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What is the relation between Foucault's work and critique? Foucault made his debt to the critical tradition clear on different occasions, either by attempting to define critique in the light of his archaeo-genealogical studies (1990: 154-155) or through explicit statements like "we are all Neo-Kantians" (2001: 546). Thus, it is not surprising that a considerable number of books and articles have been dedicated to the study of the relation between Foucault's oeuvre and the notion of critique. These studies, although varying in their scope and emphases, tend to adopt two major interpretative strategies. The first attempts to give a coherent reading of Foucault's work by making it a project that was organized around the central theme of the critique from the beginning. Beatrice Han's Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (2002) is one of the best examples of such an attempt. The second strategy, instead of doing a chronological study of the development of the notion of critique in Foucault's oeuvre, takes its starting point to be one of his, more often than not, later notions in order to present a 'Foucauldian critique', in the light of which the rest of his work needs to be re-interpreted. Colin Koopman, for example, in Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (2013), argues that Foucault's approach to critique consists in "the historical problematization of the present", on the basis of which it is possible to distinguish between "critical methods" (e.g., genealogy and archaeology) and "critical concepts" (e.g., discipline and Biopower) in his oeuvre. This thesis presents a chronological study of Foucault's oeuvre in order to reveal the existence of the multiplicity of concepts of critique, in which the relation between its variables is shifting perpetually. These variables, taking inspiration from Deleuze (1991; 2006), are: Articulation, Visibility and Subject. However, instead of identifying each of them with a specific phase of Foucault's 'critical project', I will argue that all of them have always been present but the relation between them goes through significant changes and thus gives rise to those phases. This thesis is a detailed analysis of the schemata of Foucauldian critique in order to demonstrate that instead of a singular notion, his oeuvre provides us with a plural concept of critique.

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In this thesis I analyse Félix Guattari's notion of schizoanalytic cartography in its theoretical and pragmatic development in Brazil. Cartographic practices have been developed extensively in Brazil since the 1980's, stemming from the theories and practice of Guattari and from French and Italian institutional analysis. Schizoanalytic cartographies are broadly developed as a tool to work through collective processes, as a device to analyse the collective agency of desire. Cartographies both map and create: they are realised by those who want to produce their own lives, while resisting oppression, and modes of capitalist subjectivation subsuming desire, affect and creativity itself. This thesis therefore traces schizoanalytic cartographies that devise new research processes and new propositions of organisation, subjectivation and institutionalization in Brazil. It explores key Guattarian terms ‘transversality’ and ‘micropolitics’, to analyse the practices of research processes in academia, such as Contemporary Subjectivity Research Group, and theatre groups working in transversal with mental health care, such as Ueinzz Theatre Company. I focus on how these processes work across institutions, theatre practices, the clinic and the social field. The thesis traces their work on “processual subjectivation” and “processual creativity”, proposing the “processual” as the core form of assemblage between subjects, modes of expression and institutions. This thesis argues against reductive notions of politically engaged art that pose oppositions between aesthetics and political practice, and against institutionally circumscribed definitions of practice-based research. Instead, the thesis proposes new frameworks and different genealogies of practice that transversalise and radicalise aesthetic production, connecting it in new ways to political grounds, outside of the agenda of larger cultural institutions, art worlds and markets. Through the examples of practices analysed, it argues that schizoanalytic cartographies bring “processual creativity” and the “production of subjectivity” into relation, and allow us to reassemble the fields of politics, aesthetics and knowledge production.

With a view to staking fresh vantage points from which to address the highly difficult and often fluid notion of subjectivity in Levinas, this thesis undertakes a comprehensive and critically constructive exploration of the Levinasian concept of utopia, a concept which, in any of its multifaceted and evolving designations and contexts throughout the Levinasian corpus, is integrally intertwined with subjectivity. While utopia understood in the more usual sense of ‘good place’ does occasionally feature to a secondary extent in some earlier discussions, the primary and decisive import of the Levinasian meaning is found first in its designation as ‘non-­‐place’ (on the level of the subjectivity of sensibility, especially in relation to the ‘dwelling’) and then later, crucially and far-­‐reachingly, as ‘null-­‐site’ (on the level of ethical subjectivity, which will in turn have vital ramifications on problems of subjectivity at the political and also religious or ‘prophetic’ levels). The thesis thereby makes its constructive contributions not only in demonstratively bringing, via the utopian concept, the possibility of new levels of integration and coherence (organically and developmentally) to what in the secondary literature have often been seen as contradictory stances on Levinasian subjectivity in its various contexts (sensible, ethical, political and so on); but also in providing the first comprehensive and in-­‐ depth structured analysis of utopia as a strategic theme across the Levinasian corpus. Among the several specific accomplishments and outcomes will be the thesis’s ability, via the concept of utopia, to shed new light on the pressing and widely discussed problem of how the integrity of ethical subjectivity as infinite responsibility for the other can be preserved in the justice demanded on the political level.

This thesis reconstructs a materialist dialectical logic through a novel reading of Henri Bergson’s method of intuition. We argue that Bergson’s theory of intuition is fundamentally double in nature and contains within itself both the retrieval of Kantian time as well as its transcendence by positing the Other of time through the theory of “duration.” We call this Bergson’s Transcendental Dualism and present a study of the materialist-phenomenological interrelation between time and duration as the key towards reconstructing a unique materialist dialectic that is neither naïvely positivistic nor nihilistic in nature. Our argument is that this dualism of intuition sits at the core of Bergson’s philosophy and it accomplishes a reversal of idealism that makes possible both the critique/negation of the historical constitution of finite human subjectivity as well as the affirmation of the Absolute Self from a materialist standpoint. Our exposition will be laid out in two parts. In Part I, we examine the element of time as that which endows the method of intuition with the capacity for negation or critique in a way compatible with Marxist criticism of subjectivity. In Part II, we explore the aspect of duration in terms of intuition’s capacity for affirmation. In contradistinction to that of time, it is our view that the theory of duration corresponds to Bergson’s non-metaphysical way of apprehending the Absolute Self, not in terms of a belief in the supra-sensible Idea but as the pure, transcendental sensuousness given within one’s actual intuition. Having established the duality of time and duration as the transcendental condition of intuition, this opens up a possibility for the becoming of human to be a free act of synthesis and leads towards what Bergson calls “reasonable evolution”.

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This thesis traces a subtle, but central, concern of Blanchot’s works: that of childhood and its relation to the silence in language. Beginning with an in-depth analysis of the commentary surrounding the fragment from Blanchot’s text, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), titled ‘(A primal scene?)’, our introduction and first two chapters examines the way that Freud and Blanchot come into conjunction with one another through their shared focus on the importance of the origin and its relation to the silence of the Other. From here, we move into an examination of Blanchot’s use of fragmentary writing. Our aim is to demonstrate the manner in which the ‘secret’ in which the child of ‘(A primal scene?)’ shall ‘live henceforth’ enters into a relationship with the ‘nondialectical’ Other; the Other that (or who) for Blanchot enables language to be possible within the realms of the impossible. This will lead us into an examination of the theme of childhood as it occurs more generally throughout Blanchot’s oeuvre. Examining the works of Louis-René des Forêts alongside Blanchot’s texts ‘The Last Word’ and A Voice from Elsewhere, we will argue that, when Blanchot writes that childhood is the period of ‘the impossibility of speaking’, he is gesturing toward the way that childhood and death are incorporated into the adult’s language through the silence that both maintain within the Self. We will conclude by arguing that, for Blanchot, the reason that ‘every poet is Narcissus’ is because every poet is turned away from herself in the act of writing, thereby allowing the silence of childhood and death to come forth as the ‘secret’ of language.

The influential final proposition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus defines silence negatively, as the other of language. Contrary to this externalising trend of thought is the theme of silence as a quality of interiority and intimacy, as with John Cage’s anecdote of an anechoic chamber, wherein silence became the ceaselessly sonorous plenitude of the body, as opposed to an absence. What unites these two contrastive accounts, however, is a logic of exposure: with the former, language is exposed to its outside; with the latter, exposure takes place as auditory auto-affection. I ask how this underlying logic of exposure—silence as exposure and exposure as silence—might be recuperated and strategized against prevailing discourses of linguistic inescapability. The first chapter negotiates two opposing modalities of silence in 20th century philosophy and literary theory, that is, ‘apophasis’ (or negative theology) and ‘reticence’ (which I understand through Heidegger’s use of the term Verschwiegenheit). Apophasis corresponds to a silence of ineffable transcendence, whereas reticence, keeping-silence, implies a silence of immanence. From this dichotomy, I develop the figure of a paradoxical ‘silent voice’, the trembling interminability of the possibility of speech anterior to speech, which conforms to Jean-Luc Nancy’s liminal figure of ‘transimmanence’. Chapter 2 develops the term ‘silent voice’ through a reading of Samuel Beckett’s prose piece Company, whose narrator is exposed—rather than interpellated—to silence, itself, as a phatic address. In chapter 3, I develop the notion of phatic silence through a series of comparative readings of Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Nancy, through which I analyse the dynamics of silence, community (or ‘being-with’) and singularity, with particular methodological emphasis on Barthes’s unpicking of the binary of silere (pre-lingual, inviolate silence) and tacere (verbal silence, silence exposed to language). In chapter 4 I shift to a discussion of poetry, and analyse how Wallace Stevens stages the exposure of poetic language to three interrelated determinations of silence: anterior silence, external silence, and animal silence.

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