Stuart Elden - Thinking about the question of power with Foucault

Foucault says we need to think about power in a different way. It’s not that power doesn’t work in those ways, but that power doesn’t only work in those ways.

About Stuart Elden
"I’m a Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick. My research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography. I undertake my work predominantly through approaches from the history of ideas.

My work over the past decade or so has been in two main areas - the history, concept and practice of territory; and the history of twentieth-century French thought. I've been writing a multivolume intellectual history of the entire career of Michel Foucault. I’m the author of books on Henri Lefebvre, Martin Heidegger and the question of territory."

Key Points

• Foucault says that we’re still thinking about power as being centralised in society.
• Power can be understood as power relations: an exchange that goes on within society that is dispersed throughout its institutions.
• In `Discipline and Punish', Foucault tries to understand how we moved from a spectacular display of sovereign power, to the regulation of time and space in prisons.

Foucault’s work was often historical in terms of how he approached his topics. His books include histories of madness, of clinical medicine and of the human sciences, of the history of the prison and the punitive society more generally. Then there is his last great project, the unfinished The History of Sexuality, which he was working on at the time of his death.