Foucault challenges the idea that
power is wielded by people or groups by way
of ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion, seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive. ‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor a structure (Foucault 1998: 63).
What is the concept of freedom by Michel Foucault?
It is a way of examining and freeing oneself not by socially-constructed norms and standards, but according to one’s own ethical code. Foucault deems this practice as an essential element of
maintaining freedom from oppressive power dynamics
.
What is Michel Foucault’s best known for?
Michel Foucault began to attract wide notice as one of the most original and controversial thinkers of his day with the appearance of The Order of Things in 1966. His best-known works included
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)
and The History of Sexuality, a multivolume history of Western sexuality.
Was Foucault an essentialist?
Foucault’s idea that the
body and sexuality are cultural constructs
rather than natural phenomena has made a significant contribution to the feminist critique of essentialism. … The affinities and tensions between Foucault’s thought and contemporary feminism are discussed below.
What is Michel Foucault’s theory?
Foucault challenges the idea that
power is wielded by people or groups by way
of ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion, seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive. ‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor a structure (Foucault 1998: 63).
What does Michel Foucault say the relationship between discourse knowledge and power is?
Power, in Weedon’s (1987) interpretation of Foucault is:
a dynamic of control and lack of control between discourses and the subjects, constituted by discourses, who are their agents
. Power is exercised within discourses in the ways in which they constitute and govern individual subjects (p. 113).
What is the panopticon effect?
The panopticon is
a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells
. From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can’t see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched.
Where there is power there is resistance Foucault citation?
‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this
resistance is never in a position of exteriority
in relation to power’ (Foucault, 1978: 95-96). In human sciences one of the main issues has always been the relationship of resistance to power.
What is external freedom?
External freedom is
what drives the external actions an individual performs in order to make things happen
. … It is sustained by the inner freedom and the timing of actions which build its solidity.
What is self Care philosophy?
For Foucault, the notion of care for the self (epimeleia heautou) of Ancient Greek and Roman
philosophy comprises an attitude towards the self, others, and the world
, as well as a certain form of attention. For Foucault, the pursuit of the care for one’s own well-being also comprises self-knowledge (gnōthi seauton).
Is Foucault a structuralist?
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French historian and philosopher, associated with
the structuralist and post-structuralist movements
. He has had strong influence not only (or even primarily) in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines.
What is repressive power?
The repressive hypothesis is
the argument that power has repressed sex for the past three hundred years
. … According to this hypothesis, we can achieve political liberation and sexual liberation simultaneously if we free ourselves from this repression by talking openly about sex, and enjoying it more frequently.
In what order should I read Foucault?
Always a good place to start is, in my opinion,
“The Order of Discourse”
, which was his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970. It’s rather short, not too dense and offers an overview of how he uses and structures his concept of discourse, which (at least for his later work) is a very central concept.
What does Foucault say about the body?
Foucault says that the body is
‘directly involved in a political field’ that power relations
‘have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault 1995: 25).
What does Foucault mean by Episteme?
episteme. This term, which Foucault introduces in his book The Order of Things, refers to
the orderly ‘unconscious’ structures underlying the production of scientific knowledge in a particular time and place
.
How is knowledge linked to power?
According to Foucault’s understanding,
power is based on knowledge and makes use of knowledge
; on the other hand, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with its anonymous intentions. Power (re-) creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge.
