ABSTRACT
In his inaugural speech at the Collège de France in 1971, Foucault (1981b) argued that his previous works had dealt with power despite the fact that the word power had not been explicitly used frequently. At the beginning of the 1980s, he stated: ‘It is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research’ (Foucault 2000a: 327). It is true that, at different points in time, Foucault put more emphasis on one or the other of the notions of power and subjectivity. But I would like to suggest that it is hard to understand the work of Foucault without relating his notion of power to his notion of subjectivity, and vice versa, because of the interdependency of these two concepts in his writings. Power and subjectivity are thus central to the analytical framework presented in the present chapter. However, other key notions such as pastoral and disciplinary power, managerial rationalities and practices, and technologies will also be discussed.1
