• بحث فوکو از ارتباط فاشیسم با استالینیسم: دو برادر

(1) Foucault proposes that the question of power emerges in the wake of fascism and Stalinism, which he treats as both singular but as tied to “a whole series of mechanisms that already existed within social and political systems” (189).  That is, movements now challenge “this overproduction of power that Stalinism and fascism clearly manifested in its stark and monstrous state” (189).  The emphasis on Stalinism and fascism corresponds to the lectures that bookend Society must be Defended a few years prior, where Foucault begins by critiquing “totalitarian” discourses in the form of orthodox Marxism and closes with an analysis of state racism (exemplified by the Nazis) as a form of biopower.  So too, at the beginning of SMD, he refers to some of the same movements – anti-psychiatry, the recovery of “subjugated knowledges” that are the examples in the Tokyo lecture.

(2) Second, Foucault is interested in the role of the philosopher and philosophy.  This is not surpris given his other interviews and essays on the topic, but it’s worth mentioning that he explicitly poses as a problem that philosophies of liberation presented during the 19c have become tools of oppression in the 20th.  As he puts it, “each and every time these philosophies of freedom gave birth to forms of power that, whether in the guise of terror, bureaucracy, or even bureaucratic terror, were the very opposite of the regime of freedom, the very opposite of freedom as history” (191).  As with the critique of Marxism and Freudianism at the start of SMD, the text here underscores why Foucault is skeptical of revolutionary discourses and thinks they may be a part of the problem, not the solution.  Thus, “one should no longer imagine that one can escape relations of power all at once, globally, massively, through a sort of radical rupture or a flight without return” (193).

........

neither revolution nor reform is central to his thought at this time.  For example, he is simultaneously attempting to understand the Iranian revolution.  His writings about that share some of the same anxieties.  For example, in an interview early in the Iranian revolution, he draws the same parallel between emancipatory philosophies and tyranny, in this case with regards to capitalism: out of “the [Enlightenment] vision of a non-alienated, clear, lucid, and balanced society – industrial capitalism emerged, that is, the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine” (185).  Thus, “we have to abandon every dogmatic principle and question one by one the validity of all the principles that have been the source of oppression” (in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 185).

@fallosafahmshk

Foucault’s “Analytic Philosophy of Politics” (2018) | Foucault News

https://michel-foucault.com/2018/12/13/foucaults-analytic-philosophy-of-politics-2018/