The 1AC’s study of biopolitics is predicated on a universal “white” subject that ignores the racialized histories of settler colonialism in constructing the ontological basis of which the category “human” is assumed as an innocuous surface of analysis, which Is constitutive of the Eurocentric drive towards white innocence

One of the core Foucauldian concepts that FSS develops is ‘biopolitics’. Yet the concept is not uncontroversial. Any assessment of its shortcomings must begin by admitting its virtues. As Foucault formulated it, ‘biopolitics’ powerfully challenged common sense understandings of liberalism as increasing human freedom. Foucault locates the origins of liberalism in the rise of capitalism, which required “political investment of the body” (Foucault 1977, 25) in order to “turn peasants into punctual, efficient industrial workers” (Aradau & Blanke 2010, 48, see also Scott 1999, 47-48). Instead of simply promoting “extractive-effects” on workers’ bodies, capitalism sought to produce “governing-effects” on the conduct of subjects (Scott 1999, 40, 51-52). As a result, with the formation of the administrative state from the late 16th to the 19th century, government focused on “controlling the mass of the population on its territory rather than controlling territoriality as such” (Jessop 2006, 37). Thus, according to Foucault, modern power came to intervene at the level of the individual human body (“anatomo-politics”) and at the level of the population as biological species (“biopolitics”) (Foucault 2003, 242-243). Foucault termed this novel technology of power biopower. To him, the shift away from sovereign power towards the seemingly benign modalities of biopower in fact gave rise to more insidious forms of governance. Foucault also challenged common sense understandings of liberal rule as domestically and internationally peaceful. In a widely cited passage, Foucault (1980, 137) wrote that with the shift to biopower, 4 wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who needs to be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of the life necessity, massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men [sic] to be killed. Biopower casts enemies as threats to the health, wealth and wellbeing of the population (Foucault 2003, 256), and thus “the death of the other – that is, of those deemed dangerous, unfit, or diseased – will make life in general more healthy and pure” (Inda 2005, 16). The biopolitical logic that “[i]n order to live you must destroy your enemies” (Foucault 2003, 255) extends also to domestic sources of danger. Foucault thus argues that liberalism is predicated on the model of war, that “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (Foucault 2003, 15). With the rise of biopower, war is no longer “a violent event ‘out there,’ but instead a vital presence permeating our everyday” (Nguyen 2012, xi). Likewise, the enemy is “no longer in a ‘military relationship of confrontation’ but in a ‘biological relationship’ to the life of the social body” (Medovoi 2007, 60). Foucault refers to this as social warfare (Foucault, 2003, 60; see also Jabri 2006; Howell 2014; Reid 2010). It is important to note that race and racism are not absent from Foucault’s thought (nor from FSS, as we will demonstrate). For Foucault, the sovereign decision over which life is to be protected and which is to be ‘rejected in death’ was fundamentally informed by racism. In a normalizing society, racism is “the break between what must live and what must die” and “the precondition that makes killing acceptable” (Foucault 2003, 255-256). Society is defended through the improvement and regeneration of the race through such killing. Despite these strengths, Foucault’s narrative of the rise of modernity and the operations of modern power is undermined by his failure to deal with historically specific technologies of subjection centered on race. This led him not only to frequently overlook the ways in which certain subjects within Western liberal states are deemed incapable of self-regulation, making them ineligible for disciplinary or biopolitical governance, but also to two other key oversights. Foucault neglected the constitutive role of (settler) colonialism in the production of modernity, as well as the fundamental role of the Black or Savage Other in the ontological consolidation of Man or ‘the human’ necessary for biopower. As Black studies, post-colonial and critical race studies scholars have shown, Foucault’s account of the operations of modern power within Europe replicates White fantasies of a self-generating ‘Europe’ that uphold White innocence. Foucault seeks to account for how corporeal domination made possible capitalist accumulation, but his refusal to place “metropole and colony in a single analytic field” (Stoler and Cooper 1997, 4) means he cannot describe how (settler) colonial land theft, chattel slavery and indentured labour, and the related financial innovations around insurance and investment, produced the material conditions for the rise of capitalism (cf. Baucom 2005; Byrd 2011; Williams 1944). Foucault’s origin story for biopower remains sanitized of colonial domination and violence (Mignolo 2015, 107, see also da Silva 2015; Stoler 1995; Weheliye 2014a; Wynter 2003). As a result, while Foucault acknowledged a racial economy of life to be protected versus life to be 5 eliminated, he could only see race as a sorting process after the fact of the establishment of biopower. In contrast, Black, Indigenous, Decolonial and Postcolonial studies scholars have pointed out that racism is fundamental to the idea of the human that formed the basis for biopower. People indigenous to the Americas and the African continent not only supplied unpaid land and labour, but also acted as foils against which the meaning of ‘humanity’ emerged (Wynter 2003, 291; see also Byrd 2011; da Silva 2007; Hartman 1997; Spillers 1987; Wilderson 2010). Racist, colonial discourses constructed Europeans as racially ‘pure’ and cast Black people as the “bottom marker” of a “human scale of being” (Wynter 2003, 308- 309). Racial chattel slavery should be acknowledged as “infinitely more severe than exploitation and alienation” (Wilderson 2010, 9) since the Master/Slave relationship is not ‘simply’ characterized by theft of labour but by fungibility and gratuitous (not merely instrumental) violence (Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010). In sum, the Middle Passage turned people from the African continent into things. Ontologically speaking, the slave is socially dead, mere flesh and thus structurally defined out of subjectivity (Patterson 1982, Spillers 2003, Wilderson 2010; in IR, see Agathangelou 2010b, Richter-Montpetit 2014a, 2014b). The significance of this is not merely that some racialized subjects are deemed ineligible for biopolitics and thus subject to gratuitous, sovereign or necropolitical violence. Rather, it is that the political ontology of ‘humanity’ that sits at the core of the birth of biopower is “parasitic on the Black” (Wilderson 2010, 22). Foucault’s oversight in this regard is not only to misconstrue the history of biopower, but also its present expressions. These dynamics are not merely a thing of the past. Rather, racial chattel slavery animated “a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone” (Hartman 2007, 6). In this context, Foucault’s reliance on the idea of an unspecified (White) body (Holland 2012, 11) or ‘human’ limits his ability to analyse, not only the colonial sphere, but also the internal power dynamics of the West. Foucault influentially claimed that, under biopolitics, torture and spectacular corporeal punishment had become superfluous. However, state practices of violent cruelty, including in public, remain critical to the production and management of populations deemed to lie outside the category of ‘human’ and the reach of rehabilitation. In particular, when dealing with (racialized, colonized, sub-human) populations subjected to detention or incarceration, state-administered spectacular forms of corporeal punishment, such as police beatings, rape, shock treatments, and death row, remain common (James 1996, 34; as cited in Rodríguez 2006, 160; see also Ben-Moshe 2014; Davis 2002; Gilmore 2007; James 1998, 2000, 2007; Khalili 2012; Nadesan 2008; Puar 2017; Richter-Montpetit 2014b; Tanis et al, 2018; Rodríguez 2006, 2007; Vargas and Alves 2013; Wadiwel 2017). It is precisely Foucault’s bracketing of the racial constitution of the human that made it possible for him to sanitize state repression in his account of modern biopower (James 1996, 28). Foucault’s failure to engage with these histories cannot be dismissed as mere oversight. As Heiner (2007) has traced, significant elements of Foucault’s reconceptualization of modern power came out of his anti-prison activism and engagement with the Black Panther Party 6 (BPP). BPP political thought described the US domestic social fabric as shot through with inter-national relations of war. Conceptualizing the US state’s relationship to Black people as one of internal colonialism (“a stolen people on stolen land”), the BPP theorized the concomitant continuities between politics and war for Black people and the central role of the prison in this White supremacist order. The writings and speeches of Angela Davis, George Jackson and Huey P. Newton led Foucault towards conceptualizing power through the analytic of war. Yet Foucault failed to ever cite or make explicit reference to the BPP in his published works (Heiner 2007, 343). In sum, while racism and colonialism are not absent in Foucault’s work on biopolitics and war, he fails to comprehend “the colonial global” (Bhambra 2013, 309) - the entwined, constitutive relations between social, political and economic processes and actors in Europe and the colonies, and the concomitant fundamental raciality and coloniality of the modern subject. He whitewashes not only the role of racial-sexual terror, plunder and occupation in the making of ‘modernity/coloniality’ (Quijano 2000), but also the stubborn persistence of racialized relations in the postcolonial/settler colonial present. Foucault’s Eurocentrism is not incidental to ‘biopolitics’, and cannot be remedied by adding colonial or racialized subjects. Foucault’s reliance on an unspecified human as the object of biopolitics causes him to fundamentally misapprehend the constitutive and continuing role of genocide and enslavement in modernity/coloniality. We turn now to an assessment of whether these problems are overcome or replicated in the FSS literature on liberal war.