[Foucault-L] Re : foucault and deleuze

1) I'll start with a disclaimer : I don't feel like commenting on the differences between Deleuzeand Foucault; I'd feel totally out of place. Because doing it properly would require an amount of time I clearly don't have : not only the time to index where their respective ways intersect and how they diverge from there or how they parallel each other again afterwards and so on, but the time to construct the sort of "space" where theses parallelisms, intersections and divergences could take place, and, most of all, the time to master the various kind of instruments and crafts that would allow me to do that. (Because, if we're talking about differences, we can't act as if all theses differences could be of the same nature, can we ? Anyway, to me at least, it's pretty obvious that differences of all sorts - from the way they look to the way they looked at things to the way they think an so on - exist between these two characters - and that, nonetheless, they form a system - the
very system that allows us to treat thms as "characters".) To make this way too long story short : I don't think that even an interdisciplinary seminary spanning over ten years would be enough to treat that subjectmatter seriously, so I'll hope you will not consider me a coward if i shy away from it and prefer to concentrate on your concerns regarding the liability of "Desire and Pleasure".

2) I can't but confirm your suspicions regarding this piece. If you want to study the differences between Foucault's research and Deleuze's, embrassing the perspective of one or the other may well not the best way to get the clearest view of those diffrences - they may not have the greatest hindsight, especially when the work in question is still a work in progress. But if you want to study how these gentelemen view their differences - well, no, even if we look at it that way, "Desire and Pleasure" can't be but a source of confusion - Deleuze's interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow (IIRC, first published in the second issue of History of Present, don't know if it was ever published anywhere else by your shores) is clearly a room with a clearer view - not the clearest, but still a lot less cloudy (more on this later). "Desire and Pleasure" is actually a series of QUICK NOTES that Deleuze sent as a "signe de vie" (by way of conséquence, itwas a sort of emergency measure,
Deleuze was IN A HURRY) to Foucault, circa 1977, through the canal of François Ewald (then Foucault's assistant at the Collège de France), who later published it as a supplement to Magazine Littéraire n° 325 (october 1994 issue) of which he was the editor. Consequently, though that publication allowed its integration to the deleuzian canon, this piece is still a series of quick notes conceive as part of some kind of delayed but continued conversation ie a private exchange versus an official claim, a work in progress versus a definitive statement. Plus, as I said, this piece was written circa 1977 - at the time Deleuze was still in the process of completing Capitalism and Schizophrenia with Guattari and, Deleuze himself notes, Foucault was reaching terra incognita in his own reasearch - with their respective positions so mobile, Deleuze would have had a hard time putting them in any sort of perspective but a pretty fleeting - if not eluding - one (a fact that is
apparent through the whole piece and that Deleuze in no way tries to hide - quite the contrary). By way of consequence, "Desire and Pleasure", though it contains some surprisingly insightful remarks regarding how La Volonté de Savoir would be recieved or where Foucault's research would take him, is, quite unsurprisingly, pretty messy.

(How my own piece wasn't too messy, which, in turn, would not be surprising, given the state of fever in which I wrote it.)

Chees,

Emmanuel.






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