Foucault's Notion of Power and Poststructuralist Feminist Agency

Luciana Mota (MA in philosophy from University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès and Bergische Universität Wuppertal):

In this BNKF reunion, I will give an introductory presentation to the notion of power in Foucault. From the 1970’s onwards, power became a central theme in his philosophy. Despite this, the French philosopher repeats numerous times that he does not intend to write a theory, a doctrine, or a study of power as an entity. His goal is not to grasp the essence of power, but simply to describe and analyze how power unfolds itself. In an attempt to reconstitute Foucault’s path, this presentation will be divided into two distinct moments. First, I will present Foucault’s critique of the juridico-discursive conception of power, its origin and implication for our understanding of logics of power. In the second part, I will present Foucault’s analysis of the dynamics and mechanisms of power, its relational and capillary character, and how it relates to knowledge.

Francesca Scapinello (BA in philosophy from Turin University and a current master’s student at University of Bergen):

Transfeminist selves’ polyvocality as a condition for subjective agency

Being suspicious of what we include in the notion of the self is, among many theorical and practical frictions, tranfeminisms’ philosophical trademark (by the term transfeminism I refer to the theoretical and practical instances that include and are shaped for trans, queer, non-trans and binary subjectivities who have been systematically marginalized within the Western patriarchal system). Excluded from the theoretical conceptualization of it, since the XVIII century feminist and transfeminist philosophers have systematically been tackling not only the unity of the subject, but also its (masculine) origin, unveiling the consequences surmising the tight nexus between concepts and practices. In contrast with an ego-centered, individualistic self and the coherently following capitalistic structure, transfeminist selves have a different texture, in that they are constantly reminiscent of and attentive to their cultural, political and social relations. Nowadays transfeminist selves vindicate the polyvocality of their constitutions taking the sets of relationships and diffractions to be hinge concepts and practical principles that root thinking in acting. In this sense, through the contributions of Paul Preciado, Donna Haraway and Elena Ferrante I want to argue that an effective and solid post-structuralist transfeminist subjective agency is guaranteed: transfeminist movements stem from and evolve around a need for emancipation from a systemic gender-based oppression. The metaphysical groundings of the agency of a diffracted self are entailed by the capability of thinking and acting together instantiated by transfeminist political practices. Therefore, the dismantling of unity doesn’t lead to a lack of realization, as far as we conceive the subject as constituted by the reflections and refractions of otherness in a mutualistic spirit. Alterity is the mirror and the extension of the transfeminist self, the reciprocal space of self-awareness that plays with identity as difference without deflating difference into a-critical assimilation