Description
When asked in a 1977 interview about the problem of repression in his study of sexuality, Foucault pointed at a “historical problem”: how “the West insisted for so long in seeing the power it exercises as juridical and negative rather than as technical and positive” (Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, eds., “Intervista a Michel Foucault,” in Microfisica del potere. Einaudi, 1977). This paper takes up this historical problem by rearticulating it in relation to the production of Italy's non-nuclear status within the global nonproliferation regime, despite the participation in US- and NATO-led nuclear sharing agreements.
I argue that the notion of non-nuclearity, as commonly understood in international relations and international law as a negative and entirely derivative condition, fails to account for the labor that non-nuclearity entails in practice. The paper develops a genealogical account of non-nuclearity through the Italian case to explore how this condition came to appear as an absence rather than as something actively produced and in need of constant reproduction. Yet labor-intensive negatives are hardly unusual: non-alcoholic beers, non-stop flights, non-disclosure agreements. Read through a technopolitical lens, archival evidence from the Italian case offers valuable lessons for Critical Nuclear Studies.