Part IV of Anne Caldwell’s “Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity” (Theory and Event, 7:2, 2004) :
The complexity of the relationship between bio-sovereignty and humanity is most evident in the issue of humanitarian interventions. If such interventions limit nation-state sovereignty, they serve as a ground for bio-sovereignty.
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.
Below, the text of Foucault’s speech, posthumously published by Libération under the title of “Face aux gouvernements, les droits l’Homme” – the subject of much speculation - little of it interesting - on Foucault’s ‘humanism’. A commentary, on the occasion of the speech and its significances, in a subsequent post. Suffice to say, for the moment, that much of the recent commentary on this has been rather more obviously concerned with academic industry than with much else, as also noted here.
Balibar on Arendt and Foucault, excerpted from “Difference, Otherness, Exclusion”, Parallax, 34 (2005) [paragraph breaks inserted]:
[…] What is strikingly similar in Arendt and Foucault (and probably not by chance, although Foucault carefully avoids any reference to Arendt, even when he is commenting on the ’same’ historical sequences), is the fact that neither of them belives that processes of mass extermination, or more generally elimination, ever were possible in history, especially in Modern history, and especially from within States and Societies, without their victims being so to speak prepared for elimination, ie., progressively and institutionally marked as potential, future victims, and collectively pushed into a social symbolic corner where they acquired the status of ‘living corpses’, or masses of individuals who are neither completely ‘alive’ nor yet, already ‘dead’.
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