Foucault, Politics and Violence by Johanna Oksala (review)

Is violence an eliminable feature of politics?¹ In Foucault, Politics and Violence, Johanna Oksala answers no. As she puts it in the introduction to the book: “Violence is not an ineliminable part of politics” (3).² In order to make her case, she not only questions dominant understandings of the relationship between politics and violence offered within traditional and critical political theories, but also attempts to cultivate sensitivity to the historical and contextual specificity of both concepts. Furthermore, Oksala takes issue with the appeal to both negative and positive views of human nature in Western political thought. Indeed, she adopts neither sort of view herself and argues instead that political theorists interested in the problem of violence should turn to Foucault, suspend anthropological universals, and engage in “political ontology.” Doing so promises to open up the possibility of contesting the idea of any essential connection between violence and politics, to politicize views that deem violence to be inevitable and thereby unnecessarily limit reigning political discourses on violence to the problem of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate forms of it.

In effect, Oksala claims that the view that violence is either an indispensable instrument of politics, or inevitably bound up with it, stems from the “political ontologies” and the specific “political rationalities” within which theorists are operating. She regards Foucault’s genealogical strategy of revealing the historicity and specificity of various ontological commitments associated with a given discursive regime, or form of “governmental rationality,” as indispensable to the effort to show that “the connection between violence and the political” is not internal or essential, but contingent (3).

Oksala adopts Foucault’s approach (although she does not engage in genealogy) by questioning current assumptions and beliefs about human violence and politics, suggesting that insofar as these assumptions arise within specific historical power/knowledge relations, they are inevitably political. Thus, her phrase, “political ontology,” refers to a “politicized conception of reality” constituted within power/knowledge regimes. What we take to be real or necessary is politicized insofar as it is constituted within a power-laden context of “struggle over truth and objectivity” (5). Here, following Foucault, Oksala broadens the category of “the political” to include power/knowledge relationships outside the confines of the state and its corresponding political institutions to include those found in microlevel relations between individuals and within and between institutions. She adopts Foucault’s understanding of critique as involving the resurrection of the forgotten constitution of social reality within power-laden contexts as a way of opening up a field of contestation.

In this book Oksala exhibits an admirable mastery of a range of theorists in twentieth-century European political thought including Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Renee Girard, Chantal Mouffe, and Carl Schmitt. The book contains chapters not only on what it means to politicize ontology, but also on “foundational violence,” agonistic conceptions of political thought (her view), state violence, gendered violence, biopolitics, and neoliberalism. There is also a chapter on Foucault’s introduction of the idea of “political spirituality” in his controversial observations on the Iranian revolution. Thus, it will be of interest to political and critical theorists as well as feminists and Foucault scholars.

Of particular interest to readers of this journal may be the use of Foucault to question naturalistic understandings of the origins of violence to analyze feminist accounts of gendered violence. I will devote the remainder of this review to Oksala’s pathbreaking appropriation of Foucault’s views on violence for feminism. Oksala shows how Foucaultian political ontology might enable political theorists to break from the Hobbesian legacy that links politics to a human propensity for violence insofar as it exposes the real violence in the wars of conquest at the origin of the states. This historical violence, she suggests, need not be understood as inevitable—as rooted in human nature. Thus, she challenges naturalism not only in traditional political theory, but also feminist theory.

Foucault has often been criticized for insensitivity to male violence against women.^3...