Last 2014-2015 POBICS seminary: "La Subjetivación", Gilles Deleuze, course about Michel Foucault

Today, we have finished our calendary of seminaries with the last Deleuze's book about Foucault: "La Subjetivación". Undoubtedly, this course has been very important to us due to the great set of concepts, arguments and claims given by Deleuze to understand Foucault's work, but also in order to think about some key concepts in Social Critical Psychology like Power, Subjectivity or another importants philosophic concepts from Kant or Heidegger. 

The two axes around we have talked has been these two-ones:

- What is the subjectivity? It is more than a fold, but what?

- If between power and knowledge there is a actual-virtual relationship, and the subjectivity is a third axis, which is not actual or virtual; then, what is it and what kind of relationship has with the other two ones?

So, we will present as normally we do, the main ideas we have pointed out:

What is properly Foucault, is the answer to the emptiness that causes questions about: what lies beyond the power? What is characteristic of Deleuze would be the explanation about the outside points and its origin in line outside.

Deleuze breaks with the widespread conception of what Foucault calls subjectivity: subjectivity is not knowing, nor is power; It comes from the diagram (power relations), but is independent of them: they are three different ontologies (Knowledge, Power and Subjectivity). But, what is subjectivity then? "The art of itself". Subjectivity comes from the Greek diagram, and then the fold occurs. But within the fold there are not things, no content: there is memory, the absolute memory. Greeks created the possibility that  individuals could be a totality in itself (absolute memory, Bergson's memory concept).

History is a succession of events, but the memory are the conditions to establish relationships between those events. We can have the whole data at the time, but we have all the conditions to establish relationships between these events, i.e, a logic that allows you to understand the History in a particular way, like the rest of the people of your age, you understand the things one way (for instance. 2 + 2 may be 4, and nothing else). This is the absolute memory Bergson.

Westerners have added to the memory of our times the truth (the truth of sexuality, the truth of knowledge ...). In our time we can not think without truth. Subjectivity therefore is not a set of content.

The time that Foucault gives tosubjectivity is much larger than the that one given to power or knowledge. This, restructure Power and Knowledge regarding Subjectivity: the outside line is here, do not look away because in the distance there is only diagrams: subjectivity is more basic than Knowledge and Power (subjectivity becomes autonomous from these two, and them try to catch subjectivity changing more often than this last one, and therefore , being subordinated to subjectivity, it is becomes central (although it not borns before the others one).

So, in this sense...

Knowledge: actual

Power: virtual

Subjectivity: memory

If the resistance points  are singularities or subjectivities, we can talk about micro-practices of subjectivity with the equipment-concept given by Foucault. It is the way given by Foucault in order to convert logos in ethos, as the ethos would be an individual micro-subjectivity.

To govern itself is disengaging from Power and from Knowledge: you become you in your own world.

In the fold the is the unthinkable of thinking: the unthinking are the conditions to think (the absolute memory, conditions, logic); not only the thought (that would be the contents).

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Brande Jackson.