Foucault, Politics, and Violence

Abstract

Before responding to Jana's and Kevin's questions and critical concerns, let me start by saying something about my motives for writing this book. Hopefully this will not be pointless personal detour, but will make it easier for me to answer some of the questions raised.This was not going to be book on Foucault. I was interested in the debates between agonistic and deliberative theories in political philosophy and, specifically, on the philosophical conceptions of the political underlying them.1 From Foucauldian perspective, I could not help but be critical of deliberative theorists' emphasis on consensus and deliberation as the essence of politics, but 1 was equally unhappy with many of the agonistic theories. While political theorists such as Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj liiek emphasize the ineradicability of agonism and power relations from the political, they also accept the ineradicability of violence.2 To me, this seemed unwarranted.Hence, my initial aim was to develop an agonistic conception of politics that did not forge an essential and ineliminable connection between violence and the political. With this aim in mind, I turned to Foucault for help. In other words, I was not going to write book called 'Foucault on Violence.' Foucault is not theoretician of violence in my view-he does not theorize violence beyond couple of isolated comments-and my aim was not to provide such missing, Foucauldian theory of violence.3This does not mean that we shouldn't worry about whether my interpretative claims about Foucault are correct. We should worry about that; I am not trying to make excuses for bad scholarship. I am merely trying to make clear that although I did put the word'Foucault' in the title in the end, this book is not primarily about him. Instead, it poses philosophical question about the relationship between violence and the political, and it uses Foucauldian toolbox in the attempt to answer it.Now let me address the questions that Jana and Kevin raise.I really appreciate Jana's question concerning the method I take myself to be employing in this book. It is an important and interesting question beyond the individual project discussed here, because it raises the broader question of what Foucault's method was. What do people mean when they claim to be appropriating Foucault? What does it mean to be'Foucauldian'? Was Foucault philosopher or historian? What is genealogy?I personally read Foucault primarily as philosopher and I understand myself to be engaging in philosophical study when I appropriate his thought for my own questions and concerns. My method is thus not strictly speaking 'genealogy,' if genealogy is understood as meticulous, historical study tracking the emergence of certain forms of knowledge, techniques of power and rationalities of government. In other words, while I think that it is perfecdy legitimate and interesting to debate the question whether Foucault is philosopher or historian, there is no sense in debating whether my book is philosophy or history. If it is anything, it is philosophy.Philosophically, I appropriate Foucault in at least three senses. First, I appropriate his historical, genealogical analyses for my investigation of political ontology. I draw from them politicized conception of reality in the opening chapter of the book. It is my contention that Foucault's genealogies bring to light the always conflictual and agonistic process through which reality is instituted; they make visible the historical struggles over truth and objectivity. As he defined genealogy in the lecture series 'Society must be Defended': genealogy is a meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights.4 In other words, I show that the radicality of Foucault's method lies in showing how the ontological order of things is itself the outcome of political struggle: reality as we know it is the result of social practices always incorporating power relations, but also of concrete struggles over truth and objectivity in social space. …