Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity

Guillaume Collett, Guillaume Collett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350071575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Deleuze and Guattari's work has today become ubiquitous in the humanities and social sciences, being regularly drawn on by a vast array of subjects. Throughout their careers, Deleuze and Guattari also engaged with a myriad of disciplines; yet they declared themselves that "Philosophy is not interdisciplinary". This apparent contradiction has rarely been explicitly confronted by scholars. Fortunately, however, Deleuze and Guattari left us a number of clues in their works signaling how to approach this apparent impasse. These clues amount to a complex and penetrating, if un-unified, theory of disciplinarity and cross-disciplinary articulation. Energized by recent developments in critical transdisciplinarity studies, this volume analyzes and evaluates instances of disciplinarity and transdisciplinarity within Deleuze and Guattari's shared and respective bodies of work. The first volume in English specifically devoted to examining Deleuze and Guattari's work using this framework, this book both contributes to the field of critical transdisciplinarity studies and in doing so helps shed light on the heart of Deleuze and Guattari's intellectual project.

1

Philosophy and History of Philosophy

Deleuze as a Trainee Guard of Philosophy’s Epistemological Borders

Giuseppe Bianco

Among the philosophers born in France during the 1920s and the 1930s, Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) is the one who openly defended a conception of philosophy that one could name “exceptionalist.” This conception defends the absolute singularity of the philosophical discipline and its irreducibility to psychological, historical, and social determinations. Deleuze’s exceptionalism reaches its peak in What Is Philosophy? (1991), the book he coauthored with his friend Félix Guattari (1930–1992). Here, attempting to neatly separate philosophy from doxa and science, Deleuze and Guattari opposed the “plane of immanence,” “concepts,” “problems,” “events,” and “conceptual personae,” the elements belonging to philosophy, to the “plane of reference,” “functions,” “solutions,” “states of things,” and to “psycho-social types,” belonging to science. Moreover, at the beginning of the book, Deleuze and Guattari affirmed that, usually, philosophers ask about the nature of philosophy at the end of their lives. The question “what is philosophy?” is a question belonging to “old age,” that one can pose concretely only when there is nothing more to be asked.

The following analysis of Deleuze’s intellectual trajectory during the 1950s starts from an approach that is grounded in two theses, in contradiction to the one proposed in What Is Philosophy?. The first is the following: all exceptionalist conceptions of philosophy, by attempting to preserve the singularity of this discipline, constitute an epistemological obstacle. The second is that a question such as “what is philosophy?” is a question belonging to the youth. The ways in which this question is posed by an author depends from the beginning on her intellectual trajectory, and it is tied to the moment in time when intellectual dispositions become rooted in a permanent way.¹

I will proceed following three movements. In the first part I will describe the state of the philosophical field in France after the Second World War and the space of possible options offered to Deleuze. I will then take into account a controversy between the two philosophers Ferdinand Alquié (1906–1985) and Martial Gueroult (1891–1976), which started in 1950. At its beginning, this controversy concerned the kind of interpretation one had to give to Descartes’s philosophy but soon involved as well a discussion of the task of the history of philosophy and the nature of philosophy itself. In the third section I will try to show that during the 1950s, Deleuze had to occupy an unstable position in search of a synthesis between a scientific and artistic model of the historian of philosophy. Drawing on some archival documents, I will try to show how this position will inform Deleuze’s approach to philosophical texts up to the 1960s.

The aftermath of the Liberation of France from Nazi-fascism coincided with the beginning of a process of dissolution concerning the block of antifascist forces formed ten years before and consolidated during the Resistance. This process manifested its irreversible features on June 5, 1948, with the establishment of the Marshall plan and the Soviet response through the Zhdanov Doctrine.² This macroscopic polarity indirectly influenced the intellectual field: the journal Temps modernes occupied a hegemonic place, popularizing a phenomenological and existential philosophy influenced by the German philosophies of history, Marxism, and Hegelianism. The existentialist attempt to propose a philosophical doctrine able to furnish an original and heterodox reading of Marxism provoked a series of quarrels, especially with communist intellectuals, who were not likely to tolerate an ideological line that did not conform with the one of the French Communist Party (PCF).³

During the 1940s and the 1950s, the social sciences did not yet possess a power of fascination drawing in a larger audience, as they would do after the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1908–2005) groundbreaking The Savage Mind (1962). After the dissolution of the Durkheimian school, sociology was dominated by Georges Gurvitch’s (1894–1965) eclectic “methodological holism,” which combined elements of Weberianism, Marxism, and Durkheimianism with functionalism, imported from Chicago by sociologists such as Gurvitch and Jean Stoetzel (1901–1987) thanks to the Ford Foundation. An independent curriculum in sociology would be created only in 1957, but already in 1946 Gurvitch was at the head of the Centre for Sociological Studies in the framework of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), where he was animating a research group in the sociology of knowledge.

French psychology, founded at the turn of the century by Théodule Ribot (1839–1916), Georges Dumas (1866–1946), and Pierre Janet (1847–1959), was federating the different new orientations of Gestalt psychology, existential psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, Freudianism, reflexology, and behaviorism in syncretic works such as the ones of Daniel Lagache (1903–1972). Lagache was the first psychoanalyst to teach at the Sorbonne, where an independent curriculum in psychology had been created. Two years later Lagache published his famous essay On the Unity of Psychology. A few years later, in 1951, his colleague Ignace Meyerson (1888–1983), author of a doctoral dissertation on historical psychology (Les fonctions psychologiques et les œuvres, 1947), was elected to the chair of “Comparative Psychology” at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes.

In 1947, in the same institution, a department (section) of “Economic and Social Sciences” was created, federating history, economics, sociology, and comparative psychology; the same year, the historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) had been elected professor at the Collège de France to a chair of “Modern Civilisation”; Braudel presented his discipline as the totalizing knowledge of man, able to federate all the other human sciences, following the path sketched forty years before by Henri Berr (1864–1956), the founder of the journal Revue de synthèse historique.

The social and human sciences were therefore slowly emancipating themselves from philosophy, which was, until then, the overarching discipline taught in the Faculty of Letters. Before the war, both psychology and sociology and history were present in this faculty, but they did not constitute an independent curriculum and they were monitored by academics occupying chairs of philosophy and history of philosophy; their implicit role was the one of assigning to these disciplines an acceptable epistemological spot inside the encyclopedic organization of knowledge dominated by the supreme arbiter of philosophy, the “crowning discipline.”

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, namely since the “creation” of philosophy as an academic discipline in France by Victor Cousin (1792–1867) and his pupils,⁴ history of philosophy had a solid footing in the academic system. During the 1930s, at the Sorbonne, eight chairs had “History of Philosophy” in their title.⁵ This literary genre, established at the moment of the emergence of philosophy as a discipline, was promoting an image of philosophy as a field of knowledge that, since the Ancient Greeks, had a relative coherence. The philosophers proposed themselves as the only ones entitled to produce scholarship about the past of their discipline, the other studies allegedly constituting mere “historical” approaches disregarding the truth-value of the texts. This narrative was a shield used to defend the study of the “philosophical past” from possible interferences coming from psychology, sociology, and history. By underlining the contingent factors that contributed to the emergence of philosophy in Greece, by pointing out the discontinuous development of its heritage and its proximity to religion during the Middle Ages, by showing to what extent Modern Thought constituted an epistemological break and did not have much to do with what was conceived as “philosophy,” by suggesting a further possible disappearance of philosophy substituted by the regional positive sciences, certain knowledge-producers were menacing philosophy with a dethronement from its exceptional position as both a discipline between the disciplines and the synthesis of the totality of knowledge. In France, starting from the 1820s the menace was mainly constituted by medicine and neurology,⁶ which pretended to substitute itself for spiritualism; from the 1880s it had been the turn of scientific psychology, which was ridiculing the a priori analysis of consciousness; at the turn of the century, it had been Durkheimian sociology, which wanted to replace philosophy as the crowning discipline; and, finally, during the 1930s and the 1940s, the type of history promoted by the historians of the journal Annales, who had strong ties to the group of sociologists of the Année sociologique.

On an institutional level, because of the relative expansion of the university and the generational turnover, the decade following the end of the Second World War implied a series of academic displacements involving agents teaching in chairs of history of philosophy. Martial Gueroult, professor in Strasbourg University, a pupil of the historian of ancient philosophy Léon Robin (1866–1947), and of the neo-Kantian philosopher Léon Brunschvicg (1867–1944), left his chair in Alsace and moved to the Sorbonne, where he was elected to Brunschvicg’s chair in “History of Modern Philosophy,” left vacant after his death. Gueroult’s chair in Strasbourg was assigned to Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968), another of Brunschvicg’s pupils. Following the death of the historian of modern philosophy Jean Laporte (1886–1948), Hyppolite was then appointed to the chair that the first was occupying at the Sorbonne. In 1946, Ferdinand Alquié left his job at the prestigious Henri IV lycée and then his job as an assistant at the Sorbonne, for a position as lecturer at the University of Montpellier. Six years later he substituted Emile Bréhier (1876–1952) who supervised the dissertations of both Hyppolite and Gueroult. Bréhier, both the disciple of Henri Bergson and of the Kantian historian of philosophy Victor Delbos (1862–1916), was the author of an impressive History of Philosophy, but as well of epistemological texts on the history of philosophy as a discipline. In 1951, Gueroult took the spot left vacant at the Collège de France, by Etienne Gilson (1884–1978), who had just left France to settle in Canada. At this point the situation stabilized. At the end of the 1940s, the other chairs in history of philosophy at the Sorbonne, in “History and Philosophy of Science,” “Philosophy and History of Modern Philosophy,” “History of Medieval Philosophy,” “History of Greek Philosophy,” and “Philosophical History of Religious Thought,” were respectively occupied by Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), Jean Wahl (1888–1974), Maurice de Gandillac (1906–2006), Pierre-Maxime Schuhl (1892–1984), and Henri Gouhier (1898–1994).

As it had been since its emergence as a genre, but particularly at this moment, history of philosophy was concerned with a series of debates regarding its nature and its relation with philosophy and with the other disciplines. This interrogation aimed at justifying the peculiar approach to history proper to the philosophers as compared to the one of the “historical psychologists,” who aimed at explaining the genesis of cultural productions starting from the development of the structures proper to the human psyche, to the historians of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale school, who were promoting a history of people’s “mentalities,” considered in the longue durée, and to the sociologists, interested in explaining the production of knowledge from the standpoint of social interactions. This interrogation was framed by the growing importance of the German philosophies of history, but most of all, by the growing importance of the Marxist analysis of ideology. What was most important, for the philosophers, was defending history of philosophy as a genre reserved only to philosophers and incompatible with other approach coming from the other disciplines. The constant insistence on the peculiar essence of a philosophical approach to the history of philosophy has to be interpreted as what Jean-Louis Fabiani described, using an expression taken from Bachelard as “the guard of the epistemological borders” (Fabiani 1988). We can find this approach in the multiple publications dealing with what we could call today “epistemology of history of philosophy,” produced during the decade following 1944 by authors such as Émile Bréhier, Etienne Gilson, Henri Gouhier, Ferdinand Alquié, Martial Gueroult, and by the phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and Paul Ricœur (1913–2005).

Nevertheless, if the aim of defending the borders of philosophy from the other disciplines was shared by all the philosophers, these agents adopted strategies that were very different one from the other. This multiplicity caused a conflicting context in which Deleuze grew up. At the end of the 1940s, like most of his schoolfellows, he took his distance from Sartre, to whom he had been attached and who contributed to his “conversion” to philosophy.⁷ We cannot enter into the details concerning this phase in the space of the present essay, but what has to be said is that Deleuze’s Sartrianism implied the internalization of an idea of philosopher that could be defined as artistic and messianic. This model was partially shared by his master Ferdinand Alquié, who represented a kind of academic interlocutor for the “existentialists.”

In 1948, when Deleuze passed the agrégation, the essential exam qualifying him to be a high school professor in this discipline, he was not any more an enthusiastic “Sartrian,” nor yet a charismatic “Nietzschean” philosopher who attracted Trotskyists, junkies, psychoanalysts, Palestinian activists in tiny and smoky classrooms at Vincennes. On the contrar...