Power with no central point: relational, generated everywhere, immanent in every relationship and always accompanied by resistance arising within it.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Sexuality is not a stubborn drive or a libido; Foucault treats it as "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power."
Put simply Foucault: sexuality is not a built-in urge or sex drive. It is a place where relations of power run especially thick.
Where to read it Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Part Four, ch. 3 ("Domain").
Shore reads Foucault's dispersed power as an attempt to invert and overcome the subject-object paradigm: no subject sits at the source of power, bearing down on an object.
Put simply Shore: Foucault's spread-out power tries to overturn the old picture of a subject acting on an object. No one person sits at the source of power, pressing down on something below.
Power has no single source. It is omnipresent "not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere": radically dispersed, built into every relationship.
Put simply Foucault: power has no single source. It is everywhere "not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere": spread out through every relationship.
Where to read it Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Part Four, ch. 2 ("Method").
Resistance never stands outside power. Always already present, power constitutes the very thing used to resist it; the two are locked in a shifting relational dynamic.
Put simply Foucault: resistance is never outside power. Power is always already there and shapes even the means people use to resist it. The two keep shifting in relation to each other.
Where to read it Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Part Four, ch. 2 ("Method").
Stalinist power did not merely crush, it also created: Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain brought Foucault's productive power into Stalinism studies and inaugurated a new line of work.
As Foucault would put it about power, everywhere is not nowhere: that power pervades everything does not mean it has vanished.
Put simply Foucault on power: the fact that power runs through everything does not mean it has disappeared. Being everywhere is not the same as being nowhere.
1 link between claims that both use the term. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
FoucaultPower has no single source. It is omnipresent "not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere": radically dispersed, built into every relationship. L21 · 38:23
ShoreShore reads Foucault's dispersed power as an attempt to invert and overcome the subject-object paradigm: no subject sits at the source of power, bearing down on an object. L21 · 38:04
Shore reads the denial of a single point of power as an inversion of the subject-object paradigm.
Throughlines that pass through one of these claims.
Terms that appear in the same claims.