While power can be colonized by the state, it should not be seen as belonging to or deriving from the state as the anarchists believed. Power, for Foucault, is not a function of the institution; rather the institution is a function, or an effect, of power. Power flows through institutions, it does not emanate from them. Indeed, the institution is merely an assemblage of various power relations. It is, moreover, an unstable assemblage because power relations themselves are unstable, and can just as easily turn against the institution which ‘controls’ them. Flows of power can sometimes be blocked and congealed, and this is when relations of power become relations of domination. These relations of domination form the basis of institutions such as the state.
Saul Newman, Foucault and the Genealogy of Power, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power
Saul Newman, Foucault and the Genealogy of Power, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power
❤4🥰1
Other human beings are never pure spirit for me: I only know them through their glances, their gestures, their speech -- in other words, through their bodies. Of course another human being is certainly more than simply a body to me: rather, this other is a body animated by all manner of intentions, the origin of numerous actions and words [...] I cannot detach someone from their silhouette, the tone of their voice and its accent. If I see them for even a moment, I can reconnect with them instantaneously and far more thoroughly than if I were to go through a list of everything I know about them from experience or hearsay. Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception
🔥1