"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligator to people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal" (Nitzsche, 1873)

"Michelle Foo-co" argues that "Peace would... be a form of war, and the State a means of wagin it" HUH? This is why I love to hate to read Foucault. In many ways I disagree with his point of view (and yes agree with it too). First I don't think that Peace (or the signifier PEACE) is defined in oposition to war. Therefore if I say "peace" as a salutation I am not sayin "Let's not fight", likewise if I desire "peace of mind" it is not because I have been waging mental battles (unless I am doing CSandED work). But I do agree that peace as it is mos comonly used in today's "parole" is related to the idea of war (or not being at). When he does this sort of "meaning existing in oposition to..." thing he reminds me of a"structuralist".

I think MF was at his best on page 122, in his analysis of the State aparatus. Here I think he puts in practice what he preaches "the important thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the concept of structure". Here he refers to prohibitions as conditioning and conditioned relationships. In refering to prohibitions he does not set them in binary opposition to X, Y, Z. Instead he sets it in multiple and indefinite power relations.

Here's my explanation with some help from History of Sexuality. Children are alcoholized through prohibitions or what MF calls a repressive hypothesis. By denying them from the freedom to drink before they are 21 we are "forcing [it] into hidding making possible [its] discovery". In addition we are constructing (I don't think MF would use this word) children as drinkers in need of control therfore we have added a new signifier to the child: drunk. This is the same when we control, scrutinize or prohibit "possible" sexual activity, we create children as sexualized beings.