In a rant about the relations between the university discourse and the Master-Signifier 1, Zizek criticizes Foucault:
What one should avoid here is the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity which arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power.
The thing is, that this is not an adequate rendition of Foucault. It might be ascribed to Althusser for whom the subject was constituted solely by the interpellation of ideology but for Foucault the remainder is exactly what characterizes the subject.
One indication of this remainder is found in Foucault’s desciption of his attempt to analyze power:
It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.2
In order to understand power as well as subjectivation we should study resistance, the remainder. Foucault, of course is althusserian, and he acknowledges the transition from the individual to the subject as a a result of power but even then, there are two meanings to the word ‘subject’:
It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.3
Both meanings suggest power and the production of the subject by power but in one, power takes the role of agent whereas the second is a matter of subjective response. The remainder is completely immersed in various power structures but, nonetheless, it remains a remainder.
This is exactly what constitutes Foucault’s notion of Freedom:
Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole, there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains.4
Subjectivity according to Foucault is precisely characterized by some splinter of freedom, by what Zizek calls “its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power.” The foucauldian misreading turns out to be Zizek’s misreading of Foucault.
- Cf. Zizek: HOMO SACER AS THE OBJECT OF THE DISCOURSE OF THE UNIVERSITY ↩
- Foucault: “The subject and power” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), p. 780 ↩
- Foucault: “The subject and power” p. 781 ↩
- Foucault: “The subject and power” p. 790 ↩
