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 DOI: 10.1177/019145379602200106

1996 22: 101Philosophy Social CriticismAlan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg

Michel Foucault, Auschwitz and modernity  

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What is This? 

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Alan Milchmanand Alan Rosenberg

Michel Foucault, Auschwitzand modernity

Throughout his life, he [Foucault] was haunted by the memory ofHitler’s total war and the Nazi death camps.

(James Miller, The P,7ssl’oii of !vllchel Foucault, p. 171)

In a vast body of published work that lays bare the contours of whatcan be termed the ’carceral archipelago’, and its swelling expanse inmodernity, Michel Foucault has included no sustained meditation onNazism and the Holocaust.’ The absence of any reflection on themeaning of Auschwitz and its death-world in an oeuvre devoted torevealing the genesis and omnipresence of the prison, and of discipline,as the institution, and the principle, which have shaped our modernity,has raised the suspicions of a critic such as David H. Hirsch:

Especially intriguing is the silence of Michel Foucault, an advocate of’genealogical’ history, a writer more committed to historical investi-gations than other poststructuralists, who has written at great lengthabout historical instances of oppression and exploitation and aboutthe alleged abuse of power in humanist democracies. It is curious thatFouc1Ult Should have dedlc,Hcd himself to so meticulous an itialysis ofthe ’panopticon’, his paradigm (derived from Jeremy Bentham) of theway rn which liheral democracies keep watch over their subjects andthus keep them repressed, while he had nothing to say about the w aythe Germans kept him and his neighbors in subjection from 1940 to1944.... Certainty Foucault’s erasure of his own personal experienceunder the Nazi occupation constitutes a creaming silence th,1t cannotbut undermine the authenticity of his analysis of liberal democraciesas repressive states.-

,

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Where Hirsch sees a ’screaming silence’ about Nazism, one whichperhaps masks a secret complicity with it at the ideational level, ~ JamesW. Bernauer finds a concern with Auschwitz, and a need to confront it,as a hidden motrf in the Foucauldian oeuvre:

Amid the many photographs contained in the beautiful volume oftributes published by Syros as Michel Foucault: Vile histoire de la

vérité, there is one which has especially stayed in my memory. It wastaken in 1982 during one of Foucault’s trips to Poland, and it showshim w~alkmg between two rows of electrified barbed wire, a watch-tower in the background. A visit to another prison? Only after

consulting the information at the back of the book did I realise it wasAuschwitz. Of course. It was only to be expected that he would havewanted to see Auschwitz with his own eyes, the eyes which stare

sternly out at the photographer. If Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has

permitted us to hear the voices of that distant hell, I believe Foucaulthas enabled us to see its nearness, to feel its intimacy, and to challengeits logic.~’ 4

Bernauer’s conviction that Foucault was tormented by Auschwitzseems to us to be much closer to the mark than Hirsch’s view, whichsees only silence and even complicity. Indeed, far from being silentabout Nazism and the Holocaust, in his October 1979 lectures atStanford University Foucault pointed out that with the reign of

biopolitics, ’the simultaneous possibility of protecting life and of theholocaust make their historical appearance,.5 Moreover, the theme ofstates visiting ‘holocausts on their own populations’, genocide as ’thedream of modern powers’, and Nazism as a manifestation of ’racism inits modern, &dquo;biologizing&dquo;, statist form’, all figure prominently in thefinal chapter, ’Right of Death and Power over Life’, in Volume 1 ofFoucault’s unfinished magnum opus, The History o f Sexuality.1->Interestingly, when questioned by Alain Grosrichard about his concernwith racism in that chapter, Foucault responded: ’Yes, no one wants totalk about that last part.... All the same, it’s the fundamental part ofthe book

If Foucault regarded his comments on Nazism, racism and blood,in The History of Sexuality, as fundamental, it may be because he sawin Auschwitz, and its death-world, a culmination of the techniques ofdomination, the objectification of humans, that make up one crucialcomponent of ’the history of the present’, with its genealogy of themodern subject, that he took as his task to write. It is our view thatbasic F~ucauldian categories, such as bio-power, carceral society,disciplinary and regulatory technologies, and the docile body, amongothers, can illuminate the structuration of the death-world, and its

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incipient genocidal universe. Moreover, in addition to illuminating theshadowy world of Auschwitz, Foucault can provide vital insights intothe way in which that world intersects with the project of modernity.

This facet of Foucault’s thinking, let alone its centrality to hisoeuvre, has been largely overlooked by his interpreters. Apart fromJames Bernauer, whose comments we have already cited, only MauriceBlanchot among commentators on Foucault has pointed to the

significance of his discussion of what Blanchot terms ’murderousracism’, and its manifestation in Nazism:

Nazism was founded on blood, to be sure, on superiority throughexaltation of blood free of all impurity (a biological phantasm .concealing the right to mastery claimed by a hypothetical Indo-

European society whose highest manifestation would be Germanicsociety), on the consequent obligation to save that pure society bysuppressing the rest of humanity, and, in particular, the indestructibleheritage of the people of the Bible. The implementation of genocideneeded power in all its forms, including the new forms of bio-powerwhose strategies posed an ideal of regularity, method, and colddetermination.’

We believe that the regimes of practices that shape what Foucaultsees as the carceral side of modernity, constitute the historical matrixfrom within which Nazism and the Holocaust emerged. The prevailingview within contemporary social theory is that Nazism, and theHolocaust, was an historical aberration, an atavistic revolt againstmodernity. What is so original in the Foucauldian vision is an historicalcontextualization which firmly situates Nazism, and the ’Final Sol-ution’, within the carceral archipelago that has been generated bymodernity itself. This carceral archipelago is the outcome of a majorshift in the way in which power, and domination, is exercised: from anegative power to episodically punish, and to take life, exercised by thesovereign, to a positive power to administer, manage and regulate theintimate details of the life - and death - of whole populations, in theform of technologies of domination, exercised by a multitude of

governmental institutions. The result is what Foucault terms bio-

power :

In concrete terms, starting m the seventeenth century, this power overlife evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical,however; they constituted rather two poles of development linkedtogether by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of thesepoles - the first to be formed, it seems - centered on the body as amachine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabllltl~S, the

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extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and itsdocility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic

controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power thatcharacterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics o f tbe human body.The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, thebody imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of thebiological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level ofhealth, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that cancause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entireseries of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of thepopu la tiOll.

y

The end-result of the disciplinary technologies involved in

anatomo-politics, and bio-politics, is what Foucault designates as

docile bodies:

Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ’docile’bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic termsof utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms ofobedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the onehand, it turns it into an ’aptitude’, a ’capacity’, which it seeks to

mcrease; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, thepower that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict

subjection

Thus while the power of the state metastasizes, and while the state itselfis governmentalized, that is, increasingly preoccupied with the man-agement of the population, humans are recomposed as docile bodies,to be ’subjected, used, transformed and improved’.&dquo;

The later Foucault has left us tantalizing hints as to the murderouspotential ensconced within the carceral side of modernity. In severallectures, and in his History o f Sexuality, Foucault began to develop theidea that the state which had progressively taken as its task the ’care’ ofthe population in all its dimensions, may also massacre it: ’Since thepopulation is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its ownsake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary. So thereverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.’12 A ’formidable power ofdeath’, in which political regimes inflict ’holocausts on their own

populations’, is, for Foucault, ’the counterpart of a power that exerts apositive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, andmultiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensiveregulations’.&dquo; Such is the outcome when the statification of power,and the governmentalization of the state, make it possible to ’produce’docile bodies.

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The thanatopolitics to which Foucault referred is the outgrowth oftwo processes set in motion during the 19th century, processes whichFoucault delineated in his 1975-6 collège de France lecture course, ’llfaut défendre la soci6t6’: first, the ’statification of the biological[l’etati fication du biologique]’, and second, ’the birth of state racism [leracisme d’Etat]’. 14 The Foucauldian concepts of race, and racism,developed in that 1975-6 lecture course, are not restricted to the

biologizing conceptions, based on color, ’blood’, and physiognomy,that developed on the basis of 19th-century science:

... what is racism? It is at first the means of mtroducing a break intothe domain of life that power has seized hold of: a break between whatmust live and what must die. Within the biological continuum of thehuman species, the appearance of races, racial distinctions, the

hierarchy of races, the designation of certain races as good, and ofothers, on the contrary, as inferior, all this constitutes a way of

fragmenting the biological field that power has taken charge of....Such is the first function of racism: to fragment, to drive a wedgewithin this biological continuum which bio-power confronts.’5 &dquo;

These divisions within the biological continuum need not be based on astrictly biologizing conception of race; the biological continuum maybe fragmented on the basis of language, religion, sexual orientation,gender, culture, or health. To take but one example, Foucault argues,in The History of Sexuality, that before the 19th century homosexu-ality was defined by a series of acts, whereas subsequently it becameidentified with a category of persons, a specific group within thebiological continuum, in Foucauldian terms, a race: ’The sodomite hadbeen a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species . 16Such divisions are, in Foucault’s view, inevitable for a regime based onbio-power.

Where does Nazism fit in the developmental trajectory of tech-nologies of domination, and bio-power, that have shaped our latemodernity? For Foucault, ’Nazism is the culminating point [p,7rox-ysmel of the development of the new mechanisms of power set in placesince the 18th century ... disciplinary power, bio-power: all thattraverses and sustains every aspect of Nazi society’.&dquo; But let us notforget Foucault’s allusion to thanatopolitics. War, and mass murdertoo, becomes an imperative for a regime based on bio-power:

War? How can one not only make war on one’s adversaries, butexpose one’s own citizens to war, making them kill by the millions ...if not, precisely, by activating the themes of racism?&dquo;

Here, the role of the Nazi regime is clear in Foucault’s discourse: ’Youunderstand, then, in these conditions, how and why the most

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murderous states are, at the same time, necessarily the most racist.Surely, here, we must refer to the example of Nazism.&dquo;’

’&dquo;

For Foucault, the lethality of Nazism was heightened by its fusionof a hyper-modern ’analytics of sexuality’ (concomitant with bio-power, and ’racism in its modern, &dquo;biologizing&dquo;, statist form’) and amore ancient ’symbolics of blood&dquo; 20 an overlapping that characterizesthe instanciation of a regime of power:

Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naive (and theformer because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood andthe paroxysms of a disciplinary power. A eugenic ordering of society,with all that implied in the way of extension and intensification ofmicro-powers, in the guise of an unrestricted state control (étati-satrol1], was accompanied by the oneiric exaltation of a superiorblood; the latter implied both the systematic genocide of others andthe risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice. 21

The fantasies of blood incarnated in Nazism, however, could onlyassume so massively lethal a form because of the technologies ofdomination, and the bio-power, within which they were firmlyensconced.

Nazism and genocide are one product of a manifold of historicalstrands which have come together in modernity. The disciplinary andregulatory technologies which generated an anatomo-politics of thebody, and a bio-politics of the population, the processes of governmen-talization which supplemented the juridical power of the sovereign, thedeployment of sexuality, the statification of the biological, the

episteme and regime of truth through which scientific classification,and the objectification of the subject emerged, are not reducible to asingle essence or ground from which they have sprung; nor do theyshare a common historical genesis. Nonetheless, a series of electiveaffi1llties links them. And it is on the basis of these elective affinities thatboth the bio-power, which has become a hallmark of our modernity,and the specific concatenation of micro and macro processes that cametogether in the Nazi dispositi f, were produced. 22 In pointing to electiveaffinities between distinct, though interacting, processes and practices,which have converged to give shape and form to modernity, we want toemphasize Foucault’s opposition to any sort of reductionism in thehistorical process, any mono-causal reading of history. In assertingthat Nazism was but one possibility generated by modernity, we wantto preserve Foucault’s emphasis on contingency in history, his rejectionof any kind of determinism or teleology.

Having indicated the existence of a connection between biopoliticsand thanatopolitics in the Foucauldian oeuvre, now is the time to make

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a more precise inquiry into how the components of the carceral society,its dispositif, with its regimes of truth, and its regimes of practices,explicated by Foucault, can help us to penetrate the enigma of theHolocaust.

It is Foucault’s emphasis on the dark side of modernity, on theother side of the Enlightenment heritage, that links his thinking to ameditation on Nazism and the Holocaust:

Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society tothe philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there wasalso a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not tothe state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of amachine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanentcoercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressiveforms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility. 23In our vrew, Foucault’s analysis, in Discipline iiid Punish, of the

‘mrlitary dream of society’, which underlies the dark side of modernity,and of the regime of bio-power through which it is mstanciated, is aconceptual key to an understanding of the Nazi project. The militarydream of society, with its docile bodies, should be linked to Foucault’s .

treatment of the leper and the plague victim in the classical age (the17the and early 18the centuries). Foucault’s vision of the lot of the leperand the plague victim can be seen as a brilliant prefigurationrespectively of the fate of the Jews and other victims of rituals ofexclusion in the Hitler state, and of the discipline to which thecollective entity, what the Nazis termed the Volkskörper, or body ofthe people, was subjected. As Foucault sees it:

If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to acertain extent provided the model for and general form of the greatConfinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects....The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure;he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to

differentiate; those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticuloustactical partitioning in which individual differentiations were the

constrictmg effects of a power that multiplied, articulated andsubdivided itself; the great Confinement on the one hand; the correcttraining on the other. The leper and his separation; the plague and itssegmentations. The first is marked; the second analyzed and distrib-uted. 24

The leper, who must be ruthlessly, and permanently, excluded from thecommunity, and the plague victim, who once cured can be reintegratedinto ’normal’ life, correspond to two very different political visions,

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according to Foucault. The leper is enmeshed in a ’massive, binarydivision between one set of people and another’ ;21 if the leper is onepole of this binary division, its other is the ’pure community’.&dquo; Thepure community are those who must be protected from the leper byelaborate, and merciless, rituals of exclusion. By contrast, the politicalvision of which the plague victim is a part is that of a ’disciplinedsociety’, 27 in which he or she is subject to the political technologiesintended to recompose them into a docile body. Nonetheless, it is ourcontention that a pure community, protected from contamination bythose designated as lepers, is, indeed, precisely what those who havethe military dream of society, with its docile bodies, are striving for.

Thus, these two visions, which at the outset are carefully dis-tinguished, one from the other, by Foucault, slowly come together. Forif one pole of the binary division leper/pure community, the leper, is theobject of rituals of exclusion, the members of the other pole, the purecommunity, are precisely those who will be subject to the technologiesof domination intended to produce docile bodies. In this instance, thegoal of the disciplinary mechanisms is not to exclude, and to separate,but to mold, and to integrate - precisely the aim pursued bypower/knowledge in the case of the plague victim. Indeed, in contrastto the leper, who is incurable, the plague victim incarnates a differentkind of abnormality, and is potentially a member of the pure

community, once the healing processes represented by politicaltechnology are successfully applied and a ’cure’ is effected. In this

sense, Foucault’s pure community is the furthest extension of that

military dream of society which he has traced to the very dawn ofmodernity.

The coming together or intermingling of these two visions can alsobe seen in the treatment of those excluded from the pure community. Itbegins in the 9the century, according to Foucault: ’On the one hand,the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics of individualizingdisciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, theuniversality of disciplinary controls makes it possible to brand the&dquo;leper&dquo; and to bring into play against him the dualistic mechanisms ofexclusion.’ 2’ Not mere exclusion, but the rational disciplines of

regulation and control are also visited upon the modern leper.These two political visions, and their intermingling, have stamped

the whole politico-cultural trajectory of the West from the time of theclassical age. As Foucault has pointed out: ’All the mechanisms of

power which, even today, are dispose around the abnormal individ-ual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two formsfrom which they distantly derive.’29 For FOUL-HIlt, poBB’er/knowledge inmodernity, and the technologies of domination to which it gives rise, is

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always descended from the models provided at the end of the classicalage by the leper and the plague victim.

We can see the inscription of Nazism and the Holocaust in thesetwo Foucauldian models which are traced back to the very dawn of

modernity, and which then blend together. In the racial state con-structed by the Nazis, a number of groups were brutally excluded,condemned to be victims of a ‘Fina) Solution’. As the German historianand social theorist Detlev Peukert has argued, ‘(t]he &dquo;Final Solut~on&dquo;was a systematic, high-technology procedure for &dquo;eradicating&dquo;, or&dquo;culling&dquo;, those without &dquo;value&dquo;.’;&dquo; While the Jews made up theprimary category of those designated as lebenslmwertes Leben (lifeunworthy of life), Peukert, in contrast to many scholars, extends theboundaries of the Final Solution to encompass Gypsies, homosexuals,and those members of the ’Aryan’ population, possibly more than 20percent of the total, who were deemed genetically unfit and slated forelimination either through euthanasia or sterilization.&dquo; All of these

categories, as well as those which would have been added had theHitler state triumphed and a genocidal universe emerged, such as themass of the Slav population, and others designated as Untermenschen(sub-humans), constitute the heirs of those lepers whose doom was so ,

poignantly evoked by Foucault. The imposition of a sentence of deathupon these categories had its basis, in Foucault’s view, in theconviction - mstanciated by state racism - that ’One had the right tokill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others’.32Here, the Jews provided a perfect model, conceived as they were by theNazis as representing an inferior blood which was contaminating thepure blood of the Aryans.

The opposite number to these racial others, these ’lepers’, were themembers of the Aryan race, including political and social deviants,who were to be transformed into docile bodies through the applicationof assorted disciplinary mechanisms. Here were the heirs of the purecommunity, including the plague victims, the frontiers of which hadbeen traced by Foucault in Discipline nnd Punish. The docile bodies ofthe members of the Nazi pure community were not, however, to bespared their own exposure to death. Indeed, one of Foucault’s keenestinsights into the workings of the dispositi f of Nazism is his discoverythat its multiple strands come together in the imperative to subject themaster race itself to the risk of destruction:

... it is not lust the destruction of other races which is the objective ofthe Nazi regime. The destruction of other races is one side of the [Nazi]project. The other side is to expose one’s own race to the absolute anduniversal danger of death. The risk of death, the exposure to total

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destruction, is one of the principles inscribed among the fundamentalobligations to which a Nazi is subject, and one of the essential

objectives of [Nazi] policy. It is necessary that a pomt be reached atwhich the whole population is exposed to death. Only this universalexposure of the whole population to death can really constitute it as asuperior race, and definitively regenerate it vis-a-vis races which havebeen totally exterminated or definitively subjugated.&dquo;

Here, for Foucault, is the secret core of Nazism:

One has an absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state, andan absolutely suicidal state.... These are necessarily superimposed,and lead at the same time to the final solution (through which theattempt was made to eliminate, through the Jews, all other races forwhom the Jews were the symbol and manifestation) [decided on] in1942-1943, and then to telegram 71, in April 1945, through whichHitler gave the order to destroy the bases of life for the German peopleitself.’4

It is Foucault’s own genealogy of the carceral society in Disciplinearzd Punish, his penetrating outline of the mingling of a symbohcs ofblood and of bio-power in The History o f Sexuality, and his

description of state racism in his lecture course ’ll faut d6fendre lasociete’, that have enabled us to weave together these strands of agenealogy of Nazism which Foucault did not live to write, but whichwe believe cannot be written without him. Moreover, such a genealogyfirmly situates Nazism within the hrstorical trajectory of modernity.

James Bernauer has said that ’It was Foucault’s fate to have lived atthe end of that epoch which witnessed the catastrophic outcome ofmodern efforts to transform human beings according to a technologydeduced from truth’.;’ Perhaps nothing has been more catastrophicthan the death-world which arose at Auschwitz. Foucault has made it

possible to see that death-world, not as a break with the developmentaltrajectory of modernity, but as a product of the bio-power that it hasgenerated: ’If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this isnot because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is becausepower is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race,and large-scale phenomena of population’.&dquo; Where the philosophicaldiscourse of modernity insists on separating the power to care for andprotect life incarnated in the governmentalized state, and the propen-sity to inflict mass death, Foucault’s lifelong meditation on power hasmade it possible to see the inextrrcable connection between the two:’the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside ofthe power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence’.;’ It is his

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ability to expose this dark underside of modernity that makes MichelFoucault a central figure both in comprehending the event of theHolocaust and in foreseeing the very real danger of possible newholocausts to come.

Queens College, City University of New York, USA

Notes

1 Foucault’s unpublished works, including his lecture courses at theCollège de France, do seem to contain crucial elements for such ameditation. This is particularly the case for his 1975-6 course, ‘Il fautdéfendre la société’, one lecture of which was published in both Italianand French, before the Foucault estate, pursuant to the author’s lastwishes, took legal action to prevent further publication. We shall haveoccasion to refer extensively to this lecture, ’Faire vivre et laissermourir: la naissance du racisme’, which appeared in Les TempsModernes 535 (February 1991), in the course of our analysis.

2 David H. Hirsch, The Destruction of Literature: Criticism afterAuschwitz (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1991), p. 122.

Foucault experienced the Nazi occupation of France in Poitiers, as ayoung student, first at a lycée, and then studying for his entranceexams to the École Normale.

3 Hirsch feels that ’the "violent irrational" that he [Foucault] celebratesmight well constitute a paradigm of the Hitler state Foucault dwelt infrom 1940 to 1945’; ibid., p. 125.

4 James W. Bernauer, ’Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault’s Post-Auschwitz Ethic’, in Michel Foucault Philosopher (New York:

Routledge, 1992), p. 260.5 Michel Foucault, lectures delivered at Stanford University, Palo Alto,

CA, October 1979, cited in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 138; emphasisadded. Foucault’s use of the singular (’the holocaust’) to refer to theresult of what he saw as the outcome of ’a kind of animalization of

man’ (ibid.) strongly suggests that he is thinking of Nazism, and theFinal Solution, here.

6 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, An Introduction(New York: Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 137 and 149. Foucault’s

lecture, ’Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme’, given in

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1976 (see note 1), dates from the same period in which Foucault wasworking out these ideas, and elaborates on the themes of Nazism,racism and genocide that were adumbrated in The History ofSexuality. Moreover, both these works are linked to Discipline andPunish, the work which directly preceded them, and which providedthe wealth of categories with which Foucault would directly confrontthe unfolding of racist genocide.

7 Michel Foucault, ’The Confession of the Flesh’, in his Power/

Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed.Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 222.

8 Maurice Blanchot, ’Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him’, in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), pp.99-100. Hubert L.Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow also point out that once politics becomeswhat Foucault terms bio-politics, and the regulation of populations,’the state was entitled to relocate them [populations] or to slaughterthem, if it served the state’s interest to do so’. However, Dreyfus andRabinow do not explicitly link this prospect to Nazism and theHolocaust. See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: BeyondStructuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 138.

9 Foucault, The Hrstory of Sexuality, Vol.I, p. 139; emphases in theoriginal. David Hiley’s account of Foucault’s understanding of

bio-power is particularly cogent: ’It combines disciplinary techniquesfor optimizing and administering bodies, and regulatory controls overbiological processes for the management of life.... it functions

totally and globally, colonizing every aspect of life to maximize utilityat the same time that it maximizes docility.’ See David R. Hiley,’Foucault and the Analysis of Power: Political Engagement withoutLiberal Hope or Comfort’, Praxis International 4(2) (July 1984):193.

10 ibid., p. 138. Foucault’s concept of humans transformed by technolo-gies of domination into docile bodies, is consonant with Heidegger’sconception of the tendency of humans to be reduced to Bestand,standing reserve, as the result of technological enframing.

11 ibid., p. 136.12 Foucault, ’The Political Technology of Individuals’, in Luther H.

Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds) Technologies ofthe Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, MA: TheUniversity of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 160; emphasis added.

13 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 137.14 Foucault, ’Faire vivre et laisser mourir’, pp. 37-8.15 ibid., p. 53.16 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 43.17 Foucault, ’Faire vivre et laisser mourir, p. 57.

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18 ibid.,p.55.19 ibid.,p.57.20 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 149.21 ibid., pp. 149-50.22 For Foucault, a dispositif is a social apparatus, a grid or matrix,

comprised of the discursive and institutional practices, whose inter-secting lines organize a discrete historical and sociopolitical reality.

23 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 169.

24 ibid., p. 198.25 ibid.26 ibid.27 ibid. 28 ibid., p. 199.29 ibid., pp. 199-200.30 Detlev J. K. Peukert, ’The Genesis of the "Final Solution" from the

Spirit of Science’, in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (eds)Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York: Holmes & Myer, 1993),p. 236.

31 ibid., passim. To take but one figure that indicates the possible extent of the Final Solution beyond the extermination of European Jewry,Robert Jay Lifton cites the view of the German physician-geneticist,Fritz Lenz, that all those displaying any signs of ’mental illness’ oughtto be compulsorily sterilized, perhaps up to 20 million people! SeeLifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology ofGenocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 26.

32 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 138. In his 1975-6 lecture

course, ’Il faut défendre la société’, Foucault made this same point inthe following terms: ’the putting to death, the imperative to death, isonly acceptable within the system of bio-power if it promotes not

victory over political adversaries, but the elimination of the biologicaldanger, and - directly linked to that elimination - the strengthening ofthe species itself, or of the race’. See Foucault, ’Faire vivre et laissermourir’, p. 54.

33 Foucault, ’Faire vivre et laisser mourir’, p. 58.34 ibid., pp. 58-9.35 James Bernauer, ’Michel Foucault’s Ecstatic Thinking’, in James

Bernauer and David Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 72.

36 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 137.37 ibid.

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