Description
Foucault delivered the lecture series Society must be defended (SMD) at the Collège de France in 1975-76. First fully published in the early 2000s, SMD was positively received by IR scholars who were quick to draw connections between its themes of war, biopolitics and state racism and the US-led war on terror. While very influential, SMD has had nothing like the impact within IR as Foucault’s later work on ‘governmentality’. Fifty years after the lectures were delivered, this paper revisits SMD. Which themes are still relevant? How does SMD appear when read in light of the fracturing of geopolitics and the rise of right-wing populist governments in many regions of the world? The paper makes three arguments about SMD fifty years on: (i) Whereas IR scholars took up the idea of ‘biopolitics’ from SMD, they paid less attention to Foucault’s analysis of ‘race struggle’. SMD offers us an analytics of ‘struggle’ which is relevant to the project of a genealogy of politics. Contemporary themes of ‘culture wars’ can be fruitfully read in this light. (ii) Scholars influenced by Foucault also took up the theme of ‘state racism’ but in the process have tended to overlook other ways Foucault’s methods help us understand the politics of racism. The paper develops this point through an analysis of contemporary anti-antiracism. (iii) In SMD Foucault warns against the tendency of the left to invoke ‘science’ to legitimate itself (eg, scientific Marxism). This critique also needs to be revisited in an age of right-wing populism when scientific reason itself is under attack.
