Thank you for your suggestions, François and David.
Somebody once told me that Althusser went mad after his favorite "student"
Poulantzas committed suicide.... I must have misheard that story.
Yes, I agree that Foucault's theoretical framework problematizes a concept
of "domination" deployed by thinkers like Bourdieu, albeit domination is not
non-existent for Foucault, as François pointed out. Foucault admits the
empirical possibility that power relations that are changeable, reversible,
and unstable can harden into states of domination where a certain group
blocks a field of power relations and make them irreversible (in his essay
"The ethic of care for the self as a practice for freedom" in _The Last
Foucault_). And I think that we can see this in _Discipline and Punish_ as
well when he intimates "the non-reversible subordination of one group of
people by another, the 'surplus' power that is always fixed on the same
side, the inequality of positions of the different 'partners' in relation to
the common regulation" (1995 [1975]:223), unless I am misunderstanding his
statement.
Hiro
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