"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Foucault on racism
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September 26, 2006
Towards the end of Michel Foucault's text Society Must be Defended --- the 1976 lectures from the College de France ---Foucault brings racism into consideration in the form of the phenomenon of 'State racism' . This is introduced in terms of the biological coming under state control and the old right of sovereignty to take life or let live is reworked to become the power to make live and to let die. This reworking is associated with the emergence of a new technology of power to a disciplinary power directed at man-as-body. The new non-disciplinary technology of power is directed at man-as-living-being, which Foucault calls a biopolitics or a biopower.
In this passage, courtesy of Craig at Theoria, Foucault then introduces racism. He asks:
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 among 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 be to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by power. (pp. 254-5)
This ceasura also takes place within the territory of the nation state as racism divides the biological population within a national territory. This leads to an 'us and them' situation.
Foucault then goes on to say that racism has a second function:
Racism also has a second function. Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: "The more you kill, the more deaths you will cause" or "The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more." I would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill") was not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: "In order to live, you must destroy your enemies." But racism does make the relationship of war --- "If you want to live, others must die" --- function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower. On the one hand, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: "The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I ----as species rather than individual--- can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate." The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.
Foucault says this new biological relationship can come into play is that the enemiies 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.
As Mark Kelly observes in Centretemps biopolitics is the ability to control people by maintaining them in life, not just by using the right to kill but by actually controlling life itself.
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