Cutting off the king's head: Foucault's society must be defended and the problem of sovereignty

Alternatives

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 373-398

  Neal, Andrew W ^a  

^a KEELE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 11144297675     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540402900401     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. Reported in the Guardian, November 6, 2002: "The US was accused last night of summarily executing the six alleged al-Qaida members killed in Yemen on Sunday by the first act of what experts say could be a new age of 'robotic warfare.'" Robotic warfare refers to the firing of a Hellfire missile from an unmanned Predator drone.
2. "Torture Testimony 'Acceptable': Expert Tells Terror Appeal Hearing that MI5 Would Use Information Obtained under Duress in Court": Audrey Gillan, Guardian, July 22, 2003. See also subsequent controversies about the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.
3. See Elspeth Guild, EU Citizenship and Migration Law, esp. chapter 9 (Nijmegen: Kluwer Law International, 2004).
4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
5. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1922) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 5.
6. I refer to the Schmitt of Political Theology and The Concept of the Political (1932) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), works often read so as to present Schmitt as a very clear expression of the authoritarian tension that resides in modern, statist political thought.
7. Benjamin's "permanent state of exception" is not genealogically unrelated to Mao's permanent revolution and the Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat." See "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Shocken, 1968), pp. 253-264.
8. Benjamin's "permanent state of exception" is not genealogically unrelated to Mao's permanent revolution and the Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat." See "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Shocken, 1968), pp. 253-264.
9. In fact, Agamben's logic is rather thoroughly refuted by Andrew Norris, who points out that if, as Agamben argues, the "example" and "exception" must exist as truly apart from the norm, then the claim that the (exceptional) concentration camp is the paradigm of the modern (norm) cannot be sustained. "Since the example precedes and defines the rule, Agamben cannot appeal to an independent rule or standard to justify his claim that the camps are exemplary of anything." See Andrew Norris, "The Exemplary Exception," Radical Philosophy 119 (May/June 2003): 6-16.
10. Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 34.
11. For the Veyne reference, see Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 157; for Deleuze, see Julian Reid, "Deleuze's War Machine: Nomadism against the State," Millennium 32, no. 1 (Feb. 2003): 57-86.
12. For the Veyne reference, see Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 157; for Deleuze, see Julian Reid, "Deleuze's War Machine: Nomadism against the State," Millennium 32, no. 1 (Feb. 2003): 57-86.
13. Jurgen Habermas, cited in Hanssen, note 10, p. 97.
14. This is a very crude reading of Schmitt. Habermas seems unaware of the Hobbesian roots of his own democratic form of legitimate power and that Schmitt plays out the authoritarian tensions present in Hobbes and the liberal canon. Habermas's vitriolic rejection of Schmitt amounts to a refusal to engage seriously with sovereignty as either a limit problem or as a problem of founding. See Jurgen Habermas, "The Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English," in Habermas, The New Conservatism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
15. Hanssen, note 10, p. 147.
16. Ibid., p. 157.
17. These chapters are the course synopsis, also entitled "Society Must Be Defended," available in English since 1997 in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 1, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 59-66, and an abridged translation of the first two lectures available under the simple title "Two Lectures," available since 1980 in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 78-108.
18. These chapters are the course synopsis, also entitled "Society Must Be Defended," available in English since 1997 in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 1, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 59-66, and an abridged translation of the first two lectures available under the simple title "Two Lectures," available since 1980 in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 78-108.
19. Foucault, note 9, pp. 265-267 (course synopsis).
20. For a detailed analysis of Foucault's writings on war, see Julian Reid, "Life Struggles: War, Disciplinary Power, and Biopolitics," forthcoming.
21. Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, "Situating the Lectures, " in Foucault, note 9, p. 273.
22. Ibid., p. 288.
23. From the first development of this idea at the end of Foucault's Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1991).
24. Colin Gordon, introduction to Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2002), p. xx.
25. Foucault, note 9, pp. 16-17. Hereafter, page numbers of references to Society Must Be Defended are given in the text.
26. See Michael C. Williams, "The Neoconservative Challenge in IR Theory," forthcoming.
27. Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 88.1 should add the qualification that I am agreeing with them here only on this specific point.
28. Of course, this is far from an exhaustive description of Hobbes's ideas and principles.
29. But Foucault does not delve very far into how the nation-state came to be universalized - that is, became the universal, that is, global, political form. Foucault is not an international relations or postcolonial thinker.