Please remember that this thread is all about mental and spiritual conditioning -- using a wide variety of sources and techniques -- rather than any claims to originality or exclusive-truth. This thread will really jerk you around -- and jerk your chain!! In reality, this is probably more of a study-guide for ME than anything else. I doubt that anyone really takes my 'work' seriously -- especially when I joke and swear!! I think I've got some Galactic-Relatives who are VERY concerned and disgusted with me. Just a hunch. What they need to remember is that I am working within a particular context -- and I am attempting to influence a very select audience. Please keep that in mind. This thread does NOT reflect my True-Self. Gilles Deleuze http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/ continued:
4. Collaboration with Guattari
Following his work in the philosophy of difference, Deleuze meets Guattari in the aftermath of May 1968. These famous “events,” which have marked French culture and politics ever since, brought together students and workers, to the befuddlement of the established guardians of the revolution, the French Communist Party. Days of general strikes and standoffs with the police led the French President Charles de Gaulle to call a general election. De Gaulle's call for a parliamentary solution to the crisis was backed by the Communists, who were evidently as scared of any revolution from below—which by definition would lack the party discipline they so craved—as were the official holders of State power, to whose position they aspired. The worker-student movement eventually collapsed, leaving memories of non-scripted social interactions and revealing the investments of the Party, lampooned thereafter as “bureaucrats of the revolution,” in Foucault's words in his Preface to the English translation of Anti-Oedipus. The French Communist Party's agreement with De Gaulle to allow a parliamentary solution to the social crisis was a glaring example of the horizon of identity (the desire that someone be in control of a central State bureaucracy) that allowed an opposition (of the Gaullists and the Communists as rivals for control of the State) to shackle difference. The government response to May 1968 changed French academic life in two ways. First, institutionally, by the creation of Paris VIII (Vincennes) where Deleuze taught; and second, in the direction of the philosophy of difference, which became explicitly political post-1968. It became, in fact, a politics of philosophy dedicated to exposing the historical force relations producing identity in all its ontological and epistemological forms. In other words, the philosophy of difference now set out to show how the unified objects of the world, the unified subjects who know and hence control them, the unified bodies of knowledge that codify this knowledge, and the unified institution of philosophy that polices the whole affair, are products of historical, political forces in combat with other forces.
In purely philosophical terms, the works with Guattari naturalize the still-Kantian framework of Difference and Repetition. By the time of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari explicitly thematize that the syntheses they investigate are fully material syntheses, syntheses of nature in geological as well as biological, social, and psychological registers (Welchman 2009). Not just organic syntheses, but inorganic ones as well, are “spatio-temporal dynamisms.” With this full naturalization of syntheses, the question of panpsychism is brought into full relief (Protevi 2011), since material syntheses are as much syntheses of experience as they are syntheses of things, as we see in the title of Chapter 3 of A Thousand Plateaus: “The Geology of Morals: Who does the earth think it is?”
4.1 Anti-Oedipus
In considering Anti-Oedipus we should first discuss its performative effect, which attempts to “force us to think,” that is, to fight against a tendency to cliché. Reading Anti-Oedipus can indeed be shocking experience. First, we find a bizarre collection of sources; for example, the schizophrenic ranting of Antonin Artaud provides one of the basic concepts of the work, the “body without organs.” Second is the book's vulgarity, as in the infamous opening lines about the unconscious (the Id): “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and Ooopsey [Ça chie, ça baise]. What a mistake to have ever said the id” (7 / 1). A third performative effect is humor, as in the mocking of Melanie Klein's analysis of children: “Say it's Oedipus, or I'll slap you upside the head [sinon t'auras un gifle]” (54 / 45; trans. modified). There are many more passages like this; it's safe to say very few philosophy books contain as many jokes, puns, and double entendres as Anti-Oedipus. A fourth element is the gleeful coarseness of the polemics. Among many other examples, thinkers of the signifier are associated with the lap dogs of tyrants, members of the French Communist Party are said to have fascist libidinal investments, and Freud is described as a “masked Al Capone.” All in all, the performative effect of reading Anti-Oedipus is unforgettable.
Passing to the conceptual structure of the book, the key term of Anti-Oedipus is “desiring-production,” which crisscrosses Marx and Freud, putting desire in the eco-social realm of production and production in the unconscious realm of desire. Rather than attempting to synthesize Marx and Freud in the usual way, that is, by a reductionist strategy that either (1) operates in favor of Freud, by positing that the libidinal investment of social figures and patterns requires sublimating an original investment in family figures and patterns, or (2) operates in favor of Marx by positing neuroses and psychoses as mere super-structural by-products of unjust social structures, Deleuze and Guattari will call desiring-production a “universal primary process” underlying the seemingly separate natural, social and psychological realms. Desiring-production is thus not anthropocentric; it is the very heart of the world. Besides its universal scope, we need to realize two things about desiring-production right away: (1) there is no subject that lies behind the production, that performs the production; and (2) the “desire” in desiring-production is not oriented to making up a lack, but is purely positive. Desiring-production is autonomous, self-constituting, and creative: it is the natura naturans of Spinoza or the will-to-power of Nietzsche.
Anti-Oedipus is, along with its conceptual and terminological innovation, a work of grand ambitions: among them, (1) an eco-social theory of production, encompassing both sides of the nature/culture split, which functions as an ontology of change, transformation, or “becoming”; (2) a “universal history” of social formations—the “savage” or tribal, the “barbarian” or imperial, and the capitalist—which functions as a synthetic social science; (3) and to clear the ground for these functions, a critique of the received versions of Marx and Freud—and the attempts to synthesize them by analogizing their realms of application. In pursuing its ambitions, Anti-Oedipus has the virtues and the faults of the tour de force: unimagined connections between disparate elements are made possible, but at the cost of a somewhat strained conceptual scheme.
Anti-Oedipus identifies two primary registers of desiring-production, the natural or “metaphysical” and the social or “historical.” They are related in the following way: natural desiring-production is that which social machines repress, but also that which is revealed in capitalism, at the end of history (a contingent history, that is, one that avoids dialectical laws of history). Capitalism sets free desiring-production even as it attempts to rein it in with the institution of private property and the familial or “Oedipal” patterning of desire; schizophrenics are propelled by the charge of desiring-production thus set free but fail at the limits capitalist society proposes, thus providing a clue to the workings of desiring-production.
It's important at the start to realize that Deleuze and Guattari do not advocate schizophrenia as a “lifestyle” or as the model for a political program. The schizophrenic, as a clinical entity, is the result of the interruption or the blocking of the process of desiring-production, its having been taken out of nature and society and restricted to the body of an individual where it spins in the void rather than make the connections that constitute reality. Desiring-production does not connect “with” reality, as in escaping a subjective prison to touch the objective, but it makes reality, it is the Real, in a twisting of the Lacanian sense of the term. In Lacan, the real is produced as an illusory and retrojected remainder to a signifying system; for Deleuze and Guattari, the Real is reality itself in its process of self-making. The schizophrenic is a sick person in need of help, but schizophrenia is an avenue into the unconscious, the unconscious not of an individual, but the “transcendental unconscious,” an unconscious that is social, historical, and natural all at once.
In studying the schizophrenic process, Deleuze and Guattari posit that in both the natural and social registers desiring-production is composed of three syntheses, the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive; the syntheses perform three functions: production, recording, and enjoyment. We can associate production with the physiological, recording with the semiotic, and enjoyment with the psychological registers. While it is important to catch the Kantian resonance of “synthesis,” it is equally important to note, in keeping with the post-structuralist angle we discussed above, that there is no subject performing the syntheses; instead, subjects are themselves one of the products of the syntheses. The syntheses have no underlying subject; they just are the immanent process of desiring-production. Positing a subject behind the syntheses would be a transcendent use of the syntheses. Here we see another reference to the Kantian principle of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari propose to study the immanent use of the synthesis in a “materialist psychoanalysis,” or “schizoanalysis”; by contrast, psychoanalysis is transcendent use of the syntheses, producing five “paralogisms” or “transcendental illusions,” all of which involve assigning the characteristics of the extensive properties of actual products to the intensive production process, or, to put it in the terms of the philosophy of difference, all the paralogisms subordinate differential processes to identities derived from products.
According to the “universal history” undertaken in Anti-Oedipus, social life has three forms of “socius,” the social body that takes credit for production: the earth for the tribe, the body of the despot for the empire, and capital for capitalism. According to Deleuze and Guattari's reading of the anthropological literature, tribal societies mark bodies in initiation ceremonies, so that the products of an organ are traced to a clan, which is mythically traced to the earth or, more precisely, one of its enchanted regions, which function as the organs on the full body of the earth. Material flows are thus “territorialized,” that is, traced onto the earth, which is credited as the source of all production. The signs in tribal inscription are not signifiers: they do not map onto a voice, but enact a “savage triangle forming … a theater of cruelty that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the graphic hand and the appreciative eye” (189). Empires overcode these tribal meaning codes, tracing production back to the despot, the divine father of his people. Material flows in despotic empires are thus “deterritorialized” (they are no longer credited to the earth), and then immediately “reterritorialized” on the body of the despot, who assumes credit for all production. When tribal signs are overcoded, the signifier is formed as a “deterritorialized sign” allowing for communication between the conquered and the conquerors. Signifiers are a “flattening” or “bi-univocalization”: two chains are lined up, one to one, the written and the spoken (205–6; cf. Derrida's notion of “phonocentrism”). The body of the despot as imperial socius means that workers are the “hands” of the emperor, spies are his “eyes,” and so on.
Capitalism is the radical decoding and deterritorialization of the material flows that previous social machines had zealously coded on the earth or the body of the despot. Production is credited to the “body” of capital, but this form of recording works by the substitution of an “axiomatic” for a code: in this context an “axiomatic” means a set of simple principles for the quantitative calculation of the difference between flows (of deterritorialized labor and capital) rather than elaborate rules for the qualitative judgments that map flows onto the socius. Capitalism's command is utterly simple: connect deterritorialized flows of labor and capital and extract a surplus from that connection. Thus capitalism sets loose an enormous productive charge—connect those flows! Faster, faster!—the surpluses of which the institutions of private property try to register as belonging to individuals. Now those individuals are primarily social (as figures of capitalist or laborer) and only secondarily private (family members). Whereas organs of bodies were socially marked in previous regimes (as belonging to the clan and earth, or as belonging to the emperor, as in the jus primae noctis), body organs are privatized under capitalism and attached to persons as members of the family. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, capitalism's decoded flows are reterritorialized on “persons,” that is, on family members as figures in the Oedipal triangle.
4.2 A Thousand Plateaus
Three differences between this work and its predecessor are immediately apparent. First, A Thousand Plateaus has a much wider range of registers than Anti-Oedipus: cosmic, geologic, evolutionary, developmental, ethological, anthropological, mythological, historical, economic, political, literary, musical, and even more. Second, the results of the paralogisms of Anti-Oedipus become “strata” in A Thousand Plateaus: the organism (the unification and totalization of the connective synthesis of production, or the physiological register), the signifying totality or signifiance, which we can perhaps render as “signifier-ness” (the flattening or “bi-univocalizing” of the disjunctive synthesis of recording, the semiotic register), and the subject (the reification of the conjunctive synthesis of consummation, the psychological register). Finally, while Anti-Oedipus has a classical conceptual architecture, that is, chapters that develop a single argument, A Thousand Plateaus is written as a “rhizome,” that is, as allowing immediate connections between any of its points. Because of this rhizomatic structure, a traditional summary of the “theses” and arguments of A Thousand Plateaus is either downright impossible, or at best, would be much too complex to attempt in an encyclopedia article. We will therefore have to limit ourselves to the following remarks.
In fourteen plateaus, or planes of intensity—productive connections between immanently arrayed material systems without reference to an external governing source—Deleuze and Guattari develop a new materialism in which a politicized philosophy of difference joins forces with the sciences explored in Difference and Repetition. A Thousand Plateaus is a book of strange new questions: “Who Does the Earth Think It Is?,” “How Do You make Yourself a Body Without Organs?,” “How does the war-machine ward off the apparatus of capture of the State?” and so on. To over-simplify, Deleuze and Guattari take up the insights of dynamical systems theory, which explores the various thresholds at which material systems self-organize (that is, reduce their degrees of freedom, as in our previous example of convection currents). Deleuze and Guattari then extend the notion of self-organizing material systems—those with no need of transcendent organizing agents such as gods, leaders, capital, or subjects—to the social, linguistic, political-economic, and psychological realms. The resultant “rhizome” or de-centered network that is A Thousand Plateaus provides hints for experimentation with the more and more de-regulated flows of energy and matter, ideas and actions—and the attendant attempts at binding them—that make up the contemporary world.
A Thousand Plateaus maintains the tripartite ontological scheme of all of Deleuze's work, but, as the title indicates, with geological terms of reference. Deleuze and Guattari call the virtual “the Earth,” the intensive is called “consistency,” and the actual is called “the system of the strata.” As the latter term indicates, one of the foci of their investigations is the tendency of some systems to head toward congealment or stratification. More precisely put, any concrete system is composed of intensive processes tending toward the (virtual) plane of consistency and/or toward (actual) stratification. We can say that all that exists is the intensive, tending towards the limits of virtuality and actuality; these last two ontological registers do not “exist,” but they do “insist,” to use one of Deleuze's terms. Nothing ever instantiates the sheer frozen stasis of the actual nor the sheer differential dispersion of the virtual; rather, natural or worldly processes are always and only actualizations, that is, they are processes of actualization structured by virtual multiplicities and heading toward an actual state they never quite attain. More precisely, systems also contain tendencies moving in the other direction, toward virtuality; systems are more or less stable sets of processes moving in different directions, toward actuality and toward virtuality. In still other words, Deleuze and Guattari are process philosophers; neither the structures of such processes nor their completed products merit the same ontological status as processes themselves. With this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari offer a detailed and complex “open system” which is extraordinarily rich and complex. A useful way into it is to follow the concepts of coding, stratification and territorialization. They are related in the following manner. Coding is the process of ordering matter as it is drawn into a body; by contrast, stratification is the process of creating hierarchal bodies, while territorialization is the ordering of those bodies in “assemblages,” that is to say, an emergent unity joining together heterogeneous bodies in a “consistency.”
These concepts, and several other networks of concepts considerations of space preclude us from considering, are put to work in addressing the following topics. After a discussion of the notion of “rhizome” in the first chapter (or “plateau” as they call it), Deleuze and Guattari quickly dismiss psychoanalysis in the second. In the third chapter they discuss the process of stratification in physical, organic, and social strata, with special attention to questions in population genetics, where speciation can be thought to stratify or channel the flow of genes. In chapters 4 and 5 they intervene in debates in linguistics in favor of pragmatics, that is to say, highlighting the “incorporeal transformations” (labels that prompt a different form of action to be applied to a body: “I now pronounce you man and wife”) that socially sanctioned “order words” bring about (Deleuze and Guattari also refer to speech act theory in this regard). They also lay out the theory of “territories” or sets of environmentally embedded triggers of self-organizing processes, and the concomitant processes of deterritorialization (breaking of habits) and reterritorialization (formation of habits). Chapters 6 and 7 discuss methods of experimenting with the strata in which we found ourselves. Chapter 6 deals with the organic stratum or the “organism”; the notorious term of art “Body without Organs” can be at least partially glossed as the reservoir of potentials for different patterns of bodily affect. Chapter 7 deals with the intersection of signifiance (“signifier-ness”) and subjectification in “faciality”; the face arrests the drift of signification by tying meaning to the expressive gestures of a subject. Chapters 8 and 9 deal with the social organizing practices they name “lines” and “segments”; of particular interest here is their treatment of fascism. Chapter 10 returns to the question of intensive experimentation, now discussed in terms of “becoming,” in which (at least) two systems come together to form an emergent system or “assemblage.” Chapter 11 discusses the “refrain” or rhythm as a means of escaping from and forming new territories, or even existing in a process of continual deterritorialization, what they call “consistency.” Chapters 12 and 13 discuss the relation of the “war machine” and the State; the former is a form of social organization that fosters creativity (it “reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself”), while the latter is an “apparatus of capture” living vampirically off of labor (here Deleuze and Guattari's basically Marxist perspective is apparent). Finally, Chapter 14 discusses types of social constitution of space, primarily the “smooth” space of war machines and the “striated” space of States.
4.3 What is Philosophy?
After a long period in which each pursued his own interests, Deleuze and Guattari published a last collaboration in 1991, What Is Philosophy? In answering their title question, Deleuze and Guattari seek to place philosophy in relation to science and art, all three being modes of thought, with no subordination among them. Thought, in all its modes, struggles with chaos against opinion. Philosophy is the creation or construction of concepts; a concept is an intensive multiplicity, inscribed on a plane of immanence, and peopled by “conceptual personae” which operate the conceptual machinery. A conceptual persona is not a subject, for thinking is not subjective, but takes place in the relationship of territory and earth. Science creates functions on a plane of reference. Art creates “a bloc of sensation, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects” (WP, 164).
We will deal with Deleuze and the arts in some detail below. In discussing What is Philosophy?, let us concentrate on the treatment of the relation of philosophy and science. We should remember at the outset that the nomad or minor science evoked in A Thousand Plateaus is not the Royal or major science that makes up the entirety of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘science’ in What is Philosophy?. The motives for this conflation are unclear; in the eyes of some, this change considerably weakens the value of the latter work. Be that as it may, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari vigorously deny that philosophy is needed to help science think about its own presuppositions (“no one needs philosophy to reflect on anything” [WP 6]). Instead, they emphasize the complementary nature of the two. First, they point out a number of similarities between philosophy and science: both are approaches to “chaos” that attempt to bring order to it, both are creative modes of thought, and both are complementary to each other, as well as to a third mode of creative thought, art. Beyond these similarities, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between philosophy as the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence and science as the creation of functions on a plane of reference. Both relate to the virtual, the differential field of potential transformations of material systems, but in different ways. Philosophy gives consistency to the virtual, mapping the forces composing a system as pure potentials, what the system is capable of. Meanwhile, science gives it reference, determining the conditions by which systems behave the way they actually do. Philosophy is the “counter-effectuation of the event,” abstracting an event or change of pattern from bodies and states of affairs and thereby laying out the transformative potentials inherent in things, the roads not taken that coexist as compossibles or as inclusive disjunctions (differentiation, in the terms of Difference and Repetition), while science tracks the actualization of the virtual, explaining why this one road was chosen in a divergent series or exclusive disjunction (differenciation, according to Difference and Repetition). Functions predict the behavior of constituted systems, laying out their patterns and predicting change based on causal chains, while concepts “speak the event” (WP 21), mapping out the multiplicity structuring the possible patterns of behavior of a system—and the points at which the system can change its habits and develop new ones. For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, then, science deals with properties of constituted things, while philosophy deals with the constitution of events. Roughly speaking, philosophy explores the plane of immanence composed of constellations of constitutive forces that can be abstracted from bodies and states of affairs. It thus maps the range of connections a thing is capable of, its “becomings” or “affects.” Science, on the other hand, explores the concretization of these forces into bodies and states of affairs, tracking the behavior of things in relation to already constituted things in a certain delimited region of space and time (the “plane of reference”). How do concepts relate to functions? Just as there is a “concept of concept” there are also “concepts of functions,” but these are purely philosophical creations “without the least scientific value” (WP 117). Thus concrete concepts like that of “deterritorialization” are philosophical concepts, not scientific functions, even though they might resonate with, or echo, scientific functions. Nor are they metaphors, as Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly insist:
Of course, we realize the dangers of citing scientific propositions outside their own sphere. It is the danger of arbitrary metaphor or of forced application. But perhaps these dangers are averted if we restrict ourselves to taking from scientific operators a particular conceptualizable character which itself refers to non?scientific areas, and converges with science without applying it or making it a metaphor (Deleuze 1989: 129).
Deleuze and Guattari's refusal to recognize that their work contains metaphors is due to their struggle against the “imperialism” of the signifying regime, a major theme in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: not every relation between different intellectual fields can be grasped by the most common notions of “metaphor,” reliant as they are on the notion of a transfer of sense from primary to secondary signification.
5. Deleuze and the Arts
Kant had dissociated aesthetics into two halves: the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience (the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason), and the theory of art as a reflection on real experience (the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Critique of Judgment). In Deleuze's work, these two halves of aesthetics are reunited: if the most general aim of art is to “produce a sensation,” then the genetic principles of sensation are at the same time the principles of composition for works of art; conversely, it is works of art that are best capable of revealing these conditions of sensibility. Deleuze therefore writes on the arts not as a critic but as a philosopher, and his books and essays on the various arts—including the cinema (Cinema I and II), literature (Essays Critical and Clinical), and painting (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation)—must be read as philosophical explorations of this transcendental domain of sensibility. The cinema, for instance, produces images that move, and that move in time, and it is these two aspects of film that Deleuze set out to analyze in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image: “What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time that the other arts don't show?” Deleuze thus describes his two-volume Cinema as “a book of logic, a logic of the cinema” that sets out “to isolate certain cinematographic concepts,” concepts which are specific to the cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation likewise creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon's paintings, but which also find a place in “a general logic of sensation.” In general, Deleuze will locate the conditions of sensibility in an intensive conception of space and a virtual conception of time, which are necessarily actualized in a plurality of spaces and a complex rhythm of times (for instance, in the non-extended spaces and non-linear times of modern mathematics and physics).
For Deleuze, the task of art is to produce “signs” that will push us out of our habits of perception into the conditions of creation. When we perceive via the re-cognition of the properties of substances, we see with a stale eye pre-loaded with clichés; we order the world in what Deleuze calls “representation.” In this regard, Deleuze cites Francis Bacon: we're after an artwork that produces an effect on the nervous system, not on the brain. What he means by this figure of speech is that in an art encounter we are forced to experience the “being of the sensible.” We get something that we cannot re-cognize, something that is “imperceptible”—it doesn't fit the hylomorphic production model of perception in which sense data, the “matter” or hyle of sensation, is ordered by submission to conceptual form. Art however cannot be re-cognized, but can only be sensed; in other words, art splits perceptual processing, forbidding the move to conceptual ordering. This is exactly what Kant in the Third Critique called reflective judgment: when the concept is not immediately given in the presentation of art. With art we reach “sensation,” or the “being of the sensible,” the sentiendum.
Deleuze talks about this effect of sensation as the “transcendent exercise” of the faculty of sensibility; here we could refer to the third chapter of Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze lays out a non-Kantian “differential theory of the faculties.” In this remarkable theory, intensity is “difference in itself,” that which carries the faculties to their limits. The faculties are linked in order; here we see what Deleuze calls the privilege of sensibility as origin of knowledge—the “truth of empiricism.” In the differential theory of the faculties, sensibility, imagination, memory, and thought all “communicate a violence” from one to the other. With sensibility, pure difference in intensity is grasped immediately in the encounter as the sentiendum; with imagination, the disparity in the phantasm is that which can only be imagined. With memory, in turn, the memorandum is the dissimilar in the pure form of time, or the immemorial of transcendent memory. With thought, a fractured self is constrained to think “difference in itself” in Ideas. Thus the “free form of difference” moves each faculty and communicates its violence to the next. You have to be forced to think, starting with an art encounter in which intensity is transmitted in signs or sensation. Rather than a “common sense” in which all the faculties agree in recognizing the “same” object, we find in this communicated violence a “discordant harmony” (compare the Kantian sublime) that tears apart the subject (here we find the notion of “cruelty” Deleuze picks up from Artaud).
6. The Reception of Deleuze
The writings of Deleuze have provoked a large literature of explication and introduction in both French and English; more recently, works in German, Italian, and other European languages have appeared. There have also been noteworthy critiques. Rather than attempt a complete survey of the voluminous secondary literature, we will concentrate on a few of the major critiques.
6.1 The feminist critique
An early wave of criticism was directed in the 1980s at Deleuze's collaborations with Guattari by feminists such as Alice Jardine and Luce Irigaray. Jardine 1985 criticized the concept of “becoming-woman” in A Thousand Plateaus, which Deleuze and Guattari position as the first step towards a de-subjectivizing “becoming-indiscernible.” Jardine argued that Deleuze and Guattari's claim that even women must undergo a “becoming-woman” amounts to a threat to the hard-fought victories of concrete feminist struggle that allowed women to claim a subjectivity in the first place. According to Grosz 1994's survey of the early feminist critiques, Irigaray argued that the use of “becoming-woman” as a figure of change incumbent upon all, including men, amounts to a masculinist and desexualizing appropriation of feminist struggle. In the 1990s and now into the 2000s, a number of feminists associated with the “corporeal feminism” movement have attempted positive connections with Deleuze in the name of an open and experimental attitude toward bodily potentials, in both the singular and political registers, as in the phrase “body politic.” See among others Braidotti 1994 and 2002; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994 and 1995; Olkowski 1999; Lorraine 1999; and the essays in Buchanan and Colebrook 2002.
6.2 The Badiouan critique
One of the most important criticisms of Deleuze was put forth in Badiou 1997. Badiou claimed, contrary to the dominant perception, that Deleuze is not so much a philosopher of the multiple as of the One. Conducted in the highly technical idiom for which he is known, Badiou criticizes Deleuze for a certain vitalism, which in Badiou's eyes falls short of the axiomatic austerity demanded of philosophy. Whereas Badiou merely ignored the collaborative works with Guattai, Zizek 2003 conducts a polemic against the Guattari collaborations in favor of a Deleuzean logic of Being characterized as an “immaterial affect generated by interacting bodies as a sterile surface of pure Becoming” (as in Logic of Sense). A third critical work in this vein is Hallward 2005. For Hallward, the singular logic of Deleuze's thought is analogous to the tradition of theophantic thinkers, whereby the divine spark of creation is entombed in creatures; the task of the creature is to redeem that divine spark from its creatural prison. But this redemption is not annihilation; Deleuze's philosophy is not that of Lacanian-Zizekian “renunciation-extinction.”
In response to the Badiouan critique, we can note that one of the most promising leads for future research in discussing the relation of Badiou and Deleuze is to concentrate on the type of mathematics each thinker prefers. Rather than accepting Badiou's characterization of Deleuze as a thinker of reality in biological term (as opposed to Badiou's mathematical orientation), we should see Deleuze as proposing a “problematic” version of mathematics, versus Badiou's axiomatic conception. This tack has been taken by Smith 2003.
6.3 The “Science Wars” critique
Deleuze was one of the targets of the polemic in Sokal and Bricmont 1999. As much of their chapter on Deleuze consists of exasperated exclamations of incomprehension, it is hard to say what it is that Sokal and Bricmont think they have accomplished. One thing is clear though: Deleuze was perfectly aware of the finitist revolution in the history of the differential calculus, despite Sokal and Bricmont's intimations otherwise. He writes in Difference and Repetition, “it is a mistake to tie the value of the symbol dx to the existence of infinitesimals; but it is also a mistake to refuse it any ontological or gnoseological value in the name of a refusal of the latter. In fact, there is a treasure buried within the old so-called barbaric or pre-scientific interpretations of the differential calculus, which must be separated from its infinitesimal matrix. A great deal of heart and a great deal of truly philosophical naivety is needed in order to take the symbol dx seriously …” (170). It seems obvious here that Deleuze's treatment of early forms of the differential calculus is not meant as an intervention into the history of mathematics, or an attempt at a philosophy of mathematics, but as an investigation seeking to form a properly philosophical concept of difference by means of extracting certain forms of thought from what he clearly labels as antiquated mathematical methods. (For positive views of Deleuze's use of mathematics as provocations for the formation of his philosophical concepts, see the essays in Duffy 2006.)
Another and perhaps more effective response to Sokal and Bricmont would be to point to the positive work done on Deleuze and science. Massumi 1992 and DeLanda 2003 attempt to show that Deleuze's epistemology and ontology can be brought together with the results of contemporary dynamical systems theory (popularly known as “chaos” and “complexity” theory). Bell 2006 follows up on this work. Protevi 2001 looks at the accompanying notions of hylomorphism and self-organization in the history of philosophy; Bonta and Protevi 2004 treat Deleuze and dynamic systems theory with regard to its potentials for geographical work. For other issues on Deleuze and science, see the essays in Marks 2006. Finally, Ansell Pearson 1999 brought attention to Deleuze and biology; see also Toscano 2006 in this regard.
Bibliography
Primary Literature
Works by Deleuze
(1953) Empirisme et subjectivité (Paris: PUF); tr. as Empiricism and Subjectivity, by Constantin Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
(1956) “La Conception de la différence chez Bergson,” Etudes bergsoniennes 4 (1956): 77–112; tr. as “Bergson's Conception of Difference,” by Melissa McMahon, in John Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
(1962) Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF); tr. as Nietzsche and Philosophy, by Hugh Tomlinson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
(1963) La philosophie critique de Kant (Paris: PUF); tr. as The Critical Philosophy of Kant, by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
(1966) Le Bergsonisme (Paris: PUF); tr. as Bergsonism, by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1988.
(1967) Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, by Jean McNeil, New York: G. Braziller, 1971.
(1968) Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF); tr. as Difference and Repetition, by Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
(1968) Spinoza et le problème de l'expression(Paris: Minuit); tr. as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, by Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books, 1990.
(1969) Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit); tr. as The Logic of Sense, by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
(1972) “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” in Francois Châtelet, ed., Histoire de la philosophie, tome 8: Le XXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1972): 299–335; tr. as “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” in Desert Islands, New York: Semiotexte, 2003.
(1964 [1970, 1976]) Proust et les signes (Paris: PUF); tr. (of 1976 ed) as Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, by Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
(1977) Dialogues (avec Claire Parnet) (Paris: Flammarion); tr. as Dialogues, by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
(1981 [1970]) Spinoza: Philosophie pratique; (Paris: PUF); tr. as Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, by Robert Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
(1981) Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Editions de la différence); tr. as Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation, by Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
(1983) Cinéma I: l'Image-Mouvement (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Cinema I: The Movement-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
(1985) Cinéma II: l'Image-temps (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Cinema II: The Time-Image, by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
(1986) Foucault (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Foucault, Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
(1988) Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit); tr. as The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, by Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
(1990) Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Negotiations, by Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
(1993) Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Essays Critical and Clinical, by Daniel Smith and Michael Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
(1995) “L'immanence: une vie,” Philosophie 47 (septembre 1), 3–7; tr. as “Immanence: A Life” in Two Regimes of Madness, New York: Semiotexte, 2006.
(2002) L'Île déserte et autres textes: textes et entretiens 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2002); tr. as Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974), by Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotexte, 2003.
(2003) Deux régimes de fous: textes et entretiens 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, New York: Semiotexte, 2006.
Works by Deleuze with Félix Guattari
(1972) L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Anti-Oedipus, by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York: Viking, 1977; reprint University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
(1975) Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Kafka: For a Minor Literature, by Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
(1980) Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit); tr. as A Thousand Plateaus, by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
(1991) Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit); tr. as What is Philosophy?, by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Secondary Literature
Alliez, Eric (ed.), 1998. Gilles Deleuze: une vie philosophique, Paris: Synthélabo.
–––, 2004. Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?, Eliot Ross Albert (trans.), London: Continuum.
Ansell Pearson, Keith (ed.), 1997. Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, London: Routledge.
–––, 1999. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze, London: Routledge.
Antonioli, Manola, 1999. Deleuze et l'histoire de la philosophie, Paris: Kimé.
–––, 2003. Géophilosophie de Deleuze et Guattari, Paris: L'Harmattan.
Badiou, Alain, 2000. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Louise Burchill (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Beistegui, Miguel de, 2004. Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
–––, 2010. Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bell, Jeffrey, 2006. Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
–––, 2009. Deleuze's Hume: Philosophy, Culture, and the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bergen, Veronique, 2003. L'Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Paris: L'Harmattan.
Bogue, Ronald, 1989. Deleuze and Guattari, New York: Routledge.
–––, 2003. Deleuze on Cinema, New York: Routledge.
–––, 2003. Deleuze on Literature, New York: Routledge.
–––, 2003. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, New York: Routledge.
Bonta, Mark, and John Protevi, 2004. Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Boundas, Constantin, 2011. Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction, London: Continuum.
––– (ed.), 2006. Deleuze and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
–––, and Dorothea Olkowski (eds.), 1994. Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Braidotti, Rosi, 1994. “Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or, Metaphysics and Metabolism,” in Boundas and Olkowski (eds.) 1994, pp. 159–186.
–––, 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity.
Broadhurst, Joan (ed.), 1992. Deleuze and the Transcendental Unconscious, in PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy (Volume 4).
Brusseau, James, 1998. Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism, Albany: SUNY Press.
Bryant, Levi, 2008. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Bryden, Mary (ed.), 2002. Deleuze and Religion, London: Routledge.
Buchanan, Ian, 2000. Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, Durham: Duke University Press.
–––, 2008. Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus': A Reader's Guide, London: Continuum.
–––, and Claire Colebrook (eds.), 2000. Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Colebrook, Claire, 2001. Gilles Deleuze (Routledge Critical Thinkers). New York: Routledge.
–––, 2010. Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, London: Continuum.
Colman, Felicity, 2011. Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts, London: Berg.
DeLanda, Manuel, 2003. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum.
Dosse, François, 2010. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Due, Reidar, 2007. Deleuze, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Duffy, Simon (ed.), 2006. Intensive Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, Manchester: Clinamen Press.
–––. 2006. The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze, London: Ashgate.
Faulkner, Keith, 2007. The Force of Time: An Introduction to Deleuze through Proust, Lanham MD: University Press of America.
Flaxman, Gregory, 2000. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
–––, 2011. Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gaffney, Peter (ed.), 2010. The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gatens, Moira, 1996. “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” in Patton 1996, pp. 162–187.
Genosko, Gary, 2002. Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London: Continuum.
Goodchild, Philip, 1997. Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Grosz, Elizabeth, 1994. “A Thousand Tiny Sexes,” in Boundas and Olkowski (eds.) 1994, pp. 187–210.
–––, 1995. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, New York: Routledge.
Gualandi, Alberto, 1998. Deleuze, Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Hallward, Peter, 2006. Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, London: Verso.
Hardt, Michael, 1993. Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Holland, Eugene, 1999. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, New York: Routledge.
Hughes, Joe, 2009. Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Reader's Guide, London: Continuum.
–––, 2009. Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, London: Continuum.
–––, 2012. Philosophy After Deleuze, London: Continuum.
Jardine, Alice, 1986. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kaufman, Eleanor, 2012. Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
–––, and Jon Roffe (eds.), 2009. Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kaufman, Eleanor, and Jon Heller (eds.), 1998. Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Philosophy, Politics and Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Kerslake, Christian, 2007. Deleuze and the Unconscious, London: Continuum.
Khalfa, Jean (ed.), 2003. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, London: Continuum.
Lambert, Gregg, 2002. The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, London: Continuum.
–––, 2012. In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and Philosophical Expressionism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lampert, Jay, 2006. Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History, London: Continuum.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 1985. Philosophy through the Looking Glass, Chicago: Open Court.
–––, 2002. Deleuze and Language, London: Palgrave Macmillan).
Lefebvre, Alexandre, 2008. The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lorraine, Tamsin, 1999. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Marks, John, 1998. Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, Pluto Press: London.
––– (ed.), 2006. Deleuze and Science, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Martin, Jean-Clet, 1993. Variations: La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze, Paris: Payot & Rivages.
Massumi, Brian, 1992. A user's guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
May, Todd, 2005. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mengue, Phillipe, 1994. Gilles Deleuze ou le système du multiple, Paris: Kimé
–––, 2003. Deleuze et la question de la démocratie, Paris: L'Harmattan.
Moulard-Leonard, Valentine. 2009. Deleuze-Bergson Encounters: Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual, Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Murphy, Timothy S., 1992. “The Philosophy (of the Theatre) of Cruelty in Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition,” in Broadhurst 1992, pp. 105–135.
Olkowski, Dorothea, 1999. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press.
–––, 2007. The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press.
O'Sullivan, Simon, 2006. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Patton, Paul (ed.), 1996. Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.
–––, 1999. Deleuze and the Political, London: Routledge.
–––, 2010. Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Patton, Paul, and John Protevi (eds.), 2003. Between Deleuze and Derrida, London: Continuum.
Pisters, Patricia, 2012. The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Culture, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Protevi, John, 2001. Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic, London: Athlone.
–––, 2011. “Mind in Life, Mind in Process: Toward a New Transcendental Aesthetic and a New Question of Panpsychism.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18(5–6): 94–116.
–––, 2013. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rajchman, John, 2000. The Deleuze Connections, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Ramey, Joshua, 2012. The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal, Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Reynolds, Jack, 2011. Chronopathologies: Time and Politics in Deleuze, Derrida, Analytic Philosophy, and Phenomenology, Lanham MD: Lexington Books.
Rodowick, David, 1997. Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, Durham: Duke University Press.
Roffe, Jon, 2012. Badiou's Deleuze, Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press.
Rolli, Marc, 2003. Gilles Deleuze: Philosophie des transzendentalen Empirismus, Vienna: Thuria & Kant.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1991 [1937]. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, New York: Hill and Wang.
Sauvagnargues, Anne, 2005. Deleuze et l'art, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
–––, 2009. Deleuze. L'empirisme transcendental, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Schaub, Mirjam, 2003. Gilles Deleuze im Wunderland: Zeit als Ereignisphilosophie, Munich: Wilhelm Fink.
–––, 2003. Gilles Deleuze im Kino: Das Sichtbare und das Sagbare, Munich: Wilhelm Fink.
Shaviro, Steven, 2009. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Simont, Juliette, 1997. Essai sur la quantité, la qualité, la relation chez Kant, Hegel, Deleuze: Les “fleurs noires” de la logique philosophique, Paris: L'Harmattan.
Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont, 1999. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, New York: Picador.
Smith, Daniel W., 2012. Essays on Deleuze, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
–––, and Henry Somers-Hall (eds.), 2012. The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Somers-Hall, Henry, 2012. Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negative and Difference, Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Stivale, Charles, 1998. The Two Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari, New York: Guilford.
–––, 2005. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, London: Continuum.
–––, 2008. Gilles Deleuze's ABCs: The Folds of Friendship, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Thoburn, Nick, 2003. Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London: Routledge.
Toscano, Alberto, 2006. Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tuinen, Sjoerd van, and Niamh McDonnell (eds.), 2010. Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Villani, Arnaud, 1999. La guêpe et l'orchidée: Essai sur Gilles Deleuze, Paris: Belin.
Voss, Daniela, 2011. “Maimon and Deleuze: The Viewpoint of Internal Genesis and the Concept of Differentials,” Parrhesia, 11: 62–74.
Welchman, Alistair, 2009. “Deleuze's Post-Critical Metaphysics,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 13(2): 25–54.
Widder, Nathan, 2002. Genealogies of Difference, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
–––, 2012. Political Theory after Deleuze, London: Continuum.
Williams, James, 2004. Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
–––, 2005. The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influences, Manchester: Clinamen Press.
–––, 2008. Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
–––, 2011. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Zepke, Stephen, 2005. Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari, London: Routledge.
Žižek, Slavoj, 2003. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York: Routledge.
Zourabichvili, François, 2012. Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, Kieran Aarons (trans.), Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith (eds.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
4. Collaboration with Guattari
Following his work in the philosophy of difference, Deleuze meets Guattari in the aftermath of May 1968. These famous “events,” which have marked French culture and politics ever since, brought together students and workers, to the befuddlement of the established guardians of the revolution, the French Communist Party. Days of general strikes and standoffs with the police led the French President Charles de Gaulle to call a general election. De Gaulle's call for a parliamentary solution to the crisis was backed by the Communists, who were evidently as scared of any revolution from below—which by definition would lack the party discipline they so craved—as were the official holders of State power, to whose position they aspired. The worker-student movement eventually collapsed, leaving memories of non-scripted social interactions and revealing the investments of the Party, lampooned thereafter as “bureaucrats of the revolution,” in Foucault's words in his Preface to the English translation of Anti-Oedipus. The French Communist Party's agreement with De Gaulle to allow a parliamentary solution to the social crisis was a glaring example of the horizon of identity (the desire that someone be in control of a central State bureaucracy) that allowed an opposition (of the Gaullists and the Communists as rivals for control of the State) to shackle difference. The government response to May 1968 changed French academic life in two ways. First, institutionally, by the creation of Paris VIII (Vincennes) where Deleuze taught; and second, in the direction of the philosophy of difference, which became explicitly political post-1968. It became, in fact, a politics of philosophy dedicated to exposing the historical force relations producing identity in all its ontological and epistemological forms. In other words, the philosophy of difference now set out to show how the unified objects of the world, the unified subjects who know and hence control them, the unified bodies of knowledge that codify this knowledge, and the unified institution of philosophy that polices the whole affair, are products of historical, political forces in combat with other forces.
In purely philosophical terms, the works with Guattari naturalize the still-Kantian framework of Difference and Repetition. By the time of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari explicitly thematize that the syntheses they investigate are fully material syntheses, syntheses of nature in geological as well as biological, social, and psychological registers (Welchman 2009). Not just organic syntheses, but inorganic ones as well, are “spatio-temporal dynamisms.” With this full naturalization of syntheses, the question of panpsychism is brought into full relief (Protevi 2011), since material syntheses are as much syntheses of experience as they are syntheses of things, as we see in the title of Chapter 3 of A Thousand Plateaus: “The Geology of Morals: Who does the earth think it is?”
4.1 Anti-Oedipus
In considering Anti-Oedipus we should first discuss its performative effect, which attempts to “force us to think,” that is, to fight against a tendency to cliché. Reading Anti-Oedipus can indeed be shocking experience. First, we find a bizarre collection of sources; for example, the schizophrenic ranting of Antonin Artaud provides one of the basic concepts of the work, the “body without organs.” Second is the book's vulgarity, as in the infamous opening lines about the unconscious (the Id): “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and Ooopsey [Ça chie, ça baise]. What a mistake to have ever said the id” (7 / 1). A third performative effect is humor, as in the mocking of Melanie Klein's analysis of children: “Say it's Oedipus, or I'll slap you upside the head [sinon t'auras un gifle]” (54 / 45; trans. modified). There are many more passages like this; it's safe to say very few philosophy books contain as many jokes, puns, and double entendres as Anti-Oedipus. A fourth element is the gleeful coarseness of the polemics. Among many other examples, thinkers of the signifier are associated with the lap dogs of tyrants, members of the French Communist Party are said to have fascist libidinal investments, and Freud is described as a “masked Al Capone.” All in all, the performative effect of reading Anti-Oedipus is unforgettable.
Passing to the conceptual structure of the book, the key term of Anti-Oedipus is “desiring-production,” which crisscrosses Marx and Freud, putting desire in the eco-social realm of production and production in the unconscious realm of desire. Rather than attempting to synthesize Marx and Freud in the usual way, that is, by a reductionist strategy that either (1) operates in favor of Freud, by positing that the libidinal investment of social figures and patterns requires sublimating an original investment in family figures and patterns, or (2) operates in favor of Marx by positing neuroses and psychoses as mere super-structural by-products of unjust social structures, Deleuze and Guattari will call desiring-production a “universal primary process” underlying the seemingly separate natural, social and psychological realms. Desiring-production is thus not anthropocentric; it is the very heart of the world. Besides its universal scope, we need to realize two things about desiring-production right away: (1) there is no subject that lies behind the production, that performs the production; and (2) the “desire” in desiring-production is not oriented to making up a lack, but is purely positive. Desiring-production is autonomous, self-constituting, and creative: it is the natura naturans of Spinoza or the will-to-power of Nietzsche.
Anti-Oedipus is, along with its conceptual and terminological innovation, a work of grand ambitions: among them, (1) an eco-social theory of production, encompassing both sides of the nature/culture split, which functions as an ontology of change, transformation, or “becoming”; (2) a “universal history” of social formations—the “savage” or tribal, the “barbarian” or imperial, and the capitalist—which functions as a synthetic social science; (3) and to clear the ground for these functions, a critique of the received versions of Marx and Freud—and the attempts to synthesize them by analogizing their realms of application. In pursuing its ambitions, Anti-Oedipus has the virtues and the faults of the tour de force: unimagined connections between disparate elements are made possible, but at the cost of a somewhat strained conceptual scheme.
Anti-Oedipus identifies two primary registers of desiring-production, the natural or “metaphysical” and the social or “historical.” They are related in the following way: natural desiring-production is that which social machines repress, but also that which is revealed in capitalism, at the end of history (a contingent history, that is, one that avoids dialectical laws of history). Capitalism sets free desiring-production even as it attempts to rein it in with the institution of private property and the familial or “Oedipal” patterning of desire; schizophrenics are propelled by the charge of desiring-production thus set free but fail at the limits capitalist society proposes, thus providing a clue to the workings of desiring-production.
It's important at the start to realize that Deleuze and Guattari do not advocate schizophrenia as a “lifestyle” or as the model for a political program. The schizophrenic, as a clinical entity, is the result of the interruption or the blocking of the process of desiring-production, its having been taken out of nature and society and restricted to the body of an individual where it spins in the void rather than make the connections that constitute reality. Desiring-production does not connect “with” reality, as in escaping a subjective prison to touch the objective, but it makes reality, it is the Real, in a twisting of the Lacanian sense of the term. In Lacan, the real is produced as an illusory and retrojected remainder to a signifying system; for Deleuze and Guattari, the Real is reality itself in its process of self-making. The schizophrenic is a sick person in need of help, but schizophrenia is an avenue into the unconscious, the unconscious not of an individual, but the “transcendental unconscious,” an unconscious that is social, historical, and natural all at once.
In studying the schizophrenic process, Deleuze and Guattari posit that in both the natural and social registers desiring-production is composed of three syntheses, the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive; the syntheses perform three functions: production, recording, and enjoyment. We can associate production with the physiological, recording with the semiotic, and enjoyment with the psychological registers. While it is important to catch the Kantian resonance of “synthesis,” it is equally important to note, in keeping with the post-structuralist angle we discussed above, that there is no subject performing the syntheses; instead, subjects are themselves one of the products of the syntheses. The syntheses have no underlying subject; they just are the immanent process of desiring-production. Positing a subject behind the syntheses would be a transcendent use of the syntheses. Here we see another reference to the Kantian principle of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari propose to study the immanent use of the synthesis in a “materialist psychoanalysis,” or “schizoanalysis”; by contrast, psychoanalysis is transcendent use of the syntheses, producing five “paralogisms” or “transcendental illusions,” all of which involve assigning the characteristics of the extensive properties of actual products to the intensive production process, or, to put it in the terms of the philosophy of difference, all the paralogisms subordinate differential processes to identities derived from products.
According to the “universal history” undertaken in Anti-Oedipus, social life has three forms of “socius,” the social body that takes credit for production: the earth for the tribe, the body of the despot for the empire, and capital for capitalism. According to Deleuze and Guattari's reading of the anthropological literature, tribal societies mark bodies in initiation ceremonies, so that the products of an organ are traced to a clan, which is mythically traced to the earth or, more precisely, one of its enchanted regions, which function as the organs on the full body of the earth. Material flows are thus “territorialized,” that is, traced onto the earth, which is credited as the source of all production. The signs in tribal inscription are not signifiers: they do not map onto a voice, but enact a “savage triangle forming … a theater of cruelty that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the graphic hand and the appreciative eye” (189). Empires overcode these tribal meaning codes, tracing production back to the despot, the divine father of his people. Material flows in despotic empires are thus “deterritorialized” (they are no longer credited to the earth), and then immediately “reterritorialized” on the body of the despot, who assumes credit for all production. When tribal signs are overcoded, the signifier is formed as a “deterritorialized sign” allowing for communication between the conquered and the conquerors. Signifiers are a “flattening” or “bi-univocalization”: two chains are lined up, one to one, the written and the spoken (205–6; cf. Derrida's notion of “phonocentrism”). The body of the despot as imperial socius means that workers are the “hands” of the emperor, spies are his “eyes,” and so on.
Capitalism is the radical decoding and deterritorialization of the material flows that previous social machines had zealously coded on the earth or the body of the despot. Production is credited to the “body” of capital, but this form of recording works by the substitution of an “axiomatic” for a code: in this context an “axiomatic” means a set of simple principles for the quantitative calculation of the difference between flows (of deterritorialized labor and capital) rather than elaborate rules for the qualitative judgments that map flows onto the socius. Capitalism's command is utterly simple: connect deterritorialized flows of labor and capital and extract a surplus from that connection. Thus capitalism sets loose an enormous productive charge—connect those flows! Faster, faster!—the surpluses of which the institutions of private property try to register as belonging to individuals. Now those individuals are primarily social (as figures of capitalist or laborer) and only secondarily private (family members). Whereas organs of bodies were socially marked in previous regimes (as belonging to the clan and earth, or as belonging to the emperor, as in the jus primae noctis), body organs are privatized under capitalism and attached to persons as members of the family. In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, capitalism's decoded flows are reterritorialized on “persons,” that is, on family members as figures in the Oedipal triangle.
4.2 A Thousand Plateaus
Three differences between this work and its predecessor are immediately apparent. First, A Thousand Plateaus has a much wider range of registers than Anti-Oedipus: cosmic, geologic, evolutionary, developmental, ethological, anthropological, mythological, historical, economic, political, literary, musical, and even more. Second, the results of the paralogisms of Anti-Oedipus become “strata” in A Thousand Plateaus: the organism (the unification and totalization of the connective synthesis of production, or the physiological register), the signifying totality or signifiance, which we can perhaps render as “signifier-ness” (the flattening or “bi-univocalizing” of the disjunctive synthesis of recording, the semiotic register), and the subject (the reification of the conjunctive synthesis of consummation, the psychological register). Finally, while Anti-Oedipus has a classical conceptual architecture, that is, chapters that develop a single argument, A Thousand Plateaus is written as a “rhizome,” that is, as allowing immediate connections between any of its points. Because of this rhizomatic structure, a traditional summary of the “theses” and arguments of A Thousand Plateaus is either downright impossible, or at best, would be much too complex to attempt in an encyclopedia article. We will therefore have to limit ourselves to the following remarks.
In fourteen plateaus, or planes of intensity—productive connections between immanently arrayed material systems without reference to an external governing source—Deleuze and Guattari develop a new materialism in which a politicized philosophy of difference joins forces with the sciences explored in Difference and Repetition. A Thousand Plateaus is a book of strange new questions: “Who Does the Earth Think It Is?,” “How Do You make Yourself a Body Without Organs?,” “How does the war-machine ward off the apparatus of capture of the State?” and so on. To over-simplify, Deleuze and Guattari take up the insights of dynamical systems theory, which explores the various thresholds at which material systems self-organize (that is, reduce their degrees of freedom, as in our previous example of convection currents). Deleuze and Guattari then extend the notion of self-organizing material systems—those with no need of transcendent organizing agents such as gods, leaders, capital, or subjects—to the social, linguistic, political-economic, and psychological realms. The resultant “rhizome” or de-centered network that is A Thousand Plateaus provides hints for experimentation with the more and more de-regulated flows of energy and matter, ideas and actions—and the attendant attempts at binding them—that make up the contemporary world.
A Thousand Plateaus maintains the tripartite ontological scheme of all of Deleuze's work, but, as the title indicates, with geological terms of reference. Deleuze and Guattari call the virtual “the Earth,” the intensive is called “consistency,” and the actual is called “the system of the strata.” As the latter term indicates, one of the foci of their investigations is the tendency of some systems to head toward congealment or stratification. More precisely put, any concrete system is composed of intensive processes tending toward the (virtual) plane of consistency and/or toward (actual) stratification. We can say that all that exists is the intensive, tending towards the limits of virtuality and actuality; these last two ontological registers do not “exist,” but they do “insist,” to use one of Deleuze's terms. Nothing ever instantiates the sheer frozen stasis of the actual nor the sheer differential dispersion of the virtual; rather, natural or worldly processes are always and only actualizations, that is, they are processes of actualization structured by virtual multiplicities and heading toward an actual state they never quite attain. More precisely, systems also contain tendencies moving in the other direction, toward virtuality; systems are more or less stable sets of processes moving in different directions, toward actuality and toward virtuality. In still other words, Deleuze and Guattari are process philosophers; neither the structures of such processes nor their completed products merit the same ontological status as processes themselves. With this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari offer a detailed and complex “open system” which is extraordinarily rich and complex. A useful way into it is to follow the concepts of coding, stratification and territorialization. They are related in the following manner. Coding is the process of ordering matter as it is drawn into a body; by contrast, stratification is the process of creating hierarchal bodies, while territorialization is the ordering of those bodies in “assemblages,” that is to say, an emergent unity joining together heterogeneous bodies in a “consistency.”
These concepts, and several other networks of concepts considerations of space preclude us from considering, are put to work in addressing the following topics. After a discussion of the notion of “rhizome” in the first chapter (or “plateau” as they call it), Deleuze and Guattari quickly dismiss psychoanalysis in the second. In the third chapter they discuss the process of stratification in physical, organic, and social strata, with special attention to questions in population genetics, where speciation can be thought to stratify or channel the flow of genes. In chapters 4 and 5 they intervene in debates in linguistics in favor of pragmatics, that is to say, highlighting the “incorporeal transformations” (labels that prompt a different form of action to be applied to a body: “I now pronounce you man and wife”) that socially sanctioned “order words” bring about (Deleuze and Guattari also refer to speech act theory in this regard). They also lay out the theory of “territories” or sets of environmentally embedded triggers of self-organizing processes, and the concomitant processes of deterritorialization (breaking of habits) and reterritorialization (formation of habits). Chapters 6 and 7 discuss methods of experimenting with the strata in which we found ourselves. Chapter 6 deals with the organic stratum or the “organism”; the notorious term of art “Body without Organs” can be at least partially glossed as the reservoir of potentials for different patterns of bodily affect. Chapter 7 deals with the intersection of signifiance (“signifier-ness”) and subjectification in “faciality”; the face arrests the drift of signification by tying meaning to the expressive gestures of a subject. Chapters 8 and 9 deal with the social organizing practices they name “lines” and “segments”; of particular interest here is their treatment of fascism. Chapter 10 returns to the question of intensive experimentation, now discussed in terms of “becoming,” in which (at least) two systems come together to form an emergent system or “assemblage.” Chapter 11 discusses the “refrain” or rhythm as a means of escaping from and forming new territories, or even existing in a process of continual deterritorialization, what they call “consistency.” Chapters 12 and 13 discuss the relation of the “war machine” and the State; the former is a form of social organization that fosters creativity (it “reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself”), while the latter is an “apparatus of capture” living vampirically off of labor (here Deleuze and Guattari's basically Marxist perspective is apparent). Finally, Chapter 14 discusses types of social constitution of space, primarily the “smooth” space of war machines and the “striated” space of States.
4.3 What is Philosophy?
After a long period in which each pursued his own interests, Deleuze and Guattari published a last collaboration in 1991, What Is Philosophy? In answering their title question, Deleuze and Guattari seek to place philosophy in relation to science and art, all three being modes of thought, with no subordination among them. Thought, in all its modes, struggles with chaos against opinion. Philosophy is the creation or construction of concepts; a concept is an intensive multiplicity, inscribed on a plane of immanence, and peopled by “conceptual personae” which operate the conceptual machinery. A conceptual persona is not a subject, for thinking is not subjective, but takes place in the relationship of territory and earth. Science creates functions on a plane of reference. Art creates “a bloc of sensation, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects” (WP, 164).
We will deal with Deleuze and the arts in some detail below. In discussing What is Philosophy?, let us concentrate on the treatment of the relation of philosophy and science. We should remember at the outset that the nomad or minor science evoked in A Thousand Plateaus is not the Royal or major science that makes up the entirety of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘science’ in What is Philosophy?. The motives for this conflation are unclear; in the eyes of some, this change considerably weakens the value of the latter work. Be that as it may, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari vigorously deny that philosophy is needed to help science think about its own presuppositions (“no one needs philosophy to reflect on anything” [WP 6]). Instead, they emphasize the complementary nature of the two. First, they point out a number of similarities between philosophy and science: both are approaches to “chaos” that attempt to bring order to it, both are creative modes of thought, and both are complementary to each other, as well as to a third mode of creative thought, art. Beyond these similarities, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between philosophy as the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence and science as the creation of functions on a plane of reference. Both relate to the virtual, the differential field of potential transformations of material systems, but in different ways. Philosophy gives consistency to the virtual, mapping the forces composing a system as pure potentials, what the system is capable of. Meanwhile, science gives it reference, determining the conditions by which systems behave the way they actually do. Philosophy is the “counter-effectuation of the event,” abstracting an event or change of pattern from bodies and states of affairs and thereby laying out the transformative potentials inherent in things, the roads not taken that coexist as compossibles or as inclusive disjunctions (differentiation, in the terms of Difference and Repetition), while science tracks the actualization of the virtual, explaining why this one road was chosen in a divergent series or exclusive disjunction (differenciation, according to Difference and Repetition). Functions predict the behavior of constituted systems, laying out their patterns and predicting change based on causal chains, while concepts “speak the event” (WP 21), mapping out the multiplicity structuring the possible patterns of behavior of a system—and the points at which the system can change its habits and develop new ones. For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, then, science deals with properties of constituted things, while philosophy deals with the constitution of events. Roughly speaking, philosophy explores the plane of immanence composed of constellations of constitutive forces that can be abstracted from bodies and states of affairs. It thus maps the range of connections a thing is capable of, its “becomings” or “affects.” Science, on the other hand, explores the concretization of these forces into bodies and states of affairs, tracking the behavior of things in relation to already constituted things in a certain delimited region of space and time (the “plane of reference”). How do concepts relate to functions? Just as there is a “concept of concept” there are also “concepts of functions,” but these are purely philosophical creations “without the least scientific value” (WP 117). Thus concrete concepts like that of “deterritorialization” are philosophical concepts, not scientific functions, even though they might resonate with, or echo, scientific functions. Nor are they metaphors, as Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly insist:
Of course, we realize the dangers of citing scientific propositions outside their own sphere. It is the danger of arbitrary metaphor or of forced application. But perhaps these dangers are averted if we restrict ourselves to taking from scientific operators a particular conceptualizable character which itself refers to non?scientific areas, and converges with science without applying it or making it a metaphor (Deleuze 1989: 129).
Deleuze and Guattari's refusal to recognize that their work contains metaphors is due to their struggle against the “imperialism” of the signifying regime, a major theme in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: not every relation between different intellectual fields can be grasped by the most common notions of “metaphor,” reliant as they are on the notion of a transfer of sense from primary to secondary signification.
5. Deleuze and the Arts
Kant had dissociated aesthetics into two halves: the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience (the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason), and the theory of art as a reflection on real experience (the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Critique of Judgment). In Deleuze's work, these two halves of aesthetics are reunited: if the most general aim of art is to “produce a sensation,” then the genetic principles of sensation are at the same time the principles of composition for works of art; conversely, it is works of art that are best capable of revealing these conditions of sensibility. Deleuze therefore writes on the arts not as a critic but as a philosopher, and his books and essays on the various arts—including the cinema (Cinema I and II), literature (Essays Critical and Clinical), and painting (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation)—must be read as philosophical explorations of this transcendental domain of sensibility. The cinema, for instance, produces images that move, and that move in time, and it is these two aspects of film that Deleuze set out to analyze in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image: “What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time that the other arts don't show?” Deleuze thus describes his two-volume Cinema as “a book of logic, a logic of the cinema” that sets out “to isolate certain cinematographic concepts,” concepts which are specific to the cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation likewise creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon's paintings, but which also find a place in “a general logic of sensation.” In general, Deleuze will locate the conditions of sensibility in an intensive conception of space and a virtual conception of time, which are necessarily actualized in a plurality of spaces and a complex rhythm of times (for instance, in the non-extended spaces and non-linear times of modern mathematics and physics).
For Deleuze, the task of art is to produce “signs” that will push us out of our habits of perception into the conditions of creation. When we perceive via the re-cognition of the properties of substances, we see with a stale eye pre-loaded with clichés; we order the world in what Deleuze calls “representation.” In this regard, Deleuze cites Francis Bacon: we're after an artwork that produces an effect on the nervous system, not on the brain. What he means by this figure of speech is that in an art encounter we are forced to experience the “being of the sensible.” We get something that we cannot re-cognize, something that is “imperceptible”—it doesn't fit the hylomorphic production model of perception in which sense data, the “matter” or hyle of sensation, is ordered by submission to conceptual form. Art however cannot be re-cognized, but can only be sensed; in other words, art splits perceptual processing, forbidding the move to conceptual ordering. This is exactly what Kant in the Third Critique called reflective judgment: when the concept is not immediately given in the presentation of art. With art we reach “sensation,” or the “being of the sensible,” the sentiendum.
Deleuze talks about this effect of sensation as the “transcendent exercise” of the faculty of sensibility; here we could refer to the third chapter of Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze lays out a non-Kantian “differential theory of the faculties.” In this remarkable theory, intensity is “difference in itself,” that which carries the faculties to their limits. The faculties are linked in order; here we see what Deleuze calls the privilege of sensibility as origin of knowledge—the “truth of empiricism.” In the differential theory of the faculties, sensibility, imagination, memory, and thought all “communicate a violence” from one to the other. With sensibility, pure difference in intensity is grasped immediately in the encounter as the sentiendum; with imagination, the disparity in the phantasm is that which can only be imagined. With memory, in turn, the memorandum is the dissimilar in the pure form of time, or the immemorial of transcendent memory. With thought, a fractured self is constrained to think “difference in itself” in Ideas. Thus the “free form of difference” moves each faculty and communicates its violence to the next. You have to be forced to think, starting with an art encounter in which intensity is transmitted in signs or sensation. Rather than a “common sense” in which all the faculties agree in recognizing the “same” object, we find in this communicated violence a “discordant harmony” (compare the Kantian sublime) that tears apart the subject (here we find the notion of “cruelty” Deleuze picks up from Artaud).
6. The Reception of Deleuze
The writings of Deleuze have provoked a large literature of explication and introduction in both French and English; more recently, works in German, Italian, and other European languages have appeared. There have also been noteworthy critiques. Rather than attempt a complete survey of the voluminous secondary literature, we will concentrate on a few of the major critiques.
6.1 The feminist critique
An early wave of criticism was directed in the 1980s at Deleuze's collaborations with Guattari by feminists such as Alice Jardine and Luce Irigaray. Jardine 1985 criticized the concept of “becoming-woman” in A Thousand Plateaus, which Deleuze and Guattari position as the first step towards a de-subjectivizing “becoming-indiscernible.” Jardine argued that Deleuze and Guattari's claim that even women must undergo a “becoming-woman” amounts to a threat to the hard-fought victories of concrete feminist struggle that allowed women to claim a subjectivity in the first place. According to Grosz 1994's survey of the early feminist critiques, Irigaray argued that the use of “becoming-woman” as a figure of change incumbent upon all, including men, amounts to a masculinist and desexualizing appropriation of feminist struggle. In the 1990s and now into the 2000s, a number of feminists associated with the “corporeal feminism” movement have attempted positive connections with Deleuze in the name of an open and experimental attitude toward bodily potentials, in both the singular and political registers, as in the phrase “body politic.” See among others Braidotti 1994 and 2002; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994 and 1995; Olkowski 1999; Lorraine 1999; and the essays in Buchanan and Colebrook 2002.
6.2 The Badiouan critique
One of the most important criticisms of Deleuze was put forth in Badiou 1997. Badiou claimed, contrary to the dominant perception, that Deleuze is not so much a philosopher of the multiple as of the One. Conducted in the highly technical idiom for which he is known, Badiou criticizes Deleuze for a certain vitalism, which in Badiou's eyes falls short of the axiomatic austerity demanded of philosophy. Whereas Badiou merely ignored the collaborative works with Guattai, Zizek 2003 conducts a polemic against the Guattari collaborations in favor of a Deleuzean logic of Being characterized as an “immaterial affect generated by interacting bodies as a sterile surface of pure Becoming” (as in Logic of Sense). A third critical work in this vein is Hallward 2005. For Hallward, the singular logic of Deleuze's thought is analogous to the tradition of theophantic thinkers, whereby the divine spark of creation is entombed in creatures; the task of the creature is to redeem that divine spark from its creatural prison. But this redemption is not annihilation; Deleuze's philosophy is not that of Lacanian-Zizekian “renunciation-extinction.”
In response to the Badiouan critique, we can note that one of the most promising leads for future research in discussing the relation of Badiou and Deleuze is to concentrate on the type of mathematics each thinker prefers. Rather than accepting Badiou's characterization of Deleuze as a thinker of reality in biological term (as opposed to Badiou's mathematical orientation), we should see Deleuze as proposing a “problematic” version of mathematics, versus Badiou's axiomatic conception. This tack has been taken by Smith 2003.
6.3 The “Science Wars” critique
Deleuze was one of the targets of the polemic in Sokal and Bricmont 1999. As much of their chapter on Deleuze consists of exasperated exclamations of incomprehension, it is hard to say what it is that Sokal and Bricmont think they have accomplished. One thing is clear though: Deleuze was perfectly aware of the finitist revolution in the history of the differential calculus, despite Sokal and Bricmont's intimations otherwise. He writes in Difference and Repetition, “it is a mistake to tie the value of the symbol dx to the existence of infinitesimals; but it is also a mistake to refuse it any ontological or gnoseological value in the name of a refusal of the latter. In fact, there is a treasure buried within the old so-called barbaric or pre-scientific interpretations of the differential calculus, which must be separated from its infinitesimal matrix. A great deal of heart and a great deal of truly philosophical naivety is needed in order to take the symbol dx seriously …” (170). It seems obvious here that Deleuze's treatment of early forms of the differential calculus is not meant as an intervention into the history of mathematics, or an attempt at a philosophy of mathematics, but as an investigation seeking to form a properly philosophical concept of difference by means of extracting certain forms of thought from what he clearly labels as antiquated mathematical methods. (For positive views of Deleuze's use of mathematics as provocations for the formation of his philosophical concepts, see the essays in Duffy 2006.)
Another and perhaps more effective response to Sokal and Bricmont would be to point to the positive work done on Deleuze and science. Massumi 1992 and DeLanda 2003 attempt to show that Deleuze's epistemology and ontology can be brought together with the results of contemporary dynamical systems theory (popularly known as “chaos” and “complexity” theory). Bell 2006 follows up on this work. Protevi 2001 looks at the accompanying notions of hylomorphism and self-organization in the history of philosophy; Bonta and Protevi 2004 treat Deleuze and dynamic systems theory with regard to its potentials for geographical work. For other issues on Deleuze and science, see the essays in Marks 2006. Finally, Ansell Pearson 1999 brought attention to Deleuze and biology; see also Toscano 2006 in this regard.
Bibliography
Primary Literature
Works by Deleuze
(1953) Empirisme et subjectivité (Paris: PUF); tr. as Empiricism and Subjectivity, by Constantin Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
(1956) “La Conception de la différence chez Bergson,” Etudes bergsoniennes 4 (1956): 77–112; tr. as “Bergson's Conception of Difference,” by Melissa McMahon, in John Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
(1962) Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF); tr. as Nietzsche and Philosophy, by Hugh Tomlinson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
(1963) La philosophie critique de Kant (Paris: PUF); tr. as The Critical Philosophy of Kant, by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
(1966) Le Bergsonisme (Paris: PUF); tr. as Bergsonism, by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1988.
(1967) Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, by Jean McNeil, New York: G. Braziller, 1971.
(1968) Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF); tr. as Difference and Repetition, by Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
(1968) Spinoza et le problème de l'expression(Paris: Minuit); tr. as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, by Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books, 1990.
(1969) Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit); tr. as The Logic of Sense, by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
(1972) “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” in Francois Châtelet, ed., Histoire de la philosophie, tome 8: Le XXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1972): 299–335; tr. as “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” in Desert Islands, New York: Semiotexte, 2003.
(1964 [1970, 1976]) Proust et les signes (Paris: PUF); tr. (of 1976 ed) as Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, by Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
(1977) Dialogues (avec Claire Parnet) (Paris: Flammarion); tr. as Dialogues, by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
(1981 [1970]) Spinoza: Philosophie pratique; (Paris: PUF); tr. as Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, by Robert Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
(1981) Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Editions de la différence); tr. as Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation, by Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
(1983) Cinéma I: l'Image-Mouvement (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Cinema I: The Movement-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
(1985) Cinéma II: l'Image-temps (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Cinema II: The Time-Image, by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
(1986) Foucault (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Foucault, Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
(1988) Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit); tr. as The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, by Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
(1990) Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Negotiations, by Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
(1993) Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Essays Critical and Clinical, by Daniel Smith and Michael Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
(1995) “L'immanence: une vie,” Philosophie 47 (septembre 1), 3–7; tr. as “Immanence: A Life” in Two Regimes of Madness, New York: Semiotexte, 2006.
(2002) L'Île déserte et autres textes: textes et entretiens 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2002); tr. as Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974), by Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotexte, 2003.
(2003) Deux régimes de fous: textes et entretiens 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, New York: Semiotexte, 2006.
Works by Deleuze with Félix Guattari
(1972) L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Anti-Oedipus, by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York: Viking, 1977; reprint University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
(1975) Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit); tr. as Kafka: For a Minor Literature, by Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
(1980) Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit); tr. as A Thousand Plateaus, by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
(1991) Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit); tr. as What is Philosophy?, by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Secondary Literature
Alliez, Eric (ed.), 1998. Gilles Deleuze: une vie philosophique, Paris: Synthélabo.
–––, 2004. Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?, Eliot Ross Albert (trans.), London: Continuum.
Ansell Pearson, Keith (ed.), 1997. Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, London: Routledge.
–––, 1999. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze, London: Routledge.
Antonioli, Manola, 1999. Deleuze et l'histoire de la philosophie, Paris: Kimé.
–––, 2003. Géophilosophie de Deleuze et Guattari, Paris: L'Harmattan.
Badiou, Alain, 2000. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Louise Burchill (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Beistegui, Miguel de, 2004. Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
–––, 2010. Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bell, Jeffrey, 2006. Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
–––, 2009. Deleuze's Hume: Philosophy, Culture, and the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bergen, Veronique, 2003. L'Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Paris: L'Harmattan.
Bogue, Ronald, 1989. Deleuze and Guattari, New York: Routledge.
–––, 2003. Deleuze on Cinema, New York: Routledge.
–––, 2003. Deleuze on Literature, New York: Routledge.
–––, 2003. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, New York: Routledge.
Bonta, Mark, and John Protevi, 2004. Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Boundas, Constantin, 2011. Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction, London: Continuum.
––– (ed.), 2006. Deleuze and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
–––, and Dorothea Olkowski (eds.), 1994. Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Braidotti, Rosi, 1994. “Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or, Metaphysics and Metabolism,” in Boundas and Olkowski (eds.) 1994, pp. 159–186.
–––, 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity.
Broadhurst, Joan (ed.), 1992. Deleuze and the Transcendental Unconscious, in PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy (Volume 4).
Brusseau, James, 1998. Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism, Albany: SUNY Press.
Bryant, Levi, 2008. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Bryden, Mary (ed.), 2002. Deleuze and Religion, London: Routledge.
Buchanan, Ian, 2000. Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, Durham: Duke University Press.
–––, 2008. Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus': A Reader's Guide, London: Continuum.
–––, and Claire Colebrook (eds.), 2000. Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Colebrook, Claire, 2001. Gilles Deleuze (Routledge Critical Thinkers). New York: Routledge.
–––, 2010. Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, London: Continuum.
Colman, Felicity, 2011. Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts, London: Berg.
DeLanda, Manuel, 2003. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum.
Dosse, François, 2010. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Due, Reidar, 2007. Deleuze, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Duffy, Simon (ed.), 2006. Intensive Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, Manchester: Clinamen Press.
–––. 2006. The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze, London: Ashgate.
Faulkner, Keith, 2007. The Force of Time: An Introduction to Deleuze through Proust, Lanham MD: University Press of America.
Flaxman, Gregory, 2000. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
–––, 2011. Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gaffney, Peter (ed.), 2010. The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gatens, Moira, 1996. “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” in Patton 1996, pp. 162–187.
Genosko, Gary, 2002. Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, London: Continuum.
Goodchild, Philip, 1997. Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Grosz, Elizabeth, 1994. “A Thousand Tiny Sexes,” in Boundas and Olkowski (eds.) 1994, pp. 187–210.
–––, 1995. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, New York: Routledge.
Gualandi, Alberto, 1998. Deleuze, Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Hallward, Peter, 2006. Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, London: Verso.
Hardt, Michael, 1993. Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Holland, Eugene, 1999. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, New York: Routledge.
Hughes, Joe, 2009. Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Reader's Guide, London: Continuum.
–––, 2009. Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, London: Continuum.
–––, 2012. Philosophy After Deleuze, London: Continuum.
Jardine, Alice, 1986. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kaufman, Eleanor, 2012. Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
–––, and Jon Roffe (eds.), 2009. Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kaufman, Eleanor, and Jon Heller (eds.), 1998. Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Philosophy, Politics and Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Kerslake, Christian, 2007. Deleuze and the Unconscious, London: Continuum.
Khalfa, Jean (ed.), 2003. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, London: Continuum.
Lambert, Gregg, 2002. The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, London: Continuum.
–––, 2012. In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and Philosophical Expressionism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lampert, Jay, 2006. Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History, London: Continuum.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 1985. Philosophy through the Looking Glass, Chicago: Open Court.
–––, 2002. Deleuze and Language, London: Palgrave Macmillan).
Lefebvre, Alexandre, 2008. The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lorraine, Tamsin, 1999. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Marks, John, 1998. Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, Pluto Press: London.
––– (ed.), 2006. Deleuze and Science, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Martin, Jean-Clet, 1993. Variations: La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze, Paris: Payot & Rivages.
Massumi, Brian, 1992. A user's guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
May, Todd, 2005. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mengue, Phillipe, 1994. Gilles Deleuze ou le système du multiple, Paris: Kimé
–––, 2003. Deleuze et la question de la démocratie, Paris: L'Harmattan.
Moulard-Leonard, Valentine. 2009. Deleuze-Bergson Encounters: Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual, Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Murphy, Timothy S., 1992. “The Philosophy (of the Theatre) of Cruelty in Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition,” in Broadhurst 1992, pp. 105–135.
Olkowski, Dorothea, 1999. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press.
–––, 2007. The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press.
O'Sullivan, Simon, 2006. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Patton, Paul (ed.), 1996. Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.
–––, 1999. Deleuze and the Political, London: Routledge.
–––, 2010. Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Patton, Paul, and John Protevi (eds.), 2003. Between Deleuze and Derrida, London: Continuum.
Pisters, Patricia, 2012. The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Culture, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Protevi, John, 2001. Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic, London: Athlone.
–––, 2011. “Mind in Life, Mind in Process: Toward a New Transcendental Aesthetic and a New Question of Panpsychism.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18(5–6): 94–116.
–––, 2013. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rajchman, John, 2000. The Deleuze Connections, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Ramey, Joshua, 2012. The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal, Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Reynolds, Jack, 2011. Chronopathologies: Time and Politics in Deleuze, Derrida, Analytic Philosophy, and Phenomenology, Lanham MD: Lexington Books.
Rodowick, David, 1997. Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, Durham: Duke University Press.
Roffe, Jon, 2012. Badiou's Deleuze, Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press.
Rolli, Marc, 2003. Gilles Deleuze: Philosophie des transzendentalen Empirismus, Vienna: Thuria & Kant.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1991 [1937]. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, New York: Hill and Wang.
Sauvagnargues, Anne, 2005. Deleuze et l'art, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
–––, 2009. Deleuze. L'empirisme transcendental, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Schaub, Mirjam, 2003. Gilles Deleuze im Wunderland: Zeit als Ereignisphilosophie, Munich: Wilhelm Fink.
–––, 2003. Gilles Deleuze im Kino: Das Sichtbare und das Sagbare, Munich: Wilhelm Fink.
Shaviro, Steven, 2009. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Simont, Juliette, 1997. Essai sur la quantité, la qualité, la relation chez Kant, Hegel, Deleuze: Les “fleurs noires” de la logique philosophique, Paris: L'Harmattan.
Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont, 1999. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, New York: Picador.
Smith, Daniel W., 2012. Essays on Deleuze, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
–––, and Henry Somers-Hall (eds.), 2012. The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Somers-Hall, Henry, 2012. Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negative and Difference, Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Stivale, Charles, 1998. The Two Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari, New York: Guilford.
–––, 2005. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, London: Continuum.
–––, 2008. Gilles Deleuze's ABCs: The Folds of Friendship, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Thoburn, Nick, 2003. Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London: Routledge.
Toscano, Alberto, 2006. Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tuinen, Sjoerd van, and Niamh McDonnell (eds.), 2010. Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Villani, Arnaud, 1999. La guêpe et l'orchidée: Essai sur Gilles Deleuze, Paris: Belin.
Voss, Daniela, 2011. “Maimon and Deleuze: The Viewpoint of Internal Genesis and the Concept of Differentials,” Parrhesia, 11: 62–74.
Welchman, Alistair, 2009. “Deleuze's Post-Critical Metaphysics,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 13(2): 25–54.
Widder, Nathan, 2002. Genealogies of Difference, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
–––, 2012. Political Theory after Deleuze, London: Continuum.
Williams, James, 2004. Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
–––, 2005. The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influences, Manchester: Clinamen Press.
–––, 2008. Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
–––, 2011. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Zepke, Stephen, 2005. Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari, London: Routledge.
Žižek, Slavoj, 2003. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York: Routledge.
Zourabichvili, François, 2012. Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, Kieran Aarons (trans.), Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith (eds.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
. Some critics, however, see Rand's own distinction as strikingly reminiscent of Kant (Walsh 2000). Other charges raised against Rand's epistemology include: making the reliability of perception vacuous (since nothing counts as perception unless it's accurate); assuming a foundationalist approach that conflates the perceptual process by which judgments are formed with the way in which they are to be justified; and leaving it unclear how judgments with propositional structure can be validated by sensory data lacking such structure (Dipert 1987; Long 2000). On the positive side, several philosophers have developed Rand's theory of perception in a way that successfully engages with problems in contemporary analytic epistemology (Kelley 1986; Ghate 2012; Salmieri 2012).
