Waging War, Waging Peace: The Weimar Right and Michel Foucault’s Analysis of Power in the Mirror of the Archives

Michel Foucault started to reflect on a methodology for analyzing power relations upon his appointment to the Collège de France in 1970. This essay discusses potential unacknowledged sources of these reflections. Drawing on archival material deposited at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, I highlight similarities between Foucault's pre-1976 portrayal of power relations as essentially warlike and a passage from Erich Ludendorff's Der totale Krieg that Foucault excerpted as a reading note. On this basis, I ask to what extent the interpretation of Nietzsche developed by Foucault in the early 1970s depends on ideas that had been brought to Nietzsche's work from elsewhere. Citing a manuscript on governmentality not yet published in full, I argue moreover that although Foucault began to identify 'power' with 'government' after 1976, he still construed politics as a form of warfare. His reference henceforth would be Carl Schmitt's definition of the political through the friend-enemy distinction.