Thread by @GJosephRoche

Third lecture, January 21, 1976.

In today’s lecture, Foucault will briefly revisit his discussion of sovereignty from the last lecture, before moving on to the main topic of the lecture series: war. Today we will learn the meaning of the series' title: SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED.

Other topics MF will cover include: the emergence of social war discourses after the Middle Ages. Truth and social war. The mythical nature of social war discourses. 2 types of race war. State racism.

[‘social war’ is my term]

To the lectures…

Foucault begins by saying goodbye. “Last time, we said a sort of farewell to the theory of sovereignty.”

He sums up this theory by focusing on 3 terms: subject, unity, and legitimacy.

1⃣ Sovereign power is constituted by a multiplicity of subjects.

2⃣ Sovereignty must somehow unite that multiplicity of powers.

3⃣ This sovereign power must have a legitimacy that is prior to the law (that allows law to be created).

So, subject-unity-legitimacy. These are the basic elements of sovereign power.

MF then says that his aim is to escape this model of power. Instead of these ‘elements’ of sovereignty, he wants to explore ‘relations of domination’—to come up with a theory of domination.

He stresses again a point he made in the last lecture: the task is not to locate a central source and observe how power radiates from there. Instead, we must look at power in relationships at multiple localized sites.

Then, he comes back to war. Back to this idea that “beneath the laws” there is “a sort of primitive and permanent war.” His question is: where, when & how did this idea emerge?

Very generally, MF says, we can trace the origin of this idea to changes that took place over the Middle Ages. During this period, war was taken up by the state as a professional enterprise. War was pushed to the margins of the state, as something that happens between states.

As this process nears completion in the late 16th century, a paradox emerges. As war is pushed to the state's margins, a discourse of ‘social war’ emerges. Society comes to be seen as a set of permanent antagonistic relationships. As war leaves society, society becomes war.

“The law is born of real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes; the law was born in burning towns and ravaged fields. It was born together with the famous innocents who died at the break of day.”

“In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war…peace itself is a coded war… a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently.”

MF will trace the history of these ideas—'the 1st historico-political discourses in post-medieval Europe.'

First MF looks at how these discourses reposition ideas of truth. Truth is not removed from this social war. Truth, instead, has become an “additional force” in war. Every attempt to speak the truth is spoken as part of this binary conflict. Truth becomes “de-centered.”

This means we see the emergence of new discourses about truth and reason. These discourses start treating truth and reason with greater cynicism, as instrumental justifications for brutality.

[As an aside, I have trouble following this section & fitting it into the overall lecture. I haven’t really worked through it carefully so you may want to follow up in the text, p51-55.]

MF then says that this discourse of war and truth might seem boring: “a discourse for nostalgic aristocrats or scholars in a library.” Rather than seeking firm truths that give rise to rights, it is obsessed with “the indefiniteness of history.” YAWN

But, MF tells us, this is no 😢 gloomy discourse. It is mythological. Social war is EPIC: sleeping giants, ancestral revenge, wounded heroes, the return of exiled kings, the twilight of the gods, the birth of a new era. A discourse of both bitterness and “insane hopes.”

[And we start to see here why SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED became popular at the start of Trump’s presidency. MAGA discourse is full of social war discourse, and is characterized by exactly this sort of epic, mythological quality & by bitterness and hope.]

MF claims that social war discourses started in the margins, but began its rise to significance as a challenge to royal power. The king was seen as an invader, and enemy in a social war. This challenge to the king was in some cases from the aristocrats, sometimes the people.

And then, gradually, it was assimilated and colonized by the state. Rather than being a discourse AGAINST state power, it became an essential apparatus OF state power.

This war that the state assimilates, whether it has origins in aristocratic bitterness or popular resentment, is a race war. MF describes 2 ‘transcriptions’ of race war.

1st is straightforward, biological race. War between biological races underpins nationalism & colonialism.

This idea of biological race war later transforms into the idea of class struggle: the 2nd ‘transcription’ of race war. Both transcriptions are rooted in the same idea of epic struggle between two social groups that suffuses the social body in peacetime.

MF says he will trace the transition between the two transcriptions in later lectures. But for now he tells us why this change is important. He says it gives rise to an “absolutely new” discourse that “functions very differently” from both these transcriptions of race war.

In this new transcription, the enemy race becomes internalized. It is “permanently, ceaselessly infiltrating the social body” while also “constantly being re-created in & by the social fabric.” This discourse of race war is now a mechanism of state power.

Now that the enemy is in the social body, the following discourse emerges:

“WE HAVE TO DEFEND SOCIETY against the biological threats posed by the other race, the subrace, the counterrace that we are, despite ourselves, bringing into existence.”

In this discourse, we see the emergence of state racism, and the expression of state power as the purification and normalization of society. It is the emergence of this discourse, from the 17th century to the early 19th, that MF will trace in the coming lectures. /fin