ABSTRACT In “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault attempted to historicize and criticize Nietzsche’s equating of the social with struggle. In order to do so, Foucault produced a descriptive discursive history of his genealogical project by deploying the method of the critical archaeology. Foucault realized thereinafter that his archaeological exposition of the genealogical discourse in fact laid bare a close historical and conceptual bond between genealogy and modern racial discourses. In the first lectures, Foucault, unearthed the genealogical discourse hidden in (...) the literature written by the nobility as they attempted to resist the centralisation of royal power. In the latter part of his lectures, he described a discursive interplay between genealogy-as-struggle and the biopolitical practices of the modern state. As such, he gave a tentatively description how the modern state inherited and extensively applied the notion of struggle in its biopolitical control on its populations. The immoral and historical consequences of this affinity, resulting in the biopolitics of genocide, warranted Foucault to distance himself from Nietzsche’s concept, which in effect resulted in rethinking the social within the framework of gouvernmentalité, in which struggle was a modality rather than the prime mover of society. (shrink)

Critical theory has historically assumed an undialectical either/or between reformist therapy and revolutionary politics. Frantz Fanon’s dialectical, psycho-social approach to recovery as disalienation offers us a way out. Lying at the intersection of critical theory, political strategy and the history of political thought, this article highlights a lesser-known French tradition of Freudo-Marxist psycho-politics contemporaneous with the first generation of the Frankfurt School, but which placed therapeutic imperatives front and centre of its psycho-political praxis. This article uses Fanonian institutional psychotherapy to (...) contest the anti-psychiatric conceit that madness is liberating and that therapy obstructs freedom. Fanon’s critical therapy speaks to the recent care-ethical turn of the contemporary organized left, whilst maintaining a structural critique of the aetiology and treatment of mental illness. This article concludes that recovery involves a permanent psycho-political revolution between the subjective and objective, which requires a radical transformation of both mental healthcare and the pathogenic social world to and within which it responds. (shrink)