Here you will find; Marxism by Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Power and knowledge. Discipline and punish. Political thought. Archaeology. Genealogy. Discipline. Sexuality. Power. Biopower. Governmentality. Ethics. Power is not centralized in one area or in the possession of specific people, according to Michel Foucault. However, power is present in all social interactions and is not only used by the government. Knowledge is closely related to power. Power and knowledge are thus mutually reinforcing. In order to gather more data, exercise more control over its citizens, and produce new sorts of knowledge, the state must have power. Discourse development is required for this.

1. Marxism by Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
In France, Paul-Michel Foucault was born. He created the "Groupe
d'Information sur les Prisons" in 1971 along with his life partner Daniel
Defert and a few acquaintances. Foucault's participation in politics started at
this point. His issues continued throughout the rest of his life and included
LGBT rights, the resettlement of refugees, and jail conditions. He was also a
French philosopher and historian who was regarded as one of the most
important and contentious thinkers of the post-World War II era.
The key works are typically split into two groups by scholars. The works that
were published prior to 1970 are referred to as "archaeological" works, or
works that illustrate or expand upon Foucault's archaeological method of
historical and textual analysis, while the works that were published
following 1970 are referred to as "genealogical" works, or works that
demonstrate the method of analysis that Foucault adapted from Friedrich
Nietzsche (which he describes in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History").
Foucault, who is most known for his "analytics of power," maintains that in
order to fully comprehend power in modern society, analytical frameworks,
such as liberalism or marxism, that place power in state institutions, must
be abandoned. He claims, however, that Power exists everywhere. We must
look at power at the micro-level, including relationships between employers
and employees, therapists and clients, teachers and students, and husbands
and wives, in order to understand submission as well as resistance and
reform. Power doesn't belong to one individual or group while being absent
from others; it only exists in relationships and via "exercise."

2. Book- ‘Power and knowledge’
Power is not centralized in one area or in the possession of specific people,
according to Michel Foucault. However, power is present in all social
interactions and is not only used by the government. Knowledge is closely
related to power. Power and knowledge are thus mutually reinforcing. In
order to gather more data, exercise more control over its citizens, and
produce new sorts of knowledge, the state must have power. Discourse
development is required for this. Contrarily, Foucault only perceives power
as acting when people have some degree of freedom; he does not just think
of power in terms of coercion.
Book- ‘Discipline and Punish’
He studied how the nature and intent of punishments changed throughout
the eighteenth century. By the 19th century, the focus of punishment shifted
from the body to the soul, with the goal of reform. Instead of focusing on
what they had done, people were judged for who they were. The motive for
the crime started to come into consideration.
In order to make discourses powerful, specialists were introduced into
power relations, according to Foucault. He asserts that power is not owned
but rather used. There is always a degree of uncertainty when attempts are
made to exert power. He thinks that sometimes, power can be reversed. One
might challenge the accuracy of a psychiatrist's diagnosis, for instance.
He compares the state to a Panopticon, suggesting methods of surveillance
that promote self-control. Considering the notion that people may alter their
souls and the government's efforts to create "Docile Bodies" (obedient).

3. Michel Foucault: Political Thought
The study of politics has been impacted by Michel Foucault's writings. This
impact is based on historical studies that have been used as analytical tools; the
two most notable of these are "governmentality" and "biopower."
More broadly, Foucault created a new understanding of social power that saw
people as active participants in games of power who adopt strategies that embody
their own purposes. As a result, Foucault had a fundamentally different approach
to political issues, one that was centred on new explanations of power and
subjectivity.
From an objective standpoint, Foucault's political works appear to share two
characteristics: (1) a historical perspective, which studies social phenomena in
historical contexts and focuses on how they have changed over time; and (2) a
discursive methodology, which uses the study of texts, especially academic texts,
as the starting point for his inquiries.
Archaeology
The History of Madness, his PhD dissertation from 1961, was Foucault's debut
significant work. He provides a historical description of what he terms the
"constitution of an experience of madness" throughout Europe from the fifteenth
to the nineteenth century, which is briefly replicated in the 1962 version of Mental
Illness and Psychology. To comprehend how madness was constituted as a
phenomenon, this includes a correlative study of institutional and discursive
changes in the treatment of the insane. The History of Madness, which is by far
Foucault's longest book, has a plethora of information that he develops in various
ways in most of the work he does over the course of the next two decades. Its

4. historical analysis of how institutions and discourses interact set the tone for his
political writings in the 1970s.
In the time period under consideration, the way that madness was treated
underwent three significant changes, according to Foucault. The first witnessed
growing regard for crazy with the Renaissance. Madness was once regarded as
an alien entity that needed to be driven out, but today it is considered a sign of
insight. With the start of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, this
abruptly changed. Now, the reason was given top priority, and its antithesis,
insanity, was utterly disregarded. Congenitally unreasonable persons were
forcibly removed from society and housed in asylums, while the unreasonable
were prohibited from the conversation. This persisted up until the 18th century's
close when a fresh movement aimed at "liberating" the insane emerged. However,
for Foucault, this wasn't really liberation; rather, it was the endeavour of
Enlightenment logic to eventually negate crazy by fully comprehending it and
treating it with medication.
Thus, the relationship between philosophical discourse and political actuality is
taken seriously in The History of Madness. Ideas about reason are not just seen
as abstract issues, but as having very significant societal repercussions that touch
every aspect of the lives of tens of thousands of people who were labelled as
insane and, in fact, change the social structure. Such an approach signifies a shift
from Foucault's earlier Marxism. It would appear that cultural change is being
held accountable for the development of society in this instance rather than
making an effort to anchor experience in actual realities. In other words, it could
appear that Foucault had accepted idealism, the view that ideas are the driving

5. force behind the history and the antithesis of Marxism. But this would be a wrong
reading. The History of Madness makes no claims regarding the causal
precedence of the institutional over the cultural transformation or the other way
around. Without making any etiological assumptions, it merely notices the
coincidental transition. Furthermore, although Foucault did not analyse the
political factors at play in the history of madness in this work, it is obvious that it
is a political book because it explores the political stakes of philosophy and
medicine.
But later developments in Foucault's thinking led many to believe that he was an
idealist. Following The History of Madness, Foucault shifted his attention to the
discursive, largely ignoring political issues. The foreword of his subsequent book,
The Birth of the Clinic, served as the first and most obvious indication of this.
The preface is a manifesto for a new methodology that will pay only attention to
discourses themselves, to the language that is uttered, rather than the institutional
context, even though the book itself essentially extends The History of Madness
chronologically and thematically by examining the birth of institutional medicine
from the end of the eighteenth century. The Birth of the Clinic itself did not fulfil
this aim; rather, the book that came after it in the series, The Order of Things, did
(1966). The Order of Things represented an abstract history of thought that
largely ignored anything outside the discursive, in contrast to Foucault's historical
investigations in The History of Madness and The Birth of the Clinic, which were
relatively balanced between studying traditional historical events, institutional
change, and history of ideas. Although Foucault was never fond of the term's use,
this approach was in fact "structuralism" at the time in France. His exact claims—
that knowledge is ordered by an episteme that determines what kinds of

6. propositions may be accepted as true—were in fact extremely original in the
history of academic discourses. The Order of Things traces numerous epistemic
changes in respect to the human sciences across time.
These assertions brought Foucault and French Marxism into conflict. Given that
Foucault openly accuses Marxism in the book of being an outmoded product of
the nineteenth century, this cannot have been wholly unintentional on his part.
Finally, he declared that "man" (the gendered "man" here alludes to a concept that
in English we have come to increasingly refer to as the "human") as such was
probably on the verge of becoming obsolete. He did this to express his hostility
to humanism. In this instance, Foucault was contesting a specific conception of
the human being as a sovereign subject capable of understanding oneself. This
humanism, which was supported by the leading philosopher of the time, Jean-
Paul Sartre, and supported by the French Communist Party's central committee
specifically against Althusser just one month before The Order of Things was
published, was at the time the orthodoxy in French Marxism and philosophy (DE1
36). Marxism positioned itself as a movement for the individual's full fulfilment
in its humanist guise. In contrast, Foucault considered the idea of the individual
to be a recent and bizarre concept. Additionally, Marxists believed that his
fundamental assumption to analyse and criticise discourses without taking into
account the social and economic structure that created them represented a
significant analytical step backwards. The book does appear to be politically
neutral because it declines to adopt a normative view of truth and places no value
on anything outside of academic, abstract discourses. Despite being a protracted,
ponderous, academic book, The Order of Things proved to be so contentious and
its claims to be so compelling that it became a best-seller in France.

7. However, Foucault's viewpoint is not as anti-political as previously thought.
Marx's economic philosophy was the subject of the book's explicit critique of
Marxism, which amounts to the assertion that this economics is essentially a
variation of nineteenth-century political economy. Thus, it does not represent a
complete rejection of Marxism or the significance of economics. His anti-
humanist stance was not inherently anti-Marxist because Althusser held a similar
view inside a Marxist framework, albeit one that tended to question some of the
fundamental principles of Marxism and was disapproved by the Marxist
establishment. This demonstrates how political criticism of the "man" category
can be used effectively. Finally, the goal of Foucault's "archaeological" approach
to research—looking at discourse transformations in their own terms without
reference to the extra-discursive—does not inherently imply that discursive
transformations can be explained without reference to anything non-discursive;
rather, it merely implies that they can be mapped without such a reference. Thus,
Foucault displays a lack of interest in politics but does not overtly discount their
significance.
During this period, Foucault was primarily focused on the study of language. This
cannot be taken as politically neutral in and of itself. During the 1960s, there was
a pervasive intellectual trend in France to place more importance on avant-garde
literature than on working-class politics as the primary repository for radical
hopes. During this time, Foucault published numerous works on literature and art,
including a book on the little-known French poet Raymond Roussel that came out
on the same day as The Birth of the Clinic. This was not too far from Roussel's
observations on literature in The History of Madness, given his quirkiness.
Modern literature and art are fundamentally subversive, according to Foucault.

8. The theme of transgression appears frequently in Foucault's writings from the
1960s; for him, the transgressions of lunacy and literary modernism are intimately
connected to the threat to the dominant episteme that he perceives as rising. What
Represents an Author? possibly Foucault's best-known essay in this regard, is the
culmination of his literary interest. ", which questions the idea of the human
"author" of a work in any genre by fusing some of the topics from his final book
of the 1960s, The Archaeology of Knowledge, with thoughts on contemporary
literature. No matter how abstract, each of these works has political and cultural
implications for Foucault. Given the significance he gave to discourses during
this time, it may be said that challenging "man's" suzerainty was his political
project. The History of Madness demonstrates the relevance of these questions in
real-world situations.
However, Foucault finally found fault with this strategy. In the final chapter of
The Archaeology of Knowledge, which is a reflective analysis of the
methodology of archaeology as a whole, Foucault engages in an exceptional self-
critical conversation in which he addresses hypothetical criticisms of this
approach.
Genealogy
The Archaeology of Knowledge was written by Foucault while he was residing
in Tunisia, where he had accepted a three-year university job in 1966. The world
around him altered as he was finishing the novel. Many of his students
participated in protests against the government as Tunisia experienced a political
revolution. He was persecuted as a result of being persuaded to support them.
Soon later, in May 1968, there were much larger, more significant student

9. demonstrations in Paris. Due to his location in Tunis, Foucault largely missed
these, but he closely followed news of them.
In 1969, he moved permanently back to France. He was appointed the head of
Vincennes' brand-new university's philosophy department. In stark contrast to the
rather unpoliticized nation he had left behind three years earlier, the milieu he
returned to in France was itself very politicised. His partner Daniel Defert, as well
as the majority of the peers he had employed for his department, were among his
peers who had become devoted militants. He immediately plunged himself into
activism, which would come to define his life moving forward.
It didn't take long for his thoughts to take on a new course to match. This was
initially made clear in his 1970 inaugural speech for a second new position, his
second in as many years as a professor at the Collège de France, France's top
academic institution. The Order of Discourse, a book based on this speech, was
released in France (which is one of the multiple titles under which it has been
translated in English). Foucault lays out an explicit strategy for analysing
institutions alongside discourse for the first time. Much of "The Order of
Discourse" effectively recapitulates Foucault's thinking up to that point, the
considerations of the history of madness and the regimes of truth that have
governed scientific discourse, leading to a sketch of a mode of discourse analysis
similar to that of The Archeology of Knowledge. He had done this in the early
1960s, but now he proposed it as a deliberate method, which he called
"genealogy." However, in the closing chapters, Foucault declares that he would
now conduct studies in two separate directions: "genealogical" and "critical,"
where "genealogical" refers to the study of the historical development of
exclusionary systems. This is unmistakably a return to The History of Madness's
ideas.
Although the term "genealogical" does reflect a debt to one who came before him,
namely Friedrich Nietzsche, the genealogical orientation is more original – not
only within Foucault's work but in Western philosophy generally. The question
raised by the genealogy investigation concerns the interdependence between
discourse construction and exclusionary mechanisms. The main idea here is that
excluded discourses do not necessarily suffer exclusion. Instead, discourses are
only ever produced within and as a result of exclusionary institutions, with the
negative moment of exclusion existing alongside the positive moment of
discourse formation. For Foucault, discourse is now a political issue in the truest
sense of the word because it is linked to issues of power.

10. In this text, Foucault hardly even refers to "power" by that name, yet it develops
into the key idea of his work during the 1970s. Two significant books, eight
annual lecture series he delivered at the Collège de France, and a profusion of
lesser writings and interviews make up this body of work. Foucault now sees
power and knowledge as indissolubly connected, so that one never has either one
without the other, and neither has causal suzerainty over the other. His concept
of "power-knowledge" is his distinctive idea, merging the new focus on power
with the earlier one on discourse.
Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, the title of his first lecture series at the Collège
de France, expands on the themes of "The Order of Discourse" by focusing on
the creation of knowledge. The following two lecture series, which both focused
on the prison system and were given between 1971 and 1973, contained more
overtly political material. These lectures served as a prelude to Foucault's 1975
book Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, which was his first
comprehensive genealogy.
Discipline
Activism inspired the start of this prison research. Following May 1968, the
French government outlawed a number of radical leftist organisations, leading to
the imprisonment of thousands of their members. While imprisoned, these
individuals started to demand political rights for themselves before moving on to
demand rights for all prisoners after becoming familiar with the issues faced by
regular inmates. The Groupe d'informations sur les prisons, which was essentially
born out of this struggle, was organised outside the prison by Foucault (the GIP
– the Prisons Information Group). By sending surveys to prisoners and compiling
their responses, this group, which was primarily made up of intellectuals, merely
aimed to enable prisoners to recount their experiences in their own words.
Alongside this endeavour, Foucault studied the history of the prisons in an effort
to learn what the inmates themselves were unable to: how the prison system came
to be and what function it served in society at large. His history of the prisons
turns out to be a history of a form of authority that Foucault refers to as
"disciplinary," which is similar to but much broader than the modern prison
system. Thus, there are two main historical theses that are discipline and
punishment. One, specifically relating to the prison system, is that this system
frequently produces a layer of skilled criminal recidivists, an effect that is well

11. known from empirical research. For Foucault, this is merely what prisons do in
an objective manner. The common justification for imprisonment, that prisons
are there to deter crime by punishing and rehabilitating inmates, is undermined
by bringing this up. Foucault considers the obvious counterargument to this,
namely that better psychological management of rehabilitation is necessary and
that prisons only have these effects because they have historically been run
ineffectively. He responds by pointing out that such discourses of prison reform
have accompanied the prison system ever since it was first established and are
therefore a necessary component of its functioning, in fact, supporting it despite
its flaws by constantly offering a justification for why it can be made to function
differently.
Discipline and Punish's overarching thesis are that we live in a disciplinary
society, with prisons serving as merely one stark illustration. Prior to the
establishment of professional armies, which required dressage, and the instruction
of individual soldiers in their movements so that they could precisely coordinate
with one another, discipline had its roots not in prisons but rather in monastic
institutions. From there, it spread throughout society. It was crucial to creating
"docile bodies," which Foucault refers to as the fundamental building block of
disciplinary power. The prison is just one of a raft of broadly similar disciplinary
institutions that come into existence later. Schools, hospitals, and factories all
combine similar methods to prisons for arranging bodies regularly in space, down
to their minute movements. All combine moreover comparable duties. They all
have components related to education, economic productivity, and health care,
just like a prison. Which aspect takes precedence determines how these
institutions differ from one another.
For Foucault, all disciplinary institutions also perform another quite novel action:
they create a "soul" based on the body in order to confine the body. This bizarre
formulation by Foucault aims to capture the way that disciplinary power has
become more and more personal to individuals. With the execution of a man in
1757 who had attempted to kill the King of France, Discipline and Punish paints
a vivid picture of an earlier form of power in France. As was customary, the most
severe punishment was meted out for this most heinous of crimes in a political
system centred on the person of the king: the offender was publicly tortured to
death. Foucault contrasts this with the routinized imprisonment that became the
primary form of punishing criminals in the 19th century. From a form of power
that was punished by extraordinary and exemplary physical harm against a few
transgressors, Western societies adopted a form of power that attempted to

12. capture all individual behaviour. This is illustrated by a particular example that
has become one of the best-known images from Foucault’s work, the influential
scheme of nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham called the
“Panopticon,” a prison in which every action of the inmates would be visible.
This serves as something of a paradigm for the disciplinary imperative, though it
was never realised completely in practice.
Systems of monitoring and control nevertheless spread through all social
institutions: schools, workplaces, and the family. While criminals had in a sense
already been punished individually, they were not treated as individuals in the
full sense that now developed. Disciplinary institutions such as prisons seek to
develop detailed individual psychological profiles of people and seek to alter their
behaviour at the same level. Where previously most people had been part of a
relatively undifferentiated mass, individuality being the preserve of a prominent
or notorious few, and even then, a relatively thin individuality, a society of
individuals now developed, where everyone is supposed to have their own
individual life story. This constitutes the soul Foucault refers to.
Sexuality
His next book, the first of his History of Sexuality's three volumes, continues the
theme of individualization. The Will to Knowledge is the name he assigned to
this book. It debuted a mere 12 months after Discipline and Punish. Nevertheless,
between his lectures on things penitential and the book on sexuality, three courses
at the Collège de France are in between. The first, Psychiatric Power, applies
Foucault's genealogical method to the history of psychiatry and picks up
chronologically where The History of Madness had left off. The next year, in
1975, Foucault offered a series of lectures entitled Abnormal. Through a study of
the category of the abnormal, to which criminals, the insane, and sexual
"perverts" were all put, these studies integrate prison research with studies on
psychiatry and the issue of sexuality. The Will to Knowledge does in fact
effectively reuses several of these lectures.
The Will to Knowledge, like Discipline and Punish, provides both broad and
detailed conclusions. The repressive hypothesis, which Foucault refers to as a
debunking of particular received wisdom in relation to the history of sexuality, is
the idea that while our sexuality has historically been repressed, particularly in
the nineteenth century, it has gradually been liberated throughout the twentieth

13. century and that we now need to get rid of any remaining stigmas about sex by
speaking openly and candidly about it. Although Foucault accepts the
fundamental historical claim that there has been sexual repression, he believes
that this has no bearing on the development of sexuality. Much more significant,
in his opinion, is a prohibition against discussing our sexuality that has
consistently been in place even during the years of repression and is currently
being strengthened, presumably in an effort to lift our repression. Once more,
Foucault observes a form of punishment in action: confession. This started in the
Catholic confessional, and in the early modern era, the Church propagated the
confessional urge with respect to sex throughout society. According to Foucault,
this impulse has subsequently become secular, especially with the help of
institutional psychiatry, resulting in widespread pressure on people, to be honest
about themselves, with their sexuality as a specific focus. In Foucault's view,
there is no sex outside of this urge. That is to say, sexuality itself has been created
and forced rather than being something we naturally possess.
His genealogy of sexuality has the connotation that "sex" as we currently
understand it is a modern "device" (dispositif) of sexuality. This encompasses
both the notion of "sex" in the gendered sense, as implied by Foucault in his
introduction to the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a French hermaphrodite who
lived in the nineteenth century, and the category of the sexual, which includes
specific organs and activities. The recent "third wave" of feminist thought has
been greatly influenced by Foucault's ideas, particularly his work on sexuality.
There is a separate article in this encyclopaedia that talks specifically about the
relationship between Foucault and feminism.
Power
The Will to Knowledge's central thesis, as well as Foucault's entire political
philosophy, is his response to the question of the origins of social constructs like
sex and discipline. Who or thing is in charge of encouraging criminal behaviour
through incarceration? The answer provided by Foucault can be summed up in
one word: "power." This means that no one, in particular, is responsible for
creating these things; rather, they are the results of the interaction of power
relations, which result in intentions of their own that are not always shared by
individuals or institutions. The conclusion of The Will to Knowledge that covers
the most ground is Foucault's explanation of power. The Will to Knowledge is
his most in-depth analysis of power, even if similar observations on it can be

14. found in Discipline and Punish as well as in lectures and interviews from the same
time period.
When people interact in society, wherever power relations exist, "strategies" are
created as a result of the concatenation of these power relations, according to
Foucault. These relations are a question of people acting on one another to cause
other people to act in turn, as he argues in a later essay, "The Subject and Power,"
which basically concludes the description of power provided in The Will to
Knowledge. This is power whenever we try to persuade others. But rarely do our
attempts to sway others go as planned, and even when they succeed, we are rarely
aware of the wider implications of our influence on others. In this way, the social
consequences of our efforts to influence others are mostly beyond our
comprehension or control. It creates techniques that almost have a life of their
own. Therefore, despite the fact that no one in the prison system, including the
inmates, the guards, or the politicians, wants jails to generate a particular class of
criminals, this is what is happening as a result of everyone's activities.
The debate over Foucault's political beliefs has centred on his revised
understanding of power. However, criticisms of him on this issue consistently
miss the mark or ask the question in opposition to it by merely restating the
viewpoints he has rejected. According to certain interpretations, he believed that
power was an enigmatic, autonomous force that existed without any human
interference and was so all-pervasive as to prohibit any opposition. Although it is
obviously somewhat challenging to understand his perspective, Foucault makes
it plain in The Will to Knowledge that this is not the case, precisely that resistance
to power is not external power. For Foucault, the key idea is not that resistance is
pointless, but rather that power is so pervasive that it does not, by itself, stand in
the way of resistance. Only specific forms of power can be resisted, and even
then, only very hard due to the propensity of methods to include seemingly
opposing inclinations. But power is never seen by Foucault as being monolithic
or autonomous; rather, he sees it as the result of relationships that appear stable
on the surface but are actually continually moving as a result of ongoing human
conflict. For Foucault, apparently peaceful and civilised social arrangements are
supported by people locked in a struggle for supremacy, which is eternally
susceptible to change, via the force of that struggle itself. Foucault explains this
in terms of the inversion of Clausewitz's dictum that war is diplomacy by other
means into the claim that "politics is war by other means."

15. However, many liberal observers have criticised Foucault for his relativism, or
lack of any normative distinction between power and resistance. He continuously
avoids adopting any overtly normative attitude in his reasoning; therefore, this
criticism is well-founded. Thus, he does not normatively justify resistance, but it
is not immediately apparent that a non-normative resistance involves any intrinsic
contradiction. Although it is obvious that people who hold the widely held view
in political philosophy that it is impossible to have non-normative political
thought will reject him on the basis of this, his argument is coherent. For his part,
he makes no recommendations as to what is right or wrong, merely evaluations
that he believes will be helpful to people facing difficulties in specific
circumstances.
The most well-known German philosopher currently alive, Jürgen Habermas,
made one final charge that deserves special attention. The charge is that
Foucault's analysis of power is "functionalist," which in sociology refers to
viewing society as a functional whole and reading each component as serving a
unique purpose. The issue with this perspective is that society was not
intentionally created, thus a lot of it is redundant or happened by mistake.
Although Foucault occasionally uses the word "function" to describe how power
works, he does not adhere to or even acknowledges functionalism as a school of
thought. In any event, he does not believe that society is a whole or whole because
of any need; rather, he believes that strategies evolve organically from below and
that any element's functions are flexible.
Biopower
Foucault's view on resistance is that one must start cautiously in order to avoid
merely aiding a strategy of authority while believing oneself to be rebellious,
rather than that one is defeated before one even begins. For him, the repressive
hypothesis' effects on sexuality are summarised in this way. Despite our efforts
to free ourselves from sexual repression, we actually support a power play that
we are unaware of. The goal of this tactic is for everyone to identify as "'subjects'
in both meanings of the word," a practice that Foucault calls "subjection"
(assujettissement). Here, we have passive and active senses. On the one hand, we
are subjected to this process; for instance, medical personnel may turn us into
passive research subjects. On the other hand, we are the ones who must
deliberately disclose our sexual tendencies and, in the course of doing so, create

16. an identity based on this admitted sexuality. Therefore, power functions in both
blatantly repressive and more constructive ways.
For Foucault, sexuality plays an extraordinarily significant role in the current
system of power relations. Foucault describes how sexuality had its beginnings
as a preoccupation of the newly dominant bourgeois class, who were obsessed
with physical and reproductive health, and their own pleasure. It has come to be
seen as the essence of our personal identity, and sex has come to be seen as "worth
dying for." Although it is clear that it would have been forced onto women and
children in that class regardless of their choices, this class did produce sexuality
in a positive way. According to Foucault, the device of sexuality has four
recurrent strategies: pathologizing the sexuality of women and children,
concurrently medicalizing the sexually deviant "pervert," and creating sexuality
as a topic of public interest. Foucault believes that public health organisations
have been pushing sexuality more bluntly on the rest of the population since its
inception in the bourgeoisie, completely without their will.
Why did this occur? The fundamental justification offered by Foucault is how
sexuality links together many "technologies of power," including discipline on
the one hand and a more recent technology he refers to as "bio-politics" on the
other. Foucault refers to this fusion of discipline and bio-politics as "bio-power"
in The Will to Knowledge, but confusingly he also appears to employ the terms
interchangeably elsewhere, most notably in his 1976 lecture series, Society Must
Be Defended. He also uses these words without hyphens in other places, as we
shall do throughout the remainder of this article.
A technology of power that developed from disciplinary power is biopolitics. In
contrast to discipline, which focuses on controlling individual bodies, biopolitics
focuses on controlling entire communities. In contrast to discipline, which
established people as such, biopolitics establishes people as such. Before the
development of biopolitics, governments only made sporadic, violent
interventions to quell uprisings or impose taxes, making no meaningful
endeavour to control the inhabitants of a territory. Similar to discipline, the
Church was the organisation that kept track of births, and deaths, and provided
aid to the needy and ill during the Middle Ages. This makes the Church the
primary antecedent of biopolitics. Governments began to believe during the
modern era that interfering in people's daily lives would have positive effects on
the state, preventing depopulation, maintaining a steady and expanding tax base,
and supplying a steady stream of soldiers for the military. As a result, they became

17. involved in people's daily lives. Institutions, most notably perhaps medical ones
that allowed the state to monitor and support the population's health, and
discipline mechanisms allowed the state to accomplish this. Because any
intervention in the population via the management of individual bodies had to
basically be about reproduction and because sex is one of the main vectors of
disease transmission, sex was the most intensive point at which discipline and
biopolitics interacted. In order to bring the population under control, sex had to
be managed, regulated, and watched over.
However, there is another technology of power at work, one that is older than
discipline, namely "sovereign power," a technology that operates primarily
through aggression and taking, as opposed to constructively promoting and
producing, as both discipline and biopolitics do. Historically, governments dealt
with both small groups of individuals and large populations using this sort of
power. Although discipline and biopower have taken its position in these two
functions, it still has a place at the biopower's upper bounds. The state continues
to fall back on hard force as a last resort when order and population regulation
break down. Furthermore, the state still uses brute force—or the fear of it—to
deal with matters that arise beyond its borders.
In Foucault's view, biopolitics and sovereign power are mutually incompatible.
In fact, he occasionally refers to government as "thanatopolitics," the politics of
death, as opposed to the politics of life in biopolitics. Instead of murdering you
or, at best, allowing you to live, thanatopolitics operates by assisting in your
survival. Despite a potential clash between various states or state agencies, it
seems impossible for somebody to be held in both kinds of power at once. There
must be a line drawn between the two, between those who must be "made to live,"
in Foucault's words, and those who must be put to death or left to live their lives
indifferently. The border that separates a territory's residents from its outsiders is
the most evident dividing line, but the "biopolitical border," as it has been dubbed
by modern scholars, is distinct from the territorial border. In Society Must Be
Defended, Foucault proposes a mechanism he terms "state racism" that plays a
variety of roles in determining who would gain from biopolitics and who will be
exposed to the risk of death.
Although Foucault does not use this phrase in any of the writings, he self-
published, he did indicate in The Will to Knowledge that biopolitics and racism
are closely related. In the eighteenth century, scientific racism discourses
proposed a connection between an individual's sexual "degeneracy" and the

18. general hygiene of the population. Early in the 20th century, nearly all
industrialised nations adopted some form of eugenics, the pseudoscience that
aims to increase population viability through selective breeding. Of course, Nazi
Germany was where it manifested itself most fully. However, Foucault makes it
very evident that attempts to connect the ancient notion of "blood" to
contemporary concerns with population health are inherently paradoxical. Since
there must be a boundary drawn in modern biopolitical governments between
what is part of the population and what is not, this is racist in a broad sense, rather
than necessarily having a connection to what we may typically interpret as racism
in its literal sense.
Governmentality
Following The Will to Knowledge's release, Foucault took a year off from giving
lectures at the Collège de France. He made a comeback in 1978 with a set of
lectures that logically followed those from 1976 but displayed a major change in
conceptual vocabulary. The term "biopolitics" is seldom ever mentioned. In its
place, "governmentality" is a fresh idea. Despite the rather misleading title of the
latter in this regard, the lecture series from 1978 and 1979, Security, Territory,
Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics, centres on this idea.
Governmentality is the logic by which a polity is governed; the word
"governmentality" is a portmanteau created from the phrase "governmental
rationality." However, according to Foucault's genealogy approach (which he still
maintains), this logic is not only ideal but rather embraces institutions,
behaviours, and ideas. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault defined
governmentality as allowing for a complex type of power that "has the population
as its goal, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of
security as its essential technological instrument" (pp. 107–8). Confusingly,
however, Foucault also identifies additional senses in which he will use the term
"governmentality," including the broader tendency in Western history that has led
to it and the precise process in the early modern period by which modern
governmentality was produced.
The term "governmentality" is so ambiguous. Nevertheless, it is a crucial one.
Governmentality seems to have replaced biopolitics in Foucault's thinking
because it appears to be roughly contemporaneous and functionally isomorphic.
However, unlike biopolitics, it never appears in any of his significant

19. publications; instead, he only consented to the publication of one key lecture from
Security, Territory, and Population under the heading "Governmentality" in an
Italian journal. This idea was introduced to English speakers through the article's
English translation; in fact, Foucault's one piece served as the foundation for an
entire school of sociological analysis.
So, what does this ambiguous term mean? Biopower is never rejected by
Foucault. He reiterates his interest in biopower as a subject of study throughout
these lectures, even in 1983, the year before he passed away. The purpose of the
idea of "governmentality" is to place biopower in a broader historical context, one
that goes further back in time and includes additional components, including
economic discourses and economic regulation.
The two key stages in the emergence of governmentality are described by
Foucault. The primary focus of Security, Territory, and Population is what he
refers to as raison d'État, which is French for "reason of state." This
governmentality gave way by the eighteenth century to a new form of
governmentality, what will become political liberalism, which reacts against the
failures of governmental regulation with the idea that society should be left to
regulate itself naturally, with the power of police applied only negatively in
extremis. It correlates the technology of discipline, as an attempt to regulate
society to the fullest extent, with what was contemporaneously called "police."
We find freedom of the individual and population control delicately entwined
with this governmentality, which for Foucault is broadly the governmentality that
has persisted to the present day and is the subject of study in The Birth of
Biopolitics.
Ethics
In terms of the discourses, he pays attention to and the terminology he employs,
Foucault's work underwent a considerable change in the 1980s. The concepts of
"subjectivity" and "ethics," in particular, are heavily used from this point forward.
While none of these aspects is wholly new to his work, they take on fresh
significance and combination at this point. He concentrates mostly on ancient
literature from Greece and Rome.
The ethics of Foucault are covered in another article in this encyclopaedia. What
significance do these ethics have for politics in particular? It is frequently

20. believed that the goal of Foucault's ethics is to abandon his former political
projects and his earlier political ideas, moving away from politics and toward
individual action. Such claims contain a tiny bit of truth, but only a tiny bit. While
it is undeniable that Foucault's shift to the consideration of ethics marks a
departure from an explicitly political engagement, there is no renunciation or
contradiction of his earlier views—only the provision of subjectivity and ethics
account that can improve these.
Similar to his earlier turn towards power, Foucault is now turning towards
subjectivity in an effort to give his accounts and method more depth. As in the
case of power, he accomplishes this by creating a new approach rather than
adopting an existing one: Foucault's own account of subjectivity is unique and
very dissimilar from the existing accounts of subjectivity he previously criticised
in his earlier work. According to Foucault, subjectivity has to do with a person's
capacity to control their own behaviour. His explanation ties up with his earlier
writing on government in that subjectivity is a question of self-management. As
a result, it is strongly related to his political philosophy because it concerns the
power that permeates a person's interior.
These definitions also include "ethics." In the same way that the term "political
philosophy" is commonly used to refer to normative politics, Foucault does not
produce "ethics" in the sense that the term is used today to denote normative
morality. For Foucault, the term "ethics" is better understood etymologically in
the context of Ancient Greek reflection on the ethike, or on character. What
Foucault refers to as the "care of the self"—basically a technique of fashioning
the self—marked ancient Greek ethics. Although he is clear that no truly ethical
practices exist now and that it is by no means certain that they can be re-
established, Foucault finds in such practices a potential basis for resistance to
power. Contrarily, Christianity's masticatory approach toward the self has
abnegated ethics. The Government of the Self and Others, The Courage of the
Truth, and The Hermeneutics of the Subject, which is the last three lecture series
Foucault gave at the Collège de France, are the main sources for this view of
ethics.
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