Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society

Rethinking Foucault in an Age of Terror focuses on the relationship between literary culture, power, society and war, assessing the critical importance of Michel Foucault's lecture series Society Must Be Defended for contemporary debates about war and terror in literary and cultural studies, as well as social and political thought. Foucault's Society Must Be Defended develops his historical investigations of power and knowledge to examine how society is constituted in and through relations of force, conflict and domination, articulating his account of sovereignty and biopolitics with his theory of force and war to bring a new dimension to our understanding of these fraught issues. His lectures focused in part on English society and culture, and in this respect offer an important and timely challenge to the discipline of contemporary English Studies. In response to this challenge, scholars in history, politics, as well as literary and cultural studies consider the role literary and cultural texts play in the historical and theoretical conjunction of war, society and politics Foucault outlined.