Sakinah Dava Erawan

Section AA (Becca Peach)

Extra Credit

Foucault Against Himself Documentary

Micheal Foucault, the french postmodernist and writer, has been hugely influential in
shaping understandings of power. Leading away from the analysis of actors who use power as an
instrument of coercion, and even away from the discreet structures in which those actors operate,
toward the idea that 'power is everywhere', diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and
'regimes of truth'. A concept that was addressed both in the lecture course and Foucault Against
Himself documentary is the body as a machine concept. In the lecture, it is the documentary,
Foucault asserted that "Man is an invention" (Foucault against himself, 31:53). Man is described
as a machine by Foucault, he stated that men are not at the centre of knowledge and thinking.
Instead, the systems and structures are, and one of the system is biopower.  

In Professor Reinke's lecture, she mentioned biopower concept. She stated that "it is a
new way of power operating in our bodies" (Reinke, Lecture 18, 30:50). Biopower is the switch
between power as a means to control the population starting in the late eighteenth century. "One
might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or
disallow it to the point of death" (The History of Sexuality 138). This quotation shows that
biopower incorporates certain aspects of disciplinary power. If disciplinary power is about
training the actions of bodies, biopower is about managing births, deaths, reproductions, and
illness of the population.

Other similarities in both Professor Reinke's lecture and the documentary is the power
over life. According to the documentary, if power is so powerful and omnipresent, sometimes we
forget about the peaceful humanity that the world have. Where power lays, resistance always
follows. "How that resistance plays out in the day to day practice." (Foucault against himself,
36:26). He also stated that power is empowered people that it is possible to invent new and
different thing even though it has been contradicting the natural, historical truth. The example of
this would be when Foucault met the gay community in San Francisco and New York. The
American government could diminish the historic regulation of discrimination over the gay
community.