Beyond the state, beyond the desert

"Nothing seems more dangerous to me,” Michel Foucault laments in his lecture at the Collège de France on February 2, 1983, “than that much vaunted shift from politics [la politique] to the political [le politique], which in many contemporary analyses seems to me to have the effect of masking the specific problem and set of problems of politics.” Why such a polemical reference to “contemporary analyses” in the middle of a discussion of the complex relationship between dynasteia (“the exercise of power”) and politeia (“problems of constitution”) with regard to an interpretation of parrhesia (“truth telling”) in Euripides’s Ion? Why this outright dismissal of the shift to the political, which is in French a gender shift from the feminine to the masculine noun? And whom was Foucault thinking of in this passage of his lecture, which is so emphatic but at the same time rather enigmatic?