Tony Bennett is Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and Honorary Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. Among his many books are
One of the most significant episodes in recent habit theory is the challenge that Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition issued to the negative evaluation of habit as a deadening form of repetition that characterized postwar French social theory. This revived earlier approaches to habit's repetitions as preparing the way for the adoption of new practices and thereby constituting a road to freedom. In reviewing these debates, the chapter takes issue with the tendency of the post-Deleuzian habit theory to attribute a single force to habit, one potentially generative of freedom. It draws instead on Michel Foucault's work to engage with the variable force that has been attributed to habit in different discourses regulated by different authorities and put to use in different apparatuses of power. This prepares the way for a discussion of how habit operates differently in relation to the “politics of gapped time” that mark its histories.
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