Michel Foucault: Society Must Be Defended

“In Society Must Be Defended”, Foucault deals with the emergence in the early
seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all
institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that could be deciphered by
an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines a genealogy of
power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern culminating in an
extraordinary discussion of modern racism”. Foucault starts by explaining to his
students what he feels the purpose of their lectures are. He says that as the College
de France is a research institution, he regards the weekly lectures as public reports
on his research. As such, he intends to use this series of lectures as a way to bring
together many different and seemingly disparate ideas that he has been working on
for the past four or five years. Subjugated knowledge is blocks of historical
knowledge that were hidden from view by systematic organizations. Critique is able
to reveal their existence through the use of the tools of scholarship. This is also the
point of academia and the research institution. Subjugated knowledge also refers to
the series of knowledge that have been disqualified on the hierarchy of knowledge.
Foucault seeks to investigate whether or not war can provide a way to analyze power
relations. He asks, “Can we find in bellicose relations, in the model of war, in the
schema of struggle or struggles, a principle that can help us understand and analyze
political power, to interpret political power in terms of war, struggles and
confrontations? This series of lectures seeks to explore these themes. This new
discourse of race focused only on the medical-biologic perspective and crushed the
historical dimensions of racial struggle. This helped to create what will become
actual racism. The theme of the binary society rears its ugly head in the form of a
struggle for survival between two racial groups, and this binary allowed for the
discourse that the state must protect the purity of the race. “Racism is, quite literally,
revolutionary discourse in an inverted form. History moves from something sacred
that reinforces power, to a history of power’s lower depths and betrayals. This
provides the foundation of what will later become French right-wing thought. And just
as the discourse began to circulate, royal power tried to appropriate and control it. A
ministry of history was established between the Prince and the administration in an
effort to control the knowledge.

Semir Mujić