Historical Discourse and Its Supporters (pp. 65-69)
Historical discourse tends to reinforce power. Genealogy must magnify the names of kings, and recorded history is most often written by the victors. History intensifies power by putting examples (living law) into circulation. History is not simply an image of power, but also a way of invigorating it – it has a magical quality – it dazzles. Until a very late stage in Western society, Foucault says that history was a history of sovereignty – a ritual that reinforced sovereignty. In the 16th and 17th c. however, historical discourses became discourses about races. In this new discourse, sovereignty did not bind everything together as a unity – it enslaved.
The Counterhistory of Race Struggle (pp. 70-71)
Through this, racial discourses began to offer a counterhistory, it was the discourse of those who were not represented by the sovereign discourse, and it spoke of defeats rather than victories.
Roman History and Biblical History (pp. 71-77)
To Roman history, the bible provided a protest against the power of kings and the despotism of the church. The bible was a weapon of poverty and insurrection. Historical discourse then has two great morphologies, and thus two political functions. One is the roman history of sovereignty, and the other is the biblical history of servitude and exiles.
Revolutionary Discourse (pp. 78-80)
The biblical discourse of insurrection leads to revolutionary discourses and the production of fields of knowledge around these discourses. Revolutionary discourses are counter-histories. Revolutionary discourses came out of race struggles, and became class struggles, but as these discourses were taking place, so was a recoding of the old counterhistory in terms of races (in the medical or biological sense of the term).
Birth and Transformations of Racism (pp. 80-81)
This new discourse of race focused only on the medical-biologic perspective and crushed the historical dimensions of racial struggle. This helped to create what will become actual racism. The theme of the binary society rears its ugly head in the form of a struggle for survival between two racial groups, and this binary allowed for the discourse that the state must protect the purity of the race. “Racism is, quite literally, revolutionary discourse in an inverted form.
Race Purity and State Racism: The Nazi Transformation and the Soviet Transformation (pp. 81-84)
As part of a shift from law to norm, sovereignty was able to take over the discourse of race struggle and use it as a technology of power. This was a transformation and an alternative to revolutionary power. The Nazi transformation established a state racism that is responsible for the protection of the race, the soviet transformation reworked the revolutionary discourse of social struggle, and used it to maintain the hygiene of an orderly society – with the class enemy being the sick, the deiviant and the madman
