The politics of death: Race war, biopower and AIDS in the post-apartheid

Abstract

The year 1976 marks the only period in Michel Foucault’s work which could be characterised as tragic in the sense that it was then that he outlined his thoughts on the genealogy of violence during the twentieth century, its totalitarianisms and genocides, its colonial enterprises and massacres, its racism and eugenics. Central for him was the idea that war, after being for centuries ‘the matrix of truth for historical discourse’, had become from the time of the French Revolution ‘the condition for the survival of society in its political relationships’. In other words it was internalised to defend the social order ‘against the dangers born within and from its own body’ (Foucault, 1997: pp. 146, 194). Thus the course at the Collége de France, “Society Must Be Defended”, even more than the often cited last chapter of his book The Will to Know (Foucault, 1976) which echoes it, stands out in a remarkable way from the tone and the matter of the rest of his writings.