Foucault News

Jessica Whyte, Human Rights: Confronting Governments? Michel Foucault and the Right to Intervene
Published later as chapter in New Critical Legal Thinking. Law and the Political, Edited By Matthew Stone, Illan Wall, Costas Douzinas, Birkbeck Law Press, 2012

The Writing & Society Research Centre and the Philosophy Research Initiative at UWS

TIME: March 21, 2-4pm

Venue: Room 3.G.55
University of Western Sydney
Bankstown Campus,
Australia

ABSTRACT:
In 1981, Foucault delivered the statement “Confronting Governments: Human Rights” at the UN in Geneva. Addressing “all members of the community of the governed”, he argued that the “suffering of men”, too often ignored by Governments, grounds a new right to intervene. In this period, he worked alongside Bernard Kouchner (then head of Médecins san Frontieres/Médecins du Monde, and, until recently, France’s Foreign Minister) who is credited with playing a central role in the development of the norm of humanitarian intervention. This paper suggests that Foucault saw the new activist humanitarianism of the 1970s as heralding the possibility of a new form of right liberated from sovereignty. It examines the tensions of this position, and traces the movement of the “right to intervene” from a right available to NGOs and those Foucault termed “private individuals”, to a new legitimizing doctrine for state militarism. The distance travelled by this new right is indicated by Foucault’s refusal, in 1983, to sign a petition calling for France to take action against Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. Justifying this refusal, Foucault made clear that he did not want to be seen to be calling for war. Today, in the wake of a war in Libya that was justified as a humanitarian intervention, this paper argues that Foucault’s earlier argument that discourses of right serve as masks for power is worthy of further consideration.

BIO:
Jessica Whyte is a lecturer in cultural and social analysis at the University of Western Sydney. She has published widely on contemporary continental philosophy, sovereignty, and human rights. Her PhD on the political thought of Giorgio Agamben was awarded in 2010. She is a co-editor of the Theory and Event Symposium “Form-of-Life: Giorgio Agamben, Ontology, Politics” (2010) and of The Agamben Dictionary (Edinburgh UP, 2011). Her current research is on Michel Foucault’s contribution to the emergence of the ‘right to intervene’, and on its transformation into a legitimizing discourse for state militarism.