Stuart Hall’s exposition of Michel Foucault’s work decisively relocates the study of representation from the narrow analysis of language to the wider terrain of discourse, understood as the historically organised production of meaning, knowledge and social intelligibility. Discourse is not merely speech or writing; it is the ensemble of statements, practices, institutions and rules through which particular objects become thinkable, nameable and governable. In this sense, phenomena such as madness, sexuality or criminality do not simply await neutral description. They acquire social existence as objects of knowledge through discursive formations that define what may be said about them, who may speak authoritatively, and which institutional practices may legitimately act upon them. Hall therefore presents Foucault as a radical constructionist, not because he denies the material existence of bodies, actions or suffering, but because he insists that their meaning is never available outside the classificatory and regulatory systems that render them knowable. This argument becomes especially powerful in Foucault’s account of power/knowledge. Against the conventional assumption that power is simply repressive, centralised or possessed by a sovereign authority, Foucault conceives power as dispersed, productive and embedded in everyday practices. Power does not only prohibit; it produces categories, identities, pleasures, truths and forms of conduct. Knowledge, correspondingly, is never innocent. Once inserted into institutional procedures, it regulates bodies and populations, creating what Foucault calls a regime of truth. Hall’s discussion of punishment is exemplary here: the criminal body is not governed in the same way across history. Public torture, imprisonment, surveillance and rehabilitation each belong to different discursive and institutional arrangements, each producing a distinct kind of offender and a distinct rationale for intervention. A specific synthesis may be drawn from Hall’s treatment of madness and sexuality. “Madness” becomes intelligible through medical, legal and moral vocabularies that distinguish sanity from deviance, while “sexuality” emerges through nineteenth-century psychiatric, juridical and pedagogical discourses that classify desire and regulate bodies. These examples demonstrate that the subject is not the sovereign origin of meaning. Rather, subjects are positioned within discourse: the mad person, the delinquent, the hysterical woman or the homosexual are produced as recognisable identities within historically specific fields of knowledge. Hall’s reading thus concludes that representation is inseparable from power, because to represent is not only to describe the world but to organise the conditions under which truth, identity and social reality become possible.