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Foucault and Power Revisited

University of Exeter, n.e.widder{at}exeter.ac.uk

This article takes issue with interpretations of Foucault’s thought that understand power and resistance as forces working in opposition to one another to fix and dissolve or construct and deconstruct social identities. Starting from the theme of dispersion presented in The Archaeology of Knowledge, it maintains that, for Foucault, power works only in a dispersive manner and that identities are not so much substantialities produced by power as simulacra that appear on the surface of a very different dynamic. Resistance, in turn, is not a force opposed to power but rather a consequence of the disjunctive nature of power relations themselves. Using this reconceived dynamic of power and resistance, the article revisits Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary society and the micropolitics of the care of the self, and argues that, although Foucault has been deployed in political theory to show that identities are both necessary and problematic, his work in fact points to a politics and ethics that strives to dispense with this necessity altogether.

Key Words: difference • Foucault • identity • post-identity politics • power

European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 3, No. 4, 411-432 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1474885104045913


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