I get lost here and there in this Deleuze/Foucault, but I find it rich
reading, if still absent of the substance - the dialectic of forces (life &
death) in a good poem (right down to syllable against syllable, or the
decision to climb a mountain in the morning or, alternately, duck the what I
find a life giving challenge for a café latte and NY Times).
Related to issues of power versus life, I was curious to learn that the US
Army will not take anyone with a tattoo. A good poem is a good tattoo. Or
way for the young to say no to Iraq.
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> Deleuze, G., _Foucault_ (London: Athlone 1988), pp. 92-3:
>
> "Contrary to a fully established discourse, there is no need to uphold
> man in order to resist. What resistance extracts from this revered old
> man, as Nietzsche put it, is the forces of a life that is larger, more
> active, more affirmative and richer in possibilities. The superman has
> never meant anything but that: it is in man himself that we must
> liberate life, since man himself is a form of imprisonment for man.
> Life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object.
> Here again, the two operations belong to the same horizon (we can see
> this clearly in the question of abortion, when the most reactionary
> powers invoke a "right to live"). When power becomes bio-power
> resistance becomes the power of life, a vital power that cannot be
> confined within species, environments or the paths of a particular
> diagram. Is not the force that comes from outside a certain idea of
> Life, a certain vitalism, in which Foucault's thought culminates? Is
> not life this capacity to resist force? From _The Birth of the Clinic_
> on, Foucault admired Bichat for having invented a new vitalism by
> defining life as the set of those functions which resist death. And
> for Foucault as much as for Nietzsche, it is in man himself that we
> must look for the set of forces and functions which resist the death
> of man."
>
> I note: "the forces [plural] of a life that is larger, more
> active..."; "a vital power that cannot be confined within species...";
> "life as the set of those functions which resist..." - this is
> certainly a plural, mobile, multiple "Life". But "Life" it
> nevertheless is, albeit "a certain idea of Life", belong to "a certain
> vitalism" inspired by the "new vitalism" of Bichat. This
> pluralisation, dispersal, inscription within relations of struggle and
> hence *revitalisation* of "vitalism" is not, whatever else it may be,
> the revered old vitalism of the revered old man, his withered mojo or
> cojones. But I don't think it can be denied that it *is* a vitalism,
> nonetheless - and a vitalism, moreover, "in which Foucault's thought
> culminates"!
>
> "When power takes life as its object", then there is resistance; this
> is always so in Foucault, whatever the object, since power always
> operates *as power* over against resistance, presupposing and
> engendering it. So bio-power sets the stage, creates the arena, for
> *bios* to emerge as a resistance, to be characterised finally by the
> resistance that it offers. But this is not, emphatically, "a force
> which comes from outside", an autonomous Life-force that needed only
> the provocation of bio-power to spring into being and break the
> confines of bio-power's "particular diagram".
>
> Deleuze himself observes that life's becoming-resistance-to-power and
> power's taking-of-life-as-its-object are operations that "belong to
> the same horizon" It is difficult to imagine Foucault's thought
> "culminat[ing]" anywhere, least of all here where everything is so
> problematic and entangled...
>
> Dominic
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