Foucault's politics

Foucault's Politics centers on a reexamination of Michel Foucault's work on power. A misplaced fame as the latest Continental thinker to prove that oppositional activity is impossible--arising especially out of Discipline and Punish--has blocked an appreciation of his views. Foucault's idea of power is much more fluid and indeterminate than the "iron cage" renditions of it. Furthermore, while oppositional activity is possible in Foucault's construction of the social world, opposition is also reworked in a way that is uniquely appropriate to a "post-revolutionary" world.;The dissertation begins by reviewing Foucault's discussion of disciplinary power and contrasting it to liberal descriptions of power, which Foucault refers to as "sovereignty theory." A view of Foucault's intellectual development is then proposed: a "structuralist ethos" that dominated Foucault's thought in the 1960s warps his turn to Nietzscheanism in the 1970s. Structuralist views in The Order of Things appear to bar independent and innovative human action, a view that exists in tension with a less deterministic Nietzscheanism. These opposed influences produce the structuralist-Nietzschean hybrid, Discipline and Punish in the mid-1970s. A primary goal of the dissertation is to separate out these two influences, account for and bracket the structuralist ethos that still plays a role in Discipline and Punish, and re-read the text along more Nietzschean, and thus less deterministic lines.;The dissertation argues that, following Discipline and Punish, the structuralist ethos is left pretty much behind. It goes on to trace Foucault's Nietzschean and de-centered approach to power, both in terms of how it effects the development of modern states and the constitution of individuals. The work ends by considering what kind of oppositional ethos Foucault provides for a world that, since 1989 and the revolutions in the East, appears to lack one.