Foucault and Deleuze.

MICHEL FOUCAULT: A Maoist once said to me: “I can easily understand Sartre’s purpose in siding with us; I can
understand his goals and his involvement in politics; I can partially under- stand your position, since you’ve always
been concerned with the problem of confinement. But Deleuze is an enigma.” I was shocked by this statement because
your position has always seemed particularly clear to me.
GILLES DELEUZE: Possibly we’re in the process of experiencing a new relationship between theory and practice. At
one time, practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence; at other times, it bad an opposite sense and it
was thought to inspire theory, to be indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms. In any event, their
relationship was understood in terms of a process of totalisation. For us, however, the question is seen in a different
light. The relationships between theory and practice are far more partial and fragmentary. on one side, a theory is always
local and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another sphere, more or less distant from it. The relationship
which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. Moreover, from the moment a theory moves into
its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by another type of
discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set of relays
from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without
eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall. For example, your work began in the
theoretical analysis of the context of confinement, specifically with respect to the psychiatric asylum within a capitalist
society in the nineteenth century. Then you became aware of the necessity for confined individuals to speak for
themselves, to create a relay (it’s possible, on the contrary, that your function was already that of a relay in relation to
them); and this group is found in prisons — these individuals are imprisoned. It was on this basis that You organised the
information group for prisons (G.I.P.)(1), the object being to create conditions that permit the prisoners themselves to
speak. It would be absolutely false to say, as the Maoist implied, that in moving to this practice you were applying your
theories. This was not an application; nor was it a project for initiating reforms or an enquiry in the traditional sense.
The emphasis was altogether different: a system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity of parts that are
both theoretical and practical. A theorising intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative
consciousness. Those who act and struggle are no longer represented, either by a group or a union that appropriates the
right to stand as their conscience. Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity, even within the person who speaks
and acts. All of us are “groupuscules.”(2) Representation no longer exists; there’s only action-theoretical action and
practical action which serve as relays and form networks.
FOUCAULT: It seems to me that the political involvement of the intellectual was traditionally the product of two
different aspects of his activity: his position as an intellectual in bourgeois society, in the system of capitalist production
and within the ideology it produces or imposes (his exploitation, poverty, rejection, persecution, the accusations of
subversive activity, immorality, etc); and his proper discourse to the extent that it revealed a particular truth, that it
disclosed political relationships where they were unsuspected. These two forms of politicisation did not exclude each
other, but, being of a different order, neither did they coincide. Some were classed as “outcasts” and others as
“socialists.” During moments of violent reaction on the part of the authorities, these two positions were readily fused:
after 1848, after the Commune, after 1940. The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the
facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. The intellectual spoke the
truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience,
consciousness, and eloquence. In the most recent upheaval (3) the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need
him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly
capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this
discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly
and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power-the idea of
their responsibility for “consciousness” and discourse forms part of the system. The intellectual’s role is no longer to
place himself “somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to
struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge,”
“truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse. “(4)
In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional, as
you said, and not totalising. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power
where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to “awaken consciousness” that we struggle (the masses have been
aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a
prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle
for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A “theory ” is the regional system of this struggle.
DELEUZE: Precisely. A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It
must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a
theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. We don’t revise a theory, but construct new
ones; we have no choice but to make others. It is strange that it was Proust, an author thought to be a pure intellectual,
who said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don’t suit you, find another pair;
I leave it to you to find your own instrument, which is necessarily an investment for combat. A theory does not totalise;
it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself. It is in the nature of power to totalise and it is your
position. and one I fully agree with, that theory is by nature opposed to power. As soon as a theory is enmeshed in a
particular point, we realise that it will never possess the slightest practical importance unless it can erupt in a totally
different area. This is why the notion of reform is so stupid and hypocritical. Either reforms are designed by people who
claim to be representative, who make a profession of speaking for others, and they lead to a division of power, to a
distribution of this new power which is consequently increased by a double repression; or they arise from the
complaints and demands of those concerned. This latter instance is no longer a reform but revolutionary action that
questions (expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that maintains it. This is
surely evident in prisons: the smallest and most insignificant of the prisoners’ demands can puncture Pleven’s
pseudoreform (5). If the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would be
enough to explode the entire educational system. There is no denying that our social system is totally without tolerance;
this accounts for its extreme fragility in all its aspects and also its need for a global form of repression. In my opinion,
you were the first-in your books and in the practical sphere-to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity
of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of
this “theoretical” conversion-to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical
way on their own behalf.
FOUCAULT: And when the prisoners began to speak, they possessed an individual theory of prisons, the penal system,
and justice. It is this form of discourse which ultimately matters, a discourse against power, the counter-discourse of
prisoners and those we call delinquents-and not a theory about delinquency. The problem of prisons is local and
marginal: not more than 100,000 people pass through prisons in a year. In France at present, between 300,000 and
400,000 have been to prison. Yet this marginal problem seems to disturb everyone. I was surprised that so many who
had not been to prison could become interested in its problems, surprised that all those who bad never heard the
discourse of inmates could so easily understand them. How do we explain this? Isn’t it because, in a general way, the
penal system is the form in which power is most obviously seen as power? To place someone in prison, to confine him
to deprive him of food and heat, to prevent him from leaving, making love, etc.-this is certainly the most frenzied
manifestation of power imaginable. The other day I was speaking to a woman who bad been in prison and she was
saying: “Imagine, that at the age of forty, I was punished one day with a meal of dry bread.” What is striking about this
story is not the childishness of the exercise of power but the cynicism with which power is exercised as power, in the
most archaic, puerile, infantile manner. As children we learn what it means to be reduced to bread and water. Prison is
the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral
force. “I am within my rights to punish you because you know that it is criminal to rob and kill . . . … What is
fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesn’t hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the
tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely “justified,” because its practice can be totally
formulated within the framework of morality. Its brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good
over Evil, of order over disorder.
DELEUZE: Yes, and the reverse is equally true. Not only are prisoners treated like children, but children are treated
like prisoners. Children are submitted to an infantilisation which is alien to them. On this basis, it is undeniable that
schools resemble prisons and that factories are its closest approximation. Look at the entrance to a Renault plant, or
anywhere else for that matter: three tickets to get into the washroom during the day. You found an eighteenth-century
text by Jeremy Bentham proposing prison reforms; in the name of this exalted reform, be establishes a circular system
where the renovated prison serves as a model and where the individual passes imperceptibly from school to the factory,
from the factory to prison and vice versa. This is the essence of the reforming impulse, of reformed representation. On
the contrary, when people begin to speak and act on their own behalf, they do not oppose their representation (even as
its reversal) to another; they do not oppose a new representativity to the false representativity of power. For example, I
remember your saying that there is no popular justice against justice; the reckoning takes place at another level.
FOUCAULT: I think that it is not simply the idea of better and more equitable forms of justice that underlies the
people’s hatred of the judicial system, of judges, courts, and prisons, but-aside from this and before anything else-the
singular perception that power is always exercised at the expense of the people. The anti-judicial struggle is a struggle
against power and I don’t think that it is a struggle against injustice, against the injustice of the judicial system, or a
struggle for improving the efficiency of its institutions. It is particularly striking that in outbreaks of rioting and revolt
or in seditious movements the judicial system has been as compelling a target as the financial structure, the army, and
other forms of power. My hypothesis -but it is merely an hypothesis- is that popular courts, such as those found in the
Revolution, were a means for the lower middle class, who were allied with the masses, to salvage and recapture the
initiative in the struggle against the judicial system. To achieve this, they proposed a court system based on the
possibility of equitable justice, where a judge might render a just verdict. The identifiable form of the court of law
belongs to the bourgeois ideology of justice.
DELEUZE: On the basis of our actual situation, power emphatically develops a total or global vision. That is, all the
current forms of repression (the racist repression of immigrant workers, repression in the factories, in the educational
system, and the general repression of youth) are easily totalised from the point of view of power. We should not only
seek the unity of these forms in the reaction to May ‘68, but more appropriately, in the concerted preparation and
organisation of the near future, French capitalism now relies on a “margin” of unemployment and has abandoned the
liberal and paternal mask that promised full employment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of
repression: restrictions on immigration, once it is acknowledged that the most difficult and thankless jobs go to
immigrant workers-repression in the factories, because the French must reacquire the “taste” for increasingly harder
work; the struggle against youth and the repression of the educational system, because police repression is more active
when there is less need for young people in the work force. A wide range of professionals (teachers, psychiatrists,
educators of all kinds, etc.) will be called upon to exercise functions that have traditionally belonged to the police. This
is something you predicted long ago, and it was thought impossible at the time: the reinforcement of all the structures of
confinement. Against this global policy of power, we initiate localised counter-responses, skirmishes, active and
occasionally preventive defences. We have no need to totalise that which is invariably totalised on the side of power; if
we were to move in this direction, it would mean restoring the representative forms of centralism and a hierarchical
structure. We must set up lateral affiliations and an entire system of net- works and popular bases; and this is especially
difficult. In any case, we no longer define reality as a continuation of politics in the traditional sense of competition and
the distribution of power, through the so-called representative agencies of the Communist Party or the General Workers
Union(6). Reality is what actually happens in factories, in schools, in barracks, in prisons, in police stations. And this
action carries a type of information which is altogether different from that found in newspapers (this explains the kind
of information carried by the Agence de Press Liberation (7).’
FOUCAULT: Isn’t this difficulty of finding adequate forms of struggle a result of the fact that we continue to ignore
the problem of power? After all, we had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of
exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power. It may be that Marx and Freud
cannot satisfy our desire for understanding this enigmatic thing which we call power, which is at once visible and
invisible, present and hidden, ubiquitous. Theories of government and the traditional analyses of their mechanisms
certainly don’t exhaust the field where power is exercised and where it functions. The question of power re- mains a
total enigma. Who exercises power? And in what sphere? We now know with reasonable certainty who exploits others,
who receives the profits, which people are involved, and we know how these funds are reinvested. But as for power . . .
We know that it is not in the hands of those who govern. But, of course, the idea of the “ruling class” has never received
an adequate formulation, and neither have other terms, such as “to dominate … .. to rule … .. to govern,” etc. These
notions are far too fluid and require analysis. We should also investigate the limits imposed on the exercise of power-the
relays through which it operates and the extent of its influence on the often insignificant aspects of the hierarchy and the
forms of control, surveillance, prohibition, and constraint. Everywhere that power exists, it is being exercised. No one,
strictly speaking, has an official right to power; and yet it is always excited in a particular direction, with some people
on one side and some on the other. It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see
who lacks power. If the reading of your books (from Nietzsche to what I anticipate in Capitalism and Schisophrenia (8)
has been essential for me, it is because they seem to go very far in exploring this problem: under the ancient theme of
meaning, of the signifier and the signified, etc., you have developed the question of power, of the inequality of powers
and their struggles. Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a
small-time boss, the manager of “H.L.M.,”‘ a prison warden, a judge, a union representative, the editor-in-chief of a
newspaper). And if pointing out these sources-denouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle, it is not
because they were previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised
networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets, is the first step in
the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. if the discourse of inmates or
prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on
prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups. The
discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it
turned out to be more than we expected? A whole series of misunderstandings relates to things that are “bidden,”
“repressed,” and “unsaid”; and they permit the cheap “psychoanalysis” of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps
more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. The two themes frequently encountered in the recent past, that
“writing gives rise to repressed elements” and that “writing is necessarily a subversive activity,” seem to betray a
number of operations that deserve to be severely denounced.
DELEUZE: With respect to the problem you posed: it is clear who exploits, who profits, and who governs, but power
nevertheless remains something more diffuse. I would venture the following hypothesis: the thrust of Marxism was to
define the problem essentially in terms of interests (power is held by a ruling class defined by its interests). The
question immediately arises: how is it that people whose interests are not being served can strictly support the existing
power structure by demanding a piece of the action? Perhaps, this is because in terms of investments, whether economic
or unconscious, interest is not the final answer; there are investments of desire that function in a more profound and
diffuse manner than our interests dictate. But of course, we never desire against our interests, because interest always
follows and finds itself where desire has placed it. We cannot shut out the scream of Reich: the masses were not
deceived; at a particular time, they actually wanted a fascist regime! There are investments of desire that mould and
distribute power, that make it the property of the policeman as much as of the prime minister; in this context, there is no
qualitative difference between the power wielded by the policeman and the prime minister. The nature of these
investments of desire in a social group explains why political parties or unions, which might have or should have
revolutionary investments in the name of class interests, are so often reform oriented or absolutely reactionary on the
level of desire.
FOUCAULT: As you say, the relationship between desire, power, and interest are more complex than we ordinarily
think, and it is not necessarily those who exercise power who have an interest in its execution; nor is it always possible
for those with vested interests to exercise power. Moreover, the desire for power establishes a singular relationship
between power and interest. It may happen that the masses, during fascist periods, desire that certain people assume
power, people with whom they are unable to identify since these individuals exert power against the masses and at their
expense, to the extreme of their death, their sacrifice, their massacre. Nevertheless, they desire this particular power;
they want it to be exercised. This play of desire, power, and interest has received very little attention. It was a long time
before we began to understand exploitation; and desire has had and continues to have a long history. It is possible that
the struggles now taking place and the local, regional, and discontinuous theories that derive from these struggles and
that are indissociable from them stand at the threshold of our discovery of the manner in which power is exercised.
DELEUZE: In this context, I must return to the question: the present revolutionary movement has created multiple
centres, and not as the result of weakness or insufficiency, since a certain kind of totalisation pertains to power and the
forces of reaction. (Vietnam, for instance, is an impressive example of localised counter-tactics). But bow are we to
define the networks, the transversal links between these active and discontinuous points, from one country to another or
within a single country?
FOUCAULT: The question of geographical discontinuity which you raise might mean the following: as soon as we
struggle against exploitation, the proletariat not only leads the struggle but also defines its targets, its methods, and the
places and instruments for confrontation; and to ally oneself with the proletariat is to accept its positions, its ideology,
and its motives for combat. This means total identification. But if the fight is directed against power, then all those on
whom power is exercised to their detriment, all who find it intolerable, can begin the struggle on their own terrain and
on the basis of their proper activity (or passivity). In engaging in a struggle that concerns their own interests, whose
objectives they clearly understand and whose methods only they can determine, they enter into a revolutionary process.
They naturally enter as allies of the proletariat, because power is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist
exploitation. They genuinely serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those places they find themselves
oppressed. Women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a specific
struggle against the particularised power, the constraints and controls, that are exerted over them. Such struggles are
actually involved in the revolutionary movement to the degree that they are radical, uncompromising and nonreformist,
and refuse any attempt at arriving at a new disposition of the same power with, at best, a change of masters. And these
movements are linked to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat to the extent that they fight against the controls
and constraints which serve the same system of power.
In this sense, the overall picture presented by the struggle is certainly not that of the totalisation you mentioned earlier,
this theoretical totalisation under the guise of “truth.” The generality of the struggle specifically derives from the system
of power itself, from all the forms in which power is exercised and applied.
DELEUZE: And which we are unable to approach in any of its applications without revealing its diffuse character, so
that we are necessarily led–on the basis of the most insignificant demand to the desire to blow it up completely. Every
revolutionary attack or defence, however partial, is linked in this way to the workers’ struggle.

This discussion was recorded March 4, 1972; and it was published in a special issue of L’Arc (No. 49, pp. 3-10),
dedicated to Gilles Deleuze. It is reprinted here by permission of L’Arc. (All footnotes supplied by the editor.)
Notes:
1. “Groupe d’information de prisons”: Foucault’s two most recent publications (I, Pierre Riviere and Surveiller et Punir)
result from this association.
2. Cf. above “Theatrum Philosophicum,” p. 185 in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice.
3. May 1968, popularly known as the “events of May.”
4. See L’Ordre du discours, pp. 47-53 in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice.
5, Rene Pleven was the prime minister of France in the early 1950.
6. “Confederation Generale de Travailleurs”, General Confederation of Workers.
7. Liberation News Agency.
8. Nietzsche et la Philosophie (Paris: P.U.F., 1962) and Capitalisme et schisophrenie, vol. 1, ‘Anti-Oedipus, in
collaboration with F. Guattari (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1912). Both books are now available in English.
9. Habitations à Loyer Modéré - moderate rental housing.”