As instrumental, reason assimilated itself to power and thereby gave up its critical force – that is the final disclosure of ideology critique applied to itself.

Today, however, we have reached a stage in which this weapon of the reciprocal unmasking and laying bare of the unconscious sources of intellectual existence has become the property not of one group among many but of all of them. But in the measure that the various groups sought to destroy their adversaries’ confidence in their thinking by this most modern intellectual weapon of radical unmasking, they also destroyed, as all positions gradually came to be subjected to analysis, man's confidence in human thought in general … There is nothing accidental but rather more of the inevitable in the fact that more and more people took flight into skepticism or irrationalism … What we are concerned with here is the elemental perplexity of our time, which can be epitomized in the symptomatic question “How is it possible for man to continue to think and live in a time when the problems of ideology are being radically raised and thought through in all their implications.”

Power in the way Foucault sees it, closely linked to domination, does not require a clearly demarcated perpetrator, but it requires a victim. It cannot be a “victimless crime,” so to speak … Something must be imposed on someone if there is to be domination.