October 15th, 2026 was the centenary of a Michel Foucault, once called ‘the power thinker’ by Aeon. It is debatable if anyone else thought about power in contemporary social analysis than him. But it would still be a controversial statement to say that power as a concept occupied more of his attention than any other theme. His genealogical technique in methodology is no less a life time achievement.
No less can be said for him in relation to discourse analysis although Laclau and Mouffe have, through their theory of hegemony, pushed both Foucault and even Derrida to the second row. Foucault is no less the defining voice in security studies today, surely the dominant voice one hears throughout international political sociology, for example.
It is interesting to see so much marking of Foucault’s centenary around the world. The issues he raised and the themes he brought up are too numerous. Nothing has happened which have diminished his interventions.
Some of his controversial statements such as “power is everywhere” are very much in need of further clarifications while the truism of others such as the notion that power implies resistance have acquired the status of home truth for organisations fighting for emancipation from one form of domination or another.
Intervention would wager that the Foucault might just be about becoming the centre of a major controversy because, for the first time, all his articles from a 1978 trip to engage with the Iranian Revolution have been published in a book. The trip had provoked criticism of him in the West, with critics charging him with supporting authoritarianism while many others wondered what he found fascinating with the revolution. But now, all the pieces from the trip is available in one book by the title, Iran, When the Earth Trembles.
Coming in a book form at a time the US and Israel are waging a war against Iran, Foucault could be setting up intellectual agenda from the grave. Depending on how the impending controversy goes, he might be living out his thesis that knowledge and power imply each other because of the meaning-action nexus,
What a philosopher!
