Biopower, racism and the modern states

In my effort to work out a consistent analytical framework for my research, I have been looking at secondary literature on Foucault, particularly feminist sources. Ann Stoler's "Race and the Education of Desire" is a very interesting book in which she develops a "foucauldian" account of colonialism and racism, working upon The History of Sexuality 1 and the set of lectures known as "Society must be defended", given by Foucault at the College de France in 1976.

Besides the great academic interest of the book in relation to the emergence of racist discourses as an effect of biopolitics (and the emergence of the notion of class as an effect of nationalist and racist discourses), I found engaging anecdotal stories having to do with Stoler's research process itself. At the time (mid 90s), the lectures had not yet been translated into English, nor published officially (the Foucault estate did not authorise it) and very few scholars knew of their existence or the topics they addressed, one of them being precisely state racism (in the 17th March lecture).

I am now familiar with a few critiques to Foucault, in particular those that claim that he does not adequately situate the law in the modern society, those that address his lack of an ethical account, and those that contend that Foucault dismisses the power of the modern state. While I do not think that I am in a position to "defend" Foucault (not that I think that his work needs to be defended for that matter) I do believe that several of these critiques situate themselves in a limited moment of Foucault's work and neglect a more comprehensive examination of many different topics that he developed during his life, some of them precisely as a response to earlier critiques.

At the moment it is easy to gain access to the lectures at the College de France, which have been translated into English. However, the transcriptions do not contain the questions that the public asked Foucault after the lectures, some of which we can find in Ann Stoler's book, more precisely, those corresponding to the March 17th 1976 lecture, on biopower and racism. There is a lot going on in this lecture, in the dialogue that Stoler establishes with it and the very strong claims that Foucault makes, particularly towards the end of the talk, which apparently resulted in a barrage of challenging comments. Foucault contended -and I found this very enlightening- that the mechanisms of biopower and the sovereign right (the right to kill) were indistinguishable in socialist and capitalist states. The reason why I find this so interesting, is because one of the paradoxes I have been thinking about for some time, is that penal punitivism can be found not only in neoliberal states, but also in the so called "neosocialist" states (I am thinking of the Andean new socialism in particular). Scholars like David Garland attribute the punitive nature of contemporary criminal policy to neoliberal rationalities and obscure political agendas. But what about economies that are actively attempting to escape the "long neoliberal night" (this is how the Ecuadorian president has referred to preceding governments in various occasions)? An interesting hypothesis would be, in my understanding, that governmental biopower is a major western shift, transversal to economic programmes.

State racism as an analytical tool (used in a comprehensive fashion that is not limited to ethnic racism) for post-colonial studies, I think, could be an enormously useful tool to the purpose of tracing the side effects of biopolitical binaries (normal/abnormal basically) and look at how the law can be a technique to spread these rationalities until they are taken for granted even when they are oppressive.