ABSTRACT
Criticism of Foucault returns constantly to two themes: first, his descriptive analyses of power provide us with no criteria for judgment, no basis upon which to condemn some regimes of power as oppressive or to applaud others as involving progress in human freedom. Perhaps because Foucault’s writings during the 1970s tended to employ a language of bodies and forces in place of the traditional terminology of political critique. Power relations were characterized in terms of conflict or alliance between forces, engendered on the basis of ‘the moving substrate of force relations’ which constitutes the social field. In order to make sense of Foucault’s use of the term, ‘power’ must be understood in its primary etymological sense, as the capacity to become or to do certain things. Power in this primary sense is exercised by individual or collective human bodies when they act upon each other’s actions; in other words, to take the simplest case.
