£4   Placing Race
in chapter 4. Before doing so, I want to look closely at Foucault's 1976 College de France lectures. There, certain elements of The History of Sexuality come into sharper focus, while other silences remain pronounced. Fou-cault anticipated many of the challenges I have raised here in ways that render our queries more pressing and more relevant both to his project and to our pursuit of the colonial genealogies of racism more generally.
Ill
TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF RACISMS:
THE 1976 LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE
The reading I offered of Foucault's thinking on racism in the preceding chapter could be construed as a reasonable one, based on his schematic treatment of the subject in The History of Sexuality. But Foucault's effort to account for the fact of racism was not, as we know, confined to that volume alone. The College de France lectures, given in the winter of 1976 when volume 1 was in press, evince a more direct engagement, an effort to situate the discourse of race within a deeper genealogy, with attention to its changing form. What is significant for us, and what ties, the lectures closely to The History of Sexuality, is Foucault's concluding argument that the emergence of biopower inscribed modern racism in the mechanisms of the normalizing state. If that was the central argument of the lectures, the task here would be relatively straightforward. But it is not.
Despite the fact that five of the eleven lectures center on the changing discourse of race from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, Foucault is emphatic that racism is neither his subject nor his primary concern. As he put it in the lecture of February 2nd
For me, at this moment, it is not a question of writing a history of racism in the general or traditional sense of the term". I do not want to write a history of what in the Occident could be the consciousness of the appearance of a race, nor the history of the rituals and mechanisms by which one could exclude, disqualify, and physically destroy a race. The problem that I want to pose is another and does not concern either racism nor in the first instance the problem of races. It was, and for me still is, a matter of showing how in the West, a certain
£6   Toward a Genealogy of Racisms
critical, historical, and political analysis of the state, of its institutions, and its mechanisms of power appeared in binary terms.1
There are at least three significant points here. Foucault's focus is on the modern state and the emergence of state racism as a part of it. It is not racist practice that he tracks, but rather a new form of historical analysis, emerging in the seventeenth century that comes to conceive of social relations in binary terms. The subject is historical discourse as a strategic weapon of power, not the conjuncture of events, not a chronicle of racist confrontations, and not individual practice. The "grid of intelligibility" is not the discourse of sexuality as in volume i, but rather an emergent discourse on the "war of races" in which state racism will appear as but one nineteenth-century "episode" within it.
On the face of it, Foucault's orientation seems to have dramatically shifted; the rupture with volume i seems remarkably clean. But this is not the case either. In fact, the last lecture of 1976 took up the precise themes that Foucault outlines in the final chapter of The History of Sexuality. What differs in the two texts—otherwise virtually identical in parts—is how he situates the issue of racism. While in that final chapter, Foucault's references to the relationship between racism and "biohistory" are tantalizingly brief, in the lectures that articulation is more centrally framed. In his own words, the final lecture on March 17, addressed "the birth of state racism," that historical moment when biopower transforms an earlier discourse into state racism and provides its unique form. As James Miller, in his biography on Foucault would note, the lectures were about "racism, class struggle, and the virulence of 'vital massacres' in recent history, deepening the analysis of bio-politics sketched in the last chapter of The Will to Know."2
But not everyone would agree. According to the editors of the pirated Italian edition that appeared in 1990, the lectures address the "theme of war as an instrument of analysis and a criteria of intelligibility of history and society." In attending "to the notion of a struggle of races," they were deemed "very up-to-date," highly relevant to contemporary religious and ethnic conflict.3 According to Pasquale Pasquino, Foucault's close associate, friend, and translator—and the only scholar I know who has written on the lectures—they offer a political theory of war and peace, an excur-
1. Difendere la socieiä (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990) 68.
2. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster. 1993) 299.
3. Difendere la societa (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990) 10.
Toward a Genealogy of Racisms   57
sion into the "origins of the modern state."4 Pasquino's interest was in Hobbes, and thus the issue of modem racism goes unmentioned.
The lectures are difficult to tackle on several counts. First, there is only one piece of commentary on them. Nor is this surprising given their relative unavailability to a wider audience. Only the first two lectures that focus more generally on "the insurrection of subjugated knowledges" have been published in English, and these make no reference to race.5 The more or less complete transcription, published in Italian in 1990, was quickly taken off the market, as it appeared without permission of the Foucault estate.6 In 1991, the final lecture on "the birth of state racism" was first published in French.7 Pending resolution of a publication dispute between the French publishing house, Gallimard, and the guardians of Foucault's estate, a dispute that has been going on for some time, the complete lectures are still only available on scratchy cassette recordings at the Saulchoir library in Paris where Foucault worked during his final years.
And some might argue that they should be left there. Foucault was not only unwilling to have them published; as we know, he abrupdy abandoned the project while on leave from the College the following year. The mystique that surrounds the fate of the lectures is stranger still. Few "Foucauldians" seem to know of the taped lectures, and even fewer have heard them. One scholar who initially offered to lend me the Italian transcript eventually declined to do so, fearing that if he were identified as my source, he would no longer be welcome at the Saulchoir library. But this was sheer fantasy since the very same Italian publication is available to the public in the library's open catalog. Finally, I learned upon my return to the U.S. that the last lecture that I had spent days deciphering had already been published three years earlier in Les Temps Modernes (albeit without in-
4. See Pasquale Pasquino, "Political Theory of War and Peace: Foucault and the History of Modern Political Theory," Economy and Societ)' 11.1 1 (February 1993): 76-88. c. These two lectures first appeared in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other writings: 1972-1977 (New York Pantheon Books, 1977) and have been recently reprinted in Nicholas B. Dirks, GeofT Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner. eds., Culture/Pawer/Histon/: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994) 200-222.1 use the latter volume, hereafter referred to as CPH.
6. Difendere la societa. In accordance with the instructions of the Foucault estate, I have not quoted from the cassettes. All quotes from the lectures, excluding the first, second and final ones, are derived from a translation of the Italian text, hereafter referred to as DS.
7. Michel Foucault, "Faire vivre et laisser mourin la naissance du racisme," Les Temps Modernes 46 [S$s) (February 1991): 37-61, hereafter referred to as TM.
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elusion of the audiences' questions). This was clearly my own oversight and no one else's fault, not least the Saulchoir library staff who graciously accommodated and facilitated my work. However, it does indicate some basic confusion and miscommunications about what is already in the pub-he domain, what should be available, and what should not. For if three of the eleven lectures have been published, why not publish the eight others—particularly when the first two have appeared as free-standing essays, dissociated from the lectures on the discourses of race which they preface and with which they belong?
These logistical matters aside, the lectures are elusive and challenging in their own right: not least because, as in most of his work, Foucault sparingly footnoted other authors. There are obviously no footnotes for the lectures, but there are also no citations to anyone else's work on the subject. Even for Coke, Lilburne, Thierry, and Boulainvilliers, whose historical narratives provide the grist for his analysis, there is only rare mention of the specific texts to which he sometimes painstakingly attends." To what extent Foucault drew on the quite extensive corpus on the historiography of French racism that already existed is difficult to tell. For example, just prior to the 1976 seminar, two major works had appeared on the subject. A study by André Devyver, published in 1973, entided The Purified Blood: Racial prejudices among the French nobility in the Anden Regime, 1560-1720—a six hundred page book—treated some similar themes and key historians ofthat period in far greater detail than could Foucault in a series of one-hour lectures. Another study by Arlette Jouanna, entided The Idea of Race in France in the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century (1498-1614) is a fifteen-hundred-page thesis defended at the University of Paris in 1975.
Hannah Arendt's' 1952 publication The Origins of Totalitarianism covered some similar ground. For Arendt, the metropolitan politics of race in Europe and the racial politics of imperialism both derived from the similar notion that the 'rights of man' were only inheritable by those deemed worthy of them. In her account, imperialism is central, in Foucault's it is not. While their readings differ on many other issues, both grappled with the same conversion of the idea of race from an aristocratic political weapon into its more pervasive bourgeois form.
S. Throughout this chapter, I have tried where possible to indicate those specific texts to which Foucault refers, as well as some of the well-known secondary commentaries upon them and their authors.
Toward a Genealogy of Racisms    59
This is not to suggest that these were the only relevant texts on the basis of or against which, Foucault might have worked. Coupled with the U.S. scholarship on race in the early 1970s, a bibliography on the history of racism from this period would be staggering. I cite these particular studies here because, similar to Foucault's lectures, they focus on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century racial discourse as a "defense" of the nobility against encroachments on its privilege and sources of wealth. The subtheme and historical terrain are similar, but not the conceptual framework or the analysis.
It would, however, be misleading to argue that racism is what these lectures are primarily about. In his Résumé des cours, those summaries published for all the prestigious College de France lectures, the chapter entided "II faut défendre la société" ("Society must be defended") makes only passing reference to race. Foucault was concerned with how war came to be an analytic tool of historical knowledge and of social relations at large. Moreover, the issue of racism in the lectures seems ancillary and oddly displaced. And if this is so, why bother with them?
This is not a prelude to an argument that we have all missed the "real" Foucault, and that the key to a genealogy of racism is waiting for us in his taped lectures rather than in published form. I am more interested in the productive tensions between The History of Sexuality and this subsequent project and in the ways they converge and precipitously diverge in linking biopower and race. More importandy, I am interested in what we might glean from his insights and where we might take them. Both texts are concerned with the emergence of an alternative discourse to that of sovereign right, to "a discourse of the war of races" that Foucault will identify as the first "contre-histoire" (counter-history) to a unitary conception of power represented in a historical discourse that served the sovereign state. In The History of Sexuality, racism emerges in the dramatic finale as one of several possible domains in which technologies of sexuality are worked out and displayed. In the lectures, state racism is not an effect but a tactic in the internal fission of society into binary oppositions, a means of creating "biologized" internal enemies, against whom society must defend itself. The shift between The History of Sexuality and the lectures is not in content, but in textual field and analytic emphasis.
On the issues of race and colonialism that concern us here, the lectures underscore several contradictory impulses in Foucault's work: a focus on racism and an elision of it, a historiography so locked in Europe and its
6o   Toward a Genealogy of Racisms
discursive formations that colonial genocide and narratives about it could only be derivative of the internal dynamics of European states. The studied absence of the impact of colonial culture on Foucault's bourgeois order did more than constrain his mapping of the discourses of sexuality. In the end, Foucault confined his vision to a specific range of racisms, a range that students of colonial history who might choose to follow his genealogical methods would be prompted to reject.
Still, as always with Foucault, there are unexpected insights that compel our attention. His treatment of racism is prescient in other ways, It reads biopower as a crucial feature of racism, accounting for the proliferating presence of fascist, capitalist, and socialist state racisms and the discourses of purification that legitimate their violence. Here, colonization emerges as central to Foucault's analysis of racism, but not in the way we might expect. Racial discourse consolidates not because of Europe's imperial ventures in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but because of internal conquest and invasions within the borders of Europe itself Racism is not based on the confrontation of alien races, but on the bifurcation within Europe's social fabric. This deep genealogy allows him to account for Nazism as well as the distinct nineteenth-century discourses of nation, race, and class, all as permutations of a seventeenth-century discourse on the permanency of social war.
But these lectures offer more. They bring into sharp relief some of the basic analytic quandaries that engaged Foucault and that tie the lectures to an unexpectedly broad range of his other projects. For one, in the lectures he clarifies the relationship between the archaeological and genealogical methods, not as a sequential methodological shift, but as organically dependent and complementary tools of analysis.9 Two, it is here that the differences between disciplinary and regulatory power, alluded to at the end of The History of Sexuality are distinguished in a new sort of way; as forms of power that operate at different levels and that articulate in a "society of normalization," providing the required conditions for racisms of the state.
9. In the leciure of January 7U1, he states, "'archaeology' would be the appropriate methodology of thle] analysis of local discursivities, and 'genealogy' would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play." CPH10c. See Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982; 105-6) who stress the similar point that with Foucault's turn to genealogy "archeology is still an important
part of the enterprise----[T]he presentation of genealogy must not be considered to encompass
all ofFoucault's methodological arsenal."
Toward a Genealogy of Racisms   61
Three, we are privy to Foucault's grappling with what I take to be one of the hallmark features of his work: not only a search for the discontinuities of history as so many commentators have claimed, but a more challenging analytic concern with the tension between rupture and re-inscription, between break and recuperation in discursive formations. This theme underwrites his analysis of the relationship between deployments of alliance and sexuality, between a "symbolics of blood" and an "analytics of sexuality" in The History of Sexuality and continues to guide his genealogy of modern racism in the lectures. What concerns him is not modern racism's break with earlier forms, but rather the discursive bricolage whereby an older discourse of race is "recovered," modified, "encased," and "encrusted" in new forms.
Moreover, this is an analytic project strikingly reminiscent of the project set out in The Archaeology of Knowledge, where he wrote:
Should [the principles of the individualization of discourse] not be sought rather in the dispersion of the points of choice that the discourse leaves free? In the different possibilities that it opens of reanimating already existing themes, of arousing opposed strategies, of giving way to irreconcilable interests, of making it possible, with a particular set of concepts, to play different games?10
The discourse of race will play out these "different games" with "polyvalent mobility," at one moment seized in the seventeenth century by "levellers" in their struggle against British monarchy, in the eighteenth century by French aristocratic opponents to absolutism, and yet again in the nineteenth century in "reversal," as a primary weapon replayed through the genocidal technologies of racial states.
Fourth, then, it is the state and the nature of state power, to which Foucault turns with striking clarity. For those who have characterized his conception of power as one that wholly eschews its statist locations, these lectures encourage some reconsideration. Here, Foucault is riveted on the relationship between racism and the "statization" of biology, on the anatomy of modern state power and the murderous capacities within
10. Archaeology of Knowledge. (^36-37). The quote continues:
Rather than seeking the permanence of themes, images and opinions through time, rather than retracing the dialectic of their conflicts in order to individualize groups of statements, could one not rather mark out the dispersion of the points ofchoice, and define prior to any option, to any thematic preference, a field of strategic possibilities? (AR:s7)
62   Toward a Genealogy of Racisms
it. Finally, if any single theme informs the seminar, it is not a quest for political theory, but an appreciation of historiography as a political force, of history writing as a political act, of historical narrative as a tool of the state and as a subversive weapon against it.
In what follows, I examine some lectures in detail and others in a more cursory fashion, focusing on those that most directly address the discursive conditions for the emergence of state racism and its specific technologies. This is not an easy task, pardy because Foucault's genealogy makes so much of the specific discursive transformation of social war that, for him, reconstituted the definition of historical knowledge itself. It is also difficult because his definition of "sovereignty" is idiosyncratic and often used only to refer to its French absolutist form. Moreover, his analysis seems to preclude the fact that state racism and European imperial expansion occurred together. Finally, my approach to the lectured texts are tentative and tempered by the fact that they were not intended to be published as is and perhaps were never meant to be published at all.
Given these constraints, I take up their content in three specific ways; to address those issues only programmatically stated in The History of Sexuality and to locate how his treatment here diverges from that project. Most im-portandy, I examine what the lectures say about the discursive production of unsuitable participants in the body politic, and how the maintenance of such internal exclusions were codified as necessary and noble pursuits to ensure the well-being and very survival of the social body by a protective state. While Foucault confined his field to internal divisions in European societies and to the discursive production of internal enemies within them, these issues are not as far removed from colonial concerns as one might imagine. In chapter 4,1 suggest some of the ways in which his insights dovetail with the changing terrain of scholarship on empire, citizenship, and national identity more generally. Specifically, I re-view them in light of my own work on the cultivation of whiteness in French, British, and Dutch colonial settings and its relationship to the interior frontiers of these European nation-states.
Subjugated Knowledges: On the Discourse of Sovereigns and the War of Races
On January 7, 1976, Foucault opens his College de France seminar with a number of unsettling reflections on the value of his work." He characterizes his preceding five years of research as efforts that "had failed
Toward a Genealogy of Racisms   63
to develop into any continuous or coherent whole," and that in their repetition "perhaps says nothing" (CPH:2oo). But this rude disclaimer, expressed with such dismal force, signaled not a rejection of what he had pursued for so many years, but an analytic repositioning of it. Here Foucault sees these earlier projects as contributions to the "insurrection of subjugated knowledges," to oppositional histories that emerged out of the "historical knowledge of struggles," independent of "the approval of the estabUshed regimes of thought" (CPH:2o2-3). It is the "independence" of these "disqualified" knowledges that he challenges, querying how these oppositional histories resurface within the very unitary discourses they opposed:
In fact, those unitary discourses which first disqualified and then ignored them when they made their appearance, are, it seems quite ready now to annex them, to take them back within the fold of their own discourse and to invest them with everything this implies in terms of their effects of knowledge and power. (CPH:2o6)
In this first lecture, Foucault poses the issue of recodification as a problem of the present, as a development of the "last fifteen years" (CPH:202). And the specific "subjugated knowledges" that he cites are what we might expect: those of "the psychiatric patient, of the ill person, of the nurse, of the doctor.... of the delinquent, etc." (CPH:203). But none of these specificities of time and person are what Foucault chooses to pursue in the lectures that follow. The processes of recodification and reinscription that he will trace are not of the last fifteen years, but of the last three centuries; nor is it the subjugated voices of the condemned, the mad, the deviant, the medicalized subaltern that he will track, but rather the subjugated knowledge and oppositional history embodied in seventeenth-century discourse on races.
In rejecting the notion of power as repression, Foucault reiterates a central theme of The History of Sexuality, but uses it toward a different end. Here power is not only productive, it is, inverting Clausewitz's aphorism, "war continued by other means." Politics "sanction[s] and uphold[s] the disequilibrium offerees that was displayed in war" (CPH:209). This, too, is not a new theme. In chapter 2 of The History of Sexuality, the same question is already posed: "should we . . . then ... say that politics is war pursued by other means?" (HS:93). There, his analysis of the discourse of war is embedded in a broader discussion of power; in the lectures, the discourse
64   Toward a Genealogy of Racisms
of war is repositioned as the "grid of intelligibility" through which the discourse of race takes form.
In the second meeting of January 14th, Foucault turns back to what he sees as that quintessential unitary discourse that has shaped our understanding of power since the middle ages: namely the discourse of sovereignty in which the fact of domination is hidden in a language of legitimate rights. It is this "juridico-political theory of sovereignty" that he attacks in order to reject its usefulness for understanding the nature of power and to show how a new historical discourse of power emerged, "incompatible with the relations of sovereignty" and in contradistinction to them (CPH:2i8).
This new type of non-sovereign power is disciplinary power, "one of the great inventions of bourgeois society" (CPH:2i9). Again, it is not the rupture between sovereign and disciplinary power that concerns him and not the disappearance of sovereign power, but rather its superimposi-tion "upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as to conceal its actual procedures, the element of domination inherent in its techniques" (CPH:2i9). At the same time, this discourse of discipline, "has nothing in common with that of law, rule or sovereign will. The disciplines may well be the carriers of a discourse that speaks of a rule, but a natural rule, a norm. The code they come to define is not that of law, but that of normalization" (CPH:22o). It is within the technologies of power nurtured in this "society of normalization" that internal enemies will be constructed and that modern racism will be conceived. But this is to jump ahead of his argument; in the following lecture of January 21 st, normalization is not yet mentioned and the war of races is only briefly discussed at its end. Nor is the distinction between sovereign and disciplinary power pursued. Instead, he first critiques a theory of sovereignty as one that assumes the subject and therefore cannot account for its manufacture. Dismissed as an inappropriate method for analyzing relations of power, Foucault asks, "who imagined that the civil order was an order of battle: who perceived war in the watermark of peace; who has sought the principle of intelligibility of order, of the state, of its institutions and its history in the outcry, in the confusion and in the mud of battíes" (DS:4c)? Paradoxically, it is with the development of states at the end of the Middle Ages, as "private wars" were cancelled and war was made the prerogative of states, as war proper moves to the margins of the social body, as society is "cleansed of war-like relations" that this "strange," "new" discourse emerged, one in
Toward a Genealogy of Racisms   65-
which society itself was conceived as an entity saturated with the relations of war.
It is a new discourse in several ways: new because it is the first "historico-political discourse about society"; new because it differs from the juridical discourse that previously prevailed. It is a discourse of "double contestations—popular and aristocratic—of royal power" (DS:52). It appears clearly in the early seventeenth century around the English bourgeois revolution (in the texts of Sir Edward Coke and John Lilbume) and then again at the end of that century around the opposition of the French nobility to the absolutist monarchy (as in the historical accounts of the Counts de Boulainvilliers and d'Estaing). In both its bourgeois and aristocratic form, it is an instrument of political opposition and struggle against sovereign rule. It reappears in the revolutionary texts of the abbé Sieyes and Augustín Thierry and by the late nineteenth century it underwrites racist biology and eugenics.11 These purveyors of erudite knowledge, however, are not its sole locutors (although these are the only texts that Foucault invokes). It is an ambiguous discourse harnessed to different political projects, a discourse combining erudite and subjugated knowledges, guaranteeing its broad dissemination and wide appeal. Interestingly, this combination of "learned" and "disqualified knowledges" is precisely what Foucault, in his initial lecture, has newly designated as the object of genealogical research and more generally as a "provisional definition" of the specific genealogies that he had explored over the last few years.12
This discourse no longer lays claim to a neutral subject. The one who speaks is "necessarily someone else's adversary." The "great pyramid description" of the social body is replaced by the notion that "there are always two groups, two categories of individuals, two armies confronting one another" (DS:4£) ■ It is a discourse that interrogates law and sees its formation as the consequence of massacres, conquests, and domination, not as the embodiment of natural rights. It is not, however, a discourse that detaches itself from the language of rights; on the contrary, its truth claims are made to specific rights and by specific holders of them; the rights of a family (to property), of a class (to privilege), of a race (to rule). Truth
n. The two major texts of Augustin Thierry are Tales of the Franks: Episodes from Merovingian History, trans. M. F. O. Jenkins (184a; The U of Alabama P, 1977), and History of the Conquest of England by the Normans (iftojr; London: J.M.Dent, 1907). 12. See CPH 203-4.
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is tied to a particular, decentered perspective, confirming a "fundamental link between relations of force and relations of truth." No one is above the fray; in fact, it is those most immediately implicated whose accounts are elicited and those outspokenly partisan voices that are credible and heard.
In the seventeenth century, this idea of war as the "uninterrupted weft of history" appears in the specific form of a war of races, a binary conception of the social body that will provide the "matrix within which all the forms of social war will be sought afterwards" (DS:£4). One wonders whether, malgré Iui, this is not some sort of originary moment for Foucault in the genealogy of race; throughout the lectures, this discourse takes on the force of an almost cataclysmic creation. But here it is the subsequent forms of social war of the nineteenth century, represented in two distinct "transcriptions" that he will set out to explain. One is an "explicitly biological transcription," preceding Darwin, that will draw its concepts and vocabulary from "anatomo-physiology." Ambiguous like that discourse of the eighteenth century, it will articulate with nationalist movements in Europe against the state and underwrite the European politics of colonization.
The second "transcription" will also draw on this notion of social war, but in a different way, in a discourse that will "tend to erase all the traces of the conflict of races and redefine them as class struggle" (DS:£4). Although Foucault will privilege the biological and not this class transcription, alluding to the, latter only briefly in subsequent lectures, when we turn to the early racialization of bourgeois culture in the next chapter, it should become clearer why this prefiguring of the language of class in that of race is so important to his argument Here, Foucault focuses on the development of an entirely new "biologico-social racism" predicated on the notion that, "the other race is neither one arrived from somewhere else, nor one which at a certain moment triumphed and dominated, but instead, one with a permanent presence, that incessandy infiltrates the social body—that reproduces itself uninterruptedly within and out of the social fabric" (DS:£4). There is no confrontation of two alien races here, but the bifurcation of one into an "upper-race" and "lower-race," with the latter representing the "reappearance of its own past" (DS:£4). Foucault explores how this "decentered" discourse of the seventeenth century struggle of races is "recentered" two hundred years later to become a discourse of normalizing and centralizing power:
Toward a Genealogy of Racisms    67
It will become the discourse of a combat to be carried out not be-l tween two races, but between a race placed as the true and only onej (that holds power and defines the norm) and one which constitutes various dangers for the biological patrimony. At this point, all those biologico-racist discourses on degeneration will appear as will all the institutions which function internal to the social body as principles of segregration, elimination and normalization of society. (DS:£4)
In short the assertion that "we must defend ourselves against society" will be replaced by the inverted claim—providing the seminar's title—that "we must defend society against all the biological dangers of that other •race, ofthat sub-race, ofthat counter-race that despite ourselves we are .constituting" (DS:£c). The key elements are still "society," "enemies," and "defense," but in new configuration. The speaking subject is different as is the epidemiology of danger. The theme of race will no longer serve one social group against another; it will become a "tool" of social conservatisms and of racisms of the state: "It is a racism that a society will practice against itself, against its own elements, against its own products; it is an internal racism—that of constant purification—which will be one of the fundamental dimensions of social normalization" (DSisj).
.What then distinguishes Foucault's analysis of race? Does it, in fact, differ from the common "scapegoat theory" of racism, or merely reflect a more subtle variation, where the "enemy" is constructed, not outside the body politic, but organically within it? Certainly Foucault is not the first to seek the origins of racism in the political logic of the particular historians on whom he wrote. Francois Hotman in the sixteenth century, Boulainvilliers in the seventeenth century, Augustín Thierry in the early nineteenth century are familiar forbearers invoked in more conventional accounts.13 Nor is his observation unique, as already noted, that the discourse of race was, among other things, of aristocratic origins. Others have commented at length on the internal bifurcations in seventeenth-century European society as the terrain on which notions of race were cast.14
13. Jacques Bamin. The French Race: Theories o\ its Origins and their Serial an J Political Implications prior to the Revolution (New York: Kennikat Press, 1932) deals with Hotman and Boulainvilliers at some length. On Boulainvilliers, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1948) 162-63.
14. See, Tar example, Devyver who, in a chapter entitled "A reflex of social defense," argues that the idea of a "purity of blood" emerged as a defense among an impoverished and re-
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But Foucault's positioning of racism is distinctive and counter-intuitive in ways that are not mirrored elsewhere. For one, it is not based on the successive meanings of race as described, for example, by Michael Ban-ton, for whom race changes sharply from a notion of lineage to. that of typology between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.15 Foucault's concern is not the changing meaning of race, but the particular discourses of power with which it articulates and in which it is reconceived. Two, the changing force of racial discourse is not understandable in terms of clean semantic breaks. Again, what occupies Foucault are the processes of recuperation, of the distillation of earlier discursive imprints, remodeled in new forms.
Three, racism in its nineteenth-century elaboration is not consolidated in biological science, but more direcdy in the biologizing power of the normalizing state. This is a crucial distinction. The biologizing of race is not a nineteenth-century invention (as he seemed to allude in The History of Sexuality), but part of an emergent biopower two centuries earlier. Nineteenth-century science may have legitimated racial classifications as many have claimed, but it does so by drawing on an earlier lexicon, on that of the struggle of races.
Four, while other scholars have certainly noted that the language of race prior to the nineteenth century was shared by those of varied political persuasions, Foucault makes very different analytic use ofthat observation. Bace has not always been what we might assume, a discourse forged by those in power, but on the contrary, a counter-narrative, embraced
sentful nobility whose solvency was dependent on marriage alliances with an empowered and enriched bourgeoisie. The latter was deeply resented by the nobility because of the increasing number of titles conferred upon its members (8,10). The "internal bifurcation" on which De-vyver focuses is between the nobility and the bourgeoisie and only secondarily thai between the nobility and commoners. Also see Jouanna, who argues that the idea of race emerged as a "system of defense" among the nobility against the "inundation" of "people without honor" (1270, 1272). A related but somewhat different argument is made by Albert Sicroffwith respect to the Spanish debates that surrounded the statutes on purity of blood between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, namely, that "with the proclamation of the statutes, those nobles who could themselves be suspected of impure blood, as a defense, entirely dissociated themselves from people of the middle class" (Les comroverses des Statuts Je pureié Je song en Espagne du XVe au XVlIe siede [Paris: Didier, 1960J 129). In both cases it was the fragile distinctions of some nobility that were endangered and at issue. i£. Michael Banton, The Ideo of Rok (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977) 13-62, esp. 27-28.
Toward a Genealogy of Racisms   69
by those contesting sovereign notions of power and right, by those unmasking the fiction of natural and legitimate rule.16 While many historians accept the premise that nineteenth-century racism drew on earlier "looser" notions of race, for Foucault, this polyvalent mobility does more than describe its etymology; it critically accounts for the nature of modern racism and the sustained power invested in it. Racial discourses are not only righteous because they profess the common good; they are permeated with resurrected subjugated knowledges, disqualified accounts by those contesting unitary power and by those partisan voices that speak for the defense of society. Others, such as George Mosse, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Fields, have noted the "very broadness of racist claims" as well as the very broad political spectrum of participants that have embraced them. Foucault's genealogy organically joins the two.
In short, this is no scapegoat theory of race. Scapegoat theories posit that under economic and social duress, particular sub-populations are cordoned off as intruders, invented to deflect anxieties, and conjured up precisely to nail blame. For Foucault, racism is more than an ad hoc response to crisis; it is a manifestation of preserved possibilities, the expression of an underlying discourse of permanent social war, nurtured by the bio-political technologies of "incessant purification." Racism does not merely arise in moments of crisis, in sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the bio-political state, woven into the weft of the social body, threaded through its fabric.17
16; Foucault drew his examples solely from French and British history but equally compelling and applicable are those one could draw from the racial discourses of Creole elites in Latin America's nineteenth-century nationalist movements. See Julie Skurski's subtle analysis of creole nationalism in Venezuelan ("The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Dono Barbara and The Construction of National Identity," Poetics ToJoy (Winter 1994] i£[4]:6o£-42)— and her powerful critique of Ben Anderson's fraternally based imagined communities—where she suggests how a privileging of whiteness and a coding of race were implicit in the claims to entidement of creole elites against the Spanish crown. Also see Emilia Viotti da Costa's The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1988) that examines the ambiguous role that a discourse of race and "whitening" played in the "myth of racial democracy" in nineteenth-century Brazil.
17. Foucault's argument that racial discourse emerged as a form of subjugated knowledge strikingly resonates with some of the more compelling historical analyses of racism today. In Wages of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1991), for example, David Roediger argues that a discourse on "whiteness" not only went hand and hand with working class formation in the nineteenth and twentieth-century UÜ., but that working class "assertions of white freedom" and struggles
70   Toward a Genealogy of Racisms
The War of Roces as a Contre-Histoire
The fourth lecture on January 28th is where Foucault first justifies his use of the term "racism" and "racist discourse" exclusively for the nineteenth century. From The History of Sexuality we already know that he conceived of nineteenth-century racism as a specific kind, but offered no elaboration. Here, he reserves the term "racism" for a "particular localized episode ... a phase . . . ," better yet, a "recovery" and "reversal" in sociobiological terms of this "old already secular discourse" on the war of races (DS:£6).
His task here is a "eulogy" to the war of races, to that discourse that neither justified nor glorified sovereign power but loudly narrated opposition. Before chronicling its demise, he looks again at its "newness" in yet another way, as "a disruptive prise de parole" that told "a story in the shadows" that cut through the uninterrupted genealogies of power" (DS:59). The sovereign is no longer one with the city, the nation or the state and thus emerges "the possibility of a plurality of histories": "in short, the history of some is not the history of the others." The function of memory is also turned toward a different end; not to maintain the law and reinforce power, but to reveal its deceptions, to show that power is unjust because it is not "ours" (DS:57). As a discourse of binary distributions between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, it calls up new actors: the French, the Gauls, the Celts, the rulers and the ruled. This is not, he reiterates, only a discourse of the oppressed; rather one that "circulated," that enjoyed a capacity to metamorphize and serve different political projects—radical English thought in the seventeenth century, French aristocratic interests decades later, and by the early nineteenth century, "a popular post-revolutionary mobilization.",B Colonialism outside Europe makes its appearance late in Foucault's historical frame; at the end of the nineteenth century, when that racial discourse was recouped yet again to deny a colonized "sous-race" the rights to autonomous rule.
against capitalist disciplinary were made in the language of race (4g). It is not that the U.S. white working class conceived of itseifas a race apart from those whites that ruled; rather, the struggle for rights required a psychological displacement, a projection onto Blacks of a "preindustrial past they scorned and missed" (97). While Foucault might have been sceptical of Roediger's Freudian explanation, in both accounts, the "watermark" of subaltern rights is indelibly etched in the discourse of race.
18. Whether this "popular post-revolutionary mobilization" refers to the German move against Napoleon is plausible but not clear. I
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But Foucault's interest is broader still; not only to register the disappearance of this counter-history, but to identify the political dynamics of historical narratives more generally. This counter-narrative does not represent the difference between an official discourse that produces knowledge and one that does not. On the contrary, it signals a paradigmatic shift in the function of European historical knowledge as an instrument of permanent war. And the very language and project of revolution is subsumed by it. It was Marx, Foucault recalls, who wrote to Engels in 1892: "but the war of classes, we know very well where to find it: among the French historians when they tell of the war of races" (DS:6c). The early nineteenth-century discourse of war plays a "new game": at once "displaced" by a discourse of class and "converted" into the revolutionary discourse of class struggle. Displacement and conversion are not opposed; both are elements in the dynamic of this recuperative process. As Foucault somewhat cryptically writes, "racism is literally revolutionary1 discourse put in reverse" (DS:6^). The project of revolution and the counter-history of race in the nineteenth century do not coexist par hasard; their etymologies are one and the same, derived from the recovery of an earlier discourse on the war of races.
The nineteenth century holds other conversions in store. Just as the seventeenth-century discourse of war entered the social body when war proper receded from it, in the mid-nineteenth century, the theme of a historic war will be converted into a discourse of war conceived in biological terms. "It is no longer battle in the warrior sense, but a biological batde of differentiation, stronger selection of the species, maintenance of the better adapted race" (DS:6j). The "enemy" changes as does the role of the state. The theme of the unjust state will appear in reverse formula where "the state is and must be the protector of the integrity, the superiority, the purity of the race" (DS:66). Modern racism is born out of this conversion from a discourse on races in the plural to a discourse on race, in its singular form, from a discourse directed against the state, to one organized by it.
Foucault is not arguing for a racial discourse of generic form. Different racisms will be the product ofthat shift, exemplified by two "great transformations" of the early twentieth century: the Nazi state and Soviet state racism. The Nazi state both reinscribed the characteristics of late nineteenth-century racism (posing the state as biological protector) and "reimplanted" earlier themes drawn from the eighteenth-century discourse of social war: those of redeemed heros, of an ancestral war, and
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of the old legends" of the war of races. The Soviet transformation did the inverse, not with the high drama displayed by the Nazi state, but in the form of a "surreptitious," "scientisüc" transformation. These state racisms depend on a new sort of army, a medical police that "assurefsj the silent hygiene of an ordered society" (DS:66). The sick, the mad, and the deviant are designated as "class enemies" and targeted for elimination. Foucault writes, "On the one side, [you have] the Nazi reinscription of state racism in old legends of the war of races; [on the other side, you have] a Soviet re-inscription of the class struggle in the mute mechanism of a state racism" (DS:67). The theme of social war articulated in biopower provides the overarching principle that subsumes both la lutte des races and la lutte des classes.
Several features of this account are worth underscoring. First, no one "theory of race" functioned as the particular thesis of one group against another. Foucault is concerned with a more general racial grammar, what he carefully labels as a racial "coding" ("codage") that provided an "instrumental space, at once discursive and political" in which each group could infuse a shared vocabulary with different political meaning (DS77).
Second, he identifies not the end of one discourse and the emergence of another, but rather the refolded surfaces that join the two.19 Third, a point made repeatedly in each lecture: race is a discourse of vacillations. It operates at different levels and moves not only between different political projects but seizes upon different elements of earlier discourses reworked for new political ends. Four, the discourses of class and revolution are not opposed to the discourse of social war but constituted by it. Thus, unlike Hannah Arendt, who identified the "economic struggle of classes" and the "natural fight of races" as the two prominent "ideologies" of the nineteenth century, for Foucault they are neither independendy derived
19. Güles Deleuze also uses this notion of a "fold" to capture what he refers to as Foucault's "fundamental idea ... that ofa dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them." See the chapter endued "Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivization) in Gilles Deleuze," Michel Foucault (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 9^.-123. My notion of the fold is quite different 1 use it to identify the recursive, recuperative power of discourse itself, in a way that highlights how new elements (new planes) in a prior discourse may surface and take on altered signi0cance as they are repositioned in relation to a new discourse with which they mesh.
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ideologies nor alternate "persuasive views"; their etymology is one and the same.20
The Politics of Historical Knowledge
The four subsequent lectures play out these vacillations in specific terms. They do so by interrogating the causes and consequences of this new historical knowledge. Since these lectures are not direcdy concerned with state racism, I explore them less fully than the others. They are not tangential, however, to the method by which Foucault eventually arrives at his analysis of biopower and nineteenth-century racism at the end of the 1976 course. They serve as a detailed substantiation of his general argument concerning the transformational grammar of racial discourse between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
In the first of these four lectures, Foucault draws on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century histories of the Norman conquest of Saxon England to illustrate how a discourse on conquest and the war of races took over new political fields and was refrained by them.21 He identifies it as the first historical discourse that both challenges absolutist rights and ties the "rights of the English people" to the expulsion of the Norman foreigners. But this discourse was also used toward other ends: seized on the one hand by a Norman aristocracy to claim that their "right of colonization"
20. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 159.
21. For some minimal help in situating those historians and political figures to whom Foucault refers (such as Adam Blackwood, Sir Edward Coke and John Lilbume) see Christopher Hill, "The Norman Yoke," Puritanism and Revolution (New York: Schocken, 1958) 50-123. Hill's interpretation of the myth of the Norman conquest and its political uses resonates with Foucault's in at least one striking way: both noted its "polyvalent mobility." Hill saw this theory of conquest, that originally justified absolutism, "turned against its inventors" to become a "rudimentary class theory of politics," historically significant because it was among the first papular opposition theories that was not religious but secular (57). But also see J. G. A. Pacock who disagreed with Hill, arguing that absolutist monarchy never legitimated itself "on the theoretical basis of a conqueror's right." The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1957) £4. However, note too Pocock's contention (again in line with Foucault's) that historians have wrongly assumed a continuity in use ofthe myth of the Norman conquest by the early common lawyers such as Coke and the later Levellers such as Lilburne. He argues that their deployment ofthe myth was to very different ends (i2£~i26).
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provided them with the right to rule and on the other hand, by parliamentarians opposed to the unchecked power of the Stuart monarchs.22.
According to Banton (and Foucault), the popular version of the myth of the Norman yoke as retold in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820) portrayed the "opposition between Saxon and Norman ... as a struggle between two races." Banton counts the term "race" used fifty-seven times in the novel.23 Both hold that the discourse of races (but not yet that of "race") was already evident in the seventeenth century, in a form that allowed it continually to be turned toward different ends. Foucault focuses on its strategic mobility, on its "series of elements" that could allow the "coding" of fundamental social conflicts "in the historical form of conquest and the domination of one race over another." That coding neither confers uniformity on the function of the discourse nor implies a commonality in the classes that will embrace it. The importance for Foucault is that this discourse on the war of races anticipates the notion of "two nations" inside a society that will conceive of itself in binary terms.24
One particular part of Foucault's treatment of sixteenth century historiography should draw our attention. A text he attributes to Adam Blackwood contains what he calls a "very strange and important analogy"; namely, how the Norman conquest of England and the European conquest of the Americas were discursively constructed as similarly legitimized events, both confirming that early Normans and the contemporary English shared a right of colonization and a right to rule.25 While the issue of colonization is broached in earlier lectures, here for the first and only time, Foucault expliciüy ties the discourse of internal colonialism within
22. According to Michal Banton, the parliamentarians claimed that "Englishmen are descended of German race" thereby allying themselves with a tradition in which "the authority of the kings is not unlimited." See Banton, The Idea of Race 16-17.
23. Banton, The Idea of Race 20.
24. Nearly half of this lecture is devoted to a discussion of Hobbes. Because it is less direcdy concerned with the discourse of races, I do not deal with it here. Foucault dispells any "false affinity" that might be found in his approach with that of Hobbes, and discusses at some length why their notions of social war are not the same. He argues that Hobbes' analysis was not based on the notion of a society made up of inequitable power, in perpetual civil war with itself as often assumed, but an a fundamental notion of "insufficient difference," a war of equality, a "sort of infinite diplomacy of rivalries that are naturally equalitarian." According to Foucault's reading, Hobbes never attacked the structure ofpower, but held fast to a discourse of contract, of sovereignty, and thus remained within a discourse of the state.
2£. The text in question is "Apologia pro regibus," dated ij8i.
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Europe to the fact of its external expansion—in a way unanticipated by any of his previous accounts:
I think at this end of the sixteenth century one sees a return effect [effet de retour] on the juridico-political structures of the West, but it is a return of colonial practice. It should not be forgotten that colonization with its techniques and juridical and political weapons transported European models to other continents, but that this same colonization had a return effect on the mechanisms ofpower in the Occident, on the institutional apparatuses and techniques ofpower. There had been a whole series of colonial models that had been brought back to the Occident and that made it so that the Occident could traffic in something like a colonization, an internal colonialism. (DS78)
This is an extraordinary passage on several counts. Here Foucault clearly identifies a process that has become central to contemporary colonial studies and European history more generally: namely, the observation that external colonialism provided a template for conceptualizing social inequities in Europe and not solely the other way around. As a growing corpus of new colonial history has shown, and as Mary Louise Pratt specifically argues, "Europe's aggressive colonial and imperial ventures" served as "models, inspirations and testing grounds" for Europe's eighteenth-century bourgeois order.26 While we cannot credit Foucault with demonstrating the link between the sixteenth-century discourse on foreign conquest and the disciplinary strategies of Europe's bourgeois world, the "return effect" he identifies is a piece of that process scholars are only beginning to follow, part of the discursive work that external colonialism has played in ordering social oppositions 'back home'. Unfortunately, this is the beginning and end of his story; Foucault neither pursued this connection nor elaborated further.
The following lecture of February nth covers some similar ground but introduces another theme, as well. Foucault retells a familiar set of narratives from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance on the origins of England and France.27 While many others have combed these accounts for their later political appropriations, Foucault re-examines the specific Trojan and Germanic myths of France's origins to substantiate two specific claims:
26. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculluration (London: Routledge, 1992) 36.
27. For a detailed account of these, see Jacques Barzun, The French Race.
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one, already made, that the seventeenth century witnessed the emergence of a discourse that challenged "the uninterrupted character of the genealogy of kings and their power." In both France and England it was, he argues, the sixteenth-century theme of the invasion, of "two foreign nations inside a state" that provided the basis for these later accounts (DS:84).
The second claim pushes his specifications of this new historiography further. This discourse of aristocratic historians represents more than a new conception of power, but a new kind of historical knowledge forged by a nobility whose claims to privilege and property were eroding fast. What Boulainvilliers, then Buat-Nancy and Mondosier, attack is not only the legitimacy of sovereign power but "the knowledge-power mechanism that tied the administrative apparatus to the absolutism of the state" (DS:93); What this impoverished and marginalized nobility sought to "reconquer" was historical knowledge, to deploy it as a political weapon in its own interests, to narrate a history with another object and with another speaking subject than that constituted by the state. For Foucault, this new subject is the nation: "hence the fundamental concepts of nineteenth century nationalism will be born; hence will emerge the notion of race: hence will appear the notion of class" (DS:93). The subject of this new kind of historical knowledge will be those social antagonisms below, outside and against the state. No wonder, Foucault argues, that states would attempt to regain control of it. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, state institutions would be created to recolonize, centralize and relocate historical knowledge for the state's own ends. It is out of this aristocratic narration of the nation and its later bourgeois variant that two discourses would emerge: the struggle of race and the struggle of class. In short, the new subject of history is invented by the nobility not the bourgeoisie. Historical knowledge is no longer reserved for the state's historians who narrated its glory, but seized by historians of a nation pitted against the state, a nation that "considers itself as the object of its own historical narrative"
(DS:97)-    ■
In the third lecture, Foucault again takes up Boulainvilliers whose writings exemplify an aristocratic version of history as a war waged on two fronts: one positioned against the third estate, legitimating the naturally endowed rights of the nobility that followed from invasion and the other against the unchecked power of the king. In this notion of history as a "calculus of forces," the grid of intelligibility for society is the theme of permanent war. Such histories, Foucault argues, contested received notions
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of power, confronting the dynamics of political force: "The aristocracy invented history because it was decaying, above all because it was waging its war and could consider its own war as an object of analysis" (DS:n2).
The lecture of February 25th pursues this theme further. The battle is not between knowledge and ignorance as most accounts of the Enlightenment would have it, but rather over which forms of knowledge could lay claims to truth-values about the contemporary social order (DS: 119). Here, the project of The History of Sexuality and the lectures converge again. The Will to Knowledge and Foucault's analysis of the truth claims of historical knowledge share a similar concern. In both, he explores the state's part in that process. In the lectures, the state intervenes in this struggle in four ways; by disqualifying some knowledges and valorizing others, by normalizing the communication between them, by establishing a hierarchy of knowledges, "a sort of Chinese box," in which the material and the particular are subordinate knowledges, encased by the more general and abstract knowledges at the top, and finally, by a centralization of knowledge that makes state control possible (DS:i2o).
Up to this point, Foucault has concentrated on historical knowledge as an instrument of war for the nobility at one moment and for bourgeois and popular politics at another. In the lecture of March 3rd he reframes that question: how did this historical-political discourse become a "tactical instrument that could be employed in strategies that were completely different from those pursued by the nobility" (DS:i2£)? Other historians such as André Devyver and Hannah Arendt would interpret seventeenth-century racial discourse as the weapon of a beleaguered nobility threatened by bourgeois incursions on the one side, by the absolutist monarch on the other. But Foucault will make a different sort of argument, identifying the French revolution as the moment when this discourse that once served the nobility was generalized and confiscated by society at large:
[Historical discourse] must not be considered as either an ideological product nor as the effect of the nobility's class position, but as a discursive tactic, of a technology of power-knowledge that precisely because it was a tactic could be transferred and could become both the law governing the formation of knowledge and the critical form of all political batdes. (DS:i25)
Foucault describes the specificity ofthat moment in this way: during the French revolution, historical knowledge was deployed in three different
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directions, "corresponding to three different battles, that in turn produced three different tactics": a battle over the nation, over social classes, and over race. Each was tied to a specific form of knowledge: philology, political economy, and biology: "to speak, to work, to live" (DS:i2^). Focusing on the tactical generalization of historical knowledge, he draws on Boulainvilliers again to show how and why this instrument of the nobility could become a general instrument in the political struggles of the eighteenth century. It was Boulainvilliers who turned "national dualism" into the principle of intelligibility of history by finding the initial conflict from which all others would derive, by identifying the carriers of domination and destroyers of civilization as the "barbarian" within Europe itself28 He explains his long digression on Boulainvilliers in these terms:
I believe it is possible to specify quite easily the way in which, beginning with Boulainvilliers, an historical and political discourse was constituted whose range of objects, whose criteria of relevance, whose concepts, and whose methods of analysis, all turn out to be quite close to one another. That is, in the course of the eighteenth century an historical discourse formed that was common to an entire series of historians, who nonetheless find themselves in strong opposition to one another regarding their theses, their hypotheses, and their political dreams ... It would be possible to pass very easily from one of these histories to another, identifying nothing more than some simple transformations in the fundamental propositions. (DS:^)29
28. On Boulainvilliers' historical account of the origins and history of the French nation (compared to the same events but in a different story told by the "democrat" Mably) see Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, "Deux legitimations historiques de la sociale francaise au XVIII siecle: Mably et Boulainvilliers," VAielia de ('historie, Francois Furet (Paris: Flammarion, 1982) 165-183.
29. Foucault was not alone in looking 10 Baulainvilliers as emblematic of a particular kind of history. Lěvi-Strauss used the term "Boulainvilliers transformation" to describe the relationship between different levels of historical analyses and why each history produces "anti-hisioires." In the ünal chapter of The Sarafle Mind, he writes:
Each history is thus accompanied by an indeterminate number of anti-histories, each complementary to the others: to a history of grade I there corresponds a history of grade 2, etc. The progress of knowledge and the creation of new sciences take place through the generation of anti-histories which show that a certain order which is possible only on one plane ceases to be so on another. (1966:261) See Devyver (1973:111) who concurs with Levi-Strauss as to how that principle worked in the case of Gobineau. Foucault's notion of a "contre-histoire" obviously bears some semblance to Levi-Strauss' "anti-histaire," but Foucault uses it to elaborate a different sel of properties be-
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What he calls the "tight epistemic weave" of this discourse "does not mean that everyone is thinking in the same way" (DS:i37). On the contrary, he identifies something like Adorno's "force-field" for a discourse that is at once powerful and shifting, without reducing to a "generative principle."3G
The condition for being able to not think in the same way is the same condition which makes it possible to think in a different mode and which makes this difference politically relevant... in other words, the reversibility of the discourse is a direct function of the homogeneity of its rules of function. It is the regularity of the epistemic field, it is the homogeneity in the manner of discourse formation which renders it usable within struggles ... [that] are extra-discursive. (DS:i37)
Given Foucault's frequent reiterations throughout the seminar, one might have expected a restatement of what made up the "regularity" of this "tight epistemic weave"; more so, since this is the first time that he would refer to epistemology at all.-Neither issue is pursued further. Instead, the lecture concludes on the subject of the bourgeoisie, on the "anti-historical" and "anti-historicist" stance of it. As in the preceding lectures, there is a sense that, despite the telegraphic treatment, his audience should clearly see by now this bourgeois connection, but again the bourgeois order and its relationship to historical knowledge remains elliptical and only partially explained.
In yet a subsequent lecture, some of these vagaries are resolved. Foucault turns away from the aristocratic origins of eighteenth-century history to the early nineteenth-century embourgeoisment of it. As the bourgeoisie appropriated national discourse, it transformed the notion of war from a "condition of existence" to a "condition of survival," positing internal war as a defense of society against itself, against the "dangers that are born in its own body" (DS:i42). Foucault examines the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts of the abbé Sieyes whose redefining of the nation positioned the Third Estate, not the nobility, at its essential core.
cause he has a specific genealogy of historiography in mind. Nevertheless, both are concerned with the sorts of counter/anti-histories that emerge when particular narratives resurface and are recontextualized for different political ends.
30. On Adorno's use of the notion of a "force-field" to "signify a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative principle" see Martin Jay, Adamo (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984) 14-1 c as well as Martin Jay, Farce-Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (London: Roudedge, 1993).
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With Sieyes, the task of the nation was recast, no longer designed to dominate others, but "to administer itself, to direct, to govern, to assure itself" (DS:i46). Unlike the aristocratic discourse that attacked the unitary state, this narrative refocuses history on another sort of battle, on the inherent "national duality" of French society at war with itself, at once challenging the universality that had been reserved for the sovereign state and reclaiming universality for the popular nation. It is not the past that holds the truth of society, as it was for the aristocracy; universal truths are located in the present. The discourse of history is curtailed in this process, "delimited, colonized, implanted, redivided and up to a certain point pacified" (DS:i4i).
This discussion of historical knowledge might seem to bring us away from the subject of racism, but for Foucault, such new forms of knowledge are at its core—and perhaps in more ways than he imagined. In Sieyes' case, as Bill Sewell has shown, a racial grammar slips into Sieyes' ruminations about citizenship, class and nation.31 While Foucault presents the nineteenth-century bourgeois appropriation of national discourse as a pacification of the historical discourse of social war, it is not one that signaled the latter's demise. On the contrary, the final lecture explores "how the theme of race comes, not to disappear, but to be recovered in an entirely other thing which is state racism" (TM:37). And it is "the birth of state racism" that he talks about on the seminar's last meeting, in fact the last day that he will write and lecture so explicidy about racism at all.32
On Biopower, Normalization, and the Birth of State Racism
Foucault's final lecture in Spring 1976 is a departure from those that preceded it in a number of important ways. First of all, it alone specifically dovetails with The History of Sexuality, overlapping significandy with the final chapter of volume 1. Secondly, it is the only one devoted to the nineteenth-and twentieth-century racisms of the state; here, the sometimes cryptic and cumbersome rehearsal of the discourse on the war of races is put aside. Thirdly, it shifts temporal and analytic terrain. This lecture is about modern racism and the biopolitical state. The term biopower has not ap-
31. See William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: Abbé Sieyes and "What Is the Third Estate?" (Durham: Duke UP, 1994).
32. Foucault's 1978 lectures at the College on "the birth of biopolitics" discuss Nazism but not genealogies of racial discourse in the detailed fashion elaborated here.
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peared before, despite the fact that by Foucault's dating, its emergence coincides precisely with that of the discourse on social war. With the demise of sovereign power and rise of disciplinary regimes, the political technology of biopower begins to take shape. Invested in the management of life not the jurisdiction over death, this technology will convert a discourse of races into a discourse of race, investing the state as protector of social purifications. These connections are clarified, as Foucault turns to the reinscription of specific elements of sovereign power in the racist state.
The "statisation of the biological" (TM:37~38) was a "fundamental phenomenon of the nineteenth century," and it is within the biologized state that modern racism flourishes and rests. Once again, Foucault turns back to the classical theory of sovereignty where "the right over life and death was one of the fundamental attributes of sovereign rule." This right "to take life and let five," however, is a strange one that operated in asymmetric fashion. The sovereign could only intrude on life at the moment when he could take it away, by exercising the "right of the blade." Foucault captures its critical transformation in the nineteenth century with an agile turn of phrase that first appeared in The History of Sexuality and that he will use again here: the sovereign right "to kill and let live" (faire maurir et laisser vivre) will become the right "to make live and let die" (faire vivre et laisser mourir) (TM:38).
[It] consisted not exaeüy in a substitution, but in a completion of this old right of sovereignty—to kill and let live—by another new right, that would not efface the first, but would penetrate it, cut across it, modify it and which would be a right, or rather a power that was precisely the inverse: the power to make live and let die. (TM:39)
This is not a new formulation. In The History of Sexuality, biopower was defined in similar terms, as a power "organized around the management of life," where wars were "no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended," but
on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of the life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men [sic] to be killed . . .
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at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population. (HS:i37)
Foucault traces this emergent form of biopower in the seventeenth and eighteenth century through those "techniques of power that were essentially centered on ... the individual body" (TM:39). These are the disciplinary technologies familiar to us Írom Discipline and Punish and to a lesser extent from The History of Sexuality. But here Foucault draws a distinction not made in his earlier work: namely, the development of a new technology of biopower in the mid-eighteenth century, that of regularization. This is not a variant form of discipline (as it appeared in Discipline and Punish); it occupies a different social and political space:-
A technology óf power that would not exclude the first, but that would encase it, integrate it, partially modify it and that would most of all come to utilize it by way of a sort of implanting of itself in it and by effectively encrusting itself owing to this prior disciplinary technique. This new technology does not cancel out the disciplinary technique because it is at another level, it is at another rung... (TM:4o)
Addressed not to the individual body, but to the life of the species and its "global mass," it presides over the processes of birth, death, production, and illness. It is not individualizing, but what he calls "globalizing" ("raas-sifiante"). It acts not on the human body, but on the human species. Not a variation of the eighteenth-century anatomo-politics of the body, this biopower is a new thing. It does not concern itself with fecundity alone, nor with the morbidity caused by sporadic epidemics. Its focus is on the "endemic," those "permanent factors" that cut into the time for work, that lower energies, that diminish and weaken life itself (TM:42). Its primary instrument is not the disciplinary technology of individual dressage, but regularization, a "technology of security," a "bio-regulation by the state" of its internal dangers (TM:47).33
33. This attention to "the technology of security" anticipates a theme that will become central to Foucault in his 1978 College de France lectures on govemmentality as he turns away from the issue of racism per se and focuses on "the apparatuses of security," what Colin Gordon
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Power is no longer lodged in the sovereign right "to kill and let live" but rather in "the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life" (HS: 136). It is "the right to intervene in the making of life, in the manner of living, in 'how' to live" (TM:46). This is, for Foucault, the ultimate bourgeois project. In The History of Sexuality, he has already described this "how to live" as central to the cultivation of the bourgeois self. It is through the technologies of sexuality that the bourgeoisie will claim its hegemony, its privileged position, its certified knowledge and jurisdiction over the manner of living, over the governing of children, over the civilities, conduct and competencies that prescribe "how to live."
No surprise then that Foucault turns back (for the first time in the lectures) to the strategic importance of sexuality as the "crossroads" where that power over, and invested in, individual bodies and populations would converge, in technologies of discipline and regularization (TM:^o). Thus he explains the medical valorization of sexuality in the nineteenth century and the dangers that sexuality was deemed to hold in store. When undisciplined and irregular, sexuality could have two catastrophic effects at the level of the individual and the population. His example is the discourse on masturbating children, sketched in The Will to Knowledge and in the first of the lectures. The masturbating child would not only risk illness all of his (sic) life, but perpetuate a degeneracy that would be carried from generation to generation (TM:5o). Medicine would become a technique of knowledge/power, serving both as a "scientific seizure on biological and organic processes" and a "political technique of intervention" (TM:£o-£i).
What Foucault is after is something more than the technology of power residing in medicine. That is only one site of a more general process of normalization that Pasquino rightly argues is a common theme of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.34 What interests him rather is the norm that circulates between the processes of disciplining and regularization and that articulates the individual and the population:
has called a "specific principle of political method and practice" that joins the governing of the social body to "proper conduct" of the individual, 10 the governing of one's self See Colin Gordon, ed., The Foucault Effect Studies in Gowmmentality (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991) esp. 1-52 and 87-104.
34. Pasquale Pasquino, "Michel Foucault (1926-84): The Will to Knowledge," Economy and Society 15,1 (1986): 98.
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The society of normalization is not then, under these conditions, a sort of generalized disciplinary society in which disciplinary institutions swarm all over and eventually take over. This, I think is only a first insufficient interpretation. . . . The society of normalization is a society where the norm of discipline and the norm of regularization intersect... To say that power in the nineteenth century... has taken life in charge, is to say that it was able to cover the entire surface that stretched from the organic to the biological, from the body to the population, by a double play of technologies of discipline on the one hand, of technologies of regulation on the other. (TM:5i)
Within this modern biopolitical state, the sovereign right to kill appears in new form; as an "excess" of biopower that does away with life in the name of securing it (TM:£2). The death penalty serves as his example in The History of Sexuality (HS:i37-i38) and the atom bomb in the lectures (TMrji-£i). From both, Foucault returns to the problem of racism and to a basic paradox of a biopolitical state: how does this disciplinary and regulatory power over life permit the right to kill, if this is a power invested in augmenting life and the quality of it? How is it possible for this political power "to kill, to give the order to kill, to expose to death not only its enemies but even its own citizens? How to exercise the power of death in a political system centered on biopower" (TM:£2)?
For Foucault, this is the point where racism intervenes. It is not that all racisms are invented at this moment. Racisms have existed in other forms at other times: Now, "what inscribes racism in the mechanisms of the state is the emergence of biopower.... racism inscribes itself as a fundamental mechanism of power that exercises itself in modern states" (TM:^). What does racist discourse do? For one, it is a "means of introducing... a fundamental division between those who must live and those who must die" (TM: si)- It fragments the biological field, it establishes a break (césure) inside the biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of races, a set of subdivisions in which certain races are classified as "good," fit, and superior.
More importantly, it establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life. It posits that "the more you kill [and] . . . let die, the more you will live." It is neither racism nor the state that invented this connection, but the permanency of war-like relations inside the social body. Racism now activates this discourse in a novel way,
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establishing a biological confrontation between "my life and the death of others" (TM:^). It gives credence to the claim that the more "degenerates" and "abnormals" are eliminated, the lives of those who speak will be stronger, more vigorous, and improved. The enemies are not political adversaries, but those identified as external and internal threats to the population. "Racism is the condition that makes it acceptable to put [certain people] to death in a society of normalization" (TM:j4). The murderous function of the biopolitical state can only be assured by racism which is "indispensable" to it (TM:£4).
Several crucial phenomena follow from this. One is evident in the knot that binds nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power:
Basically, evolutionism understood in the broad sense, that is not so much Darwin's theory itself but the ensemble of [its] notions, has become ... in the nineteenth century, not only a way of transcribing political discourse in biological terms,... of hiding political discourse in scientific dress, but a way of thinking the relations of colonization, the necessity of war, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness ... (TM:55).
In addition, racism will develop in modern societies where biopower is prevalent and particularly at certain "privileged points" where the right to kill is required, "primo with colonization, with colonizing genocide." How else, Foucault rhetorically asks, could a biopolitical state kill "peoples, a population, civilizations" if not by activating the "themes of evolutionism" and racism (TM:js). Colonialism is only mentioned in passing because what really concerns him is not racism's legitimating function to kill "others," but its part in justifying the "exposure of one's own citizens" to death and war. In modern racist discourse, war does more than reinforce one's own kind by eliminating a racial adversary; it "regenerates" one's own race (TM:£6).
In conditions of war proper, the right to kill and the affirmation of life productively converge. But, he argues, one could also see criminality, madness, and various anomalies in a similar way, thereby resituating the subjects of his earlier projects (on madness, prisons, and sexuality) as expressions of the murderous qualities of the normalizing state, as sub-themes in a genealogy of racism in which the exclusion and/or elimination of some assures the protection of others (TM:£6). Here discourse has con-
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crete effects; its practices are prescribed and motivated by the biological taxonomies of the racist state:
You see that we are very far from a racism that would be, as traditionally, a simple disdain or hate of some races for others. We are also very far from a racism that would be a sort of ideological operation by which the State or a class would attempt to divert those hostilities towards a mythical adversary ... I think it is much more profound than an old tradition ... than a new ideology, it is something else. The specificity of modem racism... is not tied to mentalities, ideologies, to the deceits of power. It is linked to the technology of power . . . to that which places us far from the war of races and this intelligibility of history: to a mechanism that permits biopower to exercise itself. Racism is tied to the functioning of a State that is compelled to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race to exercise its sovereign power. (TM:£6~S7)
Not surprisingly an explanation of the Nazi state underwrites his argument. As a state that combined the tightest regimes of discipline and regulation, it expressed the "paroxysms of a new mechanism of power" culled from the eighteenth century" (TM:c7). At once disciplinary and universally assuring ("assuranrielle"), insuring, and regulatory, the Nazi state generalized both biopower and the right to kill in a form that was "racist, murderous, and suicidal" (TM:s9).
Foucault ends his final lecture here on a prescient and ominous note. While the deadly play between a power based on the sovereign right to kill and the biopolitical management of life are exemplified in the Nazi state, it is not housed there alone. His argument is broader still, namely that this play between the two appears in all modern states, be they fascist, capitalist or socialist;
i I think that the socialist State, socialism.-is also marked by racism ... social racism does not await the formation of socialist states to appear ... It is difficult for me to speak about this. . . . But one thing is certain: that the theme of biopower . . . was not just criticized by socialism, but, in fact, embraced by it, developed, reimplanted, modified on certain points, but absolutely not reexamined in its foundations and in its modes of functioning. (TM:59~6o)
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Invoking nineteenth-century popular mobilizations revered by the French left, Blanquism, the Communards, and the Anarchists, Foucault contended that their notions of society and the state (or whatever authoritarian institutions might substitute for it) were predicated on the strongly racist principle that a collective body should manage life, take life in charge, and compensate for its aleatory events. In so doing, such forms of socialism exercised the right to kill and to disqualify its own members. Whether this should rightly be labelled, a "racist principle" or be understood as a particular effect of biopolitical technologies more generally is open to question. Foucault justifies his designation in these terms: "Each time that socialism has had to insist on the problem of the struggle, of the struggle against the enemy, of the elimination of the adversary inside capitalist society . . . racism has revived ... a racism that is not really ethnic but biological" (TM:6o).
If this was difficult for Foucault to speak about, it appeared even more difficult for his audience to hear. Although no questions from the audience appear in the Italian or French transcriptions, a barrage was fired at him as he uttered his last sentence—striking in the context of the staid College de France format where challenging questions are still frowned upon and where even general ones are rarely posed. One member of the audience asked about the relationship between the Paris communards and racism. Another pressed him to specify the difference between capitalist and socialist states. Foucault's answers were both direct and evasive. He refused to take the bait. Instead, he merely alluded to a point made in earlier lectures that under socialism, class and racial enemies were often conflated and confused, embodied in the anti-semitism of the Paris commune, where financiers were first of all conceived as Jews. Apologizing for explaining himself badly, he repeated his contention that the same mechanisms of biopower and sovereign right were indistinguishable in socialist and capitalist states.
James Miller is convinced that Foucault's attack on nineteenth-century socialist strategies had a much more recent target, directed at the violent tactics of the French left in the wake of 1968.35 One might also conclude that he was registering his view of Stalin's (biopolitical) purgings that prompted him to leave the Communist party two decades earlier. It cer-
35-. Miller, Passion of Michel Foucault 291.
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tainly resonates with his more recent indictment of Soviet prison camps, evident in one striking interview he gave to Nouvel Observateur in February 1976 where he condemned Soviet "mechanisms of power, systems of control, surveillance, and punishment" as similar in form to those by which the bourgeoisie had asserted their domination at another time.36 In contemporary perspective, Foucault's analysis has an almost eerie quality. It speaks to, and even seems to anticipate, the conditions for "ethnic cleansing" in Eastern Europe's fractured states.
If these lectures did not work as effective history, it is not because Fou-cault did not try. As a history of the present, the lectures are disturbingly relevant today, and given the questions raised by those in the College de France audience, they were disturbing at the time. His attack on socialism certainly caught the attention of those who attended, but no one took up his more pessimistic indictment; namely that racism was intrinsic to the nature of all modern, normalising states and their biopolitical technologies. Nor was he called upon to account for those varying intensities of racist practice ranging from social exclusions to mass murder. The state looms so large in his account, but the critical differences between state formations that discursively threaten expulsion and extermination as opposed to those that cany it out went unaddressed. On this unsettling note, he ended an extraordinary seminar.
Bourgeois Racism, Empire and Biopower in Light of the Lectures
I do not think it necessary to rehearse the broad analytic openings that these lectures provide. Those I outlined at the beginning of this chapter should be more than apparent now. Foucault's sustained concern with the nature of the state, with the distinction between disciplinary and regulatory power, and with changing forms of biopower emerge with force if not always with clarity. Moreover, they make new sense of the two initial lectures on subjugated knowledges that have been available in English for some time. Here I am more interested in looking at how the seminar informs our thinking about racism, The History of Sexuality, and our colonial reading of it. To my mind, one of the seminar's most striking contributions is the ten-
36. See Diis el ecrils 111:74.
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sion that underwrites Foucault's historical analysis: namely, that between rupture and reinscription in the discourse of history and the implications it carries for the practices predicated on it. Using a substitutable set of terms (reinscription, recuperation, recovery, reimplantation, encasement), he identifies how racial discourse underwent micro- and macro-transformations: from a discourse on war proper to a discourse on war conceived in biological terms; from a power based on discipline to one transfigured into normalization; from a discourse that opposed the state to one annexed by it; from an ancient sovereign right to kill converted into a deadly principle in the modern state's biopolitical management of life; from racial discourse as the nobility's defense against the state into a discourse in which the state intervenes to defend society against itself At each of these moments of conversion Foucault broaches what appears discursively continuous and what does not. What remains unclear, however, are the dynamics ofthat transformation, the discursive and non-discursive mechanisms that account for the selective recuperations of some elements and not others. What his analysis does do is unseat the conventional coupling of a discourse with a specific political ideology, alert us to discursive vacillations and to what this "polyvalent mobility" can mean.
The analytic and political tension between rupture and recuperation has strong contemporary relevance. It underscores what I would identify as one of the most striking features of racism and the historiography about it; namely, that racism always appears renewed and new at the same time. How else could we account for the fact that historians have come up with such an enormously different range of darings to track its emergence, have identified so many different crucial conjunctural moments to pinpoint its consolidation, have disagreed so fundamentally about its origins in place and time? Why is there such disagreement over whether there is a "new," "everyday" racism today? Why does Winthrop Jordan offer one date and Edmund Morgan another for the emergence of racism in the U.S.? Why is LePen's racism viewed by some as a new cultural racism and by others as a reformulation of tried and true forms? One could make two counterarguments: first, that a common definition of racism is not shared by many scholars, that they are not necessarily talking about the same thing. For some, it is defined by evidence of prejudice, while others mark racism by its structural, institutional edifice and its practical consequences. Thus one could argue that the darings differ because the phenomena in question are not the same. Alternately, one might invoke the work of Stuart Hall,
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or Michael Omi and Howard Winant who hold that racial formations are shaped by specific relations of power and therefore have different histories and etymologies, a point with which Foucault would have likely agreed.37 Foucault might have been equally intrigued by Lawrence Hirschfeld's distinction between a commonly shared theory of race—what we might call an underlying grammar—and the distinct and varied systems of racial referencing and categorization adduced from it.3a
Neither of these counter arguments, however, address a fundamental paradox of racial discourse. Namely, that such discourse invariably draws on a cultural density of prior representations that are recast in new form; that racism appears at once as a return to the past as it harnesses itself to progressive projects;39 that scholars can never decide among themselves whether they are witness to a legacy of the past or the emergence of a new phenomena all together. Foucault's analysis suggests that these scholarly discrepancies are irresolvable precisely because they mirror what is intrinsic to the paradoxical power of racist discourse itself; namely, that it is, as George Mosse once noted, a "scavenger" discourse or as Barbara Fields writes, a "promiscuous critter," but not in unpatterned ways. Racial discourse is not opposed to emancipatory claims; on the contrary, it effectively appropriates them. Nor does it always cast itself as the voice of the state: it can speak as articulately for a beleaguered nobility against the state, for a creole elite opposed to the crown, and for the "silent majority."40
A genealogy of racisms would not entail the search for some culturally consistent originary moment from which racism derives; it would rather attempt to locate, as Foucault does for sexuality, why certain truth claims are banked on it; why racism, as Etienne Balibar notes, "embodies a very
37. Stuart Hall, "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance," Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO. 1980) 305-346; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; From die 1960s to the 1990s (London: Routledge, 1994).
38. Lawrence Hirschfeld "Do Children have a Theory ofRace?" Cognition 54 (1995): 209-252.
39. See André TaguiefT's compelling analysis of Le Pen's racial discourse where he shows how Le Pen substantiates the necessity of stringent racist policies vis-á-vis immigrants in the name of a demand for a "real French revolution" and a more just "direct democracy." "The Doctrine of the National Front in France {1972-1989): A 'Revolutionary' Programme? Ideological Aspects ofa National-Populist Mobilization," New Political Science 16-17 (Fall/Winter 1989): 29-70.
40. Whether this facility of appropriation is more true of the discourse of race than of any other number of powerful discourses—of, for example, class and gender—is not entertained.
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insistent desire for knowledge," about the articulation of psychic/somatic features of individuals and about what is inherent in the dispositions of particular social groups.41 Racisms provide truth claims about how the social world once was, why social inequities do or should persist, and the social distinctions on which the future should rest.
This is in no way to credit Foucault with having worked out a complete genealogy of racisms or even to suggest that his own criteria for genealogical research that might trace racism's "numberless beginnings, . . . minute deviations,... complete reversals ... and false calculations" were carefully followed or adequately mapped.42 On the contrary, the lectures confirm, even more strongly than The History of Sexuality, that Foucault's selective genealogical attention to the dynamics of internal colonialism within Europe by and large positioned the racial formations of Europe's imperial world outside his epistemic field and ofThis analytic map. Because Foucault's account of racial discourse is so endemically detached from the patterned shifts in world-wide imperial labor regimes of which those discourses were a part, we are diverted from the gritty historical specificities of what racial discourse did both to confirm the efficacy of slavery and to capture new populations in the transition to wage-labor.43 Our task then would not be to follow his genealogy of racism with exegetical care, but rather to explore how his insights might inform our own.
The lectures, thus, are clearly of interest in their own right, but they also allow us to read The History of Sexuality in a somewhat different light. First of all, they obviously put to rest any question as to whether Foucault was concerned with the issue of race. Second, they make sense of the somewhat bizarre dating he offered for the emergence of "racism," by providing a clearer analysis ofthat specific form of "state racism" for which he reserved that term. Third, the lectures contextualize what many commentators have viewed as the somewhat "enigmatic" final chapter,
41. Etienne Balibar, "Racism as Universalism," Masses, Classes, Ideas (London: Routledge, 1994) 200.
42. See Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays anil Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 139-164.
43. See Brion Davis Brion's classic work on this subject, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975). Also see Tom Holt's excellent study of this process in The Problem of Freedom: Race, Lahor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 1992).
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and why the issue of sovereign right and particularly the articulation of the "right to kill" and the "management of life" were so central to it.
Not least, the lectures read along with The History of Sexuality resituate the nineteenth-century discourse of sexuality and the discourse of the biological war of race within a common frame as productive sites in a broader process of normalization.44 One of the more riveting themes of the lectures, on the production of "internal enemies" within the body politic, alters our reading of The History of Sexuality in yet another way. Foucault's finer tracing in the lectures of a "racism that a society will practice against itself" provides a strong rationale for two of his claims: that the biopolitical management of life was a critical bourgeois project and that the management of sexuality was crucial to it. His contention in The History of Sexuality that the affirmation of the bourgeois self was secured through specific technologies centered on sexuality emerges in the lectures as part of a specific set of strategies not only of self-affirmation (as argued in volume i) but self-defense of a bourgeois society against the internal dangers it has produced. What is at issue in the discourse of sexuality is not only the unproblematic cultivation of a bourgeois self already formed, but as we shall see in the following chapter, a more basic set of uncertainties about what it means to be bourgeois, about the permeability of its distinctions, and what constituted its vulnerabilities.
Despite some of the clarifications that the lectures provide, a number of critical lapses and ellipses remain: the most obvious being the connection between the normalizing bourgeois project in which racisms have developed and the imperial context of them.45 There is no place made in
44. Note the striking similarity between Foucault's analysis of the relationship between racism and normalization and that of Partha Chatterjee's in The Nation anil lis Fragments (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993). Strongly influenced by Foucault but unfamiliar with these lectures Chatterjee writes:
Indeed, the more the logic of a modern regime of power pushed the processes of government in the direction of a rationalization of administration and the normalization of the objects of rule, the more insistently did the issue of race come up to emphasize the specifically colonial character of British dominance in India. (19) 4Í. For an example resonant with Foucault's analysis of how the discourses on disease and those on defense of society fed ofTone another see Reynaldo Ileto's "Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines" (Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, David Arnold, ed. [Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988] 125-48), where he comments on the relationship between the discourse of germ theory in which "a foreign agent must be excised from the
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Foucault's account for the fact that the discourse that surrounded the fear of "internal enemies" was one that was played out over and over again in nineteenth-century imperial contexts in specific ways: where those who were "white but not quite"—mixed-blood children, European-educated colonized elites, and even declasse European colonials themselves—contested the terms ofthat biopolitical discourse and found themselves as the new targets for "internal purification."
Part of the problem here derives from Foucault's cursory treatment in the 1976 lectures of the relationship between nation, citizenship, and race. While he may have rightly derived the discourse of the nation from a more basic discourse on the war of races, the full consequences ofthat common derivation are not explored. For the discourse of the nation, as much recent work has shown, did not obliterate the binary conception of society, but rather replaced it with a finer set of gradated exclusions in which cultural competencies continued to distinguish those who were echte Dutch, pure-blood French, and truly English. The discourse of race was not on parallel track with the discourse of the nation but part of it; the latter was saturated with a hierarchy of moralities, prescriptions for conduct and bourgeois civilities that kept a racial politics of exclusion at its core. Racism has not only derived from an "excess" of biopower as Foucault claimed, but, as Balibar argues, from an "excess" of nationalism.46
Finally, the most glaring omission from Foucault's analysis is its non-gendered quality. Just as feminists have long questioned how Foucault could write a history of sexuality without gender or for that matter women, we could query a genealogy of racism and a history of normalizing biopolitical states that fail to account for the formative work that gender divisions have played in them. State racism has never been gender-neutral in the management of sexuality; gender prescriptions for motherhood and manliness, as well as gendered assessments of perversion and subversion are part of the scaffolding on which the intimate technologies of racist policies rest. The following chapter on bourgeois identity and colonial
healthy parts of society" (135-) and the Philippine-American war of 1899-1902. Ileto writes: "It can be argued... that the war was simply transposed from the hattlefields to the towns, that the struggle continued over the control, no longer of territorial sovereignty, but of people's bodies, beliefs and social practices" (131). 46. Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas 203,
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projects in the nineteenth-century Dutch East Indies should allow us to re-engage Foucault on a number of these fundamental questions. In looking to the sexual politics of race and the racial derivation of the language of class on imperial terrain, we are better positioned to interrogate the racial underpinnings of Europe's bourgeois order. We are in the felicitous position to draw on Foucault's insights and go beyond them.
IV
CULTIVATING BOURGEOIS BODIES AND RACIAL SELVES
The emphasis on the body should undoubtedly be linked to the process of growth and establishment of bourgeois hegemony; not, however, because of the market value assumed by labor capacity, but because of what the 'cultivation' of its own body could represent politically, economically, and historically for the present and the future of the bourgeoisie. Its dominance was in part dependent on that cultivation ... (HS: 125).
In the two preceding chapters, I closely followed Foucault's treatments of modern racism in The History of Sexuality and the lectures, as he traced its emergence through a discourse of sexuality, normalizing power, and the technologies of the biopolitical state. In The History of Sexuality, modern racism is a late effect in the biohistory of bourgeois hegemony; in the lectures that genealogy is more nuanced, more complicated, and in some ways more blurred. There, a discourse of races (if not modern racism itself) antedates nineteenth-century social taxonomies, appearing not as a result of bourgeois orderings, but as constitutive of them. It is to this shift in analytic weight and to incumbent colonial implications that I turn here. I want to suggest that by drawing on Foucault's deeper genealogy of racial discourse in the lectures, we can re-examine his history of bourgeois sexuality to enrich that account in ways more consonant with what we are beginning to understand about the work of race and the place of empire in the making of Europe's bourgeois world.
Thus, I want to keep two sorts of issues in focus: how we can use Foucault to think about a specific range of colonial issues, and, in turn, what these colonial contexts afford us for rethinking how European bourgeois culture recounted the distinctions of its sexuality. Two themes of the lectures are of interest here: one is Foucault's attention to racism as part of a