1001Philosophers

Michel Foucault vs Jacques Derrida vs Gilles Deleuze

Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze are the three most influential figures of late twentieth-century French philosophy, often grouped as post-structuralists despite representing very different philosophical orientations. Their work reshaped continental philosophy, literary theory, and the humanities more broadly from the 1960s onward.

Key differences at a glance

Michel FoucaultJacques DerridaGilles Deleuze
Object of analysis Historical institutions: madness, punishment, sexuality.Textual operations through which philosophy constitutes itself.A positive metaphysics of difference and immanence.
Method Genealogy: tracing the formation of practices.Deconstruction: privileged terms depend on what they exclude.Concept-creation drawing on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson.
Relation to philosophy Critique that turns philosophical concepts on their history.Inhabits the philosophical text to expose its operations.Treats philosophy as the creative production of concepts.
Stance toward the subject Constituted by historical regimes of discourse and power.An effect of the metaphysics of presence to be deconstructed.Replaced by impersonal multiplicities and assemblages.

Biographical facts

Michel FoucaultJacques DerridaGilles Deleuze
Dates 1926 – 19841930 – 20041925 – 1995
Nationality FrenchFrenchFrench
Era ContemporaryContemporaryContemporary
Profile Michel Foucault →Jacques Derrida →Gilles Deleuze →

Where they agree

All three held that the Western philosophical tradition has been organized around exclusions, oppositions, and structures that need critical analysis, all three rejected the philosophical centrality of the autonomous subject, and all three treated the history of thought as inseparable from the history of practices, institutions, and material conditions.

Where they disagree

The disagreements concern method and object. Foucault analyzes power-knowledge complexes through historical-genealogical investigations of specific institutions and discourses — madness, punishment, sexuality. Derrida analyzes the textual and conceptual operations through which Western philosophy constitutes itself, with deconstruction as the technique for showing the dependence of privileged terms on what they exclude. Deleuze constructs a positive ontology of difference, multiplicity, and becoming, drawing on Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and treats philosophy as the creation of concepts. Where Foucault charts disciplinary regimes and Derrida deconstructs philosophical texts, Deleuze builds a metaphysics of immanence.

Representative quotes

Michel Foucault

  • “I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.”

    Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

  • “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.”

    p. 785

  • “The soul is the prison of the body.”

    [L]'âme, prison du corps.

Jacques Derrida

  • “There is nothing outside of the text.”

    Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

  • “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.”

    Of Grammatology (1967). G. Spivak translated this as "There is nothing outside the text," which Derrida opponents have characterized to mean that nothing exists but language. Later scholarship has translated it as "There is no outside-of-text" or "There is nothing free of context," i.e. all experience is mediated by interpretation.

  • “At the end of Being and Nothingness , ... Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being ; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure.”

    The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy , tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie ). p. 116

Gilles Deleuze

  • “A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”

    from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche (“Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics”), 1988–1989.

  • “from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche (“Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics”), 1988–1989.”

    A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

  • “There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

    from Postscript on the Societies of Control

Pairwise comparisons

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