Sovereignty, Violence, and Critique: Foucault’s Early Genealogies of Power

Lichtenstein, Eli

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-m110-s085

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Sovereignty, Violence, and Critique: Foucault’s Early Genealogies of Power

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This dissertation reinterprets Michel Foucault’s theory of sovereignty to offer an explanation and critique of repressive state violence. Commentators typically locate Foucault’s contribution to political thought in concepts of power that are irreducible to sovereignty or the state. In contrast, I draw on Foucault’s early genealogies of power to argue that Foucault develops a sui generis theory of sovereignty, which helps to explain why states exercise repressive violence today. Rather than a fact of absolute power, I conceive sovereignty as a claim to a precarious political authority that can never achieve factual absoluteness. On this view, repression is the performative reassertion of a sovereignty under threat from social contestation. I also argue that Foucault’s recently published genealogies of the early 1970s constitute a distinct “early genealogical period” and retain important methodological advantages over his later genealogies. In reconstructing Foucault’s historiographic commitments of the period, I articulate the link between methodological choices and evaluative outcomes in genealogical inquiry, and illustrate why prescriptions for radical social transformation require materialist historical methods. Finally, I explain how Foucault’s early genealogies of power employ a critical strategy which is responsive to the normative principles of social struggles, providing the latter with diagnostic tools that may contribute to emancipatory action. I argue that Foucault’s genealogies, when supplemented by critical theories of race, help to historically ground a critique of repressive state violence today.

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