Sovereignty, Biopolitics and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker

Abstract

Foucault’s introduction to Society Must Be Defended (1997) announces a major shift in his analysis of power: ‘Until now, or for roughly the last five years, it has been disciplines; for the next five years, it will be war, struggle, the army’1 The stated intention is thus to turn away from the detailed analysis of disciplinary institutions that he had just presented in Discipline and Punish (1975) in order to engage with a different undercurrent of power. Accordingly, Foucault declares that the course of lectures will explore a new proposition: that ‘Power is war, the continuation of war by other means’ (SMBD, 16). As he goes on to explain, this is also to imply that ‘power relations’ in society ‘are essentially anchored in a certain relationship of force that was established in and through war at a given historical moment’ (SMBD, 16). On the one hand, then, this new analysis of power is introduced as a further development in his work on disciplinary institutions. Society Must Be Defended is intended to show that disciplinary power is rooted in political sovereignty, the military and war. On the other hand, Foucault emphasises that his new analysis will not be limited to looking at particular institutions of sovereignty or the military, for he sees this martial side of power as pervading social life in general: ‘According to this hypothesis, the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals’ (SMBD, 16).