Discourse and Power: Foucault, Deconstruction, Critical Analysis

Foucault: Discourse as Power-Knowledge

Michel Foucault rethought the concept of “discourse”: discourse is not just conversation or text, but a practice that produces the objects about which it speaks. The discourse on madness produces the mad as an object of knowledge and practice. The discourse on sexuality produces the notions of “perversion”, “norm”, “sexual health”.

Key connection: power-knowledge. There is no knowledge without power; no power without knowledge. The one who has the right to “speak the truth” about madness (the psychiatrist) possesses power over the mad. Classifications (normal/abnormal, healthy/sick, lawful/unlawful) are not neutral descriptions of reality but practices of power.

In “Discipline and Punish” (1975), Foucault analyzes how the discourse of correction and normalization creates new subjectivities. The Panopticon (Bentham's prison project, where prisoners are always visible to the guard but do not know when they are being watched) is the model of “panoptic” power: surveillance is internalized, the subject disciplines themselves.

Derrida and Deconstruction

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) developed the method of deconstruction—an analysis of texts that uncovers their internal contradictions, semantic hierarchies, and assumptions that the text seeks to conceal.

Derrida challenges the fundamental assumption of Western metaphysics—what he calls “logocentrism”: the privilege of presence, speech, immediate meaning over writing, absence, deferral. Speaking appears to be the “immediate” expression of thought; writing—secondary, derivative. But Derrida shows: speech itself is “written” in a broad sense—it always already contains difference, deferral, trace.

The concept of différance (a neologism combining “difference” and “deferral”): meaning is never fully present—it is always the result of differences between signs and the deferral of meaning. There is no “primary” sense present before language. This makes stable, “centered” meaning impossible.

The practice of deconstruction: take a text, find its organizing opposition (nature/culture, inside/outside, male/female), show that the “privileged” term of the opposition depends on the “subordinate” one, invert or destabilize the hierarchy.

Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a linguistic and social discipline that studies how language reproduces and transforms power. Norman Fairclough, Teun van Dijk, Ruth Wodak.

Methods: analyzing lexical choices (who is a “refugee” and who is an “illegal migrant”?), passive constructions (who is the agent, who is the patient?), metaphors, nominalizations (turning actions into nouns conceals agency: “the rise of violence” — who commits the violence?), intertextuality.

Example: a news headline “Riots as a Result of Protests” vs. “Police Disperse Protesters”—the same event, radically different discursive positions. The first makes the protesters the agents of violence; the second—the police.

CDA is applied to political discourse, advertising, media, legal language, educational texts. Its goal is not just description, but the critical revelation of how language serves the interests of power—and the creation of conditions for alternative discourses.