Foucault’s contribution to the critical theorization of race and racism has been much debated. Most commentators, however, have focused on his most direct remarks on the topic, which are found in the first volume of the History of Sexuality and in the lecture course “Society Must Be Defended.” This paper argues that those remarks should be reread in light of certain moves Foucault makes in earlier lecture courses, especially The Punitive Society and Psychiatric Power. Although the earlier courses do not (...) always explicitly address the theme of race, the concepts of the “accumulation of men” and the differential “management of illegalisms” developed in them immensely enrich Foucault’s outline of a genealogy of racism. They also permit a clarification of the problem to which the concept of “state racism” is an answer, and they provide the key for understanding the wider social conditions of state racism. The guiding thread linking these earlier courses to the later material is the problem of a genealogy of logics of enmity. At the same time, the earlier courses make explicit the link between these logics and the development of capitalist society. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s _History of Sexuality_ has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of _History of Sexuality_ in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom (...) issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In _Race and the Education of Desire, _Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of _History of Sexuality_ contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.” In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the genealogies of race. _Race and the Education of Desire_ will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault. (shrink)

This paper examines the problem of alternatives to the prison in order to problematize the prison as an institution, as a form of punishment and as a system for promoting respect for the law. It argues that the mechanisms that were central to the prison during the 19th century, such as the practice of penitence as a principle of rehabilitation, the family as agent of correction, or as agent of legality, and labour as a fundamental instrument for punishment, still operate (...) today, if in altered forms, in both the conventional and alternatives types of prison. The prison has been a factory for producing criminals; this production is not a mark of its failure but of its success. Prison manages control over illegalities by means of a whole set of apparatuses that manage their reorganization, redistributing them according to an economy of illegalisms. It may well be that changes in the economy and in the mechanisms for regulating populations mean that the carceral functions of the prison are today being disseminated at the level of the social body, so that they would now operate beyond the space of the prison through multiple instances of control, surveillance, normalization and re-socialization. The question of the prison cannot be resolved or even posed in terms of a simple penal theory. Neither can it be posed in tems of a psychology or sociology of crime. The question of the role and possible disappearance of the prison can only be posed in terms of an economy and a politics, that is, a political economy of illegalisms. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate a largely untold chapter in the history of race thinking in Northern Europe and North America: the transition from the form of racism that was used to justify a race-based system of slavery to the medicalising racism which called for segregation, apartheid, eugenics, and, eventually, sterilization and the holocaust. In constructing this history I will employ the notion of biopower introduced by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s account of biopower has received a great deal of attention recently, (...) but because what he actually has to say about race tends to be vague and radically incomplete, many race theorists have been critical of his contribution. However, even if the account of the holocaust in terms of biopower is incomplete, there is still a great deal to be learned from Foucault’s identification of this biologizing, or medicalising racism. (shrink)

This article uses Foucault’s lecture courses to illuminate his reading of Marx’s Capital in Discipline and Punish. Foucault finds in Marx’s account of cooperation a precedent for his own approach to power. In turn, Foucault helps us rethink the concepts of productive force and labour power in Marx. Foucault is shown to be particularly interested in one of Marx’s major themes in Capital, parts III–IV: the subsumption of labour under capital. In Discipline and Punish and The Punitive Society, Foucault offers (...) a genealogy of the forms of labour power and productive force. One of his central problems is to understand how labour power is converted in productive force and how, prior to that, productive subjects who can properly bear and dispose of their labour power are formed. Foucault’s reading of Capital resonates with those currents of Marx interpretation today that seek to repoliticize the concept of productive force and to offer a materialist account of subject formation. (shrink)

The first work to introduce Foucault's ideas on law to both graduates and undergraduates.

_Foucault’s Law_ is the first book in almost fifteen years to address the question of Foucault’s position on law. Many readings of Foucault’s conception of law start from the proposition that he failed to consider the role of law in modernity, or indeed that he deliberately marginalized it. In canvassing a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick rebut this argument. They argue that rather than marginalize law, Foucault develops a much more radical, nuanced and coherent (...) theory of law than his critics have acknowledged. For Golder and Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s law is not the contained creature of conventional accounts, but is uncontainable and illimitable. In their radical re-reading of Foucault, they show how Foucault outlines a concept of law which is not tied to any given form or subordinated to a particular source of power, but is critically oriented towards alterity, new possibilities and different ways of being. _Foucault’s Law_ is an important and original contribution to the ongoing debate on Foucault and law, engaging not only with Foucault’s diverse writings on law and legal theory, but also with the extensive interpretive literature on the topic. It will thus be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of law and social theory, legal theory and law and philosophy, as well as to students of Foucault’s work generally. (shrink)

When he died in 1984, Michel Foucault was widely regarded as one of the most powerful minds of this century. Hailed by historians and lionized in America, he continues to provoke lively debate. This meticulously documented narrative debunks the many myths and rumors surrounding the brilliant philosopher to consider that all Foucault's books are "fragments of an autobiography".

Foucault’s Forgotten Marxism. This article tries to point out several methodological issues concerning Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, such as the equivocal status of some of Foucault’s main concepts, or the assumed homogeneity of the various disciplinary institutions analyzed in this book. And it aims at suggesting that such issues might find a solution, should one consider the Marxist background on which, as the Lectures at the Collège de France of the year 1973 clearly show, Foucault’s theories were dependant. In the (...) opinion of the author, only in as much as this heritage is accepted and seriously taken into account, shall Foucault’s concepts and theses regain their political and critical pertinence. (shrink)

À partir d’une lecture critique de Foucault, cet article revient sur l’un des premiers textes de Marx, consacré au vol de bois mort, pour analyser les liens entre le régime pénal de la sanction du vol de bois et le régime civil de la transformation de la propriété, entre la production des illégalismes et les métamorphoses de la société civile. Il en tire une vision synthétique du patrimoine considéré comme un « corps juridique artificiel », avant d’apporter un éclairage saisissant (...) sur l’incarcération de masse qui caractérise notre époque, où il suggère de voir un moyen de contrôler des populations paupérisées, caractérisées par un « patrimoine vide ». (shrink)

Nietzsche referred to his critique of Judeo-Christian moral values as philosophizing with the hammer. On the Genealogy of Morals (originally subtitled A Polemic) is divided into three essays. The first is an investigation into the origins of our moral values, or as Nietzsche calls them moral prejudices. The second essay addresses the concept of guilt and its role in the development of civilization and religion. The third essay considers suffering and its role in human existence. What might be of most (...) value to today's reader is not necessarily Nietzsche's views on particular ethical issues, but rather his encouragement to think independently and to actualize the self. (shrink)