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Columbia University Press
New York Chichester. West Sussex
Porarls © 1990 by Les Editions de Minuit
Translation copyright © 1995 Columbia University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deleuze. Gilles.
[Pourparlers. 1972-1990. English)
Negotiations. 1972-1990 / Gilles Deleuze : translated by Martin
p. cm. -(European perspectives)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0231-07580-4 (alk. paper)
1. Philosophy. I. Title II. Series.
194--dc20 95-13438
Casebound editions of Columbia Universit Press books are printed
on permanent and durable acid-fee paper.
Printed in te United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
part one • From Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus
Letter to a Harsh Critic 3
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Anti-Oedipus 13
On A Thousand Pltaus 25
part two • Cinemas 35
Three Questions on Six Tims Two 3
On The Movement-Image 46
On The TimeImage
Doubts About the Imaginary 62
Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel 68
part three. Michel Foucault 81
Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open 83
Life as a Work of At
A Portrait of Foucault
1 02
part four. Philosophy
1 1 9
Mediators 1 2 1
On Philosophy 135
On Leibniz
1 56
Letter to Reda Bensmaia, on Spinoza 164
You're charming, clever, mischievous, even vicious sometimes. You
might try to be a bit nicer ... because the letter you've sent me, turn
ing sometimes on what peol say, sometimes on what you yourself
think, or a mixture of the two, is basically a sort of celebration of my
supposedly sorry predicament. You tell me, on the one hand, that I'm
trapped, completely trapped-in my life, my teaching, politically
that I've become a lousy celebrity, but not for long, and there's noth
ing I can do about it all. You tell me, also, that I've always just tagged
along behind you, the real experimenters or heroes, sucking your
blood, savoring your poisons, but keeping at a safe distance to watch
and capitalize on what you're doing. That's not how I see it at all. Real
and pretend schizophrenics are giving me such a hard time that I'm
starting to see the attractions of paranoia. Long live paranoia. What's
your letter supposed to inspire, apart from a bit of ressetimt (you're
trapped, you're trapped, "admit it" ... ) and a bit of guilt (you've got
Io self-respect, you're just tagging along ... ); if that's all you've got
to say, why bother? You're getting your own back for having written a
book about me. Your letter's fll of false sympathy and a real thirst for
In te frst place, though, you might remember it wasn't my idea,
tis book. You say you did it "for a laugh, for no good reason, for
money, for social advancement." I'm not sure it's the best way to get
althat. Then again, that's your business, and I told you from the start
tat your book w nothing to do with me, that I wasn't going to read
it or I would read it when it came out, as saying something about you.
You came to see me asking for something or other you could put in it.
Ad really just to be nice to you, I suggested an exchange of letters
a simpler and less tedious than a taped interview. On the under
stnding that the letters would be printed quite separately from your
bok, as a sort of appendix. You're already taking advantage of me by
distorting our agreement somewhat, and complaining that I've
behaved like some old Duchesse de Guermantes saying ''You will hear
fom me," like an oracle telling you to use the mail, or like Rilke refus
ing to give any advice t a young poet. Oh, patience.
Being kind isn't, it must be said, your strong point. If I ever
stopped liking and admiring people and (some) things, I'd feel
dead, deadened. But you lot, you seem to have been born thorough
ly bitter, you sneer at everything: "Nobody fools me ... I'm doing a
bok about you, but you'll see ... "Of all possible interpretations you
generally choose the most base or spiteful. Example number one: I
lk and admire Foucault. I wrote an article about him. And he wrote
Qe about me, from which you quote the remark: "Maybe one day
we'll see the century as Deleuzian." Your version of this is that we're
trading compliments. It doesn't seem to cross your mind that I might
really admire Foucault, or that his little remark's a joke meant to
make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.
There's a piece you know that explains this innate spitefulness of
people who come from the militant lef: "If you like big ideas, then
ty talking about kindness and fraternity at a leftist meeting. They
specialize in all forms of careflly calculated animosit, in greeting
anybody, present or absent, friend or foe, and anything they say, with
agressiveness and put-downs. They don't want to understand peo
ple, but to check them over."· You're checking me over very careful
IY'i your letter. I remember a guy from Gay Lib once saying in a
meeting that it was just as well they were around to be our guilty con
science ... Weird ambition, bit like a cop, to be someone's guilty con
science. And you too, it's as though you think doing a book about (or
aanst) me gives you some power over me. No way. The idea of feel-
'rd fom "Les Culs energenes," Rchch (Mach 1973), pp. 142-43.
Letter to a Harsh Critic •
ing guilty is, for me, just as repugnant as being someone else's guilty
Example number two: my fngernails, which are long because I
don't cut them. At the end of your letter you say my worker's jacket
(it's actually a peasant's jacket) is like Marilyn Monroe's pleated
bodice and my fingernails are like Greta Garbo's dark glasses. And
you shower me with ironic and spiteful advice. A you mention them
several times, my fngernails, let's consider them. One might say that
my mother used to cut them for me and it's to do with the Oedipus
complex and castration (a ridiculous interpretation but a psychoana
lytical one) . One might also note, looking at my fngertips, that I
haven't got the normal protective whorls, so that touching anything,
especially fabric, causes such irritation that I need long nails to pro
tect them (a teratological, selectionist interpretation) . Or one might
say, and it's true, that I dream of being, not invisible, but impercepti
ble, and the closest I can get to the dream is having fingernails I can
keep in my pocket, so I find nothing more disconcerting than some
body looking at them (a social psychologist's interpretation) . One
might, fnally, say: "Yu mustn't bite your fngernails, because they're
part of you; if you like fingernails, bite other people's if you want to
and get the chance " (a Darien-style2 political interpretation) . But you,
you choose the shabbiest interpretation of all: he want to be differ
ent, wants to do a Garbo. It's strange, anyway, how none of my fiends
have ever commented on my nails, fnding them perfectly natural, as
though they'd just landed there like seeds blown in the wind that
nobody bothers mentioning.
I'll come, now, to your frst criticism, where you find all sorts of dif
ferent ways of saying: You're stuck, you're trapped, admit it. The pub
lic prosecutor. I'm not admitting anything. Since what's at issue,
through no fault of mine, is a book about me, I'd like to explain how
I see what I've written. I belong to a generation, one of the last gen
erations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history
of philosophy. The history of philosophy plays a patently repressive
role in philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of the Oedipus com
plex: ''You can't seriously consider saying what you yourself think
until you've read this and that, and that on this, and this on that. "
Many members of my generation never broke free of this; others did,
by inventing their own particular methods and new rules, a new
approach. I myself "did" history of philosophy for a long tme, read.
books on this or that author. But I compensated in various ways: by
concentratng, in the frst place, on authors who challenged the ratio
naist tadition in this history (and I see a secret link between
Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, consttuted by their critique
of negativit, their cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiorit, the exter
nalit of forces and relatons, the denunciation of power ... and so
on). What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics. My book on
Knt's different; I like it, I did it as a book about an enemy that tries to
show how his system works, its various cogs-the tribunal of Reason,
the legitmate exercise of the faculties (our subjection to these made
all the more hypocritical by our being characterized as legislators). But
I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time w to see the histo
r of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing)
immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author fom behind
and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.
It w really important for it to be his own child, because the author
had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be
monstous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping,
dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed. I think my
book on Bergson's a good example. And there are people these days
who laugh at me simply for having written about Bergson at all. It sim
ply shows tey don't know enough history. They've no idea how much
hatred Bergson managed to stir up in the French universit system at
the outset and how he became a focus for all sorts of crazy and uncon
ventonal3 people right across the social spectrum. And it's irrelevant
whether that's what he actually intended.
It was Nietzsche, who I read only later, who extricated me from all
this. Because you just can't deal with him in the same sort of way. He
gets up to all sorts of things behind yor back.4 He gives you a per
verse taste-certainly something neither Marx nor Freud ever gave
anyone-for saying simple things in your own way, in affects, intensi
tes, experiences, experiments. It's a strange business, speaking for
yourself, in your own name, because it doesn't at all come with seeing
yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals fnd a real
name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in
depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities
everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them. A
Letter to a Harsh Critic •
name as the direct awareness of such intensive multiplicit is the
opposite of the depersonalization effected by the history of philoso
phy; it's depersonalization through love rather than subjection. What
one says comes from the depths of one's ignorance, the depths of
one's own underdevelopment. One becomes a set of liberated singu
larities, words, names, fngernails, things, animals, little events: quite
the reverse of a celebrity. So anyway, I got to work on to books along
these meandering lines, Differece and Retition and Th Logc ofSnse.
I know well enough that they're still full of academic elements,
they're heavy going, but they're an attempt to jolt, set in motion,
something inside me, to treat writing as a flow, not a code. And I like
some passages in Diference and Retition, those on tiredness and con
templation, for instance, because in spite of appearances they're liv
ing experiences. That's as far as it went, but it was a beginning.
And then there was my meeting with Felix Guattari, the way we
understood and complemented, depersonalized and singularized
in short, loved-one another. Out of that came Anti-Oedipus, and it
takes things a step further. I've wondered whether one general reason
for some of the hostilit toward the book is simply the fact that there
are two writers, because people want you to disagree about things,
and take different positions. So they try to disentangle inseparable
elements and identif who did what. But since each of us, like anyone
else, is already various people, it gets rather crowded. And we would
n't of course claim that Anti-Oedipus is completely fee of any scholar
ly apparatus: it's still prett academic, fairly serious, and it's not the
Pop Philosophy or Pop Analysis we dreamed of. But I'm struck by the
way it's the people who've read lots of other books, and psychoana
lytic books in particular, who fnd our book really diffcult. They say:
What exactly i a body without organs? What exactly do you mean by
"desiring machines"?5 Those, on the other hand, who don't know
much, who haven't been addled by psychoanalysis, have less of a prob
lem and happily pass over what they don't understand. That's why we
said that, in principle at least, the book was written for ffteen- to ten
t-year-olds. There are, you see, to ways of reading a book: you either
see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it sig
nifes, and then if you're even more perverse or depraved you set off
ater signifers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in
te frst or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and ques
ton, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there's
te other way: you see the book as a little non-signifing machine, and
te only question is "Does it work, and how does it work?" How does
it work for you? If it doesn't work, if nothing comes through, you try
another book. This second way of reading's intensive: something
comes through or it doesn't. There's nothing to explain, nothing to
understand, nothing to interpret. It's like plugging in to an electric
ciruit. I know people who've read nothing who immediately saw what
bodies without organs were, given their own "habits," their own way
of being one. This second way of reading's quite different from the
frst, because it relates a book directly to what's Outside. A book is a
little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Writing is
one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others,
that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with
other flowsflows of shit, sperm, words, action, eroticism, money,
politics, and so on. Take Bloom, writing in the sand with one hand
and masturbating with the other: what's the relation between those
two flows? Our outside, at least one of our outsides, was a particular
mass of people (especially young people) who are fed up with psy
choanalysis. They're "tapped," to use your expression, because they
generally continue in analysis even after they've started to question
psychoanalysisbut in psychoanalytic terms. (On a personal note, for
example, how can boys fom Gay Lib, and girls fom Women's Lib,
and plenty others like them, go into analysis? Doesn't it embarrass
them? Do they believe in it? What on earth are they doing on a
couch?) The fact that this current is there made Anti-Oedip possible.
And if psychoanalysts, ranging from the most stupid to the most intel
ligent ones, have as a whole greeted the book with hostility, but defen
sively rather than aggressively, that's obviously not just because of its
content but because of this growing current of people getting fed up
listening to themselves saying "daddy, mommy, Oedipus, castration,
regression" and seeing themselves presented with a really inane
image of sexuality in general and of their own sexuality in particular.
Psychoanalysts are going to have to take account, in the old phrase, of
the "masses," of little masses. We get wonderful letters about this from
psychoanalytic lumpenproletariat that are much better than critics'
This intensive way .of reading, in contact with what's outside the
Letter to a Harsh Critic •
book, as a fow meeting other fows, one machine among others, as a
series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have
nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to
interact with other things, absolutely anything ... is reading with love.
That's exactly how you read the book. And the bit I like in your letter,
the bit I think is rather wonderfl in fact, is where you say how you
read the book, what you yourself did with it. Why, oh why, do you then
have to rush straight back into the attack: "There's no way out, we'll
be waiting for your second volume, and we'll spot what you're up to
straight away ... ?" No, you're quite wrong, we've already seen where
to go next. We'll do the sequel because we like working together.
Except it won't be anything like a sequel. With a bit of help from out
side, it will be something so different in its language and thinking that
anyone "waiting" for us will have to say we've gone completely crazy,
or we're frauds, or we couldn't take it any frther. It's a real pleasure
to confound people. Not that we just want to play at being mad, but
we'll go mad in our own way and in our own time, we won't be pushed
into it. We're well aware that the frst volume of Anti-Oedips is still fll
of compromises, too full of things that are still scholarly and rather
like concepts. So we'll change, we already have, it's all going wonder
fully. Some people think we're going to continue along the same
lines, some even thought we were going to set up a fh psychoana
lytic group.6 Yck. Our minds are on other things that are less public
and more fun. We're going to stop compromising, because we don't
need to any more. And we'll always find the allies we want, or who
want us.
I'm trapped, am I? It's not true: neither Felix nor I have turned
into little leaders of a little school. And we couldn't care less what peo
ple do with Anti-Oedips, because we've already moved on. You see me
as trapped politically, reduced to signing manifestos and petitions, "a
glorifed social worker": it's not true, and Foucault's to be praised,
among all sorts of other things, for being someone, the frst person,
who's disrupted the machinery of recuperation and freed intellectu
als fom the intellectual's classic political predicament. You, all you
can think of is provocation, publication, questionnaires, public con
fessions ("admit it, admit it ... "). I, on the other hand, sense that
we're rapidly approaching an era of half-voluntary and half-enforced
secrec, the dawn of a desire that is, among other things, political. You
se me a tapped profesionaly, bcause I went on talking for to years
at Vmcennes and now, you-sy-they-say, I'm no longer doing anything
there. You think that by contnuing to talk I w in a contradictory posi
ton, "refsing to play the professr, but stuck in teaching, stll chug
gng along after everyone else had gone of the rails." I don't see any
contadicton, I'm not some beautl soul' living out my tragic
predicament; I went on tking bcause I really wted to, and I w
encouraged, attacked, interrupted by militts, people actng cray
ad people who really were, idiots and really intelligent characters ...
Vmcennes w a sort of ongoing party. It went on like that for to years,
which is long enough, it couldn't go on indefnitely. And now that I'm
not tlking in that context any more, you say or report people saying
I'm doing nothing, that I'm impotent, a big old sterile queen. That's
not tue eiter: I've gone into hiding, and I'm stll doing my own ting,
wth a few people a possible-and you, instead of helping me not to
bcome a celebrit, you're there confonting me wit the choice
bteen impotence and contradicton. You see me, fnaly, a person
aly, domestcally tapped. It's not your most subde point. You explain
I've got a wife, and a daughter who plays with dolls and potters around
te house. And you think that in the light of Anti-Oep this is a huge
joke. You might have added I've got a son who's amost old enough to
go into analysis. I you think it's dolls that produce the Oedipus com
plex, or te mere fct of being married, that's pretty weird. The Oedi
pus complex is nothing to do with dolls, it's an internal scretion, a
glad, and you can't fght oedipal secretons except by fghting your
sl, by experimentng on yourself, by opening yourslf up to love and
dsire (rather tha the whining need to be loved that leads everyone to
te pschoanalyt). Non-edipal love is prett hard work. And you
shoud know that it's not enough just to b unmarried, not to have kids,
t b gay, or belong to this or that group, in order to get round the
Oedipus complex-given al the group complexes, oedipal gays, oedip
ied women's libbrs, and so on. Just look at the piece called "Us and
te Ab,' which is even more oedipal than my daughter.
S there's nothing to "admit." The relative success of Anti-Oedip
dosn't compromise Felix or me; in a way it's nothing to do with us,
bcause we're working on other things. S I'll move on to your other
.� (Mh 1973).
Letter to a Harsh Lnuc • 1Æ
more cruel and hurtl criticism, when you say I'm someone who's
always just tagged along behind, taking it easy, capitalizing upon other
people's experiments, on gy, drug-users, alcoholics, masochists,
lunatics, and so on, vaguely savoring their transports and poisons
without ever taking any risks. You turn against me a piece I wrote
where I ask how we can avoid becoming professional lectrers on
Artaud or fashionable admirers of Fitgerald. But what do you know
about me, given that I believe in secrecy, that is, in the power of fasit,
rather than in representing things in a way that manifests a lamenta
ble faith in accuracy and truth? If! stick where I am, ifl don't travel
around, like anyone else I make my inner journes that I can only
measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously
in what I write. And what do my relations with gays, alcoholics, and
drug-users matter, if I can obtain similar efects by different means?
What's interestng isn't whether I'm capitalizing on anything, but
whether there are people doing something or other in their little cor
ner, and me in mine, and whether there might be any points of con
tact, chance encounters and coincidences rather than alignments
and rallying-points (all that crap where everyone's supposed t be
everyone else's guilt conscience and judge). lowe you lot nothing,
nothing more than you owe me. I don't need to join you in your ghet
tos, because I've got my own. The question's nothing to do with the
character of this or that exclusive group, it's to do with the transver
s relations that ensure that any efects produced in some particular
way (through homosexualit, drugs, and so on) can always bpruce
U oth mans. We have to counter people who think "I'm this, I'm
that," and who do so, moreover, in pschoanaltc terms (relating every
thing to their childhood or fate), by thinking in strange, fuid, unusu
al terms: I don't know what I am-I'd have to investgate and experi
ment with so many things in a non-narcissistic, non-edipal way-no
gay can ever defnitively say "I'm gay." It's not a queston of being this
or that sort of human, but of becoming inhuman, of a universal ani
mal becoming-not seeing yourself as some dumb animal, but
unraveling your body's human organization, exploring this or that
zone of bodily intensit, with everyone discovering their own particu
l zones, and the groups, populations, species that inhabit them.
Who's to say I can't talk about medicine unless I'm a doctor, if I talk
about it like a dog? What's to stop me taking about drugs without
1g a addict, il talk about them like a little bird? And why should
,." t ,invent some way, however fantastic and contrived, of talking
'ut something, without someone having to ask whether I'm quali
�t talk like that? Drugs can produce dlire, so why can't I get into
. lr about drugs? Why does your particular version of "realit" have
t come into it? You're a pretty unimaginative realist. And why do you
�er reading me, i that's how you feel? Arguments fom one's own
peged experience are bad and reactionary arguments. My
fvrte sentence in Anti-Oedip is: "No, we've never seen a schizo
'Wat, in sum, does your letter contain? Nothing about you, except
t,one bit I like. Lots of gossip, "things people say," where you deftly
h what they're saying and what you're saying. And maybe that's
W you set out to produce, a sort of self-contained jumble of echoes.
It. a mannered letter, rather disdainful. You ask me for something
, ca publish, then say nasty things about me. My letter, given
�, seems like a self justifcation. Wonderfl. You're not an Arab,
�'r a jackal. You're doing all you can to turn me into what you
cplan I'm becoming, a little celebrit, ra r ra. I can do without
�jhelp, but I do like you-to put an end to the gossip.
Printed in Michel Cressole's Delze (19
One ofyou is a pschoanalyst, the other's a philosoher; your book sets out to
quetion both pschoanalysis and philosohy, and to intrduce something di
feent: schizoanalysis. So what' the overaUfame ofthe book? How did you
concive this project, and how has it affectd each ofyou ?
GILLES DELEUZE; I suppose I should tell you a story, like a little girl;
frst of all we met each other, then such and such happened ... Two
and a half years ago I met Felix. He thought I'd gone further than he
had and he could learn something from me. I'd neither a psychoan
alyst's feeling of responsibilit nor an analysand's conditioning, no
feelings of guilt, that is. I'd no particular place in the institution, so
I didn't have to take it too seriously and found it rather funny that
psychoanalysis was such a sad business. But I was working solely with
concepts, rather timidly in fact. Felix had talked to me about what he
was already calling "desiring machines"; he had a whole theoretical
and practical conception of the unconscious as a machine, of the
schizophrenic unconscious. So I myself thought h�'d gone further
than I had. But for all his unconscious machinery, he was still talking
i terms of stuctures, signifers, the phallus, and so on. That was
hadly surprising, since he owed so much to Lacan ( just as I did).
But I felt it would all work even better i one found the right con
cept, instead of using notions that didn't even come from Lacan's
tve side but from �orthodoxy built up round him. Lacan him-
�sy "I'm
not gettmg much help." We thought we'd give him
e sch
izophrenic help. And there's no question that we're all the
e indebted to Lacan, once we've dropped notions like structure,
bolic, or the signifer, which are thoroughly misguided, and
.�ch Lacan himself has always managed to turn on their head to
ing out their limitations.
So Felix and 1 decided to work together. It started off with letters.
Ad then we began to meet from time to time to listen to what the
oter had to say. It was great fn. But it could be really tedious too.
One of us always talked too much. Often one of us would put forward
�Pe notion, and the other just didn't see it, wouldn't be able to
lake anything of it until months later, in a different context. And
�en we read a lot, not whole books, but bits and pieces. Sometimes
we found quite ridiculous things that confrmed for us the damage
,.lought by Oedipus and the awful misery of psychoanalysis. Some-
tes we found things we thought were wonderful, that we wanted to
�. Ad then we wrote a lot. Felix sees writing as a schizoid flow
,dng i all sorts of things. I'm interested in the way a page of writ
ing fies off in all directions and at the same time closes right up on
itl like an egg. And in the reticences, the resonances, the lurches,
at all the larvae you can fnd in a book. Then we really started writ
ing togeter, it wasn't any problem. We took turns at rewriting
FBLIX GUATTARI: A for me, 1 had too many "backgrounds," four at
1L I'd come from the Communist Path, and then the Left Opposi
to. Up to May 68 there was a lot of activism, a bit of writing-the
'ne Theses of the Left Opposition," for example. And then I'd
. _n ivolved with the La Borde clinic at Cour-Cheverny from the
te i w set up by Jean Oury in 1 9
3 as an extension of Tosquelles's
_prment:1 we were trying to establish the theoretical and practical
bs . for institutional psychotherapy (I myself was working with
�tons like "transversality" and "group phantasm"). And then there
wee Lca's seminars too, which 1 followed from the start. Last, 1 had
a,$rt of schizoid background or discourse, I'd always liked schizo
pnics, been drawn to them. You have to live with them to under
¢d· this. Schizophrenics do at least, unlike neurotics, have real
On Anti-Oedipus • 15
problems. My first work as a psychotherapist was with a schizophrenic,
using a tape recorder.
Now these four backgrounds, these four discourses, weren't just
backgrounds or discourses but ways of life, and of course I was to
some extent torn beteen them. May 68 came as a shock to Gilles and
me, as to so many others: we didn't know each other, but this book,
now, is nevertheless a result of May. I felt a need, not to integrate, but
to make some connections between these four ways I was living. I had
some guidelines, how neurosis, for instance, had to be interpreted in
terms of schizophrenia. But I didn't have the logic I needed to make
the connections. I'd written a piece in Recherches, "From One Sign to
the Other," full of Lacan, but no longer invoking the signifer. But I
was still stuck in a kind of dialectics. What I was after in the work with
Gilles were things like the body without organs, multiplici ties, the pos
sibilit of a logic of multiplicities connected with the body without
organs. In our book, logical operations are physical operations too.
And what we were both looking for was a discourse that was at once
political and psychiatric, without reducing either dimension to the
You'e constantly contrasting a schizoanalytic unconscious made up ofdesir
ing machines and a psychoanalytic unconscious you cticize in all sort of
ways. You relate eerything to schizohrenia. But can one really say Fred took
no account ofthe whol area ofmachines, or ofapartuses at last ? And that
h faild to understand the whol area ofpschosis ?
FG: It's complicated. In some ways Freud was well aware that his real
clinical material, his clinical base, came from psychosis, fom the work
of Bleuler andJung. It's always been like that: everything new that's
come into psychoanalysis, from Melanie Klein to Lacan, has come
from psychosis. But then there's the Tausk affair: maybe Freud was
worried whether analytic concepts could deal with psychosis. In his
account of the Schreber case you get all sorts of evasions. And you get
the feeling Freud really doesn't like 'chizophrenics at all, he says ter
rible things about them, really nast things ... Now, when you say
Freud did take some account of desire's machines, that's true.
Indeed, that's what psychoanalysis discovered, desire, machineries of
d. They're constantly whirring, grinding away, churning stuf
oit in any analysis. And analysts are always starting up machines, or
Nng them, on a schizophrenic basis. But they may be doing or
st g in motion things they're not flly aware of. What they do in
ptce may involve working with sketchy ideas of processes that
a't flly explained in their theory. There's no question that psy
doaalyis has shaken up the whole area of mental health, it's been
l a bmb smuggled inside. The way it's been compromised from
te stt doesn't really matter, it's shaken things up, it's forced people
t organie things differently, it's uncovered desire. You yourself cite
Frud's analysis of psychical apparatuses: there's the whole aspect of
mahinery, the production of desire, production lines. But then
t's te other aspect, of personifing these apparatuses (as Super
e; Ego, and Id), a theatrical mise-sce that substitutes merely rep
rtte tokens for the tue productive forces of the unconscious.
S desire's machines become more and more like stage machinery:
t superego, the death instinct, becomes a deus ex machina. They
cme to work more and more behind the scene, in the wings. Or like
mes for creating illusions, special efects. All desiring produc
ton is crippled. What we're saying is that Freud at once discovers
dese a libido, as productive desire, and is constantly forcing the
Hbdo back into a domestic representation within the Oedipus com
plex. The same thing happens in psychoanalysis as Marx saw hap
ping in economics: Adam Smith and Ricardo discovered the
e.nce of wealth in productive labor but constantly forced it back
it representations of ownership. It's the way it projects desire back
ont te domestc stage that accounts for the failure of psychoanaly
"1 udertd psychosis, for its coming to feel at home only with
Rs, and understanding neurosis itself in a way that misrepre
..uconscious forces.
Is t wh yo man wh you tl abt pschoanalysis taking "an ideal
i tm" wth the Oedipus cmpkx, and wh you tr to contat a n mt
rm wth il in pschiatr? Wat fom d th distincion bte
Iiand idalm tae in the .el ofpschoanalysis?
'1 ·
Il& Wat we're attcking isn't some supposed ideology behind psy-
On Anti-Oedipus • 17
choanalysis. It's the practce and theory of psychoanalysis itself. That
said, there's no contradiction between saying it's a wonderfl thing
and saying that it's been going wrong fom the start. The idealist turn
is there fom the start. There's no contradiction: magnifcent fowers,
even though the rot set in right at the start. What we call idealism in
psychoanalysis is a whole system of projections, of reductions, in ana
lytic theory and practice: the reduction of desiring production to a
system of soalled unconscious representations, and to correspond
ing forms of causation and expression or explanation; the reduction
of the factories of the unconscious to a piece of theater, Oedipus or
Hamlet; the reduction of the social investments2 of libido to domes
tc investments, and the projection of desire back onto domestic coor
dinates, Oedipus again. We're not saying psychoanalysis invented the
Oedipus complex. It gives people what they want, they bring their
Oedipus complex along with them. Psychoanalysis simply turns the
complex back on itself, oedipizes transference, oedipizes the com
plex itself on the couch, its mucky little kingdom. But whether in its
domestic or analytic form, the Oedipus complex is basically an appa
ratus for repressing desiring machines, and in no sense a formation
of the unconscious itself. We're not saying the complex, or some
equivalent, varies from one form of society to another. We'd say
rather, like the stucturalists, that it's an invariant. It's what's invariant
in any diversion of unconscious forces. S we're not attacking the
Oedipus complex fom the standpoint of some society fee fom it,
but as it operates in the societ that best exemplifes it, our capitalist
society. We're not attacking it fom the standpoint of some supposed
ideals beyond sexuality, but fom the standpoint of sexualit itself,
which can't be reduced to a "dirty little family secret." And we don't
make any distinction beteen hypothetical variants of the Oedipus
complex and the structural invariant, because however you approach
it, you reach the same impasse, the same crippling of desiring
machines. What psychoanalysis calls the resolution or dissolution of
te Oedipus complex is a complete joke, it's precisely the way an end
less debt is inherited, the anaysis never ends, Oedipus infects every
one, passed on fom father to child. It's cray how much nonsense has
been spawned by the Oedipus complex, particularly in relation to
A materialist psychiaty is one that brings production into desire
1 8
lI e'one
hand and desire into production on the other. Delireturns
,. te
fater, nor even "the name of the father," but on names in
��It's as it were the immanence of desiring machines in great
�achines. What psychoanalysis sees in psychosis is the line of
a" that leads into the Oedipus complex, castration, and so
•• ,al,the repressive apparatuses planted in the unconscious. But it
:mae nothing at all of the schizophrenic basis of delire, the line of
Iphrenia" tracing out its undomesticated pattern. Foucault said
.analysis remains deaf to the voice of unreason. Indeed, it neu
Qs everything, and through this neuroticization contributes not
.to producing neurotics whose treatment never ends but al
o psy
Mcsin the form of anyone resisting oedipization. It has no way at
ilo .approaching schizophrenia directly. And in its idealism, its
"stc and theatrical idealism, it completely misses the uncon
.u character of sexuality.
iboh a pschiatrc and psychoanalytic sid It also a political, eco
",s. How do you yourselves see the unit ofthese two sides? Are you in
� tking up Rich's aproach? You tal about fascist investments, both in
U,to dire and to the social fiel. That 's certainly one thing that reltes
t:/k politic and psychoanalysis. But it's difcult to see how you poose to
w.nt fascst investment. Wat is there to sto fascism? So it 's not just a
' of the book's unit It ofits practical implications too: and these are
(imprtance, bcause i nothing can preent 'Jascist investments, " i no
_cn cntain them, i all one can do is recognize the're thee, whee do
. plticl rections get you, and what are you actually doing to change
�j like lots of other people, we're signaling the rise of a com
�nve fascism. We can see nothing, no reason, to stop it spread
f! nter: either a revolutionary machine that can harness desire
1.,tephenomena of desire will take shape, or desire will go on
amanipulated by the forces of oppression, of repression, and so
laten, even from within, any revolutionary machine. We distin
u beteen two ways the social field's invested: preconsciously
lvested by interests and unconsciously invested by desire. The way
�t are invested can be truly revolutionary, while at the same
On Anti-Oedipus • 1
time leaving in place unconscious investments of desire that aren't
revolutionary, that may even be fascistic. In a way, the ideal starting
point for the schizoanalysis we're proposing would be in groups, mil
itant groups: that's where you get the most direct access to extra
domestic elements and where the sometimes contradictory play of
investments comes out. Schizoanalysis is militant libidino-economic,
libidino-political analysis. By contrasting the two different types of
social investment, we're not contrasting desire, as some romantic lux
ury, with interest that are merely economic and political. We think,
rather, that interests are always found and articulated at points pre
determined by desire. So there can't be any revolution that serves the
interests of oppressed classes until desire itself takes on a revolution
ary orientation that actually brings into play unconscious formations.
Because however you look at it, desire is part of the infrastructure (we
don't have any time for concepts like ideology, which are really no
help at all: there are no such things as ideologies). The constant
threat to revolutionary apparatuses comes from taking a puritanical
view of interests, so the only people who ever gain anything are a small
section of the oppressed class, and this section then just produces one
more thoroughly oppressive caste and hierarchy. The higher you go
up a hierarchy, even a pseudo-revolutionary one, the less scope there
is for the expression of desire (but you always fnd it, however dis
torted, at the basic level of organization). We set against this fascism
of power active, positive lines of flight, because these lines open up
desire, desire's machines, and the organization of a social feld of
desire: it's not a matter of escaping "personally,» from oneself, but of
allowing something to escape, like bursting a pipe or a boil. Opening
up fows beneath the social codes that seek to channel and block
them. Desire never resists oppression, however local and tiny the
resistance, without the challenge being communicated to the capital
ist system as a whole, and playing its part in bursting it open. One
thing we reject is all talk of a confict between man and machine, of
men being alienated by machines, and so on. Those in power, sup
ported by pseudo-left-wing organizations, tried from the start of May
68 to convince people it was just a load of spoilt children attacking
consumer society, while real workers knew well enough where their
real interests lay, and so on. Nobody was ever attacking consumer soci
ety, that idiotic notion. What we say, in fact, is that there's never any-
like enough consumption, never anything like enough con
tvance: people's interests will never turn in favor of revolution until
lines of desire reach the point where desire and machine become
indistinguishable, where desire and contrivance are the same thing,
turning against the so-alled natural principles of, for example, capi
tist society. Now, this point is both terribly easy to reach, because it's
in even the tiniest desire, and terribly diffcult to reach, because
it brings into play all our unconscious investments.
GD: From this point of view there's no problem about the book's
unit. It does indeed have two sides: it's both a criticism of the Oedi
pus complex and psychoanalysis, and a study of capitalism and the
relations beteen capitalism and schizophrenia. But the frst aspect is
entirely dependent on the second. We attack psychoanalysis on the
following points, which relate to its practice as well as its theory: its
cult of Oedipus, the way it reduces everything to the libido and
domestic investments, even when these are transposed and general
ized into structuralist or symbolic forms. We're saying the libido
becomes unconsciously invested in ways that are distinct fom the
wys interests are preconsciously invested but that impinge on the
social feld no less than invested interests. And then there's dilire: peo
ple have asked us if we've ever seen a schizophrenic; we might ask psy
choanalysts whether they've ever listened to dilire. Delire is world-his
torical, nothing to do with the family. It fastens on the Chinese, the
Germans, Joan of Arc and the Great Mogul, Aryans and Jews, money,
power, and production, not on mommy and daddy at all. Or rather,
the tired old family drama depends entirely on the unconscious social
investments that come out in delre, rather than the other way round.
We ty to show how this is true even for children. We're proposing
schizoanalysis as opposed to psychoanalysis: just look at the two things
psychoanalysis can't deal with: it never gets through to anyone's desir
ing machines, because it's stuck in oedipal fgures or structures; it
never gets through to the social investments of the libido, because it's
stuck in its domestic investments. This comes out very well in the clas
sic test-tbe psychoanalysis of President Schreber. We're interested in
something that's of no interest to psychoanalysts: What are your desir
ing machines like? How does your delire invest the social field? The
unit of our book comes fom the way we see the defciencies of psy-
On Anti-Oedipus • 21
choanalysis as equally linked to its deep roots in capitalist society and
its failure to grasp its own schizophrenic basis. Psychoanalysis is like
capitalism: although it tends toward the limit of schizophrenia, it's
constantly evading this limit, and trying to get round it.
There are lots ofreeences in your book, texts cheerfully pressed into service
bth in and out ofcontx�' but it is nonethels a bok rootd in a vey specif
ic "intellctual culture. " Within that clture, though, you attach great impor
tance to ethnolg, and not much to linguistic; great importance to certain
English and American novelist, but hardly any to contemporary theories of
wrting. Wy, in particlar do you attack the notion ofsiflier and what are
your reasons for reecting that approach?
FG: We've no use for signifiers. We're not the only people, or the first,
to reject all that. Look at Foucault, or Lyotard's recent book [Discours,
figure, 1
7 1]. If our criticism of the signifer isn't terribly clear, it's
because the signifer's a sort of catch-all that projects everything back
onto an obsolete writing-machine. The all-mbracing but narrow
opposition of signifer and signifed is permeated by the imperialism
of the Signifier that emerges with the writing-machine. Everything
comes to turn on the letter. That's the very principle of despotic over
coding. What we're suggesting is this: it's the sign of the great Despot
(in the age of writing) that, as it withdraws, leaves in its wake a uni
form expanse that can be broken down into minimal elements and
ordered relations between those elements. The suggestion does at
least account for the tyrannical, terrorizing, castrting character of
the signifier. It's an enormous archaism that harks back to the great
empires. We're not even convinced they tell us much about language,
these signifers. That's why we turned to Hjelmslev: quite some tme
ago he worked out a sort of Spinozist theory of language in which the
fows of content and expression don't depend on signifers: language
a a system of continuous fows of content and expression, intersect
ed by machinic arrangements4 of discrete discontinuous fgures. One
thing we didn't pursue in the book was a concepton of collective
agents of utterance that would supersede the distinction between the
uttering subject and the subject of an utterance.5 We're strict func
tionalists: what we're interested in is how something works, fnc-
tionsfinding the machine. But the signifier's still stuck in the ques
tion "What does it mean?"-indeed it's this very question in a blocked
form.6 But for us, the unconscious doesn't MöÜÌ anything, nor does
language. Functionalism has only failed when people have tried to
introduce it where it doesn't belong, into great structured wholes that
can't themselves come about, be produced, in the same way they func
tion. Functionalism does rule, however, in the world of micro-multi
plicities, micro-machines, desiring machines, molecular formations.
On this level there isn't this or that kind of machine, a linguistic
machine, say, but linguistic elements along with other elements in all
the machines. The unconscious is a micro-unconscious, it's molecu
lar, and schizo analysis is micro-analysis. The only question is how any
thing works, with its intensities, fows, processes, partial objects
none of which WÜÌ anything.
GD: We feel the same way about our book. What matters is whether it
works, and how it works, and who it works for. It's a machine too. It's
not a matter of reading it over and over again, you have to do some
thing else with it. It's a book we enjoyed producing. We're not writing
for people who tink psychoaalysis is doing fne and sees the uncon
scious for what it is. We're writing for people who think it's prett dull
and sad as it burbles on about Oedipus, castration, the death instinct,
and so on. We're writing for unconsciousnesses that have had
enough. We're looking for allies. We need allies. And we think these
allies are already out there, that they've gone ahead without us, that
there are lots of people who've had enough and are tinking, feeling,
and working in similar directions: it's not a question of fashion but of
a deeper "spirit of the age" informing converging projects in a wide
range of fields. In ethnology, for instance. In psychiatry. Or what Fou
cault's doing: our method's not the same, but we seem to meet him
on all sorts of points that seem basic, on paths he's already mapped
out. And then it's true we've read a lot. But as the fancy took us, rather
randomly. What we're after certainly isn't any return to Freud or
return to Marx. Nor any theory of reading. What we look for in a book
is the way it transmits something that resists coding: flows, revolu
tionary active lines of flight, lines of absolute decoding rather than
any intellectual culture. Even in books there are oedipal structures,
oedipal codes and strictures that are all the more insidious for being
On Anti-Oedipus • 23
abstract, nonfgurative. What we find in great English and American
novelists is a gift, rare among the French, for intensities, flows,
machine-books, tool-books, schizo-books. All we've got in France is
Artaud and half of Beckett. People may criticize our book for being
too literary, but we're sure such criticism will come from teachers of
literature. Is it our fault that Lawrence, Miller, Kerouac, Burroughs,
Artaud, and Beckett know more about schizophrenia than psychia
trists and psychoanalysts?
Aren't you oen to a more serous cticism? The schizoanalysis you're advo
cating is efectively d(analyzing. Peol might say your celbration ofschizo
phrenia is romantic and irresponsibl. Even that you tend to confuse revolu
tionaries and schizohrenic. How woul you respond to these potetial crti
cisms ?
GD-FG: Hmm . . . a school for schizophrenia, that's quite an idea.
Freeing flows, going frther and further into contrivance: a schizo
phrenic is someone who's been decoded, deterritorialized. We're not
responsible for misinterpretations, though. There are always people
around who'll intentionally misinterpret you (look at the attacks on
Laing and antipsychiatry). There was an article in the Nouvel Obse
vatÛrrecencly whose psychiatrist author was saying: I'm pretty daring,
challenging modern developments in both psychiatry and antipsychi
atry. Nothing of the sort. He'd chosen the precise moment that a
political reaction against any attempt to change anything at all in psy
chiatric hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry was gaining
ground. There's always a political motive behind any misinterpreta
tion. We're considering a very simple problem, like Burroughs with
drugs: can you harness the power of drugs without them taking over,
without turning into a dazed zombie? It's the same with schizophre
nia. We make a distinction beteen schizophrenia as a process and
the way schizophrenics are produced as clinical cases that need hos
pitalizing: it's almost the same thing in reverse. The schizophrenics in
hospitals are people who've tried to do something and failed, cracked
up. We're not saying revolutionaries are schizophrenics. We're saying
there's a schizoid process, of decoding and de territorializing, which
only revolutionary actvit can stop turning into the production of
shiophrenia. We're considering a problem to do with the close link
een capitalism and psychoanalysis on the one hand, and beteen
revolutonary movements and schizoanalysis on the other. We can
t in terms of capitalist paranoia and revolutionary schizophrenia,
because we're not setting out from a psychiatric understanding of
these words but rather fom their social and political determinations,
fom which their psychiatric application follows only in specifc cir
cumstances. Schizoanalysis has one single aim-to get revolutionary,
artistic, and analytic machines working as parts, cogs, of one another.
Aain, i you take delire, we see it as having to poles, a fascist paranoid
pole and a schizorevolutionary pole. That's what we're interested in:
revolutionary schisis7 as opposed to the despotic signifer. But anyway,
there's no more point complaining in advance about misinterpreta
tions, since you can't predict them, than fghting against them once
they're made. It's better to get on with something else, to work with
people going in the same direction. A for being responsible or irre
sponsible, we don't recognize those notons, they're for policemen
and courtroom psychiatrists.
Converation with Catherne BackesClement
L'rC 49 ( 1972)
CHRISTIAN DESCAMPS: SO how are your Thousand Plataus arangd?
It's not just a bok for specialst; it seem to b composed in varous m, in
t musicl sese ofthe t. It s not ogani in capts that each unol the
es ec ofsomthing. Look at the tabl ofcntet, it s fU ofthing haping.
I9 I4 i the war but the WolMan s analysi to , I94 7 is the point whe
Artaud cm upon the body without on, 1847 is the point whee Barb
d'uriUy produc a the oft nove� 1227 is the dth ofG Kn
1837 Schumann s . . . The dt hee are eet, mars, fed fom any one
w crolcal progesion. Yor pltau are hily "act "1 . • •
GILLES DELEUZE: It's like a set of split rings. You can ft any one of
tem into any other. Each ring, or each plateau, ought to have its own
clmate, its own tone or timbre. It's a book of concepts. Philosophy
ha always dealt with concepts, and doing philosophy is trying to
ivent or create concepts. But there are various ways of looking at
concepts. For ages people have used them to determine what some
ting is (its essence) . We, though, are interested in the circumstances
i which things happen: in what situations, where and when does a
ptcular thing happen, how does it happen, and so on? A concept,
a we se it, should express an event rather than an essence. This
.ow us to intoduce elementary novelistic methods into philosophy.
A concept like the ritornello, for example, should tell us in what situ-
ations we feel like humming a tune. Or take the face: we think faces
have to be made, and not all societies make faces, but some need to.
In what situations does this happen, and why? Thus each ring or
plateau has to map out a range of circumstances; that's why each has
a date-an imaginary date-and an illustration, an image too. It's an
illustrated book. What we're interested in, you see, are modes of indi
viduation beyond those of things, persons, or subjects: the individua
tion, say, of a time of day, of a region, a climate, a river or a wind, of
an event. And maybe it's a mistake to believe in the existence of
things, persons, or subjects. The title A Thousand Plteaus refers to
these individuations that don't individuate persons or things.
CD: Thee days, books in genaland philsohy books in particlar-are
in an odd position. O the one hand there's a clt ofcellt trmpeting spu
rous books concocted fom crret fashions; on the othe hand we see a sort of
resal to analyze peol s work bsed on some hazy notion ofexpression. Jean
Luc Godard sugt, for his part, that what count isn't so much exresion,
It impresions. A philsohy bok's at onc a difcl sort ofbok, yet som
thing anyone can use, an amazingy oen toolx, as lng as the have some
use for it, want to use it, in som particlar situation. A Thousand Plateaus
offeus knowldgeffects; It how can w preet it without turing it into
an oinion-effect, a star-ffect, amidst all the chattng that each week "dis
cover" some important ne work? The way the oinion-make tal, you'd
think w didn't need any concet at all. That we coul gt t just as well with
some vae subclure ofmagaines and revies. Philosohy as an institution
is under threat. Vincnnes, that wonderfl lborator, has been carted away. 2
But this bok, fl ofscietic, litar, musical, and ethologcal rtolls,
set ot to wor with conct. It actually ebdie-with geat forc gam
bl that philosohy can reurac as a Gay Sciec . . .
It's a complicated question. In te frst place, philosophy isn't just the
preserve of philosophy teachers. You're a philosopher by becoming
one, that is, by engaging in a very special form of creation, in the
realm of concepts. Guattari's an amazing philosopher, particularly
when he's talking about politics, or about music. But you want me to
talk about the possible place or role of this sort of book these days.
More generally, you want me to talk about what's happening in the
feld of books these days. We've been going through a period of reac-
On A Thousand Plateaus • 27
tion in all felds for several years. There's no reason for it not t have
af ected books. People are setting up a literary space, along with a
legal space, and an economic and political space, that's completely
reactionary, artificial, and crippling. I think it's a systematic process,
which Libation should have investigated. The media play an essential
part in the process, but they're not the only factor. It's fascinating.
How can we resist the establishment of this European literary space?
What part can philosophy play in resisting a terrible new con
formism? Sartre played an outstanding part, and his death's a sad
event in all sorts of ways. Mter Sartre, the generation to which I
belong was, I think, a strong one (with Foucault, Athusser, Derrida,
Lyotard, Serres, Faye, Chatelet, and others) . What now seems prob
lematic is the situation in which young philosophers, but also all
young writers who're involved in creating something, fnd them
slves. They face the threat of being stifed from the outset. It's
become very diffcult to do any work, because a whole system of
"acculturation" and anticreativity specifc to the developed nations is
tng shape. It's far worse than censorship. Censorship produces a
ferment beneath the surface, but reaction seeks to make everything
impossible. This sterile phase won' t necessarily go on indefnitely. For
te moment just about all one can do is set up netorks to counter it.
So the question that interests us in relation to A Thousand Plteaus is
whether there are any resonances, common ground, with what other
wtrs, musicians, painters, philosophers, and sociologists are doing
or tying to do, from which we can all derive greater strength or con
fdence. Someone, at any rate, should do a sociological analysis of
what's happening in the feld of journalism, and its political implica
tons. Maybe someone like Bourdieu could do it . . .
ROBERT MAGGIORI: Some peol might b sursed b the prominec
gve in A Thousand Plateaus to linguistics, and migt een wonde
whhe it' not plying the ctral rol reseved in Anti-Oedipus for pschl
4nsi. Fo in the chapt doted to it ("Postult ofLingistic: "O S
14 Rm ofSigns "3) you deel conct like collective arrangements
of utterance4 that in a way ct acoss all the other "plteaus. " One might,
frh, easily eough se the wor you d on the theor of Chomk,
l Helml and Benveist a a contrbution, alt ctc� to lngis
, tc. And yet one gt the impresion that what you're ting to do isn't to chart
wthin lngag zones ofscienticit that might b semantically, syntactically,
phtically, or othewiseically delimited, Itt rathe to condemn lnguis
tic' pretensions to "clse up lnguage within itel " to explin utteances in
ters ofsigies, and utteranc in tes ofsubect. So how shoul we take
the importanc ascbed to linguistic? Shoul we see it as a continuation of
the battl begn in Anti-Oedipus against a Lacan-stl dictatorhip ofthe
sigier against strcturalism, indeed? O are you just vey pecliar lingists
who are only inteested in what � "outide" linguistic ?
I don't personally think the linguistics is fundamental. Maybe Felix, i
he were here, would disagree. But then Felix has traced a develop
ment that points toward a transformation oflinguistics: initially it was
phonological, then it w semantic and syntactic, but it's turning
more and more into a pragmatics. Pragmatics (dealing with the cir
cumstances of language use, with events and acts) was long consid
ered the "rubbish dump" of linguistics, but it's now becoming more
and more important: language is coming to be seen as an activit, so
the abstract units and constants of language-use are becoming less
and less important. It's a good thing, this current direction of
research, precisely because it makes possible convergences and col
laborations beteen novelists, linguists, philosophers, "ocalists" . . .
and so on ( "vocalists" are what I call anyone doing research into
sound or the voice in felds as varied as theater, song, cinema, audio
visual media . . . ) . The potential here is enormous. I'd like to cite
some recent examples. First of all, the path taken by Roland Barthes:
he worked on phonology, then on syntax and semantics, but he began
more and more to frame his own pragmatics, the pragmatics of an
intimate language permeated by circumstances, by events and
actions. Another example: Nathalie Sarraute has written a very fine
book that one might see as a mise-en-scne of a number of "proposi
tions," a case of philosophy and novel-writing becoming quite indis
tinguishable; the same year, a linguist like Ducrot produces, in a dif
ferent sort of book, a linguistic study of the mise-e-scne, the strategic
aspects, the pragmatics of propositions. A fine case of convergence.
Yet another example: the American linguist Labov's research in prag
matics, his opposition to Chomsk, the way he draws on the language
of ghettos and specifc districts. I don't think we, for our part, are par
ticularly competent to pronounce on linguistics. But then compe-
On A Thousand Plateaus • 29
tence is itself a rather unclear notion in linguistics. We're just address
ing a number of points that we ourselves consider fndamental: frst,
the part played in language by precepts;5 second, the importance of
indirect discourse6 (and the recognition of metaphor as something
that just confses matters and has no real importance) ; third, a criti
cism of linguistic constants, and even linguistic variables, that empha
sizes ranges of continuous variation. But music and the relations
beteen music and the voice play a greater part than linguistics in A
Thousand Plateaus.
CD: You emphatically reect metaphors, analoges too. But you use the notion
of"blck hol, " borrowed fom contempoary physics, to descibe spaces you
cn't ecape fom onc you're drwn in; the're linked to your notion ofwhite
wall. You see a face as a white wall with blck hol in it, and proceed to artic
ulte facialit on that basis. And the, earlie on in the book, you're always
taling about fuzy set and oen systms. These links with very contemporary
scence lad one to wonder what scetists might make ofa work like this.
Are't the likely to see it as fll ofmetaphor?
A Thousand Plteaus does indeed use a number of concepts with a sci
entifc resonance, or correlate even: black holes, fzzy sets, neigh
borhoods, Riemannian spaces . . . I'd like to reply by saying there are
to sorts of scientifc notions, even though they get mixed up in par
ticular cases. There are notions that are exact in nature, quantitative,
defned by equations, and whose very meaning lies in their exactness:
a philosopher or writer can use these only metaphorically, and that's
quite wrong, because they belong to exact science. But there are also
essentially inexact yet completely rigorous notions that scientists can't
do without, which belong equally to scientists, philosophers, and
artists. They have to be made rigorous in a way that's not directly sci
entifc, so that when a scientist manages to do this he becomes a
philosopher, an artist, too. This sort of concept's not unspecifc
because something's missing but because of its nature and content.
Take a current example, from a book that's attracted a lot of interest,
Prigogine and Stengers's Od Out of Chaos. One of the many con
cepts created in the book is that of a region of bifrcation. Prigogine
draws it out fom the foundations of his own field of thermodynam
ics, but it's a good example of a concept that's irreducibly philosoph-
ical, scientific, and artistic too. Conversely, it's not impossible for a
philosopher to create concepts that can be used in science. This has
ofen happened. To cite only one fairly recent but forgotten example,
Bergson profoundly infuenced psychiatry, and what's more, his work
was closely linked to Riemannian spaces in mathematics and physics.
It's nothing to do with setting up some specious unity of no particu
lar interest to anyone. Here once more, it's to do with the way some
one's own work can lead to unexpected convergences, and new impli
cations, new directions, in other people's work. And no special status
should be assigned to any particular field, whether philosophy, sci
ence, art, or literature.
DIDIER ERIBON: Although you drw on the wor ofhistorans, on Braudel
in particlar (but then we know how interestd he i in lndscape), you don't,
t say the vey last, gve histry any dcisive rol. You re hapier doing geog
rphy, you make spac fndamental, and say we should map out a "cartog
raphy" of becomings. But isn't history one way ofgetting from one plateau to
History's certainly very important. But if you take any line of research,
for part of its course, at certain points, it's historical; but it's also ahis
torical, transhistorical . . . "Becomings" are much more important
than history in A Thousand Plateaus.
They're two quite different
things. We attempt, for instance, to construct a concept of war
machines;8 they involve, above all, a certain type of space, a conjunc
tion of very specifc sorts of men with other technological and affec
tve components (like arms, jewels . . . ) . Such arrangements enter into
history only indirectly, by coming into all sorts of different relations
with state apparatuses. A for state apparatuses themselves, we relate
them to factors like territory, terrain, and deterritorialization:9 you get
a state apparatus when territories are no longer exploited sequential
ly but compared simultaneously (as land or terrain) and so drawn,
from that point on, into a movement of deterritorialization. This
corresponds to a long historical process. But we can fnd the same
complex of notions differently artculated in completely different con
texts: take animals' territories for instance, and the way they're some
tmes related to an external center that defnes, so to speak, a terrain.
Or lieder, say, where there's a territory, but also a land or homeland,1O
On A Thousand Plateaus •
and then an opening onto something else too, leaving it all behind
something cosmic. From this viewpoint, I think the section on
ritornellos in A Thousand Plateaus is the converse of the section on
state apparatuses, though they deal with two different things. That's
how one "plateau" is linked to another. To take another example: we
try to define a very specific system of signs that we call "passionate." It
corresponds to a series of trials. Now you find this system in certain
historical processes (typifed by crossing a desert) , but you find it in
other contexts too, in the dilires studied by psychiatry, in literary
works (in K, for instance) . It's not a matter of bringing all sorts of
things together under one concept but rather of relating each con
cept to variables that explain its mutations.
RM: The "explded"form ofA Thousand Plateaus, its non chrnologcal yet
datd organization, the multiplcit and multivocit ofit reeences, the inter
ply ofconcetual schemes taken fom the most vared and seemingly dispart
tpes and felds oftheory, do at last allow one to see it as an anti-system. A
Thousand Plateaus don't make a mountain, but the spawn a thousand
paths that, unlike Heideger's, lad everywhee.l l A Thousand Plateaus as
ultimate anti-sstem, as patchwok, absolute dispesion. But I see it quite di
feently. In the frst place, because A Thousand Plateaus, as you yoursel tol
L'Ac (number 49, in the new edition ofI9Bo) is a purely philosohical enter
pse, "philosohy in the traditional sense ofthe tem "; frthe, because in
ste ofthe way it's set out, which cetainly isn't sstematic, it does al the same
cve a certain "worlview, " gves one a vision, or a glimpse, ofa "realit"
tt' not actually so dissimilr fom the realit crent scientifc theories are
dcbing or trying to articlate. Is it in fact such a paradox to see A Thou
snd Plateaus as a philosohical sstem?
', not at all. It's become a commonplace these days to talk about the
�reakdown of systems, the impossibilit of constructing a system now
aat knowledge has become so fagmented ("we're no longer in the
nineteenth century . .. " ). There are two problems with this idea: peo
;pIe can't imagine doing any serious work except on very restricted
id specifc little series; worse still, any broader approach is left to the
trou work of visionaries, with anyone saying whatever comes into
�head. Systems have in fact lost absolutely none of their power.
�te groundwork for a theory of socalled open systems is in place
in current science and logic, systems based on interactons, rejecting
only linear forms of causality, and transforming the notion of time. I
admire Maurice Blanchot: his work isn't just a mass of little bits and
pieces and aphorisms, but an open system that built up in advance a
"literary space" in which to confont what's happening today. What I
and Guattari call a rhizome is precisely one example of an open sys
tem. Let's retrn to the question: What is philosophy? Because one
ought to give a very simple answer. Everyone knows that philosophy
deals with concepts. A system's a set of concept. And it's an open sys
tem when the concepts relate to circumstances rather than essences.
But concepts don't, frst of all, turn up ready-made, they don't pre
exist: you have to invent, create concepts, and this involves just as
much creation and invention as you fnd in art and science. Philoso
phy's job has always been to create new concepts, with their own
necessit. Because they're not just whatever generalities happen to be
in fashion, either. They're singularities, rather, actng on the flows of
everyday thought: it's perfectly easy to think without concepts, but as
soon as there are concepts, there's genuine philosophy. It's got noth
ing to do with ideology. A concept's fll of a critcal, political force of
feedom. It's precisely their power as a sstem that brings out what's
good or bad, what is or isn't ne, what is or isn't alive in a group of
concepts. Nothing's good in itself, it all depends on carefl systemat
ic use. In A Thosand Plteaus we're tying to say you can never guar
antee a good outcome (it's not enough just to have a smooth spac, for
example, to overcome striatons and coercion, or a body without organs
to overcome organizatons) . People sometimes criticize us for using
complicated words "to be trendy. " That's not just malicious, it's stu
pid. A concept sometimes needs a new word to express it, sometmes
it uses an everyday word that it gives a singular sense.
I think, anywy, that philosophical thinking has never been more
important than it is today, because there's a whole system taking shape,
not just in politcs but in culture and journalism too, that's an insult to
all thinking. Once again, Libation should look at this problem.
DE: The are a numb ofpoint t which I'd l to rur:
I. We taled ear abut the impnc you attac to eet; th abut how
yo ephasie gogphy rathe than hitor. Wat, then, is the plce of
eet in the "crtogaphy" yo want to deel?
On A Thousand Plateaus •
iw.r tali�gabut s�ac, w shol alo retur to the problm ofthe
�. IhSt, whJCh yo lnk t tr t.
aparatuse intduc ccive "stratd spac, " war machine try to
r etblih a "smooth spac" alng line offight.
4. Bt yo war ¾ that smooth spac alne won't save ¾- Line offight
� ), a't ncs arly lbating.
, Wat we call a "map," or sometimes a "diagram, " is a set of various
itractng lines (thus the lines in a hand are a map) . There are of
' co
urse many diferent kinds of lines, both in art and in a society or a
· pron. Some lines represent something, others are abstract. Some
· fies have various segments, others don't. Some weave through a
· aae, others go in a certain direction. Some lines, no matter
Weter or not they're abstract, trace an outline, others don't. The
�ost beautifl ones do. We think lines are the basic components of
iings and events. So everything has its geography, its cartography,
I da. What's interesting, even in a person, are the lines that
,. iae them up, or they make up, or take, or create. Why make lines
• more fndamental than planes or volumes? We don't, though. There
ae various spaces correlated with different lines, and vice versa
/here again, one might bring in scientifc notions like Mandelbrot's
: &ctals) . Diferent sorts of line involve diferent confgurations of
'ae and volume.
C This leads into your second point: we defne " machines" as lin
., e arrangements constructed along lines of flight. Thus understood,
*e a of w machines isn't w at all but a very special kind of
, ie, smo th spac which they establish, occupy, and extend. Nomadism
, i precisely this combination of war-machine and smooth space. We
t t show how and in what circumstances war-machines aim at w
(when state apparatuses take over a war-machine that's initially no
, p of them) . War-machines tend much more to be revolutionary, or
astc, rather than military.
But your third point emphasizes the fact that we can't be sure in
avnce how things will go. We can defne diferent kinds ofline, but
tat won't tell u one's good and another bad. We can' t assume that
les of fight are necesy creative, that smooth spaces are always
btter than segmented or striated ones: as Virilio demonstrates,
, nUclear submarines establish a smooth space devoted to w and ter-
ror. Cartography can only map out pathways and moves, along with
their coeffcients of probabilit and danger. That's what we call
"schizo analysis, " this analysis of lines, spaces, be comings. It seems at
once very similar, and very different, to problems of history.
DE: Lines, becoming, eents . . . Perhaps this takes us back to the oeing
question about dats. There's a date in the titl for each plteau:
B. c. -CaptureAparatus, " "Year Zo-Facialit" . . . imagnar dates, you
said, but the do reer things to the order ofeent, circumstances, and may pe
haps provide the basis for the cartogaphy we've ben discussing?
The fact that each plateau's dated, given an imaginary date, is no
more important than the fact it's illustrated, includes proper names.
There's something about a telegraphic stle that doesn't just come
from its abruptness. Take a sentence like "Jules to come 5 P. M.
Nobody would want to write like that. But it's interesting how the
words actually convey a sense of imminence, of something about to
happen or something that's just happened behind our back. Proper
names belong primarily to forces, events, motions and sources of
movement, winds, tphoons, diseases, places and moments, rather
than people. Infnitives express be comings or events that transcend
mood and tense.12 The dates don't refer to some single uniform cal
endar; each refers to a different space-time . . . Together, these ele
ments produce arrangements of utterance: "Wrewolves swarming
1 7
0" . . . and so on.
Conversation wt Christian Descamps, Didier Eribon, and Robert Maggiori
Libation, October 23, 1980
0ê|ÍÍR0 • CINEMAS
THREE QUESTI ONS ON SIX TIMES Two
Cahiers du Cinema has asked you for an intview, because you're a
"Philosoher" and we wanted to do something philosohical, but more specif
cally because you like and admire Godard s wor. Wat do you think ofhis
recent TV programs ?
Like many people, I was moved, and it's a lasting emotion. Maybe
I should explain my image of Godard. A someone who works a great
deal, he must be a very solitary fgure. But it's not just any solitude, it's
an extraordinarily animated solitude. Full, not of dreams, fantasies,
and projects, but of acts, things, people even. A multiple, creative soli
tude. From the depths of this solitude Godard constitutes a force in
his own right but also gets others to work a a team. He can deal a an
equal with anyone, with official powers or organizations, as well a a
cleaning lady, a worker, mad people. In the TV programs, Godard's
questions always engage people directly. They disorient us, the view
ers, but not whoever he's talking to. He talks to crazy people in a way
that's no more that of a psychiatrist than of another madman, or of
someone "playing the fool." He talks with workers not as a boss, or
another worker, or an intellectual, or a director talking with actors.
It's nothing to do with adopting their tone, in a wily sort of way, it's
because his solitude gives him a great capacit, is so full. It's as though,
in a way, he's always stammering. Not stammering in his words, but
stammering i n language itself. You can normally only be a foreigner
in another language. But here it's a case of being a foreigner in one's
own language. Proust said that fne books have to be written in a sort
offoreign language. It's the same with Godard's programs; he's even
perfected his Swiss accent to precisely this effect. It's this creative
stammering, this solitude, which makes Godard a force.
Because, as you know better than I do, he's always been alone.
Godard's never had any popular success with his films, as those who say
"he's changed, from such and such a point onward it's no good" would
have us believe. They're often the very people who initially hated him.
Godard was ahead of, and infuenced, everyone, but not by being a
success, rather by following his own line, a line of active fight, a
repeatedly broken line zigzagging beneath the surface. Anyway, in cin
ema, they more or less managed to lock him into his solitude. They
pinned him down. And now he's used the opportunity presented by
the holidays, and a vague demand for creativity, to take over the TV for
six times two programs. It may be the sole case of someone not being
duped by TV. You've usually lost from the outset. People wouldn't have
minded him promoting his flms, but they can't forgive him for mak
ing this series that changes so many things at the heart of TV (ques
tioning people, making them talk, showing images from a variety of
sources, and so on) . Even now it's over, even if it's been stifled. Many
groups and associations were bound to get annoyed: the statement
from the Union of Photographic Journalists and Cameramen is a good
example. Godard has at the very least stirred up hatred. But he's also
shown that a differently "animated" TV is possible.
You haven't answeed our question. Say you had to gve a "course" on these
progams . . . Wat idas did you see, or sense in them? How woul you try to
explin your enthusiasm? We can always tal about eerything ele afrward,
een iit's what 's most impotant.
OK but ideas, having an idea, isn't about ideology, it's a practical mat
ter. Godard has a nice saying: not ajust image, just an image. 1 Philoso
phers ought also to say "not the just ideas,just ideas" and bear this out
in their activity. Because the just ideas are always those that conform
to accepted meanings or established precepts, they're always ideas
Three Questions on Six Times Two •
that confrm something, even if it's something in the fture, even if
it's the future of the revolution. While "just ideas" is a becoming-pre
sent, a stammering of ideas, and can only be expressed in the form of
questions that tend to confound any answers. Or you can present
some simple thing that disrupts all the arguments.
There are two ideas in Godard's programs that work this way, con
stantly encroaching on one another, getting mixed up and teased
apart bit by bit. This is one reason why each program has to parts: as
at primary school there are the two elements oflearning about things
and learning about language. The first idea is to do with work. I think
Godard's constantly bringing into question a vaguely Marxist scheme
that has spread everywhere: there's supposed to be something pretty
abstract called "labor" that one can buy or sell, in situations that
either mark a basic social injustice or establish a little more social jus
tice. But Godard asks very concrete questions, he presents images
touching on what exactly is being bought and sold. What are some
people prepared to buy, and others to sell, these not necessarily being
the same thing? A young welder is prepared to sell his work as a
welder, but not his sexuality by becoming an old woman's lover. A
cleaning lady's happy to sell the time she spends cleaning but won't
sell the moment she spends singing a bit of the "Internationale"
why? Because she can't sing? But what, then, if one were to pay her for
talking about not being able to sing? A specialist clockmaker, on the
other hand, wants to get paid for his clockmaking efforts, but refuses
to be paid for his work as an amateur filmmaker, which he calls his
"hobby"; but the images show that the movements he makes in the
two activities, the clockmaking sequence and the editing sequence,
are so remarkably similar that you can mistake one for the other. But
no, says the clockmaker, there's a great difference oflove and warmth
in these movements, I don't want to be paid for my flmmaking. But
then what about flmmakers and photographers who do get paid?
What, furthermore, is a photographer himself prepared to pay for?
He's sometimes prepared to pay his model. Sometimes the model
pays him. But when he photographs torture or an execution, he pays
neither the victim nor the executioner. And when he photographs
children who are sick, wounded, or hungry, why doesn't he pay them?
Guattari once suggested at a psychoanalytical congress that analysands
should be paid as well as analysts, since the analyst isn't exactly pro-
viding a "service," it's more like a division of labor, two distinct kinds
of work going on: there's the analyst's work of listening and sifting,
but the analysand's unconscious is at work too. Nobody seems to have
taken much notice of Guattari's suggestion. Godard's saying the same
thing: why not pay the people who watch television, instead of mak
ing them pay, because they're engaged in real work and are them
selves providing a public service? The social division of labor means
it's not only work on the shop foor that gets paid but work in offces
and research laboratories too. Otherwise we'd have to think about
the workers themselves having to pay the people who design the
things they make. I think all these questions and many others, all
these images and many others, tear apart the notion of labor. In the
frst place, the very notion of labor arbitrarily sets one area of activity
apart, cuts work off from its relation to love, to creativity, to produc
tion even. It makes work a kind of maintenance, the opposite of cre
ating anything, because on this notion it's a matter of reproducing
goods that are consumed and reproducing its own productive force,
within a closed system of exchange. From this viewpoint it doesn't
much matter whether the exchange is fair or unfair, because there's
always selective violence in an act of payment, and there's mystifca
tion in the very principle of talking in terms oflabor. It's to the extent
that work might be distnguished fom the productive pseudoforce of
labor that very different flows of production, of many disparate kinds,
might be brought into direct relation with fows of money, indepen
dently of any mediation by an abstact force. I'm even more confsed
than Godard. Just as I should be, since the key thing is the questions
Godard asks and the images he presents and a chance of the specta
tor feeling that the notion of labor isn't innocent, isn't at all obvi
ous- ven, and partcularly, fom the viewpoint of social critcism. It's
this, quite as much as the more obvious things, that explains the reac
tions of the Communist Party and some unions to Godard's pro
grams: he's dared to question that sacrosanct notion of labor . . .
And then there's the second idea, to do with informaton. Because
here again, language is presented to us as basically informative, and
informaton as basically an exchange. Once again, information is mea
sured in abstract units. But it's doubtl whether the schoolmistress,
explaining how something works or teaching spelling, is transmitting
informaton. She's instructing, she's really delivering precept. And
children are supplied with st like workers being given tools, in
order to produce utterances conforming to accepted meanings. We
should take him quite literally when Godard says children are political
prisoners. Language is a system of instructions rather than a means of
conveying information. T tells us: "Now we'll have a bit of entertain
ment, then the news . . . " We ought in fact to invert the scheme of
information theory. The theory assumes a theoretical maximum of
information, with pure noise, interference, at the other exteme; and
in beteen there's redundancy, which reduces the information but
allows it to overcome noise. But we should actually start with redun
danc as the transmission and relaying of orders or instructions; next,
there's informaton-always the minimum needed for the satisactory
reception of orders; then what? Well, then there's something like
silence, or like stammering, or screaming, something slipping through
underneath the redundancies and information, letting language slip
through, and making itself heard, in spite of everything. To talk, even
about yourself, is always to take the place of someone else in whose
place you're claiming to speak and who's been denied the right to
speak. Orders and precepts stream fom seguy's open mouth.2 But the
woman with the dead child is open-mouthed too. A image get rep
resented by a sound, like a worker by his representative. A sound takes
over a series of images. So how can we manage to speak without giving
orders, without claiming to represnt something or someone, how can
we get people without the right to speak, to speak; and how can we
restore to sounds their part in the stuggle against power? I suppos
that's what it means to be like a foreigner in one's own language, to
tace a sort of line of fight for words.
That's "just" to ideas, but two ideas is a lot, it's massive, includes
loads of things and other ideas. So Godard brings into question to
everyday notions, those of labor and information. He doesn't say we
should give tre information, nor that labor should be wU paid
(those would be the just ideas) . He says these notions are very sus
pect. He writes FALSE beside them. He's been saying for ages that
he'd like to be a production company rather than an autr, and to
run the television news rather than make flms. He didn't of course
mean he wanted to produce his own flms, like Verneuil, or take over
TV. But that he wanted to produce a mosaic of different work rather
than measuring it all against some abstract productive force, and
wanted to produce a sub-informational juxtaposition of all the open
mouths instead of relating them all to some abstract information
taken as a precept.
I those are Godard � two idas, do the correspond to the theme of"sounds and
images " that constantly recrs in the progams? Images-laring fom
thing-relting to wok, and sound-laring the lnguage-elting to
No, there's only a partial correspondence: there's always information
in images, and something at work in sounds. Any set of terms can and
should be divided up in various ways that correspond only partially.
To try and articulate the relation between sounds and images as
Godard understands it you' d have to tell a very abstract story, in sev
eral episodes, and then finally see that this abstract story corresponds
to a single episode of something terribly simple and concrete.
1 . There are images, things are themselves images, because images
aren't in our head, in our brain. The brain's just one image among
others. Images are constantly acting and reacting on each other, pro
ducing and consuming. There' s no difference at all beteen imags,
thing, and motion.
2. But images also have an insid or certain images have an inside
and are experienced fom inside. They're subjects (cf. Godard's
remarks on Two o Thre Thing I Know Abt He in Godard Ü Godard,
pp. 23942) . And there's a gp beteen actions upon these images and
the reactons they produce. It's this gap that enables them to store up
other images, that is to perceive. But what they store is only what inter
ests them in other images: perceiving is subtracting fom an image what
doesn't interest us, there's always Lsin our perception. We're so fll of
images we no longer see those outside us for what they are.
3. There are also aural images, which don't seem to have any pri
orit. Yet these aural images, or some of them, have an othe side you
can call whatever you like, ideas, meaning, language, expressive
aspects, and so on. Aural images are thus able to contract or capture
other images or a series of other images. A voice takes over a set of
images (the voice of Hitler, say) . Ideas, acting as precepts, are embod
ied in aural images or sound waves and say what should interest us in
Three Questions on Six Times Two •
other images: they dictate our perception. There's always a central
"rubber stamp" normalizing images, subtracting what we're not sup
posed to see. So, given the earlier gap, we can trace out as it were two
converse currents: one going from external images to perceptions,
the other going from prevailing ideas to perceptions.
. So we're caught in a chain of images, each of us in our own par
ticular place, each ourself an image, and also in a network of ideas
acting as precepts. And so what Godard's doing with his ''words and
images" goes in two directions at once. On the one hand he's restor
ing their fullness to external images, so we don't perceive something
less, making perception equal to the image, giving back to images all
that belongs to them-which is in itself a way of challenging this or
that power and its rubber stamps. On the other hand, he's undoing
the way language takes power, he's making it stammer in sound
waves, taking apart any set of ideas purporting to be just ones and
extracting from it just some ideas. These are perhaps two reasons
among others why Godard makes such novel use of the static shot.
rather like what some contemporary musicians do by introducing a
fxed aural plane so that eerything in music is heard. And when
Godard puts a blackboard on the screen and writes on it, he's not
making it something he can film but making the blackboard and
writing into a new televisual resource, a sort of expressive material
with its own particular current in relation to the other currents on
the screen.
This whole abstract story in four episodes sounds a bit like science
fction. But it's our social realit these days. The strange thing is that
the story corresponds in various ways to what Bergson said in the first
chapter of Matt and Memory. Bergson's seen as a sedate old philoso
pher who's no longer of any interest. It would be good if cinema or
television revived interest in him (he should be on the :unrc¹syl
labus, maybe he is) . The first chapter of Matte and Memory develops
an amazing conception of the relations between photography and
cinematic motion, and things: "photography, if there is such a thing
as photography, is caught from the outset in, drawn from the start
right into the interior of things, and this at every point in space, " and
so on. That's not to say Godard's a Bergsonian. It's more the other
way around; Godard's not even reviving Bergson, but fnding bits of
Bergson along his way as he revivies television.
Bt why d eeythin in Gr co in twos? Yonee two to gt three . . .
Fine, bt what ar thee tws an thres aU abt?
Oh, come on, you know better than anyone it's not like that. Godard's
not a dialectician. What counts with him isn't to or three or howev
er many, it's AND, the conjunction AND. The key thing is Godard's
use of AND. This is important, because all our thought'S modeled,
rather, on the verb "to be," I S.
Philosophy's weighed down with dis
cussions about attributive judgments (the sky is blue) and existential
judgments (G is) and the possibility or impossibility of reducing
one to the other. But they all turn on the verb "to be. " Even conjunc
tions are dealt with in terms of the verb "to be"-look at syllogisms.
The English and the Americans are just about the only people who've
set conjunctions fee, by thinking about relations. But when you see
relational judgments as autonomous, you realize that they creep in
everywhere, they invade and ruin everything: AND isn't even a spe
cifc conjunction or relation, it brings in all relations, there are as
many relations as ANDS, AND doesn't just upset all relations, it upsets
being, the verb . . . and so on. AD, "and . . . and . . . and . . . " is pre
cisely a creative stammering, a foreign use of language, as opposed to
a conformist and dominant use based on the verb "to be."
AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identi
ties. It's not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I come out,
and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man's wife isn't the
same before and after the conviction. But diversit and multiplicity
are nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense of "one more,"
"one more woman" . . . ) or dialectical schemas (in the sense of "one
produces two, which then produces three") . Because in those cases
it's still Unity, and thus being, that's primary, and that supposedly
becomes multiple. When Godard says everything has to parts, that
in a day there's morning an evening, he's not saying it's one or the
other, or that one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multi
plicity is never in the terms, however many, nor in all the terms
together, the whole. Multiplicit is precisely in the "and," which is dif
ferent in nature from elementary components and collections of
Neither a component nor a collection, what is this AND? I think
Godard's force lies in living and thinking and presenting this AND in
Three Questions on Six Times Two •
a very novel way, and in making it work actively. n×uis neither one
thing nor the other, it's always in between, between two things; it's the
borderline, there's always a border, a line of fight or fow, only we
don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of things. And yet it's
along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve,
revolutions take shape. ''The strong people aren't the ones on one
side or the other, power lies on the border." Giscard d'Estaing made
a sad observation in the lecture on military geography he recently
gave the army: the more that things become balanced at the level of
the largest groups, between West and East, u. s. and USSR, with plan
etary consensus, link-ups in space, global policing, and so on, the
more they become "destabilized" between North and South-Giscard
cites Angola, the Near East, the Palestinian resistance, but also all the
unrest that produces "a regional destabilization of security, " airplane
hijacking, Corsica . . . Between North and South we'll keep on find
ing lines that derail the big groups, an x×u,x×u.x×uwhich each
time marks a new threshold, a new direction of the broken line, a new
course for the border. Godard's trying to "see borders," that is, to
show the imperceptible. The convict and his wife. The mother and
child. But also images and sounds. And the clockmaker's movements
when he's in his clockmaking sequence and when he's at his editing
table: an imperceptible border separates them, belonging to neither
but carrying both forward in their disparate development, in a fight
or in a flow where we no longer know which is the guiding thread, nor
where it's going. A whole micropolitics of borders, countering the
macropolitics of large groups. At least we know that's where things
come to pass, on the border between images and sounds, where
images become too full and sounds too strident. That's what Godard's
done in Six Times Two: made this active and creative line pas six times
between them, made it visible, as it carries television forward.
Cahies du Cinea 271 (November 1976)
Yor book � pretd, not as a hist ofcnea, but a a classication of
img and sis, a taxonomy. In this rpect it follws on fom some ofyour
ear wors: for instanc, yo m a clssfcation ofsigs when uting
abut Poust. But with The Movement-Image you've dcidd fothe frt
time to tackl, not a philsohical probl o a particulr bdy ofw (that
ofsinoa, Ka, Bacon, o Poust, say), bt the whol ofa particlr .el,
in this case cinea. And alo, although you rl out producing a history of
cnea, yo deal wth it historcaly.
Well yes, in a way it's a history of cinema, but a "natural history. " It
aims to classif tpes of images and the corresponding signs, as one
classifes animals. The main genres, the western, crime, period flms,
comedy, and so on, tell us nothing about different tpes of images or
their intrinsic characteristics. The diferent sorts of shot, on the other
hand-oseup, long shot, and so on-o amount to diferent types
of image, but there are lots of other factors, lighting, sound, time,
which come in too. If I consider the feld of cinema as a whole, it's
because it's all built upon the movement-image. That's how it's able
to reveal or create a maximum of different images, and above all to
combine them with one another through montage. I There are per
ception-images, action-images, af ection-images, along with many
other types. Ad in each case there are internal signs that character-
The sigmtlcanu: L1 c ''o'�
extremely rich classifcation of signs, relatively indepenaent L1 LI
guistic model. It w particularly tempting to see whether the m4
matter2 introduced by cinema was going to require a new u:
standing of images and signs. In this sense, I've tried to prodl
I book on logic, a logic of cinema.
It seems you alo want to set rght a kznd ofinjustice done to cnea �
lsohy. You cticize pheomeolg, in particlr for having misund
cinea, for having minimized its sigicanc b comparng and contn
it with naturl pecetion. And you think Bgon had eething he n
to undetand it, had anticipatd it ee, but couln't or wouln't see th
alZl betwee his own conctions and cinema. As though he wee sort �
ning away fom the art. Thus in Matter and Memory, without kn(
anything abt cn, he wk out the basic conct ofmovet-i
with it three main fos-pecetion-zmag, aczon-imag, affecton-im
which heal the ve novel offlm. But lt in Creative Evolution
this time actualy confonting cnea, he obect to it, bt in a quit di
way fom the phenomeolgst: he see in it, in the same way as i l
perception, the peetuation ofa ve ol illusion, that ofblin�
motion cn b reconstcted fom static slc oftim.
It's very odd. I have the feeling that modern philosophica COl
tons of the imagination take no account of cinema: they either :
movement but lose sight of the image, or tey stick to the image '
losing sight of its movement. It's odd that Sartre, in The Pscho�
Imagnation, takes into account every tpe of image except the
matc image. Merleau-Ponty was interested in cinema, but only in
tion to the general principles of perception and behavior. Berg
position, in Matt and Meory, is unique. Or Matt and Me, I
is a unique, extraordinary book among Bergson's work. He no Ie
put motion in the realm of duration, but on the one hand posj
absolute identit of motion-matter-image, and on the other hanl
covers a Time that's the coexistence of all levels of duration (r
being only the lowest level) . Fellini recently said we're i infn�
ae, and middle age all at once: that's thoroughly Bergsonian. S
there's a marriage in Matt and Men of pure spiritualism and radi
cal materialism. At once Vertov and Dreyer, i you like, both directions.
But Bergson didn't continue along this path. He relinquished these
to basic advances touching the movement-image and the tme-image.
Why? I think it's because Berson w here working out new philo
sophical concepts relating to the theory of relatvity: he thought rela
tivit involved a conception of time which it didn't itself bring out, but
which it w up to philosophy to construct. Only what happened w
that people thought Bergson w attacking relativity, that he w criti
cizing the physical theory itself. Bergson considered the misunder
standing too basic to dispel. S he went back to a simpler conception.
Still, in Matt and Mey ( 18
6) he'd traced out a movement-image
and a time-image that he could, subsequently, have applied to cinema.
Isn't this just what you g in a flmmaker like Dee who inspire som ver
fne passag in your book? I rectl saw Gertud agin, which is ging to
b reelased aftwet year. It s a wondefl flm, whee the moultion
be dif eet lvel oftim reache a sbtlt onl, someim, equalld in
Miogshi s flm (with the apearanc and diapearanc ofthe potts wif,
da and alve, at the e of Ugetsu Monogatari, fo instanc). And De
e in his esays, i constantly saying w shoul gt r ofthe third dimesion,
deth, and produc f imag, setting them in direct reltion to a forth and
ffh dimension, to Tim and Sirt.
l he discsse The Word, for exam
pl, whats so intrging is hi elnaton that it's not a stor about gosts or
mns , it's abut a "profound rltion be exact scec and intuitive
rlgon. " And he invok Einstn. I quot: "&ct scnc, follwing upon
Eintn's rltvit, h bught proofs ofthe existctide the worl of
thredim which i that ofor se-f a forth dimeion, that of
tim, and a ffh, the pschical. It h be show that it is possibl to exper
ec et which have not ye t pl. Ne perpective have beoe
up which m us recgie a profound relton bte eact sciec and
intuitive religon. " . . . But lt s retur t the quetion of"the histor ofcine
ma. " Yo introuc an orde ofsuccsion, yo say a cain te ofimag
apar at a ctain momt, foinstanc afthe war So you're not just p
ducng an abstract clsifction or ee a natural histo. You want to
accnt foa historcal delmet too.
On The Movemen t-Image
• 4
In the frst place, the various types of image don't already exist, they
have to be created. A fat image or, conversely, depth of feld, always
has to be created or re-reated-signs, i you like, always imply a sig
nature. So an analysis of images and signs has to include monographs
on major auter. To take an example: I think expressionism con
ceives light in relaton to darkness, and their relaton is one of strug
gle. In the prewar French school it's quite different: there's no strug
gle, but alternation; not only is light itself moton, but there are to
alternating lights, solar and lunar. It's very similar to the painter
Delaunay. It's anti-xpressionism. If an autr like Rivette belongs
these days to the French school, it's because he's rediscovered and
completely reworked this theme of two kinds of light. He's done won
ders with it. He's not only like Delaunay, but like Nerval in literature.
He's the most Nervalian, the only Nervalian, flmmaker. There are of
course historical and geographical factors in all this, running through
cinema, bringing it into relation with other arts, subjecting it to infu
ences and allowing it to exert them. There's a whole history. But this
history of images doesn' t seem to me to be developmental. I think all
images combine the same elements, the same signs, diferently. But
not just any combination's possible at just any moment: a particular
element can only be developed given certain conditons, without
which it will remain atrophied, or secondary. So there are diferent
levels of development, each of them perfectly coherent, rather than
lines of descent or fliation. That's why one should tlk of natural his
tory rather than historical history.
Stil� your cls icton s an ealuation. It impl value judgent abut the
auteurs you deal with, and so about those you hardly notice, or don't mtion.
The bo k dos, to b sure, point towar a sequel, laving us on the threhol of
a timimag that g bond the movet-imag. But in this frt volume
yo descbe the breakdown ofthe action-ima at the ed oj and just afe the
Scond Worl War (Italian neorealsm, then the Frech Ne Wave . . . ).
Are't some ofthe feature b which yo charactz the cinea ofthi c
(a taking into account ofrealit a fagentar and dispeive, a feelng that
ee things bcome a clchi, constant pemutations of what s ctral and
perpheal, ne articltions ofseec, a breakdown ofthe simpl lnk
bea gve sitation and a characs action) . . . isn't aU that already
there in two prewar flms, The Rules of the Game and Citizen Kane, gen
erlly considered to be founding works ofmodern cinema, which you don't
I don't, frst of all, claim to have discovered anyone, and all the
auteurs I cite are well-known people I really admire. For example, on
the monographic side, I consider Losey's world: I try to define it as a
great sheer cliff dotted with huge birds, helicopters, and disturbing
sculptures, towering over a little Victorian city at its foot. It's Losey's
own way of recreating the naturalist framework. A framework of
which you get different versions in Stroheim, in Bunuel. I take some
one's work as a whole, I don' t think there's anything bad in a great
body of work: in Losey's case The Trut was disparaged, even by
Cahiers, because people didn't take enough account of its place in his
work as a whole: it's a reworking of Eva. Then you say there are gaps,
Welles, Renoir, tremendously important auteurs. That's because I
can' t in this volume deal with their work as a whole. Renoir's work
seems to me dominated by a certain relation between theater and life
or, more precisely, between actual and virtual images. I think Welles
was the first to construct a direct Time-image, a Time-image that's no
longer just derived from movement. It's an amazing advance, later
taken up by Resnais. But I couldn't discuss these things in the first
volume, whereas I could discuss Naturalism as a whole. Even with
neorealism and the New Wave, I only touch on their most superficial
aspects, right at the very end.
On get the impression, all the same, that what really interest you is natu
ralism and spirtualism (say Bufuel, Strheim, and Lose on the one hand,
Bresson and Dreer on the other), that is, naturalism's descent and degrada
tion, and the elan, the ascent ofsirit, the fourth dimension. The're vetical
motions. You don't seem so interested in horizontal motion, in the linking of
actions, in Amercan cinema for exampl. And when you come to neorealism
and the New Wave, you tal sometimes about the action-image beaking down,
and sometimes about the movement-image in gneral breaking down. Are you
saying that at that point it's the movement-image as a whol that begns to
break down, producing a situation where another tpe of image that goes
beond movemet can apear or just the action-image, laving in place, or
On The Movement-Image •
een reinforci!tg, the other two aspects ofthe movement-image: pure percetions
and affections?
It's not enough just to say that modern cinema breaks with narrative.
That's only an effect whose cause lies elsewhere. The cinema of action
depicts sensory-motor situatons: there are characters, in a certain sit
uation, who act, perhaps very violently, according to how they per
ceive the situation. Actions are linked to perceptions and perceptions
develop into actions. Now, suppose a character fnds himself in a sit
uation, however ordinary or extraordinary, that's beyond any possible
action, or to which he can't react. It's too powerful, or too painful, too
beautifl. The sensory-motor link's broken. He's no longer in a sen
sory-motor situation, but in a purely optical and aural situation.
ere's a new type of image. Take the foreign woman in Rosselini's
Stromboli: she goes through the tuna-fshing, the tuna's agony, then
the volcano's eruption. She doesn't know how to react, can't respond,
it's too intense: "I've had it, I'm afraid, it's so strange, so beautiful,
God . . . " Or the posh lady, seeing the factory in Euroa 5 r: 'They
looked like convicts . . . " That, I think, is neorealism's great innova
tion: we no longer have much faith in being able to act upon situa
¬ons or react to situations, but it doesn't make us at all passive, it
allows us to catch or reveal something intolerable, unbearable, even
in the most everyday things. It's a Visionary cinema. A Robbe-Grillet
says, descriptions replace objects. Now, when we fnd ourselves in
these purely optical and aural situations, not only does action and
thus narrative break do'Il, but the nature of perceptions and affec-
ons chan es because they enter a completely different «
'�<: s��:
longer in the same tpe of space: space, haVing lost its motor connec
tions, becomes a disconnected or vacant space. Modern cinema con
structs extraordinary spaces; sensory-motor signs have given way to
"opsigns" and "sonsigns. " There's still movement, of course. But the
movement-image a a whole comes into question. And here again,
obviously, the new optical and aural image involves external factors
SUlting fom the war, if only half-demoIished or derelict spaces, all
e forms o�¹that take the place of action, and the rise,
verywhere, of what is intolerable.
An image never stands alone. The key thing's the relation beteen
images. So when perception becomes purely optical and aural, with
what does it come into relation, if not with action? A actual image,
cut off from its motor development, comes into relation with a virtu
al image, a mental or mirror image. I saw the factory, and they looked
like convicts . . . Instead of a linear development, we get a circuit in
hich the two images are constantly chasing one another round a
point where real and imaginary become indistinguishable. The actu
al image and its virtual image crystallize, so to speak. It's a crystal
image, always double or duplicated, which we find already in Renoir,
but in Ophuls too, and which reappears in a different form in Fellini.
There are many ways images can crystallize, and many crystalline
signs. But you always see something in the crystal. In the frst place,
you see Time, layers of time, a direct time-image. Not that move
ment's ceased, but the relation between movement and time's been
�rted. Time no longer derives from the combination of move
ment-images (from montag) , it's the other way round, movement now
follows fom time. Montag doesn't necessarily vanish, but it plays a
different role, becomes what Lapoujade calls "montrage. "
Second, the
-mage bears a new relation to its optical and aural elements: you
might say that in its visionary aspect it becomes more "legible" than
visible. So a whole pedagogy of the image, like Godard's, becomes
possible. Finally, image becomes thought, is able to catch the mecha
nisms of thought, while the camera takes on various fnctions strictly
(comparable to propositional fnctions. It's in these three respects, I
think, that we get be ond the movement-image. One might talk, in a
classication, of "chronosigns, ectosigns, ana "noosigns. "
You're very ctical oflingitic, and oftheores ofcinema inspired b that dis
cipline. Yet you tal ofimags bcoming "lgbl" rathe than "visibl. " No,
the t legible as apled to cin was all the rage when linguistics domi
natedjlm theory ("readingajlm, " "readings" ofjlms . . . ). Isn't there a rk
ofconfsion in your use ofthis word? Does your t legible image conve
something dif eent fom that linguistic concetion, or doe it bring you back
to it?
No, I think not. It's catastrophic to try and apply linguistics to cinema.
Of course, thinkers like Met, or Pasolini, have done very important
On The Movement-Image • 53
critical work. But their application of a linguistic model always ends
up showing that cinema is something different, and that if it's a lan
guage, it's an analogical one, a language of modulation. This might
lead one to think that applying a linguistic model is a detour that's
better avoided. Among Bazin's finest pieces there's one where he
explains that photography's a mold, a molding (you might say that, in
a different way, language too is a mold) , whereas cinema is modula
tion through and through. 6 Not just the voices but sounds, lights, and
movements are being constantly modulated. These parameters of the
image are subjected to variations, repetitions, alternations, recycling,
and so on. Any recent advances relative to what we call classic cinema,
which already went so far in this direction, have two aspects, evident
in electronic images: an increasing number of parameters, and the
generation of divergent series, where the classic image tended toward
convergent series. This corresponds to a transition from visibilit to
legibility. The legibility of images relates to the independence of their
parameters and the divergence of series. There's another aspect, too,
which takes us back to an earlier remark. It's the question of vertical
it. Our visual world's determined in part by our vertical posture. An
American critic, Leo Steinberg, explained that modern painting is
defned less by a flat purely visual space than by ceasing to privilege
the vertical: it's as though the window's replaced as a model by an
opaque horizontal or tilting plane
on which elements are inscribed.
That's the sense of legibilit, which doesn't imply a language but
something like a diagram. A Beckett says, it's better to be sitting than
standing, and better to be lying down than sitting.8 Modern ballet
brings this out really well: sometimes the most dynamic movements
take place on the ground, while upright the dancers stick to each
other and give the impression they'd collapse if they moved apart.
Maybe in cinema the screen retains only a purely nominal verticality
and fnctions like a horizontal or tilting plane. Michael Snow has seri
ously questioned the dominance of verticalit and has even con
structed special equipment to explore the question. Cinema's great
auters work like Varese in music: they have to work with what they've
got, but they call forth new equipment, new instruments. These
instruments produce nothing in the hands o second-rate autrs,
providing only a substitute for ideas. It's the ideas of great auters,
rather, that call them forth. That's why I don't think cinema will die,
and be replaced by TV or video. Great auteurs can adapt any new
Verticalit may well be one ofthe geat questions ofmode cinema: it 's at the
heart ofGlube Rocha's ltst flm, The Age of the Earth, for exampla
marvelus flm containing unbelieabl shot that really def verticalit. And
yet, b considerng cinema only fom this "geometric, " spatial angl, aren't you
missing an essentialy drmatic diWion, which comes out for exampl in the
problm ofthe 100k9 a handld b auteurs like Hitchcock and Lang? You do,
in reltion to Hitchcock, tal about a "demarque, "l0 which seems implicitly
to relte to the lok. But the notion ofthe look, the very word itsel doesn't onc
apear in your book. Is this deliberate?
I' m not sure the notion's absolutely necessary. The eye's already there
in things, it's part of the image, the image' s visibility. Bergson shows
how an image itself is luminous or visible, and needs only a "dark
screen" to stop it tumbling around with other images, to stop its light
(diffsing, spreading in all directions, to reflect and refract the light.
'The light which, if it kept on spreading, would never be seen. " The
eye isn't the camera, it's the screen. A for the camera, with all its
�����sitional fnctions, it's a sort of third eye, the mind's e
. You
�itchcock: he does, it's true, bring the viewer into thelilm, a
Truffaut and Douchet have shown. But that' s nothing to do with the
look. It's rather because he frames the action in a whole network of
relations. Say the action's a crime. Then these relations are another
dimension that allows the criminal to "give" his crime to someone
else, to transfer or pass it on to someone else. Rohmer and Chabrol
saw this really well. The relations aren't actions but symbolic acts that
have a purely mental existence (gift, exchange, and so on) . And
they're what the camera reveals: framing and camera movement dis
play mental relations. If Hitchcock's so English, it's because what
interests him is the problem and the paradoxes of relation. The frame
for him is like a tapestry frame: it holds within it the network of rela
tions, while the action is just a thread moving in and out of the net
work. What Hitchcock thus brings into cinema is, then, the mental
image. It's not a matter of the look, and if the camera' s an eye, it's the
mind's eye. So Hitchcock has a special place in cinema: he goes
On The Movement-Image • 55
beyond the action-image to something deeper, mental relations, a
kind of vision. Only, instead of seeing this as a breaking-own of the
action image, and of the movement-image in general, he makes it a
consummation, saturation, of that image. So you might equally well
say he's the last of the classic directors, or the frst of the moderns.
You see Hitchcock a the prototical flmmaker ofreltions, ofwhat you call
thirdness. Reltions: i that what you mean b the whole ? It's a diffclt bt
ofyour bok You invoke Bgon, saying the whol isn't clsed, it's rthe the
Open, something that's always oe. It 's particlar sets ofthing that are
closed, and one mustn't confse the two . . .
The Open is familiar as a key notion in Rilke's poetry. But it's a
notion in Bergson's philosophy too. The key thing is to distinguish
between particular sets of things and the whole. Once you confuse
them, the whole makes no sense and you fall into the famous paradox
of the set of all sets. A set of things may contain very diverse elements,
but it's nonetheless closed, relatively closed or artifcially limited. I say
"artifcially" because there's always some thread, however tenuous,
linking the set to another larger set, to infnit. But the whole is of a
different nature, it relates to tme: it ranges over all sets of things, and
it's precisely what stops them completely flflling their own tenden
c to become completely closed. Bergson's always saying that Time is
the Open, is what changes-is constantly changing in natre-ach
moment. It's the whole, which isn't any set of things but the ceaseless
passage from one set to another, the tnsformation of one set of
things into another. It's very difcult to think about, this relation
beteen time, the whole, and openness. But it's precisely cinema that
makes it easier for us to do this. There are, as it were, tree coexisting
levels in cinematography: faming, which defnes a provisional artif
cially limited set of things; cutting, which defnes the distribution of
movement or movements among the elements of the set; and then
this movement refect a change or variation in the whole, which is
the realm of montae. The whole ranges over all sets and is precisely
what stops them becoming "wholly" closed. By talking about offscreen
space, we're saying on the one hand that any given set of things is part
of another larger to- or three-imensional set, but we're also saying
that al sets are embedded in a whole that's different in nature, a
fourth or ffth dimension, constantly changing across all the sets
(however large) over which it ranges. In the frst case we have spatial
and material extension, but in the other, the spiritual order we find
in Dreyer or Bresson. The two aspects aren' t mutually exclusive but
complementary, mutually supportive, and sometimes one's domi
nant, sometimes the other. Cinema's always played upon these coex
isting levels, each great autr has his ow
way of conceiving and using
them. In a great film, as in any work of art, there's always something
open. And it always turns out to be time, the whole, as these appear
in every different flm in very different ways.
Conversation of September 1 3, 1 983, with Pascal Bonitzer and
Jean Narboni, as set down and amplifed b
the participants
Cahies du Cina 352 (October 1 983)
A hundred years ofcinea . . . and only now does a Philosohe have the idea
ofsetting out concet specifc to cinea. Wat shoul we mk ofthis blind
spot ofphilosohical rection?
It's true that philosophers haven't taken much notice of cinema, even
though they go to cinemas. Yet it's an interesting coincidence that cin
ema appeared at the very time philosophy w trying to think motion.
That might even explain why philosophy missed the importance of
cinema: it was itself too involved in doing something analogous to
what cinema was doing; it w tying to put moton into thought while
cinema w putting it into images. The two projects developed inde
pendently before any encounter became possible. Yet cinema critics,
the greatest critics anyway, became philosophers the moment they set
out to formulate an aesthetics of cinema. They weren't trained as
philosophers, but that's what they became. You see it already in Bazin.
How do you see the plc offlm cticism thee days-. what rol shoul it ply?
Film criticism faces twin dangers: it shouldn' t just describe flms but
nor should it apply to them concepts taken fom outside flm. The job
of criticism is to form concepts that aren' t of course "given" in flms
but nonetheless relate specifcally to cinema, and to some specifc
genre of film, to some specifc flm or other. Concept specic to cin
ema, but which can only be formed philosophically. They're not tech
nical notions (like tracking, continuity, false continuity, 1 depth or fat
ness offield, and so on) , because technique only makes sense in rela
tion to ends which it presupposes but doesn't explain.
It's these ends that constitute the concepts of cinema. Cinema sets
out to produce self-movement in images, autotemporalization even:
that's the key thing, and it's these two aspects I've tried to study. But
what exactly does cinema thereby show us about space and time that
the other arts don't show? A tracking shot and a pan give two very dif
ferent spaces. A tracking shot sometimes even stops tracing out a
space and plunges into time-in Visconti, for instance. I've tried to
analyze the space of Kurosawa's and Mizoguchi's flms: in one it's an
encompassing,2 in the other, a world-line. They're very different:
what happens along a world-line isn't the same as what happens with
in an encompassing. Technical details are subordinate to these over
all fnalities. Ad that's the diffculty: you have to have monographs
on auter, but then these have to be grafted onto differentiations,
specific determinations, and reorganizations of concepts that force
you to reconsider cinema as a whole.
How can you exclude, fm the problmatic ofbody and thought that rn
rght through your rection, pschoanalysis and it reltion to cnema? O
lingistic fothat mte That is, "conct tak fom outide film"?
It's the same problem again. The concepts philosophy introduces to
deal wt cinema must be specifc, must relate specifcally to cinema.
You can 'f course link framing to castration, or close-ups to partial
objects, but I don' t see what that tells us about cinema. It's question
able whether the notion of "the imaginary, " even, has any bearing on
cinema; cinema produces reality. It's all very well psychoanalyzing
Dreyer, but here as elsewhere it doesn't tell us much. It makes more
sense to compare Dreyer and Kierkegaard; because already for
Kierkegaard the problem w to "make" a movement, and he thought
only "choice" could do this: then cinema's proper object becomes
spiritual choice.
On The Time-Im
• 59
A co
mparative psychoanalysis of Kierkegaard
d' Dre
er won't
help us with the philosophico-cinematic proble
o,bw ti
al dimension becomes the object of cinema. The
retrns in
a very different form in Bresson, in Rohmer, and perv
which aren' t at all abstract but very moving, very engag
It's the same with linguistics: it also provides only concepts a
able to cinema fom outside, the "st" for instance. But tat
immediately reduces the cinematic image to an utterance, and its
essential characteristic, its motion, is left out of consideration. Narra
tive in cinema is like the imaginary: it's a very indirect product of
motion and time, rather than the other way around. Cinema always
narrates what the image's movements and times make it narrate. Ifl
the motion's governed by a sensory-motor scheme, i it shows a char
acter reacting t a situation, then you get a story. If, on the other
hand, the sensory-motor scheme breaks down to leave disoriented
and discordant movements, then you get other patterns, becomings
rather than stories.
That s the whol importance, which you examine in your book, ofneorealism.
A ccial break obiousl connected with the war (&sseUini and Visconti in
Italy, Ray in America). And yet Ou bfore the war and then Wells preent
one taking too historcist an aproach . . .
Yes, if the major break comes at the end of the war, with neorealism,
it's precisely because neorealism registers the collapse of sensory
motor schemes: characters no longer "know" how to react to situa
tions that are beyond them, too awful, or too beautiful, or insoluble
. . . So a new type of character appears. But, more important, the
ossibility appears of temporalizing the cinematic image: pure time,
little bit of time in its pure form, rather than motion. This cine
atic revolution may have been foreshadowed in different contexts
by Welles and, long before the war, by Ozu. In Welles there' s a depth
of time, coexisting layers of time, which the depth of feld develops
on a truly temporal scale. 3 And if Ozu's famous still lifes are thor
oughly cinematic, it's because they bring out the unchanging pat
tern of time in a world that's already lost its sensory-motor connec
But what are the prncpls bhind these changs? How can we assess them,
aesthetically or othewise? In short: on what basis can we assess flms?
I think one particularly important principle is the biology of the
brain, a micro-biology. It's going through a complete transformation,
and coming up with extraordinary discoveries. It's not to psycho
analysis or linguistics but to the biology of the brain that we should
look for principles, because it doesn't have the drawback, like the
other two disciplines, of applying ready-made concepts. We can con
sider the brain as a relatively undifferentiated mass and ask what cir
cuits, what kinds of circuit, the movement-image or time-image trace
out, or invent, because the circuits aren' t there to begin with.
Take Resnais's flms for example: a cinema of the brain, even
though, once again, they can be very entertaining or very moving.
The circuits into which Resnais's characters are drawn, the waves they
ride, are cerebral circuits, brain waves. The whole of cinema can be
assessed in terms of the cerebral circuits it establishes, simply because
it's a moving image. Cerebral doesn't mean intellectual: the brain's
emotive, impassioned too . . . You have to look at the richness, the
complexity, the signifcance of these arrangements, these connec
tions, disjunctions, circuits and short-ircuits. Because most cinemat
ic production, with its arbitrary violence and feeble eroticism, reflects
mental defciency rather than any invention of new cerebral circuits.
'hat happened with pop videos is pathetic: they could have become
a really interesting new field of cinematic activity, but were immedi
;tely taken over by organized mindlessness. Aesthetics can't be
divorced from these complementary questions of cretinization and
cerebralization. Creating new circuits in art means creating them in
the brain too.
Cinema sees, on the fac ofit, m a part ofcivic lie than does philsohy.
How can we /dg that gap, what cn we do about it?
That may not be right. I don' t think people like the Straubs, for exam
ple, even considered as political flmmakers, ft any more easily than
philosophers into "civic life. " Any creative activity has a political
aspect and signifcance. The problem is that such activity isn' t very
On The Time-Image • 61
atible with circuits of information and communi
cation, ready
made circuits that are compromised fom the outset. All forms of cre
ativity, including any creativity that might be possible in television,
here face a common enemy. Once again it's a cerebral matter: the
brain's the hidden side of all circuits, and these can allow the most
basic conditioned refexes to prevail, as well as leaving room for more
creative tacings, less "probable" links.
The brain's a spatio-temporal volume: it's up to art to trace
through it the new paths open to us today. You might see contnuities
and false continuities as cinematic synapsesyou get different links,
and different circuits, in Godard and Resnais, for example. The over
al importance or signifcance of cinema seems to me to depend on
this sort of problem.
Conversation wt Gilbert Cabasso and Fabrice Revault d'Allonnes
Cina 334 (December 1 8, 1 985)
I. The Movement-Image sees to take up onc m t prbatic ofThe
Logic of Sense, but fom a ve dif eet ang. W The Logic of
Sense exlued the cbtantal rlation ofparadox and langag, The
Movement-Image sugt ging beond paradox b subtitutng the
tranal notion ofan oe ttalt for that ofa pardoxicl set.
Wat rl doe the cintic ml ply in woring toward a rolution
thai, I reading Bgon fom the viewoint ofcnea, apear to lad to
seeing "the univee as cin in it purt for "?
In othe words, dos cin play t rol in your wor ofa mtaphor that
helps you read a cnctual txt, or ofa conctal tool you use t arve at
a n lgc?
2. Your refction, root in the lnks btwe Bon and cin, tur on
(aethetic) ctegs and (Philsohical) etti that you eetualy char
az as Ideas in t Pltonic sese ofthe t.
You alo, whil reecting a siolgcal analysi of cinea, revive
Peirc's pct ofa gal seiolog ofsigs.
Do yo think cin has a special part to ply in reurecting in a
machinic veion, thinking in t ofsubstanc and univeal? W, in
the ver notions ofmovent-imag and timimag, are the asect that
supc this cnction of cnea 7 An what are the reltions be
ima and moet in the movet-ima7
3. In your analysis ofcina you ne use t t the imaginary, widel
ue in othe wor to charactez cineatic langag.
Wat are your reasons for avoiding the t? Might not your refctions
on the rol oflht in flmic fgrtion, your fascinating sugtion ofa lo k
that is already there in the imag, allw you to trac out your own conc
tion ofthe imagnary ?
4. More geaUy, doe the notion ofthe imagnar, which var widely fm
one disciplne to another have any plac in philosohy? How woul you
characterze this plc?
5. Might not your analysis ofcin induce you to set out the hrstic rol of
the imagnary in your ow wor-including that on cina-and in the
way you wrt?
1 . The idea of an open totalit has a specifcally cinematic sense.
Because when images move, then by linking up with one another
they're internalized in a whole, which is itself externalized in the
linked images. Eisenstein worked out the theory of this image-whole
circuit, where each term depends on the other: the whole changes as
images are linked together. He invokes the dialectic. And for him, it's
effectively the relation beteen shots and montag.
But cinema isn't completely defned b the model of a moving
open totalit. Not only c this totality be understood in a wy that
isn't at all dialectical (in pre Aerican, German, and French cin
ema) but postar cinema brings the model itself into question. Per
haps because the cinematic image ceases to be a movement-image
and becomes a time-image: that's what I try to show in the second vol
ume. The model of the whole, of an open totalit, presupposes that
there are commensurable relations or rational cuts! beteen images,
in the image itself, and beteen image and whole. This is the very
condition for there being an open totalit: here again, Eisenstein
works out an explicit theory, using the golden number, and the theo
ry's not just "dumped" on us but deeply connected with his practice,
in fact with a fairly general prewar flmmakng practice. If postr cin
ema breaks with this model, it's because it sets up all sorts of irratonal
cuts and incommensurable relations beteen imaes. False continu-
ity becomes the rule ( a dangerous rule, because one can get a false
continuity just as wrong as a true one, more wrong even) .
So here again we find paradoxical sets. But if irrational cuts
become fundamental in this way, it's because what's fundamental is
no longer the movement-image but rather the time-image. From this
viewpoint the model of an open totality deriving from movement
doesn't work any more: there's no totalization any more, no internal
ization in a whole or externalization of a whole. Images are no longer
linked by rational cuts but relinked around irrational cuts (in Resnais,
Godard) . It's a different cinematic system, where linguistic paradox
es turn up once more. Thus talking pictures seem initially to have per
petuated the primacy of the visual image, making sound a new dimen
sion of the visual image, a fourth dimension, ofen wonderful. Post
war talking pictures, on the other hand, tend toward autonomous
sound, an irrational break2 between the aural and visual (in the
Straubs, Syberberg, Dua) . There's no totalization any more, because
time no longer derives from motion and measures it, but manifests
itself directly, inducing false moves. 3
So I don' t think cinema can be reduced to the model of an open
totalit. That was one model, but there are and always will be as many
models as cinema manages to invent. Also, no models are specific to
one discipline or one feld of knowledge. What interests me is reso
nances, given each field with its own rhythms and history, and the dis
location between developments and transformations in different
felds. At a particular point philosophy, for example, transformed the
relations between motion and time; cinema may have been doing the
same thing, but in a different context, along different lines. So there's
a resonance between decisive events in the histories of the two felds,
although the events are very dissimilar. Cinema is one type of image.
Beteen diferent tpes of aesthetic image, scientifc fnctions, and
philosophical concepts, there are currents of mutual exchange, with
no overall primacy of any one feld. In Bresson you get disconnected
spaces with tactile continuities, in Resnais you get probabilistic and
topological spaces, which correspond to spaces in physics and mathe
matics, but which cinema constructs in its own way ( Je t 'aim, Je
t 'aim) . The relation between cinema and philosophy is that between
image and concept. But there's a relation to the image within the con
cept itself, and a relation to the concept within the image: cinema, for
example, has always been trying to construct an image of thought, of
Doubts About the Imagnary
the mechanisms of thought. And this doesn't make it abstract, quite
the reverse.
2. In fact it's the principles that are sometimes realized in images,
sometimes in fnctions and sometimes in concepts, that one might
call Ideas. It's signs that realize Ideas. Images, in cinema, are signs.
Signs are images seen from the viewpoint of their composition and
generation. I've always been interested in the notion ofa sign. Cinema
has given rise to its own particular signs, whose classification is speci
ic to cinema, but once it produces them they turn up elsewhere, and
the world starts "turning cinematic. "4 I I've used Peirce, it's because
in Peirce there's a profound mirroring of images and signs. I, on the
other hand, a semiotics based on linguistics worries me, it's because it
does away with both the image and the notion of sign. It reduces the
image to an utterance, which seems very bizarre, and then of course
finds in it the linguistic components of utterancessyntagms, para
digms, the signifier. It's a sleight of hand that makes us forget about
movement. Cinema begins with the movement-image-not with any
"relation" between image and movement even: cinema creates a self
moving image. Then, when cinema goes thrugh its "Kantian" revolu
tion, that's to say when it stops subordinating time to motion, when it
makes motion depend on time (with false moves manifesting tempo
r relations), the cinematic image becomes a time-image, an autotem
poralization of the image. So the question isn't whether cinema can
aspire to universality. It's not a question of universalit but of singular
it: what are the image'S singularities? The image is a fgure character
ized not by any way it universally represents anything but by its inter
nal singularities, the singular points it connects: the rational cuts
whose theory Eisenstein worked out for the movement-image, for
example, or irrational cuts in the case of the time-image.
. There's actually a real philosophical problem here: is "the
imaginary" a good concept? We might begin with the terms real and
unreal, defning them the way Bergson does: reality as connection
according to laws, the ongoing linkage of actualities, and unreality as
what appears suddenly and discontinuously to consciousness, a vir
tualit in the process of becoming actualized. Then there' s another
pair of terms, true and false. The real and the unreal are always dis
tinct, but the distinction isn't always discernible: you get falsity when
the distinction between real and unreal becomes indiscernible. But
then, where there' s falsity, truth itself becomes undecidable. Falsity
isn' t a mistake or confusion, but a power that makes truth undecid
The imaginary is a very complicated notion because it marks the
intersection of these two pairs of terms. The imaginary isn't the unre
al; it's the indiscernibility of real and unreal. The two terms don't
become interchangeable, they remain distinct, but the distinction
beteen them keeps changing round. This comes out well in three dif
ferent aspects of the phenomenon of crystallization: there's an
exchange between an actual image and a virtual image, virtual becom
ing actual and vice versa; there's also an exchange beteen clear and
opaque, opaque becoming clear and vice versa; finally there's an
exchange between seed and environment. I think the imaginary is this
set of exchanges. The imaginary is the crystal-image. It's the key factor
in modern cinema: one fnds it in very different forms in Ophuls, in
Renoir, in Fellini, in Visconti, in Tarkovsk, in Zanussi . . .
And then there's what we see in the crystal. What we see in the crys
tal is falsity or, rather, the power of falsit. The power of falsity is time
itself, not because time has changing contents but because the form
of time as becoming brings into question any formal model of truth.
This is what happens in the cinema of time, frst of all in Welles, then
in Resnais, in Robbe-Grillet: it's a cinema of undecidability. In short,
the imaginary doesn't lead us on to a signifier but to a presentation
of pure time.
This is why I don't attach much importance to the notion of the
imaginary. It depends, in the frst place, on a crystallization, physical,
chemical, or psychical; it defines nothing, but is defined by the crystal
image as a circuit of exchanges; to imagine is to construct crystal
images, to make the image behave like a crystal. It's not the imaginary
but the crystal that has a heuristic role, with its triple circuit: actual-vir
tual, clear-paque, seed-nvironment. And in the second place, all that
matters about the crystal itself is what we see in it, so the imaginary
drops out of the equation. What we see in the crystal is a time that's
become autonomous, independent of motion, temporal relatons con
stantly inducing false moves. I don't believe the imaginary has any
power, in dreams, fantasies . . . and so on. The imaginary is a rather
indeterminate notion. It makes sense in strict conditons: its precondi
ton is the crystal, and the unconditioned we eventually reach is time.
I don't believe the imaginary is at all specifc, but that there are
Doubts About the Imagnary •
twO systems of images: a system one might call organic, that of the
movement-image, which is based on rational cuts and linkages and
itself sets forth a model of truth (truth is the whole . . . ) . And then
a crystalline system, that of the time-image, based on irrational cuts
with only relinkings, and substituting for the model of truth the
power of falsity as becoming. Cinema, precisely because it set images
in motion, had its own resources for dealing with this problem of
to different systems. But one finds these systems elsewhere, draw
ing on other resources: Worringer long ago brought out a con
frontation in the arts between a "classic" organic system and an inor
ganic or crystalline system with no less vitality than the frst, but a
powerfl nonorganic, barbaric or gothic life. These are two stylistic
forms, and one can't say one is "truer" than the other, because truth
as a model or as an Idea is associated with only one of the two sys
tems. Perhaps the concept, or philosophy, also takes these two dif
ferent forms. In Nietzsche one sees philosophical discourse top
pling into a crystalline system, substituting the power of becoming
for the model of truth, nonorganic life for the organon, "pathic"
relinkings (aphorisms) for logical links. What Worringer called
expressionism is a fine way of approaching nonorganic life, fully
developed in cinema, that one can' t adequately explain in terms of
the imaginary. But expressionism is only one approach, and in no
way exhausts the crystalline system: it appears in many other guises
in other art-forms and in cinema itself. Might there not even be
other systems than the two considered here, the crystalline and the
organic? Of course. (What sort of system is there in digital electron
ic images-a silicon system rather than a carbon system? Here again,
art, science, and philosophy interact with each other. ) What I set out
to do in these books on cinema was not to reflect on the imaginary
but something more practical: to disseminate time crystals. It's
something you can do in cinema but also in the arts, the sciences,
and philosophy. It's not something imaginary, it's a system of signs.
Making, I hope, further systems possible. Classifing signs is an end
less business, not least because there are an endless number of dif
ferent classifcations. What interests me is a rather special discipline,
taxonomy, a classifcation of classifications, which, unlike linguistics,
can' t do without the notion of a sign.
HO-cadre { ( 1 986)
Your previous book, L Rmpe ( 1 983), brought together a number of
articles written for Cahics. What made it a real book was the way you
based the arrangement on an analysis of the different periods Cahics
had gone through, and more specifically, on your analysis of various
fnctionsl of the cinematic image. An eminent earlier analyst of the
plastic arts, Riegl, distinguished three tendencies in art: the beautif
cation of Nature, the spiritualization of Nature, and competition with
Nature (and he took "beautifcation," "spiritualization," and "compe
tition" as historically and logically fndamental factors) . You, in the
poization you propose, defne an initial fnction expressed by the
question: What is there to see behind the image? And of course what
there is to see behind an image appears only in succeeding images,
yet acts as what takes us fom the frst image to the others, linking
them in a powerfl beautg organic totality, even when "horror" is
one element in this transition. This allows you to say the initial peri
od has as its principle Th Sct Beond th Door,2 "the desire to see
more, see behind, see through," where any object whatever can play
the role of a "temporary mask,"3 and where any film is linked to oth
ers in an ideal mirroring. This frst period of cinema is characterized
by the art of Montagculminating in great triptychs and corre
sponding to the beautication of Nature or the encyclopedia of the
World-but also by a depth ascribed to the image taken as a harmo-
Letter to Serge Daney •
ny or consonance, by a network of obstacles and advances, by disso
nances and resolutions in this depth, and by the specifically cinemat
role of actors, bodies, and words in this universal scenography: the
role of always furthering a supplementary vision, a "seeing more. " In
your new book you offer Eisenstein's library, the Cabinet of Doctor
Eisenstein,4 as a symbol of this great encyclopedia.
Now, you've pointed out that this form of cinema didn't die a nat
ural death but was killed in the war (Eisenstein's ofce in Moscow,
indeed, became a dead, dispossessed, derelict place) . Syberberg
extensively developed some remarks of Walter Benjamin' s about see
ing Hitler as a flmmaker . . . You yourself remark that "the great polit
ical mises e scene, state propaganda turning into tableaux vivants, the
frst mass human detentions" realized cinema's dream, in circum
stances where horror penetrated everything, where "behind" the
image there was nothing to be seen but concentration camps, and the
only remaining bodily link was torture. Paul Virilio in his turn shows
that fascism was competing from beginning to end with Hollywood.
The encyclopedia of the world, the beautifcation of Nature, politics
as "art" in Benjamin's phrase, had become pure horror. The organic
whole was simply totalitarianism, and authoritarian power was no
longer the sign of an auteur or mtter e scne but the materialization
of Caligari and Mabuse ("the old business of directing, " you said,
"would never again be an innocent business") . And i cinema was to
revive after the war, it would have to be based on new principles, a new
fnction o{ the image, a new "politics," a new artistic fnalit. Resnais's
work is perhaps the greatest, the most symptomatic example of this:
he brings cinema back from the dead. From the outset, through to his
recent Love Unto Death, Resnais has considered only one cinematic
subject, body or actor, a man returning from the dead. Thus in this
book itself you compare Resnais to Blanchot, Wrting the Disast.
Mter the war, then, a second fnction of the image was expressed
by an altogether new question: What is there to see on the surface of
the image? "No longer what there is to see behind it, but whether I
can bring myself to look at what I can't help seeing-which unfolds
on a single plane. " This changed all the relations beteen cinematic
images. Montage became secondary, giving way not only to the famous
"sequence shot," but to new forms of composition and combination.
Depth w condemned as "deceptive, " and the image took on the flat-
70 •
ness of a "surface without depth," or a slight deth rather like the
oceanographer's shallows (and there's no contradiction between this
and depth of field, in Welles for example, one of the masters of this
new cinema, who shows everything in one vast glimpse and does away
with the old kind of depth) . Images were no longer linked in an
unambiguous order of cuts and continuities but became subject t
relinkings, constantly revised and reworked across cuts and false con
tinuities.5 The relation between the image and cinematic bodies and
actors changed too: bodies became more Dantean, were no longer,
that is, captured in actions, but in postures and the ways they're
linked (this also you show in the present book, in relation to Aker
man, to the Straubs, and in a striking passage where you say an actor
in a drunken scene no longer has to add something to his movement
and stagger around as in earlier flms but rather has to adopt a pos
ture, the posture that allows a real drunk to stay on his feet . . . ) . The
relation between images and words, sounds, music changed too, with
basic disymmetries between the aural and visual that allow the eye to
read images, but also allow the ear to imagine the slightest noise.
Finally, this new age of cinema, this new function of the image, was a
pedagg ofpection, taking the place of an eccloedia ofthe wol that
had fallen apart: a visionary cinema that no longer sets out in any
sense to beautif nature but spirtualzes it in the most intense way.
How can we wonder what there is to see behind an image (or follow
ing on fom it . . . ) , when we can't even see what's in it or on the sur
face until we look with our mind's eye?6 And while we can identif
many high points in this new cinema, it's the same pedagogical path
that leads to all of them-Rosselini's pedagogy, "a Straubian peda
gogy, a Gdardian pedagogy, " as you said in La Rampe, to which you
now add Antonioni's pedagogy, by analyzing the eye and ear of a jeal
ous man as a "poetics" registering everything evanescent, everything
that might disappear, a woman on the desert island in particular . . .
If you belong to any critical tradition, it's to that of Bazin and
Cahiers, along with Bonitzer, Narboni, and Schefer. You're still look
ing for a fundamental link between cinema and thought, and you still
see flm criticism as a poetic and aesthetic activity (while many of our
contemporaries have felt the need to turn to language, to a linguistic
formalism, in order to preserve the seriousness of criticism) . Thus
you still subscribe to the grand idea of cinema's frst period: cinema
Letter to Serge Daney
as a new Art and a new Thought. Only for the first filmmakers and
critics, from Eisentein or Gance to Elie Faure, the idea is bound up
with a metaphysical optimism, a total art for the masses. The war and
what led up to it, though, generated a radical metaphysical pes
simism. But you've managed to salvage a certain critical optimism:
cinema for you remains linked, not to a triumphant collective
thought, but to a precarious, singular thought that can be grasped
and sustained only in its "powerlessness," as it returns fom the dead
to confront the worthlessness of most cinematic activit.
This refects the emergence of a third period, a third function of
the image, a third set of relations. The question is no longer what
there is to see behind the image, nor how we can see the image
itself-it's how we can find a way into it, how we can slip in, because
each image now slips across other images, "the background in any
image is always another image, " and the vacant gaze is a contact lens.
And with this, you say, things come full circle, with Syberberg we're
back to Melies, but the mourning is now endless and the provocation
is pointless,' threatening to pitch your critical optimism into a critical
pessimism. Indeed, two different factors meet in this new relation
beteen images: on the one hand, there's the internal development
of cinema as it seeks new audio-visual combinations and maor peda
gogical lines (not just Rosselini, Resnais, Godard, and the Straubs, but
Syberberg, Duras, Oliveira . . . ) and fmd in television a wonderfl
feld to explore, with wonderful resources; on the other hand, there' s
television's own development, as competing with cinema, as actually
"perfecting" and "generalizing" it. Yet however interconnected, these
two aspects are fndamentally different and don't oerate on the same
leL For if cinema looked to television and video to "relay" a new aes
thetic and poetic fnction, television for its part (despite a few early
experiments) took on an essentially socialfnction that disrupted from
the outset any relay, appropriated video, and substituted altogether
different forces for the potential of beauty and thought.
Thus began a development reminiscent of the initial period of cin
ema: just as authoritarian power, culminating in fascism and major
state intervention, made it impossible to continue the first form of
cinema, the new social power of the postar period, one of surveil
lance or control, threatened to kill the second form of cinema. Con
trol is the name Burroughs gave to modern power. Even Mabuse
changes his method and operates through television sets. Once again,
cinema faced no natural death: it w at the very beginning of its new
explorations and creations. But the threat this time would come, not
fom an image always having another image as its background, and
art reaching the point of "competing with Nature," but fom the way
all images present the single image of my vacant gaze contacting a
non-Nature, a privileged spectator allowed into the wings, in contact
with the image, entering into the image. Recent surveys show that one
of the most highly prized forms of entertainment is to b in the stu
dio audience of a television show: it's nothing to do with beauty or
thought, it's about being in contact with the technology, touching the
machinery. The prying zoom has been taken out of Rossellini's hands
to become television's standard technique; continuity, through which
art beautifed and spiritualized Nature, and then competed with it,
ha become the televisual insert. A visit to the factory, with its rigid dis
cipline, becomes ideal entertainment (seeing how they make a pro
gram) , and ediction becomes the highest aesthetic value ("an edi
ing experience") . The encyclopedia of the world and the pedagogy of
percepton collapse to make way for a professional training of the eye,
a world of controllers and contolled communing in their admiration
for technology, mere technology. The contact lens everywhere. This
is where your critical optimism turns into critical pessimism.
Your new book leads on from the frst one. It's a question, now, of
taking up this confontation of cinema and television on their two dif
ferent levels. And, although you often allude to such matters in your
book, you don' t inscribe the problem within some abstract compari
son of the cinematic image with newer kinds of image. Your func
tionalism fortunately rules this out. And fom your fnctionalist view
point you're of course aware that television has, potentially, just as sig
nifcant an aesthetc fncton as any other form of expression and,
conversely, that cinema has always come up against forces working
within it to seriously impede any aesthetic fnality. But what I fnd so
interestng in CineJourl is that you ty to establish two "facts," along
with their determinant. The frst is that television, despite significant
efforts, often made by great flmmakers, hasn' t sought its own specif
ic identity in an aesthetic fnction but in a social fnction, a fnction
of control and power, the dominance of the medium shot,S which
denies any exploraton of perception, in the name of the profession-
Letter to Serge Daney •
al eye. Thus any innovation that does occur may appear in some unex
pected corner, some unusual situation: you cite Giscard producing an
empt shot on TV by walking of the set, or a brand of lavatory paper
reviving American comedy. The second fact, on the other hand, is
that cinema, despite all the forces it has served (and even launched) ,
has always "preserved" an aesthetc and noetic fnction, however fag
ile and misunderstood. We shouldn't, then, compare different types
ofimages, but cinema's aesthetic fnction and television's social fnc
ton: you say the comparison not only i asymmetric but h t b asym
metric, only makes sense in an asymmetric way.
We must, then, determine how cinema comes to embody this aes
thetic fnction. Here, by asking yourself what it means to be a flm
critic, you come up with things I fnd very intriguing. You take the
example of a flm like Verneuil's Th Vulure, which does without any
press viewing, rejects criticism as thoroughly pointless, and seeks
direct contact with "the social consensus" as its audience. This is per
fectly reasonable, because this tpe of cinema doesn' t need critics to
fll, not only the cinemas, but the whole range of its social fnctions.
I critcism has any point, then, it's to the extent that a flm bears in it
something supplementary, a sort of gap between it and a still virtual
audience, so we have to play for time and preserve the taces as we
wait. This notion of "supplement" seems to have various resonances;
perhaps you take it fom Derrida, reinterpretng it in your own way:
the supplement turns out to be a flm's aesthetc fnction, a tenuous
thing that can, however, be isolated in some cases and some circum
stnces, with a bit of skill ad thought. Thus Henri Lnglois and
Andre Bazin are for you to key fgures. For one of them "
obsessed with showing that flm should be preserved" and the other
had "the same obsession, in reverse" to show that flm preserved
things, preserved everyting that mattered, "a strange mirror whose
silvering retains images. " How can one claim that such a fagile mate
r preserves anything? And what does it mean to preserve things,
which seems a fairly humble fnction? It's nothing to do with the
material, it's something to do with the image itself: you show that the
cinematc image in itself preserves, preserves the one time in his life
that a man cries, in Dreyer's Gtr preserves the wind, not great
storms with their social fnction but moments "where the camera
plays with the wind, runs ahead of it, turns back into it" in Sjostrom
or the Straubs; preserves or watches over whatever can be watched
children, empty houses, plane trees-as in Varda's Vagabond, and
throughout Ozu's work; preserving, but always out of step with things,
because cinematic time isn't a time that flows on but one that endures
and coexists with other times. Preserving is, thus understood, no lit
tle thing; it's creating, constantly creating a supplement (that beauti
fies Nature, or spiritualizes it) . It's in the nature of a supplement that
it has to be created, and therein lies its aesthetic or noetic function,
itself something supplementary. You might have developed this into
an elaborate theory, but you choose to speak very concretely, keeping
as close as possible to your experience as a critic, insofar as you see the
critic as "keeping watch" over the supplement and thereby bringing
out cinema's aesthetic fnction.
Why not allow television this same supplementary force of creative
preservation? There's nothing in principle to stop it adapting its dif
ferent resources to this same end, except that TV
S social functions
(seen in game shows, news) stife its potential aesthetic fnction. T
is, in its present form, the ultimate consensus: it's direct social engi
neering, leavng no gap at all between itself and the social sphere, it's
social engineering in its purest form. For how could professional
training, the professional eye, leave any room for something supple
mentary in the way of perceptual exploration? And i I had to choose
among the finest passages of your book I'd pick those where you show
that the "replay, " the instant replay, is television's substitute for the
supplement or self-preservation, of which it is in fact the opposite; I'd
pick those where you rule out any chance of jumping from cinema to
communication, or of setting up any "relay" between one and the
other, since a relay could only be set up in a form of television that
had a non-communicative supplement, a supplement called Welles;
I' d pick those where you explain that television's professional eye, the
famous socially engineered eye through which the viewer is himself
invited to look, produces an immediate and complacent perfection
that's instantly controllable and controlled. For you don't take the
easy path, you don't criticize television for its imperfections, but pure
ly and simply for its perfection. It has found a way of producing a tech
nical perfection that is the very image of its complete aesthetic and
noetic emptiness (which is how a visit to the factory becomes a new
form of entertainment) . And you find Bergman agreeing-with con-
Letter to Serge Daney •
siderable mirth, and considerable enthusiasm for what television
might have contributed to the arts-that Dalls is completely empty,
but a perfect piece of social engineering. In another area, one might
say the same of Apostrohes:9 fom a literary viewpoint (aesthetically,
noetically) it's empty, but technically it's perfect. To say television has
no soul is to say it has no supplement, except the one you confer on
it as you describe the weary critic in his hotel room, turning the TV
on once more, and recognizing that all the images are equivalent,
having sacrificed present, past, and future to a flowing time.
It's fom cinema that there's come the most radical criticism of
information, from Godard for instance, and in a different way from
Syberberg (this not just in things they've said but concretely in their
work) ; it's from television that there comes the new threat of a death
of cinema. So you've thought it necessary to go and "have a close
look" at this essentially uneven or asymmetric confrontation. Cinema
met its frst death at the hands of an authoritarian power culminating
in fascism. Why does its threatened second death involve television,
just as the first involved radio? Because television is the form in which
the new powers of "control" become immediate and direct. To get to
the heart of the confrontation you' d almost have to ask whether this
control might be reversed, harnessed by the supplementary fnction
opposed to power: whether one could develop an art of control that
would be a kind of new form of resistance. Taking the battle to the
heart of cinema, making cinema see it as it problem instead of com
ing upon it from outside: that's what Burroughs did in litrature, by
substituting the viewpoint of control and controllers for that of
authors and authorit. But isn't this, as you suggest, what Coppola has
in his turn attempted to do in cinema, with all his hesitations and
ambiguities, but really fghting for something nonetheless? And you
give the apt name of mannersm to the tense, convulsive form of cine
ma that leans, as it tries to turn round, on the very system that seeks
to control or replace it.10 You'd already, in La Rampe, characterized
the imae's third phase as "mannerism": when there's nothing to see
behind it, not much to see in it or on the surface, but just an image
constantly slipping across preexisting, presupposed images, when
"the background in any image is always another image, " and so on
endlessly, and that's what we have to see.
This is the stage where art no longer beautifes or spiritualizes
Nature but competes with it: the world i s lost, the world itself "turns
to flm, "
any flm at all, and this is what television amounts to, the
world turning to any film at all, and, as you say here, "nothing hap
pening to human beings any more, but everything happening only to
images." One might also say that bodies in Nature or people in a land
scape are replaced by brains in a city: the screen's no longer a window
or door (behind which . . . ) nor a frame or surface (in which . . . ) but
a computer screen on which images as "data" slip around. How,
though, can we still talk of art, if the world itself is turning cinematic,
becoming 'just an act" directly controlled and immediately processed
by a television that excludes any supplementary function? Cinema
ought to stop "being cinematic," stop playacting, and set up specifc
relationships with video, with electronic and digital images, in order
to develop a new form of resistance and combat the televisual func
tion of surveillance and control. It's not a question of short-circuiting
television-how could that be possible?-but of preventing television
subverting or short-circuiting the extension of cinema into the new
types of image. For, as you show, "since television has scorned, mar
ginalized, repressed the potential of video-its only chance of taking
over from postwar modern cinema . . . taking over its urge to take
images apart and put them back together, its break with theater, its
new way of seeing the human body, bathed in images and sounds
one has to hope the development of video art will itself threaten TV.
Here we see in outline the new art of City and Brain, of competing
with Nature. And one can already see in this mannerism many differ
ent directions or paths, some blocked, others leading tentatively for
ward, offering great hopes. A mannerism of video "previsualization"
in Coppola, where images are already assembled without a camera.
And then a completely diferent mannerism, with its strict, indeed
austere, method in Syberberg, where puppetry and front-projection
produce an image unfolding against a background of images. Is this
the same world we see in pop videos, special effects, and footage from
space? Maybe pop video, up to the point where it lost its dreamlike
quality, might have played some part in the pursuit of "new associa
tions" proposed by Syberberg, might have traced out the new cerebral
circuits of a cinema of the fture, if it hadn't immediately been taken
over by marketing jingles, sterile patterns of mental deficiency, intri
cately controlled epileptic fts (rather as, in the previous period, cin-
Letter to Serge Daney •
ema was taken over by the "then hysterical spectacle" of large-scale
propaganda . . . ) . And maybe space footage might also have played a
part in aesthetic and noetic creation, if it had managed to produce
some last reason for traveling, as Burroughs suggested, if it had man
aged to break free from the control of a "regular guy on the Moon
who didn't forget to bring along his prayer book, " and better under
stood the endlessly rich example of La Regon cetrl, where Michael
Snow devises a very austere way of making one image turn on anoth
er, and untamed nature on art, pushing cinema to the limit of a pure
Spatium. And how can we tell where the experimentation with images,
sounds, and music that's just beginning in the work of Resnais,
Godard, the Straubs, and Duras will lead? And what new Comedyll
will emerge from the mannerism of bodily postures? Your concept of
mannerism is particularly convincing, once one understands how far
all the various mannerisms are different, heterogeneous, above all
how no common measure can be applied to them, the term indicat
ing onl a battlefield where art and thought launch together with cin
ema into a new domain, while the forces of control try to steal this
domain from them, to take it over before they do, and set up a new
clinic for social engineering. Mannerism is, in all these conflicting
ways, the convulsive confontation of cinema and television, where
hope mingles with the worst of all possibilities.
You had to go and "have a look" at this. So you became a journal
ist, at Libeation, without giving up your connection with Cahie. And
since one of the most compelling reasons for becoming a journalist is
wanting to travel, you produced a new series of critical pieces in the
form of a series of investigations, reports, and journeys. But here
again, what makes this book a real book is the fact that everything is
woven around the convulsive problem with which L &mpe closed in
a rather melancholy way. Any reflection on travel hinges perhaps on
four observations, one to be found in Fitzgerald, another in Toynbee,
the third in Beckett, and the last in Proust. The frst notes that travel
ing, even to remote islands or wildernesses, never amounts to a real
"break, " if one takes along one's Bible, one's childhood memories,
and one's habits of thought. The second, that travel aspires to a
nomadic ideal, but it's a ridiculous aspiration, because nomads are in
fact people who don't move on, don't want to leave, who cling to the
land taken from them, their regon cetrW2 (you yourself, talking
about a flm by Van der Keuken, say that going south is bound to
mean coming up against people who want to stay where they are) .
Because, according to the third observation, the most profound,
Beckett's, "we don't travel, as far as I know, for the pleasure of travel
ling; we're dumb, but not that dumb."13 So what reason is there, ulti
mately, except seeingjoryoursel going to check something, some inex
pressible feeling deriving from a dream or nightmare, even ifit's only
finding out whether the Chinese are as yellow as people say, or
whether some improbable color, a green ray, some bluish, purplish
air, really exists somewhere, out there. The true dreamer, said Proust,
is someone who goes to see something for himself . . . Ad in your
case, what you set out to ascertain in your travels is that the world real
ly is turning to flm, is constantly moving in that direction, and that
that's just what television amounts to, the whole world turning to
flm:14 so traveling amounts to seeing "what point in the history of the
media" the city, or some particular city, has reached. Thus you
describe Sao Paulo as a self-consuming city-brain. You even go to
Japan to see Kurosawa and to see for yourself how the Japanese wind
flls the banners in Rn; but as there's no wind that particular day, you
fnd wretched wind-machines standing in for it and, miraculously,
contributing to the image the indelible internal supplement, that is,
the beauty or the thought that the image preserves only because they
exist only in the image, because the image has created them.
Your travels, in other words, have left you with mixed feelings.
Everywhere, on the one hand, you fnd the world turning to film, and
fnd that this is the social function of television, its primary function
of control-whence your critical pessimism, despair even. You fnd,
on the other hand, that flm itself still has endless possibilities, and
that it is the ultimate journey, now that all other journeys come down
to seeing what's on Tv-whence your critical optimism. Where these
to strands meet there's a convulsion, a manic depression you've
made your own, a vertigo, a Mannerism that's the essence of art, but
also a battlefield. And there sometimes seems to be an interplay
between the two sides. Thus the traveler, wandering from TV set to TV
set, can't help thinking, and seeing film for what it really is, extricat
ing it from game shows and news alike: a kind of implosion that gen
erates a little cinema in the televsual series you set up, for example,
the series of three cities, or three tennis champions. And conversely,
Letter to Serge Daney •
returning to cinema as a critic, you can then see all the better that the
fattest of images is almost imperceptibly inflected, layered, with vary
ing depths that force you to travel within it, but on a supplementary
journey, out of control: with its three speeds, in Wajda, or more par
ticularly, the three kinds of movement in Mizoguchi, the three sce
narios you discover in Imamura, the three great circles traced out in
Fanny and Alexander, where you once more, in Bergman, come upon
the three phases, the three functions of cinema-the beautifing the
ater of life, the spiritual antitheater of faces, and the competitive
workings of magic. Why three so often, in so many forms, in the analy
ses of your book? Perhaps because three sometimes serves to close
everything up, taking two back to one, but sometimes, on the other
hand, takes up dualit and carries it far away from unity, opening it up
and sustaining it. "Three, or Video in the Balance: Critical Optimism
and Pessimism" as your next book? The battle itself takes so many
forms that it can be fought on any terrain. Fought out, for example,
between the speed of movement that American cinema keeps on step
ping up, and the slowness of the material that Soviet cinema weighs
and preserves. You say, in a fne passage, that "the Americans have
taken very far the study of continuous motion, of speed and lines of
flight, of a motion that empties an image of its weight, its materialit,
of bodies in a state of weightlessness . . . while in Europe, even in the
USSR, at the risk of marginalizing themselves to death, some people
allow themselves the luxury of exploring the other aspect of move
ment, slowed and discontinuous. Paradjanov and Tarkovsky, like
Eisentein, Dovzhenko, and Barnet before them, observe matter accu
mulating and piling up, a geology of bits and pieces of rubbish and
treasure slowly taking shape: theirs is the cinema of the Soviet ram-
. parts, of that immobile empire . . . " And if the Americans have actu
ally used video to go even faster (and to control the highest speeds) ,
how can one return video to the uncontrollable slowness that pre
serves things, how teach it to slow down, as Godard "recommended"
to Coppola?
Preface to Serge Dane
'S CineJoral ( 1 986)
0õ|Í Í 0|00 • MI CHEL FOUCAULT
BREAKI NG WORDS OPENi
W and how did you gt to know MichelFoucault ?
It's easier to remember a gesture or a laugh than a date. I got to know
him around 1 9
62, when he w fnishing Raymond Roussel and The
Birth ofthe Clnic. Then ater '68 I joined him and Daniel Defert in the
Prison Information Group they'd set up. I sw Foucault often, I've
many memories that come involuntarily, so to speak, and quite throw
me, because the gaiet they bring back is mixed with the pain of his
being dead. I' m aaid I didn't see him in the last years of his life: after
the frst volume of The Histor ofSexualt he went through a general
crisis, in his politics, his life, his thought. A with all great thinkers, his
thought alwys developed through crises and abrupt shifts that were
the mark of its creativity, the mark of its ultimate consistency. I got the
impression that he wanted to be left alone, to go where none but his
closest friends could follow him. I needed him much more than he
needed me.
In the course of his lie, MichelFoucault wrote several articls about you. You
yoursel wote about him many times. But it 's hard not to see something sm
bolic in the fact that now, afer Foucault 's death, you're publishing a Fou
cault. It prmpts all sorts ofconjectures: shoul one see it a the outcome of
U MÜÕ OJ mourmg". Is it a way ofrlying 10both ofyou" to the cti
cm of antihumanism tht have recently been coming fom both lf and
rght 7 A way ofclsing the circl and marking the end ofa cetain
sohical ea "7 O rathe a call to carry on alng the same lnes 7 O none of
these thing 7
The book is, above all, something I had to do. It's very different fom
the articles dealing with particular themes. Here I'm trying to see
Foucault's thought as a whole. By the whole, I mean what drives him
on from one level of things to another: what drives him to discover
power behind knowledge, and what drives him to discover "modes of
subjectcation" beyond the confnes of power. The logic of some
one's thought is the whole set of crises through which it passes; it's
more like a volcanic chain than a stable system close to equilibrium.
I wouldn't have felt the need to write this book i I hadn't had the
impression that people didn't really understand these transitions,
this pushing forward, this logic in Foucault. Even the notion of an
utterace,2 for example-I don't think it's been understood con
cretely enough. But my reading may b no better than various oth
ers. A for the current objectons, they're not readings at all and are
quite irrelevant: they come down to criticizing vague ideas of things
Foucault's said, without taking any account whatever of the problems
to which they relate. "he death of man," for example. It's a familiar
sight: whenever a great thinker dies, idiot feel a sense of relief and
kick up an unholy row. Does this book amount to a call to carry on
the work, then, in spite of all the people who now want to turn back?
Maybe, but there's already a Foucault Center bringing together peo
ple working along lines or using methods similar to Foucault's. A
recent book like Ewald's L'tat-Pc
is at once profoundly orig
inal (in fact it's a new philosophy of law4) yet couldn't have existed
without Foucault. It's not a work of mourning; non-mourning takes
even more work. To characterize my book yet another way, I'd bring
in one of Foucault's constat themes, that of the double. Foucault's
haunted by the double and its essental otherness. I wnted to fnd
Foucault's double, in te sense he gave the word: "a repetition,
another layer,5 the return of the same, a catching on something else,
an imperceptible difference, a coming apart and ineluctable tearing
I the s and set yo and Michel Focul 'e t invlun
trly, and whil bth doing your bt to avoid it-"intllctual gr, "6 e
caU foseeal geations ofstudt. D that sometim ceat a rvalr
beyo' Wathe Foucult-Dele rltionship-on the peronal, profe
s� or intlcual lel-lke the reltion bwee yo and Gattar, o
Sme and Aron, or lke Sarlr's reltion to Merlau-Pont?
It's tis book, not me I' m afraid, that's trying to be Foucault's dou
ble. My relations with Guattari were necessarily quite different,
because we've worked together over a long period, whereas I never
worked with Foucault. But I do think there are a lot of parallels
beteen our work and his, although they're kept apart, as it were, by
their widely difering methods, and purposes even. This makes the
parallel all the more important to me, invaluable; there was some
thing more than a common purpose, there was a common cause. I'll
say this: the fact Foucault existed, with such a strong and mysterious
personality, the fact he wrote such wonderful books, with such style,
never caused me anything but delight. In a remarkable text, which is
just the record of a conversation, Foucault contrasts passion and
love. By his defnition, my relation to him was some sort of passion
("it has strong phases and weak phases, phases when it becomes
incadescent and everything wavers for an unstable moment we
cling to for obscure reasons, perhaps through inerta. ") . How could
I feel rivalry or jealousy, since I admired him? Wen you admire
someone you don' t pick and choose; you may like this or tat book
better than some other one, but you nevertheless take them as a
whole, because you see that some element that seems less convincing
than others is an absolutely essential step in his exploration, his
alchemy, and that he wouldn't have reached the new revelation you
fnd so astonishing if he hadn't followed the path on which you had
n' t initally seen the need for this or that detour. I dislike people who
say of someone's work that "up to that point it's OK, but from there
on it's not much good, though it get better agan later on. " You have
to take the work as a whole, to try and follow rther than judge it, see
where it branches out in different directions, where it get bogged
down, moves forward, makes a breakthrough; you have to accept it,
welcome it, as a whole. Otherwise you just won't understnd it at all.
Does following Foucault through the problems he confonts, the
shifts and detours he has to make, before presuming to pronounce
on his solutions, amount to taking him as an "intellectual guru?" You
talk as though that notion's self-explanatory, generally accepted. I
fnd it suspect and puerile. When people follow Foucault, when
they're fascinated by him, it's because they're doing something with
him, in their own work, in their own independent lives. It's not just
a question of intellectual understanding or agreement, but of inten
sity, resonance, musical harmony.
Good lectures, after all, are more
like a concert than a sermon, like a soloist "accompanied" by every
one else. And Foucault gave wonderful lectures.
In his Chronique des idees perdues,8 Franfois Chatelt, descibing his
very longfendship with you, with Guattar, Sc and Lyotard, wrts that
you were all "on the same side" and al had-erhaps the sig oftre com
plict-the "same enemie. " Woul you say the same ofMichelFoucault ? Wee
you on the sam side?
I think so. Chatelet had a strong sense of all that. Being on the same
side also means laughing at the same things, or sharing a silence, not
needing to "explain. " It w so nice not having to explain things. Per
haps we al had the same conception of philosophy too. We had no
taste for abstractions, Unity, Totalit, Reason, Subject. We set our
selves the task of analyzing mixed forms, arrangements, what Fou
cault called apparatuses.9 We set out to follow and disentangle lines
rather than work back to points: a cartography, involving microanaly
sis (what Foucault called the microphysics of power, and Guattari the
micropolitics of desire) . We looked for foci of unification, nodes of
totalization, and processes of subjectifcation in arrangements, and
they were always relative, they could always be dismantled in order to
follow some restless line still frther. We weren't looking for origins,
even lost or deletedl
ones, but setting out to catch things where they
were at work, in the middle: l l breaking things open, breaking words
open. We weren't looking for something timeless, not even the time
lessness of time, but for new things being formed, the emergence of
what Foucault calls "actualit. " Perhaps actuality or novelty is enegia,
almost Aristotelian, but closer still to Nietzsche (even though Niet
zsche called it the untimely)
. 1 2
Breaking Things Open • 87
Isn't it alo a way ofworking with "suraces"? You used to like Valy's maxim
that "there: nothing deeer than skin" . . .
Yes, it's a wonderful saying. Dermatologists should inscribe it on their
doors. Philosophy as a general dermatology or art of surfaces (I tried
to describe such surfaces in The Logic of Sense) . The new forms of
image give the problem a new impetus. It's in Foucault himself that
surfaces become essentially surfaces on which things are inscribed:
this is the whole problem of utterances, which are "neither visible nor
hidden. " Archaeology amounts to constituting a surface on which
things can be inscribed. If you don't constitute a surface on which
things can be inscribed, what's not hidden will remain invisible. Sur
face isn't opposed to depth (from which one resurfaces) but t inter
pretation. Foucault's method was always opposed to any interpreta
tive method. Never interpret; experience, experiment13 . • . The
theme of folds and enfolding, so important in Foucault, tes us back
to the skin.
You once told Michel Foucault: "You were the frst to teach us something quite
basic: the indigit ofspeaking for others. "It was in I972, when May 68 was
still in the air (May 68, ofwhich, b the way, you say in your book that "to
read some analyses, you'd think it all hapened only in the he ofParisian
intellctuals 'j. I think you feel this digit ofnot speakingfor other should b
part ofwhat it means to b an intellctual. Woul you still today charcterize
intellectuals-who the pape say have g silnt-in those same ters ?
Yes, it's natural that modern philosophy, which has gone so far in crit
icizing representation, should challenge any attempt at speaking in
place of others. Whenever we hear the words "nobody can deny . . . , "
"everyone would agree that . . . , " we know a lie or slogan's about to
follow. Even after '68 it was normal, in a TV program about prisons,
for example, to get the views of everyone, judges, prison warders, vis
iting wives, men in the street, everyone except prisoners or former
prisoners. It's become more diffcult to do tat now, and that's one
positive result of '68: letting people speak for themselves. This applies
to intellectuals too: Foucault said intellectuals had stopped being uni
versal and become specifc; that is, they were no longer spokesmen
for universal values but for their own particular expertise and situa
tion (Foucault fixed the change at the point where physicists spoke
out against the atom bomb) . When doctors no longer have the right
to speak on behalf of patients, and when they also have a duty to speak
as doctors about political, legal, industrial, and ecological problems,
then you need the sort of groups envisaged in '68, bringing together
for example doctors, patients, and nurses. They're multivocal groups.
The Prison Information Group, as organized by Foucault and Defert,
was one such group: it embodied what Guattari called "transversality"
as opposed to the hierarchical groups in which one person speaks on
behalf of everyone else. Defert set up this sort of group for AIDS,
organizing at once support, information, and struggle. Now, what
does it mean to speak for oneself rather than for others? It's not of
course a matter of everyone finding their moment of truth in mem
oirs or psychoanalysis; it's not just a matter of speaking in the frst per
son. But of identifing the impersonal physical and mental forces you
confront and fght a soon as you try to do something, not knowing
what you're trying to do until you begin to fght. Being itself is in this
sense political. I'm not, in this book, trying to speak for Foucault, but
trying to trace a transversal, diagonal line running fom him to me
(there's no other option) , and saying something about what he was
trying to do and what he was fghting, as I saw it.
"A bl oflightning ha stck, that wl bear Delze's name. 14 A ne kind
ofthinking i possibl, thinking is possibl anew. Hee it i, in Deluze's txt,
laPing, dancing before W¡ among us . . . One day, pehaps, the century wl
b seen as Delzian. " Michel Foucault wt those lines. I don't think you've
ee cmmet Ü t.
I don't know what Foucault meant, I never asked him. He was a terri
ble joker. He may perhaps have meant that I was the most naive
philosopher of our generation. In all of us you find themes like mul
tiplicity, difference, repetition. But I put forward almost raw concepts
of these, while others work with more mediations. I've never worried
about going beyond metaphysics or the death of philosophy, and I
never made a big thing about giving up Totality, Unity, the Subject.
I've never renounced a kind of empiricism, which sets out to present
Breaking Things Open • 89
concepts directly. I haven't approached things through structure, or
linguistics or psychoanalysis, through science or even through histo
ry, because I think philosophy has its own raw material that allows it
to enter into more fundamental external relations with these other
disciplines. Maybe that's what Foucault meant: I wasn't better than
the others, but more naive, producing a kind of art lrut,1
so to speak;
not the most profound but the most innocent (the one who felt the
least guilt about "doing philosophy") .
It isn't possibl here-articl have already ben wrtten abut this, and more
wor is doubtlss on the way-to tr to tallate all the points ofconvegnc
btween Foucault 's Philosohy and your Û (thee are many, running fom
your common Anti-Hegelianism to your micohysic or micrologc) and all the
points at which the diverg. So l W take a feshortcuts. You once said, in
these very columns, that the particulr job ofthe philsoher was to fashion
concets. Wich ofthe concets producd lFoucault has ben most usel in
your own elaboration ofphilsohy, and which Foucalian concet do you
fnd most foreig to your work? Wich, converely, are the main conct that
Foucault may, as you see it, have taken fom your philsohy ?
Diference and Reetition may have infuenced him, but he'd already
produced a very fne analysis of those themes in Raymond RousseL Per
haps also the concept of arrangement, put forward by Felix and
myself, may have helped him with his own analysis of "apparatuses. "
But he thoroughly transformed everything he used. The concept of
an utterance, as he framed it, really struck me, because it implied a
pragmatics oflanguage that opened up a new direction for linguistics.
It's interesting, incidentally, how Barthes and Foucault come to place
more and more emphasis on a generalized pragmatics, one taking a
rather Epicurean approach, the other a rather Stoic one. And then
there's his conception of the play of forces, as going beyond mere vio
lence: it comes from Nietzsche, but extends Nietzsche's concepton,
goes even frther than he did. In all Foucault's work there's a certain
relaton beteen forms and forces that's infuenced my work and w
basic to his conception of politics, and of epistemology and aesthetics
too. It sometimes happens that a "little" concept has a great reso
nance: the noton of the "infamous man" is as fne as the "last man"
go • MI CHEL FOUCAULT
in Nietsche and shows how much fn philosophical analysis can be.
The article on The Lie ofInfamous Men is a masterpiece. I often turn
to that text, because although it's one of Foucault's minor pieces, it's
inexhaustible, potent, and really works, giving you a feel for the way
his thought works on you.
Thee's been much tal, especially in Italy, ofthe ''ietzsche Renaissance "for
which Foucault and you yourel are taken, among others, to be . . . responsi
bl. Along with the directly linked problms ofdif eence and nihilism ("active"
nihilism and its "affrmative" transvaluation). One might wonder inciden
tally, about the dif eenc and similrties between ''our'' Nietzsche andFou
cault's. But I'll restrct mysel to the following question: Wy did Foucault 's
(ver Netzschean) tal ofthe "death ofman" gneat so much misunder
standing, with peol complining that he had no regard for man and human
rght, and hardly eer cediting him with the "Philsohical otimism" or
faith in the force oflie that' ofen said to charcterze your own philosohy?
Misunderstandings are often reactions of malicious stupidity. There
are some who can only feel intelligent by discovering "contradictions"
in a great thinker. People acted as though Foucault was talking about
the death of existing men (and they said "that's going a bit far") or as
though, on the other hand, he was just noting a change in the con
cept of man ("that's all he's saying") . But he wasn' t saying either of
these things. He wa talking about a play of forces, and a dominant
form emerging fom it. Take the human forces of imagining, con
ceiving, wanting . . . and so on: with what other forces do they come
into play at some particular period, and what composite form
emerges? It may happen that human forces enter as components into
a form that isn't human but animal, or divine. In the classic period,16
for example, human forces come into play with infnitary forces,
"orders of infnity," with the result that man is formed in the image of
God and his finitude is merely a limitation of infinity. The form of
Man emerges in the nineteenth century, when human forces com
bine with other fnitary forces discovered in life, work, language.
Then these days it's often said that man is confronting new forces: sil
icon and no longer just carbon, the cosmos rather than the world . . .
What reason is there to think that the resulting composite form is still
Breaking Things Open • 91
Man? And as for human rights, Ewald shows that it's precisely legal
transformations tat mark this change of form. Foucault returns to
Nietsche by reviving the question of the death of man. And, if man
has been a way of imprisoning life, mustn' t the liberation of life in
man himself take a different form? In this connection, you wonder
whether I'm not reading into Foucault a vitalism that's hardly to be
found in his work. On at least to essential points I think there is
indeed a vitalism in Foucault, irrespective of any "optimism. " In the
first place, the play of forces operates along a line of life and death
that is always folding and unfolding, tracing out the very limit of
thought. And if Foucault sees Bichat as a great writer, it may be
because Bichat wrote the frst great modern book on death, ramifing
partial deaths and taking death as a force coextensive with life: "a
vitalism rooted in mortalism, " as Foucault put it Second, when Fou
cault fnally introduces the theme of "subjectification," it amounts
essentially to inventing new possibilities onife, as Nietzsche would say,
to establishing what one may truly call styles of life: here it's a vitalism
rooted in aesthetics.
It will come as no surse that you give such an important plac in your book
to Foucault's analyses ofpower You particularly emphasize the notion ofdia
gram that apears in Discipline and Punish, a diagam that's no lng the
archive of The Archaeology of Knowledge, bt the map, the maping, the
setting out ofthe interly offorcs that constitutes power Yet Foucault, in his
"Afword" to Drefus and Rabinow's book Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics-a remarabl work that you fequently
cte- wrote that the oveall theme ofhis researches hadn't been powe but the
subect, the ways that human being had been subectied. Was Foucault the
cartogapher making cartes . . . d'identite, 1
which you say "lck any idn
tit, rther than identiing anything"? Doesn't understanding Foucault come
down, in other words, to understanding the ''assage "fom Discipline and
Punish to The Care of the Self and the question "Wo am I?"
It's diffcult, all the same, to call Foucault's philosophy a philosophy
of the subject. The most one can say is that that's what it "came to be"
when Foucault came upon subjectivity as a third dimension. The
thing is, his thought consists of tracing out and exploring one dimen-
sion after another in a way that has its own creative necessity, but no
one dimension is contained in any other. It's like a broken line whose
various orientations refect unforeseeable, unexpected events (Fou
cault w always "surprising" his readers) . Thus Power delineates a
second dimension that's irreducible to the dimension of Knowledge,
even though they together produce concretely indivisible composites;
but knowledge relates to forms, the Visible, the Utterable, in short to
the archive, while power relates to forces, the play of forces, diagrams.
You can say why he passes from knowledge to power, as long as you see
that he's not passing from one to the other as fom some overall
theme to some other theme, but moving fom his novel conception
of knowledge to an equally inventive new concepton of power. This
applies stll more to the "subject': it takes him years of silence to get,
in his last books, to this third dimension. You're right to say that what
we must understand is the "pasage. " If Foucault needs a third dimen
sion, it's because he feels he's getting locked into the play of forces,
that he's reached the end of the line or can't manage to "cross" it,
there's no line of fight open to him. He says as much, brilliantly, in
Th Lie of Inams Me. It's all very well invoking foci of resistance,
but where are such foci to be found? And it takes him a long time to
fnd a solution because he actually has to create one. Can we say, then,
that this new dimension's that of the subject? Foucault doesn't use the
word subec as though he's talking about a person or a form ofiden
tity, but talks about "subjectifcation" as a process, and "Self as a rela
tion (a relation to oneself. And what's he talking about? About a rela
tion of force to itself (whereas power w a relation of a force to other
forces) , about a "fold" of force. About establishing different ways of
existing, depending on how you fold the line of forces, or inventing
possibilities of life that depend on death too, on our relations to
death: existng not as a subject but as a work of art. He's talking about
inventing ways of existing, through optional rules, that can both resist
power and elude knowledge, even if knowledge tries to penetrate
them and power to appropriate them. But ways of existing or possi
bilities of life are constantly being recreated, new ones emerge, and
while it's true that this dimension was invented by the Greeks, we're
not going back to the Greeks when we ty to discern those taking
shape today, to discern in ourselves an artistic will irreducible to
knowledge and to power. There's no more any return to the subject
i Foucault than there's a retrn to the Greeks. To imagine that Fou
cault rediscovered, came back to the subjectivit he'd initally reject
ed, is as fndamental a misunderstanding as the one about "the death
of man." Indeed, I think subjectcation has little to do with any sub
ject. It's to do, rather, with an electric or magnetic feld, an individu
ation taking place through intensities (weak as well as strong ones) ,
it's to do with individuated felds, not persons or identities. It's what
Foucault, elsewhere, calls "passion." This idea of subjectication in
Foucault is no less original than those of power and knowledge: the
three together constitute a way of living, a strange three-imensional
fgure, as well as the greatest of modern philosophies (and I say this
without joking) .
Conversation wt Robert Maggiori
Libation 2-3 (Septembr 1986)
LIFE AS A WORK OF ARTl
You've already wte a lt about Foucault' work. Wy this book, two years
afr his death?
It marks an inner need of mine, my admiration for him, how I was
moved by his death, by that unfinished work. Yes, earlier I'd done arti
cles on particular points (utterances, power) . But here I'm trying to
fnd the logic of this thought, which I see as one of the greatest of
modern philosophies. A thought's logic isn't a stable rational system.
Foucault, unlike the linguists, thought that even language was a high
ly unstable system. A thought's logic is like a wind blowing us on, a
series of gusts and jolts. You think you've got to port, but then find
yourself thrown back out onto the open sea, as Leibniz put it. That's
particularly true in Foucault's case. His thought's constantly develop
ing new dimensions that are never contained in what came before. So
what is it that drives him to launch off in some direction, to trace out
some-always unexpected-path? Any great thinker goes through
crises; they set the rhythm of his thought.
You consider him above all a philsoher whil many peol plac the empha
sis on his historcal researches.
History's certainly part of his method. But Foucault never became a
historian. Foucault's a philosopher who invents a completely differ-
Life as a Work of Art • 95
ent relation to history than what you fnd in philosophers of histo
ry. History, according to Foucault, circumscribes us and sets limits,
it doesn't determine what we are, but what we're in the process of
differing from; it doesn' t fx our identity, but disperses it into our
essential otherness. That's why Foucault deals with recent short his
torical series (from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) . And
even when, in his last books, he deals with a long-term series, down
from the Greeks and Christians, it's in order to fnd in what way
we're not Greeks, not Christians, but becoming something else. His
tory, in short, is what separates us from ourselves and what we have
to go through and beyond in order to think what we are. A Paul
Veyne says, our actuality's something distinct from both time and
eternity. Foucault is the most "actual"2 of contemporary philoso
phers, the one who's most radically broken away from the nine
teenth century (which is why he's able to think the twentieth centu
ry) . Actuality is what interests Foucault, though it's what Nietzsche
called the inactual or the untimely; it's what is in actu, philosophy as
the act of thinking.
Is this what lads you to say that what' basic for Foucault i the question:
Wat is it to think? 3
Yes, thinking-as a perilous act, he says. It's defnitely Foucault, along
with Heidegger but in a quite different way, who's most profoundly
ansformed the image of thought. And tis image has various levels,
corresponding to the successive layers or areas of Foucault's philoso
phy. Thinking is in the frst place seeing and talking, but only once
te eye goes beyond things to "visibilities," and language goes beyond
words or sentences to utterances. That's thought as archive. And then
thinking' s a capacity,4 a capacity to set forces in play, once one under
stands that the play of forces doesn' t just come down to violence but
is to do with acting upon actions, with acts, like "inciting, inducing,
preventng, facilitating or obstructing, extending or restricting, mak
ing more or less likely . . . " That's thought as strategy. Finally, in the
last books, tere's the discovery of thought as a "process of subject
caton": it's stupid to see this as a return to the subject; it's to do with
establishing ways of existing or, as Nietzsche put it, inventing new pos
sibilities oflife. Existing not as a subject but as a work of art-and this
last phase presents thought as artistry. The key thing, obviously, is to
show how one's forced to pass from one of these determinations to
the next: the transitions aren' t there ready and waiting, they corre
spond to the paths Foucault traces out, and the areas he reaches that
weren't there before he reached them, and the jolts he himself pre
cipitates as well as experiences.
Let's take these areas in od Wat 's the "archive"? You say that foFoucault
the archive is "audiovisual"?
Archaeology, genealogy, is also a geology. Archaeology doesn't have
to dig into the past, there's an archaeology of the present-in a way
it's always working in the present. Archaeology is to do with archives,
and an archive has two aspects, it's audio-visual. A language lesson
and an object lesson. It's not a matter of words and things (the title
of Foucault's book5 is meant ironically) . We have to take things and
find visibilities in them. And what is visible at a given period corre
sponds to its system of lighting and the scintillations, mirrorings,
fashes produced by the contact oflight and things. We have to break
open words or sentences, too, and fnd what's uttered in them. And
what can be uttered at a given period corresponds to its system oflan
guage and the inherent variations it's constantly undergoing, jump
ing from one homogeneous scheme to another (language is always
unstable) . Foucault's key historical principle is that any historical for
mation says all it can say and sees all it can see. Take madness in the
seventeenth century, for instance: in what light can it be seen, and in
what utterances can it be talked of? And take us today: what are we
able to say today, what are we able to see? For most philosophers,
their philosophy's like a personality they haven't chosen, a third per
son. What struck people who met Foucault were his eyes, his voice,
and an erect bearing that went with them. Flashes, scintillations,
utterances wresting themselves from his words-even Foucault's
laugh was an utterance. And if there's a dislocation between seeing
and saying, i there's a gap between them, an irreducible distance, it
only means you can't solve the problem of knowledge (or rather, of
"knowledges"6) by invoking a correspondence or conformity of
terms. You have to look elsewhere for what links and weaves them
together. It's as though the archive's riven by a great fault dividing
Life as a Work of Art
visible form on one side from the form of what can be utl
other, each irreducible to the other. And the thread that kit t . ·
together and runs between them lies outside these forms, in anot
er dimension.
Aren't thee some similarties to Maurce Blnchot here, an infuence een?
Foucault always acknowledged a debt to Blanchot. This, perhaps, in
three respects. First of all, "talking isn't seeing . . . ," a difference that
means that by saying what one can't see, one's taking language to its
ultimate limit, raising it to the power of the unspeakable. Then
there's the primac of the third person, the "he" or neuter, the imper
sonal "one," relative to the frst two persons-there's the refsal of
any linguistic personology. Lastly, there's the theme of the Outside:
the relation, and indeed "nonrelation," to an Outside that's further
from us than any external world, and thereby closer tan any inner
world. And it doesn' t diminish the importance of these links to
emphasize how Foucault takes the themes and develops them inde
pendently of Blanchot: the dislocation between seeing and talking,
most fully developed in the book on Raymond Roussel and the piece
on Magritte, leads him to a new determination of the visible and the
utterable; the "one speaks" organizes his theory of utterance; the
interplay of near and far along the line Outside, as a life-and-eath
experiment, lead to specifically Foucaldian acts of thought, to fold
ing and unfolding (which take him a long way from Heidegger too) ,
and eventually becomes the basis of the process of subjectcation.
Afer the archive o the analysis ofknowldge, Foucault discoves power and
then subectivit. Wat's the relation between knowldge and power
btween power and subectivit?
Power' s precisely the nonformal element running between or
beneath different forms of knowledge. That's why one talks about a
microphysics of power. It's force, and the play of forces, not form.
And the way Foucault conceives the play of forces, developing Niet
zsche's approach, is one of the most important aspects of his thought.
It's a different dimension from that of knowledge, although power
and knowledge form concretely indivisible composites. But the fun
damental question is why Foucault needs yet another dimension, why
he goes on to discover subjectifcation as distinct from both knowl
edge and power. And people say: Foucault's going back to the subject,
rediscovering the notion of subject that he'd always rejected. It's not
that at all. His thought underwent a crisis in all sorts of ways, but it was
a creative crisis, not a recantation. What Foucault felt more and more,
after the first volume of The History ofSexualit, was that he was getting
locked in power relations. And it was all very well to invoke points of
resistance as "counterparts" of foci of power, but where was such resis
tance to come from? Foucault wonders how he can cross the line, go
beyond the play of forces in its turn. Or are we condemned to con
versing with Power, irrespective of whether we're wielding it or being
subjected to it? He confronts the question in one of his most violent
texts, one of the fnniest too, on "infamous men." And it takes him a
long time to come up with an answer. Crossing the line offorce, going
beyond power, involves as it were bending force, making it impinge
on itself rather than on other forces: a "fold," in Foucault's terms,
force playing on itself. It's a question of "doubling" the play of forces,
of a self-relations that allows us to resist, to elude power, to turn life or
death against power. This, according to Foucault, is something the
Greeks invented. It's no longer a matter of determinate forms, as with
knowledge, or of constraining rules, as with power: it's a matter of
otional rls that make existence a work of art, rules at once ethical
and aesthetic that constitute ways of existing or styles of life (includ
ing even suicide) . It's what Nietzsche discovered as the will to power
operating artistically, inventing new "possibilities oflife. " One should,
for all sorts of reasons, avoid all talk of a return to the subject, because
these processes of subjectifcation vary enormously fom one period
to another and operate through very disparate rules. What increases
their variabilit is that power's always taking over any new process and
subordinating it to the play of forces, although it can always then
recover by inventing new ways of existing, and this can go on indefi
nitely. So there's no return to the Greeks, either. A process of subjec
tification, that is, the production of a way of existing, can't be equat
ed with a subject, unless we divest the subject of any interiorit and
even any identity. Subjectifcation isn't even anything to do with a
Life as a Work of Art •
"person": it's a specific or collective individuation relating to an event
(a time of day, a river, a wind, a life . . . ). It's a mode9 of intensity, not
a personal subject It's a specific dimension without which we can't go
beyond knowledge or resist power. Foucault goes on to analyze Greek
and Christian ways of existing, how they enter into forms of knowl
edge, how they make compromises with power. But they are them
selves different in nature from knowledge and power. For example,
the Church as pastoral power was constantly trying to take control of
Christian ways of existing, but these were constantly bringing into
question the power of the Church, even before the Reformation. And
Foucault, true to his method, isn' t basically interested in returning to
the Greeks, but in us today: what are our ways of existing, our possi
bilities oflife or our processes of subjectification; are there ways for us
to constitute ourselves as a "self, " and (as Nietzsche would put it) suf
fciently "artistic" ways, beyond knowledge and power? And are we up
to it, because in a way it's a matter oflife and death?
Foucault had earlie deeloed the theme ofthe death of man, which caused
such a stir Is it compatibl with the idea ofceative human exitence?
The "death of man" is even worse than all the fss about the subject;
misinterpretations of Foucault's thought really thrived on it. But mis
interpretations are never innocent, they're mixtures of stupidity and
malevolence; people would rather fnd contradictions in a thinker
than understand him. So they wonder how Foucault could get
involved in political struggles when he didn't believe in man and
therefore in human rights . . . The death of man is in fact a very sim
ple and precise theme, which Foucault takes over from Nietzsche but
develops in a very original way. It's a question of form and forces.
Forces are always interacting with other forces. Given human forces
(like having an understanding, a will . . . ) , what other forces do they
come into play with, and what's the resulting "composite" form? In
The Order of Thing, Foucault shows that man, in the classic period,
isn't thought of as man, but "in the image" of God, precisely because
his forces enter into combination with infinitary forces. It's in the
nineteenth century, rather, that human forces confront purely fni
tary forces-life, production, language-in such a way that the result-
1 00
ing composite is a form of Man. And, just as this form wasn't there
previously, there's no reason it should survive once human forces
come into play with new forces: the new composite will be a new kind
of form, neither God nor man. Nineteenth-century man, for exam
ple, confronts life and combines with it as the force of carbon. But
what happens when human forces combine with those of silicon, and
what new forms begin to appear? Foucault has two models here, Niet
zsche and Rimbaud, and adds his own brilliant analysis to theirs: What
new relations do we have with life, with language? What new struggles
with Power? When he comes to consider modes of subjectifcation, it's
a way of pursuing the same problem.
In what you call "ways ofexisting" and Foucault calld "stls oflie" there is,
a you've pointed out, an aesthetics oflfe: lie a a work ofart. But there's an
ethic too!
Yes, establishing ways of existing or styles of life isn't just an aesthetic
matter, it's what Foucault called ethics, as opposed to morality. The
difference is that morality presents us with a set of constraining rules
of a special sort, ones that judge actions and intentions by consider
ing them in relation to transcendent values (this is good, that's bad
. . . ) ; ethics is a set of optional rules that assess what we do, what we
say, in relation to the ways of existing involved. We say this, do that:
what way of existing does it involve? There are things one can only do
or say through mean-spiritedness, a life based on hatred, or bitterness
toward life. Sometimes it takes just one gesture or word. It's the styles
of life involved in everything that make us this or that. You get this
already in Spinoza's idea of "modes." And is it not present in Fou
cault's philosophy from the outset: What are we "capable" of seeing,
and saying (in the sense of uttering) ? But if there's a whole ethics in
this, there's an aesthetics too. Style, in a great writer, is always a stle
of life too, not anything at all personal, but inventing a possibilit of
life, a way of existing. It's strange how people sometimes say that
philosophers have no style, or that they write badly. It can only be
because they don't read them. In France alone, Descartes, Male
branche, Maine de Biran, Bergson, even Auguste Comte in his Balza
cian aspect, are stylists. And Foucault also belongs to this tradition,
Life Üå Ü Work of Art • 1 01
he's a great stylist. Concepts take on with him a rhythmic quality, or,
as in the strange dialogues with himself with which he closes some of
his books, a contrapuntal one. His synta accumulates the mirrorings
and scintillations of the visible but also twists like a whip, folding up
and unfolding, or cracking to the rhythm of its utterances. And then,
in his last books, the stle tends toward a kind of calm, seeking an ever
more austere, an ever purer line . . .
Conversation wt Didier Eribn
L Nouvel Obsevateur, August 23, 1986
Wat are you doing in this book? Is it a homage to Michel Foucault ? Do you
reckon his thought isn't proerly understood? Are you analyzing the simi
larties and difeences between his work and yours and what you reckon you
owe to him? O are you, rther trying to present a mental portrit ofFou
cault ?
I felt a real need to write this book. When someone that you like and
admire dies, you sometimes need to draw their picture. Not to glori
f them, still less to defend them, not to remember, but rather to pro
duce a fnal likeness you can fnd only in death, that makes you real
ize "that's who they were. " A mask, or what he himself called a dou
ble, an overlay. l Different people will fnd different likenesses or
overlays. But in the end he's most like himself in becoming so dif
ferent from the rest of us. It's not a question of points I thought we
had in common, or on which we differed. What we shared was bound
to be rather indefinite, a sort of background that allowed me to talk
with him. I still think he's the greatest thinker of our time. You can
do the portrait of a thought just as you can do the portrait of a man.
I've tried to do a portrait of his philosophy. The lines or touches are
of course mine, but they succeed only if he himself comes to haunt
the picture.
A Portrait of Foucault • 1 03
You wote in Dialogues: "I can tal about Foucault, say he tol me this o
that, explin how I see him. That 's irrelant, unlss I've actually come to
terms with the set ofchiseld sounds, compelling gestures, ideas that are all tin
d and fire, extreme concentrtion and abrpt conclusions, laughs and smils
that seem dangerous the very moment one feels their tendss . . . " Is there
something "dangerous" in Foucault 's thought that also explains the passion it
continues to arouse?
Dangerous, yes, because there's a violence in Foucault. An intense
violence, mastered, controlled, and turned into courage. He was
trembling with violence on some demonstrations. He saw what wa
intolerable in things. This may be something he shared with Genet
He was a man of passion, and he himself gave the word "passion" a
very precise sense. One can' t but think of his death as a violent death
that came and interrupted his work. And his style, at least up to the
last books that attained a kind of serenity, is like a lash, it's a whip tist
ing and relaing. Paul Veyne paints a portrait of Foucault as a warrior.
Foucault always evokes the dust or murmur of battle, and he saw
thought itself as a sort of war machine. Because once one steps out
side what's been thought before, once one ventures outside what's
familiar and reassuring, once one has to invent new concepts for
unknown lands, then methods and moral systems break down and
thinking becomes, as Foucault puts it, a "perilous act," a violence
whose first victim is oneself. The objections people make, even the
questions they pose, always come fom safe ashore, and they're like
lumps of mud fung at you to knock you down and stop you getting
anywhere rather than any help: objections always come from lazy,
mediocre people, as Foucault knew better than anyone. Melville said:
"For the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool,-then had I
rather be a fool than a wise man.-I love all men who dive. Any fsh
can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs
fve miles or more . . . Thought-ivers . . . have been diving and com
ing up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began. "2 People will
readily agree that intense physical pursuits are dangerous, but
thought too is an intense and wayward pursuit. Once you start think
ing, you're bound to enter a line of thought where life and death, rea
son and madness, are at stake, and the line draws you on. You can
think only on this witches' line, assuming you're not bound to lose,
not bound to end up mad or dead. That's something that always fas
cinated Foucault, the switching, the constant juggling of what's close
and distant in death or madness.
Wa eeything already implicit in Madness and Civilization, or are there
rther successive advances, cses, changes ofdirection?
The question of madness runs right through Foucault's work.
Though of course he criticized Madness and Civilization for still giving
too much weight to an "experience of madness. " He shifted from a
phenomenology to an epistemology where madness is trapped in a
"knowledge" varying from one historical formation to another. Fou
cault always used history like this, he saw it as a way of avoiding mad
ness. But the experience of thinking cannot itself be detached from
some broken line running through the different fgures of knowl
edge. To think about madness is to experience not madness but
thought: it becomes madness only when it breaks down. This said,
does Madnes and Civilization already contain in principle everything
else, for example the conceptions Foucault came to form of dis
course, knowledge, and power? Certainly not. There's something
great writers often go through: they're congratulated on a book, the
book's admired, but they aren't themselves happy with it, because
they know how far they still are from what they're trying to do, what
they're seeking, of which they still have only an obscure idea. That's
why they've so little time to waste on polemics, objections, discussions.
I think Foucault's thought is a thought that didn't evolve but went fom
o cis to anothe. I don't believe thinkers can avoid crises, they're too
seismic. There's a wonderfl remark in Leibniz: "Having established
these things, I thought I was coming into port, but when I started to
meditate upon the union of the soul with the body, I was as it were
thrown back onto the open sea. " Indeed, this ability to break the line
of thought, to change direction, to fnd themselves on the open sea,
and so discover, invent, is what give thinkers a deeper coherence.
Madness and Civilization was of course itself the result of a crisis. Out
of it came a whole conception of knowledge, flly elaborated in the
Archaeolg of I g6g-that is, in his theory of utterance-but leading
A Portrait
f Foucault •
into a new crisis, that of '68. For Foucault it w a great
period of ener
g and exhilaration, of creative gaiety: DiScplne and Pnish bears its
mark, and that's where he moves from knowledge to power. He moves
into this new area to which he' d earlier drawn attenton, which he'd
marked out but not explored. And of course it's a radicalizaton: '68
stripped bare all power relatons wherever they were operatng, that
is, everywhere. Previously, Foucault had primarily analyzed forms,
and now he moved on to the play of forces underpinning tose forms.
He leaps into something formless, into the element of what he him
self calls "microphysics.» And this takes him right through to the frst
volume of Th History ofSexualit. But after that book there's yet anoth
er, very different, crisismore internal, perhaps more depressive,
more secret, the feeling of facing an impasse? There were lots of inter
connected reasons, and maybe we'll come back to this point, but I got
the impression that Foucault wanted to be left alone, to be on his own
with a few close friends, to take a distance without even moving away,
to reach a point where relations broke down. That was my impression,
anyway; maybe it was quite wrong.
He seemed to still be working on the history of sexualit; but he
was taking a completely different line, he was discovering long-term
historical formations (down from the Greeks) , whereas up to that
point he'd restricted himself to short-term formations (in the eigh
teenth and nineteenth centuries) ; he was reorienting all his research
in terms of what he called modes of subjectifcation. It was nothing
to do with returning to the subject, he was creating something new,
breaking out along a new line, a new exploration no longer con
cerned with knowledge and power in the same way. Another radical
ization, if you like. Even his stle changed, no longer scintillating,
with sudden flashes of brilliance, but taking on an ever more austere,
ever purer linearity, almost calm. It wasn' t all just theory, you see.
Thinking's never just a theoretical matter. It was to do with vital prob
lems. To do with life itself. It was Foucault's way of coming through
this new crisis: he was tracing the line that would take him through,
and into new relations with knowledge and power. Even if it killed
him. That seems a silly thing to say: it wasn't the discovery of subjec
tifcation that killed him. And yet . . . "some opening, or I'll suffocate
. . . » There' s one key thing that runs right through Foucault's work:
he was always dealing with historical formations (either short-term
l ob • MI CHEL FOUCAULT
or, toward the end, long-term ones) , but always in relation to us
today. He didn' t have to make this explicit in his books, it was quite
obvious, and he lef the business of making it still clearer to inter
views in newspapers. That's why Foucault's interviews are an integral
part of his work. Discipline and Pnish deals with the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries but can in no way be divorced fom today's pris
ons and the Information Group set up by Foucault and Defert after
' 68. Historical formations interest him only because they mark
where we come from, what circumscribes us, what we're in the
process of breaking out of to discover new relations in which to fnd
expression. Wat he's really interested in is our present-day relation
to madness, our relation to punishment, our relation to power, to
sexualit. Not the Greeks, but our relation to subjectifcation, our
ways of constitting ourselves as subjects. Thinking is always experi
encing, experimenting,S not interpreting but experimenting, and
what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality,4 what's
coming into being, what's new, what's taking shape. History isn' t
experimentaton, it's only the set of conditions, negative conditions
almost, that make it possible to experience, experiment with, some
thing beyond history. Without history the experiment would remain
indeterminate, divorced from any particular conditions, but the
experimentation itself is philosophical rather than historical. Fou
cault's more thoroughly philosophical than anyone else in the twen
tieth century, probably the only philosopher: he's completely escaped
from the nineteenth century, which is why he can talk about it so
well. That's what it meant for Foucault to put his life into his thought:
his relation to power, and then the relation to oneself, was a matter
of life or death, of madness or a new sanit. Subjectifcation wasn' t
for Foucault a theoretical return to the subject but a practical search
for another way of life, a new style. That's not something you do in
your head: but then where, these days, are the seeds of a new way of
existing, communally or individually, beginning to appear; and are
there any of these seeds in me? We must, of course, examine the
Greeks; but only because, according to Foucault, it w they who
invented this notion, this practice, of a way of life . . . There was a
Greek experience,5 Christian experiences, and so on, but it's not the
Greeks or Christians who are going to experience things for us these
A Portrait of Foucault • 1 07
it so vey tragc, Foucaul's thought ? Isn't it shot through with humor too?
In all great writers you fnd a humorous or comic level along with the
other levels, not just seriousness, but something shocking even.
There's a general outlandishness in Foucault: not only outlandish
punishments, which produce the great comic passages in Disciplne
and Punish, but the outlandishness of things, and of words. There was
a lot of laughter in Foucault, in his life as well as his books. He par
ticularly liked Roussel and Brisset, who at the close of the nineteenth
century invented strange "procedures" for manipulating words and
phrases. And Foucault's book of 1 96
on Roussel is already, so to
speak, the poetic and comic version of the theory of utterance set out
in the Archaeolg of 1 969. Roussel takes to phrases that have very
disparate senses but difer only minimally ( ls bande du viex pillrd
and ls bn du viex billrdI
) and proceeds to conjure up visual
scenes, extraordinary spectacles to connect the two phrases, twist one
into the other. Working along other lines, with a crazy etymology, Bris
set conjures up scenes corresponding to the way he takes a word
apart. Foucault fnds here already a whole conception of the relatons
between the visible and the utterable. And the reader's stuck by the
way Foucault seems to come upon themes reminiscent of Heidegger
or Merleau-Pont: "A visibility beyond the gaze . . . The eye lets things
be seen by grace of their being." It's as though, implicitly, he's taking
Roussel as a precursor of Heidegger. And it's tue that in Heidegger
too there's a whole etological procedure borderng on madness. I
really liked Foucault's pages on Rousel, because I got a more vague
sense of a certain similarit beteen Heidegger and another author
rather like Roussel in some ways, Jarry. Jarry defnes pataphysics ety
mologically as going beyond metaphysics, and explicitly bases it on
the visible or the being of phenomena. But what do you get by trans
posing things from Heidegger to Roussel (or Jarry) ? Foucault gets a
complete transformation of the relations between the visible and
utterable seen in the light of the "procedures" mentioned: rather
than any agreement or homology (any consonance) , you get an end
less struggle between what we see and what we say, brief clutchings,
tussles, captures, because we never say what we see and never see what
we say. The visible bursts out beteen two propositions, and an utter
ance bursts out between to things. Intentionality gives way to a whole
theater, an endless interplay between the visible and the utterable.
Each breaks open the other. Foucault's criticism of phenomenology
is there, unannounced, in Raymond RousseL
And then there's the emphasis on "one, " in Foucault as in Blan
chot: you have to begin by analyzing the third person. One speaks,
one sees, one dies. There are still subjects, of course-but they're
specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an
anonymous babble. The subject's always something derivative. It
comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what one
sees. Foucault draws from this a very intriguing conception of "infa
mous men," a conception imbued with a quiet gaiety. It's the opposite
of Bataille: the infamous man isn't defned by excessive evil but ety
mologically, as an ordinary man, anyone at all, suddenly drawn into
the spotlight by some minor circumstance, neighbors complaining, a
police summons, a trial . . . It's a man confonting Power, summoned
to appear and speak. He's more like something out of Chekhov than
Ka. In Chekhov there' s a story about a little maid who strangles a
baby because she hasn' t being able to get any sleep for nights and
nights, and one about a peasant who's taken to court for unbolting
railway lines to get weights for his fishing rod. The infamous man is
Dasen. The infamous man's a particle caught in a shaft oflight and a
wave of sound. Maybe "fame" works the same way: being taken over by
a power, an instance of power that makes us appear and speak. There
was a point where Foucault got tired of been famous: whatever he
said, people were just waiting to praise or criticize it, they didn't even
attempt to understand it. How could he ever again produce some
thing unexpected? You can't work without the unexpected. To be an
infamous man w a sort of dream for Foucault, his comic dream, his
way of laughing: am I infamous? His essay on The Lie ofInfamous Me
i a masterpiece.
Woul you say that articl also expresses a csis?
Absolutely, yes, the article has various levels. The fact is that Foucault,
after the frst volume of The Hitory ofSexualit in 1
76, didn't publish
any books for eight years: he suspended work on the rest of The Histo
r ofSualt, even though the contents had already been announced.
A Portrait of Foucault •
1 09
It was fascinating material, "the children's crusade" and Û on,"'ot
which he must have completed most of the research. What happened
at this point, and during those years? If there was really was a crisis, it
must have involved many very different interacting factors: disap
pointment, perhaps, about the way things were going elsewhere, with
the eventual failure of the prison movement; on another level, the col
lapse of more recent hopes, Iran, Poland; the way Foucault became
ever more dissatisfed with French social and cultural life; in his work,
the feeling of growing misunderstandings about the frst volume of
The History ofSexualit and of what he was trying to do in the History;
and fnally, the most personal element perhaps, a feeling that he had
himself reached an impasse, that he needed solitude and strength to
deal with something relating not only to his thought but also to his life.
If he'd reached an impasse, what did it come down to? Foucault had
up to that point analyzed formations of knowledge and apparatuses of
power; he'd reached the composites of power and knowledge in which
we live and speak. And that w still the viewpoint of the History'S first
volume: establishing the corpus of utterances relating to sexuality in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ascertaining around
which foci of powers these utterances take shape, either normaizing
or, conversely, challenging those powers. The first volume thus
remains within the method Foucault had earlier managed to establish.
But I think he must have come up against the question of whether
there was anything "beyond" power-whether he was getting trapped
in a sort of impasse within power relations. He was, you might say, mes
merized by and trapped in something he hated. And it wa no use
telling himself tat coming up against power relations was the lot of
modern (that is, infamous) man, that it's power that makes us speak
and see, it wasn't enough, he needed "some opening" . . . He couldn't
stay locked in what he'd discovered. The frst volume did of course
identi points of resistance to power; it's just that their character, their
origin, their production were still vague. Perhaps Foucault had the
feeling that he must at all costs cross that line, get to the other side, go
still frther than knowledge and power. Even if it meant reconsidering
the whole project of the History ofSexualit. And that's just what he's
telling himself in the very fne piece on infamous men: "Always the
same inabilit to cross the line, to get to the other side . . . always the
same choice, on the side of power, of what it says or has people say . . .
"t's nothing to do with him repudiating his earlier work. It's all his ear
lier work, rather, that pushes him into this new confontation. Only
readers who've "accompanied" Foucault in his research can under
stand this. That's why it's so stupid to hear that "he saw he'd made a
mistake, and had to reintroduce the subject. " He never reintroduced
the subject, and never had to do anything but what his work demand
ed: he left behind composites of knowledge and power and entered
into a fnal line of research, like Leibniz "thrown back onto the open
sea. " There w no other option but to pursue this new discovery, or
stop writing.
Wat is this "line, " o this reltion that's no lngr a powe relation? Isn't it
foreshadowed earlie on ?
It's difficult to talk about. It's a line that's not abstract, though it has
no particular shape. It's no more in thought than in things, but it's
everywhere thought confronts some thing like madness, and life
some thing like death. Miller used to say you fnd it in any molecule,
in nerve fbers, in the threads of a spider's web. It's the fearsome whal
ing line, which Melville says (in Mol-Dick) can carry us off or strangle
us as it flies out. For Michaux it's the line of drugs, "headlong accel
eration," the "whiplash of a frenzied coachman. " It may be a painter's
line, like Kandinsky's, or the one leading to Van Gogh's death. I think
we ride such lines whenever we think bewilderingly enough or live
forcefully enough. They're lines that go beyond knowledge (how
could they be "known"?) , and it's our relations to these lines that go
beyond power relations (as Nietzsche says, who could call it "a will to
contol"?) . Are you saying they're already there in all Foucault's work?
That's true, it's the line Outside. The Outside, in Foucault as in Blan
chot from whom he takes the word, is something more distant than
any external world. But it's also something closer than any inner
world. So you get an endless switching between closeness and dis
tance. Thinking doesn't come fom within, but nor is it something
that happens in the external world. It comes from this Outside, and
returns to it, it amounts to confronting it. The line outside is our dou
ble, with all the double's otherness. Foucault was always talking about
it, in Raymond Rnsse� in a homage to Blanchot, in The Od of Thing.
A Portrait of FOUClult •
The Birth of the Clinic ther�'s a whole p
assage on �f
me a model of Foucault s method or procedure: he's
Bichat's conception of death epistemologically, and it's the most tot
ough, the most brilliant analysis imaginable. But you get the feeling
that there's something more to the text, that there's a passion tere
that goes beyond summarizing some long-dead author. The thing is,
Bichat put forward what's probably the frst general modern concep
tion of death, presenting it as violent, plural, and coextensive with
life. Instead of taking it, like classical thinkers, as a point, he takes it
as a line that we're constantly confronting, and cross in either direc
tion only at the point where it ends. That's what it means to confront
the line Outside. Passionate men die like Captain Ahab, or like the
Parsee rather, chasing their Whale. They cross the line. There' s some
thing of that in Foucault's death. Beyond knowledge and power,
there's a third side, the third element of the "system" . . . A acceler
ation, one might almost say, that makes it impossible to distinguish
death and suicide.
This lne, iit's so "earsome, . how can we make it endurbl? Is this what the
fold is all about: the need to fol the line?
Yes, this line's deadly, too violent and fast, carrying us into breathless
regions. It destroys all thinking, like the drugs Michaux had to stop
using. It's nothing but delire and madness, like Captain Ahab's "mono
mania." We need both to cross the line, and make it endurable, work
able, thinkable. To find in it as far as possible, and as long as possible,
an art ofliving. How can we protect ourselves, survive, while still con
fronting this line? Here a frequent theme of Foucault's comes in: we
have to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in
which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe-in
short, think. Bending the line so we manage to live upon it, with it: a
matter oflife and death. The line itself is constantly unfolding at crazy
speeds as we're trying to fold it to produce "the slow beings that we
are, " to get (as Michaux says) to "the eye of the hurricane"; both
things are happening at once. This idea of folding (and unfolding)
always haunted Foucault: not only is his stle, his syntax, shaped by
folding and unfolding, so is the way language works in the book on
Roussel ( "folding words") , the way thought works in The Ode of
Thing, and above all the way what Foucault discovers in his last books
as an art ofliving (subjectifcation) works.
The fold and unfolding is something familiar to readers of Hei
degger. It's arguably the key to the whole of Heidegger's philosophy
( "to approach Thought is to be on the way to the Fold of Being and
beings") . In Heidegger we fnd the Open, the fold of Being and
beings as the condition for any visibility of phenomena, and human
as the being of distance. In Foucault we find the outside, the
folding of the line Outside, and human reality as the being of the Out
side. Maybe that's why Foucault in his last interviews compares his
approach with Heidegger's. And yet taken as a whole, these two ways
of thinking are so different, the problems addressed are so different,
that the similarity remains very external: in Foucault there's no such
thing as experience in the phenomenological sense, but there are
always knowledges and powers already in place, which both reach
their limit and vanish in the line Outside. Foucault seems to me clos
er to Michaux, sometimes even to Cocteau: he brings out the relation
between them in terms of a problem of living, breathing (just as he
transposed a Heideggerian theme into Roussel so as to transform it) .
The Cocteau who, in a posthumous book called precisely The Dif
clt ofBeing, explains that dreaming works at amazing speeds, unfold
ing "the folding whose intervention makes eternity endurable," but
that waking life has to fold the world so we can endure it, so that
everything doesn't confront us at once. Or more specifically, the
Michaux whose very titles and subtitles might have inspired Foucault:
The sace Within, The Distant Intero, Lie Among Fols, Locked In (subti
tled Poetic Capacities, Slic ofKnowldge . . . ) . It's in The Space Within
that Michaux writes: "Children are born with twenty-two folds. These
have to be unfolded. Then a man's life is complete. And he dies.
There are no more folds to undo. Men hardly ever die without still
having a few more folds to undo. But it has happened." You can't get
much closer to Foucault than that. You get just the same sense of fold
ing and unfolding. Only in Foucault there are four primary folds
instead of twenty-to: the folding of our body (if we're Greeks, or our
flesh, if we're Christians-so there are many possible variations for
each fold) , the folding of a force impinging on itself rather than other
forces, truth enfolded in relation to us, and fnally the ultimate fold-
A Portrait of Foucault • 1 1 3
ing of the line outside, to produce an "expectant interiority." But it's
always the same question, running from Roussel through to Michaux,
that produces this poetic philosophy: how far can we unfold the line
without falling into a breathless void, into death, and how can we fold
it, but without losing touch with it, to produce an inside copresent
with the outside, corresponding to the outside? It's a matter of "prac
tices." Rather than talking of a more or less hidden influence of Hei
degger on Foucault, I think one should talk of a convergence of
Holderlin-Heidegger on the one hand, and Roussel- or Michaux-Fou
cault on the other. But they're working along very different paths.
Is this what "subectication" is all about? Wy that word?
Yes, this folding of the line is precisely what Foucault eventually comes
to call the "process of subjectifcation," when he begins to examine it
directly. It's easier to understand when you see why, in his to last
books, he attributes it to the Greeks. The tribute's more Nietzschean
than Heideggerian and is, in particular, a very clear and original view
of the Greeks: in politics (and elsewhere) the Greeks invented a
power relation between free men, it's free men who govern fee men.
Given that, it's not enough for force to be exerted on other forces or
to suffer the effects of other forces, it has to b exerted upon itself
too: the man fit to govern others is the man who's completely mas
tered himself. By bending force back on itself, by setting force in a
relation to itself, the Greeks invent subjectcaton. We're no longer
in the domain of codifed rules of knowledge (relations between
forms), and constraining rules of power (the relation of force to
other forces), but in one of rules that are in some sense otional (self
relation): the best thing is to exert power over yourself. The Greeks
invent an aesthetic way of existing. That's what subjectifcation is
about: bringing a curve into the line, making it turn back on itself, or
making force impinge on itself. So we get ways of living with what
would otherwise be unendurable. What Foucault says is that we can
only avoid death and madness if we make existing into a "way," an
"art." It's idiotic to say Foucault discovers or reintroduces a hidden
subject after having rejected it. There's no subject, but a producton
of subjectivity: subjectivity has to be produced, when its tme arrives,
precisely because there i s no subject. The time comes once we've
worked through knowledge and power; it's that work that forces us to
frame the new question, it couldn't have been framed before. Sub
jectivity is in no sense a knowledge formation or power fnction that
Foucault hadn't previously recognized; subjectification is an artistic
activity distinct fom, and lying outside, knowledge and power. In this
respect Foucault's a Nietzschean, discovering an artistic will out on
the fnal line. Subjectifcation, that's to say the process of folding the
line outside, mustn't be seen as just a way of protecting oneself, tak
ing shelter. It's rather the only wy of confronting the line, riding it:
you may be heading for death, suicide, but as Foucault says in a
strange conversation with Schroeter, suicide then becomes an art it
takes a lifetime to learn.
Isn't that a reur to the Greeks, though? And "subectication, " isn't it an
equivocal word that does actualy rentroduc a subec?
No, there's defnitely no return to the Greeks. Foucault hated return
ing anywhere. He only ever talked about what he himself was livng
through; and mastering oneself, or rather the production of self,
speaks for itself in Foucault. What he says is that the Greeks "invent
ed" subjectifcation, and did so because their social system, the rival
ry beteen free men, made this possible (in games, oratory, love .. .
and so on). But processes of subjectifcation are extraordinarily var
ied: Christian ways are altogether different from the Greek way, and
not just after the Reformation, but from primitive Christianity
onward, the production of individual or collective subjectivity takes
all sorts of paths. We should remember the passages in Renan about
the Christians' new aesthetics of existence: an aesthetic way of exist
ing to which Nero, in his own way, contributes, ad which goes on to
find its highest expression in Francis of Assisi. A confontation with
death, with madness. The key thing, for Foucault, is that subjectica
tion isn't to do with morality, with any moral code: it's ethical and aes
thetic, as opposed to moralit, which partakes of knowledge and
power. So there's a Christian morality but also a Christian ethics/aes
thetics, and all sorts of conficts and compromises between the to.
We might say the same these days: what is our ethics, how do we pro-
A Portrait of Foucault • 1 1 5
duce an artistic existence, what are our processes of subjectfication,
irreducible to our moral codes? Where and how are new subjectvities
being produced? What can we look for in present-day communities?
Foucault may well go right back to the Greeks, but what interests him
in Th Use ofPlasure, as in his other books, is what's happening, what
we are and what we're doing, today: whether recent or distant, a his
torical formation is analyed only as it differs from us, and in order to
trace out that difference.
How can anyone see a contradiction between the theme of "the
death of man" and that of artistic subjectfications? Or beteen reject
ing morality and discovering ethics? The problem changes, and some
thing new is created. The simple fact that subjectivity is produced,
that it's a ''way, '' should be enough to convince one the word should
be treated very careflly. Foucault says "an art of oneself that's the
exact opposite of oneself . . . " If there's a subject, it's a subject with
out any identity. Subjectification as a process is personal or collective
individuation, individuation one by one or group by group. Now,
there are many types of individuation. There are subject-type individ
uations ( "that's you . . . , " "that's me . . . ") , but there are also event
tpe individuations where there's no subject: a wind, an atmosphere,
a time of day, a battle . . . One can't assume that a life, or a work of art,
is individuated as a subject; quite the reverse. Take Foucault himself:
you weren't aware of him as a person exactly. Even in trivial situations,
say when he came into a room, it w more like a changed atmos
phere, a sort of event, an electric or magnetic field or something.
That didn't in the least rule out warmth or make you feel uncomfort
able, but it wasn't like a person. It was a set of intensities. It sometimes
annoyed him to be like that, or to have that effect. But at the same
time all his work fed upon it. The visible is for him mirrorings, scin
tillations, flashes, lighting effects. Language is a huge "there is,"8 in
the third person-as opposed to any particular person, that's to say
an intensive language, which constitutes his style. In the conversation
with Schroeter, once again, he develops an opposition between "love"
and "passion, " and presents himself as a creature of passion rather
than love. It's an extraordinary text; since it's only an informal con
versation, Foucault doesn't try to provide any philosophical basis for
the distinction. He talks about it on an immediate, vital level. The dis
tinction is nothing to do with constancy or inconstancy. Nor is it one
between homosexuality and heterosexuality, though that's discussed
in the text. It's a distinction beteen to kinds of individuation: one,
love, through persons, and the other through intensity, as though pas
sion dissolved persons not into something undifferentiated but into a
feld of various persisting and mutually interdependent intensities ("a
constantly shifting state, but not tending toward any given point, with
strong phases and weak phaes, phases when it becomes incandescent
and everything wavers for an unstable moment we cling to for
obscure reasons, perhaps through inertia; it seeks, ultimately, to per
sist and to disappear . . . being oneself no longer makes any sense . . . ") .
Love's a state of, and a relation between, persons, subjects. But pas
sion is a subpersonal event that may last as long as a lifetime ( "I've
been living for eighteen years in a state of pasion about someone, for
someone") , a field of intensities that individuates independently of
any subject. Tristan and Isolde, that may be love. But someone, refer
ring to this Foucault text, said to me: Catherine and Heathcliff, in
Wutheng Height, is passion, pure passion, not love. A fearsome kin
ship of souls, in fact, something not altogether human (who is he? A
wolf . . . ) . It's very diffcult to express, to convey-a new distinction
between affective states. Here we come up against the unfinished
character of Foucault's work. He might perhaps have given this dis
tincton a philosophical range as wide as life. It should teach us, at
least, to be very careful about what he calls a "mode of subjectifca
tion." For such modes involve subjectless individuations. That may be
their main feature. And perhaps passion, the state of passion, is actu
ally what folding the line outside, making it endurable, knowing how
to breathe, is about. All those who are so saddened by Foucault's
death may perhaps rejoice in the way that such a monumental body
of work breaks offwith an appeal to passion.
In Foucault a in Nietche we fnd a ctique oftrth. In each ofthem there's
a worl of captures, clutching, strgl. But eething in Foucault seems
col more metallic, like the geat descptive clinical tablaux . . .
Foucault does draw on Nietzsche. To take one specifc instance: Niet
zsche prided himself on being the frst to produce a psychology of
priests and to analyze the nature of their power (priests treat the com-
A Portrait of Foucault • 1 1 7
munity as a "flock," which they control by infecting it with ressentiment
and guilty conscience) . Foucault rediscovers the theme of "pastoral"
power, but his analysis takes a different direction: he defnes this
power as "individuatve," that is, as an attempt to take over the mech
anisms individuating members of the fock. In Discipline and Pnih
he'd shown how in the eighteenth century political power became
individuative through "disciplines"; but he eventually discovered pas
toral power at the root of that tendency. You're right, the fndamen
tal link beteen Foucault and Nietzsche is a criticism of truth, framed
by asking what "will" to truth is implied by a "true" discourse, a will the
discourse can only conceal. Truth, in oter words, doesn't imply some
method for discovering it but procedures, proceedings, and process
es for willing it. We always get the truths we deserve, depending on
the procedures of knowledge (linguistic procedures in particular) ,
the proceedings of power, and the processes of subjectification or
individuation available to us. So to get at the will to truth directly, we
have to consider untrue discourses, which become confused with the
procedures that produce them, like those of Roussel or Brisset: their
untruth can also be seen as truth in the wild state.
Foucault and Nietzsche have three main things in common. The
frst is their conception of force. Power in Foucault, like power9 in
Nietzsche, isn't just violence, isn't just the relation of a force to a
being or an object, but corresponds to the relation of a force to the
other forces it affects, or even to forces that affect it (inciting, excit
ing, inducing, seducing, and so on, are afects) . Secondly, there's the
relation between forces and form: any form is a combination of
forces. This already comes out in Foucault's great descriptive
tableaux. But more particularly in all the stuff about the death of man
and the way it relates to Nietzsche's superman. The point is that
human forces aren't on their own enough to establish a dominant
form in which man can install himself. Human forces (having an
understanding, a will, an imagination, and so on) have to combine
with other forces: an overall form arises fom this combination, but
everything depends on the nature of the other forces with which the
human forces become linked. So the resulting form won't necessari
ly be a human form, it might be an animal form of which man is only
an avatar, a divine form he mirrors, the form of a single God of which
man is just a limitation (thus, in the seventeenth century, human
understanding appears as the limitation of an infinite understad
ing) . A Man-form, then, appears only in very special and precarious
conditions: that's what Foucault analyses in The Ode ofThing as the
nineteenth century's project, in terms of the new forces with which
man w then combining. Now, everyone says man's coming into rela
tion these days with still other forces (the cosmos in space, the parti
cles in matter, the silicon in machines . . . ) : a new form is coming out
of this, and it's already ceased to be human . . . Nothing excites so
many stupid reactions as this simple, precise, and grand theme in
Nietzsche and Foucault. The third common point, finally, has to do
with processes of subjectification: once again, this is nothing to do
with constituting a subject, it's about creating ways of existing, what
Nietzsche called inventing new possibilities of life, already seeing its
origin in the Greeks. Nietzsche saw this as the highest dimension of
the will to power, artistic wl. Foucault would eventually characterize
this dimension by the wy force impinges on or inflects itself, and
would himself take up the history of the Greeks and Christians, ori
enting it along these lines. The key thing, as Nietzsche said, is that
thinkers are always, so to speak, shooting arrows into the air, and
other thinkers pick them up and shoot them in another direction.
That's what happens with Foucault. Whatever he takes up he thor
oughly transforms. He's always creating. You say he's more metallic
than Nietzsche. Maybe he even changed what the arrow was made of.
You have to compare them in musical terms, in terms of their respec
tive instruments (procedures, proceedings, and processes) : Nietzsche
went through a Wagnerian phase but came out of it. Foucault went
through Webern, but he's perhaps closest to Varese, yes, metallic and
strident, calling for the instruments of our "actuality. "
Conversation wt Claire Parnet, 1 986
0ê |Í Í0ä| • PHILOSOPHY
If things aren't going too well in contemporary thought, it's because
there's a return under the name of "modernism" to abstractions, back
to the problem of origins, all that sort of thing . . . Any analysis in
terms of movements, vectors, is blocked. We're in a very weak phae,
a period of reaction. Yet philosophy thought it had done with the
problem of origins. It w no longer a queston of startng or fnish
ing. The queston w rather, what happens "i bteen"? And the
same applies to physical movement.
The kind of movement you fnd in sport and habits are changing.
We got by for a long time with an energetic concepton of motion,
where there's a point of contact, or we are the source of movement.
Running, putting the shot, and s on: efort, resistance, with a start
ing point, a lever. But nowadays we see movement defned less and
less in relation to a pint of leverage. All the new sprtssurfng,
windsurfng, hang-gliding-take the form of entering into an existing
wave. There's no longer an origin a starting point, but a sort of
putting-intorbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the moton
of a big wave, a column of rising air, to "get into something" instead
of being the origin of an effort.
And yet in philosophy we're coming back to eternal vlues, to the
idea of the intellectual as custodian of eternal vlues. We're back to
Benda complaining that Bergson w a traitor to his own class, the
1 22
clerical class, in trying to think motion. These days it's the rights of
man that provide our eternal values. It's the constitutional statel and
other notions everyone recognizes as very abstract. And it's in the
name of all this that thinking's fettered, that any analysis in terms of
movements is blocked. But i we're so oppressed, it's because our
movement's being restricted, not because our eternal values are
being violated. In barren times philosophy retreats to reflecting "on"
things. If it's not itself creating anything, what can it do but refect on
something? So it refects on eternal or historical things, but can itself
no longer make any move.
Philsohers Aren't Refctive, It Creative
What we should in fact do, is stop allowing philosophers to reflect
"on" things. The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.
I'm criticized for going back to Bergson's analyses. Actually, to dis
tinguish as Bergson did between perception, affection, and action as
three kinds of motion is a very novel approach. It remains novel
because I don't think it's ever been quite absorbed; it's one of the
most difcult, and fnest, bits of Bergson's thought. But this analysis
applies automatically to cinema: cinema w invented while Bergson's
thought wa taking shape. Motion w brought into concepts at pre
cisely the same time it w brought into images. Bergson presents one
of the frst cases of self-moving thought. Because it's not enough sim
ply to say concepts possess movement; you also have to construct intel
lectually mobile concepts. Just as it's not enough to make moving
shadows on the wall, you have to construct images that can move by
In my frst book on cinema I considered the cinematic image as this
image that bcomes self-moving. In the second book I consider the cin
ematc image as it takes on its own temporality. So I'm in no sense tak
ing cinema as something to refect upon, I'm rather taking a feld in
which what interest me actually takes place: What are the conditions
for self-movement or autotemporality in images, and how have these
to factors evolved since the end of the nineteenth centry? For once
there's a cinema baed on time rather than motion, the image obvi
ously has a different nature than it had in its inital period. And cinema
alone can provide the laboratory in which to explore, precisely because
in cinema, moton and tme become consttuents of the image itelf.
Mediators • 1 2 3
The frst phase of cinema, then, is the self-moving image. This hap
pened to take the form of a cinema of narraton. But it didn't have to.
There's a paper by Noel Burch that makes the basic point tat narra
tion w not part of cinema fom the outset. What led movement
images-that is, the self-moving image-to produce narration, w
the sensory-motor schema. Cinema is not by its very nature naratve:
it becomes narrative when it takes as its object the sensory-motor
schema. That's to say, someone on the screen perceives, feels, reat.
It takes some believing: the hero, in a given situation, reacts; the hero
always knows how to react. And it implies a particular conception of
cinema. Why did it become American, Hollywoodian? For the simple
reason that the schema w American propert. This all came to an
end with the Second World War. Suddenly people no longer really
believed it was possible to react to situations. The postar situation
was beyond them. So we get Italian neorealism presenting people
placed in situatons that cannot advance through reactions, through
actions. No possible reactions-does that mean everything becomes
lifeless? No, not at all. We get purely optical and aural situations,
which give rise to completely novel ways of understanding and resist
ing. We get neorealism, the New Wave, an American cinema breaking
with Hollywood.
There's still movement in images, of course, but with the appear
ance of purely optical and aural situations, yielding time-images,
that's no longer what matters, it's only an index of someting else.
Time-images are nothing to do with before and after, with succession.
Succession was there from the start as the law of narraton. Time
images are not things happening in time, but new forms of coexis
tence, ordering, transformation . . .
Th "Bak's Trnsfotion"
What I'm interested in are the relations beteen the arts, science, and
philosophy. There's no order of priority among these disciplines.
Each is creative. The true object of science is to create fnctions, the
tue object of art is to create sensory aggregates, and the object of phi
losophy is to create concepts. From this viewpoint, given these gener
al heads, however sketchy, of fnction, aggregate, and concept, we
can pose the queston of echoes and resonances beteen them. How
is it possible-in their completely different lines of development, with
quite different rhythms and movements of production-how is i t pos
sible for a concept, an aggregate, and a function to interact?
A initial example: in mathematics there's a kind of space called
Riemannian. Mathematically very well defined, in terms of functions,
this sort of space involves setting up little neighboring portions that
can be joined up in an infinite number of ways, and it made possible,
among other things, the theory of relativity. Now, if! take modern cin
ema, I see that after the war a new kind of space based on neighbor
hoods appears, the connections between one little portion and
another being made in an infnite number of possible ways and not
being predetermined. These two spaces are unconnected. If I say the
cinematic space is Riemannian, it seems facile, and yet in a way it's
quite true. I'm not saying that cinema's doing what Riemann did. But
if one takes a space defned simply as neighborhoods joined up in an
infinite number of possible ways, with visual and aural neighborhoods
joined in a tactile way, then it's Bresson's space. Bresson isn't Re
mann, of course, but what he does in cinema is the same as what hap
pened in mathematics, and echoes it.
Another example: in physics there's something that interest me a
lot, which has been analysed by Prigogine and Stengers, called the
"baker's transformation. " You take a square, pull it out into a rectan
gle, cut the rectangle in half, stick one bit back on top of the other,
and go on repeatedly altering the square by pulling it out into a rec
tagle again, as though you were kneading it. Mter a certain number
of transformations any two points, however close they may have been
in the original square, are bound to end up in two different halves.
This leads to a whole theory, to which Prigogine attaches great impor
tance in relation to his probabilistic physics.
On, now, to Resnais. In his flm Je t'aim, je t'aim we see a hero
taken back t one moment in his life, and the moment is then set in
a series of different context. Like layers that are constantly shifted
around, altered, rearranged so that what is close in one layer becomes
very distant in another. It's a very striking conception of time, very
intriguing cinematically, and it echoes the "baker's transformation."
So I don't feel it's outrageous to say that Resnais comes close to Pri
gogine, or that Godard, for different reasons, comes close to Thom.
I'm not saying that Resnais and Prigogine, or Godard and Thom, are
doing the same thing. I'm pointing out, rather, that there are remark-
Mediators • 1 25
able similarities beteen scientc creators of fnctions and cinemat
ic creators of images. And the same goes for philosophical concepts,
since there are distinct concepts of these spaces.
Thus philosophy, art, and science come into relations of muta
resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons. The way
they impinge on one another depends on their own evolution. So in
this sense we really have to see philosophy, art, and science as sorts of
separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another. With
philosophy having in this no reflective pseudoprimac nor, equally,
any creative inferiority. Creating concepts is no less dificult than cre
ating new visual or aural combinations, or creating scientific func
tions. What we have to recognize is that the interplay between the dif
ferent lines isn't a matter of one monitoring or reflecting another. A
discipline that set out to follow a creative movement coming from out
side would itself relinquish any creative role. You'll get nowhere by
latching onto some parallel movement, you have to make a move
yourself. If nobody makes a move, nobody gets anywhere. Nor is inter
play an exchange: it all turns on giving or taking.
Mediators are fndamental. Creation's all about mediators. With
out them nothing happens. They can be people-for a philosopher,
artists or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists-but things
too, even plants or animals, as in Castaneda. Wheter they're real or
imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators.
It's a series. If you're not in some series, even a completely imagnary
one, you're lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and tey'd
never express themselves without me: you're always working in a
group, even when you seem to be on your own. And still more when
it's apparent: Felix Guattari and I are one another's mediators.
The formation of mediators in a community is well seen in the
work of the Canadia flmmaker Pierre Perrault: having found medi
ators I can say what I have to say. Perrault tinks that if he speaks on
his own, even in a fictional framework, he's bound to come out with
an intellectua's discourse, he won't get away from a "master's or
colonist's discourse," an established discourse. What we have to do is
catch someone else "legending," "caught in te act of legending. "
Then a minority discourse, with one or many speakers, takes shape.
We here come upon what Bergson calls "fabulation" . . . To catch
someone in the act of legending is to catch the movement of consti-
tution of a people. A people isn' t something already there. A people,
in a way, is what's missing, as Paul Klee used to say. Was there ever a
Palestinian people? Israel says no. Of course there was, but that's not
the point. The thing is, that once the Palestinians have been thrown
out of their territory, then to the extent that they resist they enter the
process of constituting a people. It corresponds exactly to what
rault calls being caught in the act oflegending. It's how any people
constituted. So, to the established fctions that are always rooted in Û
colonist's discourse, we oppose a minorit discourse, with mediators.
This idea that truth isn't something already out there we have
discover, but has to be created in eery domain, is obvious in the sci
ences, for instance. Even in physics, there's no tuth that doesn't pre
suppose a system of symbols, be they only coordinates. There's no
truth that doesn' t "falsif" established ideas. To say that "truth is cre
ated" implies that the production of truth involves a series of opera
tions that amount to working on a material-strictly speaking, a series
of falsifications. When I work with Guattari each of us falsifes the
other, which is to say that each of us understands in his own way
notions put forward by the other. A refective series with two terms
takes shape. And there can be series with several terms, or complicat
ed branching series. These capacities of falsit to produce truth, that's
what mediators are about . . .
The L;Needs Mediators
A political digression. Many people expected a new kind of discourse
from a socialist government. A discourse very close to real move
ments, and so capable of reconciling those movements, by establish
ing arrangements compatible with them. Take New Caledonia, for
example.2 When Pisani said, ''Whatever happens, there'll be inde
pendence," that in itselfwas a new kind of discourse. It meant: instead
of pretending to be unaware of the real movements in order to nego
tiate about them, we're going to recognize the outcome right away,
and negotiations will take place in the light of this outcome set in
advance. We'll negotiate ways and means, the speed of change. So
there were complaints from the Right who thought, in line with the
old way of doing things, that there should above all b no talk of inde
pendence, even if we knew it was unavoidable, because it had to be
made to depend on very hard bargaining. I don't think that people
Mediators •
1 27
on th
e �ght
�eluded, tey're no mor
Pid ta a z;
but elr me 0 IS to oppose movement t s e same as the opposi
tion to Bergson in philosophy, it's all the same thing. Embracing
movement, or blocking it: politically, two completely different meth
ods of negotiaton. For the Left, this means a new way of talking. It's
not so much a matter of winning arguments as of being open about
things. Being open is settng out the "facts," not only of a situation but
of a problem. Making visible tings that would otherwise remain hid
den. On the Caledonian problem we're told that fom a certain point
onward the territory was regarded as a settler colony, so the Kanaks
became a minority in their own territory. When did tis start? How
did it develop? Who was responsible? The Right refses these ques
tions. If they're valid questions, then by establishing te facts we state
a problem that the Right wants to hide. Because once the problem
has been set out, we can no longer get away from it, and te Right
itself has to talk in a different way. So the job of te Left, wheter in
or out of power, is to uncover the sort of problem that the Right wants
at all costs to hide.
It seems, I'm araid, that one may speak in tis connection of a real
inabilit to get at the facts. The Left can certainly be excused a great
deal by the fact that, as a body, civil servants and those in charge have
in France always been on the Right. So that even in good faith, even
playing by the rules, they can't change the way they think or behave.
The socialists didn't have people who would provide, let alone
assemble informaton for them, who would set out problems their
way. They should have established parallel, supplementary channels.
They should have had intellectuals as mediators. But all that hap
pened along these lines were vague friendly contacts. We weren't
given basic information about things. To take three very different
examples: land ownership in New Caledonia may be recorded in spe
cialist journals, but it wasn't divulged to the general public. On the
question of education, we're led to believe that the private sector is
Catholic educaton; I've never been able t fnd out what proportion
of private education is secular. Another example: since the Right took
back a large number of town hals, fnding for all sorts of cultural
activities has been cut off-some prominent, but some very small and
local-and it's the numerous small ones that are particularly interest
ing; but there's no way of getting a detailed list. The Right doesn't
face this kind of problem because they've got direct mediators already
in place, working directly for them. But the Left needs indirect or free
mediators, a different style, if only the Left makes it possible. The Left
really needs what, thanks to the Communist Party, has been debased
under the ridiculous name of "fellow-travelers," because it really
needs people to think.
The Conspirac ofImitators
How can we define the crisis in contemporary literature? The system
of bestsellers is a system of rapid turnover. Many bookshops are
already becoming like the record shops that only stock things that
make it into the charts. This is what Apostrohes is all about.3 Fast
turnover necessarily means selling people what they expect: even
what's "daring," "scandalous," strange, and so on falls into the mar
ket's predictable forms. The conditions for literary creation, which
emerge only unpredictably, with a slow turnover and progressive
recognition, are fragile. Future Becketts or Kkas, who will of course
be unlike Beckett or K, may well not find a publisher, and if they
don't nobody (of course) will notice. A Lindon says,4 ''You don't
notice when people don't make it." The USSR lost its literature without
anyone noticing, for example. We may congratulate ourselves on the
quantitative increase in books, and larger print runs-but young writ
ers will end up molded in a literary space that leaves them no possi
bility of creating anything. We'll be faced with the monstrosity of a
standard novel, imitations of Balzac, Stendhal, CHine, Beckett, or
Duras, it hardly matters which. Or rather, Balzac himself is inimitable,
CHine's inimitable: they're new syntaxes, the "unexpected. " What
gets imitated is always itself a copy. Imitators imitate one another, and
that's how they proliferate and give the impression that they're
improving on their model, because they know how it's done, they
know the answers.
It's awl, what they do on Apostrohes.
Technically, the program's
very well done, the way it's put together, the shots. And yet it's the
zero-state of literary criticism, literature as light entertainment.
Pivot's never hidden the fact that what he really likes is football and
food. Literature becomes a game show. The real problem with TV
programs is their invasion by games. It's rather worrying that there's
an enthusiastic audience that thinks it's watching some cultural activ-
Mediators • 1 2
ity when it sees two men competing to make a word with nine letters.
There are strange things going on, summed up by the filmmaker
Rossellini. Listen carefully: 'The world today is too pointlessly cruel.
Cruelty is crushing someone else's personality, reducing someone to
the state where they'll make a total confession of anything. I there
was some point in getting the confession, I could accept it, but if it's
all done by a voyeur, someone sick, then we have to call it cruelty. I
strongly believe that cruelty is always an expression of infantilism. All
art these days is becoming daily more infantile. Everyone has the
crazy desire to become as childish a possible. Not naive, but childish
. . . Art these days is either plaintive or cruel. There's nothing else
around, either you complain or you commit some absolutely pointless
act of petty cruelt. Look, for example, at all this speculation (for
that's what we have to call it) on incommunicability, alienation-I see
in it no sentiment whatever, just gross indulgence. And that, as I said,
has made me give up cinema." And it's an even better reason for giv
ing up interviews. Cruelty and infantilism test the strength even of
those who indulge them, and they force themselves even on those
who try to evade them.
The Coupl Oefoweth
We sometimes go on as though people can't express themselves. In
fact they're always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are
those where the woman can't be preoccupied or tired without the
man saying "What's wrong? Say something . . . , " or the man, with
out the woman saying . . . , and so on. Radio and television have
spread this spirit everywhere, and we're riddled with pointless talk,
insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity's never blind or
mute. So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves
but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they
might eventually fnd something to say. Repressive forces don't stop
people expressing themselves but rather force them to express
themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say
nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare,
and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we're
plagued by these days isn't any blocking of communication, but
pointless statements. But what we call the meaning of a statement is
its point. That's the only defnition of meaning, and it comes to the
same thing as a statement's novelty. You can listen to people for
hours, but what's the point? . . . That's why arguments are such a
strain, why there's never any point arguing. You can't just tell some
one what they're saying is pointless. So you tell them it's wrong. But
what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn't that some
things are wrong, but that they're stupid or irrelevant. That they've
already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, neces
sity, the point of something, are a thousand times more signifcant
than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the mea
sure of the truth of what I' m saying. It's the same in mathematics:
Poincare used to say that many mathematical theories are com
pletely irrelevant, pointless. He didn' t say they were wrong-that
wouldn' t have been so bad.
Oedipus in th Colonies
Maybe journalists are partly responsible for this crisis in literature.
Journalists have of course always written books. But they used, when
writing books, to adopt a form different from newspaper journalism,
they became writers. The situation has changed, because journalists
have become convinced that the book form is theirs by right and that
it takes no special effort to use this form. In one fell swoop and en
masse,journalists have taken over literature. A the result is one vari
ant of the standard novel, a sort of Oedips in the Colonies,
a reporter's
travels, arranged around his pursuit of women, or the search for a
father. The situation affects all writers: any writer has to make himself
and his work journalistic. In the extreme case everything takes place
beteen a journalist author and a journalist critic, the book being only
a link between them and hardly needing to exist. Because books
become accounts of activities, experiences, purposes, and ends that
unfold elsewhere. They become nothing but a record. So everyone
seems, and seems to themselves, to have a book in them, simply by
virtue of having a particular job, or a family even, a sick parent, a rude
boss. A novel for everyone in the family, or the business . . . It's forgot
ten that for anyone, literature involves a special sort of exploration and
effort, a specifc creative purpose that can be pursued only within lit
erature itself, whose job is in no way to register the immediate results
of very different activities and purposes. Books become "secondary"
when marketing takes over.
Mediators • 1 31
ÞLiterature Dies, It Wil Be Murder
People who haven't properly read or understood McLuhan may think
it's only natural for audiovisual media to replace books, since they
actually contain all the creative possibilities of the literature or other
modes of expression they supersede. It's not true. For if audiovisual
media ever replace literature, it won't be as competing means of
expression, but as a monopoly of structures that also stifle the creative
possibilities in those media themselves. If literature dies, it will be a
violent death, a political assassination (as in the USSR, even if nobody
notices) . It's not a matter of comparing different sorts of medium.
The choice isn't between written literature and audiovisual media. It's
between creative forces (in audiovisual media as well as literature)
and domesticating forces. It's highly unlikely that audiovisual media
will find the conditions for creation once they've been lost in litera
ture. Different modes of expression may have different creative pos
sibilites, but they're all related insofar as they must counter the intro
duction of a cultural space of markets and conformit-that is, a
space of "producing for the market"-together.
The Proltarat in Tennis
Style is a literary notion: a syntax. And yet one speaks of style in the
sciences, where there's no syntax. One speaks of style in sport. Very
detailed studies have been done on style in sport, but I' m no expert
on this; I think perhaps they show that stle amounts to innovation.
Sports do of course have their quantitative scale of records that
depend on improvements in equipment, shoes, vaulting-poles . . . But
there are also qualitative transformations, ideas, which are to do with
stle: how we went from the scissors jump to the belly roll and the Fos
bury flop; how hurdles stopped being obstacles, coming to corre
spond simply to a longer stride. Why not start here, why do we have to
go through a whole history of quantitative advances? Each new style
amounts not so much to a new "move" as to a linked sequence ofpos
turesthe equivalent, that is, ofa syntax, based on an earlier style but
breaking with it. Technical advances play their part only by being
taken up and incorporated in a new style. That's why sport's "inven
tors" are so important; they're qualitative mediators. In tennis for
instance: when did the kind of return of serve where the returning
ball lands at your opponent's feet as he runs to the net frst appear? I
think i t was a great Australian player, Bromwich, before the war, but
I'm not sure. Borg obviously invented a new stle that opened up ten
nis to a sort of proletariat. There are inventors in tennis, just as else
where: McEnroe's an inventor, that is, a stylist-he's brought into ten
nis Egyptian postures (in his serve) and Dostoyevskian reflexes ( "if
you insist on banging your head on the wall all the time, life becomes
impossible") . And you then get imitators who can beat the inventors
at their own game: they're sport's bestsellers. Borg produced a race of
obscure proletarians, and McEnroe gets beaten by a quantitative
champion. You could say the copiers get their results by capitalizing
on moves made by others and that sporting bodies show remarkable
ingratitude toward the inventors who allow them to survive and pros
per. Never mind: the history of sport runs through these inventors,
each of whom amounts to something unforeseen, a new synta, a
transformation, and without them the purely technological advances
would have remained quantitative, irrelevnt, and pointless.
AIS and Global Strteg
One very important problem in medicine is the evolution of diseases.
Of course you get new external factors, new forms of microbe or
virus, new social conditions. But you have to look at symptomatology,
the grouping of symptoms, too: over a very short timescale symptoms
stop being grouped the same way, and diseases are isolated that were
previously split into various different aspects. Parkinson's disease,
Roger's disease, and others present major changes in the grouping of
symptoms (one might speak of a syntax of medicine) . The history of
medicine's made up of these groupings, these isolations, these
regroupings that, here again, become possible with technological
advances, but aren't determined by those advances. What's happened
since the war in this context? The discovery of "stress" illnesses, in
which the disorder's no longer produced by a hostile agent but by
nonspecifc defensive reactions that get out of hand, or exhausted.
Medical journals after the war were fll of discussions of stress in mod
ern societies, and new ways of grouping various illnesses in relation to
it. More recently there wa the discovery of autoimmune diseases, dis
eases of the self: defense mechanisms no longer recognizing the cells
of the organism they're supposed to protect, or external agents mak
ing these cells impossible to distinguish from others. AIDS comes
Mediators • 1 33
somewhere between these two poles of stress and autoimmunity. Per
haps we're heading toward diseases without doctors and patients, as
Dagognet says in his analysis of contemporary medicine: diseases with
images rather than symptoms, and carriers rather than sufferers.
That's a problem for the welfare system, but it's worrying in other
ways too. It's striking how this new style of disease resembles global
politics or strategy. They tell us the risk of war comes not only fom
specific external potential aggressors but from our defensive reac
tions going out of control or breaking down (which is why we need a
properly controlled atomic weapons system . . . ) . Contemporary dis
eases ft the same pattern-or nuclear policy corresponds to our dis
eases. Homosexuals are in danger of playing the part of some biolog
ical aggressor, just as minorities or refgees will fll the role of an
enemy. It's one more reason to insist on a socialist government that
rejects this twin image of disease and society.
We have to see creation as tracing a path between impossibilities
. . . K explained how it was impossible for aJewish writer to speak
in German, impossible for him to speak in Czech, and impossible not
to speak. Pierre Perrault comes up against the same problem: the
impossibility of not speaking, of speaking in English, of speaking in
French. Creation takes place in choked passages. Even in some par
ticular language, even in French for example, a new syntax is a for
eign language within the language. A creator who isn't grabbed
around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator's
someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates
possibilities. A with McEnroe, it's by banging your head on the wall
that you fnd a way through. You have to work on the wall, because
without a set of impossibilities, you won't have the line of fight, the
exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth. Your writing has
to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opin
ion are solid, geometric. It's what Bergson did in philosophy, what
Virginia Woolf or Henry James did with the novel, what Renoir did in
cinema (and what experimental cinema, which has gone a long way
exploring the states of matter, does) . Not becoming unearthly. But
becoming all the more earthly by inventing laws of liquids and gases
on which the earth depends. So style requires a lot of silence and work
to make a whirlpool at some point, then flies out like the matches chil
dren follow along the water in a gutter. Because you don't get a stle
just by putting words together, combining phrases, using ideas. You
have to open up words, break things open, to free earth's vectors. All
writers, all creators, are shadows. How can anyone write a biography
of Proust or Kka? Once you start writing, shadows are more sub
stantial than bodies. Truth is producing existence. It's not something
in your head but something existing. Writers generate real bodies. In
Pessoa they're imaginary people-but not so very imaginary, because
he gives them each a way of writing, operating. But the key thing is
that it's not Pessoa who's doing what they're doing. You don't get very
far in literature with the system "I've seen a lot and been lots of
places," where the author frst does things and then tells us about
them. Narcissism in authors is awl, because shadows can't be nar
cissistic. No more interviews, then. What's really terrible isn't having
to cross a desert once you're old and patient enough, but for young
writers to be born in a desert, because they're then in danger of see
ing their efforts come to nothing before they even get going. And yet,
and yet, it's impossible for the new race of writers, already preparing
their work and their styles, not to be born.
Conversation wt Antoine Dulaure ad Claire Parnet
L'utejoural 8 (October 1985)
You re publshing a ne book, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Can
you retrce the path that, setting out fom your study ofHume (Empiricism
and Subjectivity, 1953), brng you now to Leibniz? Taking your books
chronologcally, one might say that afer an initial phase deotd to wq on the
history ofphilosohy, culminating perhaps in the Nietzsche of 1962, you
worked out in Difference and Repetition (1969) and then in the two vol
umes ofCapitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-1980), wtt with Felix
Gtr, yor ow philsohy, whose stl i anyting but acic. You nOl
having written on painting (acon, 1981) and Cinema [1983-1985J,
see to b rturing to a more traditional apach t philsohy. Do you rec
ognize yoursel in such a pogesion? Shoul we tk your wok as a whol, as
nitary? O do you see in it, rathe breaks, transforations?
Three periods, not bad going. Yes, I did begin with books on the his
tory of philosophy, but all the authors I dealt with had for me some
thing in common. And it all tended toward the great Spinoza-Niet
zsche equation.
The history of philosophy isn't a particularly reflective discipline.
It's rather like portraiture in painting. Producing mental, conceptual
portraits. A in painting, you have to create a likeness, but in a differ
ent material: the likeness is something you have to produce, rather
than a way of reproducing anything (which comes down to just
repeating what a philosopher says) . Philosophers introduce new con
cepts, they explain them, but they don't tell us, not completely any
way, the problems to which those concepts are a response. Hume, for
example, sets out a novel concept of belief, but he doesn't tell us how
and why the problem of knowledge presents itself in such a way that
knowledge is seen as a particular kind of belief. The history of phi
losophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say
what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is
nonetheless present in what he did say.
Philosophy is always a matter of inventing concepts. I've never been
worried about going beyond metaphysics or any death of philosophy.
The fnction of philosophy, still thoroughly relevant, is to create con
cepts. Nobody else can take over that function. Philosophy has of
course always had its rivs, fom Plato's "rivals" through to Zarathus
tra's clown. These days, information technology, communications,
and advertsing are taking over the words "concept" and "creative, "
and these "conceptualists" consttute an arrogant breed that reveals
the actvity of selling to be capitalism's supreme thought, the cogto of
the marketplace. Philosophy feels small and lonely confonting such
forces, but the only way it's going to die is by choking with laughter.
Philosophy's no more communicative than it's contemplative or
reflective: it is by nature creative or even revolutionary, because it's
always creating new concepts. The only constraint is that these should
have a necessity, as well as an unfamiliarity, and they have both to the
extent they're a response to real problems. Concepts are what stops
thought being a mere opinion, a view, an exchange of views, gossip.
Any concept is bound to be a paradox. A philosophy is what Felix
Guattari and I tried to produce in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand
Pltaus, especially in A Thousand Plateaus, which is a long book
putting forward many concepts. We weren't collaborating, we just did
one book and then we did another, each "a" book not in the sense of
a unity, but of an indefinite article. We each had a past and earlier
work behind us: his was in psychiatry, politics, and philosophy, already
crammed with concepts, and mine was Difeenc and Retition and
The Logc ofSense. But we didn't collaborate like two different people.
We were more like to streams coming together to make "a" third
stream, which I suppose was us. One of the questions about "philoso
phy, " after all, has always been what to make of the philos. A philoso-
On Philosophy • 1 37
phy amounted for me, then, to a sort of second period that would
never have begun or got anywhere without Felix.
Then let's suppose there's a third period when I worked on paint
ing and cinema: images, on the face of it. But I was writing philosophy
books. You see, I think concepts involve two other dimensions, per
cept and affects. That's what interests me, not images. Percepts
aren' t perceptions, they're packets of sensations and relations that
live on independently of whoever experiences them. Mfects aren't
feelings, they're becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives
through them (thereby becoming someone else). The great English
and American novelists often write in percepts, and Kleist and K
in affects. Mfects, percepts, and concepts are three inseparable
forces, running from art into philosophy and from philosophy into
art. The trickiest case, obviously, is music; an analysis is sketched out
in A Thousand Plteaus: the ritornello1 involves all three forces. We
tried to make the ritornello one of our main concepts, relating it to
territory and Earth, the little and the great ritornello. Ultimately all
these periods lead into one another and get mixed up, as I now see
better with this book on Leibniz or the Fold. It would be better to talk
about what I want to do next.
We've gt plnt oftime. Can't we frst tal about your lie? Isn't thee some
reltion btween bibliogaphy and biogaphy?
Academics' lives are seldom interesting. They travel of course, but
they travel by hot air, by taking part in things like conferences and dis
cussions, by talking, endlessly talking. Intellectuals are wonderfully
cultivated, they have views on everything. I'm not an intellectual,
because I can't supply views like that, I've got no stock of views to draw
on. What I know, I know only from something I'm actually working
on, and if I come back to something a few years later, I have to learn
everything all over again. It's really good not having any view or idea
about this or that point. We don't suffer these days from any lack of
communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things
when we've nothing much to say. Traveling is going somewhere else
to say something and coming back to say something here. Unless one
doesn't come back, and settles down in the other place. So I' m not
very keen on traveling; you shouldn't move around too much, or
you'll stife becomings. I was struck by a sentence of Toynbee's: "The
nomads are the ones who don't move on, they become nomads
because they refse to disappear. "
If you want to apply bio-bibliographical criteria to me, I confess I
wrote my first book fairly early on, and then produced nothing more
for eight years. I know what I was doing, where and how I lived dur
ing those years, but I know it only abstractly, rather as if someone else
was relating memories that I believe but don't really have. It's like a
hole in my life, an eight-year hole. That's what I fnd interesting in
people's lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but some
times not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleep
walking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it's in these
holes that movement takes place. Because the real question is how to
make a move, how to get through the wall, so you don't keep on bang
ing your head against it. Maybe by not moving around too much, not
talking too much, avoiding false moves, staying in places devoid of
memory. There's a fne short story by Fitzgerald, in which someone's
walking around a town with a ten-year hole. There's the opposite too:
not holes, but an excess of memory, extraneous foating memories
you can no longer place or identif (that did happen, but when?) . You
don't know what do with that kind of memory, it gets in your way. Was
I seven, fourteen, forty? Those are the two interesting things in some
one's life, amnesias and hypermnesias.
This crticism of taling i one you direct against telision in particulr
You've expresed your feeling about this in the preace you wrote for Serge
Dane's book, Cine:ournal. But how do philosohers communicate, how
shoul the communicate? Philsohes since Plto have wrttn books,
expressed themselves in books. The still do, but these days one sees a dif erenc
emergng between two sort ofpeol we call, or who call themselves, philso
phes: there are the ones that tach, who go on teaching, have chairs in uni
vesities, and think that's important. An thee are the ones that don't teach,
perhaps een rese to teach, but try to mk their mark in the media: the "n
philsohers. " We have to put you, it seems, in the frst categry-ou've ee
produced a "tract" against the "ne philsohes. " Wat does giving course
mean to you? Wat 's so special about it?
On Philosophy • 1 39
Giving courses has been a major part of my life, in which I've been
passionately involved. It's not like giving individual lectures, because
courses have to be carried on over a long period with a relatively fxed
audience, sometimes for a number of years. It's like a research labo
ratory: you give courses on what you're investigating, not on what you
know. It takes a lot of preparatory work to get a few minutes of inspi
ration. I was ready to stop when I saw it was taking more and more
preparation to get a more taxing inspiration. And the future' s bleak
because it's becoming more and more difficult to do research in
French universities.
A course is a kind of Sprechgesang, closer to music than to theater.
Indeed there's nothing in principle to stop courses being a bit like a
rock concert. It must be said that Vincennes (and it was the same after
we'd been forcibly transferred to Saint-Denis) provided exceptional
conditions. In philosophy, we rejected the principle of "building up
knowledge" progressively: there were the same courses for first-year
and nth-year students, for students and nonstudents, philosophers
and nonphilosophers, young and old, and many different nationali
ties. There were always young painters and musicians there, flmmak
ers, architects, who showed great rigor in their thinking. They were
long sessions, nobody took in everything, but everyone took what
they needed or wanted, what they could use, even if it w far removed
from their own discipline. There was a period marked by abrupt inter
ventions, often schizophrenic, from those present, then there wa the
taping phase, with everyone watching their cassettes, but even then
there were interventions fom one week to the next in the form oflit
tle notes I got, sometimes anonymously.
I never told that audience what they meant to me, what they gave
me. Nothing could have been more unlike a discussion, and philoso
phy has absolutely nothing to do with discussing things, it's difficult
enoughjust understanding the problem someone's framing and how
they're framing it, all you should ever do is explore it, play around
with the terms, add something, relate it to something else, never dis
cuss it.2 It was like an echo chamber, a feedback loop, in which an idea
reappeared after going, as it were, through various filters. It was there
that I realized how much philosophy needs not only a philosophical
understanding, through concepts, but a non philosophical under
standing, rooted in percepts and affects. You need both. Philosophy
has an essential and positive relation to non philosophy: i t speaks
directly to non philosophers. Take the most remarkable case, Spino
the absolute philosopher, whose Ethics is the foremost book on con
cepts. But this purest of philosophers also speaks to everyone: anyone
can read the Ethic if they're prepared to be swept up in its wind, its
fire. Or take Nietzsche. You can, on the other hand, get too much
knowledge taking all the life out of philosophy. Nonphilosophical
understanding isn't inadequate or provisional, it's one of philoso
phy's two sides, one of its two wings.
In the preace to Difference and Repetition, you say: "The time is apoach
ing when it will hardly be possibl to wrte a philsohy book in the way peol
have for so lng wtten them. " You add that the search for these ne means of
Philosohical expression, begun b Netzsche, shoul b pursued in conjunc
tion with the deelment of "certain othe art, " like theater or flm. You cit
Borges a a moelforyouraproach to the history ofphilosohy (a modelFo
cault h already invoked fo his own project in the introduction to The
Order of Things). Twelve years late you say ofthe ffeen ''lteaus '' ofA
Thousand Plateaus that o can read them moe or lss indeendently of
each other exct that the conclusion shoul be read at the end-the conclu
sion thrughout which you stick the numbers ofthe preceing plteaus in a
cazy carousel. As though you felt you had to embrc bth orde and disorde
without surenderng either. How do you see this qestion ofphilsohical stl
these days, this question ofthe architecture, the composition, ofa philosohy
book? And what, fom that pespective, does it mean to wte a book with som
one else? Wrting with someone else i something very unusual in the histor
ofphilosohy, especially when it s not a dialgue. How, why, do you do it ? How
did you g about it? Wat made you do it? And who's the author ofthese
boks? Do the even have an author?
Great philosophers are great stlists too. Style in philosophy is the
movement of concepts. This movement's only present, of course, in
the sentences, but the sole point of the sentences is to give it life, a life
of its own. Style is a set of variations in languae, a modulation, and a
straining of one's whole language toward something outside it. Phi
losophy's like a novel: you have to ask "hat's going to happen?,"
"What's happened?" Except the characters are concepts, and the set-
On Philosophy • 141
tings, the scenes, are space-times. One's always writing to brng _
thing to life, to free life from where it's trapped, to trace lines of fght
The language for doing that can't be a homogeneous system, it's
something unstable, always heterogeneous, in which style carves dif
ferences of potential between which things can pass,3 come to pass, a
spark can flash and break out of language itself, to make us see and
think what was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were
hardly aware existed. Two things work against style: homogeneous
language or, conversely, a heterogeneity so great that it becomes indif
ferent, gratuitous, and nothing defnite passes between its poles.
Beteen a main and a subordinate clause there should be a tension,
a kind of zigzagging, even-particularly-when the sentence seems
quite straightforward. There' s style when the words produce sparks
leaping between them, even over great distances.
Given that, writing with someone else presents no particular prob
lem, quite the reverse. There' d be a problem if we were precisely two
persons, each with his own life, his own views, setting out to collabo
rate with each other and discuss things. When I said Felix and I were
rather like two streams, what I meant was that individuation doesn't
have to be personal. We're not at all sure we're persons: a draft, a
wind, a day, a time of day, a stream, a place, a battle, an illness all have
a nonpersonal individualit. They have proper names. We call them
"hecceities. " They combine like two streams, two rivers. They express
themselves in language, carving differences in it, but language gives
each its own individual life and get things passing between them. If
you speak like most people on the level of opinions, you say "me, I' m
a person, " just as you say "the sun's rising. " But we're not convinced
that's defnitely the right concept. Felix and I, and many others like
us, don't feel we're persons exactly. Our individuality is rather that of
events, which isn' t making any grand claim, given that hecceities can
be modest and microscopic. I've tried in all my books to discover the
nature of events; it's a philosophical concept, the only one capable of
ousting the verb "to be" and attributes. From this viewpoint, writing
with someone else becomes completely natural. It's just a question of
something passing through you, a current, which alone has a proper
name. Even when you think you're writing on your own, you're always
doing it with someone else you can' t always name.
In The Logc ofSense I attempted a kind of serial composition. But A
Thousand Plteaus is more complex: "plateau" isn't a metaphor, you
see, they're zones of continuous variation, or like watchtowers sur
veying or scanning their own particular areas, and signaling to each
other. A sort of Indian or Genoese pattern.4 This is the nearest we
come to a style, that is, to a polytonality.
Liteature is everywhere preent in your work, running parall� almost, to the
philsohy: the esay on Sacher-Masoch, the littl book on Poust (which gt
big and big), a lrg part of The Logic of Sense, both in the body of
the wor (on L Carrll) and the suplentary mateal (on Klssowski,
Michel Tourie Zl), the book on Kfa wrtten with Guattari and follw
ing on fom Ati-Oedipus, a chapte ofyour Dialogues with Clire Paret
(on the "supeort ofAnglAmercan literature'), considerabl fragments of
A Thousand Plateaus. It's a lng lit. And yet this doesn't lad to anything
comparabl to what we fnd pncipally in your books on cinema, but also in
The Logic of Sensaton: the orderng rationalizing ofan art form, ofa
medium ofexpression. Is that bcause liteature's too clse to philsohy, to the
very form of it expression, so it can only inct and accompany the movement
ofyour thought a a whol? O are thee othe reasons ?
I don't know, I don' t recognize that difference. I've dreamed about
bringing together a series of studies under the general title "Essays
Critical and Clinical. " That's not to say that great authors, great artists,
are all ill, however sublimely, or that one's looking for a sign of neu
rosis or psychosis like a secret in their work, the hidden code of their
work. They're not ill; on the contrary, they're a rather special kind of
doctor. Why has Masoch given his name to a perversion as old as the
world? Not because he "suffered" from it, but because he transformed
the symptoms, he set out a novel picture of it by making the contract
its primary sign and also by linking masochistic practices to the place
of ethnic minorities in society and the role of women in those minori
ties: masochism becomes an act of resistance, inseparable from a
minority sense of humor. Masoch's a great symptomatologist. In
Proust it's not memory he's exploring, it's all the different kinds of
signs, whose natures have to be discovered by looking at their setting,
the way they' re emitted, their matter, their system. The Rcherche is a
general semiology, a symptomatology of different worlds. Ka's
On Philosophy • 143
work is a diagnosis of all the diabolical powers around us. A Niet
zsche said, artists and philosophers are civilization's doctors. It's hard
ly surprising that, if they consider it at all, they're not particularly
interested in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is so reductive in the
secrets it pursues, so misunderstands signs and symptoms; everything
comes down to what Lawrence called "the dirty little secret. "
It's not just a matter of diagnosis. Signs imply ways of living, possi
bilities of existence, they're the symptoms of life gushing forth or
draining away. But a drained life or a personal life isn't enough for an
artist. You don't write with your ego, your memory, and your illness
es. In the act of writing there's an attempt to make life something
more than personal, to fee life fom what imprisons it. The artist or
philosopher ofen has slender, frail health, a weak constitution, a
shaky hold on things: look at Spinoza, Nietzsche, Lawrence. Yet it's
not death that breaks them, but seeing, experiencing, thinking too
much life. Life overwhelms them, yet it's in them that "the sign is at
hand"-at the close of Zrthustr, in the ffth book of the Ethics. You
write with a view to an unborn people that doesn't yet have a lan
guage. Creating isn't communicating but resisting. There' s a pro
found link between signs, events, life, and vitalism: the power of
nonorganic life that can be found in a line that's drawn, a line of writ
ing, a line of music. It's organisms that die, not life. Any work of art
points a way through for life, fnds a way through the cracks. Every
thing I've written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is, and amounts to a the
ory of signs and events. I don't think the problem takes a different
form in literature than in the other arts, it's just that I haven't had the
chance to do the book I' d like to have done about literature.
Psychoanalysis still runs through, underins, albet in a strange way, Differ
ence and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. From Anti-Oedipus, the
frst volume ofCapitalism and Schizophrenia, onward, it patently becomes
an enemy to be topld. But on a still deee lvel it remains fom that point
on the prime outlok we have to get rd ofif we're to think something ne, to
think ane, almost. How did this come about ? And why was Anti-Oedipus
the frt major philsohy book to come out ofwhat hapeed in May 68, per
haps it frst real philosohical maniesto? For the book says, rght at the start,
that the future doesn't lie in some FredcMarist sntheis. It fees us fom
Frd (fm Lacan and his structures), rathe a some peol thought the
"new philsohers" woul soon free us fom Mar (and the Rolution). Ho
do you see what thus seems a strking analg?
Oddly enough, it wasn't me who rescued Felix from psychoanalysis;
he rescued me. In my study on Masoch, and then in The Logc ofSense,
I thought I' d discovered things about the specious unity of sadism
and masochism, or about events, that contradicted psychoanalysis but
could be reconciled with it. Felix, on the other hand, had been and
was still a psychoanalyst, a student of Lacan's but like a "son" who
already knew that reconciliation was impossible. Anti-Oedipus marks a
break that followed directly from two principles: the unconscious isn't
a theater but a factory, a productive machine, and the unconscious
isn't playing around all the time with mummy and daddy but with
races, tribes, continents, history, and geography, always some social
frame. We were trying to find an immanent conception, an immanent
way of working with the syntheses of the unconscious, a productivism
or constructivism of the unconscious. Ad we came to see that psy
choanalysis had no understanding at all of the meaning of indefinite
articles ( "a" child . . . ) , becomings (becoming-animal, our relation to
animals) , desires, utterances. Our last piece on psychoanalysis was
something we wrote about the Wolf-Man in A Thousand Plteaus, show
ing how psychoanalysis is unable to think plurality or multiplicit, a
pack rather than a lone wolf, a pile of bones rather than a single bone.
We saw psychoanalysis as a fantastic project to lead desire up blind
alleys ad stop people saying what they wanted to say. A project direct
ed against life, a song of death, law, and castration, a thirsting after
transcendence, a priesthood, a psychology (all psychology being
priestly) . If our book was significant, coming after '68, it's because it
broke with attempts at Freudo-Marxism: we weren't trying to articulate
or reconcile diferent dimensions but trying rather to fnd a single
basis for a production that was at once social and desiring in a logic of
fows. Delrewas at work in reality, we saw only realit all around us, tak
ing tl)e imaginary and the smbolic to be illusory categories.
Anti-Oedipuswas about the univocity of the real, a sort of Spinozism
of the unconscious. And I think '68 was this discovery itself. The peo
ple who hate '68, or say it was a mistake, see it as something smbolic
or imaginary. But that' s precisely what it wasn't, it was pure reality
On Philosophy • 1 45
breaking through. I don't, at any rate, see the slightest analogy
between what Anti-Oedipus did with Freud and what the "new philoso
phers" have been doing with Marx. I fnd the very suggeston shock
ing. If Anti-Oedipus seeks to criticize psychoanalysis, it's in terms of a
conception of the unconscious that, whether right or wrong, is set out
in the book. Whereas the new philosophers, denouncing Marx, don't
begin to present any new analysis of capital, which mysteriously drops
out of consideration in their work; they just denounce the Stalinist
political and ethical consequences they take to follow from Marx.
They're more like the people who attributed immoral consequences
to Freud's work: it's nothing to do with philosophy.
You're always invoking immanec: what seems most charctstic in your
thought i that it doesn't deend on lc or negaton, sstaticaly banishing
any apeal to transcc, in whater for. O want to ask: Is that realy
tre, and how can it b? Partclrl sinc, despit this galed immanenc,
your concts always reain partial and lcl. From The Logic of Sense on,
it seems you've always be at pains to produc a whol btt ofconcts fo
each n bok. O do ofcoure notc conct migating inteecting. But,
on the whol, the vocablry ofthe bo k on cin isn't that of The Logic of
Sensaton, which is dif eet again fom that ofCapitalism and Schizo
phrenia, and so on. As thoug rather than bing rO a the � elin,
r¢ned, ramied, and coldt in rlton t o anothe so to spea your
concts had each tim to foa distinct guping a spcfc plne ofinvetion.
Doe that imply the �e not ameabl to bng brought tgthe int any oel
scheme? O is it just a qtion ofoing thing up a far as possibl, wthout
presposing anything? And h d that ft in wth immanenc?
Setting out a plane of immanence, tracing out a feld of immanence,
is something all the authors I've worked on have done (even Kant
by denouncing any transcendent application of the syntheses of the
imagination, although he sticks to possible experience rather than
real experimentation) . Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves
have to be explained: there are no such things as universals, there's
nothing transcendent, no Unit, subject (or object) , Reason; there
are only processes, sometimes unifing, subjectifing, rationalizing,
but just processes all the same. These processes are at work in con-
crete "multiplicities," multiplicity is the real element in which things
happen. It's multiplicities that fll the feld of immanence, rather as
tribes fll the desert without it ceasing to be a desert. And the plane of
immanence has to be constructed, immanence is constructivism, any
given multiplicity is like one area of the plane. All processes take place
on the plane of immanence, and within a given multiplicity: unifca
tions, subjectifcations, rationalizations, centralizations have no spe
cial status; they often amount to an impasse or closing off that pre
vents the multiplicity's growth, the extension and unfolding of its
lines, the production of something new.
When you invoke something transcendent you arrest movement,
introducing interpretations instead of experimenting. Bellour has
shown very well how this happens in cinema, in the flow of images.
And interpretation is in fact always carried out with reference to
something that's supposed to be missing. Unit is precisely what's
missing from multiplicit, just as the subject's what's missing fom
events ("it's raining") . Of course, things ÜTö sometimes missing, but
it's always to do with something abstract, some transcendent view
point, if only that of a Self, when you can't construct the plane of
immanence. Processes are becomings, and aren't to be judged by
some fnal result but by the way they proceed and their power to con
tinue, as with animal becomings, or nonsubjective individuatons.
That's why we contrasted rhizomes with trees-trees, or rather
arborescent processes, being temporary limits that block rhizomes
and their transformations for a while. There are no universals, only
singularities. Concepts aren' t universals but sets of singularities that
each extend into the neighborhood of one of the other singularities.
Let's go back to the ritornello as an example of a concept: it's relat
ed to territory. You get ritornellos in any territory, marking it out; and
then others when you're trying to fnd your way back to it, afraid at
night; and still others to do with leaving: "Farewell . . . " That already
differentiates three stances, so to speak. And the ritornello thus
expresses the tension beteen a territory and something deeper, the
Earth. But then the Earth is the Deterritorialized, it can't be separat
ed from a process of de territorialization that is its aberrant motion.
Take any set of singularities leading on fom one another, and you
have a concept direcdy related to an event: a lied. A song rises,
approaches, or fades away. That's what it's like on the plane of imma-
On Philosophy • 1 47
nence: multiplicities fill it, singularites connect with one another,
processes or becomings unfold, intensities rise and fall.
I see philosophy a a logic of multiplicities (I feel, on tis point,
close to Michel Serres) . Creating concepts is constructing some area
in the plane, adding a new area to existing ones, exploring a new area,
flling in what's missing. Concepts are composites, amalgams oflines,
curves. If new concepts have to be brought in all the time, it's just
because the plane of immanence has to be constructed area by area,
constructed locally, going fom one point to the next. That's why it
comes in bursts: in A Thousand Plateaus each plateau was supposed to
be that sort of burst. But that doesn't mean they can't be taken up
again and treated systematically. Quite the reverse: a concept's power
comes from the way it's repeated, as one area links up with another.
And this linkage is an essential, ceaseless activity: the world as a patch
work. So your tin impression of a single plane of immanence, and
concepts on the other hand that are always local, is quite right.
What for me takes the place of refection is constructionism. And
what takes the place of communication is a kind of expressionism.
Expressionism in philosophy finds its high point in Spinoza and Leib
niz. I think I've found a concept of the Other, by defning it a neither
an object nor a subject (an other subject) but the expression ofa pos
sible world. Someone wit a toothache, and aJapanese man walking
in the road, express possible worlds. Then they start talking: someone
tells me aboutJapan, it might even be the Japanese man who tells me
about Japan , he might even be speakingJapanese: language thus con
fers realit on the possible world a such, the realit of the possible a
something possible (i I go to Japan, on te other hand, then it's no
longer something possible) . Including possible worlds in the plane of
immanence, even in tis very sketchy way, makes expressionism the
counterpart of constructionism.
But why this need to ceat new concet? Is there any "progess" in philso
phy ? How would you defne what it need to do, why we need it, and ee it
''ogam'' these days ?
I think there's an image of thought that changes a lot, that's changed
a lot through history. By the image of thought I don't mean its
method but something deeper that's always taken for granted, a ss
tem of coordinates, dynamics, orientations: what it means to think,
and to "orient oneself in thought. "5 However one sees it, we're on the
plane of immanence; but should we go around erecting vertical axes
and trying to stand up straight or, rather, stretch out, run out along
the horizon,6 keep pushing the plane further out? And what sort of
verticality do we want, one that gives us something to contemplate or
one that makes us reflect or communicate? Or should we just get rid
of all verticality as transcendent and lie down hugging the earth,
without looking, without refecting, cut off from communication?
And then, have we got a friend with us, or are we all alone, Me = Me,
or are we lovers, or something else again, and what are the risks of
betraying oneself, being betrayed, or betraying someone else? Doesn't
there come a time to distrust even one's friend? How should we
understand the phils in philosophy? Does it mean different things in
Plato and in Blanchot's book L'mitie, even though it relates to think
ing in both cases? From Empedocles on, there's a whole dramaturgy
of thought.
The image of thought is what philosophy as it were presupposes; it
precedes philosophy, not a nonphilosophical understanding this time
but a prephilosophical understanding. There are lots of people for
whom thinking's just "a bit of discussion. " OK, it's a stupid image, but
even stupid people have an image of thought, and it's only by bring
ing out these images that we can determine philosophy's precondi
tions. Do we, for instance, have the same image of thought that Plato,
or even Descartes or Kant, had? Doesn't the image change in
response to overriding constraints that express, of course, extrinsic
determinants, but above all express a becoming of thought? Can we,
failing around in confsion, still claim to be seeking truth?
It's the image of thought that guides the creation of concepts. It
cries out, so to speak, whereas concepts are like songs. On the ques
tion of progress in philosophy, you have to say the sort of thing Robbe
Grillet says about the novel: there's no point at all doing philosophy
the way Plato did, not because we've superseded Plato but because
you can't supersede Plato, and it makes no sense to have another go
at what he's done for all time. There's only one choice: doing the his
tory of philosophy, or transplanting bits of Plato into problems that
are no longer Platonic ones.
On Philosophy • 1 49
One might call this study of images of thought "noology" and see
it as the prolegomena to philosophy. It's what Diference and Retition
is really about, the nature of the postulates of the image of thought.
And the question runs right through The Logc ofSense, where height,
depth, and surface are taken as the coordinates of thinking; I come
back to it in Poust and Signs, because Proust confronts the Greek
image with all the power of signs; then I come to it again, with Felix,
in A Thousand Plateaus, because the rhizome's the image of thought
that spreads out beneath the tree image. We've got no model for
dealing with this question, no guide even, but there is something to
which we can constantly refer and relate it: what we know about the
There's a special relation between philosophy and neurology,
which comes out in the asociationists, in Schopenhauer, in Bergson.
Our current inspiration doesn't come from computers but from the
microbiology of the brain: the brain's organized like a rhizome, more
like grass than a tree, "an uncertain system,
with probabilistic, semi
aleatory, quantum mechanisms. It's not that our thinking starts from
what we know about the brain but that any new thought traces
uncharted channels directly through its matter, twisting, folding, fs
suring it. It's amazing how Michaux does this. New connections, new
pathways, new synapses, that's what philosophy calls into play as it cre
ates concepts, but this whole image is something of which the biology
of the brain, in its own way, is discovering an objective material like
ness, or the material working.
Something that's interested me in cinema is the way the screen
can work as a brain, as in Resnais's flms, or Syberberg's. Cinema
doesn't just operate by linking things through rational cuts, but by
relinking them through irrational cuts too: this gives to different
images of thought. What was interesting about pop videos at the out
set was the sense you got that some were using connections and
breaks that didn' t belong to the waking world, but not to dream
either, or even nightmare. For a moment they bordered on some
thing connected with thought. This is all I' m saying: there' s a hidden
image of thought that, as it unfolds, branches out, and mutates,
inspires a need to keep on creating new concepts, not through any
external determinism but through a becoming that carries the prob
lems themselves along with it.
Your lst book was devoted to Foucaul. Wee you doing history ofphilosohy ?
Wy Foucault ? Wat are the reltions between your two philosohies? You
already introduced the notion ofthe fol in the Foucault book. Is there some
reltion btween Foucault and Leibniz?
Foucault's a great philosopher, an amazing stylist too. He mapped out
knowledge and power in a new way and traced specific relations
between them. Philosophy takes on, in him, a new sense. Then he
introduced processes of subjectifcation as a third dimension of his
"apparatuses," as a third distinct term that provides a new approach
to forms of knowledge and articulates powers in a new way, thereby
opening up a whole theory and history of ways of existing: Greek sub
jectification, Christian subjectifications . . . his method rejects univer
sals to discover the processes, always singular, at work in multiplicities.
What's influenced me most is his theory of utterance, because it
involves conceiving language as a heterogeneous and unstable aggre
gate and allows one to think about how new tpes of utterance come
to be formed in all felds. The importance of his "literary" work, his
literary and artistic criticism, will come out only when all his articles
are collected; his text on The Lie ofInfamous Men, for example, is a
beautiful comic masterpiece; there is in Foucault something close to
The book I did wasn't about the history of philosophy, it's some
thing I wanted to do with him, with the idea I have of him and my
admiration for him. If there was any poetry in the book, one might
see it as what poets call a tombau.8 I differed from him only on very
minor things: what he called an apparatus, and what Felix and I called
arrangements, have different coordinates, because he was establish
ing novel historical sequences, while we put more emphasis on geo
graphical elements, territorialit and movements of deterritorializa
tion. We were always rather keen on universal history, which he
detested. But being able to follow what he was doing provided me
with essential corroboration. He was often misunderstood, which
didn't get in his way but did worry him. People were afraid of him,
that's to say his mere'e�istence was enough to stop idiots braying. Fou
cault flflled the fnction of philosophy as defned by Nietzsche:
being bad for stupidity. Thinking, with him, is like diving down and
always bringing something back up to the surface. A thought that
On Philosophy • 1 51
folds this way and that, then suddenly bursts open like a spring. 1
don't in fact think he was particularly influenced by Leibniz.
Although there's a remark in Leibniz that applies particularly well to
him: "I thought I'd reached port, but found myself thrown back onto
the open sea." Thinkers like Foucault advance by lurching from one
crisis to another, there's something seismic about them.
The last approach opened up by Foucault is particularly rich:
processes of subjectification are nothing to do with "private lives" but
characterize the way individuals and communities are constituted as
subjects on the margins of established forms of knowledge and insti
tuted powers, even if they thereby open the way for new kinds of
knowledge and power. Subjectifcation thus appears as a middle term
between knowledge and power, a perpetual "dislocation," a sort of
fold, a folding or enfolding. Foucault fnds the initial movement of
subjectification, in the West at least, with the Greeks, at the point
where free men imagine they have to "master themselves" if they want
to be able to govern others. But subjectification takes many different
forms, which explains Foucault's interest in a Christianit permeated
by these processes on an individual and collective level (hermits, reli
gious orders and communities) , not to mention heresies and reforms,
with self-mastery no longer the guiding principle. One might even say
that in many social formations it's not the masters but rather those
excluded from societ who constitute foci of subjectcation: the
freed slave, for example, who complains he's lost any social role in the
established order, and opens the way for new kinds of power. Plaintive
voices are very important, not just poetically but historically and
socially, because they express a movement of subjectifcation ("poor
me . . . ") : there's a whole order of elegiac subjectivit. Subjects are
born quite as much from misery as from triumph. Foucault was fasci
nated by the movements of subjectification taking shape in our pre
sent-day societies: what modern processes are currently at work pro
ducing subjectivity? Thus, when people talk about Foucault returning
to the subject, they're completely missing the problem he's address
ing. Here again, there's no point arguing with them.
O des indeed fnd scaps ofuniveal hitory in Anti-Oedipus, with the
distinction btween coded societie, ovecoding Stt, and capitlism decod-
ing fWS. You then retur to this theme in A Thousand Plateaus, intro
ducing an oposition btween nomadic war machines and sedentary states:
you set out a "nomadolog. " But do any political stances follow fom this ? You
belongd, with Foucault, to the Pson Information Group; you sponsored
Coluche's standing for president; 9 you came out in support ofthe Palstini
ans. But since the afermath of'68 you seem, especially compared with Guat
tari, to have falln rthe "silnt. " You've taken no part in the human rghts
movement, or philosohical debate about the constitutional state. 1O Is this a
matter ofchoice, or reticence, or disillusion? Doesn't the philosohe have a
rl to play in societ?
If you're talking about establishing new forms of transcendence, new
universals, restoring a refective subject as the bearer ofrights, or set
ting up a communicative intersubjectivity, then it's not much of a
philosophical advance. People want to produce "consensus, " but con
sensus is an ideal that guides opinion, and has nothing to do with phi
losophy. A sort ofphilosophy-asmarketing, often directed against the
USSR. Ewald's shown that you need more than just a legally constitut
ed subject to have human rights, that you have to confront juridical
problems that are in themselves very interesting. And in many cases
the states that tple on human rights are so much outgrowths or
dependencies of the ones that trumpet them that it seems like two
complementary activities.
One can't think about the state except in relation to the higher
level of the single world market, and the lower levels of minorities,
becomings, "people. " Beyond the state it's money that rules, money
that communicates, and what we need these days definitely isn't any
critique of Marxism, but a modern theory of money as good as Marx's
that goes on fom where he left off (bankers would be better placed
than economists to sketch its outlines, although the economist
Bernard Schmitt has made some progress in this area) . And below the
state are becomings that can't be controlled, minorities constantly
coming to life and standing up to it. Becomings are something quite
distinct from history: even structural history generally thinks in terms
of past, present, and fture. We're told revolutions go wrong, or pro
duce monsters in their wake: it's an old idea, no need to wait for Stal
in, it w already true of Napoleon, of Cromwell. To say revolutions
turn out badly is to say nothing about people's revolutionary becom-
On Philosophy • 153
ing. ll If we've been so interested i n nomads, it's because they're a
becoming and aren' t part of history; they're excluded fom it, but
they transmute and reappear in different, unexpected forms in the
lines of fight of some social feld. That's one difference, in fact,
beteen ourselves and Foucault: he saw social fields a criss-rossed
with strategies; we see them as feeing all over the place. May 68 was a
becoming breaking through into history, and that's why history
found it so hard to understand, and why historical society found it so
hard to come to terms with.
People talk about the fture of Europe, and the need to harmonize
banking, insurance, internal markets, companies, police forces: con
sesus, consesus, consesus, but what about people' s becoming? Is
Europe leading us into strange becomings like new versions of '68?
What's going to become of people? It's a question fll of surprises,
not the question of the fture, but of actualit, the untimely. The
Palestinians are what's untimely in the Middle East, taking the ques
tion of territory to its limit. In unconstitutional states it's the nature
of the necessarily nomadic processes of liberation that counts. And in
constitutional states, it's not established and codifed constittional
rights that count but everything that's legally problematic and con
stantly threatens to bring what's been established back into queston
that counts. There's no shortage of such problems these days; the
whole Civil Code's strained to breaking-point, and the Penal Code is
in as great a mess as the prison system. Rights aren' t created by codes
and pronouncements but by jurisprudence. Jurisprudence is the phi
losophy oflaw, and deals with singularities, it advances by working out
from singularities. All this may of course involve taking particular
positions to make some particular point. But it's not enough these
days to "take a position," however concretely. You need some sort of
control over how it's presented. Otherwise you'll quickly find yourself
on television replying to stupid questions or face to face, back to back,
with someone, "discussing things. " What ifwe were to get involved in
producing the program? But how? It's a specialized business, we're
not even the customers any more; television's real customers are the
advertisers, those well-known liberals. It would be prett sad to see
philosophers being sponsored, with company logos all over their out
fts, but maybe it's happening already. People talk about intellectuals
abdicating their responsibility, but how are they supposed to express
themselves in some all-purpose medium that's an offense to all think
ing? I think there's a public for philosophy and ways of reaching it,
but it's a clandestine sort of thinking, a sort of nomadic thinking. The
only form of communication one can envisage as perfectly adapted to
the modern world is Adorno' s model of a message in a bottle, or the
Nietzschean model of an arrow shot by one thinker and picked up by
The Fold, devote to Leibniz (even though his name apears only in the sub
titl, coupld with a theme: "Leibniz and the Barque"), seems to hark back to
the long sees ofbooks you devoted to particlr philsohers: Knt, Begon,
Nietzsche, Spinoza. And yet one feels it's much more a book ofthan a book Ü
a philsoher O rthe that to an amazing extent it S at onc about both Leib
niz and the whol ofyour thought, here more than ever before present as a
whol. "at's your view ofthis dual aspect? One might say that b drwing
on Leibnizian conct, the book combines sees ofconcet fom your other
boos, somhat roring all the earlier results in a very ingenious way to
arrve at a new and more comprehensive result.
Leibniz is fascinating because perhaps no other philosopher created
so much. They're at frst sight extremely odd notions, almost crazy.
They seem to have only an abstract unity, along the lines of "Every
predicate is contained in its subject," except the predicate' s not an
attribute, it's an event, and the subject isn't a subject, it's an envelope.
His concepts do however have a concrete unity in the way they' re con
structed or operate that's reflected on the level of the Fold, the folds
of the earth, the folds of organisms, folds in the soul. Everything
folds, unfolds, enfolds in Leibniz; it's in the folds of things that one
perceives, and the world is enfolded in each soul, which unfolds this
or that region of it according to the order of space and time (whence
the overall harmony) . So we can take the nonphilosophical situation
implicit in Leibniz Û something like a "windowless and doorless"
baroque chapel that has only an inside, or the baroque music that
fnds the harmony in any melody. The baroque carries folding to
infinity, Û in EI Greco's paintings and Bernini's sculptures, and so
opens the way to a non philosophical understanding through per
cepts and affects.
On Philosophy • 155
I see this book as both a recapitulation and a continuation. One has
to follow in Leibniz's footsteps (he's probably had more creative fol
lowers than any other philosopher) but also in those of artists who
echo his work, even unknowingly-Mallarme, Proust, Michaux, Han
t, Boulez-anyone who fashions a world out of folding and unfold
ing. The whole thing is a crossroads, a multiple connectedness. We're
still a long way from exhausting all the potential of the fold, it's a good
philosophical concept. That's why I wrote this book, and it leaves me
in a position to do what I now wat to do. I want to write a book on
"What Is Philosophy?" A long as it's a short one. Also, Guattari and I
want to get back to our joint work and produce a sort of philosophy of
Nature, now that any distinction beteen nature and artifce is becom
ing blurred. Such projects are all one needs for a happy old age.
Conversation wt Raymond Bellour and Fran\ois Ewald
Maazine Litteaire 257 (September 1 988)
You've always said that doing philsohy is working on concets as one wors
on a piece ofwood and constantly producing ne ones that can b used to tack
l real problms. The concet offold seems particlrly usel, since it allws
one, b startingjom Leibniz:philsohy, to characterze the baroque and pr
vides a way into the work ofMichaux or Bors, ofMaurce Leblnc, Gom
bc, Jace, or into the teritory ofartists. One: very tempted to ask whethe
a cnct that works so wU, and t Ü so far in't in dange oflosing its
value b a sort ofintion and inviting t cticisms peol used to make
ofsst that elined eerthing?
One does indeed fnd folds everywhere: in rocks, rivers, and woods,
in organisms, in the head or brain, in souls or thought, in what we call
the plastic arts . . . But that doesn't make the fold a universal. It was
Uvi-Strauss, I think, who showed you had to distinguish the following
two propositions: that only similar things can differ, and only differ
ent things can be similar. One proposition says similarity's primary,
the other says things themselves differ, and differ above all from
themselves. Straight lines are all alike, but folds vary, and all folding
proceeds by differentiation. No two things are folded the same way,
no two rocks, and there's no general rule saying the same thing will
always fold the same way. Folds are in this sense everywhere, without
the fold being a universal. It's a "diferentiator," a "differential." There
On Leibniz • 1 57
are two kinds of concepts, universals and singularities. The concept of
fold is always something singular, and can only get anywhere by vary
ing, branching out, taking new forms. You've only to consider or, bet
ter still, to see and touch mountains as formed by their folding, for
them to lose their solidity, and for millenia to turn back into what they
are, not something permanent but time in its pure state, pliabilit.
There's nothing more unsettling than the continual movement of
something that seems fixed. In Leibniz's words: a dance of particles
folding back on themselves.
Your whol book shows how Leibniz's philosohy, whe one wors through it
with the concet offol, can b linked to non philsohical realitie and cast
light on them, how the monad reltes to othe peol s work in the fels ofpaint
ing, sculpture, architcture, and litature. But can it alo cast light on our
social and political worl? I the social realm's bcome, a the say, a "dark con
tinent, " isn't it bcause we've ben thinking about it, afMar, in mechani
cal or anatomical terms rather than in ters offols, drapery, texture?
Leibniz's most famous proposition is that every soul or subject
(monad) is completely closed, windowless and doorless, and contains
the whole world in its darkest depths, while also illuminating some lit
tle portion of that world, each monad a different portion. So the
world is enfolded in each soul, but differently, because each illumi
nates only one little aspect of the overall folding. It is, at frst sight, a
very odd conception. But, as always in philosophy, one's dealing with
a concrete situation. I try to show how the conception applies to
baroque architecture, to the baroque "interior," to baroque lighting.
But it's our situation as modern men as well, ifwe take account of the
new ways things are folded. The minimalist art of Tony Smith presents
us with the following situation: a car speeding along a dark motorway
lit only by the car's headlamps, with the tarmac hurtling by in the
windscreen. It's a modern version of the monad, with the windscreen
playing the part of a small illuminated area. You wonder if we can
understand this socially and politically. Certainly, and the baroque
was itself linked to a political system, a new conception of politics. The
move toward replacing the system of a window and a world outside
with one of a computer screen in a closed room is something that's
taking place i n our social life: we read the world more than we see it.
Not only is there a social "morphology" in which textures play their
part, but the baroque plays a part in town-planning and rural devel
opment. Architecture has always been a political activity, and any new
architecture depends on revolutionary forces, you can find architec
ture saying ''We need a people, " even though the architect isn't him
self a revolutionary. Through its relation to the bolshevik revolution,
constructivism links up with the baroque. A people is always a new
wave, a new fold in the social fabric; any creative work is a new way of
folding adapted to new materials.
The conct offol la yo on quite naturlly, in true Leibnizian spirt, to a
ctain conction ofmatt and living thing, and an insistence upon the clse
reltion btwee matte and lfe, organims. But a I read your book I ofn won
dered how what you say about matt o living organims-nd about pec
tion or pain, for exampl- might be undtood b a contemporary physicist,
biolgst, physiolgst, and so on. "The model for the scec ofmatte is orga
mi . . . o the art offolingpape':· "i to b alive is to have a soul, it's because
proteins already preset us with acts ofpection, discmination and dif e
entiation"; "matte is textures ": how are we to take proositions lke these?
Inflecton still plays a central part in mathematics, or in the theory of
fnctions. That matter isn't granular but made up of smaller and small
er folds, as Leibniz says, is a hypothesis that can be interpreted in terms
of the physics of particles and forces. That an organism is the theater
and principle of its endogenous folding is something that comes out at
the level of molecular biology, as well as embryology: as Thor shows,
morphogenesis is all about folding. The complex noton of texture has
taken on a fndamental importance in all sorts of felds. The idea that
there's such a thing a molecular perception has been accepted for a
long tme. When ethologists defne the worlds of animals, they do b in
a way that's very reminiscent of Leibniz, showing that an animal
responds to a certain number of stimuli, sometimes very few, that
amount to little glimmerings in the dark depths of a vast nature. This
isn't of course to say that they're repeating what Leibniz said before
them. Between seventeenth-entury "preformaton" and present-day
genetics, folding changes in nature, fnction, and meaning. But then
On Leibniz • 1 59
Leibniz himself didn't invent the notion and principles of folding,
which were familiar in the sciences and arts before his day. He w how
ever the frst thinker to "free" the fold, by taking it to infnity. The
baroque, similarly, was the first period in which folding went on inf
nitely, spilling over any limit, as in El Greco and Bernini. That's why
Leibniz's great baroque principles are stll so scientcally relevant,
even though folding ha taken on new characteristcs, which illustrates
its power of transformation. It's the same in art: Hantai's folds aren't of
course El Greco's, but it w the great Baroque painters who feed folds
fom the constraints and limits imposed on them by Romanesque,
Gothic, and neoclassical art. They thus made possible all sorts of new
experiments that they didn't prefgure, but of which they mark they
opening phase. Mallarme and Michaux are obsessed with folds: that
doesn't make them Leibnizian, but it does mean they're somehow
related to Leibniz. Art Inorell is based on to things: textures ad
folded shapes. That doesn't make Klee or Dubuffet baroque painters.
But the cabinet logolgque2 is like the inside of a Leibnizian monad.
Without the baroque and without Leibniz, folds wouldn't have devel
oped the autonomy that subsequently allowed them to create so many
new paths. In short, the raising to infinity or autonomizaton of folds in
the baroque has artistic, scientific, and philosophical consequences,
with their diferent time scales, that are far fom being exhausted, and
in which one keeps coming back to Leibnizian "themes."
For you to b working Ü a theory ofeents is nothing new. In The Fold,
though, the theory : more flly worked out than ee bfore, most particularly
through the way you brng togethe Leibniz and Witehead. I can hardly sum
marize here the elements or determinants ofeents a you charcterze them.
But simply to say that you tal in terms ofextension, intensit, individuals,
and prehension is enough to make clar that the eent you're talking about
aren't the ones jouralist and the media chae afer. Wat, then, are the media
handling when the "capture eents, " or what woul have to hapen for the
media to grasp what you yoursel call "eent"?
I don't think the media have much capacit or inclinaton to grasp an
event. In the frst place, they often show a beginning or end, whereas
even a short or instantaneous event is something going on. And then,
they want something spectacular, whereas events always involve period
when nothing happens. It's not even a matter of there being such per
ods before and ater some event, they're part of the event itself: you
can't, for example, extract te instant of some terribly bruta accident
from the vast empty time in which you see it coming, staring at what
hasn't yet happened, waiting ages for it to happen. The most ordinary
event casts us as visionaries, whereas the media turn us into mere pas
sive onlookers, or worse still, voyeurs. Groethuysen said events aways
take place, so to speak, when nothing's happening. People miss the
amaing wait in events they were least awaiting. It's art, rather than the
media, that can grasp events: the flms of Ozu or Antonioni, for exam
ple. But then with them, the periods in which nothing happens don't
fall between to events, they're in the events themselves, giving events
their depth. I have, it's true, spent a lot of time writing about this noton
of event: you see, I don't believe in things. The Fol returns to this ques
tion fom another viewpoint My fvorite sentence in the book is
'There's a concert tonight." In Leibniz, in Whitehead, there are only
events. What Leibniz calls a predicate is nothing to do with an attribute,
but an event, "crossing the Rubicon. " So they have to completely recast
the notion of a subject: what becomes of the subject, i predicates are
events? It's like a baroque emblem.3
It seems to me that The Fold, rther than "develoing" your work so far
"envelos" it, implicates rther than explicates it.4 In other word, rther than
taking W toward some regon (a commetator's dream) of "Delze's philoso
phy summed up, " it makes it circlr 'Joins it all up. " Indeed, the conct of
fol links up with your lst book, Foucault-th foling ofthought in the
proces ofsubectication-and Leibniz links up with a "succession" ofstud
ies relting to the histor ofphilosohy, deoted to Rume, Spinoza, Knt, Niet
zsche, and Bergon. The Fold, in short, seems to fit in and connect with any
gven segent ofyour work so that, i you'l excuse the comparson, the whol
might b lkened to, say, an alr clck that doesn't so much "tell " us some
thing (the time!) a offer innit possibl ways ofbeing taken apart and put
back together again. Am I completely wong?
I hope you're right, and I think you are. The thing is, everyone has
habits of thinking: I tend to think of things as sets of lines to be unrav-
On Leibniz • 161
eled but also t be made to intersect I don't like points; I tink it's
stupid summing things up.5 Lines aren't things running between two
points; points are where several lines intersect. Lines never run uni
formly, and points are nothing but inflections oflines. More general
ly, it's not beginnings and ends that count, but middles. Things and
thoughts advance or grow out fom the middle, and that's where you
have to get to work, that's where everything unfolds. So a multilinear
complex can fold back on itself with intersections and inflections that
interconnect philosophy, the history of philosophy, history in gener
al, the sciences, and the arts. A tough these are so many twists in the
path of something moving through space like a whirlwind that can
materialize at any point.
But we're not talking about just any point, we're taling about Leibniz. Evey
one knows about Leibniz, but the know about him fom Candide, and
Voltaire's mocking references to "the best ofall possibl worlds. " I'm ging to
ask you a silly queston: does it damage the way a philosoher's rebered, to
be laughed at lk that ?
But Voltaire's a philosopher too, and Candide's a major text. The rela
tion beteen Leibniz and Voltaire marks a fndamental transiton in
the history of thought. With Voltaire we're in the Enlightenment, a
system of light, indeed, of matter and life, of Reason, quite different
from te baroque sstem, even tough Leibniz opened the way into
this new period: theologica reason breas down, giving way to human
reason pure and simple. The baroque itself already marks a crisis in
theological reasoning-a fnal attempt to reconstruct a world that's
falling apart. It's a bit like the way they define schizophrenia, and
what we call baroque dances have often been compared to the pos
tures assumed by schizophrenics. Now, when Leibniz says our world's
the best of all possible worlds, we have to understand "the best" as
replacing the classical Good, and reflecting, precisely, the collapse of
the Good. Leibniz's idea is that our world's the best, not because it's
governed by the Good but because it allows the production and intro
duction of new elements: it's a very striking idea, and one that
Voltaire himself takes up. And it's a long way from Leibniz's supposed
optimism. Indeed, for Leibniz, the very possibilit of progress
depends on his baroque conception of damnation: the best of all pos
sible worlds rises up on the shoulders of the damned, because the
damned have themselves forsaken progress and so set free infnite
quantities of "progressiveness." There's a wonderful piece about this
called The Philsoher's Pofession ofFaith, beautifully translated into
French by Belaval. There's a song of Beelzebub' s in the book, which
must be the fnest of all texts on evil. These days it's no longer theo
logical reason but human reason, Enlightenment reason, that's enter
ing a crisis and breaking down. So in our attempts to preserve some
part of it or reconstruct it, we're seeing a neobaroque, which brings
us closer, perhaps, to Leibniz than to Voltaire.
Along with The Fold, you're publishing a shortluminous-iece on
Frn{ois Chitelet's philsohy, Pericles and Verdi. Shoul we take the way
this major book on philsohy is preceded and followed b two txts devoted to
Michel Foucault and Frn{ois Chitelt, dearted fends, as somehow signi
cant (as relating, in particulr to the sense of philein in philosohy) ? Are
you trying to brng into philosohy and/or the wrting ofphilosohy the
"music" that Chatlet, as you'll recall, defned a "establishing human rela
tions in aural matal"?
You tk, in the first place, about fiendship. I wrote a book about Fou
cault, and then a little piece about Chatelet. But they're not for me just
tributes to friends. The book on Foucault was very much meant as a
philosophy book-and by writing a philosophy book entitled Foucault
I was claiming that he never turned into a historian but always
remained a great philosopher. Francois Chatelet, for his part, thought
of himself more as a philosophy "producer, " rather as one talks of a
film producer. But then, in film, a lot of producers have wanted to
establish new "modes of producton," new ways of running things.
What I' m trying to show, all too sketchily, is that what Chatelet saw him
self doing wasn' t a substitte for philosophy but involved, on the con
trary, a very original and defnite philosophy. Ad then there' s the
question of fiendship. It's intrinsic to philosophy, because the
philosopher isn't a sage, but a "friend"-ofwhom, what? Kojeve, Blan
chot, Mascolo have taken up this question of friendship, which goes to
the heart of thought. You can't know what philosophy is until you con-
On Leibniz • 1 63
font this puzzling question and find some answer, however difcult
that may be. You ask about music, too, since Chielet was immersed in
music. Music-are philosophers fiends of music too? It seems clear to
me that philosophy is truly an unvoiced song, with the same feel for
movement that music has. That already applies to Libniz who, paral
leling baroque music, makes Harmony a basic concept. He makes phi
losophy the production of harmonies. 6 Is that what friendship is, a har
mony embracing even dissonance? It's not a matter of setting philoso
phy to music, or vice versa. Rater, it's once again one thing folding
into another: "fold by fold," like Boulez and Mallarme.
Conversaton wt Robert Maggiori
Libeatio (September XX, 1 988)
LETTER TO REDA BENSMAiA, ON SPI NOZA
I' m struck by the extremely high quality of the articles devoted to me
here, and therefore very honored by this venture of Ldeain. I'd
like to respond by setting the whole venture under the aegis of Spin
oza and telling you, if I may, about the problem that interests me in
relation to him. It will be a way of so to speak "participating" in the
I think great philosophers are also great stylists. And while a philo
sophical vocabulary is one element in a style, involving as it does the
introduction of new words on the one hand, or giving an unusual
sense to ordinary words on the other, style is always a matter of syntax.
But syntax is a sort of straining toward something that isn't syntactic
nor even linguistic (something outide language) . Syntax, in philoso
phy, strains toward the movement of concepts. Now concepts don't
move only among other concepts (in philosophical understanding) ,
they also move among things and within us: they bring us new percet
and new affect that amount to philosophy's own non philosophical
understanding. And philosophy requires nonphilosophical under
standing just as much as it requires philosophical understanding.
That's why philosophy has an essential relation to non philosophers,
and addresses them too. They may even sometimes have a direct
understanding of philosophy that doesn' t depend on philosophical
understanding. Style in philosophy strains toward three different
Letter to Reda Bensmai'a, on Spinoza • 1 65
poles: concepts, or new ways of thinking; percepts, or new ways of see
ing and construing; and affects, or new ways of feeling. They're the
philosophical trinity, philosophy as opera: you need all three to get
things moving.
What has this to do with Spinoza? He seems, on the face of it, to
have no style at all, as we confront the very scholastic Latin of the
Ethics. But you have to be careful with people who supposedly "have
no style"; as Proust noted, they're often the greatest stylists of all. The
Ethics appears at first to be a continuous stream of defnitions, propo
sitions, proofs, and corollaries, presenting us with a remarkable devel
opment of concepts. An irresistible, uninterrupted river, majestically
serene. Yet all the while there are "parentheses" springing up in the
guise of scholia, discontinuously, independently, referring to one
another, violently erupting to form a broken volcanic chain, as all the
passions rumble below in a war of joys pitted against sadness. These
scholia might seem to ft into the overall conceptual development,
but they don't: they're more like a second Ethics, running parallel to
the first but with a completely different rhythm, a completely differ
ent tone, echoing the movement of concepts in the full force of
And then there's a third Ethics, too, when we come to Book Five.
Because Spinoza tells us that up to that point he's been speaking from
the viewpoint of concepts, but now he's going to change his stle and
speak directly and intuitively in pure percepts. Here too, one might
imagine he's still proving things, but he's certainly not continuing the
same way. The line of proof begins to leap like lightning across gaps,
proceeding elliptically, implicitly, in abbreviated form, advancing in
piercing, rending fashes. No longer a river, or something running
below the surface, but fre. A third Ethics that, although it appears
only at the close, is there from the start, along with the other two.
This is the style at work in Spinoza's seemingly calm Latin. He sets
three languages resonating in his outwardly dormant language, a
triple straining. The Ethics is a book of concepts (the second kind of
knowledge) , but of affects (the first kind) and percepts (the third
kind) too. Thus the paradox in Spinoza is that he's the most philo
sophical of philosophers, the purest in some sense, but also the one
who more than any other addresses non philosophers and calls forth
the most intense nonphilosophical understanding. This is why
absolutely anyone can read Spinoza, and be very moved, or see things
quite differently afterward, even if they can hardly understand Spin
oza's concepts. Conversely, a historian of philosophy who under
stands only Spinoza's concepts doesn't fully understand him. We
need both wings, as Jaspers would say, just to carry us, philosophers
and non philosophers, toward the same limiting point. And it takes all
three wings, nothing less, to form a style, a bird of fire.
Lndeains 53 ( 1 989)
0ê|ÍÍ | V0 • POLITI CS
The problm ofpoltics see to have always be n preet in your intllctual
le. Yor involvet in varous movet (prsone, homosexuals, Italan
autonomists, Paltinians), on the o hand, and the constant probkatizing
ofinstitutions, on the oth folw on fm o anothe and intac with o
another in your wor, fom the bo k on Bur thrugh t the o on Foucul.
Wat ar the rot ofthi sstined cc with the qstion ofpoltc, and
how h it reained so peitt wthin your delng w 1 Wy i the rel
tion btemovemt and intitution alwys prktic1
What I've been interested in are collectve creatons rather than rep
resentatons. There's a whole order of movement in "institutons"
that's independent of both laws and contacts. What I found in Hume
w a very creative conception of insttutions and law. I w initially
more interested in law than politcs. Even with Masoch and Sade what
I liked w the thoroughly tisted conception of contract in Masoch,
and of insttutions in Sade, as these come out in relation to sexualit.
And in the present day, I see Francois Ewald's work to reestablish a phi
losophy oflaw as quite fndaental. What interests me isn't the law or
laws} (the former being an empty notion, the latter uncritical
notons) , nor even law or right, but jurisprudence. It's jurisprudence,
ultimately, that creates law, and we mustn't go on leaving this to judges.
Writers ought to read law reports rather than the Civil Code. People
are already thinking about establishing a system of law for modern
biology; but everything in modern biology and the new situations it
creates, the new courses of events it makes possible, is a matter for
jurisprudence. We don't need an ethical committee of supposedly
well-qualiied wise men, but user-groups. This is where we move fom
law into politics. I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics
around May 68, as I came into contact with specifc problems, through
Guattari, through Foucault, trough Elie Sambar. Anti-Oedipus w
from beginning to end a book of political philosophy.
You took the events of'68 to be the triumph ofthe Untimely, the dawn ofcoun
teractualization.2 Already in the years lading up to '68, in your wor on
Nietzsche and a bit lter in Coldness and Cruelty, you'd gven a new mean
ing to politics-as possibilit, event, singularty. You'd found short-circuits
where the fture breaks through into the present, modiing institutions in it
wake. But the af '68 you take a slightly diff eret aproach: nomadic
thought always takes the temporal for ofinstantaneous counteractualza
tion, whil spatially only "minort becoming i universal. " How shoul O
undtand this univesalit ofthe untimely?
The thing is, I became more and more aware of the possibilit of dis
tinguishing between becoming and history. It was Nietzsche who said
that nothing important is ever free fom a "nonhistorical cloud." This
isn't to oppose eternal and historical, or contemplation and action:
Nietzsche is talking about the way things happen, about events them
selves or becoming. What history grasps in an event is the way it's actu
alized in particular circumstances; the event's becoming is beyond
the scope of history. History isn't experimental,3 it's just the set of
more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experi
ment with something beyond history. Without history the experi
mentaton would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial condi
tions, but experimentation isn' t historical. In a major philosophical
work, Clo, Peguy explained that there are to ways of considering
events, one being to follow the course of the event, gathering how it
comes about historically, how it's prepared and then decomposes i
history, while the other way is to go back into the event, to take one's
place in it as in a becoming, to grow both young and old in it at once,
Control and Becoming • 1 71
going through all its components or singularities. Becoming isn' t part
of history; history amounts only the set of preconditions, however
recent, that one leaves behind in order to "become," tat is, to create
something new. This is precisel what Nietsche calls the Untimely.
May 68 was a demonstration, an irruption, of a becoming in its pure
state. It's fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolu
tion. It's nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflec
tions on Cromwell very similar t present-day reflections on Stalin.4
They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confsing
two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and peo
ple's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of
people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only
way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.
A Thousand Plateaus, which I regard as a major philosohical work, seems
to me at the same time a catalogue ofunsolved problms, most particularly in
the fel ofpolitical philosohy. Its pairs ofcontrasting terms-rocess and pro
ject, singulart and subect, composition and organization, lines offlight and
apartuses/strtegies, micro and maco, and so on-all this not only
remains forever oen but it's constantly bing reoened, through an amazing
will to theorize, and with a violence reminiscent ofheetical proclmations. I've
nothing against such subverion, quite the reverse . . . But I seem sometimes t
hear a trgc note, at points where it's not clar where the "war-machine" i
I' m moved by what you say. I think F eIi Guattari and I have remained
Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see,
we think any politcal philosophy must turn on the analysis of capital
ism and the ways it has developed. What we fnd most interesting in
Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that's con
stant overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against
them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is
Capital itself. A Thousand Plateaus sets out in many different direc
tions, but these are the three main ones: frst, we think any society is
defined not so much by its contradictions as by its lines of flight, it
flees al over the place, and it's very interesting t try and follow the
lines of fight taking shape at some particular moment or other. Look
at Europe now, for instance: western politicians have spent a great
deal of effort setting it all up, the technocrats have spent a lot of effort
getting uniform administration and rules, but then on the one hand
there may be surprises in store in the form of upsurges of young peo
ple, of women, that become possible simply because certain restric
tions are removed (with "untechnocratizable" consequences) ; and on
the other hand it's rather comic when one considers that this Europe
has already been completely superseded before being inaugurated,
superseded by movements coming from the East. These are major
lines of fight. There's another direction in A Thousand Plateaus,
which amounts to considering not just lines of fight rather than con
tradictions, but minorities rather than classes. Then finally, a third
direction, which amounts to finding a characterization of "war
machines" that's nothing to do with war but to do with a particular
way of occupying, taking up, space-time, or inventing new space
times: revolutionary movements (people don't take enough account,
for instance, of how the PLO has had to invent a space-time in the
Arab world) , but artistic movements too, are war-machines in this
You say there's a certain tragic or melancholic tone in all this. I
think I can see why. I was very struck by all the passages in Primo Levi
where he explains that Nazi camps have given us "a shame at being
human. " Not, he says, that we're all responsible for Nazism, as some
would have us believe, but that we've all been tainted by it: even the
survivors ofthe camps had to make compromises with it, i only to sur
vive. There's the shame of there being men who became Nazis; the
shame of being unable, not seeing how, to stop it; the shame of hav
ing compromised with it; there's the whole of what Primo Levi calls
this "gray area." And we can feel shame at being human in utterly triv
ial situations, too: in the face of too great a vulgarization of thinking,
in the face of TV entertainment, of a ministerial speech, of 'jolly peo
ple" gossiping. This is one of the most powerful incentives toward phi
losophy, and it's what makes all philosophy political. In capitalism
only one thing is universal, the market. There's no universal state,
precisely because there's a universal market of which states are the
centers, the trading floors. But the market's not universalizing,
homogenizing, it's an extraordinary generator of both wealth and
misery. A concern for human rights shouldn't lead us to extol the
Control and Becoming • 1 73
'joys" of the liberal capitalism of which they're an integral part.
There's no democratic state that's not compromised to the very core
by its part in generating human misery. What's so shameful is that
we've no sure way of maintaining becomings, or still more of arousing
them, even within ourselves. How any group will turn out, how it will
fall back into history, presents a constant "concern."5 There's no
longer any image of proletarians around of which it's just a matter of
becoming conscious.
How can minort becoming be poweful? How can resistance become an insur
rection? Reading you, I'm nee sure how to answer such questions, een
though I always fnd in your works an impetus that forces me to reormulat
the questions theoretically and practically. And yet when I read what you've
wrtten abot the imagnation, or Ü common notions in Spinoza, or when I
follow your descption in The Time-Image ofthe rse ofreolutionary cine
ma in third-worl countres, and with you gasp the passage fom image into
fabultion, into political praxis, I almost feel I've found an answer . . . O am
I mistaken? Is thee then, some way for the resistance ofthe op ressed to become
efective, and for what 's intolabl to be denitively removed? Is thee some
way for the mass ofsinglarties and atoms that we all are to com forward as
a constitutive powe or must we rthe acct the jurdical paradox that con
stitutive power can b defned only b constitute powe?
The difference beteen minorities and majorities isn't their size. A
minority may be bigger than a majorit. What defnes the majority is
a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male
city-dweller, for example . . . A minority, on the other hand, has no
model, it's a becoming, a process. One might say the majority is
nobody. Everybody's caught, one way or another, in a minority
becoming that would lead them into unknown paths if they opted to
follow it through. When a minority creates models for itself, it's
because it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive
or prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for
example) . But its power comes from what it's managed to create,
which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn't depend on it.
A people is always a creative minorit, and remains one even when it
acquires a majority: it can be both at once because the to things
� ___
eva& ¶ lUvUKe a people, and fnd they "lack a people":
Mallarme, Rimbaud, Klee, Berg. The Straubs in cinema. Artists can
only invoke a people, their need for one goes to the very heart of what
they're doing, it's not their job to create one, and they can't. Art i
resistance: it resists death, slavery, infamy, shame. But a people can't
worry about art. How is a people created, through what terrible suf
fering? When a people's created, it's through its own resources, but in
a way that links up with something in art (Garrel says there's a mass of
terrible sufering in the Louvre, too) or links up art to what it lacked.
Utopia isn't the right concept: it's more a question of a "fabulation"
in which a people and art both share. We ought to take up Bergson's
notion of fabulation and give it a political meaning.
In yor bok onFoucaul, and the again in your TV intvie at INA,6 you
suget we shoul lok in more detail at three kind ofpoe: soeeig powe
discplnar pow and above aU the contl of"communication" that s on the
wy to bcming hegeonic. O the o hand this third scaro relt to the
most pefect for ofdomination, extding ee to speech and imagnaton,
but on the other hand any man, any minort, any singlrt, is more than
ee bfoe pottialy abl to speak out and thel recove a geat degee of
feedom. In the Marxist utoia ofthe Grundrisse, communism takes prcse
ly the fom ofa transveal organization offee individual built on a tech
nolg that make it possibl. Is communism still a viabl otion? Mayb in a
communiction societ it's lss utoian than it used to b?
We're defnitely moving toward "control" societes that are no longer
exactly disciplinary. Foucault's often taken a the theorist of discipli
nary societies and of their principal technology, confnt (not just
in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks) . But
he w actually one of the frst to say that we're moving away fom dis
ciplinary societes, we've already left them behind. We're movng
toward control societies that no longer operate by confning people
but through contnuous control and instnt communication. Bur
roughs w the frst to address this. People are of course constantly
talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking
down. But they're breaking down because they're fghtng a losing bat-
tle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealth
ily intoduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care hav{
been around for some time. One can envisage education bcoming
less and less a closed site differentiated fom the workspace a anoth·
er closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to fightl con
tinual traning, t continual monitoring7 of worker-choolkids or
bureaucrat-student. They try to present this as a reform of the school
systm, but it's really its dismantling. In a control-based systm noth
ing's left alone for long. You yourself long ago suggested how work in
Italy was being transformed by forms of part-time work done at home,
which have spread since you wrote (and by new forms of circulaton
and distribution of products) . One can of course see how each kind of
societ corresponds to a particular kind of machine-with simple
mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societes, thermo
dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and
computers to control societies. But the machines don't explain any
thing, you have to analyze the collective apparatuses of which the
machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching
forms of ceaseless contol in open sites, we may come to see the harsh
est confnement as pat of a wonderfl happy past. The quest for "uni
versals of communication" ought to make us shudder. It's tue that,
even before contol societes are flly in place, forms of delinquency
or resistance (to diferent things) are alo appearing. Computer pira
cy and viruses, for example, wl replace stikes ad what the nine
teenth century called "sabotage" ("clogging" the machinery). 8 You ak
whether control or communication societes wllead to forms of resis
tance that might reopen the way for a communism undertood a the
"transversal organizaton of fee individuas. " Maybe, I don't know. But
it would be nothing to do with minorites speaking out. Maybe speech
and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly per
meated by money-and not by accident but by their very nature.
We've got to hiack speech. Creating has always been something dif
ferent fom communicatng. The key thing may be to create vacuoles
of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.
In Foucault and in The Fold, procses ofsubectication see to b studied
mre clsely than in som ofyour othe wo. The subect' the bundary ofa
continuous movement btween an inside and outide. Wat are the political
consequenc ofthis conction ofthe subect ? I the subect can't be reducd to
an extalized ctizenship, can it invest citizenship with forc and lie? Can
it make possibl a ne miltant pragatism, at once a pietas toward the worl
and a ver rdical constuct ? Wat politics can cary into history the spln
dor ofeet and subectivit? How can we conceive a communit that h real
forc but no base, that isn't a totalit but is, as in sinoza, absolute?
It defnitely makes sense to look at the various ways individuals and
groups constitute themselves as subjects through processes of subjec
tifcation: what counts in such processes is the extent to which, as they
take shape, they elude both established forms of knowledge and the
dominant forms of power. Even i they in turn engender new forms of
power or become assimilated into new forms of knowledge. For a
while, though, they have a real rebellious spontaneity. This is nothing
to do wit going back to "the subject," that is, to something invested
with duties, power, and knowledge. One might equally well speak of
new kinds of event, rather than processes of subjectcation: events
that can't b explained by te situations that give rise to them, or into
which they lead. They appear for a moment, and it's that moment
that matters, it's the chance we must seize. Or we can simply talk
about the brain: the brain's precisely this boundary of a continuous
two-way movement between an Inside and Outside, this membrane
beteen them. New cerebral pathways, new ways of thinking, aren't
explicable in terms of microsurgery; it's for science, rather, to try and
discover what might have happened in the brain for one to start
thinking this way or that. I think subjectifcation, events, and brains
are more or less the same thing. What we most lack is a belief in the
world, we've quite lost the world, it's been taken from us. If you
believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous,
that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small
their surface or volume. It's what you call pietas. Our abilit to resist
control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our
every move. We need both creativity and a people.
Conversation wth Toni Negri
Futur Anteer 1 (Spring 1990)
Foucault associated discplinar socetes with the eighteenth and nine
teenth centuries; they reach their apogee at the beginning of the
twentieth century. They operate by oranizing major sites of confne
ment. Individuals are always going fom one dosed site to another,
each with its own laws: frst of all the fmily, then school ("ou're not
at home, you know") , then the barracks ("you're not at school, you
know") , then the factory, hospital fom tme to tme, maybe prison,
the model site of confnement. Prison provides a model for the oth
ers: thus the heroine in Euroa 5 I, on seeing the workers, cries out: "I
thought they were convicts . . . .. Foucault has thoroughly analyzed the
ideal behind sites of confnement, dearly seen in the factory: bring
ing everything together, giving each thing its place, organizing time,
setting up in this space-time a force of production greater than the
sum of component forces. But Foucault also knew how short-lived this
model was: it succeeded soveeg soceties with an altogether diferent
aim and operation (taking a cut of producton instead of organizing
it, condemning to death instead of ordering life) ; the transition took
place gradually, and Napoleon seems to have effected the overall
transformation from one kind of societ into the other. But discipline
would in its turn begin to break down as new forces moved slowly into
place, then made rapid advnces after the Second World War: we
were no longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind.
We're in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confine
ment-prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family. The family is
an "interior" that's breaking down like all other interiors-educa
tional, professional, and so on. The appropriate ministers have con
stantly been announcing supposedly appropriate reforms. Educa
tional reforms, industrial reforms, hospital, army, prison reforms; but
everyone knows these institutions are in more or less terminal
decline. It's simply a matter of nursing them through their death
throes and keeping people busy until the new forces knocking at the
door take over. Contrl societies are taking over from disciplinary soci
eties. "Control" is the name proposed by Burroughs to characterize
the new monster, and Foucault sees it fast approaching. Paul Virilio
too is constantly analyzing the ultrarapid forms of apparently free
floating control that are taking over from the old disciplines at work
within the time scales of closed systems. It's not a question of amazing
pharmaceutical products, nuclear technology, and genetic engineer
ing, even though these will play their part in the new process. It's not
a question of asking whether the old or new system is harsher or more
bearable, because there's a conflict in each between the ways they free
and enslave us. With the breakdown of the hospital as a site of con
fnement, for instance, community psychiatry, day hospitals, and home
care initially presented new freedoms, while at the same time con
tributing to mechanisms of control as rigorous as the harshest con
finement. It's not a question of worrying or of hoping for the best, but
of fnding new weapons.
The various placements or sites of confnement through which indi
viduals pass are independent variables: we're supposed to start all
over again each time, and although all these sites have a common lan
guage, it's analgical The various forms of control, on the other hand,
are inseparable variations, forming a system of varying geometry
whose language is digital (though not necessarily binary) . Confne
ments are mols, different moldings, while controls are a modultion,
Postscript on Control Societies •
1 79
like a self-transmutingl molding continually changing from one
moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point
to another. This comes out well in the matter of wages: the factory was
a body of men whose internal forces reached an equilibrium between
the highest possible production and the lowest possible wages; but in
a control society businesses take over from factories, and a business is
a soul, a gas. There were of course bonus systems in factories, but busi
nesses strive to introduce a deeper level of modulation into all wages,
bringing them into a state of constant metastability punctuated by
ludicrous challenges, competitions, and seminars. If the stupidest TV
game shows are so successfl, it's because they're a perfect refection
of the way businesses are run. Factories formed individuals into a
body of men for the joint convenience of a management that could
monitor each component in this mass, and trade unions that could
mobilize mass resistance; but businesses are constantly introducing
an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competiton, a wonderful
motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up
in each of them, dividing each within himself. Even the state educa
tion system has been looking at the principle of "getting paid for
results": in fact, just as businesses are replacing factories, school is
being replaced by cntinuing education and exams by continuous
assessment.2 It's the surest way of turning education into a business.
In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as
you went fom school to barracks, from barracks to factory) , while in
control societies you never fnish anything-business, training, and
military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modu
lation, a sort of universal transmutation. K, already standing at
the point of transition beteen the two kinds of society, described in
The Trial their most ominous judicial expressions: aparent acquittal
(between to confnements) in disciplinary societies, and endlss post
pontt in (constantly changing) control societies are to very dif
ferent ways of doing things, and if our legal system is vacillating, is
itself breaking down, it's because we're going fom one to the other.
Disciplinary societies have to poles: signatures standing for individ
ual, and numbers or places in a register standing for their position in
a mass. Disciplines see no incompatibilit at all beteen these two
aspects, and their power both amasses and individuates, that is, it fash
ions those over whom it's exerted into a body of people and molds the
individuality of each member of that body (Foucault saw the origin of
this twin concern in the priest's pastoral power over his flock and over
each separate animal, and saw civil power subsequently establishing
itself by different means as a lay "pastor") . In control societies, on the
other hand, the key thing is no longer a signature or number but a
code: codes are passwad, whereas disciplinary societies are ruled
(when it comes to integration or resistance) by pects.
The digital
language of control is made up of codes indicating whether access to
some information should be allowed or denied. We're no longer deal
ing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become "divid
ual," and masses become samples, data, markets, or "bank. " Money,
perhaps, best expresses the difference beteen the to kinds of soci
et, since discipline was always related to molded currencies contain
ing gold as a numerical standard, whereas control is based on floating
exchange rates, modulations depending on a code setting sample
percentages for various currencies. If money's old moles are the ani
mals you get in places of confinement, then control societies have
their snakes.4 We've gone from one animal to the other, from moles
to snakes, not just in the system we live under but in the way we live
and in our relations with other people too. Disciplinary man pro
duced energy in discrete amount, while control man undulates, mov
ing among a continuous range of different orbits. Surng has taken
over from all the old spat.
It's easy to set up a correspondence between any societ and some
kind of machine, which isn't to say that their machines determine dif
ferent kinds of society but that they express the social forms capable of
producing them and making use of them. The old sovereign societies
worked with simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks; but recent disci
plinary societies were equipped with thermodynamic machines pre
senting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabo
tage; control societies fnction with a third generation of machines,
with information technology and computers, where the passive dan
ger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination. This tech
nologica development is more deeply rooted in a mutation of capi
talism. The mutation has been widely recognized and can be summa
rized as follows: nineteenth-entury capitalism was concentrative,
directed toward production, and proprietorial. Thus it made the fac
tory into a site of confinement, with the capitalist owning the means of
Postscript on Control Societies • 181
production and perhaps owning other similarly orgaized sites (work
er's homes, schools) . A for markets, they were won eiter through
specialization, through colonization, or through reducing te cost of
production. But capitalism in its present form is no longer dircted
toward production, which is often transferred to remote part o te
Third World, even in the case of complex operations like textile plant,
steelworks, and oil refineries. It's directed toward metaproducton. It
no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells finished products: it
buys fnished products or assembles them from parts. What it seeks to
sell is services, and what it seeks to buy, activities. It's a capitalism no
longer directed toward production but toward products, that is,
toward sales or markets. Thus it's essentially dispersive, wit factories
giving way to businesses. Family, school, army, and factory are no
longer so many analogous but different sites converging in an owner,
whether the state or some private power, but transmutable or trans
formable coded confgurations of a single business where the only
people left are administrators. Even art has moved away fom closed
sites and into the open circuits of banking. Markets are won by taking
control rather than by establishing a discipline, by fxing rates rather
than by reducing costs, by trasforming products rather than by spe
cializing production. Corrupton here takes on a new power. The sales
department becomes a business center or "soul. " We're told business
es have souls, which is surely the most terrifing news in the world.
Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produce: the
arrogant breed who are our masters. Control is short-term and rapid
ly shifting, but at the same time contnuous and unbounded, whereas
discipline was long-term, infnite, ad discontnuous. A man is no
longer a man confined but a man in debt. One thing, it's true, hasn't
changed-apitalism still keeps tree quarters of humanity in extreme
poverty, too poor to have debts and too numerous to be confned: con
trol will have to deal not only with vanishing frontiers, but with mush
rooming shantytowns and ghettos.
We don't have to stray into science fction to fnd a control mecha
nism that can fx the position of any element at any given moment
an animal in a game reserve, a man in a business (electronic tagging) .
Felix Guattari has imagined a town where anyone can leave their flat,
LâC1 DLCCL¡ melr neIghborhood, using their (dividual) electronic
card that opens this or that barrier; but the card may also be rejected
on a particular day, or beteen certain times of day; it doesn' t depend
on the barrier but on the computer that is making sure everyone is in
a permissible place, and efecting a universal modulation.
We ought to establish the basic sociotechnological principles of
contol mechanisms as their age dawns, and describe in these terms
what is already taking the place of the disciplinary sites of confnement
that everyone says are breaking down. It may be that older means of
contol, borrowed from the old sovereign societies, wll come back
into play, adapted as necessary. The key thing is that we're at the begin
ning of something new. In the pon sst the attempt to fnd "alter
natives" to custody, at least for minor ofenses, and the use of elec
tronic tagging to force ofenders to stay at home beteen certain
hours. In the scho l sst forms of contnuous assessment, the impact
of contnuing education on shools, and the related move awy fom
any research in universities, "business" being brught into education
at every level. In the hstal sst the new medicine "wthout doctors
or patents" that identes potental cases and subjects at risk and is
nothing to do with any progress toward indivdualizing treatment,
which is how it's presented, but is the substituton for individual or
numbered bodies of coded "dividual" matter to be controlled. In the
binssst new ways of manipulating money, products, and men,
no longer channeled through the old factory system. This is a farly
limited range of examples, but enough to convey what it means to talk
of insttutons breaking down: the widespread progressive introduc
ton of a new system of domination. One of the most important ques
tions is whether trade unions still have any role: linked throughout
their history to the stuggle against disciplines, in sites of confnement,
can they adapt, or wll they give way to new forms of resistance against
contol scieties? Can one already glimpse the outlines of these ftre
forms of resistance, capable of standing up to marketng's blandish
ments? Many young people have a strange craving to be "motivated,"
they're always asking for special courses and continuing education; it's
their job to discover whose ends these serve, just as older people dis
covered, with considerable difcult, who was benefting from disci
plines. A snake's coils are even more intricate than a mole's burrw.
L'uteJoural l (May 1990)
1. The journal Rchchw started by Guattari in 1 965 as the organ of one
of the many acronym-esignated groups he founded over the course of his
career, the FGERI (Federation des Groupes d'Etude et de Recherches Insttu
tionelles, "grouping of groups for the study of groups" perhaps) . The FGERI
went on to play a major role in the "events" of May 68, notably orchestating
the occupation of the Natonal Theater (dircted by Guattari, Gdar, Julian
Beck, Danny Cohn-Bendit, and others) , where the principls of the "Rolu
ton" were dramatcally debated and enacted in exchanges beteen stage and
foor that ran contnuousl for seeral days and nights. Mer Ma 68, Rcheh
es became a focus for a wide range of "marinal" groups, and in 1 973 Guatari
w prosecuted for "an outrage to public moras" for publishing a special issue
entitled "hree Billion Pervert: Grnd Encyclopedia of Homosexualites."
The opening list of contibutors included Deleuze, his wife Fanny, Foucault,
Sartre, Genet, and the tent-four-year old gay activist Michel Cressole (to
whom the present letter is addressed) . The various contibutons wer
unsigned, but Cressole w presumably the "M, 24 years old" who directed the
opening (and scandalously open) discussion of sexual experiences with Arab
men, "Us and the Arabs," referred to later, and critcized as racist, fscistc, and
oedipal in the second contributon (coauthord by Deleuze, who here, allud
ing to Kka's short story "Aabs andJackals," complains "You're not an Aab,
you're ajackal"?) , as in the closing essay, "Ls Culs enerumenes" ("anatcal
Asses"-in every sense) . Cressole's letter to Deleuze display the su couety
and wounded pride of a spured (and rather oedipal) courthip, ad tis is
reflected in De1euze's occasionally teasing tone (his closing rmak may b
read as "atever people say, I do like you") .
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