This essay traces the genealogy and evolution of the category of the subject as it developed in the thought of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Alain Badiou. As will be seen, within the fruitful and complementary dialogue about the subject and subjectivity formation among these three French thinkers, there are major discrepancies in their approaches, from Althusser’s seemingly passive view of the subject as a victim of state oppression, to Foucault’s one, embedded in power but with the capacity of resistance, and, finally, to Badiou’s understanding, in his book Théorie du sujet (Theory of the Subject, 1982), of the subject as the one who courageously takes risks to put into practice the truth brought about by the event in order to radically transform the present situation.

Distribution grid reliability and resilience has become a major topic of concern for utilities and their regulators. In particular, with the increase in severity of extreme events, utilities are considering major investments in distribution grid assets to mitigate the damage of highly impactful outages. Communicating the overall economic and risk-mitigation benefits of these investments to regulators is an important element of the approval process. Today, industry reliability and resilience planning practices are based largely on methods that do not take explicit account of risk. This paper proposes a practical method for identifying optimal combinations of investments in new line segments and storage devices while considering the balance between the risk associated with high impact and low probability (HILP) events and the reliability related to routine failures. We show that this method can be scaled to address large scale networks and demonstrate its benefits using a Target Feeder from the Commonwealth Edison Reliability Program.