Power and Subjectivity in Foucault

In the current literature addressing the Foucault/Deleuze relationship, there is a clear tendency to either replicate and expand Foucault's oversimplified rejection of Deleuzian desire as already caught in a discursive trap or play of power; or to replicate Deleuze and Guat-tari's oversimplified reading of Foucault's dispositif, in which power and resistance are deemed opposed and thus understood via a structure of negativity. In either case, each thinker is accused of referring to an asocial or essentialist multiplicity, typically in the form of a real transcendence (positive Body), which is deemed 'inconsistent' with their post-structuralist yearnings. This article argues that there is in fact a real and enduring consistency between the two thinkers, which is to be found in the mutual use of an ontology of 'pure' or 'disjunctive' immanence – as derived from and developed through Nietzsche's method of genealogy – as a way to construe pow-er/subjectification, with pleasure/desire taken as the affective inside of this power. That said, the somewhat semantic difference between desire and pleasure being proposed does lead to a slight, though tangible, divergence in politico-ethical and practical possibilities. This article concludes that it is this divergence that should from the real basis of debate.

The Politics of Desire: Foucault, Deleuze, and Psychoanalysis, 2021

have recently argued, we need a new-or at least renewed-critical theory that can help provide theoretical resources in making sense of this moment in which we are watching a reemergence of authoritarian politics and authoritarian impulses around the globe. 1 These impulses have expressed themselves in a variety of ways from Trump's United States, in which long standing-but sometimes submerged-racism, xenophobia, and general hostility toward difference (and the social whole as such) has been unleashed and allowed to flourish in the open in new ways, to Bolsonaro's Brazil, Orban's Hungary and other places where we are watching similar trends take shape. Though it is the case that Trump was defeated in the 2020 presidential election, the attempted right-wing putsch during the certification of the election results on January 6 2021 at the U.S. capitol building and the ongoing campaign to 'de-certify' those election results by the right both inside and outside the mainstream of the republican party, along with a renewed interest in passing laws that restrict the voting rights of the working poor, and BIPOC voters (who tend not to vote with conservatives in large numbers) should tell us that this movement is far from over, that it is now firmly entrenched in U.S. politics as it is in many places around the world. 2 As further evidence for this in the U.S., we only have to look at the 2020 election results themselves where almost half the record number of voters came out and voted for Trump's chaotic authoritarianism despite his severe mishandling of the pandemic and his administration's many failures over the three and a half years leading up to the election. 3 And even now, support for the ex-president remains extremely high among the right in this country. 4 What accounts for this? How can we understand its emergence on the political scene now? I hope here to offer a small contribution to the larger and ongoing project of building a critical theory to help our understanding this authoritarian turn. I want to do this here by looking to Deleuze and Guattari's work on the role that desire plays in the production and reproduction of social relations and also the ways in which, as they argue, desire is produced and channeled by capitalist social relations. Specifically, this chapter will, after offering a more general accounting of Deleuze and Guattari's elaboration of desire's capture, look at the role that desire's production plays in this moment, in ushering in and sustaining the renovation of right-wing authoritarianism that we are currently living through. Desire's production, or, desire as social product There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be. 5 Desire works in the infrastructure, invests it, belongs to it…Desire thereby organizes power: it organizes the system of repression. 6

Contemporary Political Theory, 2005

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Foucault Studies, 2014

This paper charts the course of Deleuze and Foucault’s philosophical friendship or ‘block of becoming,’ showing the series of reciprocal determinations through which each philosopher’s thought develops in response to the other’s. Specifically, I will argue that the concept of transversal resistance is fundamental for the political thought of both Foucault and Deleuze, allowing us to reconstruct the basis and trajectory of a shared political theory. This concept emerges in Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo-politics, which advances the central aim of Foucault’s earlier History of Madness (problematizing the exclusion of a certain intensive experience of madness; activating its potentially liberatory force) while accounting for why Foucault’s particular politics of literary transgression had failed (the becoming-commodity of art). The question then becomes one of conceiving and creating transversal forms of struggle that would respond to the problem of capitalism—a question which Deleuz...

2016

Freedom from Domination A Foucauldian Account of Power, Subject Formation, and the Need for Recognition Katharine M. McIntyre Michel Foucault is criticized for offering an account of power that leaves no room for the freedom of individuals. This dissertation will provide an account of freedom that is compatible with Foucault’s descriptions of the operation of power and its role in the constitution of the subject. First, I clarify Foucault’s own distinction between power and domination, the conflation of which has been the primary source of criticism of his social theory. With this distinction in hand, I address the apparent break in Foucault’s middle and late periods, which, respectively, describe human beings as constituted by power on the one hand and as having the reflective critical capacities necessary for selftransformation on the other. I then explore Foucault’s criticism of the modern concept of autonomy, which he believes to be inherited from the Enlightenment and, more spe...

This essay elaborates a non-imperial concept of constructive agency, embedded within aspects of poststructuralist thought. For Deleuze and Foucault, the making of history is compelled from within the existing social fabric by the creative potential of the virtual, which persists in the actual forms that eventuate. While a theory of agency remains underdeveloped in their works, the overriding aim of this essay is to begin to draw out the concept of agency enabled by this notion of immanent causation and to suggest how this poststructuralist theory of agency might inform the effort of formerly colonising peoples to rethink their historically imperial modes of being and of social engagement, enabling performances of postcolonial sociability. Taken together, desire and power define the conditions and impetus for action; these are here considered as constructive forces in the actualisation of social forms. Unlike in the dialectical tradition, desire is not conceptualised in relation to lack and its aim is not the negation of difference; it is the constructive force bringing association, resulting in the creation of new complex bodies. Similarly, power is not conceptualised in relation to mastery, but in terms of constitutive force relations between bodies. One’s chosen practices of desire and power shape the nature of one’s relationships and the resulting complex social body.

Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference Asia 2019

Desire and repression: the relations between molar and molecular What I would like to address here is the way in which Deleuze and Guattari sought to put the question,-which they defined as the fundamental question of political philosophy, as Spinoza puts it (and that Reich rediscovered)-, namely: the question of voluntary servitude. Why men fight for their bondage as if it were their salvation, why the hungry do not revolt and why the exploited do not strike? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972, 38). But this question will be posed by Guattari and Deleuze, from the point of view of psychoanalysis, following namely Reich and the freudian marxism, the question would then be, therefore, to know, how can desire pursuit its own repression? Freud made a discovery, the discovery of desire as libido, the discovery of a productive unconscious "domain of free synthesis where everything is possible, connections without end, disjunctions without exclusion, conjunctions without specificity, partial objects and flows." (Deleuze, Guattari, 1972, 66) But this discovery was cloistered by the Oedipus complex, that is, reduced to the socially acceptable forms, to the social norms themselves. We aim to emphasize here the originality of Deleuzo-Guattarian theory in relation to psychoanalysis and Freudo-Marxism. Therefore, this is an attempt to understand what, according to them, was left aside by psychoanalysis. For Deleuze and Guattari the discovery of the productive unconscious has two correlates: the direct confrontation between desire and social production, between formations of symptoms and collective formations, their identity of nature and the difference of regime that distinguishes them; on the other hand, the repression that social normativity exerts under the productions of desire and the relation that exists between this repression[social repression] and psychic repression [réfoulement]. It is all that will be lost, at least uniquely committed to the establishment of the sovereign Oedipus. (Deleuze, Guattari, 1972, 66) The Freudian Oedipus complex describes the constitution of an "I" as the result of an unconscious desire repression operation of the superego. The super-ego can only perform this action because it is the social law itself, which means that it is by "internalizing" the law, or repressing an incestuous desire, that the child begins to identify with his parents, to constitute their "I", as an image resembling an ideal self and / or an