Deleuze and Guattari

Ronald Bogue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134974788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The philosopher Giles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst and political activist Felix Guattari have been recognised as among the most important intellectual figures of their generation. This is the first book-length study of their works in English, one that provides an overview of their thought and of its bearing on the central issues of contemporary literary criticism and theory. From Deleuze's 'philosophy of difference' to Deleuze and Guattari's 'philosophy of schizoanalytic desire', this study traces the ideas of the two writers across a wide range of disciplines - from psychoanalysis and Marxist politics to semiotics, aesthetics and linguistics. Professor Bogue provides lucid readings, accessible to specialist and non-specialist alike, of several major works: Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Difference and Reception (1968), and Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Besides elucidating the basic structure of Deleuze and Guattari's often difficult thought, with its complex and often puzzling array of terms, this study also shows how theory influences critical practice in their analyses of the fiction of Proust, Sacher-Masoch and Kafka.

Part One

Deleuze before Guattari

1
Deleuze’s Nietzsche: Thought, will to power, and the eternal return

Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) marks a significant turning-point in French philosophy. Before Deleuze, Nietzsche had received little consideration in France as a serious thinker; by the late 1960s and 1970s, Nietzsche had become a major presence in French thought. Although it would be excessive to attribute this development exclusively to Deleuze, his study of Nietzsche was the first in France to treat him as a systematically coherent philosopher, and Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche opened up questions that became central in subsequent Nietzschean studies and in French post-structuralism in general.¹

Nietzsche and Philosophy also marks an important stage in Deleuze’s career, for here many of the central themes and concerns of his later work find their first enunciation. For Deleuze, Nietzsche is not a mere rhapsodic aphorist, but an intellectually consistent philosopher with a profound understanding of the history of philosophy, whose responses to Plato, Hegel, and Kant delineate the fundamental problems of modern thought. In Deleuze’s view, Nietzsche’s major goals are to overturn Platonism and develop a philosophy of becoming based on a physics of force; to replace Hegel’s ‘negation of negation’ with a philosophy of affirmation; and to complete Kant’s project for a critical philosophy by directing it against the traditional principles of Western rationality. These, too, are the ends that Deleuze himself pursues in much of his own work.

Central to Nietzsche’s mature thought, in Deleuze’s judgement, are the concepts of the ‘will to power’ and the ‘eternal return’.² Although the two phrases occur frequently in Nietzsche’s later works, particularly in the unpublished fragments collected in The Will to Power, commentators before Deleuze generally treat them with no particular care, regarding them as loose expressions of vague and inconsistent notions.³ Deleuze, however, sees ‘all the rigour’ of Nietzsche’s philosophy in his terminology, arguing that Nietzsche ‘uses precise new terms for very precise new concepts’ (NP 52, 59). In this chapter, I should like to trace the outlines of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, and to focus particularly on Deleuze’s innovative interpretation of the will to power and the eternal return – two precise new terms for precise, if somewhat elusive, new concepts. Such an analysis, besides suggesting something of Deleuze’s talent for transforming others’ thought, will provide the necessary groundwork for a consideration of Deleuze’s thought as a whole.

Evaluation, interpretation and the image of thought

Deleuze, in situating Nietzsche within the history of philosophy, is particularly careful to establish his relationship to Kant. Deleuze argues that in Nietzsche there is not only ‘a Kantian heritage, but a half-avowed, half-hidden rivalry’ (NP 52, 59). Nietzsche’s thought is an effort to complete the task of a critical philosophy only imperfectly begun by Kant. Where Kant fails, according to Nietzsche, is in his exclusion of values from critical analysis. Kant assumes the value of Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and his critique is wholly subservient to these unexamined values. Nietzsche therefore proposes to introduce the question of value into thought and to make the critique of value the centre of a new, genealogical philosophy.

Nietzsche seeks to evaluate values by tracing their lineage to their origin. Values stem from ‘ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate’ (NP, 1, 1–2), and all ways of being are either high or low, noble or base. The noble mode of existence is essentially active and affirmative, whereas the base mode of existence is reactive and negative. Values are created through ways of being, and their origin is always marked by a difference between high and low, noble and base. ‘Genealogy signifies the differential element of values from which their value itself derives. Genealogy thus means origin of birth, but also difference or distance in the origin’ (NP 2, 2).

At the origin of values is difference, but there are two distinct ways of making differences, one affirmative and one negative. The affirmative and noble way is that of the master. The master affirms himself and labels himself good; he then recognizes the baseness of the slave and affirms his difference from the slave in calling the slave bad. The slave, by contrast, resents the master and calls him bad. The slave’s initial act is a reaction, a negative evaluation of the master, and his declaration of himself as good is simply a second reaction, a second negation. The master says, ‘I am good, therefore he is bad.’ The slave says, ‘He is bad [i.e. not good], therefore I am good [i.e. not not-good].’⁴ The slave ‘needs to conceive of a non-ego, then to oppose himself to this non-ego in order finally to posit himself as self. This is the strange syllogism of the slave: he needs two negations in order to produce an appearance of affirmation’ (NP 121, 139). The slave is a covert Hegelian whose thought, like Hegel’s, proceeds via contradiction and negation, and only arrives at affirmation through a ‘negation of the negation’. The slave, like Hegel, cannot understand mastery, for he assumes that the master desires power and that he seeks recognition in the slave, a representation of his power in his opposite. But this, insists Nietzsche, is nothing but a slave’s conception of mastery. Only the impotent desire power; only the reactive need confirmation of their power in someone else. The master does not seek recognition or the representation of his power, simply the affirmation of his power in its exercise and a subsequent affirmation of his difference from the slave, an ‘affirmation of affirmation’. The master affirms his difference, the slave denies that which differs. One makes distinctions through difference and affirmation, the other through contradiction and negation.

An evaluation of values must start with the differential origin of values, with a determination of the way of life that creates those values. Such an evaluation necessarily involves interpretation as well, for the values of a way of life permeate all things and give them their meaning. The master’s good and bad, for example, have nothing to do with the slave’s good and bad, and only a discerning interpretation of those words reveals their divergent meanings. The meaning or sense (sens) of something is a function of ‘the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it’. A phenomenon is ‘a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and a semeiology’ (NP 3, 3). Interpretation entails what Deleuze calls a ‘method of dramatisation’ (NP 78, 89) in Nietzsche. The question Nietzsche asks is not ‘what does it mean?’ but ‘who makes this meaning?’ ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ have no intrinsic meaning, but are symptoms of the way of life of the speaker; only by ‘dramatizing’ the words, by putting them in the mouth of a master or a slave, can one determine their sense.⁵

Interpretation and evaluation are the tools of Nietzsche’s critical philosophy, but that critique itself, argues Deleuze, is in no way neutral or disinterested. Every evaluation expresses a way of life, and every interpretation is the symptom of a mode of existence. Nietzsche’s ultimate goal is to enunciate an affirmative and active thought, one that will counteract the negative and reactive thought that has dominated Western philosophy from its inception. Active evaluation involves both the creation of values and the affirmative destruction of negative values. When the master evaluates, he affirms himself and thus creates values, and he affirms his difference from the slave and joyfully destroys that which is negative within himself. Nietzsche’s critique, therefore, is not negative but affirmative, and it is inseparable from the creation of new values. Nietzsche’s goal is to be an affirmative philosopher, one who is both an interpreter-physician who reads symptoms and prescribes cures, and an evaluator-artist who destroys negative values and creates new ones.

Deleuze argues that the ultimate result of Nietzsche’s completion of the Kantian critique is the creation of a new image of thought. What Nietzsche finds missing in Kant’s critique of reason is a genealogy of reason, an analysis of the ‘genesis of reason itself, of ‘the will which hides and expresses itself in reason’ (NP 91, 104). Such a genealogy is missing because ‘Kant merely pushed a very old conception of critique to the limit, a conception which saw critique as a force which should be brought to bear on all claims to knowledge and truth, but not on knowledge and truth themselves’ (NP 89, 102). Nietzsche dramatizes the question of truth and asks, ‘who is seeking truth? In other words: what does the one who seeks the truth want?’ (NP 94, 108). Nietzsche finds that the seeker of truth wants above all not to be fooled. The world is deceptive and misleading, a world of ‘appearance’, so the man of truth opposes it to another world, a world beyond, a true world. Beneath this speculative opposition is a moral opposition of good knowledge and false life, and this opposition is only a symptom of a will to correct life, to turn life against life and make life conform to knowledge. Ultimately, this will to correct life is a nihilistic will, for the man of truth wants life to become as reactive and vengeful as he is, to turn on itself and annihilate itself.

Beneath the seemingly innocent search for truth, then, Nietzsche uncovers a moral, ascetic and nihilistic will. He proposes to replace this will to truth with an affirmative will to falsehood, an artistic will that would turn a will to deception into a superior, creative will. A thought informed by such a will would not oppose knowledge to life, would not confine life within the narrow bounds of rational knowledge and then measure knowledge by the reduced standard of a reactive life. Rather, in such a thought life would become ‘the active force of thought’ and thought would become ‘the affirmative power of life . . . Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life’ (NP 101, 115).

According to Deleuze, such a way of thinking entails a new conception of thought that is antithetical to the traditional, dogmatic image of thought in three ways. First, the element of such a thought is not truth but meaning and value, the categories of such a thought being ‘not truth and falsity but the noble and the base, the high and the low’ (NP 102, 119). Second, the enemy of such a thought is not error, a force external to thought that diverts it from its natural course, but stupidity, a base way of thinking internal to thought: ‘there are imbecile thoughts, imbecile discourses, that are made up entirely of truths; but these truths are base, they are those of a base, heavy and leaden soul’ (NP 105, 120). Finally, such a thought does not require method, which protects thought from error, but the violence of ‘forces which take hold of thought’. Violence must be done to thought ‘as thought, a power, the force of thinking, must throw it into a becoming-active” (NP 108, 123).

Thought is always interpretation and evaluation, and it is either noble or base, depending on the forces that seize hold of it. When thought becomes active, it results in a joyous destruction of all that is negative and a creation of new possibilities of life. Deleuze regards Nietzsche as an exemplar of the active philosopher, a physician who deciphers the symptoms of reaction and negativity, and an artist who creates a new image of thought and invents new forms for its articulation. Through the fragmentary aphorism Nietzsche interprets the meaning of a phenomenon, and through the poem he determines the hierarchical value of various meanings. ‘But because values and sense are such complex notions, the poem itself must be evaluated, the aphorism interpreted. The poem and the aphorism are, themselves, objects of an interpretation, an evaluation’ (NP 31, 36). Interpretation and evaluation have two dimensions, ‘the second also being the return of the first, the return of the aphorism or the cycle of the poem’ (NP 31, 36). In its affirmative guise, the return of interpretation and evaluation to which Deleuze refers is the eternal return, and that which interprets and evaluates is the will to power.

The will to power

The will to power is an elusive and easily misunderstood concept, and yet one that is central to Nietzsche’s thought and, according to Deleuze, one that is integrally related to the concept of the eternal return. It is no easy matter to say what the will to power is, but one can easily state what it is not. It is not a ‘will’ in the common sense of the word, that is, a conscious agency of decision separable from the actions it motivates, for Nietzsche argues repeatedly that such an abstract notion is a fiction generated by the linguistic distinction between subject and verb, which encourages the development of the notion that the subject is an autonomous actor separate from its actions. Nor is the will to power a ‘desire for power’, since the will to power is for Nietzsche a source of affirmation, and the desire for power is a slavish, reactive and negative desire. ‘The desire for power’, says Deleuze, ‘is the image which the impotent fashion of the will to power’.⁶ The weak long for power in order to negate the power of the strong; the strong, by contrast, merely exercise power, never desire it.

Deleuze approaches the notion of the will to power by way of the concepts of force and the body. According to Nietzsche, ours is a world of becoming, of constant flux and change in which no entities preserve a stable identity. In such a world ‘no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta’.⁷ Nature, then, is an interrelated multiplicity of forces, and all forces are either dominant or dominated. A body is defined by ‘this relation between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body – whether it is chemical, biological, social or political . . . . In a body the superior or dominant forces are known as active and the inferior or dominated forces are known as reactive (NP 40, 45). We know little about force and the body because we generally form our knowledge on the evidence of consciousness, and consciousness is itself only a symptom of the presence of reactive forces. In Nietzsche, ‘consciousness is never self-consciousness, but the consciousness of an ego in relation to a self which is not itself conscious. It is not the master’s consciousness but the slave’s consciousness in relation to a master who is not himself conscious’ (NP 39, 44–5). Consciousness inevitably views the body from its reactive perspective and misunderstands the nature of active forces, ‘without which the reactions themselves would not be forces’ (NP 41, 47). A true science must be a science of activity, ‘of what is necessarily unconscious’ (NP 42, 48). Such a science will explore ‘the power of transformation, the Dionysian power’, which ‘is the primary definition of activity’ (NP 42, 48).

Deleuze finds the key to this science of activity in Nietzsche’s philosophy of nature, which is ultimately a philosophy of dynamic relations of forces. Deleuze first distinguishes between dominant and dominated quantities of force and active and reactive qualities of force. He observes that Nietzsche at times treats qualities of force as mere functions of quantities, and at others resists reducing qualities to quantities. This is not evidence of confusion on Nietzsche’s part, argues Deleuze, but of a concern that differences of quantity should not be treated in an abstract manner. The temptation in a quantification of forces is to establish equations of forces, mathematical equivalences of randomly combined forces, and to ignore the specific differences between forces. No two forces in a given relation are equal, and every force is in a relationship of difference with other forces. ‘Difference in quantity is the essence of force and of the relation of force to force’ (NP 43, 49). Of two forces in a relation, one will be dominant and the other dominated, and each will have a specific quality, that of being active or reactive, which will be determined by that relationship.

Active and reactive qualities of force, however, must also be characterized in terms that are not strictly deducible from quantities of force. An active force commands, appropriates, and imposes forms on reactive forces (NP 42, 48). It also ‘goes to the limit [jusqu’au bout] of its power’ (NP 59, 66), whereas a reactive force limits itself and, ‘even when it obeys, limits the active force’ with which it is in relation (NP 56, 63). A reactive force, then, tends to negate that which differs from it, whereas an active force affirms its difference from other forces. Finally, Deleuze asserts that ‘the measure of forces and their qualification depend in no way on absolute quantity, but relative effectuation’, and that ‘the least strong is as strong as the strong if it goes to the limit [jusqu’au bout]’ (NP 61, 69). It would seem, then, that Deleuze’s characterization of the relation of forces in terms of differences of quantity is limited to the relation of active to reactive forces and does not pertain to the relations of active to active, or of reactive to reactive, forces.

The characterization of quantities and qualities of force alone, however, is not sufficient to distinguish Nietzschean force from the mechanistic force of conventional physics. Therefore, says Nietzsche, the concept of force ‘still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as “will to power”’.⁸ The will to power is internal to force, but not reducible to it, for, says Deleuze, ‘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, 57). Deleuze defines the will to power as

the genealogical element of force, both differential and genetic. The will to power is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation. The will to power here reveals its nature as the principle of the synthesis of forces.

(NP 50, 56)

Without the concept of the will to power, forces remain indeterminate. The will to power determines the relationship between forces, in terms both of quantity (as the differential element that determines the differences between quantities) and of quality (as the genetic element that determines the quality of each forces as either active or reactive). The will to power is a principle, but not in any abstract sense. It is a plastic principle which may be distinguished conceptually from force, but never removed from the specific forces it determines in any single instance. It is therefore neither a universal will (as in Schopenhauer) nor an individual, selfidentical will (as in traditional psychology). ‘The will to power is plastic, inseparable from each case in which it is determined; just as the eternal return is being, but being which is affirmed of becoming, the will to power is unitary, but unity which is affirmed of multiplicity’ (NP 85–6, 97).

Deleuze argues that the will to power has qualities which must be distinguished from the qualities of force: ‘active and reactive designate the original qualities of force but affirmative and negative designate the primordial qualities of the will to power’ (NP 53–4, 60–1). Although a basic affinity exists bet...