The Idiot in Societies of Control

Deleuze’s political philosophy underwent a marked change towards the end of his life. He embraced Foucault’s conception of the nature of power in modern societies as a form of bio-power focused on control rather than extraction. This raises the question : what new forms of resistance are possible and necessary? Deleuze’s answer is that Melville’s Bartleby provides us with a model. The literary persona of the Idiot, as found in Dostoyevsky and Melville, represents a space of indetermination which amounts to the actualization of virtual potentiality and the condition of the emergence of an event. The political task is then to find ways of creating such spaces in modern democratic societies of control.