Foucault, Kant, Deleuze, and the problem of political agency

Political agency concerns the transformation of the conditions of social organization through collective action. In order to treat the set of necessary conditions for such agency, I develop a detailed reconstruction of Michel Foucault's political philosophy, placed in relation to the work of Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze. I argue that the key to Foucault's political thought is contained in two crucial but neglected concepts, verticality and transversality, and that the systematic exposition of these concepts yields an account of what must obtain for political agency to be possible, realizable, and sustainable.