Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and the violence in the USSR

Abstract

Michel Foucault (1926-1984), on the course Society must be defended (1976), explains the relationship between biopower and racism. Among the types of racism practiced since the nineteenth century, Foucault includes socialism, and says that there is a kind of evolutionary and biological racism in it that works fully in relation to the mentally ill, the criminals, the political opponents etc., that was always necessary when socialism had to insist on the issue of the fight against the enemy and the elimination of the adversary within the capitalist society, and appeared because it was the only way, in this case, to think of a reason to kill the opponent. On the other hand, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) published in 1947 the book Humanism and Terror, which invokes the problem of violence practiced by the Soviet Union, highlighting the theory and practice of violence by the communist regime. For Merleau-Ponty, when you live in a time when the traditional basis of a society is destroyed and man must rebuild it and rebuild either the human relationships, the freedom of each one disappears and violence appears. That would be like it was on the principle of communism, with Lenin. What Merleau-Ponty is questioning is whether the violence perpetrated by the same regime in 1947 has the same meaning it had on the Leninism. The objective of this work is to check for and what are the touch points between Foucault’s vision of the state racism practiced by the USSR and the revolutionary violence identified by Merleau-Ponty in the same USSR.