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Abstract
This article examines the role of resistance in Michel Foucault's political thought. The article recovers this otherwise obscured aspect of Foucault's thought through a systematic analysis of his theoretical regicide and consequent reconceptualization of power, agency, and resistance. It is argued that Foucault developed a highly original account of resistance, which was, and should continue to be considered, central to his thought and its critical potential. It is shown how Foucault's concept of resistance overcomes the limitation of voluntarism and determinism, which continue to mar contemporary political theory, providing a passage from the critique of contemporary configurations of power to the irrepressible possibility that they may be contested and changed.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of the late professor David Frisby to the development of the ideas contained in this article. Moreover, I would like to thank Juliane Wammen, Yannick Harrison, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Mikkel Flohr is a PhD fellow in political theory at Roskilde University, Denmark. His research project is a critique of political theology departing from the early works of Karl Marx and G.W.F. Hegel. He also teaches and works on issues in contemporary political economy and philosophy. He holds an MA in Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory from Kingston University and an MSc in Political Sociology from London School of Economics.
ORCID
Mikkel Flohr http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6465-9870
Notes
1. There are relatively few articles and works dedicated to the topic of resistance in Foucault's thought, and only a handful attempt to provide a systematic analysis, whereas most focus on his late explorations of classical practices of self-formation as the model of resistance (Simons Citation1991; Thompson Citation2003; Armstrong Citation2008; Hofmeyr Citation2008) or limit themselves to other highly particular passages and problematics in his oeuvre (Keating Citation1997; Bidet Citation2007; McNay Citation2009; Adorno Citation2014) thereby missing or otherwise obscuring the crucial connection to Foucault's previous elaborations on power and resistance. Brent Picket is an exception insofar as he attempts to provide a definition of resistance, but, in the absence of a systematic analysis of Foucault's reconceptualization of power, he ends up misconstruing resistance as an essentialized entity with a clear normative import (Picket Citation1996, 461). Catherine Mills rightfully challenges Judith Butler's interpretation for conflating Foucault's concept of power with language and thereby reducing resistance to resignification (Mills Citation2003, 261–2; cf. Butler Citation1997, 5–6, 106–31; Hoy Citation2004), before proceeding to elaborate a distinctly Nietzschean concept of resistance, shying away from Foucault's own development of the concept (Mills Citation2003, 254–5; cf. Deleuze Citation1999). Kevin Heller (Citation1996), Jeffrey Nealon (Citation2008), and Mark Kelly (Citation2009) are some of the few authors who develop systematic analyses of Foucault's concept of resistance, although we differ markedly in our analysis, as will become clear in the course of the article. These divergences primarily issue from my re-reading of Foucault's reconceptualization of power in terms of a theoretical regicide, modeled on the French Revolution, which inscribes resistance at its very core, and the reinterpretation of Foucault's propositions on power in terms of his subsequent clarifications from 1982 (Foucault Citation2000d, 326–48; Citation1997a, 163–73).
2. For a contending conception and defense of resistance as an affirmative capacity ‘without any prospect of a final outcome', see Howard Caygill's On Resistance (Citation2013, 208; cf. Hallward Citation2014).
3. This is a prevailing tendency in much of the literature, but Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's collaboration provides an especially poignant example (Adorno and Horkheimer Citation2002; cf. Postone 1997, 87–90).
4. It should be noted that this does not apply to Peter Hallward's dialectical voluntarism, insofar as he insists on inscribing agency within its historical and political context, while emphasizing the immanent and irrepressible possibility of popular self-determination (Hallward Citation2009, 17–19, 26).
5. Given the limitations of the current format, his preceding ‘archaeological’ works will not be considered, nor will the particularities of the different forms and constellations of power uncovered in his genealogical works; for a useful overview of these see Nealon (Citation2008, 45).
6. Foucault's invocation of ‘conditions of possibility’ seems to be an allusion to Immanuel Kant's turn from classical (‘dogmatic’) metaphysics’ occupation with transcendent entities towards the necessary forms assumed by human experience. These forms were not derived from experience, but from cognitive structures immanent to the subject, which formed the necessary (‘transcendental’) condition of possibility of experience (Kant Citation1998). The parallel Foucault is insinuating seems to be to his turn from a transcendent conception of power (the sovereign model) towards an understanding of power as a multiplicity of relationships immanent to the social body. It should be noted that this is only a parallel; Foucault's reconceptualization of power served as the conceptual and methodological starting-point of various genealogical investigations into decidedly historical and heterogeneous phenomena and thus was not transcendental in the Kantian sense (Foucault Citation1997c, 51), contrary to Jürgen Habermas's assertions (Citation1987, 253–4).
7. Thus (sovereign) power does not disappear in Foucault's ‘immanent’ account as Mitchell Dean suggests, nor does it need the introduction of supplementary ‘transcendent’ elements (Dean Citation2013, 176, 194–5); in this regard see in particular Foucault's answer to his imaginary interlocutor in The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault Citation2008, 77–8).
8. Agamben's analysis in The Kingdom and the Glory departs from Foucault's theoretical regicide, but proceeds to suggest that the sovereign model actually forms part of this specific historical configuration of power relations. He suggests that it is practices of popular acclamation, celebrating power as sovereign, that constitute and maintain the efficacy of the fiction of sovereign power, in spite of the headless and/or otherwise mutilated king (Agamben Citation2011, xi–xii, 229–30, 68–9).
9. It should be noted that Foucault does not explicitly use the term resistance in the overview he provides in Discipline and Punish, but describes ‘innumerable points of confrontation’ that coincide with what he subsequently conceptualized as resistance (Foucault Citation1977, 27).
10. How this allows Foucault to raise knowledge claims is beyond the scope of this investigation, which will instead refer to the illuminating analyses of the matter by Gary Gutting (Citation1989, 272–86), Wendy Brown (1998, 37–49), as well as Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Citation1983).
11. Giorgio Agamben makes the interesting but unexplored point that Foucault's analysis of power resembles Étienne de la Boétie's in this regard (Agamben Citation1998, 6; cf. Boétie Citation1975; Flohr, Citationforthcoming).
12. Kelly's conception of power as a coherent entity may also explain why he has to resort to a form of vitalism to account for resistance and, in that process, approach determinism (Kelly Citation2009, 116–18; cf. Keating Citation1997).
13. This section follows Foucault in focusing primarily on the constitution of individual subjects and leaves the question of collective forms of resistance for the next section. Wendy Brown points out that Foucault never seriously addressed the constitution of collective (political) subjects that might resist the various modes and constellations of power he investigated (Brown Citation2015, 85–6). He did, however, on numerous occasions indicate that the dynamics of individual and collective subjection coincided, suggesting the possibility of inverting his account of the constitution of individual subjects and/as groups, to account for the development of collective political subjects of resistance. However, this is an area which would benefit from further research, possibly incorporating Foucault's controversial commentaries on the Iranian Revolution, wherein he explicitly refers to the constitution of a ‘collective will of the people’ (Foucault in Afary and Anderson Citation2005, 253).
14. In spite of the proximity between Foucault's early archaeological works and the structuralism of the period, his works were never concerned with ahistorical structures and thus, strictly, do not qualify as structuralist.
15. The most obvious example of these rhetorical excesses is the frequently cited conclusion of The Order of Things, where Foucault prophesized the imminent erasure of the subject ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault 1994, 387). However, he subsequently clarified that this dramatic conclusion was not concerned with subjectivity as a ‘general cultural experience’, but the a priori status of the subject within the human sciences, which, in all fairness, had been the subtitle of that work (Foucault Citation1991, 122–3).
16. From the French assoujettissement (and occasionally sujétion), which Foucault later replaces with his own term subjectivation. Confusingly these are all inconsistently rendered as ‘subjection’, ‘subjectivation', or ‘subjectivization’ in different translations. Despite Kelly's contention that these terms may be differentiated (Kelly Citation2009, 87–9, 100), the terms all contain the dual connotations of the term ‘subject’ [Sujet], which Foucault is invoking. For consistency and clarity all of these terms will be rendered as subjection.
17. This of course does not mean that the subject is exercising this power itself, i.e. constituting its own field of possibilities, although it could, subject (pardon the expression) to the matrix of power relations it finds itself inscribed in – indeed this was the topic of some of Foucault's late works on practices of self-formation. Also note that the field of possible action is not cumulatively reduced by the exercise of power, as power is productive rather than prohibitive as outlined previously (cf. Armstrong Citation2008, 24).
18. Aurelia Armstrong's erudite rebuttal of Dews’ and Žižek's critique inadvertently reproduces their charge of a fundamental discontinuity within his works, suggesting the necessity of abandoning Foucault's concept of resistance, in order to defend his later work on practices of freedom qua self-formation as the model of resistance (Armstrong Citation2008, 22–3).
19. Italics in original.
20. Deleuze notices a remarkable similarity between Foucault's account of power and the Italian Autonomism of Mario Tronti in the primacy ascribed to resistance (Deleuze Citation1999, 120; cf. Tronti Citation2007). It is possible that Foucault came into contact with these theories through the influx of Italian political refugees from the Autonomist Movement, etc., such as Antonio Negri, who established close contacts with a number of French thinkers. The commonality between the two aforementioned thinkers is further developed in Negri's subsequent collaborations with Michael Hardt (Citation1994, Citation2000, Citation2004, Citation2009).
21. The citation from Kelly is from a currently untranslated interview with Foucault from 1975, published in French under the title Les Confessions De Michel Foucault in 2004.
22. Towards the end of his life, Foucault began to use the term ‘government’ to denote power relations, specifying that the use of this term was premised on ‘the very broad meaning it had in the sixteenth century [ … ] [where] it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed’ (Foucault Citation2000d, 341). For a further elaboration see Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller's The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1991).
23. Heller's (Citation1996) reading of Foucault comes close to this conclusion, in spite of its strange reliance on neo-Marxist categories, but ultimately it fails to maintain Foucault's distinction between power and resistance, as distinct positions in a particular type of relation between actions, concluding that they are in fact identical and that the terminological distinction is merely an expression of Foucault's normative evaluation.
24. Nealon goes as far as to suggest that ‘resistance is the dominant mode of cultural power today’ and thus, while completely misapprehending the political indeterminacy of these analytical concepts, efficiently illustrates it (Nealon Citation2008, 109).
25. The specific forms that practices of resistance might assume, and their prospects, depend on the specific power relations(s) they are premised on and their dynamic development, i.e. an empirical issue, which cannot be determined in the abstract and thus remains beyond the scope of this article.
26. This may in turn provide a clue as to why various configurations of power appear transcendent, as manifest in the sovereign model.
27. It should be noted that power and counterpower are not distinct concepts as such; the latter term is only employed to emphasize the origins of specific exercises of power in resistance.
28. For an informative discussion of the analytical and political potential of thinking resistance and revolution together, see Jacques Bidet (Citation2007, 89–95).
29. Pierre Clastres (Citation1987) and David Graeber (Citation2004, 23–37) provide relevant anthropological case studies of societies where power relations are devised and employed to limit the centralized expression of power and maximize (a non-sovereign) autonomy. The implications of Clastres's case studies are further explored in the collaboration between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Citation1988, 351–423).