Foucault’s idea, underdeveloped in theory, although extensively explored in his genealogies and lectures, is that political actions, regimes, violence, and everyday practices ought neither to be understood as simply emanating from the intentions of rulers or participants nor, on the other hand, as driven by either material conditions or ideology. Rather, he uses the term "political rationality" to identify the governing form of normative reason that, as Mitchell Dean formulates it, is both "anterior to political action and a condition of it." … Moreover, power always brings into being the subjects and orders that it may be seen only to organize or to rule.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 219