ABSTRACT
Patton distinguishes, following Berlin, between negative and positive freedom. There is one obvious relation of one kind of power to negative freedom, the one which receives most of the attention by people who propound theories of power, particularly political scientists. The important point for our purposes is that Foucault’s theory of power is bound up with domination. It is very definitely a theory of ‘power over’. That is why power is always correlative to resistance. Power always has victims. In a society dominated by patriarchy, women and men are given their respective languages of the emotions, and this allows both of them to achieve a human fulfilment in relationship. But this same language closes certain possibilities to women, and lays certain burdens on them. What empowers oppresses. But the great pity of this obfuscation is that it stops us even asking what ought to be the central question emerging out of Foucault’s empirical work.
