Intellectuals and power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze

Foucault is a twentieth-century thinker of power and, specifically, the power to resist established ways of thinking and doing.

Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.

For the degeneration of the workers’ movement has led the theorists to represent the class struggle as a duel, or a game between actively conscious partners, and each social or political event as a manoeuvre by one of these partners—a conception that has no more to do with materialism than has Greek mythology.

It is almost impossible to insist strongly enough on the distinction between means and ends in an epoch in which purposes have been reduced to operations, in an epoch in which people “raise” consciousness, movements pretend to provide “liberation,” languages rather than persons are said to “speak,” and politicians “make” revolutions. The law can ag