Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California:

What Is Critique

The Punitive Society: Lectures At The Collège De France 1972–73. By Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell (transl.), Bernard Harcourt (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 320 pp. $40.00/£27.00)

The Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

While the immediate aim of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Critique of Violence,” is to provide a critique of legal violence, commentators typically interpret it as providing a further critique of state violence. However, this interpretation often receives no further argument, and it remains unclear whether Benjamin’s essay may prove analytically relevant for a critique of state violence today. This paper argues that the “Critique” proves thusly relevant, but only on condition that it is developed in two directions. The first direction is conceptual, and consists in an explanation of the necessary relationship between states and violence. This explanation is found by appealing to a concept not cited in Benjamin’s text, but which, I argue, remains its implicit basis: sovereignty. According to this conceptual development, state violence is the necessary result of the state's attempt to maintain its sovereign law at the expense of emancipatory struggles to generate non-sovereign law. The second direction is genealogical, and consists in destabilizing the modern belief that justice is best served through the judicial channels of a sovereign state. Here I employ Michel Foucault’s genealogical research to demonstrate the historical contingency of state justice and, by extension, the possibility of a justice beyond the state.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12577

Sovereignty, genealogy, and the critique of state violence

The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was alwa...

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Foucault’s Analytics of Sovereignty

Philosophers have cataloged a range of genealogical methods by which different sorts of normative conclusions can be established. Although such methods provide diverging ways of pursuing genealogical inquiry, they typically con-verge in eschewing historiographic methodology, in favor of a uniquely philosophical approach. In contrast, one genealogist who drew on historiographic methodology is Michel Foucault. This article presents the motivations and advantages of Foucault's genealogical use of such a methodology. It advances two mains claims. First, that Foucault's early 1970s work employs a distinct genealogical method, which borrows from contemporary historiographic models of explanation to expand the range of objects that are proper to genealogical accounts of historical change. I demonstrate how Foucault modifies two central commitments of Nietzsche by broadening the dimensions of genealogical inquiry and explanation. Second, that historical method has normative relevance for genealogy, insofar as different historiographic choices can lead to different normative conclusions. I motivate this second claim by explaining how Foucault's multidimensional genealogical method expands both (a) the range of objects that are subject to evaluative assessment, and (b) the set of possible prescriptive recommendations that follow from such assessment.

Explanation and evaluation in Foucault's genealogy of morality

This article reconstructs and defends Theodor Adorno’s social theory by motivating the central role of abstract domination within it. Whereas critics such as Axel Honneth have charged Adorno with adhering to a reductive model of personal domination, I argue that the latter rather understands domination as a structural and de-individualized feature of capitalist society. If Adorno’s social theory is to be explanatory, however, it must account for the source of the abstractions that dominate modern individuals and, in particular, that of value. While such an account remains undeveloped in Adorno, Marx provides resources for its development, in positing the constitution of value neither in production nor exchange alone, but in the social totality. This article argues that Marx’s account is compatible with Adorno’s, and that it may be used to render Adorno’s theory of domination more credible on explanatory grounds.

/pdf/adorno-marx-and-abstract-domination-2q0o9o60.pdf

Eli B. Lichtenstein

Papers

Sovereignty, genealogy, and the critique of state violence

Foucault’s Analytics of Sovereignty

Explanation and evaluation in Foucault's genealogy of morality

Adorno, Marx, and abstract domination