The Waging of War

The Waging of War

“Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.”[1]

In Foucault’s pithy explanation of a new form of warfare, in its justification, causes, and even execution, several units of logic enter a rationality of massacre. In the context of the sentence, amid a discussion of bio-politics as a population-level version of bio-power, the facet he takes issue with seems primarily to be this justification for war. He understands its logic as part and parcel of the movement of thinking that declares “we are repressed”, that liberation is the alternative, and that the truth will set you free - a romantic positivism. His move makes the slogan of sexual liberation, “make love not war”, something between naïve and cunningly sinister - perhaps the latter for the very reason of the former. However close his politics here seem to sophisticatedly anti-war, the comment is not a thesis statement or a way to collect together all political sentiment for one clear and explicit goal to which all philosophical moves can be instrumentalized and all other political objectives subordinated. That bio-political power has become dominant, and has not always been so (a genealogical reminder kept in the preface to the political statement), is instead an important consideration in discussions of which discourses and what rationalities are more or less politically appreciable, almost separately of their philosophical merits. In his juxtaposition of different ages’ wars, Foucault suggests some changes in political rationality: more clearly the name of the survival of the population as a kind of substitute for the name of the sovereign, and less obviously a shift in understanding of death.

Yet, the contrast is not so simple as wars having once been waged for the sovereign and now for the population. First, and most pressingly in this context of discussion of the population, the sovereign and the population are not necessarily characters of a similar kind. Indeed, Foucault writes early in The History of Sexuality: Volume One that

One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded.