Foucault: Lecture 14, 04 March 1986

<p><em>The Deleuze Seminars</em> is a collection of audio recordings, transcriptions, and English translations of, and supplemental materials from, the lectures French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave during his career at the University of Paris 8.</p>

<p><span liberation="" sans="" style="font-size:11.0pt;line-height:107%;
font-family:">"Foucault" was a 26-lecture seminar given from October 1985 to June 1986. In these lectures, Deleuze offers his interpretation and analysis of French philosopher Michel Foucault's work. Examining the theoretical foundations and major themes of Foucault's philosophy, Deleuze dedicates several lectures to each of what he calls the "three axes" of Foucault's thought. This seminar coincides with the publication of Deleuze's book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Foucault</i> (1986).</span></p>

<p>In the 4 March 1986 lecture, Deleuze continues discussing power with Foucault’s <i>The Order of Things</i> by rejecting the uproar that Foucault’s supposed “death of man” sentiment raised and reconsidering the previous session’s discussion of the diagrammatic mutation of forces and concomitant changing of forms. Following the appendix to Deleuze’s book on Foucault (titled “On the Death of Man and Superman”), Deleuze proposes three great phases, first, details on the Classical Age, with a contrast between perspectives of Pascal (and “two infinities”) and Spinoza (finding a third infinity, much admired by Leibniz). He then takes up the formations developed by Foucault, notably political economy, philology and biology, but understood in the Classical Age as wealth, general grammar, and natural history. Hence, this era is one of order, with man situated in a place on the corresponding table, with the God-form as that which provides order. Second, in the eighteenth-century, the shift occurs bringing man into contact with different forces of the outside, and for man in the nineteenth century, now conscious of his finitude, his component force enters into relations with external forces of this finitude, hence not his own, but which he proceeds to make his own, notably life, work, language, the triple root of finitude. Tracing these three formations, Deleuze observes that whereas these forms correspond, for example, to watchmaking and to carbon, i.e., to energetic machines, the subsequent age of the man-made machine is the age of silicon. So, Deleuze returns to the “God is dead” statement as a truism, the “man-form” replaced the “God-form”, but what interests Nietzsche, Deleuze argues, is what will replace the “man-form”, leading to the age of the Overman, i.e., toward possible forms beyond the second one, the “man-form”. Deleuze asks, for the next meeting, what would the new forces constitute other than man?<o:p></o:p></p>

<p>This dataset for the new version includes four files, the translation and transcription of the session in Open Data Text (odt) format, an aggregate version of the audio recordings in a single mp3, and the original Paris-8 French transcription of the recorded lecture. The aggregate audio file has been downsampled.</p>

<p>-</p>

<p><em>Les Séminaires de Deleuze</em> sont une collection d'enregistrements audio, de transcriptions et de traductions en anglais et de documents complémentaires des conférences que le philosophe français Gilles Deleuze a donné lors de sa carrière à l'Université de Paris 8.</p>

<p>«Foucault» était un séminaire de 26 conférences donné d'octobre 1985 à juin 1986. Dans ces conférences, Deleuze offre son interprétation et son analyse de l’œuvre du philosophe français Michel Foucault. En examinant les fondements théoriques et les thèmes majeurs de la philosophie de Foucault, Deleuze consacre plusieurs conférences à chacun de ce qu'il appelle les «trois axes» de la pensée de Foucault. Ce séminaire coïncide avec la publication du livre de Deleuze <em>Foucault</em> (1986).</p>

<p>Dans la séance du 4 mars 1986, les sujets de discussion comprennent: le thème de la mort de l'Homme dans <em>Les mot es les choses</em> de Foucault; les rapports des forces comme lieux de mutations perpétuelles; forme comme un composé de forces; les modes d'existence; l'ordre d'infinité; la Pensée Classique, l'Univers infini et la perte du centre; Spinoza; le Mercantilisme: la monnaie, l'échangeabilité des richesse, les tableaux et le déploiement, le coût de l'échange; la grammaire générale; la révolution kantienne: la finitude devient constituante; les forces composantes dans l'homme: vie, travail, langage et forces du Dehors; le XIXe siècle et la forme ‘Homme’; l'âge des machines; le système homme-machine; l'âge du silicium (àpres ceux de l'horlogerie et du carbone); le philosophe et anthropologue allemand Ludwig Feuerbach et la mort de Dieu, et l'effet de ceci sur l'identité humaine; et Nietzsche, la mort de l'Homme, les forces et le Surhomme (<em>Übermensch</em>).</p>