Katharyne Mitchell: Dangerous Futures: Speculative Capital, Race, War @ Antipode Lectures 2009 (March 2009 @ AAG)

Ansgar Allen - Roy Goddard: The domestication of Foucault. Government, critique, war @ History of the Human Sciences, 01Dec2014

Ansgar Allen - Roy Goddard: The domestication of Foucault. Government, critique, war @ History of the Human Sciences, 01Dec2014

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Abstract

Though Foucault was intrigued by the possibilities of radical social transformation, he resolutely resisted the idea that such transformation could escape the effects of power and expressed caution when it came to the question of revolution. In this article we argue that in one particularly influential line of development of Foucault’s work his exemplary caution has been exaggerated in a way that weakens the political aspirations of post-Foucaldian scholarship. The site of this reduction is a complex debate over the role of normativity in Foucaldian research, where it has been claimed that Foucault’s genealogical approach is unable to answer the question ‘Why fight?’ The terms of this debate (on the neo-Foucaldian side) are limited by a dominant though selective interpretation of Foucault’s analytics of power, where power is understood primarily in terms of government, rather than struggle. In response we suggest that if we reconfigure power-as-government to power-as-war, this adjusts the central concern. ‘Why fight?’ becomes replaced by the more immediate question, ‘How fight?’ Without denying the obvious benefits of cautious scholarly work, we argue that a reconfiguration of Foucault’s analytics of power might help Foucaldian research to transcend the self-imposed ethic of political quietism that currently dominates the field.

Foucault on Politics, Security and War - Edited by Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neal - Palgrave MacMillan, Uk, Jan. 2011 (Paperback)

This diverse collection of essays is the first to specifically engage Michel Foucault on questions of politics, security and war. It is also the first to take up the provocations found in Michel Foucault's recently published Collège de France lectures, particularly Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. The contributors reassess the way Foucault worked experimentally and in collaboration and dialogue with others. In so doing, the essays pursue lines of enquiry that Foucault briefly extolled but did not exhaust, and take him in directions that he could not have foreseen, including the War on Terror, risk, biosecurity and biopolitics, AIDS, racial and ethnic conflict, and the critique of law. Foucault on Politics, Security and War is an essential contribution to Foucault scholarship and also poses wider challenges to political theory, international relations, security studies and legal theory.

Introduction; M.Dillon & A.W.Neal
PART I: SITUATING FOUCAULT
Strategies for Waging Peace: Foucault as Collaborateur; S.Elden
PART II: POLITICS, SOVEREIGNTY, VIOLENCE
Goodbye War on Terror? Foucault and Butler on Discourses of Law, War and Exceptionalism; A.W.Neal
Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault; J.Reid
Security: A Field Left Fallow; D.Bigo
Revisiting Franco's Death: Life and Death and Bio-Political Governmentality; P.Palladino
PART III: BIOS, NOMOS, RACE
Law Versus History: Foucault's Genealogy of Modern Sovereignty; M.Valverde
The Politics of Death: Race War, Bio-Power and AIDS in the Post-Apartheid; D.Fassin
Security, Race, and War; M.Dillon

MICHAEL DILLON International Fellow of the London Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Politics at Lancaster University, UK. He publishes widely on continental philosophy and political and cultural theory especially in relation to politics, security and war. Among his books are Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (1996) andThe Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live, (2009). He has two new books forthcoming: Deconstructing International Politics (2011), and Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century: A Political Analytic of Finitude (2011). Michael Dillon is co-editor of The Journal of Cultural Research, the Journal of The London Graduate School.
 
ANDREW W. NEAL Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of Exceptionalism and the Politics of Counter-Terrorism: Liberty, Security and the War on Terror and numerous scholarly articles. His work explores critical theoretical approaches to the politics of security.

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