Force from Nietzsche to Derrida by Connors Clare;

Author:Connors, Clare;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

CHAPTER 3

Foucault: Force, Power, and History

Force, it seems, cannot be caught in conceptual or philosophical nets. In both Nietzsche and Heidegger this provides the drama and interest in their thinking and writing about it. Reaching for its quality they traduce it — and yet in that process something of what is meant by ‘force’ is disclosed. Force gives itself to be thought through its own spoliation, or through disturbing the coherence of the thought that would master it. Foucault, on the other hand, renounces the attempt to think force altogether. Force is not a word one much associates with his work: as is well known, his term is pouvoir. He turns his attention — even more resolutely than Nietzsche — away from metaphysical and ontological questions, and looks instead at particular configurations of power in a number of contexts and epochs of human history. What I should like to suggest in this chapter, however, is that the question or problem of ‘force’ nevertheless haunts his explorations of power, in ways that — once articulated — might shed new light on some well-known Foucaultian theses, as well as on larger questions of the relationship between force and history.

Force names different things at different times in the Foucaultian corpus, and for that reason cannot, I think, be elevated to the status of an explanatory concept, in the way that Deleuze perhaps attempts to do in his Foucault.1 Indeed it is the slightly erratic status of force in Foucault’s work that interests me. It seems always to mark a problem in Foucault’s texts: the site of a disturbance which cannot simply be eliminated. And this problem is invariably to do with historical causality — with what precipitates changes in the regimes of power he describes. What I want to suggest is that Foucault’s invocation of force at certain key moments smuggles into his historical and historicist readings a metaphysical contraband for which he cannot account in terms of his own theories of history, power, and discourse. The philosophical or conceptual attempts to capture force made by Heidegger and Nietzsche seemed inadequate. But when force is banished from the theoretical arena by Foucault’s avowedly historical and anti-metaphysical approach to the workings of power, it seems to return as a necessary but disavowed conceptual supplement.

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