John Marks

Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biology

Foucault’s 1976 lectures at the College de France can be read, in isolation, as an exploration of one of the key themes of his work; namely, the way in which — neatly reversing Clausewitz’s formula — politics is a continuation of war by other means.1 In this sense, the lectures are an expression of Foucault’s attempt to analyse power in terms of its operation, functions and effects, rather than in terms of sovereignty and juridical models. They are a continuation of his project to look at power from the perspective of its functions and strategies, as it operates ‘under the radar’, as it were, of the juridical system of sovereignty (SMBD, 39). However, as far as the wider context of his work is concerned, the lectures also mark the point at which Foucault begins to shift his focus from a genealogy of power-knowledge. As Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani note in their essay contextualising Society Must Be Defended, the lectures were delivered at a point when Foucault was beginning to think of power in new ways.2 In this sense, they are an exercise in self-reflexive critique. In the course of analysing the history of discourses that draw on this model of war, Foucault undertakes the genealogy of an important component of his own method. He feels that his work up to this point has been couched in the ‘struggle-repression schema’, and he now wants to scrutinise the assumption that power mechanisms are essentially repressive.

Gilles Deleuze: Writing in Terror

Issues of guilt and shame are crucial components of the work of Gilles Deleuze, since the concept of desire is set against the moralising and individualising tendencies of the psychoanalytic and Judeo-Christian traditions.1 However, writing as one of the generation of French intellectuals who lived through the Second World War as children or adolescents, and whose adulthood was marked by the revelation of the Soviet Gulag, as well as the Algerian War, Deleuze’s work is also marked – often implicitly – by the issue of terror. He acknowledges, for example, that the most important post-war writers, thinkers and artists have shown that ‘thought has something to do with Auschwitz, with Hiroshima’.2 He is careful to point out that this is the very opposite of a resigned and pessimistic ‘cult of death’. In the artists that Deleuze admires, he can always hear, however violent or intense their work, the ‘song of life’. The terror which marked the twentieth century has imposed upon art the need to be ‘visionary’, to take us beyond recognition and into contact with what Deleuze calls the ‘intolerable’.

Le beau danger: Entretien avec Claude Bonnefoy

and her presence in this study is perhaps inevitable. According to El Nossery, Djebar’s 1990s works can be characterised by a textual violence that reflects the physical violence rife at the time, but also by the intermingling of the factual and the fictional, ultimately putting forward the notion that fiction is indispensable to uncovering the blanks that the official version of History cannot or will not reveal. As well as contributing to existing scholarship on Djebar’s literary œuvre, this study also includes analysis of writers on whom there has been less critical attention, and this constitutes one of the many positive aspects of this book. The chapter on Malika Mokeddem focuses on the theme of ‘errance’ as a form of resistance adopted by the Algerian female figure in order to escape confinement, repression and death, ultimately encouraging women to reject any law that seeks to subjugate them. The chapter on Leı̈la Marouane comprises an extended discussion on the theme of rape, putting forward the notion that the preponderance of acts of rape committed against Algerian women during the 1990s demonstrates that women were the specific targets of the violence of this period. Finally, for Latifa Ben Mansour, writing becomes a therapeutic means of coping with the emotional trauma that she and her country have suffered during the civil war. As such, the fictional text acts as the only possible way to imagine and come to terms with the unimaginable. In her analysis of the ‘témoignages fictionnels’ of four francophone Algerian women writers, El Nossery has contributed significantly to our understanding of the interplay between fiction and history, demonstrating that, in certain cases and under specific circumstances, literature can be more faithful to reality than a history book. Témoignages fictionnels au féminin will prove relevant to researchers and students working in the fields of gender studies, francophone studies and postcolonial studies amongst others.

Lessons from Lysenko

This chapter explores the question of whether we can still “learn lessons” from Lysenkoism. Contemporary allusions are often narrowly polemical, usually making the claim that scientific work is being marginalised for non-scientific reasons. However, one of the lessons of Lysenkoism is that there can be no straightforward separation of science from ideology, politics and economics. Also, recent developments in developmental biology have suggested that Lamarckism may have been prematurely dismissed as erroneous science as a consequence of Lysenkoism. The chapter argues that the emerging paradigm of plasticity ironically revives in a contemporary neoliberal iteration Lysenkoism’s promise of abundance delivered by the capacity to manipulate and engineer life.

Le roman d’entreprise: Breaking the silence:

This article looks at three recent French novels in order to explore key themes in what has become known as the roman d’entreprise: Pierre Mari’s Résolution (2005), Nathalie Kuperman’s Nous étions des êtres vivants (2010) and Thierry Beinstingel’s Retour aux mots sauvages (2010). The figure of the entreprise functions both as a fictional representation of the post-Fordist workplace environment in companies such as France Télécom, and also as a means of tackling wider issues of work and social organisation in an era of neoliberal managerialism. The concepts of capitalist realism, organisational miasma and virtuality are used to analyse the ways in which the three novels convey the distinctive affective landscape of the contemporary entreprise. Fiction is used to consider the prolix and self-referential nature of the managerialist entreprise, which enables it to exert a significant influence on the individual and collective subjectivities of employees. The three novels focus on the capacity of the entreprise to capture language and impose an affect of silence on employees.

Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and the Lysenko Affair: Boundary Work

This article looks at the highly influential scientific work of François Jacob and Jacques Monod in the context of the Lysenko affair. It argues that Lysenkoism provided a stimulus to understand and interpret the science they were doing in the field of molecular biology in a particular way, leading to a crucial terminological shift from adaptation to induction in 1953. At a time when new geopolitical borders and barriers were being constructed, molecular biology claimed to have identified a rigidly policed border between the genetic material in the cell nucleus and the rest of the cell. Molecular biology was, in this sense, drawn into a form of intellectual Cold War.

Fukuyama and the French: Woody, Fuku et Baudrillard

In large part, Fukuyama points out the predictable fact that English reviewers should be suspicious of the ’left-bank’ French intellectualism of the book, and that French and German reviewers should criticize the ’typically American’ belief in progress. However, he also draws attention to the fact that Europeans are unaware of their mutual intellectual heritage, simply because of problems of language. For example, he notes with interest that fewer and fewer German publications are translated into French. Returning to Fukuyama’s first point, it is certainly true that one only has to look at the brief opinions of four journal editors collected in L’Evenement du jeudi to note the anti-American tone of most of the French reactions to Fukuyama.’ Olivier Mongin sees the notion of a global revolution which will rule out the possible return of totalitarianism as a sort of American wishfulfilment.4 4 Likewise, Pierre Nora considers Fukuyama’s thesis to exist within ’un contexte trbs am6ricain’.’ Nora notes somewhat dismissively that Fukuyama, in his position as an employee of the Rand Corporation, uses the ideas of Hegel and Strauss to see international relations as tending towards a form of unity, just as the same organization used the work of Shelling and Wohlstater to elaborate a notion of international relations based on rational