War in the Filigree of Peace Course Summary

Author(s): Michel Foucault and Ian Mcleod

Source: Oxford Literary Review , 1980, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1980), pp. 15-19
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/43973617

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War in the Filigreeof Peace
Course Summary
Michel Foucault

Translated by Ian Mcleod

In order to conduct a concrete analysis of the relations of power, we must

abandon the juridical model of sovereignty. This model in effect presupposes
the individual as the subject of natural laws or primitive powers. It sets out to
account for the genesis, in ideal terms, of the State. Lastly, it makes law the
fundamental manifestation of power. Power should be studied not on the
basis of the primary terms of the power-relation, but on the basis of that
relation itself, insofar as it determines the elements on which it bears. Rather
than asking ideal subjects what they might have yielded up of themselves or
of their powers so as to let themselves be subjected, one should inquire how
the relations of subjection are able to fabricate subjects. Similarly, rather than
seek the one and only form, the central point from which all the forms of
power would supposedly derive, as consequences or developments of it,
we must first give these forms their full weight, in their multiplicity, their
differences, their specificity, their reversibility. We must study them, then, as
intersecting relations of force, which cross-refer to each other, converge, or
on the contrary oppose each other and tend to cancel each other out. Finally,
rather than accord a privilege to the law as a manifestation of power, it is
better to try to observe the different techniques of constraint which it sets
to work.
If we have to avoid collapsing the analysis of power back on to the schema
proposed by the juridical constitution of sovereignty and conceive power in
terms of relations of force, must we then decipher it following the general
form of war? Can war act as the operator of analysis of the relations of
power?

This text appears with the kind permission of Mã Alain Horeau, Adminis-
trateur of the College de France.
15

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 1 6 Oxford Literary Review
This question embraces several others:
1. Must we regard war as a primary and
relation to which all the phenomena of so
and hiérarchisation are merely derivative?
2. Do the processes of antagonism, confr
individuals, groups and classes arise ultima
war?

3. Can the set of notions derived from strategy or tactics constitute a valid
and sufficient instrument for analysing the relations of power?
4. Are the military and war-making institutions, or in general the procedures
put into operation for waging war, the nucleus of political institutions (either
closely or remotely, directly or indirectly)?
5. But the question we should perhaps ask first is this: how and when
did the belief arise that it is war that functions in power relations, that
an uninterrupted combat 'works' (travaille) peace, and that civil order is
fundamentally a battle-order?

A first glance reveals a paradox. With the evolution of States from the
beginning of the Middle Ages, it seems that the practices and institutions of
war followed a visible evolution. On the one hand they tended to become
concentrated in the hands of a central power which alone had the right and
the means to make war; by this very fact, they (the institutions and practices)
gradually disappeared from the relations between man and man, group and
group: a line of evolution led them to become increasingly the privilege of the
State. On the other hand, war tended in consequence to become the private
technical and professional field of a carefully defined and controlled military
apparatus. In a word, a society entirely permeated by war-relations was
gradually replaced by a State equipped with military institutions.
No sooner was this transformation completed than a particular type of
discourse about the relations between society and war appeared: an historico-
political discourse, very different from the philosophico-juridical discourse
geared to the problem of sovereignty, and one which makes war the per-
manent foundation for all the institutions of power. This discourse appeared
shortly after the end of the wars of religion and at the beginning of the great
political struggles in England in the seventeenth century. According to this
discourse (which is exemplified in England by Coke and Lilburne, in France
by Boulainvilliers and later by du Buat-Nancy), it was war that presided over
the birth of States; not ideal war - the kind imagined by the philosophers of
the state of nature - but real wars and actual battles; laws were born in the
midst of expeditions, conquests, the burning of cities; but war also continues
to rage inside the mechanisms of power, or at least continues to constitute
the secret motor of institutions, laws and order. Beneath the forgetfulness,
the illusions or the lies which make us believe in the necessities of nature or
the functional exigencies of order, we must find war: war is the key which
cracks the code of peace. War divides up the whole social body in a permanent
way, placing each of us in one camp or the other. And it is not enough,

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 Michel Foucault 1 7

according to the new t

as a principle of explanation: we are supposed to reactivate it, to make it
come out of the mute and larval forms in which it is carried on unnoticed; we
have to draw it into a decisive battle, for which we must prepare ourselves if
we want to be the victors.
Through this thematisation, as yet only vaguely sketched, we can grasp the
importance of this form of analysis.
1 . The subject who speaks in this discourse cannot occupy the position of
the jurist or the philosopher, i.e. the position of the universal subject. In this
general struggle of which he speaks, he is necessarily on one side or the other:
he is in the battle; he has adversaries; he is fighting for victory. No doubt he
seeks to make right hold sway; but it is his own right - a singular right
marked by a relation of conquest, domination, or of seniority; rights of the
race, rights from triumphant invasions or thousand-year occupations. And if
he also speaks of truth, it is of that biassed and strategic truth which permits
him to carry off the victory. What we have here is thus a political and historical
discourse which lays claim to truth and right, but excludes itself explicitly
from juridico-philosophical universality. Its role is not the one dreamed of by
legislators and philosophers from Solon to Kant: to establish itself between
the adversaries, in the centre of but above the fray, to impose an armistice, to
found a reconciliatory order; but to posit a right that is marked by dissym-
metry and that functions as a privilege to be maintained or re-established, to
apply a truth which would function like a weapon. For the subject who
holds such a discourse, universal truth and general right are illusions or traps.
2. It is moreover a discourse which turns the traditional values of intel-
ligibility inside out, because it explains things from the bottom, which is by
no means the same as explaining things by what is simplest, most elementary,
and clearest, but on the contrary by what is most confused, most obscure,
most disordered, and most given over to chance. What must stand as the
principle of decipherment is the confusion of violence, of passions, of hatred
and revenge; and also the tissue of petty circumstances which make the
defeats and victories. The elliptical and sombre God of battles must illuminate
the long days of order, work and peace. The fury must account for the
harmonies. In this way, a series of raw facts (physical vigour, strength, charac-
ter-traits) and a series of chances (defeats, victories, successes or failures of
conspiracies, revolts or alliances) are made to stand as the principle of history
and law. And it is only above this entanglement that a growing rationality
will be sketched out - a rationality which becomes more fragile, treacherous,
and tied to illusions, to fantasies and mystifications, the higher we go and
the more it develops. Thus we have here the complete contrary of those
traditional analyses which attempt to find beneath the accidents of appearance
and surface, beneath the visible brutality of bodies and passions, a funda-
mental rationality, permanent and linked in essence to what is just and good.
3. This type of discourse develops entirely in the historical dimension. It
does not undertake to gauge history, unjust governments, or abuses and
violence, by the ideal principle of a reason or law; on the contrary, it seeks
to awaken beneath the form of institutions and legislations the forgotten past

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 18 Oxford Literary Review

of real struggles, of masked victor

the codes of the law. It takes as its field of reference the indefinite movement
of history. But at the same time the discourse is able to take support from
traditional mythical forms (the lost age of the great ancestors, the imminence
of new times and of millenarian revenge, the coming of the new kingdom
which will efface former defeats): it is a discourse which is capable of bearing
equally well the nostalgia of declining aristocracies and the ardour of popular
vengeance.
All in all, by opposition to the philosophico-juridical discourse, which is
ordered by the problem of sovereignty and the law, this discourse is an
essentially historico-political one, which deciphers the permanence of war in
society, and in which truth functions as a weapon for a partisan victory; it is
a sombrely critical yet at the same time intensely mythical discourse.

This year's course was devoted to the appearance of this form of analysis:
how was war (and how were its different aspects, invasion, battle, conquest,
victory, relation of victors to vanquished, pillage and appropriation, revolts)
used as an operator of analysis of history and more generally of social relations?
1. We must first put aside some false paternities. And above all that of
Hobbes. What Hobbes calls the war of all against all is in no sense a real and
historical war, but a play of representations by which each measures the
danger which every other represents for him, estimates the will of the others
to fight, and gauges the risk which he would himself be taking if he resorted
to force. Sovereignty, whether of an 'instituted republic' or an 'acquired
republic', is established not by a fact of warlike domination, but on the
contrary by a calculation which makes it possible for war to be avoided. For
Hobbes it is non-war which founds the State and gives it its form.
2. The history of wars as matrices for States was of course sketched out,
in the sixteenth century, at the end of the wars of religion (in France, for
example, by Hotman). But this type of analysis was developed above all in
the seventeenth century. In England, at first, in the parliamentary opposition,
and by the Puritans with the idea that English society since the eleventh
century is a society of the conquered: the monarchy and the aristocracy with
their own institutions being regarded as Norman imports, while the Saxon
commoners were seen as preserving, not without difficulty, some few traces
of their original liberties. Against this background of warlike domination,
English historians like Coke or Seiden relocate the principal episodes of the
history of England; each of these episodes is analysed either as a consequence
or as a resumption of this historically primary state of war between two
hostile races who differ in their institutions and interests. The Revolution of
which these historians are the contemporaries, the witnesses and at times the
protagonists would thus be seen as the last battle and the revenge of that
long-established war.
An analysis of the same type is found again in France but at a later time
and above all in the aristocratic milieux of the end of Louis XIV's reign.
Boulainvilliers gives it its most rigorous formulation; but this time the story

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 Michel Foucault 19

is told and the rights are claimed in the name of the victor; the French
aristocracy by claiming a Germanic origin accords itself the right of conquest
and hence the pre-eminent right of possession over all the lands of the king-
dom, and the absolute right of domination over all the inhabitants, Gallic or
Romanic; but it also grants itself privileges in relation to the royal power
which is supposed to have been established in the first place only by its
(the aristocracy's) consent, and which must always be kept within the limits
fixed at the beginning. The history thus written is no longer, as in England,
that of the perpetual confrontation of vanquished and victors having as its
basic category the revolt, and the concessions thereby acquired; it is the
history of the king's usurpations and treacheries in respect of the nobility
from which he came, and of his anti-natural collusions with a bourgeoisie of
Gallo-Romanic origin. This analytic schema, taken up by Freret and especially
by du Buat-Nancy, was the major stake of a whole series of polemics, and the
object of considerable historical researches up until the Revolution.
The main thing was to seek the principle of historical analysis in the
duality and the war of the races. On this basis and by the intermediary of the
works of Augustin and Amédée Thierry, two types of decipherment of
history were then developed in the nineteenth century: the one articulates
history on the class struggle, the other on biological confrontation.

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