Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 04:56:05 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Deleuze's fifth paragraph


	Foucault designates the Athenian city as the first place in which
subjectification was invented: this is because it is, according to the
original definition which he gives to it, the city which invented the
line of forces which runs through the *rivalry of free men*. Now, from
this line which makes it possible for one man to command others, a very
different one branches off which has it that a man who commands free men
has to be seen as a master of himself. It is these optional rules for
self-mastery which constitute subjectification, and this is autonomous,
even if it is subsequently called upon to inspire new powers. One might
wonder if these lines of subjectification do not form the extreme boundary
of a social apparatus [*dispositif*], and if perhaps they sketch the
movement of one apparatus to another, in this sense preparing for 'lines  
of fracture'. And lines of subjectification have no general formula, any
more than the other lines. Though cruelly interrupted, Foucault's research
would have shown that processes of subjectification could take on quite
different forms from the Greek mode: for example in Christian and social
apparatuses [*dispositifs*] in modern societies, and so on. Can one not
think of apparatuses where subjectification does not come about through
aristocratic life or the aestheticised existence of the free man, but
through the marginalised existence of the 'outsider'? Thus the Sinologist
Tokei explains how the liberated slave somehow lost his social status and
found himself thrown back on an isolated, lamenting, *elegiac* existence,
out of which he was to shape new forms of power and knowledge. The study
of the variations in the process of subjectification seems to be one of
the fundamental tasks which Foucault left to those who would follow him. I
believe that there is a great fecundity in this form of research, and that
current projects concerning a history of private life only partially cover
it. The creators of subjectivity can sometimes be the nobles, those who,
according to Nietzsche, say 'we the good...', but in different conditions
they are the excluded, the bad, the sinners, the hermits, or monastic
communities, or heretics: a whole typology of subjective formations in a
moving apparatus. And everywhere there are mix-ups to sort out: the
productions of subjectivity escape from the powers and the forms of
knowledge [*savoirs*] of one social apparatus [*dispositif*] in order to
be reinserted in another, in forms which are yet to come into being.

above passage is from Gilles Deleuze, "What is a *dispositif*"? in _Michel
Foucault: Philosopher_, Routledge, 1992.




<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>><
< John S. Ransom     717-2 <
< Political Science      4 <
^ Dickinson College      5 ^
^ Carlisle, PA 17013     - ^
> ransom-AT-dickinson.edu   1 <
< Denny 107              7 >
<                        1 >
>                        6 ^
><^<>^^<>^<>^<>^^>><<>^<^^<`