| dc.description.abstract | Michel Foucault’s deeply influential theorization of modern power has had an extraordinary impact on those disciplines seeking to understand the “historical ontology of ourselves.” Despite his radical claim that the modern state “can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point,” however, it is Foucault’s notion of “racism” that is least developed—due, perhaps, to the notorious absence of colonialism in his genealogy of biopolitical governmentality. This “imperial absence,” as Claire Cosquer has called it, is accompanied, not incidentally, by a striking silence as to the role of law in the modern state. And yet, given law’s operative force in the racialization of colonial subjects, law may very well be the key to uncovering how, precisely, as Foucault famously writes in Society Must Be Defended, racism is the “basic mechanism of power as it is exercised in modern States.”
By relocating the colonial context in Foucault’s genealogy of biopolitical governmentality, Coloniality and the Racial Ontopolitics of Law suggests that there exists a modality of power called “juridical power” that operates as an ontopower, imposing upon reality a “regime of truth” demanded by the state’s will to know (vouloir-savoir) and institutionalizing a particular social and political order—what Foucault in his writings on Ancient Greek juridical practices identifies as the nomos—that governs not only the production of knowledge domains and objects, but the norms by which subjects are constituted and are made to constitute themselves. Applying Foucault’s theorization of nomos to his genealogy of modernity, this study concludes that modern “biological racism” has its roots in the juridical subjectivation of colonial subjects along metrics of racial purity in relation to European colonizers. By rethinking colonialism as a fundamental dimension of Foucault’s genealogy of modern power, this dissertation offers a radical rethinking of Foucault’s conceptual toolbox that can help us to better interrogate the racially laden, juridical and legal norms that continue to structure our social, economic, and political present. | |
