ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the critical orientation of Michel Foucault's imagination of power, Edward Said elevates a distinct geo-spatial perspective that informs. Foucault's analyses of systems of thought, focusing as he does on the actual spaces, territories, domains, and sites where statements, habits of thought, forms of knowledge, and modes of being all acquire their singular density. Said says that Foucault's lack of a metaphysical yearning can be attributed to this geographic orientation: Foucault's perspective is that in the modern period to which he belongs there is an unremitting and unstoppable expansion of power favoring the administrators, managers, and technocrats of what he calls disciplinary society. The foundation of the state as the bearer of the political was prepared, then, by laying down presuppositions and a multitude of derivative knowledge claims in a long series of arguments modeled on the new science of geometry. The critical task left for the construction of the commonwealth lay in its geometric design.
