Foucault’s Power: Knowledge Is Power, Obscurity Is Apparently Also Power

Cogito Ergo Nope, Book 3

De: Sophia Blackwell

Narrado por: Benjamin Powell

Ever wondered why your college roommate wouldn't stop talking about "discursive formations" after one semester of critical theory? Curious how a bald Frenchman in a turtleneck became the patron saint of impenetrable academic writing? Want to understand Foucault without developing a migraine or a sudden urge to wear all black?

Foucault's Power is the antidote to pretentious philosophical obscurity you've been waiting for. This irreverent guide takes you on a sarcasm-soaked journey through Michel Foucault's most influential ideas—from his analysis of prisons and power to his baffling observations about sexuality and truth—all while mercilessly mocking the cult of incomprehensibility that has grown around him.

In this audiobook, you'll discover:

• How Foucault transformed "people in power control information" into a revolutionary insight
• Why your open-plan office is actually a sophisticated surveillance mechanism (as if you needed another reason to hate it)
• How Foucault managed to write extensively about sex without including a single useful tip
• The convenient contradictions of a man who questioned all institutions while becoming the ultimate institutional insider
• A bonus translation guide from Foucauldian jargon to human English!

Whether you're a confused student forced to read "Discipline and Punish," a curious listener wanting to understand what the fuss is about, or someone who enjoys watching intellectual pretension get skewered by razor-sharp wit, this audiobook is your perfect introduction to the man who made simplicity unfashionable and gave academic writing permission to be terrible forever.

©2025 Sophia Blackwell (P)2025 Sophia Blackwell

Too Harsh with Foucault

Since I understand this is a book on philosophy with humor and not a humoristic book with philosophy, I will criticize it as such.

The book starts cracking jokes a little bit over, but eventually it does deliver on the promise to seriously engage with Foucault's thought. And once toned down, humor did help to make some difficult topics more palatable.

If I were in situation to guide myself by this book alone, I would certainly skip Foucault and look for another team to read about. The author represents the Foucault's philosophy mainly as a bunch of banalities written in impenetrable jargon, and from times to times says something to soften it.

I think the book offers some well-placed critics and can be useful to those that have already started to learn on the subject, as I am, and need to get some critical distance. But for those that are absolute novices, I am afraid they may be inculcated with certain prejudices that will hinder their progress or make them abort the endeavor altogether.

The author’s criticism of Foucault follows these lines:

1. Claim: Foucault uses deliberately abstruse language as a marketing tool and to display his own erudition. True, and the author could not be more critical of it than I am. Working in the way that keeps knowledge restricted to a narrow intellectual elite is profoundly selfish, and when done by someone that was paid with public money to advance it becomes plain dishonesty. To be fair, his later books have become increasingly accessible.

2. Claim: Many of the concepts sold by Foucault as revolutionary were indeed common sense clothed in pompous wording. Partially true. There were such instances, possibly many of them. But I found that in some examples the author gave Foucault’s points were oversimplified to better fit such claim. One of such cases was the affirmations attributed to Foucault that who detains power decides what will be taught as truth. Obvious indeed. But Foucault says much more than that: that the power relations that prevail in certain historical moment (relations, not people in positions of power) interact as to delimit what is perceived as truth or even what can be meaningfully said. It is not simply that the government or the corporations will force on you bunch of propaganda – it is that by the fact you live in certain time and place which has certain culture and power relations you will be unable to desire or even to conceive things out of a certain box. And the same applies to people in positions of power. And that is not something one can just say – it needs to show it, and Foucault did. Foucault was a deeply original thinker, which brought a completely fresh view of many of the subjects he tackled.

3. Claim, Foucault claimed for himself the status of absolute truth while he regarded all other sources of truth as power determined and historically contingent. False. Foucault acknowledged his own discourse was also determined by prevailing power relations. But asking for him to justify it before a “tribunal of truth” informed by the same principles he was criticizing is for me, as it was for him, non-sensical. The correct question would be not if it is true but if it is fruitful. As for the fossilization of the Foucaultian thought in the academic sphere appointed by the author, he could hardly prevent that.

4. Claim: Foucault saw everything as consequence of power. True but misleading. That is because the author failed to represent adequately what power meant for Foucault. When you think of power as productive, relational network of forces permeating all social life, not only top-down but in all directions, you may realize that indeed nothing in our culture is left out.

5. Claim: Foucault was a kind of philosophical nihilist, for which no progress was possible because one cannot escape from being defined by power relations. Furthermore, he contradicted himself by taking militant positions on different subjects. False. That corresponds to an extremely naïve reading of Foucault. When author represents Foucault as saying that when one resolves one situation it just uncovers a completely new set of issues issues, isn’t that exactly the lived experience of every person in this world? Or did any of you find the keys to a worry-free realm? Inferring from it that any change would be sterile is a non-sequitur which must be debited to the author and not to Foucault. There are better and worse sets of power relations and Foucault never denied that.

6. Claim: Foucault threw stones at everything and proposed no solutions. False. First, Foucault sees the existence of power relations not as an evil per se but as a necessary part of the human condition, which is to be understood and bettered. Then, it seems author’s concept of philosophy is stuck in the classic Greece, where the main mission of philosophers was to provide guidance for good life. The modern philosophy considers that describing reality from certain perspective, without venturing into any kind of prescription, is a worthwhile endeavor. The contrary would mean discarding a considerable chunk of philosophical production, including nearly all analytical philosophy. But Foucault, especially in his later phase, did write extensively on how a subject could preserve a degree of freedom and individuality within existing power structures. The claim is entirely baseless.

As for this last point above, the author completely ignored Foucault’s later phases. The fundamental concepts such as Games of Truth and Technologies of the Self were ignored. Also, nothing was said about Foucault’s approach to subjectivation, which I deem important to a comprehensive concept of his ideas.