A taste for life (on some suicides in Deleuze and Spinoza)

Abstract

"Gilles Deleuze’s book-length account of Foucault’s thought, Foucault, published two years after the Foucault’s death, sets out to decipher the secret or latent systematicity of that thought’s unfolding.1 Such a systematicity would seem to be belied by the hazards and turns of Foucault’s itinerary, marked deeply as it was by sudden shifts in perspective, object and methodology. It is this very capacity for sudden mutations that was, for many, the strength of his thought. As early as 1969, in the “Introduction” to The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault proposed the figure of the labyrinth as a way of describing the space of thought and of writing that he was moving in, admonishing readers who object to his brusque shifts in orientation in this way: “do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”2 Deleuze underlines that, on the surface and indeed in its most interior movement, Foucault’s thought proceeds by jolts, and mutates only under the bottled-up pressure of an impasse. The crisis witnessed by the long period of silence at the end of his life—between the publication of La Volonté de savoir in 1976 and L’Usage des plaisirs in 1984, on the eve of his death—is said to be exemplary of this halting trajectory. And yet after his death it becomes incumbent on thought itself, in its confrontation with Foucault’s published work, to decipher the “logic of a thought” and to demonstrate the “necessary” passage from one phase or stratum of that thought to another: “Obviously, what is important is to show how one passes necessarily from one these determinations to the next.”3 That Deleuze’s scansion of Foucault’s work would result in the isolation of three definitive periods or moments necessarily casts a “systematic” shadow over it, while placing a special pressure on the concluding phase—in this case, Foucault’s seeming return to the figure of the self and the subject in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality trilogy. More telling, Deleuze then proceeds to characterize these three periods of Foucault’s thought in terms that deliberately, if not explicitly, recall the articulations found in Kant’s critical system. Deleuze sees Foucault’s thought unfolding in three moments dealing successively with questions of knowledge, power and the aesthetic: thought-as-archive, thought-as-strategy, thought-as-artistic.4 To these images of thought correspond a given form or type of “rule”: the determined forms of knowledge, the “constraining rules” of commands or ethical imperatives, and what Deleuze refers to the set of “facultative rules” that evaluate a given “style” of existence