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September 13, 2006
I bought a copy of Foucault's 'Society Must Be Defended': Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76 this afternoon in Paperchain Bookstore at Manuka, Canberra. Apparently it is the first in a series of his annual lecture programs to be published in coming years.
The lectures are situated between Discipline and Punish, which traced out the shifts in culture that lead to the prison's dominance and focused on the body and questions of power, and The History of Sexuality Vol 1, where the turn was made to biopolitics and biopower. 'Society Must Be Defended' is a historical examination of the model of war as a grid for analysing politics. Its subject is a Foucault's inversion of Clausewitz's famous dictum: 'Politics is the continuation of war by other means.'
In the first lecture, Foucault distinguishes two schemas for analyzing power - the contract-oppression schema and the war-repression schema - and acknowledges that while his work up to this point has criticized the former schema it has tacitly assumed the latter. His aim in these lectures is to subject the war-repression schema to critical scrutiny. His focus is on the war side of this schema, as his critique of the repressive hypothesis is worked out in detail in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Thus, the central question of 'Society Must be Defended' is this: "can we find in bellicose relations, in the model of war, in the schema of struggle or struggles, a principle that can help us understand and analyze political power, to interpret political power in terms of war, struggles, and confrontations?" (p.23)
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