On the Government of the Living

Foucault

Tomorrow I am 66. I dwell in a nation going insane. I open my atlas. Surely there is an isle in an out of the way corner of the planet prosperous and free. There is none. All are governed by men or women gripped by obedience madness. A madness instilled by poison circulating for generations. And today a madness injected to transmogrify man into a machine. A madness of sane sensible servants surrendering to Mammon saying only how can I bow lower, may I scrape the earth on my belly as I play your worm O master?

“ Late capitalism is, after all, an economic regime with all the stability of a house of cards, a Ponzi scheme of cooked books based on war profiteering, credit debt, the con-artistry of "consumer confidence," the legerdemain of corporate accountants, and the ethics of organized crime. The whole mess is exemplified in the U.S. by the largest military budget in the world, the largest prison system in the world, and the fabulous celebrity salaries of brain-dead carpetbagger executives in the ultra-spectacular hi-tech virtual-commodity economy.

In his 1930 essay on the relationship between capital and intellectual labor, Breton turned to Marx's Capital to warn of the marketplace's sick, dependent fetishization of commodities. Products of intellectual labor become commodities only if bourgeois society contrives to make them profitable. Breton himself said it best: "In the capitalist system, it is the same for certain very rare productions of the mind as for the extraction of certain precious materials such as diamonds, which, according to Marx, almost never 'completely pay their value' to those who seek them." Thirty-seven years after Breton's death, the elements and products of his own intellectual labor are on the verge of being hijacked by the manipulators of a monstrous commodity racket built around absurd "art market" values. Breton's epitaph reads "I seek the gold of time," but now this quest is obfuscated by those who reign supreme in the Time of Gold.” From Chicago Surrealist group protesting the sacking of the home and library of Andre Breton after his death.

Agamben wrote in 2001-

On Security and Terror"

Giorgio Agamben, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 20, 2001

Security as leading principle of state politics dates back to the the birth of the modern state. Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of fear, which compels human beings to come together within a society. But not until the 18th century does a thought of security come into its own. In a 1978 lecture at the College de France (which has yet to be published) Michel Foucault has shown how the political and economic practice of the Physiocrats opposes security to discipline and the law as instruments of governance.Turgot and Quesnay as well as Physiocratic officials were not primarily concerned with the prevention of hunger or the regulation of production, but wanted to allow for their development to then regulate and "secure" their consequences. While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and to globalization; while the law wants to prevent and regulate, security intervenes in ongoing processes to direct them.In short, discipline wants to produce order, security wants to regulate disorder. Since measures of security can only function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security accompanies the ideas of liberalism.

Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several definitive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterium of political legitimation. The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic.

https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/blog/review-michel-foucault-on-the-government-of-the-living

(Substitute in this text by Foucault for Severus the American Establishment.)

Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, who, as you all know—well, at 

any rate, as I know since yesterday—ruled at the end of the second and 

beginning of the third century, between 193 and 211 I think. Septimius 

Severus had a palace built in which there was, of course, a large cer-

emonial hall where he granted audience, delivered his judgments, and 

dispensed justice. On the ceiling of this hall, Septimius Severus had a

representation of the star-studded sky painted, which did not represent 

just any sky, or any stars in no matter what position. What was exactly 

represented was the sky of his birth; the conjunction of the stars that 

presided over his birth and so over his destiny. His reasons for having 

this done are quite clear and explicit and fairly easy to reconstruct. For 

Septimius Severus the purpose was, of course, that of inscribing his 

particular and conjunctural judgments within the system of the world 

and of showing how the logos that presided over this order of the world, 

and over his birth, was the same logos that organized, founded, and justi-

fied his judgments. What he said in a particular circumstance in the 

world, in a particular kairos, as the Stoics would say, belonged precisely 

to the same order of things as that fixed once and for all on high. He also 

wanted to show how his reign was founded by the stars, that it was not 

an error that he, the roughneck from Leptis Magna, had seized power 

by force and violence, that it was not by chance or as the result of any 

human plot that he had seized power, but that he had been called to the 

position he occupied by the very necessity of the world. His reign, his 

seizure of power, which could not be founded by the law, was justified 

once and for all by the stars. Finally, third, it was a matter of showing 

his, the emperor’s good fortune in advance, and how it was fated, inevi-

table, inaccessible, and the extent to which it was impossible for anyone, 

conspirator, rival, or enemy, to seize the throne that the stars had shown 

was due to him, and which henceforth nothing could overcome. His 

fortune was good, it was certain, the past indicated this, but for the 

future too things were definitively sealed. Thus, uncertain and particular 

actions, a past made of chance and luck, and a future which of course no 

one could know, but from which some might take advantage to threaten 

the emperor, were all turned into necessity and had to be seen as a truth 

on the ceiling of the hall in which he passed judgment. What manifested 

itself as power here, down below, I was going to say at ground level, 

could and had to be deciphered in truth in the night sky.

From the commentary on the book-”It is this question of obedience that perhaps needs to be taken up again today over and against a Lacanian psychoanalytics which posits this in terms of the individual and the injunctions of his or her Super Ego. How might we effectively redefine the government of the living not in terms of the production and management of ‘obedient’ subjects or ‘docile’ bodies and the containment and regulation of ‘disobedient’ subjects or ‘criminal’ and ‘deviant’ bodies but instead through notions such as ‘care’ and ‘responsibility’? Here, On the Government of the Living concludes appropriately with an indictment of what Foucault saw as contemporary resignation to the notion that ‘we are all Oedipus’, an indictment which seems no less relevant today:

‘You don’t have to be Oedipus, unless, of course, an amusing mind tells you: but yes, yes you do! If you are obliged to tell the truth it is because without knowing it, despite everything, there’s a bit of Oedipus in you too. But you see that the person who tells you this in the end, does no more than turn the glove inside out, the glove of the Church.’ (p.312)”

https://classicalstudies.org/power-oedipus-michel-foucault-hannah-arendt

Foucault analysed Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in a series of essays and lectures from the early 1970s-to early 1980s. Across these works, Oedipus becomes a significant protagonist in the development of his thinking around the nexus of power/knowledge. In the wake of the critique of the Freudian Oedipus developed simultaneously by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and by Jean-Pierre Vernant in his essay ‘Oedipus without the Complex’ (1981; first published 1967), Foucault presents Oedipus ‘as not the one who didn’t know but, rather, the one who knew too much’ (2000, 24). Foucault drills deep into Oedipus’ identity as a knowing subject to show how his pursuit of truth is firmly linked to his wielding of power.

In particular, Foucault characterises Oedipus’ knowledge as the knowledge of the tyrant. He contrasts what he calls Oedipus’ ‘alethurgy’ to the divine truth saying of the oracle and Tiresias and to the witness statements of the messenger from Corinth and the shepherd of Cithaeron. Oedipus’ inquiry in Sophocles’ play ends by bringing divine knowledge into harmony with the truth telling of the slave. But in the coming together of these two realms, the kind of tyrannical knowledge that Oedipus represents is bypassed: ‘Oedipus was necessary for the truth to appear…but he was eliminated as a kind of “excess”’ (2014, 81). What Sophocles’ play dramatizes for Foucault is the emergence of the juridical subject. Oedipus’ quest helps to bring this about but effectively replaces the power of the tyrannuswith the nomos of the people. As Foucault concludes: ‘The public square that stages the judicial institutions assures, guarantees, and confirms what has been said through the flash of divine prophecy’ (2014, 81).

Wordsworth

THERE is a bondage worse, far worse, to bear
Than his who breathes, by roof, and floor, and wall,
Pent in, a Tyrant's solitary Thrall:
'Tis his who walks about in the open air,
One of a Nation who, henceforth, must wear
Their fetters in their souls. For who could be,
Who, even the best, in such condition, free
From self-reproach, reproach that he must share
With Human-nature? Never be it ours
To see the sun how brightly it will shine,
And know that noble feelings, manly powers,
Instead of gathering strength, must droop and pine;
And earth with all her pleasant fruits and flowers
Fade, and participate in man's decline.

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity