Foucault News

Anthony Alessandrini, Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions, Jadaliyya, April 01 2014

[This article is the final in a three-part Jadaliyya series that looks at Foucault’s work in relationship to the legacy of French colonialism in North Africa. Read the first and second installments here: “The Dangers of Liberalism: Foucault and Postcoloniality in France” by Diren Valayden and “Justifications of Power”: Neoliberalism and the Role of Empire by Muriam Haleh Davis.

My theoretical ethic is…“antistrategic”: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal. A simple choice, a difficult job: for one must at the same time look closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it. – Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?”[1]

In their invaluable contributions to this series, Diren Valayden and Muriam Haleh Davis note, rightly, that Michel Foucault had relatively little to say about colonialism, in any direct way, throughout most of his body of work. I have nothing to add to this more general point regarding the Eurocentrism of Foucault’s work, except perhaps a proposal to place it within two larger contexts. The first is the general (and continuing) lack of engagement with postcolonial studies within French scholarship more generally; Achille Mbembe, among others, has described this as a form of provincialism within French thought from which we might, at last, begin to break away today. The second context is the complex history, still being told, of the interconnections between poststructuralist thought and French colonialism in North Africa, so well analyzed by Muriam Haleh Davis in a previous article.

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Muriam Haleh Davis, ‘Justifications of Power’: Neoliberalism and the Role of Empire, Jadaliyya, March 25, 2014

This article is the second in a three-part Jadaliyya series that looks at Foucault’s work in relationship to the legacy of French colonialism in North Africa. Read the first installment here: “The Dangers of Liberalism: Foucault and Postcoloniality in France“ by Diren Valayden

“I am like the crawfish and advance sideways.”[1] So Foucault warns us in the Birth of Biopolitics. And indeed, one would need to be an extremely nimble, if not heroic, crawfish to claim that Foucault espoused a serious reflection on French colonialism in North Africa. Point taken. What is irrefutable, however, is that his writings have had an enormous impact on historians working on colonialism in the Maghreb (and elsewhere). Foucault’s relative silence on colonialism (despite a few references to Algeria in interviews) is even more curious given the fact that the Algerian war was considered a decisive event for a generation of French intellectuals.

One might be tempted to explain this silence by his general distrust of the conventional objects of historical inquiry. Foucault insisted that the genealogy of the “Other” was more expansive than its narrowly colonial guise. Indeed, in explaining the inability of history to come to terms with a “general theory of discontinuity” he postulates it was “[a]s if we were afraid to conceive of the Other in the time of our own thought.”[2] The long-standing units of analysis held little interest for Foucault who maintained, “As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence.”[3] Moreover, the definition of colonialism has been the subject of a long debate in Algeria, both in current-day politics as well as in its historical study.[4] It is thus easier to see how colonial practices intersect with the history of madness, disciplinary power, governmentality, and neoliberalism than to identify what Foucault “had to say” about colonialism itself.

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