In reading the Introduction to Alain Badiou's Infinite Thought: Truth and the return of philosophy, by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens we find this statement:
"When poststructuralists do engage with problem of agency they again meet with difficulties,and again precisely because they merge their theory of the subject with their general ontology. In his middle period Foucault argued that networks of disciplinary power not only reach into the most intimate spaces of the subject, but actually produce what we call subjects. However, Foucault also said that power produces resistance. His problem then became that of accounting for the source of such resistance. If the subject--right down to its most intimate desires, actions and thoughts--is constituted by power, then how can it be the source of independent resistance? For such a point of agency to exist, Foucault needs some space which has not been completely constituted by power, or a complex doctrine on the relationship between resistance and independence. However, he has neither."
Is that so?
Why cannot relations of force/power produce (shape) the free subject and resistance by that subject? If you take the power relations of our political institutions, then these shape you so that you become a different kind of person who can also resist the particular use of power in that institution. Power and resistance are fused together. Resistance is not a different sort of thing to power.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 21, 2005 08:41 PM | TrackBack