Deleuze's Foucault
A Virtual Force Ontology
How does Deleuze’s study of Foucault challenge and deepen our understanding of both philosophers’ thought?
- Provides the first book-length study of Deleuze’s Foucault
- Establishes a novel, previously untreated conceptual framework that Foucault and Deleuze shared, serving as the basis for the philosophical reconstruction of Foucault’s thought
- Includes new insight and analysis from Deleuze’s recently translated and published seminars on Foucault
- Treats of recently published primary source material (e.g., Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh) as independent critical support
Christopher Penfield illuminates the philosophical encounter between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, developing the first systematic treatment of Deleuze’s book Foucault, originally published in 1986. Using the full spectrum of Foucault’s primary texts, as well as new insights and analysis from Deleuze’s recently translated and published seminars on Foucault, Penfield identifies and elaborates the two thinkers’ shared philosophy of force as the novel conceptual framework of ‘virtual force ontology’.
For the field of Foucault studies, where Foucault still meets with misunderstanding, Penfield clarifies and motivates the demanding, highly abstract portrait of Foucault that Deleuze offers; and in demonstrating Deleuze’s philosophical reconstruction, unlocks unrealized aspects of Foucault’s thought.
For students as well as scholars of Deleuze, Penfield establishes the unique place and importance of Foucault in Deleuze’s oeuvre, illuminating the fundamental impact of Foucault on Deleuze and the ‘common cause’ (Deleuze) that shaped the course of their mutually transformative philosophical relationship.
Acknowledgements
Introduction. Foucault’s Double (Foucault)
0.1 Deleuze on Foucault
0.2 Deleuze’s Conceptual Evolution: The Audiovisual and the Outside
0.3 Note to the Reader
Chapter 1. A New Archivist (The Archaeology of Knowledge)
1.1 ‘A New Pragmatics’
1.1.1 The Rarity and Regularity of Discourse
1.1.2 Topology of the Discursive Field
1.2 Discursive Production and the ‘Repeatable Materiality’ of Statements
Chapter 2. A New Cartographer (Discipline and Punish)
2.1 Painterly Writing and Revolutionary Affect
2.2 Practice and Theory: The Prison Movement and Transversal Resistance
2.3 Power: Macrophysical Postulates and Microphysical Counter-Principles
2.3.1 Property Postulate and Strategic Counter-Principle
2.3.2 Localisation Postulate and Dispersive Counter-Principle
2.3.3 Subordination Postulate and Immanent Counter-Principle
2.3.4 Essence-Attribute Postulate and Relational Counter-Principle
2.3.5 Modality Postulate and Productive Counter-Principle
2.3.6 Legality Postulate and Strategic Counter-Principle, Revisited
2.3.7 New Pragmatics of Political Struggle
2.4 The Disciplinary Diagram
2.4.1 Content and Expression: From the Episteme to Power-Knowledge
2.4.2 Power and Visibility: The Prison Machine as Regime of Light
2.4.3 The Panoptic Abstract Machine: The Diagram and the Archive
2.5 Diagrammatic Social Ontology
2.5.1 History and Becoming
2.5.2 The Diagram as Immanent Cause
2.6 The Mechanosphere of Power
2.6.1 A History of Concrete Machines
2.6.2 The Becoming of Abstract Machines
2.6.3 Foucault’s Three Lines
Chapter 3. The Strata or Historical Formations: The Visible and the Articulable (Knowledge)
3.1 Overview of the Knowledge Axis
3.2 The Problem of Truth
3.3 The Visible and the Articulable as Historical Conditions of Real Experience
3.3.1 The Birth of the Clinic
3.3.2 Raymond Roussel
3.3.3 History of Madness
3.4 Archaeology and the Audiovisual Archive
3.4.1 Archaeological Pragmatism
3.4.2 Archaeology as Critical Ontology
3.4.3 The Being of Language: Murmuring of the ‘One Speaks’
3.4.4 The Being of Light: ‘Virtual Visibility’
3.5 Audiovisual Capture and the Two Regimes of Truth
3.5.1 Posthumous Verification: Two Alethurgic Forms in Confessions of the Flesh
Chapter 4. Strategies or the Non-Stratified: The Thought of the Outside (Power)
4.1 Overview: Microphysics as Force Ontology
4.2 Power-Knowledge: Relations of Capture between Forces and Forms
4.2.1 Actualising Forces in Language and Light
4.2.2 Actualising Transformative Force: The Iranian Uprising
4.3 The Primacy of Force over Form: Diagram and Archive, Revisited
4.4 Resistance and the Thought of the Outside
4.4.1 The Primacy of Resistance over Power
Chapter 5. Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)
5.1 The Problem of Resistance
5.1.1 The Militant Counter-Truth of Cynic Parrhesia
5.2 The Subjectivation Axis: How to Sustain a Line of the Outside
5.2.1 Aesthetics of Existence: Askesis, Freedom and the True Life
5.2.2 Becoming-Queer: The Creative Resistance of Transversal Connection
Conclusion. The Foucault Assemblage
6.1 Virtual Force Ontology and the Historical Ontology of Ourselves
6.2 Coda: Chiastic Social Philosophies
Notes
Bibliography
Index
This is a careful nuanced analysis of one of the most productive intellectual friendships in the history of Western philosophy, between Foucault and his exploration of the relations between power and knowledge and Deleuze and his understanding of the transversal and marginal lines of flight that cross these relations. Christopher Penfield shows the creative force and future potential of these conceptual encounters and the profound and utterly original questions they raise that may enable new ways of thinking and living to be created.
In a 1970 review of two recent books by GIlles Deleuze, his friend Michel Foucault ventured that 'perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian.' If there has been any ascendant influence of French philosophy over the past half-century of the critical social sciences and humanities, it has seemingly been that of Foucault's genealogy. Christopher Penfield's book shows that Foucault was, however, nevertheless quite right. If the last half-century has been more Foucauldian, it is only in terms of what are the fundamentally Deleuzeian stakes of Foucault's philosophy. Through a meticulous study of Deleuze's 1986 book on Foucault, Penfield brings into view the transversal reciprocal effect of Deleuze and Foucault and Foucault through Deleuze. It is only through Deleuze that we can understand what Penfield calls "the primacy of practice" in Foucauldian genealogy and the "virtual force ontology" at the heart of the Foucauldian analytics of power.
