Colonelism without a subject: colonial illegalisms and power concentration

Abstract

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault approaches the movement between political practices that, originated in colonial territories, return to Europe (“internal colonialism”). Graham makes a metaphor out of this concept, through which he addresses the growing militarization of the world’s great capitals according to the model of colonial occupation. However, what returns from the peripheries to the great world centers is not just militarization, but a whole set of relationships that escape the laws and the official dimension, which Foucault called illegalisms. Although he never analyzed the interplay of these relationships between center and periphery, the tactics of circumventing norms appear as a matter of reflection for a certain Brazilian critical theory, whose analytical acuity we intend to revisit.