Original Article

Foucault and the logic of dialectics

John Grant
Department of Political Science, Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada E-mails: johngrant@alumni.qmul.net; jgrant@brocku.ca An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Essex in June 2007.

Abstract This paper reorganizes our understanding of dialectical thought and

the work of Michel Foucault by addressing each one through the other. Foucault explicitly repudiates dialectics, and yet the dialectical implications found in his positions on power and resistance offer a contrasting understanding of his work. Although I do not claim that Foucault is in fact a dialectician, I show how he participates in dialectical thought through his programmatic arguments and in his genealogical histories. This requires elaborating an appropriate logic of dialectical relations that cannot be reduced to a logic of contradiction. The result is that a rapprochement between Foucault and proponents of dialectics becomes possible. It gives recourse to Foucault for those who see dialectics as a requirement of radical politics, while also providing a platform for future research that reconnects the study of power relations with dialectical themes such as experience, liberation and ideology. Contemporary Political Theory (2010) 9, 220238. doi:10.1057/cpt.2009.3 Keywords: Foucault; dialectics; power; resistance; Hegel; Adorno

Introduction
Recent accounts of dialectical thought present stark oppositions. Gilles Deleuzes classic polemic against dialectics in Nietzsche and Philosophy suggested that dialectics has acted as a regressive historical force by providing a refuge in thought for the weakwilled (Deleuze, 1986). More recently, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have been judicious enough to admit that dialectics once offered considerable resources but, ironically, has been outflanked by historical developments (namely the emergence of Empire and postmodern society) that it was thought to be uniquely equipped to make sense of (Hardt and Negri, 2000, pp. 114137). The ongoing success of the Adorno industry usually has the merit of considering the relevance of dialectical criticism to social transformation, and often finds considerable potential, even if there is a tendency to beg the question. Instead of having to choose between these disparate positions, what if a radical divide between dialectics and one of its
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most severe critics Michel Foucault can be bridged? If a logic of dialectics that avoids conceptual reductionism is found to operate in Foucaults work, is it possible that dialectical critical theory can then account for a number of Foucauldian theses regarding power relations without renouncing a commitment to liberation through revolution? Foucaults animosity toward dialectics can be traced back beyond Deleuze ` to the influence of Alexandre Kojeve. Challenging the rationale of Foucaults entrenchment provides an opportunity to reconsider his theorizing of power, resistance, and struggle, which yields implications for dialectics and, as I will show, dialectical implications. Much of my argument will focus on similarities between Foucault and dialectical thinkers such as G.W.F. Hegel and Theodor W. Adorno. Beatrice Hanssen and Judith Butler have made similar comparisons previously, and I refer to their work to help build an ongoing line of inquiry, but also to articulate a more compelling relationship between Foucault and dialectics. Hegels work remains the ground-zero of dialectics, which is why he figures so prominently, even if subsequent thinkers such as Adorno are required to articulate a more modern dialectical approach. What is at stake intellectually is a reordering of the relations between different theoretical traditions. If Foucault is compatible, in specific ways, with a sophisticated dialectics that is Hegelian-inspired, it would go some way to constructing the basis for a more productive engagement in the future between, for example, Foucauldians and Deleuzians, on the one hand, and critical theorists (perhaps Zizek and Jameson most importantly) on the other. The main political consequence I want to draw out involves the dialectical relationship between juridical and productive power. Foucault is clear that he thinks a politics of liberation is incoherent. Subjects are always-already constructed by power, so there can be no appeal to an originary nature or state of being from which we are estranged. Although the substance of this argument is convincing, its political implications are exaggerated. By addressing how juridical and productive power incite and challenge one another, it becomes possible to articulate the rationale of a politics of liberation and even revolution, but without reviving a crude dialectics based on determinist teleologies or alienation from a supposedly primordial nature. Escaping Foucaults anti-dialectics Foucaults hostility to dialectics is well known. It is inspired in large part by how he understands the relationship between power and resistance, and by his concern with struggle, which he thinks must be thought of in terms of a logic free of the sterilizing constraints of the dialectic (Foucault, 1980, p. 144). Foucault takes the position that the dialectic forces events into a predetermined conceptual architecture, domesticating what is otherwise
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aleatory and reducing a hazardous reality to nothing more than a formula or a Hegelian skeleton (Foucault, 1977, p. 115; Foucault, 1980, pp. 184186). In other words, Foucault tells us, if one wants to take seriously the assertion that struggle is at the core of relations of power, one must take into account the fact that the good old logic of contradiction is no longer sufficient y (Foucault, 1980, p. 164). Foucault did not arrive at this position on his own. French philosophys renewed interest in Hegel was ignited by multiple sources, notably Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite, but for Foucault, it was the influence of ` Deleuze and especially Kojeve that was most formative. ` The usual argument against Kojeve depicts his reading of Hegel as an idiosyncratic, overly anthropological interpretation, in which the reliance on the master and slave motif loses any proportion to its place in the Phenomenology (see Rockmore, 1995, pp. 3138). The implication, which is ` not in fact true, is that Kojeve either disregarded or was blind to everything in the Phenomenology that addresses the ontological unfolding of the categories ` of thought from the standpoint of Being (Kojeve, 1969, p. 259). However, as ` Kojeve was taken to be a largely reliable guide to Hegel, his arguments were ` difficult to ignore. Refracted through Kojeve, Hegel is presented as the bearer of epochal and unbelievable truths. For example, he is made to look as if he ` thinks self-knowledge is consonant with world-historical knowledge (Kojeve, 1969, p. 162). Later, Napoleons conquests are said to serve for Hegel as evidence for the end of Historys long narrative, or more substantively, that moment when we give up all bloody Fighting and creative Work ` (191; 35). Kojeve even asserts that classical philosophy, which began with Plato, ends with Hegel (8889), apparently ignoring how the Phenomenology concludes with the insight that in light of what Spirit has learned about itself, it H must continue on as if starting its journey over again (Hegel, 1977, 808). Only a strenuous disregard for textual evidence could find in this The End of History. Nevertheless, Hegels apparent sterilization of history and thought guaranteed Foucaults opposition. His rather unsubtle appreciation of ` dialectical thought finds its roots here too. Although Kojeve is actually at ` pains to downplay the importance of dialectics for Hegel (Kojeve, 1969, p. 259), Foucault could never separate a mode of thinking from its results. For him, dialectical thought is not extraneous to Hegel, but rather must be seen as culpable in an idealist version of history that elevates the struggles of bare existence to the status of an unfolding destiny. It is for all of the reasons I have outlined that Foucault made unequivocal statements about how it was necessary to free ourselves from Hegel from the opposition of predicates, from contradiction and negation, from all of dialectics (Foucault, 1977, p. 186). Many of the objections made against dialectics are captured in the familiar equation that dialectics equals teleology. Part of my intention is to break this
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equation. Those who are convinced by it as Foucault was cannot help but view dialectics as thoroughly compromised by a compulsion to find a picture of destiny in any event or historical conjuncture. Perhaps, though, the problem is not with teleology as such, but with the differences between what I will call its determinist and discrete forms. Determinist teleology involves attributing a predetermined purpose and unalterable course to the unfolding of existence (whether to that of a particular acorn or to world history). Discrete teleology involves different arguments. It admits that many things strive to reach particular ends and only those ends, but insists that their potential to do so is determined entirely according to their lived circumstances. Striving toward an end is not the same as expecting an unalterable and organic sequence of events to deliver it without fail. Nor does discrete teleology refuse the useful argument that history has occupied various determinable paths, without going so far as to claim that any of them were predetermined to follow a precise historical succession. The decisive differences that separate discrete from determinist teleology should be evident. The former understands that our movement through time might include progress, whereas the latter sees a steady advance. The discrete form prioritizes contingency instead of inevitability, it identifies tendencies without divining the future and it takes events to be intelligible short of being comprehensively knowable. It is worth mentioning here that one possible model of discrete teleology can be found in Walter Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History, which at its most persuasive offers an image of history that is bristling with both opportunity and danger. It is by managing to amputate every last vestige of irresistible progress from this image of history There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism (Benjamin, 1969, p. 256) that we can begin to understand historical progression. If this distinction is broadly acceptable then one might fairly want to know if either type of teleology is also a kind of historicism (for there is surely no single definition for this term either). Determinist teleology is equivalent to the type of historicism attacked by Karl Popper, where the unpredictability of events is explained away as owing to part of an unbreakable historical plan. The actions of individuals are thought to be irrelevant and are construed as nothing more than effects of historys unfolding. Discrete teleology avoids such implications, but still can be indicted on the grounds of an alternative historicism. If determinist teleology is a type of historical universalism, it is possible that discrete teleology is a type of historical particularism. This variant of historicism denies the possibility of successive historical developments. Instead, it places all its emphasis of inquiry on a particular event or phenomenon, without then projecting them onto a backdrop of a more expansive historical narrative. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault addresses his critics by anticipating the charge of careless historicism, according to which he ignores
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the hard facts of sex and biology in favour of particular and therefore secondary and unessential aspects of sexuality (Foucault, 1990, pp. 150151). Foucault responds that as the biological and the historical are intertwined rather than consecutive, it is a mistake to think that sex is an autonomous agency which secondarily produces manifold effects of sexuality (Foucault, 1990, pp. 155; 152). Nothing in this line of argument contains any characteristics of historical universalism or determinist teleology as I have described them. However, Foucault did not reduce himself to historical particularism, either. On the contrary, he aligned himself with what I have described as discrete teleology. Dialectical thought shares this alignment, at least once the old equation that links dialectics with determinist teleology is broken. In short, there is a shared emphasis on historical developments and tendencies beyond isolated moments, which are analyzed through the specific relations of power and resistance that characterize their histories. The point, then, is not to fear that freeing ourselves from teleology drops us into the pit of historicism (in either of its senses), but rather to see that avoiding historicism helps to establish a useful notion of teleology. It would be fair to assume from the statements I quoted earlier that Foucault did not consider dialectics to have any great importance for his work. This makes it all the more surprising that the following admission was made after dialectics had apparently been disregarded. On many points I am thinking especially of the relations between dialectics, genealogy and strategy I am still working and dont know whether I am going to get anywhere (Foucault, 1988a, p. 101). Foucaults uncertainty provides an opening to consider his work in light of a more subtle and sophisticated understanding of dialectics. The positions I have articulated regarding teleology and historicism provide greater clarity about dialectics as an historical phenomenon and as a type of critical inquiry, helping to set a broader context for reevaluating Foucault. Given how Foucault interpreted Hegel, it is ironic that they have both been accused of authoring closed systems. In one case, impersonal relations of power operate as fully determining and unassailable, and in the other case the development of consciousness is constant and unyielding, with nothing counting against it. The evidence I will present from Foucault offers sharp contrast to such a reading by reminding us that even when power relations seem to have become unalterable, we must hear the distant roar of battle (Foucault, 1979, p. 308). Hegel does not lack for famous statements either, but the one most appropriate to match Foucaults riposte actually comes from Adorno: Hegels philosophy murmurs and rustles (Adorno, 1993, p. 51). It does so because it is dialectical. Adorno explains his description of Hegel by charting the turn in dialectics from identity to non-identity. In a process that parallels power and resistance, non-identity is generated by the very act of identification. But rather than being the strict opposite or Other of identity,
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non-identity is the undoing of this type of relational consistency. As material reality exceeds and overflows the conceptual, non-identity requires an alternative, rebalanced relationship between subject and object. The subjects priority is revoked, while the apparent being-in-itself of the concept is reconnected to the antagonistic material reality it supposedly represents. For Adorno, the pervasive negativity of the dialectical conflicts in Hegels philosophy refuses the order of a reconciled unity. As Hegel put it in his Encyclopaedia, thinking is always the negation of what we have immediately H before us (Hegel, 1975, 12). This insight does not amount only to some epistemological curiosity, as the exertions of consciousness are only too real. Consciousness of life, of its existence and activity, is only an agonizing over H this existence and activity (Hegel, 1977, 209). Indeed, Hegel does not ignore how, for the subject, the ontological unfolding of consciousness is experienced as if all its defences have broken down, that every part of its being has been H tortured on the rack and every bone broken (Hegel, 1977, 539).1 Whereas Foucault would be unpersuaded, certain that the small tragedies of consciousness would be overcome in Hegels reconciliation of mind and world, Adorno discovered and constructed an alternative dialectics. Hegels idealism failed to settle the differences between subject and object or idea and society because, according to Adorno, non-identity emerges unpacifiable (Adorno, 1993, p. 31). The contradictions described by Hegels philosophy end up revealing the contradictions in his philosophy. The disjunctions between concept and object compel an engagement with material conditions, the experience of which makes it possible to organize the move that sees philosophy and social critique become entwined in dialectics, as Adorno explains. Dialectical contradiction is experienced in the experience of society. Hegels own construction, formulated in terms of the philosophy of identity, requires that contradiction be grasped as much from the side of the object as from the side of the subject; it is in the dialectical contradiction that there crystallizes a concept of experience that points beyond absolute idealism. It is the concept of antagonistic totality. (1993, p. 78) Even when Hegels dialectical philosophy is revealed as inadequate, its richness illuminates what Foucault did not believe: that the trials of consciousness implicate those of an entire society. These trials are experienced not as contradictions, however, but as antagonisms. Antagonism articulates a sense of opposition, hostility, and even suffering, which contradiction alone often cannot convey. Hence the materialist implications in Hegels account of the agony that occurs as the pursuit of identity repeatedly fails. It is not simply
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logic or emotion that compels such a response, but our physical experience of what we live through. As Adorno knew, the physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different (Adorno, 1973, p. 203). Sceptics should not fear a renewed fixation with contradictions. This is merely another equation to be broken; just as dialectics does not equal determinist teleology, neither does it equal contradiction. Explicit in my reading of Foucault is a more complex version of dialectics that does not raise its hand always with the same answer to everything it addresses. Even in Adorno, who never tired of analyzing contradiction, it was not elevated onto a conceptual throne. Instead, contradiction and antagonism are shown to belong to different orders of problems in their own specific manifestations, although being equally indicative of the same general ones. Whereas contradiction is often restricted to features of our thought, antagonism occurs on a real, existing material level. Social antagonism therefore cannot be reduced to the logical category of contradiction, but it remains as symptomatic of contradiction as contradiction is reflective of antagonism. Capitalist exchange relations remain one of the most profound examples. Exchange is the social model of the principle [of identity], and without the principle there would be no exchange; it is through exchange that non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical (Adorno, 1973, p. 146, translation modified). For Adorno, identity becomes the bleach of difference, reducing objects to their respective exchange value and individual actions to what they can demand by way of compensation. In the midst of the identifying power of capitalism, the dissonance of dialectical non-identity is a point of resistance. The justification of capitalism presumes an identity between its promised achievements including individual freedom, efficiency and equal opportunity and the reality it has accomplished. Yet the increasing inability to imagine what being free might be like in a non-capitalist society tells us about what freedom amounts to in a capitalist one. Immediate realities tell us even more. Grinding inequalities, sprawling slums, slave-like wage labour and environmental degradation constitute the fault lines between the massive capacity of productive forces and the exploitative relations that support them. Attempts to stitch the identity of capitalism back together result in an unresolvable contradiction that finds its correlate in an antagonistic society (Adorno, 1998, p. 156). Although the former applies to the logical order of identity and the latter to material existence, together they constitute both a description and a critique of our present conditions. Foucaults opposition to dialectics is confronted directly by Adornos negative dialectics on two crucial points. The priority of identity is replaced by non-identity, and the logic of contradiction is revealed to be an inadequate shorthand for a constellation of concepts that include antagonism, difference
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and negativity. Released from the conceptual stasis and determinist teleology that Foucault sees, dialectics is free to undertake the type of analysis it is supposedly incapable of conducting, including how our society operates through ongoing dialectical struggles of power and resistance. The next section presents the case for the existence of a dialectical sensibility in Foucault, and throughout the rest of the paper I situate Foucault in relation to Hegel and Adorno in order to facilitate a concluding (yet preliminary) statement on the future implications for dialectics.

Discovering the dialectical in Foucault In the early 1970s, Foucault began theorizing a novel relationship between power and resistance. He eschewed the common belief in a juridical, zero-sum calculus, where power and resistance are antithetical. Instead Foucault sought to demonstrate how the operational logic of power relations establishes a dependence between power and resistance. In fact, resistance itself is taken to be an instance of power. The reason we refer to resistance is to designate it as a non-dominant instance of power that is opposed to the present configuration of power relations. As I will show, it is a relationship that is both productive and juridical. In his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault explains how the body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances (Foucault, 1984, p. 87). Although the body is malleable, it cannot be transformed endlessly or even easily. To use Foucaults example of work and rest, it is rare for workers to change easily from a day shift to a night shift. The body adheres to established hours and rhythms of working, eating, and resting, in effect resisting the changes that come with working through the night. This relationship of power and resistance is an immanent one for Foucault because it is internal to a specific social formation. In Foucaults words, y there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised (Foucault, 1980, p. 142). Foucault thinks that power incites resistance and that resistance motivates greater power. This compels him to assert that resistances are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite (Foucault, 1990, p. 96). Further, in the same way that resistance is never absent from power, we are never outside or free from power relations. What becomes more important than power as such is the nature of specific relations of power. Foucault considers power to be something that is always dangerous because it can produce practices that result in exploitation or injury. Indeed, he acknowledges that it is even possible for power relations to become so
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entrenched that a state of domination takes hold where resistance is foreclosed and the possibility of reversing those relations is lost (Foucault, 1988b, p. 3). The question of reversing relations of power is an important one for Foucault. He wants it to be clear that the nature of any specific power/ resistance relationship is shifting and precarious. Take, for example, the claim in Discipline and Punish that relations of power y are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations (Foucault, 1979, p. 27). These are the qualities that might seem to undermine any reading of the power/resistance relationship as a dialectical one. Because Foucault defines dialectics as nothing other than a binary logic of contradiction, it is easy to see why he thinks that it cannot account for the complexities of power relations. On the contrary, part of what I want to show is that the full force of Foucaults resistance to dialectics does not prevent the complexity of struggles from being understood dialectically. Foucaults view that power and resistance are compatriots, with the latter inscribed in the former, has implications for our understanding of social struggles that are unmistakably dialectical. These implications are particularly evident in Foucaults important later essay, The Subject and Power. In this essay, Foucault describes how any study of power relations ought to begin by examining resistance because it indicates exactly those points where relations of power are exercised. As power relations have resistance inscribed in them by their very nature, it means that they are also relations of freedom insofar as they include struggle and the possibility of escape (not from power itself, but from any particular manifestation of it). Foucault contends the following: In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal (Foucault, 1982, p. 226). By translating this into a dialectical language, yet without sacrificing any of its intended meaning, my claim is that Foucault has conceived of power/resistance as a relationship that is simultaneously one of reciprocity, antagonism and production. To be more specific, power and resistance are compatriots and irreducible opposites, reliant on each other for their own existence. This mutual dependence makes for a productive relationship as power and resistance interrelate to construct a terrain of contestation and struggle. It is also an antagonistic relationship as each element offers a perpetual challenge to the arrangement of power that the other effects. Finally, there is no suprahistorical achievement toward which these ineradicable relations of power and resistance are oriented, and no assurance that they might yield any positive returns. Instead, the perpetual linking and reversal to which Foucault appeals is the epitome of a non-progressive negative dialectic and its ceaseless determinate negations, especially to the extent that there is a common concern
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with the conflict between openness and closure, qua power and reification. My description of these dialectical relations requires that we affirm what will be a scandal as much to dialecticians as to their critics: dialectics can no longer be reduced to a logic of contradiction, which is nothing more than a reductive shorthand that betrays the complexity of any real scenario. Dialectics relies on, but is not reducible to, contradiction. Other readers of Foucault have not entirely overlooked his dialectical qualities, but neither have they been elaborated sufficiently. This is the case with both Beatrice Hanssen and Judith Butler. Hanssen, whom I address first, focuses on Foucaults description of the shift from the juridical power of the Hobbesian sovereign to what he calls bio-power. Here the norm becomes more important than the law, and power becomes less concerned with granting life, as under pre-modern regimes, than with generating it through the regulation of, for example, sexual relations, birth and mortality rates, diet and hygiene (Foucault, 1990, pp. 140; 25). Hanssen suggests that Foucaults conception of the struggles that take place within relations of biopolitical production is informed by the logic of dialectical moments. To be more specific, Hanssen claims there are characteristics of Hegelian logic in Foucault. After testing the composition of Foucaults work, she finds that it draws significantly from German idealism. y according to which pushed to the limit, at the brink the negative may turn into a positive. Dispensed in sufficient quantities, counterviolence will redeem itself. In that sense, the critical violence Foucault advocated however figurative or metaphorical still operated as a dialectical tool, activating the force of negation, which, he conjectured, might bear productive or generative effects. (Hanssen, 2000, p. 52) As Hanssen supposes, similar figures of dialectical relations run throughout Hegels Phenomenology, where the contradictions in each stage of consciousness become so overwhelming that they result in ongoing negations. The nature of these negations results in the production of new stages of consciousness (or new relations of power in the case of Foucault) for the subject to negotiate. What Hanssens analysis does not elaborate is how Foucaults genealogical histories display real instances of dialectical relations. For example, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the spectacle of the scaffold and the use of public execution in the 18th century as a method of stamping an obedient fear and knowledge into the populace. Notably, he documents how this overt demonstration of state power gave rise to the very resistance that it was intended to prevent, as never did the people feel more threatened, like them [the condemned], [than] by a legal violence exercised without moderation
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or restraint (Foucault, 1979, p. 63). On execution days, the scaffold resulted in hostility toward the executioner and guards, sympathy for the condemned, along with a general milieu of illegality as work stopped, crowds gathered and the spectacle began. The main objective for the authorities became to break an emergent social solidarity. Yet out of the ceremony of the public execution, out of that uncertain festival in which violence was instantaneously reversible, it was this solidarity much more than the sovereign power that was likely to emerge with redoubled strength (Foucault, 1979, p. 63). The power of the execution incited public resistance, which was resisted in turn by police repression. This epitomizes how power and resistance intertwine in an ongoing dialectical relationship defined by reciprocal dependence, antagonism and productivity. However, Foucault is clear that the spectacle of the scaffold is an example of juridical power. And despite his insistence that power is never without resistance, when Discipline and Punish elaborates a history of disciplinary power, this emphasis on resistance quietly retreats. Does discipline achieve what other types of power cannot, namely the elimination of resistance? This is a tempting conclusion to make, especially as Foucault refers repeatedly to how the disciplines guarantee the obedience of individuals through a seamless and automatic functioning of power (Foucault, 1979, pp. 148; also, 201203, 282, 303). But resistance is always closer at hand than Foucaults accounts of disciplinary power sometimes suggest. This was notably the case in 1840, when a 13-year-old boy named Beasse stepped in front of a judge and, step by step, turned the accusations of the law into the resistance of a popular illegality. For Foucault, this act y revealed indiscipline in a systematically ambiguous manner as the disordered order of society and as the affirmation of inalienable rights. All the illegalities that the court defined as offences the accused reformulated as the affirmation of a living force: the lack of a home as vagabondage, the lack of a master as independence, the lack of work as freedom, the lack of a time-table as the fullness of days and nights. (Foucault, 1979, p. 290) Is this resistance nothing more than a reminder of youths ingenuity? Or does it suggest too that discipline and normalization firmly established by that time in the carceral system according to Foucault do not always produce docile subjects, that even a panoptic society still cannot break the dialectical companionship of power and resistance? Despite somewhat eliding this aspect of the carceral systems broader investments in society, Foucault agrees that the production of delinquency is an historical development that provokes only tentative results, no doubt because they [illegalities] have always met with
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resistance; they have given rise to struggles and provoked reaction (Foucault, 1979, p. 285). More evidence of dialectical features in Foucault can be found by turning again to The Subject and Power. Without mentioning Hegel, it is obvious that Foucault shares his concern with the struggles of life and death. Of course, Foucaults concern is with the capacity of war and biopower to rule over all of life rather than with the unfolding of consciousness. This does not, however, prevent him from adopting this Hegelian motif of life and death struggle or from putting it in a quasi-Hegelian framework. If it is true that at the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal. A relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its final moment (and the victory of one of the two adversaries) when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions. Through such mechanisms one can direct, in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable certainty, the conduct of others. For a relationship of confrontation, from the moment it is not a struggle to the death, the fixing of a power relationship becomes a target at one and the same time its fulfilment and its suspension. (1982, p. 225)2 These profound similarities with Hegel become all the more dramatic because there is a shared logic of struggle and strategies that makes sense for Foucault according to his own views on power and resistance. The masterslave dialectic with its relational logics of reciprocity and antagonism, along with its productive effects arguably had a greater impact on Foucault than on Marx. Whereas Marx used this dialectic as a model for capitalist work relations, it is generalized by Foucault and applied to all intersubjective relationships. There arent immediately given subjects of the struggle, one the proletariat, the other the bourgeoisie, he claims. Who fights against whom? We all fight each other (Foucault, 1980, p. 208). There are, nevertheless, clear differences between Foucault and Hegel. Foucault does not see the operations of power/resistance as involving contradiction, and his depiction of them just quoted is a story of reification and the closure of struggle rather than a metanarrative of progress. That said, Foucaults description of power struggles is consistent with Hegels up to the point where the relationship between the master and slave is overcome. In other words, they agree that a struggle to the death is replaced by a fixed and
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institutionalized relationship that threatens to turn into a relation of domination. As well, Foucault argues that each force in a power relationship acts as a permanent limit for the other force, which recalls Hegels discussion of determinate negation in the Encyclopaedia, where he insists that a thing is H what it is, only in and by reason of its limit (Hegel, 1975, 92). I do not take this to be just some fortuitous phrasing that supports a false line of continuity. For both Foucault and Hegel, nothing is constituted purely on its own terms, but always in relation to what limits it. Power and resistance, then, have a paradoxical relationship in that they serve as the limit of the other, and yet in doing so they motivate and incite more of what they intend to check or restrain. Such a relationship is eminently dialectical.

The dialectics of power and the return of liberation One way to refine this account of how power relations are invested with dialectical qualities is to compare it to some of Judith Butlers arguments on Foucault, which both reinforce and differentiate my own position. Of particular interest is her early text Subjects of Desire, which is notable because reading Butler backwards in this way uncovers a reverse trajectory in her work that involves an increasingly sensitive treatment of dialectical thought. Whereas Hanssen tends to stress Foucaults Hegelian affinities, Butler begins by differentiating their dialectical qualities, pointing out that Foucaults argument in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History is a critique of all philosophies of history and their teleological implications. Where Butler thinks Foucault and Hegel overlap is in their mutual insistence that their objects of study must be grasped immanently, according to their own internal logic. In his Phenomenology, Hegel goes even further than saying that the developmental transitions of consciousness occur immanently; for him, consciousness is synonymous with those transitions because it experiences the pain of their development and knows nothing outside of them. Butler thinks that Foucaults characterization of power relations shares this trait with Hegels depiction of consciousness, although she includes an important qualification. Because power does not exist apart from the various relations by which it is transmitted and transformed, it is the very process of transmission and transformation, a history of these processes, with none of the narrative coherence and closure characteristics of the Phenomenology. (Butler, 1987, p. 225) Butler reminds us if we needed reminding of Nietzsches influence on Foucault, which is especially evident in their shared genealogical arguments
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against progressivist histories. However, because Foucaults account of the immanent logic of power, resistance, and struggle remains dialectical, as I have been describing, his jettisoning of certain features attributed to Hegel, notably the presumed metanarrative of progress, is not enough to accomplish a complete break with dialectics. According to Butler: Foucault thus remains a tenuous dialectician, but his is a dialectic without a subject and without teleology, a dialectic unanchored in which the constant inversion of opposites leads not to a reconciliation in unity, but to a proliferation of opposites which come to undermine the hegemony of binary opposition itself. (1987, p. 225) Butlers claim that Foucault is a tenuous dialectician is dangerously misleading. It is an apt description insofar as his efforts to escape dialectics were not entirely successful. But it can also be taken to imply that ones dialectical credentials become suspect if one rejects the idea of a Subject,3 teleology, or a project of reconciliation. Does this mean that Adorno whose negative dialectics is meant to go beyond a proliferation of opposites by inducing a proliferation of difference or Louis Althusser who rewrote Marxist dialectics by insisting we think of history as a process without a Subject are not dialectical thinkers? Quite the opposite, the genuine dialectician rejects teleological promises or any other certainty, maintaining only the rhythm of a relentless yet contingent dialectical process. Butlers reading may move Foucault away from the more Hegelian characterization offered by Hanssen, but rather than calling into question his dialectical attributes altogether, this only places him in closer proximity to the efforts of other dialectical thinkers. On the other hand, Butlers reading also contributes to the Hegelianizing of Foucault. Take, for example, Foucaults renowned work on the historical function of the repressive hypothesis, which belongs to a juridical conception of power and has worked to mask powers productive features. It is well known that rejecting the repressive hypothesis, which holds that powers primary function is to act as a block or a prohibition, requires a similar portrayal of emancipatory principles of liberation and revolution as logically incoherent. According to this view, if the subject is an effect of power through and through, then those who pursue liberation have misrecognized what they desire: a different construction and writing of the subject rather than the freeing of an existing but dominated one. From this it would seem that the classical view of revolution as a rupture and radical reordering of socio-economic structures also fails to recognize that the primary task of radical politics is the creation of new subjectivities. Butler suggests that even if the repressive hypothesis is abandoned, the relation of juridical to productive power still involves a
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juridical distinction, inasmuch as it is analogous to the opposition between life and anti-life, affirmation and negation (Butler, 1987, p. 228). But this opposition should be understood dialectically and not in the Deleuzian fashion where life and affirmation are pitted against anti-life and negation as unrelated opposites. Just as each component of the dialectic between power and resistance relies unwillingly on its opposite, so it is the same for productive and juridical power. Part of the reason that power is productive, in Foucaults sense, is because it generates resistance. As I have shown, powers own productivity results in a juridical opponent and a juridical standoff that is never resolved, but only altered and replayed by way of the struggles that define it. What Butler and Foucault fail to recognize is that this relationship accommodates the precepts of productive power without condemning liberation politically or theoretically. The dialectical position I have described holds that liberation is not the restoration of a repressed and essential nature. In its most basic sense, liberation is the freedom from a particular set of engrained relations of power (but not from power as such), although freedom that endures also requires a qualitative change in the capacity of individuals to participate in the writing of their lives (which is also to say a qualitative change in society itself). Is this description of liberation not also one of the primary aims of resistance as Foucault would have it? The political intention of revolution described above also makes sense according to this position, especially as the radical changes that occur to socio-economic structures and relations as a result of revolution herald opportunities for the construction of new subjectivities. This affirmation of revolutionary politics takes on even greater significance because revolution, more than just becoming an empty signifier, is on the verge of being lost to our general consciousness altogether. At stake is our political imagination as well as an influential tradition of political engagement, both of which find themselves being preserved as forms of entertainment, packaged acceptably for popular consumption in films about Che Guevara or libertine teenagers in the 1960s. The dialectical qualities that Butler articulates and I have developed further are best confirmed by turning again to Foucaults genealogical histories. Foucaults description of suicide as a response to biopower repeats the dialectical logic discussed earlier in the operations of disciplinary power. Under the conditions of the biopower, which works to control life by fostering and managing it, death becomes powers limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence (Foucault, 1990, p. 138). The general dialectic of power and resistance that I have been articulating assumes the specific character of a dialectic of life and death. It [suicide] testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life. This
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determination to die, strange and yet so persistent and constant in its manifestations, and consequently so difficult to explain as being due to particular circumstances or individual accidents, was one of the first astonishments of a society in which political power had assigned itself the task of administering life. (1990, p. 139) Normally, death would terminate any dialectic. But in a society where the regulation of life was preferred increasingly to corporal punishment, suicide became a tactic of resistance that struck back at the operations of power. Short of suicide, other dialectical manifestations of power and resistance took hold. The evolution of a rights discourse and the deployment of rights as a political tactic is a direct reaction to the encroachment of the disciplines. As Foucault puts it, life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. He continues: The right to life, to ones body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or alienations, the right to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this right which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty. (1990, p. 145) As Foucault indicates with his use of quotation marks, there are reasons to be suspicious about the political role of rights as well as their philosophical justifications. What this does not diminish is how biopower and rights are mutually productive of life. It is the site of their meeting and the reason for their present dependence on each other. This dialectical relationship continues because the antagonistic political objectives of biopower and rights incite each other to action without yet resulting in one being negated.4 In developing my argument I do not want to give the impression that Foucault was actually a dialectician without knowing it. I will maintain that the implications of Foucaults work exceed his intentions. Consequently, he could study and argue using the principles of genealogy and still bear positively on dialectics. Dialectical moments are not introduced into Foucault as much as they are revealed to exist already. The real scandal again for dialecticians and their critics alike is that Foucault makes it acceptable to participate in dialectical thought without being a dialectician. The difference is wide enough: dialecticians generate insights by intentionally employing dialectical thought; others, such as Foucault, become participants in dialectical thought when their work takes on dialectical implications. We know well, after all, that participation often has no relation to willingness.
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Conclusion
There are three main issues at stake in this paper. The first is the various points of compatibility I have elicited between Foucault and dialectics. The rhythm and structure of power relations, specifically the relationship between power and resistance, are eminently dialectical. This is evident in Foucaults methodological injunctions and his genealogical histories. My presentation of dialectics also shares with Foucault an understanding of historys discrete teleologies and non-progressive unfolding, a position that avoids the traps of historical universalism and particularism alike. When combined with my use of Adorno and Hegel, Foucaults anti-dialectical positions are revealed to rely on a crude image of dialectics. In its place I elaborated new dialectical logic of reciprocity, antagonism and production that exceeds the logic of contradiction. The second and third areas of interest are determined directly by the previous arguments. Intellectually, there is the opportunity for a rapprochement between different traditions of thought. Dialectical thinkers have less reason to be hostile to Foucault, whose work has, unfortunately, proved fairly inconsequential to Jameson and Zizek. Although I cannot pursue this here, negotiating Foucaults work with concepts such as ideology critique (a model of which runs throughout Foucault) and totality might well provide a sharper sense of how he thinks of and conducts critique. Politically, a logic of liberation and revolution is shown to be able to accommodate Foucaults positions on power and resistance, as well as productive and juridical power. Finally, what do the arguments in this article hold for the future of dialectical thought? The recasting of dialectical logic provides an axial turn away from a reductionist logic of contradiction, but without abandoning it as a concept. Hegel is reaffirmed as the pivot point for dialectics. As with Marx and Adorno before them, Jameson and Zizek (and Foucault) are proof as to how much still turns on the question: who is your Hegel? The current tendency, which should be supported, is to construct a Hegel who is more radical, with materialist and existentialist attributes, than was common in the past. In relation to dialectics, my arguments about power relations and revolutionary politics leave off at related problems of experience and ideology. Both as a concept and something real, the status of experience is unresolved and under-exploited. Adorno thought that the possibility of experience had almost disappeared, whereas Zizek thinks that it offers no ground for critical insight or praxis. On the contrary, any type of dialectical thought that intends to contribute to the transformation of social relations by way of social critique needs to draw on and criticize experience. It plays a double role as an object of and a requirement for dialectical critique, all the while anchoring dialectics in the real. When Jameson or Henri Lefebvre ask about how our lived conditions contribute to how we experience them, it reveals the double life of experience,
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as a site of profound conservatism and the potential source of an explosion. Dialectical thought is intended to account for, and contribute to, the latter.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Simon Critchley for his comments at that event. Thanks also go to Samuel Chambers and James Martin for their thoughtful questions, along with the editors and anonymous reviewers at this journal, whose reviews have been very helpful.

Notes
H 1 More evidence is available in support of these two quotations. See Hegel, 1977, 12, 32, 78, 80. 2 Hanssen also focuses on this passage and its proto-Hegelian narrative (Hanssen, 2000, 156157), although I focus more on its dialectical implications. 3 Although Butler does not capitalize the term, in this instance she is referring to the Subject in the pejorative sense that Althusser does, as teleology, or the unfolding destiny of a worldhistorical agent. 4 The negation of rights remains a long way off. And it might well be argued that biopower and rights are now often complicit in their aims. Does not a violation of international human rights real or supposed clear a path for intervention that brings with it a biopolitical agenda as well?

References
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Foucault, M. (1988a) Questions of method: An interview with Michel Foucault. In: K. Baynes et al. (eds.), After Philosophy: End or Transformation? London: The MIT Press, pp. 100117. Foucault, M. (1988b) The ethics of care for the self as a practice of freedom. In: J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds.) The Final Foucault. London: The MIT Press, pp. 120. Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Translated by R. Hurley, New York: Vintage. Hanssen, B. (2000) Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory. London: Routledge. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (1975) Hegels Logic: Being Part One of The Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830), Translated by W. Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, Translated by A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ` Kojeve, A. (1969) Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Translated by J.H. Nichols, Jr., New York and London: Basic Books, Inc. Rockmore, T. (1995) Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being. New York and London: Routledge.

Date submitted: 1 July 2008 Date accepted: 27 October 2008

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