War drives the regular mechanisms of power beneath the law

Evidence

For those historians who identified history with public right, with the State, war was therefore essentially a disruption of right, an enigma, a sort of dark mass or raw event that had to be accepted as such, and not, certainly not, a principle of intelligibility. There was no question of that; on the contrary, it was a disruptive principle. Here, in contrast, war turns the very disruption of right into a grid of intelligibility, and makes it possible to determine the force relationship that always underpins a certain relationship of right. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

“Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war pursued by other means? H we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded— in part but never totally—either in the form of ‘war’ or in the forms of ‘politics’; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, uastable, and tense force relations."" wa — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 296 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial sovereignty means power exercised outside the law, with peace as endless war. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 74; European sovereignty legitimated states by domesticating and rationalizing war within borders. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 75; War machines govern populations by immobilizing or scattering them beyond state borders. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 139 (+7 more)

Related

• Sovereignty annexes the race-war weapon by shifting from law to norm (similarity 0.88)
• War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle (similarity 0.88)
• War and politics are two codings of the same force relations (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial sovereignty means power exercised outside the law, with peace as endless war. (similarity 0.83)
• War is the continuation of politics, not its own autonomous sphere. (similarity 0.82)
• Civil society may be structured by perpetual war between forces (similarity 0.81)
• The juridical discourse of sovereignty has dominated Western analysis of power. (similarity 0.81)
• Foucault proposed war as the model for understanding political power (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial sovereignty operates outside legal and institutional rules of warfare (similarity 0.81)
• Hobbes denies war any role in founding sovereignty (similarity 0.80)
• The West has only ever theorized power through the legal-juridical lens (similarity 0.80)
• European sovereignty legitimated states by domesticating and rationalizing war within borders. (similarity 0.80)
• War exercises sovereignty through the right to kill. (similarity 0.80)
• The overall balance of forces imposes the form of war (similarity 0.80)
• War is the permanent underpinning of social institutions; this is Hobbes’s great adversary. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• War can invert from disruption of law into law’s governing principle #corroborates (0.92) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179
• War and politics are two codings of the same force relations #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 296
• Sovereignty annexes the race-war weapon by shifting from law to norm #expands (0.78) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 98