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Karolis Klimka Lietuva/Lithuania |
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Power Doesn’t Exist, Does It? On the ‘Feminine’ Character of Power Relations Suppose we are persuaded by the Foucauldian argument that ‘power doesn’t exist’ (meaning that there is only a dispersed, ‘non-all’ network of local practices and so on). What then are we to make of the seemingly contradictory characterization of the symbolic order, ‘the big Other’, as fictional (and/or virtual) entity, but at the same time as something ‘undecidable’? It is here that the dialectics of ‘the feminine’, as explored by Slavoj Ţiţek on numerous occasions, seems to exert its full power. To the extent that a critique of ideology presupposes a mask (or even posits a face, as in prosoponpoiein), it takes part in (or even makes part of) the ruse of the ‘feminine’ power. The self-destructive epistemology of the fictionalist thesis on Power, however, does not impair the critical force of the question as to the non-all character of power. Power relations are ‘non-all’ in so far as they are imperative. Now what does the assertion of the non-all being of imperative exactly entail? |
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