I'm afraid both Doug and John's interpretations of Foucault's College de
France suffer from Yankeecentrism. Foucault's remarks were not
directed at the impotent New World American White left, but at the
practise of Old World governments which identified themselves as
socialist - whether social democratic as in eugenicist Swden and Austria
- or stalinist like eastern Europe and the USSR. They were made at a
time when the French intelligentsia was shifting from the antifascist
stance of the immediate post war years towards a more general
anti-totalitarianism brought about politically by heightened awareness
of the gulag (Solzhenitsyn, charter77) and intellectually by the
nouvelle philosophes like Alain deBenois.
It is arguable that this argument about the relationship between purity
and the social goes back a long way in European intellectual arguments -
to Durkheim's views of the conscious collective and the role of
ethnicised solidarity in the maintenance of social cohesion.
Foucault's thesis is not about the ideologies of either racism or
socialism. It is about the effect on civil socieities of the
biopolitics of population when state institutions have been controlled
by the Left, whether social democratic or stalinist. Since the US, as
opposed to Canada and Europe, has never seen a period of socialist
governance democratic or otherwise, the examples given just ain't
pertinant.
France suffer from Yankeecentrism. Foucault's remarks were not
directed at the impotent New World American White left, but at the
practise of Old World governments which identified themselves as
socialist - whether social democratic as in eugenicist Swden and Austria
- or stalinist like eastern Europe and the USSR. They were made at a
time when the French intelligentsia was shifting from the antifascist
stance of the immediate post war years towards a more general
anti-totalitarianism brought about politically by heightened awareness
of the gulag (Solzhenitsyn, charter77) and intellectually by the
nouvelle philosophes like Alain deBenois.
It is arguable that this argument about the relationship between purity
and the social goes back a long way in European intellectual arguments -
to Durkheim's views of the conscious collective and the role of
ethnicised solidarity in the maintenance of social cohesion.
Foucault's thesis is not about the ideologies of either racism or
socialism. It is about the effect on civil socieities of the
biopolitics of population when state institutions have been controlled
by the Left, whether social democratic or stalinist. Since the US, as
opposed to Canada and Europe, has never seen a period of socialist
governance democratic or otherwise, the examples given just ain't
pertinant.