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On the Uses of Foucault for International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2012

TANJA AALBERTS  and
BEN GOLDER
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Extract

This symposium concerns the utility of the work of the French philosopher and social theorist, Michel Foucault (1926–84), for international law as an academic discipline. It almost goes without saying that there are several different ways to approach this question of utility. We want to introduce the symposium by sketching just a few of the different avenues by which one could approach the question of Foucault's utility for theorizing international law. One dominant understanding within the extant legal literature on Foucault is essentially to ask after his own legal-theoretical credentials. This approach is based on the seemingly straightforward and widely shared presupposition that if his ‘work offers no plausible account of law, why should legal scholars take him seriously? If we seek to bring Foucault into law, must we not first seek to bring law into Foucault?’1 Here, a precondition to being taken seriously within the discourse of law is precisely the plausibility of one's fidelity to existing conceptions of what law is. Somewhat solipsistically, then, from this perspective, one must first adduce a plausible theory of law in order to be taken seriously within law.

Type
INTERNATIONAL LEGAL THEORY: Symposium on Foucault
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 603 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2012

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References

1 Baxter, H., ‘Bringing Foucault into Law and Law into Foucault’, (1996) 48 Stanford Law Review 449CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 450.

2 A. Hunt and G. Wickham, Foucault and Law: Towards a Sociology of Law as Governance (1994), viii.

3 Ibid., at viii. The assertion that Foucault lacked a theory of law has been contested by, inter alia, B. Golder and P. Fitzpatrick, Foucault's Law (2009); and Fitzpatrick, P., ‘Foucault's Other Law’, in Golder, B. (ed.), Re-Reading Foucault: On Law, Power and Rights (2012)Google Scholar.

4 Hunt and Wickham, supra note 2; see also Hunt, A., ‘Foucault's Expulsion of Law: Toward a Retrieval’, (1992) 17 Law & Social Inquiry 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunt, A., ‘Getting Marx and Foucault into Bed Together!’, (2004) 31 Journal of Law and Society 592CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wickham, G., ‘Foucault and Law’, in Banakar, R. and Travers, M. (eds.), An Introduction to Law and Social Theory (2002), 249–65Google Scholar; and Wickham, G., ‘Foucault, Law, and Power: A Reassessment’, (2006) 33 Journal of Law and Society 596CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 M. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (1990), 135; Foucault, M., ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (translated by Macey, D.) (2003), 240–1Google Scholar.

6 Foucault, History of Sexuality, supra note 5, at 85.

7 Ibid., at 90.

8 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison (1978), 194.

9 Foucault, History of Sexuality, supra note 5, at 82.

10 Foucault, supra note 8, at 26.

11 Neal, A. W., ‘Rethinking Foucault in International Relations: Promiscuity and Unfaithfulness’, (2009) 23 Global Society 539CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 539.

12 See, e.g., the collection by Larner, W. and Walters, W. (eds.), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (2004)Google Scholar and I. B. Neumann and J. O. Sending, Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality (2010).

13 See A. Negri and M. Hardt's trilogy of Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, although this is not simply an ‘upscaling’ or an ‘updating’ of the Foucauldian analytic, but also a theory of empire drawing upon Deleuze, autonomist traditions of Italian Marxism, and so forth. See A. Negri and M. Hardt, Empire (2000); A. Negri and M. Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004); A. Negri and M. Hardt, Commonwealth (2009).

14 M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78 (2007), 107.

15 For critical analyses of the expulsion thesis, see Tadros, V., ‘Between Governance and Discipline: The Law and Michel Foucault’, (1998) 18 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ewald, F., ‘Norms, Discipline, and the Law’ (translated by Beale, M.), in Post, R. (ed.), Law and the Order of Culture (1991), 138–61Google Scholar; Golder and Fitzpatrick, supra note 3.

16 See, e.g., the comments in Foucault, M., ‘Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir’, in Defert, D. and Ewald, F. (eds.), Dits et écrits, Vol. 11 (1994 [1974]), 523–4Google Scholar.

17 See Golder, B. and Fitzpatrick, P., ‘The Laws of Michel Foucault’, in Golder, B. and Fitzpatrick, P. (eds.), Foucault and Law (2010), xi–xxviGoogle Scholar.

18 Otto, D., ‘Everything Is Dangerous: Some Post-Structural Tools for Rethinking the Universal Claims of Human Rights Law’, (1999) 5 Australian Journal of Human Rights 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olmsted, M., ‘Are Things Falling Apart? Rethinking the Purpose and Function of International Law’, (2005) 27 Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review 401Google Scholar.

19 Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, supra note 5, at 7.

20 The current lecture notably reflects on the research process of her project on the Responsibility to Protect as an illustration to the utility of Foucault for international legal theory. For the full substantial argument, see A. Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (2011), as well as the other references in her lecture.

21 This is what Foucault has cursorily referred to as étatisation or the governmentalization of the state; see Foucault, supra note 14, at 109–10, 389; and Foucault, M., The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (translated by Senellart, M. and Burchell, G.) (2010), 77Google Scholar; cf. Dillon, M., ‘Sovereignty and Governmentality: From the Problematics of the “New World Order” to the Ethical Problematic of the World Order’, (1995) 20 Alternatives 323CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Dean, Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule (2007).

22 Foucault, M., History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure (translated by Hurley, R.) (1992), 8–9Google Scholar.

23 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1994), xxiv.

24 See Koskeniemmi, M., ‘The Politics of International Law’, (1990) 1 EJIL 4; and Reus-Smit, C. (ed.), The Politics of International Law (2004)Google Scholar.