DELEUZE (Gilles).
Un Nouvel Archiviste.
'A new archivist has been appointed. But has anyone actually appointed him?'
Inscribed by the author to the art critic Jean Paget, ‘À Jean Paget hommage sincere, Gilles Delueze Mai 72’ in blue ink to the half title.
Published just a year before Foucault wrote his much-reproduced preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti Oedipus, this short essay, later reproduced as the first chapter of Deleuze’s monograph Foucault, is a lovingly critical commentary on his sometime friend’s Archaeology of Knowledge. Meeting in the early 1960s, Deleuze and Foucault worked together at the Prison Information Group and often publicly debated over the priority of their respective key concepts of desire and power, a critical tension in evidence throughout this text. Nevertheless, Deleuze’s intellectual admiration for Foucault is evident throughout, most especially as he reflects upon Foucault’s conceptualisation of the archival space as one in which ‘utterance’ is permitted to become ‘statement’.
