Foucault
DELEUZE ON THE MONSTROUS

"What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous".

Gilles Deleuze "I have nothing to admit"

The less the point of vision is taken for granted, the more dangerous it can become.

A criticism that produces monstrosities has as its benefit the possibility of sustaining the assault on what it means to be human. When the monstrous is the aim, the human is supplanted as the teleological horizon of thinking, opening what man is to all the range of what could be.

Alain Badiou has renewed the claims of an anti-humanist thought most forcefully in contemporary French philosophy. Railing against the territorializing of his predecessors in radical critique into a little-modified humanist discourse, he asks in his Ethics: An Essay in the Understanding of Evil, for a ‘proof for the fact that the thematics of the "death of man" are compatible with rebellion’:

‘Foucault, Althusser, Lacan … all three were - each in his own way, and far more than those who uphold the cause of "ethics" and "human rights" today- the attentive and courageous militants of a cause.’ 1

Simultaneous with the causes each pursued outside the sphere of their intellectual environs- the prisoners Foucault fought for; the patients Lacan treated – was the pursuit of the theme, the death of man. If that theme can be revived, renewed in the light of changes that have taken place in the world, and in the light of a deterioration (perhaps, even, its obliteration) of the idea in contemporary practice, then, by a monstrous form of thinking, can its implications be put to use again?

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