In Werner Herzog’s
documentary “Echoes from a Somber Empire”, we dig into the wicked legacy of
death and brutal power represented by the Central African Republic former
dictator Bukassa, who fancied himself as a new Napoleon, dressing like the
French emperor and re-enacting moments of the French revolution. Westerns may find it simply ridiculous. But a Foulcauldian
reading of Bukassa may show that in his folly, one can in fact learn a lot
about Napoleon and understand in a new light his role as the historical figure
who brought liberal institutions and civil code unto Europe.
Foucault’s two
lectures are very rich with radical methodological procedures which are to be
used towards a complete new writing of the history of power. Therefore, many
philosophical concepts of power have to be rejected. Contractualism, theory of
sovereignty and Marxism perform all deductions of power from a larger all-containing
unity. In contractualism and Marxism power is like a commodity, which can be
traded for the integration within a larger social unity or to serve broader
economic goals. Theory of sovereignty performs a subject-to-subject cycle, a
juridical model that endows individuals with a claim to rights, their only
resource against the (abuses of) discipline exercised by the powers to which
they’re subject.
Foucault rejects these
models and moves towards a decentralized one, where minor and local mechanisms are
more important than great unities and according to which one should rather
analyze the relational forms that power assumes in technologies of subjugation.
He unveils the superficial discourse modernity has built around rationality and
proves that, in industrial times, all such theories were themselves mechanisms necessary
to the implementation of disciplinary, surveillance societies. Thus the project
of modernity headed by the bourgeoisie was executed by means of a mechanics of
discipline, while ensuring a right of sovereignty as its necessary counterpart:
rights are an instrument of disciplinary power because they present it no harm
whatsoever.
With this, Foucault
shifts from a juridical understanding of rules to a natural one, that is, one
related to the body and its affects, which is explored in the second lecture.
This move is necessary not only from a theoretical point of view, but also from
a political one, since it is necessary to transcend the juridical understanding
of power and build a new one capable of resisting and countering disciplinary
society. Foucault recuperates what he considers to be the first
historico-political account of power, one that preceded modern theory of
sovereignty and the juridical power apparatus that it engendered. These early
modern theories were binary and can be traced to one’s body or desires, that
is, to the very basic affects of human beings, egotistical acts of speaking
one’s truth and recognizing the other as an enemy par excellence. It’s a
“perspectival discourse” in consonance to Nietzsche’s presentation of will to
power at the origin of everything. It understands truth as a relationship of
force and dissymmetry, something that therefore has to be enforced through war.
Foucault is rather controversial in his anti-bourgeois liberal scheme when he
recognizes the presence of such a historico-political understanding of power in
phenomena such as Nazism or other mythological, “late-aristocratic” movements.
But he’s right. Even Nietzsche recognized himself as an anti-liberal old
aristocrat. When one sees that Foucault had to resort to the Iranian Islamic
Revolution as a possible counterpoint to Western modern power, though, he’s
inability to present with convincing alternatives, rather than these political
monsters, is somewhat frustrating.
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