The subject of liberation in the work of Michel Foucault

One of the major difficulties with Foucault's work has been the question of liberation. There is a paradox between what appears to be a call to liberate the subject from the coercive and dominating institutional structures that populate the contemporary mis en scene and a conception of the subject that precludes any such liberation. This essay does three things with respect to this problem. First, it addresses the constitution of the subject as an effect of discursive formations via a close analysis of The Archaeology of Knowledge and as an effect of power relations via an analysis of Foucault's genealogical works. Second, it shows that all previous attempts to construct a strategy of liberation consistent with Foucault's work fail due to either a re-invocation of the Cartesian cogito or to a failure to appreciate the force of the analysis of power/knowledge relations. Lastly, it argues that while there can be no liberation for Foucault there is nonetheless a possibility for political action. Such action is based on strategies of transformation which attempt to produce restructurings and reconfigurations in power/knowledge formations. Such strategies do not produce liberation since they simply shift the structure of the fields in which the subject is constituted. They do however, in a best case scenario, produce alterations in the forms of subjectivity, in the relative power relations between subjects, and in the subject's relation to itself.