Paul Patton, Foucault on Power and Government
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Abstract:
Foucault’s lectures in 1976 open with the statement of an intellectual crisis. They proceed to a series of questions about the nature of power and the ways that he has conceived of it up to this point: what is power? How is it exercised? Is it ultimately a relation of force? Only some of these questions are answered in the course of these lectures. His answer to the conceptual questions about the nature of power and the appropriate means to analyze it is not forthcoming until after the discovery of ‘governmentality’ in 1978 and his lectures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality in 1979. This talk aims to retrace his answers to these questions in the light of the published lectures and to examine the consequences of these answers for his overall approach to the analysis power, and…