book review foucault

8/6/2019 Book Review Foucault

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TITLE: SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED

AUTHOR: MICHEL FOUCAULT

TRANSLATED BY: DAVID MACEY

PUBLISHER: PENGUIN

PAGES: 336

PRICE: 16.99

ISBN # 0713997079

FORMAT: PAPER BACK

REVIEWED BY: HAMMAD RAZA

AVAILABLE: PARAMOUNT BOOKS, KARACHI

Michel Foucault, an intellectual giant of twentieth century, left behind a gigantic

legacy upon which modern scholars and intellectuals reconfigured new academic

disciplines. His deconstructive approach and critique to modernity in predicting the end of

humanity (just as Nietzsche predicted, so rightly, the end of modernity and just as now

Denial Bells end of ideology thesis has also confirmed these trends) seems to be much true

in current society, which is based on consumerist lines and mass culture. The automation

and atomization are ending the human beings as a critical creature. These novel ideas of

Foucault have intruded now in multitude of discipline ranging from philosophy to critical

theory to politics to art to literature to international relations to sociology to arts giving

birth to new styles of analyzing these disciplines under the head of post modernism. What

did Foucault does? He simply analysed society and civilization by demystifying the meta-

narratives into discursive formations and, thus, changing these formations into discourse

analysis of modern Western civilization.

It is easy to understand that Foucault's sway springs from a simple but discerning,

insightful intellect, developed early in his career when he by himself became the victim of


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psychiatry: the history of western civilization developed from a sort of purifying thought

i.e. of exclusion and hatred for particular sections within Western society. These particular

sections were outcasts and fragmented people of the society. They included lunatics, gays,

lesbians, deviants and delinquents. It was, in fact, bourgeoisie plan to keep order in the

society by excluding these social pathologies out of whole schema. Thus a new discourse

came out: surveillance of society and its acceptance.

In modern times, this surveillance has been extended from prison to schools, to

hospitals, to corporate model of organizations. All this has been done in the name of

efficiency, production, order, progress and development. Thus Panopticalization of

society began to take place with acceptance from everywhere thinning the chances of

resistance to new age of Profitization out of this control system. But Foucault asserted

that the order within a society creates the same amount of disorder within the society.

Deviancy has increased with the increase in the controlling mechanisms now.

Michel Foucault also became a key figure in the generation that, in the wake of the

convulsions of May 1968, sought to change contemporary society by interrogating it as "a

construction". He tended to de-construct the institutions of society. He was the spearhead

of that modern counter-culture movement in which feminists also partook, homosexuals

rights were demanded, secularism over multiculturalism and localisms over impersonal

governmentality were favoured. His main task in his own words was, "The real political

task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be

both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the

political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be


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unmasked, so that one can fight against them." (Michel Foucault -The Chomsky-Foucault

Debate: On Human Nature). His radical criticism of modernized human beings is quite

satirical, The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need

of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal. (History of Sexuality, Vol-I, p.

59)

Ironically enough, since his death in 1984, Foucault has become a mainstream figure

in global intellectual life. These days, he is principally regarded not only as a "radical

philosopher", but also a scholar of history. He was of the view that history has always been

analyzed in the same way as natural sciences. History, according to him, is a continuous

discontinuity. He criticized the prevalent method of history, which had become an appetite

for historians and political scientists of every hue. This appetite, which is also a kind of

method, is diametrically opposed to the pursuit of "objective truth" (a "phantom", in

Foucault's terms), which merely places people and events on the linear storyboard that we

arbitrarily call history.

For Foucault, it is by diagnosing the "diseases" of an era (such a Stalinism and

fascism in the 20th century) that we can approach something like the "truth". According to

him, The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with

a war against bad government." Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first

liberated...(The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception). At another

place he diagnosed another disease of humanity: mental fascism. He asserted, The

strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday


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behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates

and exploits us.

The lectures in this book (which are skillfully translated for the first time into English by

Foucault's best biographer, David Macey) were first delivered in 1976 at the College de

France, the very heart of the French intellectual establishment. Foucault's aim is

systematically to take apart the illusory nature of what Europeans have, for more than

2,000 years, called society. His central argument is that "society" has always been an

artificial nexus of institutions - legal, political and financial - that is imposed on peoples or

races those are constantly in conflict with each other.

However the title given by the translator of his lectures to the book is very

misleading. Foucault does not believe in society as a force for good. Rather, it has been the

impulse to defend society at all costs that has been the defining force in the evolution of

Western civilization through the plans of those who hold power. This impulse has been

carried out through institutionalization of social relations and bureaucratization of popular

ideas as Foucault put it, The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise

popular justice then you give it the form of a court. He wanted to deconstruct the society

and its institutionalization, which coagulate power relations in fixated manner.

For Foucault there is war everywhere, because there is power relation everywhere.

Wherever there is power, there will be resistance. There is a constant conflict embedded

within the modern civilization, which is, as Noam Chomsky calls, dehumanization of

human beings. This dehumanization in my own point of view entails the idea of


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functionalization of human beings like nuts and bolts of a grand machinery ran by supra-

human beings of modernity i.e. bourgeoisie.

Foucault ranges over a variety of historical periods, swooping elegantly down on to

early England and France to show how the formation of these fledgling countries depended

as much on the sustaining myths of power as upon the physical domination of territory.

The Frankish nation that was born with Clovis, for example, was not just an administrative

instrument, but an active engine of war, dedicated to the subjugation of the French people

as they emerged from the wreckage of the Roman Empire. Ever since, Foucault argues, the

French state has been no more or less the sublimation of this master-slave relationship.

This relationship has become a dominant paradigm of contemporary era now in novel

forms. Modern society is a society of masters of judgments, of treatments, of teachings, of

cures, of disciplines, of orders, of ideas etc. and slaves of those entirely dependent on these

masters.

According to Foucault, war is necessary as a means of control. He convulsed the

Clausewitz idea that the war is politics by other means to politics is the war by other

means. Only war defines the human relations, according to Foucault. Precisely, Foucault

suggests that war is required as a perpetual, quasi-religious sacrifice without which no

society could hold together for long.

Two years after giving these lectures, Foucault travelled to Iran, where he saw the

truth of this theory in practice. He described the revolution there as "politics with

spirituality . . . the most insane and modern form of revolt". He was no apologist for the

Ayatollah Khomeini, but he did understand the singular nature of what was happening. He


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saw that, in its deeply held contempt for all ethical constructs other than its own, Islamic

fundamentalism posed a greater threat to the West than at any time since the Renaissance.

Foucault might be witnessing this era of Islamic revivalism with great curiosity as it

is heralding the demise of modernity. Also many Arab nations are now desiring to have a

revolution in the form of change in subjectivity in relation to new forms of authority

defying the models developed by era of Reformation and Renaissance, which are very much

Western styled. He was very critical to that era because with giving new forms of ideas of

liberty, that era also brought new forms of latent oppressions and disciplines now known

as legitimacy.

After Weber he was the second person to predict the rise of new forms of

subjectivities drifting away from modernization and its theory. Weber was the first

sociologist who foresaw the around 150 years ago, the revivalism of Islamic

fundamentalism in the last decades of twentieth century (Anthony Giddens, Sociology).

Iranian revolution and rise of Islamic revivalism have also defied Marxist idiom of religious

opium consumed by the oppressed. Now the only challenging force to global consumerism

is the Islamic militancy. That might be due to the fact that consumerism makes the concept

of heaven or hell tangible in this world, which is against the doctrine of religions. Do not

presume me an apologetic of militancy at this juncture. I am as opposed to religious

fundamentalism as to the concept of institutionalized modernity.

Unfortunately, we cannot exactly say what Foucault would have said about this war

on terror and other global developments as his highly complex analysis of events left most

people in the complete state of bewilderment. He was also very much against the power of


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predictions as they herald havoc with them. Take, for example, religious wars and Marxist

revolutions as precursors of finality predetermined by religious or philosophical

authorities. However his lectures made it amply clear that civilization is a war without end.

And this is very much true. The book is a must read for those who wanted to know that

how human beings have been enchained in the name of security, survival, development and

progress through modern institutions.

This review is dedicated to my parents and generations to come for changing the

course of history on egalitarian and peaceful lines

book review foucault

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