About power, authority and subjection

Abstract

Power produces subjects, it would be a way to enunciate one of the Foucauldian theses that open a critical horizon beyond the scheme of sovereignty, which Judith Butler accurately describes when she says “we are accustomed to conceive power as something that exerts pressure on the subject from the outside, something that subordinates, underrates and relegates to a lower order “(2010, p.12). The representation of power as an external force that imposes itself, as repression on the part of a group, an individual or the State, moves, in the Foucauldian analytic, towards a theory of subjection, in the double sense of this term, as submission and as subjectivation (Álvarez, 2015, Butler, 2010). Thus, the central problem for Foucault would not be the origin, nature or legitimation of power but its exercise on others, the particular question posed by Foucault is, precisely, “what happens when individuals exercise, as they say, their power over others?” (Álvarez, 2015, p. 329). For Foucault the answer to this question is not evident nor immediate, because the appearance in the sixteenth century of the State in the Western world (Álvarez, 2015) was configured as a cause of the widespread conception of power invested to subdue. Now, distant is the French philosopher of ignoring the importance of these analyzes, nonetheless, his reflection points to the constitution of the subject as who exercises and on which power is exercised and, therefore, the strategies used to it.