Foucault is always hard to get into, but once you eventually get a grip of the assumptions and definitions he comes in with, the ideas he presents and the stories he describes are mindblowing. I borrowed this from the local library and read it over a couple of months - but have now ordered my own copy.

There is a loose agenda in this series of lectures, but it's not always very precisely defined, coherent, or entirely thoroughly backed up. But what Foucault does well - as in Discipline and Punish - is use history to shed light on certain movements today. Perhaps this is how history should have been taught at school.

In these lectures, Foucault addresses the link between war and politics - is either an extension of the other, but through different means? In asking the question, he delves into the history of power struggles in France, England and Europe over the last 800 years or so, and traces the use of stories and knowledge through this time to show how the balance of power has changed.

In short, a fascinating read - and one that asks many more questions than it does provide answers, especially as the lectures are now 35 years old, and working out how they apply to modern politics and technology is a challenge in itself. I wanted my own copy to delve into these questions more, as I'd probably rack up dozens of fines if I had to keep getting this out of the library. ( )

In the things I am presently concerned with, the moment when that which does not exist is inscribed in reality, and when that which does not exist comes under a legitimate regime of the true and false, marks the birth of this dissymmetrical bipolarity of politics and the economy. Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or errors, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the truth and the false.

It is quaint growing old. I celebrated my birthday today by coming home and noshing on a wonderful Indian meal with my wife. I retired then to complete this volume and was rather shaken with thought. If this volume is any indication, then the Foucault Lectures series provides a rich trove of erudition and theory and is one which I will mine again and again. The work begins exploring the distinction between Institution and Acquisition as regards to Sovereignty -- lord knows I worried about my deficits per Hobbes and Machiavelli.

It is Foucault's notion of war as politics by other means that strings the text along. the discussion leads to his notion of race, which for Foucault is more a ethnic chauvinism than the American or modern binary opposition. These views at history are simply astonishing. The idea of a dovetail into the nascent biopolitical creates an enticing field of possibility.

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