ABSTRACT
Poststructuralism is deeply subversive. It deconstructs all those binary oppositions that are central to Western culture and that give it its sense of uniqueness and superiority. In deconstructing these oppositions it exposes false hierarchies and artificial borders, unwarranted claims to knowledge and illegitimate usurpations of power. In deconstructionist criticism, however, the dismantling of oppositions and the exposure of hidden hierarchies and relations of power is generally limited to the text at hand. Although the interrogation of power on a wider scale is implicit in Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism – the belief that language gives us access to truth – the interest in power and its workings that dominates the poststructuralist criticism of the 1980s and 1990s derives mainly from the work of Michel Foucault. During his career as a historian Foucault (1926-84) wrote books on the history of psychiatry, the origin and rise of clinical medicine, the evolution of biology and economics, the emergence of the modern prison system, and other important social developments that find their origin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century – the so-called Enlightenment period. In these books he focuses on what he sees as the Enlightenment desire to establish the procedures by which our societies regulate themselves on a rationalized and orderly basis.
