PHIL 2280 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Classical LiberalismPremium

Michel Foucault: Two Lectures on Power

Lecture 1

- Fouault otes that i the reet histor of the past tet ears there has ee the effia of

dispersed offesies. Here  offesie he eas halleges to the theories ad praties i

domains of law, politics, psychiatry, moral theory, and so on. The recent history is characterized

 the geeral feelig of the proliferatig ritiizailit of thigs, istitutios, ad praties, ad

disourse.

- The ai of these attaks has ee hat he alls totalizig theories or uitar theories that

need validation from the all-eopassig theor. This is hat he alls retur of koledge

that makes local critique possible.

- He also calls the return of knowledge the insurrection of subjugated knowledge, which has two

features: 1) it refers to historical content buries and masked in functional coherences or formal

systematizations. Subjugated knowledge that were present in the functional and systematic

corps – but were masked – by the critique that used the tools of scholarship.

- 2) subjugated knowledge also refers to a whole series of knowledges that according to Foucault

have been disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as inferior knowledges, knowledges that

are below the required level of scientificity. It is the reappearance of what people know at a

local level, of these disqualified knowledges, that made the critique possible.

Marxists zealously engage in. to say that it is a science, that is ascribes to a rational structure

and that its propositions are the result of verification procedure, what is done first and foremost

is to connect Marxism with the power-hierarchy typical of science.

- The next question, then, is the question of power. Foucault presents two conceptions of power:

1) the juridical or the classical liberal conception according to which power is regarded as a right,

a commodity and therefore, as what can be transferred -through a contract- or alienated; and 2)

the Freudian-Marxian conceptualization of power as a struggle, conflict, domination and

repression.

Lecture 2

- The seod leture further spells out Fouaults onception of power. He sees power in a sort of