Foucault's Project

Foucault sought to account for the way in which human beings have historically become the subject and object of political, scientific, economic, philosophical, legal and social discourses and practices.

But Foucault does not take the idea of subjectivity in philosophical isolation. It becomes linked with - and even produced by knowledge and power through - dividing practices where, for example, psychiatry divides the mad from the sane. Scientific classification: where science classifies the individual as the subject of life (biology), labour (economics) and language (linguistics). Subjectification: the way the individual turns himself into a subject of health, sexuality, conduct, etc.