The contagion of difference: Identity, bio-politics and National Socialism

Foucault Studies

Volumn , Issue 1, 2004, Pages 53-70

  Enoch, Simon ^a  

^a RYERSON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748263870     PISSN: None     EISSN: 18325203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.22439/fs.v0i1.565     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Nikolas Rose, "The Politics of Life Itself." Theory, Culture and Society (Vol. 18, No. 6, 2001), 1.
2. Bio-politics should be viewed as one pole of what Foucault deemed bio-power, the other being anatomo-politics, or the disciplinary techniques focused on the individual body. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 139.
3. Michel Foucault. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003a), 259.
4. Rose, 2001, 2.
5. Foucault, 2003a, 254.
6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 122.
7. See Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 177-222.
8. Juliet Steyn, The Jew: Assumptions of Identity.(London: Cassell, 1999), 7.
9. However, it would be equally unwise to conclude that the modes of objectification deployed by Nazi medico-political discourse had no affect on the Jewish population. Obviously, the construction of a diseased and degenerate identity foisted upon the conceptual Jew was a matter of life and death. For a discussion on how modes of objectification transform human beings into subjects see "The Subject and Power." In James D. Faubion,(ed.), Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (New York: The New Press, 2000).
10. See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 430-432.
11. Gotz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), 5.
12. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 30
13. Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 498. See also Lifton, 1986, 23.
14. James M. Glass, Life Unworthy of Life: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler s Germany (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 39.
15. Michael Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989),174.
16. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College De France, 1974-1975. (New York: Picador, 2003b), 50.
17. While I place more emphasis on race rather than sexuality for the purposes of this paper, it should be noted that Foucault identified the potential for state racism within bourgeois sexual norms of health and degeneracy. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 26-32.
18. While Foucault makes no explicit mention of how constructions of race facilitate nation-building, there are indeed parallels between race as a normalizing category and the need for a "fictive ethnicity" to consolidate the members of "the nation." For example, see Enakshi Dua "Beyond Diversity: Exploring the Ways in which the Discourse of Race has Shaped the Institution of the Nuclear Family" in Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson. Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-racist Feminist Thought (Toronto: Women s Press, 1999), 237-259.
19. Omar Bartov, "Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews and the Holocaust." The American Historical Review (Vol. 103, No. 3, June 1998), 791.
20. Ross Chambers, "The Unexamined." in Mike Hill, (ed.) Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 189.
21. Phillipe Burin, "Nazi Antisemitism: Animalization and Demonization." in Robert S. Wistrich (ed.) Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), 226.
22. Sander L. Gilman, "Plague in Germany, 1939/1989: Cultural Images of Race, Space, and Disease." In Andrew Parker, et al. (ed.) Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), 178.
23. Uli Linke, German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler (New York: Routledge, 1999), 119.
24. Glass, 1997, 40.
25. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman. The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 84.
26. Gisela Kaplan, "Irreducible "Human Nature": Nazi Views on Jews and Women." in Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff, (ed.) Challenging Racism and Sexism: Alternatives to Genetic Explanations. (New York: The Feminist Press, CUNY, 1994), 194.
27. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. (New York: Howard Fertig Inc., 1985), 140.
28. Michel Foucault, "Politics and the Study of Discourse." Ideology and Consciousness. (No. 3., 1978), 13.
29. Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject. (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 45.
30. There is no crude determinism here that states that the mere existence of these discursive variables will inevitably result in the need to exterminate the "Other." Rather, this confluence of factors constitute what Foucault considered a "field of possibilities," not all of which are actually realized. See Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change. (Cambridge, U.K: Polity Press, 1998), 43
31. Eduardo Mendieta, "To Make Live and to Let Die." (Paper presented at The Foucault Circle. Chicago, April 25th, 2002), 7.
32. Detlev J.K. Peukert, "The Genesis of the "Final Solution" from the Spirit of Science." In Thomas Childers & Jane Caplan (eds) Reevaluating the Third Reich. (New York :Holmes & Meier, 1993), 236.
33. Mario Biagioli, "Science, Modernity and "The Final Solution." In Saul Friedlander (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 185.
34. Lerner cited in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, "Foucault, Auschwitz, and the Destruction of the Body." in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (eds.), Postmodernism and the Holocaust. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 224.
35. It should be noted that Foucault is not advocating the wholesale rejection of modern rationality, but rather its uncritical acceptance. To quote Foucault, "If it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning risks sending us into irrationality." Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?" in Paul Rabinow (ed). The Foucault Reader. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 249.
36. Detlev J.K. Peukert. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 249.