Deleuze’s FOUCAULT is a crucial reference for situating, and for understanding in relation to contemporary philosophical concerns, Foucault’s posthumously published LES AVEUX DE LA CHAIR, the fourth volume in his history of sexuality project.
Foucault has often been seen as elaborating a form of historical epistemology, and this is certainly an important part of his work. He affirmed that the aim of his philosophical project was not to give the history of the differing forms taken by « sexuality » as a unitary essence. Rather, his project amounts to proposing a history of our experience of sexuality, insofar as that experience is constituted, articulated and transformed across successive or co-existing incommensurable assemblages.
Deleuze’s book showed that underlying Foucault’s manifest epistemological project, motivating and orienting it, lay a realist ontological research programme. It allows us to make sense of Foucault’s claim that his project is more akin to Heidegger’s approach to the relations between subject and truth than to Lacan’s.
Far from piloting the relativist turn to post-modern « correlationism », Foucault’s research programme was tenaciously realist throughout its transformations. Two key realist dimensions of his analyses can be singled out: the material cause and the outside.
1) The material cause (called in his history of sexuality project the « ethical substance ») is a constant concern of Foucault’s work, embracing the materiality of the archives, of the technologies of power, and of the techniques of the self. It is strictly inseparable from the efficient cause consisting in rules, regulations, and prescriptions. Together they constitute the assemblages of bodies-languages within which our experience is formed.
2) The outside is a concept that Foucault and Deleuze share with Maurice Blanchot. Deleuze argues that Foucault gives this category of the outside a distinctively realist turn in his transformation of Blanchot’s affirmation that « speaking is not seeing ». For Deleuze, Foucault’s treatment of the epistemological divergence between the sayable and the visible, and the freeing of the visible from the domination of the sayable, institutes a second, realist, maxim: seeing is not speaking.
This constitution of a relative outside, and of a composite of seeing-speaking rejoins the first point concerning the material cause and the convergent or divergent composites of bodies-languages.
However, the category of the outside is not limited to these two dimensions, nor even to their divergence. The outside is what underlies both the convergence and the divergence of bodies and languages, and is the driving force of their transformations.
Deleuze’s reconstruction of Foucault’s ontological research programme is complex, but he succeeds in isolating a realist core that operates as a positive heuristic in the passage from phenomenology to epistemology and from epistemology to ontology.
AGENT SWARM 