You are right to be suspicious: Deleuze's reading here (repeated with
Guattari in an endnote in A Thousand Plateaus) is quite wrongheaded and,
unsurprisingly, it disappears by the time he writes his book on Foucault.
I don't know the Foucault Live interview, but Foucault says something
similar (along the lines of power presupposing freedom) in "The Ethic of
Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom." You may be interested in a
piece I've written in the European Journal of Political Theory (Dec., 2004)
entitled "Foucault and Power Revisited," which reads the ideas of power and
resistance off the thesis of dispersion in the Archaeology.
(By the way, Laclau and Mouffe's reading of dispersion in Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy is also, I think, rather suspect).
Best wishes,
Nathan
Dr. Nathan Widder
Senior Lecturer in Political Theory
Royal Holloway, University of London
Department of Politics and International Relations
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
United Kingdom
Web page: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/politics-and-IR/About-Us/Widder/Index.html
Genealogies of Difference: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/s02/widder.html
-----Original Message-----
From: foucault-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:foucault-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sean Saraka
Sent: 19 February 2007 21:07
To: 'Mailing-list'
Subject: [Foucault-L] foucault and deleuze
Does anybody out there feel like commenting on the differences between
Deleuze and Foucault? In particular, I'm interested in the claim (made by
Deleuze himself in "Desire and Pleasure"?) that whereas for Foucault it is
power that engenders resistance, for Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari, lines of
flight are primary.
I've seen this claim repeated in a number of places, primarily in Deleuzian
literature, and I've come across a number of passages in Foucault recently
that make it seem a bit tenuous. First of all, my students keep reciting a
passage from the interview "Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity" (in
Foucault Live) back at me, where Foucault says, "[I]f there was no
resistance, there would be no power relations." Secondly, I just read the
second chapter of Archaeology of Knowledge in conjunction with a rereading
of Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, where Foucault
defines the consistency of a discourse in terms of a regularity of
dispersion.
Both of these points (perhaps the first more than the second) seem to
suggest to me that the difference between Foucault and Deleuze on this issue
may not be so clear as all that. Any thoughts?
Cheers,
Sean
-----
Sean Saraka, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
Mount Allison University
144 Main Street
Sackville, NB E4L 1A7
Phone (506)364-2206
Fax (506)364-26
_______________________________________________
Foucault-L mailing list
Guattari in an endnote in A Thousand Plateaus) is quite wrongheaded and,
unsurprisingly, it disappears by the time he writes his book on Foucault.
I don't know the Foucault Live interview, but Foucault says something
similar (along the lines of power presupposing freedom) in "The Ethic of
Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom." You may be interested in a
piece I've written in the European Journal of Political Theory (Dec., 2004)
entitled "Foucault and Power Revisited," which reads the ideas of power and
resistance off the thesis of dispersion in the Archaeology.
(By the way, Laclau and Mouffe's reading of dispersion in Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy is also, I think, rather suspect).
Best wishes,
Nathan
Dr. Nathan Widder
Senior Lecturer in Political Theory
Royal Holloway, University of London
Department of Politics and International Relations
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
United Kingdom
Web page: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/politics-and-IR/About-Us/Widder/Index.html
Genealogies of Difference: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/s02/widder.html
-----Original Message-----
From: foucault-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:foucault-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sean Saraka
Sent: 19 February 2007 21:07
To: 'Mailing-list'
Subject: [Foucault-L] foucault and deleuze
Does anybody out there feel like commenting on the differences between
Deleuze and Foucault? In particular, I'm interested in the claim (made by
Deleuze himself in "Desire and Pleasure"?) that whereas for Foucault it is
power that engenders resistance, for Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari, lines of
flight are primary.
I've seen this claim repeated in a number of places, primarily in Deleuzian
literature, and I've come across a number of passages in Foucault recently
that make it seem a bit tenuous. First of all, my students keep reciting a
passage from the interview "Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity" (in
Foucault Live) back at me, where Foucault says, "[I]f there was no
resistance, there would be no power relations." Secondly, I just read the
second chapter of Archaeology of Knowledge in conjunction with a rereading
of Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, where Foucault
defines the consistency of a discourse in terms of a regularity of
dispersion.
Both of these points (perhaps the first more than the second) seem to
suggest to me that the difference between Foucault and Deleuze on this issue
may not be so clear as all that. Any thoughts?
Cheers,
Sean
-----
Sean Saraka, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
Mount Allison University
144 Main Street
Sackville, NB E4L 1A7
Phone (506)364-2206
Fax (506)364-26
_______________________________________________
Foucault-L mailing list