Foucault’s Theatre of War

Chapter 4, “Foucault’s Theatre of War”, presents the thematic of constant war as a logical framework for grasping the genealogical use of history which has the potential to bring about its own wreckage with telling political underpinnings. The auto-destructive structure of Foucault’s hystorical critique locates a point of impossibility for its own operations which I approach from Lacan’s account of the Real as the impossible qua discursive formalization. Drawing on clinical perspectives, I explain how Foucault’s genealogical staging of “repeated scenes of violence” brings into focus the binary structure of the modern discursive arena as an ongoing struggle between the psychoanalytic ‘forces’ of hysterical desire (the Hysteric) and perverse drive (the University). The structural impasse of the Real in Foucault’s hystorical critique leads to a comment on the topological structure of the Möbius band in a discursive context. I conclude Chapter 4 by arguing that the framework of war impels Foucauldian critique toward a moment outside of discourse and thus forces him to pass to another one.