[D66] Foucault – Philosopher of Violence?

[R.O.]

https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#

  * *Foucault – Philosopher of Violence?*
  * Frédéric Gros
    <https://www.cairn-int.info/publications-de-Frédéric-Gros--1389.htm>
  * In Cités <https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-cites.htm> *Volume 50,
    Issue 2, 2012
    <https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-cites-2012-2.htm>*, pages 75 to 86
  * Translated from the French by Cadenza Academic Translations


I should like to examine how the thinking of Michel Foucault formulated 
the problem of violence. We should begin by noting that this term 
“violence” is actually little used by Foucault himself. Foucault is not 
a philosopher of violence in the sense that he would wish to put forward 
a general explanation or a fundamental theory of the phenomenon. He 
neither asks questions concerning the psychological causes of 
aggression, nor does he seek to inquire into the sociological roots of 
civil violence. Neither does he consider violence from the victim’s 
point of view through examining, perhaps, the problems of suffering and 
denial. Nonetheless, one finds in his thinking a substantial number of 
considerations on the place of violence in public discourse and 
institutions; in knowledge and in power.

2 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa2>We 
may begin by identifying the two domains in which the problem will be 
developed – the discursive field and the political field. In the 
discursive field, the question is this: is it possible to speak of a 
violence of truth and discourse? In the political sphere, the question 
is: is there a specific institutional and state violence to be 
discussed? The violence of the /logos/, the violence of the state? These 
two questions constitute one of the major theoretical legacies of Michel 
Foucault. This obviously is not to declare that the /logos/ is always 
violent, or that power is inherently violent, but rather that for any 
moment, particular historical configurations or specific methodological 
frameworks can be described.

3 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa3>Classical 
philosophy traditionally places violence in opposition to reason. It is 
customary to regard them as mutually exclusive, antagonistic, 
irreducible with, on the side of reason, truth, language, speech, the 
/logos/, and on the side of violence the clash of wills, coercion, and 
domination. This opposition is reflected in a number of maxims – reason 
delivers us from the chains of error and ignorance, the truth is 
independent of might, knowledge is not power, access to the /logos/ is a 
liberation. Classically, it is considered that the /logos/ imparts 
justice to all things, peacefully rendering them meaningful, that reason 
frees us from the constraints of obscurantism, that dialogue is an 
alternative to fighting, that knowledge obviates violence. We can 
summarize all these issues with the following proposition: the /logos/ 
is essentially non-violent, while violence is fundamentally 
extra-discursive.

4 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa4>A 
number of Foucault’s theses make it possible to question this evidence, 
which we may term classical or Platonic. Before we begin, it is 
necessary to indicate that Foucault is neither the only nor the first 
thinker to challenge the idea that the /logos/ is always and essentially 
a peacemaker. The Sophists were presented and denounced by Plato as 
exploiters of language, making it an instrument of domination and 
manipulation – an issue of power. Much later, Nietzsche affirmed that 
there is no pure “will to truth,” because knowledge depends upon a 
struggle between instincts, and the statement of a truth is never 
anything but a strategy in an ongoing power struggle. Heidegger strongly 
condemns the technique, because it assumes what he calls an “enframing” 
(/Gestell/) [1] 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#no1>[1]“The 
conventional translation for Gestell is ‘enframing’ 
in…<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#no1> 
of the world and nature. Technical reasoning considers the world and 
humans as manipulable entities from whom maximum utility and profit must 
be extracted. Finally, we recall Horkheimer and Adorno’s assertion in 
their 1947 book, /Dialektik der Aufklärung/ that “[r]eason has become 
totalitarian.” In this famous book, the authors raise questions on the 
extent to which the Nazi concentration camps might not be regarded as a 
monstrous child of the Enlightenment. Foucault is the heir to all of 
this tradition of thought, from the sophists to Horkheimer, via 
Nietzsche and Heidegger. Before examining in detail the theses which, in 
Foucault, are part of this tradition, we should make two preliminary 
remarks.

5 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa5>The 
first concerns the importance of Nietzschean inspiration. It is 
Nietzsche, rather than the Sophists, Heidegger, or Adorno, who allows 
Foucault to overcome the great Platonic equivalence of the reasonable 
/logos/. For example, Nietzsche claims that interpretation is not the 
discovery of meaning, but the imposition thereof because there is no 
“primary signification” of things. This thesis resurfaces in Foucault’s 
refusal of commentary and hermeneutics. Foucault rejects the idea that 
the philosopher’s work is to search through texts, speeches, and 
thoughts for an original meaning buried beneath the thickness of letters 
and stories. Philosophy is not looking for primary signification, 
somehow lost – it is a diagnostic activity. That is to say that 
philosophy is not the revelation of meaning, but the description of a 
strategy. The philosopher is not a prophet, he is a cartographer. He 
does not reveal mankind’s eternal destiny from the discovery of a lost 
original meaning, but describes the historical power struggle, the 
opportunities and risks that history has presented. Foucault recognizes 
this Nietzschean influence on many occasions in his work.

6 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa6>The 
second remark corrects the first a little and helps to reduce the 
importance of Nietzsche’s influence. There is indeed another important 
distinction that must constantly be remembered and which lies at the 
heart of another important text – Husserl’s /Krisis/. The thesis of a 
domineering /logos/ can indeed easily lead to irrationality. If reason 
is inherently totalitarian, salvation must be sought in poetry, mystical 
intuitions, or impulses of the heart. But most often it is primarily to 
expose the perversion of reason, rather than reason itself. What is 
condemned is not reason in itself, but the dominance of calculative 
rationality, cold and technical, at the expense of critical reason, 
laden with values. This is important because, when studying Kant’s essay 
“What is Enlightenment?” Foucault claims to be within the tradition of 
critical reason. It is reason that denounces unjust rulers and 
iniquitous systems, it is reason that writes the story of its own 
perversion, and only reason that can establish an equilibrium in the 
internal division between formal rigor and ethical rigor.

7 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa7>We 
can now turn to a first major thesis of Foucault, in which we find an 
attempt to describe the violence of the Western /logos/. In /Madness and 
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason/ (1964), 
Foucault seeks to establish that the assertion of classical reason 
presupposes a violent rejection of madness. To be reasonable is to 
reject insanity. To understand what is provocative in this statement, 
consider the traditional thesis, which says that reason includes 
madness, and by understanding it, saves, liberates, recognizes, and 
integrates it. Madness, according to the traditional theory, is mental 
illness, but was long treated otherwise and through ignorance, 
obscurantism, and prejudice, the mad were considered possessed by 
demons, damnable criminals, the “innocents of God,” or even lazy 
play-actors. When modern medical reason says that the mad are 
essentially and primarily patients, it frees sufferers from ancient 
anathemas, allowing them to access their own truths, reinstating them in 
the human community. Here we find the Platonic equation. Knowing is to 
install everything in the pacifying neutrality of its meaning. But 
Foucault’s thesis is exactly the opposite: it is reason which excludes 
madness, and when reason claims to define insanity medically, it renews 
the exclusion. We can give two illustrations of this thesis. The first 
refers to problems that existed in the creation of “General Hospitals” 
in France in the seventeenth century. Based on a number of archives, 
Foucault shows that the underworld of poverty in the mid-seventeenth 
century was subject to an administrative policy of confinement. The 
streets of Paris were cleared of their beggars and vagabonds. The insane 
were evidently part of this “world of the wandering.” Before going 
further we must immediately prevent a misunderstanding. Foucault does 
not say that the century of classicism chose exclusively to lock the 
insane away rather than treat them – of course, a number of the insane 
at the time were treated medically, and of course, some continued to be 
regarded as possessed, or as the innocent creatures of God. But these 
medical or religious practices were traditional and even if they 
continued to exist, the particularity of the classical experience of 
madness is expressed more in this new practice of confinement than in 
other ways. It was not only beggars who were locked up, but prostitutes 
and helpless old folks too – the indolent and ultimately the 
unproductive, forming a world of “unreason” which included the insane. 
This rejection is rooted in a bourgeois moral reasoning that 
simultaneously condemns laziness, immorality, and insanity. This 
standard of reasonableness nourishes, according to Foucault, the first 
of the /Méditations/ and explains why Descartes, in order to push 
further the possibilities of doubt, preferred to think of himself as a 
dreamer rather than a madman. Later, the modern experience of madness 
gave birth to the science of psychiatry. This is the time when, finally, 
the old interpretations of madness (“the fool is a mystical being” 
during the Renaissance, “the fool is a pariah” in the classical age) are 
massively rejected in favor of one view – madness is only and entirely a 
mental illness. The insane then moved from the General Hospital where 
they were indistinguishable from the poor, the prostitutes, and the 
perverts, to the insane asylum. For Foucault, this understanding of 
madness cannot be immediately interpreted as a rescue and repatriation 
into the human community. Foucault describes the operation of the first 
asylums in terms of constraints, beatings, surveillance, and punishment. 
Scientific objectification, when it comes to the humanities, consists of 
confining individuals, not only by walls but by truths, imposed on them 
like a new set of chains.

8 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa8>Other 
illustrations of this principle of the non-irreducibility of violence 
and the /logos/ can be found in a number of aesthetic, epistemological, 
and ethical themes developed by Foucault. For example, when Foucault 
studies literature in Bataille, Artaud, and Blanchot, it is to show 
that, for the writer, language is not a space that permits him to 
express his identity and to identify himself within in its truth. 
Language is a mortifying element, an inhuman, anonymous structure in 
which the subject undergoes the trials of his dispersion, rupture, and 
death. On the other hand, the concept of power/knowledge developed in 
the 1970s allows Foucault to reveal the political dimension of the 
sciences at the level of their origins and effects. At their origin, he 
shows that the matrices of knowledge consist of sociopolitical 
techniques: Greek mathematics and judicial mechanisms, empirical science 
and techniques of Inquisition, humanities and discipline. As for their 
effects, Foucault takes the example of psychiatry to show that this 
science is worth less in its content than in the effects of the power 
that it authorizes against the person who is its object.

9 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa9>But 
the goal is not to denounce, in a nihilistic and relativistic manner, 
the fraud of knowledge by revealing its practical roots or political 
effects. It is, rather, to show than we can never completely separate 
the domain of disinterested knowledge, establishing the truth of its 
objects in the purity of a fundamental detachment, from the domain of 
pure power relations where manipulation and deceit reign. Knowledge and 
power are two sides of the same reality. Finally, “truth” means less the 
agreement of meanings than the vectorization of forces. A last example, 
then: in the 1980s, the study of the Greek notion of /parrhesia/ brought 
Foucault, in one of his last lectures at the Collège de France (/Le 
Gouvernement de soi et des autres/ [Governing oneself and others], 
1983), to rethink the conditions of the exercise of political speech, 
particularly in the context of Athenian democracy. Foucault gives the 
example of Pericles and Demosthenes, when they violently challenge their 
fellow citizens in the Assembly. He describes this as a genuinely 
democratic use of speech. But this is to show that democratic frank 
speaking is less about consensus, to pacify disputes, than to smash the 
comfortable cowardice of anonymity and the silent majorities. Speaking 
the truth forces us to recognize that we are less in agreement with 
ourselves and others than we would like to admit.

10 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa10>The 
problem now arises concerning the theme of violence through Foucault’s 
conception of power. On this point we must be very careful, because a 
number of Foucault’s statements specifically oppose the idea that all 
power is violence. This refusal to equate power with violence has 
several aspects. It is firstly a very general opposition to the ideas of 
Althusser whose thinking aims to understand power as a mechanism of 
domination by the propertied classes of the lower orders. This 
domination, says Althusser, is exercised by means of violence and 
ideology, through the apparatus of state such as the police and 
education. Power fundamentally suppresses and lies in order to safeguard 
the economic interests of the ruling class. For Foucault, these 
arguments are too simplistic. First, because power involves much broader 
relationships than those between the state and its citizens, and because 
power cannot be reduced to a mere tool, working for the benefit of 
economic interests.

11 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa11>Despite 
these reservations, even if Foucault refuses to say that power is the 
state, and the state is violence, we can show how his analysis poses the 
problem of political violence through the concepts of “civil war” and 
the “reason of state.” According to a classical definition, the state is 
understood as a sovereign decision-making body, structured by rules of 
law and requiring the obedience of individuals within its jurisdiction. 
A political society can be generally defined as a state of harmony 
achieved by the rule of law over every member of the society. Power, in 
this sense, is the opposite of violence, since the assertion of a 
judicial order is the exit, once established, from the pre-political 
state of war, defined as pure violence. This is what Foucault repeatedly 
called the Hobbes hypothesis: power is determined as established law, 
and law is peace. All the studies conducted by Foucault in the 1970s 
were just so many ways to censure the evidence of this relentless 
opposition between political authority and violence, between the rule of 
law and a state of war. This denunciation is articulated through 
concepts that express figures of violence: ongoing disciplinary 
coercion, perpetual civil war, the permanent state of emergency, state 
racism, etc. We may speak of these issues as a Foucauldian neo-Marxism.

12 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa12>In 
/Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison/ (1975) and /The History 
of Sexuality: An Introduction/ (1978), Foucault opposes, very broadly, 
two main modalities of power: the power of sovereignty and disciplinary 
power. With Foucault we encounter two ways of presenting the contrast 
between the power of the law and the power of the standard. Either he 
opposes the violence of authoritarian rule to the gentleness of 
normalizing discipline, or he distinguishes between two regimes of 
violence: on the one hand a dramatic, discontinuous, brutal regime (the 
law that subjugates and dominates), and on the other, a continuous 
regime that is insidious and insistent (the social norm which eventually 
obtains docility). The power of sovereignty is that of the authoritarian 
father, the despotic overlord, or absolute monarch. It imposes its law, 
relieves subjects of their possessions, collects taxes, requisitions 
wealth, imposes work, and tortures the body. Disciplinary authority is 
that of institutions (the army, the school, the factory) which train the 
body, correct attitudes, and normalize behavior through monitoring, 
punishment, and examinations.

13 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa13>The 
neo-Marxism of Foucault is the statement of two theses, corollaries to 
the construction of this opposition between the law and the standard. On 
the one hand, it is about the individual disciplined by technical 
standards, of whom the philosophy of the social contract gives an 
idealized, ideological version – the “free citizen.” But this equality 
and freedom of the citizen are proclaimed only to make the hierarchies 
and constraints of a specific disciplinary system acceptable. Of course, 
the state is non-violent as such, since it guarantees the existence of 
fundamental rights and the pacification of interpersonal relationships. 
But this warranty is only there to make the micro-violence of discipline 
acceptable. The other neo-Marxist thesis aims to establish an economic 
function of disciplinary mechanisms: Marx shows in /Das Kapital/ how the 
labor of the worker becomes a productive force from which a profit can 
be extracted. Foucault shows how disciplines transform the life force of 
the worker, immanent and polymorphic, into a force of work which may be 
used by industry.

14 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa14>Foucault’s 
neo-Marxism can also be seen through another theme, that of perpetual 
civil war. The first thesis proposed that the peace of the state hides 
the micro-violence of disciplinary institutions. At the Collège de 
France, one year after the publication of /Discipline and Punish/, 
Foucault began a series of lessons (/Society Must be Defended: Lectures 
at the Collège de France/ in 1976 [2003 in English], /Security, 
Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France/ in 1978 [2007 
in English]) which would propose a reading of politics in terms of war 
and governmentality.

15 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa15>The 
state, according to the classical theory, is law and law is peace. For 
Foucault this theme of a non-violent sovereign state is built at the 
intersection of historical content on the one hand and philosophical 
discourse on the other. The historical content is the slow emergence in 
the West (Foucault’s examples are mainly French) of a centralized 
monarchy reactivating Roman law – as reworked in the Justinian Code, and 
therefore in its imperial form – because it seeks to establish the 
legitimacy of its command over the people based on public law. 
Philosophical discourse is the idea developed by philosophers of the 
contract (Hobbes, for example) that state law is formed from the 
transfer by all individuals, once and for all, of their natural rights 
to a third party which then imposes a positive law whose observance 
becomes the condition of security for all. At the crossroads of this 
content and this discourse is an obvious fact – political power always 
requires the imposition of civil peace by a higher authority.

16 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa16>With 
this in mind Foucault examines two major sets of narratives: those of 
English jurists of the seventeenth century (Coke and Selden), 
contemporaries of the first English Revolution, and those of the 
eighteenth century French aristocrats (Boulainvilliers, Buat-Nançay). 
The English historians describe the monarchical institutions of their 
time as the legal expression and technical instrument of domination by 
the invaders. The Normans had imposed their law upon the indigenous 
Saxon peoples whose freedoms were thus violated such that the history of 
England, from the eleventh century, is fundamentally scarred by a secret 
war between the victors and the vanquished. In this story, the English 
Revolution is the time of reversal. The important thing is that in this 
story, public law appears as a legal system imposed by a warrior caste 
upon a people after invasion, in order to maintain its dominance. The 
apparent social order, secured by a system of public law, is therefore 
subject to this secret war in which the defeated seek to regain their 
lost rights. Elsewhere, Foucault studies the early eighteenth century 
writings of Boulainvilliers concerning the history of France. The 
pattern this time is more complex. The texts of Boulainvilliers express 
the efforts of the French nobility to assert their prerogatives against 
an absolute monarch intent on building a unified France through the 
progressive destruction of the freedoms of aristocrats, relying on a 
third-party State to ensure the administration of public affairs. 
Boulainvilliers’ history lesson is first to remind the king that the 
nobles are, like him, from a line of Germanic conquerors – they are 
fundamentally the king’s peers – but also to denounce the strategic 
alliance the King has made with the subject populations, against the 
nobility. Foucault’s interest in these texts lies in the fact that 
Boulainvilliers is not concerned, like other English historians, to 
rehabilitate a primitive law (that of the Saxon people) following the 
unfortunate accidents of history (the Norman invasion). Rather, it is to 
proclaim the legitimacy of a law of force (that of the warriors who came 
from Germany to subjugate the Gallic people), and to pose the problem of 
the conditions of its reactivation: how to make it such that the 
strongest ensure their place and their rights? Which institutions must 
be set up? What legal knowledge should they acquire? What stories shall 
they tell and what place should they occupy in society? The interest of 
these texts by historians for Foucault is that they denounce the 
illusion of the public peace, the illusion of the universality of law, 
the illusion of social order. The political game is not one of peace, 
but of war. Public law is a strategy of domination. These games of 
domination and these struggles are the engine of history. This is a 
reversal of Clausewitz’s aphorism: war is the continuation of politics 
by other means. The idea of a perpetual civil war would be found in the 
communist doctrine of class struggle. It allowed Lenin to build the idea 
of a European or global civil war. Beyond national solidarity, it aims 
precisely to build a transnational alliance of the world’s proletariat 
to fight against a bourgeoisie whose interests are also global. For 
Foucault, the state is not understood as something which puts an end to 
this primitive war. The public peace is nothing more than a strategic 
moment in the history of continuous civil war, which includes tactical 
retreats and promises of revolution.

17 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa17>The 
state can also be violent. It may trigger a “biological” war against its 
own people. We previously introduced the distinction between sovereign 
power and disciplinary power. This opposition, however, overflows far 
beyond the state framework. Foucault specifically places the state of 
sovereign function and the state in its biopolitical function in 
opposition (I prefer to speak in terms of functions, even if Foucault 
tends sometimes to talk about two forms of state in historical 
succession). The difference between these two state functions can be 
found in the following statement: the sovereign state “/causes people to 
die and provides for their life/” while the biopolitical state “/causes 
people to live and provides for their death/.” When the sovereign state 
interests itself in the lives of its subjects, it is only ever under the 
sign of destruction: to condemn to death or to send to die in war. 
Otherwise, it permits life to continue within the framework of a public 
and legal order which it is merely content to provide. The emergence of 
the biopolitical occurs, for Foucault, at the moment when the state 
considers that the life of its people is its concern, for example, when 
it implements active health or birth policies. The state, in this new 
role, seems to demonstrate its ability to care rather than to exercise 
violence. Yet Foucault shows that the biopolitical function of the state 
(“to provide for life”) was at the origin of the mass violence in the 
twentieth century – its genocide, extermination, and massacres. It was 
in the name of an intensification of the life of its people that the 
Nazi government distinguished a number of “races.” The destruction of 
European Jewry by the Nazis can be understood in Foucault as a 
paradoxical inflection of the biopolitical project: the biopolitical 
state, in order to protect and improve the lives of its people, 
exterminates races whose presence it considers detrimental to the purity 
and vital intensity of its people.

18 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa18>I 
should mention one final way in which Foucault reveals the violence of 
the state. It is found in his 1978 course at the Collège de France 
entitled /Security, Territory, Population/. It is customary to say that 
between 1976 and 1978 Foucault abandoned the model of war for that of 
governmentality. However this change, as far as our problem is 
concerned, does not constitute a break but an inflection. In 1976 it was 
enough to say that the state did indeed establish peace, but a 
precarious, fragile, and illusory peace, the peace of the “winners of 
the day.” Yet the losers had not capitulated. By 1978, it had become 
necessary to understand something else: how what Foucault calls the 
governmentality of the reason of state introduced a logic of violence as 
a principle of its action. We must first understand the relevance of the 
concept of governmentality. Foucault invented the concept of 
governmentality in order to understand the state as a historically 
determined construction. There was a governmentality of the city in 
ancient Greece, a governmentality of the Empire in ancient Rome and the 
Christian Middle Ages, and a governmentality of the state in the modern 
age. But the concept of governmentality goes well beyond the political 
frame. Foucault speaks of a pastoral governmentality which assumes a 
purely individual relationship. Governmentality is the art of leading 
men and things. In the seventeenth century, a governmentality “of the 
reason of state” appeared, that is to say, in which the leaders directed 
their actions toward a specific rationality. One may rule on the basis 
of a natural, a divine, or a family model, governing as a good father, 
as a just king, or respecting the natural rights of individuals or 
natural hierarchies. The seventeenth century invented government 
according to the state, that is, a government committed to the 
sustenance of the state, based on needs related to the assertion of the 
state, which calculates interests in terms of the interests of the 
state, without moral, religious, or legal consideration. Governing 
according to the state is to assert a regime of necessities indifferent 
to morality, religion, and law. The “reason of state” and the “/coup 
d’état/” are the concepts which establish this primacy. The state can be 
defined as a certain political unit (consisting of a territory, a 
centralized administration, a population, and natural resources) whose 
existence is supported by some governmentality. The undefined 
reinforcement of the state is obtained by a governmentality which coldly 
calculates interest. Foucault’s idea is not to find the philosophical 
foundations of “how the state should govern,” but to describe how 
historically we started to rule ourselves from the seventeenth century 
onwards with the systematic adoption of this specific need called the 
state. Governing according to the state is a perpetual pendulum swinging 
between compliance with a legal order which is guaranteed and, in order 
to strengthen the state, the taking of measures and decisions in 
contempt of all law. The ultimate justification is the interest of the 
state. Therefore, Foucault argues that violence is to be found at the 
heart of the state since it exists according to a regime of necessity 
whose assertion presupposes the transgression of moral values, the law, 
and natural requirements. To certain decisions (when a son puts his own 
mother in prison, when a Catholic king makes an alliance with Protestant 
princes against Catholic Spain, when a king bloodily represses an 
unarmed people), we can say “this is immoral,” “this is contrary to 
religion,” or “this is not natural.” Perhaps, but it is in the interest 
of the state. I quote Foucault in the lesson of March 15, 1978: “The 
violence of the state is nothing other than the irruptive manifestation, 
in a way, of its own reason.”

19 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa19>In 
conclusion, we should remember that the work of Foucault is neither an 
anthropological nor a psychological, sociological, or moral treatment of 
violence. It never aims to bring violence back to any primary 
determinant whatsoever (as a fundamental negativity, a natural 
aggression, domination or social frustration – an original finitude). 
Foucault also refuses any comparison between power and violence, because 
for him power is a relational game. Violence is precisely that moment 
when, in a particular power game, the asymmetry becomes too great and 
there is no longer any possibility of reciprocity.


  Notes

[1] 
<https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#re1no1>“The 
conventional translation for /Gestell/ is ‘enframing’ in English. This 
translation is misleading, however, since it relates Gestell to a 
‘framing’ of human existence, which is a far too neutral term to convey 
the force with which Gestell impinges upon ontological disclosure. The 
French translation “/arraisonnement/” is probably closer to the meaning 
of Heidegger’s concept.” Chihab El Khachab, “Questioning Heidegger on 
Modern Technology,” 16^th Oxford Philosophy Graduate Conference, 
November 17-18, 2012, full text at 
http://www.ub.edu/tif/papers/Khachab.pdf - Translator’s note.
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