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Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand-Foucault FOUCAULT This page intentionally left blank Foucault Gilles Deleuze Translated and edited by SEAN HAND Foreword by PAUL BOV£ University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Originally published in French © 1986 by Les Editions de Minuit. Copyright © 1988 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Seventh printing 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deleuze, Gilles. [Foucault. English] Foucault/Gilles Deleuze; translated and edited by Sean Hand. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8166-1674-4 ISBN 0-8166-1675-2 (pbk.) 1. Foucault. Michel. I. Hand, Sean. II. Title. B2430.F724D4513 1988 194-dc 19 87-31668 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Foreword: The Foucault Phenomenon: the Problematics of Style Paul Bove vii Translating Theory, or the Difference between Deleuze and Foucault [Translator's Introduction] xli Acknowledgements xlv Abbreviations xlvii From the Archive to the Diagram A New Archivist (The A rchaeology of Knowledge) 1 A New Cartographer (Discipline and Punish) 23 Topology: 'Thinking Otherwise' Strata or Historical Formations: the Visible and the Articulable (Knowledge) 47 Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power) 70 Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation) 94 Appendix: On the Death of Man and Superman 124 Notes 133 Index 155 This page intentionally left blank Foreword The Foucault Phenomenon: the Problematics of Style Paul A. Bove "The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of rea- son but in the end the Overman, the overcome, over- taken man. Ths point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility." Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy "But, after all, this was the proper task of a history of thought, as against a history of behaviors or representations: to define the conditions in which hu- man beings 'problematize' what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live." Michel Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure "Would Zarathustra steal this bite from the devil? Well then, we wish you a good meal." Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra I Many of Foucault's most telling statements—often some of his weakest and most controversial — come in interviews and occa- sional essays. They often occur in an admonitory mode when he viii The Foucault Phenomenon tries to correct the very self-interested images of him and his work that scholars create in line with their own intellectual, political, and professional needs. Because there is commonly such a buzz of contradictory comment going on around him — as his friends and enemies push him to the left, right, and center or sometimes off the political spectrum altogether—Foucault could assert that it proves what he contends: conventional categories really don't fit him; he is posing an entirely new and different set of questions about a whole range of sometimes unthought of matters.1 Since his early death in 1984, that left so many of his projects incomplete, the aca- demic effort to appropriate, correct, or dismiss Foucault has gone on even more intensely—sometimes brilliantly,2 sometimes stupidly,3 and sometimes with troubling seriousness.4 The Foucault debate is so profitable that it has a peculiar aca- demic allure. It attracts the attention of anyone who hopes to con- sider Foucault and tempts him or her to write an essay instead about the ongoing conversation: where so many renowned Profes- sors gather to argue, there is an air of excitement, energy, and sig- nificance that draws one with its promise of pleasure, stimulation, and reward. One of my interests in this foreword is to analyze some parts of the structure of reception that incorporates Foucault into North American academic intellectual circles — especially Philosophy and Literary Criticism — both to get some insight into the apparatus un- derlying those structures and to preserve some of Foucault's origi- nary value as a critical alternative to them. Moreover, it seems to me, examining how these academic circles function in dealing with Foucault, whose own work is so forcefully critical of their knowl- edge politics, will provide a privileged insight into some aspects of these structures' workings while reclaiming something of the origi- nary critical force of Foucault's work—a force that, as I hope to show, these structures function to dissipate.5 Of course, an introduction to a book on Foucault, especially a translation of one written by Gilles Deleuze, Foucault's ally and friend, unavoidably must say something about the place and posi- tion that book occupies in the Foucault debate, and one can take the occasion of its appearance to comment on and worry about the system of reception that awaits it. One can easily see that Deleuze's is the best study of Foucault to date. He treats Foucault in a style The Foucault Phenomenon ix and within a problematic that, while not Foucault's own, contrast favorably with the efforts both of analytically trained philosophers to represent Foucault in the incongruously alien style of their professional discourse and the ways in which significant elements of literary criticism — on the "Left" and "Right" — have appropri- ated and resisted him.6 For example, and by way of contrast with Deleuze, I would like to consider Charles Taylor's extremely careful explication and cri- tique "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," which follows the path taken recently by powerful thinkers such as Habermas and Nancy Fraser7 in trying to oblige Foucault to answer questions about is- sues raised within the very systems of discourse that, as Foucault himself put it once, come from the very "mind-set" he was trying to critique. (A bit further on in the essay, I shall turn to the writings of Fredric Jameson to offer an analysis not of the "entire" genealogy of such a complex intellectual but of some effects of the political knowledge-apparatus at work in the North American reception of Foucault — precisely as these appear in even such a historically aware dialectical thinker as Jameson.) Taylor's essay is worth commenting on because it is more ex- tended than Habermas's treatment of Foucault and develops aspects of Nancy Fraser's position (although without noting her es- say). Also, Taylor is an eminent philosopher often identified as sympathetic with continental traditions in a way many of his col- leagues (those who take a stand against the "pluralist" rebels within the APA) are not. Furthermore, Taylor is a politicized intellectual often spoken of admirably for his "organic" connection to resisting elements in Canadian society. For these reasons his politically "left" and philosophically "open" attitude make him an important limit case for understanding how and to what ends analytically trained Professors of Philosophy can represent Foucault. My point about Taylor cannot be made easily by a brief quotation, but per- haps the problem can be suggested by his nearly final remark that with Foucault's last step toward "acknowledging" his own "sources" "the really interesting debate can begin, on the issues which count, which Foucault's mode of expression up to now has obscured" (CT, 99: my emphasis). That Taylor then goes on to identify the two "issues which count" is less interesting than what the italicized part of his remark x The Foucault Phenomenon suggests. His essay proceeds by allegorizing Foucault's texts, by "tellingstories," as the analytic philosophers like to say, or, perhaps more accurately, by rephrasing the "stories" about power, man, history, truth, etc., he feels he finds embedded within Foucault's work. He rephrases Foucault's writings so that he can consider them in light of the "history" of philosophical discussion of those questions. But Taylor has set himself what he must consider a difficult task because, as he sees it, Foucault's style "obscures" his stories. Taylor's practical, methodological, disciplinary response to this difficulty is not hard to sketch. He paraphrases or quotes Fou- cault and then rephrases the "position" he feels he has found badly enunciated there. As Taylor would have it, several of these "positions" — once adequately distilled by the analytic philosopher to release their essential point—can be seen to contradict each other as, for example, when we are told that Foucault cannot hold the "position" he does on "power" and "truth": " 'Power' without 'freedom' or 'truth': can there really be an analysis which raises the notion of power, and which leaves no place for freedom, or truth?" (CT, p. 90). There is no point to debating Taylor's "reading" of Foucault. Given Taylor's aims and the disciplinary burdens in- scribed within his techniques—the effects of which quite precisely are to produce such comments—a serious debate, one that raised the question of determining forces as such, could not be carried out. Such a debate would inevitably have to come to the point of asking Taylor to examine critically — and that means here histori- cally, politically, and genealogically—the value of his discipline's values. It would mean, rather obviously, taking up the kind of cri- tique carried out by Nietzsche in On The Genealogy of Morals and extended by Foucault to matters of institutions, politics, and knowledge-production. But, as I shall try to show, these are pre- cisely among the very questions it is Taylor's disciplinary function to deflect — despite his sympathies for European Philosophy and his presumed status as an "organic intellectual." What we have, then, when we read Taylor on Foucault is a doubled appearance: he seems to be trying simply to clarify Foucault for our benefit; but this points to another appearance: he is writing Foucault into the discourse of analytic Philosophy and so making him more available for discussion and correction.
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