![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Does Bevir’s weak intentionalism clash irredeemably with the rejection of conceptions of subjectivity in the work of Deleuze and the later Foucault? The paper examines the notion of the subject required by Bevir’s weak intentionalism, before turning to the ‘rejection’ of the subject found in the work of Deleuze and the later Foucault, suggesting that this rejection only rejects the subject as something fully autonomous and given in advance, and does not constitute a global rejection of any subject capable of intentional meaning. A subject who intends is perfectly permissible within the context of Deleuze and Foucault’s philosophies, provided that they are regarded as emergent phenomena from multiple impressions, processes, forces and powers. This subject is in fact a strong candidate for weak intentionalism. However, the Deleuzean–Foucaultian conception of the subject does problematize Bevir’s restriction of historical meaning to the meanings of individual subjects, and not to collectivities. Collectivities, much like individuals, can be conceived as emergent phenomena from multiple matters, relations, powers, individuals and so on, and therefore seem capable of generating meanings, much in the way that subjects can generate meanings. We must, therefore, ask what is so special about the individual subject such that only they are capable of meaning.
Notes
1 M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ix.
2 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), 4.
3 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 68.
4 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 90.
5 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 5.
6 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 90.
7 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 251.
8 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 92.
9 L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 341.
10 G.E. Moore, Philosophical Papers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959).
11 Moore, Philosophical Papers, 125.
12 Moore, Philosophical Papers, 141.
13 Moore, Philosophical Papers, 83.
14 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 258.
15 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 201.
16 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 258.
17 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 38.
18 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 52.
19 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 67.
20 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 69.
21 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 34.
22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 45.
23 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
24 G. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 6.
25 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 22.
26 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 24.
27 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 22.
28 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23.
29 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 22.
30 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 28.
31 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 20.
32 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 85.
33 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92.
34 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 124.
35 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 70.
36 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
37 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
38 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
39 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
40 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
41 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
42 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 71.
43 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
44 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 73.
45 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
46 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
47 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
48 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, my emphasis.
49 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 74.
50 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 75.
51 As Deleuze puts it, ‘the self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification’ (Difference and Repetition, 79).
52 I leave open the question of whether Foucault would subscribe to the view of subjectivity developed herein.
53 M. Foucault, The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1998), 92.
54 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 93.
55 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge.
56 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge.
57 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge.
58 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 93–4, my emphasis.
59 Since the force relations described are already taking place in institutions of power, they themselves will depend on a multiplicity of force relations at a lower level.
60 For more on the emergence and nature of Disciplinary Society, see M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1977).
61 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 99.
62 Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
63 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4.
64 This notion of a self‐organization that brings about wholes with systemic properties that have causal impact on their own, and can act back on the parts that produce them, as well as form productive relations that the parts alone could not enter into, is not a bizarre speculation on the part of Deleuze and Foucault, but forms the crux of the sciences of emergence and complexity. See S. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and S. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
65 Complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman (Reinventing the Sacred, 177–230) has attempted, in a related way, to develop an account of the mind’s intentionality and meaning as emergent and non‐reducible phenomena from physical matter.
66 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 183–8.
67 M. Foucault, Power (London: Penguin, 1994), 331.
68 M. Bevir, ‘Meaning and Intention: A Defence of Procedural Individualism’, New Literary History, 31:3 (2000), 385–403 (386).
69 Bevir, ‘Meaning and Intention’, 391–2.
70 Bevir, ‘Meaning and Intention’.
71 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3.
72 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
73 Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 204.
74 On causal redundancy as a way of showing the existence of collectivities as social actors, see M. Delanda, A New Philosophy of Society (London: Continuum, 2006), 37–9.