Who can speak, on what matters, with what authority and under what conditions is what is said accepted as true? These questions allow us to understand the relationship between discourse and power in Michel Foucault (1926-1984). His thesis is not to affirm that every word is an order or that a central authority creates all our ideas. It investigates the historical practices that make certain statements possible, distribute the credibility of those who pronounce them, and link the production of knowledge with specific forms of government.

The question is of special interest to literary theory. A work does not circulate outside of institutions: an author is attributed to it, it is classified in a genre, it is edited, it is taught, and it is incorporated—or excluded—from a canon. Analyzing these operations does not exhaust the aesthetic meaning of the text, but it allows us to understand why some voices acquire authority and others remain outside the field of legibility.

1. What does Foucault understand by “discourse”?

In common use, “discourse” can designate a text, an oral intervention or an ideology. The Foucauldian sense is more demanding. In The archeology of knowledge (1969), Foucault studies sets of statements as historical practices: he asks about the rules that allow formulating certain objects, occupying certain subject positions, using concepts and organizing knowledge strategies. For example, “mental illness” does not function in the same way in all periods: to study it, one must pay attention to the medical classifications, the institutions, the observation criteria and the modes of intervention that make such an object intelligible.

Discourse, therefore, is not a simple verbal screen placed in front of an intact reality. People and bodies exist, of course, but the categories with which they are identified, described and treated have a history. Nor is speech equivalent to any uttered phrase: its inscription in practices that determine who can speak with authority, what evidence counts, and what consequences a statement produces is important. This precision avoids reducing Foucault to the trivial thesis according to which “everything is language.”

It is convenient to distinguish their procedures without imagining an absolute break between stages. The archeology examines the historical conditions of formation of statements; the genealogy adds the investigation of the struggles, techniques and institutions involved in this training. In his later career, the question about the ethical constitution of the subject takes on greater importance. These are shifts in emphasis within a work that continually revises its own instruments.

2. The order of discourse: to speak is to enter a regulated field

The inaugural lesson The order of speech, delivered at the Collège de France on December 2, 1970 and published in 1971, exposes a decisive hypothesis: the production of discourse is controlled, selected, organized and distributed through social procedures. The word can be dangerous precisely because it intervenes in the dispute over what is true, what is legitimate and what is possible.

Foucault distinguishes, among other mechanisms, the prohibition —not everyone can talk about anything in any circumstance—, the historical separation between reason and madness, and the will of truth, supported by institutions, knowledge and validation practices. Explicit censorship is only one case within a broader repertoire: it can allow speech and, at the same time, deny an intervention the status of admissible knowledge.

There are also controls that operate within the discourses. He comment organizes the repetition of texts recognized as fundamental; the author function groups, individualizes and limits reading modes; the discipline sets objects, methods and conditions to admit new propositions. Other rules regulate access to the word: titles, rituals, group membership and forms of transmission. None of these devices are identical to the others. A court, a university, a publishing house and a medical consultation room distribute the right to state something effective in a different way.

In literature, the canon offers a clear example: a work can exist and be accessible, but be relegated if it is not republished, studied, or recognized as worthy of interpretation. Conversely, the prestige of a name can cause a text to receive attention that would be denied to another formally similar one. It is an analytical application of Foucault’s questions, not the claim that he has reduced all aesthetic valuation to power.

3. Power and knowledge: a relationship of reciprocal production

In Monitor and punish (1975), analysis of prison, school, hospital, and other institutions shows how detailed knowledge about individuals is formed by observing, comparing, classifying, and recording them. The test or exam It combines surveillance and normalizing judgment: each person becomes both an object of description and a subject subjected to a scale. The resulting files, statistics and categories allow us to intervene again on behaviors.

This understands the link between power and knowledge. Power is not limited to preventing previously free knowledge; His techniques create occasions, objects and methods of observation. Knowledge, for its part, increases the ability to classify, correct and manage. Hence, the Foucauldian question is not “is all science false?” It consists of studying how scientific problems have been established, who can formulate them, with what instruments they are investigated and how their results are used. Describing the genealogy of an institutional truth is not, in itself, equivalent to refuting its propositions.

This relationship also does not make power the exclusive property of a ruler. A state law matters, but Foucault also observes the capillary relationships that cross classrooms, consultations, archives, families and workplaces. Authority is exercised through practices, positions and instruments; Those who participate in them can obey some rules and exercise others. The analysis of the institution therefore requires descending from the grand declarations to the materiality of its forms, schedules, spaces and procedures.

4. From silence imposed to the obligation to speak: sexuality and confession

In The will to know (1976), first volume of the history of sexuality, Foucault questions the so-called repressive hypothesis: the idea that the modern history of sexuality can be described, without further ado, as a growing prohibition followed by a future liberation through speech. Modernity not only silenced sex. He multiplied the contexts in which it had to be described, interpreted and told its truth: religious confession, medical interrogation, pedagogy, psychiatry and population administration.

The confession It is revealing. The subject is invited or required to search within himself for an intimate truth; but that truth is produced in a relationship that includes an authorized listener, rules of interpretation, and practical consequences. The act of speaking can offer relief, resistance or self-knowledge and, at the same time, be incorporated into a device of knowledge and government. That is why the multiplication of speeches does not prove, by itself, that power has receded.

Foucault calls device to the network of discursive and non-discursive elements—institutions, norms, spaces, knowledge, administrative decisions—that are strategically articulated around a problem. His analysis of sexuality also leads to biopower: techniques that act on individual bodies and on population processes, such as health, birth rate or mortality. The course We must defend society (1976) allows us to see clearly the analytical difference between discipline of bodies and regulation of populations.

5. The «author function» and the power to classify texts

For a section on literary theory, the lecture What is an author?, delivered before the Société française de philosophie on February 22, 1969, is indispensable. Foucault does not deny that a person has written a book nor does he propose simply erasing his name. It asks what a culture does when it attributes certain discourses to an author: it groups them, assigns them coherence, sets boundaries between the authentic and the apocryphal, and conditions their circulation and interpretation.

The author function It is historical and variable: it does not operate uniformly in literature, science or anonymous texts, nor does it remain identical from one period to another. An author’s name does not serve only to identify a person; guides expectations about style, responsibility, value, and the set of texts that constitute a “work.” Added to this are legal and editorial institutions that regulate appropriation and transmission.

This proposal invites us to question decisions that often seem natural. Why do some manuscripts make up the complete works and others are left out? What are the effects of editing a story under a prestigious signature? How does the reading of an anonymous text change when authorship is attributed? They are questions about concrete operations of classification, not an invitation to ignore the formal choices of the writer.

6. Literature, fiction and resistance

The Foucauldian method does not turn the novel into a passive document nor does it allow each metaphor to be deciphered as the immediate effect of an institution. A work can reproduce categories of its time, displace them, ironize them or make visible an experience that authorized languages ​​barely register. Fiction moves within historical conditions of possibility, but that framework does not predetermine each of its sentences.

The picaresque novel offers a fruitful field to test the method. A narrator of humble origin reclaims the word in a society that hierarchizes lineages, offices and honors; His story can appropriate procedures of confession or justification to construct an interested version of himself. Analyzing who demands the story, to whom it is addressed and what behaviors it should explain enriches the reading of Lazarillo de Tormes. Formal analysis remains essential: narrative irony and double meaning cannot be deduced from a general theory of power.

Another example is found in the criminal story. Who defines an event as a crime, evidence or anomaly? How does the testimony of an expert acquire value compared to that of a suspect? What function do files, interrogations and files play in the construction of the outcome? These questions can dialogue with those of the crime novel, provided that the narrative functioning is distinguished from the historical description of the police or law.

Power, in Foucault, is not an omnipotent force that extinguishes all opposition. Power relations imply possibilities for action and generate friction, investments and resistance. But it is not enough for a work to denounce an authority to automatically place itself outside of any power relationship: it is important to observe the conditions of its publication, reception and consecration.

7. How to apply the proposal without turning it into a formula

A literary analysis inspired by Foucault can advance through precise questions:

1. Delimit the corpus and the historical moment. Establish which texts, editions and circumstances of circulation are studied, avoiding attributing to one era rules that belong to another.
2. Examine enunciation positions. Identify narrator, characters, institutions invoked and authorities cited; distinguish the fictional voice from the empirical author.
3. Rebuild categories. Ask how “criminal,” “crazy,” “normal,” “civilized,” or “true” appear, and what experiences fall outside such labels.
4. Relate words and practices. Compare the statements with genres, files, schools, publishers, courts or professional knowledge whose existence can be documented.
5. Return to form. Analyze irony, focalization, silences, montage and ambiguity. The same social category can receive radically different literary treatments.

The limit of the method appears when “power” is invoked as a sufficient explanation of any textual feature. A convincing genealogy requires historical evidence, distinctions between institutions, and a reading attentive to the uniqueness of the work. It is also advisable not to confuse a category used by a character with the position that the text adopts in relation to it.

Conclusion: the story of what can be said

Foucault’s contribution lies in showing that discourses have conditions of existence, rules of legitimation and effects on lives. Power contributes to forming knowledge and subjects; Knowledge offers instruments to exercise power. This relationship changes historically and cannot be reduced to a universal slogan about the falsity of language or the uselessness of truth.

For literary theory, the consequence is fertile: reading also means investigating how a work comes to be attributed, preserved, published, taught, and considered worthy of interpretation. This research must converse with the study of form, imagination and aesthetic experience. The best use of Foucault opens up testable questions; It never replaces reading the text.

Sources and reference readings

• Michel Foucault, The archeology of knowledge (1969), record and bibliographical history in the College of France.
• Michel Foucault, The order of speech, inaugural lecture of December 2, 1970, French edition of 1971; presentation of the Collège de France.
• Michel Foucault, “What is an author?” (1969); registration of the Société française de philosophie.
• Michel Foucault, Monitor and punish (1975) and The will to know (1976); bibliography and presentation of the Collège de France.
• Michel Foucault, We must defend society, course of 1976, Collège de France.

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