The development of Foucault’s conception of power

This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of Foucault's engagement with the concept of power, from its earliest anticipations in his thought of the 1960s to its imbrication in his late, ethical turn. The chapter's core tracks the gradual development of his distinctive conception of power through his lecture series of the early 1970s, culminating in its mature presentation in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. This begins in inchoate and conventional invocations of power his lectures on Greek antiquity, develops verbally into a familiar vocabulary of “power relations” and “power-knowledge” in lectures on French history, before expanding into a new approach to power as relational in lectures on the prison. Once established, this gradually sheds—via the detour of the development and abandonment of a concept of “surplus power”—remnant negative and economistic connotations to yield a conception of power as essentially positive and productive, setting the stage for Foucault's turn towards subjectivity.