Michel Foucault’s Political Philosophy: Key Concepts
Michel Foucault’s political philosophy can be gleaned primarily from his critique of the
subject as a political agent. Hence, in these notes, the engagement with Foucault’s
political philosophy will begin with the philosopher’s critique of the subject.
Foucault’s Critique of the Subject
On the one hand, Foucault agrees with the critical ramifications of the de-centering of
the subject as effected by both the Marxist theory of ideology and Freudian
psychoanalysis, which unmask the subject the formed and deformed product of social
and psychological conditions. It must be noted that the dominant idea in the discourse
on “agency” during the time in which Foucault cast his critique of the subject remains
largely Cartesian, that is, that of Descartes’. As we may already know, in Descartes, the
cogito (that is, the “self” or the “I” or the “subject”) determines reality. Hence, in
Cartesian philosophy, the “subject” is the center of discourse. The “subject” determines
everything. It produces thoughts. It shapes reality. Marx and Freud were some of the
philosophers during the late modern period who engaged Descartes’ view of the
subject. For Marx and Freud, the cogito or the “subject” does not determine and shape
reality. On the contrary, the “subject” is shaped and reshaped, formed and deformed by
a specific context. In other words, for Marx and Freud, the “subject” is a social
construct, that is, the “subject” is a product of social and historical developments. And
Foucault agrees with this contention. As we can see, this is what we meant when we say
that “Foucault agrees with the critical ramifications of the de-centering of the subject as
effected by both the Marxist theory of ideology and Freudian psychoanalysis, which
unmask the subject the formed and deformed product of social and psychological
conditions”.
However, Foucault did not entertain any hope of eventually recovering the lost
transparency of the subject (as Heidegger did) at a higher level or at a later stage (as
Marx and Hegel did) of human development. Like Freud, Foucault was ambivalent about
the promise of emancipation. In other words, Foucault did not subscribe to the idea that
the “subject” can be liberated from the logic of domination. As will be seen later,
Foucault argues that the “subject” is definitely a product of social and historical
development and there is no escaping from it.
Power and the Subject
According to one of Foucault’s many programmatic statements, the objective of his
work “has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture,
, human beings are made subjects”. And for Foucault, this entails power (over the
subject). This explains why Foucault identifies the subject with power. And as we can
see, power for Foucault entails domination or subjugation. As Foucault writes: “There
are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and
dependence, and ties to his own identity by a conscience of self-knowledge. Both
meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to”. See Michel
Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power”, in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Harvester: Brighton, 1982), 212.
The implication of Foucault’s identification of the subject with power is that the subject
(as Foucault would have believe) is no longer a premise. In other words, the subject is
no longer an autonomous “I” (as in the case of Descartes’ cogito), but simply an object
of analysis.
Thus, in Foucault’s political philosophy, there is no longer a privileging of the subject as
the center of discourse, as an active agent who determines everything and shapes
reality. In fact, the subject is simply a social and historical construct.
The implication of this in epistemology is that the subject is no longer the absolute
condition of all knowledge and action, as in the case of Kant’s transcendental
philosophy. As Foucault writes, “If knowledge is based on a finite or contingent subject,
then the conditions of knowledge are neither timeless nor universal, and anything like
absolute is unattainable”.
As we can see, Foucault follows Nietzsche in his conviction that power and knowledge
are really two sides of the same coin. For Foucault, power and knowledge directly imply
one another. In fact, Foucault speaks of power/knowledge as an indivisible amalgam.
Hence, for Foucault, the will to truth (as in Nietzsche) is just one manifestation of an
underlying will to power and the exercise of power is accompanied or paralleled by the
production of apparatuses of knowledge. In other words, as Foucault claims, the
exercise of power requires knowledge. In this sense, knowledge is always political as its
condition of existence or possibility include power relations. Thus, the symbiotic
relationship between power and knowledge is at the heart of Foucault’s account of the
parallel emergence in modern societies of the human sciences as “disciplines” with
scientific pretensions and what he calls “disciplinary power”.
Negative and Positive Conception of Power
There are two major types of power in Foucault’s political philosophy, namely, negative
power and positive power.
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