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Radical Philosophy Review

Volume 7, Issue 1, 2004
Biopolitics and Racism

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1. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
Eduardo Mendieta, Jeffrey Paris Introduction
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articles
2. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
Julian Bourg “Society Must Be Defended” and the Last Foucault
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Michel Foucault’s 1976 Collège de France course provides a window on the shift into the work of his final years. Presented between the publication of Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), the lectures presented a political history of power that foregrounded the function of war. This article suggests that elements of the lectures could already be found in Discipline and Punish and that they introduced categories, such as bio-power, that became increasingly important to Foucault in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Furthermore, I illustrate the historical context for Foucault’s lectures: the fading possibilities of 1968 and contemporaneous anti-totalitarian political debate.
3. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
Ellen K. Feder The Discursive Production of the “Dangerous Individual”: Biopower and the Making of the Racial State
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The recent publication of Michel Foucault’s 1974-75 and 1975-76 lectures at the Collège de France provides an opportunity to reconsider the potential contribution of Foucault’s “analytics” of power for understanding the contemporary operation of race. Unlike the deployment of gender, which, I argue here, is best understood as a function of “disciplinary” power, the deployment of race is primarily a function of “biopower,” an expression of power that is bound up with the state apparatus. The announcement of the federal Violence Initiative in the 1990s provides an illuminating example of the operation of this power, and the chiasmic function of discourse that Foucault famously termed “power/knowledge.”
4. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
Todd May War in the Social and Disciplinary Bodies
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In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault offers a history of the rise of discipline in its application to the body. Foucault suggests, although he does not develop this suggestion, that the politics of discipline is war carried on by other means. The lecture series “Society Must Be Defended” can be seen as a development of this suggestion. In these lectures, Foucault offers a way of thinking about the society and its politics in terms of war, as well as a way of thinking about war. If this concept of war is integrated into the thought ofDiscipline and Punish, the work that that text does can be extended in several ways. First, we are offered an analysis of the social body that fractures the holism in the name of which penal reform is offered. Second, the disciplinary body can be seen not merely as the confluence of a series of power effects, but as the site of a contestation of power. Finally, the possibility of resistance, which has often been found lacking in Foucault’s genealogical works, appears as a live possibility.
5. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
Kevin Thompson The Spiritual Disciplines of Biopower
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This paper seeks to further Foucault’s work by coming to understand the specific set of conditions that govern contemporary thought and action, the “historical a priori” of our age, and from this it seeks to assess the prospects for projects of collective self-formation. It focuses on two recent innovations in molecular science: genetic counseling and performance enhancement therapies. The paper argues, on the one hand, that these sorts of practices are indicative of a fundamentally new mode of governance, neoliberalism,and, on the other, that these same techniques can be means for engendering alliances of self-formation that can resist the intolerable elements of contemporary biopolitics. The key to seeing this is shown to be understanding these new technologies as ascetic exercises (“spiritual disciplines”) and thus as falling under the rubric of spiritual development that has historically defined these arts.
6. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
Falguni A. Sheth The Technology of Race: Enframing, Violence, and Taming the Unruly
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Drawing on Heidegger and Foucault, I argue that we need to understand race as a technology. Race has three technological dimensions: instrumental, naturalizing, and concealment. Through this understanding, I hope to bridge two discourses that appear disconnected: Race as Color, Blood, and Genealogy (RC), which sees race as phenotypical or biological, and eclipses a discussion of political power, and Political Othering (PO), which eclipses race in its accounts of political ostracization. Finally, the implications of thetechnology of race can be understood by turning to Heidegger’s notion of Enframing, Foucault’s notion of the racist state, and Benjamin’s articulation of the inherent violence of law.
book reviews
7. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
Christopher Craig Brittain Meditating on Foucault
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8. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
Renzo Llorente The Marxist Contribution to the Social Sciences
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9. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
J.M. Fritzman After Derrida, Hegel!
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10. Radical Philosophy Review: Volume > 7 > Issue: 1
Contributors
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