File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_2004/foucault.0408, message 25


From: "Stuart Elden" <stuartelden-AT-btconnect.com>
Subject: RE: war
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 08:56:16 +0100


Lots of questions recently

>is it feasible to say, yes or no, that, following the publication of The  
History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Foucault rejected the military model of  
discipline and the war model of power; that, in short, he rejected the  
"Nietzschean hypothesis"?

yes or no? - no!

If we're allowed a more nuanced answer, I'd suggest that looking at the new lecture courses will be revealing in terms of a continuity of concerns and yet a continual willingness to question and modify positions. I suppose it's worth asking why Foucault thought war and the military was revealing as a model both in Discipline and Punish (and Le pouvoir psychiatrique) and 'Society Must Be Defended'. It's not just to explain the military of course, but society in a wider sense. 'Society Must Be Defended' is related to a planned volume of the History of Sexuality on race and population.  The concern with the conduct of conduct, government of others and from there to government of the self, shows how these themes link into each other. Nietzsche continues to play a major role. Foucault talks about spending the next few courses on war and strategy in 1976, and although that is not kept to, I don't think it is entirely abandoned. As your interviews suggest, perhaps he would have returned to this, after the long detours of his research.

On noso-politics or nosology, see Birth of the Clinic and some of the later chapters of Madness and Civilisation (although not sure if the relevant bits are in the translation, it's around Pinel). Politics of Health in the 18th Century is in some sense a reworking of this earlier material around new concepts of discipline and power, just as Le pouvoir psychiatrique can be seen as revisiting, rethinking of parts of the History of Madness around the same time. Politics of Health is closely related to three lectures given in Rio in 1974 on medicine - one of which is translated in the Power volume - and was part of a collaborative project with other researches Les machines a guerir [Curing machines]. This was published in 1976 and seems to me to be an important context to the SMBD course. Looking at some of these materials might help with your questions, but the question/idea that "noso-politics [is] the medico-politics of police, whereas bio-politics is the medico-politics of liberal rationalities of government", and some of the other dichotomies seems unlikely to me.

On the question of hyphenation, I guess yes is the answer in most cases. If you can give me specific examples then I can check. But there was a discussion about power/knowledge vs. power-knowledge a while back - check the archive.

Finally, on the lecture courses, I agree with Colin that there is likely to be a lot of literature over the next few years on the newly published materials. There has been some on the earlier published courses.

best wishes

Stuart



Dr Stuart Elden
Lecturer in Political Geography
University of Durham
Durham, DH1 3LE
http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/information/staff/elden.html

www.foucault-studies.com 


   

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