Contre- : Bernard E. Harcourt
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Mia Ruyter / Untitled (2024) Contre– : Bernard E. Harcourt The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. He plays his little game—so do you propagandists. But I don’t play… Is it possible to imagine a concept that is so productive that it leads us beyond the ordinary play of “countermoves in the same game”? Is it conceivable that the particle “contre-” or, in English, “counter-,” could overcome the opposition from which it is born and generate a fully autonomous conceptual form? Not in the Kantian or Hegelian sense of a synthesis that resolves an antinomic opposition (not the least of which, because the particle “contre-” functions differently than the particle “anti-”), but rather as an original counterpoint that itself becomes so powerful as to liberate itself from the oppositional relationship and transform itself into a free-standing concept, intervention, or even mode of governmentality. I suspect this is what Étienne Balibar aspired to in his essay, in Equaliberty, when he urged us to institute “a counterpower” to the force of conventional government and administration.1 Such a counterpower would have to become greater than simply resistance to governmental power. In order for it to achieve its full potential, it would need to liberate itself from its originary opposition and transform itself into an autonomous, self-referential, fully articulated form of governance. This alone could guarantee that the “contre-” move develop into its own independent mode of governing. It is an ambitious ideal, but a realizable goal. At least, it is one that we have witnessed in our own lifetimes—though in an inverted way. But then again, we do not always have total control over our concepts. Often, they escape us. Sometimes they come back to haunt us. A model for this concept-making—for this conceptual fabrication—can be found in Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which serves as the epigraph to this essay. The character of the Professor in that novel had strapped on him, at all times, a flask of explosives and carried a small detonator in his hand—ready to blow himself and everyone around him to bits. By means of these devices, he claimed to have gotten past the conventional opposition between revolutionaries and the police. He claimed to have overcome the mere “game” of moves and countermoves, and reached a higher—and more threatening—stage. He claimed to have transformed his reactivity into a pure force. Into perfection. You will recall that it was the figure of the Professor, more so than Conrad’s other characters, who inspired later anarchists and some terrorists, prominently among them the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Conrad, who always labelled his characters for us, referred to the Professor as “the perfect anarchist.”2 And what exactly, you may ask, was the ambition of this “perfect anarchist”? “What is it you are after yourself?” his comrade Ossipon would ask him with indignation. “A perfect detonator,” Conrad writes, in a response he describes as “the peremptory answer.”3 One can infer from Conrad’s novel that the Professor himself had begun as an anarchist caught in the counter-moves that he himself disparaged—caught in the play, in the game, in the parry. One can assume that the Professor was originally part of that dance, or that judo of countermoves. But the implication is clear: The Professor had gone beyond the mere tit-for-tat and had achieved instead a more perfect form of anarchism. What made this the most perfect or peremptory anarchist state was precisely getting beyond the contre- move to another level—a level that was autonomous of the opposition itself, and in that way, absolute. It was a pure state, independent from the back and forth between the revolutionaries and the police. Because of the explosives he strapped on himself at all times, the Professor remarked, “They know…I shall never be arrested. The game isn’t good enough for any policeman of them all. To deal with a man like me you require sheer, naked, inglorious heroism.”4 The Professor may have sounded almost delirious, and self-aggrandizing for sure, but the Professor had achieved something unique: He had gotten beyond the ordinary relation of opposition. The Professor ultimately has the last scene of the Secret Agent. After the counter-intelligence and counter-espionage is all over—after Winnie Verloc’s story has reached, in Conrad’s words, “its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness, and despair,”5 after her brother’s accidental explosion at Greenwich Station, her own murder of her husband, and her suicide—it is the Professor who closes the book, “the incorruptible Professor” as Conrad adds. Conrad closes:
The Professor had become sheer force, ruin and destruction. He had overcome his opposition to the system to become something as deadly as the pest. He had achieved the full effect of the contre- move. Not a very attractive overcoming—but as I mentioned, we do not always have total control over our conceptual moves; but a remarkable one. A similar conceptual movement runs through the writings of Balibar and through much of Michel Foucault’s thought as well. A good illustration in Foucault’s work is from an early passage in his inaugural lesson, on April 2, 1981, of the Louvain lectures titled Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. At the close of that inaugural lecture, Foucault evokes, as the very framework or core of his interventions to come, the notion of a “counter-positivism” which, he explains, “is not the contrary of positivism, but rather its counterpoint.”7 The full passage reads as follows:
The notion of counter-positivism conveys something different than “anti-positivism” because Foucault actually embraces a positivistic sensibility toward the proliferation of truth-telling forms. There is a history here, a truthful one. Foucault is tracing a history of truth telling regimes—more specifically, of regimes of veridiction and of speaking truth, and, in the larger arc of his years at the Collège de France, of the different bases (legal, historical, political economic) that ground claims of truth over time. Foucault’s method, then, is not anti-positivist. It is instead a “counterpoint”: it deploys positivistic sensibilities against narrow positivism. Most importantly, his method culminates in a philosophical intervention that is autonomous of positivism and of anti-positivism, that does not depend on either, and that no longer responds or relates merely to the opposition—it becomes its own autonomous method: a pure philosophical method, a way of seeing the world. It overcomes positivism, while always indexing it. Foucault’s counter-positivism, in the end, is a full-fledged method, fully detached from any dispute with positivism. In fact, it is perhaps the most important compass to decipher the Louvain lectures—which is why, incidentally, the passage ended up on the quatrième de couverture, where it remains in the French edition as the most significant words of those lectures. It is the point of perfection. The contre- move—by which I mean, to be clear, the movement of thought and practice, the action that is captured by adding the prefix contre- or counter- to another concept—is a conceptual factory. Its generative power is remarkable. It is not so much a concept itself, but instead the creator, the producer of concepts. The contre- move produces rich, constructed mental representations. It practically defines the distinction between concept and notion: nothing here is intuitive and immediate, as are notions; on the contrary, the contre- move is complex, constructed, and stabilized over time. It is intellectual work product. It is the infrastructure to myriad new concepts. In fact, if one looks in the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, the entry for “counter” becomes a litany, a catalogue, an enumeration of counter-concepts: “Counter-address; counter-advise; counter-affirm; counter-ambush; counter-avouch; counter-beat; counter-bid; counter-bore,”8 and I am still only at the beginning of the B’s. Each term with its own early etymological use and history. Foucault made use of the contre– move extensively—in fact, one could argue that it was one of his most productive devices, a veritable conceptual-production technique. Nietzsche did too, referring for instance to “art” as the “countermovement” against nihilism; and Nietzsche coincidentally adds, in Twilight of the Idols, that “in art, man takes delight in himself as perfection.”9 In conversation with Balibar, during his seminar on Foucault at Columbia University in the Fall of 2015, we began to identify and catalogue the occurrences of the contre- move in Foucault’s work: the concept of “contre-pouvoir” in his debate with Maoists10; the concept of “counter-history” in Society Must Be Defended11; the concept of “counter-conduct” in Security, Territory, Population, or, in the same lectures, the concepts of “counter-society”: “[I]n some of these communities there was a counter-society aspect, a carnival aspect, overturning social relations and hierarchy”12; or the concept of “counter-justice” again in his debate with Maoists,13 of the “counter-weight” to governmentality in the Birth of Biopolitics,14 of the idea of psychoanalysis as a “counter-science” in The Order of Things.15 Throughout his writings, his lectures, his interviews, Foucault constantly returned to the prefix contre- to create concepts, to fashion new and autonomous ideas. And it is of central importance in reading Étienne Balibar. There are, in his Equaliberty essays and many other brilliant writings, multiple deployments of the contre- move: Balibar speaks of “counter-racism,”16 and of counter-populism—as Michel Fehrer discusses in his entry; there is the “counter-city” and the “counterpower.”17 Then, there is also this important contre- move, which may fall on the darker side of the ledger:
There is also the contre- move that counters the counter-revolution with a “counter-counterrevolution,” setting things somewhat more straight for the resisters and the disobedients:
In his culminating seminar in the Fall of 2015, Balibar proposed that Foucault had developed a “counter-politics”—in contrast to “le politique,” the a-political, or even the un-political. Following that, at a conference at the University of Paris-Est Créteil on “Assujetissement et subjectivation” (June 1, 2016), Balibar developed his contre- move further, suggesting that the central element of truth-telling in Foucault’s work—of parrhesia, of veridiction and all its associated forms of diction—is a form of “contre-diction” and “contre-conduite,” effectively placing the element of the contre- move at the very center of Foucault’s thought. Balibar pointed us in particular to the quatrième de page of both volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality, which reproduce the following quote by René Char: “L’histoire des hommes est la longue succession des synonymes d’un même vocable. Y contredire est un devoir.” To contre-dict is a duty: for Balibar, this notion of parrhesiastic contradiction has within it the seeds of a counter-democratic principle, not in Pierre Rosanvallon’s sense, but as was exercised by certain parrhesiasts such as Socrates or Diogenes. This reflects an element of the counter-majoritarian in Foucault’s work. And by means of the contre- move, Foucault’s intervention and turn to parrhesia becomes an autonomous, independent theory based on a “contradiction” that is indexed but that we barely see. In an essay titled “In praise of counter-conduct,” Arnold Davidson underscores how so many of the forms of resistance that we admire in Foucault’s writings take us back to the concept of “counter-conduct”:
One can hear, in Davidson’s essay, a kind of admiration for the concept of counter-conduct. But it is important to emphasize that the contre- move is not always or necessarily progressive. As with concepts such as solidarity,21 or internal frontiers,22 there is an equivocal nature to counter-concepts. They too can go a bit all over the place—and be deployed against the interests of a progressive agenda. This is reflected in what Robespierre would refer to as the “counter-revolutionary;”23 or, depending on your political interpretation, what Rosanvallon would refer to as “Counter-Democracy.” I am here again in Balibar’s Equaliberty—or rather, in his footnotes—always inescapably in Balibar’s work. Many of us bear an almost romantic attachment to the counter- practice itself. It feels so intimately linked to notions of disobedience, resistance, and countering power. But it is important not to get carried away. Let me set forth as systematically as possible my central thesis. There is a particularity to the contre- move that distinguishes it from other political devices or mechanisms. It does not function like a dialectic. It is not an opposition that leads to a synthesis, but instead to a stage of “perfection,” in Conrad’s terms, that (1) merely indexes its former counter-partner, and (2) becomes a fully independent concept, all to itself, that does not incorporate its opposition and is no longer a reaction against anything. This is very different than the way that concepts generally work. It is markedly different, for instance, from the Nietzschean idea that concepts are the cumulative effect of dead metaphors; or that only when its history is forgotten can something become a concept. It may be useful, then, to delineate three dimensions of the contre- move. The first dimension distinguishes it from the more classic or simple opposition associated with the prefix “anti-”. Adding the prefix anti- serves only to defeat or eradicate its object, directly. For instance, anti-terrorism aims to eliminate terrorism by stamping it out, in contrast to counter-terrorism that uses the logic and strategies of terrorism to undermine it. The contre- move is more internal: it engages in a play, a movement, a dance with its object, using the force of the object against itself, in order to get beyond that game. It uses the energy of the object, and the internal logic of the object, to defeat it. It starts in a game with the object—as in chess, or fencing, or martial arts—but then transcends it. There is, in this sense, some proximity between the contre- move and the term “against”—as in Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, or in Against Prediction.24 “Against” is closer to counter- than to anti- insofar as it attempts to develop a new method in the oppositional work rather than simply defeat its object. In any event, the contre- move is different than the anti- move.25 Returning to the example of security, specifically of counter-insurgency: Counterinsurgency uses the internal logic of Maoist insurgency to defeat the insurrection. It adopts and accepts the logic, in fact it fully embraces the logic; but it tries to do it better, to reappropriate it, to redeploy it even more aggressively. It does not rest on the idea that there would be two opposing views that are contrary to each other in a dialectical confrontation. Instead, it burrows into the logic and deploys it against its opponent. The contre- move differs as well from the Socratic dialectic (the testing of an opposing view), the Kantian model of dialectics (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), and the Hegelian method (abstract-negative-concrete). It differs, in its very foundation, from an Adornian negative dialectics. It differs as well from Marx’s dialectical materialism—which rests on a notion of direct opposition, as expressed in his Capital:
To be sure, there is of course a family resemblance between all these forms of opposition. Foucault was keenly aware of this and in fact suggested as much in an interview discussing what he called “countereffects,” where he added: “I dare not use the word dialectics—but this comes rather close to it.”27 The contre- move “comes rather close” to a dialectic, but is not the same thing. It also comes close to the anti- move, but again differs. One can hear that as well in Foucault’s writing, with passages for instance in Security, Territory, Population that read as follows: “the first element of anti-pastoral or pastoral counter-conduct is asceticism.”28 Here and elsewhere, Foucault is struggling to pin down the conceptual move, using the term “anti-pastoral struggles” interchangeably with “pastoral counter-conducts,” but trying to correct and replace the first with the second.29 A second dimension concerns the internal logic of the contre- move. It is almost an immanent form of critique: The object that is being opposed is taken as such, it already exists fully, and the contre- move effectively goes into the object to oppose it. Notice how the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term: “Done, directed, or acting against, in opposition to, as a rejoinder or reply to another thing of the same kind already made or in existence.”30 Davidson points directly to this notion of immanence in his essay “In praise of counter-conduct,” where Davidson writes that, as in the interiority of the relationship between points of resistance and relations of power:
There is, Davidson explains, a “tactical immanence” of counter-conduct to conduct. Counter conduct is not “simply a passive underside, a merely negative or reactive phenomenon, a kind of disappointing after-effect.”32 In the words of Foucault, counter-conducts are not “les phénomènes en creux.”33 There is a “productivity of counter-conduct which goes beyond the purely negative act of disobedience.”34 It is in this sense that, for Davidson, “the notion of counter-conduct adds an explicitly ethical component to the notion of resistance.”35 As a methodological matter, the “counter-” element of “counter-conduct” works in a similar way as “resistance” to power: as something internal, that does not reach beyond, that is not a gap or absence. Foucault talks about counter-conduct that is “used against and to short-circuit, as it were, the pastorate.”36 Notice the use of the term “against” and the idea of short-circuiting. The short-circuit is tied to the internal dimension of the contre- move. It uses the circuit, the flow of electricity against itself. Davidson comes back to this in regard to homosexuality:
A third dimension, and perhaps most important, is the ultimate emancipation of the contre- move, which goes beyond its oppositional object, is liberated from it, becomes autonomous. At that point, it is no longer “counter-.” It is more like the Professor in Conrad’s The Secret Agent: outside the game, outside the dance, beyond the counter-moves in the same game. But it always indexes the original opposing object. The Professor is perhaps the “perfect anarchist,” but he is still an anarchist. When the counter- move works, it gives rise to something that is neither the opposite, nor even the dance partner, but instead is perfectly autonomous and self-sufficient—a concept that functions all on its own. Counter-conduct is no longer conduct that resists something, but conduct that has become its own form, a pure form of force, or disobedience, or of resistance. Let me offer a more tangible or concrete illustration: the example of jujutsu, a form of judo. (I must emphasize up front that I am not a fan of martial arts; but I do believe the illustration is instructive here). As I see it, jujutsu is the perfect illustration of the contre- move. “Ju” stands for pliable or yielding to another. “Jutsu” means techne or art. Together, the term signifies the art of yielding to the other’s force. “The word jujutsu may be translated freely as ‘the art of gaining victory by yielding or pliancy.’”38 The central idea of jujutsu is to use someone’s own force against them. Rather than confront the other with one’s force, the idea is to turn the force of the opponent into your own weapon and use it against them. In other words, to turn one’s opponent’s energy against them, rather than trying to oppose that energy directly. In an article from 1887, “Jujutsu and the origins of Judo,” the authors explain: “its main principle being not to match strength with strength, but to gain victory by yielding to strength.” And the first principle of the art: “Not to resist an opponent, but to gain victory by pliancy.”39 I would identify this as that first moment of the contre- move: to parry, to block, to ward off by a corresponding move. But what I would suggest is that, forms of jujutsu as judo transcend that parry. The philosophy of jujutsu is that of the counter-move: to use the force of the attack and transform it into something else, something that is neither an attack nor a block. When the counter-move can exist on its own, without responding to its counter, always perhaps indexing it, but fully unmoored, detached, independent, above its counter, doing what it does without responding to its counter, countering without reference to its counter—that, I take it, is the final productive moment of contre-. The darkest illustration of the contre- move—one that demonstrates well its fullest potential—lies right before our own eyes in the United States. Over the course of the past four decades or more, a new form of governmentality characterized by counterinsurgency strategies has come to dominate our government. Developed as a counter-move that drew extensively on Maoist ideas of insurgency, this new form of governmentality has liberated itself from its oppositional object and become a form of governing despite the absence of any domestic insurgency. It has become an autonomous form of government.40 Since 9/11, the United States has undergone a dramatic transformation in the way it carries itself abroad and governs itself at home. Long in the making—at least since the colonial wars abroad and the domestic turmoil of the 1960s—this historic transformation has come about in three waves. First, militarily: in Vietnam and now in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military strategy shifted importantly from a conventional model of large-scale battlefield warfare to unconventional forms of counterinsurgency warfare. Second, in foreign affairs: as the counterinsurgency paradigm took hold militarily, U.S. foreign policy began to mirror the core principles of unconventional warfare—total information awareness, targeted eradication of the radical minority, and psychological pacification of the masses. Third, at home: with the increased militarization of police forces, irrational fear of Muslims, and over-enforcement of anti-terrorism laws, the United States has begun to domesticate the counterinsurgency and to apply it to its own population. The result has been radical: the emergence of a domestic counterinsurgency model of government, imposed on American soil, in the absence of any domestic insurgency. The counterinsurgency has liberated itself from its oppositional object to become a new and radical form of government. It is a counter-insurgency without an insurgency, an autonomous form of unconventional warfare unmoored from reality. This illustrates perfectly the contre- move: born in an opposition, it soon exceeds it. Neither inherently good nor bad, it can take us in multiple directions. It is not thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. It is not anti-. There is no inherent necessity to these logical steps. Not with counter also. Counter can fail. But when it succeeds, it tends to be a powerful device, born of contestation. In the end, the concept of the counter-move may bring us to the heart of resistance and disobedience as well. It might be possible to develop a theory of the counter-move as one decisive form of critique. To draw on the energy and positivity of needing to counter. This is perhaps the counter-counter-revolution that Balibar had in mind in Equaliberty. It is possible that, today, more than ever, we need to “go counter.” Both in the sense of counter-play, and in the sense of exceeding the ideology we counter, to achieve something autonomous. This is what happens when jujutsu becomes an art form. When the Counterreformation becomes something greater than a response to the Protestant reformation, but instead a new form of governmentality. When counterpositivism becomes a philosophical method that need not refer back to positivism anymore. When the Counterrevolution becomes a form of governmentality in the absence of any insurgency or revolution. Or when, in Joseph Conrad’s book, the Professor becomes himself the “perfect anarchist” who has gotten past the play of the game of counter-moves. This is perhaps a model for resistance.
Appendix My ambition and hope had been to write this essay with Balibar. We had often spoken about the idea, but as it so often happens, moved on to other collaborations. I will close then here with a memorable e-mail from Balibar: Cher Bernard, Hier soir ma femme et moi étions à la très belle mise en scène de textes de Paul Celan que dit Nicolas Bouchaud, un des grands acteurs français actuels, au Théâtre du Rond-Point, et donc j’ai entendu (et ensuite retrouvé dans le texte) le passage suivant de son célèbre discours de réception du prix Georg Büchner en 1960 (connu sous le titre «Le méridien») : «Après toutes les paroles prononcées à la tribune (c’est ici l’échafaud sanglant), quelle parole ! C’est la contre-parole, c’est la parole qui casse le «fil», la parole qui n’est plus la révérence faite «aux badauds et à l’histoire sur ses grands chevaux», c’est un acte de liberté. C’est un pas.» Le mot allemand est «das Gegenwort», et il s’agit d’une allusion à l’exclamation de Lucile Desmoulins au pied de la guillotine, après l’exécution de son mari, provocation destinée à lui permettre d’être exécutée à son tour pour le «rejoindre» dans la mort, dans la pièce de Georg Büchner, «La mort de Danton»). A mettre en réserve, pour notre essai à venir… (Foucault peut-être connaissait ce discours, qui a été édité d’abord de façon confidentielle en 1961 puis réédité en allemand en 1968, mais surtout traduit en français en 1967 par le poète André du Bouchet dans le premier numéro de la revue L’Ephémère, tout à fait le genre de choses que Foucault devait regarder ; mais de toute façon l’important est la rencontre des mots). Cf. Paul Celan, Le Méridien et autres proses, Edition bilingue, traduit de l’allemand et annoté par Jean Launay, Editions du Seuil 2002, page 63. Bonnes fêtes et bonne année! amitié, Étienne Published on January 22, 2025 * Bernard E. Harcourt is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University * 1. Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 284.↩ 2. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ed. John Lyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 71.↩ 3. Ibid., p. 51.↩ 4. Ibid., p. 49.↩ 5. Ibid., p. 233.↩ 6. Ibid., p. 227.↩ 7. Michel Foucault, Mal faire, dire vrai. La Fonction de l’aveu en justice, eds. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt (Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2012), p. 10.↩ 8. See “counter-, prefix.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, last modified September 2016; http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/view/Entry/42648?rskey=CSpJWI&result=16#eid (last accessed December 1, 2016).↩ 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 419, § 794; Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 83.↩ 10. Michel Foucault, “Sur la justice populaire. Débats aves les maos,” Dits et Écrits 108:1 (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2001), p. 1234.↩ 11. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2002), p. 79.↩ 12. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 211–2.↩ 13. Michel Foucault, “Sur la justice populaire. Débats aves les maos,” p. 1235.↩ 14. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Picador, 2010), p. 137.↩ 15. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, Vintage Books, 1994), p. 379.↩ 16. Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty, p. 205. ↩ 17. Ibid., p. 284.↩ 18. Ibid., p. 159.↩ 19. Ibid.↩ 20. Arnold Davidson, “In Praise of Counter-Conduct,” History of the Human Sciences 24:4 (2011): 30.↩ 21. Gary Wilder, “Solidarity,” in Thinking with Balibar: A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris, and Jacques Lezra (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).↩ 22. See Ann Laura Stoler, “Interior Frontiers,” Political Concepts 4 (2018), available at https://www.politicalconcepts.org/interior-frontiers-ann-laura-stoler.↩ 23. Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty, p. 316, n.7.↩ 24. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (New York: Verso, 2010); Bernard E. Harcourt, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).↩ 25. In this regard, I would question Étienne Balibar’s suggestion that Foucault’s relation to Marx could be properly described as an “Anti-Marx,” as Balibar titles his essay «L’anti-Marx de Michel Foucault». Especially in relation to the Foucault of the early 1970s, as I have argued, we are facing much more of a contre-Marx, than an anti-Marx. The 1972 and 1973 lectures are determinative in this regard. Insofar as Foucault supplements, but does not displace, the accumulation of capital by the accumulation of docile bodies, what we face is a contre- move–at least in this most Marxisant period of Foucault. See Michel Foucault, «Situation du cours», in Théories et institutions pénales. Cours au Collège de France, 1971–1972, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt (Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2015), p. 262 («Le contre-marxisme de Foucault n’est pas un anti-marxisme»).↩ 26. Karl Marx, “Afterword (Second German Ed.),” Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 1.14.↩ 27. Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity,” Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 167.↩ 28. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 208.↩ 29. See also ibid., p. 204.↩ 30. See “counter-, prefix.” OED Online. Oxford University Press.↩ 31. Arnold Davidson, “In praise of counter-conduct,” p. 275.↩ 32. Ibid.↩ 33. Ibid., quoting Volonté de savoir, p. 126.↩ 34. Ibid.↩ 35. Ibid., p. 28.↩ 36. Ibid., p. 29, citing Security, Territory, Population, p. 213.↩ 37. Ibid., p. 33.↩ 38. Jigorō Kanō and T. Lindsay, “Jujutsu and the origins of Judo,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 15 (1887).↩ 39. Ibid.↩ 40. See a detailed elaboration of this argument, see Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (New York: Basic Books, 2018).↩ |
