Foucault on Resistance: Some Clarifications

Abstract

Edward Said's reading of Foucault essentializes the Frenchman's notion of resistance to a kind of fatalism that Foucault's writings cannot be reduced to. In two famous essays- "Traveling Theory" and "Foucault and the imagination of power"- Said criticizes foucault's analysis of power relations conceptualized in the 1970s. According to said, when foucault says power is omnipresent he actually means that power is omnipotent; that is to say, almost impossible to oppose. Foucault's notion of resistance, according to said, is too docile and incapable of altering the "unequal" interlocution between power and resistance. The Arab-American intellectual even argues that foucault did not take resistance seriously and made it appear as a dependent function of power. However, this paper intends to offer a substantively different interpretation of Foucault's power/resistance theory. This paper argues that as a thinker who opposed domination and authority, Foucault has no reason to perceive power to be all conquering. He has pointed at the vulnerability of power, indexing how resistance movements force power to change. To accuse that Foucault was reluctant to take resistance seriously is surely to essentialize the author's work. It is important to note the gradual transformation and the paradoxical nature of Foucault's works when one sets to critique his idices.