This article examines the ambivalences in Foucault’s elaboration of the concept of biopower and biopolitics. From the beginning, he relates the idea of a power over life to struggle and war, and so to race. In the period of the formation of the nation-state, threats to the unity and strength of the population were thought to come from a contagion by an alien element. In this context, tropes of race became aligned with the ‘sciences and technologies of the social’ that (...) were emerging as part of biopolitics. They became part of the new rationality of the state, finding expression in projects such as public hygiene and eugenics, and, at the extreme, in Nazism. (shrink)

With_ Michel Foucault_, Reaktion Books introduces an exciting new series that brings the work of major intellectual figures to general readers, illuminating their groundbreaking ideas through concise biographies and cogent readings. There is no better thinker than Foucault with which to begin the "Critical Lives" series. Though reticent about his personal life for most of his career, Foucault, in the last years of his life, changed his stance on the relationship between the personal and the intellectual and began to speak (...) of an "aesthetics of existence" in which "the life" and "the work" become one. David Macey, a renowned expert on Foucault, demonstrates that these contradictions make it possible to relate Foucault's work to his life in an original and exciting way. Exploring the complex intellectual and political world in which Foucault lived and worked, and how that world is reflected in his seminal works, Macey paints a portrait of Foucault in which the thinker emerges as a brilliant strategist, one who-while fiercely promoting himself as a maverick-aligned himself with particular intellectual camps at precisely the right moments. _Michel Foucault_ traces the philosopher's career from his comfortable provincial background to the pinnacle of the French academic system, paying careful attention to the networks of friendships and the relations of power that sustained Foucault's prominence in the academy. In an interview in 1966, Foucault said, "One ought to read everything, study everything. In other words, one must have at one's disposal the general archive of a period at a given moment." It is precisely this archive that Macey restores here, accessibly relating Foucault's works to the particular context in which they were given form. (shrink)

It has become almost conventional to describe the early work of Frantz Fanon as an expression of individual political revolt, and his later work as testimony to his commitment to a collective revolution. This article contends that the early work, while individualistic, is a continued source of political embarrassment in that it is unclassifiable and raises difficult issues about the construction of race and racism, as well as challenging conventional views of Fanon as ‘revolutionary’ psychiatrist. Fanon’s representation of his native (...) Martinique, which he effectively disowned, is negative, but proves to be of surprising contemporary relevance, while his analysis of the mechanisms of racism is still pertinent: the situation in which racist stereotypes are invoked may have changed, but the stereotypical structures they employ remain remarkably constant, as do their profoundly dehumanizing effects. Fanon raises embarrassing questions for a French Republic that claims to be universal, demonstrating that its universal values are undermined by those it claims as its subjects. (shrink)