I always shied away from those moments in Deleuze based on the superman conceit that one can become machine and molecular, able to think-unfold the absolute from a non-human standpoint. I tend to think we’re always stuck with consciousness and representation, no matter how much we might want to bracket those hoary old philosophical “things.”

Consider the use of the term “mere.” The universal, according to Deleuze, is “merely the shadow of a particular and ephemeral combination carried by a historical stratum” (Foucault, p.75). And these historical strata “merely [collect] and [solidify] the visual dust and sonic echo of the echo of the battle [of forces] raging above them” (99).

I have no problem with either description as much as with the qualifier. For us slow carbon-based forms that cannot move at infinite accelerations, not even in thought, these effects can never be merely “mere.” Strata constitute what Deleuze himself recognized as part of the living inside of the folds that we inhabit, whereas the universal would always constitute our attempt to step outside into more capacious “atmospheric [elements]” (p.99).

How bourgeois is that?! Deleuze wants to have his cake and ear it too. Against the Deleuzian grain, I think there is plenty of place here in Foucault and elsewhere upon which to ground a new humanism. This would be to do with Deleuze exactly what Deleuze did to Bergson and to others. That you can actually do this with Deleuze says an awful lot about him, all of it good.