ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines what Friedrich Nietzsche, and especially Michel Foucault, had to say about power, showing how their view diverges from that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The theories of subjectivity that have dominated the second half of the twentieth century fall broadly into two categories: those that attempt to define the nature or structure of the subject, and those that see any definition of subjectivity as the product of culture and power. Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser was developing a definition of the subject’s place under capitalism in the late 1960s, at about the same time as the post-structuralist theorists who would soon attract far more attention. The primary idea that Foucault has derived from Nietzsche’s argument is that ‘subjects’ only come into existence through the complex interplay between power and language. The subject does not exist as a naturally occurring thing, but is contrived by the double work of power and knowledge to maximise the operation of both.
