BOOK THE POWER OF POSITIVE PRODUCTIVITY

Description

Power is at the center of Foucault’s work in the 1970s, it is the common thread of the series of courses which focus on its historical forms, from micro-powers to the great arts of government. The election and construction of this object, or rather, of this series of objects, are underpinned by a demand for resistance to power: if the latter never ceases to examine us, to question us, to worry us, it It is appropriate to turn the question around and understand how power has a hold on us.
“Power” must be said and understood in the plural as the set of power relations and therefore as the set of confrontations, struggles, resistance. Society, Foucault says somewhere, is “an archipelago of different powers”. By power, we must understand the specific exercise of a force on a force, in a sort of generalized war which calls upon tactics of power and strategies of struggle, locally varied, multiple in their forms, different according to the periods.
Methodologically, we must analyze power “positively” in order to understand not its nature, origin or essence, but its effects, that is to say what it produces and how it produces it. “Positivity”, “effectiveness”, “productivity”: these terms all refer in Foucault to the same methodological bias, to the same principle of investigation and analysis relating both to the “how of power”, i.e. that is to say on the concrete functioning of the devices that it mobilizes, and on the productions of knowledge, subjectivity and historically situated truth which result from it.