RE: Ever-Present Resistance and Cryptonormativity

Hello again Nathan -

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Ultimately, I am prompted to defer to your more extensive and intensive
knowledge of both Deleuze and Foucault. However, for the sake of discussion,
I offer some comments below.

I wrote:
>> To put it another way, *maybe* Deleuze's book on Foucault isn't Deleuze
>> finally getting Foucault "right" (ie, getting away from a reductive
>> reading
>> of Foucault)
>> but rather Deleuze enveloping and deploying yet another thinker within
>> his own "image of thought." Any comments you have would be appreciated.

To which you replied:
> I suppose you could look at things this way, but then the questions
>arises as to why Deleuze isn't enveloping and deploying Foucault in his
>earlier work -- i.e., in those notes in A Thousand Plateaus or the Desire
>and Pleasure piece.

One might suggest--sheepishly, in my case--that Deleuze did not employ his
"idiosyncratic" reading modus operandi because Foucault was still alive.
Of course, this assumes that the 'notes' that comprise "Desire and Pleasure"
were
all written while Foucault was still alive, even though the piece was
published in
1994 (I think). In other words, Deleuze's employment of the "idiosyncratic
style"--for
want of a better phrase--is used in books that explore philosophers who are no
longer alive. Unless I am mistaken, Deleuze's book on Foucault was the only one
on a philosopher who was once a contemporary of Deleuze's. Perhaps there is a
link between Deleuze's difference modes of engagement/discussion with/about
Foucault and Foucault's death. Speculative? Indeed.

There, Deleuze is arguing that Foucaultian power
>relations, by virtue of being merely oppositional, presuppose a deeper form
>or deterritorizaling desire which is not oppositional but rather affirmative
>in a Nietzschean sense. He basically insists that resistence in Foucault is
>the simple opposite of power, even though Foucault is pretty clear that this
>is not what resistence is for him. And Deleuze's rather lame excuse for all
>this is that he (Deleuze) is interested in how people come to desire power,
>and so he places desire prior to power.

If I remember correctly, doesn't Deleuze say that the question of
desiring power is one for himself but not applicable to Foucault;
not b/c Foucault saw resistance as the opposite of power, but b/c
for Foucault power is the organizing force of the social whereas
for Deleuze it is the molarized operations of desire that performs these
organizing
operations, one of the effects of which is the organization of relations of
power.
In essence, F. sees power as constitutive while D. sees desire performing
constitutive functions and power (relations) as an effect(s) of the
constitutive functions of desire (??).

Within such a framework, the power-resistance couplet exists as a
secondary effect within the *molar* dimensions of an assemblage of desire.
Thus it seems to me that the issue at hand is not whether or not D.
ignores that F. said the power-resistance couplet is not one of resistance,
but whether or not Deleuze's description of Foucauldian power as a molar
effect of desire and not as a primary constitutive force has anything to it?
Further, do/es D.'s complementary concept/s of desire/BWO/plane of
immanence do a different type of work that
Fouacult's power-resistance does not? What does it cost you to always think
on/about the plane of organization (which is what I think D. is suggesting
F. does)?

The other question that comes to mind for me is whether or not one
may, then, read D.'s _Foucault_ as "fixing/tinkering with" F.'s concept of
power or as coming to "realize" (or admit) that the concept of power is
not so different from the concept of desire.

[. . . .]

>To me it is a quirky intellectual spat where each thinker
>insists on misunderstanding the other.

For me, this is only part of it. It seems to me that to the extent
that F.'s conception of bodies and pleasures as a (non)locus of
resistance is territorialized on *anthropos*, then D.'s objections may have
some merit. It seems to me that F. Foucault wanted to explore how
to become-other-subjects, while Deleuze wants to explore becoming-other-than
-subject. Two conceptions of self-overcoming, perhaps?

Cheers,
Dan



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