ABSTRACT
The whole connection between knowledge and power, with mechanisms of power being the central focus, that is, essentially, what the author wanted to do. At least in Western Europe—and maybe also in Japan—that is to say in industrially developed countries, it was not so much the problem of poverty that was a stake, but the problem of an excess of power. The productions of truths cannot be dissociated from power and mechanisms of power, both because these mechanisms of power make possible, in fact induce these productions of truths, and these productions of truths themselves have effects of power that bind people, tie them to one another. The same thing slightly differently by saying that in France, power is also generally understood as the effects of domination that are linked to the existence of a State and to the workings of the state apparatus. Power: what immediately comes to mind is the army, the police, the judicial system.
