Foucault genealogies power knowledge ideologies domination

In short, Foucault argued that what was presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific discovery that madness is mental illness was in fact the product of eminently questionable social and ethical commitments. Because government refers to strategic, regulated and rationalized modes of power that have to be legitimized through forms of knowledge, the idea of critique as a form of resistance now becomes crucial. By contrast, during the Renaissance, knowledge was understood as a matter of resemblance between things. Foucault left instructions that there should be no posthumous publication of his writings that he had not published in his lifetime. Ironically, this thinker often associated with the postmodern ended his career affirming Enlightenment criticism and Greek ethics while entrenched in the study of antiquity and writing in the style of a classicist. We see, then, that for Foucault the key to Classical knowing is the idea, that is, mental representation. The rationality of biopower is markedly different from that of sovereign power in terms not just of its objectives, but also of its instruments.

Both power and knowledge are to be seen as de-centralised, relativistic, ubiquitous, and unstable dynamic systemic phenomena. Discipline and Punish. Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison. Okay, thanks.