Tuesday, November 01, 2005
(12:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Open: Deleuze and Foucault
The following excerpt is from the end of Agamben's essay on Deleuze's "Immanence: A Life...," entitled "Absolute Immanence." It is found in Potentialities, ed. by Daniel Heller-Roazen, which is really a very nice and helpful volume in terms of both selection and arrangement. I figured that, along with making Discard the Name and others very happy, it would shed some light on Agamben's project in his recent political writings and in The Open in particular.It is now possible to clarify the sense in which we were able to state at the beginning of this chapter that the concept of "life," as the legacy of the thought of both Foucault and Deleuze, must constitute the subject of the coming philosophy. First of all, it will be necessary to read Foucault's last thoughts on biopower, which seem so obscure, together with Deleuze's final reflections, which seem so serene, on "a life..." as absolute immanence and beatitude. To read together, in this sense, is not to flatten out and to simplify; on the contrary, such a conjunction shows that each text consitutes a corrective and a stumbling block for the other. Only through this final complication is it possible for the texts of the two philosophers to reach what they seek: for Foucault, the "different way of approaching the notion of life," and for Deleuze, a life that does not consist only in its confrontation with death and an immanence that does not once again produce transcendence. We will thus have to discern the matrix of desubjectification itself in every principle that allows for the attribution of subjectivity; we will have to see the element that marks subjection to biopower in the very paradigm of possible beatitude.This was published in 1996; Homo Sacer was published in 1995, Remnants of Auschwitz in 1999, The Open in 2002, and State of Exception in 2003. Deleuze does not seem to me to play a significant role in those works published after this article, at least not explicitly. Not being a Deleuzian, however, I may just be oblivious to the intense Deleuziosity of the texts.
This is the wealth and, at the same time, the ambiguity contained in the title "Immancence: A Life... ." To assume this legacy as a philosophical task, it will be necessary to reconstruct a genealogy that will clearly distinguish in modern philosophy--which is, in a new sense, a philosophy of life--between a line of immanence and a line of transcendence, approximately according to the following diagram:
[there's a diagram here with, let's say, three columns. On the left is transcendence, the middle is unlabelled, and the right is immanence. On the transcendence side, Kant's on top, with a line leading to Husserl; on the immanence side, Spinoza's on top, with a line leading to Nietzsche. Lines lead from Husserl and Nietzsche to Heidegger, who is the only figure in the middle, then from Heidegger, we get "Levinas, Derrida" on the left, and "Deleuze, Foucault" to the right. Another line also joins Deleuze and Foucault to Nietzsche, but there is no similar line from Levinas and Derrida to Husserl.]
It will be necessary, moreover, to embark on a genealogical inquirty into the term "life." This inquiry, we may already state, will demonstrate that "life" is not a medical and scientific notion but a philosophical, political, and theological concept, and that many of the categories of our philosophical tradition must therefore be rethought accordingly. In this dimension, there will be little sense in distinguishing between organic life and animal life or even between biological life and contemplative life and between bare life and the life of the mind. Life as contemplation without knowledge will have a precise correlate in thought that has freed itself of all cognition and intentionality. Theoria and the contemplative life, which the philosophical tradition has identified as its highest goal for centuries, will have to be dislocated onto a new plane of immanence. It is not certain that, in the process, political philosophy and epistemology will be able to maintain their present psysiognomy and difference with respect to ontology. Today, blessed life lies on the same terrain as the biological body of the West. (238-239)
(Interestingly, Agamben reports that Deleuze thinks "a life..." in terms of an example from Dickens in which an old man is on the brink of death; unsatisfied with that example, he also thinks in terms of an infant. Agamben seems to be reluctant to privilege those moments in the same way.)
