Inasmuch as it is true that the shift in philosophy as practiced by Marx and by Foucault involves, in a nutshell, the need which has existed for a century to move from a philosophy of history to a philosophy in history, it is necessary, in the rigorous form of a series of dilemmas (either Marx, or Foucault), that the main lines of tension of a theoretical field should become apparent and, eventually, definable. This field must, in some form, already exist, and it must already have been traversed and par-tabularized. Nonetheless it must remain to a large extent to be discovered and defined cartographically. Perhaps it could be referred to as the field of “historical materialism.” Central to this is the concept of “social relations” or, contradiction as a structure internal to power relations. This is what sustains the Marxian notion of historical materialism. This then is what, more and more explicitly, Foucault questions. At the (provisional) point of his evolution on this question he developed
ideas which it would not be wrong to refer to by the name of “historical materialism,” but in a way which is opposed, in each of the ways in which it is meant, to Marx: materiality is seen not as the materiality of “social relations” but as the materiality of the apparatus and practice of power, inasmuch as it affects bodies; historicity is seen not as the historicity of contradiction (whether this be viewed as an instance of the totalisation of different forms of struggle or as an instance of the interiorisation of their necessity) but in terms of the historicity of the event the improbable outcome of various strategies of repression and of multiple and partially uncontrollable forms of subjugation. (Balibar, 1992: 54-55)