Eighteenth-century political tactics hinge on filtering barbarism to produce revolution

Evidence

Within this historico-political field where knowledge of weapons is constantly being used as a political instrument, the great tactics that are developed in the eighteenth century can, | think, be characterized by the way they use the four elements present in Boulainvilhers’s analysis: constitution, revolution, barbarism, and domination. The problem is basically this: How can we establish the best possible fit between unfettered barbarism on the one hand, and the equilibrium of the constitution we are trying to rediscover on the other? How can we arrive at the right balance of forces, and how can we make use of the violence, freedom, and so on that the barbarian brings with him? In other words, which of the barbarian’s characteristics do we have to retain, and which do we have to reject, if we are to get a fair constitution to work? What is there in barbarism that we can make use of? Basically, the problem is that of filtering of the barbarian and barbarism: how can barbarian domination be so filtered as to bring about the constituent revolution? It is this problem, and the different solutions to the problem of the need to filter barbarism so as to bring about the constituent revolution, that will define—both in the field of historical discourse and in this historico-political field— the tactical positions of different groups and the different interests of the nobility, monarchic power, or different tendencies within the bourgeoisie. It will define where the center of the battle hes. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 212

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘filtering of barbarism’ is the mechanism where violence and domination get absorbed into legitimate constitution — a scaffold for later readings on how racialized Others are simultaneously mobilized and expelled by state power.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this filtering of barbarism map onto colonial statecraft’s handling of the ‘native’ as both labor and threat in later Islamophobia readings?