Between determination and responsiveness : a third space in Foucault

Abstract

Perhaps it would not be altogether unacceptable to suggest that throughout the 1970s, Foucault was found struggling in intellectual directions not easily reconcilable. Consequently, his positions on the law (developed mostly during this phase) show a measure of inconsistent cy1. Critical scholarship on Foucault's law has so far progressed in two opposed theses: expulsion and retrieval. The first suggests that Foucault views modern power as driven not by codes of law but by codes of normalization. In other words, it would argue that Foucault subscribes to the progressive attenuation of law (read as juridieo-political) by the two exclusively modern forms of power: discipline and biopolitics.