Abstract
This chapter delivers on this book’s promise: it clarifies what the notoriously difficult seminal texts of French theory were saying and doing. Three claims anchor this account: first, these thinkers were abandoning the abstractions of structuralism and returning to performance (parole) and to history—but without allowing the subject to return to the stage. Second, they were preserving the appearance of an affiliation with Marx (or at least with his materialism) when in fact their vision of history was becoming more and more Nietzschean. And third, they were profoundly influenced by radical modernists in the arts—by the surrealists, most of all, but also Mallarme, Artaud, James Joyce, and other violators of literary convention. They were experimenting with academic discourses in analogous ways. The syntactic and lexical contortions for which the seminal texts of French theory are known were determined by these three conditions.
Four thinkers are considered in some detail. Barthes and Derrida represent the textualistes, theorists who pursued their subversive aims in terms of language, writing, and texts. Deleuze and Foucault represent the desirants, who pursued the same subversive aims in collaboration with forces, with desire. Both parties reached for the limits of conventional conceptuality—and beyond.
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22 May 2020
The book was inadvertently published without updating the following corrections. These have been now updated.
Notes
- 1.
The chair that Foucault assumed that day had long been supposed to go to the already venerable Paul Ricoeur. A sign of the times.
- 2.
Alan Schrift’sTwentieth Century French Philosophy (2006) is an invaluable resource here (see especially Appendix 1). He describes the educational institutions and their roles in some detail. He emphasizes in particular how narrow is the path to the top and how grueling the competition.
- 3.
“Doxa” is Greek for “appear” or “seem”—it refers to commonsense beliefs and perceptions, implying that they are mistaken. Critique of Doxa was a constant in Barthes’ work, through all the phases ([1975b] 1977, 44, 59, 85, 130).
- 4.
Years later, looking back on his career, he recalled a subsequent stage: “the Doxa crushes origin and truth together, in order to make them into a single proof. … In order to thwart origin, he [meaning Barthes himself] first acculturates nature thoroughly: nothing natural anywhere, nothing but the historical” ([1975b] 1977, 139; italics mine).
- 5.
“For the engaged writer, language is essentially instrumental. … They are transparent signs quickly passed over in favor of the represented object or transmitted idea. Style must pass unnoticed: ‘since words are transparent and since the gaze looks through them, it would be absurd to slip in among them some panes of rough glass’ (Sartre’s words). In reducing language to an instrument and discarding style as excess, committed writer fails to take language seriously” (Marx-Scouras 1996, 26).
- 6.
See above for Kristeva, inspired by Emile Benveniste and Mikhail Bakhtin, making that expansion programmatic at Barthes seminar at EPHE (spelling?) in 1966 (date?).
- 7.
Barthes was not simply rhapsodizing here. He adds: “I can remember, as a child of ten or so, during a winter of solitude in a strange town, becoming obsessed with the Encyclopedia Britannica. And not least among the pleasures of that text were the surprises that attended the order (anti-order, parody of order, Dada order) the alphabet imposed. The marvelous semantic shifts” ([1975b] 1977, 147).
- 8.
Compare Derrida’s soon abandoned scientific pretensions in Of Grammatology, or the shameless way Deleuze absconded with the “Structuralism” label. Perhaps even Foucault was only pretending to believe in the reality of the synchroniccode he called an “episteme”?.
- 9.
Compare Thomas Frank’sThe Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1997).
- 10.
On the other hand, I think we can take expressions of alienation cast in less political terms at face value: “Like many of us, I profoundly reject my civilization, to the point of nausea. This book [Empire of Signs, about his experience of Japan] expresses my absolute demand for a total alterity, which is becoming a necessity for me” (Roland Barthes in Dosse 1997, 61).
- 11.
And the displacement underway is given political significance, reminiscent of the early days of the Internet and Blogging when citizen opinion and reporting were cheered on as the established media platforms lost control of the public conversation.
- 12.
“History itself is less and less conceived as a monolithic series of determinations; we know, more and more, that it is, just as is language, a play of structures, whose respective interdependence can be pushed far further then one had thought; history is also a writing. … What is at stake is to increase the rupture of the symbolic system in which the modern West has lived and will continue to live. … To decenter it, withdraw its thousand-year-old privileges, such that a new writing (and not a new style) can appear, a practice founded in theory is necessary” (Barthes in “The Division of the Assembly” in The Tel Quel Reader (1998, 22)).
- 13.
As time goes by, talk of text “tends to degenerate into prattle. Where to go next? That is where I am now” (71).
- 14.
In fact—I suddenly realize—Barthes chose to “break the ban on subject talk,” just as I have been doing in this study, but for more personal reasons.
- 15.
- 16.
Of special significance, then: Derrida’s lifelong engagement with writers like Mallarme, Artaud, and Joyce. Francois Dosse claims that Derrida was actually after for a new genre of “creative writing” (1997, vol 2, 20–21), with Glas as his principal example. Derrida’s biographer describes a man who spent his whole working life poised, and torn, between philosophy and literature (Peeters 2013, 27–34, 101, 134, 267–270, 309–312).
- 17.
The vision: in spite of the evanescence of voice, units of speech (phonemes, words, phrases, sentences) are cycled and recycled (iterated) through spoken discourse ad infinitum, in and out of changing contexts in changing combinations, woven together, an ephemeral textile composed of “chains of signification.”
- 18.
Derrida did not, however, step in as forcefully as he might have to correct them. Most of his specific deconstructions dealt with literal texts and he had a valuable audience to cultivate, especially among American literary critics—for whom literal “texts” had an obvious priority.
- 19.
Of Grammatology ([1967] 1976, 163).
- 20.
Philosophical Investigations (1953, 400). Wittgenstein used this expression to evoke Cartesian solipsism. It shows how everything can be transformed, even though nothing actually changes, at the margin of a language game.
- 21.
Why is no absolute origin conceivable? Consider a footprint in the sand. It is the trace of a foot, which is its origin. But the foot only becomes an origin, thanks to the trace. Hence the chain of signifiers, without beginning or end.
- 22.
In Modern French Philosophy (1979), Vincent Descombes—a native of this world, though not a partisan—states what to him is obvious: Derrida was engaged in “the radicalization of phenomenology” (136).
- 23.
An advocate of more rigorous public standards for philosophical justification is entitled to demur at this point, of course. But that demurral will apply as much to William James and the later Wittgenstein as to early Derrida.
- 24.
Compare Wilfred Sellars’ “Myth of the Given” ([1956] 1997), “What might the Given be? … Sellars observes, ‘Many things have been said to be ‘Given’: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even Givenness itself.’ Intuitively, it would be something that is self-evident or certain or indubitable” (Maher 2012, 52).
- 25.
For Derrida (and Deleuze), this “inhabiting” of a material sound (image) by an immaterial concept is immediately attributed to the persistence of Platonic metaphysics. The assimilation of modern subjective idealism to Platonism, if too easily carried out, risks papering over how radical in their own right the abstractions of modernity actually were.
- 26.
On the face of it, this claim is hard to reconcile with the exalted status of literacy and the veneration of literature in so much of the Western tradition. That problem, so far as I know, was never satisfactorily addressed.
- 27.
There is remarkable, apparently coincidental, overlap between the early Derrida and the later Wittgenstein. See especially the critique of private sensations and private language in the Philosophical Investigations (1953). The common aim was to neutralize the cogito before it gets off the ground, but convergences of detail are striking. See Preface to Speech and Phenomena (1973, xiii–xxii). See also H. RapaportThe Theory Mess (2001, 8, 9); N. Garver and S. Lee Derrida and Wittgenstein (1994); H. StatenWittgenstein and Derrida (1986). Richard Rorty makes the same point in “Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the reification of language” (1991).
- 28.
Searle declined to engage after Derrida’s reply to his reply (Limited Inc.1988). He turned instead (six years later) to a withering review of a book on deconstruction by Jonathan Culler, a Derrida defender (Searle 1983). His “Reply” to Derrida was not mentioned in that review. Nor would Searle allow it to be included in Limited Inc. (1988), a book conceived as a collection of all the documents relevant to the dispute, along with commentary in hindsight. Only Derrida would contribute.
- 29.
A footnote appended to the name “Derrida” in the title of Searle’s “Reply” thanked H. Dreyfus and D. Searle for “discussion of these matters.” In his blistering 85-page response to that ten-page paper (Limited Inc.1988), Derrida pretended that a certain “Sarl” (French acronym for “Society of Limited Responsibility”) was the author of Searle’s “Reply.”
- 30.
Years later, explaining the game he was playing in his reply to Searle’s “Reply,” Derrida describes it as “dual writing,” an effort to show and say things about speech acts simultaneously. He was taunting Searle, saying “try to interpret this text too with your categories and to you, as well as the reader, I say: enjoy!” For example, with the role of “speaker intentions” at issue, Derrida’s first words are “I could have pretended to begin with a false beginning.”
- 31.
If anything, Searle stepped back from the casual manner Austin adopted, as if to emphasize the modesty of his program. Searle took a more aggressively formal approach, aiming to contribute ultimately to a scientific psychology.
- 32.
Quite apart from the value of this claim, it is not hard to understand. It amounts to conventional Platonism, the kind students encounter in oft-cited passages about why one should not attribute “Being” to ever-changing sensible/material things.
- 33.
“I should say at the outset that I did not find his [Derrida’s] arguments very clear and it is possible that I may have misinterpreted him as profoundly as I believe he has misinterpreted Austin” (Searle 1977, 198). This represents Searle’s best moment in the whole exchange.
- 34.
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut were underestimating the reach of “style” when they said “Derrida = Heidegger + le style de Derrida,” but as a sound-bite description of Derrida’s basic mission, it’s fair enough (in Gutting 2013, 57).
- 35.
If anything like “sponging” was going on, Derrida’s accusatory finger was pointed at the standard cases, not the parasites. His argument was always that standard cases depend on marginal ones, as an intrinsic condition of their possibility.
- 36.
This is intended to be more than amusing. Derrida’s pivotal chapter in Of Grammatology (1967c) is called “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” It concerns the socio-political artificiality, the conventionality of the “book”—illusion of containment and completion.
- 37.
My apologies, but just had to coin at least one of those little parentheses gizmos of my own.
- 38.
Derrida’s term “hauntology” might have been used instead of scare quotes in the title of the next section—but I decided against it because, for many people, annoying puns are one of the most off-putting of all the stylistic conceits in his repertoire.
- 39.
“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 1953, 115).
- 40.
In the originary essay “DifferAnce” ([1967e] 2001), Derrida invoked the names of Freud, Nietzsche, and Levinas as representative of an “epoch” determined to make the traditional ontology of Being and beings “shake all over” (1973, 153).
- 41.
It seems that the French word translated as “trace” carries immediate connotations of tracking, of spoor.
- 42.
The intensity of the poststructuralist commitment to temporality was, as already noted, pungently expressed by Julia Kristeva when she described how “writing” targets what she called the “necrophiliac” stasis of Structuralism’s elements and rules and Structuralism’s “imperial thinkers” who believe “that by codifying” the “remains of a process” we “can possess them” (in Kristeva 2002, 27–31).
- 43.
“Intentionality [in Husserl’s sense] cannot and should not attain the plenitude toward which it nonetheless inevitably tends. Plenitude is its telos … [but] if it is attained, it, as well as intention both disappear, are paralyzed, immobilized, or die” (1988, 129).
- 44.
Compare Heidegger’s account of the possibilities lodged in tools, settings, and projects in Being and Time (1927). Appropriated by many American pragmatists, that account resonates with Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the use of words in concert with customary activities, and in the unrealized possibilities implicit in those language games described in the Philosophical Investigations (1953).
- 45.
“Thus we are obliged to think in opposition to the truisms which we believed—which we still cannot not believe—to be the very ether of our thought and language. … And it is a question not only of thinking the opposite which is still in complicity with the classical alternatives, but of liberating thought and its language for the encounter occurring beyond these alternatives” (1967f, 118).
- 46.
“in The Post Card (1987), referring to Joyce’s influence on the formation of his theories, he goes further, confessing that he has ‘never imitated anyone so irresistibly’ as he has imitated Joyce; and interestingly, Derrida formally remarks in the 1984 Joyce symposium that ‘without Joyce,’ ‘Deconstruction could not have been possible’” (Zangouei 2012, 31).
- 47.
I cannot in this space describe how often I am overwhelmed by the suspicion that Western thought is driven most deeply by the desire to put things into words in some way.
- 48.
For example, in the “Afterword” to Limited Inc., Gerald Graff asks Derrida if he hasn’t created something of a straw man for himself by attributing to abstract philosophizing in general and Austin in particular, an insistence on absolute conceptual purity and complete containment of facts by theory. Derrida admits that Austin’spersonal affect and attitude don’t reflect that insistence—that he is tentative and provisional and happy to admit exceptions and imperfections in his work. But for Derrida, following Heidegger in this, Austin’s personal intentions (the very topic at issue!) are beside the point. It is the telos of Western metaphysics he is addressing and that, he believes, is relentlessly at work underneath all specific manifestations—abstracting, purifying, containing, controlling. That is a topic both camps might discuss. In a nutshell, it comes down to this: to what extent is abstract reason, at work in the sciences and philosophy, necessarily complicit with social and economic systems of domination and exploitation? Noam Chomsky, for example, would not admit any such necessity—but compare the Frankfurt School.
- 49.
Nor can either side claim to better represent Western Reason. The analytics, like the scientists they emulate, can rightly say they have been true to the rigor of it, to the logic, the method; they tackle problems they can solve. But Derrida and the tradition that shaped him could claim to have better served philosophy’s original aim: wisdom, not knowledge—the wisdom of fallible mortals whom Socrates originally represented and addressed.
- 50.
Deleuze’s engagement with Structuralism/post-structuralism was tactically contrived to keep him in the conversation—bordering on downright disingenuous, if you attend closely to his argument in “How Do We Recognize Structuralism” ([1967] 2004). He wasn’t swept up in the French “linguistic turn”—and he came right out and said so later on, when the pressures of fashion were dissipating. That is one reason many admirers position him as an opponent of postmodernism. If you think of postmodernism as an extension of Structuralism/post-structuralism, however disruptive, and take Derrida as the prototype that makes perfect sense.
- 51.
“What is it Like to Be a Bat” was a 1974 paper by Thomas Nagle, an analytically oriented philosopher of mind who argued that consciousness is a reality unto itself, irreducible to physical processes correlated with it.
- 52.
Frederic Jameson, author of The Prison House of Language (1972) and an influential critique of Structuralism in particular and formalism more generally, was no fan of most “theory.” But he was lavish in his praise of Deleuze because he was the one who explicitly and consistently sought to escape that prison and engage with reality.
- 53.
This lecture elicited from Heidegger the landmark “Letter on Humanism” in 1946 (Heidegger 1977), at the behest of Jean Beaufret. That “letter” marked the onset of decline for existentialism and humanism, which led to the critique of phenomenology itself that attended the linguistic turn in France, the rise of Structuralism—with all its consequences for French theory.
- 54.
So much is owed here to Heidegger, it goes on and on—but let it pass.
- 55.
This obviously mirrors Husserl on pro- and re-tention and Heidegger on “having been” and “not yet.” It bears repeating: the debt Deleuze and other creators of “theory” owed to phenomenology is incalculable. They were as determined to escape the bubbles of its “life-worlds” as they were to escape the epistemological prison of the cogito. Indeed, for them, it often came down to the same thing. But inevitably, given their uniform educations and entrenched habits of thought, that “escape” entailed a reworking of phenomenological notions—efforts to open them up to some “outside” (compare today’s “speculative realism”).
- 56.
Is this sloppy conceptualizing, irresponsible and undisciplined improvising, immediate evidence of a lack of rigor—or do we take Deleuze at his word when he calls himself a pragmatist above all, dedicated to solving problems, to making something happen? If concepts are tools adapting to the task at hand, then declining to specify each shift in meaning forces the reader to attend to those tasks first of all as a matter of implicit protocol for reading Deleuze? Or is that just an excuse?
- 57.
I am every bit as serious about critique of theory, of which this is a small example, as I am about my effort to explicate it fairly. If this book gives less space and time to the task of critique, it is only because I believe that a really significant critique depends, first and foremost, on a fair reading of its object—and that is the principal aim of this book.
- 58.
More overlap with Adorno; note that abstraction, usually the villain on the scene, is a good thing in this case. That is because Deleuze’s idea of thinking (line of flight, affirmative difference, novelty, open-ended, never “settled”) could be described as “abstract” in its self-referential orientation compared to representation, the font of all banality and conformity.
- 59.
There is nothing obscure, by the way, about the idea of the “force” of language: think of your body responding to a sudden cry of pain or the literally uplifting effect of anthems for the faithful (singing La Marseillaise in Rick’s Café in Casablanca). Passages in Walter Ong’s study of oral cultures, The Presence of the Word (1967), might also serve to remind the skeptical of what it means to speak of language having force. See also Deleuze on writing “for” animals.
- 60.
Once again, Heidegger’s influence is apparent: see the discussion of “assertion” in Being and Time.
- 61.
Spinoza’s univocity is an ontological monism that says that every particular happening/entity is a mode of the one Sub-stance—so all being “is” in the same way: if a possibility “is” then it “is” as much as an actuality “is.”
- 62.
Compare George Steiner’s “lacking word” reading of high modernism in Chap. 3. Like all his confreres, Deleuze was deeply invested in the work of the radical modernists in the arts and literature—but, once again, even more so. He wrote more books and papers about the arts than all his colleagues combined. “More” is a word that readily attaches to Deleuze. But the most significant source of Deleuze’s view of language is Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” A half hour with that little essay provides a key for decoding the Deleuzean discourse.
- 63.
Certain feminist critics rightly discerned a boyish “masculinity” in Deleuze’s fascination with animals—wolf packs in particular seemed to appeal to a lingering Mowgli/Tarzan fantasy at work in his thinking. And later, fully invested a kind of panpsychism, he saw the “origins” of art in the territorial markings of animals and was as comfortable with that continuity as any nineteenth-century evolutionist would have been.
- 64.
Deleuze himself said: “A creator who is not grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is not a creator. … Without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have a line of flight, the exit that is creation.” Imagine a stutterer improvising a language of gesture at the height of his frustration: an example of a creative “line of flight.”
- 65.
A quick reminder of how radical a view this was in its context: for the posthumously published Dutch version of de Spinoza’sEthics: Including the Improvement of the Understanding ([1677] 1989), Spinoza’s friends arranged to leave out the clause “or Nature” as it appears in the Latin version, thusly: “That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists” (Part IV, Preface).
- 66.
“readers may recall from A Thousand Plateaus the image of the cosmic egg from the Dogon mythology, complete with the distribution of intensities running across the surface of the egg. According to the ancient myth, seven vibrations criss-crossed the egg in spiraling zig-zag lines, morphing its shape into a helix before it birthed the world” (see Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, “The Dogon” in African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples, by Daryll Forde (Oxford University Press 1954: 84–85)).
- 67.
In what follows I will be calling rather freely on imagery that dates to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the umbrella title for Anti-Oedipus (1972, trans. 1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980, trans. 1987). So credit (or blame) for this phase of the cosmic art project goes to Felix Guattari as well as Deleuze.
- 68.
“Deleuze invokes Bergson’s theory of pure memory … Bergson believes that pure memory stores every conscious event in its particularity and detail. The perceptions of actual existence are duplicated in a virtual existence as images with the potential for becoming conscious, actual ones. Thus every lived moment is both actual and virtual, with perception on one side and memory on the other; an ever-growing mass of recollections” (Stagoll “Memory” in The Deleuze Dictionary; italics mine).
- 69.
Deleuze refused to talk about virtuality as a set of possibilities—though he doesn’t give a satisfactory explanation. My guess is that, if he had, a deflating realization would have followed: his notion of “virtuality” is very close to Heidegger’s “possibility” with Spinoza’s God in the place of Dasein and the works of nature in the place of “equipment.”
- 70.
At a time when I was immersing myself in Deleuze’s art project while working on this book, I happened to be hiking on Mt. Katahdin in Maine when it occurred to me to “touch the mountain.” Not the slab of rock next to me (though that was all I could physically touch), but the whole mountain. And something happened; I could “feel” the mountain’s ephemerality as well as its massive solidity (no illicit substances were involved). Or, better, I got a “sense” of its ephemerality on time scales accessible to Spinoza’s God but not usually to me (see discussion of “sense,”). That’s all. Not a conversion experience, it didn’t make me a Deleuzean—but an experience nevertheless. Cezanne’s’ paintings of the mountains of Provence have a similar effect.
- 71.
Expression is “non-local, belonging directly to the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles. The flash of lightning expresses this nonlocal relation. Expression is always fundamentally of a relation, not a subject. In the expression product and process are one” (Massumi 2002, 18).
- 72.
I came eventually to understand the never-ending (and never-beginning) quality of the commentaries by the Deleuzeans—D.W. Smith and Joe Hughes, John Protevi and Brian Massumi, Leonard Lawlor and Claire Colebrook, and the rest. Over years of lingering at the virtual/actual portal, after many arrests and lessons learned and paroles undertaken, they sustained a continuous quest for moments of “getting” the Deleuzean vision, a “sense” of what only Spinoza’s God could really “know.” They produced an improvisational catechism that settles around their thought and prose like the aura of a reputation earned, an aura visible only to those who have attempted the journey themselves—or find themselves immediately committed to it as if this, yes, and only this deserves the title “life of the mind.” I think that’s how they feel and the hippie in me applauds them.
- 73.
In contrast to an extensive property, which changes when size changes (mass, volume, length), an intensive property doesn’t change if part of the sample is removed—color, hardness, pressure, charge, temperature, density, for example. Qualities and forces, not geometrical dimensions.
- 74.
Foucault felt entitled to assimilate the event almost entirely to its sense-effect and celebrate the event per se as “incorporeal” (“Theatrum Philosophicum” in Critique (1970, 885–908)). He seemed delighted to be able to talk about processes usually consigned to the mental without renouncing his commitment to materialism; Deleuzean metaphysics had disclosed what he took the liberty of calling “incorporeal materiality.” That phrase is typical of the paradoxical lengths to which interpreters have had to go to cope with The Logic of Sense.
- 75.
This account of “surface effects” bears an inescapable similarity to Galileo’s dogmatically mechanical world-picture described above (see pp. 19–21). And it calls to mind an accidental connotation—the way “surface effect” seems to echo cinematic “special effects”—and that’s apt because this is an effort to relegate the subject’s experience to a transient periphery of the universe where it belongs. Galileo’s decision to call heat (and color and sound) “secondary properties” as compared to “primary properties” that really exist—also makes it apt to say of Deleuze and Guattari’s usage: it was immanent in Galileo’s.
- 76.
In 1960, when Sartre was in a terrorism-supporting phase of his career, regularly exhorting French troops in Algeria to desert, de Gaulle was asked why he took no action against the philosopher. He replied, “One does not arrest Voltaire.”
- 77.
Deleuze himself, alluding to Kant, once said that Felix had awakened him from “dogmatic slumbers.” He called Felix the “diamond miner” and relegated himself to the role of “polisher.” Others, for example, Slavoj Zizek, saw in that influence the corruption of a great philosopher (in Zizek 2012).
- 78.
The jargon of cognitive gerunds—as in “thinking the limits of the body” or “theorizing the post-soul aesthetic”—belongs in this environment. The message: fluid, open, unfixable, not dominating, not dominated—not “about” a separate “object.”
- 79.
It is worth remembering that the idea of human beings and groups as “machines” itself goes back, somewhat ironically, to Descartes (see, e.g., in the Enlightenment, La Mettrie’s Man the Machine, and a slew of other works leading up to the mechanism still evident in Comte and even Durkheim). Cartesian dualism had a materialist aspect that many French thinkers, including Descartes himself, sometimes found irresistible.
- 80.
Lyotard later repudiated Libidinal Economy, calling it his “evil book” and claiming he needed to explode himself out of Marxist habits of thought by writing it. Along with Foucault, he was one of the few to disavow Marxism categorically.
- 81.
This helps to explain why identitypolitics activists in the USA gave so much attention to regulating language, especially in educational institutions. To shape language was to shape institutions—that was the conviction behind the forces of “political correctness.”
- 82.
See also “Deleuze is in my bones” in an interview with Bruno Latour, where it becomes clear that the whole “agency of things” trope in “Actor Network Theory” echoes Deleuze’s metaphysics: http://figureground.org/interview-with-bruno-latour/.
- 83.
It must have seemed to Deleuze that in becoming-sensation he was healing the breach created by Kant’s self-alienating “I think” (the first “difference” that fascinated him) just insofar has he managed to be aware of becoming-sensation without really thinking about it. With this, Deleuze thinks he is getting outside of “representations” through encounters with “the being of the sensible.” All of which suggests that there is a practice associated with this art project, just as there is with phenomenology or meditation. This practice doesn’t consist of habits but of openness to all that isn’t habitual. To Artaud and to Bacon, to surges and flows of intensities in general—as opposed to the objects we are conditioned to attend to. In other words, to be a Deleuzean means cultivating a faculty for “thinking the impossible.”
- 84.
“When Foucault died [in 1984], so did the incarnation of the political hopes and theoretical ambitions of an entire generation. He was neither the head of a school nor the guardian of any disciplinary boundaries, but he was far more, the brilliant embodiment of his period” (Dosse 1997, 388).
- 85.
Bataille was indebted to many for inspiration and he acknowledged them frequently, but he insisted that Nietzsche had the “decisive” impact upon him (Surya 2002, 52). And his friend, Pierre Klossowski, also passed on to the creators of French theory a version of Nietzsche that invited appropriation—especially in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1997).
- 86.
Which appealed to Foucault because “his music … tears apart the knowledge of the subject by rendering it foreign to itself” (Santini 2002).
- 87.
Perec was acting on behalf of a “potential literature,” the cause of “The Oulipo Society”—an entity within the “College de Pataphysics.” The writers and mathematicians who devoted real time and energy to such exercises were both very serious and over-the-top playful (see the term “ludicrous,” and its affinity with “ludic”). It’s hard to imagine “serious” American intellectuals indulging in such shenanigans. Once again, we are confronted with a cultural difference that complicated the reception of French “theory” in anglophone contexts.
- 88.
Says James Faubion in the Introduction to Death and the Labyrinth (XX): “Foucault’s relationship to Roussel is noticeably protective … its most telling gesture is that of a hand—or pen—raised against any and all of those roving psychologists who would … treat (and so invalidate) his oeuvre as a mere catalogue of symptoms … [in his book] Foucault proposes that Roussel’s suicide in Palermo is … a corporal demonstration of the imperative that the oeuvre “must be set free from the person who wrote it” (156).
- 89.
It says a lot about Foucault’s reputation after the publication of his History of Madness in 1961 that this homage to Bataille was published in an issue of Critique, the journal he founded immediately after WWII.
- 90.
James Miller may have gone too far in The Passion of Michel Foucault (1994). But we need not agree with his reading completely to recognize some resonance of his sex life in his work. A devotee of sadomasochism doesn’t just happen to name a book Discipline and Punish—and, yes, “passion” in the title carries a Christ-on-the-cross connotation.
- 91.
Gary Gutting stressed the importance of this aspect of language for Foucault (2013, 5–18). If it weren’t for its subject obliterating effects (and the requirements of fashion), it is not clear that Foucault would have engaged much with language, even in his “structuralist” phase.
- 92.
Compare this with a more moderately framed dispute between anglophone philosophers: “Searle’s central question [is] … ‘how do we get from the bits of paper to dollar bills?’ Now, this really is a question about ontology—about what it is for something to be money, not just about what the intentional content of our mental states is when we interact with or have thoughts about or use money. So it might seem obvious, as Searle suggests, that the phenomenologists have no way of grappling with or even understanding this question” (Kelly2004, 9; italics mine). Kelly goes on to argue that it isn’t obvious!
- 93.
Foucault was criticized for moving away from Marx as early as 1966 in The Order of Things, and he was in a later context heard to say to a reporter who asked him about Marx during a street demonstration, “I don’t want to hear that name any more.” But, in spite of such rejections, the grip of conventional commitments was strong. As late as 1972, in conversation with Deleuze in a journal of the American new left, Foucault concluded (with Deleuze shamelessly agreeing) by reassuring his audience that “Women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals” who “have now begun a specific struggle … naturally enter as allies of the proletariat. … They genuinely serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those places they find themselves oppressed” (Deleuze and Foucault 1973, Telos 16). Identitypolitics instead of socialism? Not to worry.
- 94.
Recognizing yet another barb, Sartre responded by calling Foucault “a positivist in despair.” For Sartre, a superficial “objectivity” was the only conceivable alternative to the philosophy of the subject in history. He never really understood the abstractions of Structuralism—just as he couldn’t countenance the modernist retreat from lived experience in general (See above on Barthes’Writing Degree Zero [1953] 1984). Foucault had, rather cruelly, identified the problem when he described the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) as “a nineteenth-century man’s magnificent and pathetic attempt to think the 20th century” (in Bourg 2007, 48). A perfect illustration of what Kojevian Marxism looked like to French Nietzscheans of the 1960s. It was marred, above all, by the persistence of nineteenth-century evolutionism’stelos.
- 95.
Foucault had not relinquished his critical stance entirely. The friendship he focused on (though not exclusively) was friendship between gay men—an especially promising prospect precisely because it had to be cultivated outside conventional parameters. A free creation, then—just like the “techniques of the self” the Greeks had enjoyed.
- 96.
See, for example, Jurgen Habermas “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford 1986; Christopher Norris “What is enlightenment?” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge 1994; Paul RabinowEthics, Subjectivity and Truth, The New Press 1997.
- 97.
Lee Braver argues in A Thing of this World (2007) that Foucault believed there was something like true madness that wasn’t being expressed by reason, but was nevertheless there. The next section of Braver’s book is called “no remainder” and claims that, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault finally gets away from his residual realism (2007, 347–353). It also seems likely that he was simply embarrassed into taking a more categorical position—and, in any case, it didn’t last.
- 98.
Too biased to be generally reliable, Ferry and Renault can nevertheless be specifically insightful. See, for example, their account of what constituted the “unthought” at the moment the “Classical” human sciences were being conceived according to Foucault in The Order of Things. The objects and processes that came to constitute the subject matter of biology, linguistics, and economics were not unthinkable, they just hadn’t been “thought” (1990, 103–104).
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de Zengotita, T. (2019). Texts and Bodies. In: Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_9
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