Gilles Deleuze

Key Concepts

Charles J. Stivale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317547822
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Gilles Deleuze is now regarded as one of the most radical philosophers of the twentieth century. His work is hugely influential across a range of subjects, from philosophy to literature, to art, architecture and cultural studies. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts provides a guide to Deleuzian thought for any reader coming to his writings for the first time. This new edition is fully revised and updated and includes three new chapters on the event, psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Part I
Philosophies

One
Force

Kenneth Surin

Deleuze’s employment of the concept of force (the same in English and French) can be grasped in terms of two distinctive but somewhat overlapping phases. In the first, associated with the “historical” emphasis on the works on Spinoza and Nietzsche (among others) that marked the earlier part of Deleuze’s career, force is understood primarily in terms of its relation to notions of speed and movement. In the case of Spinoza, Deleuze is particularly impressed by Spinoza’s philosophical ambition to view all of life as the expression of a fundamental striving or conatus, so that the body becomes an ensemble consisting of those forces that it transmits and those forces that it receives. Spinoza, says Deleuze in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, “solicits forces in thought that elude obedience as well as blame, and fashions the image of a life beyond good and evil, a rigorous innocence without merit or culpability” (SPP: 4). This fundamental insight is carried through in Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche, where Nietzsche is depicted as someone who follows faithfully Spinoza’s injunction that we think “in terms of speeds and slownesses, of frozen catatonias and accelerated movements, unformed elements, nonsubjectified affects” (SPP: 129).¹

In the second phase, associated primarily with Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari, the notion of force is effectively generalized, so that it expresses a power that ranges over the entirety of the social order. Here another set of definitions and principles comes to the forefront, even if the earlier indebtedness to the archive associated with Spinoza and Nietzsche is retained, so that the notion of force as a movement with its characteristic speeds and slownesses is still operative for Deleuze. This time, however, the emphasis is more on a specific effect of force, namely, puissance or “strength” (as opposed to pouvoir or “coercive power”). Each of these intellectual phases will be considered in turn.²

The physics of forces: Spinoza and Nietzsche

In Spinoza’s magnum opus, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677), each being has an essential and intrinsic disposition to preserve its own being, a tendency Spinoza terms conatus (Spinoza 2000: 171). For Spinoza, a being’s good is that which adds to its capacity to preserve itself and, conversely, the bad is that which militates against this capacity for self-preservation. Each being’s desire (appetitio) is precisely for that which conduces to its self-preservation.³ A being’s capacity for action increases, accordingly, in proportion to the strength of its conatus; and conversely, the weaker its conatus, the more diminished is its capacity for action. A being enhances its capacity for action when it actively transmits its force; its capacity for action is reduced when it is the passive recipient of some other being’s forces. Pleasure or joy ensue when the capacity for action is enhanced, and pain when it is diminished, so that for Spinoza pain is passion only and not action, whereas joy is both pleasure and action.⁴

Freedom is promoted when one’s scope for action is expanded, and this expansion is for Spinoza the outcome of a life led according to reason. In a life guided by reason, especially by knowledge of the third kind, one comes to have knowledge of oneself and of God/nature. In gaining this knowledge, one’s mind, which is part of the infinite mind of God, becomes a part of something eternal. The outcome for this kind of knower is beatitude.⁵ Deleuze explains the coincidence of power and action for Spinoza in the following terms:

all power is inseparable from a capacity for being affected, and this capacity for being affected is constantly and necessarily filled by affections that realize it. The word potestas has a legitimate use here … to potentia as essence there corresponds a potestas as a capacity for being affected, which capacity is filled by the affections or modes that God produces necessarily, God being unable to undergo action but being the active cause of these affections.

(SPP: 97-8)

This distinction between potentia and potestas (or puissance and pouvoir, respectively, in French) is crucially important for the subsequent thought of Deleuze, and in particular for the formulation of a materialist ontology of constitutive power, this being one of the primary intellectual objectives of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. For Spinoza was, in the eyes of Deleuze (and Guattari), the initiator of this ontology’s guiding insights and principles. However, the thinker who in their view created the image of thought that made possible the comprehensive amplification of Spinoza’s principles into a full-blown ontology of constitutive power was Nietzsche.⁶

Nietzsche is, of course, credited by Deleuze with numerous philosophical accomplishments, but primary among these is Nietzsche’s method of dramatizing thought. In this staging of thought or “dramatology”, the speed and slowness with which a concept is moved, the dynamism of its spatiotemporal determinations and the intensity with which it interacts with adjacent entities in a system all become primary. As Deleuze puts it:

The state of experience is not subjective, at least not necessarily so. Nor is it individual. It is flux, and the interruption of flux and each intensity is necessarily related to another intensity, such that something passes through. This is what underlies all codes, what eludes them, and what the codes seek to translate, convert, and forge anew. But Nietzsche, in this writing on intensities, tells us: do not trade intensities for mere representations. The intensity refers neither to signifieds which would be the representations of things, nor to signifiers which would be the representations of words.

(DI: 257, trans, mod.)

The criteria and formal conditions associated with a logic premised on notions of truth and falsity, and indeed of representation generally, constitute a “dogmatic image of thought”, and thus for Nietzsche have to be supplanted by a topology, and a typology in which notions indebted to representation are replaced by such concepts as “the noble and the base, the high and the low”, and so forth.⁷ Representational thinking is constitutively superintended by the logos, and in place of this logos-driven thinking Nietzsche advances a conception of sense based on (sense-making) “operators”. To quote Deleuze (who at this point is, palpably, a follower of Nietzsche):

In Nietzsche … the notion of sense is an instrument of absolute contestation, absolute critique, and also a particular original production: sense is not a reservoir, nor a principle or an origin, nor even an end. It is an “effect”, an effect produced, and we have to discover its laws of production … the idea of sense as an effect produced by a certain machinery, as in a physical, optical, sonorous effect, etc. (which is not at all to say that it is a mere appearance) … An aphorism of Nietzsche’s is a machine that produces sense, in a certain order that is specific to thought. Of course, there are other orders, other machineries – for example, all those which Freud discovered, and still more political and practical orders. But we must be the machinists, the “operators” of something.

(DI: 137, trans, mod.)

The pivot of this Nietzschean image of thought, for Deleuze, is the concept of force (macht), and in particular Nietzsche’s insight that “all reality is already a quantity of force” (NP: 40).⁸ At the same time Nietzsche believes the concept of force “still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as ‘will to power’” (quoted in NP: 49). It is at this point that Nietzsche can be said to take to a certain culminating-point Spinoza’s conception of the conatus.

The will to power (wille zur macht) and its relation to force can be understood in terms of the following propositions that can be extracted from Deleuze’s “argument” set out in Nietzsche and Philosophy.

• The essence of a force is its quantitative difference from other forces, and the quality of the force in question is constituted by this quantitative difference, and the will to power is thus the principle of the synthesis of forces; the will to power enables the emergence of this quantitative difference from other forces and the quality that is embodied by each force in this relation (NP: 50).
• Force and will should not be conflated; in Deleuze’s words, “force is what can, will to power is what wills [La force est ce qui peut, la volonté de puissance est ce qui veut]” (NP: 50). Moreover, when two forces are alongside each other, one is dominant and the other is the dominated, and the will to power is thus the internal element of the production of force (NP: 51). Nietzsche understands the will to power in terms of the genealogical element of force. Chance is not eliminated by the will to power, since the will to power would be neither flexible nor open to contingency without chance (NP: 52-3). Also, depending on its original quality, a force is either active or reactive, while affirmation and negation are the primary qualities of the will to power (NP: 53-4); affirmation is not action per se, but the power of becoming active, it is the personification of becoming active, while negation is not mere reactivity but a becoming-reactive (NP: 54). As a result, to interpret is to determine the force that bestows sense on a thing, while to evaluate is to determine the will to power that bestows value on a thing (NP: 54).
• Reactive forces diminish or annul the power of active forces, and every force that goes to the limit of its ability is active, while those who are weak are separated from what they can accomplish (NP: 57-61). All sensibility amounts to a becoming of forces (the will to power is the composite of these forces), and forces can be categorized in the following way: (i) active force is the power of acting or commanding; (ii) reactive force is the power of being acted upon or obeying; (iii) developed reactive force is the power of decomposition, division and separation; (iv) active force becoming reactive is the power of being separated, of undermining itself (NP: 63).
• The eternal return indicates that becoming-reactive is non-being, and it also produces becoming-active by generating becoming: the being of becoming cannot be affirmed fully without also affirming the existence of becoming-active (NP: 72). The object of philosophy is liberation, but this philosophy is always “untimely”, since it requires the abolition of negativity and the dissipative power of non-being, a task that will be coextensive with the emergence of a new kind of being, one beholden to neither of the two previous forms of being, God and Man.⁹

A Deleuzean ontology will extract one fundamental principle from these theses, namely, that desire is a kind of puissance and thus necessarily a type of force. With this principle Deleuze (and Guattari) are in a position to formulate the materialist ontology of political practice associated with their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. In particular, the notion of judgement, and the vision of philosophy as the “science of judgement”, could now be overthrown in favour of philosophies, political and otherwise, that hinged on conceptions of desire and intensity.

The ontology of constitutive power: the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project

By the time the first volume of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, Lanti-Oedipe (Anti-Oedipus) (1972), was published, an intellectual and political context had emerged, in France at any rate, that provided enabling conditions for the emergence of the ontological framework developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and the project’s second volume, Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) (1980).¹⁰

In (French) philosophy, the then regnant structuralist and phenomenological paradigms had largely run their course and reached a point of exhaustion by the late 1960s. Phenomenology never really managed to detach itself from the Cartesian model of subjectivity and self-consciousness, and when it became clear that not even Heidegger, the later Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre (to mention only some of the more eminent figures involved in this undertaking) were able to resolve or dissolve the conundrums of transcendental subjectivism, the phenomenological paradigm was increasingly perceived to have struck its equivalent of the proverbial iceberg. Structuralism was able to steer clear of the impasses that afflicted Cartesian subjectivism, but its reliance on Saussure’s conception of language required it to posit the linguistic code as something of a transcendental entity in its own right; the code had to be assumed from the outset as a condition for determining meaning. When it became clear that the code could not function as a transcendental principle, and this because it effectively reduced all vehicles of meaning to utterance (images were a particular problem for structuralism because many of their properties could not be accounted for in terms of a model based on utterance), the structuralist paradigm fell into desuetude.¹¹

At the same time, conceptions of subjectivity derived from psychoanalysis were found to be problematic. Freud and his more immediate followers viewed the libidinal drives as something that had to be contained or channelled if “civilization” was to be maintained (Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) is the canonical text here), and although some of Freud’s followers did seek alternative metapsychological frameworks for understanding libidinal intensities, those who strayed too far from Freud’s original metapsychological principles were soon denounced by the official Freudian establishment. Foremost among these “deviationists” was Wilhelm Reich, whose call for a “liberation” of the libidinal drives exerted a powerful influence on Anti-Oedipus, although it has to be acknowledged that Anti-Oedipus is only one of a number of contemporary French works that sought a more expansive conception of the libidinal drives, often involving an extension, more or less radically different in relation to the concept’s origin, of Freud’s notion of a “polymorphous perversity”.¹² The late 1960s and 1970s in France represented a conjuncture in which the various post- or neo-Freudianisms were consolidated into a loose-knit movement, and the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project was part of this conjuncture, at least in so far as its vigorous polemic against Freudianism is concerned.

Also important for the conjuncture that enabled the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project (and its ontology of political practice) to emerge was the social and political constellation associated with what came to be known as “the events of May 1968”. Important for the genesis of this constellation was the perceived failure of the Soviet Communist project after that country’s brutal invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, along with the disclosures concerning Stalin’s show trials and purges provided by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in February 1956. Just as significant for the French left intelligentsia of that period (the mid-1950s to the late 1960s) was the winding-down of the Bandung Project so soon after its inception in 1955; with the collapse of the Bandung Project any hope that a non-aligned Third World could serve as a repository of emancipatory potential rapidly disappeared.¹³ In political life, the post-war Gaullist institutional monopoly had pushed the French version of “representative democracy” into a gradual but seemingly inexorable sclerosis, and the post-war compromise between capital and labour, viewed as the basis of a thirty-year period of prosperity (les trente glorieuses) was also beginning to unravel (as it did elsewhere in the advanced industrial countries of the Western world).¹⁴ These developments marked, collectively, the transition of one phase of capitalist development to another, as the French manifestation of the social-democratic form of capitalism mutated into the globally integrated capitalist dispensation that is in place today. This particular transition is embodied in a number of registers: the emergence of a new subject of labour; the creation of new structures of accumulation; the setting-up of new axes of value; the transformation of the capitalist state; the availability of new forms of opposition and struggle; and so on. These and other parallel developments are taken by Deleuze and Guattari to indicate the need for a new ontology of political practice and constitutive power.¹⁵

All this amounted to a crisis of utopia for French Marxist and marxisant thought, as the question of the transformations undergone by the regime of accumulation and mode of production became a crucial object of enquiry. In a nutshell, Deleuze and Guattari’s analytical treatment of “force” helped them advance a revolutionary conceptualization of the mode of production. Their delineation of the notion of “force” enabled a central focus on the concept of a “machinic process” (agencement machinique), which could then be used by them to formulate a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Gilles Deleuze, a life in friendship
• PART I: PHILOSOPHIES
• PART II: ENCOUNTERS
• PART III: FOLDS
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index