No one
Following on from the previous post. The occasion for Foucault’s June 1981 speech was the launch of a flotilla of vessels – an initiative of the various organisations he cites – to the Gulf of Thailand.
There had been reports that thousands fleeing Viet Nam in small boats had encountered pirates in the Gulf. In some cases, those boats never reached another shore, and many did with reports of rape, kidnap and murder – while the media spoke loudly of the dangers and governments refused to act. (Some of those events are described here.) In other words, the vessels would travel to the Gulf of Thailand to either pick up people fleeing Viet Nam and/or escort boats where possible.
That said, the question of whether Foucault was a ‘neo-humanist’ seems to me to be a question that arises within the problematic of the academy as an industry, of labour with an eye to (niche) markets, and for that reason is of little interest, except insofar as it highlights the extent to which canonisation (conflicts over the canon and between the faculties – or factions) shapes thought, for some.
To put it another way: does the question here begin with the proper name, or with whether what Foucault has to say here brings something new or interesting to the discussion, of rights among other things? These don’t seem to me to be the same question, or driven by the same concerns. [As this sat in my drafts folder, Jodi posted a similar set of questions about the status of the Master on LS - perhaps in part prompted by the turns of phrase used in Wolin’s piece, eg: ‘acolytes’.]
So, what is it that Foucault, here, brings to a consideration of rights?
The speech is anything but a straightforward reiteration of the language of rights. Here, the language of rights is quite deliberately mimed, but it is also, and thereby, undercut at those crucial points where right might be grounded: “We … have no other claim to speak … than a shared difficulty” - “Who then has commissioned us? No one. And that is precisely what establishes our right.” That is, the space of sovereignty is evacuated.
Indeed, few of the peculiarities of this text make sense unless read as a practical experiment in light of Foucault’s previous statements on rights, his insistence, for example, that what is required “is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head” (from “Truth and Power”).
The question that follows from all this – just as it does from the practical experiments of the Milan Libreria delle Donne with the non-sovereign contractualism of ‘relations of entrustment’ – is whether the experiment ‘works’, or might prompt further experimentation, and if so, which directions are promising and which less so.
The very fact that these two instances are experiments with political forms of address, recognition and right that few anglophone political milieux have ever been prepared to countenance is remarkable. And, given the degree of acquiescence of (both) anglo-american activists (and academics) to the form of rights (and sovereignty), it’s important to underscore these histories of experimentation, contra Wolin et al, as political laboratories rather than canonical labours.
In one of his lectures at the College de France in 1976, Foucault remarked:
Right should be viewed not in terms of a legitimacy to be established, but in terms of the methods of subjugation that it instigates.
In 1981, Foucault’s recourse to the figure of an “international citizenry” might have been understandable as an experiment, and indeed it’s conditions at the time could be said to be emerging. But by 2006 this figure is well past its oppositional use-by date. In the intervening period, the rise of a militaristic humanitarianism, under the sign of ‘global citizenship’, reconnected the figure of the global citizen to its material conditions in sovereignty (or perhaps the re-arrangement of sovereignties through war, and in the name of ‘global citizenship’). The form of subjectivity that this currently elicits is one of subjugation to the imperatives of ‘humanitarian war’. (Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire may well have echoed Foucault’s attempt to ‘found a new right’, but the foundations of this ‘new right’, by the time of the publication of Empire, were plain enough.) See David Chandler’s “The Road to Military Humanitarianism: How the Human Rights NGOs Shaped A New Humanitarian Agenda,” in Human Rights Quarterly, 23:3, 2001.
That said, the text remains of interest for its impropriety and (to borrow and mangle a term from elsewhere) its impoliticity. First, where right is suggestive of - and historically has taken the form of - a property, both said to be proper to Man (or the human) and a property which can be possessed, contracted, transferred, Foucault deliberately stages right as conditional upon the absence of such proprieties.
in the case of the classic, juridical theory, power is taken to be a right, which one is able to possess like a commodity, and which one can in consequence transfer or alienate, either wholly or partially, through a legal act or through some act that establishes a right, such as takes place through cession or contract. [From the 1971 lectures.]
Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, it is not the invention of a “new right” that is of interest here, but the reconception of the political.
That is: the condition of being governed, rather than identity, is the ground of solidarity. And: “We must reject the division of tasks which is all too often offered to us.” In other words, a rejection of the conventional definition of politics, premised not only on a border, but also on the emergence of a specialist and distinct class of ‘political actor’ - the politician, the public intellectual, the activist and so on.
These two aspects seem to me the most conducive to experimentation in the present moment, for the invention of a different form of the political. One can pay one’s debts to previous experiments, whether indicated by im/proper names or not, but experimentation itself is not an act of propriety.
