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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