The Subject and Power

Critical Analysis

In this text, the author summarizes his interests in studying power and the nature of subjectivity.

The author argues that there are three ways in which human beings are turned into subjects; he refers to these as modes of objectification. People “try to give themselves the status of sciences”; they also work through “dividing practices”, where they work to understand themselves as existing within opposite points of reference; and how one turns themselves into a subject (777). This is, perhaps, an argument of assigning others as definitive, assigning someone relative to an externality; and assigning oneself.

Power should be analyzed from a perspective of strategies of inquiry, and examining oppositions and struggles. The struggles are “not exactly for or against the ‘individual’ but rather they are struggles against the ‘government of individualization’” (781).

At the core of the argument is that struggles of individuality occur on a daily, regular basis: “this form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him” (781). This, the author argues, is how one becomes a subject. Subject is defined as being subjected by someone else, and being tied to one’s own identity through self-knowledge. The struggles at play include a struggle against external domination, exploitation to produce, and “against that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way” (781).

In concluding the first section of this text, the author offers that “maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are”—he explains that “we have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (785).

The author next considers power more directly. Power, when exercised, modifies what others do: “what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the presence or the future” (789). Power recognizes the other person of whom power is exercised over and “maintained to the very end as a person who acts” (789). Power is “a set of actions upon other actions” (789). Governance is control over the types of actions that are available.

The author argues that power can only be exercised over those who are free: they must be free to choose from the constrained selection, and “at the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom” (791).