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, 220–238. doi:10.1057/cpt.2009.3

Keywords: Foucault; dialectics; power; resistance; Hegel; Adorno

Introduction

Recent accounts of dialectical thought present stark oppositions. Gilles

Deleuze’s 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. 114–137). 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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 Foucault and the logic of dialectics

most severe critics – Michel Foucault – can be bridged? If a logic of dialectics

that avoids conceptual reductionism is found to operate in Foucault’s work, is
it possible that dialectical critical theory can then account for a number of
Foucauldian theses regarding power relations without renouncing a commit-
ment to liberation through revolution?
Foucault’s animosity toward dialectics can be traced back beyond Deleuze
to the influence of Alexandre Kojève. Challenging the rationale of Foucault’s
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. Hegel’s 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 Žižek 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 Foucault’s anti-dialectics

Foucault’s 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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 Grant

aleatory and reducing a hazardous reality to nothing more than a formula or a

‘Hegelian skeleton’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 115; Foucault, 1980, pp. 184–186). ‘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
philosophy’s 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 Kojève that was most formative.
The usual argument against Kojève 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. 31–38). The implication, which is
not in fact true, is that Kojève 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 (Kojève, 1969, p. 259). However, as
Kojève was taken to be a largely reliable guide to Hegel, his arguments were
difficult to ignore. Refracted through Kojève, 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 (Kojève,
1969, p. 162). Later, Napoleon’s conquests are said to serve for Hegel as
evidence for the end of History’s long narrative, or more substantively,
that moment when we give up all ‘bloody Fighting and creative Work’
(191; 35). Kojève even asserts that classical philosophy, which began with
Plato, ends with Hegel (88–89), apparently ignoring how the Phenomenology
concludes with the insight that in light of what Spirit has learned about
H itself, it
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, Hegel’s apparent sterilization of history and thought
guaranteed Foucault’s opposition. His rather unsubtle appreciation of
dialectical thought finds its roots here too. Although Kojève is actually at
pains to downplay the importance of dialectics for Hegel (Kojève, 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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 Foucault and the logic of dialectics

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 Benjamin’s 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 history’s 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. 150–151).
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 don’t know whether I am going to get anywhere’ (Foucault,
1988a, p. 101). Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s riposte actually comes from
Adorno: ‘Hegel’s 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 subject’s
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 Hegel’s
philosophy refuses the order of a reconciled unity. As Hegel put it in his
Encyclopaedia, ‘thinking isH always the negation of what we have immediately
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 andH activity, is only an agonizing over
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 itsH being has been
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 Hegel’s reconciliation of mind and world,
Adorno discovered – and constructed – an alternative dialectics. Hegel’s
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 Hegel’s 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.

Hegel’s 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 Hegel’s 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 Hegel’s 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 contra-
diction 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 perfor-
mances 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.
Foucault’s opposition to dialectics is confronted directly by Adorno’s
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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 Foucault and the logic of dialectics

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 Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s resistance to dialectics does not
prevent the complexity of struggles from being understood dialectically.
Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s 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 supra-
historical 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 Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s
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 Foucault’s 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, counter-
violence 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 through-

out Hegel’s 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 Hanssen’s analysis does not elaborate is how Foucault’s 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, 201–203, 282,
303). But resistance is always closer at hand than Foucault’s accounts of
disciplinary power sometimes suggest. This was notably the case in 1840, when
a 13-year-old boy named Béasse 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 youth’s 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 system’s 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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 Foucault and the logic of dialectics

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,
Foucault’s 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 master–slave 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 aren’t 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,
Foucault’s description of power struggles is consistent with Hegel’s 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 Hegel’s discussion of
determinate negation in the Encyclopaedia, where he insists H that ‘a thing is
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 Butler’s 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 Foucault’s Hegelian affinities, Butler begins
by differentiating their dialectical qualities, pointing out that Foucault’s
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 Phenomen-
ology, 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 Foucault’s characterization
of power relations shares this trait with Hegel’s 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 Nietzsche’s influence on

Foucault, which is especially evident in their shared genealogical arguments
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 Foucault and the logic of dialectics

against progressivist histories. However, because Foucault’s 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)

Butler’s 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 one’s
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. Butler’s
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, Butler’s reading also contributes to the ‘Hegelianizing’ of
Foucault. Take, for example, Foucault’s renowned work on the historical
function of the repressive hypothesis, which belongs to a juridical conception
of power and has worked to mask power’s productive features. It is well known
that rejecting the repressive hypothesis, which holds that power’s 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 Foucault’s sense, is because it generates
resistance. As I have shown, power’s 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 Foucault’s genealogical histories.
Foucault’s 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 ‘power’s 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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 Foucault and the logic of dialectics

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 one’s 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 comprehend-
ing – 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 Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s
methodological injunctions and his genealogical histories. My presentation
of dialectics also shares with Foucault an understanding of history’s 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, Foucault’s 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 rapproche-
ment 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 Žižek. Although I cannot pursue this here,
negotiating Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s 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 Žižek (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 Žižek 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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 Foucault and the logic of dialectics

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,
156–157), 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 world-
historical 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?

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Date submitted: 1 July 2008

Date accepted: 27 October 2008

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