Johanna Oksala Ch 2 Violence)

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    2. Foundational Violence

    The hackneyed expression violence of language usually refers to the idea that

    language by necessity imposes a partial order: it simplifies experience by dividing it

    into manageable units through categories and common nouns, and artificially

    objectifies the referent by cutting it loose from its context. As I argued in the previous

    chapter, any interpretation of reality is always a form of violence in the sense that

    knowledge can only be a violation of the things to be known, not a simplerecognition or identification of them (TJF, 9). Several philosophers following

    Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida have emphasised and explicated this

    fundamental violence of language. What remains less comprehensively theorised in

    many of the discussions on the violence of language, however, is its relationship to

    physical violence.

    While the ontological violence of language does, in significant ways, sustain, enable

    and encourage physical violence, it is a serious mistake to conflate them: to

    unreflectively slide from the inevitability of violence understood as the violence of

    language the way language always imposes a partial and contingent order to

    ontological violence understood in a second and completely different sense as the

    fundamental hostility and aggression of human beings. It is my contention that such a

    slide characterises many of the recent theoretical defences of violence. Violence is

    understood to be ineliminable in the first sense, and this leads to its being treated as a

    fundamental constant in the second sense, too.

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    After discussing the violence of language in the sense delineated above, Slavoj iek,

    for example, concludes that we cannot wholly repudiate violence when struggle and

    aggression are part of life (iek 2008, 54). Chantal Mouffe makes a similar point

    when she argues that violence is the inevitable precondition of any consensus. By

    refusing to recognise that violence is ineradicable, political theory becomes incapable

    of grasping the nature of the political in its dimension of hostility and antagonism

    (Mouffe 2000, 132). While consensus is always a form of violence in the sense of

    being exclusive of some interpretations, its hegemonic nature does not imply the

    ineradicability of physical violence understood as the fundamental hostility of human

    beings. Sometimes, but not always, consensus isalso the result of physical acts of

    violence: what are supposed to be free elections, for example, turn into a practice of

    organised violence and intimidation. I will give a more detailed analysis of Mouffes

    position in the next chapter.

    While the ontological violence of language and physical violence thus cannot be

    conflated, neither is there a necessary causal link between them. The linguistic

    stereotyping of Jews and blacks, for example, has undoubtedly justified and sustained

    anti-Semitic pogroms and lynching, but it does not, by necessity, cause them. While

    these historically specific practices of physical violence have, for the most part,

    fortunately disappeared, the offensive stereotyping has not. Conversely, no matter

    how sympathetically we name, describe and characterise different groups of people,

    the ontological violence of language nevertheless remains. It is my contention that

    while the violence of language is precisely ontological and thereby a necessary and

    ineliminable feature of thought, physical violence is contingent, historically specific,

    and context-dependent.

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    This does not mean that ontology understood as the framework of competing

    background beliefs about reality is completely separate and free from physical

    violence. On the contrary, my aim in this chapter is to show the extent to which it is

    constituted by it. As I argued in the previous chapter, ontology is the sedimentation of

    political practices including horrendously violent practices, foremost among them

    war. The legacies of violence have thus sedimented into the structures and the

    meaning of our world. Reality as we know it reflects the outcome of past wars and is

    not an objective or politically neutral realm waiting to be truthfully described. My

    central claim is, however, that the investigation of the constitutive role of physical

    violence must be thoroughly historical and must not rely on any notion of originary

    violence as such.

    Political theorists such as Hannah Arendt (1970) have argued against the idea of

    constitutive violence by emphasising the purely instrumental nature of violence: it can

    only be the means of politics and is devoid of any intrinsic meaning of its own. James

    Dodd (2009,11) calls this the stupidity of violence principle: in its barest form it

    states that violence is and can only be a mere means. It remains trapped within the

    confines of a very narrow dimension of reality defined by the application of means.

    Violence as such is senseless; when taken for itself it is ultimately without direction.

    The practices of violence, however traumatic and extreme, fade into indefinite

    superficiality unless supported by a meaningful cause or end. Dodd argues that such

    an understanding of violence is the counterpart and a rejection of another influential

    philosophical view on violence: violence as an originary source of meaning. In Carl

    Schmitts thought, for example, pure violence must be understood as a radically

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    constitutive event: existential violence defines a moment in which the political will of

    the nation as such comes into being.

    I will examine Schmitts position in more detail in the next chapter. My aim here is to

    argue that while violence is constitutive of meaning, its constitutive function must

    always be understood through concrete historical practices of violence, not in terms of

    pure or originary violence as such. I will turn to Foucault again in my attempt to show

    how, alongside the political tradition that links the persistence and constancy of

    political violence to the hostile and aggressive nature of man, runs another strand that

    also insists on a strong connection between politics and violence. This connection is

    historical rather than natural, however, and is crucially tied to the birth of the state.1

    Foucaults lecture course Society Must Be Defended makes an important contribution

    to this tradition of thought. The lectures represent a major break with the Hobbesianlegacy in political thought, whilst forming Foucaults most explicit engagement with

    the question of political violence. They expose the violent origins of states, which are

    covered over by theories of timeless war and legitimate contract. I argue that his

    engagement with Hobbes in these lectures has strong implications for the efforts to

    historicise political violence and to envisage agonistic conceptions of politics

    uncoupled from it.

    Leviathan versus the Discourse of War

    1 Max Weber gives a famous formulation of this idea in his lecture Politics asVocation, in which he defines the state asa human community that holds a monopolyover the legitimate use of violence . See Weber 2004.

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    Foucault introduced his lecture course by noting that he would like to begin a series of

    investigations into whether war could provide a principle for the analysis of power

    relations. He summed up his previous efforts to rethink power by noting that until

    now, or for roughly the last five years, it has been disciplines, but for the next five

    years, it would be war, struggle, the army (SMD, 23). As we now know, this large-

    scale project never materialised. The lectures ultimately represent a failed attempt to

    rethink political power according to the model of war, and Foucault himself explicitly

    criticised the model in his late definitive essay Subject and Power. Pasquino

    Pasquale (1993, 86), who worked closely with Foucault at the time the lectures were

    delivered, claims that he would never have wished them to be published, for he

    regarded his courses as working hypotheses.From a concern with war Foucault

    moved to a more fruitful study of biopower and governmentality. 2

    It is my contention that while the war model was ultimately abandoned, what

    nevertheless remains significant in these lectures is that it was not abandoned in

    favour of an understanding of the political based on consensus or contract. The idea of

    power as the governing of conduct a set of actions upon actions and the practice-

    based account of political rationality conveyed by the notion of governmentality and

    developed in the lecture series following Society Must be Defended meant that

    political power was still understood as essentially agonistic and strategic. 3 Moreover,

    2 Beatrice Hanssen argues (2000, 148) that the change of plan revealed Foucaultsdisenchantment with the unwieldy dimensions of what threatened to become an all-enveloping power/war matrix. Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani (2003) arguethat the lectures represent a transition between Discipline and Punish andThe Historyof Sexuality, vol . I. From a concern with disciplinary power and sovereign power Foucault gradually moved to a more pronounced interest in biopower.3 In his introduction to the English translation Arnold Davidson argues (2003, xvii-

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    man, it refers to a concrete, historical struggle in which groups fight groups. As

    Foucault polemically formulated the aim, it was to show how the birth of states, their

    organisation and juridical structures are not the result of a contract, but arise from and

    are maintained in the blood and mud of battles.

    The law is born of real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests, which can

    be dated and which have their horrific heroes; the law was born in burning

    towns and ravaged fields... This does not mean that society, the law, and the

    State are like armistices that put an end to wars, or that they are the products

    of definitive victories. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war

    continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even the most regular...

    (SMD, 50) 6

    The task of unmasking the violent foundations of the state and the law attaches

    Foucault to a long lineage of thinkers, including figures such as Max Weber and

    Walter Benjamin. The way he accomplished this hackneyed task was strikingly

    original, however. His multilayered analysis moves through a complex and

    compressed set of historical material from sixteenth-century England to fascism. It is

    thus thoroughly historical, or to be more precise, genealogical. In these lectures he

    was not presenting a philosophical theory of power or a political history of states, but

    was offering a series of investigations into a specific discourse on the political history

    6 La loi nat ds batailles relles, des victories, des massacres, des conquetes qui ontleur date et leur hros dhorreur; la loi nat des villes incendies, des terres ravagesMais cela ne veut pas dire que la socit, la loi et ltat soient comme larmistice dansces guerres, ou la sanction dfinitive des victoires. La loi nest pas pacification, car sous la loi, la guerre continue faire rage lintrieur de tous les mchanismes de pouvoir, mme les plus rguliers. (IFDS, 43)

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    of England and France. He was charting the genealogy of historiography with the aim

    of revealing its connections with power: how it had been used as a weapon in political

    struggles and what power effects it had had.

    To briefly sum up the argument, Foucault claimed that up until the sixteenth century

    history was written by power to justify power: it was a record of the glory of power.

    At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century there

    emerged a radically new type of discourse in England and France, however, a

    counter-history that was used to contest power. Foucault called it historico-political

    discourse and argued that it was based on a new model for thinking about power and

    the origin of states: the present political order was the result of a past war and those

    holding power held it for no other reason than that they won the war. Its central thesis

    was thus the idea that war, rather than a contract or a natural right, formed the

    ineradicable basis of all relations and institutions of power. The historically specific

    facts of war found the political order of the state and power relations as they

    functioned at that time.

    This new historico-political discourse functioned as a counter-history to the

    mainstream political history. With it a new historical practice emerged, characterised

    by the principle of heterogeneity: the history of some people was not the history of

    others. It revealed that history was in fact a divisive light that illuminates one side of

    the social body but leaves the other side in shadows or casts it into the darkness

    (SMD, 70).

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    Foucault shows how this discourse was used in different ways to further the political

    aims of different groups. In the process he rewrites much of the history of

    historiography. He argues, for example, that the French historian Boulainvilliers a

    mostly forgotten and controversial figure because of his claim that aristocracy

    constituted a distinct and superior race was in fact a highly significant historian

    because he opened up the historico-political field in France. By evoking the memory

    of the war between the Franks and the Gauls he argued for the original right of the

    Franks and the aristocracy as their descendants to power. In his hands history

    became knowledge that was deployed and functioned within the field of political

    struggle. Boulainvilliers importance lay in his realisation that historiography not only

    analysed and interpreted political events but also deployed and modified them.

    Foucaults lectures thus operate and attempt reversals on various levels. On the level

    of historiography he is defending a practice of counter-history that is always

    perspectival, the discourse of a combat position rather than a supposedly neutral view

    from nowhere. He identifies the emergence of this historiographical counter-discourse

    and traces its developments in the truth games of historiography and its uses for

    political life. He does this with the help of controversial figures such as

    Boulainvilliers, and attempts to reconfigure, even completely overturn, the accepted

    assessments of their significance in historiographical research.

    On a philosophical level, Foucaults historiographical arguments support several

    theoretical insights. Although he did not invent the model of war as a tool for

    understanding political power, which rather emerged from historical discourse, he

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    clearly approved of and even praised it. He found in it a number of benefits compared

    to the juridical model of sovereign power. Firstly, it was able to provide a concrete

    analysis of the multiplicity of power relations that manufacture subjects, rather than

    presupposing subjects and rights that existed already. The juridical model of

    sovereignty presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights and

    primitive powers. Foucault, on the other hand, argues that we should not attempt to

    study power on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but should focus

    on the relationship itself. The power relation determines the elements on which it

    bears. Rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they

    have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, Foucault asks us to

    consider how relations of subjugation manufacture subjects (SMD, 265).

    Secondly, this type of analysis could reveal relations of domination in their

    multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, and in their reversibility rather than

    identifying a sovereign as the single form or central point from which they spring.

    Foucault suggests that these relations should be studied as relations of force that

    intersect, refer to one another, converge or, conversely, come into conflict and strive

    to negate each other. Thirdly, rather than taking the law as the fundamental

    manifestation of power, this model could identify the technical instruments and

    techniques of constraint that would guarantee the functioning of the relations of

    domination. (SMD, 266.)

    While the contract theories following Hobbes thus represent attempts to explain the

    genesis of sovereignty in terms of three basic elements subject, unitary power and

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    law Foucault wanted to offer an alternative way of thinking about political power

    that did not assume any of these elements as given (SMD, 44-46). He was continuing

    his critique of sovereign power in these lectures, buthe was no longer content with

    the idea of disciplinary power as a complement to it: it was not enough to show that

    there were modern forms of power that escaped the sovereign-juridical model or

    functioned at the interstices of it. 7 He now wanted to overturn this model completely

    by questioning it in terms of how it represented the foundations and origins of the

    state, its institutions and power mechanisms. He summed up his lectures by writing

    that in order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, one must completely

    abandon the juridical model of sovereignty (SMD, 265). The hypothesis was that the

    discourse of war could offer an alternative.

    As we now know, Foucault never completely abandoned the juridical model of

    sovereignty: instead, he ultimately abandoned the war model. His lasting contribution

    to political philosophy lies in his critique and rethinking of sovereignty, not in any

    supposed move beyond it. His war lectures showed that sovereignty was not the result

    of contract and rights, but was an ongoing battle, both physically and discursively.

    The History of Violence versus the Primal State of War

    7 Foucault began his critique of the model of sovereign power in Discipline and Punish , but it was still his central target in these lectures. He claimed that the juridicalmodel of sovereignty that located power in the centralised state apparatus was a problematic legacy of monarchical notions of sovereignty. We must cut off thekings head in political theory and analyse the phenomenon of power without the useof this model. See e.g., SMD, 59.

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    While Foucault clearly aimed to unmask irreducible violence through the model of

    war violence that is foundational and indispensable for the functioning and

    existence of the state it should be noted that this violence is not naturalised in his

    historico-political discourse. In challenging Hobbes view of the origin of political

    power, Foucault can be read to be challenging the idea that violence is a universal

    constant, an inevitable feature of the state of nature. Instead, he moves the discourse

    on war and violence to a thoroughly historical level: the origin of states lies in a

    history of violence, and not in a natural state of war.

    Foucault concedes that, at first glance, Hobbes appears to be the man who said that

    war was both the basis of power relations and the principle that explained them. More

    fundamentally, however, his thought announced the beginning of the modern master

    discourse on law and sovereignty, which covered over the empirical realities of war

    and the violent facts of history. What Hobbes calls the war of everyman against every

    man is not a real historical war a direct confrontation of forces marked by blood,

    battles and corpses but a play of representations, which were played off against each

    other. Instead of real war there was an unending diplomacy between rivals who used

    mutually intimidatory tactics, calculated presentations of strength and expressions of a

    pronounced will to wage war. The establishment of sovereignty was ultimately the

    result of this diplomacy and not of actual war. (SMD, 89.)

    There are no battles in Hobbess primitive war, there is no blood and there are

    no corpses. There are presentations, manifestations, signs, emphatic

    expressions, wiles and deceitful expressions We are in a theatre where

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    presentations are exchanged, in a relationship of fear in which there are no

    time limits; we are not really involved in a war. (SMD, 92) 8

    Hobbes makes a distinction between two categories of sovereignty: commonwealth

    by institution sovereign power that is based on a contract and commonwealth by

    acquisition sovereign power that is acquired by force.9 Commonwealths by

    institution are clearly founded on a contract according to which the sovereign

    represents the people. However, in the case of commonwealths by acquisition, it

    seems that there must have been a real battle: winners and losers of an actual war.

    However, Foucault argues that in this case the establishment of sovereignty takes

    place after the war and, in a sense, independently of it. The foundation of sovereignty

    lies in fear and the will to prefer life to death, and this leads to a contract.

    The insignificance of any real war becomes evident when Hobbes adds a third form of sovereignty the type that binds a child to his or her mother and states that this type

    is very similar to the institution of sovereignty by acquisition that appears after the

    end of a war, or after the defeat. The child has to obey its mother because its life

    depends on her, not because of violent coercion. There is no essential difference

    between the way a child consents to its mothers sovereignty in order to preserve its

    life and the way the defeated give their consent when the battle is over. Whether there

    has been a real war or not is not the decisive issue. Sovereignty is established out of

    fear of death, the will to live and the consent that follows.8 Il ny a pas de batailles dans la guerre primitive de Hobbes, il nya pas de sang, ilnya pas de cadavers. Il ya des representations, manifestations, des signes, desexpressions emphatiques, rusees, mensongresOn est sur la theatre desrepresentations changes, on est dans un rapport de peur qui est un rapporttemporellement indfini; on nest pas rellement dans la guerre. (IFDS, 79-80)9 See Hobbes 2004, 129-157.

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    importantly, the two are inseparable. As Beatrice Hansen (2000, 15-16) formulates

    Foucaults aim, it was to show how the role of political power was perpentually to use

    a silent war to reinscribe the relationship of force established through concrete war in

    institutions, economic inequalities, and the identities of individuals. Politics sanctions

    and reproduces, through symbolic practices, the disequilibrium of forces manifested

    in war.

    The model of war, as well as the notion of force, would thus articulate the

    intertwinement of the physical combat over life with the interpretative combat over

    truth and objectivity. Our political history, as well as the present political order,

    reveals how the imposition of hegemonic meanings, identities and interpretations has

    been inseparable from physical violence the historical facts of wars. Violence is

    fundamentally consitutive of the very fabric of our world in the sense that reality as

    we know it reflects the outcome of past wars and is not an objective or politically

    neutral realm waiting to be truthfully described.

    I argue that Foucault must have come to see the dangers that the complete merging of

    these two meanings of force physical and symbolic would lead to, however, and

    he later abandoned the war model. If his intial question was: To what extent can a

    relationship of domination boil down to or be reduced to the notion of a relationship

    of force (SMD, 46), he later answered it unequivocally by denying that power could

    ever be reduced to force or violence. The violent inscription of bodies fuses with the

    inscription of meanings in the functioning of modern political power, but these

    aspects cannot be completely superimposed without committing a fundamental

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    ontological error.

    In his seminal essay Subject and Power from 1982 Foucault poses the classic

    question of political philosophy the same one as Hannah Arendt did inOn Violence ,

    for example namely whether violence is simply the ultimate form of power: That

    which in the final analysis appears as its real nature when it is forced to throw aside

    its mask and to show itself as it really is (SP, 220). He also follows Arendt in his

    negative reply, and puts forward an oppositional view of the relationship between

    power and violence. 13 They are opposites in the sense that where one rules absolutely

    the other is absent: Where the determining factors saturate the whole there is no

    relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains (SP,

    221).

    Foucault distinguishes power from violence by arguing that a power relationship is amode of action that does not act directly and immediately on others, but rather acts

    upon their actions: it is a set of actions upon other actions. This means, firstly, that the

    one over whom power is exercised is thoroughly recognised as a subject, as a person

    who acts. Secondly, he or she must be free, meaning here that when faced with a

    relationship of power, a whole field of possibilities responses, reactions, results and

    possible inventions may open up and be realised. Violence, on the other hand, acts

    directly and immediately on the body. It is not an action upon an action of a subject,

    13 Arendt attempted to diagnose the political situation of her time marked by riots andinsurrections by distinguishing violence sharply from power. She vehemently arguedagainst what she claimed was the consensus among political theorists from Left toRight at the time that violence was nothing more than the ultimate kind of power. Tounderstand the nature of power and violence and their relationship, she urged us to seethem not only as distinct and different, but also as opposites. See Arendt 1970. On thesimilarities between Arendts and Foucaults views, see Hanssen 2000.

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    but an action upon a body or things. Foucault now also criticises the war model

    explicitly by writing that the relationship proper to power should not be sought on

    the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can,

    at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode

    of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government (SP 221).

    The war model was thus ultimately abandoned, but not in favour of an understanding

    of political power based on consensus or contract. The idea of power as the governing

    of conduct a set of actions upon actions and the practice-based account of political

    rationality conveyed by the notion of governmentality and developed in the lecture

    series following Society Must be Defended meant that political power was still

    understood as essentially agonistic and strategic. I will show in Chapter five how the

    idea of governmentality introduces a futher refinement and development of his

    conception of polical power, and how it opens up an original perspective for

    analysing its specific connections with violence.

    It is also important to emphise that the agonism that Foucault advocates, even in his

    Society Must be Defended lectures, is not rooted in any kind of essentialist claims

    concerning violence. The fact that the social space is agonistic does not derive from a

    primal state of war or the aggressive nature of human beings: it rather derives from

    the ontological view that all political realities are contingent and contestable because

    they are constituted by historical practices of power and violence. The historical

    reality of war means that what aquires the status of reality rather than fiction is

    determined by victory, not truth in any absolute or simple sense, and bodies are used,

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    refer to it. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is because power

    relations have come more and more under state control. (SP, 224)

    It is thus impossible to understand the functioning of power relations without

    analysing the state, but this is not because they are derived from it. Rather, the state is

    a historically contingent organisation of power that has spread its reach over an

    increasing field of experience (SP, 215).14

    In terms of the question whether political violence is ineradicable this means that

    while Foucaults thought clearly affirms the truism of political philosophy that there

    are no states without monopolised violence and histories of actual and potential wars,

    this platitude does not yet imply that violence is an irreducible feature of the political.

    If politics is not equated with the establishment and maintenance of the state, but is

    understood to cover all the dense, capillary networks of actions upon action in a

    society, then it is not difficult to imagine forms of political practice that are not tied to

    the use of violence legitimate or illegitimate. This does not mean, however, that

    politics without the oppressive state would become a harmonious realm of

    deliberation and consensus. It is quite possible that agonism would take dramatically

    more violent forms in the absence of the state, as has arguably happened in many

    instances. The point is only to deny its inevitability. The disputes could be ongoing

    and unsettled, erupt in violence or be dissolved through different procedures. Only

    actual politics can ultimately decide this. The affirmation of agonism implies the

    14 Foucault argues that the state is a new and problematic form of political power, butnot because it ignores individuals in favour of the interests of a totality. The problemis that it is totalizing and yet individualizing at the same time. As he famously writes,the modern state is a highly sophisticated power structure in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in anewform, and submitted to a very specific patterns (SP, 214).

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    ineliminability, not of war and violence, but of power relations. What the mechanisms

    for establishing, changing, regulating, limiting and criticising them should be are

    political questions par excellence .

    The agonistic ontology of practices is also the reason why Foucault repeatedly refused

    to offer any overall theory of resistance: resistances are formed of varying strategies

    in varying practices. They cut societies on the diagonal and aim at specific

    transformations. 15 Unlike Benjamin, Foucaults thought thus contains no messianic

    moment: there is no Divine violence capable of countering the mythic violence of the

    state and bringing about a new form of life. 16 While state power inevitably implicates

    us in violence in being both an individualising and a totalising form of power,

    Foucault does not envisage any radical overthrow of the state, no final or global

    liberation. Instead the anarchistic struggles he promotes are specific, immediate and

    transversal. They are struggles that question the status of the individual by promoting

    new forms of subjectivity and by questioning the ways in which knowledge circulates

    and functions in its relations to power (SP, 212).

    Conclusions

    The apparent tension between history and philosophy, or historiography and ontology,

    comes to the fore in Foucaults attempt to rethink political power and its relationship

    to violencein Society Must be Defended lectures. Initially he approached the

    15

    See e.g., Foucault PE, 375-76.16 See Benjamin 1996.

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    paragraphs of his essay whether we need a theory of power. Since a theory assumes

    prior objectification, it cannot be asserted as a basis for analytical work. He

    immediately adds, however, that the analytical work cannot proceed without an

    ongoing conceptualisation, one that implies critical thought and constant checking. As

    I have argued in chapter one, the inevitable ontology that any theory imposes must

    thus be checked and critically reflected on, but cannot be completely avoided. The

    contingency of the present and every ontological order imposed on it is, after all, our

    only guarantee that the violence of our past is not be the inevitable predicament of our

    future. I have therefore suggested that it is probable that Foucault acknowledged the

    dangers that the ontological blurring of the boundaries between different dimensions

    of force and war would cause, and that he was therefore prepared to overstep the

    limits of his modest historicism when analysing political violence.

    Foucaults vision of modernity is no doubt pessimistic. As Beatrice Hanssen writes

    (2000, 19, 27), he constructs a genealogy of modernity saturated with violence, and

    his thought announces the end of all transcendental critiques of violence. She is

    wrong to claim that it relies on anthropological pessimism, however. I have attempted

    to show that in opposing Hobbes, Foucault is making a significant break with the

    political tradition that builds on anthropological pessimism. Even if we had to accept

    that violence was so universally pervasive that it appeared necessary for human

    societies, this very observation, just like the positing of any social objectivity, could

    only be made as a historically perspectival and politically charged claim. In the realm

    of the political there is always an undefined space for freedom in the radical

    contingency of the present. These lines of fragility in the present do not, perhaps,

    make space for utopias of a world free of violence, but they do open up a space for

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    political imagination, limited hope and patient labour .17

    17 See SPS, 449-450, Flynn 2005, 250.

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