미셸 푸코 이론에서의 주체와 권력: 응시의 개념을 중심으로

The Subject and Power in Foucault: A Reading of Foucault’s Notion of the Gaze

Michel Foucault is usually assessed as one of the representative proponents of (post)structuralism since he privileged discourse or structure over the human subject. His argument, which has undergone major theoretical shifts, however, does not simply confirm (post)structuralism, but problematizes its theoretical foundation by probing the complex relationship between the subject and power. Early and mature Foucault gradually but firmly develops a solid notion of power that judges and almost tyrannizes over the subject, a power that is most effectively exercised through the gaze. Late Foucault, however, advocates for the subject that can resist the power mechanism and refashion its own autonomous existence. In Madness and Civilization Foucault investigates how from the classical age Western society tended to define madness as a deviation from the norm of reason and reduce it to an object of observation and supervision. In The Birth of the Clinic Foucault traces the emergence of the medical gaze of the doctor, who, as the agent of normative power, passes judgment on the subject (the patient). Examining the radical change in the punitive system of modern Western society in Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that the invisible, anonymous power of modern bourgeois society replaced the spectacular and self-displaying power of monarchs and put the modern subject under a persistent and more penetrating surveillance. The first volume of The History of Sexuality further explores the nature of modern power by defining it as bio-power, which dominates the subject by sustaining its life, in contrast to the power of the sovereign, which culminates in the killing of the subject. Shifting his focus from power to power relation and then to the subject, however, Foucault claims that power relation necessarily presupposes the resistance and liberty of the subject on whom power is exercised. In his later writings, including his essay on Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” and the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, he announces that his real concern is not power but the subject, and we need an ethics of autonomous subjectivity or an aesthetics of existence which enables us critically to see our constituted identity and fashion a new ethical subject. Notwithstanding this call for the ethical subject, however, Foucault fails to provide an account for what makes one resist power and form a free and autonomous subjectivity, mainly because he neglected the psychoanalytic dimension of the subject’s unconscious desire as that motive force which drives the subject to resist its socially given identity.