Hi Dominic -
Now I can't fail to see what you mean related to this specific paragraph!
This coming from the outside line is rather puzzling, though, isn't it?
What's it doing?
- It might be better to say that Foucault's thought searches back for things
from the outside, in order to fail in this, & find empirical facts instead.
But there are these unclear areas & vanishing points in Foucault, which
cause many a disagreement:
"They cannot bear (and one cannot but sympathize) to hear someone saying:
'Discourse is not life: its time is not your time; in it, you will not be
reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that
you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you
will make a man that will live longer than he.'" (the end of Archaeology of
Knowledge)
I'd add that it isn't Deleuze mis-reading Foucault so much as mis-extending
him in a direction, towards its "culmination" - or intersection, where
Foucault never quite explains himself, such as the point where objective
political techniques cross self-binding technologies - but it remains that
the culmination isn't stated by D as happening actually in Foucault's
writing, but at this rather nebulous & dubious point - untestable - the
encounter - But here yes the constructivist method seems to strain & we hear
a bolt or two fly off under the pressure.
Btw, have you read Zizek's 'Organs without bodies'? I enjoyed it - the
spiritual-animal reader - but i also think there's much fertile ground left
between these two - identification with the gesture itself; traversing the
fantasy -
A plural, mobile, multiple life - endless ritornello on ritornello... Why
not?
Edmund
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