Movement, gestures, techniques: Foucault, Deleuze, and the pragmatist side of contemporary French philosophy

It is difficult to organize French philosophy of the last century into categories. Henry Bergson was a Bergsonist more than a pragmatist or anything else. And despite any attempt of classification both Foucault and Deleuze, two of the most important representatives of the second half of the century, do not easily fit into currents of thought or movements. Foucault repeatedly said, “I am not a structuralist… and I am not an analytic philosopher” (Foucault 2013). In this paper, I will attempt to provide a good reason for this difficulty of classification and understanding, but I also want also to offer a perspective that goes in the direction of a different, advanced, “pragmatist” understanding of the French masters, or at least two of them: Foucault and Deleuze. In doing this, I hope to offer some suggestions for a new way of doing hermeneutics. In order to do this analysis and to foster those suggestions, I will concentrate not on the content but on the method of their inquiry. I will first focus on the methodological use of techniques in both authors and then I will expand a little about the metaphysical implications of both methodologies. My aim is to show that they (and Bergson) alluded to the notion of gesture, which I think is the mature fruit of an attentive, realist look at classic pragmatists.