Deleuze's Foucault

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
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