Présentation:

Good morning, and thank you very much for being there. Let me begin by thanking the organising committee, Lauren Pedersen-Hor, Jasper Lear, and Beau Kent, for the invitation. I’d also like to thank Deakin University for allowing me to participate in this conference. The title of my presentation is “Voluntary Submission and the Aesthetics of Form: Foucault, Robbe-Grillet, and the Creative Reconfiguration of Power.” What I’d like to propose today is that voluntary submission should not be understood simply as consent, obedience, or passive subjection. Rather, I’ll argue that it can be approached as a specific form through which power relations are made visible, organised, and potentially transformed.
More precisely, I’ll suggest that voluntary submission can be understood as an aesthetic-performative practice. It is performative because it does something within a relation of power: it modifies positions, redistributes possibilities, and gives a specific form to the relation itself. At the same time, it is aesthetic because this operation depends on a formal arrangement: the arrangement of bodies, gestures, gazes, rules, objects, and positions. In order to develop this argument, I’ll proceed in four steps. First, I’ll briefly situate the problem of voluntary submission within Foucault’s understanding of power. Second, I’ll explain why an aesthetic framework is useful for addressing this problem. Third, I’ll discuss the limits of theatricality and performativity as possible models for thinking voluntary submission. Finally, I’ll turn to Robbe-Grillet in order to suggest that his aesthetics of exteriority offers a more precise way of thinking the form of voluntary submission.
Let me begin, then, with the central difficulty. The expression “voluntary submission” seems, at first sight, almost contradictory. On the one hand, submission appears to name a relation of dependence, subordination, or constraint. On the other hand, voluntariness seems to presuppose agency, consent, or freedom. If one submits, one appears no longer to be free; and if one acts voluntarily, one appears not to be merely subjected. My aim, however, is not to dissolve this tension, but to take it seriously as a theoretical problem. What kind of subject is implied when submission can be described as voluntary? And what kind of power relation is at stake when the subject doesn’t merely undergo power from the outside, but actively enters into it, sustains it, or even intensifies a relation of constraint?
This question is especially important in relation to Foucault. For Foucault, power is not primarily a substance possessed by one party and imposed upon another. It is not simply juridical prohibition, sovereign command, or disciplinary repression. Rather, power is a strategic relation between free subjects. It acts upon possible actions; it structures a field of conduct; and it modifies the possibilities available to others. This, of course, doesn’t make power innocent. Foucault repeatedly insists that every power relation involves danger. But it does mean that power should not be confused with domination. Domination, for Foucault, occurs when a relation becomes fixed, blocked, and irreversible. Power relations, by contrast, presuppose some margin of freedom, resistance, and reversibility.
This distinction is crucial for my argument. If power relations presuppose freedom, then submission cannot be understood simply as the disappearance of agency. In this sense, submission may, in certain cases, be a way of acting within power, rather than merely a sign that freedom has been abolished. The question, then, is not whether submission and freedom exclude one another. What matters, more precisely, is how freedom may continue to operate within practices of self-binding, exposure, and constraint.
At this point, the problem of S/M becomes important for Foucault. I don’t approach consensual S/M through a sexual-clinical or psychoanalytic framework, nor do I treat them as mere reproductions of domination. Instead, I read them as limit-practices, that is, as practices in which asymmetrical positions are explicitly staged, negotiated, codified, and, at least potentially, reversed. In this sense, submission doesn’t necessarily mean that freedom has disappeared. It may instead name a partial and strategic yielding to power, a form of yielding in which the subject’s freedom is not simply suspended, but mobilised, tested, and redistributed through an embodied relation.
This point allows us to complicate a familiar criticism of Foucault, associated especially with Giorgio Agamben: namely, that Foucault didn’t sufficiently account for the subject’s active participation in its own subjection. And this is precisely where the problem of voluntary submission becomes important. It forces us to address this difficulty directly. What happens, in other words, when subjects are not merely produced by dispositifs of power, but also bind themselves to rules, roles, practices, and constraints through which a specific form of subjectivity becomes possible? My hypothesis is that voluntary submission cannot be adequately understood if we reduce it to disciplinary subjection, to theatrical representation, or to performativity in a narrowly linguistic sense. It must instead be understood as a form. More specifically, it must be approached as a constructed arrangement: an arrangement through which bodies, gazes, surfaces, gestures, and rules produce a field of experience.
To make this point clearer, I first need to pause over what I mean by aesthetics. I am not using the term in the restricted sense of a philosophy of beauty, or as a theory of fine art. I am using it in a broader sense, closer to the organisation of sensibility. By this, I mean the historically variable configuration of what can be seen, what can be felt, what can be perceived, and what can be judged. Understood in this broader way, aesthetics concerns not only artworks, but also the forms through which experience itself becomes organised.
This expanded meaning of aesthetics is already present, I think, in Foucault’s writings on painting. His analyses of Velázquez, Manet, and Magritte should not be treated as merely marginal texts on art. Rather, they function as laboratories for thinking regimes of visibility. In Las Meninas, for example, Foucault examines the relation between seeing and being seen, and between representation and the position from which representation becomes possible. In his reading of Manet, he then shows how painting ceases to function as a transparent window and begins instead to foreground its own material conditions: the flatness of the canvas, the position of the viewer, and the distribution of light. Finally, in Magritte, Foucault analyses the rupture between image and word, between resemblance and affirmation.
In all these cases, painting matters because it reorganises the relation between visibility, knowledge, and experience. It doesn’t simply represent something that is already given. Rather, it exposes the conditions under which something becomes visible and intelligible in the first place. For this reason, Foucault’s aesthetics should not be understood as a theory of beauty. It is better understood as an analysis of the sensible conditions through which subjects and objects come to appear.
This visual and aesthetic framework prepares the passage to Foucault’s later work on the care of the self and the aesthetics of existence. At this point, aesthetics no longer concerns only visual forms. It also concerns forms of life. Foucault’s well-known suggestion that one might create oneself as a work of art should not be understood to mean that life becomes a merely decorative object. Rather, it means that subjectivity is formed through practices, exercises, constraints, and modes of self-relation. The subject, then, is not a substance that exists prior to these practices. It is formed through them.
This is where voluntary submission becomes especially significant. The care of the self, and the aesthetics of existence more broadly, involve discipline, exercises, rules, and self-imposed constraints. In other words, the subject works on itself by binding itself to practices that it doesn’t simply invent from nothing. Self-formation, in this sense, is never pure self-creation. It requires submission to historically available forms. It requires embodiment. And it requires vulnerability. The subject becomes itself by entering into forms that it can inhabit, but never fully master.
This also means that vulnerability is not accidental to ethical subjectivation. It is not simply a risk added from the outside. Rather, it is one of its conditions. The subject who forms itself must expose itself to rules, to exercises, to bodily limits, to historical forms, and to relations with others. Voluntary submission, then, can be read as a limit-form of subjectivation: the subject constitutes itself by entering into a relation of constraint that it has, at least ostensibly, chosen.
However, if we stop at this point, we still have not fully explained the form of voluntary submission. We have shown that it may be connected to practices of the self; but we have not yet explained how those practices become visible, embodied, and relational. Here, theatricality appears as an obvious candidate. After all, Foucault frequently analyses power through scenes, rituals, ceremonies, and public displays. The execution of Damiens at the beginning of Discipline and Punish is perhaps the most famous example. In that scene, power appears as spectacle, as ceremony, and as a theatrical manifestation of sovereignty. More broadly, scholars such as Stuart Elden and Arianna Sforzini have shown how important theatricality can be for understanding Foucault’s work. Power is staged; bodies are positioned; truth is displayed; and philosophical discourse itself may operate through scenes.
This approach is useful, but it also has clear limits. If theatricality is understood mainly as representation, it risks reducing voluntary submission to something that is merely shown. It tells us how power appears, how it is staged, and how it becomes visible. But voluntary submission doesn’t only show something; it also does something. It modifies a relation, distributes positions, affects spectators or participants, and creates a field in which agency and passivity, activity and receptivity, domination and freedom, are rearranged. For this reason, performativity seems to offer a further step. Its vocabulary allows us to move from what submission represents to what submission produces. From Austin’s speech-act theory to Butler’s account of reiterated norms, performativity has been used to understand acts that don’t simply describe reality, but help bring it into being. In a Foucauldian context, then, the question becomes whether gestures, bodily positions, and practices of self-exposure can also be understood as performative acts.
This is particularly important in relation to parrhesia. Here, Foucault distinguishes parrhesia from institutionalised performative utterances. A performative utterance, in the Austinian sense, produces a conventional effect within an authorised framework: opening a meeting, pronouncing a marriage, or issuing a sentence. Parrhesia, by contrast, involves risky truth-telling. It doesn’t produce a predictable effect that is guaranteed in advance. Rather, it opens a situation, and in doing so, it exposes the speaker to danger. Yet, as Daniele Lorenzini suggests, parrhesia can also be understood in relation to perlocutionary effects: that is, in relation to what is done by saying something, or to the effects that truth-telling produces within a field of relations.
This helps us understand voluntary submission as an act that produces effects. But even in this expanded sense, performativity remains insufficient if it doesn’t also explain the formal arrangement through which those effects become possible. In other words, the question is not only whether submission performs something. The question is how a scene of submission is composed: how bodies, objects, gazes, rules, surfaces, and positions are arranged so that power relations become visible, reversible, and, at least potentially, transformable.
It is at this point that I turn to Robbe-Grillet. My aim is not to claim that Foucault was directly influenced by Robbe-Grillet in any simple or linear way. Nor is it to establish a thematic analogy between literature and sexuality. What interests me, rather, is a zone of convergence: a shared concern with the displacement of psychological interiority, stable meaning, and traditional representation.
Robbe-Grillet’s novels, especially The Voyeur and Jealousy, challenge the traditional novel by refusing psychological depth, linear causality, and moral explanation. In other words, they don’t offer a stable subject whose interior motives would explain the events. Instead, they organise experience through objects, surfaces, repetitions, visual details, spatial arrangements, and gaps. The reader, therefore, is not given a transparent moral or psychological key. Rather, they are placed within a field of perception.
This becomes particularly clear in The Voyeur, where the suspected crime around which the novel turns is never fully presented as a stable event. The narrative approaches it indirectly, circling around it through objects, gestures, temporal distortions, repetitions, and omissions. What matters, then, is not only what happened, but also how the reader is made to perceive, reconstruct, and suspect. A similar displacement occurs in Jealousy. There, desire and suspicion are not expressed through psychological confession; instead, they are displaced onto the organisation of space, objects, gazes, and lines of sight.
Robbe-Grillet’s so-called objectivity is therefore not neutral. It doesn’t eliminate desire, violence, or affect. Rather, it displaces them into form. In this sense, form prevents them from being translated too quickly into psychology, morality, or confession. The subject, then, no longer appears as a stable interiority that explains the scene from within. Instead, the subject becomes an effect of the scene’s arrangement.
This, I suggest, is what makes Robbe-Grillet especially useful for thinking Foucault’s remarks on S/M. In Foucault’s account, S/M is not important because it reveals a hidden sexual truth buried deep within the subject. On the contrary, Foucault is interested in S/M as a creative enterprise: as the invention of new possibilities of pleasure, and as the eroticisation of strategic relations.
Its importance, therefore, lies in the fact that it formalises power relations. It creates roles, rules, contracts, gestures, limits, reversibilities, and intensities. Power doesn’t disappear. Rather, it is reorganised as material for invention.
In this respect, Robbe-Grillet’s literary procedures offer a model for thinking how form can organise experience without referring it back to a pre-existing interior identity. In Robbe-Grillet, literary form prevents desire or violence from being reduced to psychology or moral judgment. In Foucault’s account of S/M, erotic form prevents sexuality from being reduced to confession, identity, or pathology.
In both cases, then, form is not merely an external container. It is the medium through which experience is organised and made thinkable.
This allows us, then, to define what I call an aesthetics of exteriority. By this I mean an aesthetic in which subjectivity is not expressed from within, as if it were the manifestation of an inner truth, but is instead produced through exterior arrangements: bodies, objects, gazes, surfaces, rules, spatial positions, and repeated gestures. In this sense, the subject doesn’t precede the form through which it appears. Rather, it is constituted by submitting itself to a form that it doesn’t fully master.
From this perspective, voluntary submission can be understood neither as passive obedience, nor as simple theatrical display, nor even only as performative efficacy. It is, more precisely, an aesthetic-performative practice. It is performative because it modifies the power relation in which it takes place. And it is aesthetic because this modification depends on a sensible and formal arrangement. The subject places itself “below,” but this position doesn’t mean disappearance. On the contrary, it becomes the very way in which a field of relations is composed, intensified, and potentially transformed.
Let me emphasise, however, that this doesn’t mean romanticising submission, nor does it mean denying the danger of domination. Foucault’s point that every power relation involves danger remains essential here. Voluntary submission can always collapse into domination: when reversibility disappears, when consent becomes empty, or when asymmetry becomes fixed. But that danger doesn’t exhaust the concept. In other words, the fact that submission is dangerous doesn’t mean that it is always identical with domination.
This has a broader implication for critique. Critique cannot restrict itself to denouncing every participation in power as mere complicity. If power relations are the field in which subjects are formed, then critique must also ask how subjects inhabit those relations, how they use the forms that bind them, and how those forms may be displaced. Voluntary submission is therefore not interesting because it reconciles freedom and power. It is interesting because it unsettles the opposition between them.
To conclude, I’d suggest that the phrase “voluntary submission” should not be resolved by choosing between voluntariness and submission. Its conceptual force lies, rather, in holding the two terms together. Read through Foucault, and placed in dialogue with Robbe-Grillet, voluntary submission names a practice in which the subject is neither simply dominated nor simply sovereign. Instead, the subject is constituted through forms of self-binding, exposure, and exterior arrangement.
Robbe-Grillet helps us see, first, that form is not secondary to experience. Form produces experience. Foucault, in turn, helps us see that power is not simply what represses the subject from the outside. It is also the field within which subjects are formed, constrained, and transformed. Taken together, then, Robbe-Grillet and Foucault allow voluntary submission to appear as a limit-practice: a risky, constructed, and reversible form through which power relations may become visible, available, and, potentially, open to transformation.
Thank you very much.