While I take full responsibility for the many shortcomings of this work, I owe a profound thanks to the friendship, wisdom, insights, and support of many people: Amy Allen, Meryl Altman, Louise Burchill, Rich Cameron, Scott Campbell, Janet Donohoe, Ellen-Marie Forsberg, Nancy Fraser, Devonya Havis, Marcelo Hoffman, Lynne Huffer, Ed McGushin, Margaret McLaren, Claudia Mills, Timothy O’Leary, David Rasmussen, Jana Sawicki, Sam Talcott, Helen Tartar, Dianna Taylor, Kevin Thompson, and many others—but above all to Jim Bernauer, without whose insistent encouragement this book would not have been achieved. Financial support for early research was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Boston College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; the Janet Prindle Institute of Ethics at DePauw University provided a wonderful setting for reflection and writing. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the welcoming people at the three different libraries that have held the Collection Michel Foucault: the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, and the library of the Collège de France. Profound thanks go also to the students in my spring 2012 DePauw University seminar on Foucault—our conversations helped give this book its final form. My mother and my daughter, Evelyn Pope and Sophia Isabelle Lynch, both inspired me to bring this project to fruition. But this book is dedicated to my wife, Stacy Klingler, who has suffered through the long process of writing with me. Thank you.
A significantly abridged (and much altered) version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Michel Foucault’s Theory of Power,” in Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, ed. D. Taylor (Acumen, 2010), 13–26. Portions of Chapter 3 appeared as “A New Architecture of Power, an Anticipation of Ethics,” Philosophy Today 53 suppl. (2009): 263–267; the section “The Importance of Population” draws upon an unpublished manuscript originally commissioned for Biopolitics and Racism: Foucauldian Geneaologies, ed. E. Mendieta and J. Paris (to date unpublished). Portions of Chapter 4 were originally presented at several conferences: “Foucault’s Implicit Strategies of Normative Justification” at a conference on “History, Technology, and Identity After Foucault” (March 2000, Columbia, S.C.); and “Freedom’s Justification: Foucault’s and Beauvoir’s as Complementary Ethical Projects,” at the tenth annual Foucault Circle meetings (April 2011, Banff, Canada) and the Feminist Ethics and Social Theory conference (October 2013, Tempe, Ariz.). Chapters 1, 2, and 4 all draw on work initially published as “Is Power All There Is? Michel Foucault and the ‘Omnipresence’ of Power Relations,” Philosophy Today 42, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 65–70.