The Deciphering of Power

This chapter briefly reframes and evaluates the methodology that Foucault advocated for the study of power. This is done by illustrating the three prongs into which that study is organized: the ‘analytics’ of power, the ‘genealogy of power’, and the ‘analysis’ of power. The chapter dwells on the methodological assumptions that guided Foucault’s inquiries and his attack on what he labeled the ‘juridical’ approach to the study of power. These assumptions are those of the multiformity of power and the ‘micropluralism’ of power. The chapter also highlights how a distinctive feature of Foucault’s method lay in its inviting us to look at the ‘microphysical’ aspects of different forms of power, a term with which he originally sought to express the hold that power has on our ‘bodies’, but which can more generally be used to refer to the subject’s psychological processes leveraged by different forms of power.