Foucault and Power

Lori Blewetts Lecture Notes on Foucault and cater
The Evergreen State College
February 26, 2005



Foucaults concept of Power in the History of Sexuality (pp. 92-93)

Power mustiness be understood in the first typesetters case as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own institution: as the process which, through ceaseless struggle and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or even reverses them; as the support which these force relations grow in one other, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.

[An understanding of power] must not be sought in a strange source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the travel substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the later are always local and unstable.Power is everywhere not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.



And Power, insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a authoritative strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a crabbed society.


Critiques of Foucaults theory of Power

1.Systemic power relations in conclusion vanish in Foucaults work. (Nancy Hartsock, Feminism and Postmodernism)

?Much of what Foucault has to secernate about power stresses the systemic nature of power and its armorial bearing in multiple...If you want to get a full essay, distinguish it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com



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