I was re-reading that piece just the other day, to clarify my feelings
about certain elements of Deleuze and Guattari that stubbornly retain a
certain unfamiliarity.
Deleuze and Guattari rescue desire from the rethoric of lack and basically remind us that desire is productive. Now with desire I find they use similar twists and turns of logic as Foucault does when describing power. That is why Deleuze asks in 'desire and pleasure': how can power be desired? Remember Foucault's manifesto-style prose in the intro to their Anti-Oedipus? Don't become enamoured of power! He says. So Deleuze's conclusion that power is an affection of desire is unsatisfactory and seems to only place a semi colon on this rhymeless poetry of immanence that still waits to be written.
What is Foucault's pleasure? We know that Foucault ascribes the overemphasis on desire to a progressive scientisation of the ethical discourse that derives directly from a sorrowful idea of the subject practised in early Christianity. This idea finally culminates into the psychoanalytical category of the Ego, a subject that has a particular relation to truth and to the practices of the self modulated on the subjugating coordinates of self-negation and self-deciphering.
This is clear in 'sexuality and solitude', when he decribes Augustine's libidinisation of sex.
Foucault problematises the disappearance of pleasure from philosophical discourse and this is doubtlessly a reinstatement of his criticism of the repressive hypothesis. But it is more than that. It is also a formulation of the constitutive aspect of freedom within power relations. Foucault counterposes practices of freedom to processes of liberation. In fact, by recognising that power can only operate on the terrain of freedom, those practices allow us to understand current forms of subjectivation as much as the possibilities intrinsic to power relations themselves.
So pleasure is as productive for Foucault as desire is for Deleuze and Guattari.
Back to square one.
What is desire for Deleuze and Guattari, really?
In the interview you mention, Deleuze keeps distinguishing between the emphasis of desire on deterritorialisation, and the emphasis of pleasure on re-territorialisation. Do you see this dynamics in the use of these concepts by D&G and F? I don't. Bodies and pleasures are the 'rallying points of counterattack' against the noise of the bourgeois economy of christian ascetism, Foucault says in VS. And they are the field of the aesthetics of existence that is a deprise de soi, or a line of flight from subjectivation, whichever language you speak. So, bodies and pleasures do produce deterritorialisations. But they are also the field of play for ethics. Now, for Deleuze and perhaps Guattari it is the conjunction or conjugation of these lines of flights into a 'veritable diagram' that constitutes the assemblage produced by desire. A clear picture.
But what does Foucault's pleasure leave us with instead?
'Just' experience, it seems. Or Bataille's upturned orb?
Nathan Widder wrote:
Deleuze and Guattari rescue desire from the rethoric of lack and basically remind us that desire is productive. Now with desire I find they use similar twists and turns of logic as Foucault does when describing power. That is why Deleuze asks in 'desire and pleasure': how can power be desired? Remember Foucault's manifesto-style prose in the intro to their Anti-Oedipus? Don't become enamoured of power! He says. So Deleuze's conclusion that power is an affection of desire is unsatisfactory and seems to only place a semi colon on this rhymeless poetry of immanence that still waits to be written.
What is Foucault's pleasure? We know that Foucault ascribes the overemphasis on desire to a progressive scientisation of the ethical discourse that derives directly from a sorrowful idea of the subject practised in early Christianity. This idea finally culminates into the psychoanalytical category of the Ego, a subject that has a particular relation to truth and to the practices of the self modulated on the subjugating coordinates of self-negation and self-deciphering.
This is clear in 'sexuality and solitude', when he decribes Augustine's libidinisation of sex.
Foucault problematises the disappearance of pleasure from philosophical discourse and this is doubtlessly a reinstatement of his criticism of the repressive hypothesis. But it is more than that. It is also a formulation of the constitutive aspect of freedom within power relations. Foucault counterposes practices of freedom to processes of liberation. In fact, by recognising that power can only operate on the terrain of freedom, those practices allow us to understand current forms of subjectivation as much as the possibilities intrinsic to power relations themselves.
So pleasure is as productive for Foucault as desire is for Deleuze and Guattari.
Back to square one.
What is desire for Deleuze and Guattari, really?
In the interview you mention, Deleuze keeps distinguishing between the emphasis of desire on deterritorialisation, and the emphasis of pleasure on re-territorialisation. Do you see this dynamics in the use of these concepts by D&G and F? I don't. Bodies and pleasures are the 'rallying points of counterattack' against the noise of the bourgeois economy of christian ascetism, Foucault says in VS. And they are the field of the aesthetics of existence that is a deprise de soi, or a line of flight from subjectivation, whichever language you speak. So, bodies and pleasures do produce deterritorialisations. But they are also the field of play for ethics. Now, for Deleuze and perhaps Guattari it is the conjunction or conjugation of these lines of flights into a 'veritable diagram' that constitutes the assemblage produced by desire. A clear picture.
But what does Foucault's pleasure leave us with instead?
'Just' experience, it seems. Or Bataille's upturned orb?
Nathan Widder wrote:
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
_______________________________________________
Foucault-L mailing list