ABSTRACT
The absence of a concept equivalent to that of the power-bloc debilitates Foucault's theory and may well account for his lack of analyses of resistance. The category has no essence that produces predetermined effects in identity or social relations, but it has a strong history of operations that shape those which can be set into motion in current conditions. Foucault's accounts of power at work do sometimes allow us to ignore the fact that some interests benefit more than others from its operations. The interests of the people take a wide variety of relations to those of the power-bloc. Apparent victories are no more stable than the struggles that precede, and often succeed, them. In this case the power-bloc won and Clarence Thomas was admitted to the Supreme Court. In Miami, African Americans and Latinos may struggle with each other for social space that the power-bloc denies both in Brooklyn, Jewish and African Americans may contest equally constrained space.
