1- Power’s blind struggle for existence: Foucault, genealogy and Darwinism PETER ATTERTON Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species) That History has no meaning is what should delight our hearts. (E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay ) HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 7 No. 4 @ 1994 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) Foucault’s strategic model of power is among his most important and original contributions to postmodern thought. Hastily drawn in the introductory volume of his projected six-volume The History of Sexuality, a project that was never completed, it remains to this day underdeveloped and controversial. The central claim attaching to the model is that ’Power relations are both intentional and non-subjective’ (Foucault, 1978:94), operating with a series of clearly decipherable aims, calculable objectives and loquacious tactics, though in such a way that no one, no single individual or group, can be said to have invented them. The challenge thus facing the genealogist is obvious. As one pair of commen- tators has succinctly put it: ’How to talk about intentionality without a subject, a strategy without a strategist?’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983:187). Such a challenge is not without precedent. In the field of ethology and evolutionary biology especially, the notion of strategies without strategists has long been employed for the study of species-specific animal behaviors and adaptations governed by the mechanism of natural selection. Of course, that particular controversy is no longer a controversy, the birth of post-Mendelian genetics handing to Darwin a decisive, if posthumous, victory. It is in view of this ’evolutionary success’, so to speak, that I have undertaken to invoke Darwinism as a model for Foucault’s genealogical project. Recourse to such a model, it is