Sartre radically displaces the centred self and begins to reconfigure the Outside/Other through his fleshism. This is advanced by Merleau-Ponty, who in reaching for the Lebenswelt as a means to bypass the crisis of modern thought, ultimately provides the conceptual notion of the fold. The fold, in turn, allows us to overcome some of the more ambiguous elements in Sartre's thought, particularly insofar as his retention of a dualistic vernacular evokes a problematic image of transcendence and therefore remains trapped in this crisis. The remaining issue with Merleau-Ponty concerns his lack of a worked-out conception of force, particularly within a political context. Though he made steps towards an account of the politico-genetic underpinning of phenomena, he failed to go far enough. In some respects, this is due to the fact that, despite developing a new conceptual language, Merleau-Ponty remained in a phenomenological frame of reference, emphasising more the conditions of possibility of knowledge and experience, as opposed to the conditions (particularly the political conditions) under which they are generated. By incorporating and profoundly politicising Merleau-Ponty's concept of force as a disjunctive fold of the Outside, Foucault elaborates a truly immanent concept of political power and resistance and connects this to broader capitalist sociopolitical processes and strategies.

There are several stages to this argument that this chapter will follow. First, despite distancing himself from the phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the basis that it represents an outmoded ontology of transcendence, Foucault utilises and radicalises its anti-Cartesian and post-Kantian elements. As is seen in his early The Order of Things, by providing a ‘pure’ phenomenological description of the episteme – as in the structure of thoughts that order experience and determine discourse as the system of possibility of knowledge, i.e. what is considered true and false, or relevant, valid, legitimate and valued fields of knowledge, investigation and methodology – Foucault reveals the way the ‘subject’ is caught in a process of historically contingent signification that precludes any transcendent point of anchorage. Foucault's subsequent The Archaeology of Knowledge extends the analysis, by establishing the methodological underpinning of discourse and discursive practice.