Unveiling the nexus of truth and power: A comparative study of Roy Bhaskar and Michel Foucault

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Roy Bhaskar's dialectical critical realism and Michel Foucault's archaeological, genealogical, and ethical approaches. Foucault's ontology is defined by four main features: it is flat, rejecting ontological depth; differential, privileging dispersed difference over structural continuity; local, favoring historically embedded formations over universal structures; and non–agentic, removing the subject from its position as an agent. Within this framework, generative mechanisms are reduced to surface phenomena, and by ignoring absence and contradiction, the possibility of dialectical transformative movement is eliminated. Its local ontology processes each form of knowledge only contextually, excluding claims to universal validity. The subject is redefined as a dispersed product of discursive processes. Moreover, due to Foucault's use of illicit forms of abstraction and resulting de–ontologization, the counterfactual possibilities that might challenge dominant truth–power configurations are foreclosed. Thus, critique remains confined within the limits of existing discursive arrangements. In contrast, Bhaskar proposes a stratified, negativist, holistic, and agency–oriented ontology. Truth is ontologically independent from power and can be accessed through critical engagement with deep generative structures. Bhaskar's MELD schema—non–identity, absence, totality, and transformative agency—makes it possible to uncover counterfactual potentials that are suppressed in existing ideologies. These potentials create openings for reconfiguring truth and transforming relations of power at their structural roots. The thesis concludes that only Bhaskar's ontological framework can ground a truly emancipatory critique of truth–power relation.