From Genealogy to the War Machine: Theorising Resistance with Deleuze and Foucault

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Michel Foucault's work, primarily in his conceptualisations of resistance and the relation between scholarly work and political activism. In this article we will deal with these topics by trying to reconstruct Foucault's understanding of resistance and how scholarly practices contribute to it through the theoretical framework of Gilles Deleuze. In the first segment we will elaborate some of Foucault's basic terms, focusing on the notion of the apparatus. We will rely on Deleuze's reading of Foucault and show how the apparatus bears a strong resemblance to Deleuze's notion of the assemblage. In the second segment we will move on to Foucault's development of the genealogical method in the early 1970s. By relying on Deleuze's notion of ‘nomadic thought’ we will interpret genealogy as a discursive practice which deterritorialises knowledge codes thereby desubjecting individuals and opening up spaces for articulating resistance practices. In the third segment we will rely on Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's notion of the ‘war machine’ to interpret Foucault's understanding of the collective subject of resistance which he develops in the late 1970s. We will conclude with a claim that, by using Deleuze's conceptual apparatus to interpret Foucault's notion of resistance and its relation to scholarly work, we would have drawn an outline for a theory of agency and a model of engaged scholarship related to it.