Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy

Constantin V. Boundas, Dorothea Olkowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351622226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This collection, first published in 1994, contains thirteen critical essays by established scholars from the fields of philosophy, literary criticism, feminist theory, politics, and sociology, and a new essay by Deleuze himself. That the contributors are from a variety of fields indicates the extent to which Deleuze's work can and will impact theory far beyond the discipline of philosophy.

1

Editors’ Introduction

Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski

From an always nomadic and anarchical difference to the unavoidably excessive and displaced sign of recurrence, a lightning storm was produced which will, one day, be given the name of Deleuze: new thought is possible; thought is again possible . . . genital thought, intensive thought, affirmative thought, acategorical thought—each of these an unrecognizable face, a mask we have never seen before; differences we had no reason to expect, but which nevertheless lead to the return, as masks of their masks, of Plato, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and all other philosophers. This is not philosophy as thought, but as theatre . . .

—Michel Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum¹

FROM DELEUZE’S EARLY WORK on Hume, Masoch, and Nietzsche to his later collaborations with radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, Deleuze's thought is startling—a lightning storm for thinkers like those who have contributed to this volume of critical essays. But in what sense are Deleuze's works of philosophy theater? For one, these works are marked by the constant invention of conceptual characters: the inquirer, the judge, the friend, and the rival are such conceptual characters invented and put on stage by Deleuze. They are not meant to resemble the philosophers (Hume, Kant, Plato) whose work they stage. But they are meant to assist in the arrival of a new image of thought. Unlike Platonism, which determines the question of the Idea in the form “What is F?,” Deleuze brings Ideas closer to accidents and argues that they can be determined only with questions like “Who?,” “How?” “How many?,” “When and where?,” that is, with questions that plot their true spatiotemporal coordinates.²

If, as Deleuze says, philosophy is the activity that traces a prephilosophical plane of immanence (reason), invents prophilosophical characters (imagination), and creates philosophical concepts (understanding), it is with the invention of the conceptual characters that the creation of concepts and the tracing of the processes that form the plane of immanence begins in earnest.³ It is through “dramatization” that the virtual Idea is incarnated and actualized (Deleuze 1967, p. 96).⁴ Without it, the concept would never be divided and specified. Pure spatiotemporal dynamisms have the power to dramatize concepts because they are the ones that incarnate and actualize Ideas: “There is a drama beneath every logos” (p. 101).

Deleuze makes it clear that this drama is taking the place of the Kantian schema. It constitutes “a strange theatre made up of pure determinations, agitating space and time, acting directly on the soul, having larvae as actors—a theatre for which Artaud has chosen the expression ‘theatre of cruelty’” (p. 95)—all this, of course, provided that the conceptual character is not mistaken for the philosopher's representative. “The philosopher is the envelope of his main character, and of all the other characters who are the real subjects of his philosophy” (Deleuze 1991, p. 62). If then Deleuze's philosophy is a theater, as Foucault thought, it is most certainly a minor theater. Only a minor theater can address the sense in which Deleuze's work always opens up an area of inquiry that had been thought to be completely exhausted and long since abandoned by philosophy or, at least, by any novel inquiry. Only a minor theater can retrace these abandoned philosophies so as to transform each one so completely that it is barely recognizable and bears no resemblance to the old exhausted ideas.

The present collection of essays—the first, we believe, in any language— is intended as a tribute to Deleuze. One, of course, does not pay Deleuze a tribute by canonizing his texts or by fencing them in with commentaries and annotations. This is the reason why we solicited essays that would be like gusts of fresh air from the outside. We tried to trade off the search for hidden signifieds for a better understanding of how Deleuze's texts work. We wanted to trace the diagram of the series that make up his work, instead of “representing” it or blurring its lines altogether, making it totally unrecognizable. The essays that we included enact a variety of research styles and ambitions. American, Canadian, French, and Australian scholars, fairly well distributed among philosophers, literary theorists, sociologists, and women's studies specialists came together to form the diverging, yet resonant, series that made this volume possible. Deleuze, with his usual grace, responded to our intrusive request for participation with his never before published essay “Begaya-t-il,” which we decided to place at the beginning of the collection, in order to avoid creating the impression that this essay in any sense stands for the customary “response” to one's critics. In the beginning was the stuttering, and the stuttering was of the outside. Stutterer, thinker of the outside—what better way is there for registering the passage of a philosopher?

Delimiting even the six areas that constitute this volume was, for us, the editors, an arduous task. Although our six chosen “themes” resonate throughout Deleuze's writings, these themes (difference and repetition, subjectivity, desire and the overturning of Platonism, becoming-woman, minor languages and nomad thought, and lines of flight) are not developed thematically in any sense by Deleuze himself. Deleuze's nomadic thought cannot give way to thematic organization because so much of what Deleuze thinks and writes has to do with the overturning of all familiar themes and of thematization itself.

The first section of our collection consists of two essays that analyze and discuss the Deleuzian themes of difference, sameness, and singularity. Todd May's essay, “Difference and Unity in Gilles Deleuze,” attempts to disentangle Deleuze from the nets of a total affirmation of alterity and anarchism. Redescribing this affirmation, May argues that Deleuze cannot coherently maintain the primacy of difference over unity without lapsing into the kind of transcendentalism that his entire philosophy was poised to denounce, reducing language to unintelligible verbiage, or letting the very surfaces upon which thought is supposed to happen break up into a host of unrelated molecules. “Difference,” May writes, “must be thought of alongside unity, or not at all!” May does not deny that there is a tendency in Deleuze's thought toward pure difference and its resounding affirmation, but he is struck by what he takes to be the presence in it of an opposite tendency that makes Deleuze appeal constantly throughout his work to writers whose work is “unitary and monistic” (Scotus, Spinoza, Bergson). In order to resolve this “tension,” May finds it necessary, first, to ponder over the role that Deleuze assigns to philosophy (the creation of concepts), in order to decide subsequently what a typical Deleuzian philosophical claim looks like, given that the primary task of philosophy is normative. Philosophy, on this reading, is a practice that can be evaluated only on the basis of the effects that it brings about, and this evaluation can have no recourse to any transcendental standpoint. From such considerations about the nature of philosophy, May concludes that the correct approach to the Deleuzian concept of difference is the investigation of how it functions, and not of how one can ground its metaphysical priority. Difference, he concludes, functions as a concept that resists transcendence in all its forms. Positive in maintaining the irreducibility and contingency of singularity, and disruptive in resisting all principles of unification, Deleuze's difference, according to May, is not mobilized against unity, but only against those transcendental principles of unification that preclude difference and relegate it to the status of the negative. With Deleuze, May finds in Spinoza's expressionism the best guarantor of the compossibilty of difference and unity, provided that, as in Spinoza, expressionism is put in the service of univocity. In the figure of the rhizome, May reads the univocity of being, that is, “the affirmation neither of difference nor of unity but of the surface which is the intertwining of the two.”

Deleuze's choice and affirmation of alterity requires the creation of new concepts, and our inclusion of Alain Badiou’ s essay—a long meditation on Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque—is dictated by the fact that it explores in an exemplary fashion the function and resonances of such a concept. From a position proximate to, and yet distant from Deleuze's own, Badiou discusses the concept of the fold and finds it to be an antiextensional concept of the multiple, an antidialectical concept of the event, and an anti-Cartesian concept of the subject. According to Badiou, the cross of metaphysics has been the impossible choice between the animal and the number. Against this background, Deleuze's fold, a figure of the multiple anchored in an anti-set-theoretical ontology, a continuist horror of vacuum, and an organicist vision, opts without hesitation for the animal. Deleuze's multiple, argues Badiou, “is a living tissue which folds and unfolds as if under the effect of its organic expandings and contractings, in perfect opposition to the Cartesian concept of extension which is punctual and regulated by the shock.” The fold is the triumph of the wave over the particle. Badiou realizes, of course, that such an organicist vision of the multiple puts the singular at risk. This is why he reminds us that singularities and events are not, for Deleuze, points of rupture, but rather “what singularizes continuity in each one of its local folds.” The event is an immanent activity against the “dark” background of a preexisting world; it is a creation, a novelty, that is thinkable only inside the interiority of a continuum. It follows, argues Badiou, that the multiple and the concept (the multiple and the one) are not opposed to each other, since the multiple exists by the concept and is warranted by the universality of continuity; but, at the same time, the multiple is the condition of the possibility of concepts. As for Deleuze's organicism, Badiou adds, it is not built around the Leibnizian compossibility of worlds, but rather around Nietzsche's (and Mallarmé's) resonant and vibrant diverging series.

In the sequence, Badiou's essay assimilates the Deleuzian fold to the concept of a subject that is neither Cartesian (reflection, cogito) nor Husserlian (focus, relation to, intentionality) nor Lacanian (eclipse). The articulation of this concept of the subject requires the outside to be thought as the exact inversion of the inside, the world as a texture of the intimate, and the macroscopic as the torsion of the microscopic. For Badiou, the advantages of such a concept are obvious: the subject emerges as multiple series, a veritable unfolding of predicates, and not as a substance; it is a point of view from which there is a truth, and an “objectless subject,” since it frees knowledge from all relations to objects. Badiou's essay concludes with an extremely nuanced and yet thorough critique of Deleuze's “ontological choice”—a critique based on his own alternative choice, focusing on number, set theory, and the admission of the vacuum. We leave it to the reader to assess the advantages and disadvantages of this choice over Deleuze's.

For the second section of our collection, we chose two essays that promise to initiate discussion concerning the role and function that subjectivity has in the writings of Deleuze. We think that the North American reception of the poststructuralist “death of man,” or “death of the subject,” thematics and rhetoric has not been adequately discussed. The Deleuzian inflections of the problem and our assemblage aim at filling this deplorable lacuna.

Peter Canning's essay, “The Crack of Time and the Ideal Game,” returns to the questions of multiplicity, time as the multiplicity of the eternal return, and subject as the kind of multiplicity that one finds suspended over the crack of time. His essay is itself a multiplicity, successfully preventing its own forms of expression and content from sedimenting around any one unifying principle, rhythm, or theme. Deleuze's multiplicity, argues Canning, is not the One turning into many, but rather an assemblage that changes dimensions and mutates constantly, according to its own lines of flight. Real time has nothing to do with the passing present; it starts when the present stops: it affects itself not with itself, but with becoming, and emerges as pretime from the crack between times. Repetition is the power of the rhythmic idea that produces differences, intensities, and disparities as its own excess. As the repetition of the future, it has nothing to do with the return to the past, which is accomplished in memory. It begins with metamorphosis and forgetting—Chaosmos, the between of chaos and order where structures form and dissolve—and has its own rhythms that account for the intensities and originary differences produced by repetition. Canning argues for the proviso that repetition is not to be seen as the function of the subject, because the subject is the result of the rhythm that creates and selects the intensive traits and the directional components of the plane of immanence. Under these circumstances, is it still possible to speak about the subject? Canning does not address this question directly, but he does speak, nonetheless, of the subject as an intervention and interval. The subject, for Canning, who echoes the Deleuze of Foucault, is the splitting between the virtual (Idea-multiplicity) and the actual (individual-multiplicity), and the folding of the one upon the other. The human subject is a being suspended over the caesura of time.

Constantin V. Boundas's essay makes the claim that a powerful theory of subjectivity can be teased out from Deleuze's texts, provided that the processes of serialization and subject formation were to be explored together. Boundas proposes to read Deleuze the way Deleuze reads others, that is, according to the series he creates, the ways in which these series converge and become compossible, and the means by which they diverge and begin to resonate together. The author's proposal is made in the context of recent discussions attempting to elucidate subjectivity in terms of narrativity, but it stays clear of the phenomenological and hermeneutic postulate of the unity of the self or the assumed coherence of lived-time consciousness. Deleuze, for whom narrativization is serialization and for whom the conjunctive linkages among series are subordinated to their disjunctive resonances, is able to provide us with a theory of subject formation liberated from old phenomenological trappings. For this purpose, Boundas spreads Deleuze's contributions to a theory of subjectivity across several series, each one of which he identifies by means of the question/problem that the series helps to introduce: the Hume series (how does the mind become a subject?), the Bergson series (how can a static ontological genesis of the subject be worked out beginning with prepersonal and preindividual singularities and events?), the Leibniz series (how can there be a notion of individuality that is neither a mere deduction from the concept “subject”—in which case it would be contradictory—nor a mere figure of an individuality deprived of concept— in which case it would be absurd and ineffable?), the Nietzsche-Foucault series (how can a dynamic genesis of subjectivity be given, with the subject as the fold and the internalization of outside forces, without giving in to a philosophy of interiority?), the Michel Tournier series (how is the field of subjectivity affected by the presence or absence of the other?), and the Nietzsche-Klossowski series (how is it possible to think the subject in terms of inclusive disjunctions and simultaneously affirmed incompossible worlds?). Boundas then goes on to show that the formation of the subject, in Deleuze, is indissolubly linked with the question of the becoming world. In fact, the series listed here would have run along their own lines of flight without ever permitting the construction of planes of consistency, were it not for Deleuze's concepts chaosmos (= chaos + cosmos) and “cracked I” (= Je fêlé), which in their capacity as portmanteau words circulate among the series and make possible the inclusive, disjunctive affirmation of all of them at once. It is chaosmos, that is, the becoming-world, that posits the constitution of the subject as a task, and chaosmos again that guarantees that the constituted subject will not emerge as a substantive hypokeimenon, but rather as an always already “cracked I.”

Sections three through six of our volume make a turn, not just in the direction of chaosmos, but toward becomings, insofar as they articulate desiring production, minoritarian groups and their discourses, nomadic distributions, and lines of flight, and insofar as becoming is no longer the simple reversal of Platonism. In “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Foucault had asked, “What philosophy has not tried to overturn Platonism?” (p. 166). In the history of philosophy, the overturn of Platonism has always meant nihilism: the necessity of embracing nothingness as well as the nullity of all values, even the highest. Understood in these terms, all philosophy subsequent to Plato might be nothing more than anti-Platonism. However, there is another way to take measure of this limit: active destruction of everything that is passive in oneself. As Deleuze writes, “Destruction becomes active to the extent that the negative is transmuted and converted into affirmative power: the ‘eternal joy of becoming.’”⁵ Such a strategy amounts to accounting for a philosophy in terms of its “Platonic differential, an element absent in Platonism but present in other philosophies” (Foucault 1977, p. 166). Indeed, the question of a differential at the origin is fundamental to any Deleuzian encounter with philosophy. But the organization of this difference is also a key factor in Deleuze's work.

Foucault points to Deleuze's articulation of Plato's “delicate sorting operation which precedes the discovery of essence, because it necessitates the world of essences in its separation of false simulacra from the multitude of appearances” (p. 167). It is the process of division that enables Plato to discover true being, establish its identity, separate it once and for all from all impostors, which are “reduced to nonexistence” by the mere presence of the Idea (p. 167). Deleuze sees Plato's philosophy organized in accordance with two dimensions: (1) that of limited and measured things including the establishment of “presents” and of “subjects” with a certain size at a certain moment or “present” and, opposed to this, in fact, subsisting beneath it, (2) pure becoming without measure, escaping the present, thus escaping ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Editors’ Introduction
• 2 He Stuttered
• I Difference and Repetition
• II Subjectivity
• III Desire and the Overturning of Platonism
• IV The Question of Becoming-Woman
• V Minor Languages and Nomad Arts
• VI Lines of Flight
• Selected Critical References to Gilles Deleuze and His Works
• Index