Power and Knowledge

Power and Knowledge, as Lacan frames it in Seminar XVI (p.232), names the structurally unstable and antagonistic relation between political or institutional power (whether capitalist or revolutionary) and knowledge in its most subversive mode. The concept is not a simple alliance or instrument-relation (as in the commonplace idea that "knowledge is power") but rather a site of irreducible tension: science, as the historically unprecedented engine of self-accumulating knowledge (S2), generates problems and effects that no configuration of power can anticipate, domesticate, or master. Lacan's intervention is to insist that genuine subversion — as opposed to the pseudo-subversion of political agitation, which merely rotates the agents of the Master's Discourse — lies precisely in this excess of knowledge over power. Knowledge, as Lacanian savoir, is constitutively incomplete and non-closeable; power, as the Master Signifier (S1) in its various historical incarnations, operates by commanding knowledge to work while remaining structurally ignorant of its own foundations. The advent of science introduces a dynamic that relentlessly produces new S2 formations which outrun the capacity of any S1 to absorb or govern them.

This tension is not incidental but structural. What power cannot master in knowledge is the latter's intrinsic drive toward articulation — toward linking one signifier to another — independent of any authorizing master-term. In the wake of May '68 and the consolidation of capitalist-scientific modernity, Lacan reads the university crisis not as a revolutionary opening but as a symptom of the Discourse of the University having promoted S2 into the commanding position while concealing S1 as its veiled truth. Yet even this arrangement fails to neutralize knowledge's subversive potential: science does not obey the master it secretly serves. Power and Knowledge thus designates the name for this impossible mastery — the gap that persists between the S1 that commands and the S2 that always produces more than commanded.

This concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-16 and sits at the intersection of several canonical Lacanian concepts. Most directly, it elaborates the structural logic of the Discourse of the Master and the Discourse of the University: in the Master's Discourse, S1 commands S2 (knowledge) while remaining ignorant of its own split; in the University Discourse, S2 takes command while S1 hides as veiled truth. Power and Knowledge names what goes wrong in both arrangements — the remainder that neither discourse can process. It is therefore a specification of the impossibility internal to these discourses, made historically legible by the rise of capitalist science and the events of May '68.

The concept also resonates with the canonical treatment of Knowledge (savoir) as constitutively non-closeable and structurally severed from truth. Power corresponds to the function of the Master Signifier (S1) — the authorizing, commanding term — while Knowledge (S2) exceeds it by continuously generating new articulations. In this sense, Power and Knowledge is an extension of the S1→S2 dynamic into the political-historical register, specifying the conditions under which knowledge's excess over its commanding master becomes socially legible as crisis or subversion. The concept also touches obliquely on Anxiety (the affect mobilized when the gap between S1 and S2 threatens to close or dissolve) and on the Subject Supposed to Know (since power's fantasy is that knowledge is masterable, i.e., that some subject fully knows). Lacan's move here is ultimately an anti-Foucauldian one avant la lettre: where Foucault would theorize power-knowledge as a productive alliance, Lacan insists on their structural non-coincidence — knowledge at its most subversive is precisely what power cannot master.

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the otherJacques Lacan · 1968 (p.232)

It is certain that a certain evolution, which is that of science, risks posing altogether new and unexpected problems to the functions of power.

The phrase "altogether new and unexpected problems" is theoretically loaded because it designates a structural excess: science (the historical form of self-accumulating S2) produces effects that are by definition outside the anticipatory grasp of "the functions of power" (the S1 position). The word "risks" signals that this is not a merely empirical contingency but a structural tendency — knowledge's drive toward articulation constitutively outstrips any master-term's capacity to command it.