Foucault Analysis Of Power Analysis

Foucault’s Analysis of Power

”The History of Sexuality” is a three-volumes book, published around 1976 and 1984 by the french historical philosopher Michel Foucault. The three volumes are “An Introduction” (which later is known also as “The Will of Knowledge”), “The Use of the Self” and “The Care of the Self”.
I decided to focus my paper on the first volume, the most mentioned and most known, which is a deep analysis of the last two centuries of history of sexuality, particularly oriented in finding out why and how sexuality is an object of discussion. Foucault is not interested in sexuality itself, but he is interested in how it has become an object of knowledge. Why, in the past few centuries, have we increasingly come to see our identity

He does not understand power as a domination, but as multiple force relations, “power is everywhere because it comes from everywhere”, being imposed from a bottom-up flow, rather that a top-down flow.

Part V: Right of Death and Power over Life
In the last part, Foucault analyzes how the right of death and the power over life have changed.
In feudal times, “right of death” was “right of life”, because the sovereign was able to decide when a person had or had not to die. It became a “right to life”, when the sovereign became more concerned about the power of how people ought to live, so that power becomes more on how to foster and maximize life. This new power-view is called “biopower”, and has two forms. The first form, considers the body as a machine, and has the goal to increase efficiency and it’s integration into the economic system. The second form, considers the body as necessary for the biological reproduction, essential for society.
Biopower is the source for the rise of capitalism, as states and governments become interested in regulating power over life.

He examines past episodes of power conquest, where political relations were understood as relations of domination, resulting from bellicose wars between different races. What appeared as right and just to the conquering race, was domination and enslavement for the conquered race.
Foucault examination of race war, also revealed an important aspect of contemporary power relationships, that is the reconciliation of techniques of sovereign power with biopower, specifically the “right to kill” considered as an optimization of life. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, war of race developed in modern racism, where there’s no longer a distinction between oppressor race and oppressed race, but between the human race and the threats to its health: the sick, the disabled, the mad, the criminal, the sexually deviant, and so on. Racism holds on a principle of exclusion, meant to protect the health and integrity of the social body, and the old sovereign right to kill is now in the name of the health of society. What we might call ethnic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and so on, share the same goal of protecting the social body, and this goal can be justified only in a society aimed at the optimization and maximization of human life, also know as