Society Must Be Defended is a book that compiles the lectures delivered by Foucault in 1976 at the Collège de France. In this book, by inverting Clausewitz’s aphorism (“war is the continuation of politics by other means”), Foucault insists that “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (2003: 15). As Kim Dong- choon does, Foucault introduces the model of war as a tool for understanding politics. However, Foucault’s war-politics is not to reveal repressive war elements embedded in politics, but to stress historical and strategical relations of powers (domination) that are formed by struggles between different forces. The assumption that “there is no such thing as a neutral subject” and “we are all inevitably someone’s adversary” underlies Foucault’s war-politics (p.51). Indeed, by using the model of war, Foucault does not intend “to demonstrate the State’s right, to establish its sovereignty, to recount its uninterrupted genealogy, and to use heroes, exploits, and dynasties to illustrate the legitimacy of public right” (p.141). Rather, for Foucault, it is important to see specific struggles that introduce a break in existing domination and constitute new relations of force by means of knowledge, institutions, and even bodies. This is the reason why Foucault pays special attention to Boulainvilliers, while criticising classical political theorists such as Hobbes and Machiavelli. As his famous maxim the war of all against all signifies, Hobbes seems to use war as an analyzer of power relations. However, there is no “a direct clash of forces battles” in Hobbes’ theory, according to Foucault (p.93). Instead, there is only “the interplay between a will, a covenant, and representation”, all of which are made on the basis of the likelihood of war (p.94). The state Hobbes is describing is thus a sort of “unending diplomacy between rivals who are naturally equal” (p.92).
Likewise, Machiavelli’s analysis of the relationship of force is not about real war but about “a political technique that had to be put in the hands of the sovereign” (p.164).
Basically, Hobbes’s discourse is a certain “no” to war. It is not really war that gives birth to States, and it is not really war that is transcribed in relations of sovereignty or that reproduces within the civil power-and its inequalities-the earlier dissymmetries in the relationship of force that were revealed by the very fact of the battle itself.
(p.97)
In contrast to Hobbes and Machiavelli, Boulainvilliers attracts Foucault’s attention. Louis XIV ordered his administration to produce the reports on the state of France for his heir, the duc de Bourgogne, and Boulainvilliers was appointed to present the kernel of the reports to the duc de Bourgogne. Thus, Boulainvilliers summarised the reports, and added a preface and some comments. For Foucault, Boulainvilliers’s text is very interesting for two reasons. First, in Boulainvilliers’s text, both “juridicial knowledge” and “quantitative economic knowledge” that were considered as the king’s or the state’s knowledge gave way to “historical knowledge” (pp.130-2). Instead of equipping the king with administrative knowledge on how to govern the state, Boulainvilliers tried to remind the king of the nobles’ and monarch’s forgotten memories so as to “reconstitute the legitimate knowledge of the king” (p.130). Second, Foucault, more fundamentally, stresses the fact that knowledge becomes a weapon in a field of power struggles. What Boulainvilliers did is not simply to describe historical relations of force but to change them through (historical) knowledge.
Boulainvilliers establishes a historico-political continuum to the extent that, when he writes history, he has a specific and definite project: his specific goal is restore to the nobility both a memory it has lost and a knowledge that it has always neglected. What Boulainvilliers is trying to do by giving it back its memory and its knowledge is to give it a new force, to reconstruct the nobility as a force within the forces of the social field. For Boulainvilliers, beginning to speak in the domain of history, recounting a history, is therefore not simply a matter of describing a relationship of force, or of reutilizing on behalf of, for example, the nobility a calculation of intelligibility that had previously belonged to the government. He is doing so in order the [sic] modify the very disposition and the current equilibrium of the relations of force. History does not simply analyze or interpret forces: it modifies them. The very fact of having control over, or the fact of being right in the order of historical knowledge, in short, of telling the truth about history, therefore enables him to occupy a decisive strategic position.
(p.171)
Meanwhile, it is interesting to point out that Foucault turns his attention to the elimination of the element of war from politics as well as the birth of an internal war. This is the point at which Kim Dong-choon’s and Foucault’s war-politics converge. First, the elimination of war from politics occurred in parallel with the re-emergence of the notion of the nation. According to Foucault, from the Revolution onward, war was no longer waged by different forces, and it no longer played a constitutive role in politics (p.215). Instead, war began to be waged by superior races against inferior races within the state. Foucault says, this is “a great retreat from the historical to the biological, from the constituent to the medical” (p.216). The retreat of war from politics could be possible through the revival of “national/statist universality” (p.222). National universality does not mean the unity
of historical experiences (e.g. struggles and relations of domination). Rather, it is more to do with the unity of the state. By examining Sieyès’s text on the Third Estate, Foucault argues that the nation began to be seen as “a group of individuals who have the potential capacity to ensure the substantive and historical existence of the nation” (p.221). The nation is the sum of the individual abilities to form an army, a magistrature, a church, and an administration, that is, the individual abilities to run the state (p.220). Sieyes’s text depicts the Third Estate as capable of fulfilling various functions of the state, and therefore makes the Third Estate a nation.
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. It is something else: its ability to administer itself, to manage, governm and guarantee the constitution and workings of the figure of the State and of State power. Not domination, but State control.
(p.223)
Second, the emergence of an internal war. Foucault starts the last lecture of the 1976 course by saying “the theme of a war between races does not disappear” (p.239). But, it takes the form of “an internal war that defends society against threats born of and in its own body” (p.216). The extreme version of an internal war can be found in what Foucault defines as state racism. But, before explaining the term, it is necessary to look at the characteristics of bio-power, because state racism is a “formidable extension of bio-power” (p.254). According to Foucault, classical (sovereign) power exercises “the right of sword” or “the right to take life or let live” (pp.240-241). However, since the seventeenth century, power has begun to intervene in the human body as well as life. Power now serves to “make live and
let die” (p.241). In particular, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a new technology of power to manage man-as-species emerged, which is called bio-power or bio-politics6. In bio-politics, the population is of key interest to power. Compared to the social/legal/physical body in sovereign and disciplinary power, the population as “a multiple body or a body with so many heads” is considered to be crucial in bio-politics (p.245). Once the criteria of the population are set up, heretofore individual, contingent, and thus unpredictable things become much more manageable. Bio-power installs security or regulatory mechanisms such as the institutions of insurance today, in order “to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within the population and its aleatory field” (p.246). Making use of technical and medical knowledge like the demographics of the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on, bio-power “regulates” and “normalises” life and human beings as living beings, by extension, a society.
However, Foucault raises a paradoxical question, that is, “how will the power to kill and the function of murder operate in this technology of power?” (p.254). To answer the question, Foucault re-introduces the notion of racism. According to Foucault, racism serves to divide the population into a mixture of different races, which results in the establishment of the hierarchy of races. Then, racism comes to
6 The operation of disciplinary- and bio-power is connected with each other. Foucault takes
working-class housing estates built in the nineteenth century as an example. Not only does the spatial layout of the working-class town influence on the ways in which individuals behave trains, but it is also related to a matter of the whole town’s health-insurance system,
apply the war principle, “in order to live, you must destroy your enemies”, to ‘inferior’ races (p.255).
This is not, then, a military, warlike, or political relationship, but a biological relationship. And the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race. There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable.
(pp.255-256)
Here the new discourse emerges: “we have to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the other race, the subrace, the counterrace that we are, despite ourselves, bringing into existence” (p.61). Nazism and Sovietism are examples of state racism. Whereas in the Nazi period, the state took responsibility for “the biological protection of the race”, the Soviet state attempted to eliminate “the class enemy” such as the sick, the deviant, and the madman (pp.82-83). And, in order to enact state racism, Nazism relied on “a whole popular, almost medieval, mythology”, whilst Sovietism utilised “scientific” and policing mechanisms (ibid.). Generally speaking, in state racism, “racial purity” replaces race struggles (p.81).
In Foucault’s account of state racism, it is by no means difficult to discover the similarity between Foucault’s and Kim Dong-choon’s theoretical concerns. Above
all, they have a common interest in how and on what conditions power of death can be exercised in modern society. However, through Foucault’s whole 1976 lecture course (the emergence of historico-political discourse and its demise), I want to add two further points about war-politics. First, what is treated as problematic by war- politics is the exposure of the existence of struggles. Struggles here are not confined to subversive political movements. More broadly, they include any activities and knowledge to “question power about its discourse of truth” or “question truth concerning its power effects”, whereby statist universality as the basis of war- politics is put in danger (Foucault, 1978b: 386). In the context of war-politics, educational neutrality is intended to remove “the messy social relations of sexism, racism, and class discrimination that underlie school and classroom relations” (Giroux, 1988: 19). Thus it promotes a “politics of silence” and an “ideological amnesia” (ibid.). Second, it is important to stress that war-politics changes its logic and strategies over time. In particular, what I want to highlight is that the exercise of power of death should be understood in relation to the exercise of power of life, as Foucault understands state-racism as an extension of bio-power. Kim Dong- choon’s analysis of war-politics pays little attention to non-repressive aspects of war-politics. After the 1976 lecture course, instead of developing the war framework, Foucault focused on ‘productive’ aspects of power, which helps to understand the working of war-politics today.
4. WAR-POLITICS IN A TIME OF NEO-LIBERAILSM: FOUCAULT