from Michel Feher (ed.), Nongovernmental Politics, New York: Zone Books, 2007

The challenge posed by Foucault was how to mobilize civic passions against practices deemed “intolerable” without assuming a horizon of satisfaction for such passions that would base itself in an ultimate moment of transparency, liberation, or transcendence that would exist beyond the condition of being governed in some form or other. He called, in other words, for a politics of “the governed” who are determined to act as such – capable of both constraining and displacing the monopoly of vision and hearing, appearing and silencing, speech and action, arrogated to themselves by governing agencies. …such a politics could be bereft of – but not unmasked by – the reassuring sights, sounds, and spaces projected by the great narrative of liberalism (the surpassing of the state by the spontaneous action of civil society) and socialism …while complicating these great narratives