PHL 101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 16: Classical Liberalism, Antiscience, Michel Foucault
4 Dec 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
Evan Reed
PHL 101
Introduction to Philosophy
Fall 2018
Professor Herman
Michael Foucault: Two Lectures on Power
● “Two Lectures” explores a significant theme in Foucault’s work, namely, the relation of
power to knowledge. He notes that in the recent history of the past twenty years there
has been “the efficacy of dispersed offensives.”
● Here by offensive he means challenges to the theories and practices in domains of law,
politics, psychiatry, moral theory and so on. The recent history is characterized by the
general feeling of the “proliferating criticizability of things, institutions and practices, and
discourses.”
● According to Foucault, the aim of these attacks have been what he calls “totalizing
theories,” or “unitary theories” that are all-encompassing because they claim to be able
to explain everything. Thus, Foucault sees our time as marked by the efficacy of
critiques, on the one hand, and the inhibiting effect of global theories.
● Critique of global theories is characterized by their local character, which for Foucault
indicates something resembling an autonomous and non-centralized theoretical
production that does not need validation from the all-encompassing theory. This is what
he calls “return of knowledge” that makes local critique possible
● He also calls the return of knowledge the insurrection of subjugated knowledge, which
has two features:
1) It refers to historical content buried and masked in functional coherences or formal
systemizations.
2) Subjugated knowledge also refers to a whole series of knowledges that have been
disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges,
naïve knowledges, historically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the
required level of erudition or scientificity.
● This revelation gives us the outline of what Foucault calls genealogy or multiple
genealogical investigation. These genealogies are a combination of erudite knowledge
and what people know.
● They would have not been made possible were it not for the removal of the tyranny of
overall discourses, with their hierarchies and all the privileges enjoyed by the theoretical
vanguard. Genealogies are anti-science and for insurrection of knowledge. 395-96
● The next question, then, is the question of power. Foucault presents two conceptions of
power:
1) The juridical or the classical liberal conception according to which power is regarded
as a right, a commodity and therefore, as what can be transferred or alienated; and
2) The Freudian-Marxian conceptualization of power as struggle, conflict, domination
and repression.
● The second lecture further spells out Foucault’s conception of Power. He sees power in a
sort of symbiotic relation with rules of right and discourse of truth. He wants to
investigate their mutual interaction in so far as the rules of law delineate power and the
truth-effects that power produces.
