Power and Resistance: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Althusser

Power and Resistance

Power and Resistance:

Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Althusser

Yoshiyuki Sato

This English-language edition published by Verso 2022

First published in French as Pouvoir et résistance: Foucault, Deleuze,

Derrida, Althusser, Éditions L’Harmattan, Paris, 2007

© Yoshiyuki Sato 2007, 2022

Preface © Étienne Balibar 2007, 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Contents

Preface. Ét ienne Balibar

Introduction

1 The subject and internalized power

2 What is internalization?

3 Trajectory of the text

Part I:

Topic and Economics: Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari

Chapter 1. Topic I (Foucault)

Introduction to Part I

1.1 Double empirico-transcendental operation

1.2 Nietzsche and the thought of the outside

1.3 Aporia of the Foucauldian theory of power

Chapter 2. Economics (Deleuze/Guattari)

2.1 Body without organs and death instinct

2.2 Machinic assemblage and becoming-other

2.3 Subject-group and impersonal desiring power

Chapter 3. Topic II, or Heterogeneous Thought (Foucault)

3.1 The arts of existence as a strategy of resistance

3.2 Turn to the thematic of ethics

3.3 The soul is the prison of the body

3.4 Ethical subjectivation and singularity

3.5 Construction of immanence and anti-pastoral revolution

Appendix 1. Production of the Competitive Subject: Foucault and Neoliberalism

1 Post-Fordist governmentality

2 Neoliberal governmentality

3 Neoliberal subjectivity

Conclusion to Part I. Becoming-other and Becoming-self

Part II:

Becoming of the Structure: Althusser and Derrida

Chapter 4. Death Drive, Contingency, and Resistance (Derrida)

Introduction to Part II

4.1 Lacanian Thing

4.2 Economics of différance

4.3 Primacy of masochism

4.4 Detours of the drive

4.5 Resistance of non-resistance

4.6 Derridian rupture

Chapter 5. Ideology (Althusser)

5.1 A ‘rupture’ with regard to Lacanian theory

5.2 Regional theory and general theory

5.3 Theory of ideology as a theory of discourse

5.4 From psychoanalytic theory to the theory of structural becoming

5.5 Structural causality and contingency

5.6 On ‘specular centration’

Chapter 6. Structure (Althusser)

6.1 Decentration of social formation

6.2 The economic and the political

6.3 Contingency and structural becoming

Appendix 2. From State Apparatus to Power Dispositives: Foucault and Althusser

1 What is a ‘dispositive’?

2 The ‘repressive state apparatus’ in Penal Theories and Institutions

3 State apparatus and disciplinary power in The Punitive Society: from the punitive society to the disciplinary society

4 Disciplinary dispositives and the state apparatus

Conclusion to Part II. Contingency, Materiality

Conclusion. What Is Resistance?

Notes

Index

Preface

Étienne Balibar

This book, which Yoshiyuki Sato publishes under the title of Power and Resistance, is the result of a brilliant PhD thesis on ‘Structuralism and the problem of resistance’, defended at the University of Paris X Nanterre before a jury composed, besides myself, of Judith Butler, Pierre Macherey, Catherine Malabou and Bertrand Ogilvie. It brilliantly testifies to the acuteness, depth and originality of the readings of twentieth-century French philosophy that young foreign, especially Japanese, philosophers are producing today. Their readings bring a freshness, a re-perspective and a re-questioning — and such conditions are ripe to relaunch previously passionate debates at this opportune moment. As a participant in these debates, which I — quite wrongly — believed to have travelled all avenues, it is with great pleasure that I welcome this critical return and relaunch.

Yoshiyuki Sato’s book is characterized both by its fascinating content and by its qualities of form. The author’s extreme condensation here is a sign of mastery, along with the clarity and rigour of the argumentation and the strength of the architectonics. In this essay, not an ounce is too much. Is it all said there? All it takes, for sure, is to investigate what is perhaps the fundamental question raised by structuralism (in the broad sense, including post-structuralism) which has persisted throughout its existence. Sato’s knowledge of the texts and their philosophical background is perfect. From the outset, he establishes the idea of the double comparison — Foucault with Deleuze, Althusser with Derrida — which forms the guiding thread of his work, but this idea revolves and is renewed around two paradoxical questions that arise herein: that of ‘the immanence of resistance to domination’ and that of the contradiction of the Freudian concept of ‘death drive’, key to the relationship of all structuralisms to psychoanalysis. We thus escape any banality, and above all we ensure that the fundamental notion — that of resistance — is effectively problematized.

Sato has constructed a schema with remarkable structural properties: it raises questions rather than just summarizing and classifying answers. Among the formally identifiable questions, some concern the grouping of discourses. Sato is aware of the insistence in contemporary critical discourse of a Derrida–Deleuze (philosophies of difference) grouping against Foucault–Althusser (philosophers of power and conflict). But he prefers a transversal coupling: Foucault with Deleuze (and Guattari), Althusser with Derrida. It is in this way, in particular, that he brings out the singular place of Lacan’s discourse: the other of structuralism, unless it is, rather, its most typical representative, in the sense of a discourse that seems to cancel any possibility of thinking resistance. Sato takes into account the fact that this thesis can be articulated at two levels: on the one hand, the historical and psychological level of political pessimism (‘as revolutionaries, you seek a master: well, you will have one!’); on the other, the transcendental level of a ‘philosophy of destiny’, as Althusser would say, where ‘the excentration of the centre’ (about which Lacan forges the neologism ‘extimacy’, which makes one necessarily think of Saint Augustine) marks forever the impossibility of freeing the subject from the hold of the Other. This demonstration opens up an extraordinary reading of the antithetical relationships of Derrida and Lacan to the texts of Freud, which, in turn, contains the key to the relationship between subjection to structure and subjection to power, or even their identification, in particular, with Foucault, from whom Sato borrows his initial formulations. Finally, the same formal schema, by its inducement of the parallelism between Deleuze–Foucault and Althusser–Derrida, leads us to wonder whether, in this second case too, we are dealing with a sort of ‘second position’ mediated by the confrontation between the discourses, both close and irreducible, of the two philosophers. It is not impossible that the key to this great analogy is to be sought in particular in the philosophy of Judith Butler, used at length here. This explains the interest that Butler, during Yoshiyuki Sato’s viva, showed in his analysis, particularly on the relationship between the problematic of the death drive and the question of the contingency of structures, understood as the uncontrollable rupture of their effects of subjection. A dialogue took shape there, and it is expected to continue.

Among the many questions of interpretation and doctrine discussed in Sato’s essay that I, for my part, would like to continue to reflect on while widening the circle of debate to new participants, I will mention two in particular. They communicate with each other precisely through the intermediary of the profound idea of the ‘new antinomy’, specifically linked to the death drive in both its necessity and its indeterminacy, destruction and conservation of life, and which appears here in the strong sense of ‘lifting [relever]’ the classical (Kantian) antinomy of causality and freedom.

The first concerns the relativization of the opposition between ‘exteriority’ and ‘interiority’, and the central importance of the problematic of activity and passivity in the development of structuralism and its critical elaborations. The paradoxical possibility of an ‘active passivity’ or, better, of a beyond of passivity by means of passivity itself, intended to dismiss the perspective of a purely reactive ‘resistance’, draws a new figure of the transcendental, distinct from what, according to Foucauldian critique of Kant, Sato called the ‘transcendental gaze’. It is regarding Derrida (and therefore, virtually, Althusser) that Sato examines its significance. What about Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari? We are tempted to find here the relevance of the idea of ‘philosophies of difference’ because it is in Deleuze, as well as in Derrida, that the idea of a beyond of passivity — where it becomes resistance (to cruelty, to mastery or to domination) or the idea of a ‘becoming-other’ — is the most explicit. This is where the question arises as to whether the idea of ‘resistance’ is really univocal.

The same remark applies to the most difficult question posed by Derrida’s discourse — at least, in any case, by its presentation here: does the eventual rupture of the time of reproduction necessarily open up to a liberation, to an emergence of justice, or does it still contain the possibility of another outcome, an oppressive and a ‘demoniac’ one, which would mean that it is always necessary to intervene, in the abyss, in a decision or a practical freedom choosing between antinomic possibilities? It is perhaps to avoid this ‘flight forwards [fuite en avant]’ or this reiteration of the political difficulty, ad infinitum, that Althusser maintained, in the face of his other idea of ‘overdetermination’, the idea of ‘determination in the last instance’ in his presentations on the schema of the ‘absent cause’. For, in accordance with Marxist tradition, this last instance ‘guaranteed’ him the correct orientation of history, especially since in fact ‘the hour of last instance never struck’.

We do not labour under the illusion of believing that these speculative questions (but which are also directly linked to ethics and politics) can be definitively ‘settled’. However, the presentation, both clear and subtle, that Yoshiyuki Sato has given them should not remain without effects. I say thank you to him for coming from so far (and yet so close) to bring them to us.

Introduction

1 The subject and internalized power

This book offers a critical reinterpretation of ‘structuralist’ theories of power. But before embarking on this attempt, it is necessary to define ‘structuralist’ thought. In the lecture entitled ‘What Is an Author?’ delivered by Michel Foucault in 1969 — where he advocates a ‘return to the text itself’ (reexamining Freud’s texts modifies, he says, psychoanalysis itself, just as a reexamination of Marx’s would modify Marxism¹) — Jacques Lacan, then present in the room, intervenes as follows:

I would like to point out that, structuralism or not, it seems to me that there is no question anywhere, in the field vaguely determined by this label, of the negation of the subject. It’s about the subject’s dependence, which is extremely different; and especially, regarding the return to Freud, about the subject’s dependence on something really elementary, and which we tried to isolate under the term ‘signifier’.²

Lacan’s remarks provide us with two important perspectives. First, structuralist thought is not a ‘negation of the subject’: it is, rather, that of ‘the subject’s dependence on something really elementary’. By affirming that the subject is formed by the elements that are external to it, this theory privileges the problematic of subject formation. In this sense, it is not a theory of negation of the subject but a ‘theory of the subject’.³ In other words, as Étienne Balibar points out, it is not a simple disqualification of the subject but, a movement of ‘reversal of the constituent subject into constituted subjectivity’, comprised of ‘a simultaneous operation of deconstruction and reconstruction of the subject, or of deconstruction of the subject as arche (cause, principle, origin) and of reconstruction of the subjectivity as effect’.⁴ It thus appears as a theory of constituted subjectivity.

The second point is about ‘something really elementary’. In Lacanian theory, the subject depends on the ‘signifier’ or the ‘signifier of lack’. Influenced by this ‘structuralist’ reading of Freud by Lacan, certain structuralist theories of power substitute ‘internalized power’ for ‘signifier’. In such theories, the subjected subject depends on internalized power.

However, we must immediately note that this substitution never means that internalized power is identical to the signifier. The borrowings of these theories of power from psychoanalytic theory rather concern the mechanism of ‘internalization [Verinnerlichung]’ or ‘introjection [Introjektion] of the object’ (Freud) and the ‘excentric position of the subject’ (Lacan) which follows from this: the subject is determined by ‘something’ it internalizes but which is not under its own control; it is in this sense that the subject is ‘excentric’ in relation to this ‘something’. In the same way that the internalized signifier determines the subject, the internalized power determines the subject, from within the subject itself, through the effect of its internalization. Since the subject itself is constituted by this internalization, it is then ‘excentric’ in relation to the internalized power. This conception is at the heart of the theories of power developed by Althusser, Deleuze/Guattari and Foucault. By way of critical approaches, but undeniably influenced by Lacan’s ‘structuralist’ theory, Althusser theorized the mechanisms of interpellation and ideological recognition/denial [reconnaissance/méconnaissance]; Deleuze/Guattari, those of Oedipal subjection [assujettissement] by the capitalist family system; and Foucault, those of investment and internalization of power achieved by the disciplinary dispositives (dispositifs: the set of power tactics).⁵ These three apparently different theorizations share the same theory of subjection effected by the internalization of power, as well as that of the subject’s ‘excentric’ position. It is in this sense that we denote by ‘structuralist’ theories of power those three theorizations, which all base their approaches on the ‘structuralist’ psychoanalytic theory of Lacan.

If this ‘something really elementary’ (Lacan) corresponds, in these theorizations, to the power that the subject internalizes, is there then a possibility for it to resist this subjection effected by power? This is precisely the question we would like to address in this essay. We can identify the ‘structuralist’ theory of power by the theorization in which the formation of the subject depends on ‘internalized’ power, and the theory seeking resistance to this power will therefore necessarily include the internal critique of this ‘structuralist’ theory as well as its self-transformation. Insofar as the problem of resistance to power implicitly includes the internal overcoming of structuralist thought itself, we will deal with the philosophers who are situated beyond the very domain determined by ‘structuralism’ (notably Deleuze/Guattari and Derrida). We can call this movement of going beyond a ‘post-structuralism’, which can be provisionally defined as a theory of power [pouvoir/puissance] capable of transforming the structure,⁶ but it will suffice here to note that it shares certain problematics (for example, subjectivity constituted as effect, the negation of the arche) with the structuralist movement and that it tries to surpass its limits internally.

Our intention is, it must be repeated, a reinterpretation of ‘structuralist’ thought and an internal overcoming of the problem it postulates. We do not therefore criticize it externally — for example, on the basis of the modern concept of constituent subject (structuralist thought is a ‘regression’ towards the premodern idea, etc.), and therefore do not deduce too easily from it a ‘return to the subject’.⁷ If the question is a ‘return’, it must be, as Foucault pointed out in ‘What Is an Author?’, a return to the text itself: ‘an effective and necessary task of transforming the discursivity itself’,⁸ to which the structuralist thought belongs.

If the thesis of ‘dependence of the subject on power’ results from the way in which psychoanalytic theory — notably Lacanian theory — affects philosophy, then the theory of resistance to power also implies a ‘resistance’ to psychoanalytic theory which postulates the ‘subject’s dependence on something’ and the subject’s ‘excentricity’. The ‘structuralist’ philosophies, affected by psychoanalysis, and this ‘other’ of philosophy were transformed by trying to overcome the problem that the latter raised. In fact, this process constitutes a kind of self-transformation of structuralist thought to include both philosophy and psychoanalysis. In the course of this research, we will often approach psychoanalytic theory critically; however, our intention is never to deny its revolutionary contribution to the renewal of human sciences. The question for us is, rather, to analyse the self-transformation of structuralist thought in relation to psychoanalytic theory.

2 What is internalization?

Before starting to reinterpret ‘structuralist’ theories of power, we must ask a fundamental question: what is the internalization or introjection that produces and reproduces the subject? Freud’s texts provide us here with a framework for reflection. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud analyses the mechanism of the formation of masses by constructing a psychoanalytic theory of the mechanism of power. Considering identification as a mechanism of mass formation, he uses the notion of ‘introjection’: the subject identifies with a certain object by introjecting it into the ego. This process is especially revealed in melancholia:

Another such instance of introjection of the object has been provided by the analysis of melancholia, an affection which counts among the most notable of its exciting causes the real or emotional loss of a loved object. A leading characteristic of these cases is a cruel self-depreciation of the ego combined with relentless self-criticism and bitter self-reproaches.⁹

In short, in melancholia, the subject identifies with the lost object of affection by introjecting it into the ego; by this introjection, the structure of the ego is strangely modified: ‘A leading characteristic of these cases is a cruel self-depreciation of the ego combined with relentless self-criticism and bitter self-reproaches’. In this cruel self-depreciation, ‘the shadow of the object has fallen upon the ego’. But what exactly is going on in the ego by introjecting this lost object? Freud explains:

They [the melancholias] show us the ego divided, fallen apart into two pieces, one of which rages against the second. This second piece is the one which has been altered by introjection and which contains the lost object. But the piece which behaves so cruelly is not unknown to us either. It comprises the conscience, a critical instance within the ego, which even in normal times takes up a critical attitude towards the ego, though never so relentlessly and so unjustifiably. On previous occasions [note: In my paper on narcissism and in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’] we have been driven to the hypothesis that some such instance develops in our ego which may cut itself off from the rest of the ego and come into conflict with it. We have called it the ‘ego ideal [Ichideal]’, and by way of functions we have ascribed to it self-observation, the moral conscience, the censorship of dreams, and the chief influence in repression.¹⁰

Melancholias show ‘the ego divided, fallen apart into two pieces, one of which rages against the second’, writes Freud. The introjection of the lost object thus creates the division of the ego [Ichspaltung], which is observed reflectively and inflicts violence on itself. This analysis allows us to identify two essential points. First, what he calls here the ‘ego ideal [Ichideal]’ is the higher instance of the ego, which regards the lower instance of the ego as the object of ‘self-criticism’ and ‘self-reproach’. It denotes the formation of the reflective subject, whose higher instance watches and controls the lower instance. He will later name the first one ‘superego’, established by the introjection of paternal or parental authority.¹¹ Second, if this system of self-reflectivity arises from the introjection of the lost object, it functions, through this introjection, both independently of the real object and dependently on the internalized object. We can notice here a kind of autonomization of the subject, which depends on the internalized object.

From this principle of introjection, Freud analyses the mechanism of the formation of ‘masses’ such as the army and the Church. He defines the mechanism of introjection as the ‘installation of the object in the place of the ego ideal [Einsetzung des Objekts an die Stelle des Ichideals]’.¹² In this case, the object is introjected and placed at the higher level of the ego, which watches and controls the lower instance in a reflective manner. This analysis leads us directly to that of Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses. According to Althusser, the introjection of the object corresponds to the internalization of the ideological interpellation. By internalizing the ideological interpellation of the ideological state apparatuses, subjects identify with the dominant ideology; by this identification, they ‘work by themselves’ as subjected subjects.¹³ Later in our analysis, we find the same problematic of internalized power in Foucault (Discipline and Punish) and Deleuze/Guattari (Anti-Oedipus). Such ‘structuralist’ theories of power thus construed the introjection of the object in the Freudian sense as the internalization of power.

3 Trajectory of the text

At this point in our reflection, we can thus formulate our fundamental question to reinterpret ‘structuralist’ theories of power: how can the subject resist the power internalized or introjected by ‘itself’?

In Part I of our work, we will consider the theories of Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari as theories of subject formation in their relation to power dispositives. It is within these theories that we will identify the possibility of resistance to these dispositives.

In the first chapter, ‘Topic’, we start from the ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ (the reflective system of the subject), defined by Foucault as the structure of the modern subject. We follow the deconstruction of this ‘doublet’ (which we will name ‘topical subject’) through the Nietzschean ‘thought of the outside’. It is during this process that an aporia of the Foucauldian theory of power emerges, namely the impossibility of resistance to power.

In the second chapter, entitled ‘Economics’, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus allows us to shed light on this Foucauldian aporia from another angle. Their struggle both against and for psychoanalysis indeed offers the possibility of resistance to power. It is in their internal critique of psychoanalytic theory that another concept of subject is to be found: the economic subject that is constantly becoming through its impersonal power [puissance impersonnelle]. This notion of an economic subject suggests a possibility of thinking about the resistance to power that is lacking in Discipline and Punish. This possibility is inscribed in their articulation of libidinal economy to capitalist economy and in their strategy to transform the ‘subjected group [groupe assujetti]’ to a ‘subject-group [groupe-sujet]’.

In the third chapter, we return to Foucault in order to find a strategy of resistance to power in his Kehre [turn] located between the first volume (The Will to Know, 1976) and the second and third volumes (The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, 1984) of The History of Sexuality. For this, we will start — by referring to Bodies That Matter by Judith Butler — from the relationship between the body and the formation of the ego, and we will show that the point of resistance to the ‘reactive ego’ (Deleuze/Nietzsche) formed by disciplinary power resides, in the last Foucault, in the body, the self and the singularity. The issue will therefore be to transform the regulatory structure of the ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ into a heterogeneity in which domination and resistance intersect. We find here a consequence of his internal critique of the Kantian concept of subject.

In Appendix 1, we focus on the Foucauldian analysis of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79) in order to define neoliberal governmentality as the production of competition and the modality of the neoliberal subject as a competitive subjectivity. Then, in the conclusion to Part I, we seek a strategy of resistance in the era of neoliberalism.

Our objective in Part I consists in looking for a modality of resistance to the power dispositives that produce and reproduce the subjected subject. However, these dispositives produce and reproduce not only the subjected subject, but also the structure or social formation. Around this point, we must therefore reflect on the thought of the ‘rupture’ — what we call the theory of structural change — which resists the reproduction of the structure itself. This theory of structural change must be posed with the ‘theory of the subject’, since the subject is included, as a minimal structured element, in the structure of the social formation itself. In Part II, we will thus analyse, in the thoughts of Derrida and Althusser, this other modality of resistance that can achieve structural change.

In the fourth chapter, we consider the problem of contingency and resistance in Derrida by referring to his analysis of the drive, particularly the death drive in the Freudian sense. Our reflection then takes two directions. First, by referring to the Derridian theory, we show that the Lacanian theory cannot conceive the problem of structural change and of contingency, and it is indeed by altering this theory that Derrida himself endeavours to conceive it. Second, Derrida analyses power from the question of ‘drive’ (‘drive for domination: Bemächtigungstrieb’), and considers the problem of resistance and structural change in relation to the notion of ‘death drive’. We therefore elucidate, by referring to Freud’s texts, the two antinomic modalities of the death drive (that which threatens human life and that which resists this very cruelty of the drive), and then we will show how resistance in the Derridian sense (gift, forgiveness, hospitality) is linked to these two modalities. This reflection ultimately convenes the analysis of Specters of Marx around the thematic of event and rupture.

Returning to our analysis of the contingency and alteration of Lacanian theory in Derrida, we address, in the fifth and sixth chapters, the issue of the causality of structural change and contingency in Althusser. The fifth chapter is devoted to the theory of ideological interpellation, which produces and reproduces the subjected subject and social formation. We show here how the contingent factor intervenes, as a ‘deviation’ of the interpellation, in the process of the ideological interpellation/introjection. The aim of this argument is to shed light on the way in which Althusser intervenes in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and modifies, even materializes, its theoretical dispositives.

This analysis of the contingent ‘deviation’ of the ideological interpellation is linked, in the sixth chapter, to the problem of the causality of structural change. We argue that the theory of causality of structural change is conceptualized and developed, as a consequence of a singular reading of Marx’s texts by Althusser, in relation to contingency (perturbation and deviation from the law). Our intention is to show how social formation — namely, structure — constantly reproduced by the power dispositives in a repetitive manner, can be altered by the eruption of an ‘other’ in relation to the law of reproduction.

In Appendix 2, we return to Foucault in order to analyse Penal Theories and Institutions (1972–73) and The Punitive Society (1973–74), two lecture courses influenced by and confronting Althusser. In this analysis, we see that Foucault created the notion of ‘disciplinary power’ and ‘power dispositives’ as his response to Althusserian theory of state apparatuses and reproduction. Through such reflection, we examine the relation of disciplinary power to the state apparatus.

Finally, in the conclusion to Part II and the general conclusion, we define the post-structuralist strategies of resistance in Foucault, Deleuze/Guattari, Derrida and Althusser to de-subject the subjected subject and transform the capitalist structure — in other words, to realize the ‘anti-pastoral revolution’.

* * *

This essay was originally written as a doctoral thesis submitted at the University of Paris X Nanterre in 2004. The English edition is the revised and enlarged version (with two appendixes) written in 2020–21. I sincerely thank Étienne Balibar, director of my thesis; without his support and our many discussions, this work would not exist. I also thank Akira Asada, Judith Butler, Yves Duroux, Yoshihiko Ichida, Pierre Macherey, Catherine Malabou and Bertrand Ogilvie, who read my work and gave me detailed and precise advice. This work has also been realized with the support of my friends, to whom I address my gratitude for their reactions, their suggestions and their advice — among others, Livio Boni, Mathias Lavin, Izumi Sekizawa, Masaaki Takeda and Jun Fujita Hirose.

This publication was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research of JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science).

Part I

Topic and Economics:

Foucault and

Deleuze/Guattari

1

Topic I (Foucault)

Introduction to Part I

During the 1960s and 1970s, structuralist thought radically changed the dominant perspective on the theory of power, notably in the apprehension of its relation to the subject. Until that time, in fact, most of these theories were based on the ‘repressive hypothesis’,¹ where power is identified with the repressive state apparatus that alienates and oppresses the original nature of the subject, while ‘structuralist’ theories, for their part, would focus on the productivity of power, which is supported by the ‘dispositives [dispositifs]’² within the social field: it is the power dispositives which produce and reproduce the docile subject. These dispositives correspond, in Althusser, to ‘ideological state apparatuses’; in Foucault, to ‘disciplinary power’; and in Deleuze/Guattari, to the ‘Oedipal family’. ‘Structuralist’ analysis thus revealed the productivity of power that was lacking in the ‘repressive hypothesis’. In this sense, they constructed more detailed theories to analyse the mechanism of power.

There seems to be, however, an aporia in these ‘structuralist’ theories of power. If the subject is effectively ‘produced’ by the power dispositives, then it is passively determined by power. This is how Althusser defines structuralism as a variant of formalism; its particularity is the suppression of the subject and the virtual existence of the truth in the object (namely, the formal structure), which can be formulated as a variation of the invariant (Subject = Object) = Truth:

( = Object) = Truth (formalist-structuralist variant)³

If we apply this schematization to ‘structuralist’ theories of power, the subject is in fact removed from the relation to power and all productivity is then found in the ‘object’, namely the power:

( = Object) = Power (‘structuralist’ variant of power)

The suppression of the subject therefore means that of its productivity in relation to power, or even the ‘subject’s dependence’ (Lacan) with regard to power. The subject then becomes, as an object produced by the power dispositives, incapable of resisting the productive mechanism of power. Thus the impossibility of thinking about the subject’s resistance to power: how can ‘structuralist’ theories of power overcome this aporia?

In Part I, we analyse this impossibility and we will seek, within the very thought of Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari, the possibility of overcoming this aporia. These ‘dramas’ of thought will lead us into the difficult endeavour of constructing a new concept of subject which will replace the existing modern concept. We first consider Foucault’s attempt