Michel Foucault: sexuality, power and resistance

Michel Foucault elaborated an original theory of modern power understood not in terms of the state's basic function to discipline its subjects through an imposed system of prohibitions and individual restrictions, but rather in terms of an all encompassing net of techniques, relations and discursive practices permeating the totality of social relations. It is to this most interesting theory created by Foucault that we focus our attention in the paper. Foucault's notion of modern power is best symbolized by the transparent and easy for surveillance space of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon'. We examine the workings of this 'technology of power' from the standpoint of the way it disciplines the body of modern man through observation and punishment in line with the (capitalist/bourgeois) ideals of benefit and profit, and also this is where we lay stress! in line with the requirements to achieve maximum political obedience. In our presentation we analyze in detail Foucault's insistence that today sexuality has become one of the most important focal points of modern power's mechanisms aiming at submission. Foucault's own argument that 'Where there is power, there is resistance', leads us to ask and explore the question 'Is any counter-action to this dispersed, anonymous, all-encompassing net of power at all possible?' And if the answer is negative, then: 'Are all our attempts to resist and break the shackles only a foredoomed and aimless wandering within the labyrinths of modern power?'