In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • New Formations of Power
  • Michael Dillon (bio)
Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)

‘Continental Thought’ is a term of art that has come to serve a variety of purposes. It differentiates a form of continental philosophy, for example, from Anglo-American philosophy. Second, it denotes a certain emphasis within continental philosophy. One that derives substantially, but not exclusively, from Nietzsche and Heidegger, it has come to be associated with a collection of thinkers as diverse, for example, as Levinas, Deleuze, Derrida, Blanchot, Nancy, Bataille, Ciscoux, Irigaray, Kristeva, Foucault, Lyotard, Barthes and Lacan, to name some of those most familiar to Anglo-American audiences. This list of names, itself, is enough to indicate that there is, however, no uniformity of approach and no easy definition of continental thought.

A catch-all phrase for philosophical themes as diverse as German idealism, Romanticism, phenomenology and existentialism, taking in structuralism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis as well, continental thought nonetheless has a certain kind of register. There is, for example, a profound suspicion of philosophical approaches modelled on the natural sciences. The return and ruination of ontology is also prominent theme. A preoccupation with Language as a significatory milieu into which we are thrown, one that keeps tripping us up and defying our mastery, is another. So also is an intense sensibility to the liminal recoil of limits on and through all that dividing practices specify. The radical perturbation of the excess, excluded or otherness that differentiation of every kind effects throughout any delimited thing - from enunciation and inscription to politics, gender, the body and the self - finds its register in many different ways, for example, in Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas and Lacan. Finally, throughout continental thought, the predicates of traditional thinking along with the predicates of traditional practices are widely questioned.

Since continental thought challenges the predicates of traditional thinking, it challenges the traditional predicates of political thought as well. For that reason it has stimulated new forms of political theorising, new modes of political criticism and new objects of politicisation. However, it hasn’t much stimulated accessible textbooks that allow under-graduate students to traverse the difficult terrain between traditional political thinking and the new insights into political theory and practice offered by continental thought. To be able to do that effectively requires a sure grasp of both, and an ability to navigate between the two in ways which students can not only follow but also emulate. Barry Hindess’ book, Discourses of Power, does precisely this. As a consequence, it deserves to be widely taught and read.

Beginning with a lucid account of power first in Hobbes and then in Locke, Hindess not only summarises each of them very well but provides a clear basis for distinguishing between them. Even more usefully he provides the basis for tracking the reader skilfully across to Foucault’s conception of power. He does that by means of Lukes and critical theory. Their ‘radical’ view of power shifts the locus of concern from the subject of power as autonomous rational agent to the subject of power as malleable creature of social conditions. Here power is portrayed as an insidious force affecting the thoughts and desires of its victims. As they do this, these proponents of a radical or critical theory of power nonetheless retain a commitment to the realisation of the rational capacities of the subject. Habermas, the thinker with which Hindess ends this transitional section of the book, is the paradigm case in point.

All this neatly sets the scene for an excellent summary account of Foucault. It does so because it is easy to see, by way of contrast, how Foucault differs not only from the traditional but also from the radical and critical theory conceptions of power that are treated earlier in the text. It is that comparison, in particular, that lends the book a powerful pedagogical appeal. And by that compliment I do not mean to diminish it in the least, since the clarity of the summaries is a mark of the degree to which Hindess comprehends the sophistication of the arguments of all his thinkers. I would however have encouraged him to be a little more adventurous...

Share