"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 & state racism
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October 17, 2006
Mark Kelly in his article in Contretemps entitled Racism, Nationalism and Biopolitics: Foucault's Society Must Be Defended, says that:
When Foucault claims that: "the modern state can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain lines and subject to certain conditions..."... he is not talking about "ordinary racism," which is to say, the simple hatred of other races....but rather, state racism, biological racism. The kind of racism that emerges in the nineteenth century is for the fi rst time based on new paradigms from biology, on ideas of evolutionary competition and the health of the species... The challenge of this analysis is its application to the contemporary context. Every state does still need to make a distinction between those it keeps alive (and every state does have a welfare system and health service which work towards these ends) and those it kills (foreign enemies in war, executed criminals), together with those it merely allows to be exposed to greater risk of death (the victims of Third World famines, its own poor and elderly citizens). More than in 1976, however, anti-racism is now the prevailing orthodoxy. Racist discourse has become taboo--to identify speech as racist is to deny its validity. The kind of biological discourse which talks about the health of our race has gone by the board. If state racism was the mechanism by which the distinction between the biopolitical population and its outside was made, is it still so today?
The kind of state racism that Foucault is referring to is racism in the broader sense---the way in which the Soviet population was perceived as a pure biological entity, threatened from within by sabotage and deviationism and by remnants of the class enemy, and from without by a world that was full of threats, the conquest of which served to make the Soviet Union stronger. A state with biopolitical aims--the aim of improving the material well-being of the population---but which also in the name of this project eliminates vast numbers of its own people, needs a social-racism.
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