ABSTRACT

Michel Foucault’s work on power is both part of his strongest and most enduring achievements and yet also one of his most controversial and most challenged. Foucault essentially sees power as exercised rather than possessed. It is not therefore a ‘thing’; it is something done rather than { because of its common usage, which he saw as unhelpful, preferring to use the term ‘relations of power’ to identify more clearly the focus of his interest, and his understanding of power as ‘mobile, reversible, and unstable’ rather than as monolithic and stultifying (Foucault 2000d: 291-2). While this can offer an interesting and fruitful reading of human activity, so from a Marxist perspective, from which most of the heaviest criticism of Foucault’s work has come.