"Foucault is not so much interested in what power is as much as how power is articulated in the social field: identifying its hold over life and analyzing power’s hold over life in turn on processes of subjectification. In many ways, it remains difficult to pin Foucault’s work down into a specific discipline or thematization, and this is perhaps due to the problematizations that Foucault concerned himself with, namely how a new “science of man” could lend itself to the governance of life. In an interview with the journal La Quinzaine littéraire in March 1968, Foucault was asked to define his work. He offers the following, modest, response: 

[My work is an attempt to] try to find something that would be like the unconscious in the history of science, and in human knowledge. If you like, the working hypothesis is, broadly put, the following one: the history of science, the history of knowledge(s), do not simply obey the general law of the progress of reason, it is not a human consciousness, it is not human reason that is a kind of guardian of the laws of its own history. There exists, beneath what science knows of itself, something that it does not know; and its history, its future, its episodes, its accidents, obey a certain number of laws [lois] and determinations. These laws and determinations, these are what I have tried to reveal. I have tried to excavate an autonomous domain that would be that of the unconscious


29 Knowledge, the Unconscious, and Desire of knowledge, that would have its own proper rules, just as the human being’s unconscious, too, has its own rules and determinations. 21 Foucault points to that hidden kernel of our knowledge that continues to exist in close proximity to us. We tirelessly and ceaselessly redouble our efforts to conceal this “unconscious of human knowledge,” professing completeness and mastery, while the human being’s unconscious remains a mystery. Throughout history, numerous efforts have been made to tame the human being, to expel the irrational, the passions, and the inhuman. 22 Foucault is not necessarily interested in how these limits are decided upon, for instance, over what qualities constitute the irrational. Rather, Foucault’s analysis is twofold: on the one hand, Foucault looks at how these authorial truths work in tandem with a technique of government, and, on the other, he sheds a light on what remains after this necessarily impossible task has been decided upon, the so called taming of man''.

SR