torture as biopower

Neal Andrew on Foucault in Guantanamo:

Foucaultian methods can be used to analyse power in exactly the sites and practices that Schmitt clearly depends on, but only alludes to. In «Society Must Be Defended»Foucault gives an account of his methodology that reads like a step-by-step refutation of the Schmittian approach. First, not to look at power as if it has a single centre, but at its extremities, at its material means of intervention and actual apparatuses of violence. Second, not to analyse power at the level of intentions or decisions; not the ‘internal face’ of power, but the external points of exercise and application. Third, not to regard power as a homogenous mass of domination divided between the haves and have-nots. Power circulates in networks and is never terminal; individuals both submit to and exercise power. Fourth, not to begin analysis at the centre of power circulation downwards but from its infinitesimal mechanisms upwards. How are these micro-mechanisms colonized and annexed by more global mechanisms of domination? Fifth and finally, not to analyse mechanisms as mere appendages of ideology, but rather to explore how mechanisms get formed into ideologies and knowledges. Foucault summarises his general intention as to analyse not the juridical edifice of sovereignty, but its material operations, local systems and apparatuses of knowledge. [7]

of the communist hypothesis

Alain Badiou in New Left Review

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away. . . .

The virtue of courage constructs itself through endurance within the impossible; time is its raw material. What takes courage is to operate in terms of a different durée to that imposed by the law of the world. The point we are seeking must be one that can connect to another order of time. . . .

In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.

zulie says

(from icanhascheezeburger)