Gilles Deleuze Totally Explained

Everything about Gilles Deleuze totally explained

Gilles Deleuze, (January 18, 1925 – November 4, 1995) was a French philosopher of the late 20th century. From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular books were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with Félix Guattari. His books Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) led Michel Foucault to declare that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian." (Deleuze, for his part, said Foucault's comment was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid.")

Life

Deleuze was born in Paris and lived there for most his life. His initial schooling was undertaken during World War II, during which time he attended the Lycée Carnot. He also spent a year in khâgne at the Lycée Henri IV. In 1944 Deleuze went to study at the Sorbonne. His teachers there included several noted specialists in the history of philosophy, such as Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, and Maurice de Gandillac, and Deleuze's lifelong interest in the canonical figures of modern philosophy owed much to these teachers. Nonetheless, Deleuze also found the work of non-academic thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre strongly attractive. He agrégated in philosophy in 1948.
   Deleuze taught at various lycées (Amiens, Orléans, Louis le Grand) until 1957, when he took up a position at the Sorbonne. In 1953, he published his first monograph, Empiricism and Subjectivity, on Hume. He married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan in 1956. From 1960 to 1964 he held a position at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. During this time he published the seminal Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and befriended Michel Foucault. From 1964 to 1969 he was a professor at the University of Lyon. In 1968 he published his two dissertations, Difference and Repetition (supervised by Gandillac) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (supervised by Alquié).
   In 1969 he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes/St. Denis, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform. This new university drew a number of talented scholars, including Foucault (who suggested Deleuze's hiring), and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Deleuze taught at Vincennes until his retirement in 1987.
   Deleuze, a heavy smoker, suffered from lung cancer. Although he'd a lung removed, the disease had spread throughout his pulmonary system. Deleuze underwent a tracheotomy, lost the power of speech and considered himself 'chained like a dog' to an oxygen machine. By the last years of his life, simple tasks such as handwriting required laborious effort. In 1995, he committed suicide, throwing himself from the window of his apartment.
   Upon Deleuze's death, his colleague Jean-François Lyotard sent a fax to Le Monde, in which he wrote of his friend:
ť "He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments — negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he's laughing, he's here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say."

The novelist Michel Tournier, who knew Deleuze when both were students at the Sorbonne, described him thus: ť "The ideas we threw about like cottonwool or rubber balls he returned to us transformed into hard and heavy iron or steel cannonballs. We quickly learnt to be in awe of his gift for catching us red-handed in the act of cliché-mongering, talking rubbish, or loose thinking. He had the knack of translating, transposing. As it passed through him, the whole of worn-out academic philosophy re-emerged unrecognisable, totally refreshed, as if it hasn't been properly digested before. It was all fiercely new, completely disconcerting, and it acted as a goad to our feeble minds and our slothfulness."

Deleuze himself almost entirely demurred from autobiography. When once asked to talk about his life, he replied: "Academics' lives are seldom interesting." When a critic seized upon Deleuze's unusually long, uncut fingernails as a revealing eccentricity, he drily noted a more obvious explanation: "I haven't got the normal protective whorls, so that touching anything, especially fabric, causes such irritation that I need long nails to protect them." Deleuze concludes his reply to this critic thus: ť "What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments."

Philosophy

Deleuze's work falls into two groups: on one hand, monographs interpreting modern philosophers (Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault) and artists (Proust, Kafka, Francis Bacon); on the other, eclectic philosophical tomes organized by concept (for example, difference, sense, events, schizophrenia, cinema, philosophy). Regardless of topic, however, Deleuze consistently develops variations on similar ideas.

Metaphysics

Deleuze's main philosophical project in his early works (for example, those prior to his collaborations with Guattari) can be baldly summarized as a systematic inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: for example, to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities. To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are not logically or metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, "given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus." That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and x'", and "x" = "the difference between...", and so forth. Difference goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain difference in itself. "If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it's only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it's not, in other words, in its internal difference."
   Like Kant and Bergson, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as unifying categories imposed by the subject, that is, he considers them to be forms of identity. Therefore he concludes that pure difference is non-spatio-temporal; it's an idea, what he calls "the virtual". (The coinage refers not to the "virtual reality" of the computer age, but to Proust's definition of the past: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.") While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's ideas of pure reason, they're not originals or models, nor do they transcend possible experience; instead they're the conditions of actual experience, the internal difference in itself. "The concept they [theconditions] form is identical to its object." A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference isn't a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it's a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations.
   Thus Deleuze, alluding to Kant and Schelling, at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism. In Kant's transcendental idealism, experience only makes sense when organized by intellectual categories (such as space, time, and causality). Taking such intellectual concepts out of the context of experience, according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs. (For example, extending the concept of causality beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause.) Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking (see below, Epistemology).
   Simultaneously, Deleuze claims that being is univocal, for example, that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many eminent theologians and philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas) held that when one says that "God is good", God's goodness is only analogous to human goodness. Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that "God is good", the goodness in question is the exact same sort of goodness that's meant when one says "Jane is good". That is, God only differs from us in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God, a man, or a flea.
   Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. "With univocity, however, it isn't the differences which are and must be: it's being which is Difference, in the sense that it's said of difference. Moreover, it isn't we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it's we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being." Here Deleuze echoes Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance, God or Nature. For Deleuze, the one substance is an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism". Difference and Repetition is Deleuze's most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, but his other works develop similar ideas. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), for example, reality is a play of forces; in Anti-Oedipus (1972), a "body without organs"; in What Is Philosophy? (1991), a "plane of immanence" or "chaosmos".

Epistemology

Deleuze's unusual metaphysics entails an equally atypical epistemology, or what he calls a transformation of "the image of thought". According to Deleuze, the traditional image of thought, found in philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, and Husserl, misconceives of thinking as a mostly unproblematic business. Truth may be hard to discover—it may require a life of pure theorizing, or rigorous computation, or systematic doubt—but thinking is able, at least in principle, to correctly grasp facts, forms, ideas, etc. It may be practically impossible to attain a God's-eye, neutral point of view, but that's the ideal to approximate: a disinterested pursuit that results in a determinate, fixed truth; an orderly extension of common sense. Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the metaphysical flux, instead claiming that genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Truth changes what we think; it alters what we think is possible. By setting aside the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a "thought without image", a thought always determined by problems rather than solving them. "All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which don't result by chance, but which don't have an intrinsic rationality either. It's just like theology: everything about it's quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift."
   Deleuze's peculiar readings of the history of philosophy stem from this unusual epistemological perspective. To read a philosopher is no longer to aim at finding a single, correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosopher's attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. "Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don't tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. [...] 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." (See below, Deleuze's interpretations.)
   Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of concepts. For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes's cogito, or Kant's doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept "posits itself and its object at the same time as it's created." In Deleuze's view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a definitive scientific description of a pre-existing world (as in the tradition of Locke or Quine).
   In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analyzing reality in different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create new qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls "percepts" and "affects"), and the sciences create quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which Deleuze calls "functives"). According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others: they're different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another." For example, Deleuze doesn't treat cinema as an art representing an external reality, but as an ontological practice that creates different ways of organizing movement and time. Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: "what does it do?" or "how does it work?"

Values

In ethics and politics, Deleuze again echoes Spinoza, albeit in a sharply Nietzschean key. In a classical liberal model of society, morality begins from individuals, who bear abstract natural rights or duties set by themselves or a God. Following his rejection of any metaphysics based on identity, Deleuze criticizes the notion of an individual as an arresting or halting of differentiation (as the etymology of the word "individual" suggests). Guided by the ethical naturalism of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze instead seeks to understand individuals and their moralities as products of the organization of pre-individual desires and powers. In the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari describe history as a congealing and regimentation of "desiring-production" (a concept combining features of Freudian drives and Marxist labor) into the modern individual (typically neurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society of continuous control), and capitalism (an anarchy domesticated into infantilizing commodification). Deleuze, following Marx, welcomes capitalism's destruction of traditional social hierarchies as liberating, but inveighs against its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market.
   But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses with his ethical naturalism? Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or immanent: to live well is to fully express one's power, to go to the limits of one's potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates persons from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become—though we can't know what that's in advance. The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity. "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it's so disgusting to judge, it isn't because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?"
   Deleuze was a profound anti-authoritarian, freely wielding the term "fascism" as an all-purpose epithet. He was critical of the racist repression of immigrant workers, repression in factories, repression in education, police repression, and the general repression of youth. He notes how children are treated like prisoners and prisoners are treated like children. He worried that teachers and psychologists were increasingly wielding powers traditionally given to the police.
   Also, Deleuze was a critic of the Vietnam War and war in general. He was highly critical of authority and the economics of capitalism. Deleuze allied himself to the workers' struggle and movements for the overthrow of all kinds and varieties of domination, exploitation, and repression.

Deleuze's interpretations

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, a claim that would strike almost anyone who has read both works as curious at best, as 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. 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 isn't misinterpretation, then, so much as it's an example of the creativity that Deleuze believes is the essence of philosophical practice. A parallel in painting may be Bacon's Study after Velázquez—it is quite beside the point to say that Bacon 'gets Velázquez wrong'. (Similar considerations apply, in Deleuze's view, to his uses of mathematical and scientific terms, pace Alan Sokal.)

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).
   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. In the 1970s, the Anti-Oedipus, written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric, 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 (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've become comfortably ensconced in the canon of "continental philosophy".
   Naturally, Deleuze has attracted many critics as well. The following list isn't exhaustive, and gives only the briefest of summaries.
   In Modern French Philosophy (1979), Vincent Descombes argues that Deleuze's account of a difference that isn't 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 shouldn't question it."
   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, for example, 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, and that the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus ("arguably Deleuze's worst book"), the "political" Deleuze under the "'bad' influence" of Guattari, ends up, despite protestations to the contrary, as "the ideologist of late capitalism". 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. 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.

Endnotes

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. (1989).
Différence et répétition (1968). Trans. Difference and Repetition (1994).
Spinoza et le problème de l'expression (1968). Trans. (1990).
Logique du sens (1969). Trans. The Logic of Sense (1990).
Spinoza - Philosophie pratique (1970, 2nd ed. 1981). Trans. (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. (2003).
Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement (1983). Trans. (1986).
Cinéma II: L'image-temps (1985). Trans. (1989).
Foucault (1986). Trans. Foucault (1988).
Le pli - Leibniz et le baroque (1988). Trans. (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. (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. (1986).

Rhizome (1976).

(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.

Documentary

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

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