Foucault: Critique, Power, and the Making of the Subject

For this session, we’ll be reading Michel Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment?” and “The Subject and Power.” These texts reposition the Enlightenment legacy and Foucault’s own project by shifting focus from universal structures to historically contingent practices of subject-formation

In What is Enlightenment?, Foucault reinterprets Kant’s 1784 essay not as a doctrine of universal reason but as a historically situated attitude—a “critical ontology of ourselves.” Enlightenment becomes a task: to interrogate the limits imposed on us and to experiment with ways of thinking and living otherwise. This is not a structuralist search for timeless systems, but an ongoing practice of critique grounded in the specificity of the present.

In The Subject and Power, Foucault clarifies his central concern: not power as a commodity or structure, but as a set of relational practices that act upon the actions of others. He distinguishes between different modes of objectification—how individuals become subjects through dividing practices, scientific classification, and self-formation. Power is productive, not merely repressive, shaping the possibilities of thought and action.

Together, these works mark Foucault’s movement beyond structuralism toward a genealogical and critical ethos. They displace questions of universal truth with questions about how we are constituted as subjects in historically specific power relations, and how critique might open spaces for transformation.

The texts can be found here and here