From: "Arianna" <ari-AT-copernic.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: AUT: material on linking resurgence of social darwinism with neo-liberalism....
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 20:03:28 +0200


In his last two lectures of 'society must be defended' (lectures delivered in 76)
Foucault treats the emergence of racism in relation to the war paradigm (which is
the object of his previous lectures).
 one of the objectives of this course is to take up marx's notion of class
struggle and focus on the term struggle rather than class for once, to write a
genealogy of it in historical discourse and political theory. the reason I am
pointing this out is that Foucault talks of racism not referring to the notion of
ethnicity, but to that of evolutionism. For Foucault, racism is the biopolitical
update of this war paradigm, for the moment life becomes the object of power
racism operates in societies of  normalisation as what makes it possible to
decide and regulate what can live and what cannot. here's a quote:
'The discourse of the war of races, with its battles, its victories etc, will be
replaced by a post-evolutionist biological theme of the war for life.
Differentiation of species, selection of the strongest, conservation of races
etc. Equally, the theme of the binary society divided in two races and two groups
foreign to one another will be replaced by that of a society biologically monist.
Its character will be that of a society which is undermined by heterogeneous
elements that are not essential because they do not divide the living social body
into two hostile sides, but are almost accidental. There you have the idea of
infiltrated foreigners or deviants as sub-products of society. Finally, the theme
of a necessarily unjust state, according to the counter history of races, will be
transformed into a state that is not the instrument of a race against another,
but the protector of integrity and superiority and purity of one race. So, the
idea of race comes to take the place of the idea of a war of races.'
 From the end of the XIX century foucault says this racism has undergone two
transformations and state racism is biological and centralised: whilst in Nazism
state racism is inscribed back into the legend of warring races, in Stalinism the
adaptation of revolutionary discourse of the war of races is inserted into
scientism and police management. in the following lecture courses in 77 and 78 he
goes on to see in a critique of liberal governmentality the insertion of police
management in the art of governing and links all this apart from to biopower,
also to the emergence of liberalism. but unfortunatelly these later lectures are
not yet available to the public. Thomas Lemke has written about them
though...society must be defended on the other hand has been published in english
recently. worth looking at for some counterintuitive and stimulating analyses.

arianna



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