The politics of time and temporality in Foucault’s theorisation of resistance: ruptures, time-lags and decelerations

This paper revolves around the politics of time and temporality within Michel Foucault’s theorisation of resistance. In focus is Foucault’s outline of resistance as discursive resistance, reversed discourses, techniques of the self and counter-conducts, and other anti-authority struggles. These forms of resistance are played out across a range of temporal scales. When is resistance, in Foucault’s view, spectacular and instantaneous rather than incremental and ‘slow’? Overall, this paper reveals how the resistance practices, that are described within Foucault’s texts, appear as repetitions of signs across time, major ruptures, breaks or as rhizomatic movements between now, then and the future.