From the Depths to the Outside: Sovereignty, Subjectivity, and Resistance in Merleau-Ponty and Foucault

s from the core of subjective experience – namely, its intentional relationship to a meaningful space, which is primary to any abstract, rule-governed understanding. For Merleau-Ponty, subjects are constituted in an exploratory, potential relationship to their world, wherein novelty and threats to the unity of a system of rules are omnipresent. Given that Merleau-Ponty’s conception of subjectivity also rejects these elements of the apparatus of sovereignty, we can use his conception to reactivate and give more substance to our earlier discussion of power and right and their relations to subjectivity. In what ways does Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the bodily cogito also help us to think past how sovereignty constitutes these phenomena, and, for that reason, how does it resonate with the inchoate understanding of subjectivity present in Foucault? When Foucault discusses the formation of subjects, he argues that the possibilities of subjects are given shape in relations of power that do not inhere in some over-arching unity. For Foucault, subjectivities are produced by multiple, intersecting apparatuses, each of which has a strategic, dynamic rationality. Although we cannot completely grasp the force of subject-constitution in its entirety, we can trace how subjects are given form in these rationalities. And further, these subjectivities can themselves become transformative elements of apparatuses, and help to form part of the historical dynamism of social practice. Even though Merleau-Ponty does not discuss these issues in terms of relations of power, and even though for him relations of right are not as fundamental to the constitution of subjects as they are for Foucault (we will see the consequences of this in more detail soon), his