Conway

“Deleuze and Foucault share a resonance in that the State-form inspired image of thought is one that sees obedience as mastery and adherence to reason”. 

“One ought to look no further than Foucault’s processual theory of the subject. Foucault’s shift to Ancient Greece toward the end of his lectures at the Collège de France is not a conventional “ethical turn,” but rather a demonstration that “the strength of bourgeois rule has been built—even before economic factors—on two centuries of ethical struggle, of transforming morality, of a generalized dictatorship over behavior and attitudes”(Tarì 2021, 189). The model of civil war is fundamentally maintained in these lectures, it is just extended to the foundations of the ethical itself”.

“This “individual full of ill will”, who “neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything”, is the final hindrance and merciless destroyer of the dogmatic image of thought (Deleuze)”

“This act of refusal initiates the process by which the individual can intervene in the process of their own subjectivation. But the “moment of refusal is rare and difficult.” It is difficult because “one must refuse not only the worst but also what seems reasonable” (Blanchot 1997, 111). The figure of refusal is, in a sense, not immediately intelligible. This refusal, which culminates in a revolt, is a rejection of representation. It is to proclaim that one does not possess this good will, that one does not think this way, and that one refuses to be represented as a subject. ”

“Deleuze’s critique of the dogmatic image of thought exposes the normalizing power of philosophy as an apparatus. The dogmatic image of thought shows the biopolitical role that philosophy plays. It impedes the materialization of new forms-of-life by reducing them to error, to the mutilation and misadventure of thought. This is an explicitly biopolitical function. For “biopolitics has never had any other aim but to thwart the formation of worlds, techniques, shared dramatizations, magic in which the crisis of presence might be overcome, might become a center of energy, a war machine” (Tiqqun 2011, 150). Disability comes from the outside, with hands that converse, eyes that listen, and skin that sees.”

“If this figure is to simply be reduced to error by a dogmatic image of thought, then they are an incorrigible error. They refuse to be hidden or eliminated.  They are comparable to the error that has become animated in Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death. “No, I will not be erased; I will stand as witness against thee, a witness that thou art a very poor writer!” (Kierkegaard 1941, 119). The figure who refuses representation stands as witness to the insufficiency of the dogmatic image of thought. If the overwhelming model for disability is a “controlled ‘situation of abandonment,’” the refusal of the dogmatic image of thought turns that position into the revolutionary one. Remember, the war machines always make contact with, or come from, the outside. The State-form inspired an image of thought, but the state “has no war machine of its own” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 355)”.

“The disabled body is certainly often confined, rejected, and abandoned. Tobin Siebers may have been correct to attest boldly that disabled people belong to the nation of the “abandoned and the dead” (Siebers 1998). This is a pessimistic outlook. But it is the pessimistic that must be organized, rather than those with malformed extensionist optimism. It is only through this refusal of the image of thought, this rejection full of ill will, that new images of thought become possible, images that are no longer functioning as the tribunals of an underexamined, yet all too powerful, reason. The abandoned carry with them wounds of the failure of the present”.

Will Conway