Foucault: The Mesh of Power (previously untranslated)

(this is an excerpt from a previously untranslated essay by Foucault)

We will attempt to proceed towards an analysis of the concept of power.¹ I am not the first, far from it, to attempt to skirt around the Freudian schema that pits instinct against suppression [répression], instinct against culture.² Many decades ago, an entire school of psychoanalysts tried to modify and develop this Freudian schema of instinct versus culture, and of instinct versus suppression – I am referring to psychoanalysts in the English as well as the French language, like Melanie Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan, who have tried to show that suppression, far from being a secondary, ulterior, or later mechanism, which would attempts to control a given or natural play of instinct, constitutes a part of the mechanism of instinct, or, more or less, of the process through which the sexual instinct [l’instinct sexuel] is developed, unfolded and constituted as drive [pulsion].

The Freudian concept of Trieb³need not be interpreted as a simple natural given, a natural biological mechanism upon which suppression would come to posit its law of prohibition, but rather, according to the psychoanalysts, as something which is already profoundly penetrated by suppression. Need, castration, lack, prohibition and the law are already elements through which desire has been constituted as sexual desire, and this implies a transformation of the original notion of sexual instinct, such as Freud had conceived of it at the end of the 19th century. It is then necessary to think instinct not as a natural given, but as already a development, as already being a complex play between the body and the law, between the body and the cultural mechanisms that assure the control of persons.

I therefore believe that the psychoanalysts have considerably displaced the point in question, by bringing to light a new idea of instinct, or, in any case, a new conception of instinct, drive and desire. Nevertheless, what troubles me, or at least what seems insufficient to me, is that, in this revision proposed by psychoanalysts, they have perhaps altered the concept of desire, but they have in no way altered our concept of power.

In their work, they still continue to regard the signified of power, the central point, that in which power consists, as prohibition, law, the act of saying no, and above all, the figure or expression: “You must not.” Power is essentially those who say, “You must not.” It appears to me that this is a totally insufficient conceptualization – and I will speak about this later – a juridical idea, a formal idea of power, and it is necessary to elaborate a different idea of power that will, no doubt, permit us to better understand the relations established between power and sexuality in our Western societies.

via viewpointmag.com