foucault and spinoza

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2008 21: 1History of the Human SciencesJames Juniper and Jim Jose

political subjectFoucault and Spinoza: philosophies of immanence and the decentred

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Foucault and Spinoza:philosophies of immanence andthe decentred political subject

JAMES JUNIPER and JIM JOSE

ABSTRACT

Deleuze has suggested that Spinoza and Foucault share commonconcerns, particularly the notion of immanence and their mutual hostil-ity to theories of subjective intentionality and contract-based theoriesof state power. This article explores these shared concerns. On the onehand Foucault’s view of governmentality and its re-theorization ofpower, sovereignty and resistance provide insights into how humansare constituted as individualized subjects and how populations areformed as subject to specific regimes or mentalities of government. Onthe other, Spinoza was concerned with how humans organized them-selves into communities capable of self-government. In particular, hisidea of immanent causality was crucial because central to his ideas offreedom and power. We argue that Spinoza’s approach to power andcausality prefigures ideas developed by Foucault in his theory of govern-mentality, especially with respect to his biopolitical rethinking of powerand resistance.

Key words causality, freedom, governmentality, immanence,power, subject, transcendence

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 21 No. 2© 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) pp. 1–20[21:2; 1–20; DOI: 10.1177/0952695108091410]



Three centuries ago certain fools were astonished because Spinozawished to see the liberation of man, even though he did not believe inhis liberty or even in his particular existence. Today new fools, or eventhe same ones reincarnated, are astonished because the Foucault whohad spoken of the death of man took part in political struggle. . . .Spinoza said that there was no telling what the human body mightachieve, once freed from human discipline. To which Foucault repliesthat there is no telling what man might achieve ‘as a living being’; as theset of forces that resist. (Deleuze, 1999: 90, 93)

INTRODUCTION

Deleuze’s positioning of Foucault and Spinoza as kindred spirits seemsfanciful, even provocative. On the one hand there is Spinoza, the radicalphilosopher whose views offended official religions and their guardians, bothfor his probing analyses of their logic and his unequivocal commitment tohuman freedom and religious (and political) toleration. On the other isFoucault, an equally radical philosopher committed to human freedom, butwho also revelled in being a trickster or shape-shifter whose philosophyappeared to deny any norms upon which liberty or toleration might be justi-fied. The connections between the two would appear therefore to be tenuous,though there is no doubt that Foucault was familiar with Spinoza’s philoso-phy as Eribon (1991) makes clear. And there are at least two occasions whereFoucault makes use of his knowledge of Spinoza’s philosophy.

One is to be found in the Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Foucault’sfirst book, published in 1961. Six years later an abridged version appeared inEnglish translation under the title Madness and Civilization: A History ofInsanity in the Age of Reason (1967). The brief discussion of Spinoza waspart of the material that was omitted from this English translation. In 2006a new, more complete translation appeared, with a title that more closelyreflected Foucault’s original version. In this History of Madness Foucaultargues that ‘all reason is the result of an accomplished choice’ and hence inthat particular sense reason in the classical age is, in effect, ‘born inside thespace of ethics’ (Foucault, 2006: 139). In this context Foucault regards ‘anaccomplished choice’ as itself ‘the constitutive movement of reason’ (ibid.).And it is at precisely this point that Foucault then appeals to Spinoza’sphilosophical view that when reason is of a oneness with nature, whenhumans attain the knowledge of the ethical, that is, the knowledge of theunion ‘which the mind has with the whole of nature’ (Spinoza cited inFoucault, 2006: 140), then such a choice emerges as ‘the necessity of reason’(ibid.). The cause and its effect are merged such that the gap between themno longer separates them, they are bound by necessity. As Macherey has

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 21(2)2



argued, this necessity positions humans as one with a higher nature in which‘each of our experiences as subjects is the more or less developed and completeexpression’ and we thereby in effect ‘do . . . away with the false alternativesof liberty and necessity’ (Macherey, 1992: 184). We shall return to Macherey’sdiscussion of Foucault and Spinoza below, but for the moment we turn to asecond occasion in which Foucault appealed to Spinoza’s philosophical views.

This occurred in the 1971 television debate with Noam Chomsky on thequestion of human nature, justice and power. The context of Foucault’s refer-ence to Spinoza was his disagreement with Chomsky over the relation betweenjustice and social struggle. Foucault had made the point that ‘[r]ather thanthinking of the social struggle in terms of “justice”, one has to emphasisejustice in terms of the social struggle’, to which Chomsky objected by asking:‘Surely you believe that your role in the war is a just role, that you arefighting a just war, to bring in a concept from another domain’ (Chomskyand Foucault, 1971: n.p.n.). Foucault responded to Chomsky’s challenge bysaying that he would ‘reply . . . in terms of Spinoza’ and asserted that

. . . the proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because itconsiders such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with theruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power.And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class it considerssuch a war to be just. (Chomsky and Foucault, 1971: n.p.n.)

Chomsky disagreed strongly with the political point being made by Foucault,the Spinozan reference notwithstanding. For our purposes, despite theapparent obscurity of the reference, it indicates Foucault’s affinity with, orat least awareness of, the philosophical problematics that were coming to thefore in the circles within which he moved.

Deleuze’s juxtapositioning of Spinoza and Foucault thus might not be asfanciful as it might first appear. Deleuze himself was one of the first ofFoucault’s contemporaries to devote a book-length study to Spinoza (1990[1968]). Almost at the same time there appeared works on Spinoza byGuéroult (1968) and Matheron (1969). Within five years Guéroult (1974)published the second volume of his work on Spinoza. Later in the 1970sanother surge of Spinoza scholarship, owing much to these early publications,emerged from radical philosophers like Macherey (1979) and Balibar (1989,1985), both one-time members of the Althusserian circle, and Negri (1991,2004), a leading light within the Italian autonomist movement. These worksfocused especially on Spinoza’s (1996) ethico-political thought, arguing forits relevance to contemporary political theory (Fourtounis, 2005). Moreover,these writings articulated themes, objectives and targets of criticism thatsuggested a broad thematic unity that can best be described as a materialistcritique of philosophical idealism: a critique that, nevertheless, attempted tosurpass, or at the very least reinvigorate, Marxist perspectives on the very

FOUCAULT AND SPINOZA 3



relationship that should hold between political activism and social theory.And it was over this same period and within this intellectual milieu thatFoucault wrote some of his major works including The Archaeology ofKnowledge (1972), Discipline and Punish (1979a) and The History of Sexual-ity (1984) and the posthumously published The Use of Pleasure (1988) andThe Care of the Self (1990). But as noted, Spinoza is notably absent from allof these works, having made a brief appearance in only one of Foucault’spublished works, his first. However, there are themes and philosophicalmoves within Foucault’s writings that bear a distinctly Spinozan imprint.

The core aim of this article is to identify and articulate these themes andphilosophical moves by drawing on the insights of Deleuze and Macherey.It could be objected that such an aim is vitiated from the outset because bothDeleuze (1999) and Macherey (1992) have argued that there is an affinitybetween Foucault and Spinoza and hence we are pursuing a somewhat circularargument. While we acknowledge that our argument is indebted to Deleuzeand Macherey we are aiming to take their insights and use them to interro-gate Foucault’s views from a perspective that has drawn little attention fromFoucault scholars. Moreover, our argument develops in directions not reallypursued in any depth by either Deleuze or Macherey. Granted, Deleuze andMacherey alike have highlighted the fact that both Foucault and Spinozadeveloped a view of the self that challenged the humanist idea of it as a tran-scendent being. For both Spinoza and Foucault, the humanist subject neededto be decentred, the ‘death of man’ as Foucault declared in The Order ofThings (1970: 387).We take that as our point of departure and develop ananalysis to show how Foucault operates on and through Spinozan concepts.Foucault’s view of governmentality and its re-theorization of power, sover-eignty and resistance provides insights into how humans are constituted asindividualized subjects and how populations are formed as subjects of specificregimes or mentalities of government, while at the same time illuminating thestrategies for transforming these constituting and objectivizing forces. Spinozatoo was concerned with how humans organized themselves into communitiescapable of self-government. His distinction between constituted and consti-tutive power provided an alternative to the dominant ideas of his time thatwere invoked to justify particular forms of political rule. For Spinoza, theidea of immanent causality was crucial because central to his ideas of freedomand power.

SPINOZAN INSIGHTS

We noted above that the problematics being developed by some of Foucault’scontemporaries in the early 1970s aimed to reinvigorate the materialistcritique of philosophical idealism. One particularly important problematic




was the encounter between the French Marxist philosophers Althusser,Balibar and Machery, and Spinoza’s philosophy. In discussing this encounterMontag (1989) makes two salient points. First, he suggests that Spinoza’sworks helped this group of authors to pose previously unasked questionsabout Marx’s philosophy. Second, he suggests that the answers provided bySpinoza’s philosophy could only be identified after the relevant questionscould be framed (1989: 90). For Montag, a critical part of understanding whatis at stake in this encounter was recognizing that materialism is not so mucha theory or a doctrine but, rather, a mode of strategic manoeuvre through thephilosophical field. This is because, in Montag’s view, Transcendentalism, theantagonist of this campaign, is an ever-changing apparatus. Thus, Spinozawas forced to intervene on many fronts. Accordingly, his oeuvre bears theeffects of this strategic encounter to the extent that it is unfinished, turbulentand elliptical (Montag, 1989: 90–1).

Ideological thinking, for Spinoza, has two causes: on the one hand, ignor-ance of the causal chain; and on the other, the erroneous imputation of freewill and objectives to God (Montag, 1989: 96). We overcome ideologicalillusions by attaining to a higher order of knowledge, which Spinoza callsknowledge of the second or third kind, the latter being of the highest order(Spinoza, 1996: II, P41–2; V, P25–8). Knowledge of the first kind (opinion orimagination) obtains when we form universal notions either from singularthings represented to us through the senses, but in an unordered or confusedway (Spinoza calls this knowledge from random experience), or from signsor ideas of things that we have heard or read about that we recollect (Spinoza,1996: II, P40, S2). Knowledge of the second kind (reason) arises from commonnotions or adequate ideas of things; while knowledge of the third kind(intuition) proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certainattributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the formal essence of modesor things (Spinoza, 1996: II, P38–40). Spinoza calls the understanding arisingthrough the third kind of knowledge, as knowing under a species of eternity,an understanding which depends on mind, as a formal cause, insofar as minditself is eternal (Spinoza, 1996: V, P29, P31). We take pleasure in this knowl-edge and our pleasure is accompanied by the idea of God as a cause (ibid.: V,P30–2). For Spinoza, this pleasure is a correlate of what he terms the intel-lectual love of God, which is eternal ( ibid.: V, P33).

Althusser and Balibar deny the potential for mysticism in Spinoza’s philoso-phy by interpreting his notion of the third kind of knowledge as the ‘adequateknowledge of a complex object by the adequate knowledge of its complexity’(Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 107). In this respect they relate it to Marx’streatment of the ‘concrete-real’, noting its consistency with Marx’s rejectionof the one-sided undialectical singularity of ‘the concrete-real-historicalsequence’. Negri also rejects a mystical interpretation of Spinoza’s concep-tion of the third kind of knowledge. However, he argues that the mystical is




‘cancelled out’ within an ascetic and materialist celebration of collective praxisbut, significantly, he argues that eternity is internal to this praxis! We knowby experience that we are eternal, outside of duration. The more the mindloves God, the more perfect it is and the less it is subject to evil and fear ofdeath. In becoming eternal it is acted on more by the second and third kindsof knowledge and, thus, a mind the greater part of which is eternal is capableof a great many actions. Although the multitude is born coarse and bestial itis, however, subject to a metamorphosis through the power of community,the knowledge of God, and the plenitude of love (Negri, 2004: 209, citingSpinoza, 1996: IV, P68, P54).

Montag suggests that Althusser, Balibar and Negri are justified in adoptingthese interpretations because the object of Spinoza’s philosophical critique is‘theism’, understood as a distinction between substances (in the form eitherof creator or creation) determined in chronological, logical, or hierarchicalterms. Thus theism depends upon an ordering that has been constructed withrespect to some notion of distance from origin, priority, or externality ordenial of access to the eidos, the One, or God. Associated with this orderingof closeness or remoteness is a conception of knowledge as a hermeneuticreading, an unveiling of truth with respect to the more or less real, and themore or less illusory. In opposing theism Spinoza offered no mere inversionbut rather constructed a notion of God or Nature as Substance and ImmanentCause, as a veritable antidote against any Platonic, hierarchical ordering(Montag, 1989). This conception of immanent causality was instrumental inoverturning the Aristotelian notion of first cause and the Cartesian dualismbetween res cogita and res extensa. For Deleuze a similar conception ofimmanent causality is to be found in Foucault’s philosophy, a claim whichnow warrants closer examination.

IMMANENT CAUSALITY: FROM SPINOZA TOFOUCAULT

This section of the article draws on texts by Pierre Macherey and GillesDeleuze, which discern in Foucault’s work the implicit deployment of theSpinozan concept of immanent causality. While Macherey locates this deploy-ment in Foucault’s concept of the norm, Deleuze finds it in the broader notionof the diagram or dispositif. Starting with Macherey, each of these applicationswill be examined in turn.

Macherey (1992: 176) discerns in Foucault’s work two different conceptionsof norms. On the one hand there is a negative notion which views norms asoperating primarily through juridical exclusion and forbidding. On the otherhand there is a positive notion that norms act through a biological process ofinclusion and regulation. He further observes (ibid.: 177) that this opposition




between positive integration and negative exclusion establishes a link betweenknowledge and truth that gives issue to a dichotomy between that which isrestrictive and representative in knowledge, and that which is constitutiveand, to this extent, effectively incorporated into its object.

Macherey raises a series of questions that he deems are pertinent to anunderstanding of the norm in Foucault’s work, namely: the nature of thetruth about norms, the way that they act, and the link between history andepistemology. He notes that for Foucault, the productive character of normsis reflected in the fact that they do not pre-exist their correlative interven-tions insofar as they produce both the field and the specific elements onwhich they act. To corroborate this interpretation Macherey (1992: 179)points to Foucault’s analysis in the History of Sexuality of the truths of theconfessional, which are seen to constitute both ‘sexuality’ and the very relationholding between the confessed and the unconfessed. The norm is somethingthat operates as an immanent cause or true idea (spiritual automaton).Moreover, to be as a subject (of knowledge and power) is both to be exposedto, and dependent upon, the action of such a norm (Macherey, 1992: 180).However, in contrast to Kant, Foucault’s subject is neither the particular,concrete self, nor the universal, abstract cogito. Rather, it obtains as a singu-larity standing out against a background, insofar as it belongs both to othersubjects and to the cultural ensemble constituted by norms (Macherey, 1992:181). And here the relevance of Spinoza for Foucault emerges. As we havenoted above, Foucault’s understanding of the emergence of reason in theclassical age needs to be understood from a Spinozan perspective in whichthere is a union of the thinking soul with nature, where the cause is simul-taneously the effect, or more to the point where the cause is understood tobe immanent with the effect.

Turning now to Deleuze, in Foucault he highlights the role played byFoucault’s idea of the ‘diagram’. Deleuze conceived the ‘diagram’ to be animmanent cause shaping the social field insofar as it mediates between the‘visible’ (i.e. what can be represented) and the ‘articulable’ (i.e. what can besaid) (Deleuze, 1999: 33–4). Deleuze observed that what Foucault initiallydescribed in negative terms in The Archaeology of Knowledge as the sphereof non-discursive practices takes a positive form in Discipline and Punishwhere it is rendered as the visible. In the latter text, the diagram operates asa bridge between the two irreducible forms: visibilities, an archaeologicalstratum operating through the formation and organization of matter such asin hospitals, prisons, schools, and workshops; and statements, a stratum thatoperates through the formation or finalization of functions (e.g. care, punish-ment, training, enforced work). In this way, the diagram ‘integrates’ orconstitutes qualified substances (e.g. delinquents, children, soldiers, workers).For example, the abstract machinery of the Panopticon goes beyond thevisual aspects of an optical arrangement for purposes of surveillance (i.e. to




see without being seen) seeking to ‘impose a particular conduct on a particu-lar human multiplicity’ (Deleuze, 1999: 34). Diagrams proliferate, they aremanifest within all societies and, as interpreted by Deleuze, they escape anysimple reduction either to a transcendent idea, an ideological superstructure,or to a singularly economic instance.

On Deleuze’s interpretation the diagram ‘is coextensive with the whole socialfield’ and hence is in that respect ‘a non-unifying immanent cause’ (Deleuze,1999: 37). As Deleuze explains, ‘the abstract machine’ of the diagram is

. . . like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations;and these relations between forces take place ‘not above’ but within thevery tissue of the assemblages they produce. (ibid.)

For Deleuze an ‘immanent cause’ is one which

. . . is realized, integrated and distinguished in its effect. Or rather theimmanent cause is realized, integrated and distinguished by its effect.(ibid.)

Deleuze had already given some thought to the concept of ‘immanent causal-ity’ in his earlier work, What is Philosophy, co-authored with Guattari. In thatwork they related immanent causality to what they call ‘the plane of imma-nence’. In their view, the plane of immanence is pre-philosophical insofar asit is presupposed by philosophy as a non-conceptual, intuitive understanding,not as an outside of philosophy but as philosophy’s internal, instituting condi-tion (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 41).1 In their view the plane of immanenceis vulnerable to the ‘four great errors’ or illusions identified by Nietzsche:(1) the illusion of transcendence (making immanence immanent ‘to’ somethingor discovering a transcendence within immanence itself); (2) the illusion ofuniversals (when concepts are confused with the plane itself); (3) the illusionof the eternal (when it is forgotten that concepts must be created); and (4)the illusion of discursiveness (when propositions are confused with concepts)(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 49–50).2 As such, philosophy cannot be reducedto mere contemplation, reflection, or intersubjective communication.

Transcendence enters whenever the movement of the infinite is stopped andimmanence is either (1) made immanent ‘to’ the One, so that another One canbe superimposed over it as the One beyond the One (as in Plato where theplane becomes the concept and the Eidetic concept becomes a transcendentuniversal) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 44–6); (2) made immanent to pureconsciousness or the transcendental subject (as with Descartes and Kant’sCritical philosophy), or (3) something transcendent such as the Other or theFlesh is discovered within immanence itself (as with Husserl’s later phenom-enological enquiries where he contends that the flux lived by subjectivitydoes not belong entirely to that subjectivity but to an intentional object oran intersubjectivity). Later in the same text Deleuze and Guattari argue that




Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence wasonly immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed bymovements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is there-fore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher neverto have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it downeverywhere. In the last book of the Ethics he produced the movementof the infinite and gave infinite speech to thought in the third kind ofknowledge. There he attains incredible speeds, with such lightningcompressions that one can speak only of music, of tornados, of windand strings. He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence.He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its pre-philosophical pre-supposition. Immanence does not refer back to the Spinozist substanceand modes but, on the contrary, the Spinozist concepts of substance andmodes refer back to the plane of immanence as their presupposition.(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 48)

For Deleuze this Spinozan critique of transcendence can readily be seen inFoucault’s critique of neo-Kantianism.

In his (1983) discussion of Magritte’s famous work – This Is Not a Pipe –Foucault establishes a non-relation between text and drawing because thestatement may refer to itself in speaking of the absent pipe rather than itspainted representation (Deleuze, 1999: 62). This non-relation carries over tothe Cartesian cogito where, for Foucault, the ‘I think’ does not rest on the ‘Iam’ but on a pure determinable element (i.e. space-time). The conjunctionbetween the visible and articulable is impossible because the statement refersto its own correlative object along with its conditions of enunciation whilevisibilities are governed by their own conditions of emergence. The statementdoes not relate to the visible (as presumed by propositional logic), and thevisible is not a mute meaning that must be realized in language (as in phenom-enology) (Deleuze, 1999: 64). The interlacing between the articulable and thevisible is therefore established via games of truth and the various proceduresfor its establishment (i.e. pragmatisms of method and process, which posequestions of what is revealed in various strata and thresholds) (Deleuze, 1999:63; citing Foucault, 1984: 93–4). Foucault adopts the metaphor of war and itsimplicit language of strategy to characterize the ongoing dynamism of therelationship between these two irreducible strata: the articulable (speaking)and the visible (thinking).3

THE DIAGRAM, RESISTANCE AND THE OUTSIDEOF THOUGHT

While thinking and speaking are forms of exteriority, thinking addresses itselfto an outside that has no form: thinking reaches the non-stratified outside




situated at the disjunction between seeing and speaking. In this way thinkingescapes the constitutive interiority of a phenomenology, which presupposesa beginning and an end, an origin and a destination eating into the intervalbetween words and things (Deleuze, 1999: 86–7). Historical transformationoccurs when the composing forces of stratification enter into a relation withother forces (strategies from the outside). Deleuze suggests that mutationaffects these composing forces, not the composed forms associated withthem. Nor is it a question of humanity as a conception, or an articulable,perceptible real unity; rather it is a question of the emergent forces that makeup a human being (Deleuze, 1999: 87–8).

While the diagram is seen to emerge from this outside, Deleuze contendsthat, for Foucault, it never exhausts its force. Nor does the outside merge withthe diagram, but rather it continues to construct new diagrams that perpetu-ally come to displace their now redundant predecessors. For this very reason,Deleuze argues that resistance ‘comes first’ insofar as it operates in a directrelation with the outside, whereas power relations operate within the diagram(Deleuze, 1999: 89, n. 28). In his text on Foucault – in a manner that resonatesstrongly with Negri’s (1991) reading of Spinoza – Deleuze approvinglycomments on the apparent traces within Foucault’s thought of Mario Tronti’snotion that the resistance of workers has constitutive priority over the reactivestrategies of capital (Deleuze, 1999: 89, n. 28). In later works, Deleuze andGuattari (1987: 531) distance themselves from this notion of resistance:

Our only points of disagreement with Foucault are the following: (1)to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not ofpower but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems tobe a stratified dimension of the assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstractmachine have lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenom-ena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edgesof creation and deterritorialization.

While space prevents a treatment of this distancing, we shall return to thenotion of resistance and power in Foucault’s work in a moment. Here wewant to comment briefly about the issue of technologies of self in the contextof our discussion of Deleuze’s interpretation of the notion of ‘immanentcausality’.

In The Use of Pleasure a fourth dimension is added to that of knowledge,power and thought (Foucault, 1988: 8). Foucault introduces this dimensionby asking the question: If thought is the outside does that mean there is aninside, perhaps an inside deeper than any internal world? As Deleuze argues,from The Order of Things onwards the unthought is not conceived byFoucault as external to thought but as what lies at its very heart, hollowingout and doubling the outside (Deleuze, 1999: 96–7; citing Foucault, 1970:327–8, 339). Rather than a doubling of the One, it is thus conceived as a




redoubling of the Other, rather than the reproduction of the Same it isconceived as a repetition of the Different, and rather than an emanation of the‘I’ it is conceived as the immanence of the Non-self, a Self that lives Me as thedouble of the Other (Deleuze, 1999: 98).

In Greek thought, the relation to oneself (enkrateia) is derived from one’srelation to others, a relation that detaches itself from power relations. How-ever, it is equally a self-constitution derived from a moral code acting as a rulefor knowledge (Deleuze, 1999: 100, citing Foucault, 1988: 81). It thus comesabout as a relation that force has with itself, a power to affect itself. Withinthe philosophical universe of the ancient Greek world only free beings coulddominate others but this was only possible if they could dominate themselves.This insight was crucial to the later articulation of Foucault’s philosophy ofpower and resistance.

Via this blatantly non-Kantian fold of the outside, the three intrinsicallyhistorical ontologies of acting, knowing and being give rise, in Foucault’swork, to the three notably Kantian questions: What can I do, What do I know,What am I? As such, in thought the thinking being problematizes itself, asan ethical subject, thinking its own history (the past) only in order to freeitself from what it thinks (the present), in order to think otherwise (thefuture): and all this is articulated in the absence of any transcendental subject(Deleuze, 1999: 118–19). Thus emerge the three crucial questions that couldbe said to define Foucault’s project, namely:

• how do particular modes of conduct shape individual (and group) subjec-tivities (Foucault, 1979a, 1984)?

• how are groups of individuals and larger populations governed (Foucault,1979b, 1982, 1997b, 2000a, 2000b)?, and

• how do individuals and groups come to collaborate or acquiesce in theirsubjectivation and subjection? (Foucault, 1981, 1984)

These questions were central to Foucault’s attempts to articulate and explorethe conditions for, and limits to, human freedom. However, Foucault’sapproach to philosophy is opposed to neo-Kantianism because the real isexperienced on the side of the object and historical formation, not theuniversal subject (Deleuze, 1999: 60; citing Foucault, 1970: 244). While Kantappealed to the mystery of the schemata of the imagination, Foucault turnedto power (Deleuze, 1999: 68). It is Foucault’s conceptualization of power andresistance to which we now turn.

POWER, RESISTANCE AND FREEDOM

Foucault’s answers to the questions identified at the end of the previous sectionwere more Spinozan than Kantian because he rejected all philosophical




perspectives that appealed to transcendence, in particular the idea of a tran-scendent self (of a sovereign consciousness), and to conceptualizations ofpower understood as negative, repressive, or juridically focused. His aim wasto develop an understanding of subjectivity and power that would inform anemancipatory politics (Foucault, 2000d, 1982). However, he recognized thatthe central paradox of modernist emancipatory politics was that the philoso-phies of freedom or liberation counterposed to any given set of oppressiveconditions all failed to recognize that their own particular political rational-ities were of a piece with the very same rationalities that give rise to andsustain the oppression in the first place (Brown, 1995: 7; Haas, 1998: 238;Barry, Osborne and Rose, 1996: 10). For Foucault the problem facing anemancipatory politics was to derive a logic of emancipation or a form ofpolitical reason that would not at the same time reproduce the logic or ratio-nalities of oppression. Liberalism, socialism or Marxism remained part of theproblem because they left undisturbed long-standing assumptions about theself, sovereignty and power (Foucault, 1986a: 121). Despite obvious, but signi-ficant, surface differences these influential political philosophies presupposedvery similar views about political rule and the epistemological and ontologi-cal conditions for its exercise.

Foucault denied two crucial commonplaces of political thought: one, thatthere was a singular locus of power that could be contested and counteredby those who were subject to specific rules of power, and two, that there werespecific singular principles that organize such resistance. In his view, acts ofresistance generally were not singular instances of binary oppositions or anti-nomies, but rather were multiple, mobile and transitory. Resistances were‘the odd term in relations of power; they [were] inscribed in the latter as anirreducible opposite’ (Foucault, 1984: 96). Foucault did not deny the possi-bility of a revolutionary eruption, but he accounted for this possibility bysuggesting that the relevant multiple points of resistance come to be codifiedin much the same way as ‘the state relies on institutional integration of powerrelationships’ (ibid.). However, for his critics prior to his writings on govern-mentality, he never explained in a convincing way how or why resistancescame to be ‘inscribed’ as ‘irreducible opposites’, as immanent within rela-tions of power. In a number of places Foucault merely asserted the reality ofresistance: specifically that ‘there are no relations of power without resist-ances’ (Foucault, 1986b: 142), that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’(Foucault, 1984: 95), that resistances ‘are all the more real and effectivebecause they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exer-cised’, and that resistance ‘exists the more by being in the same place aspower’ (Foucault, 1986b: 142). But more importantly, for Foucault ‘if therewas no resistance, there would be no power relations’ (Foucault, 2000c: 167;2000d: 292). Resistance was the irreducible ontological condition for theexercise of power relations. And tying them both together is the Spinozanconcept of immanent causality.




In his pre-governmentality approach resistance seems to be positioned asthe reactive pole – its position inscribed within these force relations. As suchthere appeared to be little space for ‘critical resistance’ to assist in the processof ‘self-formation’ (Thompson, 2003: 120). However, the Deleuzian analysisof resistance and its insight concerning the importance of the Spinozanconcept of ‘immanent causality’ raises doubts about this view. Through hisdevelopment of the idea of ‘governmentality’ Foucault refined his under-standing of power relations (and resistance). While still concerned with thediverse ways in which power might manifest itself, Foucault developed hisidea of governmentality by posing two key questions: ‘By what means ispower exercised?’ and ‘What happens when individuals exert (as they say)power over others?’ (Lemke, 2002: 51). By attending to the specific means ofexercising power Foucault aimed to go beyond both the juridical and thebroad thrust of his own strategic approach. He did not abandon the termi-nology of ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’, nor did he ignore the possibility that theexercise of power could involve violence as well as consent. However, he wasmore concerned with reconceptualizing power as ‘a total structure of actionsbrought to bear upon possible actions’; a ‘set of actions upon other actions’(Foucault, 1982: 789), a view that can also be found throughout Disciplineand Punish and the first volume of the History of Sexuality. For Foucault theexercise of power should be understood as the means for ‘guiding the possi-bility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome’ (Foucault, 1982:789; 2000d), a process which various scholars have summed up as ‘theconduct of conduct’ (e.g. Lemke, 2002: 50; Rose, 1999: 3; Dean, 1999: 13). Inshort, power, as ‘a mode of action upon the actions of others’, is government,but governing in a very much broader sense than had come to be acceptedby scholars in their analyses of modern forms of government. For Foucault,the idea of ‘government’ needed to be returned to its older, more expansivemeaning as the guiding of conduct in spheres other than the so-called politi-cal – such as ‘the government of children, of souls, of communities, offamilies, of the sick’ (Foucault, 1982: 790; 1997b: 156).

Government embraced the management of the ‘complex unit constitutedby men and things’; specifically

. . . men in their relations, their links, their imbrications with thoseother things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, theterritory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; menin their relation to that other kind of things which are customs, habits,ways of doing and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relation to thatother kind of things again which are accidents and misfortunes such asfamine, epidemics, death, etc. (Foucault, 1979b: 11)

On this interpretation of ‘government’, the reference point for the ‘art ofgovernment’ is shifted to the management of populations and their constituentindividual members. Foucault coined the term ‘governmentality’ the better




to capture these shifts in the ‘art of governing’. He was quite clear that he wasnaming a shift rather than a beginning (Foucault, 1997b: 156), but his primaryobjective in naming ‘governmentality’ was to mark a clear separation betweentwo concepts that have come to be used somewhat interchangeably: ‘govern-ment’ and ‘state’. In his view the ‘relations of power [were] much moredeeply implanted than at the level of superstructures’ and that although ‘thequestion of the foundation of power might be important’ he was adamantthat ‘power isn’t dependent on its foundation’ (Foucault, 1997a: 155).

Moreover, as Lemke has pointed out, the concept of ‘governmentality’enabled Foucault to emphasize two key themes. First, the joining up of theidea of government and modes of thought (i.e. mentalities) underlined thekey point for Foucault that any analysis of technologies of power, the howof power, necessarily presupposes that ‘the political rationality underpinningthem’ must likewise be analysed (Lemke, 2002: 50; 2001: 191). Second,insofar as ‘governmentality’ embraced a wider sense of ‘governing’, as notedabove, it draws attention to ‘the close link between forms of power and theprocesses of subjectification’ (Lemke, 2002: 50; 2001: 191). Thus Lemkeconcluded that ‘governmentality’ enabled Foucault to link ‘technologies ofthe self with technologies of domination, the constitution of the subject tothe formation of the state’ and yet at the same time differentiate ‘betweenpower and domination’ (Lemke, 2002: 51). Finally, Foucault insisted on thenecessity of freedom, its ‘intransigence’, as a constitutive feature of the art ofgoverning (Foucault, 1982: 790), a point to which we now turn.

In the Deleuzian interpretation of Foucault, resistance, as an expression ofthe ‘fold in the outside’, is responsible both for the transformation ofdiagrams and the introduction and application of new technologies of self.Similarly, these concerns are captured in Foucault’s idea of governmentalitywith its emphasis on the arts or techniques of governing. Thus, for Foucault,‘when one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actionsof others’ (i.e. as government in the broadest sense) then one must ofnecessity include resistance as an exercise of freedom (Foucault, 1982: 790;2000d: 292). Thus

. . . power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as theyare free. By this we mean individuals or collective subjects who arefaced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving,several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized.

. . . [A]t the very heart of the power relationship, and constantlyprovoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence offreedom. (Foucault, 1982: 790)

This same notion of resistance is mirrored in Foucault’s subsequent concernswith ‘the care of the self’, with theorizing the capacity of subjects to formthemselves in ways that will empower them to resist or refuse ‘the type of




individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries’ (Foucault,1982: 790). But the individuality here is not one of some transcendent self orsovereign consciousness. Rather, what is called forth is a self that has torender itself visible to itself, so that it becomes capable of knowing itself bothas it is and as it might be (Foucault, 2000d: 300–1).

In Foucault’s view the problem to be solved did not concern the dissolutionof power, or even of power relations, but that of domination – by which hemeant the asymmetrical structuring of power relations in which one or moresubjects limit in various ways the choices or conduct available to others inthe relationship (Foucault, 2000d: 292). Hence it is not the generic manifes-tation of asymmetrical power relations but the specific form that they mighttake in any given social and political context. In a clear tilt at Habermas (andin contradistinction to the claims of Dupont and Pearce, 2001: 133) Foucaultargued that we should not ‘try to dissolve [power relations] in the utopia ofcompletely transparent communication’ but try ‘to develop practices of free-dom and resistance’ that would ‘allow us to play these games of power withas little domination as possible’ (Foucault, 2000d: 298). For Foucault, powerwas not a form, neither could it be reduced to a natural law, nor was it singular:but it was a relation. It imposed distribution in space, ordering in time, andcomposition in space-time (Foucault, 1979a: 231). Moreover, power is produc-tive rather than essentially repressive, to be practised rather than possessed –a force passing through other forces: both those exercised by masters and thoseexercised by the mastered. Power is the power to affect and to be affected,to incite, provoke and produce or to be incited, provoked and produced.

However, the practice of power, the exercise of power relations, is notreducible to that of knowledge. Each in relation to the other is ‘mutuallyimmanent’ (Deleuze, 1999: 73–4, citing Foucault, 1984: 99–100). Powerrelations provoke forms of knowledge which may cross epistemologicalthresholds or institute practices. In their generality the forces and formalcategories of knowledge (educating, caring for, punishing) actualize, modify,redistribute and stabilize the affective categories of power (inciting, provok-ing, producing) through their integrative capacity, not least through estab-lishing various institutions (e.g. state, family, religion, production and themarketplace) (Deleuze, 1999: 75). In this context the state achieves globalintegration only because it organizes relations of political rule around acentral agency of sovereign and law, much like the family around the father,and the market around money and gold (Deleuze, 1999: 76–7).

CONCLUSION

In this article we set out to identify and articulate the themes common torecent philosophical interpretations of Spinoza and their resonance with




similar themes in Foucault’s work. We argued that Foucault’s re-theorizationof power, sovereignty and resistance in his later writings on governmentalityprovides insight into how humans make themselves subjects (individually) atthe same time as subjecting themselves (as a population) to specific regimesor mentalities of government. In this context resistance to the power relationsconstituted within the diagram of governmentality can be conceived inSpinoza’s terms as an unfolding of the third kind of knowledge. In ‘becomingeternal’ the collective practices of the multitude transform both technologiesof self and political rationalities of domination. In his earlier works ondiscourse and power-knowledge relations Foucault demonstrated the irre-ducibility of the ‘visible’ and the ‘articulable’, a theme that re-emerges in hisconcept of governmentality in which neither power relations nor resistancecan be reduced to each other. While power relations are determined withinthe diagram, understood as a non-unifying immanent cause, resistance arisesfrom the fold in the outside of thought. Here the resonance with Spinoza istoo strong to ignore. In rejecting transcendental concepts of reason, sovereignpower and transitive causality in favour of constitutive power and immanentcausality Spinoza foreshadowed a mode of political engagement that wasbrought to fruition by Deleuze and Foucault.

Foucault’s work on governmentality did not reinvoke the very humanistcentres of gravity that were the object of critique in his early works (e.g.Foucault, 1970, 1972, 1973) in the sense of reinvoking the idea of the sover-eign subject as the conscious, intentional, self-reflective agency of its develop-ment. Although in Foucault’s diagrams power-knowledge strategies appearto weave spontaneity and receptivity together in a manner analogous toKant’s schemata, in actuality Foucault’s idea of the diagram delineates thehistorical a priori. It is the non-place of mutation because relations of forcesdo not lie outside strata: instead, to the extent that they form the outside ofstrata they are themselves historical (Deleuze, 1999: 84–6). Nor did Foucaultsmuggle in some variation on a neo-Hegelian, transhistorical logic in whichan idea allegedly ‘develops, confronts material obstacles, grows by overcom-ing and transcending them, to fully and finally realize itself in a particularsocial order’ (Dupont and Pearce, 2001: 133). While Foucault certainly madeuse of the discursive pronouncements of government officials and bureau-crats he did not suggest that ‘governmentality’ was the outcome of theirintentions. Rather, much like his analysis of the rise of disciplinary tech-niques, these pronouncements emerged piecemeal in response to particularneeds and, only gradually, for the most part at least, did they accumulate tothe point where they could be seen as something like a ‘blueprint of a generalmethod’ (Foucault, 1979a: 138–9).

Furthermore, while Foucault’s concept of governmentality can be associ-ated with an idea of ‘sovereignty’, this is a conception that is always contin-gent rather than inevitable or a matter of necessity. The relations of power




through which subjects, rulers, government and the state are constituted andreproduced are not permanently fixed but are open to some degree of chal-lenge and, at times, transformation. It is not that power implies resistance insome mechanical sense (as might be concluded from a superficial reading ofFoucault’s earlier conception of power relations), but that for Foucault onecannot logically exercise ‘the conduct of conduct’ without there also beingpossibilities of choice for those whose conduct is in question, whether it beone’s own conduct or that of others. Freedom in some degree must alwaysbe present.

Foucault’s earlier discussions of power and resistance did not simply carryover into his later thought. Rather he reworked them so that they becamecentral to his idea of governmentality and his seemingly unrelated project ofcare of the self. We have demonstrated the way in which Foucault’s conceptof governmentality brings together four crucial dimensions: the link betweenthe idea of government and modes of political rationality; the relationshipbetween forms of power and processes of subjectification; the complex waysin which technologies of self and technologies of domination are imbricatedin the workings of the modern state; and finally the necessity of freedom.The common ground in each case is an emancipatory reworking of the very‘type of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries’(Foucault, 1982: 790).

NOTES

1 To clarify this conception, Deleuze claims that for Descartes, the plane ofimmanence is ‘the subjective understanding presupposed by the “I think”’, forPlato it is ‘the virtual image of an already-thought that doubles every actualconcept’, while for Heidegger it is the ‘preontological understanding of Being’.

2 In Difference and Repetition the site of transcendental illusion is representation,which takes on four forms with respect to the fourfold medieval distinctionbetween sensibility, thought, the idea, and being. These iron collars of represen-tation are (a) identity in the concept (ratio cognoscendi); (b) opposition in thepredicate (ratio fiendi); (c) analogy in the judgement (ratio essendi); and (d)resemblance in perception (ratio agendi).

3 Deleuze is adamant that Foucault’s philosophy is opposed to neo-Kantianismbecause the real is experienced on the side of the object and historical formation,not the universal subject (Deleuze, 1999: 60; citing Foucault, 1970: 244).

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

JAMES JUNIPER studied politics at the University of Adelaide and economicsat the ANU, Canberra. His PhD studies were completed at the Universityof Adelaide. After serving in both the state and federal public services hebecame an academic in 1990. He currently lectures in economics in theSchool of Politics, Economics and Tourism at the University of Newcastlein New South Wales, Australia. He is also an associate of the Centre of FullEmployment and Equity at the University of Newcastle. His current researchinterests include macroeconomic and regional aspects of full employmentpolicy; systems theory and the environment; and continental philosophy.

JIM JOSE studied politics at the University of Adelaide. He has taught at theUniversity of Adelaide, the University of South Australia and Charles DarwinUniversity. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Econ-omics, Politics & Tourism at the University of Newcastle in New SouthWales, Australia. He is the author of Biopolitics of the Subject: an Introduc-tion to the Ideas of Michel Foucault (1998), is a contributor to Anarchists andAnarchist Thought: An Annotated Bibliography, ed. Paul Nursey-Bray (1992),and has published numerous journal articles on political theory, feministtheory and Australian politics. His research interests include political theory;theories of governance; and post-colonialism and the imperial imagination.

Address (corresponding author): Dr Jim Jose, School of Economics, Politicsand Tourism, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia.[email: [email protected]]




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