Sovereignty annexes the race-war weapon by shifting from law to norm

Evidence

Whereas the discourse of races, of the struggle between races, was a weapon to be used against the historicopolitical discourse of Roman sovereignty, the discourse of race (in the singular) was a way of turning that weapon against those who had forged it, of using it to preserve the sovereignty of the State, a sovereignty whose luster and vigor were no longer guaranteed by magico-juridical rituals, but by mediconormalizing techniques. Thanks to the shift from law to norm, from races in the plural to race in the singular, from the emancipatory project to a concern with purity, sovereignty was able to invest or take over the discourse of race struggle and reutilize it for its own strategy. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 98

Categorization

• XREF: The law-to-norm, plural-races-to-singular-race shift is core biopolitics vocabulary the reader is assembling for the Islamophobia module. — connects to: Colonial sovereignty means power exercised outside the law, with peace as endless war. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 74; War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law; War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179 (+7 more)
• DEFINE: Defines how mediconormalizing techniques replace magico-juridical rituals as the ground of sovereign power.

Related

• War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law (similarity 0.88)
• War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle (similarity 0.81)
• Race-struggle discourse replaces sovereign unity with a principle of heterogeneity (similarity 0.80)
• The juridical discourse of sovereignty has dominated Western analysis of power. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179
• Race-struggle discourse replaces sovereign unity with a principle of heterogeneity #complicates (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 86
• Imperialism normalized unprecedented hybrid and race-based arrangements. #corroborates (0.80)
• Colonial sovereignty operates outside legal and institutional rules of warfare #corroborates (0.75) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 84
• Race persisted as epistemic currency even after its formal abolition as legal criterion #corroborates (0.75)
• Sovereignty operates by designating quotidian acts as security matters. #expands (0.75)
• Imperialism made power an end in itself rather than a means to law #expands (0.75)
• Racial domination’s transparency transformed the tradition into a force for overthrowing race structure #complicates (0.70)