From: "Stuart Elden" <stuart.elden-AT-clara.co.uk> Subject: Re: Reading Foucault Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 12:39:48 -0400 > Unfortunately there are many texts of foucault which > are like this - everyday a new collection appears, > than go search it, find it and read it. Aside from the exaggeration, and that English language readers of Foucault are being resold largely the same material in new collections, without much of the extremely interesting and valuable French material being made available, this was precisely my point. There is a lecture course of Foucault's that deals, in detail, with what you stated, quite emphatically, he _never_ dealt with. But why should > see in the biopower point on the nationalism? Because Foucault did? In another post you suggested >> If you can't see how biopower relates to >> nationalism, I don't know what to >> tell you. >> >neither do i, sorry. I cant see such thing, honestly. >The nationalism was a question foucault never cared >about... That just doesn't chime with the reading in Il faut defendre la societe, which is why I recommended it! > why not > apply it to the western society, where nationalism is > a dirty word? Foucault uses his understanding of the war of races - derived from Boulainviller - to understand France (Francs, Gauls, Romans) and Britain (Normans and Saxons). He discusses, amongst other things, variant readings of the French Revolution. He then discusses how this changes through mathematical techniques, and techniques of order (a politicised rereading of The Order of Things) and relates it to the term bio-power, and then discusses National Socialism and socialism more generally in terms of nationalism and racism. What is your problem with the > nationalism when the world tryies to be as one? i was > discussed about how the manipulating western media > presented the war in kossovo as a nationalism, when it > was a war between mafia groups. And because of this > they gave the balkans in the hands of the albanian > mafia. If you have any idea of the albanian mafia, you > must know what i am talking about. This was not my point. I don't pretend to have an encyclopedic knowledge of these complicated struggles, and that's why I don't make pronouncements on them. At its best, this list gives food for thought and speculation. My point was to contest your reading of Foucault, which was simply inaccurate. I think there much > more importenant issues to diefine about foucault than > nationalism - like his notion of dispositif, serie, > ensemble, genealogy, archeology,panopticism. That might be true, but that's hardly what you were saying before. There is an extensive literature on these issues you note - of varying quality of course, and that's not in anyway to foreclose discussion and debate about these terms. For my part, i've done most of my thinking through of those issues, and i've written extensively about them, and so I find the newly published lecture courses extremely interesting in raising some different, though related, issues. The notions of nationalism, bio-power, war of races, etc. - these seem to me to be thought through only in summary fashion. For instance, Foucault wrote/delivered an entire course called the Birth of Biopolitics, which is bound to throw most of the current work on that topic off balance, and then there are the extensive commentaries on the notion of 'governmentality', when the text of that name in The Foucault Effect was but a single lecture in the Security, Territory, Population course. Stuart
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