ABSTRACT
In this chapter and the next, I reconstruct Foucault’s utterances about power, from across a ten-year period in which his thought changed considerably, into a single, coherent account of power. I continue to attend to his biography and read him chronologically, primarily because this is necessary to address those critics who see Foucault as eventually rescinding his conceptions of power and (therefore) resistance, to defend the contentious thesis that Foucault’s work is coherent over this time. Our treatment of power is therefore split between two chapters: the fi rst sets out Foucault’s initial reconceptualisation of power in the 1970s, the second, how this shifts in the late 1970s with his use of the concept of “governmentality,” and into the 1980s correlative with his move to problematising subjectivity. This then segues with the next chapter of the book, in which we explore how Foucault understands the infl uence of power on the subject. However, I leave two themes from Foucault’s 1970s thought, namely the body and resistance, over till Chapter 5 in order to devote enough dedicated discussion to them, and because of their germaneness to the theme of subjectivity in Foucault’s later work.
