This paper draws attention to Foucault’s genealogy of critique. In a series of inquiries, Foucault traced the origins and trajectories of critical practices from the ancient tradition of parrhesia to the enlightenment and the (neo)liberal critique of the state. The paper will elucidate the insights of this history and argue that Foucault’s turn to the genealogy of critique also changed the valence of his theoretical assumptions. Foucault developed a more affirmative practice of genealogy that not only discredits truth claims by tracing them back to their inglorious origins. Rather, he presents a politics of truth as a complex interaction of (governmental) power-knowledge and critique that questions the power effects of truth and rationality. This genealogy of critique contributes to current problematizations of critique by thinkers like Boltanski, Latour and Rancière in highlighting the role of epistemological and technical critique of social rationalization and political reason.
This article analyses stockpiling as a security device that hoards time, stores power and buffers disruptions. The stockpile is a temporal matter of security by virtue of its ability to freeze time and to prepare for future emergencies. Stockpiling is informed by anticipations of threats but also materially underpins expectations. After unpacking the temporal ontology of stockpiling, the article traces its history as a security device and technology of power. Stockpiling enabled the emergence of the earliest states by establishing the means to store surpluses and centralize power. In modernity, stores became more dispersed as money, commodity exchange and new infrastructures made it possible to procure resources through circulation. In the 20th century, stockpiling became a reflexive security device reactive to risks associated with the disruption of these circulations. Finally, the article illuminates the role of reserves in contemporary German catastrophe preparedness to show that stockpiling remains an important security technique. Yet fiscal austerity and budgetary constraints limit security stockpiling. To compensate for the absence of public security stores, the government is prompting citizens to establish emergency stockpiles. The article offers a theoretical, historical and empirical engagement with stockpiling and thereby further elucidates the material politics of anticipation.
The paper provides a technopolitical analysis of public infrastructure by attending to the ways large technical systems became a political problem and how the development of infrastructure has inflected biopower, territoriality and security. It seeks to deepen the historical understanding of technopolitics by exploring the concept of Daseinsvorsorge (existential provision), which served as a crucial framework guiding public infrastructure provisions in Germany. Daseinsvorsorge provides a particularly revealing lens through which to examine questions of technopolitics, since it makes it possible to illuminate the dis/continuities in the government of infrastructure between three distinct political regimes: Nazi Germany, the post-war Federal Republic and contemporary Germany. The concept first became operative in post-war Germany, but it had emerged during the Third Reich in the work of Carl Schmitt’s disciple Ernst Forsthoff. Forsthoff identified steps towards Daseinsvorsorge in Nazi infrastructure planning, which was part and parcel of war mobilization, and borrowed tropes from the geopolitical imaginary of Nazi Germany like Lebensraum. After the war, Daseinsvorsorge aimed at establishing equal living conditions within Germany. With European integration and the privatization of infrastructure, the norms and forms of Daseinsvorsorge eroded without vanishing, since they surface in modified ways in EU guidelines and in critical infrastructure protection.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.