By MICHEL FOUCAULT*

Transcript of a course at USP, given in October 1975

Translator's presentation

It was recently published in France, in a volume of unpublished works by Michel Foucault entitled Genealogies of sexuality (Vrin, 2024), the course he taught in October 1975, at USP, with the title “The genealogy of modern knowledge about sexuality”. At the time, at the request of students belonging to the student movement, transmitted to him and Gerard Lebrun by Marilena Chauí, Michel Foucault, in solidarity with the numerous arrests of students and professors at USP, interrupted his course.

On that occasion, he read a brief manifesto, written by himself, at the assembly of students gathered at FAU. The culmination of the state repression at that time was the murder of journalist Vladimir Herzog. Foucault also participated in the ecumenical act in memory of Herzog, held in the Sé Church, which was surrounded by army forces. This episode was recalled in detail by José Castilho Marques Neto in “In a Taxi with Michel Foucault. Memoirs of a Philosophy Student at 22” (Cult, 225, July 2017).

The brief text translated below is part of the first class of a course designed for eight classes, of which only four were taught, for the reason mentioned above. It is an attempt to explain the relations between what Michel Foucault called at the time the “microphysics of power” and the question of fascism.

Personally, I believe that the controversies that were very intense until recently, which reduced Michel Foucault’s thought to “postmodernity”, “poststructuralism”, “irrationalism” or even to total anti-Marxism, should be given their rightful place in the history of a time when little was known about the set of unpublished works that we know today. After a few decades of these controversies, the more we gain distance from them, the more we can read his work with patience and sobriety and, thus, we can better measure, beyond the passionate support or criticism of the hasty reader, the lucidity and scope of his analyses and perhaps how they still help us understand the persistence of fascism today.[I]

Michel Foucault – 1975 course

“I must confess that I cannot answer this question of why, the question of why the theme of power and infinitesimal power arose, but I would like to discuss it a little at the end of this lecture or the course and see how one could try to develop an answer. For the moment, in the absence of an explanation of why the problem arose as it does now, I would like to simply outline some considerations about the ‘how’. How did this problem arise, at least in the countries of Western Europe? I believe that two processes can be singled out, in the course of which the problem of this infinitesimal power, of micropower, arose.

On the one hand, I believe that what we could call the collapse of fascism has appeared. And, [regarding] this line of the collapse of fascism, two things can be observed. First, this fascism, which was defined by the Third International, as you know, as 'the bloody dictatorship of the most reactionary faction of big capital', this dictatorship, when we looked at it more closely, after its collapse in 1945, revealed that it was not just about that, that fascism was not just about the broad confiscation of a state apparatus by henchmen who were commanded, directly or indirectly, by a certain faction of shareholders of big capital, etc.

Fascism was perhaps this, but it was also something else: if fascism was able to maintain itself and maintain itself for a long time, it was because it was able to prolong its effects on the social body, it was because it was able to deepen its roots. If fascism was able to maintain itself for so long in Europe and in other countries where it established itself, it was because it was able to use a whole series of pre-established power structures within the social body itself.

As is well known, fascism used medicine and psychiatry; it used a centuries-old, even millennia-old, status of women considered – how long ago! – as biological reproducers or domestic slaves. Fascism used in the social body where it was established all the divisions that had already been made, all the divisions of marginality concerning race, diseases, anomalies – sexual, marginality of delinquency, etc.

When fascism operated, it did so on this pre-existing basis; and it is true that once Nazism was suppressed, all these basic elements that fascism had used appeared in liberal societies, but precisely with a scandalous value, since they had already been used by fascism. These basic elements had until then been tolerated, accepted, and even if they had not been noticed, they were in any case part of the continuous fabric of everyday existence. And then, after they had been used by fascism, as a result, as you know, they became absolutely intolerable.

The simplest and most famous example is, of course, the concentration camp. The concentration camp, which was to a certain extent the maximum, paroxysmal form of fascism, when the concentration camp, […] denounced, photographed, suppressed and solemnly suppressed, disappeared from the European horizon, what was found? If it found asylums, if it found hospitals, if it found the confinement unit. And the problem of confinement, of psychiatric confinement, of the confinement of the abnormal, etc., this problem appeared in Europe under the very repercussion of fascism.

We cannot forget Charles Bettelheim, who in his practice was one of those who most radically questioned the psychiatric confinement of children, he was someone who came out of the concentration camps. Through the filter of fascism, there appeared in our societies – that which scandalizes our societies – a whole set of excessive powers, of petty violence, of intolerable domination, of absurd persistence, a whole series of micropolitical asymmetries that had been exercised for a long time and with complete tranquility, through medicine, psychiatry, school, family, criminal justice, marital power, macho sexism, you name it.

In leftist groups, people are currently happy to talk about the fascism of psychiatrists and teachers who cheat on exams. For my part, I think it is important to say that it is very nice to try to free the psychiatric insertion of fascism in European societies, its roots in schools, the support it has been able to have in medicine, in the family, in the judicial system. Bloody dictatorship of the most reactionary faction of big capital? Perhaps, at one extreme.

But, at the other end […] what makes fascism possible is not this bloody dictatorship, it is something much smaller or much worse, as you wish, it is the muffled subjugation that is exercised silently in the deepest amplitude of the social body. In short, the disappearance of institutional fascism, of the great historical and bloody fascism, has left behind a mass of excessive powers, of intra-family violence, similar to it, which prepared it and survive it. I think that one of the pairs that has brought the problem of micro-powers to light today is, therefore, the existence and collapse of fascism.

*Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a professor of philosophy in the chair of History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. Author of, among other books, The birth of biopolitics (Martins Fontes). [https://amzn.to/4jlokJo]

Translation: Ernani Chaves.

Translator's note

[I] The notation (…) means inaudible words, due to problems with the recording.

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