Abstract

This article deals with Foucault's reflections on war. This theme was in fact at the core of the link between archeology and genealogy, and it regularly appears in the studiesof the early Seventies. The theme is also at the center of one of Foucault's most important courses at the Collège de France, where it becomes the key to understand power relations. War's centrality in minor political speeches between XVII and XVIII centuries becomes an extraordinary viewpoint from which Foucault reconstructs the genealogy of modern political thought. At the end of the 1975-76 course, Foucault introduces the theme of biopolitics, radically innovative in both the practice and representation of modern war.