Brady Thomas Heiner - The Passions of Michel Foucault | differences 14.1

Copyright 2003 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14:1

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The Passions of Michel Foucault

The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtakenman. The point of critique is notjustification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.—Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 94

In an interview with Duccio Trombadori in 1978, Foucault In an interview with Duccio Trombadori in 1978, Foucault Ienigmatically theorizes the concept of the “limit-experience” and cites it as a guiding force of his work.1 He goes on to characterize his books as “experience books, as opposed to truth books or demonstration books” (Essential Works 3: 246). In this essay, I will argue that the concept of the limit-experience provides a compass with which to navigate the labyrin-thine trajectories of Foucault’s work. It will be read here as the passion that underpins and infuses the motions of Foucault’s critical explorations. The trajectory that will be followed here—because in Foucault they are myriad and intersecting—is that of subjectivation. Foucault’s theoreti-cal development of this concept leads him from confrontations with the techniques of domination that were developed in asylums and prisons of the classical age to engagements with the practices of the self that were cultivated in Greco-Roman society—from confinement and discipline to the art of existence. Ultimately, as his analysis of subjectivation unfolds, Foucault shifts his attention from the subject as an object of knowledge and power to the “affective and relational virtualities” immanent to the subject. The hinge that links the early Foucault to the later Foucault, the

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techniques of domination to the technologies of the self, is his conception of the limit-experience—what, in Madness and Civilization, he describes as “the power to annihilate” and what he refers to in a 1982 interview as “the art of life.” The limit-experience is what drives his attempts to histo-ricize the subject of knowledge and practice; it is the radical current that courses through his texts.

In the pages that follow, I will trace the passage of Foucault’s passion from destruction or annihilation to something explicitly produc-tive—from the (antihumanist) early works on the human sciences and techniques of domination, particularly Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Order of Things (1966), to the (posthumanist?) later texts deal-ing with biopower and technologies of the self, such as the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1976–84) and various interviews conducted yduring the final years of his life. Throughout this critical navigation, I will maintain that Foucault’s passion for the limit-experience is a potent and influential force that remains present in all of his texts, albeit sometimes negatively.

Foucault’s Passion: The Limit-Experience

Since Foucault’s passion—and its development—will function as the underlying guide of this analysis, I will begin with the word itself. “Passion” derives from the Latin passio, which means literally “to suffer.” However, the term signifies in interesting ways. For example, The Ameri-can Heritage Dictionary defines passion as “[a] powerfuly emotion, such as love, joy, hatred, or anger” (my emphasis), and it defines emotion as “[a]n intense mental state that arises subjectively rather than through y consciouseffort and is often accompanied by physiological changes” (my emphasis).Thus, passion is something subjective, which we are told is distinct from consciousness. The AHD defines “subjective” as “[p]roceeding from or tak-ing place within a person’s mind such as to be unaffected by the external world.” According to these definitions, then, passion is a powerful emo-tion that arises within the subject—more specifically, “within a person’s mind”—yet is distinct from the conscious processes of the subject. Also, given that it arises within the subject, according to the AHD, passion is separate from and “unaffected by the external world.”

On the other hand, The Oxford English Dictionary defines pas-ysion as “[t]he fact or condition of being acted upon or affected by external agency; subjection to external force; an effect or impression produced by

24 The Passions of Michel Foucault

action from without.” This is the sense in which passion is an experience of suffering, of being moved and controlled by external forces. Hence, whereas according to one source passion arises within the subject and so is described as distinct from and even unaffected by the external world, daccording to another it is defined precisely as the state of being acted upon by external agents or forces.2 Clearly, passion as a concept—let alone as a phenomenon—resides at the threshold between conflicting modern epistemological categories; it disrupts the intact demarcations between inside and outside, subject and object. Passion, according to these deno-tations, is simultaneously produced and contained in the subject—i.e., “unaffected by the external world”—and subject to the penetrations of the outside world—i.e., “The condition of being acted upon or affected by external agency.” It gestures both inward and outward, toward the self and the other.3 In Madness and Civilization, Foucault acknowledges the precarious position that passion maintains in the modern episteme (and even before). He writes:

Before Descartes, and long after his influence as philosopher and physiologist had diminished, passion continued to be the meeting ground of body and soul; the point where the latter’s activity makes contact with the former’s passivity, each being alimit imposed upon the other and the locus of their communica-tion. (86)

Passion resides at the threshold of subjectivity (which is, of course, the brink of objectivity), at the point of antagonism between mind and body, activity and passivity, freedom and necessity.

This is the sense in which passion underpins and infusesFoucault’s critical project. For in his work, Foucault vehemently exca-vates the epistemological foundations of the modern subject. His texts dismantle the transcendental subject of knowledge as it is constituted in modern discourse and unveil its historicity. Against the Hegelian and Sartrean models of subjective reception, cognition, and production, in which the subject functions as the self-identical and foundational site of the production of meaning, Foucault elucidates the “reciprocal genesis of the subject and the object of knowledge” (Essential Works 3: 254). And in opposition to what Foucault calls “the fundamental postulate that French philosophy had never abandoned since Descartes” (251), which establishes the supremacy and transcendental function of the subject, Foucault articu-lates a subject constituted in and through a historical network of discur-


sive and nondiscursive practices—a subject that (passionately) disrupts the traditional categories of subject/object, mind/body, inside/outside, activity/passivity.

It is in the service of his passionate destruction of the modern epistemological subject that Foucault advances the limit-experience. For the limit-experience, he avers, “has the function of wrenching the sub-ject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution. [. . .] [It] is a project of desubjectivation” (Essential Works 3: 241). Whereas in a phenomenologi-cal framework, experience serves as a means through which the subject grounds itself as the agent “responsible, in its transcendental functions, for founding that experience together with its meanings” (241), the limit-experience wrenches the subject away from itself—annihilating any sense of transcendental fixity or self-identity—and effects “a transformation of the relationship we have with ourselves and with the world [. . .] a trans-formation of the relationship we have with our knowledge” (244).

The AHD defines passion as a powerful emotion, as being fre-quently accompanied by “physiological changes”; the OED further speci-fies these alterations as “changes that prepare the body for immediate vigorous action.” Foucault deploys the limit-experience as the necessary destruction that precedes radical social and political transformation;4 it is the total negation that clears the terrain for alternative constitutive prac-tices—the desubjectivation that prepares the body for immediate vigorous action. Hence, the rupture that the early Foucault effects in the established theory of the subject—the destructive force of the limit-experience, of antihumanism—is accompanied in the later Foucault by an appeal for a constructive movement—the creative force of (posthumanist) constituentpractice. For the dissolution effected by the limit-experience is necessarily linked to (re)creation for Foucault; passion is inextricably tied to trans-formation. As he argues, “Calling the subject in question meant that one would have to experience something leading to its actual destruction, its decomposition, its explosion, its conversion into something else” (247, my emphasis). This conversion marks the shift from destruction to constitu-tion—a shift I shall now trace in Foucault’s texts.

The Death of Man: The Early Foucault

In Madness and Civilization, we find Foucault at his mostpassionate. In that text, he embarks upon a genealogical history of the


experience of madness between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. And yet the text functions not solely as a genealogical history of madness but also as a limit-experience that transforms our relationship to madness and to the institutional discourses and practices that constitute it and are constituted by it. I will focus here on the latter of these two (though by no means exhaustive) functions of Madness and Civilization—that is, as limit-experience, not genealogy.5

In his archaeological analysis of the classical experience of madness, Foucault examines the discourses of passion and delirium. He claims that in the classical age madness was regarded as a unity of the mind and body—as a case that occurs when the mind blindly surrenders to the desires of the body, when the mind displays an “incapacity to control or to moderate” the passions of the body. So in the classical period, madness, Foucault claims, was produced by (or founded in) passions. This madness manifested itself or was expressed in delirium—that is, in the inability to distinguish between (subjectively produced) image and (objectively extant) reality. As he writes, “Madness is precisely at the point of contact between the oneiric and the erroneous; it traverses, in its variations, the surface on which they meet, the surface which both joins and separates them” (Madness 106).

This treatment resembles our prior discussion of passionas the point of convergence—the antagonism—between subject andobject, mind and body. Madness, in Foucault’s analysis of the classical period, presents itself as the failure of the mind to control, to discipline, the passions of the body; it signals the subsumption of the mind by the body—“the unity of mind and body”—and the “surrender” of the subject to unreason. Hence, later in his genealogy, Foucault claims that mad-ness in the classical age was conceived as the negation of reason and thus was represented as having no positive content of its own; it was defined as nonbeing, as nothingness.6 He argues from this point that the institutional practice of confinement “restored [madness] to its truth as nothingness. Confinement,” Foucault continues, “is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing” (116). Foucault’s genealogy shows how the institutions of classical reason dissipated the positivity of madness first through the dis-course of unreason—a discourse that produced an experience of madness as the empty negativity of reason—and then through the corresponding visible practice of confinement—a practice that restored madness to its


“truth” as nothingness. Through this Foucault reveals that there is noth-ing prior to or behind the knowledge of madness, that that knowledge is nothing more or less than an assemblage of discursive and nondiscursive practices.7 Whereas the discourses of classical reason produced madness as the negativity of reason, Foucault’s discourses produce a knowledge of reason as a process of articulations, visible practices, and desires. As Foucault maintains, “Madness begins where the relation of man to truth is disturbed and darkened” (104).

We can begin to see at this point that Foucault advances mad-ness as a limit-experience that wrenches the subject outside what might be thought of as a stable relation to truth. In fact, the word delirium, Foucault points out, is derived from lira, meaning a “furrow”; so deliro literally means “to move out of the furrow”—that is, to move away from the “proper” path of reason (99–100). Passion—as the antagonistic ground between consciousness and corporeality, reason and unreason—is the impetusto madness. When the passions of the body intervene in or obstruct the (necessarily insular) processes of speculative rationality, when they are not properly controlled by the mind, madness ensues. As Foucault argues,“The possibility of madness is [. . .] implicit in the very phenomenon of passion” (88). For this reason, madness disrupts the perceived coherence of the classical subject. It flattens being onto the plane of immanence composed of practices and desires.8

Madness, which finds its first possibility in the phenomenon of passion, and in the deployment of that double causality which, starting from passion itself, radiates both toward the body and toward the soul, is at the same time suspension of passion, breach of causality, dissolution of the elements of this unity. ( Madness 91)

Foucault proffers madness as a limit-experience and, as such, invests it with a trenchant critical power. He gestures toward this power in the conclusion of Madness and Civilization when he briefly discusses art and the critical violence waged by the works of Sade, Goya, Van Gogh, Artaud, and Nietzsche. He writes:

[T]hrough madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actually engages within itself the world’s time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which


interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconcilia-tion where the world is forced to question itself [. . .]. [T]he world is made aware of its guilt. (288)

This void, this breach without reconciliation that madness, through the work of art, tears in the social fabric, is the destructive movement of the limit-experience; it is a process of desubjectivation by which the mod-ern subject is wrested from its privileged relation to truth and forced to acknowledge itself as an object of knowledge constituted in a historical field of discursive and nondiscursive practices. Somewhat similar to the estrangement or distanciation effected by Brechtian dramaturgy, the work of madness interrupts the subject’s knowledge and appropriation of the object and throws the entire subject/object relationship into interroga-tion, into crisis.9

Foucault’s early work, like the work of madness, is devoted to inciting crisis in the humanist subject—a subject whose existence is premised upon a negation of the body and of the (irrational) other. In the work of this period we see the destructive aspect of Foucault’s passionate pursuit of the limit-experience; we see the annihilation of man as the fulcrum and sole producer of knowledge. As he proclaims in The Order of Things :

To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questionsabout what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthro-pologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflec-tion we can answer only with a philosophical laugh—which means, to a certain extent, a silent one. (342–43)

Saturated with references to Nietzsche, The Order of Things analyzes the knowledge of man that was produced by discourses of life, labor, and lan-guage from the seventeenth century to the twentieth—a knowledge that largely still obtains in the West. Like Nietzsche, Foucault recognizes that “man and God belong to one another” and that “the death of the second is synonymous with the disappearance of the first” (342). Thus, he argues, “Rather than the death of God—or, rather, in the wake of that death and in


a profound correlation with it—what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man’s face in laughter, and the return of masks” (385). In this passage we see the silent “philosophical laugh” that Foucault invoked above associated with the “explosion of man’s face.” This insurrectional Nietzschean laughter is the epitome, I suggest, of the passion of the early Foucault. With its force, Foucault uproots anthropology as an analytic of man and explodes the “essence” of humanism.

In a playful reference to his own work, Foucault writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969):

What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing—with a rather shaky hand—a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forc-ing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write. (17)

This labyrinth of underground passages where one’s discourse is inces-santly forced beyond itself, where the speaking subject has no face and loses itself in transformation, is “the return of masks” that Nietzschean laughter heralds; it is the passion of the limit-experience, of a subject that is constantly dismantling and recreating itself simultaneously as it acknowledges the reciprocal processes by which it is disarticulated and rearticulated by discursive and nondiscursive practices. In these texts, Foucault’s passion for destruction predominates; his negation of anthropo-logical man must be total and uncompromising before an original praxis of constitution can ensue.

In the 1978 interview, Foucault comments that “the Nietzs-chean theme of discontinuity [. . .] [and] the theme of limit-experiences through which the subject escapes from itself [. . .] afforded a kind of way out between Hegelianism and the philosophical identity of the subject” (Essential Works 3: 248). We have seen that Nietzsche functions as a kind of beacon for the early Foucault. But I have until now focused on that rela-


tionship in terms of Foucault’s negation of humanism—of the philosophical identity of the subject. However, before Foucault can approach the later movement of the limit-experience—the passionate “leap” of constitu-tion—he must first escape the “great, slightly phantomlike shadow that [is] Hegel” (Archaeology(Archaeology( 235). Using the concept of negation as a point of yentry, I shall now look briefly at Foucault’s break with this phantom of Hegel.

Foucault asserts that

the essential task [of the archaeological method] was to free thehistory of thought from its subjection to transcendence [. . .]. My aim was to analyse this history, in the discontinuity that no teleology would reduce in advance; to map it in a dispersion that no pre-established horizon would embrace; to allow it to be deployed in an anonymity on which no transcendental con-stitution would impose the form of the subject; to open it up to a temporality that would not promise the return of any dawn [. . .] to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism. (Archaeol-(Archaeol-(ogy 203)

Hegelian philosophy reduces history to the teleological progression of Spirit—the transcendental consciousness of universal subjectivity. Which is to say that through its totalizing logic, the discontinuous discourses and practices of history are subsumed in the horizon of History as the dialecti-cal progression of consciousness. Consequently, the gaze of Hegelianism construes each historically situated instance of discursive or practical activity exclusively as an expression of that single, universal metanarra-tive. Foucault, on the other hand, seeks to dispense with the problematic of historical consciousness entirely and the “transcendental narcissism” that it entails; he strives to demolish every aspect of transcendence from the field of historical causality. It is in this effort—the effort to disrupt the coherence of the subject as it is constituted in continuous history—that Foucault deploys the Nietzschean theme of discontinuity in his approach to the history of thought.

Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the found-ing function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject—in the form of his-


torical consciousness—will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at adistance by difference. (Archaeology (Archaeology ( 12)

The conception of the subject that Foucault advances in the limit-expe-rience is one that disrupts the fundamental categories (subject/object, inside/outside) upon which the subject of continuous history is founded, be it the subject constructed by Enlightenment humanism or by Hege-lianism. In this effort, Foucault must pose the question of how one gets beyond Hegel without being subsumed within the Hegelian problematic.10

Implicit in his response to this question is the desire to establish a form of (nondialectical) negation that is unassimilable to dialectical synthesis. For this, he goes to Nietzsche, to Sade, and to Goya; he finds his answers in the passion of the limit-experience as “the power to annihilate.”

As Hegel describes it, dialectical negation (Aufhebung(Aufhebung( ) is a g) is a cancellation, which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded. For this reason, dialectical negation is necessarily a partial aggression—a reformism—because it preserves or sublates the “essence” of that which it negates. It “raises” the opposing elements into a higher synthetic unity, subsuming their particularity, their difference, into universal self-consciousness. The constructive moment—the synthe-sis—that follows dialectical negation is not truly productive, but rather revelatory: being is not created or transformed; it becomes “conscious” of what it truly is. Foucault’s deployment of the Nietzschean insurrectional critique, as we saw above, is not concerned with the achievement of self-consciousness, with the conservation of a continuous and unified essence. Foucault’s critique is the explosion of established essence, and with it God, man, and the transcendental functions of the subject. There is no preserva-tion and no transcendence in the negation of the limit-experience; it is a thoroughgoing critique, an unrestrained attack on the established values of society and the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. Foucault’s Nietzsche-inspired negation is a destructive force so violent that it razes the contemporary horizon, abolishing the present state of things.

Foucault looks also to the works of Sade and Goya as founda-tional deployments of total critique. “For Sade and Goya, [. . .] [unreason] becomes the power to annihilate. Through [them], the Western worldreceived the possibility of transcending its reason in violence, and of recov-ering tragic experience beyond the promises of dialectic” (Madness 285, my emphasis). This power to annihilate—a power that is unrestrained,


unseparated from what it can do, and that conserves nothing—is the first step beyond Hegel. For, in his unbridled assault on the subject of human-ism, Foucault dispenses with dialectics. As he argues, “Calling the subject in question meant that one would have to experience something leading to its actual destruction, its decomposition, its explosion” (Essential Works 3: 247). The subject, for Foucault, is not a conscious interiority but a produc-tive exteriority, not a transcendental consciousness but an immanent func-tion that is historically constituted. “What is that fear,” Foucault demands, “which makes you reply in terms of consciousness when someone talks to you about a practice, its conditions, its rules, and its historical transforma-tions? [. . .] It seems to me that the only reply to this question is a political one” (Archaeology(Archaeology( 210). Foucault’s entire corpus cuts through this fear ywith a fist—a fist thrust in the throes of passion.

In The Order of Things, Foucault acknowledges Nietzsche as the force that first launched the attack on the various guises of Enlighten-ment subjectivity (via Descartes or via Hegel), behind which his own work comes to light. The arrangement of knowledge constituted by Hegelianism and humanism

maintained its firm grip on thought for a long while; and Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, made it glow into brightness again for the last time by setting fire to it [. . .]. [Nietzsche] sent all [the] stable forms [of nineteenth-century thought] up in flames, [he] used their charred remains to draw strange and perhaps impossible faces; and by a light that may be either [. . .] the reviving flames of the last great fire or an indica-tion of the dawn, we see the emergence of what may perhaps be the space of contemporary thought. It was Nietzsche, in any case, who burned for us, even before we were born, the intermingled promises of the dialectic and anthropology. (263)

Here we can see an “explosion” and “return of masks” similar to what Foucault referred to above when invoking Nietzsche. The aggression that drives the negation-beyond-negation of his early work resolutely differs from the inherent sadness of the dialectic; the negativity of total critique manifests itself as affirmation. “[A]ggression,” Deleuze affirms, “is the negative, but the negative as the conclusion of positive premises, thenegative as the product of activity, the negative as the consequence of the power of affirming” (Nietzsche 121). Like Nietzsche, Foucault flees from the labor of opposition and the suffering of the negative in order to enact


“the warlike play of difference, affirmation and the joy of destruction” (191). For the negative dialectic lacks a will that goes beyond it; it has no power of its own but remains a mere reaction to (a mere representation of) power.11 Deleuze describes this “ontological emptiness” of negativity in the context of a discussion of Nietzsche:

Nietzsche’s enemy [. . .] is the dialectic which confuses affirma-tion with the truthfulness of truth or the positivity of the real; and this truthfulness, this positivity, are primarily manufac-tured by the dialectic itself with the products of the negative. The being of Hegelian logic is merely “thought” being, pure and empty, which affirms itself by passing into its own opposite. But this being was never different from its opposite, it never had to pass into what it already was. Hegelian being is pure and simple nothingness; and the becoming that this being forms with noth-ingness, that is to say with itself, is a perfectly nihilistic becom-ing; and affirmation passes through negation here because it is merely the affirmation of the negative and its products. (183)

Therefore, Deleuze continues, “An activity which does not raise itself to the powers of affirming, an activity which trusts only in the labor of the negative is destined to failure; in its very principle it turns into its oppo-site” (196). Separated from the power of affirmation—the creative motor of being—the dialectic can do nothing but reactively turn against itself. “Separated from what it can do,” Deleuze argues, “active force does not evaporate. Turning back against itself it produces pain” (128). The aim of total critique, as distinguished from the dialectic, is a different way of feeling—another sensibility. The aim of total critique is the constitution of a joyful practice.12

In all of Foucault’s work, he actively dismantles the reactive conception of power as negativity—as that which says “no.”13 He reaffirms Nietzsche’s discovery that the dialectic only produces a phantom of affir-mation.14 Whether in the form of an overcome opposition or a resolved contradiction, the image of positivity yielded by the dialectic is a radically false one (196).15 Through the nondialectical negation enacted in the limit-experience, Foucault affirms that positivity is not “a theoretical and prac-tical product of negation itself,”16 but rather that which destroys the will to nothingness that fuels the dialectic. Positivity, first taking form in the becoming-active “joy of annihilation,” the “affirmation of annihilation and destruction,” clears the terrain for a truly active, which is to say, a joyful


practice of constitution (Nietzsche 3). For only an unrestrained aggres-sion against the established “essence”—the death of the adversary—can procure the opportunity for a positive creation. Only by the light of this conflagrant destruction is it possible to discern the potentialities of con-temporary thought and practice.

To return to the mask that began this part of the discussion, the Foucault of Madness and Civilization writes that

beginning with passion, madness is still only an intense move-ment in the rational unity of soul and body; this is the level ofunreason ; but this intense movement quickly escapes the rea-son of the mechanism and becomes, in its violences, [. . .] an irrational movement; and it is then that, escaping truth and itsconstraints, the Unreal appears. (93)

In other words, passion can cause a “disequilibrium” in the subject that results in unreason, but as it gains intensity, this passion exceeds the ratio-nal boundaries of the subject and erupts in a violent, irrational negation—a negation that is unassimilable to any synthesis, that resolutely departs from the inherent conservatism of the dialectic. Foucault deploys the limit-experience as precisely such an escape from truth and its constraints—as an experience that opens up a void, that provokes a breach without rec-onciliation. Through the unrestrained assault of the limit-experience, the “truthfulness of the truth,” the “positivity of the real”—a “positivity” that dialectical reason itself manufactures with the products of the nega-tive—is demystified and the discursive infrastructure that supports and produces it destroyed.17 This assault opens up a void in which positive, original creation can take place. For, as Foucault announces, it is only after this critical violence “that, escaping truth and its constraints, the Unreal appears.” By “Unreal” here, I would argue that Foucault means something like virtual—what he, himself, later calls “affective and relational virtu-alities” (Essential Works 1: 138). By dismantling the transcendence that the subject of history has been subjected to, the destructive movement of the limit-experience clears the way for a practice of constitution—a practice which seeks to actualize affections and relationships that exceed the framework of possibility drawn by contemporary institutions. This practice aims to create the conditions of possibility for new alliances to be formed and unforeseen lines of force to be tied together—relationships


that, within the limited relational fabric demarcated by contemporary society, are relegated to and confined in the “baleful” realm of unreason. The later Foucault turns his attention toward the areas of subjectivity in which these constitutive practices take form.

The Art of Existence: The Later Foucault

We now have reached the passage of Foucault’s passion. Hav-ing exploded the essence of humanist man, disarticulated the discursive and institutional processes of subjectivation, and forged textual experi-ences through which the contemporary subject might be wrenched away from itself, the intensity of the later Foucault shifts away from destructiontoward constitution. To navigate this constitutive terrain, I will first inves-tigate the theoretical shift undertaken in the last major works of Foucault’s life—volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality—and attempt to situate that shift with respect to his earlier work. I will then analyze the relation-ship of this theoretical relocation to the strange and perhaps impossible faces that the later Foucault draws in the sands of contemporary thought. In other words, I will follow the passions that lead Foucault away from the human sciences and techniques of domination in the classical age toward technologies of the self in Greco-Roman society, and I will explore the potentialities that are opened up as a result of that departure.

In the later volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault sets y, Foucault sets yout to write “a history of the way in which individuals [. . .] constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct” (Sexuality 2: 29). By studying y“the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject” (6), the later Foucault begins to focus on “the transformations that one seeks to accomplish withoneself as [an] object” (29). This signals a fundamental shift in Foucault’s approach to the subject.18 In his early work, he approaches the subject from two different but related vantage points. On the one hand, in his confron-tation with the human sciences and his analyses of discursive practices (The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge), the early Foucault exposes the discursive processes by which a subject is constituted as a normative category. He elucidates the way that the generalized subject is simultaneously constituted as a knowing subject and as an object of knowl-edge. On the other hand, in his analyses of techniques of domination (Mad-ness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish), he examines the formation of the subject from the other side of the normative


division—i.e., the mad, the ill, the delinquent. He tracks the institutional methods by which that subject is made to know and be known.

The later Foucault takes a different approach. He approaches a subject constituting himself “as an object for himself,” through what Foucault calls the technologies of the self. In order to do this, he examines“the formation of procedures by which the subject is led to observe himself, analyze himself, interpret himself, [and] recognize himself as a domain of possible knowledge” (Essential Works 2: 461). This later theoretical approach leads to a more constructive conception of the subject—an active subject of creation, as distinguished from the receptive subject of domina-tion, a subject affected by active rather than passive affections. However, by differentiating an active from a receptive conception of the subject here, I do not mean to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, I am arguing that the later Foucault’s approach radically enriches his theory of subjectivity; it opens up a reservoir of potentiality.

In his analysis of the ethical practices of antiquity, Foucault deploys the language of techne—the art of existence, the art of govern-ment, the stylistics of governing oneself—and moves toward a conception of power that strengthens and activates his notion of the subject. In the process of elaborating the forms and modalities by which the ethical sub-ject of antiquity experiences and transforms itself as an object of power/knowledge, Foucault describes a certain relation to self that produces a particular type of pleasure:

[T]he experience of the self that forms itself in [unanxious] pos-session is not simply that of a force overcome, or a rule exercised over a power that is on the point of rebelling; it is the experience of a pleasure that one takes in oneself [. . .]. It is defined by the fact of not being caused by anything that is independent of our-selves and therefore escapes our control. It arises out of ourselves and within ourselves. ( Sexuality 3: 66, my emphasis)

This pleasure (laetitia) that arises out of oneself and within oneself is related to what Foucault, in various instances, calls potestas sui (power of self), cura sui (care of self), or sui juris (self-rule). It is coincident with an aesthetics of existence through which “one exercises over oneself an authority that nothing limits or threatens” (65); it is a force that is unsepa-rated from what it can do. Foucault contrasts this pleasure, or affection, with voluptas, which signifies a sort of pleasure/affection that can be contrasted term for term with the causa sui delineated above. “[Voluptas]


denotes a pleasure whose origin is to be placed outside us and in objects whose presence we cannot be sure of: a pleasure, therefore, which is pre-carious in itself, undermined by the fear of loss, and to which we are drawn by the force of a desire that may or may not find satisfaction” (66).19

These two types of affections—the one caused from within, theother from without—have significant ethical and political implications. Deleuze deftly brings these implications to light in a comparison between Nietzsche and Callicles:

Callicles strives to distinguish nature and law. Everything that separates a force from what it can do he calls law. Law, in this sense, expresses the triumph of the weak over the strong. Nietzsche adds: the triumph of reaction over action. Indeed, everything which separates a force is reactive as is the state of a force separated from what it can do. Every force which goes to the limit of its power is, on the contrary, active. It is not a law that every force goes to the limit, it is even the opposite of a law. ( Nietzsche 58–59)

This demarcation, or more accurately, this antagonism between reaction and action, a force separated from what it can do and a force that goes to the limit of its power, is present, I suggest, in Foucault’s differentiation between pleasure (voluptas) caused externally and pleasure (laetitia)caused from within; it is also present in the distinctions Foucault makes between law and art (techne), code and practice (askesis), morality and aphrodisia.20 As theorized in these later volumes of The History of Sexu-ality, a law or code designates a universal structure of being dictated as y, a law or code designates a universal structure of being dictated as ynecessary and eternal from above that imposes general interdictions on the practices (sometimes the thoughts and desires) of a community of subjects. The tenets of Christian morality, for example, institute sucha law through a hermeneutics of desire. Art and practice, on the other hand, constitute a network of (non-necessary) relationships formed from below, from within the immanent field of forces. Whereas through laws and codes, being is ordered from outside the domain of subjective forces, in the art of existence, being is organized from within—by the acts, ges-tures, and practices of constitution. Here, being is produced in the rela-tions between subjects, in the collective formation of ideas and concepts, in the network of acts and practices. It is in and through this constituent praxis—this relational concert of action—that one attains what Foucault refers to as “an enjoyment without desire [that is, without a desire founded


in the representation of a lack] and without disturbance” (Sexuality 3: 68). yThis is the pleasure tied to a power unseparated from what it can do—being that is the cause of itself (causa sui).

Passion is at the heart of the antagonism between action and reaction; for, once again, it disrupts the categories of inside and outside. Passion is defined as both arising from within—like laetitia—and acting from outside—like voluptas. It is considered both action and reaction. I would argue, however, that two distinct affections—what I will call, by way of Spinoza, active and passive affections—are conflated as “passion” by the transcendental functions of the subject; it is only in that context that action is mistaken as reaction.

A brief look at Spinoza’s theory of affections will provide us with a means to link the discussion of passions and pleasures to one of powers and practices.21 According to Spinoza, the power of a body is expressed in rits capacity to be affected ; the more ways a body can be affected, as Deleuze put it, the more force it has. However, much like Foucault’s distinction between laetitia and voluptas, Spinoza distinguishes between two types of affection, which in turn give rise to two corresponding notions of power. Active affections, according to Spinoza, are those caused from within the subject; they constitute a power (potentia(potentia( ) that is an immanent and imme-diate force of constitution. Passive affections (or passions), on the other hand, are those caused from without; they present a power (potestas(potestas( ) that is a mediating force, a mere representation of potentia.22 Within the notion of the passive affections, Spinoza further differentiates the “sad passions” from the “joyful passions.” He claims that we have one (or a combination) of two types of encounters when we come into relation with another body. In the first type, the forces of the body with which we come into contact destroy and decompose the forces within us. Spinoza relates the effects of this sort of encounter to those of a poison ingested by the body. The result of such an encounter is a feeling of sadness; the affection is a sad passionthat reduces, or disjoins, our power of action. On the other hand, when we come into contact with a body whose relation can be combined with our own, our body’s relations are strengthened and our power to act is increased. As Deleuze explains in the context of a discussion of Spinoza, “The affection [of a joyful encounter] is passive because it is explained by the external body, and the idea of the affection is a passion, a passive feeling. But it is a feeling of joy, since it is produced by the idea of an object


that is good for [us], or agrees with [our] nature” (Expressionism 239). This is a joyful passion that expands or aids our power of action.23 However, because this form of joy is passive, which is to say, because it is produced by the forces of which we are not ourselves the cause, it does not itself connect us to our power to act.

Any passion does of course keep us cut off from our power of action, but this is to a greater or lesser extent. As long as we are affected by passions we have not come into full possession of our power of action. But joyful passions lead us closer to this power, that is, increase or help it; sad passions distance us from it, that is, diminish or hinder it. ( Expressionism 273)

Spinoza thus proposes a learning process by which the subject seeks to transform itself—a process that is composed of two phases. Given, as Spinoza says, that most subjects are predominantly affected by passive as opposed to active affections, and moreover, given that the majority of these passive affections are sad passions, the subject that seeks to over-come itself, who seeks to come into possession of its power of action, must first seek to be affected by a maximum of joyful passions. By evading or destroying sad passions and accumulating joyful ones, the subject reduces its relation to forces that distance it from its power to act and increases its relation to forces that lead it closer to its power to act. But the sum of joyful passions does not make an action; the subject cannot experience active affections (of which it is the cause) simply through the accumulation of joyful passions. It is with the aid of the joyful passions, however, that the subject creates the conditions of possibility for a second phase, a genuine “leap” by which the subject is put into possession of its power of action. This leap is the formation of what Spinoza calls a common notion : “A feel-ing which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct [adequate] idea of it”; “Insofar as we understand the causes of sadness, it ceases to be a passion” (Spinoza, Ethics 5: 3; 18 scholium). We create common notions when our minds form an idea of that which is common between our forces and the forces of the bodies we encounter. From the common notion “flows an idea of the [passive] affection, a feel-“ing, which is no longer passive, but active” (Deleuze, Expressionism 284, original emphasis).

In a discussion of Foucault and the death of man, Deleuzemakes a comment that will return us to Foucault.


[W]hile we were once told [by both Hegelianism and human-ism] only that man becomes aware of his own finitude, under certain historically determinable causes Foucault insists on the necessity of introducing two distinct phases. The force within man must begin by confronting and seizing hold of the forces of finitude as if they were forces from outside: it is outside oneself that force must come up against finitude. Then and only then, in a second stage, does it create from this its own finitude, where its knowledge of finitude necessarily brings it to its own finitude. ( Foucault 127, my emphasis)

If the forces within the subject come to possess their active powers—that is, come to create their own finitude—only by entering into a relation with forces from the outside, the question then becomes: with what new forces and forms might the subject enter into a relation that will compose a new form that is neither God nor Man? In Spinoza’s theory of affections, we find an alternative to God and to Man—what, by way of Balibar, we might call transindividuality. This alternative significantly resembles Foucault’s later y. This alternative significantly resembles Foucault’s later ytheory of the ethics of the self.24 Spinoza shows that the project of attain-ing the pleasure (laetitia) which, according to Foucault, “is defined by the fact of not being caused by anything that is independent of ourselves and therefore escapes our control”—a pleasure that “arises out of ourselves and within ourselves” (Sexuality 3: 66)—is realized “not by suppressing yall passion, but by the aid of joyful passions restricting passions to the smallest part of ourselves, so that our capacity to be affected is exercised by a maximum of active affections” (Deleuze, Expressionism 285).25

The perceived self-identity of the humanist subject is founded upon a strict division between mind and body; it is founded upon the mind’s separation from and control over its objects (and over the body), on the suppression of all the forces that affect the mind from outside. The subject of humanism thus seeks freedom from the necessity of the pas-sions through their suppression. The subject that seeks to go beyond itself, however, participates in the necessity of the passions in order to overcome their determinism. As Foucault asserts in Madness and Civilization :

[Classical thought] saw that the determinism of the passions was nothing but a chance for madness to penetrate the world of reason; and that if the unquestioned union of body and soul manifested man’s finitude in passion, it laid this same man


open, at the same time, to the infinite movement that destroyed him. (89)

By seeking to be affected by a maximum of joyful passions, the subject creates the conditions of possibility that allow it to leap into possession of its power to act (its active affections) through the formation of common notions; it opens itself up to the infinite transformative movement of the limit-experience, of potentia—a movement that destroys the transcenden-tal fixity of the humanist subject. “Madness participates both in the neces-sity of passion and in the anarchy of what, released by this very passion, transcends it and ultimately contests all it implies” (Madness 91). Through the formation of common notions, the subject creates active affections from joyful passions. These active affections join with the joyful passions and, in turn, empty those passions of their dependency on external causes—a process that “transcends” the determinism of the passions and constitutes reason as the univocity of body and mind.

As we saw earlier, one dictionary defined passion as “subjec-tive”—i.e., originating within the subject—though it made a point to dis-tinguish it from consciousness. But that dictionary defines “subjective” as that which takes place exclusively in the mind: “Proceeding from or tak-ing place within a person’s mind such as to be unaffected by the external world.” The dictionary acknowledges a subject that is self-identical and located exclusively in consciousness—the mind resolutely distinct from the body. From that perspective, both potentia and potestas are conceived as reaction, as acting from outside, even though potentia arises from the active affections within the subject. Thus, the force of active affections (potentia(potentia( ), which the transcendental subject misrecognizes as arising from outside—i.e., as the force of passions (potestas(potestas( )—is actually thedestructive movement of the limit-experience, which pulls the subject away from itself; it is a power (potentia(potentia( ) unseparated from what it can do, a power that moves from affirmative negation to creation.

Thus, we see that constituted power (potestas(potestas( ) is predicated on the separation of the will and intellect—on an abstraction that requires the disarticulation of our powers to act (our active affections). Constituent power (potentia(potentia( ), on the other hand, is the general set of our powers to act. It is not predicated on the separation of the will and the intellect; rather, constituent power is presented as the univocity of body and mind, or what the later Althusser called “thinking with the body.”26 As Antonio Negri argues in a discussion of Spinoza, “Only when it is connected, simultaneous


to the body, does the mind think. Not in parallel but in simultaneity”; whereas “potestas is given as the capacity (or conceivability) of produc-ing things; potentia is presented as the force that actually produces them”(Savage 180, 191; Spinoza 229, 242).27

By distinguishing between pleasure as laetitia and voluptas(a distinction I have here somewhat hastily aligned with the Spinozian distinction between power as potentia and potestas), Foucault bursts opena realm of potentiality within the subject. The use of pleasure (or, in Spi-nozian terms, the use of active affections and joyful passions) is part of the creative movement of the limit-experience. Through it, the subject constitutes itself as the subject and object of power/knowledge; it creates the conditions of possibility for its own transformation. However, there is no essentialism in this creative subject. This subject takes form after the destruction of the total negation, after the subject has been wrenched away from itself, after every transcendental mediation has been dismantled. Virtuality is the internal motor of being. Consequently, the aim of the limit-experience is neither revelatory nor redemptive, but creative; the subject seeks neither to become conscious of its nature nor to liberate its nature from the interdictions and prohibitions of an ostensibly necessary order, but to produce another “nature”:

[W]hat we need to do is not to recover our lost identity, or liber-ate our imprisoned nature, or discover our fundamental truth; rather, it is to move toward something altogether different. A phrase by Marx is appropriate here: man produces man. How should it be understood? In my judgment, what ought to beproduced is not man as nature supposedly designed him, or as his essence ordains him to be—we need to produce something that doesn’t exist yet, without being able to know what it will be. ( Essential Works 3: 275)

This is the point of departure for the constituent practice that Foucault appeals to in various interviews at the end of his life; he calls not for the liberation of sex-desire but for the production of alternative bodies and pleasures.28 For example, in 1982 he claims,

I think what the gay movement needs now is much more the art of life than a science or scientific knowledge (or pseudoscientific knowledge) of what sexuality is. Sexuality is a part of our behav-ior [. . .]. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create—it’s our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret


side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it’s a new possibility for creative life. ( Essential Works 1: 163)

The potentiality for creative life to which Foucault refers resides in the constituent power of collective subjectivity (i.e., potentia). In particular, for Foucault, the gay community bears a special potential to forge alternativeconstitutive itineraries by virtue of its strategic position within society.

Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic quali-ties of the homosexual but because the “slantwise” position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light. ( Essential Works 1: 138)

As he claims, “homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desir-able” (136).

Like the critical power the early Foucault ascribes to mad-ness—as a limit-experience that tears open the established social fabric, that effects a “breach without reconciliation”—the later Foucault attributes to the homosexual the potential to disrupt the institutional and discursive structures of the established sexual order. But whereas the power of the madman resides in his ability to destroy the transcendent edifice that upholds the established identity of the reasonable subject, the power of the homosexual consists in the potential he bears to constitute affections and relationships that exceed the framework of possibility drawn by con-temporary institutions. Foucault asserts:

We live in a relational world that institutions have consider-ably impoverished. Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich rela-tional world would be very complex to manage. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric. ( Essential Works 1: 158)

I would argue that the glib explanation Foucault provides here to account for the limited relational possibilities within the contemporary institutional framework—“because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage”—is a considerably depoliticized one. However, his point remains: the relationships and alliances made possible by established society are


limited and impoverished. It is thus that he proposes we “escape as much as possible from the type of relations that society proposes for us and try to create, in the empty space where we are, new relational possibilities” (Essential Works 1: 160). This empty space at the threshold of constituent praxis is one that has been cleared by the unrestrained attack of total cri-tique. The subject of the later Foucault’s creative practice is one that has wiped away all transcendent conceptions of being—one that has wrested itself away from itself in order to deploy itself in immanent praxis.

It is important to note that this constituent practice is necessar-ily collective in nature. As Spinoza asserts, “If two come together and unite their forces, they have jointly more power, and consequently more right over nature, than either of them alone; and the more there be that join in alliance, the more right they will collectively possess” (Political, ch. 2, par. 13).29 Through the assemblage of affective intensities and the formation of joyful relationships, the multitude simultaneously increases its power to act (potentia(potentia( ) and disrupts the institutional mechanisms of command. By plowing “slantwise” furrows in the soil of society—furrows that will be incessantly turned over in praxis—the multitude can sow the seeds of virtuality and thereby, through its living labor, create the conditions of possibility to suture them to reality; the multitude can begin cultivating and expanding its power, unseparated from what it can do.

Foucault’s passions lead him from Nietzschean insurrectional critique to constituent power. In his early work, he violently dismantles the epistemological foundations of the modern subject—revealing thereciprocal processes by which the generalized subject is simultaneously constituted as a knowing subject and as an object of knowledge. Through his analyses of discursive practices and techniques of domination, the early Foucault tears the subject away from itself, dispenses with its tran-scendent functions, and reduces it to an immanent plane. In his later work, he shifts his theoretical approach to the subject by examining the forms and modalities through which the subject constitutes itself as an object of power/knowledge. Through his investigations of technologies of the self, the later Foucault bursts open the affective and relational virtuali-ties immanent to the subject. These affective virtualities exist through-out the social sphere and, as the later Foucault acknowledges, can be actualized through the art of existence—through the creative practices of the subject:


[A]ffection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship [are] things that our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alli-ances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force. I think that’s what makes homosexuality “disturbing”: the homosexualmode of life, much more than the sexual act itself. To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another—there’s the problem. The institution is caught in a con-tradiction; affective intensities traverse it which at one and the same time keep it going and shake it up [. . .]. These relations short-circuit it and introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or habit. ( Essential Works 1: 136–37)

Points of resistance exist virtually everywhere in the network of power established by contemporary social institutions.30 The affective intensi-ties of the multitude are what simultaneously fuel social production and disrupt the institutional mechanisms of control. Potentia, or the art of existence, gives rise to a notion of resistance that is radically distinguished from the dialectic. Where the dialectic valorizes the sad passions, potentiapresents itself as a joyful practice; where the dialectic posits affirmation as the theoretical and practical product of the suffering of the negative, potentia presents affirmation as that which destroys the will to nothing-ness that fuels the negative dialectic; and whereas the dialectic seeks transformation through the negation of the negation, potentia constitutes transformation as the affirmation of affirmation. “Do not think,” Foucaultaffirms, “that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revo-lutionary force” (preface to Deleuze and Guattari xiii–xiv). It is toward the self-productive potentiality of the multitude that Foucault’s later work moves—toward a creative militancy that enacts resistance as counter-power and rebellion as a praxis of joy.

brady thomas heiner is currently studying at the University of Padua. He is the coauthor with Ariana Mangual of “The Repressive Social Function of Schools in Racialized Communi-ties,” which appeared in States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons, edited by Joy James (St. Martin’s Press, 2002). His article “Social Death and the Relationship between Prison Abolition and Reform” is forthcoming in Social Justice.


1 This essay does not engage in any direct way with The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller.t

2 The Larousse defines the French passion : “Powerful, ardent incli-nation, attachment of someone toward what he desires with all of his forces, toward that whichhe loves with violence, with intensity, blindly [Puissant, viveinclination, attachement de quel-qu’un vers ce qu’il désire de tou-tes ses forces, vers ce qu’il aime avec violence, avec intensité, enaveugle].” This more phenom-enological definition differs fromboth English definitions in thatit brings together subject and object. Here, passion is not justa powerful emotion within the subject or the condition of beingacted upon by external forces, butthe powerful attachment of thesubject to its desired object.

3 The AHD also defines subjec-tive as “[e]xisting only in the mind; illusory,” and “[r]elating y,” and “[r]elating yto the real nature of something; essential” (my emphasis). Accord-ingly, that which is subjective issimultaneously truth and illusion, essence and appearance. Here, again, we see the antagonisminherent to the traditional con-cept of the subject—an antago-nism that, as we shall see, haspassion at its heart.

4 “An experience,” Foucault asserts, “is something that one comes outof transformed” (Essential Works3: 239).

5 Didier Eribon points out:For Foucault [. . .]

insubordination had to take the double path of literature and theory. On the one hand there was his fascination with writers whodealt with “transgression,” the“limit-experience” of excess and expenditure (Bataille’s dépense); e); the exaltation he would feel on

Notes reading Bataille, Maurice Blan-chot, and Klossowski and on dis-covering the “possibility of a mad philosopher,” whose fiery wordsturned dialectics and positivism to ashes as he described it in “Pré -face à la transgression” [trans. in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice ]. On the other hand, there was his examination at a histori-cal level of the scientific status of psychological disciplines, the med-ical gaze, and then the established human sciences as a whole. (28)

6 “[M]adness in the classical period ceased to be the sign of anotherworld [. . .]. [I]t became the para-doxical manifestation of non-being” (Madness 115).

7 “That everything is alwayssaid in every age is perhaps Foucault’s greatest historicalprinciple: behind the curtain there is nothing to see, but itwas all the more important eachtime to describe the curtain, orthe base, since there was noth-ing either behind or beneath it” (Deleuze, Foucault 54).t

8 In my use of the term “desire,” I depart slightly from Foucault. He favors “pleasure” to “desire” because of the association desirehas with a model of representa-tion that is premised upon lack, one which implies a libidinal drive that must be liberatedor satisfied. I employ the term “desire” in the spirit in which Deleuze and Guattari use the term—that is, not in order toinvoke an essential notion of being that must be liberated,but to emphasize the aspect of production that a term like “plea-sure” fails to grasp. “[P]leasure interrupts the positivity of desire and the constitution of its plane of immanence [Le plaisir vient interrompre la positivité du désir et la constitution d’un plan d’im-manence]” (Deleuze, “Désir et


plaisir” 64). See also Deleuze andGuattari.

9 “The moment when, together, the work of art and madness are bornand fulfilled is the beginning of the time when the world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is” (Madness 289).

10 Foucault acknowledged this dilemma in his address to theCollège de France in 1970 whenhe said,

[O]ur age [. . .] is attempting to f lee Hegel [. . .]. But truly to escape Hegel involvesan exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detachourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously per-haps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. Wehave to determine the extent towhich our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.(Archaeology(Archaeology ( 235)

11 “The famous dialectical aspect of the master-slave relationshipdepends on the fact that power isconceived not as a will to powerbut as a representation of power, representation of superiority, recognition by ‘the one’ of thesuperiority of ‘the other’”; “The notion of representation poisons philosophy: it [. . .] constitutes theworst, most mediocre and most base interpretation of power”(Deleuze, Nietzsche 10, 81).

12 At this juncture we must recog-nize the limits of textual critique in this constitutive process. As I will argue below, the active affec-tions are foundational to the con-stituent notion of power nascently developed by the later Foucault.

Thus, it is through the accumula-tion of joyful passions, through the formation of affirming rela-tionships, that the multitude expands its strength to a point where it can “leap” beyond itself. Deployment of the critical oraesthetic text is simply one (lim-ited) practice among many in theproduction of the limit-experi-ence. As Deleuze asserts, “How do we arrive at our power of action?As long as we retain a speculativeviewpoint, the problem remains insoluble” (Expressionism 281). The affirmation enacted in total critique is only the manifesta-tion of a force becoming active. In gorder to truly possess our power of action—that is to say, in orderfor our power of action to become capable of producing affections that are themselves active—we must first increase our power through the accumulation of joy-ful passions.

13 We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes,” it “represses,” it “cen-sors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it “conceals.” In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. ( Discipline 194)

[R]elations of power are not in a position of exterior-ity with respect to other types of social relationships (economic processes, knowledge relation-ships, sexual relations), but areimmanent to the latter [. . .]. [T]hey have a directly produc-tive role, wherever they come intoplay. ( Sexuality 1: 94)

14 “Negativity as negativity of thepositive is one of Nietzsche’s antidialectical discoveries” (Deleuze, Nietzsche 198).

15 It is reactive forces that express themselves in oppo-sition, the will to nothingness that


expresses itself in the labour of the negative. The dialectic is the natural ideology of ressentimentfand bad conscience. It is thought in the perspective of nihilism and from the standpoint of reactive forces. It is a fundamentally Chris-tian way of thinking, from one end to the other; powerlessness tocreate new ways of thinking and feeling. (Deleuze, Nietzsche 159, original emphasis)

16 Three ideas definethe dialectic: the idea of a power of the negative as a theoretical principle manifested in opposi-tion and contradiction; the ideathat suffering and sadness have a value, the valorization of the “sad passions,” as a practical principlemanifested in splitting and tear-ing apart; the idea of positivity as a theoretical and practical product of negation itself. It is not exaggeration to say that thewhole of Nietzsche’s philosophy, in its polemical sense, is the attack on these three ideas. (Deleuze, Nietzsche 195–96)

17 Dialectic loves and controls history, but it has a his-tory itself which it suffers fromand which it does not control. The meaning of history and the dia-lectic together is not the realiza-tion of reason, freedom or man as species, but nihilism, nothing but nihilism. (Deleuze, Nietzsche 161)

18 Foucault acknowledged this shift in a talk he gave in 1981.

If one wants to ana-lyze the genealogy of the subject in Western civilization, one must take into account not only tech-niques of domination but also techniques of the self [. . .]. When I was studying asylums, prisons,and so on, I perhaps insisted too much on the techniques of domi-nation. What we call “discipline” is something really important in this kind of institution; but it

is only one aspect of the art of governing people in our societies. Having studied the field of power relations taking techniques of domination as a point of depar-ture, I would like, in the years tocome, to study power relations starting from the techniques of the self. ( Essential Works 1: 177)

19 In part 5 of his Ethics, Spinozamakes a distinction between two types of love that I think is analo-gous to Foucault’s distinctionbetween laetitia and voluptas. On the one hand, he claims that “oursorrows and misfortunes mainlyproceed from too much love toward an object which is subject to many changes, and which wecan never possess.” Spinoza con-trasts this precarious love withpotentia : “[Potentia ] begets a lovetoward an immutable and eter-nal object of which we are reallypartakers—a love which therefore cannot be vitiated by the defectswhich are in common love, butwhich can always become greaterand greater, occupy the largest part of the mind and thoroughly affect it” (Ethics 5: 10 scholium).I will soon return to Spinoza toaddress more directly his notion of potentia and his related con-ception of the “sad passions” and the “joyful passions.” I men-tion them here merely to motion toward a certain affinity between the later Foucault and Spinoza—an affinity that will prove morefecund later in my analysis.

20 “The aphrodisia are the acts, gestures, and contacts that pro-duce a certain form of pleasure” (Sexuality 2: 40).y

21 It is on the subject of pathosthat Deleuze connects Spinoza’s theory of affections to Nietzsche’s will to power:

[T]he will to power is manifested as the capacity for being affected. It is difficult to


deny the Spinozist inspirationhere. Spinoza [. . .] wanted acapacity for being affected to cor-respond to every quantity of force. The more ways a body could be affected the more force it had. Thiscapacity measures the force of abody or expresses its power [. . .]. “The will to power is not a being not a becoming, but a pathos .” ( Nietzsche 62)This Nietzschean pathos is notcharacterized by a body “suf-fering” from passions; on the contrary, pathos here serves an active, a productive, a constitutivefunction.

22 Deleuze implicitly connects Foucault’s conception of power toSpinoza’s theory of the affects:

An exercise of power shows up as an affect, since forcedefines itself by its very power to affect other forces (to which it is related) and to be affected by other forces. To incite, provokeand produce (or any term drawnfrom an analogous list) constitute active affects , while to be incited,provoked, to be induced to pro-duce, to have a “useful” effect, con-stitute reactive affects . (Deleuze, Foucault 71, my emphasis)

23 Of course, many encounters are characterized by a variegatedexchange of both sad and joyful passions. For example, in a meet-ing with the forces of anotherbody, a quantity of my body’s forces may concatenate with a quantity of those outside forces while another quantity of my forces is decomposed by it.

24 Balibar argues that Spinoza moves toward a conception of what Balibar calls “transindividu-ality.”

Any individual’s conservation (or stability, there-fore identity) must be compatible with a “continuous regeneration” of its own constituent parts, i.e.,

what in modern terms we would call a regulated inward and out-ward flow, or material exchange with other individuals [. . .]. [This exchange] results from a rela-tionship of forces (potentiae(potentiae( ), or e), or a balanced equilibrium between destructive and constructiveeffects of the exchange. But there is more to be said. We cannot be con-tent with the idea that “exchange” takes place between different indi-viduals: we must indicate what is actually exchanged . Spinoza’s idea is simple, but daring: what is exchanged are parts of the individuals under consideration, that is, “regeneration” means that a given individual (let’s call it “I”) continuously abandons some part(s) of itself , while at the sametime continuously incorporating some part(s) of others (let’scall them “they”), provided thissubstitution leaves a certain “pro-portion” (or essence) invariant.(18, original emphasis)

25 “Spinoza does not mean thatall passion disappears: what disappears is not the passive joyitself, but all the passions, all thedesires linked to it and connected with the idea of the external thing (the passions of love, and so on)” (Deleuze, Expressionism 284).

26 See Althusser 212–19. See also Negri, “Notes” 56–58.

27 [Spinozian parallel-ism] overturns the moral principleby which the actions of [the body]are the passions of [the mind, and vice versa] [. . .]. What is a passion in the mind is also a passion in the body, what is an action in the mind is also an action in the body.(Deleuze, Expressionism 256,original emphasis)

[W]e must no longer try to situate passion in a causal succession, or halfway between the corporeal and the spiritual;


passion indicates, at a new, deeper level, that the soul and the body are in a perpetual metaphori-cal relation in which qualities have no need to be communicated because they are already common to both; and in which phenomenaof expression are not causes,quite simply because soul and body are always each other’s immediate expression. (Foucault, Madness 88)

28 “The rallying point for the coun-terattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures” (Sexuality 1: 157).y

29 Spinoza’s expression “If two cometogether and unite their forces” resolutely differs from any con-tractual relation. Here Spinoza describes a tendency that is, before all else, a physical aggre-gation of bodily forces that share common characteristics. Thereis no conventional renunciationof natural rights, no limitation of our power to act. Spinoza’s stateof reason does not sublate or limitnatural rights (which is to say, our capacity for action); rather, it“raises them to a power without

which such rights would remain unreal and abstract” (Deleuze,Expressionism 264).

30 Unfortunately, although Foucault acknowledged this fact—“pointsof resistance are present every-where in the power network”(Sexuality 1: 95)—he rarely spokeyto the issues and possibilities of resistance directly, and never at great length. In fact, this absencehas facilitated the many critiquesasserting that Foucault’s theory of power forecloses the possibil-ity of substantive sociopolitical change. Nevertheless, Foucault’s theoretical explorations of thesubject should serve as pointsof departure for future analyses on the subject of resistance and counterproduction—analyses which might incite and enhanceexperimentation on the plane of political practice. The work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—which is indispensable tothe arguments presented here—isjust one example of the potentiali-ties that can be opened up by thispath of analysis. For example, seeNegri’s Insurgencies and Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Labor of Dionysus. Also see Hardt.

Althusser, Louis. The Future Lasts Forever. Ed. Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang. r. Ed. Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang. rTrans. Richard Veasey. New York: New P, 1993.

Balibar, Étienne. “Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality.” Mededelingen van-wege het Spinozahuis 71. Eburon Delft, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Désir et plaisir.” Magazine Littéraire 325 (Oct. 1994): 59–65.

. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone, 1992.

. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia UP, y. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia UP, y1983.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Helen R. Lane, et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.

“Emotion.” Def. 1. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th ed. 2000.

Works Cited


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Negri, Antonio. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Trans. Maurizia Boscagli. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.

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. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. Trans.Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

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