Foucault’s Regicide in Theory

129

4

Torturing SovereigntyFoucault’s Regicide in Theory

“Political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign,” Michel Foucault maintained in a 1977 interview, “We need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory, that has yet to be done.”1 With such statements, Foucault argued that an emphasis on sovereigns and sovereignty had kept philosophers and political theorists from delineating other forms of power operating in modernity. He utilizes his genealogies of power, along with his later “problematizations” of the practices of sexu-ality during periods prior to modernity, to argue that sovereignty—as op-posed to disciplinary power, bio-political power, and governmentality—is but a juridico-philosophical element best left to historians of philosophy, rather than “historians of the present.”2 Foucault could suggest that our emphasis on sovereignty in this book is a repetition of philosophy’s long and naive focus on juridical power, one that avoids other instantiations of power that dominate our societal landscapes and our subjective forma-tions. We are reminded to look up now and again for the owl of Minerva. This critique could be directed at a number of contemporary philosophers who have returned to the trope of sovereignty, including Agamben and Derrida, and have seen it as central to recasting contemporary debates over the self and the return nation-state sovereignty. On the other hand, a cri-tique by could be directed at Foucault, namely that his arguments against the relevance of sovereignty for histories of the present miss the (now) obviously crucial role of the sovereign exception and the exceptional sov-

UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS

DO NOT CITE OR REPRODUCE. 09/26/10

Torturing Soverignty130

ereignty on plain view in the contemporary period (and after the fact in all of modernity). One could say, thus, that Foucault, as Agamben argues in Homo Sacer, misses the true import of sovereignty and is thus offering what Foucault himself once called sovereignty: a “retroversion” of power.3

Genealogies in the Multiple

My contention in this chapter is relatively straightforward: while Foucault in the early half of the 1970s appears to think of sovereignty as the past of the political, he resuscitates sovereignty during and after his 1975-6 lectures, offering a thinking of sovereign power that, intertwined with bio-power, discipline, governmentality, and pastoral power, is not just relevant for an academic consideration of Foucault’s work, but for thinking the perniciousness of sovereignty as such. Foucault, in his lectures and work on the 1970s and early 80s, offers genealogies of power that, to use an Arendtian word that he too often utilizes, “crystallizes” in this supposedly retro forms of power of early modernity, though I am not going to sim-plify his micro-physics of power.4 Our task is to demonstrate Foucault’s remarkable genealogies of sovereignty, while attuned to the lessons on political pedagogy that were often his focus. Moving from an archaeol-ogy of sovereignty in Arendt to Foucault’s genealogies of power from the 1970s provides a difficult undertaking for any of his readers. First, there are the genealogies on offer from Foucault in thousands of pages of lec-tures, interviews, and published books. To make matters worse, one must take account of Foucault’s shifting method, given that he makes a turn in his texts after The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) towards what he calls in Discipline and Punish (1972) “genealogies” that would be char-acterized by “histories of the present.”5 We need not be detained by argu-ments in the secondary literature over whether or not these genealogies are of a different order than those found in his early “archaeological” pe-riod.6 What is significant is that these genealogies take up the contingent formations of power in the period of early modernity that had interested Arendt in her accounts of “race-thinking before racism.” In the 1970s, the historical epochs under study by Foucault begin for the most part with the late-Middle Ages and the Renaissance and move to the period just before the Second World War, with the notable exception of his 1978-9 lecture course on the rise of economic governmentality. Foucault’s main target, as always in his career, was the “disinterested” humanistic discourses of the post-Enlightenment.7 Foucault argues is that far from a history of progress,



Torturing Soverignty 131

Enlightenment philosophies offer a cover for forms of power-knowledge that may speak in the platitudes of rights and freedoms, as opposed to the less-Enlightened past, but operate through strategies of societal exclusion and normalization. In sum, defenders of the Enlightenment want to cherry pick the strains of rationalism in our history, making it an ahistorical force, while utterly ignoring the contexts in which these Enlightened thinkers were writing.

The sources for Foucault’s genealogies are often Franco-centric, de-livering near universal accounts of the movements of power based on ex-amples from French history. One finds time and again in Foucault a formu-lation that such and such dispositif8 is part of “typical features of modern societies.”9 This lends credence to the view that Foucault’s method, as with Agamben after him, forces a certain sovereign reach over history, not just in terms of its periodizations but also by way of consistently moving out from one or two examples to universally applicable paradigms. This view gains more credit since Foucault often argued that a given paradigm of power shifted quickly from one type to another. In this way, each of his texts begins and teases out the meaning of a particular “example” meant to show a “turning-point” or “an invention”10 in the treatment of the mad, the prisoner, the sovereign, or the deviant, though he never treats at length the use of narrative examples in his texts. The example is not just a particular under a universal movement of power in a particular period, or layer of history. As an example, as the chosen example among others, each of these “turning-points” is the exemplary example, the exceptional example, the example that is exceptional to the categorization of a given period since it would be so normal as to be exceptional to the given norm he is investigat-ing. It is thus both the particular under a given power dynamic and excep-tional to that power dynamic at the same time. We underline this given the logic of the exception at the heart of the concept of sovereignty. We will also see this in Foucault’s treatment of King George III, who will not just be a disciplined figure, as mad, but also, as the example of the disciplined, an exceptional (and sovereign) figure that combines both the bare embodi-ment of the mad under disciplinary power and sovereign power, even in its absence. This remains the misgiving of many in Foucault’s work: the use of particular examples to write all-encompassing histories that have the force of colonizing all forms of discourse under a given dispositif.

Foucault’s genealogies, however, are often far less polemical than one finds, for example, in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of




The History of Sexuality. Gary Gutting is right to point to the experimental form of Foucault’s work as well as its specificity: “Foucault’s work is at root ad hoc, fragmentary, and incomplete. Each of his works is determined by concerns and approaches specific to it and should not be understood as developing or deploying a theory or a method that is a general instrument of intellectual progress.”11 Jeffrey Nealon, too, finds in a Foucault an “ex-perimental research itinerary,” as opposed to the ideologist of disciplinary power and the death of the author one often reads about. Foucault himself notes, “I wouldn’t want what I may have said or written to be seen as laying any claims to totality. I don’t try to universalize what I say.” But, that said, one doesn’t stray far into Foucault’s texts without finding claims about concatenations of power/knowledge that are not so “specific.” In-deed, each of his genealogies offers a methodological approach—“the blue print of a general method”12—about how such analyses should be broached beyond the specific field of inquiry.

These are not minor arguments in his oeuvre; they are central to un-derstanding each of Foucault’s genealogies of the 1970s, and in fact each of his studies is determined by showing the “micro-physics of power” pro-ducing various institutions and institutionalization as a process itself, a macro claim: “I would like to advance the hypothesis that something like disciplinary power exists in our society,” Foucault argues in Psychiatric Power, and we would need to think much further about the hesitations of this “hypothetical” move that announces “something like” disciplin-ary power. This power, he continues, is a “particular, terminal, capillary form of power…a particular modality by which political power, power in general, finally reaches the level of bodies and gets hold of them.”13 But this should not be taken as reason to dismiss Foucault’s genealogies of power, which, especially in his lecture courses, operate experimentally and heuristically through his nomination of dispositifs of power important to contemporary concerns. His claims are far from homogeneous and ho-mogenizing. As such, we should follow Foucault in his wrestling with the specificity and applicability of his claims (here regarding the rise of the prison):

The “invention” of this new political anatomy [the disciplining of bodies] must not be seen as a sudden discovery. It is rather a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origins and scattered locations, which overlap, repeat, or imitate one




another, support one another, distinguish themselves from one another according to their domain of application, converge and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method.14

In last section of this chapter, we will take up Foucault’s work just where it operates on macro-physical developments, namely in the rise of nations and races in “Society Must Be Defended.” In these lectures, Fou-cault lays out the macro-micro movements of power first in a society at war with itself and then in a society docile under disciplinary and bio-po-litical regimes—all preceded by what he rightly calls the “administrative monarchy” that becomes, after the nineteenth century, a more insidious racist sovereignty.15 Thus I am comfortable with the supposed uncomfort-ableness of these broad claims, which have the much-feared consequence of showing productions of power everywhere, making any confrontation with power apparently pointless. Foucault’s work is thus said to lead to a political quietism given the inevitability that one is always imprisoned within these power formations.16 This complaint is as old as Foucault’s first publications on madness. Indeed, critics of Foucault often measure their resistance to his work quasi-aesthetically. They contend less with his work and methodology than with what they take to be (wrongly) its distasteful consequence, namely that all resistance is futile. It is rather odd, though often the case, that this is what passes for serious rebuttals to Foucault’s work: his descriptions of power might mean that I’m less free than I would like to presuppose, thus I can counter the feared implications of his work with imbrications of age-old views of the sovereign self. As such, I can avoid the quintessential Foucaultian insight that power oper-ates more than through coercion, and I can take a view that would return to a classical notion of power, one which has the upshot that it can be more easily resisted. This is theory as catharsis, a declaration of one’s fears while quieting oneself by having an identifiable enemy: a state, a class, a demanding family member—a teenage analysis of power that sees power as merely having to with the “problems of law and prohibition,” as finding one’s freedom by taking on mom and dad. Power would be localizable; it would have a position and a center and my freedom would be nothing other than marking myself as outside that center. This is, of course, the thinking behind all versions of negative freedom, where power is denied its productive force, and places the sovereign subject, like reason itself, outside of history.




In this way, it is not a matter of finding one’s position on the other side of power. Nothing perhaps shows better what Arendt, Foucault, and Derrida, all in different ways, characterize as the fiction of sovereignty and its self-authorization: by fiat I declare myself free of the powers denoted by Foucault, all in the name, often enough by Foucault’s critics, of liberal freedoms whose historical iteration is left unquestioned. A sovereign free-dom is thus posited as standing outside of history, untouched by anything that could condition its circularity back to the self-authorizing subject—an exceptional sovereignty. The force of Foucault’s work is not to illustrate a diachronic or synchronic determinism—the multiple genealogies Foucault engages should be enough to dispel such a conclusion—but rather to il-lustrate the contingency of power formations, as well as the ever-present vigilance necessary for denoting and proclaiming something other than these particular, though no less pernicious, movements of power. We can-not have a clear conscience that once we have opposed a policy or regime that our work is done. This means thinking the power/knowledge basis of social security, for example, even as we may strategically defend it as a last resort for the elderly and the poor; it means thinking about all that we defend under more “humanistic” public policies. It signifies, at long last, as Foucault points out in many interviews and lectures, maintaining an interminable critical vigilance.

We may not follow Foucault in all his assertions about power and knowledge, his particular spatialization of history with its layering and turning points, but we cannot join those all-too-comfortable in the political self-positioning and positing of the subject. And this includes those who would simply side with what the tradition has de-privileged. For example, Foucault notes that he is not, given his early work on the history of mad-ness, engaged in merely “denouncing what is continually…oppressive un-der reason, for after all, believe me, insanity (déraison) is just as oppres-sive.”17 As Foucault makes clear time and again, his interest is in exactly those places of darkness left unexplored by the light of the Auklärung. Yet, he is careful to note that he doesn’t want simply to repeat the exclusions that would merely have one, for example, cast away light in favor of that which lurks in the shadows, since his task was to shine a light specifically on what gave rise to shadow governments. His genealogies, he says, must “outwit the problematic of the Enlightenment. It has to outwit what was at the time described (and still described in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) as the progress of enlightenment, the struggle of knowledge




against ignorance, of reason against chimeras, of experience, of reason against error, and so on. All this has been described, or symbolized, by light gradually dispelling darkness.”18 We must not see things in this way, but as “an immense and multiple battle.”19 In describing the power/knowl-edge of particular institutions, a siding with one or the other would return to a self-congratulatory discourse of progress. If we emphasize all of this about Foucault’s work, it is because, in thinking through challenges to sovereignty, we must also conceive methods for historical understanding that are not just power speaking to power.

Foucault, as we noted, offers not a single genealogy of power (e.g. of discipline) or genealogies of different powers ultimately reducible to one (e.g., as found in base forms of Marxism, where discipline and state power would be the result of given economic structures). Rather, he offers hetero-genealogies of power, and it would take a stunted view to think power as subsumable under a given category, such as a particular set of oppressive state actors. We will attempt to render suspect discussions of power whose movement is but one way, for example, top-down. Foucault, for his part, calls for a “strategic logic”—he opposes it to the dialectical logic that would bring multiple powers into a given “homogeneity”—that would “establish possible connections between disparate terms which re-main disparate.”20 This thinking of a heterogeneity, of multiple formations of power interacting with one another, “is never a principle of exclusion; it never prevents coexistence, conjunction, or connection” among modalities of power.21 This “strategic logic” becomes even more plastic when one re-calls that each genealogy of power itself takes up the strands of a particular power (discipline, governmental, sovereign, etc.) and its dispositifs, that is, the techniques of this particular power’s appearance. Each dispositif itself, Foucault remarks, is

a resolutely heterogeneous ensemble comprised of discourses, institutions, architectural models, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific terminology, philosophical propositions, morality, philanthropy, in short: of what is said as much as what is unsaid. …The dispositif itself is the grid [réseau] that we can establish among these elements.”22

Let’s leave aside the aporia of writing a history of the “unsaid.” What we have in Foucault are multiple folds of power that in turn operate ac-cording to heterogeneous ensembles or technologies (dispositifs), a series




of growing complexification (heterogeneous dispositifs operative in het-erogeneous movements of power), but not one that becomes a mere mys-tification of power. In this way, Foucault ultimately provides an answer to Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited appeal in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emer-gency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.”23 Just as Fou-cault uses Las Meninas of Velasquez as a presentation of three forms of linguistic-epistemic structures (resemblance [16th century], representation [17th-18th centuries], and as the effect of the empirico-transcendental dou-blet of man [19th-20th centuries]) in the preface to The Order of Things, we view Foucault’s writings of this period as providing a pluri-vocal recita-tion of the polyvalent and polymorphic perversities of power. This should make sense in any serious thinking of power: if we limit power to particu-lar instantiations of itself, if we attempt to figure it, and thus to figure it out, then we miss, to risk tautology, what makes power powerful. If it is assumed to be but one figure, as with the monarch, it would be more easily resisted. That power is polymorphic is what makes power, irreducible to the state, in a sense irresistible. The point is to think the very dynamism of power, its dynamis, its movements in and through various loci. Power is not just to be found in the Leviathan of the state but in the multi-headed hydra of the crystallizing and always exceptional movements of sover-eignty—and I will insist on the pertinence of this term—and its permuta-tions as disciplinary power, as governmentality, as bio-power, and finally, as pastoral power.

In the sections that follow, we will turn to Foucault’s multiple genealogies of power not just to recapitulate how he formulated different topologies of societal force, but to conclude with what Foucault offers for advancing what he called a “counter-history” of sovereign power. We begin with Foucault’s treatment of the madness of King George III in lectures given at the Collège de France in 1973-4, collected in Psychiatric Power. Here, we will allow Foucault himself to summarize what he takes, at that time, to be the important distinctions between the powers of sovereignty and disciplinary power. As we continue along, we will show how Foucault’s thinking of sovereignty becomes more complicated in his later lectures, which offer multiple lessons on the state of sovereignty and the political fictions of modernity.




Sovereign Madness

After years of battling mental disease, King George III, the figure of the raison d’État of Great Britain, fell into a mania. He was found at one point foaming at the mouth and at another addressing his subjects as peacocks. In 1788, the king was put under the care of Francis Willis, whose medi-cal treatment was something of a reverse-coronation, a taking away of his sovereignty. A previous bout of mania in 1765 had been treated by bleeding and Willis is said to have been brought in by aides because of his reputation for “humaneness.” Foucault begins his narrative with Philippe Pinel’s study, written as a “successful” case some ten years before the monarch gave up his crown for the final time, living out his final days as something of a sovereign scandal, if not a scandal to sovereignty. Allow me to quote at length, as Foucault does, from Pinel’s recitation of the case:

A monarch falls into a mania, and in order to make his cure more speedy and secure, no restrictions are placed on the prudence of the person who is to direct it; from then on, all trappings of royalty having disappeared, the madman, separated from his family and his usual surroundings, is consigned to an isolated place, and he is confined alone in a room whose tiled floor and walls are covered with matting so that he cannot harm himself [and not incidentally, communicate with the world outside]. The person directing the treatment tells him that he is no longer sovereign, but that he must henceforth be obedient and submissive. Two of his old pages…keep watch over him in calm silence, but take every opportunity to make him aware of how much stronger than him they are. One day, in a fiery delirium, the madman harshly greets his old doctor who is making his visit, and daubs him with filth and excrement. One of the pages immediately enters the room without saying a word, grasps by his belt the delirious madman, who is himself in a disgustingly filthy state, forcibly throws him down on a pile of mattresses, strips him, washes him with a sponge, changes his clothes, and, looking at him haughtily, immediately leaves to take up his post again. Such lessons, repeated at intervals over some months and backed up by other means of treatment, have produced a sound cure without relapse.24




Foucault emphasizes all the particulars of this remarkable scene, a ceremony of the transition of sovereignty proclaimed not through the pass-ing of the scepter or the touching of swords or through the taking of a crown. The king had indeed, for all concerned, lost his head along with the reason of his crown, and thus when the visitor declares to the monarch that “he is no longer sovereign,” that “he must henceforth be obedient and sub-missive,” it is an enunciation of what had already occurred to the king and a proclamation that, for Foucault, marks the passing away of sovereignty to disciplinary power. It is this turn of events, this event of the turning of sovereignty, that Foucault emphasizes: it is disciplinary power that will have the effect of calling into question the self-sovereignty of each person, telling each one that he or she “must be obedient and submissive,” that he or she is “no longer sovereign” over him or herself. Here we have a scene, Foucault notes, of a “deposition, a sort of reverse coronation” in which the king is “reduced to complete impotence.”25

Isolated from the outside world, we do not have the passing of sover-eignty from one entity to another, but its complete inversion: an abjection of sovereignty where the once-sovereign is “reduced” to “his body” and left with no other defense but his own abject defilement—the excrement he will hurl back so ineffectually at those treating him. “This is not a case of one sovereign power falling under another sovereign power, but the transition from a sovereign power—decapitated by the madness that has seized hold of the king’s head, and dethroned by the ceremony that shows the king that he is no longer sovereign—to a different power,” namely disciplinary power.26 To paraphrase Augustin Thierry’s claim about the king’s ineffectuality during the second French republic, this is “a king who rules, but does not govern”; indeed, he does not even govern himself.

We are used to such “transitions” of sovereignty, and Foucault’s depiction plays on all the scenes of the passing of the crown from one person to another, or even the passing of sovereignty from the king to the people through regicides, revolutions, and so on. This turn-over of sover-eignty, between one sovereign and another, is the most dangerous hiatus of sovereignty, its very interruption at its peak as power, and thus the need for so many ceremonies around these moments of passing, of the passing away of one sovereignty to another—rituals of glory infused, as Foucault argues well, with narratives of foundations and rights—natural, religious, and otherwise. But here, in this particular dethronement, this scene of the unseen, as Foucault depicts it, we have the transition, the passing and




passing away of sovereignty to another power that operates, not through the visibility of its apparatuses, but through its invisibility, in particular, the invisibility of Willis. We thus see the visibility of an invisible power whose site is not the sovereign but the impotent subject, the bare body on which “disciplinary power prevails” in all its nakedness—and this be-comes literal as the scene moves along. But, as is well known, this passing of sovereignty does not last long. King George would regain power along with his reason not long after his detention by Willis. And not long after Psychiatric Power, Foucault, too, would return to the problem of sover-eignty, no longer so dismissive of its hold over the political imaginary.

Nevertheless, this scene allows Foucault to distinguish two forms of power, though Foucault does note he’s being perhaps too schematic: it “seems” to him “that it is more complicated, and what’s more will become increasingly complicated.”27 In any case, despite this caveat, he argues at this time that there “are two absolutely distinct types of power correspond-ing to two systems”:

The macrophysics of sovereignty, the power that could be put to work in a post-feudal, pre-industrial government, and then the microphysics of disciplinary power. …There is a transformation, therefore, of the relationship of sovereignty into disciplinary power. And you see at the heart of all of this, at bottom, a kind of general proposition which is: “You may well be the king, but if you are mad you will cease to be so,” or again: “You may well be mad, but this won’t make you king.” …The king…could only be cured to the extent that he was not treated as king, and to the extent that he was subjected to a force that was not the force of royal power.28

For Foucault, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, we witness the overtaking of sovereign power by disciplinary power. Let us quickly follow Foucault in schematizing these “heterogeneous” forms of power. We will see, as he notes, that things are not so simple.

Foucault argues that sovereignty operates by “deduction [prélève-ment], a subtraction mechanism…power in this instance was essentially a right to seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culmi-nated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it,” the latter being the sovereign’s right over life and death, the right to let live and make die.29 In other words, sovereignty operates as a positive freedom,




leaving a space, as in Hobbes’s Leviathan, of “negative freedom” beyond the reach of the sovereign. Secondly, sovereignty founds itself in proce-dures and ceremonies marking its authorization and authority, whether founded upon divine right, an act of submission by the populace, rights of blood, or contracts.30 Sovereignty, Foucault argues, is thus backward looking in legitimating itself.31 Nonetheless, it must always “reactualize” itself through its rituals and ceremonies, its narratives and insignias. Sov-ereignty is taken once and for all, but is also “fragile,” “always liable to disuse or breakdown.”32 To forestall this breakdown, that is, for sover-eignty to “really hold,” there is the need, he says, for a “supplement or threat of violence. …The other side of sovereignty is violence, it is war.”33 We have discussed this “supplement” in both the introduction and chapter one. Thirdly, relations of sovereignty are not “isotopic.” They are tangled up with each other and “we cannot establish a system of exhaustive and planned hierarchy between them.”34

Different forms of sovereignty have “no common measure”: the rela-tions between the lord and serf, the suzerain and the fief-holder, the priest and the laity cannot be “integrated within a genuinely single system.”35 There is, however, a general equality of all beings under sovereignty: land, roads, instruments of production, as well as populaces. “The relationship of sovereignty applies not to a somatic singularity but to multiplicities—like families, users [of land, of roads, etc.]—which in a way are situated above physical individuality, or, on the contrary, it applies to fragments or aspects of individuality, of somatic singularity.”36 Finally, at the “summit” of sovereignty, at the height of its power, “there is a sort of underlying individualization” of the sovereign, but not his subjects, a “monarchical spiral” in which the sovereign sits in judgment over all below:

[I]f you look towards the summit [as sovereignty] you will see there the individualization absent at the base. …There is a sort of underlying individualization of the relationship of sovereignty towards the top, that is to say, toward the sovereign. The power of the sovereign necessarily entails a sort of monarchical spiral. That is to say, precisely insofar as the power of sovereignty is not isotopic but entails never ending disputes and movements, to the extent that plunder, pillage, and war still rumble behind these sovereign relationships, and the individual [sovereign] as such is never caught in the relationship, then, at a given moment




and coming from above, there must be something that ensures arbitration: there must be a single, individual point which is the summit of this set of heterotopic relationships that absolutely cannot be plotted on the same table. The sovereign’s individuality is entailed by the non-individualization of the elements on which the relationship of sovereignty is applied.37

In order to describe the “event” under discussion—here from sover-eignty to disciplinary power— there is an avowed simplification at work, which has the force of crystallizing the power/knowledge formations38 on both sides of this “invention,” “event” or “turning-point,” as Foucault will variously call them. The sovereignty on description here is a self-account-ing of sovereignty in its Bourbon form. It is also a thinking of sovereignty that is conflated with the law, treating all under it as equal through the rule of law, as Foucault describes it. It is also notable that the basis for Fou-cault’s descriptions of sovereignty is Ernst Kantorowicz’s indispensable and eminently readable history of medieval political theology, The King’s Two Bodies. For Kantorowicz, there are two bodies to the king: the king must be an individual with a body, a point at the summit to which disputes are brought. However, the body of sovereignty must not die with “the king’s somatic singularity. The monarchy must remain when the monarch no long exists. …The king’s body which holds together all of these rela-tionships of sovereignty [priest-laity, suzerain-fiefholder, etc.] must not disappear with the death of this individual X or Y.”39

For Kantorowicz, this is best seen in the phrase “the king is dead, long live the king,”40 and his long discussions of the “fiction of the crown” focuses on the hiatus of the comma in the statement, noting how often the body of the king was dead, and yet legally was treated as alive; this is how sovereignty dealt with its own passage between generations. As Foucault puts it, the medieval legal order required this “kind of permanence…the solidity of [the] realm, of [the] crown.”41 And I think we see something of this still wherever theorists focus on the sovereign summit (the figure of the king or the president) and its irresponsibility to those below, with little said about the other sovereign body operating in the dark shadows below.

In any event, Foucault will generalize from these particular descrip-tions to describe as passé any thinking that is infected with this older form of sovereignty while notably ignoring the polymorphism of sovereignty after (and during) the Middle Ages: feudalistic, constitutional, national, as




well as popular sovereignties that in fact were the background for George III’s tepid hold on his own power. Foucault will be suspicious of any form of thinking, including psychoanalysis, that assumes the performance of a sovereign, whether it be the sovereign-father of psychoanalysis, or even the law (of the father).42 We “must,” he writes, orient ourselves toward a conception of power that “replaces the privilege of law with the view point of the objective, the privilege of prohibition [as in, he believes, the repres-sive hypothesis of psychoanalysis] with the viewpoint of tactical efficacy, the privilege of sovereignty with the analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force relations. The strategical model, rather than the model based on law.”43 Foucault here conflates sovereignty and the functioning of the law, even the law of the father in psychoanalysis, rather than recognizing that the very concept of sovereignty puts it above or outside the law, as is depicted in his own description of its height beyond all other heights of power relations in society suggests. In Discipline and Punish, Psychiatric Power, and The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, Foucault argues that there is a move from the type of power demonstrated during the classical age (via the sovereign and the rule of law) and the polymorphic operations of power in the contemporary period. It would seem, then, that the propo-nents of the repressive hypothesis in psychoanalysis, to pick one discourse among others, are engaged less in a naïve thinking of power than in de-scribing its past. Psychoanalysis, Foucault argues, by theorizing sexuality in “terms of the law, the symbolic order, and sovereignty,” attempted, in the first decades of the twentieth century, “to surround desire with all the trappings of the old order of power.”44 The psychoanalytic history of sexu-ality is, Foucault writes, “in the last analysis a historical ‘retro-version.’ We must conceptualize the deployment of sexuality on the basis of the techniques of power that are contemporary with it.”45 Or, as he puts it in 1976,

[I]n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the production of an important phenomenon, the emergence, or rather the invention, of a new mechanism of power possessed of highly specific strategical techniques…absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty. …This new type of power…can no longer be formulated in terms of sovereignty.46

Foucault takes as his task asking after how to describe those forms of power heterogeneous to the sovereign law:




From where is this conception of power borrowed that sees power impinging massively from the outside, as it were, with a continuous violence that some (always the same) exercise over others (who are also always the same)? ....The idea that power has the essential function of prohibiting, preventing, and isolating, rather than allowing the circulation, change, and multiple combination of elements, seems to me a conception of power that also refers to an outdated historical model. … [I]t seems to me that by making the major characteristics we attribute to political power into an instance of repression, a superstructural level, and an instance whose essential function is to reproduce and preserve the relations of production, we do no more than constitute, on the basis of a historically outdated and different models, a sort of daguerreotype that we can find in power in a slave society, a caste society, a feudal society, and in a society like the administrative monarchy.47

Of course, his target is not simply psychoanalytic discourses, but also theories of right still fighting the politics of three to four centuries ago. Moreover, it’s his contention that, in some sense, this provides a theoreti-cal cover to secret away the dominant modes of power underway today. Such retro-versionist theories, he writes, “allow a system of right to be superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as to con-ceal its [discipline’s] procedures, the element of domination inherent in its techniques, and to guarantee to everyone, by virtue of the sovereignty of state, the exercise of his [or her] proper sovereign rights.”48 As such, if sovereignty has survived in the discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, embedded in the legal codes of the West, it may simply be as a ruse diverting attention from and “concealing” from view the disciplining of the body. “Retro-versions” of sovereignty, for Foucault, reinforce rather than resist other power formations; they “preclude the analysis” necessary for such resistance.49

The upshot of Foucault’s depiction of sovereignty in Psychiatric Power is that in these non-isotopic relationships of sovereignty, individu-ality exists only at the summit, not in the link of the subjects to sovereign-ty. To this schema, Foucault opposes disciplinary power, which operates not from on high, but “from below.”50 This power has a “total hold” over the individual’s body and it has no need for ceremonies, the old pomp and




circumstance, given its “procedures of continuous control…perpetually” putting the individual under “one’s gaze.”51 As with Jeremy Bentham’s dream of the panopticon, a prison where all are seen but can never see the gaze of power (an institutional inverse of the ring of Gyges), the individ-ual gains back his or her mastery only by internalizing this gaze, always watching over him or herself as if he or she were still on view. This will be the ultimate cure of King George, on Pinel’s account. Importantly, dis-ciplinary power will not be backward looking toward a particular founda-tion, theology, or a bloodies set of contractual rights, as with sovereignty, but is forward-looking toward its telos of “docile bodies”:

What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act on the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it. …Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, “docile” bodies.52

This docile body will be constantly aware—and this is why Foucault will focus on the nudity of George III—of one’s absolute visibility, which is the mechanism of disciplinary power, a “conscious and permanent vis-ibility.”53 Disciplinary power, hence, “looks forward to the future…when it will keep itself going by itself and only a virtual supervision will be re-quired, when discipline, consequently will have become habit.”54 Remak-ing the body, disciplinary power is auto-poietic in the strict sense. Rather than the discontinuous attention of the sovereign and the law, whose flip side is violence, the “disciplinary relationship” renders “punishment.”55 And these relations of disciplinary powers make everything visible, pro-viding a record of any and all data deemed relevant to the subjectivizing (assujettissement) of the subject.56 Unlike sovereign power, disciplinary power is isotopic: its movement through different institutions mirror and imitate one another, lining up to form a “disciplinary society.”57

This is not to say that there are not “residues” or remainders that cannot function outside these topoi of disciplinary power. It is not total-izing: “all disciplinary power [and the knowledge that is concomitant with it] has its margins,” such as the deserter to the army escaping its disci-plinary regime and regimens. But new disciplines, Foucault argues, are invented to pick up these residues, capturing the mentally ill, the delin-quents, sexual deviants, and so on: “We can say that the underworld is




the discipline of those inaccessible,” for example, “to police discipline.”58 What “characterizes” discipline is its continuing colonization of other dis-courses and other “disciplines” to enclose these residues, to place them within a system entailing a normative center through which the subject, always-already-pathetically abnormal, maintain and measure ourselves.59

More importantly, for Foucault’s analysis, is that disciplinary power, as with bureaucracy in Arendt, comes from nowhere and no one, and certainly not from the height of the sovereign. And yet, it individual-izes each one, such that the individual is, as such, not prior to these mecha-nisms of discipline, but is, on the contrary, the result of these mechanisms:

[W]e can say that disciplinary power, and this is no doubt its fundamental property, fabricates subjected bodies; it pins the subject-function exactly to the body. It fabricates and distributes subjected bodies; it is individualizing only in that the individual is nothing other than the subjected body. …Disciplinary power is individualizing because it fastens the subject-function to the somatic singularity by means of a system of supervision-writing, or by a system of pangraphic panopticism, which behind the somatic singularity projects, as its extension or as its beginning, a core of virtualities, a psyche, and which further establishes the norm as the principle of division and normalization, as the universal prescription for all individuals constituted in this way.60

The individual, then, is the terminus of this relationship of power, in which the subject is “fabricated” along a horizontal axis of relative normal-ity, made to gaze upon itself because of each one’s implacable abnormal-ity. This normalizing power has subjects but no sovereigns; even the “di-rector” of any such system “is caught up within a broader system in which he is supervised in turn…subject to discipline.”61 Foucault can thus set out his well known propositions in the first volume of the History of Sexuality with regard to power in general: (1) it is not the property of an agent, but is “exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations”62; (2) though de-centered from any subject, power is “intentional,” operating through a “series of aims and objectives63; and (3) relations of power are immanent to all social relations (economic, scientif-ic, pedagogic, sexual, and so forth). Power, consequently, is irreducible to any entity or agent—including, significantly, though he doesn’t mention it, the sovereign—since power “comes from below…all the way to the major




dominations.” The state, as such, is an effect of power relations already at work in the discursive formations of a given society.64

One cannot confront this power, Foucault argues, with an enunciation of rights or privileges derived from juridical power. We cannot reinstate the “juridical individual,” since if we scratch below the surface of this individual, we quickly find the “normalized” and “docile body” that is the result, the telos and not the archē, of disciplinary and normalizing power.65 This split, Foucault finally argues, is “man” in the modern era:

What I call Man [presumably, a reference to the transcendental doublet of the earlier Les mots et les choses], in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is nothing other than the kind of after-image of this oscillation between the juridical individual, which really was the instrument by which, in its discourse, the bourgeoisie claimed power, and the disciplinary individual, which is the result of the technology employed by the same bourgeoisie to constitute the individual in the field of productive and political forces. From this oscillation between the juridical individual—ideological instrument of the demand for power—and the disciplinary individual—real instrument of the physical exercise of power—from this oscillation between the power claimed and the power exercised, were born the illusion and the reality of what we call Man.66

Here we would emphasize the illusion at the heart of “man,” that is to say, the modern, sovereign self, or more precisely, the “oscillation” between the supposition of power, its “comme si,” and its exercise, its “comme ça,” between its “illusion” and its “reality,” to return to categories set up in this book’s introduction. It is also at this point that we can worry about a dualism of puissance in Foucault, one operating at two levels of the individual, one productive (discipline), the other deductive (sovereignty). If we were to stop here, Agamben would be right to point out a problem in Foucault’s analysis, which he argues must be “corrected, or at least com-pleted”67 for any adequate thinking of sovereignty and the bio-political:

If Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is exclusively based on juridical models (“What legitimates power?”) or on institutional models (“What is the State?”), and if he calls for a “liberation from the theoretical




privilege of sovereignty” in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code, then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which technologies of individualization and totalizing procedures converge? And, more generally, is there a unitary center in which the political “double bind” finds its reason to be? …What is the point at which the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into contact with objective power? ...Confronted with phenomena such as the power of the society of the spectacle that is everywhere transforming the political realm today, is it legitimate or even possible to hold subjective technologies and political technologies apart?68

In order to explain disciplinary power, there is little doubt that Fou-cault often doesn’t follow up on the points and summits of sovereignty—as both making and nevertheless irreducible to the law—that he himself discusses (its political theology, its point at the summit of emerging power dynamics in society, etc.), given that as he often simplifies sovereignty to a single state form (monarchy) and as indistinguishable from the law. But Foucault does not stop his analysis here. Returning to the madness of King George III, it was not as if sovereignty ended on the day King George III was handed over to the care of his doctors. In fact, he faced detention as part of a juridical process (somewhat mitigated because of his stature and based upon a “legal fiction” that allowed King George III, or rather his son, to stamp a letter to pass his powers to Lord Commissioners) that was used to help fold more power into the ascendant sovereignty of the Brit-ish prime minister’s office. The history of this period is complex and I’ll refrain from going into too many details here. Nonetheless, the “madness of King George” was used as an example (disseminated by rumor in the late eighteenth century) for the rise of another type of sovereignty (parlia-mentary, national) that no longer utilized the old forms of ceremony in the use of its power. But this does not sound the death knell of sovereigntism, since it is rather a mark of the historical change of ceremony and sover-eign pretense. The ascendance of new scientific-technological apparatuses provided different forms for legitimation and authorization for the use of sovereign violence, even one that would rebound upon the (no longer sov-ereign) monarch. This is what Benjamin will describe, in a letter to Ger-hard Scholem in 1938, as the rise of “the vast machinery of officialdom




whose functions are directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with.”69 Its ceremonies, as we’ve suggested in our discussions of Arendt, are more visible in their invisibility, dazzling less with displays of wealth and pageantry than with an air of omniscience, cloaked with lab coats or the more prosaic uniforms of the petit bureaucrat, carrying secretive checklists and so on—but no less ceremonial, and deadly, for all that.

There is, as we’ve noted in past chapters, an inherent “madness” to sovereignty, a self-supposition of its own height above laws and norms, above and beyond reason, and Foucault is right to point to a shift in which this “madness”—just months before the start of the French Revolution—could be used for a softer regicide. This de-coronation, at least in this episode, kept the king from power for only a few months, though disci-plinary power—the power of the police and the psychiatrists—remained a constant threat. Indeed, this was a period in which all kings were on guard for their power, not least for those aiming their gaze at their very heads.

Foucault’s narrative of the madness of King George points to similar changes that Arendt tracks in the Origins of Totalitarianism. Sovereignty and disciplinary power work hand-in-glove, the latter forming the very violence that reinforces the “claims”—to use Foucault’s word—of sover-eignty. In order to understand this better, we can point to the beginning of Discipline and Punish, where Foucault carefully provides the narrative of Damien the regicide, drawn and quartered—all the while asked to confess his crimes. Foucault argues that the tortured body is the flip side, the logi-cal inverse of sovereignty, even as he’ll argue later that sovereignty does not “tactically” operate on the body as such. Let me quote from Foucault on this point,

At the opposite pole [of sovereignty] one might imagine placing the body of the condemned man; he too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own ceremonial and he calls forth a whole theoretical discourse, not in order to ground the “surplus power” possessed by the person of the sovereign, but in order to code the “lack of power” with which those subjected to punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.70

The supplice is no longer puts on view such public spectacles,71 but this does not mean that sovereign power has not found, utilizing forms




of disciplinary power, new and insidious ways of providing lessons for its “others” in the darkest places of the political; la question (torture) of sovereignty is not as dated as once believed. The death penalty is no more “humane” in its procedures of last meals and last rites, with doctors on hand to make sure the patient is as healthy as possible until, strapped to a chair, asked to say his or her last words, the patient/prisoner is injected or gassed or electrocuted—all in front of witnesses a glass partition away, spectators taking in the abject lessons of the continuing sovereign power of the state.

Histories of the State of Sovereignty

We can now begin the turn toward Foucault’s considerations on sovereign biopower. Foucault, for his part, worried in later interviews that the last chapter of The History of Sexuality: Volume I (La Volenté de savoir) on bio-power was largely ignored by his readers. An opposite worry might now be the problem, especially after the work of Agamben, namely that readers of Foucault may overdetermine their readings through his notion of bio-power or bio-politics. One reason for this shift has largely to do with the fact that the last chapter of La Volenté de savoir was unprepared for within the rest of the text. “The Right of Death and Power over Life,” the last section of La Volenté de savoir, as is frequently mentioned, seems less a conclusion than an introduction to another text entirely. In addition, “The Right of Death and Power over Life” begins with a critique of the ju-ridical-philosophical concept of sovereignty and the political well known from his other work, and thus Foucault’s own descriptions of bio-power, while notable, were not entirely fleshed out. Juridical power and disci-plinary power, as Foucault will later admit—and acknowledge especially, if indirectly, in his forays into bio-power, governmentality, and pastoral power—are not easy to ply apart, and we must take seriously Foucault’s claim that sovereignty takes itself as “the summit” atop “this set of het-erotopic relationships that absolutely cannot be plotted on the same table,” a table of dynamic relations that would include the formations of power mentioned above. Sovereignty, as we have argued, is outside any law, any norm, that would constitute it within a given space, and thus would dis-figure any figuring of it or figuring it out as a purely juridical device, even as it works through a figuring of the political.

The publication of Foucault’s lecture courses, especially “Society Must Be Defended,” and the wider availability of interviews and essays




from the late 1970s make clear that the notion of bio-politics was a central concern of Foucault during this time. My worry, however, is that while bio-power has resurged as a philosophical trope, thanks largely in reac-tion to Agamben, it is the genealogy of bio-power and state racism that will be left aside. If it is a one-sided reading to take Foucault as offering just a simple rejection of juridical sovereignty in favor of discipline as the mechanism of power, so too it is equally one-sided to read Foucault’s thinking of state racism and bio-power without a full consideration of the genealogies through which he develops these ideas.72 In this section, I will turn to Foucault’s genealogy of the nation-state offered in “Society Must Be Defended,” connecting this, as Foucault does, with the rise of bio-pow-er and state racism that he details in that year’s final lectures, as well as the last chapter of La Volonté de savoir.

“Society Must Be Defended” is perhaps Foucault’s richest text on the fate of the political, not least because he provides a genealogy of his own method sourced to the discourses on power found in Boulainvil-liers’ and his peers’ views of societal war. Foucault’s lectures wrestle with how counter-narratives to formations of power can articulate themselves without themselves being “colonized”—Foucault’s own phrasing of the problem—by received tropes and metaphors. This discussion of “counter narratives” will bring us to the ascendance of national sovereignty and bio-power. It is the ascendance of national sovereignty, I argue, that leads Foucault to rethink his previous regicide in theory, or rather to think of the polymorphism of sovereignty after the regicides of the eighteenth century. Undoubtedly, his lectures in Security, Territory, Population (1977-8) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-9) continue to relegate a certain sovereign-ty, in terms of its state form, to a relatively minor role in the contemporary period. But ultimately, I pull the threads of his genealogies, showing how, in Foucault’s view, not just a “retroversion” of sovereignty, but sovereign-ty in a more pernicious form, disseminates itself in bio-political societies.

In our chapters on Hannah Arendt, we followed a trajectory that took us back to what she saw as the invention of sovereignty in the philosophi-cal use of the Greek archē as a word for rule. Our archaeology, focused on the conditions that set the possibility, according to Arendt, for the ruler-ruled relation, would be, for Foucault, “juridico-philosophical.” Foucault regarded his genealogies as historico-political, that is, seeking the geneses of power as they were elaborated not through the history of philosophy, but in opposition to philosophy and, in fact, more often than not, prior to their




philosophical articulation. This means that we need to follow Foucault in thinking of non-state sovereignties and formations of power, which we have begun to describe in chapter one and four in terms of the rise of na-tional sovereignty and the police states put in force to protect them.

On this count, “Society Must Be Defended” is indispensable. The work begins on familiar ground. Foucault critiques political theory for missing the import of non-juridical movements of power given that they have been “essentially centered around royal power…since the Middle Ages.”73 Foucault proposes, as opposed to this top-down view of power, to take an “ascending” approach, one that will ultimately see both states and individuals as the “effects” of powers circulation.74 We should, he says, bid a final farewell (adieu) to the theory of sovereignty as it has been constitut-ed.75 Further, the analyses of Boulainvilliers and his interlocutors introduce a “perspectival discourse” and “counter-histories” to sovereign power, ar-guing along an “ascending axis” that confronts the juridical-philosophical, specifically, Roman rights of sovereignty claimed by Louis XIV and other monarchs.76 Boulainvilliers’ is a central character in Foucault’s staging of these issues, as we noted in our introduction. For Foucault, the discourses of this declining aristocracy offer the “first exclusively historico-political” discourse, one that would influence the juridico-philosophical narratives of power only through the latter’s attempt to exclude these analyses from legitimate discussion.77

This is not to say that the juridico-philosophical discourses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated without their own concep-tions of history. For the sovereigntists, France and its king were essentially heirs to Rome and its caesars. According to a popular histoire, one that lent legitimacy and was in the background of the Catholic Louis XIV’s use of Roman mythology (namely, Apollo, the sun king), the Franks, as found-ers of France, were itinerant descendants of the Trojans who had left Troy under King Francus, the son of Priam. For Boulainvilliers, however, the Franks were not cousins to the Romans, but their conquerors, and rather than denoting a remarkably large family reunion, the Franks entering Gaul were their blood enemies. And as conquerors they were to have certain rights, which were neither natural nor juridical.

What is called Boulainvilliers’ “dangerous doctrine of the con-quest” therefore contested the mythoi of Louis XIV in two important ways: First, he challenged the substance of these histoires, arguing that behind the thèse royale was a history of unacknowledged and forgotten battles




that must be remembered if the aristocracy was to reclaim its historical rights, which were ultimately derived from violence. Secondly, Boulain-villiers changed the subject of history from the sovereigns and their con-tinuous reign over nations at war with one another. History was not made up of class struggles or of the doings of great men, but of wars between nations, and in his own historical period, the “Gallic-Roman element” of society was successfully taking power from the aristocracy and, not inci-dentally, replacing them with professional bureaucrats at the court. This administration, for Boulainvilliers, did not serve the nation, but was basi-cally a “permanent ritual operation” that served “daily lessons in public right.” As Foucault writes,

The court’s essential function is to constitute, to organize, a space for the daily and permanent display of royal power in all its splendor. The court is basically a permanent ritual operation that begins again every day and requalifies a man who gets up, goes for a walk, eats, has his loves and his passions, and who is at the same time—thanks to all that, because of all that, and because none of all that is eliminated—a sovereign.78

Part of displaying “royal power in all its splendor” included the pro-duction of narratives of its power. Relevant not just to our discussions in this chapter, but also more generally to sovereign self-supposition, Fou-cault argues,

[F]or a long time, [history] remained related to rituals of power. It seems to me that we can understand the discourse of the historian to be a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce a justification of power and a reinforcement of that power…[by] speak[ing] the right of power and to intensify the luster of power. It had two roles. The point of recounting history, the history of kings, the mighty sovereigns and their victories (and if need be their temporary defeats) was to use the continuity of the law to establish a juridical link between those men and power, because power and its working were a demonstration of the continuity of the law itself. History’s other role was to use the almost unbearable intensity of the glory of power, its examples, to fascinate men. Like rituals, coronations, ceremonies, and legendary stories, history is an operator of




power, an intensifier of power.79

Both the practice and the content of writing these histories was sover-eigntist. In brief, the moral of these fables was that what sovereigns do “is never pointless, futile, or petty, and never unworthy of being narrated.”80 Foucault’s discussion here is a critique of the still-mainstream versions of historiography, and this can even be extended to any form of narration (e.g., journalism) that sees its duty to to encircle and describe the inner workings of the inner circles of power (e.g., the Oval Office of the White House), whose very performance provides a continuous public lesson on what is important. Sovereignty as such cannot exist without this media-function, this prosthesis and simulacrum of itself, i.e., this mediation.

That Boulainvilliers would be chosen by the royal court to condense the history of France for the duc de Bourgogne in his L’État de la France would provide him an opportunity for a counter-lesson in public right, or rather a lesson in the violent origins of all such public rights. In his hands, Foucault writes, “history does not simply analyze or interpret forces: it modifies them”—a claim, of course, that sovereigns have long known.81 Like Foucault the genealogist, Boulainvilliers’ more literal genealogy of his family history intervenes in history by writing history. For Bou-lainvilliers and Foucault, as such, there is no neutral point from which to converse about history; writing history is not exceptional to history itself. Importantly, for Boulainvilliers, one either inculcates the lessons of sover-eignty or learns another more “dangerous doctrine,” as his contemporaries called it. By attempting to awake the memories of the aristocrats, Boulain-villiers “modif[ies] the very disposition and the current equilibrium of the relations of force.”82 Thus Foucault argues that Boulainvilliers invented another thinking of power:

[H]e defined the principle of what might be called the relational character of power: power is not something that can be possessed, and it is not a form of might; power is never anything more than a relationship that can, and must, be studied only by looking at the interplay between the terms of that relationship. One cannot therefore write either the history of kings or the history of peoples; one can write the history of what constitutes those opposing terms. …By writing that history, by defining the relational character of power, and by analyzing it in history, Boulainvilliers was challenging…the juridical model of sovereignty which had,




until then, been the only way of thinking of the relationship between the people and the monarch, or between the people and those who govern. Boulainvilliers describes the phenomenon of power…in historical terms of domination and the play of relations of force. …In Boulainvilliers, we therefore find—for the first time, I think—a historico-political continuum.83

The lineage between Boulainvilliers’ genealogy, as depicted in “Soci-ety Must Be Defended,” and Foucault’s genealogies of power/knowledge is unmistakable. In the lectures that follow, Foucault turns directly to a dis-cussion of the meaning of genealogy, especially the problem of the rise of the university and officially directed knowledges, those that “disqualif[y] what might be termed useless and irreducible little knowledges [and] nor-malizes those knowledges.”84 Foucault argues that the state becomes the locus for the “selection, normalization, and centralization” of “normal-ized” knowledges, and provides the displacement of philosophy from its summit at the height of the sciences. The regimes and regimens of science would henceforth become the masterful knowledge behind disciplinary power.85 The state, in other words, is in these lectures the juncture of ju-ridical and disciplinary power. Despite this normalization by the state of other knowledges, what Foucault argues is occurring during the eighteenth century is the movement of Boulainvilliers’ thinking of the nation—what Arendt in the same context called “race-thinking before racism” in Origins of Totalitarianism—to the center of politics, providing a binary view of society that would crystallize in various philosophical tropes, he argues, including Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, but more significantly and per-niciously, in race-thinking and nationalism.

Boulainvilliers’s historical pedagogy, as we have seen, depicts the Franks—the Germanic peoples whose defeat of the outlying areas of the Roman empire is the starting point for most French histories—as a fe-rocious race that had given up its freedom for the increasing peace and security of the graveyards of history. These great warriors were, Boulai-nvilliers claims, the forbearers of a dying aristocracy selling itself out for a pittance to the royal court, a court led by a king who should have been nothing other than a magistrate marking a place of exchange between Frank-descended seigniors. To those who have not heard of Boulainvil-liers, Foucault’s claims for the importance of the French aristocrat would appear audacious. However, Foucault is right to point to the boiling caul-




dron of claims and counter-claims made for different nations—eventually “classes” for Foucault—within France as the eighteenth century reached its end in the Terror of the Revolution and the rise of Napoleon.

The Rise of the Nation-State

The intellectual field, in the late eighteenth century, Foucault argues, was divided between the historicism of Boulainvilliers—defined as seeing “an unavoidable connection between war and history, [which] no matter how far back it goes … never finds nature, right, order, or peace”86—and the anti-historicism of the Rousseauists, with their thinking of a pre-societal “noble savage.”87

During the French Revolution, he argues, the nation takes over the state. For Sieyès and the ideologues of the Revolution, the nation preexists the state88; it is a particular being that must take the state in order to make itself universal, to proclaim its rights, to protect the nation once and for all. What we find in Sieyès, to simplify, is an inversion of the previous Bour-bon order. The state does not exist as that which gathers together a land and its indiscriminate multitude, but rather is now to be thought as an in-strument of the nation. Once it takes over the state, Foucault argues, what

characterize[s] the nation [at the time of Sieyès] is a vertical relationship between a body of individuals who are capable of constituting a State, and the actual existence of the State itself. It is in terms of this vertical nation/State axis, or the Statist potentiality/Statist realization axis, that the nation is to be characterized and situated. This also means that what constitutes the strength of a nation is not so much its physical vigor [as in Boulainvilliers]. What does constitute the strength of a nation is now something like its capacities, its potentialities, and they are all organized around the figure of the State: the greater a nation’s Statist capacity, or the greater its potential, the stronger it will be.89

Here we have in brief an account of nationalist yearnings since the days of the French Revolution: no longer domination over another class, no longer a depiction of a binary opposition within the state, but rather the need to control the state, to exploit its intermediary powers between the people and itself, the nation and itself—a Rousseauism read through the




nationalist guise.

The essential function and the historical role of the nation is not defined by its ability to exercise a relationship of domination over other nations [n.b., though it will now turn its attention to the barbarians to be colonized]. It is something else: its ability to administer itself, to manage, govern, and guarantee the constitution and workings of the figure of the State and of State power. …The nation is the active, constituent core of the State. The nation is the State, or at least an outline State.90

The state will be the instrument for the nation’s protection; it will join with the disciplining of those, in a claim by Sieyès not cited by Foucault, who “are not of my species, [who] are not my fellow men; a noble is not of my species; he is a wolf and I shoot.”91 During the eighteenth century, there is a turn-over of the thought of sovereignty from the state as king guiding and creating a multitude to a conceptualization of an opposition between the nation and that segment of the social that holds back its free-dom, all in an era in which techniques of security and political economy described living as “to live dangerously.”92 Politics is motivated at this time, Foucault implies, not by Aristotle’s righteous anger for justice, or Christian humility, or even a Rousseauian pleasure in willing the good, but fear. (Thus all the work of an earlier period that Stuart Elden notes linked terror and territory to its common root in Latin.93) National sover-eignty, exploiting disciplinary power, takes aim at the wolf of monarchical sovereignty, the carnivorous monarchival power that deems “might makes right,” as in the La Fontaine fable of the lamb and the wolf, and hunts it down: a regicide in fact, but not the denouement of sovereignty itself. As such, Boulainvilliers provides a discourse essentially anti-State, and these new discourses produce narratives tying the nation to the state, marking the “transition from the virtual [the “outline state” of the nation] to the real, the transition from the national totality to the universality of the State.”94

This readies us for Clausewitz’s nineteenth-century dictum: war will be politics by another means. Only from this nationalist context, Foucault argues, can one understand the rise of the bio-political in the nineteenth century as operating alongside governmentality and disciplinary power—all “crystallizing” together into a pernicious national sovereignty more deadly than the old sovereign states, since war retreats from the historico-political discourses as the field of intelligibility to the stasis of civil war:




“We see the emergence of an internal war that defends society against threats born of and in its own body,”95 like the body’s immune system that attacks the self for its own protection. War, he argues, as the raison d’état turns-over to the biological, to an immanent, bodily conception of the nation-state.96 Racism as state policy is born.

Before turning fully to biopolitical sovereignty, it would be helpful review the heterogeneous forms of power Foucault was describing during this period:

1. Sovereignty: Foucault uses this term, as we have seen, for the function-ing and logic of a given power of the state, especially the state in its monar-chical form. Where Foucault thinks sovereignty as such (its self-mastery, self-positioning, its place of exception outside the law and outside any norm), we’ll mark it, since to refuse to compare Foucault’s conceptualiza-tion of sovereignty, e.g., to the work of Arendt, because he doesn’t use this term betrays the worst assumptions of nominalism: if he doesn’t use the name, somehow he’s not discussing it. No doubt, for his part, Foucault begins many of his lecture courses describing “sovereignty”—considered not in terms of the self or the other ways found hitherto in this book—as a “retro-version” of power. Many times, he discusses the older, familial forms of power (the sovereign monarch) as a pedagogical means for teas-ing out non-state dispositifs. Limited to the rule of law, sovereignty, in Foucault’s use of the term, acts directly on the body (e.g., the supplice of Damien the regicide in Discipline and Punish) in its right over life and death. It utilizes ceremonies and fictions of the divine or mythological self in order to render the king’s subject obedient. Foucault is said to think “sovereignty” as juridical, and therefore conflated with the law.

2. Discipline: Unlike sovereignty, this power operates at the “micro”-lev-el. The scientist, the physician, and all manner of experts “break down…individuals, places, times, actions, and operation,” fixing “processes of progressive training [dressage] and permanent control,” in the end divid-ing the “normal from the abnormal.”97 Discipline works “techniques of normation (normation)” that shape subjectivities based upon prescriptive models.98 Foucault’s best-known example is the panopticon, which func-tions through “the gaze” of the prison guard and the “interiorization” of that gaze by its individual prisoners, who are unaware of when and if they are being seen, Foucault’s primary example of political pedagogy in the




early 1970s. Whereas sovereignty is “deductive,” discipline is “produc-tive” of “docile bodies”; it is a technique, a “how” of power: “how to sur-vey someone, how to control her conduct, her comportment, her aptitudes, how to intensify her capacities, how to put her in a place where she will be more useful.”99

3. Biopower: This last quotation from Discipline and Punish—“how to put her in a place where she will be more useful”—brings us to Foucaultian biopower, especially as it is developed in his 1978-9 lecture course, The Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault argues that bio-power operates at the level of population and on “life” itself, not on particular bodies. The science of bio-power is statistics. Importantly, he teases out bio-power not just in terms of the rise of nationalisms, as we have shown and will develop further, but also through the rise of civil society (what Arendt dubbed the realm of the “social”) as well as liberal and neoliberal thought. For Foucault, biopower cannot be thought without reference to “governmentality.”

Biopolitical Sovereignty

According to Foucault, biopower developed along with the dispositif or apparatus of “security,” which in the eighteenth century provided for the circulation of goods beyond the direct control of the state. What Foucault describes here is in line of Arendt’s history of the rise of the social in the Human Condition, since both agree that the political economy, the police state, and governmental administration all grew to fruition with the rise of “civil society.” For both, this confluence of events, as we noted in chap-ter three, was coextensive with (a) the rise of economics as modeled on the household into the techniques of government, and (b) the dominance of metaphors depicting a “national household” that continues its mastery over the political.

The social, on Foucault’s account, exploits the dispositif of security, which quelled the anxieties of this civil society, regulating its “reality” through a “centrifugal” force that spread through a given space; discipline, for its part, operates, on Foucault’s account, by enclosing given spaces, such as the prison, the madhouse, and the hospital. Security “lets things happen” locally for optimizing the utility of the population, and the gov-ernment’s experts, e.g., the kings’ administrators, assume greater control in line with the emergence of the powers of the police. This, of course, is the era of the Physiocrats, whose very name derived from the Greek word




for nature. For Foucault, there is an inherent given-and-take between the growth of the police and the rise of liberal economic thought, which more and more views the economy as operating at the frontiers of the reach of the state. Liberal political economy sees power as a self-limiting form, and its task is to expand the utility of the population at the least cost in time and money to the state, which obviously, though, does not and has not precluded a powerful police operation. (Later-day political libertarian-ism functions precisely by conflating staggering differences in economic ideology from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.)

On this view, “government, initially limited to the function of super-vision, is only to intervene when it sees that something is not happening according to the general mechanics of behavior, exchange, and economic life.”100 This dispositif—and here we should note that for Foucault liberal-ism is a technique of power, not a form of power itself—gives rise to a conception of economic freedom in which civil society is but a process, not a collection of subjects under governmental authority. In other words, the rights of the subject under sovereignty are not to be confused with the “transactional” rights of political economy. Economic thinking will find among its techniques utilitarianism. The major shift at this time is the fic-tion of a homo economicus over whom “there is no sovereign.”101 Again, without minimizing all the differences between Arendtian archaeology and Foucaultian genealogies, this is precisely what Arendt identifies as the dominance of homo faber and its “efficiencies.” The government is to be a “frugal” one, though Foucault is also clear that liberal governmentality op-erates with the police, a term that we will discuss in specificity soon: there is an inseparable “conjunction,” he argues, “between the disciplines and liberalism.”102 In corporatist states, such as Augusto Pinochet’s Argentina, we find case studies of the rather contented marriage of dictatorship and libertarian economics. In these police states, “a government…merges with administration,” with “all the weight of a governmentality.”103 Therefore, we do not have an “economy” of powers in which one form (economism) replaces another (disciplinarity), which had itself replaced another (sover-eignty). Economic freedom “and disciplinary techniques are completely bound up with each other,” Foucault maintains.104 The flip side of liberal-ism’s “leave us alone [laissez-nous faire]” is its “culture of danger”: the risk society of liberalism is conceptually and historically allied to disposi-tifs of security.105

In the twentieth century, economic paranoia of the state becomes




manic, and neo-liberalism envisions the subject as wholly sovereign, a term Foucault does not use, but is clear from the movement he traces from the labor-centric writings of economic liberalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the neo-liberal emphasis on formal competition. Neo-liberalism is not centered on Lockean conceptions of property and the exchanges of wages for labor. On the contrary, it depicts subjects as freelancers, a term originating with medieval swordsmen, ever in control of ourselves and entering into arrangements for pursuing our free inter-ests—all in competition with each other. This is the well known “risk so-ciety,” where we are each “companies of one.”106 Considered something like mini-states, we seek mechanisms of security-freedom that provide ”the least exposure to danger,” even as, for Foucault, the very existence of savings banks, mass marketed detective novels, and ubiquitous phar-maceuticals increase fears of senior impoverishment, crime, and disease, respectively.107 And we could add, precisely at a time where freelancers are left free of any of the social securities of previous eras. In principle, the “invisible hand” of capitalism is “atheistic,” since there is no master homo economicus in charge of the economy. It claims that economics acts blindly or not at all, yet the administrative police makes great strides in its surveying of the population in the name of safety and security. Homo eco-nomicus is no longer considered a “natural” figure, as in Locke, but instead a participant in a game or structure of formal competition. Each is on his or her own, seeking an optimal return on investments of time and energy, while measuring the debts owed among one and all.

The other powers of governmentality produce a “civil society” that is but the glue the holds these entrepreneurs together, an “entanglement” of powers that Foucault underlines time and again in his later lectures. For Arendt, as we saw, the social glue of society would become race-thinking and then racism, and Foucault argues there is a bio-political “doubling” “carried out since the subjects of right on which political sovereignty is exercised appear as a population that a government must manage.”108 In this competitive, freelancing society is a bio-politics in which each is never immune from the powers of the police state, or is rather attacked as part of the social body’s immunitarian apparatus. There is a war of all against all: as the U.S. army put it in a series of 2007-8 television commer-cials that inadvertently tied all of Foucault’s considerations of biopower together, each is an “army of one,” a freelancer in the oldest sense. Or as an example, we can point to the rise of American exceptionalism and its




security apparatuses along with its call for “freer” economic trade—all in the name, bringing Foucault’s discussion together, of “economic security.” We will come back to this point, where the laissez-nous faire of homo eco-nomicus meets up with the faire vivre (make live) and laissez mourir (let die) of the most potent biopolitical sovereignty.

Foucault, Schmitt, and “the King who rules but does not govern”

These nation-state, disciplinary institutions, and the court bureaucracies come together to deliver pernicious political violence. As the state be-comes the locus through which this violence operates, another element returns, like the repressed, as Nancy writes: the reinstantiation of sover-eignty with bio-power, which would make state racism possible and de-liver on the worst of its promises. Before coming to this last element, let us turn for a moment to the powers that Foucault puts under the heading of “governmentality” and “pastoral power.” The import of these other gene-alogies will become clear.

For Foucault, as he notes in Security, Territory, Population, govern-ing is not the “same things as ‘reigning,’ ...[G]overning is not the same thing as being a sovereign, a suzerain, a lord, a judge, a general, master, or professor. There is a specificity, let us surmise, to what it is to govern” be-yond previous descriptions of power.109 Here, he turns to Augustin Thierry, himself a nationalist descendent of Boulainvilliers and historian of the ear-ly Germanic peoples in France, who offered the republican dictum that the “king may rule, but he does not govern” (“le Roi reigne mai il ne gouverne pas”).110 This, for Foucault, phrases the “modern political problem”:

The privilege that government begins to exercise in relation to rules, to the extent that, to limit the king’s power, it will be possible one day to say, the “king reigns, but he does not govern,” this inversion of government and the reign or rule and the fact that government is basically much more than sovereignty, much more than reign or ruling, much more than imperium, is, I think, absolutely linked to population.111

Foucault points out that this problem of governmentality has its ana-logue in a long-standing theological view of God’s power. God, it is said, provides the general laws by which, in turn, his shepherds would watch over individual members of the flock. Foucault also describes a “strik-




ing” “theological-cosmological continuum,” which provides the impetus, which we analyze in the next chapter, for the work of Schmitt and Agam-ben: the continuum in which power moves from God to the sovereign mon-arch to the father of a family by way of nature and pastors.112 But, accord-ing to Foucault, there is a “break” in this circuit of power during the late Renaissance. The whole of Agamben’s Il Regno e la Gloria (2007) sets out to date this “break” much earlier, to the beginnings of Christianity itself, while also claiming, despite Foucault and Schmitt’s well-known work on these specific terms, that these concepts have “rarely been thematized as such outside the strictly theological sphere.”113 He’ll also claim, confound-ingly, that Foucault’s mistake was to investigate this “continuum” only within explicitly political texts. Thus Foucault’s analysis needs to be “cor-rected” and “clarified” (yet again) since, despite Foucault’s extended anal-ysis of pastoral power back to many of the theological figures in Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, “he appears to ignore the theological implications of the term oikonomia.”114 For Agamben, Fou-cault’s references to a number of the same, but not all figures important to Il Regno e la Gloria is evidence that Foucault concentrated on “medieval political treatises,” and thus “was not attentive enough” to work on these concepts in “different milieux.”115 However, Foucault misses none of the major claims available in Il Regno e la Gloria, especially since much of Agamben’s text is not on the track of these early Christian texts, but is given over to concepts and descriptions derived from Carl Schmitt’s read-ings of this period in Political Theology II. More pertinently, Foucault’s analyses in his late-70s lecture courses, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, performed the genealogical task—however successful is another question—of providing a “history of the present” that would lead his discussions of economy, security, and the bio-political up to the contemporary period (Agamben’s analysis stops three hundred years before skipping to Schmitt’s analysis of democratic doxa). We can-not help but pause and note what is a sovereign rhetoric that would know what Foucault “ignored,” “attended to,” etc., all before a writer who will have the last word over history and its paradigms in a masterful, sovereign pedagogy, since he uses this lack of attention as a teachable moment for others on performing genealogies of concepts.

This sets us up better for the ensuing chapters of this book. Returning to Foucault, the theoretical problem of this “continuum” arises because God imparts but a “general grammar,” a set of “immutable, intelligible




laws,” but does not “‘govern’ the world.”116 The economy of salvation, then, becomes very worldly, mundane even; something “supplemental in relation to sovereignty,” “something without a model” is demanded of the sovereign, namely an art of government over the res publica, “the public domain (la chose publique).”117 Here, we could return to the whole of anal-yses in chapter one, while also noting that Rousseau’s problem is precisely the relation between the sovereign and the government.

Sovereignty evinces, on Foucault’s account, a vicious “circularity,” wherein the sovereign is to aim at the common good, which in the theories of Pufendorf and Rousseau means nothing other than the exercising of sovereignty itself, that is, the submission of subjects to sovereign: “the end of sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty,” the tautology of sovereignty has always stipulated.118 Governmentality performs not through laws, as classical sovereignty did, and his analysis teases out the insular circular-ity of this monarchical sovereignty isolating itself on high from the ad-ministrative governmentality operating in the shadows behind the king’s purview. Governmentality directs itself to the care of the people through a “range of multiform tactics.”119 Striking again an Arendtian theme, Fou-cault argues that governmentality was “linked” to the rise of the bureau-cracies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whose principle was the care of the people by a careful collection of data from a nation depicted as a large household.120 What Foucault marks—and I am simplifying his genealogy here—is a shift from the circular raison d’État of the pre-gov-ernmentality era (the sovereign self-protection through terror over the ter-ritory) to an ethos of care at a point when economic concerns came into the political through the rise of mercantilism, which itself, he says, was a tactic in the might of the sovereign.

Sovereignty, in this way, is “renewed.”121 Concomitant with the rise of the bureaucracies came an invention of knowledges and disciplines through which the bureaucracies of the state would govern by watching over and caring for the nation. We thus witness a changover from an earli-er “art” of governance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to these “sci-ences” of government, a veritable political science focusing attention on population and looking at the aggregate effects of incremental movements by one and all. Here we have the ideologies of the Physiocrats and their naturalisms and their focus on phusis as well as early liberalism. Govern-mentality does not mark an excess of the state in all of these ideologies, but nevertheless the government, according to multiple authors of the pe-




riod, aimed not at the state’s well-being, but the “welfare of the popula-tion, the improvement of its condition, [and] the increase of its wealth.”122 We live, Foucault argues, in a continuing era of governmentality and thus it is important to understand its development123:

[T]he state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality. …First came the state of justice, born in a territoriality of feudal type and corresponding in large part to a society of law [Foucault, conflates sovereignty and law]—customary laws [e.g., the British “constitution”] and written laws—with a whole game of engagements and litigations. Second, the administrative state, born in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries…that corresponds to a society of regulations and disciplines. Finally, the state of government, which is no longer essentiality defined by…the surface it occupies, but by a mass: the mass of population, with its volume, its density. … And this state of government, which is grounded in its population and which refers and has resort to the instrumentality of economic knowledge, would correspond to a society controlled by apparatus (dispositif) of security.124

We can see Foucault redescribing discipline in these lectures in terms of governmentality.125 In fact, Foucault suggests, sovereignty is an exem-plary form of this governance of the subject.126 Further, Foucault argues, “It is certain that in contemporary societies that the state is not simply one of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of power…but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it.”127

These discussions of governmentality, as is well known, refer Foucault to older, Christian forms of “pastoral power.” This power, born again or renewed in early modernity, will be one that will lead each lamb to its salvation or leave behind those to be sacrificed as but lambs to the slaughter in the exercise of power. Pastoral power is linked by Foucault to early Christian practices in which the pastor watched over its flock prepar-ing it for eventual salvation, and in this way is associated with the care (cura) of the shepherd (pastor). Modern pastoral power—theological in provenance, biological in its mechanisms—watches over the herd while also paying heed to the material needs of each person. Foucault claims that Greek and Roman discussions of power were territorial, and that pastoral power instead has its roots in the Hebraic and Christian traditions. The fact




that the pastor looks after a flock that can wander, like a nation, over any particular territory, is important to note. For his part, the shepherd must be constantly on hand to the flock, without whom they would disperse:

The theme of keeping watch is important. …The shepherd acts, he works, he puts himself out, for those he nourishes and who are asleep. He watches over them. He pays attention to them all and scans each one of them. He’s got to know his flock as a whole, and in detail. Not only must he know where good pastures are, the season’s laws, and the order of things; he must also know each one’s particular needs. ...The shepherd’s power implies individual attention paid to each member of the flock.128

Here we have the rhetoric and expectation of every national leader of recent memory. Additionally, as Plato argues in the Statesman, the shep-herd would be like a god among men, and this is why Plato rejects the analogy between the statesman and the shepherd for a this-world politics. Mixing in another of the analogies from the Statesman, Foucault argues that shepherd is “fundamentally” “a physician,”129 which means that the shepherd will continually “render an account” of the safety and salvation of his flock. Rooted in the Hebraic tradition,130 pastorship becomes a form of governance only with its reinscription in the Christian tradition and Christian agapē. This Christian pastorship

implies a peculiar type of knowledge between the pastor and each of his sheep. This knowledge is particular. It individualizes. It isn’t enough to know the state of the flock. That of each sheep must also be known. …The shepherd must be informed as to the material needs of each member of the flock and provide for them when necessary. He must know what…each of them does—his public sins. Last but not least, he must know what goes on in the soul of each one, that is, his secret sins, his progress on the road to sanctity.131

Utilizing the “Christian techniques of examination, confession, guid-ance, [and] obedience,”132 pastoral power is the “embryonic point of the governmentality [whose] entry into politics marks the threshold of the modern state.”133 Christian agapē provides not just for salvation, but also the mortification necessary for saving one’s soul. The modern pastor,




Foucault suggests, is the policeman, the one whose original power was to watch over the religion, morals, health, and public safety (public salut) of the people during the eighteenth century. As Nicolas Delamare puts it in his Traité de la police (1705), the “police must see to everything per-taining to men’s happiness; they were not, nor are they now, merely an apparatus of the law.” They are also the medium through which the laws and regulations—all the “calculations and tactics of the state”134—touch life itself.135 In this way, the “true object of the police becomes, at the end of the eighteenth century, the population”: climbing the pulpit of its renewed pastorship, the police and “the state essentially takes care of men as a population.”136

In due course, then, the old raison d’État of the governmentality of the seventeenth century is “broken up into four elements—economic practice, population management, law and respect for freedoms, police—which are added to the great diplomatic apparatus (dispositif) that has hardly changed since the eighteenth century.”137 Politically, the shepherd will also be the executioner who will love you to death and sacrifice you in the name of the salvation and safety of the flock.138 Pastoral power, he writes, “was no longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world, but rather insuring it in this world. And in this context, the word salvation takes on a different meaning: health, well being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, [and] protection against accidents.”139

We need only look to Carl Schmitt, would-be court philosopher to the third Reich, to see the stakes of this pastoral power. Foucault’s genealogies of “pastoral governmentality” relied on resources ancient, medieval, and modern, which had also grounded Schmitt’s thinking in the 1930s. In his earlier work, Schmitt had wondered about the “dualism” between “reign-ing” and “governing” in other “parliamentary” state systems, a distinction brought into relief by Thierry’s dictum that the king rules but does not govern, a point discussed by the jurist Max von Seydal.140

Political leadership and administration is in the hands of ministers, who are responsible to the popular assembly and dependent on its trust. The famous formula for this reads: “Le roi règne mais il ne gouverne pas” [The king rules but does not govern]. The question posed by...Max von Seydal, what then remains of “régner” if one removes “gouverner?,” is answerable




in reference to the fact that one distinguishes between potestas [power] and auctoritas [authority] and that the distinctive meaning of authority is made evident in regard to political power.141

By laying out this supposed “dualism” in terms of the trinity of his aptly titled Staat, Bewegung, Volk (State, Movement, People), Schmitt sought to define and defend the specificity of the new German constitu-tion of 1933. Needless to say, Schmitt sees a sovereign path for bringing together this “dualism.” He posits—at a time in which his writings were at their most influential in the Nazi hierarchy—that the Führer, redubbed das Führung, was just the figure to do so. In order to argue this, Schmitt specifically evokes the pastoral care of the early church. Having already defended the propriety of Hitler’s moves under the previous Weimar con-stitution as that constitution’s “protector,” Schmitt avers that the president, at that time, Hitler, had merely returned to his mandated position as the head of state as one “who rules and does not govern.”142 As chancellor, though, Hitler not only now served the function of a ruling, but also had a new power Schmitt dubs, akin to the Führer’s preferred title, Führung, meaning, he says, “the person who governs.” Schmitt stipulates, “Führen does not mean to command,” and he claims the distinction between com-manding and governing goes back to a time in which the early Catholic and Roman authorities had “distorted the image of the shepherd and the sheep” in line with a certain “dogmatism.”143 Schmitt then turns to a pas-sage we cited earlier from the Statesman, arguing that while in Plato the shepherd is of a different kind than his flock, there is an “unconditional racial equality [Artgleichheit] between the Führer and the people of the party.”144 (Needless to say, Schmitt’s mytho-politics leaves out the He-braic sources Foucault later cites.) Schmitt then references languages that inherited various forms of the Latin gubernator (gouvernement, governo, government, even the “Gubernium” of the Hapsburg monarchy) and ar-gues that the history of “gubernator” provides “a good example by which a metaphorical comparison becomes a concept that is both juridical and technical.”145 We are not far, of course, from Foucault’s later historical claims, though one is left to wonder just how Schmitt can dilineate, as his discussion of the secularization of theology necessitates, a “metaphorical comparison” from a juridical or technical “concept.” Moreover, Schmitt’s linguistic analysis is driven, despite its invocation of the early Church, by




bad faith: he needed to provide for the embarrassing fact that “Führer” was not derived from any such sources, but was a translation of the Italian “duce.”

In 1933, as Hitler dissolved the German parliament as part of his rise to power, the so-called Ermächtigungsgestz, Schmitt argued it was a measure in line with the Weimar-era constitution’s article twenty-five. Next, Hitler would declare a state of exception, a measure outlined in the constitution’s article forty-eight. The only check in article forty-eight on this power, which stipulated that the parliament could declare an end to such a state of emergency, had already been rendered null by the presi-dent’s previous decision. A new constitution was put in place—Schmitt himself defended all of this, referencing the pouvoir constitué posited by the French Revolutionary Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès to dissolve the nation-al assembly during the French Revolution—and the legal apparatus for a permanent state of emergency was put in place. “The Führer protects the law (Der Führer schützt das Recht),” Schmitt wrote succinctly.146 By way of explaining the unexplainable, Schmitt argues, despite the sovereign placement of itself outside the law, the sovereign decision is, on Schmitt’s account, not arbitrary: it keeps in place the very “normalcy” that prevents a slide into utter chaos—never mind the political and philosophical tau-tological coup de force of this argument (not least given the Nazi party’s violent role in 1933 in instigating all manner of emergencies to give the Fuhrer greater power, a point about which Schmitt was not oblivious), and no matter Schmitt’s earlier argument that no one could call such a state of sovereignty to an end. Schmittianism thus thinks le salut public (a term he used in the French) as both a good-bye or (salut) to the public space as its supposed saving grace (salut). Here, we can cite Schmitt’s well-known description of the sovereign decision:

What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes. Because the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind. The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its superiority over the validity of the legal norm. The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute. The state suspends the law in the exception




on the basis of its right of self-preservation, as one would say.147

We could spend an entire chapter following the turns of this circu-lar reasoning, of the foundationless fiction of the “right of self-preserva-tion”—sovereignty operates, Schmitt writes, exceptional to any norm, any law, and any right, even presumably that “right” of self-preservation—based on nothing other than an appeal to what everyone knows: “as one would say.” In fact, this presupposition of what “one would say,” the sup-position “as if” one spoke for another or for all, is a mark not only of a certain Rousseauism, but of all sovereign performance.148

In any case, to indicate the pastoral care of Hitler, Schmitt utilizes Führung for his role as chancellor, as the one who will be “governing [Regierungakt],” not just “commanding [führen]” the people, though in his person, as head of state, Hitler closes the dualism by performing both roles. For Schmitt, this means that the “democratic” dualism between leading and governing is sealed over with a secularized but also fully ra-cialized, that is to say, biopolitical, office through which das Führung will shepherd the flock “liv[ing] under the protection and the shadow of politi-cal decisions.” In this way, the movement and the people are united, with Hitler “affirming his supreme Führertum.”149

Beyond the Sovereign Decision

The powers described by Foucault can all be recognized in Schmitt’s anal-yses, though to be clear, the different genealogies that pull them together do not, as he puts it, evince “a circular ontology” (power that proves its own power, as his critics have argued), since they are traced through hap-penstance and the individual histories he produces. As we will see, there is a return to a notion of a top-down “repression” (so-called in La Volonté de savoir) in Foucault’s work, linked rightly to the rise of police states and their dangerous shepherding of the poor, the stateless, the refugee onto the killing fields of our history.

These powers crystallize—that is, solidify even as they reflect off one another—as sovereign bio-political power. On offer from Foucault are distinguishable genealogies tracing formations of power that concatenated into the most devastating and deadly regimes of the twentieth century. But we should not isolate these different powers, as often occurs in the philosophical work on Foucault, and thus see them as conceptually and historically heterogeneous. In the later 1970s, Foucault was careful not




to periodize these formations of power, arguing instead that each was still operative, permeating one another at a time when “the problem of sover-eignty is made more acute than ever.”150

We need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security.151

Derrida, for example, continued to read Foucault to the very end as providing “periodizations” of history, of epistemic and genealogical “turn-ing points,” with the upshot that he erased the “singularity of event[s],” in turn producing a “homogeneity” on either side of such “epistemic breaks.”152 For Agamben, this is his avowed means of proceeding. But this view of Foucault was long in need of updating, and may indeed have belonged to a particular “period” in Foucault’s writing that Derrida long before had described in “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963). Der-rida’s right that Agamben’s work “calls on us to reconsider, precisely, a manner of thinking history, of making history, of articulating a logic and rhetoric concerning a thinking of history, or of the event.”153 As I have set out to demonstrate, this is exactly what one finds in Foucault, or at least, one would have to admit, using Derrida’s own logic, that the text of Fou-cault is itself always open to reading otherwise. To take one example that is exemplary, Agamben cites Foucault’s descriptions of the “panopticon” and “panopticism” for what he calls his “paradigmatic method,” which we’ll describe in the next chapter. That is, for Agamben, the panopticon is the paradigm of Foucaultian paradigms. But Foucault did not leave the panopticon behind in the era of disciplinarity he writes about in Disci-pline and Punish. His work was not simply a “panopticism.”154 Foucault did argue in 1972 that it formed the “most general political and technical formula of disciplinary power.”155 But he returned to the panopticon on numerous occasions, reading it, for example, as the “dream of the oldest sovereign,”156 as a “general formula of liberal government,”157 and as per-vaded by the eighteenth century dispositif of security158; it was a paradigm in the etymological sense: it was always showing up besides itself, never as one power or one shape (paradigma). Which is all to say that it’s time to put a final period on a certain reading of Foucault’s periodizations, or




risk keeping his work locked up and surveilled from an invisible center as a panoptic that sees only the same-old, same-old in Foucault’s disparate works.

Returning to the question at hand, Foucault argues that the circularity of sovereignty, its vicious circle, operates after its supposed denouement. The state “wields power over living beings as living beings, and its poli-tics, therefore, has to be biopolitics. Since the population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is en-titled to slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of bio-politics is thanato-politics.”159 It is in light of these claims that Foucault takes up state racism.

“For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power,” Foucault writes in “The Right of Death and Power over Life,” the last chapter of La Volonté de savoir, “was the right to decide life and death.”160 Derived from the Roman patria potestas, which granted the fa-ther the right to dispose of his children and slaves, Foucault argues sov-ereignty in the classical age was redefined “in a considerably diminished form” as an ability to exercise power “only in the cases where the sover-eign’s very existence was in jeopardy.”161 Foucault does not develop here, though he does elsewhere, as we’ve seen, what both Schmitt and Agamben will note about this peculiarity of sovereignty: it is the sovereign that dic-tates those cases in which it is in jeopardy, operating definitionally outside the law in order to insure the effectiveness of the law. Sovereignty as such never appears, pace Foucault, in a “diminished form.” This is the sover-eign exception. In “Society Must Be Defended,” Foucault teases over the “theoretical paradoxes” of “traditional” sovereignty.

The right of life and death [of the sovereign] is a strange right. …In one sense, to say that the sovereign has a right of life and death means that he can, basically, either have people put to death or let them live, or in any case that life and death are not natural or immediate phenomena which are primal or radical, and which fall outside the field of power. If we take the argument a little further, or to the point where it becomes paradoxical, it means that in terms of his relationship with the sovereign, the subject is, by rights, neither dead or alive. …[I]t is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive or possibly, the right to be dead.162

This is the “right of the sword,” the right to let live or make die, a




right that, as Foucault rightly remarks, leaves the subject neither alive nor dead, at least in theory.163 In the nineteenth century, alongside the rise of bureaucracies and the policing of morality and the civility of the citizens, this right is “complemented by a new right which does not erase the old but which does penetrate it, permeate it.”164 Sovereignty is not just the power of the sword, the cutting of the political, but, with its onto-theologi-cal edifice and its bio-ethics of care, has the power to “‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.”165 It is the power of the sword and the power of the physician who will cut off a limb to save the body politic. Foucault is careful, as usual, not to trace this trend through philosophic-juridical thought—though one could cite Rousseau’s “life is a conditional gift of the state” here—but “at the level of mechanisms, techniques, and technologies of power.”166

In the contemporary period, power, Foucault believes, metasta-sizes itself through an administration of life in the name of the security and safety of populations. What is at stake in this power is no longer “the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population,” not a people. Power is “situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of race.”167 (Thus sexuality is an exemplary point through which it operates, given the nexus of life and death, of population control, at stake.) In words oft-cited, Foucault argues, “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (in the double sense: as a problem and as a threat).168

Accordingly, if philosophy begins with Socrates’ dictum that the un-examined life is not worth living, for Foucault, modern power begins with the dictum or diktat that the unexamined life, the undisciplined, ungov-erned, and non-sovereign life, is not just death, but a threat to power and the life of the nation. Life is reduced to its utility, becoming, what both Foucault, in his 1981-2 lecture course, and Arendt argue is zōē as opposed to bios.169 Life as zōē is something to be “made” and “produced,” that is, fabricated as just another element in a population carefully calibrated in a political economy. Foucault, in his 1981-2 lecture course, argues that for much of Greek history, bios was related to technē,170 that is, the “know-how” that Aristotle had argued was the part of the soul active in the mak-ing of poiēsis. Recall from chapter two that Arendt argued that the later Greeks, represented by Plato and Aristotle, had replaced the prudence and praxis of politics civil life, bios, with, respectively, the technē and process-




es of poiēsis. This production of bios, requiring this know-how or technē, maps well on Arendt’s claims, though Foucault does not repeat Arendt’s mythology of an originary Greek political isonomy of the earlier archaic period.171

This bios/zōē distinction, of course, also comes to play a crucial role in Agamben’s project on biopolitics, to which we’ll soon turn in chapter five. For his part, Foucault argues that though discipline is the form of power that keeps individual bodies under surveillance, bio-politics op-erates on a “different level,” addressing itself to “man-as-species,”172 an echo of the species-being (Gattungswesen) described by Marx in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts. The technē of bio-politics is demography, and the place of biopolitical intervention is the population. Under bio-politics,

regulatory mechanisms must…establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within the general population and its aleatory field. In a word, security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life.173

Foucault claims that bio-power does not function on the individu-al, though like discipline, it is organized around a statistical average, a “norm” that is both regulative and regulating; discipline thus operates in-terstitially as a mode of biopower. We now arrive at the point where racism is “inscribed” into the “mechanisms of the state. …[T]he modern state can scarcely function without becoming involved in racism at some point.”174 Let me quote him at length on these circumstances:

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction between races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat




that population as a mixture of races…to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known.175

“Race,” he argues, is not categorized by physical features—these be-came means of classification are after racism that replaced Boulainvilliers’ race wars entered history—but instead by a normalizing teleology. “In-ferior races” will include all those that threaten the purity of the national body: foreigners (including and perhaps especially Jews176), the mad, the prisoners, the malcontents, the sexual pervert, the economically useless—the figures of the pariah in general. Boulainvilliers’ old discourse of a war between two nations had disappeared. Rather, “we have to defend soci-ety against all biological threats posed by the other race, the subrace, the counter-race that we are, despite ourselves, bringing into existence,” those genetically born abnormal that must be sequestered or destroyed for the sake of the whole immunizing itself177:

At this point, the racist thematic is no longer a moment in the struggle between one social group and another; it will promote the global strategy of social conservatisms. At this point…we see the appearance of a State racism: a racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own products. This is the internal element of permanent purification.178

This “permanent purification” is not a relation between one and the other of war, but rather is a confrontation of a “biological-type.”179 The stasis, the internal war, of this teleological homeostasis of society is now biological. The “enemies that have to be done away with are not adver-saries in the political sense; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population.”180 Foucault is incisive on this point. He undermines what he takes to be the whole talk of civility that becomes the mode of the historico-political, the economic, and the juridi-co-philosophical discourses of modernity. Wars are no longer fought for conquest; all wars are now race wars. Colonialism is exemplary of this. Evolutionism and other appeals to natural struggles for existence provide the narrative undercurrent for war. This, of course, is not to pay heed to those who would deny evolution. Rather, this discourse became a natural-ized mythology providing bio-politics’ mystical foundations. With all this in mind, “racism” becomes

the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed.




…Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State. …From this point onwards, war is about two things: it is not simply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but of destroying the enemy race, of destroying that biological threat that those people over there [and here] represent to our race.181

The other side of this, as Foucault notes, is a suicidal element con-tained in biopolitical power: the war against the other will make us purer; it will destroy those who were unfit to live in our society anyway, even to the point where this immunity for the sovereign self becomes autoimmune and destroys the body politic it was supposed to protect. Foucault argues that this racism is not bound to a hatred of one societal group, though he’s not denying that specific groups indeed are marked as a disease to be ir-radicated; nor is it a function of class; nor is it only a mythos hiding a ter-ritorial will to power.

The specificity of modern racism…is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power. It is bound up with this, and that takes us as far away as possible from race war and the intelligibility of history. … So racism is bound up with the workings of the State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of race, to exercise its sovereign power.182

Here is, in sum, his argument for biopolitical sovereignty as the sum-mit of a deadly politics of the living. Foucault argues that once power takes this form, once it becomes enmeshed along a biological continuum, “we find the actual roots of racism.”183 Ideologies and mythological sup-positions of later theorists aside, it is the techniques and technology, the accounting and reasoning of the raison d’État, the pastoral shepherding of the policeman over the precinct, that will be an operative racism. And, as we will see, the purest biopolitical state is the one where the governed will take these techniques upon themselves.

At this point, Foucault says, “we have to take the example of Na-zism,” which of course is not one example among others. No politics, Foucault argues, not that he needs to, was more biologically controlled and regulated. And, of course, the Nazi regime was the also the most disci-




plinary. We could also say that no other state was more “pastoral” in Fou-cault’s sense, or governmental. In Arendt’s words, the Nazis attempted to remove all spontaneity from humanity, which Foucault dubs the “random element.”184 But in order to prove itself as the purest race, the least degen-erate, the Nazi state was also the most suicidal; it was, in every sense, dy-ing to prove its purity. The classical right to kill of the state would not just be generalized, as Foucault notes, but it would also be turned eventually on the state and the very people it was meant to save. These paroxysms of bio-political power, the paroxysms of sovereignty disseminated across Nazi society, are the symptoms of the death drive of the bio-political, its “thanatopolitics.”

Sovereignty thus “haunts,” as Foucault notes.185 Its exceptional pow-er of and over the political cannot be regulated out of the political, even as it takes on new forms and new techniques for seizing and seizing up politics. It is not simply juridical, but on Foucault’s description, part and parcel of bio-politics.

Ultimately, everyone in the Nazi state had the power of life and death over his or her neighbors, if only because of the practice of informing. ...[M]urderous and sovereign power are unleashed throughout the entire social body. …We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which also generalized the sovereign right to kill. …The Nazi state makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill everyone, meaning not only other people, but its own people. There was, in Nazism, a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social body by this fantastic extension of the right to kill and of exposure to death. …A racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State. …This is where the mechanism inscribed in the modern State leads.186

Sovereignty would be an exceptional power, that mad power that denotes the mad of society, a perverted power that denotes the pervert, and so on, and sovereignty would be the nom de guerre of the excep-tional “play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of




biopower.”187 Hence, “sovereign power” is “unleashed through the entire social body”188: a national sovereignty that can make live and make die—sovereignty as homo faber’s ultimate mastery. This is the ultimate terror of a monarchical sovereignty disseminated through nationalized societies. Like Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, which pulled together different “elements” that “crystallized,” Foucault’s genealogies describe different elements that would come together in power’s ultimate hold over life in Nazism. His work analyze the disparate elements that form what Arendt called “the origins of totalitarianism”: disciplinary power from the rising technologies, institutions, and sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; bio-politics developed from the race-thinking of the eighteenth century into the full-blown racisms of the nineteenth century; governmen-tality from the Physiocrats and early liberal thought; pastoral power from early Christian notions of rule reinstantiated in the nineteenth century as care of the nation; and a intensification of the Roman right “to let live and make die” as a right of “letting die and making live.” As Falguni Sheth puts it succinctly, while “biopolitics and scientific management are two dimensions of how races operates in modern society…they do not exhaust the modes by which sovereign power instantiate” and “naturalize racial divisions.”189

No doubt, however different, the analyses on offer in Foucault and Arendt follow a tragic arch. How could they not, in light of the history of the twentieth century and beyond? But I don’t think it’s the case in either author—questions of historicism and determinism aside—that each pos-ited an ex post facto account of the past based upon the camps. It could have been otherwise. History as written does not mean it was written in stone. To bear the lessons of the state of sovereignty, for Foucault, meant performing genealogies rendering the narratives and narratology of sover-eignty, which works hand in glove with a calculation and accounting of the political as governmentality and as the political theology of the salvation and saving of the nation through its new shepherds.

These shepherds are the police in all its forms operating beyond the view of the supposed “sovereign,” but nevertheless practicing biopolitical sovereignty as the force of law beyond and within the law. “Emancipat-ed” from the law, Walter Benjamin argues, the police power “is formless, like a nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence. This horizontal, ghostly power, Benjamin famously argued, called “for a new conception of history” in keeping with the “insight” that “the state of emergency in




which we live is not the exception but the rule.”190 It has been my argument that Foucault provides just such a history. Benjamin notes,

Though the police may, in particulars, everywhere appear the same, it cannot finally be denied that their spirit is less devastating where they represent, in absolute monarchy, the power of a ruler in which legislative and executive supremacy are united, than in democracies where their existence, elevated by no such relation, bears witness to the greatest conceivable degeneration of violence.191

Sovereign Freedom, or Freedom from Sovereignty

Foucault in his later lectures links governmentality to self-governance, and this thinking of self-governance is one of the reasons he turns to the Greek “care of the self” and self-mastery as the predicate for a difficult freedom. Important for our concerns in the last chapter of this book, Fou-cault’s conceptualization of freedom in these works, however, is never far from the very types of freedom he contested in the early 1970s: “practices of freedom” in which one acts in the shadow of power relations. Power in governmentality is “acting upon the possibilities of action of other peo-ple.”192 In finding a form of power “neither warlike nor juridical,” Foucault defines the freedom he believes can be initiated in self-governance. This is not to say that for him resistance and freedom take place outside of the governmentality of state forms, but rather, that freedom is itself a form of governmentality, a form of acting in reaction to others, that is, acting upon the action of others. This is why there are few mentions in Foucault’s work of equality, which marks a notable distinction between him and Rancière, whose conceptualizes the “police” by reference to Foucault. There is no “fact of equality” for Foucault, since action upon the action of others de-notes reverberating asymmetries of power always in flux:

When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the action of others, when one characterizes these actions by the government of men—in the broadest sense of the term—one includes an important element: freedom. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several



Documents

Foucault’s Regicide in Theory