Continental Philosophy Review 36: 113–138, 2003.

© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

FORMS Printed in the Netherlands.
OF RESISTANCE 113

Forms of resistance: Foucault on tactical reversal and

self-formation

KEVIN THOMPSON
Department of Philosophy, DePaul University, Chicago, IL 60614-3522, USA

Abstract. This paper argues that two distinct models of resistance are to be found in Foucault’s
work. The first, “tactical reversal,” is predicated on the idea that conflict is inherent to power
relations, the strategical model of power, and thus that a specific configuration of power and
knowledge can be thwarted by reversing the mechanisms whereby this relation is sustained.
The second, the “aesthetics of existence,” is based in the governmental model of power and
holds that it is possible to forge autonomous forms of life in and through such techniques of
governance. I argue that Foucault came to favor the latter of these two alternatives because
the model of power underlying resistance as tactical reversal proved insufficient both his-
torically and conceptually. It was thus on this basis that he was able to work out the govern-
mental conception of power relations and thereby accord a fundamental role to the concept
of resistance as autonomy or self-formation. The key to understanding how this project is not
only practical, but is also our obligation lies in the “genealogy of the critical attitude” that
Foucault was developing in his final years.

“Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently,

this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.”1

Perhaps no other remark in Foucault’s corpus has provoked as much discus-

sion. Surely, none has become, as this one has, the locus classicus for assess-
ing the possibility of a critical stance within his thought. In what follows I
want to show that though Foucault never abandoned the essential interweav-
ing of power and resistance that he proclaimed in this provocative line, the
concept of resistance at issue in it did undergo a profound shift, one that strikes
at the very heart of the problem of critique. The reason for this transforma-
tion, I shall argue, lies in a fundamental change in the conception of power
itself. In order to see this we need to begin by briefly setting the context within
which the question of resistance emerges in Foucault’s thought.
In his final years, Foucault came to see the entirety of his work as organ-
ized around two basic problems: the constitution of human beings as subjects,
on the one hand, and the struggle to extricate their capacities from increas-
ingly rigid forms of power relations, on the other. Now, of course, few would
deny that these issues stand at the very core of Foucault’s thought; few would
114 KEVIN THOMPSON

also deny that Foucault held them to be deeply interconnected. The trouble
has always been to define the problematic that served as the motivating con-
cern behind these seemingly quite disparate projects.
Though it has generally been neglected, even by many of Foucault’s most
astute readers, the answer to this problem is nonetheless rather simple. Foucault
sought, throughout his work, to understand how we came to want our own
subjection and his ultimate goal was to identify the resources that might en-
able us effectively to contest this disposition. In a word, the problem at the
core of Foucault’s thought is fascism, both as a historical political system and
as a contemporary mode of existence.2 And it is the desire to comprehend the
ever increasing complexities of this phenomenon that unites the apparently
divergent trajectories of his research. Perhaps the best descriptive title he ever
provided for this project was the “Critique of Political Reason” (DE IV, p. 134;
EW III, p. 298). Foucault invoked the concept of critique, he said, not in the
standard Kantian conception of reason’s self-examination, its placing of it-
self before its own tribunal, but in the sense in which Kant defined enlighten-
ment as an exiting from one’s immaturity and thus as an analysis of the specific
rationalities embedded in heteronymous practices of excessive political ad-
ministration and discipline. Foucault’s pursuit of such investigations showed
that the historically most developed fascist state had been born in the cruci-
ble forged by the antinomic rationalities of totalization and individualization
and that it is this antinomy that continues to give birth to the ever more subtle
microfascisms of contemporary life. The need to create and sustain forms of
existence that would counter the reign of this antinomy, forms of life that would
be, at once, genuinely shareable and non-fascistic, was thus the impetus for
the critique of political reason. Hence, the problem: how is resistance possi-
ble and what could it be if the arena within which it must be created is itself
defined by the very antinomy that it is seeking to contest? 3
In what follows I argue that two distinct responses to this problem are to
be found in Foucault’s work. The first, which he called the “tactical reversal”
of the mechanisms of power, held that the conflicts that are necessarily in-
trinsic to all power relations could nonetheless thwart particular arrangements
of such relations; while the second, the “aesthetics of existence” or the “care
of the self,” maintained that only autonomous forms of life genuinely chal-
lenge configurations of power and that such forms can only be forged in and
through heteronymous processes and structures. The aim of the essay is to show
that Foucault’s final position favored the latter of these two alternatives (the
“care of the self”) and that the research of his final years was devoted to
working out precisely how this option could be the basis for genuinely non-
fascistic forms of sociality. The argument rests on three claims: (1) Foucault
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 115
rejected the model of tactical reversal because it is predicated on a concep-
tion of power that he judged to be insufficient on both historical and concep-
tual grounds; (2) the shift to the model of the “care of the self” occurred because
it enabled Foucault to get at the subtle mechanisms of power and because it
accorded the concept of autonomy what he believed was its historically cen-
tral role in resistance; and finally (3) being autonomous, for Foucault, is made
possible in and through heteronymous practices and doing this requires iso-
lating the capacity of these practices to facilitate the stylization of existence,
what I shall call their generative core, from their imposition of docile forms
of individuality, what I term their productive cast. The nerve of the argument
centers around the concepts of freedom and critique.4 Accordingly, the project
on which Foucault was working in the last years before his death, a “geneal-
ogy of the critical attitude,” will play a crucial role in the analyses that fol-
low.
The discussion is divided into three parts. The first sketches the concept of
tactical reversal, along with the strategic conception of power upon which it
is based, and identifies the impetus for Foucault’s rejection of this model of
resistance (1). The second discusses Foucault’s account of self-formation and
the governmental view of power that underlies it (2). The final part deals with
the problem of the relationship of autonomy and heteronomy that arises out
of this view (3).

1. The strategic

I want to take Foucault’s analysis of Nazism as our point of departure. This

form of state racism stands as one of the organizing problematics of the His-
tory of Sexuality project and it will thus enable us concretely to see the politi-
cal stakes of Foucault’s first account of resistance.
In the famously neglected Part V of La volonté du savoir, “Right of Death
and Power over Life,” Foucault claims that the political regime of German
fascism arose precisely at the historical juncture at which two distinct con-
figurations of power and knowledge penetrated one another.5 The first, the
deployment of alliance, which arose in the thirteenth century, was the con-
stellation of laws that maintained and insured the continuance of kinship re-
lations, and the second, the deployment of sexuality, which emerged in the
eighteenth century, was the ensemble of techniques that incited and prolifer-
ated the pleasures and impressions of the flesh. Historically, the governing
principle of alliance was blood and the political regime that marked its domi-
nance was the sovereign authority over death. The concern of this deployment
116 KEVIN THOMPSON

was nothing less than uniting and ordering all those under its governance through
the bonds of familial descent. As such, it was an operation of totalization. The
principle at work in sexuality, on the other hand, was life and the regime that
marked its emergence was the administration of populations. The defining aim
of this ensemble was the forging of social unity through the specification of
fundamental identities and the construction of governable typologies. It was
thus an operation of individualization. From this, Foucault was able to argue
that Nazism was the result of a unique combination of these distinctive strat-
egies. As a process of individualization, it sought to construct society in ac-
cordance with an eugenic taxonomy, a form of administrating populations that
had recently arisen under the sway of the deployment of sexuality. This tech-
nology, in turn, functioned under the guidance of the legal exaltation of a
superior blood, a higher breed of alliance, a process of totalization. The tech-
nologies of total domination that were perfected in the concentration camps
of the National Socialist regime – the laboratories for what Foucault calls the
“Hitlerite politics of sex” – together with the ultimate genocidal blood bath
to which they gave rise was thus, for him, one of the most profound instances
of the union of rationality and power under the antinomy of totality and indi-
viduality. That these same principles continue to govern our political orders
and social lives, that, in short, microrationalities of fascism still persist in our
thought and in our conduct, moved him to proclaim that the central task of
contemporary life was to understand how a counterattack against the deploy-
ment of sexuality could be carried out.
The answer, he believed, was to be found in what he called a “tactical re-
versal of the various mechanisms of sexuality” (VS, p. 208/157). By this he
meant that the specific procedures dictated by the deployment of sexuality as
a general strategy could be turned against the deployment itself and, when
carried sufficiently far enough, could eventually even thwart its reign. The pos-
sibility that such a reversal could be something other than just a reconfiguration,
that is to say that it could be something more than just a redistribution at the
tactical level, lay in the interdependence of tactical relations and strategical
design, what Foucault called the “rule of double conditioning” (VS, pp. 131–
132/99–100). With this principle we come to the very center of Foucault’s ac-
count of the strategic conception of power relations. Let us thus now turn to
that discussion.
The innovation of the strategic conception of power was to show that tra-
ditional hierarchical relations – relations such as the state in its sovereign au-
thority over its citizens, the law in its rule over the domains of property and
action, and the domination of various social groups over others – did not op-
erate, when examined more closely, as the classical account of power, what
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 117
Foucault dubbed the “juridico-discursive” (VS, p. 109/82) theory, would have
it. According to the standard model, such relations were said to be sustained
by the possession of power by one side over the other. On closer inspection,
however, these hierarchies prove to be nothing other than ossified forms of
moving and ever changing sets of unequal, anarchic force relations. On this
view then, power is defined as a process of continual struggle immanent within
a variety of different sorts of social relations (economic, epistemic, pedagogi-
cal, erotic, etc.). These relations function as the undergirding support and lines
of negotiation on and around which social nexuses are articulated. Though
the overall ensemble of such force relations is not itself the result of coordi-
nated planning, the forces at work are intentional and they thus form a dis-
cernible rationality, a strategy of procedures and aims, in and through their
interactions. In this sense, the general order of force relations is amenable to
analysis and evaluation. These configurations are historically specific struc-
tures or regimes, what Foucault calls dispositifs (deployments, apparatuses),
and it is in accordance with these that a basic social order coalesces. Conse-
quently, the task of an analytics of power, for Foucault, is twofold: on the one
hand, it must seek to understand the nature of the force relations as they op-
erate in their historical specificity, that is to say, its work is to identify the
historical deployments, or epochal shifts, in force relations as they imbue
economic, social, cultural, and epistemic relations; on the other hand, its task
is to investigate the unique ways in which these historical ensembles have
crystallized into what have seemed to be the generally rigid and intransigent
hierarchical relations of the state apparatus, the legal regime, and social strati-
fication.
Now if power is to be understood relationally, and such relations are de-
fined by constantly shifting states of disequilibrium, resistance cannot be
conceived as opposed to power, as it has traditionally, but instead must be
thought as intrinsic to it: “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet,
or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in
relation to power” (VS, pp. 125–126/95). This means, Foucault tells us, not
that power is some inescapable, all encompassing institution, but rather that
it is precisely relational and that this entails both adversarial as well as sup-
portive lines between forces. In short, power relations are relational to the
extent that the ascendancy of one force is resisted by the exercise of another.
And this can take a variety of forms. In the classic and most obvious cases, an
ascendant force can be opposed by a genuine enemy, an adversary, or by some-
thing that the ascending force targets for eradication or domination. But rela-
tions of power obey no general form of binary opposition, no simple and
universal division between rulers and the ruled, principles and punishment,
118 KEVIN THOMPSON

oppressors and the oppressed. There is resistance in purely instrumental or

even in supportive relationships. What these relations all have in common is
the element of friction, of something, even when it is employed effectively
by something else, nonetheless presenting a plane to be overcome, a recalci-
trance to being exercised in a specific way, for a specific set of purposes. For
Foucault then, resistance of varying types, multiple sorts of struggles and
frictions, is what constitutes force relations precisely as, what he terms, a “play
of nonegalitarian and mobile relations” (VS, p. 123/94).
The concept of critique that Foucault develops during this period flows
directly from his recognition of the way in which struggle is necessarily in-
trinsic to the constitution of such power relations. He begins again with the
juridical model. On this view, critique was thought to serve as a corrective to
the control maintained through the possession of power; critical discourse was
conceived as a legislating voice, speaking the truth to power, helping to work
out the liberation of those under the sway of power’s domination. In a word,
it was negative, the great refusal of enslavement. But just as the concept of
rigid hierarchy, upon which this account of critique is based, proved to be
rooted in the deeper shifting configurations of acting and resisting forces, so
too does the source of the traditional understanding of critique lay in another
way of conceiving the critical stance.6
Foucault holds that a critical voice can arise at those points within the web
of force relations where resistance to employment by an ascending force is
greatest. A general trajectory or orientation, a strategy, arises in the midst of
each force pursing its own ends. The tactics of power relations cannot func-
tion unless they enter into such a general scheme of coordination; their com-
patibility depends on this. The tactical and the strategic thus condition one
another, the strategic acts as the fundamental structure enabling the forces to
exercise themselves in consistent and relatively stable patterns; the tactical is
the support insuring and providing the limiting concreteness for the aims of
the strategic. As we noted above, Foucault refers to this relation as the “rule
of double conditioning” (cf. VS, pp. 131–132/99–100) and the significance
of it for the concept of critique is that as a result of it a struggle exercised merely
at a local point of resistance can, when carried far enough, not only challenge
the ascendancy of the force against which it is resistant, but can also call into
question the very system of coordination itself. Put more simply, a tactical
conflict can become, without itself necessarily intending to be, a tactical re-
versal that provides a basis for beginning to break the grips of the deployment
under which it operates.
It is in these terms that Foucault considers two forms of critical resistance
that arise under the deployment of sexuality: the “historico-political critique
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 119
of sexual repression,” which emerged in the interwar period around the psy-
choanalytic work of Wilhelm Reich (VS, pp. 172–173/130–131),7 and the
counterattack, whose “rallying point” is “bodies and pleasures” (VS, pp. 207–
208/157), with which La volonté du savoir concludes. Foucault refers to both
forms of critique as carrying out tactical reversals. However, the former, the
infamous “great sexual sermon” (VS, p. 15/7), is inadequate because it oper-
ates wholly within the strategy of sexuality, accepting its terms and aims, and
defining itself as seeking to overturn the repressive obstacles to sexual lib-
eration. What makes the move to “bodies and pleasures” preferable, for
Foucault, is that this form of resistance provides a grid of analysis that ena-
bles one to account for the deployment of sexuality itself. It thus presents a
fundamental challenge to this structure and, in so doing, provides a basis for
a movement to dismantle this historical constellation. More precisely, as sexu-
ality seeks to define the surface in terms of the depth, the body in terms of
sex, pleasures in terms of desire, a resistance builds, one whose friction with
the smooth operation of the mechanisms of this strategy can open a fissure, a
“rallying point,” from which the strategic itself might lose its support and
thereby be brought to a state of crisis. This, in turn, can precipitate a break
with the deployment of sexuality and with the embrace that its aims and pro-
cedures have had over our bodies, our pleasures, and our lives. In this way,
accounting for sexuality marks out its fundamental points of constitution and
thereby its possible lines of fracture. The tactical reversal wrought by the af-
firmation of “bodies and pleasures” over sex and desire can thus enable an
epochal shift gradually to commence. On this model, critique is resistance that
is, at once, historically situated, local and specific, and politically effective, a
challenging of the reign of the strategic as a whole from within this reign it-
self. To engage in critique is thus to carry out a vigilant countering of a spe-
cific sort of force’s emergence and its striving to fix itself such that, in the
end, this struggle brings into question the system of coordination of which
this force is but one part.
This, in its essentials, is the strategic conception of power and the theory
of critical resistance that it entails. And it is this account that has not only played
the foil for most of the critical appraisals of Foucault’s work, but also pro-
vided the paradigm for those who have sought to carry on and extend his
enterprise. Yet, precisely during the period in which Foucault’s research was
beginning to be taken up in so many important and diverse ways, he was him-
self already starting to rethink the strategic model of power relations and its
conception of critique. The clearest and most elaborate public formulation of
this transformation came in the essay entitled “The Subject and Power” (1982).
But already in the lecture courses of 1976 and 1978 the motive for this pro-
120 KEVIN THOMPSON

found change is plainly at work.8 Stated most succinctly, Foucault came to

see that the strategic model was, in the end, incapable of accounting for the
actual historical workings of social power, and that it likewise failed to cap-
ture the necessarily creative character of resistance and critique. The root
problem, Foucault maintained, lay in conceiving power in terms of fundamen-
tally negative relations.
As we have seen, the strategic model revolved around showing that the
seemingly rigid hierarchies that conventionally define social orders are actu-
ally constituted by constantly shifting force relations. What defined these sorts
of relations was that the forces stood in relation to one another directly; they
were always, so to speak, face-to-face encounters. The exercise of one force
instigated, in reaction, whether for cooperation or confrontation, the exercise
of another. This meant, Foucault argues, that the friction of resistance inher-
ent in force relations is always reactive and, as such, restrictive. The ascend-
ing force directly dictates the course of the relation to which the responding
force can answer. Consequently, the agenda of resistance, on this model, is
always determined by its engagement with an ascending force; its only op-
tions are to comply with or refuse the challenge. No room is left for a concept
of action without an object directly instigating it, what Foucault came to call
the “intransitivity of freedom” (DE IV, p. 238; EW III, p. 342 [translation
modified]).
Foucault’s recognition of this critical deficiency led him to rethink the stra-
tegic model of power relations. In essence, he moved from one form of agonism
to another, from a direct struggle to an indirect contest. On the strategic con-
ception, any response to the work of one force by another that did not con-
form to the model of the face-to-face confrontation would simply not count
as a power relation. Foucault became convinced that historical techniques of
self-constitution, such as disciplines of detachment, inspection, consultation,
and screening, among others, had always been central not only to the mecha-
nisms of power that had become institutionalized in the political rationality
of sexuality, but also to the historical forms of critique that had sought to re-
sist these ways of being governed. Yet as works on and of the self, that is, as
practices in and through which subjectivity itself is formed, these techniques
could not be understood in terms of power relations on the strategic model.
The strategic conception thus left no conceptual space for critical resistance
as self-formation and it was this project, Foucault became convinced, that had
been and would continue to be central to struggles against ossifications of
power. Foucault thus concluded that the strategic model was inadequate his-
torically, conceptually, and critically and it was this conclusion that drove him
to work out a fundamentally new conception of power: governmentality.
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 121
2. Governmentality

The problem that now confronted Foucault was how to conceive of the
relationality of power configurations such that they could account for prac-
tices of self-formation. The key move that enabled Foucault to begin to ad-
dress this deeply perplexing challenge was his shift away from force as the
operative concept of power to conduct, from strategy to government. He
sought, he said, to recover the broad meaning of the term ‘government’ as it
had been used, in phrases such as the “arts of governing,” at the end of the
sixteenth century and during the first half of the seventeenth. On this under-
standing, government is not identified with the organs of state power but in-
stead with the guiding of the behavior of another, the conducting of their
conduct.9
Conceiving the exercise of power in these terms made it possible for
Foucault to overcome the fundamental limitations not only of the juridical
conception of power, but of the strategical as well. According to the juridical
model, power is construed as operating in terms of the consent given by indi-
viduals by which they grant some overarching power, a Leviathan for instance,
the right to rule over them. The object on which power operates here is the
will of the individual. On the strategical model, exercising power is conceived
as a relationship of violence in which one acts to force, or to break, or to close
off another’s possibilities, the sort of relation that might obtain in a state of
nature. The objects at issue here are another’s body and/or their possessions.
The governmental model seeks to articulate the more subtle way in which
power is actually at work in both of these sorts of relations. At its core, it holds
that one acts upon another not by extracting an act of their will or by compel-
ling them physically or even by limiting access to the objects over which they
have control, but rather by acting on their actions, i.e., upon their conduct.
Doing this requires shaping and molding the field of possibilities within which
another functions, orchestrating the space in which others conduct themselves.
The techniques whereby this is effected are numerous and diverse: inciting,
inducing, releasing or contriving, making conditions more favorable or less
so, and, in the extreme, compelling or forbidding the action of another abso-
lutely. What each of these practices seeks to do is to establish an arena of
possible actions such that another’s behavior has a certain trajectory, a set of
preformed limits, a directionality. This creates a field within which action can
occur. To govern the space of response then is to open a domain of structured
possibility. As such, as Foucault says in “The Subject and Power,” the exer-
cise of power at work here is neither violent confrontation nor free consent
(“neither warlike nor juridical”):
122 KEVIN THOMPSON

To conduct is, at once, the act of ‘leading’ others (in accordance with mecha-
nisms of coercion more or less strict) and the way of behaving in a field of
more or less open possibilities. The exercise of power consists in ‘conduct-
ing conduct (conduire des conduites)’ and in laying out (aménager) the
probabilities. Power, fundamentally, is not so much confrontation between
two adversaries, or the engagement of one with regard to another, but ‘gov-
ernment’ (DE IV, p. 237; EW III, p. 341 [translation modified]).

The central point here is that, in such practices, the other whose actions are
being molded is always recognized, albeit in the extreme only minimally, as
an agent with the capacity to act in and through such structuring, as one able
to exercise precisely their capacities.10 The other whose conduct is being
shaped is taken to be capable of acting in accordance with the range of op-
tions or trajectories arrayed before them. Consequently, Foucault is able to
claim that freedom, rather than simply resistance, is intrinsic to the exercise
of power itself:

there is not a face-to-face of power and freedom with a relation of exclu-

sion between them (freedom disappearing everywhere power is exercised)
but rather a much more complex game. In this game, freedom may well
appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at once its prerequisite,
since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent
support since, if it were entirely concealed in the power that exerts itself
on it, it would, in fact, disappear and should find itself a substitute in the
pure and simple coercion of violence), but it may also appear as that which
is only able to oppose itself to an exercise of power that tends, in the end,
to determine it completely (DE IV, p. 238; EW III, p. 342 [translation modi-
fied]).

Power and freedom are thus, on the governmental model, co-constitutive.

Power relations necessarily presuppose that all parties involved in such rela-
tions have the ability, even in the most extreme cases, to choose amongst a
range of structured options. This sort of minimal freedom is, in turn, only
possible in a field defined precisely by the structuring work of governance.
Thus, each is the condition of the possibility of the other.11
Foucault’s understanding of resistance underwent a significant change as
a result of this new conception of the necessary relation of power and free-
dom. Under the governmental model of power, he writes, the task of critique
is “to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of the type of
individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries” (DE IV, p. 232;
EW III, p. 336). Here both the end sought by critique and the means it is to
employ are profoundly different than under the strategical model. Let us con-
sider each in turn.
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 123
First, the change in goal. As we have seen, Foucault had previously con-
ceived of critical practices as contestations against the ascendancy of antinomic
deployments, specifically the contemporary entanglement of alliance
(totalization) and sexuality (individualization). The purpose of critique, on this
construal, was to thwart the reign of such epochal regimes. Resistance sought
to loosen up the rigid structures endemic to such constellations so as to rene-
gotiate the demands of the search after hermeneutic truth and depth so central
to their classificatory schemes. But to conceive of critical practices in this way,
as we noted, is, for Foucault, to define them as wholly negative. Their agenda
is determined by that that they seek to disrupt. And, as Foucault argued, this
conception of critique is inherently inadequate as an analytic tool because it
fails to provide an understanding of the sorts of struggles that have been at
the center of both historical and contemporary social and political life.
Now, because the governmental model of power is predicated on the con-
cept of freedom, Foucault is able to offer a more nuanced understanding of
critique. Resistance is no longer merely the sabotaging of a reigning epoch’s
agenda. It is concerned, rather, with the constitution of novel sorts of subjectiv-
ity, forms of agency that don’t just call into question the demand for classifica-
tion and individualization, but that, in addition, develop viable alternatives to
contemporary fascistic life. That is to say, the aim of critique is not merely to
resist the antinomic structures that gave birth to National Socialism, and con-
tinue to cultivate a temperament disposing us to want our own subjection. The
point of critique, rather, is to forge news forms of life, new non-fascistic modes
of existence. The work of critique is, in short, self-formation.
But doesn’t this just entail moral anarchy, a kind of deep antinomianism,
as many of Foucault’s most ardent critics claim? It would if critique was sim-
ply the obliteration of ultimate standards such that each is free to do as one
wants. But, self-formation is not license. Critical practices, for Foucault, loosen
the hold of epochal measures on us. They do so, so that the rule endemic to
the process of self-constitution itself can begin to take hold of us and enable
us to cultivate new forms of being and doing, new kinds of value and obliga-
tion, ones that stand in accordance with the process of constitution itself. This
is what Foucault is referring to when he speaks of an “aesthetics of existence,”
and, like every craft, this art has its own inherent rule: self-governance. As
Foucault said in one of his last interviews, the critical function of philosophy
derives from what he called the Socratic imperative: “‘Concern yourself with
yourself,’ in other words, ‘Establish yourself in freedom by the mastery of
yourself (Fonde-toi en liberté, par la maîtrise de toi)’” (DE IV, p. 729; EW I,
p. 301 [translation modified]). To promote new forms of subjectivity is thus
to take one’s bearings from the principle of autonomy.12 Whatever the new
124 KEVIN THOMPSON

types of agency might be, they must be such that they enable us to govern our-
selves and so form ourselves in ever new and different ways. Hence, the ac-
tivity of constitution is its own norm.
But from what source does this standard derive its binding force, its nor-
mative grip? Foucault’s answer is not to appeal to a transcendent standard.
Instead, consistent with his historical nominalism, he provides a genealogi-
cal deduction of the principle of self-governance. This is the concern of the
later volumes of the History of Sexuality project and the various other writ-
ings and lectures he produced during this period. In a set of analyses to which
we shall return in more detail shortly, Foucault shows that the concern with
the self, and thus with the project of self-fashioning, was the historical matrix
within which the Western regime of truth, obligation, and ethical relations
developed. Today, we experience the precept, “take care of yourself,” as it is
embedded in the permutations it underwent in the Delphic command to know
ourselves and in the Christian injunction to purify the self. Foucault shows
that what occurred in this line of descent was nothing less than a fundamental
inversion. Put simply, the Delphic imperative to “know thyself” was initially
subordinated to the Socratic imperative to “care for thyself.” However, this
order was overturned and, as a result, the project of shaping the self was now
brought wholly under the dictates of knowledge and science.
One of the central insights of this analysis is that the imperative to concern
ourselves with ourselves is still at work even in the heteronymous and trou-
bling practices of governance under which we presently live. The source of
the normative appeal of this principle has been largely buried within the thicket
of current techniques of regulation and administration, practices that gener-
ally require and encourage self-regulation and self-infatuation, rather than self-
formation. Nonetheless, the imperative to forge ourselves anew still appeals
to us from within these measures. Foucault’s genealogical investigation seeks
then not only to call into question the present hierarchy of knowledge over
care, but also to restore the urgency of the project of self-formation, a direc-
tive that, paradoxically, is laid upon us precisely by the tradition that has
brought us to the precarious position within which we now find ourselves. The
task of promoting new forms of subjectivity is therefore an historical exigency
and it is as inheritors of this lineage, rather than by any appeal to some tran-
scendent measure, that this injunction is endowed with normative force.
An “aesthetics of existence” means then that just as any technician, arti-
san, or artist, always crafts a new work under the guidance of critical scru-
tiny, examining what has been achieved thus far, recalling the rules of the art
itself, and comparing the former against the latter, so are we, for Foucault, to
fashion new sorts of non-fascistic subjectivities, working under the direction
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 125
of critical inspection, reminding ourselves constantly of the fundamental rule
of this unique art, the principle of autonomy, not, of course, as a judge, as-
sessing guilt, but as a craftsperson shaping new forms of existence, always
comparing what we’ve made for its fidelity to the project and activity of self-
fashioning itself.
Now, if forging ourselves in this manner is what Foucault meant by pro-
moting new forms of subjectivity, and if this is indeed the proper way to con-
strue the aim of critique under the governmental model of power, then a deeply
perplexing question stands before us: how can non-fascistic forms of life be
forged within the very crucible from whence Nazism itself arose and within
which we still carry out our lives? For this, the question of the means of cri-
tique, we must turn to the “genealogy of the critical attitude” that Foucault
was working on in the final years of his life and, specifically, to its unearth-
ing of a certain “slippage” within the Western tradition of critique.

3. Enlightenment

We can get at this issue by considering what exactly promoting new forms of
subjectivity by refusing imposed types of individuality really means. The
reference to refusal seems, at least initially, to cast the tactics at issue here as
inherently negative: to refuse is to reject. But Foucault is clear that to read the
claim in this way is to miss its central thrust. The means whereby new forms
of subjectivity are to be created are precisely the techniques and disciplines
that are currently at work shaping us as compliant governable subjects. It is
the goal of these practices that is to be rejected, not the practices themselves.
As we noted above, one of the main concerns of Foucault’s later work was
to show that the various techniques that have structured our present field of
action have not always operated in service to the demands of knowledge and
governance as they do now. They have been, and thus can be, ways of form-
ing the self beyond these strictures. Yet, clearly the current goal of these dis-
ciplines is to form us as docile and pliant subjects. Two questions then: first,
why must these techniques be the implements of our self-formation, and sec-
ondly, how can they enable us to do this?
The governmental model of power teaches that exercising our capacities
in a manner that is truly free is dependent on the measures used to conduct
our conduct. Any action we take can only operate within the field defined by
these practices. It follows that any act of self-formation must work within and
through the techniques of governance already in place. But these techniques
are clearly marked by their insistence that we be cared for, rather than their
126 KEVIN THOMPSON

enabling us to care for ourselves. How then can we craft ourselves in genu-
inely autonomous ways if the means to do so mold us in ways that are funda-
mentally heteronymous?13
The answer to this question is to be found, as before, in Foucault’s genea-
logical deduction of our present practices. At its core, Foucault’s analysis
shows that the guiding assumption at work in our question – that autonomy
and heteronomy are, in some sense, opposed – is fundamentally mistaken.
Since at least the Classical period, autonomy and heteronomy have been deeply
intertwined, each making the other possible. What changed was the nature and
the aim of the relationship. In the Classical and Imperial periods, one of the
principal ways of caring for one’s self was to make use of relations of subor-
dination and dependency, for instance, by seeking the counsel of some sage
and becoming thereby their disciple. But these relations were always tempo-
rally circumscribed, instrumental, and wholly provisory. Their goal was to
enable one to attain mastery of one’s self. Thus, a disciple sought out the as-
sistance of a master for a specific problem, and for an equally specific period
of time, so as to craft a flourishing and autonomous form of life for themselves.
In early Christianity, however, such relations, particularly the exemplary forms
that took shape in monastic life, came to be defined by both their perma-
nence and their comprehensiveness. What was sought was no longer au-
tonomy, but contemplation of God. Once one became a disciple, one always
remained under the rule of their master, even when they became masters of
others, and one had to reveal everything about themselves to their spiritual
guide, a permanent and complete sacrifice of their will to the other. Only in
doing this could one properly prepare one’s heart so as to be able to see God.14
Foucault claims that it was this form of dependency that served as the para-
digm for the modern development of the human sciences and laid the basis
for the emergence of contemporary practices of administration, control, and
normalization.15
So, for Foucault, the issue is not choosing autonomy over heteronomy or
demonstrating their reconcilability, the now standard options in contemporary
discussions of these issues. Rather, the question is how can the present con-
stellation of governing practices be employed such that they enable us to forge
new kinds of agency, new modes of existence, non-fascistic forms of life.
Over the course of the final years of his life, Foucault sought to work out
what he came to call a “genealogy of the critical attitude.”16 Its aim was to
track the emergence and development of critique as a specific sort of disposi-
tion towards others, towards one’s self, and towards various kinds of author-
ity. At the center of this project stood the dilemma we have just invoked: the
fact that we are enjoined to care for ourselves, to be self-governing, precisely
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 127
in and through practices that seem, at least initially, to deny us this very pos-
sibility.
In the set of seminars he gave at Berkeley in 1983, Foucault traced the
critical attitude to practices of speaking frankly (παρρησιᾱ), of saying eve-
rything that is to be said, of speaking the truth, openly, completely, and freely.
He referred to this as the root of the “critical tradition”. And he distinguished
it from the concern that arose with establishing the truth conditions for the
veracity of statements or judgments, which he termed the “analytics of truth”
(cf. FS, pp. 170–171). In essence, what Foucault showed was that the analytics
of truth came to define the care of the self, the practice of critique, as an
epistemic concern, a project dictated by the aims of knowledge, rather than
as a technique of self-formation, a creative ‘aesthetics of existence’. As we
noted above, care and truth became not just deeply entangled, but truth came
to reign over the needs of care. Thus, the key to adopting a critical stance today,
for Foucault, requires the unraveling and reconfiguring of this knot.
The entwinement of critique as concern for the self with the analytics of
truth begins in Socrates. Taking Plato’s presentation as decisive, Foucault
shows that the function of critique for Socrates was to call people to self-ex-
amination. This entailed a change of one’s life, a conversion from indiffer-
ence to taking up the charge to bring one’s life into union with reason, to
produce an existence in accord with itself, a harmony between word and deed
(cf. FS, pp. 91–107). The practice of critique thus involved a risk. Not the risk
of speaking frankly to the tyrant, telling him that his rule is unjust, but the
risk of angering those whom one challenges. In this sense, critique requires
courage, the courage to confront others with the task of caring for themselves,
the task of autonomy (cf. FS, pp. 11–19, 20–24).
But at the same time as Socratic practice served the injunction of taking
care of one’s self, Foucault argues, it also established a relationship between
critique and truth: to speak freely and frankly meant to speak the truth. And it
was precisely because one spoke the truth that one could be courageous in the
face of the possible adversity that their critical practice might provoke. Soc-
rates is himself said, in the Laches for instance, to act as a “touchstone” (188a)
that exposes the truth of someone’s life, whether it stands in harmonious ac-
cord or not (cf. FS, pp. 95–104). In this sense, Foucault claims, the role of the
figure of Socrates is to be the measure against which the harmony of anoth-
er’s life can be gauged. But to do this means that the one who functions as the
touchstone already has what Foucault calls a “harmonic relation to truth” (FS,
p. 102) and this sets up an asymmetrical relationship, the relation of master to
disciple. The figure of Socrates, as Foucault says, is not only a model of cri-
tique but a “master of truth” as well because he possesses a privileged epistemic
128 KEVIN THOMPSON

relation that serves as the standard for those with whom he comes in contact
(cf. UP, pp. 312–313/242; cf. pp. 304–316/236–245).17
Thus, the Socratic imperative to take care of ourselves, and the critical
practices that issue from it, are already entangled with the domains of knowl-
edge and truth. And, according to Foucault, this relation sets a historical de-
velopment going that only deepened the bond, turning decisively inward, in
the disciplines of self-examination, self-diagnosis, and self-screening in the
Imperial period (cf. SS, pp. 81–89/58–64), practices that in turn gave rise, in
early Christianity, to the demand that one must purify one’s self through
penitential practices of self-disclosure and monastic disciplines of constant
scrutinization (cf. DE IV, pp. 804–813; EW I, pp. 242–249; DE IV, pp. 301–
308; EW I, pp. 189–197). These techniques were integrated and generalized
in the modern epoch, in such practices as carceral examination (Surveiller et
punir [1975]), social confession (La volonté de savoir [1976]), and the wel-
fare schemes employed in the governing of populations (DE IV, pp. 148–161;
EW III, pp. 312–325). Hence, our present predicament.
But, Foucault argues that already with Kant this knot loosened, if only for
a moment. Two of Foucault’s texts on Kant are especially relevant here. The
first, “What is Critique?,” was delivered in 1978, the second, entitled “What
is Enlightenment?,” was published in 1984.18 Both take their bearings from
Kant’s famous definition of enlightenment as an exit or emergence from a “self-
incurred immaturity (selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit).” And in both texts
Foucault takes this to mean that enlightenment is a practice of critical resist-
ance, a countering of conditions in which one is under the excessive authority
of others. In short, it is a practice that resists simple submission to heter-
onomy and does so by appealing to its adherents to have the courage, the
strength, to use one’s own understanding (Sapere Aude!), and so to think and
act freely, what Foucault called, in 1978, “the art of voluntary inservitude, of
reflective indocility” (QC, p. 39/386), and in 1984, “not to accept oneself as
one is in the flux of the passing moments; to take oneself as object of a com-
plex and difficult elaboration” (DE IV, p. 570; EW I, p. 311).
However, in the public lecture of 1978, Foucault notes what he refers to as
a certain “slippage” or “displacement” (décalage) (QC, p. 41/387) in Kant’s
thought, a break between his understanding of enlightenment and his own
conception of critique. Critique, Foucault reminds us, is defined for Kant in
terms of identifying the limits of knowledge, how far reason can go before it
violates the strictures of possible experience. Whereas enlightenment is con-
cerned with having the courage to resist absolute heteronomy, critique is an
epistemic concern, an establishing of the borders and conditions of knowl-
edge.
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 129
Kant thus inherits the Socratic legacy binding together an analytics of truth
and the concern for the self. But he doesn’t just passively inherit this knot, he
opens up a space within it so that the relationship of truth and care can be
reconfigured. As Foucault argues, Kant understood the relation between truth
and care in terms of a quite specific order of progression. The project of cri-
tique, the ascertainment of the limits of knowledge, is to serve as a prole-
gomenon, a preparatory work, for the task of enlightenment. The analytics of
truth is to serve the work of self-formation. Referring to Kant’s famous claim
that true enlightenment means that one can be publicly free and still subordi-
nate themselves to civil and religious authorities (encapsulated in the phrase:
“Argue as much as you will about whatever you will, but obey”), he writes:

Critique will say, in sum, that our freedom rides less on what we undertake
with more or less courage than in the idea we ourselves have of our knowl-
edge and its limits and that, consequently, instead of allowing another to
say ‘obey,’ it is at this moment, when one will have made for oneself a sound
idea of one’s own knowledge, that one will be able to discover the princi-
ple of autonomy, and one will no longer hear the ‘obey’; or rather the ‘obey’
will be founded on autonomy itself (QC, p. 41/387 [emphases added]).

Establishing the limits of knowledge, the Kantian project of critique, is thus

the condition that allows one to discover the enlightenment project of au-
tonomy, the art of reflective indocility. In this sense, what Foucault was to come
to call the analytics of truth serves the Socratic injunction to care for ourselves.
Kant does this not by invoking a privileged relation to truth, as did the figure
of Socrates, but precisely by circumscribing the dominion of knowledge. For
Foucault then, Kant’s primary concern in pursuing this conception of critique
is not to identify the conditions for making veridical judgments. Rather, cri-
tique in the properly Kantian sense, Foucault holds, sets strictures on knowl-
edge and, by doing so, places itself, as a discerning of those limits, in service
to the task of self-formation, the project of autonomy, the project of enlight-
enment.
In the 1984 essay, Foucault returns to this very point saying that if this tra-
jectory opened by Kant, what Foucault calls here a “limit attitude” (DE IV, p.
574; EW I, p. 315), is pursued to its end, and critique as the analytics of truth
is indeed placed in service to the enlightenment project of self-formation, then
the tradition of criticism we’ve inherited can begin to be reconceived.19 No
longer would it be merely the establishing of limits and borders beyond which
knowledge cannot tread, as it ultimately remained in Kant and for at least one
important strand that followed after him.20 Rather, an analytics of truth would
isolate those elements within the contemporary regime of governance wherein
130 KEVIN THOMPSON

lies the “possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or
think” (DE IV, p. 574; EW I, pp. 315–316). Because its ultimate concern is
self-formation, criticism would no longer merely constrict us within the
boundaries of knowledge. It would, instead, explore how we might create
ourselves otherwise than as these limits have defined us, a work, Foucault says,
“of ourselves upon ourselves as free beings” (DE IV, p. 575; EW I, p. 316 [trans-
lation modified, emphases added]). But what does this really mean?
Regimes of governmental practices constitute, for Foucault, specific types
of governable subjects; they do so by shaping the individual’s conduct from
within: the individual acts in accordance with the conceptions of self-identity
implicit within these practices. Pedagogical techniques, policing procedures,
and the various ways of curing, caring, and punishing that are constantly
weaving together the social fabric all operate by instilling conceptions, norms,
and expectations within the individuals that they govern. These define the op-
timal functioning of the self under this regime of governance and they forge
a disposition to act in compliance with the principles that they instill; they
forge, in short, a fascistic subject. In this sense, individuals under a regime of
governance are rendered subject to their own identities and, as such, act out
of a tendency to conform to the regulations and ongoing practices of the vari-
ous social agencies that define and shape these identities. Given this, we can
say that the presently dominant form of these technologies is an immanent
yet heteronymous sort of power. How then could these practices facilitate the
constitution of autonomous forms of life?
Kant’s “slippage,” his discovery of a way to loosen once again the rigid
and hierarchical entanglement of the care for self and truth, showed that an
analytics of truth can be placed in service to the project of self-formation. When
this is done, one is able to locate precisely those elements within the regime
of governance under which one currently exists that can be used to forge one’s
self in what is ultimately a non-compliant manner. That is to say, the limits of
the rationalities that are embedded in the practices that have constituted the
domain in which we are to act can be identified. A testing of those limits can
be begun and this can issue in the employment of these practices, at their lim-
its, in exercises of caring for the self that move outside the strictures of the
ways in which we have predominantly been cared for. In this way, autonomy
is forged in and through heteronomy.21
We must, however, be careful here. Self-formation is not self-fabrication.
To produce something is to impose static form upon recalcitrant matter, to
stamp being upon becoming. To be cared for rather than to care for one’s self
is to live simply under the sway of programs and procedures defined by this
logic. And to manufacture oneself as a product, to merely fabricate oneself,
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 131
would thus be nothing other than rendering oneself pliant to the standards of
experimentation, calculation, exchange, and consumption embodied in the
regimes of governmental technologies.
Foucault’s genealogy shows that these practices initially arose as processes
of generation, as ways of stylizing existence, of caring for the self. Yet, the
logic of production, and with it the rise of knowledge and truth, gradually came
to govern and define them. The result of this was a growing occlusion of the
generative core of these practices; aesthetics gave way to production and thus
the techniques whereby one could concern themselves with themselves be-
came technologies of examination and confession.
The task of an analytics of truth in service to self-formation must thus be
to delineate the generative core of the practices that shape our current fascis-
tic modes of existence from their productive cast.22 This is what it means to
isolate and test limits and only such an examination as this can begin to map
the possible avenues of autonomy within the processes of mastery.23
Following what we have seen in Foucault’s move to the governmental model
of power, such a project as this would have to operate constantly on two fronts.
One would have to discern those features within the present techniques of gov-
ernance that would permit and even enable the creation of collective practices
of reflective indocility, alliances of voluntary inservitude. To do this, one would
have to exploit the procedures, ceremonies, arenas, and public forums afforded
by these practices, together with the various kinds of knowledge that they
imbue, so as to thwart the process of instilling compliant identities and
taxonomies, the process of individualization. One would have to make use of
the social spaces opened up by these various classificatory schemes in ways
that contest and call them into question.
But simply to develop resistances against these practices from within them
would remain merely reactive; they would do nothing other than counter the
subjugation that the technologies of subjectivity seek to forge. To move to the
project of critique, these same techniques must be placed in service to the aims
of self-formation. This means that the practices of contemporary fascistic life
must not only be forums for contestation, they must also become the means
to reclaim the task of caring for ourselves, for forging our own destinies, for
governing our own lives. Of course, this would require a fundamental trans-
formation, a reshaping and rethinking, of the basic design of the current re-
gime of institutions. In particular, it would entail introducing self-governance
into many of the sectors of society where such forms of governance are cur-
rently most resisted, and would require that the structures of institutions be
open to collectively guided change, experimentation, and reversibility of
positions so as to foster the creation of new forms of sociality, new sorts of
132 KEVIN THOMPSON

shared subjectivities.24 This, in turn, would entail the creation of new institu-
tions of self-governance and alliance out of, and from within, the present re-
gime.
At the core of both of these struggles is the project of autonomous and
collective formation: the struggle to create ourselves in ways that are at once
shareable and resilient before the constant encroachment of the logic of fas-
cism. It is thus a struggle that is inherently social and, as such, necessarily
public and institutional. To fashion ourselves autonomously thus requires an
infrastructure that can serve as a crucible for the continual process of creat-
ing, renewing, and transforming non-fascistic forms of existence. It is only
when this struggle is taken up that the hope of a transformation of the regime
of governance itself becomes possible. Forging non-fascistic forms of social
existence is thus the practical condition for the antinomy of totality and indi-
viduality to begin to loosen its grip.25
This, then, is what it means to carry out the project of self-constitution in
and through the techniques of subjection. It is to affirm the generative core of
these practices, while at the same time refusing their productive cast. It is to
bind one’s self to their inherent creative possibilities – their capacities for in-
novation and the non-repeatable – beyond the demands of finality. In this way,
critique, in the Kantian sense of discerning the limits of knowledge, provides
a basis for a renewal of the critical attitude, the project of self-formation.

4. Conclusion

We have seen that two distinct responses to the problem of fascism are indeed
to be found in Foucault’s work. The first, “tactical reversal,” is predicated on
the idea that conflict is inherent to power relations, the strategical model of
power, and thus that a specific configuration of power and knowledge can be
thwarted by reversing the mechanisms whereby this relation is sustained. The
second, the “aesthetics of existence,” is based in the governmental model of
power and holds that it is possible to forge autonomous forms of life in and
through such techniques of governance. I have argued that Foucault came to
favor the latter of these two alternatives and that he did so because the model
of power underlying resistance as tactical reversal proved insufficient both
historically and conceptually. It was thus on this basis that he was able to work
out the governmental conception of power relations and thereby accord a
fundamental role to the concept of resistance as autonomy or self-formation.
As we have seen, the “genealogy of the critical attitude” that Foucault was
developing in his final years provided, in the end, the key to understanding
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 133
how such a project as this is not only practical, but how it is our obligation as
well.
Foucault often said that the values that sustained his work were the refusal
of the self-evident, the curiosity of knowing what is possible, and the cour-
age to seek out what had yet to be done. By rethinking his initial response to
the threat of fascism, he sought to do nothing other than to remain faithful to
these guiding virtues. To live autonomously is just to refuse the given, to
uncover what is possible, and to have the courage to master one’s own life.
Thus, when the fabric of the historical foundations of action has become frayed,
tattered, and threadbare, Foucault’s thought stands before us as a challenge
to reinvigorate our ethical imaginations, to stir our capacities to think anew
about our conduct and the forms of existence we share. When our traditions
have become exhausted and fascism is again in the offing, his work forces us
to consider just how we might best take care of ourselves.26

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 125–126; The His-
tory of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random
House, 1978), p. 95.
All further references to Foucault’s works are included in the text according to the
following scheme of abbreviation:
VS La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); The History of Sexuality: Volume I:
An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978)
UP L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985)
SS Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Random House, 1986)
DE Dits et écrits. 1954–1988, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)
EW The Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984, 3 vols. (New York: The New Press,
1997)
QC “Qu’est-ce que la critique? (Critique et Aufklärung)” Bulletin de la société française
de philosophie 84 (1990), pp. 25–63; “What is Critique,” trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, in
What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions,
ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1996), pp. 385–
398
FS Fearless Speech (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001)
2. In one of his contributions to a panel discussion at the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference,
Foucault remarked that:
The problem for the generation which turned twenty in the 1930s was how to fight fas-
cism, how to fight the fascists, how to fight the different forms, the different milieux
in which fascism appeared. Depending on the balance of powers, depending on the glo-
bal political and economic situation, forms of struggle, the struggle against fascism
134 KEVIN THOMPSON

between the years 1930 and 1945 was a specific kind of struggle. I think that what has
happened since 1960 is characterized by the appearance of new forms of fascism, new
forms of fascist consciousness, new forms of description of fascism, and new forms of
the fight against fascism. And the role of the intellectual, since the sixties, has been
precisely to situate, in terms of his or her own experiences, competence, personal
choices, desire – situate him or herself in such a way as to both make apparent forms
of fascism which are unfortunately not recognized, or too easily tolerated, to describe
them, to try to render them intolerable, and to define the specific form of struggle that
can be undertaken against fascism. (“Schizo-Culture: On Prisons and Psychiatry” in
Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews: 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 179)
See also Foucault’s “Preface to Anti-Oedipus” (1977) where he identifies historical fas-
cism (“the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini”) as well as the “fascism in us all” (“the fas-
cism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits
us”) as the “major enemy” of Deleuze and Guattari’s first collaborative work, and praises
it for developing what he calls an “art of living counter to all forms of fascism” (DE III,
pp. 133–136, esp. pp. 134–135; EW III, pp. 106–110, esp. 108).
Among the first to draw attention to fascism as a central problematic of Foucault’s
work were Maurice Blanchot, “Murderous Racism,” in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey
Mehlman and Brian Massumi (New York: Zone Books, 1987), pp. 99–101, and James
W. Bernauer, “Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault’s Post-Auschwitz Ethics” in Michel
Foucault: Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp.
260–279.
See also, Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “Michel Foucault, Auschwitz and Mo-
dernity” Philosophy and Social Criticism 22 (1996), pp. 101–113, and Mark Neocleous,
“Perpetual War, or ‘War and War Again’: Schmitt, Foucault, Fascism” Philosophy and
Social Criticism 22 (1996), pp. 47–66.
3. For a useful discussion of the social and political ramifications of Foucault’s work and
its place within contemporary political theory, see Jon Simons, Foucault and the Politi-
cal (New York: Routledge, 1995), esp. chap. 9. Simons, however, never recognizes the
problem of fascism as the central organizing problematic of Foucault’s work. He thus
fails to see its implications for Foucault’s conception of autonomy.
4. On the concept of critique, see especially the debates concerning the relationship of
Foucault and Habermas: Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate,
ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994) and Foucault contra Habermas:
Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. Samantha Ashenden
and David Owen (London: Sage Publications, 1999). More recently, see Kevin Jon Heller,
“Power, Subjectification and Resistance in Foucault” Substance 79 (1996), pp. 78–110,
Mark Bevir, “Foucault and Critique: Deploying Agency against Autonomy” Political
Theory 27 (1999), pp. 65–84, and Didier Eibon, ed. L’infréquentable Michel Foucault:
Renouveaux de la pensée critique (Paris: EPEL, 2001).
The present essay does not address the normative foundations of Foucault’s concept
of critique directly, but instead seeks to present the rudiments of Foucault’s response to
the requirements of a critical stance in a positive form.
5. Foucault refers to this as the “fundamental part of the book” in the 1977 interview, “Le
jeu de Michel Foucault” (DE III, pp. 298–329, esp. pp. 323–329). This interview is trans-
lated under the title “The Confession of the Flesh” in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowl-
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 135
edge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 194–228, esp. pp. 222–228.
6. On the problem of resistance conceived in terms of force relations, see Gilles Deleuze,
Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)
and Françoise Proust, De la résistance (Paris: Cerf, 1997).
7. For Foucault’s account of the centrality of Reich, and Reichnian style analyses, to the
original plan of the History of Sexuality project, see “Schizo-Culture: Infantile Sexual-
ity,” in Foucault Live, pp. 154–167.
Of course, Reich’s work, specifically The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), also
plays an important, though significantly different, role in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-
Oedipus (1972).
8. See the course summaries Foucault submitted for his 1976 (Il faut défendre la société)
and 1978 (Sécurité, Territoire et Population) lecture courses (DE III, pp. 124–130; EW
I, pp. 59–65; DE III, pp. 719–723; EW I, pp. 67–71). See also the transcripts of the 1976
lectures, “Il faut defendre la société” Cours au Collège de France. 1976 (Paris: Gallimard,
1997).
For useful discussions of this course, see Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education
of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1995), chap. 2, Neil Levy, “History as Struggle: Foucault’s
Genealogy of Genealogy” History of the Human Sciences 11 (1998), pp. 159–170, Yves
Michaud, “Des modes de subjectivation aux techniques de soi: Foucault et les identités
de notre temps” Cités 2 (2000), Yves Charles Zarka, “Foucault et le concept non
juridique du pouvoir” Cités 2 (2000), Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between
Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000), chap. 3, John
Marks, “Foucault, Franks, Gauls” Theory, Culture and Society 17 (2000), pp. 127–147,
Warren Montag, “Vers une conception du racisme sans races: Foucault et la bio-politique
contemporaine, “ in Michel Foucault et la médecine: Lectures et usages, ed. Philippe
Artières and Emmanuel de Silva (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2001), pp. 101–115, and Stuart
Elden, “The War of Races and the Constitution of the State: Foucault’s “Il faut défendre
la société” and the Politics of Calculation” Boundary 2 29 (2002), pp. 125–151.
9. The best accounts of governmenality are Thomas Lemke, Eine Kritik der politischen
Vernunft. Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität (Berlin: Argument, 1997),
Part II, Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London:
Sage Publications, 1999), and Thomas Lemke, Susanne Krasmann, and Ulrich Bröckling,
“Gouvernementalität, Neoliberalismus, und Selbsttechnologien,” in Gouvernementalität
der Gegenwart. Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen, ed. Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne
Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 7–40.
10. Foucault draws an important, and too often neglected, distinction between power, as a
set of relationships between actions, and capacities, as bodily abilities or aptitudes (cf.
DE IV, p. 233; EW III, p. 337). In doing so, he is able to capture the difference between
power as ability or potentiality – one of the most important senses of power in the tra-
dition – and power as a relational structure. His undermining of power as mere domina-
tion or violence, the juridical model of power, thus doesn’t entail a rejection of power as
strength.
11. Despite this profound rethinking of the nature of power, the remainder of the theorems
that comprised the strategic model are largely retained, albeit in modified forms. Most
importantly for our present concerns, the activities of governance are conceived to be
136 KEVIN THOMPSON

intentional and historically distinct, just as strategic power relations had been. They thus
form, through their structuring of fields for action, epochal regimes, historically identi-
fiable schemes of coordination and organization. It follows that they also still obey the
“rule of double conditioning”: changes at the level of action can bring about changes at
the level of governing structure.
12. On the concept of freedom and its relationship to the project of self-formation in Foucault,
see Ian Hacking, “Self-Improvement,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens
Hoy (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 235–240.
13. On the question of the relationship of autonomy and heteronomy, see the 1983 interview,
“Un système fini face à une demande infinie” (DE IV, pp. 367–383; EW III, pp. 365–
381, translated under the title, “The Risks of Security”), and the audio recording of the
public lecture Foucault delivered in Berkeley in April, 1983, “The Culture of the Self,”
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/audiofiles.html#Foucault
See also J. Jeremy Wisnewski, “Foucault and Public Autonomy” Continental Philoso-
phy Review 33 (2000), pp. 417–439.
14. For this comparison, see the public lectures Foucault delivered in 1980 entitled, “About
the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” in his Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy
R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 158–181, esp. pp. 174–175, and the 1982
lecture course, “Technologies of the Self” (DE IV, pp. 783–813, esp. pp. 808–809; EW
I, pp. 223–251, esp. pp. 245–246).
On this issue, see the source for much of Foucault’s own work in this area, Pierre Hadot,
“Spiritual Exercises” and “Ancient Spiritual Exercises and ‘Christian Philosophy’” both
in his Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed.
Arnold I. Davidson (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 81–125, 126–144.
Hadot lays out important differences of interpretation and contrasts his own project
with that of Foucault’s in his “Reflections on the Idea of the ‘Cultivation of the Self’”
Philosophy as a Way of Life, pp. 206–213.
15. Foucault held that what marked the transition from the pastoral age to the modern ep-
och, what he famously called the age of man, was the project of establishing a positive
self, a positive foundation and resource, in contrast to Christianity’s demand that the self
be sacrificed in the act of purification. See his remarks at the conclusion of the 1980
public lectures, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self” Religion and
Culture, pp. 180–181, and the slightly more substantial comments from the 1983 inter-
view, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (DE IV, pp. 409–
411; EW I, pp. 277–280). Compare also the revisions Foucault made to these passages
for the 1984 French edition of this interview (DE IV, pp. 629–631)
16. This project occupied Foucault over the entirety of the last decade of his life, although
he never brought it to systematic expression. Fragments of it are available in some of
the public addresses, interviews, and essays of this period, but its fullest elaboration
(although, even here, it is still truncated) is in the final lecture courses in both California
(Discourse and Truth, Fall 1983) (FS) and France (1983, 1984).
For an overview of the 1984 lecture course, see Thomas Flynn, “Foucault as Parrhesiast:
His Last Course at the Collège de France (1984)” Philosophy and Social Criticism 12
(1987), pp. 213–229.
17. For a useful discussion of this material, see Francesco Paolo Adorno, Le style du
philosophie: Foucault et le dire-vrai (Paris: Kimé, 1996), ch. V.
 FORMS OF RESISTANCE 137
18. See also the important lecture Foucault delivered in Japan in 1978, “La philosophie
analytique de la politique” (DE III, pp. 534–551).
For discussions of Foucault’s relationship to Kant’s thought, see James Schmidt and
Thomas E. Wartenburg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fash-
ioning of the Self,” in Critique and Power, 283-314, and Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical
Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
19. For an account of the relationship between the “limit attitude” and critique, see Paul Healy,
“A ‘Limit Attitude’: Foucault, Autonomy, Critique” History of the Human Sciences 14
(2001), pp. 49–68.
20. Foucault identifies the Frankfurt School as a prime example of this lineage. Foucault’s
relationship to Critical Theory would thus need to be worked out in terms of his situat-
ing himself within the French tradition that investigated the historicity of rationality,
power, and truth (Cavaillès, Bachelard, and Canguilhem) (cf. QC, pp. 41–46/387–391).
Despite the multitude of discussions of the relationship of Foucault and Habermas (cited
in note 4 above), this line of inquiry stills remains to be explored.
For accounts of the relevant methodological context within which Foucault worked,
see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989), ch. 1, and Arnold Davidson, “On Epistemology and Ar-
cheology: From Canguilhem to Foucault,” in his The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical
Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001), pp. 192–206.
21. On this point, see Reiner Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject,”
Praxis International 6 (1986), pp. 294–310.
22. Ladelle McWhorter makes a similar point in arguing that ascetic practices can be em-
ployed as vehicles for self-overcoming if the link within them between increased ca-
pacity, what I here call the generative core, and docility, what I refer to as the productive
cast, is undone. See her Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Nor-
malization (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 178–183.
23. Of course, an analysis such as this would not itself be sufficient. The constellation that
defines the epochal regime at issue – what Foucault called initially the “historical a pri-
ori,” then the “deployment,” and finally, and most fully, the “problematization” (cf. UP,
pp. 22–45/14–32) – would also have to be specified. This would mean laying out the
fundamental sorts of exercises and disciplines (ascetics) that are enjoined upon us in the
present age as the current techniques of governance, as well as the object of these prac-
tices (ontology), the way in which we are bound to perform these activities (deontol-
ogy), and their ultimate aim (teleology). The task then would be to disengage the exercises
from their current goal, refashioning them such that they become affirmative of the very
activity of formation itself.
24. For a discussion of these issues, see what is perhaps Foucault’s clearest account of the
sort of characteristics a positive power structure might include in the 1980 interview,
“Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” History of the Present 4 (1988), pp. 1–2,
11–13, esp. pp. 11–13.
Foucault’s remarks on friendship can also serve as a source of envisioning what less
calcified relations of power might be like. See the excellent study by Francisco Ortega,
Michel Foucault. Rekonstruktion der Freundschaft (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1997), esp.
138 KEVIN THOMPSON

Part III; see also Herman Nilson, Michel Foucault and the Games of Truth (London:
Macmillan Press, 1998), Part II, chs. 8–9.
25. For practical examples of these types of struggles, see James C. Scott, Domination and
the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990),
chaps. 5–6, and Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and
Other Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
26. I want to thank the members of the Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) Foucault
Reading Group for their patience and encouragement as the ideas presented here origi-
nally developed in discussions with them: Chris Blakley, Phil Dean, John Hartmann, and
Dave Heise.