Immanence of Power

In Copjec's reading of Foucault, "Immanence of Power" names the theoretical move whereby Foucault's post-1968 genealogical turn relocates power from an external, transcendent force bearing down on society to a position internal to, and constitutive of, the social fabric itself. Power, on this account, is no longer a sovereign command from above but a "fine, differentiated, continuous" network of uneven relations that does not stand apart from the social order but rather weaves it into existence. The social becomes identical with its own power-relations; there is no remainder, no substance prior to or outside the web of forces. This is the core theoretical gesture Copjec isolates and critiques: by making power fully immanent, Foucault appears to radicalize the critique of sovereign repression, yet simultaneously forecloses any register of existence that could escape or exceed the positivity of the social field.

Copjec argues this move is self-undermining because it eliminates the very thing Foucault's own analysis had opened up — the notion of "plebness," a form of existence-without-predicate, an irreducible surplus that resists any positive determination by power. When power is immanent, the social is a closed totality; everything is captured within the relational network and nothing can be said to exist outside or beyond it. From a Lacanian perspective, this closure is precisely what the Real — the register of what cannot be symbolized or positively located within the social — refuses. Immanence of Power thus names not a local error in Foucault's method but the structural consequence of historicist reduction: once you flatten existence onto the plane of social relations, you lose the surplus that psychoanalytic theory, through concepts like the not-all and the Real, preserves against any totalizing account of the social.

The concept lives in the opening argument of Copjec's Read My Desire (radical-thinkers-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-verso), where it functions as the precise pivot point of her critique of Foucauldian historicism. It is introduced not as a positive theoretical resource but as a diagnostic term: the name for what goes wrong when Foucault's genealogical method resolves all social phenomena into immanent relational networks. In this respect it is positioned as the theoretical condition of possibility for what Copjec calls "Historicist Reduction" — once power is fully immanent, the social totality is sealed, and Lacanian concepts that mark its constitutive incompleteness become invisible or inadmissible.

The concept is in direct tension with the cross-referenced notions of the Real, the Not-all, and Singularity. Immanence of Power is structurally analogous to the masculine logic of sexuation that the Not-all opposes: it produces a closed universal (all social phenomena fall within the network of power-relations) grounded on no exception. What the Not-all insists upon — an open, non-totalizable series with a surplus that cannot be located positively — is exactly what the immanence of power precludes. Similarly, the Real in Lacanian theory names precisely the register that resists symbolization and positive capture within any relational network; Immanence of Power, by making the social field self-sufficient and complete, structurally forecloses this register. The concept also shadows the treatment of Ideology: whereas the Lacanian account insists that ideology is constitutively incomplete (requiring fantasy as supplement because the social never fully closes), the immanence of power thesis risks presenting the social as self-grounding — a move Copjec reads as Foucault's inadvertent reproduction of the very ideological closure he sought to diagnose.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 2015 (page unknown)

power was no longer conceived by Foucault as an external force that exerted itself on society, but as immanent within society, the 'fine, differentiated, continuous' network of uneven relations that constituted the very matter of the social.

The phrase "constituted the very matter of the social" is theoretically decisive: it signals that power is not merely present everywhere but is ontologically generative — the social has no substance prior to or outside power-relations. Combined with "fine, differentiated, continuous," which emphasizes seamlessness and saturation, the formulation describes a closed, self-constituting field, precisely the totalizing structure that Copjec, via Lacan's Real and the not-all, argues must be punctured by a surplus existence that power-as-immanence cannot account for.