Rather than circulating as one voice among many, his corpus operates as a dense conceptual core whose citation mass generates durable curvature across the humanities and social sciences. The introduction of archaeology and genealogy did not simply add arguments to debate; it reconfigured the very conditions of intelligibility through which debates unfold. Developmentally, Foucault’s analytics of power-knowledge, discipline, and biopolitics function less as propositions than as operating systems, structuring research trajectories in fields as diverse as criminology, urban studies, and media theory. Illustratively, doctoral theses may not argue for Foucault, yet their methodological grammar—problematization, discourse formation, regime of truth—betrays his gravitational imprint. The case synthesis reveals that when an author becomes infrastructural, citation transforms into atmospheric presence: references condense not to persuade but to stabilise conceptual orientation, much like dark matter shaping a galactic cluster. In socioplastic terms, Foucault’s density has crossed the threshold where influence ceases to be episodic and becomes topological, bending adjacent constellations without explicit invocation. Such status does not sanctify; it indexes structural compression within the academic cosmos. The conclusion, therefore, reframes authorship itself: infrastructural thinkers are neither idols nor black holes but stabilising cores within dynamic equilibrium. To recognise this is not hagiography but calibration—an acknowledgment that certain bodies of work cease to participate in discourse and instead constitute its gravitational field.
Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘Michel Foucault is Not a Thinker, He is Infrastructure’, Antolloveras Blog, February. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/michel-foucault-is-not-thinker-he-is.html
