a new regime of truth in the middle of the eighteenth century meant that the market no longer appeared, or had to be, a site of jurisdiction. It now appeared as something that obeyed and had to obey “natural,” spontaneous mechanisms. The spontaneity was such that attempts to modify the mechanisms would only impair and distort them. The market thus became a site of truth—it allowed natural mechanisms to appear, and these permitted the formation of the right conditions for its proper functioning (BB 30–31). The market also essentially constituted the site of the veridiction of governmental practice: a good government now functioned according to truth rather than justice. This meant that limiting its reach also became increasingly a question not of rights, but of utility. Limiting the exercise of power by public authorities was no longer formulated in terms of the traditional problems of law or revolutionary questions concerning original rights and how the individual could assert them against any sovereign. From the beginning of the nineteenth century the key questions addressed to government were: Is it useful? For what is it useful? Foucault claims that what fundamentally characterizes liberal governmentality is the idea that “governmental power is limited by evidence, not by the freedom of the individual” (BB 62).7 The possibility of limitation and the question of truth are thus both importantly introduced into governmental reason through political economy. This is an extremely important moment in the history of governmentality “since it establishes, in its most important features . . . a particular regime of truth which . . . is in fact still the same today” (BB 18).

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Foucault’s claim is not that at that moment in history politics and the art of government finally became rational, nor that an epistemological threshold had been reached on the basis of which the art of government could become scientific. He is rather arguing that governmental activity entered into a new regime of truth that conditioned what kind of claims could be reasonably made about it and when its interference was legitimate. This transformation was decisive for our current understanding of politics. It meant that all the questions formerly posed by the art of governing had to be reconfigured in order for us to be able to answer them in terms of truth or falsehood. At one time these amounted to the question: Am I governing in proper conformity to moral, natural, or divine laws? Then, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with raison d’Etat, it was: Am I governing with sufficient intensity, depth, and attention to detail so as to bring the state . . . to its maximum strength? And now the question will be: Am I governing at the border between . . . the maximum and minimum fixed for me by the nature of things . . . ? (BB 18–19)8

Foucault’s key claim is thus that our modern understanding of politics was constituted and limited by a particular liberal regime of truth, which established a new relationship between political power and economic knowledge. To sum up its essential features, it became possible, for the first time in history, to make scientific truth claims about economics and good governance. One of the most important ontological tenets of economic liberalism and neoliberalism is the doctrine of economic neutrality: economic facts are objective, universal, and politically neutral. Political decisions have to be based on economic truths, which in themselves are understood to be politically neutral.9 This regime also implied that good government could not interfere with economic mechanisms. Because economic truths dictated that market mechanisms—Adam Smith’s invisible hand—best ensured that the pursuit of private interests spontaneously led to the common good, it was irrational to place such pursuits under political control. All possible market distortions had to be avoided to ensure the correct formation of prices, because only correct pricing effectively guided resource allocation toward efficiency, equity, and stability. This meant that once something was defined as an economic question—such as the magnitude of the income gap between the rich and the poor—it was moved out of the political realm understood as a realm that could be interfered with politically in accordance with political commitments and moral principles. Economic truths, on the other hand, could not be argued against politically without falling into irrationality.

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This idea has reorganized our political ontology in carving out an autonomous realm of economy that cannot be interfered with politically. From a Foucaultian perspective the rise of neoliberalism must be understood as the culmination of a historical development that redrew the ontological boundary between economy and politics. Under neoliberal governmentality the autonomy of the economic sphere places strict limits on the realm of politics, and economic knowledge must fundamentally guide and condition political power. In terms of political resistance this means that the essential philosophical task is not to reveal the hidden truth about neoliberal economic theory and policy; it is more fundamentally to ask how politics has become a domain in which it is possible to make scientifically true claims about an increasing number of issues. Neoliberalism cannot be reduced to just another political belief that one could adopt or discard. When it is understood as the extreme articulation of liberal governmentality it forms the current conditions for formulating political beliefs. This means that the Left has not been duped by dubious ideological propaganda into accepting neoliberal economic policies: it has been defeated by truth. Truth poses a far more difficult political conundrum than ideology or the restoration of class privilege because opposing it politically appears irrational. Margaret Thatcher, one of the most famous advocates of neoliberalism, summed up the seeming inevitability of the neoliberal economic reforms in her slogan, “There is no alternative.” The absurd question that the Left has had to face is: how can one resist economic truths politically?

Power Some commentators have contended that the biopolitical societies that began to take shape in the seventeenth century and crystallized in the extended welfare states of the 1960s and 1970s have since collapsed: neoliberal hegemony has brought the era of biopolitics to an end. Biopolitical care in the form of a tight control of populations has ceased to exist, and globalization has proceeded largely without any biopolitical considerations for the health and happiness of individuals or populations.10 My aim in this section is to question such an interpretation and to argue that neoliberalism should be understood as a powerful mutation of biopolitical governmentality. The fact that it has become the hegemonic model even in countries which traditionally had strong welfare states shows that its underlying values, at least in Europe, are not so much libertarian, but utilitarian. The neoliberal economic argument

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has won in the governmental game of truth organized according to the undisputed, biopolitical value of life: the aim of good governance is the maximal material well-being of the population. Only economic growth, a continuous increase in productivity, can deliver higher living standards for everybody and thus ensure the best care of life. My claim is that the rise of neoliberalism has meant that whereas the means for achieving this aim have changed, the biopolitical end of maximal life has remained the same. Harvey is undoubtedly right in demonstrating that the rise of neoliberalism has been contemporaneous with the dramatic increase of the wealth of the elites. In contrast to Harvey, however, I contend that it is important to see that this is a necessary consequence and not the hidden, conspiratorial aim of neoliberal economic policy. The explicit purpose of neoliberal government is to maximize everybody’s material wellbeing, not just the well-being of the elite: as the popular slogan states, the rising tide lifts all boats. This is why the spread of neoliberalism has been politically unstoppable in our current biopolitical governmentality according to which the maximal material well-being of the population is an unquestioned goal. Foucault’s short discussion of biopolitics at the end of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 was followed the next year by the lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79). The very title suggests that the lectures were intended as an elaboration of the topic. However, their actual content appears to have nothing to do with biopolitics, and concerns economic liberalism and neoliberalism instead. A quick look at the index reveals that the word “biopolitics” occurs in only four instances, and in two of these the context is an apology for the fact that Foucault had spent too long on other topics and had not been able to talk about it.11 The lectures thus give no easy or conclusive answer to the question of how biopolitics and neoliberalism are related. In the first lecture Foucault introduces biopolitics as the general topic of the series and gives a general characterization of its relationship to liberalism: the governmental regime of liberalism must form the framework for understanding biopolitics. “It seems to me that it is only when we understand what is at stake in . . . this governmental regime called liberalism . . . will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is” (BB 21– 22). In the course summary he again apologizes for the fact that the course ended up being devoted entirely to what should have been the introduction. He insists again, however, that biopolitical issues could not be understood as separate from the framework of political rationality within which they appeared and took on their intensity. This means “liberalism,” since it was in relation to liberalism that they assumed the form of a challenge. How can the phenomena of “popu-

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lation,” with its specific effects and problems, be taken into account in a system concerned about respect for legal subjects and individual free enterprise? In the name of what and according to what rules can it be managed? (BB 317)12

The demands of biopolitics posed a theoretical challenge to liberal governmentality, and biopolitics and liberalism formed a historical intersection: they were linked de facto, not de jure. Nevertheless, Foucault argues that liberalism fundamentally determined the specific form that biopolitics assumed in Western societies. Rather than being imposed by totalitarian systems of coercion, it has, for the most part, developed as a complex regime of power/knowledge in Western societies. As I argued in the previous section, what characterizes liberal governmentality is the idea that there can be no sovereign in economics. Economic rationality is not only surrounded by, but also founded on, the fundamental unknowability of the totality of the economic process: the invisible hand is invisible precisely because there can be no totalizing sovereign view. The sovereign has to respect the natural and inevitable mechanisms of the economy in order to ensure the maximal well-being of all. The erosion of sovereign power that is now often attributed to globalization thus began in the eighteenth century, in fact, if we analyze it on the level of political ontology. The eighteenth century crucially saw the emergence of new economic experts whose task it was to tell the government the truth about the natural mechanisms that it had to manipulate or respect. The economists of the time were able to explain, for example, that the movement of the population to where wages were highest was a law of nature (BB 16). The discovery of “natural laws” in the social sphere meant that the form that biopolitics assumed in modern societies was essentially tied to the power of experts—economic experts and others with privileged access to scientific truths about life. It is my contention that neoliberal governmentality is thus not contrary to modern biopolitical governmentality, and that their rationalities are deeply interwoven and compatible in the sense that they both rely on expert power. Liberal governmentality effected a shift to a regime of truth that emphasized the limitation of government according to truth, at the expense of a juridical framework, and paved the way for a modern biopolitical society of experts and managers of life at the expense of sovereignty. Many of the biopolitical techniques and regulations that proliferated throughout the nineteenth century were implemented by the state. Biopolitics has historically developed in tandem with the modern nationstate, but it has also retained a relative independence from it. It has developed and spread not only in welfare states, but also in sub-state and trans-

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national institutions and contexts: welfare funds, private institutions, and insurance companies, for example. The rapid reduction of the state connected with the rise of neoliberalism has not led to the disappearance of biopolitical rationality: on the contrary, neoliberalism can be seen as its new hegemonic form. It has successfully advocated biopolitical values and ends: the right to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs. It has effectively eroded the domain that is considered internal to a sovereign community and thus the power of sovereignty, but it has correspondingly expanded the domain of the economic and in this way extended and strengthened the rationality of biopower. The methods and techniques of biopolitics have dramatically changed with the rise of neoliberalism, however. I will finish this section with a brief discussion of neoliberal social policy, which provides an illuminative example of this transformation of biopolitical techniques. Foucault’s historical account of neoliberalism is suddenly interrupted in lecture eight in which he takes up the contemporary political issue of social policy in France at the end of the 1970s. In my view this lecture is highly revealing of the stakes involved in his inquiry into liberal and neoliberal forms of governmentality. The transition to the neoliberal model was literally happening in front of his eyes as he was delivering his lectures.13 Foucault argues that France had adopted full employment rather than price stability, and the provision of social services rather than the balance of payments as its primary and absolute economic objectives after the Second World War. The reasons for the liquidation of these previous forms of economic priority toward the end of the 1970s were connected to the serious economic crisis that had hit the country at the beginning of the decade, which was attributed by economic experts to insufficiently rationalized economic decisions (BB 195). This neoliberal turn in France had a dramatic effect on social policy. The arguments that the neoliberal economists advanced at the time have become all too familiar to us in recent decades: due to extensive social security, labor is more expensive and work moves to countries such as China where labor is cheap. International competition is distorted to the detriment of countries with the most extensive social insurance cover. This is again a source of rising unemployment. All are worse off. As Foucault formulates this central neoliberal doctrine: “There is only one true and fundamental social policy: economic growth” (BB 144). Social justice can never be the aim of successful economic policy.14 Foucault notes how the German ordoliberals’ conception of social policy from the 1930s is reiterated almost word for word in the French social policy reform of the 1970s. There should be two systems that, as

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far as possible, are impermeable to each other: the economy must have its own rules and the social must have its specific objectives. However, they must be decoupled so that the economic process is not disrupted or damaged by the social mechanism, and so that the social mechanism has a limitation, a purity as it were, such that it never intervenes in the economic process as a disruption (BB 200). Economy is a game, and the essential role of the state is to set the rules and to make sure that they are followed, but it must never interfere with the game itself. The rules must be such that the economic game is as active as possible and consequently to the advantage of the greatest number of people. There must be only one supplementary and unconditional rule, which is that it must be impossible for any of the players to lose everything and thus be unable to continue playing. This is a safety clause for the player, a limiting rule that changes nothing in the course of the game itself, but which prevents someone from ever dropping totally and definitely out of it (BB 201). Such a system is understood as the only guarantee that the economic mechanisms of the game, the mechanisms of competition and enterprise, will be allowed to function for the rest of society. A society formalized on the model of competitive enterprise will be able to exist above the threshold of absolute poverty: everybody will have to be an enterprise for themselves and their families. Below the threshold there will an assisted, floating, and liminal population, which for an economy that has abandoned the objective of full employment will be a constant reserve of manpower that can be drawn on if need be, but which can also be returned to its assisted status if necessary (BB 206). Hence, the only point of contact between the economic and the social is the rule safeguarding players from being excluded from the game. Below a given level of income the state must pay social benefits, but this means giving up the idea that society as a whole owes services such as health and education to each of its members. It also means introducing an imbalance between the poor and others, between those who are receiving aid and those who are not (BB 203–4). Social benefits are thus not meant to modify the causes of poverty. They will never function on that level, only on the level of their effects. The contrast to a socialist policy is clear: a socialist policy is a policy of relative poverty, the aim being to alter the gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest. Relative poverty does not figure in any way in the objectives of neoliberal social policy. The only issue is absolute poverty, the threshold below which people are deemed not to have an adequate income to ensure that they have sufficient consumption (BB 206).

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What is at stake in neoliberal governmentality is thus not class antagonism—workers’ rights and demands versus those of the capitalist class. It is based on a completely different social ontology: society is an economic game for self-interested individuals. Foucault argues that the principle behind the neoliberal understanding of the political community is an inverted social contract: all those who want the social contract and virtually or actually subscribe to it form part of society until such a time as they cut themselves off from it. In the neoliberal conception of society as an economic game there is no one who originally insisted on being part of it, and consequently it is up to society and the rules of the game imposed by the state to ensure that no one is excluded from it (BB 202). As I argued in the previous section, contesting neoliberal hegemony politically is difficult because it means contesting economic truths. As the example of neoliberal social policy shows, it appears to be equally difficult even if we attempt to move the debate into the realm of values. Contesting neoliberal hegemony has come to mean contesting the undisputed value of economic growth. The primary goal of good governance in modern biopolitical societies is the maximal material well-being of the people. Achieving this biopolitical objective in the neoliberal framework has the adverse consequence of inequality: a widening income gap. Questions of social justice have mutated into economic facts while the undisputed biopolitical ends have remained the same.15

The Subject Several commentators have noted how neoliberal governmentality can be viewed as a particular production of subjectivity: it produces an economic subject structured by different tendencies, preferences, and motivations than the political or legal citizen of a disciplinary society or a society of sovereignty.16 The political subject is understood as an atomic individual whose natural self-interest and tendency to compete must be fostered and enhanced. He or she is a fundamentally self-interested and rational being who will navigate the social realm by constantly making rational choices based on economic knowledge and the strict calculation of the necessary costs and desired benefits. The popularity of selfhelp guides and self-management manuals is seen as a symptom of this current, neoliberal understanding of the subject: individuals are solely responsible for a number of problems that were previously considered social or political issues.17

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It must be pointed out that this neoliberal production of a new form of subjectivity is not a direct consequence of implicit or hidden ontological presuppositions concerning human beings, however. The metaphysical or anthropological question of whether human beings really are naturally self-interested and competitive is ultimately irrelevant. The crucial and fundamental presupposition is that in order for us to be able to provide a rational explanation for economic mechanisms, we must treat them as if they are self-interested and competitive. The production of a new economic subject is a consequence of neoliberalism’s political ontology: economic rationality must be the rationality of the entire society. Foucault argues that the Chicago school took this goal to the extreme by eliminating the difference between the social and the economic. It was characterized by its use of market-economy analyses to decipher relationships and phenomena that were previously thought to belong not to the economic but to the social or political realm. Economy was no longer one domain among others with its own particular rationality: it was understood as the rationality of the entirety of human action. The generalization of the economic form of the market to the whole of society functioned effectively as a grid of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment for social relationships and individual behavior. This schema made it possible to reveal in non-economic processes, relations, and behavior a number of formal and intelligible relations. It became possible to generalize the economic form of the market throughout the social body, including relationships that were not conducted, and therefore not usually analyzed, through monetary exchanges. An important example is the neoliberal analysis of human capital. The theory of human capital developed by economists of the Chicago school such as Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz in the 1960s and early 1970s was an attempt to fill a gap in formal economic analysis by offering a unified explanation of a wide range of empirical phenomena that had either been given ad hoc interpretations or had baffled investigators. Becker, for example, refers to well-known phenomena such as the fact that earnings typically increase with age at a decreasing rate, and that unemployment rates tend to be negatively related to the level of skill.18 The idea of human capital explains such phenomena by treating behavioral choices such as education and on-the-job training as investments made in people. People enhance their capabilities as producers and consumers by investing in themselves. The many ways of doing this include activities such as schooling, training, medical care, vitamin consumption, acquiring information about the economic system, and migration.19

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These investments result not just in some incalculable increase in the individual’s well-being but also in a calculable increase in his or her income prospects. From the worker’s point of view labor comprises capital: it is ability, skills that can be acquired at a cost. Human capital comprises both innate and acquired elements. While the innate elements are largely out of our control, the acquired elements are not. If we make educational investments we can become ability machines that will produce income (BB 244). The most striking example that Foucault discusses is the motherchild relationship (BB 229–30, 243–44). A neoliberal economic analysis would treat the time the mother spends with the child, as well as the quality of the care she gives, as an investment that constitutes human capital and on which she can expect a return. Investment in the child’s human capital will produce an income when the child grows up and earns a salary. Similarly, economic analyses of marriage could be read as attempts to decipher what is traditionally considered non-economic social behavior in economic terms. Social relationships could be considered forms of investment: there are capital costs, and returns on the capital invested. The theory of human capital represents one striking example of the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain: it makes possible a strictly economic interpretation of a whole range of phenomena previously thought to be non-economic. Neoliberalism, understood as a specific form of governmentality, requires that economics can and must analyze human behavior and its internal rationality: theoretical analysis must bring to light the calculation through which an individual decides to allot his or her scant resources to this end rather than another. This means that the object of economic analysis ultimately becomes any conduct whatsoever that employs limited means for one end among others. And we reach a point at which the object of economic analysis should be identified with any purposeful conduct which involves a strategic choice of means, ways, and instruments: in short, the identification of the object of economic analysis with any rational conduct. (BB 268–69)20

Neoliberalism forms a comprehensive schema for understanding social reality: all rational conduct, whatever it may be, ultimately comes under economic analysis. Economic interpretation of all human behavior is not only possible, it is understood to be the best way to make sense of it. Foucault quotes Gary Becker, who formulated this most strongly by

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noting that any conduct that responded systematically to modification in the variables of the environment, “which accepts reality,” must be susceptible to economic analysis (BB 269).21 Homo economicus is anyone who accepts reality. Foucault claimed that economics was therefore no longer primarily the analysis of economic processes and their historical or mechanical logic—which it had been for both Marx and Adam Smith, for example. It was the analysis of the strategic programming of an individual’s activity (BB 223). The worker was no longer present in the analysis only as an object—the object of supply and demand in the form of labor power— he or she was also an economic subject. Whereas according to the classical liberal conception economic man, homo economicus, was a man of exchange, a partner in the process of exchange, in neoliberal terms he is an entrepreneur of himself. As Jason Read (2009, 31) points out, Marxists and neoliberals understand labor in fundamentally different ways: for Marx it was a sphere of exploitation, while for the neoliberals the difference between labor and capital is effaced through the idea of human capital. Neoliberalism scrambles and exchanges the terms of the opposition between “worker” and “capitalist” by constructing a society in which everybody is a capitalist, an entrepreneur of himself. This means that any antagonism between classes can only ever be apparent because ultimately everybody wants the same thing: to succeed in their enterprise and to win in the economic game. The rationality of neoliberalism thus potentially extends everywhere: the whole of society becomes a game in which self-interested, atomic individuals compete for maximal economic returns. The aim of neoliberal governmentality is to create social conditions that not only encourage and necessitate natural competitiveness and self-interest, but that produce them. As Foucault notes, the individual’s life is lodged, not within the framework of a big enterprise such as the firm or the state, but within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other. The individual’s very life—his or her relationships with private property, family, household, retirement— must make him or her into a permanent and multifaceted enterprise (BB 241). Neoliberalism reconfigures the line between public and private and between economy and society. It advocates competition as the dominant principle for guiding human behavior in society: competitiveness at all levels and at various scales of human activity—from the individual to the household, the nation, and the world economy—is paramount. It constructs a social order that safeguards competition in free markets in the knowledge that such an order is superior, not only economically but

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also morally and politically—the most conducive to securing its members’ freedom and happiness. Individuals who do well in this competitive environment must accept this framework and act accordingly: make carefully calculated strategic choices between the most effective means, ways, and instruments. They must make long-term and short-term investments in different aspects of their lives and acquire sufficient economic knowledge to be able to calculate costs, risks, and possible returns on the capital invested.

Resisting Neoliberalism To conclude, my aim was to show that neoliberalism is a much deeper and more complex phenomenon than a mere economic doctrine. It is a political ontology that fundamentally shapes our current experience of the world by forming its constitutive conditions. This entails a fundamental rethinking of the tools of critical thought as well as of political resistance: because neoliberalism is not just another political program, we cannot fight it solely with the traditional weapons of politics. To put it simply, neoliberal governmentality reduces politics to a single question: according to the best available economic analysis, what kind of political arrangement would ensure that the greatest number of people were as wealthy as possible? The economic, but also biopolitical, terms in which this question is framed determine that it is difficult to resist neoliberal arguments with socialist demands for equality or workers’ rights, for example. Foucault claimed provocatively that although liberal governmentality existed, socialist governmentality did not. Socialist politics had to operate within the framework of liberal governmentality (BB 92). It is my contention that effective resistance requires advocating some version of radical politics that questions the very terms in which our political options are set. It requires attacks along all of the three axes of truth, power, and the subject. The neoliberal production of regimes of truth is never complete, nor is their operation as internally consistent as neoliberalism’s own representations would lead us to think. We must question their hegemony, as well as the political neutrality of economic knowledge, and analyze the way in which economic truths produce political effects. We must also advocate the seemingly crazy argument that the maximal material well-being of the population is not necessarily the undisputed aim of good government. We must regain and reinvigorate other political values, such as justice and equality, with which to assess the ways we are governed. Finally, we must acknowledge that it is

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through us, our subjectivity, that neoliberal practices of governing are able to function. Although some people claim that the financial crisis of 2008 brought neoliberal hegemony to an end, from a Foucaultian perspective it seems clear that such a feat would require a much more fundamental transformation of our political ontology than the rather superficial changes in economic policy that many Western countries have implemented in response to it. It would require a profound and radical revolution in our governmentality, in the way in which we understand politics and govern societies, and ultimately ourselves.

8

Violence and Neoliberal Governmentality

The relationship between neoliberalism and political violence has been commonly understood in two diametrically opposite ways by its supporters on the one hand and its critics on the other. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom—one of the most influential books of the twentieth century and a pivotal text for neoliberalism—forged an intrinsic link between the planned economy and political violence.1 Hayek’s claim was that a planned economy inevitably led to the need for coercion because this was the only way central planning on a large scale was possible. Planning was always a form of discipline that had to be imposed by force, and centralized economic power created a degree of dependence that was scarcely distinguishable from slavery.2 For Hayek, neoliberalism represented the way out of political violence in a postwar Europe debilitated and scarred by Nazism. Some of the most important critics of neoliberalism have attempted to turn this argument around: they have sought to demonstrate the violence accompanying the spread of neoliberalism. Perhaps its most famous recent critic, Naomi Klein, argued in her bestseller The Shock Doctrine (2007) that it is in fact the implementation of neoliberal policies around the globe that has been accompanied by the consistent use of terror—brutal coercion intended to shock the population into accepting the new economic and political order. According to Klein, neoliberal economic policies were always extremely unpopular because they inevitably made the most numerous sectors of the population economically worse off. This meant that they could not be implemented democratically because they would never have survived democratic election. They could only be imposed by repression and force.3 The problem that both of these approaches have in common is, in my view, that they understand the connection between a certain type of governmental rationality and political violence as purely external. In both cases violence is seen as an instrumental means by which to consolidate political power. As Klein herself points out, the widespread use of terror is always an indication that the rulers are trying to impose a system—whether political, religious, or economic—that has been rejected 134

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by large numbers of the people they are ruling (Klein 2007, 125). Regardless of whether this system is neoliberal, communist, or something else, the same kind of violence can be, and has been, used as a means of imposing it. Extreme forms of political violence are understood as an instrument for redistributing power in a way that benefits certain sectors of the population—in the case of neoliberalism these include landowners, multinational corporations, and political elites—while disadvantaging the majority. There is thus nothing in the specific rationality of neoliberalism as such—apart from its assumed unpopularity—that connects it with political violence. To put this in another way, there is no intrinsic connection between neoliberalism as governmental rationality and political violence: the violence accompanying neoliberalism is instrumental and contingent. An alternative to such an instrumental understanding of political violence is to theorize the violence of neoliberalism as structural. Slavoj Žižek (2008) has argued for a structural approach to political violence: rather than focusing on concrete or “subjective violence,” we should look for the fundamental link between violence and politics on the level of objective, systemic, or structural violence. Žižek’s provocation is to accuse us of hypocrisy: in combating subjective violence, we in fact, by the same gesture, commit “objective violence” that generates the very phenomenon that we attempt to eradicate. When we condemn obvious instances of subjective violence—killings and rapes perpetrated by soldiers against women and children, for example—we choose a hypocritical sentiment of moral outrage while remaining comfortably blind to the actual causes of this violence, its systemic aspects. We are enabling the political and economic system of advanced capitalism to operate smoothly by loudly protesting against its catastrophic consequences. While I strongly agree with Žižek that any theoretical analysis of political violence cannot be limited to its most direct manifestations, I am unconvinced that moving the analysis of violence to a structural level the way he does can help us. According to Žižek, objective violence refers to the violence inherent to the system itself: the violent consequences of the smooth functioning of the capitalist economic and political system. Objective violence is thus something specific and historical, but it nevertheless refers to a monolithic phenomenon. In the neoliberal capitalist society, objective violence incorporates, among other things, economic structures of exploitation, hunger, and poverty, ecological decay, human misery, inadequate welfare systems, and systemic inequality (Žižek 2008, 11). The notion of objective violence thus functions as a broad abstraction that does not clarify the specific connections between neoliberalism and political violence, but obfuscates them further. Instead of posing a

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specific theoretical question about the links between forms of political violence and the rationality of neoliberal economic policy and practice, it merges them in an indiscriminate totality. For this cluster of heterogeneous elements to meaningfully denote a form of violence it must furthermore heavily lean on our understanding and experience of subjective violence as individual bodily harm. The argument only works on the basis of an analogy: the harm caused to the environment and certain sectors of the population by advanced capitalism is analogous to the harm caused by physical violence to the body. It is destructive, disabling, and unjust. My claim is that if we are to fully understand the specific connections between neoliberalism and political violence we have to expose their structural link on the level of governmental rationality. I argue that Foucault’s conception of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality can provide an original angle for such a critical analysis. It enables us to explicate, in a rigorous manner, what is distinctive about the relationship between neoliberalism and violence. Appropriating his analysis makes it possible to avoid the pitfalls of simply equating neoliberalism with violence the way Žižek does, of understanding their relationship as purely instrumental the way Klein does, and of opposing the two as antithetical the way neoliberals such as Hayek do. In the first section of this chapter I show that, contrary to what neoliberals such as Hayek claim, neoliberal governmentality does not result in the redundancy of state coercion. This is not simply due to the unpopularity of neoliberal economic reforms, however, but more fundamentally because effective and widespread state violence is inherent to the rationality of neoliberal governing. While Hayek is right in insisting that in liberal societies state violence is not required for imposing economic choices and preferences the way totalitarian systems do, it is nevertheless necessary on a more fundamental level for creating society as an economic game and for policing the transgression of its rules. The free market is not a natural given, but has to be produced by means of effective government. In the second section I argue against a purely instrumental understanding of violence. I contend that we have to understand the specific and distinct meaning that practices of violence attain in different power networks and political rationalities in order to effectively criticize them. I discuss what is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the relationship between neoliberalism and violence: it is not the permanent need in the former for instrumental violence nor its inherent “objective” violence, but the fact that it effectively depoliticizes violence by turning it into an essentially economic rather than a political or moral issue. I conclude by

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investigating what this depoliticization of violence implies for critiques of state violence on the one hand and for the possibility of violent resistance against neoliberalism on the other.

Neoliberalism as an Art of Government Many commentators now see the year 1979, when Foucault delivered his lecture series at the Collège de France on neoliberal governmentality, as the inauguration of the formal period of the dominance of neoliberal economic policy in Europe and the United States.4 Almost thirty years after its expanding application, Foucault’s topic and his insights appear farsighted, almost prophetic. His point in spending so long on the analysis of the history of neoliberalism was to show how it formed “his actuality” (BB 192). He was concerned about the “state phobia” prevalent in the social critiques of his day. Similar to his aim in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, which was to show that the fervent mission to liberate our repressed sexuality was fundamentally misguided, he was again trying to show how the most popular forms of social and political critique were in fact attacking the wrong enemy. “What is presently at issue in our reality . . . is not so much the growth of the state . . . but much more its reduction” (BB 191). His problem was not the unlimited growth of the state, its omnipotence, or its continuous and unified expansion. The risk was not that the unlimited expansion of the welfare state or the administrative apparatus on which it rested would inevitably lead to a totalitarian state like the Nazi or Stalinist state. “All those who share in the great state phobia should know that they are following the direction of the wind and that in fact, for years and years, an effective reduction of the state has been on the way” (BB 191). In signaling the reduction of the state Foucault did not claim that neoliberalism leads to a lack of actual government, however. What makes his philosophical interpretation of it interesting and original in my view is his critical analysis of it, not as an ideology or a political doctrine, but as a specific, rationally reflected and coordinated way of governing: a form of governmental rationality or governmentality.5 Neoliberalism and the state cannot be understood as simply antithetical to each other when they are understood to combine in the form of a rationally coordinated set of governmental practices. Regarding political violence, this means that the rise of neoliberalism does not automatically amount to the reduction of state violence. By approaching neoliberalism as a governmental rationality, Foucault at-

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tempted to show that neoliberal governmental intervention was no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than any other system of governmental rationality. Only the domains and methods of governmental intervention were new. Political critics of neoliberalism often argue that at the heart of the model is the idea that the job of government is not to govern, because it must subcontract the task to the more efficient and generally superior private sector. The political scientist Michel Wolfe, for example, has formulated this idea by comparing neoliberals trying to govern to vegetarian chefs trying to prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: if you believe that what you are called to do is wrong, you are unlikely to do it very well (quoted in Klein 2007, 354). Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism as a form of governmental rationality questions this idea. The theoretical strength of his approach is that it construes neoliberalism not as a lack of government, but as a specific governmental form and doctrine. It is a “governmental regime” that is directed toward specific objectives and regulates itself through continuous reflection. Foucault’s lectures analyze in detail the historical shift from classical liberalism to neoliberalism in order to highlight this. His aim is to identify the difference between them in order to grasp neoliberalism “in its singularity” (BB 130). For him, neoliberalism was not just the revival of classical liberalism after a period of socialist dominance, but involved a fundamental shift within liberalism itself: on the level of political ontology, neoliberalism effected a move away from naturalism.6 It did not only introduce some refinements to the liberal economic doctrine, but more important, it introduced a new political ontology: it was a form of antinaturalism. Ordoliberals completely rethought the relations between economy and politics and consequently the whole of the liberal art of government. In the first three lectures that focus mainly on classical liberalism, Foucault shows that it was a much broader and at the same time much more complex phenomenon than a simple political doctrine advocating individual liberty. Understood as governmentality, it was a form of “governmental naturalism.” Social reality had its own quasi-natural and self-regulating principles and dynamics. It was determined according to inevitable economic processes—which Adam Smith famously called “the invisible hand”—that could maximize the efficiency of production and promote social good when left to function uninterrupted. While liberalism is thus politically associated with the idea of individual liberty manifested as juridical rights, classical economic liberalism emphasized, seemingly paradoxically, both the determinism and spontaneity of social reality. Human beings, driven by natural self-interest, would spontane-

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ously attempt to maximize their wealth. The mechanisms of the economic sphere would then harmonize their natural and spontaneous selfinterests in accordance with the deterministic laws of economics. The sum total of individual tastes and talents in an open market determines correct prices for goods, and the correct prices guide resource allocation toward efficiency and stability.7 Foucault argues that a crucial change was the shift from exchange to competition as the principle of the market. In eighteenth-century liberalism the market was understood on the basis of free exchange between two partners who through this exchange establish the equivalence of two values. The neoliberals, on the other hand, followed the development in liberal thought of the nineteenth century according to which the most important thing about the market was no longer exchange, but competition: not equivalence, but inequality. Only full and complete competition could ensure economic rationality through the formation of prices, which could measure economic magnitudes and regulate choices (BB 118–19). The ordoliberals broke with the preceding tradition of liberalism, however, in denying that the political consequence of unlimited competition should be the principle of laissez-faire. There could be no intervention in economic processes as such, but the government had to intervene in the fundamental conditions of the market. The economy was like a game that had to be left to follow its own course, but only after the government had set its rules. Foucault points out how many of the Freiburg school economists were directly influenced by Husserl’s philosophical anti-naturalism: Walter Eucken was a close friend of Husserl’s and acknowledged his influence on his economic method; the title of Wilhelm Röpke’s definitive work on neoliberalism, The Crisis of Society, explicitly refers to Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences (BB 103–4). Freeing oneself from the grip of naive naturalism meant, for the ordoliberals, that laissez-faire could not be the conclusion drawn from the principle of competition as the organizing form of the market. This would have meant understanding the market as a given of nature, something that emerges spontaneously and which the state must respect precisely as much as if it was a natural datum. Competition was not a pre-given source and foundation of society that only had to be allowed to rise to the surface and be discovered. Instead, the market had to be produced by means of effective government. The ordoliberals argued that, rather than being an essence in the sense of a natural given, competition was an essence in the sense of a structure with formal properties, and it was these formal properties that could assure economic regulation through the price mechanism. Competition was not the result of the natural interplay of appetites, instincts,

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and behaviors between individuals, but a formal game between inequalities. Just as for Husserl, an eidos as a formal structure was only given to intuition under certain conditions, in the same way competition as the essential, formal logic of economy could only appear and produce its effects under certain conditions, which had to be carefully and artificially constructed. Pure competition was never a primitive datum: it was the result of lengthy efforts, and ultimately was never fully attained. It had to be and could only be an objective presupposing an infinitely active policy. While competition as a formal structure was thus rigorous in its internal organization, it was fragile in its real, historical existence. The task of neoliberal policy was to develop the concrete and real space in which the formal structure of competition could function (BB 120). While the key problem in the liberalism of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century had been to cut out a free space for the market within an already given political society, the problem of neoliberalism was rather how the overall exercise of political power could be modeled on the principles of a market economy. It was a question not of freeing an empty space, but of taking the formal principles of a market economy and projecting them onto the general art of government. There was no autonomous “logic of capitalism”: capitalism was a historically contingent economic-institutional system, which required innovative political intervention and construction in order to function properly. Neoliberalism should thus be identified not with laissez-faire, but rather with permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention. It was an intervening liberalism: it had to intervene everywhere in order to create effective competition and to actively oppose all inferior methods of coordinating individual efforts, such as central planning. Planning was required, but it had to be planning for competition, not instead of it. As Hayek formulates the objective: Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the insistence . . . on . . . the principle of laissez-faire. . . . The liberal argument is in favour of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of co-ordinating human efforts, not an argument for leaving things as they are. It is based on the conviction that where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual effort than any other. (Hayek 1944, 13, 27)8

While the crucial problem facing the economic liberalists of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth was to distinguish between actions that had to be taken and actions that should not, between domains in which government could intervene and those in which it could

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not, in the eyes of the neoliberals this was a naive position. The problem was not whether there were things that you could not touch and others that you were entitled to interfere with: it concerned how you touched them. Neoliberal governmental intervention was no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than any other system of governmental rationality. Only the point of intervention was new. The government should not interfere with the effects of the market, nor should it correct its destructive consequences for society retroactively. It has to intervene in the very being of society in order to make competition the dominant principle for guiding human behavior. It has to construct the legal, institutional, and cultural conditions that give competition between enterprises and entrepreneurial conduct maximal range. It also has to maintain these conditions through effective policing. This means that far from becoming redundant, state violence— understood as effective practices of policing—must be understood as inherent to neoliberal governmentality. The denial of laissez-faire as the organizing political principle of society implies that state violence remains a highly effective means for creating and securing a healthy market. The connection between neoliberalism and state violence cannot be understood as contingent and external when the free market has to be artificially produced by the means of effective government. To put the point concisely, if society is an economic game then it must have players as well as rules. The state must not only set the rules in the first place— a process that often involves brutal coercion, as Klein demonstrates—it must also be capable of effectively policing them in order for the market mechanisms to work smoothly. Private property and trade must be protected, theft and fraud investigated and punished, for example. More fundamentally, the state must also make it impossible for people to simply opt out of the game. For the economic rationality of market mechanisms to extend maximally throughout society, the possibilities for engaging in practices with alternative, non-economic rationalities must be restricted, by violent means if necessary. The occupation of empty buildings, streets, and other urban spaces for activities with no economic aim has been one of the tactics of political activism against neoliberal hegemony. The violent suppression of such activism in Western democratic states must be seen not only as an attempt to protect private property—effective policing of the economic game—but also as an attempt to close off possibilities for opting out of it. Confidence in the spontaneous intelligence of market mechanisms thus does not mean that state interference and state violence become unnecessary. On the contrary, state violence remains an effective means of ensuring that the spontaneous logic of the market can oper-

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ate and that entrepreneurial conduct can reach maximal range. While Hayek is right in insisting that planned economies need to resort to coercion to balance economic supply and demand, neoliberalism has no need for this. However, that is only because it uses coercion to produce and maintain a social order in which this task is allocated completely to market mechanisms. State violence is eliminated from the level that dictates people’s consumer choices and preferences only to appear on the level that precludes them from interfering with or opting out of the economic game. To sum up this section, neoliberalism advocated interventionism as the historical and social condition of possibility for a free market economy. It is not just an economic theory or a political ideology intended to lead to a lack of actual government. It is a comprehensive political project that sees the market as the model for the state and for the overall organization of society. It endeavors to produce a certain kind of historical and political reality that, it is claimed, already exists formally. For this production state violence remains indispensable.

The Irrationality of Violence While state violence thus remains an important political instrument for creating and maintaining the economic game in neoliberal governmentality, all other forms of violence are effectively divested of any political significance. Neoliberalism depoliticizes violence by turning it into an economic rather than a political or moral issue. As I showed in the previous chapter in connection with Becker’s work, neoliberalism crucially maintains that all rational behavior—including violence—can be analyzed through economic intelligibility and must pass through such an analysis in order for the market to function properly. To the extent that violence is a rational form of behavior its cost and profit can also be calculated, analyzed, and managed. In the neoliberal framework the essential question is not whether violence is wrong or unjust, because costbenefit calculations and other market criteria form the framework for rendering it intelligible. Violence becomes invested with a historically specific meaning—it is understood as a rational and strategic form of conduct, which responds systematically to modifications in the environmental variables, and is therefore susceptible to economic analysis. Foucault argues that for neoliberals there was no substantive definition of crime, for example. A crime was simply that which made the individual incur the risk of being sentenced to a penalty—whether it

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be for murder or a parking offense. If we consider the subject as homo economicus, the criminal is just another person who invests in an action, expects a profit from it, and accepts the risk of a loss. This means that the criminal system has, above all, to react to the supply of crime. Law enforcement should be a set of instruments of action, which on the market for crime opposes a negative demand for its supply. Crime is primarily understood as a set of risks that have to be managed: prevention and riskspreading, such as through insurance, assume more importance than detection and correction.9 Penal policy must renounce the objective of the complete suppression and exhaustive nullification of crime. Certain forms of violence, such as domestic violence, must simply be tolerated as being relatively inexpensive and therefore disproportionately costly to remove completely. The objective must not be complete elimination, but a balance between the curves of supply and negative demand. The moral and political dimensions of violence are insignificant from an economic point of view, and the policies designed to deal with violence must therefore be built around a strict cost-benefit analysis. Although state violence as opposed to criminal violence has to be recognized as a form of political violence, it must also be subjected to rational and cost-effective management, and its criticism must be done in market terms. Foucault argues that in neoliberal analyses the general form of the market becomes an instrument of discrimination also in the debates with the administration. The criticism of public authorities is not just a political or juridical criticism, it is a market criticism: there is a permanent economic tribunal confronting government. He claims that faced with excessive governmental action, and in opposition to it, nineteenth-century liberalism sought to establish an administrative jurisdiction that would enable the action of public authorities to be assessed in terms of right. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, sought to introduce a sort of economic tribunal that could assess government action in strictly economic and market terms (BB 248). The worrying consequence of this for critiques of state violence is that in neoliberal governmentality the criterion for the legitimacy of state violence becomes its cost-effectiveness. What seems to escape the neoliberal framework of intelligibility is irrational action, however. If all rational action, whatever it is, ultimately falls under economic analysis, irrational action seems to break away from this schema. As violence is in some instances thought to be the paradigmatic example of mindless, irrational action, should we not conclude that it ultimately comes to represent the only genuine form of protest against neoliberal hegemony? Was the violence that marred the globalization-critical demonstrations in Seattle, Gothenburg, and Genoa

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in fact a sign of their success?10 Or what should we think about the seeming irrationality and meaninglessness of the French suburban riots in autumn 2005—thousands of cars were burned in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, but no particular political demands were made? While Žižek (2008, 64–65) argues for the importance of recognizing the objective violence of capitalism, he understands the subjective violence of the Paris riots as meaningless. For him, the meaninglessness of the Paris riots is a sign of the meaninglessness of our ideologicalpolitical predicament, the worldlessness of capitalism. He notes that the riots were completely irrational in the sense that the violence was self-destructive: the protesters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own property. The cars burned and the schools torched were not those of people from the richer neighborhoods, but the hardwon property of those from the very strata from which the protesters originated. He refers to Alain Badiou and argues that what characterizes advanced capitalism is that it does not disclose reality: it is “worldless.” Even Nazism, however ghastly it was, disclosed reality in a way that allowed its subjects to acquire a global “cognitive mapping” enabling meaningful engagement. Capitalism, on the other hand, although it is global and encompasses the whole world, contains no meaningful cognitive mapping, no worldview. It is a meaningless space without goals or the means to obtain them, and this is reflected in the meaninglessness of such events as the Paris riots. If we accept my analysis of the relationship between neoliberalism and political violence, however, irrational violence becomes the only meaningful form that violent resistance against neoliberalism can take. The implication of the specific relationship between neoliberalism and political violence is, paradoxically, that there can be no cost-effective and in this sense rational practices of violence that could function as genuine resistance against it. Burning cars in rich neighborhoods instead of poor would mean adopting the very political ontology one is attempting to question and transform: all human behavior should not be reduced to cost-effective means to an end. If we want to oppose neoliberalism not just as an economic policy, but also as a socio-political matrix, we have to challenge the ontological framework that explains all human behavior through the economic analysis of its costs and effects. Some forms of behavior, such as violence, must retain an irreducibly moral and political meaning. The paradoxical relationship between neoliberalism and violent resistance obviously does not imply that the only meaningful form of protest against neoliberalism is irrational violence. On the contrary, it should constitute a strong reason not to engage in violence, but to seek

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other ways of resisting. While we have to accept that practical forms of resistance against neoliberalism have to consider the efficaciousness of their strategies and even apply strictly economic, cost-benefit analysis to some of their actions, economic rationality should not form the framework for assessing violence as a form of resistance. We should question neoliberalism’s exclusive claim to rationality and introduce alternative means and ends to the political arena: justice, compassion, creativity, and solidarity, for example. Many of the peaceful protests against neoliberal hegemony—demonstrations, public performances, and the occupation of public spaces—provide good examples of this. I am thus not promoting mindless, irrational violence, but I contend that the economic irrationality of violence does not amount to its meaninglessness, not unless we have lost all frameworks other than the neoliberal for understanding social reality. The disruptive forces of violence may appear as a genuine and sometimes appealing alternative to people disenchanted with the all-encompassing framework of cost-benefit analysis and the systemic, “rational” forms of violence compatible with it. I also disagree with Žižek’s claim that advanced capitalism is worldless in the sense that it contains no worldview. Not unlike Nazism and communism, neoliberalism contains an explicit worldview: it holds metaphysical assumptions about what human beings and societies are essentially like by maintaining a belief that human beings are always rational beings driven by natural self-interest. This is not a problem, a lamentable manifestation of the human condition, but something to be affirmed because it is ultimately the engine for economic growth. Neoliberalism also advances values and political ideals for the optimal organization of human societies: the maximal material well-being of the population must be the undisputed goal of all societies, and it is achieved only by continuous economic growth. The importance of free competition and the privileging of market mechanisms is thus not based solely on their economic rationality. They are implicitly understood as the means for a good life where good life is understood to include both maximal wealth and freedom. Free markets guarantee that people have maximal choice in cheap products and services and are thus not only maximally wealthy, but also free. The prevalent characteristic of neoliberalism is not just the conviction that free markets provide the optimal organizing mechanism for capitalist economies. More fundamentally, the conviction is that they provide the optimal organizing mechanism for the entirety of human life and social interaction: the necessary conditions for political freedom and a morality based on individual responsibility.11 The free market is thus not just an economic, but also a moral and political force. It does not function

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simply as the most efficient means for allocating resources: it is the optimum context for achieving human freedom and happiness. Not unlike Nazism and communism, neoliberalism maps a cognitive space for individuals with very clear objectives and the means of achieving them. Some would express the objective by saying that it is quite simply wealth—whoever dies with the most toys wins. Some would say that the ultimate objective of any form of liberalism is freedom. That ultimately amounts to the same things, however, because “money is . . . the greatest instrument of freedom ever invented by man” (Hayek 1944, 67). And the best means for achieving wealth is unlimited competition in the free market. As Foucault saw it, the art of government developed by the ordoliberals in and around the 1930s had become the program of most governments in capitalist countries by 1979, when he delivered his lectures. Since then this political ontology has become even more expansive and deeply ingrained. It has circumscribed our everyday life in the last thirty years to the extent that it has not just been the dominant economic theory, it has been constitutive of our life-world and ultimately of ourselves. Its triumph does not mean that we have become a standardized, mass society of consumption and spectacle, as some social critics have insisted. It rather means that we live in a society that is oriented toward the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises. We have become entrepreneurs of our lives, competing in the free market called society. We compete in an ever-expanding range of fields, and invest in ourselves by enhancing our abilities and appearance, by improving our strategies of life coaching and time management. Our life has become an enterprise that we must lead to success. Within this framework irrational violence does not appear morally wrong or politically compromised: it is simply a losing strategy, and this, paradoxically, remains its appeal and its significance.

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Terror and Political Spirituality

In 1976 the British government started to phase out the “Special Category Status” of all paramilitary prisoners in Northern Ireland. This meant that their status as political prisoners was withdrawn and they were treated as ordinary convicts. Margaret Thatcher famously claimed that there was no such thing as political violence, there was only criminal murder, criminal bombing, and criminal violence. The ensuing five years of protests in the Maze prison—the blanket protests, the dirty protests, and the hunger strikes resulting in the death of ten prisoners—all focused on the same demand: the prisoners demanded an unequivocal recognition of the political meaning of their actions. The protests and their shocking symbols—prisoners wearing nothing but blankets in bare cells smeared in excrement—graphically illustrate the central idea of this study: the political conflict embedded in the struggle over the meaning of violence. The contested meaning of violence has also been the focus of recent critical analyses of terrorism. Political theorists have emphasized that various forms of violence are called “terror,” not because there are valences of violence that can be distinguished from one another on objective grounds, but because the label functions as a way of characterizing violence waged by political entities deemed illegitimate by established states. Judith Butler (2004), for example, has argued, that to the extent that the Geneva Convention gives grounds for a distinction between legal and illegal combatants, it distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate violence. The use of the term “terrorism” works to delegitimize certain forms of violence committed by non-state-centered political entities, and at the same time it sanctions a violent response by established states. In other words, terror does not describe a distinct type of violence, but a form of violence that is illegitimate. It is not a descriptive notion, but a prescriptive notion the intelligibility of which depends on the normative claim that it makes. If violence is terrorism rather than political violence, this means that it is not only illegitimate but, more fundamentally, that it is unintelligible in the framework of accepted political rationality: it is conceived as an action with no rational political goal, an action that cannot be read politically (Butler 2004, 87–88).

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It is important to see that through this negation of its political meaning terror paradoxically becomes fundamentally constitutive of our current understanding of the political. The concept of terror functions as an important tool for the erection of a boundary between political and non-political violence, and thereby it circumscribes and limits a realm of intelligible political action: the forms of violence that are deemed as a necessary aspect of the political. In a world dominated by political talk about terrorism, terror has become fundamentally constitutive of our political ontology. Our current conception of the political is the effect of the constant political negotiation and crossing of the boundary between terror and political violence. The discursive process of negotiation and contestation importantly covers over the second, concrete sense in which terror must be understood as constitutive of the political. To borrow the terms made famous by Walter Benjamin in “Critique of Violence,” violence—whether state violence or terrorist violence—is lawmaking violence. In his famous and dense essay Benjamin identifies the function of violence that is able to found and modify the legal order. The founding of the state and the law must necessarily rely on a performative act of violence because no legitimate authority can precede the founding act itself. The foundation of all states and their legal orders thus occurs in a revolutionary situation in which an interruption of the established law is necessary to found another. While Benjamin initially distinguishes lawmaking violence from law-preserving violence in his essay—terrorism could be seen as lawmaking violence while the police violence of the state would be only law-preserving—he subsequently turns to demonstrate their indistinguishability. Terror as founding or lawmaking violence must morph into legitimate, law-preserving violence of the state in order to constitute a stable political realm: parliaments are quick to forget the terror from which they originate.1 Police violence as law-preserving violence, on the other hand, constantly substitutes itself for lawmaking violence, and the ignominy of police authority “lies in the fact that in this authority the separation of lawmaking and law-preserving violence is suspended” (Benjamin 1996, 286). State violence and terrorist violence must therefore both be understood to conform to the same logic: they are both lawmaking violence to the extent that they are conceived as justified means to just ends by their perpetrators. They both rely on the same understanding of the relationship between violence and the political: the political signifies the just end founded and maintained by the justified means of violence. Benjamin suggested that the question we needed to ask was the possibility of a different kind of violence that was not related to justified

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or unjustified ends as a means at all. In the last cryptic paragraphs of his essay he names this different kind of violence divine violence and distinguishes it from mythic violence—the lawmaking violence that founds the state and the law. Its essential characteristic is that it can never be understood as a means because it serves no end, not even the end of bringing about a more just society.2 It is arguable whether it is a form of violence at all, but rather nonviolence since it is essentially bloodless. It is the moment of interruption in human history the consequences of which cannot be determined in advance and the forms of which we might not even be able to recognize. “For only mythic violence, not divine, will be recognized as such with certainty . . . because the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men” (Benjamin 1996, 252). Benjamin wrote his essay in the context of what he perceived as a crisis of liberal parliamentary democracy. It can be read as his attempt to rethink the political in a messianic and anti-statist fashion: “a new historical epoch” would be founded on the breaking of the cycle of mythic violence and on the abolition of state power (Benjamin 1996, 251). It is my contention that the task of rethinking the political in a way that attempts to wrest it free from the cycle of mythic violence remains pertinent in a world dominated by security concerns and wars on terror. The questions that his essay compels us to ask are: What would signal such a rethinking today? What kinds of collective political action could effect a shift in our political ontology constituted by terror? How should we respond to its current forms? What would it mean to radically rethink our conception of the political and its relationship to violence outside the framework of justified means and ends?

Foucault on Terror and the Iranian Revolution In today’s political climate saturated with security concerns focusing on terrorism, it is perhaps easy to forget what a central concern terrorism was already in the political landscape of 1970s Europe. Britain was gripped by the IRA terror I referred to at the beginning of this chapter, while Germany had to come to terms with the terror of the Baader-Meinhof group, the Red Army Faction. In the summer of 1977 Klaus Croissant— one of the principal defense lawyers at the 1975 trial of the members of the Baader-Meinhof group—escaped to France seeking political asylum. Several philosophers, including Foucault, were involved in organizing support for him in France, and the ensuing debate among them on the

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political principles of the affair became bitter. Foucault not only refused to countenance support for terrorism, he refused to conceptualize the stakes of the affair in the framework of justified means and ends. He did not lend his name to a petition that was being circulated by Felix Guattari. It opposed the extradition of Croissant by referring to West Germany as a fascist state: the terror inflicted by the Red Army Faction was a justified response to the terror of the state. Since the state was fascist, the only effective means to oppose it was armed struggle. Foucault argued instead in a newspaper article that what was at stake in the Croissant affair was a right: the right of the governed—including the members of the Baader-Meinhof group—to have a lawyer (Macey 1993, 393). Michael Hardt (2010, 154) argues that Foucault’s lecture course on neoliberal governmentality in the following year should be read as a defense and an explanation of his position in the Croissant affair through its argument that the West German state was not fascist, but, in fact, neoliberal. For Foucault, it was crucial to recognize that the repressive state violence in Germany was not an aspect of a fascist state, but a neoliberal one. Those commentators who interpreted Foucault’s refusal to countenance support for terrorism as a conservative endorsement of liberalism must have also been surprised when Foucault lent his sympathy so unreservedly to the Iranian Revolution the following year. He visited Iran twice in the fall of 1978 as a special correspondent of the Italian newspaper Corriera della sera, and he wrote a series of articles on “the birth of ideas” he witnessed there.3 These writings have not received the critical attention they deserve, but have either been viewed as a profound political error comparable to Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism and passed over in embarrassed silence, or been attacked as infantile leftism.4 It is my contention that the ideas expressed in them should be recognized as an important contribution to our attempts to rethink the political and its relationship to violence. I want to make the seemingly strange claim that they should not be read as an intervention on the political future of Iran, but as an intervention on the political future of Europe. The most fruitful approach is to read them as a philosophical exercise in thinking otherwise: they are an attempt to imagine the possibilities of a different political ontology for us. His critics and commentators often overlook the fact that his reflections on the Iranian Revolution were more or less contemporaneous with his critical analysis of neoliberal governmentality: Foucault was delivering his lectures at the Collège de France when the shah of Iran abdicated and Khomeini returned to Teheran.5 The shah had been a strong supporter of economic neoliberalism and the extensive Westernization of Iran, whereas the popular uprising that resulted in the dis-

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solution of the monarchy was united by its opposition to the reductive, Western ideal of progress defined by individualism and economism. For Foucault, the events in Iran were extremely interesting because he saw them as a genuine experiment in trying to imagine and create political alternatives to Western neoliberal governmentality. In an interview with the Iranian writer Baqir Parhan held in Teheran in September 1978, soon after he had arrived in the country for the first time, Foucault was asked about the role of an intellectual in politics. He answered that an intellectual, by definition, was someone who was entangled with the politics of his society. He then added: “I am, of course, only dealing with the society of which I am a part” (FIR 184). He expressed his hope that in the discussion they would discover what the differences were between the political situations in the West and in Iran. His diagnosis of the political past and future of Europe was extremely bleak. He foregrounded two crucial and painful experiences during the last two centuries. One was the birth of industrial capitalism and the harsh, selfish, and oppressive social reality accompanying it— an outcome of the rational, philosophical vision of the Enlightenment. The second was the birth of the totalitarian socialist states. Out of the seemingly objective, rational, and accurate analyses of Marx and other socialist thinkers emerged political systems, social organizations, and economic mechanisms that, in reality, were monstrous. What the West sorely needed at that point in time, in his view, were bold and radically different visions of its future: We have to abandon every dogmatic principle and question one by one the validity of all principles that have been the source of oppression. From the point of view of political thought, we are, so to speak, at point zero. We have to construct another political thought, another political imagination, and teach anew the vision of a future. (FIR 185)

This was what had brought him to Iran: “I am saying this so that you know that any Westerner, any Western intellectual with some integrity, cannot be indifferent to what she or he hears about Iran” (FIR 185). In Iran he encountered people who struggled to “present a different way of thinking about social and political organization, one that takes nothing from Western philosophy, from its juridical and revolutionary foundations” (FIR 186). The political struggle in Iran could therefore teach a valuable lesson to the intellectuals of the West: it could disturb mental habits and expectations by challenging some of the most fundamental, cherished, and taken-for-granted premises of our political thought.6 “If

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philosophy of the future exists, it must be born . . . in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe” (RC 113). Similarly, the politics of the future must be born in consequence of meetings and impacts between the West and its others.7 For a Western observer the violence of the events in Iran must have been shocking.8 Every time government troops shot and killed protesters in the street processions were organized on the fortieth day after the killings, in keeping with the Shia tradition, commemorating the dead and resulting in larger demonstrations. On September 8, 1978, government troops shot at protesters in Teheran, killing at least 250 and wounding another thousand. This event became known as the “Black Friday Massacre.” Foucault’s first visit to Iran took place immediately after this event and he was expecting to find a terrorized city. Instead he encountered a strongly united and empowered people.9 Many commentators held that it was religion—particularly the tradition of Shia martyrdom—that explained the Iranian people’s courage to face down terror and to face up to death. The few commentators who have taken Foucault’s writings on Iran seriously have emphasized the importance of the religious subtext in them that has remained unexamined and neglected.10 The notion of political spirituality central in these writings has also been read in the context of religion, particularly Islam.11 Foucault’s relationship with religion was undoubtedly more complicated than a simple denial or condemnation, but it is nevertheless my contention that in order to understand his notion of political spirituality correctly we should place the emphasis on political as opposed to religious spirituality.12 It is significant that Foucault did not interpret the role of Shia Islam in the Iranian Revolution as providing a new absolute that would replace the absolute sovereignty of the shah. He did not see Islam becoming the source of the moral or institutional foundation of a new political body. It was clearly capable of giving strength to the political demands, but he believed that it was also capable of opening up a space for a completely undetermined future. He could see unique promise in Shia Islam precisely because he understood it as a religion that was not coupled with static power hierarchies or existing structures of government. Unlike Christianity, which since its birth had had to coexist with the juridical and social structures of the state, Shia Islam was characterized by a distrust of legalism, and its religious structures were flexible enough to become a source of political creation (FIR 205–6).13 It is arguable that Foucault was profoundly mistaken in his understanding of Islam. As we now know, power relations in Iran became con-

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gealed into a completely immobile structure—theocracy—very quickly after the revolution, and the political promises of Islam became transposed onto a political scene that was of an entirely different nature than Foucault had imagined. His view of it implies, nevertheless, that the political spirituality that he claimed he encountered in Iran does not refer to any dogmatic theology or religious belief and practice as such that would provide a unitary form and foundation for politics. He was not putting forward a critique of secular culture and politics, nor was he attempting to introduce religious ideas to politics in order to give it a deeper meaning. I contend that political spirituality rather names an attempt to find new meaning in politics itself.

Political Spirituality Similar to thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Foucault was clearly opposing and challenging the idea of politics as an instrumental set of procedures. It was not reducible to a framework of means and ends, and its meaning therefore did not rely on the achievement of a goal. He insisted that the Iranian revolt could not be brushed aside or neglected as meaningless because it failed to achieve its political goals. The idea of political spirituality embedded in the revolt in Iran could thus be understood to convey this dimension of political action that is anti-strategic: politics must have a meaning that is irreducible to strategic success and pragmatic calculation. I want to make a more provocative claim, however, and suggest that the notion of political spirituality is not just a vague endorsement of the intrinsic value of politics. It is an attempt to contribute to a completely different understanding of the political. Similar to Benjamin, Foucault’s idea of political spirituality is an explanation and recognition of the ontological structure of the messianic inherent in politics: the possible interruption of all previous history that opens up an unrealized future, a world yet to come. Politics is a realm of the messianic in the sense that it is a realm of necessary contingency—a realm in which anything is possible— and therefore a realm of hope and promise of a different world.14 In a definitive text published in May 1979, at a point when the failure of the Iranian Revolution already seemed undeniable, Foucault was forced to reflect on its significance with the benefit of hindsight. He importantly described the revolt as an interruption of history, as an event that escaped or suspended the chain of historical causality. As such it was

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an event that had the structure of a promise: it opened up the possibility of a radically different future shaped by a new kind of spiritual political community. It was a moment when literally anything was possible. The Iranian revolt was a momentary emergence of something completely new in the struggle to find an alternative to the existing options of Western neoliberalism and a return to religious, pre-modern tradition. He emphasizes (FIR 265–66) that the spirituality of those who were going to their deaths had no similarity whatsoever to the government of a fundamentalist clergy. The fact that the Iranian clerics wanted to authenticate their regime through significations that the uprising had does not invalidate this revolt, but forces us to underscore what was irreducible in it and profoundly threatening for all despotisms.15 Many would no doubt describe this text as uncharacteristic of Foucault because it is such a powerful defense of the historical irreducibility of the moment of revolt: Uprisings belong to history, but in a certain way, they escape it. The movement through which a lone man, a group, a minority, or an entire people say “I will no longer obey,” and are willing to risk their lives in the face of a power that they believe to be unjust, seems to me to be irreducible. This is because no power is capable of making it absolutely impossible . . . The man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable. There must be an uprooting that interrupts the unfolding of history, and its long series of reasons of why, for a man “really” to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey. (FIR 263)16

The political spirituality in Iran was essentially connected to the inexplicability and irreducibility of the revolt. It was Foucault’s answer to the baffling but simple question of why anybody would choose to stand in front of a tank at the risk of death: “What on earth is it that can set off in an individual the desire, the capacity, and the possibility of an absolute sacrifice without our being able to recognize or suspect the slightest ambition or desire for power or profit?” (quoted in Afary and Anderson 2005, 140–41).17 After witnessing in Iran this kind of willingness to risk death rather than to obey, he was forced to answer his own question by admitting that in the end there was no explanation for the man who revolts. It was precisely this inexplicability that was crucial because it refuted our understanding of politics as a means to an end in one single act. Standing up against power perceived to be unjust at the risk of one’s life was no doubt rare and exceptional, but it was nevertheless irreducible in politics because it was an ever-present possibility: there always exists the possibility of this moment, “where power becomes powerless,

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and where, in front of gallows and the machine guns, men rise up” (FIR 264). The irreducibility of revolt—the fact that it is always possible to respond to political coercion, brutal violence, and terror with death rather than obeisance—forces us to accept the profound contingency of the political realm and to acknowledge “that the human time does not take the form of evolution, but that of ‘history’ ” (FIR 266). In the end Foucault was forced to withdraw his support of the Iranian Revolution, and he asserted only the importance of the moment of the revolt itself. The inexplicable moment of revolt is an event that escapes political history because it must condition it. It is the moment when anything is possible and as such it is a condition of possibility for the contingency of every political order: the enacted refutation of historical and political determinism and the reason why human time takes the form of history. The messianic character of politics—the fact that a completely different world is possible—is thus not related to a transcendent being or a world beyond this one. It is grounded in the inexplicable human action of revolt capable of defying all despotic and deterministic orders. For Foucault, the events in Iran demonstrated that politics does not have to borrow a dimension of spirituality from religion: it could rather be a spiritual practice in itself. God is not the only possible guarantor of a just future in the next world, nor is he the only possibility for breaking with our present: this is not all there is because we, human beings, can create another world. To conclude, my aim has been to make a tentative attempt in political imagination, a philosophical gesture toward a rethinking of the political according to which it would be defined irreducibly by political spirituality and not political violence. Instead of being constituted by mythic, lawmaking violence the political would be defined by the messianic contingency enacted by the people: a negative absolute, which promises nothing but the lack of all absolutes. Political spirituality would mean relating to our collective future as radically open because it harbors the possibility of a world yet to come. While terrorism forces us to critically reevaluate our current conception of the political, the implication should not be the strengthening of an irreducible link between violence and the political, or the fortification of the boundary between terror and political violence proper. Instead of getting caught up in the cycle of mythic violence, we should try to imagine different responses to terror. In the enigmatic words of Benjamin, divine violence can never be understood to confer on men lethal power against one another, and yet its manifestations are not confined to the acts of God. It is present in the ordinary life of men and it is defined “not by miracles directly performed by God but . . . by the absence of all lawmaking” (Benjamin

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1996, 250). The unarmed people who died in Iran in 1978 while standing up against power they perceived to be unjust were not engaging in an act of lawmaking. What they did is not reducible or even fully comprehensible as a means to some end—whether achieved or failed. Their actions constituted a sign of the injustice of the world, but also a promise of the indeterminacy of their future. In the realm of politics anything is possible, even the end of violence.

Notes

Introduction 1. See, e.g., Mouffe 1993, 2000, 2005; Žižek 2008. 2. See, e.g., White 2000; Critchley 2007. 3. The term “ontology” was introduced by Christian Wolff in the eighteenth century to give a name to a branch of metaphysics alongside cosmology, psychology, and theology concerned with the study of being in general. In contemporary use it is often used as a synonym for metaphysics as the systematic study of the ultimate nature of reality. 4. Foucault’s late essays on Kant’s article “What Is Enlightenment?” introduced his idea of philosophy as “ontology of the present” (une ontology du present, une ontology d’actualité, une ontology de nous-même). This critical ontology turns around Kant’s question of the necessary limits that knowledge has to renounce transgressing, and asks instead what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints in what is given to us as universal and necessary. The aim is thus to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into one that seeks out the possibilities of change. See, e.g., FR 45; PPC 95. 5. The famous metaphysical debates on modernity take issue precisely with this ambiguity in different ways: while Kant’s solution was to establish the separation between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, Nietzsche’s attack against metaphysics denied the possibility of any objective ontology at all, for example. 6. To distinguish between these two senses in contexts in which the meaning is not obvious, I will use the notions “ontology” and “ontological inquiry” respectively. 7. See Gandhi 1985; King 1986. 8. The Tolstoyan anarcho-pacifist movement in Russia, for example, was built on the idea that the rejection of coercive authority necessarily implied absolute pacifism. 9. “Et d’abord un scepticisme systématique à l’égard de tous les universaux anthropologique, ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’on les rejette tous d’entrée de jeu, d’un bloc et une fois pour toutes, mais qu’il ne faut rien admettre de cet ordre qui soit rigoureusement indispensable; tout ce qui nous est proposé dans notre savoir, comme de validité universelle, quant à la nature humaine ou aux catégories qu’on peut appliquer au sujet, demande à être éprouvé et analysé . . . La première règle de méthode pour ce genre de travail est donc celle-ci: contourner 157

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autant que faire se peut, pour les interroger dans leur constitution historique, les universaux anthropologiques” (DE2 1453). 10. “La plus dangereux, dans la violence, est sa rationalité. Bien sûr, la violence est en elle-même terrible. Mais la violence trouve son ancrage le plus profond et tire sa permanence de la forme de rationalité que nous utilisons. On a prétendu que, si nous vivions dans un monde de raison, nous pourrions nous débarrasser de la violence. C’est tout à fait faux. Entre la violence et la rationalité, il n’y a pas d’incompatibilité. Mon problème n’est pas de faire le procès de la raison, mais de déterminer la nature de cette rationalité qui est si compatible avec la violence” (DE2 803). 11. Merleau-Ponty (1969, 109) famously noted that inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot. For him this meant that politics was always inevitably coupled with violence, however.

Chapter 1 1. A distinctive notion of the political was first developed in the context of German political thought by Carl Schmitt, who sought to differentiate the political from other domains of the social such as the economic or the aesthetic. The importance of the distinction has been particularly strong in French political philosophy (le politique, la politique). It has been developed in different ways in the work of such thinkers as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Claude Lefort. The political has now also become a standard concept in Anglo-American political theory influenced by Continental philosophy. For an overview of the conceptual difference between “politics” and “the political,” see Marchart 2007. On contemporary theorists in whose thought the distinction between politics and the political is crucial, see, e.g., Lefort 1986, 1988, 2000; Nancy 1991, 1993, 2000; Laclau and Mouffe 1985. 2. See also, e.g., Mouffe 2000. 3. See Schmitt 1996; Arendt 1990, 1998. 4. Stephen White (2000, 5), for example, argues that there is a broad ontological turn taking place in political philosophy, and he mentions Foucault as one of the thinkers who has helped to bring ontological reflection to the forefront. He claims that there is no sustained affirmation of a particular ontology in his work, however. 5. See, e.g., Lefort 1986, 1988; B. Flynn, 2005. 6. Compare Hacking 1984, 122. 7. In his analysis of Foucault’s ontological premises, Gilles Deleuze (1999) claims that Foucault’s central aim was to challenge the empirical dogma that we speak of that which we see and see that which we speak of. He denied any isomorphism or conformity between words and things, or in Deleuze’s terminology between the visible and the articulable. If a statement has an object, it is a discursive object unique to the statement and not isomorphic with any visible object. Deleuze emphasized that this thesis does not imply the erroneous interpreta-

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tion that, for Foucault, everything is discursive. Foucault attributed epistemological primacy to statements as they are capable of determining visibilities, but he nevertheless insisted on the irreducibility of the visible. 8. See Nietzsche 1976, 42–47. 9. “C’est contre un monde sans ordre, sans enchaînement, sans forme, sans beauté, sans sagesse, sans harmonie, sans loi que la connaissance doit lutter. C’est à lui que la connaissance se rapporte. Il n’y a rien dans la connaissance qui l’habilite, par un droit quelconque, à connaître ce monde. Il n’est pas naturel à la nature d’être connue—il ne peut y avoir, entre la connaissance et les choses que la connaissance doit connaître, aucune relation de continuité naturelle—La connaissance ne peut être qu’une violation des choses à connaître, et non pas une perception, une reconnaissance, une identification de celles- ci ou à celles-ci” (DE1 1414). 10. Foucault refers to The Gay Science, aphorism 109, as an example. See Nietzsche 1974, 168. 11. “C’est-à-dire que la connaissance est toujours une certaine relation stratégique dans laquelle l’homme se trouve placé. C’est cette relation stratégique qui va définir l’effet de connaissance et c’est pour cela qu’il serait totalement contradictoire d’imaginer une connaissance qui ne fût pas dans sa nature forcément partiale, oblique, perspective. Le caractère perspectif de la connaissance ne dérive pas de la nature humaine, mais toujours du caractère polémique et stratégique de la connaissance. On peut parler du caractère perspectif de la connaissance parce qu’il y a bataille et que la connaissance est l’effet de cette bataille” (DE1 1419). 12. Foucault confirms the centrality of social practices in his thought on numerous occasions. He singles them out as the constant object of his studies: what unites and gives coherence to his always partial and local analyses is that they have the realm of practices as their homogeneous domain of reference. See FR 48. In one of his last interviews he mapped out his whole thought as studies of different aspects of practices. See DE2 1512. 13. Paul Veyne (1997), Thomas Flynn (2005), and Ian Hacking (2002), for example, have all argued that Foucault’s historical nominalism is a form of social constructivism. 14. Compare Berger and Luckmann 1967; Castoriadis 1987. 15. In OT Foucault argued that Kant’s thought marked the threshold of modernity, and with him all traditional questions of metaphysics came to an end. All naive metaphysical belief that our representations and reality—or words and things—simply coincided could not be upheld anymore, because all objectification required the transcendental organization of human thought in order to be understood as such. As the human being also becomes an empirical object in this same historical conjunction, however, the anthropological structure specific to modernity—Man as an empiro-transcendental doublet—was born. Man becomes “the fundamental disposition that has governed and controlled the path of philosophical thought since Kant until our own day” (OT 342). All modern philosophy, including Foucault’s own thought, is a necessary effort to deal with

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the paradoxes embedded in this figure. As well as a vehement critique of phenomenology as a contemporary effort to solve it, OT also contains a critique of naturalism as its inevitable complement. Since it is clear which side was the main enemy in 1960s France, however, not too much ammunition is spent on the critique of naturalism: despite being post-Kantian, naturalism is pre-critical. It forgets the dependence of experience on transcendental determinations in its ontologization of empirical knowledge. For more on Foucault’s critique of naturalism and phenomenology, see, e.g., Gutting 1989; Han 2002; Oksala 2005. 16. See also Oksala 2005. 17. Han (2002, 140–41), however, like Hacking, raises the question of what extension should be accorded to Foucault’s claims. Her problem is with mathematical propositions, which seem to contradict Foucault’s thesis that it is impossible to define truth independently of power relations. She concludes that Foucault’s analysis shows a tendency to turn a particular case into a generality without enough justification. 18. See, e.g., Longino 1990, 2002. 19. Foucault explicitly denied that the concepts of power and knowledge could be used to identify general principles of reality. “No one should ever think that there exists one knowledge or one power, or worse, knowledge or power, which would operate in and of themselves” (PT 52). 20. See, e.g., Burchell, Gordon, and Miller (eds.) 1991; Barry, Osborne, and Rose (eds.) 1996. 21. “Il s’agit de montrer par quelles interférences toute une série de pratiques—à partir de moment où elles sont coordonnées à un régime de vérité— par quelles interférences cette série de pratiques a pu faire que ce qui n’existe pas (la folie, la maladie, la délinquance, la sexualité etc.), devienne cependant quelque chose, quelque chose qui pourtant continue à ne pas exister” (NB 21). 22. See, e.g., Foucault STP 115. 23. Martin Saar (2010, 39) argues that the threefold quasi-definition that Foucault offers in the fourth lecture (STP 108–9) must be understood as an ad hoc definition, since it is hard to see how something can meaningfully be said to be an “ensemble” of something, a temporal “tendency,” and the “result of a process” at the same time, the latter only explained with the help of the term to be defined. He suggests that semantically the term aims at the whole sphere that can be said to be “gouvernemental,” i.e., relating to the instance and the act of government. 24. Compare Mouffe 1993, 2000, 2005. 25. On Foucault’s understanding of “the political,” see also P/K 189–90. 26. Foucault (PPC 257) explains that in History of Madness the question was how and why, at a given moment, madness was problematized through a certain institutional practice and a certain apparatus of knowledge. Similarly, in Discipline and Punish, for example, he analyzed the changes in the problematization of the relations between crime and punishment through penal practices and penitentiary institutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See also, e.g., UP 3–32; FR 381–90; PPC 255–70.

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Chapter 2 1. Max Weber gives a famous formulation of this idea in his lecture “Politics as Vocation,” in which he defines the state as a human community that holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. See Weber 2004. 2. Beatrice Hanssen argues (2000, 148) that the change of plan revealed Foucault’s disenchantment with the unwieldy dimensions of what threatened to become an all-enveloping power/war matrix. Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani (2003) argue that the lectures represent a transition between Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. From a concern with disciplinary power and sovereign power Foucault gradually moved to a more pronounced interest in biopower. 3. In his introduction to the English translation Arnold Davidson argues (2003, xvii–xviii) that in studying the discourse of war in this course Foucault formulated a strategic model of power. Although it is widely recognized that its articulation was one of his major achievements during this time, the full scope and significance of the model has not been fully appreciated. 4. See also Pasquino 1993, 86. 5. See Clausewitz 1984, 87. 6. “La loi naît dés batailles réelles, des victoires, des massacres, des conquêtes qui ont leur date et leur héros d’horreur; la loi naît des villes incendiées, des terres ravages . . . Mais cela ne veut pas dire que la société, la loi et l’État soient comme l’armistice dans ces guerres, ou la sanction définitive des victoires. La loi n’est pas pacification, car sous la loi, la guerre continue à faire rage à l’intérieur de tous les mécanismes de pouvoir, même les plus réguliers” (IFDS 43). 7. Foucault began his critique of the model of sovereign power in Discipline and Punish, but it was still his central target in these lectures. He claimed that the juridical model of sovereignty that located power in the centralized state apparatus was a problematic legacy of monarchical notions of sovereignty. We must “cut off the king’s head” in political theory and analyze the phenomenon of power without the use of this model. See, e.g., SMD 59. 8. “Il n’y a pas de batailles dans la guerre primitive de Hobbes, il n’y a pas de sang, il n’y a pas de cadavres. Il y a des représentations, manifestations, des signes, des expressions emphatiques, ruses, mensongères . . . On est sur le théâtre des représentations échangées, on est dans un rapport de peur qui est un rapport temporellement indéfini; on n’est pas réellement dans la guerre” (IFDS 79–80). 9. See Hobbes 2004, 129–57. 10. Historico-political discourse underwent a problematic naturalization of its own in the nineteenth century, however. Foucault argues that the discourse of two races struggling for political power—such as Normans and Saxons in England or Franks and Gauls in France—was being reworked in socio-biological terms. The historical dimension of this discourse was suppressed and replaced with a biologico-medical perspective resulting in the emergence of state racism. The historical reality of war was again eliminated and social conflict recoded in

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biological terms as the need for one race to defend itself and to protect its purity. This mutation of war discourse into state racism was cotemporaneous with the development of biopower. What is now the familiar idea of biopower was first introduced in the last of these lectures, and linked to the question of state racism: racism emerged as a way of rationalizing biopower killing its own subjects. See SMD 254–63. For more on biopower and state racism, see chapter 5. 11. Colin Gordon (1996, 266), for example, argues that Foucault’s exploration of notions of struggle as a principle of historical intelligibility has led some to suppose, wrongly, that he equivocally endorsed a Nietzschean metaphysics of war, will, and struggle. Nietzsche’s idea of the world as the will for power can furthermore be understood in very different senses depending on what status is given to the Nachlass notes. The metaphysical reading of it is only one possibility. Rather than being a flux of forces pertaining to the being of everything, animate or inanimate, it could also be understood as an empirical observation about human behavior. See, e.g., Williams 2001. 12. See, e.g., FR 76–100. 13. See Arendt 1970. 14. “Que l’Etat dans les sociétés contemporaines ne soit pas simplement l’une des formes ou l’un des lieux—fût-il le plus important—d’exercice du pouvoir, mais que d’une certaine façon tous les autres types de relation de pouvoir se réfèrent à lui, c’est un fait certain. Mais ce n’est pas parce que chacun dérive de lui. C’est plutôt parce qu’il s’est produit une étatisation continue des relations de pouvoir . . .” (DE2 1060). 15. Foucault argues that the state is a new and problematic form of political power, but not because it ignores individuals in favor of the interests of a totality. The problem is that it is totalizing and yet individualizing at the same time. As he famously writes, the modern state is a highly sophisticated power structure “in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns” (SP 214). 16. See, e.g., Foucault FR 375–76. 17. See EWF2 449–50; T. Flynn 2005, 250.

Chapter 3 1. See, e.g., Connolly 1991; Honig 1993; Mouffe 1993, 2000, 2005. 2. I will critically examine the ontological commitments that inform Mouffe’s theory in this chapter. Comparison between the positions of the different agonistic theorists is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this work. 3. Fossen (2008) distinguishes between emancipatory agonism represented by Connolly, Honig, and Mouffe and perfectionist agonism represented by David Owen, which is based on radically different normative commitments: agonism is valued for its capacity to enhance citizens’ virtues and capacities. See Owen 1995.

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4. See, e.g., Mouffe 2005, 9. 5. See, e.g., Mouffe 1993, 2000, 2005. 6. See Schmitt 1985. 7. See, e.g., Mouffe 2000, 32. According to Mouffe, what crucially distinguishes modern from ancient democracy is the acceptance of pluralism. This is due to the intermingling of the tradition of democracy with the modern tradition of liberalism. The emergence of the ideals of individual liberty and the assertion of equal liberty for all has necessarily resulted in the legitimization of conflict and division in the political sphere. Pluralism is thus not only an empirical fact defining modern Western societies, it is also a feature of the symbolic ordering of modern democracy. See in particular Mouffe 2000; also Mouffe 1993, 2005. 8. Human victims must belong to the fringes of society—prisoners of war, slaves, small children, the handicapped—because between these victims and the community a crucial link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without the fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an act of vengeance. At the same time, there must be enough similarity between the victim and the community for the substitution to function properly. See Girard 1977, 12–13. 9. Girard argues that the generative, unanimous act of mob murder is recognizable in various myths and rituals, and also in our contemporary society. As the ritualistic aspects of our festivals and holidays dwindle, they have degenerated into a communal “letting off of steam” (Girard 1977, 125). 10. See, e.g., Debray 2005. 11. See Clastres 1994, 139–67. 12. See, e.g., Girard 1977, 145. 13. Girard’s thought takes a new direction in his later work Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (2001). He presents Christianity as a way out of the mimetic structure of desire, and therefore also of the destructive cycle of violence. 14. See, e.g., Mouffe (ed.) 1999. 15. See also Schmitt 1999, 203. 16. As Ulrich Preuss (1999, 162–64) argues, Schmitt’s objective was to oppose the tendency of the people to regress into a multitude of individuals and particularistic social forces. A people is not only a multitude of individuals within a distinct territory: its political sense consists of the ethnic and cultural oneness of this multitude, which entails its capacity to realize its otherness in relation both to other peoples and to the liberal-universalist category of mankind. 17. According to Strauss (1996, 101), Schmitt’s theory also has a normative dimension that he goes to great lengths to hide: he does not merely describe the political, but in effect affirms it. He rejects both liberalism and pacifism because he sees in the threatened status of the political a threat to the seriousness of human life. Against a world of entertainment, in which economics and aesthetics prevail, he affirms a world of serious meanings that people are ready to kill and die for. 18. See, e.g., Mouffe 1993, 117–34; Mouffe 2000, 36–59. 19. See also Mouffe 2000, 49; Mouffe and Laclau 1985.

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20. Slavoj Žižek (1999, 35) points out that even though Schmitt’s project is explicitly directed against the depoliticization that he deems characteristic of liberal modernity, he ends up reiterating the gesture himself. He ends up depoliticizing conflict by bringing it to its extreme, via the militarization of politics. Political conflict is resolved through its false radicalization—by reformulating it as a war between us and them. 21. See, e.g., Mouffe 1993, 3; Mouffe 2000, 102–3, 114. 22. See, e.g., Mouffe 2000, chapter 5. 23. Foucault coined the term “repressive hypothesis” to refer to the idea that the relationship between power and sexuality was essentially negative or repressive: that sexuality in the Victorian era was repressed and discourse on it silenced. The key aim of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 was to repudiate this hypothesis and to show that power in fact produces sexuality. See HS1.

Chapter 4 1. See, e.g., Dobash and Dobash 1979; Caputi 1987; MacKinnon 1989; Bart and Moran 1993. 2. See, e.g., Anderson 1997. 3. Girshick conducted a nationwide survey in the United States based on in-depth interviews with seventy women, and documented what happened to them, how they responded, and whether they received any help to cope with the emotional impact of their assault. The incidents ranged from acquaintance rape and sexual abuse by partners to sexual harassment in the workplace. 4. See SP 220. 5. To the extent that feminist analyses of patriarchy are modeled on Marxist analyses, Foucault’s views could be read as a direct attack on them in that both patriarchy and capitalism are conceived of as monolithic and total systems of oppression. While power relations are conceptualized in Marxist analyses as an antagonistic relation between two preexisting classes defined in terms of economics, feminist analyses of patriarchy appropriate this model by understanding women as a class that is controlled by men as a class. Women’s access to employment, education, reproductive choices, health care, and physical safety is controlled by the ruling class, namely men. Individual acts of male violence against women are further understood as gender-class actions over women. See, e.g., Bart and Moran 1993. 6. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, for example, Foucault famously suggested that we should not start by looking for the center of power, or for the individuals, institutions, or classes that rule. Instead we should construct a “microphysics of power” that analyzes it at the extremities: in families, workplaces, everyday practices, and marginal institutions. Power relations should be viewed from the bottom up and not from the top down because power comes from below. 7. Susan Bordo (1993, 190), for example, contends that Foucault’s reconceptualization of power provides significant improvements over the “old” feminist oppressor/oppressed model that tended to subsume all patriarchal in-

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stitutions and practices under it. This model provided no alternative to viewing women as passive victims, thereby reproducing the notion of female passivity. Neither did it provide ways of adequately theorizing the complexities of the situations of men, who frequently found themselves implicated in practices and institutions that they as individuals did not create or control. See also, e.g., Martin 1988. 8. “Pour ce qui est des relations entre hommes, maints facteurs déterminent le pouvoir. Et, pourtant, la rationalisation ne cesse de poursuivre son œuvre et revêt de formes spécifiques. Elle diffère de la rationalisation propre aux processus économiques, ou aux techniques de production et communication; elle diffère aussi de celle du discours scientifique. Le gouvernement des hommes par les hommes—qu’ils forment des groupes modestes ou importants, qu’il s’agisse du pouvoir des hommes sur le femmes, des adultes sur les enfants, d’une classe sur une autre, ou d’une bureaucratie sur une population—suppose une certaine forme de rationalité, et non une violence instrumentale” (DE2 980). 9. See, e.g., Dobash and Dobash 1979; Kurz 1993. 10. On feminist critiques of Foucault’s conception of power, see also, e.g., Fraser 1989; Hartsock 1990. 11. Foucault’s fundamental and radical critique of the subject did not amount to the abandonment or the denial of it. The rethinking and reconceptualization of the subject rather meant that the subject was at the center of his work. See, e.g., SP 208. 12. See, e.g., Fagot, Leinbach, and Hagan 1986. 13. There are very few feminist texts advocating violence against men. Perhaps the most radical example is SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. Solanas later claimed that the text was intended as ironic, however. See Solanas 1996. 14. One of Foucault’s seminal models for thinking about power was the notion of a game: relations of power were played, and it was these games of power that one had to study in terms of tactics and strategy. See DE2 534–51; Davidson 1997, 4. 15. The debate on the correct term is ongoing. Stark and Flitcraft (1996, 25), for example, argue that domestic or family violence is a problematic notion because it implies that what is to be explained is a private event. “Violence against women,” on the other hand, is problematic because it refers to a transhistorical phenomenon. They advocate the term “woman battering,” and argue that it refers to “a historically specific constellation of structural, cultural, and psychodynamic forces.” 16. Carol Sheffield (1993), for example, has studied women’s experiences of obscene telephone calls as a form of male violence against women. She argues that such an integrated analysis rests on the theoretical premise that violence and its threat are the foundation of male domination. She calls this system sexual terrorism: men and boys frighten, and by frightening they dominate and control women and girls (Sheffield 1993, 73). Other feminist theorists have claimed that sexist institutions and practices that are competitive, hierarchical, non-democratic, and essentially unjust are therefore also essentially violent. See, e.g., Harlow 1996.

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Chapter 5 1. Arendt’s feminist critics have seen it as another expression of her masculinism and her hostile attitude to the feminine, private realm. Hanna Pitkin has compared it to a monstrous blob that is gobbling up our freedom and politics. See Pitkin 1995, 53. On the criticism of the distinction between social and political realms, see also, e.g., Bernstein 1986, 238–60. 2. In The Human Condition Arendt expresses concern with the conformism and normalization that modern societies impose through “innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to normalize its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement” (Arendt 1998, 40). 3. See, e.g., Arendt 1998, 26, 31, 129. 4. The distinction between violence, force, and power is touched upon in The Human Condition, but elaborated further in the later essay On Violence. See Arendt 1998, 202. See also, e.g., Arendt 1990, 179–81. 5. James Dodd (2009, 58–60) argues that Arendt’s instrumental account of violence appears more complex if her separation of labor and work in The Human Condition is understood as leading to the idea that the order of instrumentality characterizing work is a kind of violence. She describes the emergence of the sphere of human works as a form of constitutive violence: the world of instruments, of produced and built things, represents a violent breaking free from the monotony and impermanence of the incessant metabolism with nature that is embodied in labor. The world, understood as more than nature, can thus be understood to be born of originary violence against the givenness of nature. 6. See, e.g., Honig 1995, 135. For an alternative reading, see McClure 2007. McClure argues that Arendt wanted to primarily emphasize the need to distinguish between questions that can and should be politicized—debated and decided publicly—and questions that are amenable to purely technical and administrative solutions. While some “social problems” required politicization in Arendt’s view, we had to accept that some allowed for an administrative solution. In the former category she located the issue of whether decent housing should be available to everybody and in the latter the question of how many square feet every human being needs in order to live a decent life (McClure 2007, 102). 7. Catherine Mills (2008, 64, 69) argues similarly in her seminal book on Agamben that the notion of “bare life” has given rise to a great deal of misunderstanding in literature on Homo sacer. While Agamben often appears to use the term simply as a synonym for natural or biological life (zoe), she shows that his aim is in fact to question the distinction between bios and zoe. Bare life is neither natural nor political life because it is the politicized form of natural life. Other commentators also noted that the concept is never precisely defined. See, e.g., Norris 2005a, 270; Fitzpatrick 2005, 65. 8. Carl Schmitt presents his influential theory of sovereignty in Constitutional Theory (2008) and the first volume of Political Theology (2006). 9. See Agamben 2005b, 289. Peter Fitzpatrick (2005, 58–60) argues that Agamben moves markedly beyond the conception of sovereignty extracted from

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Schmitt because for Schmitt the sovereign was still a juridical entity. For Schmitt the sovereign decision cannot be simply beyond the normal order and preformed law, but is also imbued with law. If sovereign claims are to be any more than evanescent and assume operative continuance, they must be integrally tied to law. Law constitutes the decision maker and constitutes the matters decided upon. Exception must be distinguishable from juristic chaos, and therefore it is the legal system itself which can anticipate the exception and suspend itself. Although the sovereign stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, and sovereignty remains a juristic concept. In other words, sovereignty could not be sovereign without the law. The law and sovereignty depend on each other in a way that means that the law cannot simply be subordinated to sovereignty instrumentally. 10. See Dillon 2005, 38; Fitzpatrick 2005, 54–56; Kalyvas 2005, 110–13. 11. Andrew Norris (2005a, 264) argues that what is perhaps most intriguing and most problematic about Agamben’s project is that he brings these claims about metaphysics into dialogue with a rich and specific set of very concrete examples. 12. A detailed discussion of Agamben’s idea of the coming politics must remain outside of this study. In Homo sacer Agamben suggests that we could move beyond the categories of bare life and political life: “bare life must itself . . . be transformed into the site for the constitution and constellation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe” (Agamben 1998, 188). The idea of a sovereignless political community is developed in The Coming Community (1993). Agamben’s critics have argued that he is the least convincing and the most obscure when he attempts to offer us political alternatives to biopower. Andreas Kalyvas (2005, 116), for example, argues that his elusive notion of the sovereignless coming community, beyond rights and legal norms, comes dangerously close to one of an extralegal, permanent, though sovereignless exception. It ultimately dissolves into an eschatological utopian vision of social life: society without institutions or any modern structure of rights and institutionalized liberties. For an account of “affirmative biopolitics,” see Esposito 2008. 13. See, e.g., STP 219. 14. “Je ne veut pas dire que la loi s’efface ou que les institutions de justice tendent à disparaître; mais que la loi fonctionne toujours davantage comme une norme, et que l’institution judiciaire s’intègre de plus en plus à un continuum d’appareils (médicaux, administratifs, etc.) dont les fonctions sont surtout régulatrices. Une société normalisatrice est l’effet historique d’une technologie de pouvoir centrée sur la vie” (HSf 190). 15. “La mise à mort, l’ impératif de mort, n’est recevable, dans le système de bio-povoir, que s’il tend non pas à la victoire sur les adversaires politiques, mais à l’élimination du danger biologique et au renforcement, directement lié à cette élimination, de l’espèce elle-même ou de la race . . . La fonction meurtrière de l’État ne peut être assurée, dès lors que l’État fonctionne sur le mode du biopouvoir, que par le racisme” (IFDS 228).

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16. “On a donc dans la société nazie cette chose tout de même extraordinaire: c’est une société qui a absolument généralisé le bio-pouvoir, mais qui a, en même temps, généralisé le droit souverain de tuer. Les deux mécanismes, celui classique, archaïque, qui donnait à l’État droit de vie et de mort sur ses citoyens, et . . . le nouveau mécanisme de bio-pouvoir, se trouvent exactement coïncider” (IFDS 232). 17. Ojakangas (2005) shows that Foucault traces the origin of biopolitics not to the modern state but to the religious tradition of the West, the JudeoChristian tradition of pastoral power in which the shepherd is the political leader of his people. The power of the shepherd is markedly different from the power of the sovereign: it is not power to take life or to let live, it is the power to guide, lead, and protect. It is power not over a territory, but over a flock. It is continuous and personal, and its only measure of success is the welfare of the flock. Foucault’s claim is that in Christian societies the function of the law as the source of absolute authority was called into question and the principles of pastoral power came to organize political thought and practice. The legal framework lost dominance as pastoral power was gradually transformed into the art of governing people. This transformation constitutes the essence of biopower. It is exercised not through law and violence, but through their opposite, the Christian power of love (agape) and care for individual life. See, e.g., EWF3 307–11.

Chapter 6 1. See, e.g., Foucault SMD 25–27. 2. See Foucault SP 220–21. 3. See Arendt 1970, 51–52. 4. “C’est le mécanisme disciplinaire qui va se caractériser par le fait que . . . outre l’acte législatif qui pose la loi, l’acte judiciaire qui punit le coupable, toute une série de techniques adjacentes, policières, médicales, psychologiques, qui relèvent de la surveillance, du diagnostic, de la transformation éventuelle des individus” (STPf 7). 5. Pasquale Pasquino (1993, 79) notes that it became clear in his discussions with Foucault in the second half of the 1970s that the discourse on discipline had reached an impasse and could go no further. According to Pasquino, it threatened to lead to an extremist denunciation of power—envisioned according to a repressive model—that was dissatisfying from the theoretical point of view. If a close analysis of disciplines opposed the Marxist thesis of economic exploitation as a principle for understanding the mechanisms of power, this analysis in itself was not enough and required the investigation of global problems involving the regulation and ordering of society. 6. See, e.g., STP 248; “SP.” 7. “Alors l’enjeu de ce cours que je voudrais faire cette année, ça serait en somme celui-ci. . .tout comme pour la prison on a essayé de passer derrière les institutions pénitentiaires proprement dites, pour essayer de retrouver

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l’économie générale de pouvoir, est-ce que, pour l’État, il est possible d’opérer le même retournement? . . . Est-ce qu’il est possible de replacer l’État moderne dans une technologie générale de pouvoir qui aurait assuré ses mutations, son développement, son fonctionnement?” (STPf 123–24). 8. “Je crois qu’on a là une rupture importante: alors que la fin de la souveraineté se trouve en elle-même et qu’elle tire ses instrument d’elle-même sous la forme de la loi, la fin du gouvernement est dans les choses qu’il dirige; elle est à rechercher dans la perfection ou la maximalisation ou l’intensification des processus qu’il dirige, et les instrument du gouvernement, au lieu d’être des lois, vont être des tactiques diverses. Régression, par conséquent, de la loi, ou plutôt, dans la perspective de ce que doit être le gouvernement, la loi n’est certainement pas l’instrument majeur . . . ce n’est certainement pas par la loi que l’on peut effectivement atteindre les fins du gouvernement” (STPf 103). 9. See also Lemke 1997. 10. Ron (1997, 294–98, 298) acknowledges that the pressure of international conventions and the ensuing “standardization” of violence ensure that by bypassing the controlling state and linking up directly to global mechanisms such as international human rights organizations and human rights discourse, targeted populations can gain a measure of protection from grossly illegitimate violence. It also means exposing themselves to the ensuing new forms of coercion, however. These may be even more pernicious because they are harder to detect. For example, it is difficult for detainees and their advocates to effectively contradict the state portrayal of the system when all the hard evidence has disappeared. There is thus no single front or strategy of resistance against an overarching political rationality and repression, but a web of strategies implicating new forms of power. 11. “Ceux qui résistent ou se rebellent contre une forme de pouvoir ne sauraient se contenter de dénoncer la violence ou de critique une institution . . . Ce qu’il faut remettre en question, c’est la forme de rationalité en présence. La critique du pouvoir exercé sur les malades mentaux ou les fous ne saurait se limiter aux institutions psychiatriques; de même, ceux qui contestent le pouvoir de punir ne saurait se contenter de dénoncer les prisons comme des institutions totales. La question est: comment sont rationalisées les relations de pouvoir? La poser est la seule façon d’éviter que d’autres institutions, avec les mêmes objectifs et les mêmes effets, ne prennent leur place” (DE2 980). 12. Because the Geneva Convention was not applicable, Beaver’s report tested the interrogation techniques against the standards set by U.S. law, namely the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishments,” the federal Torture Statute, and the military law of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. See Sands 2009, 79. 13. See Allison and Hattenstone 2007. In January 2009 the high court ordered a new inquest into the death of Adam Rickwood, ruling that the previous verdict had been flawed. The nose distraction technique has also been banned since. See Travis 2009.

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Chapter 7 1. For some recent accounts of the spread of neoliberalism, see, e.g., SaadFilho and Johnston (eds.) 2004; Harvey 2005; Klein 2007. 2. There are a number of connections between the two forms of neoliberalism that Foucault discusses: they share the same enemy—a state-controlled economy—and a series of persons, theories, and books passed between them. Yet, they also have their own distinctive features. Foucault argued that the Chicago school was more radical in its expansion of the economic to the social, ultimately eliding the difference between them. See, e.g., BB 323. 3. Moishe Postone (1993, 7) describes “traditional Marxism” as “all theoretical approaches that analyze capitalism from the standpoint of labor and characterize that society essentially in terms of class relations, structured by private ownership of the means of production and a market regulated economy. Relations of domination are understood primarily in terms of class domination and exploitation.” Radical reinterpretations of Marx’s critique of capitalism, such as Postone’s theory, could be read as compatible with Foucault’s position. Postone distances himself from the notion of ideology as a covering-up of the “real” social relations of capitalist society and argues that Marx’s critique of capitalism should be understood as a theory of the historical constitution of the social structures specific to capitalist society. Similar to Foucault, he would thus argue that capitalism produces a world that conforms to its own representations of economic laws. For Postone, the possibility of theoretical and practical critique should therefore not be located “in the gap between the ideal and the reality of modern capitalist society, but in the contradictory nature of the form of social mediation that constitutes that society” (ibid., 67). 4. Since the global neoliberal turn in the 1970s the income gap between the rich and the poor has considerably widened. Harvey shows that, whereas it narrowed considerably in most Western countries after the Second World War and stayed relatively stable for nearly three decades, since the neoliberal turn there has been an enormous spiraling of the levels of wealth in the top income categories. In the United States, for example, the share of the national income taken by the top 1 percent of income earners fell from a pre-war high of 16 to less than 8 percent by the end of the Second World War, and stayed close to that level for nearly three decades. The wealth that is now concentrated in the upper echelons of society has returned to a level that has not been seen since the 1920s. See Harvey 2005, 15. 5. See, e.g., P/K 118. 6. Foucault notes that the meaning of “political economy” (économie politique) oscillated between two semantic poles between 1750 and 1810–20. Sometimes it aimed at a particular strict and limited analysis of the production and circulation of wealth, but in a broader and more practical sense, it also referred to any method of government that could produce the nation’s prosperity (BB 13). 7. In addition to the two characteristics of the liberal art of government— the market as the site of truth and the limitation of governmentality by the calculus of utility—Foucault takes up a third feature: the globalization of the market

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as an objective. Until the middle of the eighteenth century economic activity was seen as competition over limited resources: there was only a certain amount of gold in the world, so as one state became enriched its wealth had to be deducted from the wealth of others. According to the new liberal art of government expressed by Adam Smith and the physiocrats, competition under conditions of freedom could only mean that everybody profited. Competition in a free market would lead to maximum profit for the seller and, simultaneously, minimum expense for the buyer. For the first time Europe appeared as an economic unit and the whole world gathered around it to exchange its own and Europe’s products in the European market. This was not the start of colonization or imperialism, but heralded a new type of global calculation in European governmental practice: a new form of global rationality (BB 56–57). A global market was thus set as an objective, even in this period. 8. “Ces questions, autrefois, c’était: est-ce que je gouverne bien conformément aux lois morales, naturelles, divines, etc.? C’était donc la question de la conformité gouvernementale. Puis cela était, au XVIe et XVIIe siècle, avec la raison d’État: est-ce que je gouverne bien assez, assez intensément, assez profondément, avec assez de détail pour porter l’ État . . . à son maximum de force? Et maintenant le problème va être: est-ce que je gouverne bien à la limite de ce trop et de ce trop peu, entre ce maximum et ce minimum que me fixe la nature des choses” (NB 21). 9. Teivo Teivainen (2002) calls “economism” the attempt to carry out state policies exclusively on the basis of economic analyses, which are understood to be neutral politically. He argues (2002, 17) that politically relevant decisions are increasingly made in institutions and contexts that are defined as economic and that are therefore outside of democratic decision- making. Democracy is restricted through the defining of various governance institutions and the issues they deal with as economic and using the doctrine of economic neutrality to produce a dichotomy between the economic and the political spheres. Examples include central bank independence, balanced budget amendments, and exchange- rate rules, as well as commitments to specific policy rules associated with trade and investment through international or regional institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the North American Free Trade Agreement. As a consequence, areas defined as economic or financial have been increasingly insulated from democratic parliamentary control. Although the insulation of some policy- making areas from democratic control and accountability is necessary and beneficial to the overall functioning of democracy, the danger is that the domain of democratic politics will become excessively narrow. 10. See, e.g., Ojakangas (2005, 52–53), who argues that the fact that the era of biopolitics is coming to an end precisely at the moment when the nationstate is coming to an end suggests that the exercise of biopolitics presupposes sovereignty, if not de jure, then at least de facto. 11. See, e.g., BB 185. 12. “À savoir le ‘libéralisme,’ puisque c’est par rapport à lui qu’ils ont pris l’allure d’un défi. Dans un système soucieux du respect des sujets de droit et de

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la liberté d’initiative des individus, comment le phénomène ‘population’ avec ses effets et ses problèmes spécifique peut-il être pris en compte? Au nom de quoi et selon quelles règles peut-on le gérer?” (NB 323) 13. Foucault’s point was not that neoliberalism had been implemented wholesale. He noted (BB 192) that its diffusion in France had taken place on the basis of a strongly state-centered, interventionist, and administrative governmentality in the context of an acute economic crisis. This meant that it involved a whole range of specific features and difficulties. Nevertheless, he claimed that the basic principles of neoliberal governmentality were clearly visible in the policies, speeches, and writings of President Giscard d’Estaing and his political and economic advisers: the construction of an advanced social project had to go hand in hand with the construction of an efficient market economy. 14. Foucault cites a report that appeared in 1976 in the Revue française des affaires socials, written as a study-appraisal of thirty years of social security. 15. As William Connolly (1984, 227–31) has argued, the principles of capitalist economy conflict with the principles of equality that underlie the welfare state. The welfare state needs a growing economy to support its redistributive programs, but the structure of the economy is such that growth can only be achieved by policies that are inconsistent with the principles of justice that underlie those welfare programs. 16. See, e.g., Hamann 2009; Read 2009. 17. See, e.g., Cruikshank 1996. 18. See Becker 1962, 10. See also Becker 1964; Schultz 1971. 19. See, e.g., Schultz 1962, 2; Becker 1962, 9. 20. “Et on en arrive à ceci, que peut-être l’objet de l’analyse économique doit être identifié à toute conduite finalisée qui implique, en gros, un choix stratégique de moyens, de voies et d’instruments: en somme, identification de l’objet de l’analyse économique avec tout conduite rationnelle” (NB 272). 21. Becker’s groundbreaking work in economics demonstrated how a whole range of behavior was rational from an economic perspective, including phenomena such as altruism and addiction that were generally understood as exceptions to purely economic interests. When economic rationality was defined broadly enough, individuals always maximized their welfare as they conceived it: altruism, for example, maximized utility when the welfare of others was the person’s object of interest. See, e.g., Becker 1995, 218–39, 329–42.

Chapter 8 1. Hayek’s book has been extremely popular and sold millions of copies. The magazine Reader’s Digest published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling it to reach a wide audience beyond academics. Hayek’s work is often mentioned as the main influence behind Margret Thatcher’s neoliberal political convictions. In many respects his attack on central planning relies on traditional liberal values such as individual autonomy, and he could also be seen as a transi-

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tional figure between classical liberalism and neoliberalism. Another pivotal text for neoliberalism that Foucault refers to is Henry Calvert Simons’s 1934 essay “A Positive Program for Laissez Faire.” Many neoliberal thinkers see this essay as the definitive or originary text of neoliberalism. See Simons 1948. 2. See, e.g., Hayek 1944, 52, 108. 3. While human rights groups reported and criticized the atrocities of the juntas of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile in the 1970s, for example, Klein claims that this focus on human rights abuses has in fact hidden the deeper rationality behind the abuses: the fact that the juntas were at the time in the process of remaking the countries along radically neoliberal lines. While reporting and listing the junta laws and decrees that violated civil liberties, the human rights groups named none of the new economic decrees that lowered wages and increased prices and that clearly explained why such extraordinary repression and violence was necessary. Without understanding the economic rationality, the acts of sadism documented in the reports appeared as senseless, random events, easily condemned, but impossible to understand (Klein 2007, 119–20). 4. See, e.g., Palley 2005. 5. Compare, e.g., Rose 1996; Burchell 1996; Lemke 1997, 2002. 6. See also Hindess 1996. 7. See, e.g., Smith 1976, 456. According to Foucault, this meant that the freedom that Adam Smith, for example, talked about referred much more to the spontaneity, the internal and intrinsic mechanisms of economic processes, than to a juridical freedom of the individual recognized as such (BB 61). 8. See also, e.g., Simons 1948, 42. 9. See, e.g., Reichman 1986; Ewald 1991; Defer 1991. 10. The crucial event for the political movement against neoliberalism was the Seattle demonstrations in November and December 1999 when tens of thousands of people protested against the World Trade Organization summit. The demonstrators managed to block access to the summit conference, thereby delaying it. The initial carnival-type spirit turned into violent protests and looting, however, and since then policing methods around the world have rapidly adapted to the new demands: the cost of Seattle made it clear that heavier investments in tactical and strategic planning, equipment, and manpower were required by the police. This was evident in the policing arrangements for the International Monetary Fund/World Bank summit, held in Washington D.C., in April 2000. A huge “no-protest zone” was drawn around the conference area and strictly enforced. In a three-day period, over 1,300 arrests were made. Seven months later tear gas, water cannons, and concussion grenades were used against anti-globalization protesters in Prague. In the following April the police used a similar range of weaponry during the Summit Meeting of the Americas in Quebec City, and constructed a custom-built perimeter fence, a three-meter-high chain and concrete-based construction capable of withstanding 20,000 pounds of pressure (King and Waddington 2005, 263–66). 11. See, e.g., Hayek 1944; Friedman 1962.

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Chapter 9 1. As Derrida writes (1992, 35) in his reading of Benjamin’s essay, all revolutionary situations and discourses justify the recourse to violence by alleging the founding of a new law. As this law to come will in return legitimate, retrospectively, the violence that may offend our sense of justice, its future anterior already justifies it. 2. Divine violence is a notoriously difficult notion that Benjamin’s commentators continue to struggle with. Sjavoj Žižek (2008, 169), for example, describes it as “the sign of the injustice of the world, of the world being ethically out of joint.” 3. The political importance of the Iranian Revolution cannot be overemphasized: it initiated a wave of radical Islamist politics around the globe. In 1978– 79 a massive urban revolution involving several million participants toppled the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The anti-regime uprising was initially a coalition of various groups—Islamists, but also secular nationalists, leftists, and liberals—but by late 1978 it had become dominated by the radical Islamist faction led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In February 1979 the shah fled the country and Khomeini returned from exile to take power. The following month he organized a national referendum that declared Iran an Islamic republic. Soon after he assumed almost absolute power. A reign of terror followed: the persecution of religious and sexual minorities, the violent suppression of anti-regime criticism, and the dramatic narrowing of the freedom of women. For a detailed account of Foucault’s visits to Iran and the events he witnessed and wrote on, see Afary and Anderson 2005. 4. The criticism they have evoked has been strikingly mean-spirited. In the most extensive, book-length study of the topic, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005), Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, for example, argue that the deep flaws that marked Foucault’s writings on Iran were not only the result of his ignorance of Iranian history and culture, but were organic to his thought. In line with James Miller’s controversial biography of Foucault, they consider his enthusiastic and uncritical support of the revolution a consequence of his lifelong fascination with limit-experiences and death. 5. For a notable exception, see Beaulieu 2010. Beaulieu also emphasizes the link between Foucault’s writings on Iran and his late work on practices of the self. He contends that the events in Iran revealed to Foucault that there could be no lasting political transformation of society, no true revolution, without a spiritual transformation of the self. A revolution that implied merely a materialistic change of regime based on economic values could not affect a lasting change in our lives. 6. Foucault emphasized that the Iranian revolutionary movement did not fulfill the Marxist criteria for a revolution that Western intellectuals of the Left at the time looked for: there was no avant-garde and no class struggle (FIR 211). 7. For Foucault, history provided “a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on” that could not simply be appropriated, but that could provide tools for imagining alternatives and for instigating political change (FR

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349–50). Encounters with different cultures could function similarly as inspiration for imagining political alternatives. 8. As Foucault emphasized (FIR 254), the government had a large army that was very effectively armed, and a strong police force. The regime was directly supported by the United States and backed by the rest of the world. It had oil that provided it with an independent income. Yet, despite all these factors that seemed to render it very stable, the people rose up in revolt. 9. See, e.g., FIR 220–23, 239–41. 10. Jeremy Carrete (1999, 42) argues that the Iranian Revolution fascinated Foucault precisely because of its religious basis. See also Carrette 2000. Georg Stauth (1991) similarly, but less sympathetically, argues that Foucault was interested in identifying the spiritual aspects of the Iranian Revolution. His claim, against Foucault, is that the revolt was fueled by the wants of the people, and cultural and religious remnants remained contingent tools of political and economic demands. 11. See, e.g., FIR 203–9. 12. In a round table that took place in May 1978, immediately after the beginning of the Iranian Revolution, Foucault gave political spirituality an explicitly non-religious meaning: “The search for a new foundation for each of these practices [governing oneself and others], in itself and relative to the other, the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false—this is what I would call ‘political spiritualité’ ” (FE 82). As many commentators have noted, spirituality is detached in Foucault’s late thought from any transcendent order, and comes to denote secular strategies that shape the patterns of human experience. See, e.g., Khatami 2003, 122. 13. He insisted that there could not be a Khomeini party or a Khomeini government, a claim that we know now turned out to be misguided (FIR 222). See also, e.g., FIR 261. 14. Martin Hägglund (2008, 132–34) explicates the messianic in the context of Derrida’s thought by opposing it to messianism: the messianic names a relation to an undecidable future, whereas messianism is the religious or political faith in a future that will come and put an end to time, replacing it with a perpetual peace that nothing can come to disrupt. For Derrida, the messianic promise is the formal condition for all experience and all hope, since it marks the opening to an undecidable future. Hägglund argues that the notion of the messianic thus runs counter to the entire religious tradition because the common denominator for religious notions of the messianic is that they posit it as the promise of timeless peace. See, e.g., Derrida 1994, 74. 15. As Slavoj Žižek (2007, 11–15) argues, the European liberals who wanted to discredit the revolt because it ended up in an oppressive regime of clergy moved at the same level as this clergy itself, which reclaimed the revolt in order to justify its rule. They both attempted to reduce this unique politicospiritual event to a factor in a political struggle for strategic interests, rather than recognizing it as a momentary opening that unleashed unprecedented forces of social transformation. He contends that Foucault relies on a problematic theoretical framework, however: he opposes the revolutionary event to the pragmatic

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domain of the politics of interests and strategic calculations. Similar to Afary and Anderson, he holds that Foucault was not interested in the Iranian events on the level of actual social reality. He focused on the evental surface: the event of becoming-people, the people’s revolutionary becoming. 16. “Les soulèvements appartiennent à l’histoire. Mais, d’une certaine façon, ils lui échappent. Le mouvement par lequel un homme seul, un groupe, une minorité ou un peuple tout entier dit: ‘Je n’obéis plus,’ et jette à la face d’un pouvoir qu’il estime injuste le risque de sa vie—ce mouvement me paraît irréductible. Parce qu’aucun pouvoir n’est capable de le rendre absolument impossible . . . Et parce que l’homme qui se lève est finalement sans explication; il faut un arrachement qui interrompt le fil de l’histoire, et ses longues chaînes de raisons, pour qu’un homme puisse, ‘réellement,’ préférer le risque de la mort à la certitude d’avoir à obéir” (DE2 790–91). 17. Foucault had posed this key question a decade earlier in 1968 when he witnessed the student demonstrations in Tunisia.

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Index

Afary, Janet, 154, 174 n4, 176 n15 Agamben, Giorgio, 12, 81, 86– 94, 96– 101, 112, 166 n7, 166 n9, 167 n11, 167 n12 agonism, 3– 4, 7, 47– 48, 51– 55, 59, 63– 64, 162 n3 Allen, Amy, 73 Anderson, Kevin B., 154, 174 n4, 176 n15 antagonism, 36, 52, 55, 59– 60, 63, 119, 128, 131 apparatus (dispositif ), 28– 29, 96, 106, 118, 160 n26 administrative, 108– 9, 111– 12, 137 archaeology, 20, 23, 25 Archaeology of Knowledge, The, 20, 23, 25 Arendt, Hannah, 9, 12, 15, 32, 37, 46, 51, 81– 86, 91, 93, 101, 105, 153, 166 n1, 166 n2, 166 n5, 166 n6 Aristotle, 80– 81, 86 Badiou, Alain, 144 Becker, Gary, 129– 30, 142, 172 n21 Benjamin, Walter, 14, 40, 148– 49, 153, 155, 174 n1, 174 n2 Bertani, Mauro, 161 n2 biopolitics, 81, 85, 89– 92, 95, 97, 99, 101, 123– 26, 167 n12, 168 n17, 171 n10 biopower, 12– 13, 38, 81, 86, 89, 91, 93– 102, 118, 126, 161 n2, 162 n10, 167 n12, 168 n17 Birth of Biopolitics, The, 6, 13, 28, 124 body, 4, 22, 35, 45– 47, 74, 82– 84, 93, 94– 95, 104, 126, 136 Bordo, Susan, 164 n7 Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 41, 45 Brownmiller, Susan, 67 Butler, Judith, 75, 112, 147 Byatt, A. S., 80

capitalism, 92, 119, 135– 36, 140, 144– 45, 151, 164 n5, 170 n3 Carrete, Jeremy, 175 n10 Chicago school, 118, 129, 170 n2 Clastres, Pierre, 57– 58 Clausewitz, Carl von, 3, 39 communism, 145– 46 Connolly, William, 51, 162 n3, 172 n15 contingency, 17– 18, 24, 50, 54, 153, 155 Critchley, Simon, 15 Davidson, Arnold, 162 n3 Deleuze, Gilles, 158 n7 democracy, 18, 53– 54, 62– 63, 163 n7, 171 n9 agonistic, 53 deliberative, 51 liberal, 53– 54, 59, 63, 149 parliamentary, 53, 59, 149 pluralist, 53– 55, 63 de/naturalization, 19, 161 n10 Derrida, Jacques, 36, 174 n1, 175 n14 Descartes, René, 21 Dillon, Michael, 92 Discipline and Punish, 23, 93, 104, 160 n26, 161 n2, 161 n7 discourse, 5, 18, 20, 25– 26, 30– 31, 38– 41, 43– 44, 49, 55, 57– 58, 60– 61, 74, 78, 108, 161 n10, 164 n23, 174 n1 counter-discourse, 41, 44, 94 historico-political discourse, 39– 40, 42, 161 n10 of war, 38, 42, 161 n3 Dodd, James, 37, 166 n5 economic analysis, 129– 32, 142– 44, 171 n9 game, 131, 136, 141– 42

185

186 I N DE X

growth, 82, 124, 126, 128, 145 knowledge, 122– 23, 132 laws, 31, 139, 170 n3 mechanism, 122, 127, 129, 151 practices, 121 rationality, 125, 129, 139, 141, 145, 172 n21, 173 n3 theory, 13, 123, 142, 146 economics, 31, 108, 120, 122, 125, 130– 31, 139, 163 n17, 164 n5, 172 n21 Enlightenment, 3, 55, 151, 157 n4 Eucken, Walter, 118, 139 fascism, 40, 91– 92 feminism, 67– 74, 76– 79, 164 n5, 164 n7, 165 n10, 165 n13, 165 n16, 166 n1 feminist theory, 67, 73, 76 Ferraro, Kathleen, 71 Fitzpatrick, Peter, 166 n9 Flitcraft, Anne, 68, 165 n15 Flynn, Bernard, 18 Flynn, Thomas, 70, 159 n13 Fontana, Alessandro, 161 n2 force, 4, 22, 42– 46, 49– 50, 56–58, 68, 71– 74, 83, 95, 110, 114, 134, 145, 166 n4 Fossen, Thomas, 51– 52, 162 n3 Freiburg school of economists, 118, 139 gender, 67, 69, 73– 76 genealogy, 25– 27, 29, 40, 50, 94, 106, 120 Geneva Convention, 113– 15, 147, 169 n12 Girard, René, 11, 51– 52, 55– 59, 88, 163 n9, 163 n13 Girshick, Lori, 68, 72, 164 n3 Gordon, Colin, 162 n11 governmentality, 9– 10, 12– 13, 28– 31, 38– 39, 47, 69, 81, 94, 103– 4, 106– 15, 118, 120– 21, 123– 26, 128, 130– 33, 134– 38, 141– 43, 150– 51, 170 n7, 172 n13 biopolitical, 94, 123– 25 liberal, 121, 123, 125, 132 neoliberal, 13, 120, 123, 125, 128, 131– 32, 134, 136– 37, 141– 43, 150– 51, 172 n13 Guantanamo, 12, 111– 15 Guattari, Felix, 150 Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 51 Hacking, Ian, 24– 25, 159 n13, 160 n17

Hägglund, Martin, 175 n14 Han, Beatrice, 20, 25– 27, 160 n17 Hanssen, Beatrice, 45, 50, 161 n2 Hardt, Michael, 150 Harvey, David, 119, 124, 170 n4 Hayek, Friedrich, 134, 136, 140, 142, 172 n1 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 18, 36, 150 Hern, Jeff, 77– 78 history counter-, 40– 41, 45 of governmentality, 28– 30, 131 History of Madness, 160 n26 History of Sexuality, The, Vol. 1, 89, 94, 124, 137, 161 n2, 164 n6, 164 n23 Hobbes, Thomas, 3, 11, 38– 39, 42– 45, 50, 52, 58, 62 homo economicus, 118, 131, 143 homo sacer, 88, 90 Honig, Bonnie, 51– 52, 162 n3 human capital, 129– 31 human nature, 4, 6– 8, 21– 23, 54– 55, 58, 61 Foucaultian critique of, 6– 8 humanism, 7 Husserl, Edmund, 139– 40 idealism, discursive, 20, 28 invisible hand, 122, 125, 138 Iranian revolution, 14, 149– 50, 152– 53, 155, 174 n3, 175 n10 Foucault on, 14, 149– 50, 152– 53, 155, 175 n12 Islam, 152– 53, 174 n3 Kalyvas, Andreas, 92, 100, 167 n12 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 157 n4, 157 n5, 159 n15 Keane, John, 8 Klein, Naomi, 134, 136, 141, 173 n3 knowledge economic, see economic governmental, 108 and power, see power scientific, 26, 31, 108– 9, 120 Laclau, Ernesto, 52 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 158 n1 law/s, 13, 18, 22, 31, 40, 42, 52, 78, 87– 88, 90– 91, 94– 96, 99, 101, 103– 109,

187 I N DE X

111– 16, 120– 21, 143, 168 n17, 169 n12, 173 n3, 174 n1 economic, see economic natural, 91, 122, 125 and sovereignty, 39, 43, 94, 167 n9 as tactic, 96, 100, 103, 108, 111– 16 and violence, 10, 168 n17 Lefort, Claude, 18, 158 n1 Lemke, Thomas, 108 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 57 life animal, 82, 87– 88 bare, 86– 93, 95, 98, 166 n7, 167 n12 biological, 12, 80, 82– 83, 85– 87, 90, 92, 101– 2, 166 n7 human, 32, 87, 92, 145, 163 n17 managing of, 95– 101, 108– 9, 124– 25, 131, 146 political, 12, 41, 51, 80– 81, 86– 87, 92– 93, 166 n7, 167 n12 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 3, 107 Marx, Karl, 131, 151, 170 n3 marxism, 45, 52, 119, 131, 164 n5, 168 n5, 170 n3, 174 n6 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 158 n11 Messerschmidt, James, 75 metaphysics, 3, 17– 20, 25– 26, 45, 86, 92– 93, 157 n3, 157 n5, 159 n15, 162 n11, 167 n11 Miller, James, 174 n4 Mills, Catherine, 166 n7 Mouffe, Chantal, 3, 11, 15, 36– 37, 51– 56, 58– 59, 62– 64, 162 n2, 162 n3, 163 n7 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 158 n1 naturalism, governmental, 138– 39. See also natural realism natural realism, 23– 25, 28, 160 n15 Nazism, 92, 118, 134, 144– 46, 150 Nealon, Jeffrey, 119 neoliberalism, 9– 10, 13, 116, 117– 26, 129– 32, 134– 46, 150, 154, 170 n1, 170 n2, 172 n13, 173 n1, 173 n10 and governmentality, see governmentality and violence, 10, 13, 118, 134– 46 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21– 23, 36, 51, 78, 157 n5, 162 n11

nominalism, 19– 20, 23, 25, 28, 30, 159 n13 normalization, 78, 95, 119, 166 n2 norm/s, 26, 76, 89– 90, 95– 96, 99, 105, 112, 167 n12 Norris, Andrew, 88, 167 n11 ontology, 4– 6, 10, 15– 20, 23– 24, 26– 27, 32, 34– 35, 37, 48– 50, 54– 55, 61, 128, 157 n3, 157 n4, 157 n5, 157 n6, 158 n4 historical, 117– 18 political, 5, 11, 13, 15– 16, 29, 35, 45, 52, 54– 55, 59– 60, 64, 76, 117– 18, 120, 123, 125, 129, 132– 33, 138, 144, 146, 148– 50 of the present, 5, 13, 28– 29, 117, 157 n4 of violence, 4, 6, 11, 62 Order of Things, The, 25 ordoliberals, 118, 126, 138– 39, 146 Owen, David, 162 n3 Pasquino, Pasquale, 38, 168 n5 patriarchy, 67– 70, 164 n5 Plato, 3, 18, 21 pluralism, 32, 51, 53– 55, 58, 62– 64, 163 n7 political, the 3– 12, 15– 16, 18, 23, 30, 32– 33, 36, 39, 45, 47– 48, 50– 53, 55, 59– 64, 80– 93, 104, 106, 117, 120, 148– 50, 153– 55, 150 n1, 160 n25, 163 n17 political economy, 30, 108, 119– 21, 170 n6 political imagination, 3, 14, 49– 50, 155 political spirituality, 14, 152– 55, 175 n12 politics agonistic, 11, 32, 38– 39, 45, 47, 51– 53, 55, 59, 61, 85, 111 bio-, see biopolitics deliberative, 4, 51– 53 Postone, Moishe, 170 n3 post-structuralism, 11, 19, 52, 54– 56, 63 power bio-, see biopower disciplinary, 12, 29, 42, 104– 7, 161 n2 juridical, 103– 5 and knowledge, 23– 26, 74, 95, 108, 160 n19

188 I N DE X

pastoral, 30, 168 n17 productive, 6, 10, 23– 26 sovereign, 12, 29, 41– 43, 86– 87, 89– 96, 98– 101, 104, 107, 109, 112, 114– 15, 125, 161 and violence, 12, 46– 47, 49, 66, 68– 72, 76, 78, 84– 85, 105 power/knowledge, 17, 26– 27, 74– 75, 78, 98, 102, 125 practices discursive, 20, 23 economic, see economic of gender, 75 governmental, 77, 107, 115, 137 neoliberal, 119, 133 of violence, 9, 12– 13, 37– 38, 65– 66, 71– 73, 75– 77, 100– 101, 103, 106, 109, 115, 136, 144 problematization, 33– 34, 160 n26 rationality biopolitical, 96, 126 economic, see economic governmental, see governmentality political, 29, 39, 47, 110– 11, 116, 118, 124, 147, 169 n10 of violence, 9– 10, 69, 142, 145 Rawls, John, 4, 51 Read, Jason, 131 resistance, 44, 47– 49, 70, 73– 74, 99– 100, 119, 123, 132, 144– 45, 169 n10 violent, 10, 137, 144 revolution, 84, 148, 174 n1 French, 83– 84 Iranian, 149– 55, 174 n3, 174 n4, 174 n5, 174 n6, 175 n10, 175 n12, 175 n15 Ron, James, 109– 10, 169 n10 Röpke, Wilhelm, 118, 139 Saar, Martin, 30, 160 n23 Sands, Philippe, 113 Schmitt, Carl, 3, 11, 15, 38, 51– 53, 55, 59– 63, 87, 97, 99, 101, 158 n1, 163 n16, 163 n17, 164 n20, 166 n8, 167 n9 science, 15, 19, 24– 26, 28, 108, 120 Security, Territory, Population, 6, 12, 28– 29, 104 Senellart, Michael, 29

sexuality, 28, 32– 33, 85, 137, 164 n23 Sheffield, Carol, 165 n16 Simons, Henry C., 173 n1 Smith, Adam, 120, 122, 131, 138, 140, 171, 173 n7 social, the, 15, 25, 81– 85, 127– 29 Society Must Be Defended, 6, 11, 38– 39, 47, 49, 97 Sorel, Georges, 3 sovereignty, 39, 41– 44, 86– 90, 92– 94, 96, 99– 100, 104, 106– 8, 111– 13, 115, 125– 26, 128, 161 n7, 166 n8, 166– 67 n9, 171 n10 bio-sovereignty, 100 popular, 53, 100 sovereign power, see power sovereign violence, see violence Stark, Evan, 68, 165 n15 state of exception, 87– 90, 96, 100– 101, 114 Stauth, George, 175 n10 Strauss, Leo, 61, 163 n17 subjectivity, 13, 49, 75– 76, 105, 118, 128– 29, 133 technology/ies governmental, 10, 106, 109, 111 power of, 10, 30, 71, 94, 96, 107, 116 of violence, 115 Teivainen, Teivo, 171 n9 terror, 13– 14, 67, 83, 134, 147– 50, 152, 155, 174 n3 terrorism, 3, 10, 14, 147– 50, 155 totalitarianism, 10, 18, 33, 91– 92, 97, 125, 136– 37, 151 Use of Pleasure, The, 33 Veyne, Paul, 24, 159 n13 violence against women, 11, 66– 67, 71– 72, 77– 78, 164 n5, 165 n15, 165 n16 biopolitical, 97, 99– 101 disciplinary, 104– 6 divine, 14, 149, 174 n2 domestic, 12, 67– 68, 71– 72, 77– 78, 114, 143, 165 n15 existential, 38 feminist critique of, 77– 78 foundational, 11, 42, 55– 59, 63, 65, 96

189 I N DE X

generative, 11, 52, 55– 59, 163 n9 gendered, 10, 11, 66– 69, 71– 72, 75– 76 and law, see law/s lawmaking, 148– 49, 155 law-preserving, 148 mythic, 149, 155 and neoliberalism, see neoliberalism political, 3– 14, 31, 38– 39, 48, 50, 65, 67, 80– 83, 101, 103, 115– 16, 118, 134– 37, 143– 44, 147– 48, 155 and power, see power rationality of, see rationality sacrificial, 56 sexual, 67– 68 sovereign, 93, 100– 101

state, 10, 12, 100, 103– 4, 109– 16, 136– 37, 141– 43, 148, 150 war, 3, 11, 37– 50, 57– 58, 60, 63, 67, 95, 113– 14, 118, 126, 149, 161 n2, 161 n3, 161– 62 n10, 162 n11, 163 n8, 164 n20, 170 n4 Weber, Max, 40, 161 n1 White, Stephen, 5– 6, 158 n4 Wolfe, Michel, 138 Wolff, Christian, 157 n3 Žižek, Slavoj, 3, 36, 135– 36, 144– 45, 164 n20, 174 n2, 175 n15

About the Author

Johanna Oksala is a senior research fellow in the department of philosophy, history, culture, and art studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland.