"Paul Veyne paints a portrait of Foucault as a warrior. Foucault always evokes the dust and murmur of battle, and he saw thought itself as a sort of war machine. Because once one steps outside what's been thought before, once one has to invent new concepts for unknown lands, then methods and moral systems break down and thinking becomes, as Foucault puts it, a 'perilous act,' a violence whose first victim is oneself. The objections people make, even the questions they pose, always come from safe ashore and they're like lumps of mud flung at you to knock you down and stop you getting anywhere rather than any help: objections always come from lazy, mediocre people, as Foucault knew better than anyone. Melville said: 'For the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool,--then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.--I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more ... Thought divers ... have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.' People will readily agree that intense physical pursuits are dangerous, but thought too is an intense and wayward pursuit. Once you start thinking you're bound to enter a line of thought where life and death, reason and madness, are at stake, and the line draws you on. You can think only on this witches' line, assuming you're not bound to lose, not bound to end up mad or dead."
"... there's the relation between forces and form: any form is a combination of forces. This already comes out in Foucault's great descriptive tableaux. But more particularly in all the stuff about the 'death of man' and the way he relates it to Nietzsche's superman. The point is that human forces aren't on their own enough to establish a dominant form in which man can install himself. Human forces (having an understanding, a will, an imagination, and so on) have to combine with other forces: an overall form arises from this combination, but everything depends on the nature of the other forces with which the human forces become linked. So the resulting form won't necessarily be a human form, it might be an animal form of which man is only an avatar, a divine form he mirrors, the form of a single God of which man is just a limitation (thus, in the seventeenth century, human understanding appears as the limitation of an infinite understanding). A Man-form then appears only in very special and precarious conditions: that's what Foucault analyses in The Order of Things as the nineteenth century's project, in terms of the new forces with which man was then combining. Now, everyone says man's coming into relation these days with still other forces (the cosmos in space, the particles in matter, the silicon in machines...): a new form is coming out of this, and it's already ceased to be human ... Nothing excites so many stupid reactions as this simple, precise, and grand theme in Nietzsche and Foucault."
(Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations)
