Description
This paper re-conceptualises the existing relationship between power relations and the affixed mechanisms of control that affect the subject under Michel Foucault’s theorisation of power. Foucauldian power has been illustrated through the emphasis on the element of domination, as something that constricts the individual and strips him/her of autonomy and agency by being totalising, insidious, and individuating, and by acting at the most intimate levels of life that previously appeared to be sans power. The author argues that a reading of power through the early Foucault is inadequate and incapacitates the emancipatory and productive capacity a Foucauldian framework can offer when constructed through a comprehensive understanding of the late works on the ethics of the self. The paper aims to examine and employ the underdeveloped elements in Foucauldian thought, identifying three key elements that are misrepresented in the scholarship: the possibility of resistance and agency, the transitive characteristic of knowledge regimes, and the prospect of liberated subjectivities. This framework paves the way to a notion of the power as positive which has the possibility of producing less oppressive discourses and mentalities over time through the understanding that any subjectivity that an individual can conceive of is already a possibility within the web of power we operate within.
