ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of Michel Foucault’s genealogical method and its consequent bearing on his understanding of power and knowledge. In The History of Sexuality he characterizes confessional practices which aim at self-disclosure and self-discovery as aiding the interests of domination and social control. The chapter argues that Foucault’s thesis of power/knowledge leaves no room for subjects of oppositional resistance. One of the terms Foucault uses to describe the problematic of history and the construction of the present is “eventalization”. The chapter highlights that the insidiousness of Richard Rorty’s implicit political program is highlighted against the background of Foucauldian critique. Foucault would argue that the alternatives and programs given by critique in Rorty’s sense would simply amount to regurgitating acceptable and pre-formed effects of the knowledge and power that invests present scientific discourse. Foucault believes that for every form in which power is exercised and applied there exist corresponding forms of resistance.
