870107

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SOR0010.1177/0038026119870107The Sociological ReviewMedien

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Special Section: Roots, Routes, and Reconstruction: Travelling Ideas/Theories
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The Sociological Review

Foucault in Tunisia: The

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DOI: 10.1177/0038026119870107
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Kathryn Medien
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract
In September 1966, 10 years after Tunisia officially gained independence from French colonial
rule, Michel Foucault took up a three-year secondment, teaching philosophy at the University of
Tunis. This article offers an account of the time that Foucault spent in Tunisia, documenting his
involvement in the anti-imperial, anti-authoritarian struggles that were taking place, and detailing
his organizing against the carceral Tunisian state. Through this account, it is argued that Foucault’s
entrance into political activism, and his associated work in developing a new analytic of power,
was fundamentally motivated by his encounter with the neocolonial operatives of power that he
witnessed and resisted while in Tunisia. In tracing the anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles
taking place concurrent to Foucault’s development of his analytic of power, albeit struggles that
are shown to not take centre stage in his subsequent works, this article concludes by suggesting
that taking seriously the scholar-activist archive presented may offer us a set of radical Foucauldian
tools for resistance.

Keywords
anti-colonialism, Foucault, imperialism, power, prison, Tunisia

In 1978 Italian Marxist intellectual and politician Duccio Trombadori interviewed

Michel Foucault. The topic of the interview was France’s May 1968, an event com-
monly narrated as having provided a significant catalyst for the emergence of
European post-structuralist philosophy, as argued by Bourg (2007), Braidotti (2008),
Gendron (2013) and Poster (1984). During the interview, Foucault was asked to
describe the impact that France’s May 1968 had on his philosophical and political
praxis, to which he responded:

Corresponding author:
Kathryn Medien, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1SB,
UK.
Email: kim28@cam.ac.uk
2 The Sociological Review 00(0)

I remember that Marcuse said reproachfully one day, where was Foucault at the time of the May
barricades? Well, I was in Tunisia, on account of my work. And I must add that this experience
was a decisive one for me . . . Tunisia, for me, represented in some ways the chance to reinsert
myself in the political debate. It wasn’t May of ’68 in France that changed me; it was March of
’68, in a third-world country. (1979/1991, p. 132)

Foucault’s assertion, that he was radically transformed in the Tunisian third world, at
once ruptures many of the narratives that are told about his work and life. Within prevail-
ing accounts, Foucault’s work is routinely categorized into three overlapping, yet dis-
tinct, periods: an early focus on ‘archaeology’ in the 1960s; a shift to Nietzschean
‘genealogy and power’ in the 1970s; and a final focus on the ‘care of self’ in the late
1970s and early 1980s, before Foucault’s death in 1984 (Barrett, 1988; Dreyfus &
Rabinow, 1983; Haugaard, 2002; Packer, 2011; Poster, 1984; Smart, 1985). According to
these stories, it is the events of May 1968 in France, Europe, and Foucault’s subsequent
and apparently resulting political activity, most notably the establishment of the Groupe
d’Information sur les Prisons (Prison Information Group, GIP) in Paris, that motivated
Foucault’s movement from ‘archaeology’ to ‘genealogy’, inspired by European thinkers
such as Friedrich Nietzsche, and resulting in the development of concepts such as ‘disci-
pline’, ‘technology’, ‘governmentality’, ‘strategy’ and ‘biopower’.1 Within these domi-
nant narratives Foucault’s time in Tunisia is given little to no attention, often mentioned
in a sweeping reference or relegated to a footnote. Foucault’s radical activism and schol-
arship are firmly identified as having erupted from a European experience, located within
the European continent.
Against theses narratives, Foucault’s claim of Tunisian transformation warrants genea-
logical investigation. Taking heed of his assertion, this article traces his life changing time
in northern Africa, assembling an account of this period from the writings of Tunisian intel-
lectuals and activists (Bouraoui, 2015; Othmani, 2008; Triki-Boubaker, 2008), as well as
some of Foucault’s contemporary European biographers and commentators (Defert, 2013;
Eribon, 1991; Macey, 1993, 2004; Mills, 2003). Through an analysis of Foucault’s involve-
ment in anti-imperial, anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian struggles, I fold the Tunisian sub-
jects, geographies and histories erased from current accounts of Foucault back into our
purview. Thus, while the focus of this article is Michel Foucault, throughout my re-telling
of his time in Tunisia I note the Tunisian organizations and movements who, I suggest,
should rightly hold a place in our rememberings of Foucault. After having documented
Foucault’s involvements in anti-imperial and anti-authoritarian Tunisian struggles, I then
turn to examine how this experience travelled with Foucault back to Paris. In so doing, I
trace how Foucault’s recognition of the intolerability of power, a term that, as we will
shortly see, characterized both his Parisian prison activism and later scholarship on power,
directly emerged out of his Tunisian experiences.
Together, this article follows in the steps of feminist scholars who, in utilizing and
examining Foucault’s work, have sought to question the place of colonialism and imperial-
ism in his archive, exemplified in the works of Lazreg (2017), Stoler (1995) and Weheliye
(2014). Stoler, for example, has importantly noted that ‘crucial elements of gender and
empire are missing from Foucault’s account’ of biopower (1995, p. 35). As a result, Stoler
argues that any account of biopower that does not take seriously the ways in which
Medien 3

biopolitical discourses of racial survival and sexual regulation in Europe were influenced
by the figuring of colonized subjects as posing a sexual and racial threat, misses a large part
of the history and emergence of biopower. In building on this scholarship, this article traces
the anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles taking place concurrent to Foucault’s develop-
ment of his analytic of power, albeit struggles that are shown to not take centre stage in his
subsequent works. In doing so, this article concludes by suggesting that taking seriously the
scholar-activist archive presented may offer us a set of radical Foucauldian tools for resist-
ance. A set of tools that demand an expansion of our frames of reference beyond the shores
of Europe, asking that we take seriously the centrality of state racism, (neo)colonialism and
imperialism to power’s modern deployments.

Foucault in Tunisia
In September 1966, 10 years after Tunisia officially gained independence from French
colonial rule, Michel Foucault took up a three-year French-government-sponsored
secondment, teaching philosophy at the University of Tunis, Tunisia. While in Tunisia,
Foucault taught his Tunisian students the works of Nietzsche, Althusser and Descartes,
and gave a weekly lecture series every Friday afternoon at the University of Tunis where,
as one of his former students reports, ‘you had to arrive early to get a seat’ (Othmani,
2008, p. 8).2 Alongside his work at the university, Foucault spoke regularly at Club Tahar
Hadad, a cultural centre run by Tunisian feminist Jellila Hafisa, during which he outlined
the ideas that anticipated The Archaeology of Knowledge (Rice, 2007, p. 27). During
Foucault’s time in Tunisia he also undertook regular visits to the private library of his
colleague Gérard Deledalle, who held a collection on John Dewey, and began reading
texts by Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg and the American Black Panther Party (Defert,
2013; Macey, 1993, p. 90).
Nearly all of Foucault’s accounts of Tunisia are marked by his amazement at his
Tunisian students and their ability to go beyond European readings of philosophical
texts, dissolving the boundary between theory and practice, propelling thought into revo-
lutionary action. During an April 1967 interview with La Presse de Tunisie, Foucault
remarked, ‘I met the Tunisian students, and it was love at first sight . . . What enchants
me more than anything is their insatiable appetite for knowledge’ (Foucault, 1967 cited
in Wojciehowski, 2015, p. 168). In a later 1980 interview, Foucault suggested that unlike
in Europe, ‘in Tunisia, on the contrary, everyone was drawn into Marxism with radical
violence and intensity and with a staggeringly powerful thrust. For those young people,
Marxism did not represent merely a way of analyzing reality; it was also a kind of moral
force, an existential act that left one stupefied’ (Foucault, 1979/1991, p. 135). Similarly,
in a December 1966 letter to his partner Daniel Defert, Foucault wrote of his Tunisian
students’ insight into Althusser, noting that, ‘It’s strange to see that what for us is pure
theoretical discourse, here suddenly rises up into an almost immediate imperative’
(Foucault, 1966 cited in Defert, 2013, p. 34).
Foucault’s students’ radical intensity sprang into action in June 1967, 10 months after
Foucault’s arrival in Tunisia. On 5 June 1967, the first day of the Six Day War, also
known as al Naksah (the setback), which saw troops from across Africa and Asia launch
a war against the colonial state of Israel, Perspectives,3 an anti-colonial socialist Tunisian
4 The Sociological Review 00(0)

student group, organized a protest in central Tunis. Protestors congregated at the British
and American embassies to denounce Western imperialism and Zionism, and to call upon
the Tunisian government to end its support for Western regimes. The protest cumulated
in Tunisian protestors launching attacks against the British and American embassies,
attempting to set them on fire.
While the anti-imperialist protests had at their core an anti-racist, anti-colonial spirit,
a faction of the protest broke off, marching to Quartier de Lafayette, a Tunisian-Jewish
neighbourhood in downtown Tunis. Protestors burnt houses, looted Jewish-owned shops,
and firebombed the quarter’s synagogue. Foucault denounced the anti-Jewish violence:
two days later, in a letter to his friend George Canguilhem in Paris, he wrote:

A good fifty fires. 150 or 200 shops looted – the poorest ones, obviously; the timeless spectacle
of the synagogue gutted, carpets dragged into the street, trampled on and burned; people
running through the streets, taking refuge in a block that the mob wanted to set on fire. Since
then, silence, the shutters down, no one or almost no one in the area, children playing with
broken knick-knacks. (Foucault, 1967 cited in Macey, 1993, p. 204)

In the weeks following the riots the Tunisian state came down heavily on the protes-
tors, rounding up and arresting the movements’ leaders and levying a tax upon all resi-
dents of the city of Tunis to pay for the damage caused. The Tunisian regime beat and
tortured the imprisoned and, in private military tribunals, harshly sentenced the defend-
ants. For example, among the many arrested was theology student Mohammed Ben
Djennet,4 who was sentenced to 20 years’ forced labour, and who was to become a focus
of the March 1968 protests the following year.
In the months that followed, Foucault allowed the remaining un-arrested activists to
use his apartment as an organizing space, safe from regimes of state surveillance (Macey,
1993). Foucault also hid a printing press in his garden to allow activists to print posters
and newsletters in support of imprisoned activists, including a pamphlet titled ‘The
Question of Palestine’ (Wojciehowski, 2015), and posters and leaflets detailing the
names of tortured and imprisoned Tunisians (Eribon, 1991; Macey, 1993). Foucault also
began donating part of his salary in support of his students’ legal defence (Defert, 2013).
Following months more of protest, which included a day of action against the war in
Vietnam in November 1967, and a January 1968 protest against the diplomatic visit of
US Vice President Hubert Humphrey,5 the student movement came to a head in March
1968, the date that Foucault suggests ‘changed him’ in this article’s opening quote. In
March 1968, a week of protests and strikes took place across the University of Tunis,
with protestors calling for the release of all of those who had been imprisoned during the
anti-Zionist, anti-imperial marches during the previous year. A movement that had begun
as internationalist and anti-imperialist was now connecting global struggles against colo-
nial violence to localized carceral authoritarian state oppression.
On 15 March 1968, thousands of Tunisian students gathered outside of the University
of Tunis. Tunisian student leader Brahim Razgallah addressed the crowd, accusing the
Tunisian government of being apologists for US imperialism, calling for an end to the
Vietnam war, condemning Israeli colonialism, and calling on the Tunisian authoritarian
state to investigate torture and corruption, and release all imprisoned students. Once
Medien 5

again, the Tunisian authorities responded with force. Over 200 students were arrested
and held without trial until September of that year. Reports of torture included acid burns
on the soles of feet, ripping off fingernails, the burning of skin, electroshocks, water-
boarding, and cigarette burns on women’s breasts (Hendrickson, 2012). Among those
arrested was Ahmed Othmani, a member of Perspectives and one of Foucault’s students,
who Foucault had previously given sanctuary to in his residence while the Tunisian
authorities were seeking his arrest (Macey, 2004). During the same month, in reaction to
Tunisian state violence, Foucault called a meeting with the then Tunisian President
Habib Bourgiba and the French ambassador to Tunisia, unsuccessfully calling on them
to release the imprisoned student activists (Defert, 2013).
On 9 September 1968, six months later, the trial of 134 imprisoned activists opened in
Tunis. Their trials were conducted by newly established court, Cour de la Sûreté de
l’Etat (Security Court of the State), which denied them access to defence attorneys and
any supporting evidence. Despite this, Foucault compiled and passed files of evidence on
to lawyers (Defert, 2013), which were later refused by the courts. Alongside many oth-
ers,6 Foucault’s student Ahmed Othmani was sentenced to 14 years, which he went on to
serve in full.7
Two weeks later, in September 1968, Foucault ended his secondment to Tunisia early,
returning to Paris.8

The intolerability of (neo)colonial power

As the above section attests, and contra to accounts that suggest that ‘in 1969 Foucault
began to embody the very figure of the militant intellectual’ (Eribon, 1991, p. 2010,
emphasis added), Foucault was already militantly engaging in activism in Tunisia, where
we saw him provide immense support to his students who were fighting against the
authoritarian and neocolonial Tunisian state, and against colonial rule elsewhere.
Retrospectively reflecting on his time in northern Africa, Foucault remarked:

.  .  . what on earth is it that can set off in an individual the desire, the capacity, and the possibility
of an absolute sacrifice without being able to recognize or suspect the slightest ambition or
desire for power and profit? This is what I saw in Tunisia. The necessity for a struggle was
clearly evident there on account of the intolerable nature of certain conditions produced by
capitalism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. (Foucault, 1979/1991, p. 137, emphasis added)

In identifying the colonial relations of power that he witnessed and resisted while in
Tunisia and, further, stating that he ‘felt compelled to give personal support to the stu-
dents, to experience and take part in something absolutely different from all that mutter-
ing of political speeches and debates that occurred in Europe’, Foucault named the modes
of oppression that he witnessed as intolerable (1979/1991, p. 134). Before turning to ask
how Foucault’s militant time in Tunisia inspired a shift in his philosophy, impelling him
to focus on the operatives of power, in what follows I explore how Foucault’s Tunisian
experience of the intolerability of colonial oppression travelled with him back to Paris,
most notably in his role establishing the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Prisons
Information Group, GIP) and the Comité Djellali.
6 The Sociological Review 00(0)

The GIP – a group of scholars, practitioners, prisoners and their families who sought to
make the oppressive site of prison known – are often described as having influenced
Foucault’s ‘turn’ to genealogy and power, providing us with a scholar-activist archive which
should sit alongside Foucault’s ‘philosophy proper’ (e.g. Dilts & Zurn, 2016; Elden, 2017;
Heiner, 2007; Hoffman, 2012). Many recent analyses of the GIP, and of Foucault’s role in
setting up and working with the group, while emphasizing the internationalist dimensions of
their work, nonetheless posit its origins in a European experience. For example, in their recent
volume, Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future
of Abolition, Dilts and Zurn argue that, ‘the roots of the GIP can be traced to the political
turbulence of May 1968 in France’ (2016, p. 3). While it indeed could be argued that Paris
May 1968, and the opening up of political possibility that followed, made the work of the GIP
possible,9 in what follows I suggest that the positing of Paris as a site of origin may function
to obfuscate its Tunisian, non-European, lines of relation. Thus, my aim here is not to merely
replace one site of origin with another. Rather, it is to suggest that Tunisia inspired Foucault
to become involved in the French prison struggle, and provided him with some of the neces-
sary connections for the GIP’s transnational work, restoring an international and anti-imperial
multiplicity to a seemingly singular European history.
On 8 February 1971, Michel Foucault appeared at a press conference in Chapelle Saint-
Bernard, declaring the establishment of the GIP, which Foucault founded alongside Pierre
Vidal-Naquet, a professor in classics who had routinely publicly condemned the French
army’s systematic use of torture in the Algerian war, and Jean-Marie Domenach, the editor
of Esprit, a French literary magazine which had vocally opposed the Algerian war and
French colonialism. Recognizing the disproportionate targeting of ‘foreigners’ and ‘young
people’ by the French state, and with the aim of allowing the imprisoned to ‘speak for
themselves’,10 the GIP’s activities included data collection through inmate surveys, and
public meeting and demonstrations aimed at raising awareness of the violent carceral log-
ics of the state (Dilts & Zurn, 2016; Eribon, 1991; Macey, 2004).11
The GIP’s function, to make carceral reality known, was driven by a desire to oppose,
counter and resist the prison, and institutions of social control more broadly, as sites of
intersecting violence. In so doing, the GIP named the site of the prison, echoing Foucault’s
description of his experiences of colonial and neocolonial oppression in Tunisia, as intol-
erable. A month after their founding press conference, the GIP published a statement in
J’accuse, which read:

Let what is intolerable – imposed, as it is, by force and by silence – cease to be accepted. We
do not make our inquiry in order to accumulate knowledge, but to heighten our intolerance and
make it an active intolerance. Let us become intolerant of prisons, the legal system, the hospital
system, psychiatric practice, military service, etc. (GIP, March 1971, cited in Foucault, 1994,
pp. 175–176)

Foucault’s work with the GIP, and the group’s critique of the intolerable French prison
system, was internationalist in its outlook from inception, drawing on and connecting
with a number of struggles globally. For example, in April 1971, two months after the
GIP’s founding, Foucault travelled to Montreal to lecture at McGill University. During
his trip, he took the time to meet with MDPPQ (Movement for the Defense of Political
Medien 7

Prisoners in Quebec), and visited Pierre Vallieres, author of Negres Blancs D’Amerique,
in prison12 (Defert, 2013). One month later, in May 1971, Foucault returned to Tunisia to
lecture at the Tahar Haddad Club. During his return, he arranged a meeting with the
Tunisian authorities, once again calling on them to release activists still imprisoned, and
once again to no avail (Defert, 2013). During the same month, May 1971, the GIP pub-
lished the first pamphlet in its four-part series entitled Intolérable. On the back cover of
the pamphlet, Intolérable named its targets:

These are intolerable:

courts

cops

hospitals, asylums

school, military service

the press, television

the State.

(GIP, May 1971, cited in Eribon, 1991, p. 224)

As these excerpts from the GIP’s vast archive make clear, their work was driven by
the conviction that sites of state and social governance were intolerable: scenes of vio-
lence that see power wear itself out on the bodies of the social populous, marking par-
ticular bodies out for state intervention, disappearance and control. The dual use of the
term intolerable – used by Foucault to retrospectively describe his experiences in Tunisia,
and by the GIP to actively resist the intolerable French state – arguably signifies the
continuities that he drew between both political experiences. Later reflecting on these
experiences, and their relation to his scholarship, Foucault remarked:

When I returned to France in November–December 1968, I was quite surprised and amazed – and
rather disappointed – when I compared the situation to what I had seen in Tunisia. The struggles,
though marked by violence and intense involvement, had never brought with them the same price,
the same sacrifices. There’s no comparison between the barricades of the Latin Quarter and the
risk of doing fifteen years in prison, as was the case in Tunisia . . . So, I tried to accomplish a
series of actions that would really imply a personal, physical commitment that was real and that
posed problems in concrete, precise, definite terms, within a determinate situation.

Only by starting from there could the necessary investigations and analyses be developed. I
tried, while working in the GIP on the problem of prisoners, to accomplish some sort of total
experience. That provided me the opportunity to stitch together the loose ends that had troubled
me in works like The History of Madness or The Birth of the Clinic, with what I had been able
to experience and know in Tunisia. (Foucault, 1979/1991, p. 138)
8 The Sociological Review 00(0)

Thus, as Foucault himself makes clear, his experiences in Tunisia bear a direct rela-
tion to his work with the GIP, and simultaneously ascribe only a minor significance to
prior events in Europe. In light of Foucault’s proclamation, I now turn to trace a series of
moments concerning Foucault’s involvement with the GIP. Moments which, as will be
made clear, are linked to Foucault’s experiences in Tunisia both in light of personal con-
nections that he made whilst in northern Africa, and in terms of the populations that he
worked amongst in order to resist the intolerability of French carceral power.

Resisting that which is intolerable, from Paris, to San

Quentin, to Tunis
Shortly after the publication of the first edition of Intolérable, Foucault was introduced
to French poet and activist Jean Genet by Catherine von Bülow, whom he had met while
living in Tunisia (Macey, 2004, p. 102). At the time, Genet was preparing a text in
defence of the imprisoned American Black Panther George Jackson, and had recently
returned from spending time working in Palestinian refugee camps (Defert, 2013).
Foucault was already familiar with the US Black Power movement, literature from which
he had begun reading while in Tunisia, and the pair decided to write the text together
(Defert, 2013, p. 46).13 In August 1971, Jackson was assassinated in San Quentin Prison,
California.14 Following this, on 11 November 1971, the GIP organized a large public
meeting in the Mutualite.15 The meeting was devoted to the French and American prison
systems, and featured a film on Attica, a prison in New York State which had been the
site of a prisoner rebellion in September 1971, and San Quentin Prison, California, fea-
turing an account of Jackson’s assassination and an overview of the Black Power move-
ment in the US (Defert, 2013, p. 48).16
Several months later, Foucault’s attention was to be brought back to the intolerability of
French racism. In October 1971, Algerian teenager Djellali Ben Ali was shot dead in a
racially motivated attack in the Parisian neighbourhood of La Goutte d’Or (Hajjat, 2011).
The neighbourhood, populated by a significant number of northern African migrants,
ignited into protests organized by the local ‘Palestine Committees’, with over 2000 people
marching through the neighbourhoods streets on 30 October. The murder reached Foucault
and his comrades’ attention, leading them to instigate the creation of Comité Djellali, a
committee set up to investigate the killing and ‘the existence of politically organized rac-
ism’ more broadly (Defert, 2013, p. 48). As part of the investigation, Foucault began visit-
ing La Goutte d’Or and ‘spent hours in local cafes discussing the situation, often using the
services of an Arabic-speaking interpreter’ (Macey, 1993, p. 308).
In November 1972, Mohammed Diab, an Algerian migrant worker living in Paris,
was shot dead whilst being held in French police custody. In response to Diab’s death
another investigative committee was set up, and Foucault and Genet organized a protest
to be held on 16 December 1972 (Defert, 2013, p. 51). Hundreds of protestors gathered
at Bonne-Nouvelle metro station, a location that importantly marked the site of the
October 1961 Paris massacre which had taken place a decade earlier,17 connecting
France’s brutal colonial past to present police brutality. The French police responded
with force, rounding up north African protestors, beating and arresting them. Foucault
Medien 9

attempted to snatch the arrested north Africans back from the police, which resulted in
Foucault himself being beaten and arrested. Foucault was ‘held with forty-five others in
a holding cell designed for twenty. Shortly after ten he was told that he could go, but
refused to leave until his temporary cellmates were freed . . . Foucault’s concern was to
make certain that no North Africans were still being held’ (Macey, 1993, p. 313). Centring
the lives of those north Africans marked for intolerable state violence, and in response to
the press focusing heavily on the beatings that he had received, he told a waiting reporter
that, ‘We should say that we were hit more so that the Arabs would be hit less. We have
to shout for the Arabs who cannot make themselves heard’ (Foucault, 1972 cited in
Defert, 2013, p. 52).
During the same month, following his arrest, Foucault continued to support the libera-
tion of Ahmed Othmani, his former student who was still imprisoned in Tunisia, signing
a petition requesting his release (Hendrickson, 2012). It was also during this month that
the GIP published the final two editions of their publication Intolérable. The third
focused on the assassination of George Jackson. The fourth and final edition was titled
Suicides de Prison, published jointly with the Comité d’Action des Prisonniers and the
Association pour la Défense des Droits des Détenus, publicized and analysed 32 suicides
that occurred in French prisons in 1972. The pamphlet included a series of ‘case histo-
ries’ and letters from prisoners who had committed suicide. One of the case histories
reads as follows:

Fleury-Merogis, 27 March 1972. Said Bleid, aged 19. Algerian, family resident in France.
Placed by a judge in the Foyer des Epinettes.18 Arrested; the warden of the foyer refused to take
him back on his release from prison. Deemed to be without any fixed abode, he is deported.
Having no family ties in Algeria, he comes back to France. Arrested and threatened with
deportation. Hangs himself. (GIP, Suicides de Prison, cited in Macey, 1993, p. 287)

Before December 1972 was out, the GIP had disbanded itself. Days later, Foucault
wrote in a letter that he was going to embark on an analysis of power relations on the
basis of the ‘most condemned form of war: not Hobbes, not Clausewitz, not the class
struggle, but civil war’ (Foucault, cited in Defert, 2013, p. 52, emphasis added).

Conclusion: The intolerability of imperial power

From all these different experiences, including my own, there emerged only one word, like a
message written with invisible ink, ready to appear on the page when the right chemical is
added; and that word is power. (Foucault, 1979/1991, pp. 145–146)

Throughout Foucault’s time in Tunisia, as well as during his years working with the GIP
and the Comité Djellali, we see him witness and resist the intolerability of imperial,
racializing and carceral power; a set of war-like forces which, for Foucault, can only
adequately be countered by militant rebellion.19 Working amongst and on behalf of
groups bearing the brunt of the subjugating capacities of power, Foucault’s actions con-
sistently recognized the racism of societies’ fabric. From hiding fugitive Tunisians in his
apartment, through undertaking the lengthy task of compiling files of evidence in their
10 The Sociological Review 00(0)

defence, to taking beatings from Parisian police in the place of north African migrants,
Foucault’s actions reveal an immense active intolerance to modern power.
Following the dissolution of the GIP, and a few years after Foucault’s radical and trans-
formative years in Tunisia, he went on to publish Discipline and Punish (1975), followed
by the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1978, 1984, 1988), while also continu-
ing to give courses at the Collège de France. It is within these works that we see Foucault,
in philosophical terms, outline most concretely his theory of biopolitics, governmentality
and power. Yet, despite the significance that the revolutionary anti-colonial will of the
Tunisian people, the radical philosophies and struggles of the Black Panther Party, and the
ongoing injustices faced by northern Africans living in France had on Foucault’s develop-
ment of this analytic of power, their existence and influence is reduced to silence in
Foucault’s subsequent philosophy, and has rarely been analysed in any sustained manor
by Foucault’s subsequent commentators and critics.20 In the concluding section of this
article I turn to analyse how Foucault’s experiences of neocolonial, imperial oppression in
Tunisia proved formative to his account of power. Indeed, despite Foucault’s theorizations
of power appearing as untouched by the political and theoretical traditions of anti-coloni-
alism and anti-imperialism, I argue that his analytic of power is deeply indebted to the
intensities, forces and commitments of Foucault’s Tunisian students.
From the early 1970s onwards, following his time in Tunisia, Foucault began to con-
ceive of societal power relations as a productive war-like set of forces, unequal in distri-
bution, using the Nietzschean term ‘genealogy’ to depict ‘the struggle that these forces
wage against each other’ (1998, p. 376). Taking the deployment of sexuality, the putative
system and neoliberal governance, among others, as sites of analysis, Foucault conceived
of modern power as desiring an ever more pervasive interdependence of the administra-
tion of life and death. Within Foucault’s formulation, it was primarily in resistance to the
being ‘governed thus’ that the art of critique or resistance operates (1978/2002, p. 196).
Central to Foucault’s critical formulation was the establishment of a mutually dependent
relationship between ‘thought’ and ‘experience’ (1997, pp. 109–112), a conceptualiza-
tion that foregrounds one’s own experiences of power as central to any critical project.
Later reflecting on the significance of Tunisia to his conceptualization of power, and
foregrounding the role that political experience played in his philosophical thought,
Foucault remarked:

. . . what was the meaning of that outburst of radical revolt that the Tunisian students had
attempted? What was it that was being questioned everywhere? I think my answer is that the
dissatisfaction came from the way in which a kind of permanent oppression in daily life was
being put into effect by the state or by other institutions and oppressive groups. That which was
ill-tolerated and continuously questioned, which produced that sort of discomfort, was ‘power’.
And not only state power, but also that which was exercised within the social body through
extremely different channels, forms, and institutions. It was no longer acceptable to be
‘governed’ in a certain way. I mean ‘governed’ in an extended sense; I’m not referring just to
the government of the state and the men who represent it, but also to those men who organise
our daily lives by means of rules, by way of direct or indirect influences, as for instance the
mass media. If I look today at my past, I recall having thought that I was working essentially on
a ‘genealogical’ history of knowledge. But the true motivating force was really this problem of
power. (Foucault, 1979/1991, pp. 144–145)
Medien 11

Thus, as Foucault himself makes clear, rather than having arisen in the wake of Paris
May 1968 or solely through European intellectual debate, we see Foucault’s ‘turn to
power’ arise, in part, through his experiences of the Tunisian people’s resistance to the
modes of permanent and intolerable oppression brought into being by what he earlier
named as ‘capitalism, colonialism and neo-colonialism’. Having reached the limits of the
liveable, it is precisely the Tunisian people’s refusal to allow imperial, colonial power its
grip on life, propelling thought into revolutionary action, that revealed, for Foucault, ‘the
problem of power’. Yet, rather than resulting in a fatalist conception of power relations,
it was precisely the Tunisian people’s rejection of neocolonial social order, their refusal
of the totalizing limits of intolerable power, and their exuding of what Foucault would
later call a politic of ‘de-subjugation’ (1978/2002, p. 194), that inspired Foucault’s posi-
tive critique of power.
Importantly, Foucault’s assertion of Tunisian transformation and his recognition of
societal-wide networks of intolerable power acknowledged the diverse intersecting ways
that power is ‘exercised within the social body through extremely different channels,
forms, and institutions’. Yet, despite this acknowledgement, the anti-colonial and anti-
imperial struggles that fuelled it are left unaccounted for in Foucault’s subsequent
works.21 Rather, what we see Foucault take up in his formation of modern power is the
notion of power’s intolerability. In 1972, during the time of Foucault’s involvement with
the GIP, he participated in a conversation with Gilles Deleuze, Intellectuals and Power.
During the exchange, Deleuze asked Foucault how we are to understand differing
national and transnational struggles against power, for the ‘multiple centres’ of struggles
and resistance, and the ‘transversal links between these active and discontinuous points,
from one country to another or within a single country’ (Foucault & Deleuze, 1977). In
response, Foucault professed that:

. . . if the fight is directed against power, then all those on whom power is exercised to their
detriment, all who find it intolerable, can begin the struggle on their own terrain and on the
basis of their proper activity (or passivity). In engaging in a struggle that concerns their own
interests, whose objectives they clearly understand and whose methods only they can determine,
they enter into a revolutionary process. They naturally enter as allies of the proletariat, because
power is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation . . . Women,
prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a specific
struggle against the particularised power, the constraints and controls, that are exerted over
them. Such struggles are actually involved in the revolutionary movement to the degree that
they are radical, uncompromising and non-reformist, and refuse any attempt at arriving at a
new disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of masters. (Foucault & Deleuze,
1977, p. 216, emphasis added)

Connecting particular struggles against power’s institutionalized intolerability – military,

patriarchal, sexual, carceral, medical – Foucault argued that what held these struggles in
common was their relation to the experience of intolerable power, an intolerable power
that worked in the service of global capitalist exploitation. Arguing that localized groups
must find means to speak and struggle on the basis of their own local experiences, Foucault
mirrored the GIP’s desire to give a voice to prisoners, his centring of the violence faced
by African migrants, and his wish to facilitate and aid his Tunisian students’ rebellion.
12 The Sociological Review 00(0)

Through situating such specific struggles within a common experience of resisting power
that is intolerable, however, Foucault also posited a kind of empiricist universality, or at
least solidarity, between disparate sites of localized resistance. Indeed, Foucault’s claims
that ‘power is everywhere’ (1978, p. 93) and that ‘society without power is a simple
abstraction’ (1982, p. 222), rather than abstract or nihilistic, were grounded in a recogni-
tion of power’s ability to concomitantly generate resistance, not in abstract and decontex-
tualized modes, but through situated experiences of intolerability: experiences that
together reveal the omnipresent transnational hold of power, a hold that unites us in com-
mon. As Foucault himself reflected, ‘Yet I am convinced that in the end, what was really
at stake also in France, and what accounted for change in so many things, was of the same
nature as that experience I had come to know in Tunisia’ (Foucault, 1979/1971, p. 141).
What can be said, then, is that Foucault’s anti-colonial, anti-imperial Tunisian experiences
provided the grounding for his analysis of power’s productivity. Yet the anti-colonial and
anti-imperial politics that underpinned these experiences are evacuated out of his formula-
tion of modern power.
Thus in having named the revolutionary Tunisians, radical Black Panthers and
targeted French-north Africans, who, I want to suggest, largely inspired and moti-
vated Foucault’s turn to power, my aim has been to begin to counter the erasure of
their struggles from Foucault’s subsequent analytic. Indeed, while any analysis of
imperialism and colonialism do not make it into Foucault’s subsequent vast philo-
sophical oeuvre in any sustained, systematic way, what this article has hoped to make
clear is that Foucault himself was inspired by, and immersed within, struggles against
colonial rule, the racist state and neocolonial authoritarianism. And, furthermore, that
these struggles shaped his philosophy, despite their subsequent marginalization. In
drawing attention to this scholar-activist archive, I want to suggest that taking seri-
ously the relationship between (neo)colonialism, imperialism, state racism and the
working of modern power, and the attendant need for situated resistance, may offer us
a set of radical Foucauldian tools for contemporary resistance. In deploying Foucault’s
analytic of power, the task becomes not one solely of social analysis, but rather the
cultivation of resistive relations of thought and experience that directly challenge and
refuse the subjugating forces of modern power’s deployments. A task that calls on us
to activate our intolerance to the racializing practices of the state, and to take seri-
ously power’s imperial, racist and colonial matter.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
  1. This argument has been made by, for example, Mark Poster (1984, p. 1), who argues that,
‘Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality can be interpreted as Foucault’s response
to the events of May 1968 in France’. Similarly Bernard Gendron has argued that, ‘Foucault’s
career as a public intellectual, his stance in words and deeds, in theory and practice, were
deeply informed by the events of May 1968 and the political struggles that followed upon it’
(2013, p. 21).
Medien 13

  2. This was similarly reported by the Tunisian press. In the 12 April 1967 edition of the Tunisian
newspaper La Presse de Tunis it was reported that, ‘Every Friday afternoon, the biggest lec-
ture hall of the University of Tunis is too small to hold the hundreds of students and visitors
who come to follow the lectures of Professor Michel Foucault’ (cited in Defert, 2013, p. 35).
  3. Perspectives were a leftist internationalist Tunisian socialist group founded by Tunisian stu-
dents who were studying in Paris in the 1950s. They formed one of the main opposition move-
ments to the Bourgiba’s dictatorial regime. The group published a regular newspaper, El Amal
Ettounsi (The Tunisian Worker), as well as the journal Tunisian Outlook.
  4. Mohammed Ben Djennet was a militant Tunisian activist and a leading member of the group
Perspectives. Ben Djennet fought tirelessly against both Bourgiba and Ben Ali’s dictator-
ships. He was exiled to Paris in 1972, where he died in 2012.
  5. During the protest, Tunisian students who had set up the Committee for the Liberation of Ben
Djennet gathered 1300 signatures in a petition addressed to President Bourgiba, demanding
his release (Hendrickson, 2012).
  6. In addition to Othmani, those imprisoned during the September 1968 trials included the fol-
lowing Tunisian activists: Gilbert Naccache, Noureddine Ben Khader, Brahim Razgallah and
Abdelaziz Krichen. Following their imprisonment, many of these activists published autobio-
graphical monographs detailing Tunisia’s March 1968, which have largely been ignored by
scholars. These include Charfi (2009), Gilbert (2009) and Othmani (2008).
  7. Ahmed Ben Othmani’s case was brought to the attention of Amnesty International in Paris,
who took him on as their first ‘political prisoner’. Othmani was freed in 1979, and later
helped found the Tunisian Section of Amnesty International. In 2008 he published a book,
Beyond Prison, in which he details his incarnation in Tunisia and subsequent international
fight against the prison system.
  8. Prior to Foucault’s departure from Tunisia he was reportedly pulled over in his car and beaten
by what he thought to be plain-clothed policemen (Eribon, 1991).
  9. Foucault himself made this claim, stating that, ‘But it is certain, in any case, that without May
of ’68, I would never have done the things I’m doing today; such investigations as those on
the prison, sexuality, etc., would be unthinkable’ (Foucault, 1979/1991, p. 140).
10. The GIP was critical of representing or speaking for others. In the first edition of Intolérable it
was stated that, ‘the GIP does not propose to speak in the name of prisoners in various prisons:
it proposes, on the contrary, to provide them with the possibility of speaking themselves and
telling what goes on in prisons’ (GIP cited in Eribon, 1991, p. 224).
11. Contained within the introduction of the first edition of Intolérable is a detailed explanation
of the GIP’s objectives. See Eribon (1991, pp. 227–228) for an English translation of this.
12. Pierre Vallieres was a leader of the Front de Liberation du Quebec (The Quebec Liberation Front).
13. Jean Genet was a prominent French writer, poet, playwright and activist whose work focused
on homophobia, racism and state violence. As Heiner has noted (2007, pp. 317–318), Foucault
and Genet formed a relationship through the work of the GIP: ‘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 . . . As
Genet’s 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.’
14. See George Jackson (1970) for an account of his life and struggles against the white suprema-
cist American state.
15. The GIP’s organizing around the murder of George Jackson was not an anomaly, but rather
forms part of a wide array of connections between French artists and intellectuals and the
US Black Panther Party. For example, French filmmaker Agnès Varda produced the 1968
14 The Sociological Review 00(0)

documentary Black Panther which she shot in Oakland, California during protests over Huey
P. Newton’s arrest (see Ongiri, 2009); in 1968 Jean-Luc Godard, a French film director,
directed Sympathy for the Devil featuring the Rolling Stones interwoven with shots of the
Black Panther Party reading revolutionary texts; French writer Jean Genet regularly spoke
and write about the US Black Power movement, including in the Black Panther official news-
letter itself (see Genet, 1970).
16. See Brady Heiner (2007) for an important and rich analysis of the role that the philosophies
of the Black Panther Party played in Foucault’s elaboration of genealogy and power.
17. On the evening of 17 October 1961, amid the Algerian War for Independence, thousands of
north African protestors, mainly Algerians, demonstrated across Paris against the discrimi-
natory curfew that had been imposed against them. Parisian police responded with force,
opening fire on protestors and arresting an estimated 11,500, who were taken to makeshift
detention centres, where they were beaten and held without food for days. In addition, up to
300 protestors were massacred and their bodies dumped in the River Seine. See House (2001)
and Sebbar (2008) for in-depth depictions and analyses of these events.
18. Foyer des Epinettes was a halfway house, mainly used to house young male French-north
African workers facing criminal charges.
19. Foucault’s decision to focus on power, oppression and resistance in terms of civil war and
rebellion is made clear in his subsequent lectures. For example, in a 4 February 1976 lecture
as part the series Society Must be Defended, Foucault argued that ‘that the social order is
war, and rebellion is the last episode that will put an end to it’ (2004, pp. 110–111). See also
Foucault (2015).
20. The exceptions to this are Heiner (2007), Ahluwalia (2010), Young (2014) and Wojciehowski
(2015).
21. While anti-imperial theory and politics are not taken up centrally in Foucault’s subsequent
work, imperialism is discussed on occasion. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault outlines
what he terms the ‘liberal art of government’, a socio-political and economic mode of gov-
ernment that arose in the eighteenth century attendant to biopower as a means of securing
Europe. Arguing that the ‘idea of progress, of a European progress, is a fundamental theme
in liberalism’ (2008, p. 54), Foucault traces the emergence of liberalism as a set of market
practices through which ‘Europe appeared as an economic unit’ (p. 55). Here, importantly,
Foucault links the ‘liberal art of government’ and the ‘culture of danger’ to processes of
colonization and imperialism. As he writes, ‘obviously, this organization, or at any rate this
reflection on the reciprocal positions of Europe and the world, is not the start of colonization.
Colonization had long been underway. Nor do I think this is the start of imperialism in the
modem or contemporary sense of the term, for we probably see the formation of this new
imperialism later in the nineteenth century’ (p. 56)

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