ABSTRACT
At one point in his lectures on the war-society relationship, Michel Foucault poses the question “What is the principle that explains history [and right]?” The answer, he suggests, is to be found in “a series of brute facts” such as “physical strength, force, energy,” in short in “a series of accidents, or at least contingencies.” But governments have tended to dissimulate the events of global violence by interpolating the use of raw force into the implementation of rationality and right. Accordingly, Foucault refers to:
the rationality of calculations, strategies, and ruses; the rationality of technical procedures that are used to perpetuate the victory, to silence . . . the war . . . [and adds that] given that the relationship of domination works to their advantage, it is certainly not in their [government’s] interest to call any of this into question.2
