Dictionnaire des philosophes (On Foucault)

"Foucault has now undertaken, still within the same general project, to study the constitution of the subject as an object for himself: the formation of procedures by which the subject is led to observe himself, analyse himself, interpret himself, recognize himself as a domain of possible knowledge. In short, this concerns the history of “subjectivity”, if what is meant by the term is the way in which the subject experiences himself in a game of truth where he relates to himself".

"Hence a third principle of method: address “practices” as a domain of analysis, approach the study from the angle of what “was done”. For example, what was done with madmen, delinquents, or sick people? Of course, one can try to infer the institutions in which they were placed and the treatments to which they were subjected from the ideas that people had about them, or knowledge that people believed they had about them. One can also look for the form of “true” mental illnesses and the modalities of real delinquency in a given period in order to explain what was thought about them at the time. Michel Foucault approaches things in an altogether different way. He first studies the ensemble of more or less regulated, more or less deliberate, more or less finalized ways of doing things, through which can be seen both what was constituted as real for those who sought to think it and manage it and the way in which the latter constituted themselves as subjects capable of knowing, analysing, and ultimately altering reality. These are the “practices”, understood as a way of acting and thinking at once, that provide the intelligibility key for the correlative constitution of the subject and the object".

"Now, since it is a matter of studying the different modes of objectivation of the subject that appear through these practices, one understands how important it is to analyze power relations. But it is essential to clearly define what such an analysis can be and can hope to accomplish. Obviously, it is a matter not of examining “power” with regards to its origin, its principles, or its legitimate limits, but of studying the methods and techniques used in different institutional contexts to act upon the behavior of individuals taken separately or in a group, so as to shape, direct, modify their way of conducting themselves, to impose ends on their inaction or fit it into overall strategies, these being multiple consequently, in their forms and their place of exercise; diverse, too, in the procedures and techniques they bring into play. These power relations characterize the manner in which men are “governed” by one another; and their analysis shows how, through certain forms of “government”, of madmen, sick people, criminals and so on, the mad, the sick, the delinquent subject is objectified. So an analysis of this kind implies not that the abuse of this or that power has created madmen, sick people, or criminals where there was nothing, but that the various and particular forms of “government” of individuals were determinant in the different modes of objectivation of the subject".

    Dictionnaire des philosophes