Patricia Ticineto Clough, Deleuze’s Foucault, Coils of the Serpent, issue 6 (2020): Control societies II: Philosophy, politics, economy, pp. 26-32
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When in 2013, I taught a graduate seminar on Foucault at the Graduate Center, CUNY, my introductory lecture for the course was titled “Au Revoir to Deleuze’s Foucault.” Perhaps the lecture title was only a note to myself, a reminder that when earlier in 2006, I taught a graduate seminar on Foucault, I had ended the course with Deleuze’s Foucault, where Deleuze traced the movement in Foucault’s thought from focusing on the archive to focusing on the diagram (cf. Deleuze 1988). Arriving at my last lecture to discuss the book, I announced to the class with much enthusiasm that Deleuze’s Foucault touched exactly on all we had discussed that semester. The blank faces of the students suggested that they had not had the experience I had had reading Foucault. “Whatever could Deleuze be talking about?” students instead responded. If, in 2006, students found Deleuze’s Foucault a mystifying reading of Foucault’s works, the students of the 2013 seminar simply felt no urgency to read it at all. Perhaps I felt the same: Au Revoir to Deleuze’s Foucault.
