Foucault, Politics, and Violence

Introduction

3 Introduction Multiculturalism and terrorism are arguably the most hotly debated political issues today, provoking misunderstanding, fear, and anxiety across a wide spectrum of society. The Enlightenment has not delivered its promise of a universal and rational political order. Instead it has irrevocably placed us in an agonistic society where groups with conflicting understandings of the world and the good life struggle for power, sometimes with violent means. The aim of this book is to study the philosophical issues underlying the debate on multiculturalism and terrorism —agonism and political violence. It is my contention that what must be at stake in the philosophical attempts to respond to the current political situation is our ontological understanding of the nature of politics . The question is not idle armchair metaphysics. It is crucial in order to open up a space for political critiques of violence. The attempt to expose the ontological commitments underlying the tradition of Western political thought is a journey into the heart of darkness. Similar to the revelation of Joseph Conrad’s most famous protagonist, the irreducible violence of “forgotten and brutal instincts” traverses our political imagination. It is the problem of violence that political order is, in different forms according to different thinkers, understood to address. Whether this means forming a social contract in order to move from the state of primordial war to an ordered society, or accepting violence as the irreducible essence of the political, the problem remains the Archimedean point of political thought. Thinkers from Plato to Hobbes, Machiavelli, Sorel, Clausewitz, and Schmitt have built their understanding of the political on the recognition of the irreducibility of violence in human affairs. More recently scholars such as Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Žižek have emphasized the ineliminability of violence from the political domain.1 The study at hand poses once more the fundamental question about the relationship between violence and the political. It is my contention that the post-humanist forms of thought characterizing our time give this question a renewed urgency, as well as making new responses theoretically possible. My aim is to show that the connection between violence and the political is not internal or essential, but contingent: violence is not an ineliminable part of politics. This requires, first, bracket- 4 I N T R O D U C T I O N ing all beliefs about human nature—both positive and negative. Second, it entails understanding, analyzing, and partly reconceiving the meaning of violence and of the political. I show that arguments for the ineliminability of violence from the political are often based on excessively broad, ontological conceptions of violence that are distinct from its concrete and historically specific meaning. Violence is treated as an extremely wide-ranging term that covers everything from the use of physical force to damage bodies to the forms of semantic exclusion involved in issuing a meaningful sentence. It is my contention that such width serves an uncritical ontologization of violence: violence comes to be understood as ineliminable and as an essential aspect of politics. On the other hand, the arguments often rely on a restrictively narrow and empirical understanding of the political as the realm of the state and its political institutions. While contesting all essentialist claims about violent human nature and sociality, my inquiry nevertheless defends an agonistic conception of politics. In arguing against the ineliminable violence of politics I am thus not claiming that it is a harmonious realm of rational consensus. The inquiry has therefore important consequences for the current debate between agonistic and deliberative accounts of politics. Agonism is generally understood as a conception of politics that places contestation at the heart of politics, while deliberative theories of such thinkers as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas emphasize the search for consensus. The ontological presuppositions underlying the debate are often unclear, however, and this has led to serious misunderstanding of the central issues at stake. My focus will be on the agonistic political theories. I will show that they rely on differing ontological commitments regarding the conditions of possibility for agonism. While they reveal the essentially conflictual character of politics, they often build upon a problematic ontology of violence. While I am sympathetic to the reasons why such ontologizing claims about violence are made—they are typically made to unmask the pretensions of liberal political theory to have eliminated conflict from politics—it is my contention that they confuse conflict and power with violence. My claim is that the agonism intrinsic to the political...