ABSTRACT
Von Clausewitz, the great military tactician, considered that war was politics conducted by other means. Michel Foucault inverted this to assert that politics is war conducted by other means (Rabinow 1986:64-65). This inversion was in accord with Foucault’s abiding view that ‘The history which bears and determines us has the form of war rather than that of a language: relations of power not relations of meaning.’1 Foucault’s perspective, that conflict lies at the heart of the matter, emerges in the following statement from his 1971 essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’:
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.
