This article takes issue with interpretations of Foucault’s thought that
understand power and resistance as forces working in opposition to one another to
fix and dissolve or construct and deconstruct social identities. Starting from the
theme of dispersion presented in The Archaeology of Knowledge, it maintains
that, for Foucault, power works only in a dispersive manner and that identities are
not so much substantialities produced by power as simulacra that appear on the
surface of a very different dynamic. Resistance, in turn, is not a force opposed to
power but rather a consequence of the disjunctive nature of power relations
themselves. Using this reconceived dynamic of power and resistance, the article
revisits Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary society and the
micropolitics of the care of the self, and argues that, although Foucault has been
deployed in political theory to show that identities are both necessary and
problematic, his work in fact points to a politics and ethics that strives to
dispense with this necessity altogether.
