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Desire & PleasureGilles Deleuzetrans. Melissa McMahon1997
Editorial foreword by Francois EwaldThe following text is not just unpublished. There is something intimate, secret, confidentialabout it. It consists of a series of notes - classed from A to H - that Gilles Deleuze hadentrusted to me in order that I give them to Michel Foucault. It was in 1977. Foucault had just published La Volonté de savoir, the introduction to a Histoire de la Sexualité whichchallenged the play of categories through which the struggles of sexual liberation reflecteditself. The reception of the book, poorly understood, was contemporary with a sort of crisis inFoucault, already wholly bent to the task of bringing out of himself, and converting himself to, what would become the problematic of L'usage de plaisirs and the Souci de soi. GillesDeleuze, sensitive to what he perceives as a suffering in his friend, thus writes up these notes:therein he gives the account of his convergences and divergences with Foucault. It is not amatter of a critique, even less of a polemic, but of an invitation, entirely imbued with thesincerity of friendship, to take up again a dialogue which had been interrupted.Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault became acquainted in 1962 at Clermont-Ferrand, at thehouse of Jules Vuillemin. Gilles Deleuze has just published his Nietzsche et la philosophieand Foucault is seeking to have him nominated (against Roger Garaudy) for a position at theUniversity of Clermont-Ferrand where he teaches. It is the beginning of a long friendship.Deleuze invites Foucault to the Colloque de Royaumont dedicated to Nietzsche and which hehas been given the task of organising. It is together that they take, in 1966, responsibility for the French version of the new Colli-Montari edition of Nietzsche at Gallimard. When Deleuze publishes Différence et Répétition and Logique du sens in 1969, Foucault reviews them in Le Nouvel Observateur and in an article in Critique where, according to a formula which will become famous, he declares: "But one day, perhaps, the century will be deleuzian". Deleuze,on his side, reviews L'Archéologie du savoir in Critique. In the post-May '68 period, Deleuze joins Foucault at the heart of the éGroupe Information Prisons (G.I.P). They are often seen
 
together at the anti-judiciary demonstrations at the beginning of the 70's. The publication of L'Anti-Oedipe in 1972, an "extraordinary profusion of new notions and surprise concepts",shows Deleuze to be one of the great thinkers of the post-May '68 period. In the aftermath of this publication, L'Arc dedicates an issue to him: therein figures an important interview wherethe two philosophers come together to define in common the new status of the intellectual, of his work and of his relationship with the struggles. L'Anti-Oedipe, published three year beforeSurveiller et Punir, has no doubt been an arresting work for Foucault, who soon proposes hisown version of Oedipus ("La Vérité et les formes juridiques")2, a text and a theme that he willtake up several times again. In 1977, Foucault prefaces the American edition of L'Anti-Oedipe, presenting it, in the categories which will be the same as those of his last work, as an"Introduction to non-fascist life". Deleuze reviews Surveiller et punir in Critique (no.343).Then the dialogue is interrupted. Foucault will never see Deleuze again.One of his last wishes, when he is hospitalised in June 1984, will be to see him again. Thesenotes are thus the last text of the Foucault-Deleuze exchange, a call which went withoutresponse. In them can be found, beyond the friendship between two men, all that can bewished of the dialogue between two philosophers.AOne of the essential theses of Surveiller et Punir (SP) was concerning the systems [dispositifs]of power. It seems essential to me in three respects:1. In itself and in relation to "leftism": profound political novelty of this conception of power,in opposition to all theory of the State.2. In relation to Michel, because it permitted him to go beyond the duality of discursive andnon-discursive formations, which subsisted in L'Archéologie du Savoir (AS ), and to explainhow the two types of formations distributed or articulated themselves segment by segment(without being reducible to the other or resembling each other, etc.). It was not a matter of suppressing the distinction, but of finding a reason of their relations.3. Leading to a precise consequence: the systems of power proceeded not by repression nor byideology. Thus a rupture with an alternative that everybody had more or less accepted. Insteadof repression or ideology, SP formed a concept of normalisation, and of disciplines.BThis thesis on the systems of power seemed to me to have two directions, not at allcontradictory, but distinct. In any case, these systems were irreducible to a State apparatus.But according to one direction, they consisted in a diffuse, heterogenous multiplicity, micro-
 
systems. According to another direction, they referred to a diagram, to a sort of abstractmachine immanent to the whole social order (such as panopticism, defined by the generalfunction of seeing without being seen, applicable to a given multiplicity). It was like twodirections of micro-analysis, equally important, since the second showed that Michel was notsatisfied with a "dissemination".CVolonté de Savoir (VS) makes a new step, in relation to SP. The point of view remains exactlythe same: neither repression nor ideology. But, to go quickly, the systems of power are nolonger content to be normalising, they tend to be constitutive (of sexuality). They are nolonger content to form knowledges, they are constitutive of truth (truth of power). They nolonger refer to "categories", negative despite everything (madness, delinquency as object of confinement), but to a positive category (sexuality). This last point is confirmed by theQuinzaine interview 3, beginning of page 5. In this regard, I believe then in a new advance in the analysis in VS. The danger is: does Michel return to an analogy of the "constitutivesubject", and why does he feel the need to resurrect the truth, even if he makes a new conceptof it? These are not my own questions, but I think that these two false questions will be posed,as long as Michel will not have explained further.DA first question for me was the nature of the micro-analysis that Michel established at themoment of SP. Between "micro" and "macro", the difference was evidently not of size, in thesense that micro-systems would concern small groups (the family has no less extension thanany other formation). Neither was it a matter of an extrinsic dualism, since there are micro-systems immanent to the State, and segments of the State apparatus also penetrated the micro-systems - complete immanence of the two dimensions. Must we then understand that thedifference is of scale? One page of VS (132) explicitly challenges this interpretation. But this page seems to refer the macro to the strategic model, and the micro to the tactical model.Which bothers me; since Michel's micro-systems seem very much to me to have a strategicdimension (especially if one takes into account this diagram from which they areinseparable)-. Another direction would be that of the "relations of force", as determining themicro: cf. notably the interview in Quinzaine . But Michel, I believe, has not yet developedthis point: his original conception of relations of force, what he calls relation of force, andwhich must be a concept as new as all the rest.
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