Deleuze's Foucault - by Christopher Penfield (Hardcover)

About the Book

How does Deleuze's study of Foucault challenge and deepen our understanding of both philosophers' thought?

Book Synopsis

Christopher Penfield illuminates the philosophical encounter between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, developing the first systematic treatment of Deleuze's book Foucault, originally published in 1986. Using the full spectrum of Foucault's primary texts, as well as new insights and analysis from Deleuze's recently translated and published seminars on Foucault, Penfield identifies and elaborates the two thinkers' shared philosophy of force as the novel conceptual framework of 'virtual force ontology.'

For the field of Foucault studies, where Foucault still meets with misunderstanding, Penfield clarifies and motivates the demanding, highly abstract portrait of Foucault that Deleuze offers; and in demonstrating Deleuze's philosophical reconstruction, unlocks unrealized aspects of Foucault's thought.

For students as well as scholars of Deleuze, Penfield establishes the unique place and importance of Foucault in Deleuze's oeuvre, illuminating the fundamental impact of Foucault on Deleuze and the 'common cause' (Deleuze) that shaped the course of their mutually transformative philosophical relationship.

Review Quotes

In a 1970 review of two recent books by GIlles Deleuze, his friend Michel Foucault ventured that 'perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian.' If there has been any ascendant influence of French philosophy over the past half-century of the critical social sciences and humanities, it has seemingly been that of Foucault's genealogy. Christopher Penfield's book shows that Foucault was, however, nevertheless quite right. If the last half-century has been more Foucauldian, it is only in terms of what are the fundamentally Deleuzeian stakes of Foucault's philosophy. Through a meticulous study of Deleuze's 1986 book on Foucault, Penfield brings into view the transversal reciprocal effect of Deleuze and Foucault and Foucault through Deleuze. It is only through Deleuze that we can understand what Penfield calls "the primacy of practice" in Foucauldian genealogy and the "virtual force ontology" at the heart of the Foucauldian analytics of power.--Colin Koopman, University of Oregon

This is a careful nuanced analysis of one of the most productive intellectual friendships in the history of Western philosophy, between Foucault and his exploration of the relations between power and knowledge and Deleuze and his understanding of the transversal and marginal lines of flight that cross these relations. Christopher Penfield shows the creative force and future potential of these conceptual encounters and the profound and utterly original questions they raise that may enable new ways of thinking and living to be created.--Elizabeth Grosz, Duke University