Foucault himself says even under a system of biopower, hope in the state and in the people is key to reforming this imprisonment, there is always action that can be done even if it is within the state. Even if the affirmative fails, it builds a way to breaking free. There is no margin of safety from control, so the alternative is in the same position as the state.

James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” originally penned to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” The first stanza, which serves as the epigraph for this chapter, reflects the joy and hope of African Americans even though, as indicated in the stanza’s final line, “victory” remains elusive and the struggle for liberty continues. Johnson himself later took on the role of a national organizer for the NAACP. Yet, Johnson’s poem suggests that hope is not guaranteed. The second stanza revisits the days of slavery: “Bitter the chast’ning rod/Felt in the days when hope unborn had died” (Johnson 1900, 768–769). Johnson’s work vividly captures the tension between hope and despair that characterizes the African American experience shaped by slavery. This dialectical struggle between hope and despair similarly influenced the gay community’s responses to the AIDS crisis (a poignant example can be found in Shilts 1988/2007, 356–357). This ongoing struggle underpins my interpretation of Foucault’s work. I propose that this hope is central to what Foucault described as his “hyper- and pessimistic activism” (DE326.1, 232). As Foucault explains, “if everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do” (DE326.1, 231–232). Without hope, why would we engage in any activity at all?

I have sought to demonstrate that this hope resonates throughout Foucault’s work. It is even apparent in the concluding lines of Discipline and Punish, where Foucault presents a seemingly bleak depiction of our society: “In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration,’ objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle” (1975ET, 308). After this portrayal of humanity as bodies trapped in an intricate system of incarceration, how should we interpret the final phrase (indeed, the main clause) of this sentence: “we must hear the distant roar of battle”? I believe it signals hope: this grim depiction is not meant to induce despair but to mobilize efforts for an approaching battle—one that could bring about new ways of relating to others and to ourselves. Foucault’s initial ethical focus in 1976 was on viewing these bodies and their pleasures as sites of resistance against these imprisoning forms of power.

A contrasting example that poignantly embodies the hopeful spirit of Foucault’s assertion that “we always have something to do” is found in Jules Tygiel’s 1997 “Afterword” to his 1983 history of Jackie Robinson and baseball integration. Tygiel writes: “We remain engrossed in the great social experiment that he [Jackie Robinson] began. But, as with all incomplete experiments, we must periodically reassess its progress and reinvigorate its promise. We must reinforce those strategies that work, reject those that have failed, and assay new initiatives” (Tygiel 1997, 355). This process—of reassessment and revitalization, reinforcement and rejection, and initiating anew—is the critical work that follows from Foucault’s idea that everything is dangerous and that we always have tasks to undertake. Tygiel continues: “The Jackie Robinson saga, whether in myth or reality, has always appealed to ‘the better angels of our nature.’ Today, fifty years after he first graced us with his pride, his courage, his passion, and his vision, our nation, amidst our current failures, disappointments, and dispiriting political drift, has yet to produce a more compelling prophecy of a just, interracial society than that which we envision when we invoke the memory of Jackie Robinson” (Tygiel 1997, 355). Tygiel’s point is that despite our present shortcomings, Jackie Robinson’s story continues to inspire hope. (One might reasonably question the relevance of citing a baseball player here; however, Jackie Robinson’s experience illustrated the everyday face of resistance and the multiple layers of racism he navigated.)

Foucault explicitly addressed the role of hope in an unpublished April 1983 interview. When Leo Löwenthal challenged Foucault by noting, “I [Löwenthal] cannot discover thus far in your [Foucault’s] argumentation about distrust any kind of theoretically argued possibility to overcome this hopelessness, this defeatism, this distrust” (BdSD250[07], 10), Foucault responded: “I don’t think that to be suspicious means that you don’t have any hope. Despair and hopelessness are one thing; suspicion is another. And if you are suspicious, it is because, of course, you have a certain hope. The problem is to know which kind of hope you have, and which kind of hope it is reasonable to have in order to avoid what I would call not the ‘pessimistic circle’ you spoke of, but the political circle which reintroduces in your hopes, and through your hopes, the things you want to avoid by these hopes” (BdS-D250[07], 11). Foucault characterized his attitude as “hyper- and pessimistic activism.” His suspicion and pessimism, along with his hyperactivity, are precisely because he holds “a certain kind of hope.” As J. Joyce Schuld notes—and her choice of adjectives is apt—this interview reminds us that “he has been inspired by something that is both more promising and more dangerous [than pessimism]—hope” (Schuld 2003, 1). Later in this discussion, Foucault clarified: “It’s not a circle, a vicious circle from hope to despair, or from hope to complete disappointment. All it is is strategic features, and hope is totally essential to our political life. . . . And we don’t have to renounce our hope because we are suspicious, or renounce our suspicion because we have hope” (BdS-D250[07], 14).

Reflecting on his 1977 comment, we can discern that hope is evident: “It seems to me that power is ‘always already there,’ that one is never ‘outside’ it, that there are no ‘margins’ for those who break with the system to gambol in. But this does not entail the necessity of accepting an inescapable form of domination. . . . To say that one can never be ‘outside’ power does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what” (DE218.1, 141–142). Although power is ubiquitous and influences all our relationships and even our ethical possibilities, we are not “condemned to defeat.” On the contrary, this universality of power implies that resources for freedom are always available, and “we always have something to do.” The ongoing challenge is to determine what actions one ought to take.

Consider again excerpts from Foucault’s 1978 Collège de France course, a crucial series in which Foucault articulated the final structures of his power analysis and clarified the ethical stakes of the “art of governing.” He observes, in his description of biopower, that “risks are not the same for all individuals, all ages, or in every condition, place or milieu. There are therefore differential risks that reveal, as it were, zones of higher risk and, on the other hand, zones of less or lower risk. This means that one can thus identify what is dangerous” (CdF78ET, 61). This process of assessing dangers relates to power in governance. As Foucault notes while discussing Machiavelli’s The Prince: “On the one hand, [Machiavelli’s analysis] involves the identification of dangers: where they come from, in what they consist, and their comparative severity; what is the greater danger, and what is the lesser? The second aspect is the art of manipulating relations of force that enable the Prince to protect his principality” (CdF78ET, 92). Foucault continues, however, that contemporary anti-Machiavellian literature reveals that this analysis should not be limited to “preserving one’s principality” but rather extended to a broader “art of government” encompassing three levels: “the government of oneself, which falls under morality; the art of properly governing a family, which is part of economy; and finally, the ‘science of governing well’ the state, which belongs to politics” (CdF78ET, 93–94). Foucault’s analysis of power provides resources for integrating these three levels and for recognizing (and thus manipulating) the kinds of force relations (sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical) at play within them. His ethical trajectories offer tools to identify and evaluate the accompanying dangers, providing grounds upon which to act and criteria for assessing that action, albeit tentatively, for “we always have something to do.” Indeed, we must always keep in mind the contingency and provisionality of our maxims—this gives us a sense of humility that might prevent or resist a hubristic tendency towards totalizing (if not totalitarian) or utopian visions—even as we articulate these maxims as “imperatives.” Thus, his 1977 remark that “the role for theory today seems to me to be just this: not to formulate the global systematic theory which holds everything in place, but to analyse the specificity of mechanisms of power, to locate the connections and extensions, to build little by little a strategic knowledge” (DE218.1, 145).