Overview

Christopher Penfield illuminates the philosophical encounter between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, developing the first systematic treatment of Deleuze's book Foucault, originally published in 1986. Using the full spectrum of Foucault's primary texts, as well as new insights and analysis from Deleuze's recently translated and published seminars on Foucault, Penfield identifies and elaborates the two thinkers' shared philosophy of force as the novel conceptual framework of 'virtual force ontology.' For the field of Foucault studies, where Foucault still meets with misunderstanding, Penfield clarifies and motivates the demanding, highly abstract portrait of Foucault that Deleuze offers; and in demonstrating Deleuze's philosophical reconstruction, unlocks unrealized aspects of Foucault's thought. For students as well as scholars of Deleuze, Penfield establishes the unique place and importance of Foucault in Deleuze's oeuvre, illuminating the fundamental impact of Foucault on Deleuze and the 'common cause' (Deleuze) that shaped the course of their mutually transformative philosophical relationship.

Full Product Details

Author:   Christopher Penfield (Postdoctoral Scholar in Philosophy, Purdue University)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399530095

ISBN 10:   1399530097
Pages:   288
Publication Date:   31 March 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction. Foucault’s Double (Foucault) 0.1 Deleuze on Foucault 0.2 Deleuze’s Conceptual Evolution: The Audiovisual and the Outside 0.3 Note to the Reader Chapter 1. A New Archivist (The Archaeology of Knowledge) 1.1 ‘A New Pragmatics’ 1.1.1 The Rarity and Regularity of Discourse 1.1.2 Topology of the Discursive Field 1.2 Discursive Production and the ‘Repeatable Materiality’ of Statements Chapter 2. A New Cartographer (Discipline and Punish) 2.1 Painterly Writing and Revolutionary Affect 2.2 Practice and Theory: The Prison Movement and Transversal Resistance 2.3 Power: Macrophysical Postulates and Microphysical Counter-Principles 2.3.1 Property Postulate and Strategic Counter-Principle 2.3.2 Localisation Postulate and Dispersive Counter-Principle 2.3.3 Subordination Postulate and Immanent Counter-Principle 2.3.4 Essence-Attribute Postulate and Relational Counter-Principle 2.3.5 Modality Postulate and Productive Counter-Principle 2.3.6 Legality Postulate and Strategic Counter-Principle, Revisited 2.3.7 New Pragmatics of Political Struggle 2.4 The Disciplinary Diagram 2.4.1 Content and Expression: From the Episteme to Power-Knowledge 2.4.2 Power and Visibility: The Prison Machine as Regime of Light 2.4.3 The Panoptic Abstract Machine: The Diagram and the Archive 2.5 Diagrammatic Social Ontology 2.5.1 History and Becoming 2.5.2 The Diagram as Immanent Cause 2.6 The Mechanosphere of Power 2.6.1 A History of Concrete Machines 2.6.2 The Becoming of Abstract Machines 2.6.3 Foucault’s Three Lines Chapter 3. The Strata or Historical Formations: The Visible and the Articulable (Knowledge) 3.1 Overview of the Knowledge Axis 3.2 The Problem of Truth 3.3 The Visible and the Articulable as Historical Conditions of Real Experience 3.3.1 The Birth of the Clinic 3.3.2 Raymond Roussel 3.3.3 History of Madness 3.4 Archaeology and the Audiovisual Archive 3.4.1 Archaeological Pragmatism 3.4.2 Archaeology as Critical Ontology 3.4.3 The Being of Language: Murmuring of the ‘One Speaks’ 3.4.4 The Being of Light: ‘Virtual Visibility’ 3.5 Audiovisual Capture and the Two Regimes of Truth 3.5.1 Posthumous Verification: Two Alethurgic Forms in Confessions of the Flesh Chapter 4. Strategies or the Non-Stratified: The Thought of the Outside (Power) 4.1 Overview: Microphysics as Force Ontology 4.2 Power-Knowledge: Relations of Capture between Forces and Forms 4.2.1 Actualising Forces in Language and Light 4.2.2 Actualising Transformative Force: The Iranian Uprising 4.3 The Primacy of Force over Form: Diagram and Archive, Revisited 4.4 Resistance and the Thought of the Outside 4.4.1 The Primacy of Resistance over Power Chapter 5. Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation) 5.1 The Problem of Resistance 5.1.1 The Militant Counter-Truth of Cynic Parrhesia 5.2 The Subjectivation Axis: How to Sustain a Line of the Outside 5.2.1 Aesthetics of Existence: Askesis, Freedom and the True Life 5.2.2 Becoming-Queer: The Creative Resistance of Transversal Connection Conclusion. The Foucault Assemblage 6.1 Virtual Force Ontology and the Historical Ontology of Ourselves 6.2 Coda: Chiastic Social Philosophies Notes Bibliography Index

Reviews

This is a careful nuanced analysis of one of the most productive intellectual friendships in the history of Western philosophy, between Foucault and his exploration of the relations between power and knowledge and Deleuze and his understanding of the transversal and marginal lines of flight that cross these relations. Christopher Penfield shows the creative force and future potential of these conceptual encounters and the profound and utterly original questions they raise that may enable new ways of thinking and living to be created. -- Elizabeth Grosz, Duke University

Author Information

Christopher Penfield is Charles A. Dana Associate Professor of Philosophy at Sweet Briar College. He is the co-editor of Between Foucault and Derrida (EUP, 2016) and author of numerous articles on contemporary French philosophy, social and political theory, and aesthetics, including those published in or by Deleuze and Guattari Studies, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Tate Publishing, Foucault Studies and The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon.

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