bruno cuconato claro - entry no. 2 (on Foucault / Protevi)

Foucault begins his genealogy of power by considering the traditional questions surrounding the concept.  Philosophy, he states, had always been preoccupied with the limit to the rights of power.  Foucault, however, wonders about which kind of power produces what he terms “discourses of power,” and how it manages to do so.  Foucault considers that contemporary society is based on truth (or its discourses,) therefore power structures society to stimulate the development of truth (or rather its truths.) 

Western societies, Foucault says, have had their juridical systems based in the concept of royal sovereignty since the Middle Ages.  Even though the discourses may have changed, the question of “legitimate rights of the sovereign on the one hand, and the legal obligation to obey on the other” has been used to mask relationships of domination, not sovereignty.  Foucault is not interested in the grand manifestations of power, such as in the power of a monarch over his subjects, but “at the point where it [power] becomes capillary.”  In this stage of his lecture, Foucault attacks the false perception of power as something of mass and of homogeneous domination.  To Foucault, power circulates, and every individual is a relay of power – propagating, originating and suffering manifestations of power through networks.

When Foucault tells the history of the formation of national state as the holder of the monopoly of war and the subsequent emergence of the army as institution, he sees the rise of a paradox.  To my understanding, there is no necessary contradiction: compelling the national political forces to abstain from fight, the national state may or not provide a legal framework to the dispute for power that follows.  If it does provide this framework, it gives rise to internal politics, or “continuation of war by other means,” with established rules and means to change these same rules.  Otherwise, if the state does not provide this framework, it can only try to smash the rebellions that will inevitably follow, and (civil) war will be the easiest way to challenge the established power.

In his second lecture, Foucault tries to summarize the explanatory factors of history.  He divides these factors in three different types: those of a physic-biological nature, which are considered as “brute facts,” such as physical strength and energy, those of accidental nature, such as the failure or success of military campaigns or rebellions, and those of a psychological or moral nature, human conditions such as courage, fear and hatred.  Rationality is seen in this foucauldian schema as a means to preserve power, a way to prevent the inversion of the relationship of force.

Finishing his lecture, Foucault analyses the elements that render war possible – what effectively makes “millions of good Christian folk who claim to love their neighbour go about murdering each other,” as Tolstoy would put it.  Foucault considers these elements to be ethnic or linguistic differences, different degrees of force, violence and the false notion of civilization X barbarism.  Taking advantage of the binary nature of the thought of Western societies, power discourses can create false dichotomies that legitimate conflict.