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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLI | Number 1 | 2020 | 61–85 | doi: 10.3986/fv.41.1.02
* Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania
Dave Mesing*
The Intervening Prince: Althusser, Foucault, 
and a Theory of Strategy
Intervening in the Second Reception
Today it has become de rigueur, especially albeit not exclusively among those of 
us writing within what Stefano Pippa has proposed to synthesize as Althusser’s 
second reception, to adopt a posture of intervention, demarcating in this way 
a contribution towards that other Althusserian mot de passe of the conjunc-
ture.
1
 Given the proliferation of this strategic couplet throughout Althusser’s 
published and unpublished writings, such a gesture is unsurprising. Moreover, 
further interventions into conjunctures have also been elaborated and innovat-
ed upon by some of Althusser’s closest readers and interlocutors. For example, 
in Can Politics Be Thought?, Alain Badiou aligns intervention with a polemical 
conception of politics as the rupture of the political understood as the fictive 
1
 To cite only some very recent examples in English (despite the fact extensive, innovative, 
and challenging Althusser scholarship has flourished in other languages and contexts), 
see the following introductions to special issues on Althusser: Banu Bargu and Robyn 
Marasco, “The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser: Introduction”, Rethinking Marx-
ism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 31 (3/2019), pp. 239–241; Stefano Pippa and 
Vittorio Morfino, “Reading Althusser, Again”, Revista Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa 
Rica 58 (152/2019), pp. 11–14. My focus and reference-point in this essay remains the Al -
thusserian context, but I would emphasize that a strategic, interventionist approach is 
by no means some exclusive property among Althusser scholars. Barnard E. Harcourt, 
for example, has recently underscored the efforts of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht 
to establish a journal they titled Krisis und Kritik as well as Kritische Blätter, noting that 
“‘Interventionist thinking’ was the order of the day [and] ‘inconsequential thought’ was to 
be avoided.” Bernard E. Harcourt, “Counter-Critical Theory: An Intervention in Contempo-
rary Critical Thought and Practice”, Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 
1 (1/2018), p. 7. Harcourt both excavates this interventionist inheritance in Benjamin and 
Brecht’s plans as well as mobilizes it in the present towards what he calls “counter-critical 
theory.” Benjamin and Brecht’s journal title was reanimated for the 2014 launch of Crisis 
& Critique by the Dialectical Materialism Collective, which has published several essays 
involving Althusser.

62
dave mesing
bond between State and civil society.
2
 Writing from a distinct but not entirely 
antagonistic perspective, Étienne Balibar also has recourse to a multifaceted 
sense of intervention which is perhaps more imbued with the Marxian critique 
of political economy,
3
 in turn adopting intervention as an object of analysis,
4
 
but also and more basically in the way I invoke here, as a self-description of the 
theoretical enterprise.
5
As a multifaceted rhetorical and conceptual device, intervention and its dyadic 
companion conjuncture often indicate a strategic orientation which foregrounds 
specific context, historical inscription, a shifting balance of forces, and a kind of 
tentative yet aggressive experimentation captured in the Napoleonic slogan on 
s’engage et puis on voit – first we engage the enemy and then we see what sticks 
or does not stick.
6
 Such a strategic orientation is perhaps succinctly captured, 
2
 Alain Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought?, trans. Bruno Bosteels, Duke University Press, Dur-
ham, NC 2018, p. 36.
3
 Étienne Balibar, “Critique in the 21
st
 Century: Political economy still, and religion again”, 
Radical Philosophy 200 (2016), pp. 11–21. For an important analysis of Badiou in this re -
gard, see Gavin Walker, “On Marxism’s Field of Operation: Badiou and the Critique of Po-
litical Economy”, Historical Materialism 20 (2/2012), pp. 39–74. 
4
 Étienne Balibar, “Politics and Truth: The Vacillation of Ideology, II”, in Masses, Classes, 
Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson, 
Routledge, London 1994, p. 168. This sense is particularly suggestive of a critical point that 
should not be too quickly dispensed with, but which I can only gesture to here for reasons 
of space, namely that intervention has been one of the central legal, economic, political, 
and military practices of the state in recent decades. Balibar claims that economics is the 
main area of state intervention into social practice. A study of the histories and practices of 
intervention is sorely needed for those who adopt the theoretical posture of intervention. 
For a perspective generated by a critical reading of Foucault on some of the questions 
which arise when taking intervention as object of analysis rather than theoretical modali-
ty, see Jessica Whyte, “Human rights: confronting governments?: Michel Foucault and the 
right to intervene”, in M. Stone, I. Wall, and C. Douzinas (eds.), New Critical Legal Think-
ing: Law and the Political, Routledge, London 2012, pp. 11–31.
5
 One among other examples of this, characteristically for Balibar as well as Althusser, con-
cerns Spinoza, whom Balibar presents as composing the Theologico-Political Treatise “as 
a direct intervention in the political conjuncture of the crisis of the [Dutch] Republic.” Éti-
enne Balibar, “Spinoza: The Anti-Orwell”, in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and 
Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson, Routledge, London 1994, p. 9. 
6
 I follow Warren Montag in noting this phrase, which he uses in order to synthesize “strat-
egy for Althusser” in terms of his philosophical interventions which were coupled with ex-
tensive reflections on the surrounding theoretical (philosophical as well as scientific) con-
juncture. See Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual 

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the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
without recourse to the intervention-conjuncture dyad, in Michel Foucault’s for-
mulation of a “conceptualization [which] implies critical thought—a constant 
checking.”
7
 And yet to invoke Foucault here as one possible crystallizer of such 
strategic theoretical practice suggests a further question, which hopefully does 
not open onto an infinite regress: what does it mean to intervene among friends 
(or enemies) concerning the status of intervening into the conjuncture?
In what follows, I present a theory of political strategy not merely as the self-con-
tained formula “intervention into a conjuncture,” but rather with further refer-
ence to the surrounding conceptual contexts of intervention, conjuncture, and 
other terms as a part of Althusser’s philosophical lexicon. By means of a critical 
confrontation between some of Althusser’s later writings and certain strategic 
formulations in Foucault, I sketch an account of strategy as the anticipation of 
an encounter which modifies, abolishes, or otherwise alters the relations con-
stituting its conjuncture. To borrow Warren Montag’s ambivalent deployment, 
Foucault is certainly best approached in this way as among Althusser’s philo-
sophical contemporaries, rather than simply a friend or enemy. Yet in some of 
Foucault’s writing, we find a productive set of assumptions which enable the 
further elaboration of the intervention-conjuncture dyad in order to offer an ac-
count of strategy absent in both Foucault and, at least explicitly, Althusser. In 
other words, by proposing a definition of strategy as a reflection on the interven-
tion-conjuncture dyad, I will traverse through Foucault’s writings as those of an 
eminently strategic thinker in order to sharpen them by turning to Althusser as 
offering a philosophy for strategy, in addition to his own conception and life-
long project of offering a philosophy for Marxism.
8
 
In order to propose a definition of strategy as part of the Althusserian lexicon, 
it is useful to tarry further with Pippa’s remarks concerning Althusser’s ongo-
ing second reception, which allow me to isolate a protocol for staging a narrow 
War, Duke University Press, Durham, NC 2013, p. 4. Invoking the question of engagement 
as another strategic modality opens up a line of inquiry into Althusser and Sartre, among 
others. 
7
 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in J. Faubion (ed.), The Essential Works of Fou-
cault Vol. 3: Power, The New Press, New York 2000, p. 327.
8
 For a succinct description as well as enactment of Althusser’s distinction between phi-
losophy for and philosophy of Marxism, see Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality, 
Haymarket Books, Chicago 2018, pp. 1–16, especially pp. 6–7. 

64
dave mesing
Althusser-Foucault encounter vis-à-vis the alternative between strategy and 
strategic thought.
9
 With his proposal of Althusser’s second reception, Pippa 
calls attention to a tidal wave of posthumously published material, which has 
in part animated renewed interest in Althusser’s writings, a flourishing set of de-
bates only possible to capture in brief snapshots here.
10
 As he points out, since 
Althusser’s death in 1990, “over 5,000 pages of notes, quasi-finished texts al -
most ready for publication, an autobiography, [and] letters” have all been pub-
lished, “opening up an entirely new perspective in Althusser’s scholarship.”
11
 
Pippa’s key anchorage point lies with the empirical fact that this enormous 
amount of material calls for a reconsideration of Althusser’s philosophical pro-
duction. However, in terms of the helpful periodization of a second reception, 
Pippa’s insight does not only stabilize this empirical shift for those working in 
light of Althusser’s concepts and problematics. To this first observation con-
cerning the productive eruption of posthumously published writings, we can 
add two further starting points for a second reception of Althusser which are 
helpful in approaching an alternative between strategy and strategic thought by 
reading Althusser together with Foucault. 
9
 I stress the narrowness of this encounter, hoping it proves productive for those thinking 
in light of problems shared by Foucault and Althusser. For reasons of space I have been 
unable to enter into the complex discussions and utilizations of Foucault’s methodolo-
gies, instead trying to situate a narrow set of assumptions observable in his arguments 
against the context of Althusser’s philosophy for strategy. For one debate on methodo-
logical questions, see Colin Koopman, “Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in 
Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages”, Foucault Studies 8 (February 2010), pp. 100–121; Kevin 
Thompson, “Response to Colin Koopman’s ‘Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique 
in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages’”, Foucault Studies 8 (February 2010), pp. 122–128; and 
Colin McQuillan, “Transcendental Philosophy and Critical Philosophy in Kant and Fou-
cault: Response to Colin Koopman”, Foucault Studies 9 (September 2010), pp. 145–155. For 
a Foucauldian perspective closer to the Althusserian one I delineate here, see Johanna 
Oksala, “Foucault’s Politicization of Ontology”, Continental Philosophy Review 43 (Novem -
ber 2010), pp. 445–466. For a helpful and more expansive contrast between Foucault and 
Althusser throughout the 1960s and 1970s, see Andrew Ryder, “Foucault and Althusser,” 
Foucault Studies 16 (September 2013), pp. 134–153.
10
 Below I discuss an “early” reassessment-type text by Vittorio Morfino. Another “early” text 
in this regard which might be useful to revisit for those working in the second reception is 
Maria Turchetto, “I ‘due Marx’ e l’althusserismo,” in R. Bellofiore (ed.), Da Marx a Marx? 
Un bilancio dei marxismi italiani del Novecento, Manifestolibri, Rome 2007, pp. 101–107.
11
 Stefano Pippa, Althusser and Contingency, Mimesis International, Milan 2019, p. 17.

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the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
First, Pippa convincingly demonstrates the way that the second reception of 
Althusser’s writings has helped introduce distance from a prevailing position 
among earlier scholars that Althusser abandoned a faith in Marxist science in 
order to embrace a philosophy of contingency as the theoretical manifestation 
of political despair. Pippa’s work is to date the most extensive treatment of the 
category of contingency throughout Althusser’s writings, and in providing such 
a thorough analysis, his advancement of the second reception does not exem-
plify that this shift constitutes only the refusal of such rigid demarcation of dis-
tinct Althusserian stages, but rather that this reception has helped to overcome 
such a position. Indeed, we can find proof of this overcoming by attending to 
some contributions within the second reception by scholars who have labored 
within Anglophone Althusser scholarship prior to Pippa’s proposed indexing of 
the second reception to the mid-to-late 1990s, such as Warren Montag’s help -
ful discussion of the “early” appearance of the concept of encounter.
12
 Or, to 
borrow from Panagiotis Sotiris’ formulation, by stepping back from an inter-
nal assessment of Althusser’s variegated theoretical production, the critical, 
polemical, and appreciative attention Althusser has received from consecutive 
waves of Marxist scholars should give permanent pause to any neat typography 
of Althusser’s structuralist phase, irrationalist phase, and so on as we continue 
to debate Althusser’s contributions and relevance in the present.
13
 
12
 Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries, p. 188. Indeed, in suggesting we have arrived 
at a second reception, Pippa rightly notes Montag’s similar assessment in an article pub-
lished in 1998, which I will return to later. For one elaboration of this position concerning 
a break in Althusser, see Antonio Negri, “Notes on the Evolution of the Thought of Lou-
is Althusser”, trans. Olga Vasile, in A. Callari and D. Ruccio (eds.), Postmodern Marxism 
and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition, Wesleyan University 
Press, Hanover, NH 1995, pp. 51–68. 
13
 Panagiotis Sotiris, A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser, Brill, Leiden 2020, 
p. 529. Sotiris provides an extensive discussion of Althusser’s entire career in a text which 
will undoubtedly be debated at much length in the years to come. In part three of the book 
especially, he undertakes a reading of Althusser’s intellectual production as a continuous 
intervention in the context of the communist movement and what would eventually come 
to be called the crisis of Marxism. Moreover, he situates Althusser’s entire work with re-
gard to various strategies within this context. I offer an approach to strategy in this essay 
which is distinct from these nuanced and important problems synthesized well by Sotiris, 
which I hope is useful for revisiting these lessons throughout Althusser’s work in further 
detail than I am able to accomplish here. 

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dave mesing
In addition to the quantitative avalanche of posthumously published writings 
and the refusal of a break or discrete periods in favor of the continued elabo-
ration of problems, a third and perhaps most relevant aspect Pippa outlines as 
part of the second reception concerns Althusser’s status, from the beginning to 
end of his work, as a philosopher. To focus too narrowly on the delimitation of 
the philosophical enterprise, a vexed question,
14
 would take us too far afield, 
but the simple fact that Althusser’s theoretical labor is animated by an engage-
ment with classical philosophers as well as his contemporaries who undertook 
similar engagements in their own fashion, is important to recall. Notably, as 
Montag underscores in a manner which reinforces Pippa’s proposal of a sec-
ond reception, in terms of the Anglophone scholarship concerning French 
philosophers during Althusser’s time, too often there has been a silo effect of 
thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, despite the similarities in 
questions among them. More importantly, I would suggest, is that each silo was 
indexed to a tradition: “Foucault to French epistemology, Derrida to phenom-
enology and Heidegger, Deleuze to Bergsonianiam, and, of course, Althusser 
to Marxism,” such that we witness the unfortunate and unproductive appear-
ance of monstrous groups such as Foucauldians, Derrideans, Deleuzeans, and 
Althusserians.
15
 
Pippa’s deployment of a second reception of Althusser is likely best understood 
as a heuristic starting point rather than a rigid break within intellectual history, 
but I take these three elements within his work and the work of other contem-
porary scholars as decisive touchstones for my intervention concerning inter-
vention in what follows. Situating ourselves within this second reception allows 
for the possibility of new insights and problems. It is in this sense that I would 
14
 In light of the context I will turn to in my discussion of Althusser’s “Lenin and Philosophy” 
address in part three, one especially technical elaboration of this question is the work of 
François Laruelle. An important and understudied development of this theme in Althuss-
er’s work is Paulin Hountondji, “The Myth of Spontaneous Philosophy”, Conséquence 1 
(1974), pp. 11–37. I am thankful to Dhruv Jain for bringing this text to my attention. I have 
addressed some of the details in Laruelle’s enterprise with respect to Althusser’s concep-
tion of philosophy in Dave Mesing, “Critical Theory as Theoretical Practice: Althusserian-
ism in Laruelle and Adorno,” in R. Gangle and J. Greve (eds.), Superpositions: Laruelle and 
the Humanities, Rowman & Littlefield International, London 2017, pp. 59–74.
15
 Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries, p. 8. For an illuminating discussion of Althuss -
er and French historical epistemology, see David Maruzzella, “The Two Bachelards of Lou-
is Althusser”, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy 31 (2019), pp. 174–206. 

67
the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
like to stage an encounter between Althusser and Foucault by traversing some 
of the latter’s writings which show Foucault practicing a strategic thought, in 
order to contrast them with a definition of strategy as part of an Althusserian 
philosophical lexicon. In using such a protocol, I follow what I take to be an 
exemplary and, within the second reception of Althusser, “early” text by Vittorio 
Morfino, in which he emphasizes focusing on concepts, categories, and their 
functions in order to clarify a lexicon of terms.
16
 With reference to the interven-
tion-conjuncture nexus, I will sketch an account of strategy as the anticipation 
of an encounter which modifies, abolishes, or otherwise alters the relations con-
stituting a conjuncture. I will illuminate this theory of strategy by means of a 
critical contrast to a set of assumptions within Foucault’s theoretical practice of 
strategic thought, to which we can now turn.
Foucault’s Strategic Priority
In part four of La Volonté de savoir, Foucault advances a number of general 
propositions concerning objective, method, domain, as well as some provision-
al periodizations about power, particularly in light of his investigation into the 
history of sexuality. Despite the fact that throughout his project, Foucault pre-
sents analyses of power relations in a number of contexts, his comments in this 
section provide a helpful condensation of assumptions observable in his the-
oretical practice of strategic thought.
17
 One other locus of this practice, which 
offers a helpful way into these assumptions, is the following programmatic re-
mark in an interview he gave in 1975, one year prior to the publication of this 
text. Asked to expand upon his preceding comments about making visible the 
unseen by changing a level, by “addressing oneself to a layer of material which 
16
 Vittorio Morfino, “An Althusserian Lexicon,” trans. Jason Smith, borderlands e-journal, 
4 (2/2005). Available at: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol4no2_2005/morfino_lexicon.
htm. Note that the text was originally published in 2000 as an introduction to the Italian 
translation of some of Althusser’s late writings. 
17
 In this context I focus on the question of Foucault’s understanding of strategy and what 
I call his strategic priority in light of the way he invokes strategic rhetoric. Foucault’s as-
sessment of power, especially his criticisms of moralizing notions of power, are especially 
relevant for further debates about strategy and the history of strategy. In order to focus on 
drawing out a particular approach to strategy as strategic priority, I leave these substan-
tive aspects of the context of his writings on power to one side for reasons of space. I am 
thankful to Asad Haider for bringing this point to my attention. 

68
dave mesing
had hitherto no pertinence for history and which had not been recognised as 
having any moral, aesthetic, political or historical value,” Foucault responds:
Mechanisms of power in general have never been studied much by history. History 
has been studied by those who held power – anecdotal histories of kings and gen-
erals; contrasted with this there has been the history of economic processes and 
infrastructures. Again, distinct from this, we have had histories of institutions, of 
what has been viewed as a superstructural level in relation to the economy. But 
power in its strategies [le pouvoir dans ses stratégies], at once general and de-
tailed [à la fois générales et fines], and its mechanisms, has never been studied.
18
Here Foucault offers a clear statement of his strategic priority: in order to track 
the layer of power within the archives where it has as yet received no history, it is 
necessary to conduct analyses of a plurality of power relations within a plurality 
of contexts, thereby making visible, by means of conceptualization and a nu-
anced, constant checking, that “the exercise of power itself creates and causes 
to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of informa-
tion.”
19
 In other words, analyses of power uncover power-knowledge relations 
by attending to strategies as the mechanisms of power. Such mechanisms come 
from everywhere. “One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an insti-
tution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; 
it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation [une situa-
tion stratégique complexe] in a particular society.”
20
 Here Foucault has identified 
the “general” as opposed to the “detailed” of power in its strategies, namely, a 
complex strategical situation. Should a strategist press for further clarification, 
Foucault continues: “perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity 
of force relations [multiplicité des rapports de force] can be coded—in part but 
never totally—either in the form of ‘war’, or in the form of ‘politics’; this would 
18
 Michel Foucault, “Prison Talk,” in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews 
& Other Writings 1972–1977, Pantheon Books, New York 1980, pp. 50–51. The original is 
reprinted as Michel Foucault, “Les jeux du pouvoir,” in D. Grisoni (ed.), Politiques de la 
Philosophie, Grasset, Paris 1976, pp. 155–174.
19
 Ibid., p. 51.
20
 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 
Pantheon Books, New York 1978, p. 93. All references are checked against the original. Cf. 
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir, Éditions Gallimard, Paris 
1976.

69
the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
imply two different strategies [deux stratégies differentes] (but the one always 
liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogenous, 
unstable, and tense force relations.”
21
 Hence in being nominalistic in order to 
pursue the task of analyzing power mechanisms, we have an ambivalently artic-
ulated general level of strategies as war and politics, understood as integrating 
forms of force relations, always capable of tilting into one another.
 
Accordingly, Foucault’s strategic priority describes both the orientation and 
enactment of his theoretical practice as a strategic thought into the history of 
mechanisms of power, on the one hand, and a postulate subtending his other as-
sumptions about this practice throughout this part of La Volonté de savoir, on the 
other: there are strategies, but no strategy. In order to speak of strategy, we must 
do so heuristically, granting a kind of paradoxical, logical priority to the strate-
gic over strategy. Strategy is but one tool in the arsenal of the strategic thinker 
in search of the mechanisms of power suffused everywhere throughout history. 
 
By carefully attending to a number of passages in this part of La Volonté de 
savoir, we can observe three related assumptions Foucault makes in pursuing 
his strategic priority. First, as Foucault clarifies in a manner that presents more 
specifically how to go about writing the history of power he broaches in the in-
terview, it is necessary to develop “an analytics” [une anaytique] of power in 
order to displace what he calls “a theory” [une théorie] of power, understood 
as the juridico-discursive representation of power.
22
 Foucault maps out a series 
of “principal features” of this theory of power, but what is most important to 
notice for understanding his strategic priority is his claim animating the turn 
towards an analytics of power: “The analysis, made in terms of power, must not 
assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity 
of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms 
[les formes terminales] power takes.”
23
 In other words, for Foucault, a theory of 
power oriented around these forms—elsewhere, he fleshes them out by referring 
to overlapping conceptual problems such as “right and violence, law and ille-
21
 Ibid.
22
 Ibid., p. 82.
23
 Ibid., p. 92. My emphasis.

70
dave mesing
gality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty”
24
—implicitly 
renders static the actual mechanisms of power at work throughout history.
 
Turning to analyze power mechanisms without the structuring mediation of 
such a theory of power, Foucault wagers, opens up entirely new vistas. Most 
notably as far as strategies are concerned, an analytics of power uncovers pow-
er otherwise than under the guise of its terminal forms taken as its final word, 
instead allowing power as “the moving substrate of force relations [le socle 
mouvant des rapports de force] which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly 
engender [such] states of power,”
25
 to flare up before our eyes. Hence Foucault’s 
displacement of theory for analytics enables a conception of power which “one 
must first understand as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the 
sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.”
26
 
It is in this context of presenting a series of equivocal descriptions of such “pri-
mary” force relations that Foucault draws closest to specifying an account of 
strategy. In addition to the imperative to first attend to an immanent multiplicity 
of force relations, he adds:
[Power must be understood as] the process which, through ceaseless struggles 
and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses [force relations]; as the 
support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or 
a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate 
them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies [les stratégies] in which [these 
force relations] take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization 
is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various 
social hegemonies.
27
As such, in addition to Foucault’s first assumption concerning the methodology 
of analytics as opposed to theory, we witness the second: force relations as the 
omnipresence of power, understood dynamically as always in motion and com-
ing from everywhere, “produced from one moment to the next, at every point, 
24
 Ibid., p. 89.
25
 Ibid., p. 93.
26
 Ibid., p. 92. Translation modified. Interestingly, Robert Hurley’s translation renders the 
initial phrase as “in the first instance.”
27
 Ibid., pp. 92–93.

71
the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
or rather in every relation from one point to another.”
28
 This second assumption 
concerning the omnipresence of power and its linear production expressed in 
relations effectively involves a more detailed elaboration of Foucault’s claim we 
examined earlier concerning the necessity to “be nominalistic” in examining 
power mechanisms. An analytics of power uncovers a complex strategical situ-
ation coded as politics and/or war. 
 
Foucault’s third assumption in these passages allows us to begin grasping how 
force relations as expressed in strategies which circulate within the state appa-
ratus, law, and social hegemony are actually composed. Whereas the “general” 
level of strategies reveals itself as the Janus-faced complex strategical situation 
of war-politics, at the more detailed level of strategies in their effectuation, we 
find Foucault conceiving of strategies as the agglomeration of tactical instanc-
es. It is perhaps here where Foucault’s strategic priority is most rooted, so to 
speak.
29
 Indeed, such an agglomeration of tactics appears to be the result of 
Foucault’s methodological displacement of theory into analytics: the complex 
strategical situation, qua moving substrate of force relations constantly engen-
dering states of power such as the state, law, or domination which “are always 
local and unstable [locaux et instables].”
30
 As Foucault suggests in probably one 
of his most well-known phrases, “where there is power, there is resistance, and 
yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in 
relation to power.”
31
 In light of what I have argued is Foucault’s strategic priority, 
we can read this summary proposition of Foucault’s claims throughout this sec-
tion as both an expression of the major advantage gained from an analytics of 
power and as what enables us to make sense of Foucault’s remarks which align 
strategies and tactics by means of formulating strategies, always and necessar-
28
 Ibid., p. 93. In light of this assumption, the relationship between power and relation would 
be useful to study further. Foucault draws near in a few formulations to what Vittorio 
Morfino has called the primacy of relations, to which my account of strategy is indebted. 
See Vittorio Morfino, “Spinoza: An Ontology of Relation”, trans. Jason E. Smith in Plural 
Temporality: Transindividuality and the Aleatory Between Spinoza and Althusser, Brill, Lei-
den 2014, pp. 46–71. 
29
 Perhaps this is why some suggest Foucault provides an analysis of tactics but not strategy. 
For a reading of Foucault which moves in this direction by supplementing his arguments 
with Michel de Certeau, see Claire Colebrook, “Certeau and Foucault: Tactics and Strategic 
Essentialism”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100 (2/2001), pp. 543–574.
30
 Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, p. 93.
31
 Ibid., p. 95.

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dave mesing
ily in the plural, as ultimately comprised of particular tactical instances of the 
exercise of power.
 
Foucault develops this sense of strategies as the agglomeration of tactics in the 
summary proposition prior to his remark about the coterminous existence of 
power and resistance by claiming that “power relations are both intentional and 
nonsubjective.”
32
 Arising from everywhere, no power arrives without being fixed 
to aims or objectives. However, the rationality of this power is displaced to level 
of tactics, understood as particular instances of decision-making with regard 
to power, out of which arises the general level of power as complex strategical 
situation. 
[L]et us not look for the headquarters that presides over [power’s] rationality; nei-
ther the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor 
those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network 
of power that functions in society (and makes it function); the rationality of power 
is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where 
they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connect-
ed to one another, attracting and propagating one another, but finding their base 
of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive systems: 
the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that 
no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated 
them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strat-
egies [des grandes stratégies anonymes] which coordinate the loquacious tactics 
whose ‘inventors’ or decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy.
33
Hence, by using analytics, we uncover the mechanisms of power relations 
which arise everywhere from local tactics. These tactics provide, by means of 
becoming concatenated to one another, the basis for strategies which comprise 
a moving substrate of force relations.
 
Accordingly, one of the crucial implications of Foucault’s shift to analytics, as 
expressed in the well-known passage about power and resistance, is that he 
provides the tools for a method capable of attending to a plurality of resist-
32
 Ibid., p. 94.
33
 Ibid., p. 95.

73
the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
ances without end. Yet Foucault punctuates these remarks with a curious and 
indecipherable comment on Machiavelli, which I will revisit in light of turn-
ing to Althusser in the next section. Falling back onto the received wisdom of 
Machiavelli as a scandalous cynic about power,
34
 Foucault grants his impor-
tance for conceiving “the power of the Prince in terms of relations of force,” but 
adds, “perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the 
Prince, and decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is im-
manent in relations of force [une stratégie immanente aux rapports de force].”
35
 
And yet as we have observed in attending to Foucault’s comments about strat-
egies throughout this section, Foucault’s analytics of power actually forestalls 
this question, suggesting instead that we need to take a step back rather than 
a step forward.
36
 In terms of Foucault’s strategic priority expressed throughout 
his innovative analyses in these remarks on power relations, we can analyze 
strategies but never strategy.
37
 We can uncover a complex strategical situation 
34
 For an alternative perspective which directs careful attention to the theoretical work of the 
people in Machiavelli’s writing, see Stefano Visentin, “The Different Faces of the People: On 
Machiavelli’s Political Topography”, in F. Lucchese, F. Frosini, and V. Morfino (eds.), The 
Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy, and Language, Brill, Leiden 2015 pp., 368–389.
35
 Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, p. 97. Translation modified.
36
 In an entirely different context, such a need to step back in order to ask the question 
of strategy was also broached by Gayatri Spivak in relation to the transmutation of her 
phrase “strategic use of positivist essentialism” into the watchword “strategic essential-
ism.” I discuss the reference and related texts in Dave Mesing, “From Structuralism to 
Points of Rupture: George Jackson and the Tactics of the Subject”, Symposium: Canadian 
Journal of Continental Philosophy 23 (1/2019), pp. 123–125.
37
 In an interview with Roger Pol-Droit published in Le Monde in February 1975, on the oc -
casion of the publication of Discipline and Punish, Foucault makes some brief comments 
which further illuminate some of the assumptions I have tracked here and perhaps open 
up further lines of inquiry for a more thorough consideration of his writings on these 
questions. Responding to the question of whether he has a method, Foucault insists on 
abandoning the search for a system’s “unconscious,” instead proposing to be both more 
“modest and more prying [plus modeste et plus fureteur].” When studying the “mass of 
documents that constitute the actual discourse of political action” for the bourgeoisie, 
Foucault claims, we find “an absolutely conscious, organized, and reflexive strategy [une 
stratégie absolument consciente, organisée, réfléchie].” We must thereby substitute a logic 
of unconscious with a logic of strategy. Foucault thus seems to align strategy with bour-
geois thought in its wielding of power, and in terms of his own proposal towards coun-
ter-strategy or counter-power, adopts the register of discrete struggles rather than strategy 
or strategies, proposing (likely in reference to his famous interview with Deleuze from 
three years earlier) that his books may be “little toolboxes [petites boîtes à outils]” capable 
of finding a use in these struggles. See Michel Foucault “Des supplices aux cellules”, in 

74
dave mesing
or attend to the local in order to observe the agglomeration of detailed tactics as 
what comprises anonymous and nonsubjective strategic obstacles, but we can 
never truly ask after strategy. Foucault’s strategic priority hence conceals the 
possibility of approaching the question of strategy as part of a concerted nexus 
of theory and practice in a specific conjuncture, a concealment that I will sug-
gest can be overturned by displacing this strategic priority by moving towards 
a theory of strategy. 
Theory and the Tasks of Strategy
A number of potential avenues for conducting a narrow Foucault-Althusser en-
counter are possible,
38
 but one illuminating point of contrast which will enable 
us to move towards an account of strategy as part of an Althusserian lexicon 
concerns the philosophical position of nominalism and the distinct manner in 
which Foucault and Althusser inhabit it. Such a contrast enables us to take a 
step back from Foucault’s strategic priority in order to develop the suggestive 
possibility of strategy as intervention into conjuncture into a proposal for de-
fining strategy as the anticipation of an encounter which will modify, abolish, 
or otherwise alter the relations constitutive of the conjuncture. As such, I turn 
to nominalism not as some eternal possibility within philosophia perennis—an 
idealist perspective on philosophy that Althusser and Foucault would reject in 
their own fashion—but rather to illuminate and produce a definition of strategy 
as a reflection on the intervention-conjuncture dyad, thereby allowing me to 
draw out some further consequences about these concepts and their functions 
as part of a philosophy for strategy.
D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds.), Dits et écrits tome II (1970–1975), Éditions Gallimard, Paris 
1994, pp. 716–720.
38
 For one example of a productive encounter between Foucault and Althusser, see Banu 
Bargu, “Police Power: The Biopolitical State Apparatus and Differential Interpellations”, 
Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 31 (3/2019), pp. 291–317 . Im -
portantly, Bargu stresses that Althusser’s work has been a useful starting point, but only 
that, for feminist and critical race theorists. I have sketched out an initial development of 
some arguments which are adjacent to the contrast between strategic thought and strategy 
I stage here, using George Jackson’s work to extend the framework I sketch in relation to a 
dynamic understanding of tactics in Mesing, “From Structuralism to Points of Rupture”, 
pp. 131–137.

75
the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
As I have broached a few times, Foucault’s invocation of nominalism in the con-
text of enacting his strategic priority as an inquiry into power relations is pre-
sented in the form of an injunction: “One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt [Il 
faut sans doute être nominaliste].”
39
 Foucault does not clarify what he means 
in this context, beyond the implicit suggestion that rather than fix the name of 
power to or as an institution, structure, strength, or capacity, “it is the name 
that one attributes [c’est le nom qu’on prête] to a complex strategical situation 
in a particular society.”
40
 In an essay of decisive importance on Foucault and 
Marx, Balibar suggests that Foucault’s work represents a form of nominalism in 
which he simultaneously carries out a break with Marxism as theory at a global 
level while partially using Marxist tenets or claims which are compatible with 
some in the Marxist tradition.
41
 At such a global or general level of his analy-
ses, Balibar points out, Foucault questions “the concept of ‘social relations’, or 
contradiction as a structure internal to power relations.”
42
 As part of this ques-
tioning, Foucault practices a “historical nominalism” in order to make notions 
such as power or contradiction impossible as idealized concepts. Starting from 
a sense of materiality linked to the apparatus and practice of power on bodies 
rather than the materiality of social relations, Foucault’s nominalism not only 
takes the form of refusing an abstract essence for such notions, but also “for-
bids one to pass directly from the material nature of bodies to the ideal nature 
of life.”
43
 In other words, Foucault’s injunction to “be nominalistic” expresses 
both a rejection of Marx’s historical materialism and its emphasis on contradic-
tion as well as a sort of structural similarity to the usage made of nominalism as 
a necessary theoretical supplement for materialism against metaphysics, which 
describes its deployment in Althusser’s Marxian practice of philosophy.
39
 Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, p. 93. 
40
 Ibid. One proposal for how to typologize Foucault’s rhetorical usage of such terms is 
provided by Colin Koopman and Tomas Matza, who suggest that “central philosophical 
debates into which Foucault is often drafted,” such as “nominalism versus universal-
ism,” be understood as “doctrines of philosophy”, meaning that Foucault only raises the 
specter of such an “-ism” for rhetorical effect. Colin Koopman and Tomas Matza, “Put-
ting Foucault to Work: Analytic and Concept in Foucaultian Inquiry”, Critical Inquiry 39 
(4/2013), pp. 822–823. 
41
 Étienne Balibar, “Foucault and Marx: The Question of Nominalism”, in T. Armstrong (ed. 
and Trans.), Michel Foucault: Philosopher, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hampsted 1992, 
p. 53.
42
 Ibid., p. 54.
43
 Ibid., p. 55.

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dave mesing
Balibar provides the latter description of nominalism as a synthetic suggestion 
that both Marx and Foucault practice critiques of philosophies of history, in 
which the question of materialism or the nature of the material is often at hand. 
“One might agree to call upon nominalism as a supplement to materialism neces-
sary to stop a particular form of materiality – economic, political, or discursive –  
from turning back into metaphysics.”
44
 As Montag points out, such supplemen-
tal use of nominalism for materialism also characterizes Althusser’s brief de-
scriptions of the term. For Montag, the insertion of a nominalist moment into 
materialist theorization can be captured for Althusser by that “superb phrase” of 
the first proposition in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Die Welt 
ist alles, was der Fall ist.
45
 However, as often is the case with Althusser, a slight 
shift is then introduced into the citation, such that the proposition as a “fun-
damental thesis of nominalism” becomes, to translate the phrase into English, 
“there exist only cases.” As such, much like Foucault’s ambivalent injunction 
to “be nominalistic” in order to approach the specificity of power relations, 
Montag shows how Althusser perceives the nominalist thesis as a means for 
emphasizing and focusing on the singular and diverse.
46
 To borrow Foucault’s 
rhetoric, both Foucault and Althusser occupy nominalist positions as part of 
their strategic or philosophical practice within complex strategical situations.
Of course, as should be clear at least to scholars of Althusser working within the 
second reception of his philosophy, one important name for a “complex strategi-
cal situation” is precisely the conjuncture. In light of the manner in which both 
of them introduce nominalism into their theoretical practice, one question for 
Foucault’s work concerns whether and to what extent it is helpful for the analy-
sis of a conjuncture. In the short section discussing power relations we focused 
on earlier, it is clear that the conjuncture would only comprise one among other 
44
 Ibid., p. 56.
45
 Warren Montag, “Althusser’s Nominalism: Structure and Singularity (1962–6)”, Rethink-
ing Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 10 (3/1998), p. 68. Montag quotes 
interviews with Fernanda Navarro, available in English as “Philosophy and Marxism: In-
terviews with Fernanda Navarro, 1984–87”, trans. G.M. Goshgarian in F. Matheron and O. 
Corpet (eds.), Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, Verso, London 2006, 
pp. 251–289. I note Montag’s attention to Althusser’s “early” writings in conjunction with 
much later discussions with Navarro, further giving credence to Pippa’s proposal regard-
ing the second reception of Althusser and the overcoming of neatly fixed stages in favor of 
an elaboration of related and revisited problems. 
46
 Montag, “Althusser’s Nominalism”, p. 69. 

77
the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
possible heuristic names for unveiling the omnipresence of power-knowledge 
relations. Such a strategic priority, as we have seen, forestalls the possibility of 
a theory of strategy understood as a concerted nexus of theory and practice as 
part of a specific conjuncture. In order to break with such a priority, we might 
rewrite Montag’s Wittgensteinian illumination of Althusser’s nominalism as fol-
lows: the conjuncture is all that is the case, and yet there is intervention.
This proposition enables us to shift our focus to Althusser’s philosophical lexi-
con. As Vittorio Morfino argues, conjuncture is Althusser’s way of rewriting fac-
ticity with a further elaboration. “Conjuncture names the set of material condi-
tions within which one is compelled to think and act.”
47
 As a category, conjunc-
ture does not only rewrite facticity into another term, but rather entails at least 
two further claims.
48
 First, conjunctures are comprised of intertwining, contra-
dictory, and overdetermining relations. When viewed in light of Foucault’s ana-
lytic of power relations, such a claim presents an Althusserian gloss on another 
Foucaultian nominalistic injunction, which he presents twice over in the con-
cluding propositions we explored above: one must not suppose that there is a 
neatly identifiable center from which such relations emanate.
49
Second, to be precise, any reference to “the” conjuncture must be done with the 
recognition that such a conjuncture is only one among other conjunctures, each 
of which “holds” due to the sedimentation of practices expressed in its con-
stitutive relations while also being the object of practices able to change such 
relations. As Morfino writes, “the conjuncture is the facticity […] that practice 
47
 Morfino, “An Althusserian Lexicon”.
48
 A study of Althusser’s nearly continuous use of the term conjuncture would make an im-
portant contribution to Althusser scholarship and contemporary political and critical the-
ory more generally. Here I have tried to emphasize its importance as a category rather than 
only a concept, and it seems to me that such a distinction might be useful to pursue in light 
of Althusser’s materialism. I follow Morfino’s discussion focused on some of Althusser’s 
later writings but note that the term appears in a nearly constant fashion throughout his 
work.
49
 “One must suppose rather [Il faut plutôt supposer] than the manifold relations of force that 
take shape and come into play […] are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that 
run through the social body as a whole. […] there is no power that is exercised without 
a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or 
decision of an individual subject; let us not look [ne cherchons pas] for the headquarters 
[l’état-major] that presides over its rationality”. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 
1, pp. 94–95. 

78
dave mesing
confronts, and practice is in turn possible only within the interstices of this fac-
ticity, since it can only intervene within the relations that constitute practice in 
the first place.”
50
 As a category, conjuncture thus invokes what we might call the 
thesis of relational entwinement without center or simple contradiction, on the 
one hand, and the thesis of practical plurality and transformative possibility, 
on the other. 
As apparent in attending to Morfino’s brief elaboration of conjuncture as a part 
of Althusser’s philosophical lexicon, attending to the function of this category 
in Althusser’s arguments requires invoking the notion of intervention, perhaps 
not surprisingly given my repeated insistence on the intervention-conjuncture 
nexus as a strategic dyad, or as I have now proposed to reflect on it, the propo-
sition that the conjuncture is all that is the case, and yet there is intervention. 
Morfino does not discuss intervention as a part of Althusser’s lexicon, and as 
thorough readers of Althusser could suspect, one reason for this absence may 
be that, at least for a certain tendency within Althusser’s continual unfolding 
and elaboration of his philosophical problems, intervention constitutes much 
less a specific part of the lexicon than the modality in which such a lexicon is 
expressed. By attending briefly to the question of intervention in Althusser’s 
philosophy, we will be able to return to Foucault’s refusal of the Prince and its 
relevance for taking a step back from his strategic priority in order to propose a 
theory of strategy.
Within Althusser’s second reception, an important theme is the continued de-
velopment of problems, or perhaps even more sharply put, the at-times con-
tinuous and at-times discontinuous clarification of a conjunctural conceptual 
lexicon. The notion of intervention is crucial for drawing out such a reading of 
Althusser’s philosophical enterprise and what I propose to call his philosophy 
for strategy, which entails the recognition of further questions and problems 
which he only began to broach as a part of his own conjunctural deployments of 
a conceptual lexicon. Sorting out a comprehensive reading of Althusser in this 
regard would be beyond the scope of the present argument, but an analysis of 
50
 Morfino, “An Althusserian Lexicon”. An important question, which can only be briefly 
broached in this context, concerns distinguishing between conjunctures. This question 
would need to take on both the problem of the different determinations of the category or 
concept of conjuncture, as well as issues in space and, in my view especially, time.

79
the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
intervention in the 1968 “Lenin and Philosophy” lecture in light of some of his 
reflections on a continuous, strategic companion in Machiavelli will enable us 
to sketch such a proposal and put it to work in developing a notion of strategy 
as an implicit part of such a lexicon in the sense of pushing further the interven-
tion-conjuncture dyad in order to stipulate a theory of strategy rather than only 
a strategic practice of thought. 
As is well-known, Althusser’s lecture scandalously proposes an extended reflec-
tion on Lenin in relation to philosophy for the Société Française de Philosophie, 
opening with a kind of provocation that the idea of a philosophical commu-
nication would have made Lenin laugh, “with that whole-hearted, open laugh 
by which the fishermen of Capri recognized him as one of their kind and on 
their side.”
51
 Such a provocation attempts to impress upon the audience, or even 
enact, Lenin’s response to an invitation from Maxim Gorky to discuss philos-
ophy with a small group of Russian intellectuals. Regarding Lenin’s laughter, 
Althusser proposes the following: “To be sure, [laughing as a refusal to philo-
sophically discuss] was a tactical attitude: since political unity among Bolshevik 
émigrés was essential, they should not be divided by a philosophical dispute.”
52
 
However, Althusser suggestively continues:
We can discern in this tactic much more than a tactic [beaucoup plus qu’une tac-
tique], something I should like to call a ‘practice’ [pratique] of philosophy, and the 
consciousness of what practicing philosophy means; in short the consciousness 
of the ruthless, primary fact that philosophy divides, and it can only unite by di-
viding. We can thus understand Lenin’s laughter: there is no such thing as philo-
sophical communication, no such thing as philosophical discussion. All I want to 
do today is to comment on that laughter, which is a thesis itself.
53
51
 Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy”, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. 
Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, New York 1971, p. 23. Louis Althusser, Lénine et la 
philosophie, François Maspero, Paris 1969. Althusser was verbally reprimanded by Jean 
Wahl towards the beginning of his talk, choosing not to publish this reprimand in the 
publication of the text of his address. See the editorial notes in Louis Althusser, Solitude 
de Machiavel et autres textes, PUF, Paris 1998, p. 138. I am thankful to David Maruzzella for 
reminding me of these details. 
52
 Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy”, p. 26.
53
 Ibid. My emphasis. 

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dave mesing
Althusser links this polemical conception of philosophical practice directly to 
the notion of intervention, arguing that “Lenin thus defines the ultimate essence 
[l’essence ultime] of philosophical practice as an intervention in the theoretical 
domain [intervention dans le domaine théorique].”
54
 For Althusser, Leninist phil-
osophical intervention simultaneously operates theoretically by formulating 
categories, and practically “in the function [pratique par la fonction] of these 
categories,” or as I have attempted to reiterate here, via the clarification and 
demarcation of a conjunctural conceptual lexicon.
 
To translate Althusser’s remarks in the “Lenin and Philosophy” essay in this 
manner and submit the notion of intervention itself to a conjunctural determi-
nation requires a brief study of Althusser’s reflections on Machiavelli, the con-
junctural thinker par excellence. In a manner recalling the Wittgensteinian prop-
osition I introduced above, Althusser posits that “Machiavelli is the first theorist 
of the conjuncture [le premier théoricien de la conjoncture].”
55
 However, he then 
makes a decisive remark for understanding the sense in which a philosophi-
cal lexicon which includes strategy as part of its conceptual contribution can 
only be understood as an initial definition, subject to additional clarification 
and development. Althusser claims that Machiavelli is a “theorist” of the con-
juncture in the sense of “if not to think the concept of conjuncture [concept de 
conjoncture] […] then at least consistently – in an insistent, extremely profound 
way – to think in the conjuncture [pensé dans la conjoncture]: that is to say, 
in its concept of an aleatory, singular case [cas singulier aléatorie].”
56
 In terms 
of understanding Althusser’s theoretical enterprise as a philosophy for strate-
gy, then, his extensive study of Machiavelli is absolutely decisive. Althusser’s 
concepts and categories, especially intervention and conjuncture, may help 
to establish a more elaborate, conceptual definition of strategy, but we must 
trace this philosophical functioning of a lexicon to, at least in Althusser’s case, 
a close study of Machiavelli’s conjunctural theory and practice as expressed in 
The Prince and other texts. To reformulate this tension another way, we might 
say that although Althusser’s philosophical, conceptual lexicon helps stage a 
theory of strategy, it is Machiavelli who, in his theory and practice as a theorist, 
54
 Ibid., p. 61.
55
 Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, trans. Gregory Elliot, Verso, London 1999, p. 18. Louis 
Althusser, “Machiavelli et Nous (1972–1986)”, in F. Matheron (ed.), Écrits Philosophiques 
et Politiques Tome II, Stock/IMEC, Paris 1995, pp. 39–168.
56
 Ibid. Althusser’s emphasis.

81
the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
and, we should add, practitioner in the conjuncture, truly lets us observe the 
functioning of strategy in his works.
57
And yet, we should not run ahead of ourselves, especially given the need we 
have uncovered to step back from strategic prioritization in Foucault. If inter-
vention is merely the modality of Althusser’s conjunctural conceptual lexicon, 
we must still address whether intervention can be understood as a distinct con-
cept helping to illuminate the definition of strategy I propose. Much like con-
juncture, which I only quickly reflected on above, such a task would be helpful 
for pushing further into the nuances and possible counter-tendencies of the in-
sights I have attempted to stipulate here. However, it is the question of interven-
tion that I think the contrast with Foucault usefully illuminates, again involving 
Machiavelli’s Prince. 
As I noted at the end of the previous section, Foucault punctuates his remarks in 
which he practices a strategic priority with a puzzling comment on Machiavelli’s 
Prince. Entangled perhaps with the omnipresence of force relations, Foucault 
proposes an acknowledgement that Machiavelli’s cynical scandal towards pow-
er makes him “among the few” to conceive the power of the Prince as in terms of 
force relations. He then adds: “perhaps we need to go one step further, do with-
out the persona of the Prince, and decipher power mechanisms on the basis of 
a strategy that is immanent in force relations.”
58
 Reading Foucault to the letter, 
however, would seem to suggest we will always be in search of such a strategy 
absent from his strategic practice of analyzing power relations. Althusser and 
especially Machiavelli might propose the following rejoinder: rather than seek 
to decipher [déchiffrer] power relations, a theory of strategy proposes, and in 
turn takes all of its force from such a proposal, to intervene into power relations 
for the sake of modifying, abolishing, or otherwise altering them.
Such a displacement of Foucault thus enables us to step back from his strategic 
priority in order to sketch a theory of strategy. However, in putting to work such 
a notion, category, or concept of intervention, such a theory of strategy needs to 
57
 The same could be said for Lenin, and I might add that such a suggestion could be a help-
ful starting point for trying to work out a theory of strategy in light of Lenin’s theory and 
practice – something which, to my knowledge is absent from his writings at an explicit 
level, though codified within Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism. 
58
 Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, p. 97.

82
dave mesing
go beyond merely the repeated insistence within Althusser, for different contexts 
and concepts within his theoretical archive, that strategy might be abbreviated 
as intervention into a conjuncture. For we know that interventions into conjunc-
tures do not come with guarantees. Indeed, Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli 
attempts to enact and reflect upon this necessity of theory and practice submit-
ted to the exigency of class struggle. As a concluding gloss on the theory of strat-
egy we have proposed, then, in light of this narrow Foucault-Althusser encoun-
ter and its implications, we might propose the following, quasi-Wittgensteinian 
proposition of a Strategōs Logico-Philosophicus: conjunctures are all that is the 
case, and yet there is intervention—and, thankfully, encounter.
* * *
Although my reading of Foucault has been for the sake of illuminating the 
possibility of introducing strategy as a part of an Althusserian lexicon, I have 
attempted to suggest that they share a strategic theoretical practice whose en-
counter is quite productive, presenting my intervention concerning intervention 
as something capable of introducing new insights and problems for present and 
future conjunctures. To this end I would like to conclude by drawing out some 
additional consequences of this narrow Foucault-Althusser encounter. 
First, intervention-conjuncture is indeed best understood as a strategic couplet, 
which extends beyond the narrow confines of Althusser and his interlocutors 
and critics. From the vantage of a theory of strategy, such a dyad is only stra-
tegic insofar as we propose encounter as a mediating term which inscribes the 
necessity of contingency, i.e., the dialectical gesture of political practice,
59
 into 
the sketch of strategy as anticipation of an encounter which modifies, abolishes, 
or otherwise alters the relations constitutive of its conjuncture.
Second, as Balibar has suggested, the category of conjuncture belongs to a cri-
tique of certain eschatological imaginaries imbued in various philosophies of 
history, expressing instead an attempt to practice philosophy in history. Despite 
not consistently operating with a category of conjuncture, Foucault shared in 
such an attempt as part of his strategic practice of thought. By intervening to 
propose the question of strategy polemically to Foucault’s text, I have attempted 
59
 Sotiris, A Philosophy for Communism, p. 531.

83
the intervening prince: althusser, foucault , and a theory of strategy
to demonstrate how Foucault’s analyses of power relations forestall a sense of 
strategy as a concerted effort of theory and practice as part of an intervention 
into a specific conjuncture. 
Yet despite some scattered indications, a similar line of attack could be tak-
en towards what I have tried to suggest is Althusser’s philosophy for strategy. 
Althusser often limited his strategic undertaking to the history of philosophy in 
a manner that proves itself immensely productive for proceeding to investigate 
into philosophical strategies and practices, but it must be noted that the theory 
of strategy I have attempted to clarify cannot remain only philosophical in its 
determination. As such, in order to formulate this important caveat in a manner 
which I think breaks with Althusser’s theoretical endeavor by remaining faith-
ful to its conceptual intervention, we must add the following claim: any theo-
ry of strategy, initially sketched as the anticipation of an encounter which will 
modify, abolish, or otherwise alter the relations constitutive of the conjuncture, 
must be developed in the way Machiavelli proceeded—not only making using 
of a concept or category of conjuncture, but rather submitting theory to the dis-
cipline of the conjuncture. In this sense the initial definition I have repeated 
should undergo a final alteration: strategy does not speculatively anticipate en-
counters and assess changes in the relations of “the” conjuncture, but rather 
its conjuncture. Strategy first and foremost as the thought of political practice 
requires practice in order for its further elaboration as a theoretical and practical 
weapon in any conjuncture.
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