Foucault

Now this discourse, which was basically or structurally kept in the margins by that of the philosophers and jurists, began its career — or perhaps its new career in the West — in very specific conditions be- tween the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries and represented a twofold — aristocratic and popular — challenge to royal power. From this point onward, I think, it proliferated considerably, and its surface of extension extended rapidly and considerably until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It would, however, be a mistake to think that the dialectic can function as the great reconversion of this discourse, or that it can finally convert it into philosophy. The dialectic may at first sight seem to be the discourse of the universal and historical movement of contradiction and war, but I think that it does not in fact validate this discourse in philosophical terms. On the contrary, it seems to me that it had the effect of taking it over and displacing it into the old form of philosophico-juridical discourse. Basically, the dialectic codifies struggle, war, and confrontations into a logic, or so- called logic, of contradiction; it turns them into the twofold process of the totalization and revelation of a rationality that is at once final but also basic, and in any case irreversible. The dialectic, finally, ensures the historical constitution of a universal subject, a reconciled truth, and a right in which all particularities have their ordained place. The Hegelian dialectic and all those that came after it must, I think and as I will try to demonstrate to you, be understood as philosophy and right's colonization and authoritarian colonization of a historico-political discourse that was both a statement of fact, a proclamation, and a practice of social warfare. The dialectic colonized a historico-political discourse which, sometimes conspicuously and often in the shadows, sometimes in scholarship and sometimes in blood, had been gaining ground for centuries in Europe. The dialectic is the philosophical order’s, and perhaps the political order’s, way of colonizing this bitter and partisan discourse of basic warfare. There you have the general frame within which I would like to try this year to retrace the history of this discourse. I would now like to tell you how we should study this, and what our starting point should be. First of all, we have to get rid of a number of false paternities that are usually mentioned in connection with this historico-political discourse. As soon as we begin to think about the power/war relationship or about power/ relations of force, two names immediately spring to mind: we think of Machiavelli and we think of Hobbes. I would like to show that they have nothing to do with it, that this historico-political discourse is not, and cannot be, that of the Prince’s politics 13 or, obviously, that of absolute power. It is in fact a discourse that inevitably regards the Prince as an illusion, an instrument, or, at best, an enemy. This is, basically, a discourse that cuts off the king’s head, or which at least does without a sovereign and denounces him. Having eliminated these false paternities, I would then like to show you this discourse’s point of emergence. And it seems to me that we have to try to situate it in the seventeenth century, which has a number of important characteristics. First, this discourse was born twice. On the one hand, we see it emerging roughly in the 1630s, and in the context of the popular or petit bourgeois demands that were being put forward in prerevolutionary and revolutionary England. It is the discourse of the Puritans, the discourse of the Levellers. And then fifty years later, in France at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, you find it on the opposite side, but it is still the discourse of a struggle against the king, a discourse of aristocratic bitterness. And then, and this is the important point, we find even at this early stage, or in other words from the seventeenth century onward, that the idea that war is the uninterrupted frame of history takes a specific form: The war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war. At a very early stage, we find the basic elements that make the war possible, and then ensure its continuation, pursuit, and development: ethnic differences, differences between languages, different degrees of force, vigor, energy, and violence; the differences between savagery and barbarism; the conquest and subjugation of one race by another. The social body is basically articulated around two races. It is this idea that this clash between two races runs through society from top to bottom which we see being formulated as early as the seventeenth century. And it forms the matrix for all the forms beneath which we can find the face and mechanisms of social warfare.

Michel Foucault