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Gilles Deleuze



Deleuze's studies of individual philosophers and artists are purposely heterodox. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality is an attempt to rewrite Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,[26] even though Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the Genealogy, and the Genealogy's moral topics are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book. Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the total absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. In an oft-cited comment, Deleuze described his method of interpreting philosophers as "buggery (enculage)", as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different.[27] The various monographs are thus best understood not as attempts to faithfully represent "what Nietzsche (or whoever) meant" but as Deleuze extracting and illuminating concepts he finds useful. His method of freely re-directing the ideas of other thinkers is not misinterpretation, then, so much as it is an example of the creativity that Deleuze believes is the essence of philosophical practice.[28] A parallel in painting Deleuze points to is Francis Bacon's Study after Velázquez—it is quite beside the point to say that Bacon 'gets Velázquez wrong': Deleuze argues that Bacon has "let loose" latent "presences" that were already there.[29] Similar considerations apply, in Deleuze's view, to his uses of mathematical and scientific terms: "I'm not saying that Resnais and Prigogine, or Godard and Thom, are doing the same thing. I'm pointing out, rather, that there are remarkable similarities between scientific creators of functions and cinematic creators of images. And the same goes for philosophical concepts, since there are distinct concepts of these spaces."[30]

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Reception

Deleuze's ideas have not spawned a school, as Lacan's did. But his major collaborations with Guattari (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and What Is Philosophy?) were best-sellers in France, and remain heavily cited in English-speaking academe. In 1994 and 1995, L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, an eight-hour series of interviews between Deleuze and Claire Parnet, aired on France's Arte Channel (a still from the program appears in the infobox above).[31]

In the 1960s, Deleuze's portrayal of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of difference rather than a reactionary mystic contributed greatly to the plausibility of "left-wing Nietzscheanism" as an intellectual stance.[32] In the 1970s, the Anti-Oedipus, written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric,[33] offering a sweeping analysis of the family, language, capitalism, and history via eclectic borrowings from Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and dozens of other writers, was received as a theoretical embodiment of the anarchic spirit of May 1968.

Like his contemporaries Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard, Deleuze's influence has been most strongly felt in North American humanities departments, particularly in circles associated with literary theory. There, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus came to be seen as major statements of post-structuralism and postmodernism[34] (though neither Deleuze nor Guattari described their work in those terms). In the 1980s and 1990s, almost all of Deleuze's books were translated into English, where they have become comfortably ensconced in the canon of "continental philosophy".

Naturally, Deleuze has attracted many critics as well. The following list is not exhaustive, and gives only the briefest of summaries.

In Modern French Philosophy (1979), Vincent Descombes argues that Deleuze's account of a difference that is not derived from identity (in Nietzsche and Philosophy) is incoherent, and that his analysis of history in Anti-Oedipus is 'utter idealism', criticizing reality for falling short of a non-existent ideal of schizophrenic becoming.

In What Is Neostructuralism? (1984), Manfred Frank claims that Deleuze's theory of individuation as a process of bottomless differentiation fails to explain the unity of consciousness.

In "The Decline and Fall of French Nietzscheo-Structuralism" (1994), Pascal Engel presents a global condemnation of Deleuze's thought. According to Engel, Deleuze's metaphilosophical approach makes it impossible to reasonably disagree with a philosophical system, and so destroys meaning, truth, and philosophy itself. Engel summarizes Deleuze's metaphilosophy thus: "When faced with a beautiful philosophical concept you should just sit back and admire it. You should not question it."[35]

In Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1997), Alain Badiou claims that Deleuze's metaphysics only apparently embraces plurality and diversity, remaining at bottom relentlessly monist. Badiou further argues that, in practical matters, Deleuze's monism entails an ascetic, aristocratic fatalism akin to ancient Stoicism.

In Reconsidering Difference (1997), Todd May argues that Deleuze's claim that difference is ontologically primary ultimately contradicts his embrace of immanence, i.e., his monism. However, May believes that Deleuze can discard the primacy-of-difference thesis, and accept a Wittgensteinian holism without significantly altering (what May believes is) Deleuze's practical philosophy.

In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his philosophical system. Deleuze's writings on subjects such as calculus and quantum mechanics are, according to Sokal and Bricmont, vague, meaningless, or unjustified. However, by Sokal and Bricmont's own admission, they suspend judgment about Deleuze's philosophical theories and terminology.

In Organs without Bodies (2003), Slavoj Žižek claims that Deleuze's ontology oscillates between materialism and idealism,[36] and that the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus ("arguably Deleuze's worst book"),[37] the "political" Deleuze under the "'bad' influence" of Guattari, ends up, despite protestations to the contrary, as "the ideologist of late capitalism".[38] Žižek also calls Deleuze to task for allegedly reducing the subject to "just another" substance and thereby failing to grasp the nothingness that, according to Lacan and Žižek, defines subjectivity.[39] What remains worthwhile in Deleuze's oeuvre, Žižek finds, are precisely those concepts closest to Žižek's own ideas.

In Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (2006), Peter Hallward argues that Deleuze's insistence that being is necessarily creative and always-differentiating entails that his philosophy can offer no insight into, and is supremely indifferent to, the material, actual conditions of existence. Thus Hallward claims that Deleuze's thought is literally other-worldly, aiming only at a passive contemplation of the dissolution of all identity into the theophanic self-creation of nature.

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Endnotes

  1. ^ Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum", Critique 282, p. 885.
  2. ^ Negotiations, p. 4. However, in a later interview, Deleuze commented: "I don't know what Foucault meant, I never asked him" (Negotiations, p. 88).
  3. ^ Dialogues, p. 12: "At the Liberation we were still strangely stuck in the history of philosophy. We simply plunged into Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger; we threw ourselves like puppies into a scholasticism worse than that of the Middle Ages. Fortunately there was Sartre. Sartre was our Outside, he was really the breath of fresh air from the backyard."
  4. ^ Another source mentions lung tuberculosis: [1]
  5. ^ A.P. Colombat, "November 4, 1995: Deleuze's death as an event", Continental Philosophy Review 29.3 (July 1996): 235-249.
  6. ^ Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).
  7. ^ J.-F. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 194.
  8. ^ Mary Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 201.
  9. ^ Negotiations, p. 137.
  10. ^ Ibid., p. 5.
  11. ^ Ibid., pp. 11-12.
  12. ^ "Bergson's Conception of Difference", in Desert Islands, p. 33.
  13. ^ Ibid., p. 32.
  14. ^ Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé, ch. III: see the fourth line from the bottom of this page, or, in English translation, the thirteenth paragraph here.
  15. ^ Desert Islands, p. 36.
  16. ^ See "The Method of Dramatization" in Desert Islands, and "Actual and Virtual" in Dialogues.
  17. ^ Difference and Repetition, p. 39.
  18. ^ A Thousand Plateaus, p. 20.
  19. ^ Desert Islands, p. 262.
  20. ^ Negotiations, p. 136.
  21. ^ What Is Philosophy?, p. 22.
  22. ^ Negotiations, p. 123.
  23. ^ Negotiations, p. 125. Cf. Spinoza's claim that the mind and the body are different modes expressing the same substance.
  24. ^ Negotiations, p. 21: "We're strict functionalists: what we're interested in is how something works".
  25. ^ Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 135.
  26. ^ Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 88.
  27. ^ Negotiations, p. 6. This passage is cited by, among others, Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (MIT Press, 1992), p. 2; Ian Buchanan, A Deleuzian Century? (Duke UP, 1999), p. 8; Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (Macmillan, 2002), p. 37; Gregg Lambert, The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (Continuum, 2002), p. x; Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Allen & Unwin, 2003), p. 73; Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies (Routledge, 2003), p. 48; and Charles Stivale, Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (McGill-Queen's, 2005), p. 3.
  28. ^ Desert Islands, p. 144.
  29. ^ Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, pp. 46f. Cf. the passage cited above, from Negotiations, p. 136: "The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is nonetheless present in what he did say."
  30. ^ Negotiations, pp. 124-125.
  31. ^ An English language summary can be found here: [2]
  32. ^ See, e.g., the approving reference to Deleuze's Nietzsche study in Jacques Derrida's essay "Différance", or Pierre Klossowski's monograph Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, dedicated to Deleuze. More generally, see D. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (MIT Press, 1985), and L. Ferry and A. Renaut (eds.), Why We Are Not Nietzscheans (University of Chicago Press, 1997).
  33. ^ Sometimes in the same sentence: "one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius" (Anti-Oedipus, p. 347).
  34. ^ See, e.g., Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (Guilford Press, 1991), which devotes a chapter to Deleuze and Guattari.
  35. ^ Barry Smith (ed.), European Philosophy and the American Academy, p. 34.
  36. ^ Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies, pp. 19-32, esp. p. 21: "Is this opposition not, yet again, that of materialism versus idealism? In Deleuze, this means The Logic of Sense versus Anti-Oedipus." See also p. 28 for "Deleuze's oscillation between the two models" of becoming.
  37. ^ Ibid., p. 21
  38. ^ Ibid., pp. 32, 20, and 184.
  39. ^ Ibid., p. 68: "This brings us to the topic of the subject that, according to Lacan, emerges in the interstice of the 'minimal difference,' in the minimal gap between two signifiers. In this sense, the subject is 'a nothingness, a void, which exists.' ... This, then, is what Deleuze seems to get wrong in his reduction of the subject to (just another) substance. Far from belonging to the level of actualization, of distinct entities in the order of constituted reality, the dimension of the 'subject' designates the reemergence of the virtual within the order of actuality. 'Subject' names the unique space of the explosion of virtuality within constituted reality."

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Bibliography

(Near complete bibliography, including various translations)

By Gilles Deleuze
  • Empirisme et subjectivité (1953). Trans. Empiricism and Subjectivity (1991).
  • Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962). Trans. Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983).
  • La philosophie critique de Kant (1963). Trans. Kant's Critical Philosophy (1983).
  • Proust et les signes (1964, 2nd exp. ed. 1976). Trans. Proust and Signs (1973, 2nd exp. ed. 2000).
  • Le Bergsonisme (1966). Trans. Bergsonism (1988).
  • Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (1967). Trans. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1989).
  • Différence et répétition (1968). Trans. Difference and Repetition (1994).
  • Spinoza et le problème de l'expression (1968). Trans. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990).
  • Logique du sens (1969). Trans. The Logic of Sense (1990).
  • Spinoza - Philosophie pratique (1970, 2nd ed. 1981). Trans. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988).
  • Dialogues (1977, 2nd exp. ed. 1996, with Claire Parnet). Trans. Dialogues (1987, 2nd exp. ed. 2002).
  • Superpositions (1979).
  • Francis Bacon - Logique de la sensation (1981). Trans. Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation (2003).
  • Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement (1983). Trans. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986).
  • Cinéma II: L'image-temps (1985). Trans. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989).
  • Foucault (1986). Trans. Foucault (1988).
  • Le pli - Leibniz et le baroque (1988). Trans. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993).
  • Périclès et Verdi: La philosophie de Francois Châtelet (1988).
  • Pourparlers (1990). Trans. Negotiations (1995).
  • Critique et clinique (1993). Trans. Essays Critical and Clinical (1997).
  • Pure Immanence (2001).
  • L'île déserte et autres textes (2002). Trans. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (2003).
  • Deux régimes de fous et autres textes (2004). Trans. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (2006).
In collaboration with Félix Guattari
  • Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe (1972). Trans. Anti-Oedipus (1977).
  • Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure (1975). Trans. Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature (1986).
  • Rhizome (1976).
  • Nomadology: The War Machine (1986).
  • Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux (1980). Trans. A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
  • Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991). Trans. What Is Philosophy? (1996).

Most of Deleuze's courses are available, in several languages, here.

Select secondary sources
  • Buchanan, Ian (2008). Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus": A Reader's Guide. Continuum.
  • Descombes, Vincent (1979). Le Même et L'Autre. Minuit. Trans. Modern French Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
  • Foucault, Michel (1970). "Theatrum Philosophicum", Critique 282, pp. 885-908. Trans. in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice, pp. 165-198. Cornell University Press.
  • Frank, Manfred (1984). Was Ist Neostrukturalismus? Suhrkamp. Trans. What Is Neostructuralism? University of Minnesota Press.
  • Hardt, Michael (1993). Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (1985). Philosophy through the Looking-Glass. Open Court.
  • May, Todd (2005). Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.
  • Williams, James (2003). Gilles Deleuze's "Difference and Repetition": A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press.

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Documentary

  • L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, with Claire Parnet, produced by Pierre-André Boutang. Editions Montparnasse.

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See also

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