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<ul>
<li class="titre-article"><b>Foucault – Philosopher of Violence?</b>
</li>
<li class="meta auteurs auteurs-big"> <span class="auteur"><a
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/publications-de-Frédéric-Gros--1389.htm"
class="lien-auteur">Frédéric Gros</a></span> </li>
<li class="meta"> <span class="in-revue">In <span
class="titre-revue titre-revue-normalize"><a
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-cites.htm">Cités</a></span>
<b><a
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-cites-2012-2.htm">Volume
50, Issue 2, 2012</a></b>, pages 75 to 86 </span></li>
<li class=""> Translated from the French by Cadenza Academic
Translations </li>
</ul>
<p><span class="lettrine" style="position: relative;"></span></p>
<p><span class="lettrine" style="position: relative;"><br>
</span></p>
<p><span class="lettrine" style="position: relative;">I</span>
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. </p>
<p class="para" id="pa2"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa2">2</a>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 <em
class="marquage italique">logos</em>, 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 <em class="marquage italique">logos</em> 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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa3"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa3">3</a>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 <em class="marquage italique">logos</em>,
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 <em class="marquage italique">logos</em> is a liberation.
Classically, it is considered that the <em class="marquage
italique">logos</em> 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 <em
class="marquage italique">logos</em> is essentially non-violent,
while violence is fundamentally extra-discursive.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa4"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa4">4</a>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 <em
class="marquage italique">logos</em> 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” (<em class="marquage italique">Gestell</em>) <a
id="re1no1" class="renvoi typeref-note"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#no1">[1]</a><a
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#no1"
class="amorce amorce-renvoi"><span class="no">[1]</span>“The
conventional translation for Gestell is ‘enframing’ in…<span></span></a>
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, <em class="marquage
italique">Dialektik der Aufklärung</em> 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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa5"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa5">5</a>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 <em class="marquage italique">logos</em>. 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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa6"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa6">6</a>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 <em
class="marquage italique">Krisis</em>. The thesis of a
domineering <em class="marquage italique">logos</em> 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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa7"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa7">7</a>We
can now turn to a first major thesis of Foucault, in which we find
an attempt to describe the violence of the Western <em
class="marquage italique">logos</em>. In <em class="marquage
italique">Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the
Age of Reason</em> (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 <em class="marquage italique">Méditations</em>
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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa8"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa8">8</a>Other
illustrations of this principle of the non-irreducibility of
violence and the <em class="marquage italique">logos</em> 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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa9"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa9">9</a>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 <em
class="marquage italique">parrhesia</em> brought Foucault, in
one of his last lectures at the Collège de France (<em
class="marquage italique">Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres</em>
[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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa10"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa10">10</a>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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa11"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa11">11</a>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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa12"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa12">12</a>In
<em class="marquage italique">Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison</em> (1975) and <em class="marquage italique">The
History of Sexuality: An Introduction</em> (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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa13"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa13">13</a>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 <em class="marquage italique">Das
Kapital</em> 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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa14"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa14">14</a>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 <em
class="marquage italique">Discipline and Punish</em>, Foucault
began a series of lessons (<em class="marquage italique">Society
Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France</em> in 1976
[2003 in English], <em class="marquage italique">Security,
Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France</em> in
1978 [2007 in English]) which would propose a reading of politics
in terms of war and governmentality.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa15"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa15">15</a>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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa16"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa16">16</a>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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa17"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa17">17</a>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 “<em class="marquage italique">causes
people to die and provides for their life</em>” while the
biopolitical state “<em class="marquage italique">causes people to
live and provides for their death</em>.” 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.</p>
<p class="para" id="pa18"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa18">18</a>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 <em class="marquage italique">Security,
Territory, Population</em>. 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 “<em class="marquage italique">coup d’état</em>” 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.”</p>
<p class="para" id="pa19"><a class="no-para"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#pa19">19</a>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.</p>
<h1 class="titre default">Notes</h1>
<a id="no1" class="no"
href="https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CITE_050_0075--foucault-philosopher-of-violence.htm#re1no1">
[1] </a>“The conventional translation for <em class="marquage
italique">Gestell</em> 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 “<em class="marquage italique">arraisonnement</em>” is
probably closer to the meaning of Heidegger’s concept.” Chihab El
Khachab, “Questioning Heidegger on Modern Technology,” 16<sup
class="exposant">th</sup> Oxford Philosophy Graduate Conference,
November 17-18, 2012, full text at <a
href="http://www.ub.edu/tif/papers/Khachab.pdf" id="l1">http://www.ub.edu/tif/papers/Khachab.pdf</a>
- Translator’s note.
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