(De)subjectivation in Foucault’s later thought: critical indifference and resistance

This article argues that a significant dimension in Foucault’s rethinking of resistance remains underexplored, namely how he navigated the relationship between desubjectivation and subjectivation. These two processes point to fundamentally different subjective experiences of resistance and different extents of becoming-indifferent to power, understood not as an escape from power relations but as deliberate detachment from specific modes of subjectification undertaken from within them. It contends that desubjectivation, described informally by Foucault as a limit-experience, operates across a spectrum from the extreme to the more measured detachment. This measured detachment, which the article terms ‘critical indifference’, is inseparable from subjectivation, the active process through which the subject constitutes itself otherwise. Together, they form what the article terms (de)subjectivation, a single dynamic whose two dimensions Foucault explored without ever fully resolving them. Ultimately, his caution about desubjectivation reflects a sensitivity to how far becoming-indifferent to power any genuine practice of resistance can sustain.