From Power To Power Relations

To investigate Foucault's thoughts of power,one has to distinguish between his specific analysis of the modes of power in the history and his view of power itself.There is an eye-catching transformation in Foucault's view of power after mid-1970s,which is not only manifested in his analysis of various modes of power in history,but is also directly articulated about in some of Foucault's key works and thus provides us an approach to understand his view of power.Those works should include the documents published in different forms at different occasions,such as interviews,occasional writings and lectures at the College de France,as well as his published works.In this thesis I will take his works as a whole and firstly take his interview'The History of Sexuality' as a clue,asserting that the impulse to the transformation in his view of power is the need in his analysis of the modes of power,in this case the mechanisms of power in the field of sexuality.Then I will distinguish between the'diagnostic level' and 'conceptual level' in his thoughts of power,and trace the process of the transformation under the perspective of the conceptual level.It is not difficult to find that throughout the process the works published around 1976 are the pivotal and most controversial ones,I will therefore focus on Foucault's thought of power articulated in The History of Sexuality,volume 1(henceforth HS1),which came out in December of 1976,and suggest that it provides the core conception of his view of power after mid-1970s.A few years since the publication of HS1,he made direct and dense statements on power and power relations in 'The Subject and Power'(henceforth SP)published first in English,which I will examine closely as well.I will also briefly introduce the view of power Foucault expressed in the interview 'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom' in 1984 and assert that it is consistent with that in SP.After that,I will compare his view of power expressed in HS1 and SP,and conclude that his view of power in SP is more a'complement' to that in HS1 than a replacement.The elaboration of Foucault's view of power will constitute the main body of this thesis.But in Foucault's thought,.the problematics of freedom can never be fully separated from that of power,and in my opinion,the complement Foucault made in SP to HS1 lies precisely in the problematics of 'resistance'.So I will turn to his account of resistance under the perspective of his view of power,with reference to his interview,'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom',wherein he designated the three connotations of power and accounted on liberation,practices of freedom,and resistance.At the end of the thesis I will summarize the significance of resistance in power relations,which builds to a better understanding of Foucault's view of power.