our age, whether through logic or through epistemology, whether through Marx or through Nietzsche, is attempting to flee Hegel: and what I was attempting to say earlier concerning discourse was pretty disloyal to Hegel. But truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that what permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us, (235)."Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze," (1972). Trans. in LCM.
The intellectuals role is no longer to place himself somewhat ahead and to the side in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of knowledge, truth, consciousness, and discourse. In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional, as you said, and not totalizing. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to awaken consciousness that we struggle but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination, (208).
the body is also directly invested in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body, (25-6)
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These power-knowledge relations are to be analysed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the object to be known and the modalities of knowledge may be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations, (27-8).
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