Michel Foucault: Two Lectures on Power!

- two lectures explores a significant theme in Foucaults work, namely, the relation of power to
knowledge. He notes that in the recent history of past 20 years there has been the “efficacy
of dispersed offensives”!
- here by offensives he means challenges to the theories and practices in domains of law,
politics, psychiatry, moral theory and so on. The recent history is characterized by the general
feeling of the “proliferation criticizability of thins, institutions and practices and discourses”!
- according to Foucault the aim of these attacks have been what he calls “totalizing theories”
or “ unitary theories” that are all encompassing because they claim to be able to explain
everything. Thus Foucault sees our time as marked by the efficacy of critiques, on the other

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hand, and inhabiting effect of global theories!

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- critique of global theories is characterized by their local character, which for focault indicates

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something resembling an autonomous and no-centralized theoretical production that does not

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need validation from the all encompassing theory. This is what he calls “return of
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knowledge” that makes local critique possible!
- He also calls the return of knowledge the insurrection of subjugated knowledge, which has 2
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features !
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! 1)it refers to historical content buried and masked in functional coherences or formal
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systematizations!
! 2)subjugated knowledge (local knowledge) also refers to a whole series of knowledges
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that have bee disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated

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knowledges, naive knowledges, historically inferior knowledges, knowledge that are below the
required level of erudition or scientificity!
- this revelation gives us the outline of what Foucault calls genealogy or multiple genealogical
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investigation. These genealogies are a combination of erudite knowledge and what people
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know !
- they would not have been made possible were it not for the removal of the tyranny of overall
discourses which their hierarchies and all the privileges enjoyed by the theoretical vanguard.
Genealogies are ant-science and for the intersection of knowledge !
- The next question then is the question of power. Foucault presents two conceptions of power!
! 1)the juridicial or classical liberal conception according to which power is regarded as a
right a commodity and there fore as what can be transferred or alienated !

https://www.coursehero.com/file/21635870/Foucault/
 ! 2) the Fruedian-Marxian conceptualization of power as struggle, conflict, domination
and repression!
- the second lecture further spells out Foucaults conception of power. He sees power in a sort
of symbiotic relation with rules of right and discourse of truth. He wants to investigate their
mutual interaction in so far as the rules of law delineate power and the truth-effects that
power produces!
- for Focault relations of power constitutes that social body, more precicely it makes the
modern subject!
- he traces back the elaboration of juridicial thought to middle ages when it became centered
around royal power, from whom the right emanated as living body of sovereignty. From

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middle ages onward, the essential role of the theory of right ha sheen to establish legitimacy

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of power; the major problem around which the theory of right is organized, therefore is the

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problem of sovereignty!

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- in this way right also becomes an instrument of domination that serves the relations of
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power. but Foucault wants to argue that right should be viewed not in terms the legitimacy
that has tobe established, but in terms of the procedures of dominations it implements!
! 1)the object of this study is not to look at the rule-governed and legitimate forms of but to
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study power by looking at its extremities which is at th e point where it transgresses the rules of
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right organizes and delineate it!

! 2)the goal is not to study power at the level of intentions and decision but to study power
where it effectively practiced!
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! 3)further, power should not be viewed as a phenomenon of mass and homogenous

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domination, but rather as something that circulates and functions only when it is a art of a chain.
power is a network!
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! 4)when we say power we say” power is exercised, circulates, and forms networks, we
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cannot conclude that power is the best distributed thing !

! 5)ideological production may coexist with the great machetes of power but it is not the
ideologies that are shapes at the base of networks of power!
- the point is to abandon and go beyond the model of leviathan in analyzing power. The non-
sovereign power is one that Foucault calls disciplinary power. which cannot be described or
justified in terms of the theory of sovereignty!
- disciplines have their own discourse, where apparatuses of knowledge are created. The
discourse of discipline si alien to that of the law; it is alien to the juridical rule derived from

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 sovereignty. Discipline will define not a code of law but a norm, it produces a code of
normalization!
- for Foucault modern subject is constituted in relations of power, which are not just vertical as
in the liberal conception of power, but also horizontal and crisscrossing in all directions

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