20130105 理論讀書會, 周俊男導讀 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

Foucault, Deleuze and Foldings of the Subject

I. Foucault and foldings of the subject

1. Governmentality---intersection of power and the self
*The individual-subject only emerges at the intersection of a technique of
domination and a technique of the self. It is the fold of processes of subjectivation
(Hermeneutics, 526).
*It is not a matter, through the asserted primacy of the care of the self, of refusing
public office, but actually of accepting them while giving a definite form to this
acceptance (Hermeneutics, 541).
2. Subjection and subjectivation
Government” or ”the conduct of conduct” bring together the government of others
(subjectification) and the government of one’s self (subjectivation). Subjection and
subjectivation distinguish technologies of domination and technologies of self.
3. Self and the Other
*Now this personal choice is not a solitary choice but involves the continuous
presence of the Other (Hermeneutics, 531).
*The care of the self is therefore shot through the presence of the Other: the Other
as the guide of one’s life, the Other as the correspondent to whom writes…the Other
as helpful friend, benevolent relative (Hermeneutics, 537)
4. Three kinds of subject---knowledge, power, self
“My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human
beings into subjects”: knowledge (the status of science--the speaking subject, the
productive subject), power (the dividing practice--made/sane), self (turning oneself
as subject--sexuality) (“Subject and Power”)
5. Four kinds of technology
*Four inter-related ‘technologies’: technologies of production, technologies of sign
systems, technologies of power (or domination) and technologies of the self.
*Technologies of the self are the various ‘operations on their own bodies and souls,
thoughts, conduct, and way of being’ that people make either by themselves or with
the help of others in order to transform themselves to reach a ‘state of happiness,
purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (Technologies of the Self, 18).
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6. Four aspects of the ethical self

1. determination of the ethical substance (material cause)
2. mode of subjection (the individual’s relation to the rule) (efficient cause)
3. modes of subjectivation (forms of elaboration ) of ethical work that one
performs on oneself (formal cause)
4. the telos of the ethical subject (final cause)—a moral action aim to a certain
mode of being, a mode of being characteristic of the ethical subject (Use of
pleasure, 26-7)
7. Subject and truth
*Truth: What is unconcealed, unalloyed (pure), straight and unchanging
(Courage, 218-9)
*To arm the subject with a truth that he did not know and that did not dwell within
him (Hermeneutics, 501)
*To turn this learned and memorized truth into a quasi-subject that
reigns supreme within us (Hermeneutics, 504)
8. Care of the self--government of the self, hermeneutics of the self, techniques of
the self, practices of the self, a test of the self, transformation of the self,
cultivation (culture) of the self
*“A subject who scans the subtle episodes of existence with a detailed reading”
(Hermeneutics, 535)
* Three functions of care of the self: criticism, struggle, and cure (Hermeneutics, 495)
*Three elements of “Care of the Self ”: 1) “a certain way of considering things and
having relations with other people;” it is an “attitude towards the self, others, and
the world” ; 2) “ a form of attention, of looking;” “a certain way of attending to
what we think and what takes place in our thought” ; 3) a series of actions—or
practices—that are “exercised by the self on the self ” and “by which one takes
responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, purifies, transforms, and
transfigures oneself.” (Hermeneutics, 11)
9. Memory (of the rules of conduct)
*The subject is not the operating ground for the process of deciphering but is the
point where rules of conduct come together in memory. (“Tchnologies of the Self”)
*In Stoicism it's not the deciphering of the self, not the means to disclose secrecy,
which is important; it’s the memory of what you’ve done and what you’ve had to
20130105 理論讀書會, 周俊男導讀 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

do. (“Technologies of the Self”)

10. A relational and transversal self
“The self with which one has relationship is nothing other than the relationship
itself…it is in short the immanence, or better, the ontological adequacy of the self to
the relationship (Hermeneutics,533)
11. Bios as a mode of life----“modes of life,” “modes of existence,” “culture forms,”
“art of existence,” “choices of existence,” “styles of life,”
*Greek ethics is centered on a problem of personal choice, of the aesthetics of
existence. The idea of the bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is
something that fascinates me (Hermeneutics,531)
*The bios (life) ceased being the correlate of a techne to become instead the form of
a test of the self---1) the test is the experience through which we know, discover,
reveal ourselves as ourselves; 2) the test is an exercise through which we transform
ourselves. (Hermeneutics, 486-7)
12. Care of the self in Greek and Rome
*According to Foucault, care of the self formed one of the main rules for personal
and social conduct and for the art of life in ancient Greek cities.
*Between the philosophical exercise and Christian asceticism there are a thousand
years of transformation and evolution in which the care of the self is undoubtedly
one of the main threads.
13. Truth-telling (Parrhesia) and care of the self
* Foucault investigated the use of truth-tellling (parrhesia) in education to show
that education is central to the ‘care of the self’.
*A shift occurred in the classical Greek conception of parrhesia from a
demonstration of the courage to tell other people the truth, to a different truth game
that focused on the self and the courage that people displayed in disclosing the truth
about themselves. This new kind of truth game of the self requires “asksis” which is
a form of practical training or exercise directed at the art of living (techne tou biou).
The Greek practice of moral “asksis” was concerned with ‘endowing the individual
with the preparation and the moral equipment that will permit him to fully confront
the world in an ethical and rational manner’ (Fearless Speech, 144),
14. Socrates
Socratic parrhesia will speak about the mode of existence, the mode of life. The
20130105 理論讀書會, 周俊男導讀 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

mode of life appears as the essential, fundamental correlative of the practice of

truth-telling. (Courage,149). Truth telling as a speech activity emerged with
Socrates as a distinct set of philosophical problems that revolved around four
questions: ‘who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and
with what relation to power’ (Fearless Speech, 170).
15. Stoics.
In fact the Stoic techniques of self transformed truth into a principle of
action or ethos, or ethics of subjectivity, that involved two sets of exercise:
meditation (training of one’s thoughts) and the gymnasia (training of one’s body).
16. Cynics
*With the sardonic assistance of the cynics, ethics becomes then the principle of
morality’s anxiety, that which unsettles it. (1-532)
*alethes bios (true life)—what is involved in Cynicism regarding the true life is,
first of all, actually taking up the coin of the alethes bios, and taking it back as close
as possible to its traditional meaning. From this perspective, the Cynics do not, as it
were, change the metal itself of this coin. But they want to modify its effigy and, on
the basis of these same principles of the true life – which must be unconcealed,
unalloyed, straight, stable, incorruptible, and happy – by going to the extreme
consequence, without a break, simply by pushing these themes to their extreme
consequence, they reveal a life which is precisely the very opposite of what was
traditionally recognized as the true life (Courage, 227)
17. Death
*Meditation or training for death. One lives each day as if it were the last
(Hermeneutics, 504)
*Socrate’s death of ethical foundation of the care of self (Courage, 90-91)
18. Courage of Truth

II. Deleuze and foldings of the subject

1. The Greek diagram—relation to oneself
*Following the Greek diagram, only free men can dominate others. But how could
they dominate others if they could not dominate themselves (101).
*“The Greeks not only invented the relation to oneself, they linked it to sexuality,
composing and doubling it within the latter’s terms. In short, the Greeks laid the
20130105 理論讀書會, 周俊男導讀 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

foundation for an encounter between the relation to oneself and sexuality.”

(Foucault, 102)
2. Four foldings:
1) material
2) fold of the relation between forces
3) fold of knowledge
4) the fold of the outside itself (104)
3. Subject and power
In the second volume of The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure: “Foucault’s
fundamental idea is that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from power and
knowledge without being dependent on them.” (101)
4. Double
*…the double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary, it is an
interiorization of the outside. It is not a doubling of the One, but a redoubling of
the Other…it is a self that lives me as the double of the other; I do not encounter
myself on the outside, I find the other in me. (98)
*It is as if the relations of the outside folded back to create a doubling, allow a
relation to oneself to emerge, and constitutes an inside which is hollowed out and
develops its own unique dimension: “erkrateia”, the relation to oneself that is
self-mastery, is a power that one brought to bear on oneself in the power that one
exercised over others. (100)
4A.Double unhooking and differentiation
*…a double unhooking and differentiation: when the exercises that enabled one to
govern oneself become detached both from power as a relation between forces, and
from knowledge as a stratified form or code of virtue (100)
*We enter into the domain of uncertain doubles and partial deaths, where things
continually emerge and fade. (121)
5. Outside
“The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic
movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not
something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.” (96-97)
5A. Madman—outside
The inside which is merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of
20130105 理論讀書會, 周俊男導讀 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

the sea. The Renaissance madman is put to sea in a boat. Foucault wrote: “ he is
put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely […] a prisoner in the midst of what
is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the
Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage.” (97)
5B. Thought—outside
*Thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it
thinks (the present) and be able finally to “think otherwise” (the future) (119)
*To think is to fold, to double the outside with a co-extensive inside (118)
But is there an inside that lies deeper than any internal world, just as the outside is
farther away than any external world. The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving
matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make
up an inside: the are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside
of the outside .The unthought is therefore not external to thought but lies at its very
heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside.
(96-97)
*In the field of power as a problem, thinking involves the transmission of
particular features: it is a dice-throw. What the dice-throw represents is that
thinking always comes from the outside. (117)
*“There is a liberation of forces which come form the outside and exist only in a
mixed-up state agitation, modification and mutation. In truth, they are
dice-throws, for thinking involves throwing the dice. (87)
6. Forces and resistance
*This is what the Greeks did: they folded force, even though it still remained force.
They made it relate back to itself (101)
*There will always a relation to oneself, which resists codes and powers; the relation
to oneself is even one of the origins of these points of resistance. (103)
*Forces always come from the outside, from an outside that is farther away than any
form of exteriority. So there are not only particular features taken up by the
relations between forces, but particular features of resistance that are apt to modify
and overturn these relations and to change the unstable diagram. (122)
7. Absolute memory
*…we follow the folds, reinforce the doublings from snag to snag, and surround
ourselves with foldings that form an “absolute memory”, in order to make the
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outside into a vital, recurring element.

*Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or the affect on self by self (107)
8. Time and subject
Time becomes a subject because it is the folding of the outside and, as such, forces every
present into forgetting, but preserves the whole of the past within memory (108).
9. Terrible line of life
This is a terrible line that shuffles all the diagrams, above the very raging
storms….But however terrible this line may be, it is a line of life that can no longer be
gauged by relations between forces, one that carries man beyond terror.
10. (Man-)Form and forces
*Foucault's general principle is that every form is a compound of relations between
Forces (124)
*It is obvious that any form is precarious, since it depends on relations between
forces and their mutations. (129)
*We can already foresee that the forces within man do not necessarily contribute
to the composition of a Man-form, but may be otherwise invested in another
compound or form: even over a short period of time Man has not always existed,
and will not exist forever. (124)
*Mutation consists in this: the forces within man enter into a relation with new
forces from the outside, which are forces of finitude. These forces are
Life, Labour and Language -- the triple root of finitude, which will give birth to
biology, political economy and linguistics. (126-7)
11. In-depth (Infinite) finite
*Things, living creatures and words need only fold back on this depth as a new
dimension, or fall back on these forces of finitude (128).
*Everywhere it is the Fold which dominates now, to follow Foucault’s terminology,
and this fold is the second aspect of the active thought that becomes incarnated
in nineteenth-century development. The forces within man fall or fold back on
this new dimension of in-depth finitude, which then becomes the finitude of man
himself. The fold, as Foucault constantly says, is what constitutes a “thickness”
as well as a “hollow” (128).
*It would no longer involve raising to infinity or finitude but which a finite number
of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations.
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12. Superfold
It would no longer involve raising to infinity or finitude but which a finite number
of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations. It would be
neither the fold nor the unfold that would constitute the active mechanism but
something like the “Superfold” as borne out by the folding proper to the chains of
the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation machines, as well
as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature “merely turns
back on itself in an endless reflexivity. (131)
13. Superman
*If the forces with man compose a form only by entering into a relation with forms
from the outside, with what new forms will emerge that is neither God nor Man?
This is the correct place for the problem which Nietzsche called “the superman.”
Foucault unlike Nietzsche, can only sketch in something embryonic and not yet
functional. Nietzsche said that man imprisoned life, but the superman is what frees
life within himself, to the benefit of another form, and so on. (130)
*The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from outside, those of silicon
which supersedes carbon, or genetic compnents which supersede the organism, or
agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. In each case we must study the
operations of the superfold, of which the “double helix” is the best known example.
What is the superman? It is the formal compound of the forces within man and
these new forces. It is the form that results from a new relation between forces.
Man tends to free life, labour and language within himself. The superman, in
accordance with Rimbaud’s formula, is the man who is even in charge of the
animals ( a code that can capture fragments from other codes, as in the new
schemata of lateral or retrograde).It is man in charge of the very rocks, or inorganic
matter ( the domain of silicon). It is man in charge of the being of language ( that
formless, mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom even
from whatever it has to say). (131-2)