Racism, nationalism and biopolitics : Foucault's Society must be defended, 2003

2003 saw the appearance in English of Michel Foucaultʼs 1976 lectures from the Collège de France. Society Must Be Defended contains much to excite Foucault scholars, but this article concentrates solely on the final lecture of the series, which takes quite a different tack from the rest, concerned primarily with the history of the understanding of society and politics on the model of warfare, and brings this history into the present, with a consideration of where this mode of understanding has led in the twentieth century. Central is the consideration of the phenomenon of ‘State racism'. While this lecture was first published in French as far back as 1991 in Les Temps Modernes, it has clearly been largely overlooked, especially the potential momentousness of the use of the concept of racism developed in it. The only serious consideration of it in English (or at all for that matter) I am aware of is in Laura Ann Stolerʼs Race and the Education of Desire. Stoler herself notes that “no one took up” this theme of biopolitical racism from the 1976 lectures