ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, Michel Foucault notices two radical changes in the way that violence operates. The new century marks the emergence of a new form of violence, in which discipline comes to replace punishment as the fundamental form that violence adopts. Violence continues to be operative, but it loses the visibility that had hitherto characterized it. In the regime of biopower, the violence of systems of power and control work their way into the maintenance of life. Foucault links the danger of this new form of violence to its expansiveness in relation to the earlier forms. The transcendence of bare life occurs through sexuality, which is precisely what Foucault writes out of his analysis of violence. Terrorists resort to violence to constitute sexuality rather than just having sex because the problem that they confront is not sexual frustration but an absence of any sublime objects in the contemporary capitalist universe.
