In the reading, “The Definition of Power” by Foucault, Foucault discusses the different definitions of power and how the word “power” can be misinterpreted into something it is not. He mentions that, “The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.” (93) This excerpt explains saying that power has a certain path and way of working and is created from everything around us. Foucault goes on telling us four different meanings and definitions of power by looking at it from different point of views. “Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, ram pant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations.” (96) This excerpt describes how leaders who do have power in a way have special cases of resistances and they can only exist with the power relations.
Foucault also talks about the deployment of sexuality using power. He says there are ways to escape the system of Law-and-Sovereign which has captivated political thought for such a long time. From talking about leaders and rulers and the different meanings of power, Foucault specifically mentions, rather than referring all the violences that are exerted on sex, and the anxious gazes that are directed at it,
to the unique form of a great Power, we have to engage the expanding production of discuss on sex in the field of multiple and mobile power relations. Foucault ends this piece with one of the rules of immanence. “One must not suppose that there exists a certain sphere of sexuality that would be the legitimate concern of a free and disinterested scientific inquiry were it not the object of mechanisms of prohibition brought to bear by the economic or ideological requirements of power…Between techniques of knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority, even if they have specific roles and are linked together on the basis of their difference. (98)
