Foucault and Power: Philosophy and Subjectivity Review

Practice flashcards centered on Foucaultian concepts such as biopower, the clinical gaze, and the relationship between knowledge and power as described in the lecture notes.

Foucault's Three Moments

The three distinct stages mentioned in 'The Use of Pleasures': the genealogy of power, the archaeology of knowledge, and the aesthetics of existence.

Resistance

Foucault describes this as power acting as a source of tension and a form of warfare; it is an inherent force within power relations that allows subjects to modify or subtract from power's action.

Limit Experience

A concept where writing or action is used to modify oneself, aimed at uprooting the subject from themselves to enable transformation and different ways of thinking.

Struggles for Subjectivity

Identified by Foucault as the third type of struggle in society, focusing on how individuals are defined and controlled as subjects.

Epistemological Power

A polyform power that makes places of enclosure (like factories or schools) produce different types of goods or knowledge.

Closure (Clausura)

A disciplinary technique involving confinement in a closed space to maintain the disciplinary process without interruption, governed by strict or daily control.

Establishment of Rhythms

A disciplinary technique implemented by fixing strict schedules for the start and end of specific tasks.

Power-Knowledge Relation

The principle that power and knowledge directly imply one another; power creates conditions for knowledge production, and knowledge reinforces power.

Inscription of Norms

The process of embedding societal rules into the human body through physical pain or disciplinary mechanisms.

Ship of Fools (La Nave de los Locos)

The first figure that madness took historically before being understood as 'mental illness' in modern clinical terms.

Mental Illness

According to Foucault, this is a result of confinement and is historically differentiated from criminality, poverty, and unemployment.

Clinical Gaze (Mirada Clínica)

A construction of the eye and culture involving a systematic correlation between visible signs, anatomical exploration, and organized institutional knowledge.

The General Hospital (1656)

An institution founded in Paris that functioned as a mix between a prison, a police center, and a place of confinement/torture for the sick and poor.

Truth (Foucaultian perspective)

A set of rules used to discriminate what is true from what is false within a specific historical moment.

Repression

A term that synthesizes the negative conception of power as something that solely inhibits or says 'no'.

Juridical Power

Power conceived as a set of laws and rules that define the limits of what is licit and illicit.

Biopower

A form of power over life that evolved since the 17th century, combining the anatomo-politics of the human body with the biopolitics of the population.

Archaeology of Knowledge

A theoretical approach that examines the rules governing the formation of statements (enunciados) within different historical 'epistemes'.

Genealogy of Power

An investigative approach into the relations of domination and the effects of power that traverse and constitute subjects.

Episteme

The historical configuration of knowledge that establishes the conditions of possibility for what can be thought or known in a given era.

Discontinuity

A concept in the history of knowledge identifying radical ruptures in 'epistemes' rather than a linear or progressive evolution of thought.

The Death of Man

The dissolution of the notion of a universal subject, replaced by historical processes of subjectivation.

Technologies of the Self

Individual practices that allow subjects to configure their own identity and behavior within social norms.

Pastoral Power

A form of power focused on individual conduct and guidance, which was later integrated into modern governmentalities.

Governmentality

A political rationality that reorganizes economic, social, and individual life, often associated with neoliberalism as a way of governing.

Necropolitics

A concept (developed by Mbembe) describing how the exercise of power produces differentiated criteria that leave certain populations exposed to violence and death.

Anatomical Politics (Anatomía Política)

A rationality that turns the body into an object of political intervention through training, correction, and normalization.