Foucault and The Black Panthers

City
ISSN: 1360-4813 (Print) 1470-3629 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccit20
Foucault and the Black Panthers

Brady Thomas Heiner
To cite this article: Brady Thomas Heiner (2007) Foucault and the Black Panthers , City, 11:3,
313-356, DOI: 10.1080/13604810701668969
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604810701668969
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Date: 19 September 2015, At: 09:11
CITY, VOL. 11, NO. 3, DECEMBER 2007
Foucault and the Black

Panthers1
Brady Thomas Heiner
Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 09:11 19 September 2015
Taylor and Francis
This paper unearths the relation between French philosopher Michel Foucault and the US
Black Panther Party (BPP). I argue that Foucaults shift from archaeological inquiry to
genealogical critique is fundamentally motivated by his encounter with American-style
racism and class struggle, and by his engagement with the political philosophies and documented struggles of the BPP. The paper proceeds in four steps. First, I assess Foucaults biographies and interviews from the transitional period of 197072 that indicate the fact and
nature of this formative encounter. Second, I turn to some of the writings of BPP leaders and
to the theme of politics and war as they articulated it. Third, I address this same theme of
politics as war as it gets taken up and rearticulated by Foucault between 1971 and 1976, with
an eye to the degree to which the philosophies and struggles of the Black Panthers silently,
yet profoundly, inform Foucaults genealogical work. I conclude by raising some ethical and
political questions pertaining to the criteria of truthful speech in scholarly discourse.
[P]olitics is war without bloodshed while

war is politics with bloodshed.
Mao Tse-Tung, 19382
Politics is war without bloodshed. War is
politics with bloodshed.
Huey P. Newton, 19693
Politics and war are inseparable in a fascist
state.
George Jackson, 19714
[P]olitics is the continuation of war by other
means.
Michel Foucault, 19765
n the early 1970s, Foucaults method

and domain of critique undergo a
significant shift. The archaeological
works, such as The Order of Things (1966)
and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969),
give way to the more politicized genealogies of Discipline and Punish (1975) and the
first volume of The History of Sexuality
(1976). Foucault the intellectual historian,
engaged in an excavation of the epistemological foundations of the modern subject

of knowledge, moves toward Foucault the
political theorist of power relations and
techniques of domination. In the course of
this movement, concepts like episteme,
enunciation and discursive formation
are displaced in favor of discipline, technology, strategy and biopower.6
This realignment has been treated extensively by Foucault scholars in the fields of
philosophy, political theory, cultural and
literary theory, and intellectual history.7
However, in none of these studies is the
particular research constellation Foucault
and the Black Panthers broached or
explored, nor is the connection between
Foucault and the Black Panther Party
(BPP) even mentioned.8 Many of the scholarly works on Foucault, whether philosophical or historical, end up occasioning
effects that resemble those of what
Foucault himself (by way of Nietzsche)
called monumental history. They serve to
ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/07/030313-44 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13604810701668969
314
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
memorialize Foucault as an intellectual

monument.
Nietzsche put forward a scathing criticism of this form of monumental history
in his Untimely Meditations of 1874;
Foucaultlargely inspired, I argue, by the
Black Panthersrearticulated this criticism in 1971: Nietzsche accused this
history, one totally devoted to veneration,
of barring access to the actual intensities
and creations of life.9 On the present
occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the
Black Panther Party, I too would like to
undertake some, perhaps, untimely meditations. I argue that Foucaults genealogical work of the 1970s, as well as the
majority of the existing scholarship on
Foucaults middle period (i.e. 197076)
insofar as it is effectively devoted to the
veneration of Foucault as an intellectual
or genealogy as a philosophico-historical
projectbar access to the actual historicopolitical intensities and creations that in fact
motivated the genealogical project.
The few published documents that make
passing reference to the connection
between Foucault and the Black Panthers
indiscriminately refer to the writings of the
Black Panthers as just one set among a
series of documents that passed before
Foucaults eyes during the course of a lifelong reading practice. The relation between
the Black Panther Partys political philosophies and struggles and Foucaults own
genealogical project has never been pursued
as a topic of substantive philosophical and
politico-historical significance.
This paper will attempt to trace the genealogy of that relation; in it I will suggest that
the lack of engagement with this theme in the
scholarly literature itself bespeaks a silence
and erasure of a methodological and disciplinary, but also an explicitly political sort
a sort of silence and erasure that pervades
scholarly knowledge production, including,
as we shall see, that of Foucault himself.
Much more so than his return to the texts
of Nietzsche, Marx or Clausewitz, I argue
that Foucaults shift from archaeological
inquiry to genealogical critique is motivated

more fundamentally by his encounter with
American-style racism and class struggle, and
by his engagement with the political philosophies and documented struggles of the Black
Panther Party. The standard story given by
monumentalist accounts is that Foucault
arrived at the genealogical method through
his reading of Nietzsche, which he is
purported to have discovered through his
reading of Heidegger. Such a story is at worst
distorted, at best one-sided. If Nietzsche
features prominently in Foucaults genealogical turn, it is, I argue, because the philosophies and struggles of the Black Panthers led
Foucault both to Nietzsche and to genealogy
as a method of historico-political critique.
The urban insurrection of US black
liberationists and black liberationist knowledges during the 1960s and early 1970s
preceded and predelineated Foucaults genealogical project of desubjugating historical
knowledges.
Revealingly, though Foucault credits
Nietzsche and Heidegger for their contributions to his approach to genealogy and
power, he failed to ever publicly acknowledge the influence that the BPP had on his
thought. This influence can be recovered,
however, and its foundational character
appreciated through a comparative analysis
of Foucaults published reflections during
the period between 1970 and 1976 and the
literature of the Black Panther Party
published between 1966 and 1972.
In the course of his shift from archaeological analysis to genealogical critiquethe
same period in which Foucault came into
contact with the writings of members of the
Black Panther PartyFoucault formulated
the notion of the will to truth. The will to
truth is a historical, modifiable, institutionally constraining system of exclusion that
regulates what sorts of statements can appear
as truth-bearing eventswhat can and
cannot be intelligibly said in any given social
formation.
This
regulative
principle,
Foucault argues, silently governs the acceptable forms according to which knowledge is
HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 315
produced, disclosed and circulated, and it

functions in such a way as to mask its prodigious machinery and vocation of exclusion,
leaving subjects thematically unaware of its
operation. This will to truth, Foucault
writes,
like other systems of exclusion, rests on an
institutional support: it is both reinforced and
renewed by a whole strata of practices, such
as pedagogy, of course; and the system of
books, publishing, libraries; learned societies
in the past and laboratories now. But it is also
renewed, no doubt, more profoundly, by the
way in which knowledge is put to work,
valorized, distributed, and in a sense
attributed, in a society.10
What does the silence regarding the link

between Foucault and the Black Panthers tell
us about the will to truth that imperceptibly
regulates the contemporary production,
disclosure and circulation of truth-bearing
knowledge?
This paper attempts to break this silence
and, within the space of critical reflection
opened up by such an undertaking, to proffer
an immanent critique of scholarly discourse
as such, and the disciplinary formations that
govern it. I will proceed in the following way.
In Section I, I will assess a series of
Foucaults written and spoken statements
from the transitional period of 197072, as
well as historical and biographical texts dealing with that period, which indicate the fact
and nature of Foucaults formative encounter
with the philosophies and documented struggles of the Black Panther Party.
Then, in Section II, I will turn to some of
the writings of Black Panther Party leadersHuey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge
Cleaver, George Jackson and Angela Y.
Davis11stemming from the period of
196672. My analysis here will focus on the
theme of politics and war (or politics as
war) as it was articulated in the philosophies
and struggles of the Black Panthers.
In Section III, I will address this same
theme of politics as war as it gets taken up
and rearticulated by Foucault between 1971
and 1976. Looking at Foucaults 1976

Lectures and a 1971 pamphlet that he cowrote on the assassination of Black Panther
Party Field Marshall George Jackson,
LAssassinat de George Jackson,12 and
comparing them with Jacksons and Angela
Y. Daviss concurrent critical analyses of
American fascism and imprisonment practice, I will investigate the degree to which the
philosophies and struggles of the Black
Panthers silently, yet profoundly, inform
Foucaults genealogical work.
In conclusion, in Section IV, I will raise
some ethical and political questions pertaining to the criteria of truthful speech in scholarly discourse. For instance: What kinds of
knowledge are excluded from or marginalized within the domain of truth-bearing
discourses, and how, if at all, do such
discourses relate to those marginal knowledges? What sorts of delimitations, erasures,
silenceswhat epistemic and social injusticesare necessary in order to consolidate
and maintain the signifying coherence of
truth-bearing discourse and the integrity and
legitimacy of American governmental
authority? Given the formative role that
black power plays in Foucaults elaboration
of the concepts of power-knowledge, genealogy and biopower, why is it that the enunciative force of black power is met with social,
civil and biological death while that of
power-knowledge is subject to canonization
in a host of academic disciplines? Why is
Foucaults brand of genealogical discourse
incorporated by the will to truth of contemporary knowledge regimes, while the insurgent knowledges of black power movements
remain largely unassimilable to these regimes
of knowledge?
I. 197072: Foucaults encounter with the

philosophies and documented struggles of
the Black Panther Party
These are intolerable: courts, cops, hospitals,
asylums, school, military service, the press,
television, the State.13
316
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
The preceding words appear on the back

cover of a 48-page pamphlet published in
Paris in May/June 1971;14 the pamphlet,
entitled Intolrable, was the first of a series
that would be created by a prison activist
organization called the Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons (GIP), an organization
that Foucault founded in February 1971. The
orientation and point of intervention of this
discursive
actlargely
contrived
by
Foucaultmarks a radical departure from
those of The Order of Things, the book for
which he rapidly acquired celebrity in 1966,
and even from the text that he had published
only 2 years prior, The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1969).15 In 1966, Foucault was
publishing an erudite book on the history of
the human sciencesaimed primarily at an
academic audiencein which he called for
the abolition of humanism. On May Day of
1971, he was arrested outside La Sant Prison
in Paris, alongside 13 other members of the
GIP, for distributing a pamphlet that called
for the abolition of the casier judiciaire (a
system of keeping criminal records, which
makes such records available upon request to
employers or potential employers, aiding
recidivism by confining the formerly incarcerated to unemployment or underpaid
employment).16
How does one account for such a rapid
and radical reformulation? In an interview
published in July 1971, Foucault accounts for
it by saying the following:
In the past, I have focused on subjects that
are somewhat abstract and far-removed from
us, like the history of the sciences. Now I
would like to really move away from that.
Particular circumstances and events have
displaced my interest onto the prison
problem.17
It is precisely these circumstances and events

that are of interest to us.
One event in particular had a pronounced
effect on Foucaults reorientation: his first
exposure to the USA and, more specifically,
to American-style racism. Foucault indicated
the transformative role that his perception of
American class dynamics played upon his

thought in an interview conducted during
this inaugural trip in the fall of 1970.
[T]he more I travel, the more I remove
myself from my natural and habitual centers
of gravity, the greater my chance of grasping
the foundations I am obviously standing on.
[] A simple example: in New York I was
struck, as any foreigner would be, by the
immediate contrast between the good
sections [of town] and the poverty, even the
misery, that surround them on the right and
left, North and South. I well know that one
finds that same contrast in Europe, and that
you too, when in Europe, are certainly
shocked by the great misery in the poor
sections of Paris, Hamburg or London, it
doesnt matter where. Having lived in Europe
for years, I had lost a sense of this contrast
and had ended up believing that there had
been a general rise in the standard of living of
the whole population; I wasnt far from
imagining that the proletariat was becoming
middle class, that there were really no more
poor people, that the social struggle, the
struggle between classes, consequently, was
coming to an end. Well, seeing New York,
perceiving again suddenly this vivid contrast
that exists everywhere but which was blotted
out of my eyes by familiar forms of it, that
was for me a kind of second revelation; the
class struggle still exists, it exists more
intensely.18
In a certain respect, this passage resembles

Foucaults preface to The Order of Things, in
which he reflects upon the kind of limitexperience or epoch elicited by reading a
certain passage in Borges. The passage, a
taxonomy of animals quoted from a fictional
encyclopedia, shattered [] all the familiar
landmarks of my thoughtour thought, the
thought that bears the stamp of our age and
our geography. Such an experience, he goes
on, provides access to the exotic charm of
another system of thought, which in turn
reveals the limitations of our own
[system].19
Whereas the exotic charm of Foucaults
literary limit-experience prompted him to
undertake an archaeological excavation of the

epistemological foundations of the human
sciences. The characteristic system of social
taxonomy that Foucault witnessed in the
streets of New York prompted a very different type of engagement. On 8 February 1971,
less than 3 months after the above-cited
interview, Foucault appeared at a press
conference in the Chapelle Saint-Bernard,
where he exclaimed:
None of us can be sure of avoiding prison.
Less so than ever, today. Police control over
our day-to-day lives is becoming tighter: in
the streets and on the roads; over foreigners
and young people; it is once more an offense
to express an opinion; anti-drug measures are
leading to increasingly arbitrary arrests. We
are living under the sign of la garde vue.20
They tell us that the courts are swamped. We
can see that. But what if it were the police
who had swamped them? They tell us that
the prisons are overpopulated. But what if it
were the population that were being overimprisoned?
Little information is published about prisons;
this is one of the hidden regions of our social
system, one of the black spaces (cases noires)
of our lives. We have the right to know, we
want to know. This is why, together with a
number of magistrates, lawyers, journalists,
doctors and psychologists, we have formed a
Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons.21
Having gone about his academic career until

this period without a sense of class
contrastindeed, not far from imagining
[] that the social struggle, the struggle
between classes, [] was coming to an
endFoucault asserts in the first months of
1971, on the heels of the second revelation
he had received upon perceiving Americanstyle racial and class segregation, that the
prison is a hidden region of class struggle at
the heart of the social system.
One might question Foucaults earnestness
in characterizing himself as having been so
politically naive. For instance, his biographers
and others have documented the public
role that Foucault had already played in the
anti-authoritarian struggles that students and

employees of the French university system
waged against the State in the wake of the
spring of 1968.22 Eribon goes so far as to
remark that it was Foucaults two turbulent
years (196870) at the University of Vincennes
that constituted his entrance into politics,
during which a whole new Foucault was born
[] the Foucault of demonstrations and manifestations; the Foucault of struggles and
critique.23 But Eribon also points out that
this initial period of political engagement,
did not for the moment make a deep
impression on the strictly intellectual register.
At Vincennes Foucault gave a course on
Nietzsche, and the ideas expressed in his
inaugural lecture at the Collge de France in
December 1970 were closer to the
preoccupations of The Archeology of
Knowledge than to his later ideas on power.
His articles and lectures from this period still
bear surprising marks of his earlier
theoretical preoccupations and style.24
Regardless what one takes to be a strictly

intellectual register, the fact remains that the
wave of political struggles that took place in
France between 1968 and 1970, in which
Foucault was an active participant, failed to
elicit a radical reorientation in his written
intellectual production. It was only after he
had witnessed evidence of the racially fashioned class warfare transpiring in the USA
during that time, and had begun to inform
himself about the radical anti-racist struggles
being undertaken in the context of that war,
that Foucault began to theorize power relations in any kind of explicit way. It wasnt
until he had read the writings of the Black
Panthers that Foucault began to formulate
the genealogical method of critique.
After establishing the GIP in February
1971, Foucault began to meet frequently with
Jean Genet, one of the most famous literary
figures in France, who was also a homosexual
and radical political activist. Having been a
ward of the State as a youth, been in and out
of prisons throughout his early life, and
frequently experienced persecution for his
318
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
homosexuality, Genet had a radical critical

perspective on the very disciplinary institutions that would come to occupy Foucault in
the coming years. Genet, who quickly
became a participant in GIP actions,
profoundly influenced Foucaults own political transition during this period. Perhaps the
most far-reaching dimension of this influence
stems from the fact that Genet brought to
Foucaults attention the philosophies and
struggles of the US Black Panther Party. As
Genets biographer Edmund White claims,
Foucault and Genet were mutually attracted
for political reasons, they came together out
of a shared concern for the imprisoned
members of the Black Panther Party.25
In the spring of 1970, at the invitation of the
Black Panthers, Genet had spent 3 months in
the USA. During his time there, he met with
the Panthers and gave lectures and speeches in
support of the campaign to free BPP leaders
and political prisoners Huey P. Newton and
Bobby Seale (Figure 1).26 Genet was also a
supporter of then political prisoners Angela
Y. Davis (imprisoned from 1970 to 1972) and
George Jackson (imprisoned from 1960 to
1971). He had written the preface to Jacksons
published prison letters entitled Soledad
Brother (1970)the French edition of which
was, in 1971, beginning to receive a great deal
of attention among the French left27and
between July 1970 and December 1971 he
made at least 20 statements about Davis,
Jackson and the BPP in print, on the radio or
during demonstrations.28
According to Edmund White, Foucault
and Genet first met at a demonstration in the
summer of 1970, just after Genets visit with
the Panthers. Though I am unaware of any
existing documentation of the encounter, it
would not be unreasonable to assume that
some mention of Genets recent trip was
made, given that Foucault himself was scheduled to visit the USA for the first time just a
few months later. Perhaps that encounter
with Genet oriented Foucaults attention in
his initial exposure to the USA. In any case, if
Foucault required confirmation of his initial
perception of American class struggle, Genet
Figure 1 BPP leader and political prisoner Huey P.

Newton, 1968. Photo by Jeffrey Blankfort.
supplied him with further evidence

evidence that no doubt underlined the role
that race played in American class struggle.
Racism in America, Genet writes in his
preface to Soledad Brother,
constitutes the basis of relations between
white men [sic] and black []. This racism is
scattered, diffused throughout the whole of
America, grim, underhanded, hypocritical,
arrogant. There is one place where we might
think it would cease, but on the contrary, it is
in this place that it reaches its cruelest pitch,
intensifying every second, preying upon
body and soul; it is in this place that racism
becomes a kind of concentration of racism: in
the American prisons [].29
Genet assuredly put Daviss and Jacksons

prison writings in Foucaults hands at this
time. A US political prisoner at the time,
Angela Y. Davis was a prominent figure in
the black liberation movement. She studied

political philosophy with Marxist scholars
Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse
during the 1960s, was a member of the US
Communist Party (in which she served as
Vice Presidential candidate in 1980 and 1984)
and organized with the Black Panther Party.
She also was an active member of the Soledad
Brothers Defense Committeean organization working to free Soledad political prisoners Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette and
George Jackson.30
George Jackson was sentenced to one year
to life at age 18 for his role in a convenience
store robbery. Politicized while imprisoned,
Jackson studied history, politics and political
economy, reading such figures as Fanon,
Malcolm X, Marx, Mao and Guevara.
Renowned by his peers for his discipline and
strength, intellect and commitment, Jackson
eventually became a Field Marshall of the
Black Panther Party. He was as an incisive
spokesperson, strategist and activist in the
American anti-racist struggles of the period,
and served as the principal BPP organizer
and educator within the American prison
system. As we will discuss in further detail,
he was also assassinated by the State on
account of that service.
Davis and Jackson were among the first
and, without a doubt, among the most incisiveto critically appraise the strategic role
that the prison system played in the government of Americas colonized population. In
the letters, notebooks and articles that they
each wrote while imprisoned31which were
published (many in The Black Panther
newspaper in 1970 and 1971) and circulated
internationallyDavis and Jackson exposed
the relationship between the rising number
of political prisoners in the USA and the
imprisonment of rapidly increasing numbers
of poor people of color. They created a
vocabulary for understanding the reciprocal
social process by which radical political
activism was criminalized and crime
politicized. They brought to light the fact
that, since its inception, the prison system
has served the dual, racially motivated function of political weapon of the State and
surplus labor detention center for American

capital; that American prisons overwhelmingly confine, at once, the radical political
activists and the unemployed and disenfranchised people that live within US racialized
communities.32
By exposing the racializing and colonizing
functions of the prison system, Davis and
Jackson not only linked the genealogy of the
prison to the regime of chattel slavery,33 they
placed the issue of prison abolition at the
heart of the anti-racist and decolonization
struggles of their time. While Daviss past
and continued contributions to the movements for prison abolition and black liberation are more generally known, Jacksons
contributions have been subject, along with
his life, to more concerted annihilation by the
State. Writing from behind bars in 1971,
Davis indicates the centrality of Jacksons
contributions to the third world liberation
struggles of the period.
Soledad Brother [] perhaps more than any
other [volume], has given impetus and shaped
the direction of the growing support
movement outside the prisons. George, from
behind the seemingly impenetrable walls, has
placed the issue of the prison struggle
squarely on the agenda of the peoples
movement for revolutionary change. []
Through Georges life and the lives of
thousands of other brothers and sisters, the
absolute necessity for extending the struggle
of Black and third world people into the
prison system itself becomes unmistakably
clear.34
Largely inspired by Daviss and Jacksons

analyses of and mobilization against
the prison system, and by the BPPs role in
the American decolonization movement, the
Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons
engaged in a series of political interventions
between 1971 and 1972. To conclude the
present section of analysis, I would like to
simply point out some of the remaining facts
of Foucaults encounter with the works of
the Black Panther Party, and indicate the way
in which this encounter guides Foucault
320
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
toward the concerns that would preoccupy

him during the first half of the 1970s.
During the short period of their activity,
the GIP published four pamphlets under the
series title Intolrable.35 The first two were
issued by the anarchist press Champs Libre in
June 1971, and included the results of a series
of investigations of the Parisian prison system
that the GIP had conducted in the spring of
1971.36 These pamphlets reproduced a few
GIP-generated questionnaires that had been
completed in-full by prisoners, first-hand
accounts of prison life written by prisoners
and a selection of the most characteristic
responses provided by prisoners to the questionnaires. The last two issues were published
by Gallimard in November 1971 and December 1972, respectively. The last issue, entitled
Suicides de prison,37 and published jointly
with the Comit dAction des Prisonniers and
the Association pour la Dfense des Droits
des Dtenus, publicized and analyzed the 32
suicides that occurred in French prisons in
1972. The pamphlet included a series of casehistories and prison letters of the prisoners
who had committed suicide, of which a
quarter were immigrants and the majority
were in their 20s.
The third issue was devoted to the life and
assassination of US political prisoner and
Black Panther Party Field Marshall George
Jackson.38 The contents of this pamphlet will
feature prominently in my discussion in
Section III, devoted to the subject of the
Panthers influence on Foucaults genealogical work. Here it must be mentioned that
the BPPs influence on the GIP was such
that the GIP decided to make contact with
the Panthers. In June of 1971, GIP activist
Catherine von Blow went to California and
met with Angela Y. Davis and George
Jackson, each of whom was imprisoned at
the time.39 She brought many documents
back from her meetings, which she, Foucault
and Genet studied in depth.40
Genet was eager to put together a book in
support of George Jackson, who was going
on trial in August alongside Fleeta Drumgo
and John Clutchette. The three prisoners,
who were charged with murdering a prison

guard in retaliation for the murder of three
black activists by a guard in Californias
Soledad prison, became known as the
Soledad Brothers and a campaign for their
liberation was organized that attained
international scope. The GIP wanted to
contribute to this campaign and increase the
visibility of American political prisoners, and
the American prison struggle more generally,
in France.
After Jackson was assassinated in August
1971, the GIP decided to issue the third
pamphlet devoted to his life and assassination. As its back cover announced, this
document sought to inform its audience that,
[i]n America, assassination was and today
remains a mode of political action. Foucault
et al. also argue, as the concluding line of the
pamphlet reads, that [t]he prison struggle
has become a new front of the revolution.
Before turning to the writings of the
Panthers themselves and then to Foucaults
appropriation of them, allow me to reproduce part of the three-page introduction to
the GIPs first pamphlet, which published
the results of their investigations of the
Parisian prison system. This introduction,
unsigned but written by Foucault, was
composed at precisely the time when the
GIP made contact with the Black Panthers,
and in it one can clearly see the rudiments
of the genealogical method coming into
being.
1. These investigations are not designed to
improve or soften an oppressive power, or
make it tolerable. They are designed to attack
it at those points where it is exercised under a
different namethat of justice, technology,
knowledge or objectivity. Each investigation
must therefore be a political act.
2. They are aimed at specific targets, at
institutions which have names and places,
people in charge and governorsand which
claim victims and inspire revolts, even among
those in charge of them. Each investigation
must therefore be the first episode in a
struggle.
3. They bring together, around these specific

targets, different social strata which the ruling
class has kept apart thanks to the interplay of
social hierarchies and divergent economic
interests. They must bring down barriers
which are indispensable to power by uniting
prisoners, lawyers and magistrates, or even
doctors, patients and hospital personnel.
Each investigation must constitute a front
an offensive frontat each important
strategic point.
4. These investigations are not being made by
a group of technicians working from the
outside; the investigators are those who are
being investigated. It is up to them to take the
word, to bring down the barriers, to express
what is intolerable, and to tolerate it no
longer. It is up to them to take responsibility
for the struggle which will prevent oppression
from being exercised.41
It should be recalled that the above passage

was composed less than 1 year after Foucault
had admitted to being not far from imagining [] that the social struggle, the struggle
between classes, [] was coming to an end.
Just over 2 years prior to the writing of this
document Foucault was concerned with the
formation of enunciative modalities, the
historical a priori and the history of ideas.
And yet, already in the summer of 1971,
Foucault has begun to consider the knowledge-producing activity of investigation or
inquiry (enqute) as a political act, as an
episode or front in a struggle.
In a 1976 interview, Foucault commented
on the shift that his work had undergone in
the years since the publication of The Order
of Things (1966).
I wrote [The Order of Things] at a moment
of transition. Until then, it seems to me that
I accepted the traditional conception of
power, power as an essentially legal
mechanism, what the law says, that which
forbids, that which says no, with a whole
string of negative effects: exclusion,
rejection, barriers, denial, dissimulation, etc.
Now I find that conception inadequate.
[T]his occurred to me in the course of a
concrete experience I had around 197172,
regarding prisons. Prisons convinced me that

power should not be considered in terms of
law but in terms of technology, in terms of
tactics and strategy, and it was this
substitution of a technical and strategical
grid for a legal and negative grid that I tried
to set up in Discipline and Punish, and then
use in History of Sexuality.42
It is certainly true that Foucaults concrete

experience with the GIP (to which he here
refers) occasioned the theoretical and political
reorientation he underwent during those
years. There is also no doubt that this
concrete experience motivated his later reconceptualization of power relations. However,
the preceding account neglects to point out a
salient feature of the story: it was initially, if
not primarily, the Black Panthers analyses of
and mobilization against American racism
and, in particular, Angela Y. Daviss and
George Jacksons analyses of the prison
system as a strategic mechanism in the consolidation of American governmental authority,
that both directed Foucaults regard toward
the institution of the prison and led Foucault
to conceptualize power through the grid of
tactics and strategy, that is, through the
analytic of war.
II. 196672: politics and war in the

philosophies and struggles of the Black
Panther Party
What follows does not aspire to be either an
exhaustive historical treatment of the formation and struggles of the Black Panther Party,
or a comprehensive account of its foundational
philosophies and aims. Tasks such as these
warrant, and have received, volumes unto
themselves.43 From an orthodox historiographical perspective, the analysis undertaken
in this section must restrict itself in two related
dimensions: one empirical, one thematic. Insofar as it seeks to trace the as yet undisclosed
influence that the Black Panther Party exerted
on Foucaults genealogical method, the analysis must primarily restrict itself to those texts
of and about the BPP which we know or can
322
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
reasonably assume that Foucault read, and to

the themes that Foucault appropriated from
those texts.44 From this perspective, the
present section serves as the connecting thread
between the initiatory documentary (Section
I) and conceptual (Section III) facets of an
historical inquiry that, in certain respects, does
not depart significantly from the orthodox
method of the history of ideas.
However, the present investigation as a
whole also exceeds the restrictions of such an
orthodox historiographical approach. It not
only aims to expose the silenced and subjugated genealogy of Foucaults own genealogical method, it also aspires to bring the local,
discontinuous, and generally disqualified and
delegitimized knowledges and struggles of
the Black Panthers into play in the strength
that they possess in themselvesto enable
them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of Foucaults appropriation of them. In
accordance with this aim, my treatment of
the philosophies and struggles of the BPP
will also break the methodological restrictions mentioned above, in order to follow
some of the ways that the issues of politics,
war and survival are internally (and sometimes discontinuously) developed by the
BPP itself, from within its own specific
historico-political circumstances. Seen from
this latter perspective, the present section can
be viewed as the setting-into-motion of a
critical current that courses through Sections
II through IV and that gives rise to questions
about the politics of contemporary truthbearing discourses and the practices of subjugation that silently undergird them.
The primary features of the philosophies
of the Black Panther Party that will orient
this inquiry are: (1) the view that blacks in
the USA are an internally colonized population; (2) an understanding that the official
discursive and visible practices of law and
orderincluding the constitutional documents founding American sovereigntyare,
in essence, tactical deployments within that
racist colonial war; (3) the position that,
within that colonial context, politics and selfdefensepolitics and warare functionally
inseparable; and (4) the argument that the

American prison system plays a strategically
privileged role in the colonial oppression of
black people.
One of the central features of the philosophies of the Black Panther Party was the
view that the black population within the
USA constituted an internal, racialized
colonyone constantly threatened, impoverished and criminalized by the occupying
forces of American governmental authority.
An argument at the heart of this critique was
the following: beneath the law and order of
American government, beneath the ostensible peace of American civil society, a racially
fashioned war is being continuously and
permanently waged against the black
community. The type of peace that American
governmental and civil institutions officially
prescribe, according to this argument, is not
genuinely pacific at all but rather is itself a
form of coded warfare.
The political strategies that emerged from
this assessment varied in tandem with the
changing inner and outer circumstances of
the Party. For example, in the early years of
the Partys existence, this philosophy fueled
an agenda of black nationalisma political
philosophy whose genealogical lineage
extends back from Frantz Fanon and the prepilgrimage works of Malcolm X, to figures
such as Marcus Garvey, Nat Turner and
Martin Delaney.45 As early as 1967, however,
the Party had embraced a veritably internationalist, or what Newton in 1971 referred to
as an intercommunalist, perspective which
emphasized broad-based coalition-building
and viewed the liberation of the black colony
in a functional relationship with revolution
in the USA as a whole.46
Despite such differences of strategy, at the
root of the BPPs philosophies, as well as
those of many other organizations in the
black power movement, was an assessment of
the situation of African Americans as one of
internal colonization. Eldridge Cleaver
provides an articulation of this position in an
article published in Ramparts magazine in
May 1968 entitled The Land Question and
Black Liberation, where he argues against

political analyses that ignore the distinction
and the contradiction between the white
mother country and the black colony. He
writes:
Black people are a stolen people held in a
colonial status on stolen land, and any
analysis which does not acknowledge the
colonial status of black people cannot hope
to deal with the real problem []. Black
power must be viewed as the projection of
sovereignty, an embryonic sovereignty that
black people can focus on and through
which they can make distinctions between
themselves and others, between themselves
and their enemiesin short, between the
white mother country of America and the
black colony dispersed throughout the
continent on absentee-owned land, making
Afro-America a decentralized colony. Black
power says to black people that it is
possible for them to build a national
organization on somebody elses land [].
In fact, when he moved to found the
organization of Afro-American Unity, this
is precisely what Malcolm X was doing,
founding a government in exile for a people
in exile.47
One of the features of this passage that is

typical of the BPP revolutionary vocabulary
is Cleavers employment of a counter-hegemonic understanding of American history
in this case, an historical knowledge of the
enslavement and displacement of black
peopleas simultaneously a description of
the ongoing struggle for black liberation and
a weapon in that struggle. Throughout the
BPPs activity, this kind of counter-historical
knowledge was central to their mode of
political critique and struggle. History, for
the BPP, was not only a knowledge of past
struggles, it was a vehicle for refashioning
African American identity, and a knowledge
that was strategically deployed within a field
of present struggles. The political strategies
of the black liberation movement were
consistently articulated through this kind of
counter-historical knowledge.
Two of the most salient components of

black liberationist counter-history can be
formulated as follows: (a) American sovereignty was founded upon and continues to be
underpinned by the economic enslavement
and political disenfranchisement of black
people, and (b) the American institution of
slavery was never comprehensively abolished, but rather persists into the present in
altered forms. In other words, US sovereignty does not and has never protected or
guaranteed the freedom of black people;
Black Reconstruction failed.
These counter-historical principles propel
the revolutionary demands of the Black
Panther Party from its inception. The BPP
declared rights for black people that the USA
had failed to recognize and, in so doing,
effectively declared war on the USA by
declaring rights; or rather, by declaring
rights, the BPP rendered explicit the ongoing, undeclared war being waged against
black people in and by the USA.
The Ten-Point Platform and Program of
the Black Panther Party of October 1966
was precisely such a declaration of rights/
war. Indeed, Point Ten of the Platform and
Program employed the language of the US
Constitution itself to justify the revolutionary overthrow of the sovereignty founded
therein:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that
all men [sic] are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to
secure these rights, governments are instituted
among men [sic], deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed; that,
whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of the
people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
a new government, laying its foundation on
such principles, and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their safety and happiness. [] [W]hen
a long train of abuses and usurpations,
pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a
design to reduce them under absolute
324
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
despotism, it is [the peoples] right, it is their

duty, to throw off such government, and to
provide new guards for their future
security.48
The BPP called for the implementation of

Point Number Ten of the Black Panther
Party Platform and Program on 19 June 1970,
the 107th anniversary of the Emancipation
Proclamation. The Panthers and their
supporters gathered on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC where
BPP Chief of Staff David Hilliard issued a call
for a revolutionary peoples constitutional
convention to be convened on 7 September,
Labor Day, in Philadelphia.49 In this call, the
BPP referred to the USA as a monster and
barbaric organization characterized by
savage wars of aggression, mass murder,
genocide, and shameless slaughter of the
people of the world; impudent, arrogant
White Racism; and a naked, brazen attempt to
perpetuate White Supremacy on a world
scale. The BPP then goes on to criticize the
existing US Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation, making point-by-point
reference to the US Bill of Rights in order to
expose the permanent colonial war being
waged against black people by the State. The
call is an exemplar of black liberationist
counter-history, and is worth citing at length.
The end result of the EMANCIPATION
PROCLAMATION was supposed to be the
freedom and liberation of Black people from
the cruel shackles of chattel slavery. And yet,
100 and 7 years later, today, Black people still
are not free. Where is that freedom
supposedly granted to our people by THE
EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
and guaranteed to us by the Constitution of
the United States?
Is it in the many Civil Rights Bills that have
been passed to try to hide the irrelevance of
the Constitution for Black People?
Is it in the blood-shed and lives lost by Black
People when America brings Law and
Order to the ghetto in the same fashion and
by those same forces that export Freedom
and Democracy to Korea, to Vietnam, to

Africa, Asia, and Latin America?
Is it the right to political activity when the
U.S.A. attempts to legally murder Bobby
Seale, Chairman of the Black Panther Party,
for his political beliefs?
Where was that right when brother Malcolm
was murdered, when Martin Luther King was
gunned down?
Where is Freedom when peoples right to
Freedom of Speech is denied to the point
of murder? When attempts at Freedom of
the Press brings bombings and lynchings?
Where is Freedom when the right to
peacefully assemble brings on massacres?
Where is our right to keep and bear arms
when Black People are attacked by the Racist
Gestapo of America? Where is religious
freedom when places of worship become the
scene of shoot-ins and bomb-ins? Where is
the right to vote regardless of race or color
when murder takes place at the voting polls?
Are we free when we are not even secure
from being savagely murdered in our sleep by
policemen who stand blatantly before the
world but yet go unpunished? Is that
equal protection before the laws? The
empty promise of the Constitution to
establish justice lies exposed to the world
by the reality of Black Peoples existence. For
over 400 years now, Black people have
suffered an unbroken chain of abuse at the
hands of White America. For 400 years we
have been treated as Americas footstool.
This fact is so clear that it requires no
argumentation.
The Constitution of the U.S.A. does not and
never has protected our people or guaranteed
to us those lofty ideals enshrined within it.
When the Constitution was first adopted we
were held as slaves. We were held in slavery
under the Constitution. We have suffered
every form of indignity and imposition under
the Constitution, from economic
exploitation, political subjugation, to
physical extermination.
We need no further evidence that there is
something wrong with the Constitution of the
United States of America. We have had our

Human Rights denied and violated perpetually
under this Constitutionfor hundreds of
years. As a people, we have received neither the
Equal Protection of the Laws nor Due Process
of Law. [] The Constitution of the United
States does not guarantee and protect our
Economic Rights, or our Political Rights, nor
our Social Rights. It does not even guarantee
and protect our most basic Human Right, the
right to LIVE! []
Black people can no longer either respect the
U.S. Constitution, look to it with hope, or
live under it. [] We repudiate, emphatically,
all documents, Laws, Conventions, and
Practices that allow this sorry state of affairs
to existincluding the Constitution of the
United States. []
WE THEREFORE, CALL FOR A
REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLES
CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION,
TO BE CONVENED BY THE
AMERICAN PEOPLE, TO WRITE A
NEW CONSTITUTION THAT WILL
GUARANTEE AND DELIVER TO
EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN THE

INVIOLABLE HUMAN RIGHT TO
LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF
HAPPINESS!50
From the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street

Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama,
which killed Carol McNair, Cynthia
Wesley, Carole Roberts and Addie Mae
Collinsall four of them black girls under
the age of 15to the FBIs assassination of
the Chicago Chapter Field Marshall of the
BPP Fred Hampton during his sleep, each
and every charge issued in the BPPs call
refers to distinct and isolatable instances of
the recent history of black people in America at that time. Considered together, this
long train of abuses and usurpations, invariably pursuing the oppression of black
people, exposes the official documents, laws,
conventions and practices of American
political authority as tactical deployments
within a permanent racist war against black
people.
It is precisely on account of this perceived
failure of American sovereignty to guarantee
and protect black peoples very right to
livemoreover, on account of its persistent
and explicit attack on that rightthat the
BPP conceived of politics and war as functionally inseparable (Figure 2).
In Seize the Time: The Story of the Black
Panther Party and Huey Newton, written in
prison in 1968, Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale recounts a situation from
the early phases of growth of the BPP that
helps throw the issue of politics and war in
relief. In Seales account, BPP members
encountered a black nationalist faction that
went by the name of the Black Panther Party
of Northern California. Huey Newton,
Bobby Seale and other members of the BPP
met with the latter group in the planning of a
Malcolm X Memorial Day Conference
scheduled in San Francisco on the date
Malcolm X was assassinated. Kenny Freeman, one of the members of the other group,
asked the members of the BPP if they wanted
to speak, and Newton agreed.
Figure 2 BPP Brooklyn, Defend the Ghetto (The Black Panthers Speak, Da Capo Press).
Figure 2 BPP Brooklyn, Defend the Ghetto (The Black

Panthers Speak, Da Capo Press).
326
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3

Vince Lynth said, Thats good, because you
can get into the history of self-defense.
Huey said, Ill be talking about politics.
Kenny Freeman popped up and said, Do

you want to speak on self-defense or
politics?
Huey said, It doesnt make any difference,
theyre both one and the same. They went
through some intellectual changes, with a few
statements here and thereRoy Ballard,
Kenny Freeman, and a couple other people
and came back to the same question that they
had asked Huey about a minute before. Do
you want to speak on self-defense or
politics? Huey said that theyre both one
and the same thing.
If Im talking about self-defense, Im talking
about politics; if Im talking about politics,
Im talking about self-defense. You cant
separate them.
They didnt understand Huey when he said,
Politics is war without bloodshed, and war
is politics with bloodshed, a continuation of
politics with bloodshed. They didnt
understand antagonistic contradictions and
non-antagonistic contradictions both being
lodged in the arena of politics. They didnt
understand that the plight of black peoples
struggle here in the confines of decadent
America is a political-military whole, unified
within itself.
[] Huey said, very firmly to all of them,
that we would speak, and when we speak it
wont make any difference if were talking
about self-defense, or if were talking about
politics. If were talking about politics and
the survival of black people, its the same
thing.51
Black peoples struggle for survival in

America, on Newtons and Seales account, is
a political-military whole, unified within
itself. If black people are to organize themselves in the effort to secure the economic and
political resources necessary to guarantee
their freedom, they will need to defend themselves militarily, because their livelihood is
not protected by American governmental

authority. In the case of the Black Panthers, a
simple glance at the history of repressive
measures employed by the State to annihilate
and discredit themsuch as the FBIs
Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO)52only confirms Newtons and
Seales prediction that activism aimed at black
liberation will be met with attacks upon the
sovereignty and vitality of black people.53 As
Seale would argue just 1 year later in 1969:
Because of [the Ten-Point Platform and
Program of the Black Panther Party], we have
political prisoners. We have dead members.
We have a war going on. The war started 400
years ago, and the war must be ended.54
The BPP originally organized itself with
the objective of ending this colonial war.
Consider, for example, the action taken by
the Party in response to the death of Denzil
Dowell in early 1967.55 Dowell, a young
black youth living in Richmond, California,
had been shot and killed by police, whose
official account of the slaying explicitly
contradicted dozens of black eyewitnesses.
Having been called by the Dowell family to
investigate, the BPP decided to hold a rally in
the neighborhood to expose the facts of the
killing and to exhibit the political importance
of self-defense. Assuming the police would
attempt to stop the rally, the Panthers
decided to demonstrate their point on site
and set up armed guards to secure the event.
When hundreds of black people turned
out, many carrying their own guns, the
police who came to stop the rally rapidly
retreated. Several Panthers addressed the
crowd and explained the Partys program.
Then Huey Newton spoke.
The masses of the people want peace. The
masses of the people do not want war. The
Black Panther Party advocates the abolition
of war. But at the same time, we realize that
the only way you can get rid of war, many
times, is through a process of war. Therefore,
the only way you can get rid of guns is to get
rid of the guns of the oppressor. The people
must be able to pick up guns, to defend
themselves.56

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
initially came into existence for precisely the
reason that its original name suggests: selfdefense, that is, the autonomous defense of
the black community against the experienced
threat of police brutality and other forms of
State violence.57 Newton went to great
lengths to stress that arms were to serve a
political purpose and were not to be viewed in
purely military terms. At the outset, that
political purpose was primarily defensive in
nature. The initial actions undertaken by the
Party were to trail police cars through the
Oakland ghettos, equipped with guns and
law books, in order to ensure that whenever
black men or women were stopped by the
police, their constitutional rights were not
violated (Figure 3).
As the Party gained admiration and
support from the black community, and by
1967 when the Party had attained the level of
a national organization with myriad local
chapters, it dropped for Self-Defense from
its name and greatly expanded the nature of
its community involvement. The political
purpose of the Party expanded to include the
productive procurement of the social and
economic resources necessary for the survival
of the black community. These revolutionary
survival programs included not only the
Campaign for Community Control of Police,
but the Free Breakfast for Children Program,
Free Health Clinics, Free Clothing Program,
Liberation Schools and the Free Busing to
Prisons Program so that members of the black
community could maintain affective ties with
their loved ones in the prison system.
The deepening of the BPPs community
involvement and the implementation of its
many survival programs elicited even more
violence from the State. Seale discusses the
way in which the police force deliberately
attempted to attack and dismantle the
survival programs set up by the Black
Panther Party through the related techniques
of intimidation and criminalization.
Figure 2 BPP Berkeley, organized petition for community control of police, summer 1970 (Billy X Jennings, www.itsabouttimebpp.com).
The cops in Los Angeles and several other

places have walked in on the Free Breakfast
for Children Program to try to intimidate the

children and the Party. They come down
there with their guns, they draw a gun or
two, say a few words and walk all over the
place, with shotguns in their hands. Then the
little kids go home and say, Mama, the
police came into the Breakfast for Children
Program. This is the power structures
technique to try to destroy the program. Its
an attempt to scare the people away from
sending their children to the Breakfast
Program and at the same time, trying to
intimidate the Black Panther Party.
Meanwhile, through the politicians and the
media they try to mislead the people about
the value of such a program and the political
nature of such a program. []
The Black Panther Party is not stupid at all in
understanding the politics of the situation.
We understand that the avaricious,
demagogic, ruling class will use racist police
departments and mass media to distort the
real objectives of the Black Panther Party.
The more were successful with the
programs, the more well be attacked. We
dont take guns with us to implement these
programs, but we understand and know from
our own history that were going to be
attacked, and that we have to be able to
defend ourselves. Theyre going to attack us
viciously and fascistically and try to say it
was all justifiable homicide, in the same
manner theyve always attacked black people
in the black communities.
[] The power structure metes this violence
upon the Black Panther Party because weve
implemented programs that are actually
exposing the government, and theyre being
implemented and put together by a
revolutionary political party.
The freeing of political prisoners is also on
the program of the Black Panther Party,
because we have now, at this writing [1968],
over 300 Black Panthers who have court cases
that are pending. In addition there have been
hundreds of arrests, unjust arrests of Party
members, who were exercising their
constitutional rights. We believe in exercising
our constitutional rights of freedom of
assembly, of freedom of the press (the Black
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
328
Figure 3 BPP Berkeley, organized petition for community control of police, summer 1970 (Billy X Jennings,
www.itsabouttimebpp.com).
Panther Party newspaper), our constitutional

right to bear arms, to be able to defend
ourselves when attacked, and all the others
[i.e. constitutional rights]. So weve been
arrested.
What has to be understood is that they intend
to destroy our basic [survival] programs. This
is very important to understand. The fact that
they murder Black Panther Party members,
conduct attacks and raids on our offices,
arrest us and lie about us, is all an attempt to
stop these basic programs that were putting
together in the community. The people learn
from these programs because theyre clear
examples, and the power structure wants to
stop that learning.58
The States attacks on the BPPs survival

programs exemplify the way that the institutions of US political authority systematically
produced and maintained the impoverishment of black communities while simultaneously relying upon the power and support
of those communities for the authorization
and maintenance of its own sovereignty. The
survival programs were clear examples of the
black communitys power of autonomous
self-valorization and determinationa power
independent from (and in conflict with) US
governmental and civil institutions. This is
one of the things that Seale is referring to
when he writes of the educational function of
the programs: they were vehicles through
which members of the black community
could learn and experience their own power.
Given that US political authority relied upon
and was invested in fostering the perception
among members of the black community that
they were dependent upon the State for their
security and well-being, the education that
was taking place in the Black Panther Partys
survival programs about the autonomous
power of the black community was, as Seale
critically points out, a kind of learning that
the power structure wanted to put a stop to.
The primary technique by which American
institutions of political and civil governance
attempted to accomplish this goal, as is
evidenced by the BPPs need for a free
political prisoners program, was the criminalization of the BPPs revolutionary survival
programs along with the self-defense methods
resorted to in order to protect them. Government programs such as the FBIs Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) were
established for the express purpose of criminalizing, discrediting and neutralizing black
liberation movements. As explicitly outlined
by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a 1968
memorandum to FBI Field Offices: The
purpose of [COINTELPRO] is to expose,
disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise
neutralize the activities of black nationalist,
hate-type organizations and groupings, their
leadership, spokesmen, membership, and
supporters, and to counter their propensity
for violence and civil disorder.59
A brief example drawn from the autobiography of the late (and dearly missed) Safiya
Bukhari-Alston throws this governing
tendency into relief. Bukhari-Alston was a
member of the Black Panther Party and a
lifetime social justice activist. In Coming of
Age: A Black Revolutionary, she describes
the event that awakened her to political
consciousness and prompted her to join the
BPP, an organization with whose revolutionary politics she previously disagreed. Sent by
her college sorority to help disadvantaged
children in Harlem as part of a service
project, she decided to volunteer for one of
many of the Black Panther community
service enterprises: the Free Breakfast
Program for Children.
I couldnt get into the politics of the Black
Panther Party, but I could volunteer to feed
some hungry children; you see, children
deserve a good start and you have to feed
them for them to live to learn. Its hard to
think of reading and arithmetic when your
stomachs growling.
Every morning, at 5:00 my daughter and I
would get ready and go to the Center where I
was working on the Breakfast Program
cook and serve breakfast, sometimes talk to
children about problems they were
encountering and sometimes help them with
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CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
their homework. Everything was going along

smoothly until the number of children
coming began to fall off. Finally, I began to
question the children and found out that the
police had been telling the parents in the
neighborhood not to send their children to
the Program because we were feeding them
poisoned food.
Its one thing to hear about underhanded
things the police doyou can ignore it
thenbut its totally different to experience it
for yourselfyou either lie to yourself or
face it. I chose to face it and find out why the
police felt it was so important to keep Black
children from being fed that they told lies. I
went back to the Black Panther Party and
started attending some of their Community
Political Education Classes.60
As Bukhari-Alstons testimony makes

quite explicit, the police felt it was so important to keep black children from being served
by the autonomous actions of their own
community that they explicitly fabricated a
narrative of criminality in order to obstruct
such action. Dont send your children to
participate in the Black Panther Party Free
Breakfast Program for Children, because the
Black Panthers are criminals trying to kill
your children. In this act, the police fashions
the Party as criminals and the potential beneficiaries of the Partys programs as victims
who are in need of protection from the
Statethe same State whose systemic
oppression of black people motivated the
autonomous organization of the BPP to
begin with. The State executes acts of governance such as this in order to dismantle the
radical political movements that are questioning the very foundations of its political
authority.
The criminalization of black resistance to
oppression, as participants in the black liberation struggle have always well-understood,
is by no means a phenomenon that began
with the BPP. Angela Y. Davis, a BPP
member and political prisoner at the time,
provided an incisive articulation of the
historical criminalization of black political
resistance in Political Prisoners, Prisons, and
Black Liberation. Written from behind bars

in May 1971, just weeks before GIP member
Catherine von Blows visit, this essay is
what Joy James calls perhaps the first essay
authored by an African-American woman
within the genre of contemporary black
protest and prison literature.61 In this work,
Davis cites numerous extra-legal acts of resistance to terror and oppression in black
history, from the underground railroad and
abolitionist opposition to the fugitive slave
laws, to the sit-ins of the civil rights era, to
the 11 members of the L.A. Chapter of the
BPP who in the spring of 1970, took up arms
to defend themselves from an assault initiated
by the local police force on their office and
on their persons.
All these historical instances involving the
overt violation of the laws of the land
converge around an unmistakable common
denominator. At stake has been the collective
welfare and survival of a people. []
Whenever blacks in struggle have recourse to
self-defense, particularly armed self-defense,
it is twisted and distorted on official levels
and ultimately rendered synonymous with
criminal aggression. On the other hand, when
policemen are clearly indulging in acts of
criminal aggression, officially they are
defending themselves through justifiable
assault or justifiable homicide. [] The
political act is defined as criminal in order to
discredit radical and revolutionary
movements. The political event is reduced to
a criminal event in order to affirm the
absolute invulnerability of the existing order.
[] As the black liberation movement and
other progressive struggles increase in
magnitude and intensity, the judicial system
and its extension, the penal system,
consequently become key weapons in the
states fight to preserve the existing
conditions of class domination, therefore
racism, poverty, and war.62
By exposing the reciprocal link between

black survival and black resistance, and relating them to the processes by which such
survival and resistance are ritually attacked,
distorted and criminalized on official levels,

Daviss account gives us an indication of the
historical experience that motivated the Black
Panther Party to posit politics and war as functionally inseparable. Put simply, struggles for
black survival and liberation have consistently
been compelled to openly make recourse to
extra-legal action, and they have just as consistently been met with State violence and terror.
It is precisely the counter-revolutionary
violence and terror waged against the BPPs
revolutionary survival programs that led BPP
Field Marshall George Jackson to assume the
role, from within the American prison
system, of preparing military protection for
those programs; for, without such protection,
their continuation would have been inconceivable. If the American prison system
played a strategic role in the colonization of
the black communitynot only as an apparatus that criminalizes and detains the radical
community activists of black liberationist
organizations, but also as a surrogate solution
to the social problems associated with
poverty and racismJackson transformed
the prison, granting it a strategic role in the
decolonization of the black community.63
In a 29 March 1971 interview transcribed
and published in The Black Panther, which the
GIP translated and published in LAssassinat
de George Jackson later that year, Jackson
argues the following:
I feel that the building of revolutionary
consciousness of the prisoner class is
paramount in the overall development of a
hard left revolutionary cadre. And I repeat
cadre. Of course, the revolution has to be
carried out by the masses. But we need a
cadre; we need a bodyguard; a political
worker needs a bodyguard. We [i.e. the
prisoner class] see ourselves as performing
that function. The terms of existence here in
the joint conditions [sic] the brothers for that
type of work. Although I have become more
political recently, from listening to Comrade
[Huey] Newton, and from reading the [Black
Panther] Party paper, Ive gained a clear
understanding of the tie-in between political
and military activities. I still see my function
as military. [] I feel that any movement on
our part, political, will have to be

accompanied by a latent threat. And all the
projects for survival that comrade Newton
has started and developed, I think that theyre
going to have to be defended.64
Jackson shared Newtons and Seales

assessment that black peoples struggle for
survival in America was a political-military
whole, unified within itself. Organizing and
educating from within the prison, he
attempted to transform the prisonwhat
Davis called a key weapon in the states
fight to preserve the existing conditions of
class domination, racism, poverty, and
warinto a tool for revolutionary mobilization (Figure 4). And it was his principled
commitment to the politico-military struggle
for black liberation that ultimately magnetized the counter-revolutionary bullets of the
State to his person. Jackson was assassinated
Figure 4 Cover page of The Black Panther newspaper announcing the establishment of the San Quentin
Branch of the Black Panther Party, co-founded by
George Jackson (The Black Panther, 27 February 1971).
332
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
by San Quentin prison guards on 21 August

1971.
The written and practical works of George
Jackson and Angela Y. Davis played a fundamental role in galvanizing the international
prison abolition movement of the 1970s. And
more than any other Black Panther intellectual, it was Davis and Jackson who exerted
the greatest influence on Foucaults thinking
about politics during this period.65 In the
following section I will analyze their work in
further detail, and assess the manner in which
Foucault appropriates it.
Figure 4 San Quentin Branch of the BPP opens, February 1971 (The Black Panther, 27 February 1971).
III. 197176: black power in the Collge de

France?
The editors of the recently published anthology Le Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons:
Archive dune lutte, 19701972 corroborate
the formative effect that the US black liberation movement had on the GIP and other
constituents of the radical political movement
in France during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It is, above all, the GIPs engagement with
the American situation that is the most
important. [] The resistance movements in
the United Statesand particularly the black
liberation movementsustained the postMay 1968 French movement and contributed
to the redefinition of political action.66
In this section, I will inquire further into the

sustaining contribution that the black liberation movement made to the redefinition of
political action and the manner in which that
contribution gets appropriated and rearticulated by Foucault and the GIP. Through this
consideration it will become apparent that
the events of revolutionary anti-racist struggle in the USA were the primary inspiration
for Foucaults genealogical reorientation.
These events, coupled with the counterrevolutionary terror that the State unleashed
in response to them, exposed American
politics as a continuation of war, which then
served as the (unacknowledged) model for
Foucaults reflections on the continuity of
politics and warfare in the published works

of 197576.67
The editors of the anthology on the GIP
call attention to two events in particular that
generated strong mobilization in both France
and Italy. The first of these was the political
assassination of George Jackson in August
1971. The second was the prisoner revolt that
took place at Attica State Correctional
Facility in New York in September 1971.68
On 21 August 1971, a group of revolutionary prisoners, George Jackson among them,
took control of the first-floor tier of San
Quentin prison, taking four hostages and
releasing the other prisoners from their cells.
Jackson, who at a certain point exited the
adjustment center door, was gunned down
in the yard by a sniper guard. Having been
shot in the back, Jackson bled to death on the
asphalt. The some 30 minutes during which
these events took place are shrouded in obscurity.69 Fellow prisoners and companions of
Jackson, such as Luis Talamantez, have called
the event the half-hour revolution. San
Quentin prison authorities referred to it as a
riot, a massacre and a failed escape attempt
lacking precise organization or objective. One
thing about which there is rather widespread
agreement is that the account of the events
given by the San Quentin prison authorities is
internally inconsistent. The Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons scoured the accounts
published in the popular American press in
the weeks following the assassination. Having
exposed the blatant inconsistencies among
them, they wrote the following.
A man who described the death of his
neighbor with only half the incongruities that
have been provided by the director of San
Quentin on the death of Jackson would be
immediately accused of the murder. []
Jacksons murder will never be prosecuted by
the American justice system. No court will
seriously attempt to find out what took place;
it is an act of war. And what has been
published by the established power, the
prison administration, reactionary
newspapers, must be considered a series of
war bulletins.70
Angela Y. Davis, listening to radio broadcastings about the events surrounding the
murder from her cell in Marin County Jail,
commented on the incredulity of the prison
administrations account.
I listened to the radio talk shows. The
majority of the people who called in to the
shows suspected that something was very
wrong inside San Quentin; that whatever was
askew was not the fault of the prisoners, but
of the prison hierarchy. The most consistent
aspect of these responses was the belief that
the prison administration had taken them for
fools. Over and over again, people
commented on the contempt the
administration had shown by not even
constructing a sensible story. Who on earth
would believe that the tale [the
administration told] justified all the violence
unleashed on the prisoners?71
The night of the murder, Davis, who was

quite close to Jackson, reflected upon her
mourning and that of others. Tonight men
and women in every prison in the country
were probably awake, like me, mourning and
trying to channel their anger constructively.
People all over the world must be talking
about vengeanceconstructive organized
mass retaliation.72
One such action of constructive organized
mass retaliation transpired at Attica prison.
Spurred in part by Jacksons murder at the
hand of San Quentin prison guards, and
acting in resistance to protracted abuse and
neglect by prison authorities, over 1200
prisoners took control of Attica prison on 9
September 1971, in an occupation that
endured for 5 days. Referring to themselves
as the Attica Liberation Faction, they held 42
prison officials hostage, issued a list of 27
demands and requested that a select group of
intermediariesincluding black liberation
movement leaders and lawyersfacilitate
negotiations between them and the State in
order that their demands be met (Figure 5).
As stated in The Freedom Archives audio
documentary Prisons on Fire, [t]he Attica
rebellion was preceded by a long chain of
abuses, years of petition and protest to
Figure 5 September 1971: Attica prisoners negotiating with New York State officials after taking control of
the prison facility (Liz Fink Attica Photographs File
Collection and www.talkinghistory.org).
improve conditions, [and] years of false

promises of reform by the prison administration.73 The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression
Platform, included demands for such things
as access to proper medical care, adequate
visiting conditions, an end to political and
racial persecution and punishment, and the
legal prosecution of correctional officers for
acts of cruel and unusual punishment.
Despite the explicitly expressed will of the
prisoners to negotiate with State authorities,74 New York State Governor Nelson
Rockefeller ordered some 600 State Troopers
and National Guards to storm the prison.
Armed with high-powered rifles and shotguns, the agents of the State fired some 4500
rounds of ammunition on the prisoners and
hostages, shooting 150 people, killing 29
prisoners and 10 hostages; they then
proceeded to torture 1289 prisoners (Figures
6 and 7).75 Following the event, the New
York State Special Commission on Attica
wrote: With the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police
assault which ended the four day uprising
was the bloodiest one-day encounter
between Americans since the Civil War.76
Jacksons assassination and the events at
Attica State Prison gained widespread international attention, particularly in France where
Figure 5 Attica 1prisoners negotiating, September 1971 (Liz Fink Attica Photographs File Collection and www.talkinghistory.org).
Figure 76 Attica 3NY

2NY State Trooper
Troopersand
anddead
prisoners,
prisoners,
September
September
19711971
(Liz (Liz
FinkFink
Attica
Attica
Photographs
Photographs
File File
Collection
Collection
and www.talkinghistory.org).
and www.talkinghistory.org).
334
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
Figures 6 & 7 September 1971: New York State Troopers in Attica prison yard following the violent seizure of the
prison by some 600 State Troopers and National Guards. Armed with high-powered rifles and shotguns, agents of the
State fired some 4,500 rounds of ammunition on the prisoners and hostages, shooting 150 people, killing twenty-nine
prisoners, and ten hostages. (Liz Fink Attica Photographs File Collection and www.talkinghistory.org)
there was a sizeable community of African

Americans living in exile (both willed and
forced). Consider, for instance, the following
statement by African American writer and
social activist James Baldwin, speaking of
Jacksons assassination in Paris in 1971:
Beneath the political implications of this
bloody event theres also an anguish, which
has endured in my country for nearly 400
years. I, myself, have lived through too many
murders and too many assassinations to
believe a word that [President Richard]
Nixon [] or any other of the American
authorities say. [] I know very well that the
intention of the American Republic was to
keep black people slaves forever. And I know
that now that black people have discovered in
their own minds, in their own hearts, that
they are not what they are told they were,
that America is on the verge of panicon the
verge of civil war.77
The GIP was among those of the radical

political movement in France during that
period who were galvanized by the events
within the US prison system. In Le prisonnier affronte chaque jour la sgrgation (The
prisoner confronts segregation every day),
published in La Cause du peuple just days
after the prisoner revolt and State repression

at Attica, the GIP wrote:
The prisoner confronts segregation,
abasement, and physical and mental
degradation every day. Thats racism: the
ready instrument of fascist terror. The
prisoners struggle is part of the general
struggle against racism and fascism. The life
and death of [George] Jackson and the
massacre at Attica revealed that amerikkkan
prisons (les prisons amerikkkaines) are
centers for the formation of revolutionary
militants.78
In addition to confirming the importance

of these two events for the GIP and the
French prison abolition movement, the above
passage has a number of features that warrant
comment in this context. First, note the use of
the expression amerikkkan; this expression
is taken directly from the black liberationist
vocabulary, in which it is employed in order
to draw attention to the white supremacy (Ku
Klux Klan) perceived to exist at the heart of
the American polis. Secondly, the GIP takes
two positions that, while not exclusive to, are
primarily drawn fromand, as we will see,
become formulated in terms quite similar

tothe political philosophies of the Black
Panthers: (1) racism is the primary instrument
of fascist terror, and (2) the prison movement
is a continuation of revolutionary struggles
outside the prison. Foucault will later appropriate each of these theses in his political
theory. He appropriates the first thesis in the
1976 Lectures, where he first publicly
discusses the concept of biopower. The
second thesis fuels his critique of the
orthodox Marxist conception of power.79
Comparing Angela Y. Daviss and George
Jacksons distinctive formulations of these
ideas, arrived at in the context of revolutionary struggle, with Foucaults theoretical
appropriation of them, I will advance the
following three arguments: (1) Foucaults
method of genealogy, and the notion of
biopolitics that was generated by that
method, in many ways takes its cues from
Daviss and Jacksons analyses of the struggle
for black liberation, and the critique of
American State racism that was articulated in
those analyses. (2) The sovereign power/
disciplinary power schematic that Foucault
famously outlines in Discipline and Punish is
largely inspired by Jacksons analysis of
American fascism and by Foucaults interpretation of the events surrounding Jacksons
death. (3) Foucaults critique of the orthodox
Marxist conception of power in the 1976
Lectures is primarily motivated by the revolutionary role that the US black liberation
struggle accorded to the unemployed and
imprisoned populationsa role that Davis
and Jackson explicated quite clearly. Each of
these points indicates the formative role that
the revolutionary philosophies and struggles
of the Black Panther Party had on Foucaults
genealogical work.
To uncover the hidden genealogy of
Foucaults genealogical work, one must
begin with the 1976 Lectures at the Collge
de France, because those lectures contain an
importantthough codified and, therefore,
underappreciatedsubtext, which supplies a
leading clue to that hidden genealogy. On the
surface, the lectures present themselves as a
genealogical analysis of what Foucault calls
the discourse of race struggle, a discourse

that he traces back to the 17th century. On
another level, however, Foucault is engaging
in a very different kind of self-assessment.
Daniel Defert draws our attention to this
self-critical subtext in his discussion entitled
The Mechanism of War as an Analytic of
Power Relations.80 In this presentation,
delivered in 1996 at a conference devoted to
Foucaults 1976 Lectures, Defert argues that
the 1976 Lectures constitute a turning point
in Foucaults work, but they do not mark a
rupture with the genealogical method of
approach, announced in 1970. The course,
he argues, must be understood less as an
inaugural discourse, that is, less as a discussion that inaugurates the approach to
biopower and governmentality that Foucault
would pursue for the rest of the 1970s.
Rather, the course must be understood as
the end of the line of the genealogical analyses inaugurated in 1970. Foucaults discussion of the mechanism of war, Defert argues,
bears a methodological continuity with
those prior analyses, and even though the
analysis focuses on a slightly new object,
Defert claims, it is really a course that is
somewhat in abyss (en abme).
With this last claim, Defert plays upon the
French expression mise en abme, which
refers to the containment of an entity within
another identical entity, or as an image of an
image.81 What does Defert intend by
employing this expression to describe
Foucaults discussion of the mechanism of
warfare? To fully appreciate the claim, allow
me to reproduce parts of Deferts subsequent
discussion.
The years from 1970 to 1976 were all years
of genealogical analysis. The discourse of war
constitutes a discourse that is typically
genealogical, given that Foucault explains
that genealogical discourse is a discourse
founded upon passion, violence,
appropriation, and insufficiently elaborated
rationality.82 It just so happens that he
takes up the same themes when
characterizing the discourse of war. That is to
say, the discourse of war is in effect a
336
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
construction-into-an-abyss (une
construction en abme) of genealogical
analysis. [] We should perhaps focus our
attention less on the objects analyzed [in the
1976 Lectures] than on the apparatus of
analysis itself. [] [T]he vocabulary used to
describe the genealogical pursuit itself shares
many features in common with the
vocabulary that is used to describe the
analyses that are produced by the discourse
of war.83
By saying that the discourse of war is a

construction en abme of genealogical analysis, Defert means that the 1976 Lectures
constitute a genealogical analysis of genealogical analysis itself. In those lectures,
Foucault engages in a self-reflexive critique
of genealogical discourse that employs the
tools of genealogical method while simultaneously calling into question (as we shall see
below) the necessarily possible inverted
meaning and direction toward which such a
method can ultimately lead.
Foucault signals this self-critical subtext to
his audience in at least two ways. First, he
spends the first two lectures reflecting on the
genealogical project and the various power
effects it had during the early 1970s; and,
secondly, he describes the 17th-century
method of counter-history in terms similar
to the way he generally describes genealogical analysis.
The 1976 Lectures also disclose two historical facts that it is important to point out.
First, they demonstrate that Foucault
initially developed his theory of biopolitics
in the context of an analysis of the discourse
of race struggle and a critique of State
racismdiscussions which themselves arose
within the horizon of a self-reflexive critique
of genealogical discourse. Secondly, given
that the final lecture of the 1976 Lectures
(delivered in March 1976) served as the basis
from which Foucault produced the first
published version of his account of
biopolitics (published October 1976), the
former allows us to see that in the latter
Foucault erases every reference to race and
racism, replacing them instead with the
concepts of sex and the so-called deployment of sexuality.84 The meaning of this
erasure, as well as the genealogy thereby
effaced, must be interrogated.
With our attention now attuned to the
self-reflexive subtext at work in the 1976
Lectures, let us begin this interrogation by
looking at what Foucault called the discourse
of race struggle. This will permit me to clarify the argument I am putting forth regarding
the subjugated genealogy of Foucaults genealogical work. It will also permit us to assess
the filiations that exist between (a) the
discourse of race struggle as Foucault
construes it, (b) Foucaults genealogical
discourse at large, and (c) the American
discourses of black liberation with which
Foucault was concurrently familiar.
The historiographical merits of Foucaults
account in the 1976 Lectures are debatable at
best, especially considering both the paucity
and the regional and ethnic homogeneity of
his sources.85 My present objective is not to
evaluate the historiographical merits of his
account, in large part because, as with many
of his genealogical works, I would argue that
the 1976 Lectures are first and foremost an
attempt to grapple with problems of power
relations in the present rather than in the
past.86 My objective is to uncover the hidden
genealogy of Foucaults account of the
discourse of race strugglea genealogy that
must be traced to 20th-century race struggles
in the USA. In other words, I seek to expose
the actual historico-political intensities and
creations that motivated Foucaults project
and to which his own work bars access.
For the purposes of this inquiry, it is thus
sufficient to point out that the genealogy
Foucault provides for the discourse of race
struggle is exclusively Europeanone which
he traces back to 17th-century England, and
follows through the France of Louis XIV to
its articulations in Nazi Germany and
Stalins Soviet Union. One of the most
important formal features of Foucaults argument is that the discourse of race struggle
begins as a revolutionary form of discourse, a
discourse that was essentially an instrument

used in the struggles waged by decentered
camps, but that it eventually becomes
converted and inverted into the counterrevolutionary discourse of biological racism.
As he puts it, race discourse is recentered and
becomes the discourse of the dominant
power itself, the discourse of a centered,
centralized, and centralizing power.87
Thus, whereas Foucault begins the lectures
by praising the discourse of race struggle as it
manifested itself in the form of revolutionary
counter-history, he ends by criticizing the
way that this same discourse undergoes a
biological transcription and becomes the
kind of discourse that fuels State racism. The
details of Foucaults account of how one and
the same form of discourse can undergo such
a radical inversion exceeds the scope of our
analysis. Suffice it to say that the way
Foucault describes race discourse is consistent with the way he describes discourse in
general during his genealogical period,
namely, as a practice or tactical block that is
intertwined with relations of power, that is
intrinsically unstable, modifiable and
tactically polyvalent.88 It is precisely the
principle of tactical polyvalence that
accounts for the radical inversion that the
discourse of race struggle undergoes. For,
what Foucault means by this principle is that
the essence of discourse is such that any
single type of discourse lends itself to being
taken up and utilized for divergent, even
contradictory strategical purposes, and thus
can assume very different political meanings.
I would like to suggest that both of the
forms of what Foucault calls the discourse of
race struggle are primarily modeled after
discursive and visible practices of race struggle
in the USA. What he calls counter-history is
modeled after the revolutionary discourse of
the Black Panther Party. What he describes as
the biologico-social racism that fuels State
racism, while he explicitly draws from the
instances of Nazi Germany and Stalins Soviet
Union, is alsoand, I would argue, more
fundamentallyinspired by the brand of
racism that was being deployed by the US
government in concurrence with Foucaults
own discoursea racism about which

Foucault remains distressingly silent.
Allow me to clarify the argument I am
putting forth. I am not making any claims
about the nature or validity of the 17th- or
18th-century discourses that Foucault explicitly deals with in the 1976 Lectures (i.e.
Boulainvilliers, Thierry, etc.). The claim Im
making is this: before Foucault ever set eyes
upon those discourses, he was exposed to (1)
the revolutionary discourse of race struggle
as it was variously articulated by Davis,
Jackson and other participants in the US
black liberation movement, and (2) the
evidence of the racist, counter-revolutionary
violence waged by the USA in response to
those revolutionary movements. It is only in
virtue of this initial exposure that Foucault
begins to pursue the genealogical project in
the early 1970s, which culminates in the 1976
Lectures, in which he provides a genealogy of
the genealogical project itself. In a word,
American race struggle motivated Foucaultian genealogy. Had Foucault not been
exposed to that struggle, it is quite reasonable
to assume that there would be no Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History, no Discipline and
Punish and no theory of biopolitics; he
would not have set out to theorize the
institution of the prison, discourse as powerknowledge or sought after the historical
sources that he did in writing a history of the
present.
The 1976 Lectures are characterized by the
structure of repression. The genealogy of the
genealogical method that Foucault provides
under the code word of the discourse of
race struggle simultaneously acknowledges
and disavows the foundational role that race
struggle played in Foucaults formulation of
genealogy. In the subtext of the 1976
Lectures, Foucault tacitly acknowledges the
discourse of race struggle as a harbinger of
his genealogical method. However, at one
and the same time, by failing to mention the
American context, Foucault symptomatically denies the actually existing race struggle that in fact motivated his method to
begin with.
338
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
We have already seen examples (in Section

II) of the sort of black liberationist counterhistory that was central to the Black
Panthers mode of political critique and
struggle. Allow me to further substantiate
my claims about the roots of Foucaultian
genealogy by comparing Foucaults characterization of the two inverted forms of the
discourse of race struggle with selected
excerpts of the concurrent political analyses
of George Jackson and Angela Y. Davis
analyses about which we can be certain that
Foucault was familiar.
The practice of counter-history, whose
genealogy Foucault traces in the 1976
Lectures and which prefigures the genealogical method itself, radically breaks from and
displaces the traditional practice of history.
Within the critical disclosure space opened
up by this counter-historical discourse, the
traditional practice of history appears not as
neutral and universal, but as a ritual that reinforces established sovereignty, a discourse
that reinforces the law by erasing the fundamental relations of domination that undergird it. In short, counter-history exposes
traditional history as a form of codified
warfare.89 It is interested in rediscovering
the blood that has dried in the [legal] codes
[] in the battle cries that can be heard
beneath the formulas of right, in the dissymmetry of forces that lies beneath the equilibrium of justice.90 Counter-history, as an
analysis of the State, describes State sovereignty as founded upon real, historical relations of force. Contra Hobbes, who argues
that the modern State emerges from the war
of all against allan abstract notion of war
construed as a generalized state of nature
counter-history argues that the order and
peace of the law is undergirded by an actual,
historically specifiable battle. This foundational battle also continues to well up after
the State has been constituted, as the State
repeatedly attempts to secure its (always
tenuous) monopoly over the legitimized
means of violence.91
Foucault characterizes the discourse of
counter-history in the following way:
What is this discourse saying? Well, I think it

is saying this: [] Law is not pacification, for
beneath the law, war continues to rage in all
the mechanisms of power, even the most
regular. War is the motor behind institutions
and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is
waging a secret war. To put it another way,
we have to interpret the war that is going on
beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war.92
This depiction of the discourse of counterhistory could very well be a quotation of

George Jackson, who argues from within the
Maximum Security Unit of Soledad Prison in
California that the ultimate expression of
law is not orderits prison.93 Between 1969
and 1971, Jackson argued that the USA was
in the third stage of fascism.94 After a first
stage of monopoly capital, in which old
bourgeois democracy had already begun to
diminish; and a second spectacular stage,
during which American sovereignty gained a
certain degree of security through the
violently repressive tactics of the McCarthy
era during which no dissent was permitted;
Jackson argued that American sovereignty
had reached a third, secured stage of fascism,
which he called corporativism. Corporative
capitalism is characterized by what he calls a
prestige of power, which he describes as
follows:
The prestige of power at its maturity is a
thing that will prevent people from acting
against that power. This pig is a psychological
thing, a state of being wherein the
bourgeoisie[s] reign of terror need not rely
on violence to sustain itself. Its relying on
something that happened in the past, or some
accomplishment, or some, lets say, coup,
that went down in the past, where it secured
itself. And its drifting at this point, the
prestige of power means that its drifting at
this point and living off its laurels. At this
stage, people just are not inclined to attack
that power. So, consequently, our first attack
is on the prestige of power. That was
Jonathans95 job, to destroy the prestige of
power, the iconoclastic act of crushing
symbols. Once these symbols are crushed,
and people see that they are vulnerable, then
we can move on to the actual destruction of
the bases of power. Because [] after the

destruction of the prestige of power, power
will be forced to revert back to its original
force, raw brute forceviolence.96
Jacksons is a discourse that reveals the laws

of the USA as having been born in the blood
and mud of battles and as covering over that
foundational violence with the prestige of
power. Whether it be the colonial proprietary
and criminal codes that justified the genocide
of Native Americans, the slave codes that
justified the continued enslavement of expropriated Africans, postbellum Jim Crow laws,
or the so-called war on crime that began to
take root in the late 1960sAmerican law and
order, Jackson argues, has consistently and
predominantly manifested itself to black and
other nationally oppressed people as a form
of codified and institutionalized violence.
And when real challenge is made to that
violence in its codified and institutionalized
forms, power reverts back to its original
force: raw brute forceviolence.
A reversion of this kind, Jackson continues, is precisely what took place when the
Black Panther Party came into being and
began to crush the symbolic prestige of
American governmental authority.
[O]nce secure and in power, it was possible
for them [i.e. those in power] then to allow
some dissent. It was possible for them to have
a C.P. (Communist Party), just so long as
that C.P. didnt have any teeth; it was
possible, then, for them to allow us to form
what appeared to be an opposition party.
But, now, to make my point very clear, a real
opposition party did come into existence.
The BPP, Black Panther Party. What
happened? What happened: they reverted
back to the second stage, back to the second
dimension [of fascism]. They were kicking
doors in and killing people. Its pretty
obvious, its pretty obvious that a mature
fascism exists in this country, and it exists in
disguise, and the disguise takes the form of all
those idiotic, ridiculous statements about
[this being] a welfare state.97
The Black Panther Party was nailed to the

orbit of State repression because it exposed
the sedimentations of slavery and white

supremacy that, while disguised by the prestige of power, remain at the heart of the
American republic.98 The Panthers argued
that a fundamentally racist, repressive war
continually seethed beneath the surface of
American politics, and that this war wells up
in order to govern racialized populations,
especially those who challenge the conditions
of their continued oppression.
Consider the following comment about the
repressive and racist character of American
law that Davis provides from Marin County
Jail in May 1971, 1 year before she was acquitted of all charges:
Needless to say, the history of the United
States has been marred from its inception by
an enormous quantity of unjust laws, far too
many expressly bolstering the oppression of
black people. Particularized reflections of
existing social inequalities, these laws have
repeatedly borne witness to the exploitative
and racist core of the society itself. For
blacks, Chicanos, for all nationally oppressed
people, the problem of opposing unjust laws
and the social conditions which nourish their
growth, has always had immediate practical
implications. Our very survival has
frequently been a direct function of our skill
in forging effective channels of resistance. In
resisting we have sometimes been compelled
to openly violate those laws which directly or
indirectly buttress our oppression. But even
when containing our resistance within the
orbit of legality, we have been labeled
criminals and have been methodically
persecuted by a racist legal apparatus.99
To the extent that they expose the racialized

violence and oppression that State sovereignty
at once bolsters and obfuscates, the analyses
of Davis and Jackson epitomize the form of
race discourse that Foucault later champions
under the name of counter-history.
Furthermore, the other, inverted form of
the discourse of race struggle that Foucault
describes in the 1976 Lecturesthe biological
transcription that develops into the kinds of
biological racist discourses of degeneracy that
inform biopolitical State racismalso
340
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
features in the analyses of Davis and Jackson.

Biologico-social racism features in their analyses as it does in most of the anti-essentialist,
anti-racist discourses that emerged from the
third world liberation movements of the
periodnamely, as an object of critique.
Take, for example, Daviss argument (in the
self-same 1971 essay to which Foucault had
access) that American governmental authority
ascribes an a priori culpability to those it
deems social enemies. She cites US Judge
Webster Thayers comment upon sentencing
anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti to 15 years
imprisonment in 1920 for an attempted
payroll robbery: This man, although he may
not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable,
because he is the enemy of our existing institutions. Associating this policy to the legal
theory put forth by Nazi Germanys foremost
constitutional lawyer Carl Schmittaccording to which, [a] thief, for example, was not
necessarily one who has committed an overt
act of theft, but rather one whose character
renders him a thiefDavis attributes such a
policy of a priori culpability to the existing
American governmental authority.
[President Richard] Nixons and [FBI
Director] J. Edgar Hoovers pronouncements
lead one to believe that they would readily
accept Schmitts fascist legal theory. Anyone
who seeks to overthrow oppressive
institutions, whether or not he has engaged in
an overt illegal act, is a priori a criminal who
must be buried away in one of Americas
dungeons.100
Davis further indicates the way that this a

priori culpability ultimately gets articulated
in biological terms, inscribing itself, within
the American context, upon the bodies of
black and other racialized individuals. For
the black individual, contact with the lawenforcement-judicial-penal network, directly
or through relatives and friends, is inevitable
because he or she is black.101
This argument gets directly taken up by
the GIP. On 10 November 1971, the same
day that a French translation of the Attica
Manifesto was published, the GIP issued a

pamphlet on the assassination of George
Jackson, and the next day held a meeting at
which they projected two films on the
American prisons in San Quentin and
Soledad, where Jackson had been incarcerated. The pamphlet, which included translations of two interviews with Jackson, a
preface by Jean Genet and a strategical analysis of the discourses issued by the American
prison authorities and popular press regarding Jacksons death, was written by Foucault,
von Blow and Defert. In the final words of
his preface, Genet writes:
We [i.e. the GIP] maintain the following:
The word criminal, applied to blacks by
whites, has no meaning. For whites, all blacks
are criminals because theyre black. This
amounts to saying that in a white society, no
black can be criminal.102
In the American context, of which Foucault

was clearly aware, racism operated in a
distinctly biopolitical mode; it served as the
indispensable precondition that allowed the
State to subject its own population to expulsion and rejection, and to social, civic and
biological death.103 As Davis and Jackson
point out, the American judicial and penal
systems are at the center of this racist function
of the State, playing a strategic role in the
States fight to preserve the existing conditions
of social domination.
It is precisely in virtue of this strategic role
that the Black Panthers ascribed an equally
strategic role to American prisoners in the
revolutionary movement. Davis and Jackson
were, again, among the first to thematize and
strategically organize this continuity between
the prison movement and the revolutionary
movement at large. Consider the following
exchange in an interview just before
Jacksons death.
Jackson: [] [T]he prison movement was
started by Huey P. Newton and the black
panther party. Huey and the rest of the
comrades around the country. Were
working with Ericka [Huggins] and Bobby
[Seale], the prison movement in general, the

movement to prove to the establishment that
the concentration camp technique wont
work on us. We dont have to contrive any
importance to our particular movement. Its a
very real, very, very real issue and Im of the
opinion that, right along with the student
movement, right along with the old, familiar
workers movement, the prison movement is
central to the process of revolution as a
whole.
Karen Wald: Many of the cadres of the
revolutionary forces on the outside have been
captured and imprisoned. Are you saying
that even though theyre in prison, these
cadres can still function in a meaningful way
for the revolution?
Jackson: Well, were all familiar with the
function of the prison as an institution serving
the needs of the totalitarian state. Weve got
to destroy that function; the function has to
be no longer viable, in the end. Its one of the
strongest institutions supporting the
totalitarian state. We have to destroy its
effectiveness, and thats what the prison
movement is all about. What Im saying is
that they put us in these concentration camps
here the same as they put people in tiger cages
or strategic hamlets in Vietnam. The idea is
to isolate, eliminate, liquidate the dynamic
sections of the overall movement, the
protagonists of the movement. What weve
got to do is prove this wont work. Weve got
to organize our resistance once were inside,
give them no peace, turn the prison into just
another front of the struggle, tear it down
from the inside.104
The Black Panthers not only conceived of

the prison as a site of struggle for those
imprisoned for their involvement with the
revolutionary movement outside the prison
walls. They also thought of the prison as a
place to politicize the many unemployed, socalled common law prisoners.
Especially today when so many black,
Chicano, and Puerto Rican men and women
are jobless as a consequence of the internal
dynamic of the capitalist system, the role of
the unemployed, which includes the
lumpenproletariat, in revolutionary struggle,

must be given serious thought. [] In the
context of class exploitation and national
oppression it should be clear that numerous
individuals are compelled to resort to
criminal acts, not as a result of conscious
choiceimplying other alternativesbut
because society has objectively reduced their
possibilities of subsistence and survival to
this level. This recognition should signal the
urgent need to organize the unemployed and
lumpenproletariat, as indeed the Black
Panther Party as well as activists in prison
have already begun to do.105
On this point as well, a direct genealogical

line can be traced from the thought of Davis
and Jackson to that of Foucault and the GIP.
In the concluding section of their pamphlet
on George Jackson, devoted to Jacksons
Position in the Prison Movement, the GIP
write that the most notable aspect of
[Jacksons] reflections is that which regards
the relations between military action and
political actionwhat they go on to call a
fundamental problem.106 Referring to the
BPPs many revolutionary survival programs,
the GIP contend that:
Figure 7 Huey P. Newton behind bars (Jeffrey Blankfort).
[t]hese programs enable the black

community to organize itself. However, they
will be increasingly threatened by fascist
repression. This is why Jackson wrote that
these programs will quickly become
inconceivable without a military rampart.
For at least two years, Jackson had the task of
preparing this military protection, and of
preparing it from within the prisons, where
disarmed and shackled men were trained for
war. This is Jacksons grand initiative. Two
profoundly connected facts made this
possible: on the one hand, the entire black
vanguard lives under the threat of prison, and
many of its leaders remain there for quite a
long time; on the other hand, this presence, in
turn, moves other prisoners to become
politicized. One of these prisoners, for
example, when asked what his plans are for
when he is released, responded, To help my
people. Hence, not only in the ghettos, in
the factories, in the rebellions in the military,
342
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3

but also in the prisons, nuclei of resistance are
taking form, the elements of the
revolutionary army.
These previsions overturn many traditional

ideas about the imprisoned in the history of
the working class movement.
From within the prisons, Jackson prepared
the military protection necessary for political
work; preparation that had not yet been
consolidated before it was threatened by the
authorities that systematically practice
homicide. Thats the reason why, outside the
walls of the prisons, political organizations
launch military operations in order to rescue
and liberate prisoners whose lives are daily
threatened. Angela Davis became a heroic
figure for black people, when she was accused
(despite belonging to the pacifist and legalist
U.S. Communist Party) of contributing to
the bold action of support, undertaken from
the outside on August 7, 1970, to rescue
Soledad prisoners. On both sides of the walls,
the army of the prisoners and the army of the
people are preparing themselves for the same
war of liberation.107
The juxtaposition of Daviss and Jacksons

writings and the GIPs engagement with them
further evidences the degree to which the
events of revolutionary anti-racist struggle in
the USA motivated Foucaults turn to the
method of genealogy, to the institution of the
prison, and to the concepts of carcerality,
discipline and biopower. The writings of the
Black Panthers served as the model for
Foucaults reflections on the continuity of
politics and warfare in the published works of
197576. They also in many ways function as
precursors to Foucaults theory of the spectacular power/disciplinary power schematic.
Foucault argues that in the historical transition from the spectacular power regime to
that of disciplinary power, punishment
tend[s] to become the most hidden part of
the penal process.
As a result, justice no longer takes public
responsibility for the violence that is bound
up with its practice. If it too strikes, if it too
kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength,

but as an element of itself that it is obliged to
tolerate, that it finds difficult to account
for.108
This theory begins to take shape in the GIPs

depiction of the official discourse of San
Quentin prison authorities in the wake of
Jacksons assassination. The GIP claims that
the American prison administration launched
a series of counteroffensive operations in
the form of communications, news and
disclosures, in order to mold public opinion
and prepare a certain number of repressive
measures. One of the aforementioned operations, they claimed, was to represent the
power of the prison guards as a lenient,
peacefuleven defenselessforce.
On the side of the prisoners [were] all of
the weapons, all of the cunning, and all of
the violence; opposite them [were] guards
who were empty-handed, impotent, and
absent-minded. The blacks are the ones
waging permanent war; the whites are
attempting to maintain a lenient order. If
the guards dont want to be the first and
only victims, they will be forced to return,
as Jim Park [the assistant warden of San
Quentin] said, to old correctional
methods. One day, they too will be forced
to be armed.109
This reversion to old correctional methods,

to which the assistant warden of San Quentin
alludes, is precisely what in Foucaults
vocabulary would later be cast as a reversion
from the faceless gaze or empty-handed
force of disciplinary power to the explicitly
bellicose violence of spectacular power.
Racialized communities in the USA have
continually experienced and observed just
such a reversion. Before his death, Jackson
brought it to theoretical articulation in his
analysis of American fascism and the prestige of power. Where powers prestige wears
thin, where the empty-handed force of
disciplinary power fails in its effort to manufacture docile bodies, the State brings to bear
the sovereign weight of spectacular violence

upon its own subjects. In Jacksons words,
power reverts back to its original force, raw
brute forceviolence. This is precisely what
happened when the Black Panther Party
came into existence. What happened: they
reverted back to the second stage, back to the
second dimension [of fascism]. They were
kicking doors in and killing people.
Foucault was aware of the coexistence in
the USA of spectacular and disciplinary
modalities of power, and he was cognizant,
from afar, of the dimensions of race that regulated the dissymmetrical deployment of spectacular violence upon the American people.
Indeed, he wrote about itin a political
pamphlet that had very limited circulation,
but which was formative for his own thinking
about power. The question must be asked:
Why, then, in his characterization of discipline and the panoptic power regime in his
widely distributed book Discipline and
Punish, did Foucault erase the spectacle of
racialized State violence?110 How, after knowing what he knew of the race struggle in the
USA, could he pen the following claim?
Our society is one not of spectacle, but of
surveillance []. We are neither in the
amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the
panoptic machine, invested by its effects of
power, which we bring to [bear upon]
ourselves since we are part of its
mechanism. [] [T]he pomp of
sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular
manifestations of power, were extinguished
one by one in the daily exercise of
surveillance [].111
When forced by the phenomena of power

relations themselves to include the theme of
race in his analysis, as he does in the 1976
Lectures, Foucault is forced to very different
conclusions. He is compelled to formulate
the concept of biopower, in which race operates as the conduit through which the power
of normalization and the spectacular power
of life and death commingle. If the power of
normalization wished to exercise the old
sovereign right to kill, it must become racist.
Modern racism is
a mechanism that allows biopower to work.

[It] is bound up with the workings of a State
that is obliged to use race, the elimination of
races and the purification of the race, to
exercise its sovereign power. [] Biopower
functions through the old sovereign power of
life and death
and the way that it does so implies the

workings, the introduction and activation, of
racism.112
It is beyond doubt that Foucault knew of
the Black Panthers and their revolutionary
struggles. He knew about a real race war
being waged by the government of the USA
against its racialized populations; he knew
about the State racism that existed contemporaneously with his discourse. Not only did
Foucault elaborate his theories of biopower
and politics-as-war, as well as his genealogical method as a whole, in concurrence with
these events; he drew heavily from the theoretical writings of the Black Panthers in the
course of elaborating his theories. And yet,
Foucault makes not a single citation or
explicit reference to the BPP in his published
writings or lectures.
We must ask ourselves two sets of questions, the fundamental answer to which is, I
think, largely the same. The first stream of
questions is the following: Why did Foucault
neglect to treat American State racism in his
analysis of biopolitics and State racism in the
1976 Lectures? Why did he instead focus on
the instances of Nazi Germany and the
Stalinist Soviet Union, which were, in a
sense, more safely implanted in the historical past? Moreover, why did Foucault neglect
to mention black power and the ways in
which his own analysis of power was
inspired by the analyses and struggles of the
Black Panthers? Why, in the Collge de
France, was black power contorted into a
European mold and suppressed from speaking? Finally, why did Foucault jettison any
and all discussion of race or State racism
from his first published writings on
biopower in the initial volume of The
History of Sexuality?
344
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
The second stream of questions issues from

the silence that has until now followed in the
wake of Foucault, that is, the silence among
his variously disciplined commentators. Why
has the topic of Foucault and the Black
Panthers been ignored for so long? Why is it
that Foucault scholars and intellectual historians have not only failed to propose possible
answers to this question, but failed, for the
past 40 years, to even ask it?
The answers to these questions are simultaneously clear and obscure. One way of
answering them might be simply to say that
the discourse and commitments of black
power magnetize bullets; Malcolm X, Bobby
Hutton, Alprentice Bunchy Carter, Fred
Hampton, Mark Clark, Brenda Harris,
Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, William
Christmas, George Jackson and many others
have been killed precisely for having
deployed them. The discourses of disciplinary power, biopower and governmentality,
by contrast, have received widespread
acclaim and attention in the American and
European academies; they have been incorporated into numerous and variously disciplined academic narratives.
For all its truth, however, this response
remains unsatisfactorily terse. In my
concluding remarks, I would like to briefly
consider two possible avenues of response to
the questions posed here. The first response
is posed within the horizon of ethics, the
second within the horizon of politics.
IV. Epistemic injustice and disciplinary

silence in truth-bearing discourse
In an emerging debate on the ethics of testimony and the politics of knowing, feminist
philosopher Miranda Fricker has put forth
the idea of epistemic injustice.113 She suggests
that individuals in unreflective testimonial
exchanges exercise a testimonial sensibility
that regulates the nature and degree of their
receptivity to a speakers testimony. She
describes this sensibility as in the first
instance a passive social inheritance that
constitutes
ones
epistemic
second
nature.114
Our normal unreflective reception of
what people tell us, Fricker argues, is
conditioned by a great range of collateral
experience. Just as our actions toward others
are in many ways learned and internalized
through social processes of normalization,
our responses to the testimony of others are
learned and internalized through processes of
epistemic socializationa social training of
the interpretative and affective attitudes in
play when we are told things by other
people.115 Importantly, this sensibility is not
immutable, it is not a dead-weight social
conditioning, but rather is characterized by
an essential adaptabilityhence, its claim to
be a capacity of reason.116 Ones testimonial
sensibility is thus an habitual (i.e. adaptable)
structure of response that shapes what sorts
of people one takes to be trustworthy in
what sorts of circumstances. Epistemic injustice occurs when a speaker receives the
wrong degree of credibility from his hearer
owing to a certain sort of unintended prejudice on the hearers part, for example, when
a person or group of people are ritually
excluded from participating in truth-bearing
discourse.117
Although not an instance of the verbal
testimonial sort of epistemic injustice that
Fricker treats, the erasure of and silence
about the link between Foucault and the
Black Panthers, I argue, is a form of
epistemic injustice. Given Foucaults
suppression of the link between his thought
and that of the Black Panthers, given the
painstaking ethnocentrism with which he
casts the genealogy of the discourse of race
struggle in an exclusively European frame,
and given his silence about the State racism
of his time, I argue that Foucault is culpable of epistemic injustice. The philosopher
who claimed to desubjugate local, disqualified, marginalized or non-legitimized
knowledges through the practice of genealogy now appears, vis--vis the Black
Panthers, not only to have himself subjugated just such a body of knowledges, but

to have subjugated the very knowledges
from which he largely culled his method of
genealogy.
One can only assume that Foucault takes
the so-called counter-historical discourses
of Boulainvilliers and Thierry to be more
credible than those of Cleaver, Davis, Jackson, Newton, Seale, etc.or, at the very
least, that he takes them to be more appropriate or legitimate types of knowledge for
discussion in lectures and writings published
in such widely circulating, truth-bearing
institutions like the Collge de France and
major academic presses. (His one acknowledgement of the philosophies and struggles
of the Black Panthers has until now remained
muted in a pamphlet in a Parisian archive
devoted to the documentation of Foucaults
monument.) The most generous reading of
the epistemic injustice that Foucault inflicted
upon the Black Panthers is perhaps to say
(speculatively) that he thought it safer to
cite revolutionary discourse from 17thcentury Europe and to critique instances of
State racism in Europes recent past than to
challenge the global institutions of authority
as the Black Panthers were doing in their
philosophies and struggles. Such a reading, of
course, only serves to clarify the fact that
Foucault, by virtue of the position of his
discourse, enjoyed a kind of safety and
distance from potential fire that the Black
Panthers did not. In any event, Foucaults
ethical culpability seems quite clear.
Assessing the ethical culpability of the
epistemic injustice inflicted in the wake of
Foucault, however, is not quite as clear-cut a
task. Commentators who lacked access to the
resources that evidence the link between
Foucault and the Black Panthersand which
thereby disclose Foucaults own suppression
of that connectioncannot in good faith be
judged responsible and culpable on ethical
grounds for reinstantiating that erasure
through their silence about it. The limitation
of an ethical framework for understanding
and evaluating the infliction of epistemic
injustice at this level is evident. Were an ethical
framework not limited in this way, we might
Figure 8 The faulty charges currently being brought

against the San Francisco 8 are the most recent attempt
by the United States government to destroy and distort
the legacy of the Black Panther Party.
follow Fricker in espousing an ethical virtue

of reflexive critical openness. By safeguarding against the kind of pre-propositional prejudicial attitudes that result in epistemic
injustice, such a virtue would play an important role in combating this distinctively
epistemic kind of oppression. But Fricker
herself acknowledges the restrictions placed
on ethical action by the social and political
horizon within which that action takes place.
[T]here are circumstances under which the
virtue [of reflexive critical openness] cannot
be achieved. [] As something possessed
[by] mere individuals whose social-historical
situation can deprive them of the very
resources they need in order to attain the
virtue, its anti-oppressive power remains
hostage to the broader social structures in
which our testimonial practices must take
place.118
One must pose the question, then, not

within the horizon of the ethics of interper-
346
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
Figure 9
Information sheet from the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights.
348
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
sonal exchange, but rather within the horizon

of the social and political formations within
which such interpersonal exchange takes
place. A shift of this sort moves us from
Frickers testimonial sensibility, which
operates at the individual level, to Foucaults
own analysis of the will to truth, which
operates at the level of the assemblage of
normalizing social institutions.
[The] will to truth, like other systems of
exclusion, rests on an institutional support: it
is both reinforced and renewed by a whole
strata of practices, such as pedagogy, of
course; and the system of books, publishing,
libraries; learned societies in the past and
laboratories now. But it is also renewed, no
doubt, more profoundly, by the way in
which knowledge is put to work, valorized,
distributed, and in a sense attributed, in a
society.119
What does the silence regarding the link

between Foucault and the Black Panthers tell
us about the will to truth that imperceptibly
regulates the contemporary production,
disclosure and circulation of truth-bearing
knowledge? What is it about existing disciplinary formations (both academic and
social) that makes possible the kind of ethical
and political deficiency that is evidenced by
such a silence?
I am unequipped to answer such far-reaching questions; in part, because their answer
must ultimately be given by the temporally
protracted domain of collective social practice.
In the present paper, I can only hope to clarify
some of the questions involved. But I will say
this: according to information compiled by the
Prison Activist Resource Center and the
National Jericho Movement, there are over
100 political prisoners and prisoners of war
currently confined in American detention
centers, many of whom were incarcerated or
have been maintained in prison because of
their activism within the Black Panther Party
or other third world liberation movements.120
The epistemic injustice inflicted upon the
Black Panthers and other third world liberation movements can be rectified and
safeguarded against only after the social and

political injustices inflicted upon them have
been rectified. Epistemic and social justice
remain impossible so long as these prisoners
have not been freed from confinement, and
so long as others are not free from the threat
of being confined for struggling for their
freedom (Figures 8 and 9).
Figure 98 Information
The faculty charges
sheet from
currently
the Committee
being brought
for the
against
Defense
theof
San
Human
Francisco
Rights.
8 are the most recent attempt by the United States government to destroy and distort the legacy of the Black Panther Party.
Notes
1
1 A shorter and otherwise modified version of this

paper is appearing in Biopolitics and Racism:
Foucauldian Genealogies, eds Jeffrey Paris and
Eduardo Mendieta (Albany: SUNY Press,
2007).
2 Mao Tse-Tung, On Protracted War, Selected
Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. II (Peking: Foreign
Language Press, 1965), p. 153.
3 Huey P. Newton, Functional Definition of
Politics, The Black Panther, 17 January 1969;
reprinted in The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip
S. Foner (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995
[1970]), p. 47.
4 George Jackson, George Jackson: P.S., On
Discipline, The Black Panther, 27 March
1971.
5 This claim derives from Foucaults 1976 lectures
at the Collge de France. Foucault foreshadows
this claim in 1975 in Discipline and Punish, and
he reiterates it in the 1976 publication of the first
volume of The History of Sexuality. Cf. Foucault,
Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the
Collge de France 19751976, trans. David
Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 15
(hereafter referred to as 1976 Lectures);
Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1999), p. 168; The History of
Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage, 1990), p. 93.
6 It is important not to overstate the radicality of
this change of orientation; for instance, there
exist several crucial elements of continuity
between Foucaults work of the 1960s and that
of the 1970s, namely, a concern with the role of
knowledge in processes of subjectivation. In
addition, one can surely locate certain
components of Foucaults analysis of power
relations and techniques of domination in the
earlier books Madness and Civilization (1961)
and Birth of the Clinic (1963). Nevertheless, the
shift that Foucaults work undergoes in the early
1970s does lead to the displacement of certain
concepts and the formulation of new ones. For
example, episteme, a concept that pervades
the earlier texts, appears only once in Discipline
10
and Punish (p. 305), and the concept of the

historical a priori is abandoned entirely. As for
the methodological concept of archaeology, it
is neither mentioned in Discipline and Punish nor
The Discourse on Languagea text written just
1 year after Foucault had so meticulously
defined the concept in The Archaeology of
Knowledge.
7 See, for example, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 104117; Batrice
Han, Foucaults Critical Project: Between the
Transcendental and the Historical, trans.
Edward Pile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2002), pp. 73108; Gilles Deleuze,
Foucault, trans. Sen Hand (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and
What is a Dispositif?, in Michel Foucault:
Philosopher, trans. Timothy Armstrong (New
York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 159168;
Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence (New
York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 3096; Jeffrey
Minson, Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche,
Foucault, Donzelot, and the Eccentricity of
Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 4078;
Peter Miller, Graham Burchell and Colin
Gordon (eds), The Foucault Effect (New York:
Harvester, 1991); Jeremy Moss (ed.), The Later
Foucault (New York: Sage, 1998); Gary
Gutting, Foucault and Literature: Towards a
Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge,
1992), pp. 119146.
8 As will be discussed below, the three published
documents, to my knowledge, where a
connection between Foucault and the BPP is
mentioned are (1) the brief notes included in
Daniel Deferts Chronology, Dits et crits, Vol. 1
(Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 33, 38, 39; (2)
Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertanis editors
postscript to the 1976 Lectures, Situating the
Lectures, where they cite Deferts notes on the
connection (1976 Lectures, p. 282); and (3)
Edmund Whites biography of Jean Genet, where
he documents Foucaults association with Genet,
who was a prominent French literary figure, a
contemporary of Foucault, and a BPP supporter.
See Genet: A Biography (New York: Knopf,
1993), pp. 567, 570, 697 n. 43 (hereafter cited
as Genet). The influence that the US black
liberation struggle had on the Groupe
dInformation sur les Prisons, of which Foucault
was a founding member, is mentioned in Le
Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons: Archives
dune lutte, 19701972, eds Philippe Artires
et al. (Paris: IMEC, 2003), pp. 91132.
9 Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,
Essential Works, Vol. 2, p. 386.
11
10 Lordre du discourse (Paris: Gallimard, 1971),

p. 55; translated as The Discourse on Language
and published as an appendix to The
Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 219. I have
modified the translation.
11 It is important to note that Angela Y. Davis opted
not to assume an explicit position within the BPPs
leadership structure. In her introduction to The
Angela Y. Davis Reader, Joy James reports the
following:
[Davis] describes her affiliation with the Panther
organization as a permanently ambiguous
status that fluctuated between member and
fellow-traveler. Active in community
organizing, temporarily in charge of political
education in the West Side office [] and
formulating political education for the Los
Angeles Chapter, Davis remained on the fringes
of the Panthers internal contestations. Years
later, she recalls her doubts about the Partys
militarist posturing: I thoroughly respected the
BPPs visible defiance and principally supported
the right to self-defense. I also found myself
using funerals and shootings as the most obvious
signposts of the passage of time. However,
sensing ways in which this danger and chaos
emanated not only from the enemy outside, but
from the very core of the Black Panther Party, I
preferred to remain uninformed about the
organizations inner operations.
12
13
14
15
Despite the distance she retained with respect to

the BPPs inner operations, Davis maintained her
affiliation with the Party and remained a
prominent figure in the black liberation movements
of the time. Cf. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed.
Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp.
67.
12 I have translated part of this pamphlet into
English. See The Assassination of George
Jackson, in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.
Original Fr. pub. Groupe dInformation sur
les Prisons, LAssassinat de George Jackson,
Intolrable, No. 3 (Paris: Gallimard,
1971).
13 Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons, Enqute
dans vingt prisons, Intolrable, No. 1 (Paris:
Champ Libre, 1971).
14 According to Eribon, it was published in May,
according to Macey, it was published in June.
Cf. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy
Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991), p. 224; David Macey, The Lives
of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage, 1993),
p. 268.
350
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
15 Reflecting upon this break, Eribon writes: How

distant this text founding the GIP seems from the
inaugural lecture at the Collge de France given
just two months before! (p. 225).
16 Outside La Sant, Macey reports, Foucault and
others were arrested on the grounds that their
leaflets had not been duly registered for
copyright (p. 270).
17 Foucault, Je perois lintolrable, interview with
Genevive Armedler, Journal de Gnve: Samedi
littraire, Cahier 135, 24 July 1971.
18 Foucault, Rituals of Exclusion, in Foucault
Live: Collected Interviews, 19611984, ed.
Sylvre Lotringer (New York: Semiotexte,
1989), p. 73.
19 Foucault, The Order of Things (New York:
Routledge, 1966/1994), p. xv.
20 La garde vue, as Macey describes it, refers to
the common police practice of holding people
without charge for a period of up to twenty-four
hours. [] The usual pretext for taking people
into custody is the alleged need to check their
identity (p. 515 n. 1).
21 Cration dun Groupe dInformation sur les
Prisons, Esprit, March 1971, p. 531 (quoted in
Macey, p. 258).
22 See Macey, pp. 209236; Eribon, pp. 201211.
23 Eribon, pp. 209210.
24 Eribon, p. 210.
25 White, Genet, p. 570.
26 A number of BPP members have published
mention of their encounters with Genet during his
visit in the spring of 1970. Here is former BPP
member and current US political prisoner and
death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal recalling his
encounter with Genet at the BPP national office in
Oakland, California:
favorite toy. He did not fear us. Strangely, he

seemed to feel as one with us. His Yale
[University] speech certainly showed a deep
support for the significance of the [Black
Panther] Party in American life. Perhaps, as
an outsider, he perceived these other outsiders
as insiders?
Former BPP Chief of Staff David Hilliard shares
similar reflections of Genet:
Jean Genet, the French novelist and playwright,
has come over to help mobilize support for us.
Genets an ex-inmate himself, a rebel and
homosexual; although I dont understand a word
he saysand he claims not to know EnglishI
feel we are completely and easily accepted by
him, that this world-famous writer is a comrade in
arms.
27
28
[Genet] seemed more honored to be in the

company of the Black Panthers than if he
were accorded an honor guard by the
president of the United States. [] I often
wonder why his wordless visit stands so stark
in my memory. It is not because he was the
only white visitor to the office. He wasnt.
Several white radicals came by, some fairly
often, but almost all of them radiated fear
and discomfiture in the office. Genet seemed
oddly at home and at ease around the office.
As a former prisoner, and a homosexual,
perhaps he saw himself as the perennial
outsider, the consummate outlaw. I could tell
by his body language, by the openness of his
face, by his vibration, that he really dug
being in the office. It gave him a kick. He
looked like a little boy who had found his
29
30
31
32
33
27
28
29
30
31
32
Cf. Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life

in the Black Panther Party (Cambridge, MA:
Southend Press, 2004), pp. 202204; David
Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The
Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of
the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown,
1993), pp. 260, 285, 294.
In a letter to Marianne de Pur in the summer of
1971, Genet wrote that George Jacksons book
Soledad Brother has received a lot of attention
here [in France] (cited in White, Genet, p. 562).
See George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison
Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantom,
1970); the French edition was published in
1971, cf. George Jackson, Les Frres de
Soledad. Lettres de prison, Paris, Gallimard,
1971.
A number of these statements have been
translated and published in Jean Genet, The
Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. Albert
Dichy, trans. Jeff Port (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2004).
Jean Genet, Preface to George Jacksons
Soledad Brother (New York: Bantom, 1970),
p. 4.
For more on Daviss life during this period, see
Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography (New York:
International Publishers, 1974).
Davis, as is generally well known, continues to be
a prominent leader and spokesperson in the
prison abolition movement.
For further elaboration of this dual function of the
American prison system, see Brady Heiner, The
American Archipelago: The Global Circuit of
Carcerality and Torture, in Colonial and Global
Interfacings, ed. Gary Backhaus (Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2007).

33 In an essay written while incarcerated in May
1971, Davis explains that:
[a]fter the Civil War, the Black Codes,
successors to the Slave Codes, legalized convict
labor, prohibited social intercourse between
blacks and whites, gave white employers an
excessive degree of control over the private lives
of black workers, and generally codified racism
and terror.
43
Jackson writes in a July 1965 letter to his father:

The forms of slavery merely changed at the
signing of the Emancipation Proclamation
from chattel slavery to economic slavery. If
you could see and talk to some of the
blacks I meet in here [i.e. prison] you would
immediately understand what I mean, and
see that Im right. They are all average, all
with the same backgrounds, and in [prison]
for the same thing, some form of food
getting.
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
Cf. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, op. cit.,

pp. 4041; and Jackson, Soledad Brother, op.
cit., pp. 6162.
Angela Y. Davis, A Statement on our Fallen
Comrade, George Jackson, The Black Panther,
28 August 1971, p. 18.
For a more in-depth historical treatment of
the GIP than can be provided here, I
direct the reader to Le Groupe dInformation
sur les Prisons: Archives dune lutte, 1970
1972, eds Philippe Artires et al. (Paris:
IMEC, 2003).
GIP, Enqute dans vingt prisons, Intolrable,
No. 1 (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971). GIP, Enqute
dans une prison-modle: Leury-Mroqis,
Intolrable, No. 2 (Paris: Champ Libre,
1971).
GIP, Suicides de prison, Intolrable, No. 4
(Paris: Gallimard, 1972). As Foucault
biographer David Macey points out, the title of
the pamphlet Suicides de prison makes telling
use of the conjunction de: these are not suicides
which simply happen to occur in prison. They
are caused by the prison system: the prisons
suicides (p. 287).
See GIP, The Assassination of George Jackson,
in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit. Fr. pub.
LAssassinat de George Jackson, Intolrable,
No. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
White, Genet, p. 697 n. 43.
White, Genet, p. 567.
GIP, Enqute dans vingt prisons (quoted in
Macey, pp. 268269).
44
42 Foucault, Power Affects the Body, in

Foucault Live, op. cit., pp. 207208 (my
emphasis).
43 For primary sources, see many of the published
writings and memoirs of members of the BPP, a
by no means exhaustive list of which includes:
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New
York: Avon Books, 1995); All Things Censored
(New York: Seven Stories, 2000); We Want
Freedom, op. cit.; Safiya Bukhari-Alston,
Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary, in
Imprisoned Intellectuals: Americas Political
Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and
Rebellion, ed. Joy James (New York: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2003); Philip S. Foner (ed.), The
Black Panthers Speak, op. cit.; David Hilliard
and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory, op. cit.;
George Jackson, Soledad Brother, op. cit., and
Blood In My Eye (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics
Press, 1990 [1972]); Huey P. Newton, To Die
for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton
(New York: Writers and Readers, 1995 [1972]);
Huey P. Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader,
eds David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 2002); Bobby Seale,
Seize the Time (New York: Vintage, 1970
[1968]); Assata Shakur, Assata: An
Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1987);
Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu Jamal and
Assata Shakur, Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors
of the War Against Black Revolutionaries, eds
Jim Fletcher et al. (New York: Semiotext(e),
1993).
An orientational list of secondary sources
includes: Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall,
Agents of Repression: The FBIs Secret Wars
Against the Black Panther Party and the
American Indian Movement (Boston: South End
Press, 1990); Kathleen Cleaver and George
Katsiaficas (eds), Liberation, Imagination, and
the Black Panther Party (New York: Routledge,
2001); Charles E. Jones, The Black Panther
Party Reconsidered (Baltimore, MD: Black
Classics Press, 1998); Jack Olson, Last Man
Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of
Geronimo Pratt (New York: Doubleday, 2000);
Nkechi Taifa et al., Human Rights: U.S.
Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO Victims, in
States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and
Prisons, ed. Joy James (New York: Palgrave,
2002).
44 Among the primary texts from the American black
power movement that had been translated and
were circulating in France during this period were
(1) Eldridge Cleavers early memoir Soul on Ice
(New York: Dell, 1968), Fr. pub. Panthre noire,
Paris, Seuil, coll. Combats, 1970; (2) a small
95-page transcription of a series of interviews
352
45
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
with Angela Y. Davis recorded while she was

awaiting trial in 1970, entitled Angela Davis
parle, Paris, ditions Sociales, 1971; (3) a
translation of Davis and Bettina Apthekers If They
Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (New
York: Third Press, 1971), Fr. pub. Sils frappent
laube, Paris, Gallimard, 1972; (4) Davis An
Autobiography, op. cit., Fr. pub. Autobiographie,
Paris, Albin Michel, 1975; (5) George Jacksons
Soledad Brother, op. cit., Fr. pub. Les Frres de
Soledad. Lettres de prison, Paris, Gallimard,
1971; (6) Jacksons posthumously published book
Blood In My Eye, op. cit., Fr. pub. Devant mes
yeux, la mort, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Tmoins,
1972; (7) Huey P. Newtons Declaration at the
Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention
(delivered Nov. 1970), Fr. pub. Declaration
la Convention constitutionelle des peuples
rvolutionnaires, La Taupe bretonne, No. 2,
decembre 1971; (8) a tract by Huey P. Newton
translated as Mouvement noire et lutte
rvolutionnaire, Partisans, No. 44, octobre
novembre 1968; (9) Bobby Seales Seize the
Time, op. cit., Fr. pub. lafft. Histoire du parti
des Panthres noires, Paris, Gallimard, 1972;
(10) Philip Foners anthology The Black Panthers
Speak, op. cit., Fr. pub. Les panthers noires
parlent, Paris, Franois Maspero, coll. Cahiers
libres 224225, 1971; and (11) an anthology
of BPP writings edited by Yves Loyer entitled Black
Power (tudes et documents), Paris, EDI, 1968.
45 Mumia Abu-Jamal provides the following
characterization of the early ideological
formation of the BPP:
through the lens of what is generally considered

to be identity politics today. But as a matter of
fact, the black power movement per se was not
an exclusive movement. There were people of
all racial/ethnic backgrounds involved in that
movement. There was a connection with global
movements. [] We were part of a global
revolution. There was no question about the
importance of making those connections and
building those bridges.
47
48
49
50
In the beginning, the Black Panther Party for

Self-Defense was, for want of a better term, a
Malcolmist party. [] The influence of Malcolm
X permeated early BPP thought, rhetoric, and
self-perception. In this formative period, the BPP
used language and themes that did not
significantly differentiate it from other Black
nationalist groups of the period []. This meant,
in practical terms, that whites were anathema to
any organizational or political work. (We Want
Freedom, op. cit., pp. 8081)
46
See also The Huey P. Newton Reader, op. cit.,

pp. 1180.
46 Angela Y. Davis speaks of the international and
multi-racial character of the liberation movements
of the 1960s and 1970s:
Today people tend to think about the
movements of the 60s as movements that were
very separate, nationalist, [and] raciallydefined, because theyre looking at them
51
52
47
48
49
50
51
52
The above quotation is transcribed from an

interview recorded on the documentary CD
Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black
Liberation, produced by the Freedom Archives,
and available at www.freedomarchives.org. On
the internationalist character of the Black Panther
Party, see also Eldridge Cleaver, The Land
Question and Black Liberation (April/May
1968), in Post-Prison Writings and Speeches,
ed. Robert Scheer (New York: Ramparts, 1969);
Lee Lockwood, Conversation with Eldridge
Cleaver (New York: Delta, 1970); Huey P.
Newton, To Die for the People, op. cit.; The
Huey P. Newton Reader, pp. 181293 (esp.
pp. 181199); and Abu-Jamal, We Want
Freedom, pp. 8088.
Cleaver, The Land Question and Black
Liberation, op. cit., pp. 123124.
Point Ten of The Ten-Point Platform and Program
of the Black Panther Party (October 1966),
original emphasis.
Cf. Foner, Introduction, The Black Panthers
Speak, p. xxxvii.
Call for Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional
Convention, reprinted in The Black Panthers
Speak, pp. 268271.
Bobby Seale, Seize the Time, op. cit.,
pp. 116117 (my emphasis).
Dhoruba Bin Wahad (formerly Richard Moore)
was a former Black Panther leader who was
wrongly convicted on evidence that was falsely
concocted by the FBI. Falsely imprisoned for
19 years, he argues that Americas COINTELPRO
enacted a civil war against its colonial interior in
the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The implementation of the Counterintelligence
Program transcended mere investigation. It was
in effect a domestic war program, a program
aimed at countering the rise of Black militancy,
Black independent political thought, and at
repressing the freedoms of Black people in the
United States. The Counterintelligence program
can be seen as a program of war waged by a
government against a people, against its own
citizens. It was a program of domestic warfare.
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
Dhoruba Bin Wahad, War Within, in Still Black,

Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black
Revolutionaries, eds Jim Fletcher et al. (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1993), p. 18. Bin Wahad was
released in 1990 after a New York State judge
found that the FBI had suppressed crucial
evidence from his defense.
See Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of
Repression, op. cit.; Nkechi Taifa et al., Human
Rights: U.S. Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO
Victims, in States of Confinement, ed. Joy James
(New York: Palgrave, 2002).
Bobby Seale, The Ten-Point Platform and
Program of the Black Panther Party, The Black
Panther, 18 October 1969 (reprinted in The
Black Panthers Speak, p. 80).
My account of this action closely follows,
sometimes to the letter, that of Foner in his
Introduction to The Black Panthers Speak. Cf.
p. xxviii.
Quoted in Foner, Introduction, The Black
Panthers Speak, p. xxviii.
Seale and Newton originally chose the name of
the Black Panther Party because the panther is
reputed never to make an unprovoked attack but
to defend itself ferociously whenever it is
attacked. Cf. Foner, Introduction, The Black
Panthers Speak, p. xv.
Bobby Seale, Seize the Time, pp. 412, 418419.
See Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of
Repression, op. cit., and The COINTELPRO
Papers (Boston: South End Press, 1990);
Nkechi Taifa et al., Human Rights: U.S.
Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO Victims,
op. cit.
Safiya Bukhari-Alston, Coming of Age: A Black
Revolutionary, in Imprisoned Intellectuals:
Americas Political Prisoners Write on Life,
Liberation, and Rebellion, ed. Joy James (New
York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 126 (my
emphasis).
Joy James, Introduction, The Angela Y. Davis
Reader, p. 14.
Angela Y. Davis, Political Prisoners, Prisons, and
Black Liberation, The Angela Y. Davis Reader,
pp. 41, 4344. Also available online in the ebook History is a Weapon,
www.historyisaweapon.org. Hereafter referred to
as PP.
For an analysis that demonstrates the continued
relevance of Jacksons critique of the American
prison system, see Brady Heiner, The American
Archipelago: The Global Circuit of Carcerality
and Torture, op. cit.; see also the discussion
between Angela Y. Davis and Dylan Rodriguez
published in The Challenge of Prison Abolition:
A Conversation, History is a Weapon,
available at http://www.historyisaweapon.com/
64
65
66
67
68
69
64
65
66
67
68
69
defcon1/davisinterview.html, consulted 7
October 2006. See also Angela Y. Davis,
Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons,
and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press,
2005).
Interview with George Jackson 3-29-71, The
Black Panther, 3 April 1971, p. 6.
A separate work would be required to assess
the points of disagreement that exist between the
works of Davis and Jackson during this period.
Divergences between their respective political
analyses, as well as their respective strategic
assessments of effective political action at the
time, are quite evident. This is partly evidenced
by the somewhat removed stance Davis
maintained in relation to the internal leadership
of the BPP (cf. note 11). By no means does the
present work intend to represent Davis and
Jackson as homophonous figures; for they are
not. However, there are salient points of
continuity between their respective analyses of
the prison, as being both a repressive and
ideological State apparatus, and of prisoners, as
being political agents in more global struggles.
These dimensions of their thought continue to
influence prison abolitionism in the present day;
they also greatly informed the French prison
abolition movement of the 1970s, and
Foucaults political philosophy of the same
period.
Le Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons:
Archives dune lutte, 19701972, eds Philippe
Artires et al. (Paris: IMEC, 2003), pp. 9293.
This and all subsequent translations of this work
are my own.
Discipline and Punish (1975), the 1976 Lectures
and the first volume of The History of Sexuality
(1976).
The Freedom Archives has produced an extremely
informative documentary audio CD on the Attica
rebellion and the assassination of George
Jackson, entitled Prisons on Fire: George Jackson,
Attica & Black Liberation, available at
www.freedomarchives.org. For more information
on the Attica rebellion, see the Attica Revisited
web resources at www.talkinghistory.org/attica.
A copy of The Attica Liberation Faction
Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression
Platform, drafted by the resisting prisoners, can
also be found online at The Harriet Tubman
Literary Circle website: http://www.brown.edu/
Departments/African_American_Studies/JJames/
incarceration/attica_manifesto.pdf (accessed 27
January 2007).
For secondary (and sometimes contradictory)
sources on George Jacksons life and the
circumstances of his assassination, see Churchill
and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, op. cit.;
354
70
71
72
73
74
70
71
72
73
74
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3

Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography, op. cit.; Jo
Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?
(New York: Knopf, 1976); Joy James (ed.),
Imprisoned Intellectuals (New York: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2003), pp. 8487; Paul Liberatore, The
Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson,
Stephen Bingham, and the San Quentin
Massacre (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
1996); Eric Mann, Comrade George: An
Investigation into the Life, Political Thought and
Assassination of George Jackson (New York:
Harper and Row, 1974).
GIP, The Assassination of George Jackson,
trans. Brady Heiner, in Paris and Mendieta (eds),
Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.
Davis, An Autobiography, op. cit., p. 319.
Ibid., p. 317.
Transcribed from archival audio, The Freedom
Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit.
On the morning prior to the massacre on 13
September 1971, William Kunsler, a lawyer
who was serving as an intermediary in
negotiations between the prisoners and the
State, made the following prophetic statement to
the press:
76
77
78
79
We implore [the Commissioner], we implore

him now, to have no force in there [i.e. inside
the prison]. They [i.e. the prisoners] want to
continue to talk. If they [i.e. the agents of the
State] go in there, its going to be a massacre in
this prison, and its on the heads of the
authorities if it takes place. [] [Governor
Rockefellers] refusal to come here is a
monstrosity, because what he is saying is: Kill
these men, I have no concern. All I want to do is
restore law and order. And I think thats a
rotten exchange for lives. (Transcribed from
archival audio, The Freedom Archives, Prisons
on Fire, op. cit.)
75
75 Immediately after the exposure of the torture

that was organized and carried out by CIA
and US military personnel at Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq, Silvia Baraldini wrote an oped piece describing the torture that New
York Sate Troopers and National Guards
had enacted against Attica prisoners in the
violent counter-revolutionary aftermath of the
Attica prisoner revolt. The States treatment of
Attica prisoners in 1971 belies, over against
official State rhetoric to the contrary, that the
systematic use of torture has remained a
hallmark of the States official and de facto
procedure for the treatment of racialized
subjects deemed resistant. See Silvia
Baraldini, Nei sotterranei degli States, Il
80
81
82
83
84
85
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
Manifesto, 11 May 2004. My English

translation, The United States Underground,
is available on the Prison Activist Resource
Center website: http://www.prisonactivist.org/
pipermail/prisonact-list/2004-May/
008991.html
In 2000, after 25 years of delays by the State,
New York State was forced to settle for $12
million in a civil suit that was originally filed in
1974 and in which juries ruled that the State
had engaged in cruel and unusual punishment,
violating human and civil rights. Cf. The
Freedom Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit.; and
the Attica Revisited web resources at
www.talkinghistory.org/attica. The quotation
from the NY State Special Commission on Attica
is cited in Voices of Freedom: An Oral History
of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s
through the 1980s, eds Henry Hampton and
Steve Fayer (New York: Bantam, 1991), p.
561.
Transcribed from archival audio, The Freedom
Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit.
Le Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons, op. cit.,
p. 124.
It is on precisely this point that Foucault makes his
only mention of the Black Panthers, aside from that
made in the GIPs pamphlet LAssassinat de
George Jackson. In a letter to Daniel Defert he
writes that the Black Panthers are developing a
strategic analysis that has emancipated itself from
Marxist theory. See Daniel Defert, Chronologie,
Dits et crits, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994),
pp. 33, 38, 39. Also see Alessandro Fontana and
Mauro Bertanis editors postscript to the 1976
Lectures, Situating the Lectures, where they cite
Deferts notes on the connection (1976 Lectures,
p. 282).
Daniel Defert, The Mechanism of War as an
Analytic of Power Relations, trans. Brady Heiner,
in Paris and Mendieta (eds), Biopolitics and
Racism, op. cit.
Literally translated, mise en abme (also mise
en abyme), means placing into an abyss
or placing into infinity. The expression is
used to describe a formal technique
employed in painting, film and literature in
which a frame-structure is constructed whose
internal structure reiterates the frame-structure
ad infinitum, effecting a kind of recursion.
My thanks to Sam Butler for calling my
attention to some of the nuances of this
expression.
Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 79.
Defert, The Mechanism of War as an Analytic
of Power Relations, op. cit.
Cf. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Part
Five.

85 Numerous commentators, particularly in the
area of postcolonial studies, have critically
pointed out how Foucault remained, as James
Clifford put it, scrupulously ethnocentric.
Gayatri Spivak and Ann Laura Stoler have
each rightly dismissed Foucaults genealogies of
power as self-contained versions of history that
remain only about the West. For instance,
Stoler writes:
88
89
90
91
92
In both the [1976] lectures and [The History of

Sexuality] volume one, the focus is on the
internal dynamics of European states and their
disciplinary biopolitical strategies. Contiguous
empires figure in Foucaults genealogy of racism
in his lectures, but imperial expansion outside
Europe does not. In short, the genealogy of
racist discourse is sui generis to Europe: colonial
genocide is subsumed, dependent, accounted
for, and explained in absentia.
86
93
94
95
See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1988), p. 265; Spivak, Can the Subaltern
Speak?, in Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988); and Stoler, Race and the
Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1995). Stoler citation from
pp. 2829.
86 Paolo Napoli makes a similar argument in a
debate on the 1976 Lectures:
Jonathan Jackson armed McClain and, with

prisoner witnesses Ruchell Magee and William
Christmas, herded the assistant district attorney,
Judge Harold Haley, and three jurors into a van
parked outside. Law enforcement officers fired
upon the parked van without regard for the
hostages, as was prison policy, killing
Christmas, McClain, and Jackson; wounding
Magee; and killing Haley and wounding other
hostages. (George Jackson bio in James,
Imprisoned Intellectuals, op. cit., p. 85)
At the beginning of the eighteenth century,

when Boulainvilliers affirms that the Gauls
were invaded by the Franks, he expresses
something that probably doesnt correspond to
the actual truth. But if one gives up that
empirical and descriptive approach and
places oneself on the terrain of the very
construction of historical events, as is
Foucaults intention, it is less a matter of
saying what occurred than of releasing a new
possibility for speaking, of taking a position in
the present, and thus of producing reality. In
short, what is at stake is a veritable historical
practice: saying and doing history fall within
the province of the same act.
Foucaults own discourse in the 1976 Lectures, I
argue, is just such an attempt at historical
practice, at taking a position in the present.
Napolis intervention appears in Defert, The
Mechanism of War as an Analytic of Power
Relations, op. cit.
87
87 Racism is, quite literally, revolutionary discourse

in an inverted form. Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures,
pp. 61 and 81.
88 Cf. 1976 Lectures, pp. 7677, and the
first volume of The History of Sexuality,
pp. 92102.
89 Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 4951.
90 Ibid., p. 56.
91 Cf. ibid., pp. 87114.
92 Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 5051.
93 Jackson, Blood In My Eye, op. cit., p. 99.
94 In addition to Soledad Brother and Blood In My
Eye, see Comrade George Jackson on Angela
Davis, The Black Panther, 13 March 1971; and
Field Marshal George Jackson Analyzes the
Correct Method in Combating American
Fascism, The Black Panther, 4 September 1971.
The latter of these was posthumously transcribed
from an audio recording that was played at
Jacksons funeral.
95 On 7 August 1970, Jacksons 17-year-old
brother, Jonathan, entered the Marin County
Courthouse during the trial of prisoner James
McClain, who was charged with the attempted
stabbing of a Soledad prison guard.
The GIP wrote about their understanding of

Jonathan Jacksons actions.
Sequestering a judge in a full courtroom,
Jonathan Jackson denounced justice as an
evident instrument of the fascist repression of the
U.S.the justice that, with its white judges and its
white juries, consigned hundreds of thousands of
African Americans to the blood-thirsty slavedrivers of concentration camps. He demonstrated
that the act of supporting prisoners is one of the
forms of war. (The Assassination of George
Jackson, in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.)
96
97
96 Field Marshal George Jackson Analyzes the

Correct Method in Combating American
Fascism, The Black Panther, 4 September 1971,
p. 3.
97 Ibid., p. 5.
356
98
CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3
98 Angela Y. Davis articulates a similar position at

this time:
Although the most unbridled expressions of the
fascist menace are still tied to the racist
domination of blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans,
[and] Indians, it lurks under the surface wherever
there is potential resistance to the power of
monopoly capital, the parasitic interests which
control this society. (PP, p. 51)
99 Davis, PP, p. 40.

100 Ibid., p. 42 (my emphasis).
101 Frantz Fanon famously advances a similar
argument in his analysis of the colonial situation:
The native is a being hemmed in [].
Confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the
native is always presumed guilty. See Wretched
of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New
York: Grove, 1963), pp. 52, 53. The Davis quote
above comes from PP, p. 50 (my emphasis).
102 GIP, LAssassinat de George Jackson,
Intolrable, No. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971),
p. 11.
103 Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, p. 256.
104 Published online: Remembering the Real
DragonAn Interview with George Jackson, May
16 and June 29, 1971, History is a Weapon,
www.historyisaweapon.org. Also:
www.brown.edu/Departments/
African_American_Studies/
wayland_fac_seminar/interview/
george_jackson.html
105 Angela Y. Davis, PP, p. 46.
106 GIP, The Assassination of George Jackson, in
107 Ibid.
108 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 9.
109 GIP, The Assassination of George Jackson, in
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
110 For a critique of this erasure in Foucaults analysis

in Discipline and Punish, see Joy James, Erasing
the Spectacle of Racialized State Violence, in
Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender,
and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1996), pp. 2443.
Ariana Mangual and I wage a similar critique of
Foucault in the context of an analysis of the
function of schools in racialized communities. See
The Repressive Social Function of Schools in
Racialized Communities, in States of
Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons,
ed. Joy James (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp.
222230.
111 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 217.
112 Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 256, 258.
113 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice and a Role
for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing,
Metaphilosophy, 34(1/2) (January 2003),
pp. 154173. Frickers analysis is developed
further in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics
of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
114 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue
in the Politics of Knowing, p. 161.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid., p. 163.
117 Ibid., p. 153.
118 Ibid., pp. 170, 172.
119 Cf. note 10.
120 The Prison Activist Resource Center: http://
www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows. The Jericho
Movement: http://www.thejerichomovement.com
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
106
107
108
109
110
Brady Thomas Heiner is in the Department

of Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook, New
York, USA. E-mail: bheiner@ic.sunysb.edu

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ISSN: 1360-4813 (Print) 1470-3629 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccit20

Foucault and the Black Panthers

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Date: 19 September 2015, At: 09:11

CITY, VOL. 11, NO. 3, DECEMBER 2007

Foucault and the Black

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Taylor and Francis

[P]olitics is war without bloodshed while

n the early 1970s, Foucaults method

engaged in an excavation of the epistemological foundations of the modern subject

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/07/030313-44 2007 Taylor & Francis

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CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3

memorialize Foucault as an intellectual

inquiry to genealogical critique is motivated

HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 315

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produced, disclosed and circulated, and it

What does the silence regarding the link

and 1976. Looking at Foucaults 1976

I. 197072: Foucaults encounter with the

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CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3

The preceding words appear on the back

It is precisely these circumstances and events

American class dynamics played upon his

In a certain respect, this passage resembles

HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 317

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undertake an archaeological excavation of the

Having gone about his academic career until

anti-authoritarian struggles that students and

Regardless what one takes to be a strictly

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CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3

homosexuality, Genet had a radical critical

Figure 1 BPP leader and political prisoner Huey P.

supplied him with further evidence

Genet assuredly put Daviss and Jacksons

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HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 319

surplus labor detention center for American

Largely inspired by Daviss and Jacksons

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CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3

toward the concerns that would preoccupy

who were charged with murdering a prison

HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 321

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3. They bring together, around these specific

It should be recalled that the above passage

regarding prisons. Prisons convinced me that

It is certainly true that Foucaults concrete

II. 196672: politics and war in the

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CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3