References for Theme: Society must be Defended
- Foucault, Michel
- Society must be Defended (2003)
(p.194) The great adversary of Boulainvilliers and his successors is nature, or natural man. To put it a different way, the great adversary of this type of analysis (and Boulainvilliers's analyses will become instrumental and tactical in this sense too) is, if you like, natural man or the savage. "Savage" is to be understood in two senses. The savage— noble or otherwise—is the natural man whom the jurists or theorists of right dreamed up, the natural man who existed before society existed, who existed in order to constitute society, and who was theelement around which the social body could be constituted. When they look for the constituent point, Boulainvilhers...
- Society must be Defended (2003)
(p.241) In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we saw the emergence of techniquesof power that were essentially centered on the body, on theindividual body. They included all devices that were used to ensurethe spatial distribution of individual bodies (their separation, theiralignment, their serialization, and their surveillance) and the organization,around those individuals, of a whole field of visibility. Theywere also techniques that could be used to take control over bodies.Attempts were made to increase their productive force through exercise,drill, and so on. They were also techniques for rationalizingand strictly economizing on a power that had to be used in the leastcostly way...
- Society must be Defended (2003)
(p.31) We could ask how the rule of the bourgeoisie allows us to understand the repression of infantile sexuality.Well, it's quite simple: from the seventeenth or eighteenth century onward, the human body essentially became a productive force, and all forms of expenditure that could not be reduced to these relations,or to the constitution of the productive forces, all forms of expenditure that could be shown to be unproductive, were banished, excluded, and repressed. Such deductions are always possible; they are both true and false. They are essentially too facile, because we can say precisely the opposite. We can deduce from the principle that the bourgeoisie became a ruling class...
- Society must be Defended (2003)
(p.35) Now, an important phenomenon occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the appearance—one should say the invention—of a new mechanism of power which had very specific procedures, completely new instruments, and very different equipment. It was, I believe, absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty. This new mechanism of power applies primarily to bodies and what they do rather than to the land and what it produces. It was a mechanism of power that made it possible to extract time and labor, rather than commodities and wealth, from bodies. It was a type of power that was exercised through constant surveillance and not in discontinuous fashion through chronologically defined...
- Society must be Defended (2003)
How to contribute.
