Foucault And Deleuze

y aim here is to provide the basis for a
systematic distinction, in the broadest

available terms, of Foucault from Deleuze with
regard to their conceptions of individuation and
experience. Deleuze, I will argue, pursues a fully
singular conception of the individual, Foucault a
fully

specific one. This distinction says more

about their fundamental projects than the many
and generally familiar thematic resemblances
that linked their work and justified their mutual
admiration.

For these two approaches to individuation,

singular and specific, are poles apart.

The

singular is aspecific.

If a specific individual

is one which exists as part of a relationship to a
context, to other individuals and to itself, a
singular individual is one which like a Creator-
god transcends all such relations. A singularity
creates the medium of its own existence or
“expression,” in Spinoza’s sense. Examples of
singular logics include the sovereign of
absolutist political theory, the proletariat of
Marxist–Leninism, and the market affirmed by
contemporary global capital; each constitutes
itself through itself, to the exclusion of
others (other sovereigns, other classes, other
markets …).

The singular recognises no limits.

The specific, on the other hand, exists only
in the medium of relations with others, and
turns ultimately on the confrontation of limits –
the limits, for instance, of experience, of
language, of knowledge, of expression, of intro-
spection …

The essential difference between Deleuze and

Foucault, then, can be stated very simply:
Deleuze seeks to write a philosophy without
limits (through immediate intuition of the unlim-
ited, or

purely creative), whereas Foucault writes

a philosophy of the limit as such (at the limits
of classification, at the edge of the void that
lies beyond every order of recognition or normal-
isation).

I deleuze and the singularity of

creation

Towards the end of his life, Deleuze presented
his project as part of a general shift in contem-
porary thought, whereby “the function of the
singular is replacing that of the universal” as the
fundamental horizon of philosophy.

While

universality presents an empty, static field in
which distinct particularities are distributed and
measured, in which relative differences are
consolidated and regulated,

singularities create

their own medium of extension or existence;
rather than move through a “universal” field
presumed to pre-exist it, a singular movement
takes place as the

unfolding of its own time and

space. However varied these unfoldings might be
in Deleuze’s work, their fundamental logic is
invariable: “every creation is singular, and the
concept as properly philosophical creation is

9 3

peter hallward

THE LIMITS OF
INDIVIDUATION,
OR HOW TO
DISTINGUISH
DELEUZE AND
FOUCAULT

A N G E L A K I

journal of the theoretical humanities
volum e 5 number 2 august 2000

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/00/020093-19 © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/0969725002001222 3

the limits of individuation

always a singularity” (QP 12/7tm). Every creative
“explication is always an auto-explication” (SP
103/68tm); every genuine definition always
implies a “veritable generation of the object
defined.”

And if Deleuze’s own fundamental

concept is a concept of

difference, this should not

be understood as a difference in tension with
singularity. Deleuzian difference is itself singular
in the strictest possible sense, it is properly a
difference

without others.

Deleuze seeks to write

a difference that is indifferent to distinctly
differed terms, i.e. difference without mediation
or relation

between the differed. This effort

constitutes the major interest and difficulty of his
work; it is also, I will suggest, the source of its
ultimate incoherence.

Deleuze’s singular and immediate difference

begins where Aristotelian or Hegelian “specific
difference” ends.

If specific difference relates

subject

to object through a situation which co-

implies both, singular immediate difference
equates subject and object in a single material
creation, one movement-time creative of the
world itself, the basis for a “new earth” (MP
636/510). For Deleuze as for Parmenides, “think-
ing and being are one and the same” (QP 41/38).
If then “there is only one kind of production, the
production of the real” (AO 40/32), it follows
that there can be only one mechanism of under-
standing or perception, one

creative faculty of

expression-interpretation, and this faculty applies
indifferently to the material, semantic, or spiri-
tual composition of things.

(a) ontological univocity

Singular differentiation or individuation thus
presumes, as its first effectively transcendental
condition, the absolute univocity of being.
Deleuze is categorical on this point. “There has
only ever been one ontological proposition: Being
is univocal. There has only ever been one ontol-
ogy, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a
single voice [ … ]. From Parmenides to
Heidegger it is the same voice which is taken up,
in an echo which itself forms the whole deploy-
ment of the univocal.”

There is but one matter-

energy, and “whether organic or inorganic,
matter is all one” (LB 11/7). Univocity implies

the radical immanence of all forms of reality
within a single “plane of consistency,” “a plane
upon which everything is laid out, and which is
like the intersection of all forms, [ … ] a single
abstract Animal for all the assemblages that effec-
tuate it” (MP 311–312/254–255). Affirmation of
this ultimate plane of immanence or consistency
ensures the eradication of all

equivocal notions of

distinct Beings, i.e., all forms of transcendence,
all distinction in types or levels of being (literal
as opposed to figural, real as opposed to imagi-
nary or symbolic … ). Very simply,

everything is

real, and everything means in the same way, the
same literal and immediate way. As a general
rule, all forms of discourse which relate a literal
to a figured meaning are to be replaced by an
articulation of the literal pure and simple. Ellipse
rather than metaphor is the decisive figure of this
articulation or consistency – the immediate,
instantaneous leap from one fragment or name of
reality to another.

The plane of consistency is the abolition of all
metaphor; all that consists is real [ … T]he
most disparate things and signs move upon it;
a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a
chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a
language, a black hole captures a genetic
message, a crystallisation produces a passion,
the wasp and the orchid cross a letter [ … ].
It’s just that they have been uprooted from
their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritori-
alised, and that is what makes their proximity
and interpenetration in the plane of consis-
tency possible [ … ]. The plane of consistency
knows nothing of differences in level, orders of
magnitude, or distances. (MP 89/69)

This univocity, of course, in no sense implies
ontological

uniformity. On the contrary: univoc-

ity is affirmed as the basis and medium for an
effectively

unlimited differentiation. Since it is

univocal, Deleuzian difference must be “imma-
nent” or “internal” difference, self-differing (and
thus “without others” [LS 350/301]). Deleuzian
reality

is nothing other than a process of self-

differentiation: “everything divides, but into
itself” (AO 91/76). And it is an

unlimited process

of (self-)differentiation, because there is nothing
outside reality – no second or further reality, no
horizon to reality, no dualism of subject and

9 4

hallward

object … – that might limit its play. Unlimited,
the singular is, indifferently, infinitely large or
infinitely small – “the smallest becomes the equal
of the largest once it is not separated from what
it can do” (DR 55/37tm). Every singular “auto-
affection [is the] conversion of far and near” (C2
111/83). Likewise, each singular

event is the smallest time, smaller than the
minimum of continuous thinkable time [ … ],
but it is also the longest time, longer than the
maximum of continuous thinkable time […].
Each event is adequate to the Aion in its
entirety [ … ], all form one and the same single
event, event of the Aion in which they have an
eternal truth. (LS 80–81/63–64)

Singular difference is thus

immediately intra-

rather than inter-individual. “Immediate” must,
again, be taken literally: as

immediate, singular

differentiation is nothing other than pure time in
itself, time compressed to an all-inclusive instant
moving at

absolute speed. The singular equates

the whole with the point or instant. “The whole
ought to belong to a single moment” (NP 81/72).
Again, “the One expresses in a single meaning all
of the multiple. Being expresses in a single mean-
ing all that differs [

l’Etre se dit en un seul et

même sens de tout ce qui diffère].”

The singu-

lar always moves with the force of a power
creative of the very medium of its movement, a
power beyond all possible mediation.

The essential logic of such singular differenti-

ation is best evoked, I think, by a fairly crude
analogy with familiar notions of divine Creation
or “expression.”

Such notions generally

presume at least three things: (a) the effectively
unlimited power of the Creator (there is only one
Creator, who creates not only every possible crea-
ture, but the very medium of creation itself); (b)
the consequent univocity of creation (all crea-
tures, whatever their differences, are

creatures in

the same way); (c) the absence of

constituent

relational differences between creatures (for what
distinguishes one creature from another is deter-
mined by their direct, immediate relations to the
Creator). If specific or mediate difference differs
one creature from another, then singular-imme-
diate difference is simply

creative of the differed.

It is the status of this last and all-important

point that is, in my view, the most controversial

aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy. There is no more
important question to be asked of Deleuze than
this: should he be read as a philosopher of

rela-

tional difference? Though there isn’t space here
to justify my commitment to a negative answer to
this question, it is at least possible to spell out
some of the implications of such a reading.

The most important of these determines the

general orientation of Deleuze’s many and varied
accounts of individuation: rather than relational
and “mediate,” Deleuzian individuation proceeds
as singular and immediate. The essential, endlessly
ramified point is that, according to Deleuze, active
differentiation does not take place within the field
of actuality or experience but at the level of its
production – not

in creation, but from its creator.

In every case, Deleuze reserves differing power to
an effectively absolute determining instance, a
pure

creating in some sense outside or beyond its

derivative (differed) effects, or creatures.

(b) immediate non-relational difference

It is this determining instance that Deleuze calls
virtual. The virtual, as the word implies, is what
conditions or lies behind actual being or experi-
ence. A virtuality is an absolute, self-defining
intensity (variously, an Idea, Event, Problem, or
Concept): actualities are composed as so many
materially existent incarnations or consequences
of the virtual. Only the conditioning instance
actively differs; differed beings are nothing more
than the literal actualisations of their virtual
creator. In every case, active “becoming [

devenir], change, and mutation affect [virtual]
composing forces, not composed forms” (FC
91/87tm). Every creative

composing or determin-

ing force is virtual (or self-differing), while actual
forms (or creatures) are merely

composed.

All actual existent individuals, then, are

simply so many

immediate actualisations of one

and the same creative force, variously termed
desire or desiring-production,

life,

élan vital,

matter-energy, the virtual, or power – the force
that drives the chaotic distribution of things
across the plane of immanence. (“Everything I’ve
written,” Deleuze declared in 1988, “is vitalistic,
at least I hope it is.”)

What differs these actu-

alisations, first and foremost, is not a complex

9 5

the limits of individuation

dialectic of inter-actual relations so much as the
stark simplicity of a creative

hierarchy. Yes,

“equal, univocal being is immediately present in
everything, without mediation or intermediary,”
but “

things reside unequally in this equal

being” (DR 55/37). Deleuze’s Spinoza agrees
with Leibniz, that “everything can be said to be
the same at all times and places except in degrees
of perfection.”

Actualities differ in terms of

their absolute proximity to pure creation, i.e., in
terms of the

amount of creative energy they

express or expend.

This is why creative differences are essentially

quantitative, and why the infinitely diverse
components of univocal reality can in principle
be accounted for in terms of differing degrees
along a single ontological scale. “Quality is noth-
ing other than contracted quantity” (B 73/74);
“quality is nothing but difference in quantity”
(NP 50/44). For Deleuze as for Nietzsche, a strict
quantitative “hierarchy is the originary fact, the
identity of difference and origin”

– in the

compressed formula of Deleuze’s

Cinema 2,

“irreducible difference allows resemblances to be
graded” (C2 234/180). To stick to the most
significant example, “individuation is, in
Spinoza, neither qualitative nor extrinsic, but
quantitative and intrinsic, intensive,” “

purely

quantitative,” according to “the degree of [a
thing’s] power”;

any actual mode, human or

otherwise, “is, in its essence, always a certain
degree, a certain quantity, of a [divine] quality”
(SE 166/183; cf. MP 314/257).

What is thereby eliminated is not difference,

certainly, but specific or

relational difference;

“what vanishes is merely all value that can be
assigned to the terms of a relation [

un rapport],

for the gain of its inner reason, which precisely
constitutes difference.”

The only creative rela-

tionship between individuals must be measured
in terms of the virtual which effectively underlies
them all – a relation of purely

quantitative differ-

ence along a single hierarchical scale of absolute
proximity to the full creative potential of force,
life, or the virtual.

Always, the power of “actu-

alisation belongs to the virtual. The actualisation
of the virtual is singularity, while the actual itself
is [merely] constituted individuality.”

The

multiple modes or singular actualisations of the

one Real are no more related

to each other than

are Leibniz’s windowless monads.

The creative

“movement goes, not from one actual term to
another, nor from the general to the particular
[through the specific], but from the virtual to its
actualisation – through the intermediary of a
determining individuation” (DR 324/251tm).
The only legitimate relation between actual

x and

actual

y is the immediate reference back to the

virtual

z, which they both individuate to differ-

ent degrees. To move from

x to y is to jump from

one degree or one fragment of the plane of imma-
nence to another, via an immediate, instanta-
neous ellipse

beyond distance (i.e., via a shift in

intensity rather than a change in extension).
“The virtuals [

les virtuels] communicate imme-

diately above the actual that separates them.”

Consequently, “the

relative positions of the

[actual terms in a given series] in relation to one
another” depend only on their absolute position
in relation to “the virtual paradoxical element”
that distributes the series in the first place (LS
99/81).

(c) creative counter-actualisation

Our only problem – but there is no greater prob-
lem – is that we generally live in ignorance or
denial of these virtual forces. The singular nature
of creative virtuality is itself generally obscured
by its very actualisation in particular situations.
Creative (i.e., purely intense or fully

implicated)

“difference is explicated in systems in which it
tends to be cancelled” (DR 293/228), and “life as
movement alienates itself in the material form
that it creates.”

We begin our lives, as crea-

tures, in precisely such alienation. For Deleuze as
for the Spinoza he emulates, we always begin in
“impotence and slavery,” in “ignorance” (SE
241/263, 268/289–90). We are

naturally trapped

in delusions of ontological equivocity or dualism
– the belief that we are subjects as distinct from
objects, and thus subjects who represent, figure
or otherwise interpret objects; belief in psycho-
logical sufficiency, in organic specificity, territo-
rial integrity, and so on. We must then somehow
discover what we

are, i.e., contingent fragments

of a vital or creative energy pulsing through and
beyond the whole of actuality. Though we begin

9 6

hallward

as “territorialised” we must find ways to “deter-
ritorialise,” knowing that singular “deterritoriali-
sation is absolute when it brings about the
creation of a new earth” (MP 636/510). Again:
“all our false problems derive from the fact that
we do not know how to go beyond experience
toward the conditions of experience, toward the
articulations of the real [

du réel]” (B 17/26).

Access to these creative articulations is some-
thing we must

learn. Philosophy, aided by

science and art, is part of this learning process
(its conceptual part). Deleuze’s small army of
kindred spirits – Guattari, Spinoza, Leibniz,
Masoch, Nietzsche, Artaud, Beckett, the nomad,
the schizo, the dice-thrower, etc. … – is made up
of those who, differently, inspire one and the
same movement, the movement from a deluded
creatural isolation toward an eventual redemptive
fusion with creation as such.

More crudely: creatures

relate only to their

creator, and as creatures, our only access to
creative power is governed by processes
(machines,

agencements) of “extraction” or

“counter-actualisation” that allow us in some
sense to move from our derivative, static actual-
ity, back to the dynamic, effectively disembodied
vitality that expresses us, that makes us literally
what we are.

Whatever the actual animal, “it is

still the same abstract Animal that is realised [

qui

se réalise] throughout the stratum, only to vary-
ing degrees, in varying modes” (MP 62/46).

Now since everything that

is is real, real in the

same way, then to grasp the real (that we are, that
everything is) we need only eliminate everything
that persuades us that there are different levels or
spheres of being, i.e., everything that keeps us at
a certain distance from our

real immediate being.

If “equal, univocal being is immediately present
in everything, without mediation or intermedi-
ary” (DR 55/37), then our task is to eliminate
everything that mediates or re-presents this
being. To articulate the real in Deleuze’s sense
invariably and exclusively involves

the destruc-

tion of the mediate in all its forms (psychologi-
cal, imaginary, figural, political, and so on). This
involves, first and foremost, elimination of noth-
ing less than the very notion of traditional self-
consciousness, of the self as the mediator of
objects, of other selves, and of itself. Hence the

long campaign to free us from the “shackles of
mediation,” from the “long error” of representa-
tion, and with it, from subjective interiority,
equivocity, signification, territoriality, desire-as-
lack, transcendence, etc. By definition, all medi-
ations serve

only to obscure reality. Any properly

insightful philosophy, by contrast, will be consis-
tent with a kind of radical empiricism, so long as
we remember that “empiricism is a kind of ‘phys-
icalism.’ As a matter of fact, one must find a
fully physical usage for principles whose nature
is

only physical … ” (ES 136/119). The model of

Deleuzian

interpretation is thus biochemical (NP

60/53) or mechanical, geared to a single
“Mechanosphere” (MP 641/514), a single “coex-
tension of man and nature” (AO 128/107), culmi-
nating in the virtual identity of Cosmos and
Brain (C2 268–69/206–07). To move in this way
from the confines of the creatural to the absolute
sovereignty of the creator (or creating) coincides
with the movement from the confines of a partic-
ular organism to “the

non-organic life of things

[ … ] which burns us [ … and] unleashes in our
soul a

non-psychological life of the spirit, which

no longer belongs either to nature or to our
organic individuality, which is the divine part in
us, the spiritual relationship in which we are
alone with God as light” (C1 80/57).

Deleuze’s most general aim is thus to affirm

Creation or Life at a coherence which effectively
excludes that of the specific, living organism –
the coherence achieved, ultimately, by the noto-
rious “Body without Organs.”

“To move

beyond the human condition, such is the mean-
ing [

sens] of philosophy” (FC 139–40/124–25tm).

This power to overcome one’s specific or organic
limits provides one (quantitative) index of the
given

creativity of a thing, its assigned degree of

proximity to pure differing production. The crit-
ical question is always a variant of the same
imperative: “How can we rid ourselves of
ourselves [

nous défaire de nous-mêmes], and

demolish ourselves?” (C1 97/66). How can we
“attain once more the world before man, before
our own dawn, the position where movement
was [ … ] under the regime of universal variation
[ … ], the luminous plane of immanence”?
(C1 100/68). Deleuze’s enduring dream is to be
thus

9 7

the limits of individuation

present at the dawn of the world. Such is the
link between imperceptibility, indiscernibility,
and impersonality – the three virtues. To
reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in
order to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with
other traits, and in this way enter the haecce-
ity and impersonality of the creator. One is
then like grass …

The obvious problem that then arises is how to
explain the individuation of these self-singularis-
ing (self-creating) beings in a wholly deterritori-
alised space, without recourse to some kind of
intrinsic and determining – i.e., ultimately

speci-

fied – essence, thought or Idea, more or less on
the Platonic model. For the constituent phenom-
enological relationship of subject and object,
Deleuze substitutes the one-way “determining
individuation” of actual by virtual. “To be actu-
alised is also to be expressed” (LS 134/110),
where the virtual or expressing instance is wholly
sufficient and determined in itself; “actualisation
comes about through differentiation” of the
virtual, and nothing more.

What emerges from

this schema is the unqualified

dependence of the

actual upon the virtual, the pure redundance of
the actual, in exactly the sense that “the world
he produces adds nothing to God’s essence” (SE
87/99). God or the Virtual produces a redun-
dantly expressive world or actuality.

In every case, “the essence of a mode is singu-

lar in itself” (SE 179/196), “events are ideal” (LS
68/53), and “individuals presuppose only Ideas”
(DR 324/252), which are themselves self-suppos-
ing. “

Pour ce qui est de l’Idée on est toujours un

patient” (DR 283/219). Deleuze does not avoid
the question: “Where do ideas come from, the
variations of their relations [

rapports] and their

distributions of singularities? Here, again, we
follow the path to the bend at which ‘reason’
plunges into a beyond. The ultimate [

radicale]

origin was always assimilated to a divine and soli-
tary game.”

But what is this game, if not the

game of Creation itself?

The individuality of an actual body or state of

affairs, its bundle of “intrinsic modalities,” is
thus delegated from without, in advance (DR
53–55/36–37; 323–25/250–51). Every singular or
“remarkable” point, every

individual, like the

“conceptual personae” who populate Deleuze’s

creative philosophy, is effectively taken for
granted as an “Original, Unique.”

The events

sense, for example, are given in advance; we

exist to speak them and nothing more. “What the
past is to time, sense is to language and idea to
thought. Sense as the past of language is the form
of its pre-existence, that which we place ourselves
in at once” (C2 131/99–100). These pre-existent
forms are simply that, pre-existent. In the same
way, to be

cut is to suffer the actualisation of a

virtual wound which was literally waiting to
happen. “My wound existed before me … Not as
a transcendence of the wound, as higher actual-
ity, but as immanence, virtuality always at the
heart of a milieu (field or plane).”

Again,

Artaud’s exemplary theatre of cruelty is “defined
only in terms of an extreme ‘determinism,’ that
of spatio-temporal determination in so far as it
incarnates an Idea or nature …, a pure staging
without author, without actors and without
subjects” (DR 282/219), a “sequence of spiritual
states which are deduced from one another as
thought is deduced from thought.”

In short, it

is without intermediaries, “capable of

directly

affecting the organism” (DR 282/219).

So radically singular philosophy can only

culminate, in the end, in the definitive specifica-
tion of its modes. The more committed Deleuze
becomes to a single plane of immanence, the
more he must rely on the effectively “pre-exis-
tent” transcendence of its forms.

It is perhaps ironic that one of Deleuze’s most

developed illustrations of this quasi-determinist
logic should be “borrowed” from Foucault
himself. In his controversial

Foucault, Deleuze

spends much of his time trying to separate deter-
mining (composing) forces on the one hand from
determined (composed) forms on the other.
Determining “power relations” or “forces always
come from the outside,” i.e., from their self-suffi-
cient virtuality.

Any determined actuality

follows simply from the “definition of the
[virtual]

diagramme,” which “is always an emis-

sion of singularities [ … ], a distribution of
singularities” (80/73tm). Everything springs
from “the

spontaneity of power’s ability to

affect,” paired with the wholly passive “receptiv-
ity of the power to be affected” (84/77), to be
stated, or to be made visible. Throughout this

9 8

hallward

highly misleading account of Foucault’s work,
Deleuze simply takes this mysterious, sponta-
neous power to self-specify for granted, and it is
only by taking it for granted that he answers the
question of “primacy.” Always, “the question of
primacy is essential” and if “the statement has
primacy” (57/49) it is because

it remains unre-

lated to what it states and to what it makes visi-
ble. Whereas a merely actual “proposition is
supposed to have a referent,” the “discursive
object” of a virtual statement “does not in any
sense derive from a particular state of things, but
stems from the statement itself. It is a derived
object, defined precisely by the lines of variation
of the statement existing as a

primitive function”

(17/8–9), i.e., as a pre-determined or self-deter-
mining singularity. So as with any singularity,
the “rules” governing such a statement “are to be
found on the same level as itself” (15/5), defined
“by certain

inherent lines of variation,” as a

bundle of “

intrinsic positions” (16/6, emphasis

added). Again, “the statement is not at all
defined by what it designates or signifies” (FC
85/79), but by itself alone, its “spontaneity.”

The upshot is absolute self-determining power:

The statement has primacy by virtue of the
spontaneity of its conditions (language), which
give it a determining form, while the visible
element, by virtue of the receptivity of its
conditions (light), merely has the form of the
determinable [ … ]. By virtue of their spon-
taneity, [statements] exert an infinite determi-
nation over the visible element.

This is a conclusion that says a great deal about
Deleuze, but very little about Foucault.

II foucault and the despecification of

experience

The singular creates the medium of its extension,
which it fills out “at infinite speed.”

Singularity

tends toward a radical plenitude. If we cannot say
that the singular abhors a vacuum, it only allows
space for one only insofar as it opens an unpre-
dictable path for another vector of its own ongo-
ing self-differentiation. The specific, on the other
hand, always

eventually confronts the empty

horizon of its extension; what is

beyond the

specific is only the void, pure and simple. The

limits of the specific are not within its domain,
they cannot be subsumed within a logic of pleni-
tude nor accessed as part of an experience,
however deterritorialised. Nor do these limits
orient our experience one way or another (toward
consensus or dissensus, toward a sublime tran-
scendence or a grotesque materiality, toward the
Creator or alienation from the Creator … ).
While the logic of singularity implies that the
only valid criteria for its “expression” are inter-
nal to this expression itself, articulation of the
specific recognises that the only pertinent criteria
for action are always external (i.e., specific) to the
particular action itself – and thus a matter of
conflict, deliberation, and

decision. The specific

subject is inevitably partial, interested: “he is
necessarily for one side or the other; he is in the
thick of the battle, he has adversaries … ”

For all his well-known proximity to Deleuze, I

want to argue that Foucault’s work should be
read as grounded, in every phase of its complex
evolution, in an ultimately specific rather singu-
lar frame of reference.

In keeping with his now

familiar conception of the “specific” intellectual
and micro-political resistances,

Foucault always

affirmed “the strictly relational character of
power relationships” (VS 95). “Nothing is funda-
mental,” there is no specified subjective norm,
“there are only reciprocal relations, and the
perpetual gaps between intentions in relation to
one another.”

The generalised despecification

of such relations is the consistent goal of
Foucault’s work from beginning to end. No less
than the Deleuze he certainly admired, Foucault
labours for “the suppression of categories,” the
subversion of all imposed classification;

the

“specific role of [the] intellectual” is precisely “to
disturb people’s mental habits [ … ] to dissipate
what is familiar and accepted.”

This dissipation operates at the level of archae-

ological critique as much as that of genealogical
engagement. In the first case, Foucault resists the
specification of particular fields of knowledge
[

savoir] by a general faculty of “understanding,”

conceived in terms of a basic “continuity of
science and experience,” a fundamental coher-
ence of the intelligible and the human.

Such an

anthropological (ahistorical)

understanding, to

echo the phrase so often used by the Foucault of

9 9

the limits of individuation

the mid-1960s, is what puts thought to sleep. In
the second case, of course, power is first and fore-
most that force which

specifies the objects in its

field. Power certainly relates, but it tends to
conceal the relational aspect of its reality in terms
of apparently absolute or universal norms. Only
a radical practice of de-absolutisation or de-spec-
ification will expose the actual relations of power
that govern our society. Just as modern discipli-
nary individuation “specifies delinquency” (DP
277) and “objectifies” socio-pathological

types

(101–02), so too does our modern investment in
sexual discursivity enable a “new specification of
individuals” (VS 43). And once sexual behaviour
became “a principle of classification and intelli-
gibility,” the result was not so much to the
repression or exclusion of “aberrant sexualities”
as “the specification, the regional solidification of
each one of them” (VS 44).

Such consolidation or solidification is in every

case the chief target of Foucault’s critique, and
nothing is more consistent with this critique than
his adamant refusal to specify an alternative
model of sexual practice or understanding.
Nothing is more foreign to Foucault’s conception
of critical

thought than what he derides as “the

Californian cult of the self,” whereby “one is
supposed to discover one’s true self, to separate
it from that which might obscure or alienate it,
to decipher its truth” – in short, to specify its
authentic needs.

Since we are literally

governed

by pressures to specify our desires and identities,
the critical task is thus “not to discover what we
are, but to refuse what we are,” to refuse both the
state and “the type of individualisation which is
linked to the state.”

(Of all the many critical swipes made against

Foucault, therefore, none is less fair than the
assertion that his refusal of a

specified normative

basis for resistance and political change, coupled
with the apparently sinister implications of the
“death of Man,” implies that he has no concept
of subjective agency or effective freedom.

The

whole thrust of his critical histories is to show
just how fragile, how contingent, prevailing spec-
ifications really are, and so how vulnerable they
are to concerted pressure for change.

“The

work of the intellect is to show that what is does
not have to be what it is.”

)

Alongside its often-discussed “microphysical”

dimension, then, Foucault’s project acknowl-
edges a rather less well-known quasi-transcen-
dental resistance to specification as fundamental
to the very definition of

thought itself. We know

that thought is not a function of representation
or manipulation:

thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct
and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what
allows one to step back from this way of acting
or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object
of thought and to question its meaning, its
conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom
in relation to what one does, the motion
by which one detaches oneself from it, estab-
lishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a
problem [ … ]. For a domain of action, a
behaviour, to enter the field of thought, it is
necessary for a certain number of factors to
have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its
familiarity.

Such

freedom demands to be interpreted, I think,

in a loosely neo-Kantian sense – i.e., as some-
thing accessible exclusively as a

practice or expe-

rience, and not as a specifiable object of
knowledge.

So it would be quite wrong to conclude that

because Foucault

despecifies the subject (in

particular, the subject specified as “Man”), he
therefore gets rid of it entirely. Remember that
“the end of man [ … ] is nothing more, and noth-
ing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it
is once more possible to think” (MC 353/342) –
a space in which it is possible to become the true
subject (rather than the object) of thought.
Foucault went to some lengths to clarify this
point. “Refusing the philosophical recourse to a
constituent subject does not amount to acting as
if the subject did not exist, making an abstraction
of it on behalf of a pure objectivity. This refusal
has the aim of eliciting the processes that are
peculiar to an experience in which the subject
and the object are ‘formed and transformed’ in
relation to and in terms of one another.”

Again,

a “systematic scepticism toward all anthropologi-
cal universals [ … ] does not mean rejecting them
all from the start, outright and once and for all,
but that nothing of that order must be accepted
that is not strictly indispensable.”

It is

1 0 0

hallward

perfectly obvious throughout all of Foucault’s
work that the general category of

relations – rela-

tions between subjects and objects, between one
subject and another, between subject and self,
between subject and truth – is one such indis-
pensable “universal.” So is the related notion of
limits: though every particular limit is of course
historical and contingent, “limitations [them-
selves] are not historical because they are consti-
tutive of all possible history.”

And however

much Foucault suspects the words transcenden-
tal or universal, nevertheless the formulas he uses
to describe the nature of freedom and thought
are generally unqualified if not apodictic (for
instance, that no form of power is ever
completely determining, that resistance is always
present, that the subject always emerges in rela-
tion to the object, and so on). Foucault will quite
happily speak of freedom as “a

permanent provo-

cation,”

just as he seems to presume a kind of

universal agonism, a primordial conflict of “all
against all [ …; t]here is

always within each of us

something that fights something else.”

In typi-

cally aspecified fashion, Foucault “believe[s] too
much in the truth not to suppose that there are
different truths and different ways of saying it”
(FL 314).

Foucault and Deleuze can be distinguished,

then, in a number of essential ways. Whereas
Deleuze would like to get rid of the relational
subject altogether, to clear some space for a cre-
ative coherence beyond the creatural altogether,
Foucault wants to

purge the subject, to eliminate

everything that specifies or objectifies the subject
(as deviant, perverse, criminal, as much as ratio-
nal, sensible, law-abiding … ). Whereas for
Deleuze, differing relations are always “external”
to their differed terms,

for Foucault such rela-

tions are irreducibly constitutive of the situation
in which one strives to become a (de-specified)
subject. Whereas for Deleuze, thought is the vital
movement of the univocal Cosmos-Brain, the
medium of creative energy in its purest, most
anarchic and least “actual” state, for Foucault,
thought is fundamentally bound up with the con-
frontation of limits and constraints, with detach-
ment and self-awareness in an almost Buddhist
sense. Whereas Deleuze’s virtual Problems or
Events presume a virtual determining instance,

Foucault’s historically specific investigations are
“free of any constituent activity, disengaged from
any reference to an origin” or foundation.

Though he is no less hostile than Deleuze to the
illusions of interiority and representation,
Foucault’s “Outside” is emphatically not peopled
with Virtual forms or creative patterns of coher-
ence beyond our own. His thought does not flow
along a singular line of flight so much as confront
the limits of the specific, only to return, like a
Bodhisattva, from the edge of the abyss.
Although Foucault uses different terminology,
what he calls “the critical ontology of ourselves”
is close to the general reflexive effort to move
from the specified to the specific, an effort
deprived of recourse to a singular authority or
plenitude.

In order to be convincing, this disentangling

of Foucault from Deleuze would require a
demonstration in at least four steps. First, that
Foucault’s conception of the “specific intellec-
tual,” though literally devised with Deleuze’s
help, directs his engagement in a fundamentally
different critical direction, toward the composi-
tion of particular histories of how our experience
has been specified and confined. Second, that
Foucault’s eventual conception of ethical self-
reflection does indeed mark a distinct break with
Deleuze’s neo-Spinozist alternative. Third, that
Deleuze’s own much-vaunted reading of

Foucault

is seriously flawed, especially his determination
to read Foucault’s ethics in terms that anticipate
the terminology of

The Fold. Lastly, that

Foucault’s early fascination with the limits of
experience is less the symptom, as some would
have it, of a kind of suicidal mysticism than an
interest in the limits of our specification as such
(the pure, ultimately abstract limit of that

which we remain, though minimally specified,
forever specific): for the early Foucault, what lies
at the pure limit of despecification, beyond any
possible recuperation (be it humanist, materialist
or schizo-analytic), is not the Creative plenitude
of a singular vitality but the uncompromising
void of pure indetermination. This indetermina-
tion deserves comparison, at some level, with
neo-Kantian conceptions of practical reason as
much as with broadly existentialist conceptions
of subjective freedom.

1 0 1

the limits of individuation

Time blocks the development of so compre-

hensive an argument here, but of these four
steps, it is surely the last that is the most slippery
and the most suggestive of the broader distinc-
tion I want to make. I will limit my discussion to
three aspects of this most elusive step, concern-
ing the status of the subject, the nature of trans-
gression, and the relation between madness and
art.

(a) subject and imagination

We know that Foucault aims to subvert the
constituent subject. But this subversion in no
sense implies the death of

the subject and the

consequent birth of a fully objective determina-
tion. For remember that the constituent subject
is itself an emphatically

singular configuration –

a mode of individuation that constitutes itself
out of itself, as its very medium of existence.
There is nothing more singular than the
Cartesian cogito. We can fairly claim that
Foucault is indeed a philosopher of the subject,
once we accept that his subject is neither speci-
fied as empirical Man nor singularised as cogito.
In the terms he uses to describe our modern
“empirico-transcendental doublet” (MC 318),
Foucault’s subject is neither specified as the
objective reality that speaks, works and lives,
nor singularised as the creative author of
consciousness.

In this sense, Foucault’s earliest preoccupa-

tions with an existential phenomenology retain a
certain resonance throughout his career, all retro-
spective disassociations notwithstanding. His first
substantial piece of writing, the 1954 introduc-
tion to Binswanger’s

Dream and Existence,

already isolates “the freedom of man in its origi-
nal form”

as his guiding priority and interest.

Whereas an inauthentic existence “gives itself up
entirely to an objective determinism where its
original freedom is completely alienated” (66),
authentic existence resists such specification
absolutely. In this early text, dreaming and imag-
ination provide the privileged forms of such
resistance. “To imagine [ … ] is to intend oneself
as a movement of freedom which makes itself
world” (68). But once frozen in a particular
image, once specified in a particular form, imag-

ination becomes inert: “to have an image is to
leave off imagining” (71). If morbid pathologies
paralyse “the free movements” of the imagining
subject, then “the aim of psychotherapy should
be to free the imaginary that is trapped in the
image” (72).

(b) limit and void

Always for Foucault, reflective language or
thought “should be directed not toward any inner
confirmation – not toward any kind of central,
unshakeable certitude – but toward an outer
bound where it must continually contest itself.”

To be sure, short of the essay “Theatrum
Philosophicum” itself, there is nothing appar-
ently closer to a Deleuzian orientation in
Foucault’s work than the literally u-topian posi-
tion affirmed in essays like “Preface to
Transgression” (1963) and “Thought from the
Outside” (1966). Enthusiastic lexical similarities
conceal, however, a fundamental distinction.
What is crucially at issue in these and similar
pieces from the same period is not the liberation
of a singular creative dynamism so much as what
confronts a subject carried to the very edge of his
absolute despecification. And what emerges from
this confrontation is simply the empty form of
the limit as such. In all the limit experiences that
Foucault garners from Bataille, Roussel, Artaud
and others, the void which defines their limit
remains precisely that: void. It is the “essential
emptiness” left by the dissolution of the sover-
eign or singular subject that resonates in
Foucault’s early essays.

It is the “absolutely

void” character of what the Foucault of the mid-
1960s imagines as the thought of the future that
guarantees its promise to rouse us from our long
“anthropological sleep.”

Quite unlike Deleuze’s

virtual plane of immanence in which “nothing is
lacking,”

the Foucauldian “outside cannot offer

itself as a positive presence – as something
inwardly illuminated by the certainty of its own
existence – but only as an absence that pulls as
far away from itself as possible.”

So when

Foucault carefully distinguishes his “Outside”
from any merely mystical asceticism, he also
provides us with a useful way of distinguishing
his position from Deleuze’s cosmic vitalism. For

1 0 2

hallward

“the characteristic movement of mysticism is to
attempt to join – even if it means crossing the
night – the positivity of an existence by opening
a difficult line of communication with it,” i.e., to
become one with the creative presence that
sustains the world. But, Foucault insists, “the
experience of the outside has nothing to do with
that [ … ]. It opens a neutral space in which no
existence can take root.”

At this radical edge of

the specific, subtracted from every positive spec-
ification, what individuates a writer, work or style
is simply “its own particular way of being anony-
mous,” its particular way of despecifying.

(c) madness and work

We know that for the author of

Histoire de la

folie, a genuine work of art coheres only at its
specific limit with madness, when it is
confronted by the space that both inspires and
excludes it. Again, it is the

relation of work and

its limit or outside that is essential. “Since
Raymond Roussel, since Artaud, madness is the
place approached by the language of literature.
However it does not approach it as something
that it must enunciate,” but rather as something
it must confront, as its

limit.

Artaud’s

madness, for instance, “is precisely the absence
of the work of art, the reiterated presence of that
absence, its central void experienced and
measured in all its endless dimensions [ … ].
Madness is the absolute break with the work of
art” (MCiv 287). But by the same token,
“Artaud’s oeuvre experiences its own absence in
madness, [and] that experience, the fresh
courage of that ordeal [ … ] –

that is the work

of art itself: the sheer cliff over the abyss of the
work’s absence” (288; emphasis added). So what
fascinates in madness is not, as Derrida and
others have alleged, the promise that madness
itself might speak (might become-work, become-
present) – a fascination that certainly inspired
the

composition

Capitalism

and

Schizophrenia – but what it reveals about the
limits of what can be said. Madness itself has
nothing to say, it does not itself

speak. It simply

interrupts, contests and despecifies: “by the
madness which interrupts it, a work opens a
void, a moment of silence, a question without

answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation
where the world is forced to question itself”
(MCiv 288tm).

Considered in this light, Foucault’s eventual

understanding of philosophy as ethical self-fash-
ioning reads less as the betrayal of an earlier
intransigence than the culmination of a broadly
consistent programme – the isolation of an always
specific experience from all specified conformity.
There can be no

specific norms. The essential

principle of Foucault’s late conception of ethics
is precisely that ethical criteria should never be
directly conditioned by “social or economic or
political structures” on the one hand,

nor deter-

mined by

intrinsically (i.e., absolutely) “good”

or liberatory values on the other. It is the ongo-
ing, subjective

practice of liberty that is alone

decisive. “I do not think that there is anything
that is functionally – by its very nature –
absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice [ … ].
The liberty of men is never assured by the insti-
tutions and laws that are intended to guarantee
them”;

pace Deleuze, “there are no machines of

freedom, by definition.”

So “if one were to find

a place, and perhaps there are some, where
liberty is effectively exercised, one would find
that this is not owing to the order of objects” –
Foucault is thinking of liberty as something
built into the environment, freedom

à la Le

Corbusier – but rather, always, “to the practice
of liberty.”

What is consistent throughout Foucault’s

work, then, and what distinguishes him from
Deleuze, is a militant refusal of specification
(however rational, humane or creative) as a way
of approaching human experience – without
redemptive recourse to fusion with some singular
creative energy as its apocalyp-
tic alternative. The specific is
simply the irreducible medium
of our existence, the exclusive
dimension of our unending
work upon ourselves.

notes

1 For a more detailed presentation of this distinc-
tion, see Hallward, “The Singular and the Specific,”
Radical Philosophy 99 (January 2000): 6–18.

1 0 3

the limits of individuation

2 “In-difference with respect to properties is what
individuates and disseminates singularities”
(Agamben, The Coming Community 19).

3 In a more precise sense, the big bang posited by
most contemporary cosmologists is a singularity
because, rather than an explosion occurring within
an already unfolded field of time and space, it takes
place as an “inflation” creative of its own ongoing
space of expansion. A singularity is “a state of infi-
nite curvature of spacetime. In a singularity, all
places and times are the same. Hence the big bang
did not take place in a preexisting space; all space
was embroiled in the big bang” (Timothy Ferris,
The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report
17).

4 Clare O’Farrell uses the concept of the limit as
a central organising device in her very useful study,
Foucault: Historian Or Philosopher? (1989).

5 Deleuze, “Un concept philosophique” 90.

6 SE 68/79. Where traditional realism supposes to
some degree the independence of its object,
Deleuze promotes with Robbe-Grillet and
Godard a description that “replaces its own
object,” that “erases or destroys its [initially appar-
ent] reality” (C2 18/7; cf. 21/12, 34/22,
68–69/44–45).

7 I explore the precise implications of this point in
my “Deleuze and the World Without Others,”
Philosophy Today 41.4 (Winter, 1997): 530–44.

8 DR 45–52/30–35, 318–26/247–52; SP 65/45–46.

9 DR 52/35. Since I wrote the first version of this
article, some of the consequences of Deleuze’s
univocal and vitalist orientation have been bril-
liantly (if only partially) elucidated in Alain Badiou’s
Gilles Deleuze: La clameur de l’être.

10 MP 311/254; cf. B 20/29. Deleuze’s ontology is
first and foremost a thematic variation on
Spinoza’s singularity of substance, a doctrine that
amounts, for Deleuze, to little short of the
revealed truth of philosophy: “Spinoza is the
Christ of philosophers, and the greatest philoso-
phers are hardly more than apostles who distance
themselves or draw near to this mystery” (QP
59/59–60; cf. 49/48–49).

11 Given Deleuze’s unqualified dedication to
Spinoza, the analogy is hardly inappropriate. If
every creative definition always implies a “verita-
ble generation of the object defined” (SE 68/79),
it is because such “generation” conforms to

Spinozist notions of adequation. And since “an
adequate idea is just an idea that expresses its
cause” (SE 118–19/133), so then “the adequate
idea for all things will express the cause of all
things.” This, of course, is the idea of God (SE
279–80/299–300; cf. 122/136), or in more
“contemporary” jargon, of pure “vitality” (PP
143).

12 “All desiring-production is, in and of itself,
immediately consumption and consummation”
(AO 23/16).

13 PP 143. “The essential thing for me [is] this
‘vitalism,’ or a conception of life as non-organic
energy” (Deleuze, Lettre-Préface, in Buydens,
Sahara 5; cf. FC 93; B 106–07). Deleuze would no
doubt accept Baudrillard’s charge of vitalism,
levelled at him and Foucault in his Oublier Foucault
(1977).

14 Leibniz, in DR 114/84; cf. LB 78/58, 148/110.
Compared to Leibniz, Spinoza is simply the more
insistently univocal of the two; he has a less
“analogical” (and thus less qualitative) notion of
differentiation (SE 309–10/333).

15 NP 8–9/8; cf. Rose, Dialectic, 107–08.

16 SE 180/197; 166/183; cf. DR 105/77.

17 “Difference no longer exists between the poly-
gon and the circle, but in the pure variability of the
sides of the polygon” (LB 88/65). This is not to say
that relations between actualities is restricted to
purely quantitative (comparative) differences.
Relations with other actualities fall within the orbit
of Deleuze’s philosophy precisely to the degree
that they allow the individual actualities concerned
effectively to escape relationality as such, i.e., to
the degree that they provide means of returning
back up along the path that leads “down” from the
virtual to the actual, from the creating to the
created (for instance, the relation between Little
Hans and horse, or orchid and wasp, or alcoholic
and alcohol … ). Such relations, of course, are
what Deleuze calls becomings; every becoming-
other is oriented, ultimately, towards a “becom-
ing-imperceptible” (or becoming-virtual). “The
imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming,
its cosmic formula” (MP 342/279; cf. DS 56/45).

18 B 99–100/97; LB 135–36/103.

19 “L’actuel et le virtuel,” DS 181; “Our starting
point is a unity, a simplicity, a virtual totality [ … ].
Differentiation is always the actualisation of a

1 0 4

hallward

virtuality that persists across its actual divergent
lines [ … ]. Why is differentiation an ‘actualisa-
tion’? Because it presupposes a unity, a virtual
primordial totality” (B 98; 97/95). For Deleuze,
then, every apparent “dualism is therefore only a
moment, which must lead to the re-formation of a
monism” (B 20/29; emphasis added); again, “we
employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive
at a process that challenges all models [ … ], the
magic formula we all seek – PLURALISM =
MONISM” (MP 31/20–21).

20 Leibniz’s monads express the entire world, but
have “no windows,” and no relations with each
other (Leibniz, Monadology §7). Since “the world
does not exist outside of the monads that express
it, the latter are not in contact and have no hori-
zontal relations among them, no intraworldly
connections, but only an indirect harmonic
contact to the extent they share the same expres-
sion” (Deleuze, LB 110/81).

21 “L’actuel et le virtuel,” DS 185.

22 Life, “by actualising itself, by differentiation
itself, loses ‘contact’ with the rest of itself” (B
108/104; cf. SE 195–96/214–15).

23 See for instance FC 29/21, 56/49, 120/112–13;
C1 258/189.

24 See “How to Make Yourself a Body Without
Organs,” MP, plateau 6.

25 MP 343–44/280; cf. AO 334/281. Again, “the
experimental cinema tends toward a perception
as it was before men (or after) [ … ], towards an
any-space-whatever released from its human co-
ordinates” (C1 171/122).

26 MP 91/71ff. “The characteristic [le propre] of
virtuality is to exist in such a way that it is actu-
alised by being differentiated” (B 100/97).

27 DR 361/282. “The Aion is the ideal player or
the game [le joueur idéal ou le jeu],” the game itself,
or – as the word jeu implies – pure gambling (LS
81/64tm): it is this indistinction that is characteris-
tically singular.

28 QP 80/83. “Remarkable points peculiar” to any
given “level or degree of the virtual Unity” or
“Simplicity” are simply posited as so many “points
brillants” (B 103/100), i.e., as self-illuminating.

29 “The event considered as non-actualised (as
indefinite) lacks nothing [ … ] A wound incarnates
itself or actualises itself in a state of things or a

lived experience [un vécu]; but it is itself a pure
virtual on the plane of immanence which pulls us
into a life” (“L’Immanence: une vie … ” 7).

30 Artaud, Oeuvres complètes iii, 76, in C2
227/170–72.

31 FC 130/122; cf. 90/86. Séan Hand’s translation
of Foucault should be avoided if possible: he
renders singularité as “particular feature,” devenir
as “emergence,” déploiement as “unveiling,” and so
on.

32 The statement is conditioned only by the
purely given “il y a” du langage, the “spontaneity of
language” (FC 67/61), i.e., the very “being of
language or language-being” (FC 63/55–56), much
as Heidegger understands it.

33 FC 74/67. Gilbert Simondon provides another
significant illustration of the point. His L’Individu et
sa genèse physico-biologique (1964) plays an impor-
tant role in Différence et répétition and suggests to
Deleuze the central term of his Cinema 2, “the
crystal image.” It is worth quoting Bogue’s useful
summary:

Crystallisation begins when a “seed” crystal is
introduced into a substance which is in an
amorphous, metastable state, a state charac-
terised by Simondon as an internal resonance
of singularities. The seed crystal communi-
cates its shape to a molecule of the
substance, which then communicates the
shape to another, and so on. (In some
substances, several different kinds of crystals
may be formed, the seed crystal determining
which one will be actualised). The process of
individuation occurs between each crystal
and the contiguous amorphous substance,
always at the surface of crystal, the individu-
ally formed crystals being the products of
individuation and marking the cessation of
the process of individuation. Individuation,
therefore, precedes the individual. (Bogue,
Deleuze and Guattari 62)

But it is only the individual properties of the given
seed crystal, along with the determinate chemical
properties of the solution, which first sets the
possible range of derived individuals. “The crystal
as a whole is only the ordered set of its seeds” (C2
118/89), yet Deleuze never explains what deter-
mines them.

34 See for instance QP 40/38; CC 186; MP
480/386.

1 0 5

35 Foucault, “Cours de 14 janvier, 1976,” DE iii,
127. As specific, however, the subject is never
specified by an interest. The status of (Foucault’s)
specific subject is ultimately closer to (the later)
Sartre’s situated subject of freedom than it is to
Lévi-Strauss’ subject of symbolic exchange, the
Lévinasian subject of responsibility, let alone the late
Lacanian subject of drive.

36 Jon Simons’ balanced study poses a similar
question: does Foucault “write to become some-
thing other than who one is” or “to totally
dissolve oneself”? Unsurprisingly, Simons disap-
proves of Foucault to the degree that he seems
tempted by this second option, the lure of an
“unconstrained transgression” or an “unbearably
light” conception of being, drawn by the “urge to
transcend subjectivity altogether” (Simons,
Foucault and the Political 96, 101). My own defence
of a specific rather than a singular answer to this
question is designed to refute those who, like
James Miller (The Passion of Michel Foucault), would
classify Foucault along such singularly self-destruc-
tive and quasi-mystical lines.

37 See in particular Foucault, P/K 126–33.

38 Foucault, “Space, Knowledge and Power,” FR
247. Only a relational critique will be adequate to
the actual practices of modern government and
power, whose primary concern is “men in their
relations, their links, their imbrication with those
other things which are wealth, resources, means
of subsistence, the territory with its specific quali-
ties [ … ], customs, habits, ways of doing and
thinking, etc.” (“La ‘gouvernementalité’” [1978],
DE iii 643–44). More generally, relation grounds
what was to become the great methodological
rule of The Archaeology of Knowledge: “paradoxi-
cally, to define the individuality of a set of state-
ments does not consist of individualising its object,
fixing its identity, or describing the characteristics
that it permanently retains; on the contrary, it is to
describe the dispersion of these objects, to grasp
all the interstices that separate them, to measure
the distances reigning between them – in other
words, to formulate their law of distribution”
(“On the Archaeology of the Sciences” [1968],
EW ii 313).

39 Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” EW ii
360.

40 Foucault, “The Concern for Truth,” PPC 265;
cf. “What is Enlightenment?,” FR 49; “On the
Genealogy of Ethics,” FR 343.

41 Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the
Sciences,” EW ii 331.

42 “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” FR 362. As Paul
Veyne puts it very succinctly, “the originality of
Foucault amongst the great thinkers of this
century has been that he does not convert our
finitude into the foundation for new certainties”
(Veyne, “Le dernier Foucault et sa morale” 937).

43 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” in Dreyfus and
Rabinow, Foucault 216. A similar despecification is
at work, I think, in each of those moments of epis-
temic shift whose allegedly inexplicable character in
Les mots et les choses has been so often empha-
sised. The part played by Cervantes and Sade, and
then by Nietzsche, Roussel and Artaud, refers
back in each case to the same essential role.
Thought wakes up, shakes itself and sets out to
follow a newly plausible line of enquiry which then
becomes dominant in its turn, and will remain so
until it too is frozen into specified convention and
stasis. Genuine criticism can only live in the
austere atmosphere of such moments of radical
despecification. As David Carroll puts it,
Foucault’s “critical discourse is located not at the
place(s) where a discourse most fully realises itself
and closes itself off to other discourses, but rather
in the gaps within every discourse where it is not
itself but separated from itself, where it is threat-
ened with its own disappearance” (Carroll,
Paraesthetics 69).

44 Critics from Habermas and Dews to Taylor
and Said have all concurred in a similar condemna-
tion of Foucault’s alleged critical impotence and
political sterility. This has become a remarkably
common move, and is far from being confined to
the merely reactionary ranks of indignant liberal
humanists. It is not unusual to find casual confir-
mation, today, in a wide range of “theoretically
informed” disciplines, of the commonplace idea
that “Foucault pushed to an extreme the idea
of human beings being determined by the condi-
tions of their existence” (Loomba, Colonialism/
Postcolonialism [1998] 34; cf. Norris, The Truth
About Postmodernism 33; Norris, Reclaiming Truth
9–10; Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism 207; Haber, Beyond
Postmodern Politics 77–78).

Lois McNay’s recent critique is typical of the

prevailing trend: “Foucault’s attack on the subject
is so total that it forecloses any alternative theo-
retical space in which to conceive non-hegemonic
forms of subjectivity [ … ]. There remains no cate-
gory around which a notion of active agency may

the limits of individuation

1 0 6

hallward

be formulated” (McNay, Foucault 6–7). Because
she assumes, like so many critics, that for Foucault
the subject is merely the effect of power, McNay
condemns his theory for its apparent inability “to
explain how, despite the normalising forces that
overdetermine the process of subjectification,
individuals are never subsumed entirely by these
forces” (165). But the point is precisely that
Foucault has never suggested that the – despeci-
fied – subject, the subject of thought, was merely
the effect of power; such derivative status applies
exclusively to the objectified or specified subject.
To confuse the two is to make Foucault’s whole
project virtually unintelligible.

45 Foucault, “Practising Criticism,” PPC 156.

46 Foucault, “How Much Does it Cost for Reason
to Tell the Truth?” [1983], FL 359. Such despecifi-
cation should not be confused with anarchism
pure and simple. The question is “not whether a
culture without restraints is possible or even
desirable but whether the system of constraints in
which a society functions leaves individuals the
liberty to transform the system” (“Sexual Choice,
Sexual Act,” PPC 294).

Foucault,

“Polemics,

Politics

and

Problematisations,” in FR 388; cf. Bernauer,
Foucault’s Force of Flight 20; Schwarz, “Critical
Reproblematisation” 19. Like his friend Boulez,
what Foucault “expected from thought was
precisely that it always enable him to do some-
thing different from what he was doing. He
demanded that it open up, in the highly regulated,
very deliberate game that he played, a new space
of freedom […]. For him the main thing was to
conceive of practice strictly in terms of its internal
necessities without submitting to any of them as if
they were sovereign requirements.” The role of
thought is here “to supply the strength for break-
ing the rules with the act that brings them into
play” (Foucault, “Pierre Boulez, Passing Through
the Screen” [1982], EW ii 244). Nothing bears out
the fruitfulness of this theory better, of course,
than the restlessly inventive and relentlessly self-
critical evolution of Foucault’s own intellectual
practice.

48 The question of Foucault’s qualified proximity
to Kant is too complex to be addressed here.
Suffice it to say that even his hostility to the “slum-
bering” Kant of The Order of Things (OT 341–42)
can be framed in terms of an effort to complete
rather than reverse Kant’s critical project (“A

Preface to Transgression,” EW ii 76). And when,
some fifteen years later, Foucault came to write
the entry on his own work for the new Dictionnaire
des philosophes [under the pseudonym of Maurice
Florence], he begins: “to the extent that Foucault
fits into the philosophical tradition, it is the critical
tradition of Kant, and his project could be called
a Critical History of Thought” (“Foucault,” EW
ii 459; cf. Rajchman, Foucault 103–04). Unlike
Kant, of course, Foucault’s critique is directed
not toward the consolidation of what can be
known and what should be done, so much as
oriented in the direction of an always renewable,
always “possible transgression” (“What is
Enlightenment?,” FR 45). Beatrice Han’s recent
book explores the properly philosophical compar-
ison of Foucault and Kant in suggestive detail (Han,
L’Ontologie manquée de Michel Foucault 1998).

49 Foucault, “Foucault” [c.1982], EW ii 462.

50 Foucault, “Foucault,” EW ii 461.

51 Foucault, “Débat sur la poésie” [1964], DE i
398. As a rule, we can never have “any complete
and definitive knowledge of what may constitute
our historical limits … We are always in the posi-
tion

beginning

again”

(“What

Enlightenment?,” FR 47).

52 Foucault, “The Subject and Power” 222,
emphasis added.

53 P/K 208, emphasis added. Elsewhere he
presumes, for instance, that “there is probably not
a single culture in the world that does not estab-
lish heterotopias: that is a constant of every
human group” (Foucault, “Different Spaces”
[1967], EW ii 179). Paul Patton is one critic who
recognises the consistency of a certain minimal or
“thin” notion of the subject, if only a “body
endowed with capacities,” throughout Foucault’s
work (Patton, “Foucault’s Subject of Power” in
Moss, ed., The Later Foucault).

54 Cf. Deleuze, ES 122–23/108–09; DR
3–4/xx–xxi.

55 Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the
Sciences” [1968], EW ii 332–33.

56 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” FR 50.

57 Foucault, “Dream, Imagination and Existence”
53.

58 Foucault, “Thought of the Outside,” EW ii 152.

1 0 7

59 “It is at the centre of the philosophical subject’s
disappearance

that philosophical

language

proceeds as if through a labyrinth, not to recap-
ture him, but to test (and through language itself)
the extremity of its loss. That is, it proceeds to the
limit and to this opening where its being surges
forth, but where it is already lost, completely
overflowing itself, emptied of itself to the point
where it becomes an absolute void” (Foucault, “A
Preface to Transgression,” EW ii 80; cf. “The
Father’s ‘No,’” EW ii 12). The Foucault who
affirms a practice of writing that opens “a space
into which the writing subject constantly disap-
pears” is determined to avoid those alternative
notions – most importantly, the very notion of
writing itself – which effectively “suppress the real
meaning of [the author’s] disappearance” by trans-
posing his “empirical characteristics into a tran-
scendental anonymity” (“What is an Author?,”
EW ii 206, 208). Arguably, this is precisely the
consequence of Deleuze’s neo-Spinozism – freed,
of course, from any merely writerly thematics.

60 Foucault, “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre” [1964],
DE i 420.

61 Cf. Deleuze, “L’Immanence: une vie” 7.

62 Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” EW ii
155: the outside “has nothing to offer but the infi-
nite void that opens beneath the feet of the person
it attracts, the indifference that greets him as if he
were not there” (155).

63 “The Thought of the Outside,” EW ii 150, 166.
Nothing could be further from Deleuze than
Foucault’s merging, through Blanchot, of the priv-
ileged myths of Eurydice and the Sirens. Like
Odysseus lashed to his mast, “one must vanquish
all desire by a trick that does violence to itself; one
must experience all suffering by remaining at the
threshold of the alluring abyss” (161). And like
Orpheus, one must accept that by turning around
to see the unattainable face of the disappeared one
sees only “the open gaze of death,” that one
“secures only the nothingness in which the poem
can subsequently appear,” a space stripped of all
mobility and substance (162–63).

64 Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History”
[1967], EW ii 291.

65 “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre” [1964], DE i 419.

66 “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” FR 350.

67 “Space, Knowledge and Power,” FR 245, 247.

68 “Space, Knowledge and Power,” FR 246; cf.
“Truth, Power, Self” in Technologies of the Self 10,
14. “I’ve always been a little distrustful of the
general theme of liberation, to the extent that [ …
] there is a danger that it will refer back to the idea
that there does exist a nature or human founda-
tion which, as a result of a certain number of
historical, social or economic processes, found
itself concealed, alienated or imprisoned in and by
some mechanisms of repression.” For instance,
“when a colonial people tries to free itself of its
coloniser, that is indeed an act of liberation, in the
strict sense of the word. But we know very well,
regarding this precise example, that this act of
liberation is not sufficient to define the practices of
liberty that later on will be necessary for this
people, this society and these individuals to decide
upon admissible and acceptable forms of their
existence or political society. That is why I insist
on the practices of freedom” (“The Ethic of
Concern for the Self,” EW i 282–83).

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1 0 9

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Peter Hallward
French Department
King’s College London
Strand
London WC2R 2LS
UK
E-mail: peter.hallward@kcl.ac.uk

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