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Comment by golemotron | Hacker News Reader

The thing that Foucault's thought misses is that there are many ways of seeing the world. You can see it in terms of power, but then confirmation bias may lead you to a place of deep social distrust not unlike our current zeitgeist.

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Foucault wrote about many things - power, madness, social norms, the relation of words and things. Most of his books have a different theme.

Your summary is a bit reductive.

I think you misread the article. Foucault's point is that there are many ways of seeing power. "Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences."

Enumerating ways of seeing power can lead to an obsession with it. The fact that he has been cited by so many underscores this. When people are preoccupied with whether they are one-down or one-up you end up with perpetual status seeking among individuals and groups, where one's worth is perceived as tied to that status. Does that seem familiar?

For example?

It's been a while since I read Foucault, but I don't recall him being much concerned with marginal and fleeting differences of power in the add-out/deuce/add-in spectrum. The differences I recall are more at the scale of rights to commit violence and obligations to receive it. Such differences of power are in part sustained by the idea that it is common sense that things are that way because that is the way things are naturally ordered.

It does seem familiar, but it doesn't seem like Foucault. If power's everywhere, it can hardly be a bad thing in itself. The point isn't to oppose it, but to be cognizant of it, to play with it and to not get trapped in other people's usage of it.

I believe that's the "post" part of post-structuralist. Power is not a zero-sum game for Foucault.

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