While I noted in the previous chapter that Foucault's work was always based on the notion that the subject was capable of agential action, his work from the 1980s until his untimely death in 1984 is marked by a turn to an explicit questioning of the self as part of an extended engagement with the ways in which the agent is capable of acting within the constraints of the power relations subtending it. There is, then, a focus in his later work on the practices that an agent can autonomously adopt and how these both accord with and depart from the dominant discursive practices of its society. For this reason, Foucault's later works explicitly take up the question that motivates this volume; namely, how the subject that has been decentred from its foundational constituting role is capable of intentional agency to affect that which constitutes it.

Foucault's questioning of this issue depends upon and was made possible by at least three conceptual modifications. First, he alters his conception of power so that the emphasis is no longer on the network of pre-personal force relations that generate individuals, but the relations between individuals: ‘the characteristic feature of power is that some men can more or less entirely determine other men's conduct – but never exhaustively or coercively’. This is not to say that the relationship between individuals is a ‘nude’ one of pure force. It is ‘organised following certain principles and according to certain techniques, to certain objectives, to certain tactics and so on’. These structural components create and re-enforce power differentials that favour one individual over others. These are never absolute or ahistoric, but demonstrate how individuals both exist within asymmetric power relations and are capable of acting within those constraints. The question then becomes how individuals are to act with regard to the power relations that structure their relationships with others. With this, Foucault explains how individual action reshapes power relations.