Deleuze and Philosophy

The Difference Engineer

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Keith Ansell Pearson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134765270
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The work of Gilles Deleuze has had an impact far beyond philosophy. He is among Foucault and Derrida as one of the most cited of all contemporary French thinkers. Never a student 'of' philosophy, Deleuze was always philosophical and many influential poststructuralist and postmodernist texts can be traced to his celebrated resurrection of Nietzsche against Hegel in his Nietzsche and Philosophy, from which this collection draws its title.
This searching new collection considers Deleuze's relation to the philosophical tradition and beyond to the future of philosophy, science and technology. In addition to considering Deleuze's imaginative readings of classic figures such as Spinoza and Kant, the essays also point to the meaning of Deleuze on 'monstrous' and machinic thinking, on philosophy and engineering, on philosophy and biology, on modern painting and literature.
Deleuze and Philosophy continues the spirit of experimentation and invention that features in Deleuze's work and will appeal to those studying across philosophy, social theory, literature and cultural studies who themselves are seeking new paradigms of thought.

1
Deleuze Outside/Outside Deleuze

On the Difference Engineer

Keith Ansell Pearson

The most enlightened get only as far as liberating themselves from metaphysics and looking back on it from above: whereas here too, as in the hippodrome, at the end of the track, it is necessary to turn the corner.

(Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human)

To open us up to the inhuman and overhuman…to go beyond the human condition is the meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites.

(Deleuze, Bergsonism)

The ‘and’ conjoins but never innocently or romantically. So much at stake. An allusion, a play, is made to Nietzsche et la philosophie, in which the potentialities of an active and radical philosophy were marshalled against the hegemony of reactive forces and values. In addition, there is the question of Deleuze’s readings of the history of philosophy, in which philosophy loses its established historical identity and is subjected to a different kind of becoming. And then, last but not least, indeed least of all, there is the question of philosophy’s imperial claims and its relation to the pre-philosophical and the extra-philosophical.¹ Philosophy moving always outside, thought opening out onto the cosmos and becoming-chaosmos. There is also the question of ‘Deleuze and philosophy and…’, in which the lines of connection and communication are not foreclosed, but in which Deleuze will impact massively on film, on literature, on politics, on the visual arts, on historiography, on science, on technics, etc., transmuting them in the process so that they become lines of production: ‘Nothing is true once and for all, everything is rendered mobile.’

Deleuze’s identity as the name which somewhat arbitrarily, but not unintelligently, serves to gather together the disparate essays of this volume has to be dramatically called into question. It will be a question of engineering differences, subjecting his thought-experiments and inventions to the infinite play of difference and repetition, and unfolding the risks his thought undertakes in terms of the excessive logic of the ‘outside’. An engagement with ‘Deleuze outside/outside Deleuze’ does not presuppose any simple or straightforward opposition between the interior or the exterior. Rather, any ‘explication’ is at once an ‘implication’ and a ‘complication’, in which the ‘new’ spontaneously emerges out of the movements of the labyrinthine fold. The becoming of the new is never confused in Deleuze with the ‘fashionable’, but rather signals the variable creativity that emerges out of the complex becoming (becoming-complex) of social and technical practices, assemblages and machines that function through interpretation and reciprocal interpenetration (‘communication’ is always ‘transversal’). Deleuze was never a student ‘of’ philosophy, but he was always philosophical. The ‘critical’ task of ‘outside’ thought, a task that is always untimely, is to untangle the lines which cut across, like a machine, the recent past and the near future. The thinker of the ‘outside’ uses history excessively for the sake of something ‘beyond’, or alien to, it, thinking out of time for the sake of time, which amounts to becoming something other than what history has made us and wishes to make of us. This explains why Deleuze always wrote against all forms of ‘evolutionism’, whether on the level of biology or ethnology, or on the level of history, geology and archaeology. It is thus incumbent upon ‘outside’ philosophy to philosophize in the most radical manner conceivable, doing violence to the mind by breaking both with the natural bent of the intellect and with habits of scientific praxis. One is reminded of Lyotard’s ‘monstrous’ insight that the activity of thinking and writing belongs to the mode of existence in which each person escapes all control, including, and especially, their own. Thought of in these terms of the ‘outside’, Deleuze will not be the ‘subject’ of an event, say the event of ‘Deleuzian’ nomad thought. The event of Deleuze and philosophy just never happened and it is to be hoped that this volume does not serve the regressive cause of making it happen. Deleuze was always a friend of wisdom, although he cultivated a strange and dangerous wisdom, forever the outsider, the lodger, the uncanny guest at the courthouse of reason who dared to disturb the peace and derange the proceedings. The proper name of ‘Deleuze’ is a signal, a heterogeneous sign-system, that reminds us that the unthought is not external to thought but lies at the very heart of it. To enter the labyrinth of his thought one must have courage for the forbidden where the strange and unfamiliar things of the future are more familiar and welcome than the so-called reality of the present. In his reports to the ‘academy’ Deleuze never asked for a verdict, since his desire was only to impart some knowledge. He was chameleon, Corinthian and caricature all rolled into a multiplicity, an irrational number, an abstract machine.

Deleuze was a monster. His work is marked by a subversive, perilous attempt to map out a new becoming of thought beyond good sense and common sense, in which thought becomes monstrous because it forsakes the desire for an image of thought. All the names in the history of philosophy become masks and disguises, subject to a play of difference and repetition that produces double readings and multiple readings of texts and thinkers. Deleuze becomes Kantian, Kant becomes Deleuzian, Spinoza finds a line of flight, with the affirmation of a single substance transformed into a plane of immanence. In these readings ‘of’ the history of philosophy the likes of Spinoza, of Leibniz, of Kant and of Nietzsche are freed from all attempts to fix ‘once’ and ‘for all’ their time and place and to subject them, through a thermodynamic historiography, to an entropic narrative. The evolution of Deleuze’s complex adaptive system of thought, however, is deeply paradoxical, in which we necessarily get caught up in the complications and implications of his foldings. We make differences, but in turn these differences are monstrous. Deleuze is the philosopher of the pure empty form of time, of the event (the time of Aion), of pure becoming and of pure differences. But he is also the thinker of contamination, of contagion and of viroid life.

What is monstrous about the activity of thought is not the truth it discovers at the end of the journey, but the journey itself, in which the transportation of thought outside itself is always Dionysian and delirious. Truth cannot be said to be the product of a prior disposition or schema, but is rather the result of a tremendous violence in thought, an irruption of the larval mind that is populated by a thousand ‘souls’, a thousand plateaus of intensity. One will never find truth, one will never philosophize, if one knows in advance what one is looking for. When we restrict the philosophical task to the merely human, seeking the true only in order to do good, we find nothing. The philosopher desires to produce no disciples. There will not be a race of Deleuzians, unless they be a band of bastards of mixed descent and impure blood. The moral narrowness of disciples simply serves to hold back the further expansion of the truth. Their desire is to tame the monster and to make it work for them. As Nietzsche wrote, over the door of the philosopher of the future, who philosophizes beyond good and evil as his peculiar vocation, there stands the motto ‘What do I matter!’

Philosophy neither conserves old values nor provides shelter for eternal values, but always speaks of values that are to come. Philosophy is often sad, though never nostalgic. Thought-machines, machines of thinking, are never simply constructed but composed. It is a composition that brings into play sensation, perception, affectation, without reference to a determinate subject (there is only a transcendental subject which is always multiple) or to a fixed object (objects are brought into being and always refer to events). As Klee noted, the artist who remains uninspired by realism places more value on the powers that do the forming than on the final forms themselves. Final forms are illusions of solidity and stability. The task of the artist is to show that the world in its present shape is not the only possible world; this is akin to Deleuze’s comprehension of philosophy acting as a synthesizer of new values. In composing alternative worlds, the artist and philosopher do not conjure things out of thin air, even if their conceptions and productions appear as utterly fantastical. Their compositions are only possible because they are able to connect, to tap into the virtual and immanent processes of machinic becoming (there are no points on the map, only lines), even if such a connection and tapping into are the most difficult things to lay hold of and demonstrate. As Klee wrote: ‘Genesis eternal!’ (Klee 1964:87). One can only seek to show the power, the affectivity, the monstrous, alienated character of thought, which means being true to thought and untrue to oneself, becoming-pathological. One no longer seeks God, dead or alive, but is drawn to the land of the always near-future, where human impotence no longer makes us mad, reading the signs, tracking down the signals and decoding the secrets of intelligent alien life within and without us.

Philosophic modernism reveals no allegiance to man, indeed to any subject of evolution or history. Thought becomes monstrous, and travels outside, when it throws off the shackles of anthropological predicates and gives itself over to the free movement of concepts and effusions of energy, celebrating intensities and singularities. The empiricism that Deleuze championed is not to be confused with any simple-minded positivism, such as a dull mechanism that does not know how to indulge in the danger and risk of interpretation. The empiricism he brings into life is one which undertakes the most insane creation of concepts imaginable. The transcendental, Deleuze insists, is ‘answerable’ only to a superior empiricism (an empiricism of the Erewhon), in which it is acknowledged that the transcendental form of a faculty is inseparable from a complex, disjointed transcendent exercise.² The transcendent is a valuable treasure-house of illusions and flights of fancy. Faculties proliferate wildly in this philosophy of experimentation and invention, which is able to conceive of the possibility of an imagination that is impossible to imagine, of a vitality whose transcendent object is monstrosity, of a sociability whose transcendent object is anarchy, and so on. We simply do not know what thought is capable of.

This conceptual empiricism, and superior empiricism of concepts, which pursues a philosophy without objective and subjective presuppositions, resists the logic of oppositional thinking and brings Deleuze close to his arch-enemy Hegel. The problem with Hegel’s system and its pursuit of the unknown, however, is that in seeking reconciliation with actuality, through the speculative ‘is’, it normalizes the flows of life, of thought, of becoming, of evolution, and does so by constantly reducing them to an equilibrial state.³ In the face of the most extreme, violent tensions and discordance, it persists in positing reconciliation and harmonization. This is why Deleuze insists that it knows nothing of the monstrous world of difference and repetition. It does not appreciate that ‘life’ or evolution only really gets interesting (inventive) when it operates within far-from equilibrium conditions. Deleuze invokes, as the peculiar spirit of the age, a generalized anti-Hegelianism because for him it is Hegel who puts all the resources of mobile thought in the service of the sedentary, making good sense, for example, of the State and Christianity. Deleuze follows Nietzsche in deploying the language of ‘reason’ as the language of a selective nature, which would train us to decode the semiology of ascending and descending forms of life, practising what Nietzsche calls a ‘contagious nihilism’.

Hegel’s system, however, is knowingly and fully caught up in the derangement of thought. As he points out in the Logic, the reason why the uninitiated experience frustration in trying to think the vacuity of the notion is that they are hankering after an image of thought with which they are already familiar: ‘The mind, denied the use of its familiar ideas, feels the ground where it once stood firm and at home taken away from beneath it, and when transported into into the region of pure thought, cannot tell where in the world it is.’ It is thus somewhat myopic of Deleuze to attribute to Hegel some vested interest in the establishment ‘of’ concepts since it is clear within the unfolding of thought within Hegel’s system that there can be no establishment. Thought can only cultivate itself and find a home in the unfamiliar, the uncanny, the alien, and so on. Thought finds its home in permanently dislocating itself.

The question ‘where does knowledge begin?’ has always been treated as a delicate problem within modern philosophy, since ‘beginning’ means, à la Hegel, eliminating presuppositions and erasing, à la Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, the whole unbearable matter of ‘origins’.⁴ In Hegel’s system, Deleuze argues, no doubt on erroneous grounds, there is no evidence of singular processes of learning ever taking place, since the task of philosophy is restricted to that of educating the deformities of natural consciousness in which it is a question of rediscovering at the end what was there in the beginning and bringing to explicit conceptuality what was already known implicitly. The Hegelian circle is neither tortuous nor monstrous enough. As a result philosophy is rendered ‘powerless’ and ‘authentic repetition’ becomes impossible (Deleuze 1994:129). In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel writes that the movement of the Whole is to be taken up from the point at which the sublation of existence (das Aufhebung des Daseins) has been exhausted and need no longer trouble us. The task is to render thought fluid, to give it the movement of free spirit. Today, claims Hegel, the task is not so much to purge the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, of making substance into a subject that is an object of thought, but rather in freeing determinate thoughts from fixity, thereby giving ‘actuality to the universal’ and imparting to it ‘spiritual life’. Spirit is nothing other than ‘becoming-other’ to itself. Hegel speaks of ‘self-restoring sameness’ (sich ‘wiederherstellende’ Gleichheit), a ‘reflection in otherness within itself, as the goal of the entire formative, unfolding process of Spirit’s historical self-actualization (das Werden seiner selbst). For Hegel, this becoming-historical is only possible to the extent that there is a (recuperative) subject of this process, which is the process of its own becoming, the circle ‘that presupposes its end as it goal’, in which the end is present in the beginning but only becomes actual by being worked out to its logical end through the suffering, patience and labour of the negative. On Deleuze’s reading all the virtues of the slave are marshalled by Hegel to account for the positivity of dialectical negation. Nothing is dissipated: everything is conserved and thereby redeemed. We don’t need a God; philosophy can save us.

The enslavement of thought to what ‘is’ (law, the State, universal history), therefore, goes by the name of Hegelianism for Deleuze, in which the task is to work dialectically through oppositions of the abstract Understanding and to attain a state of ethical growth—and grace—through the recognition, and affirmation, of aporia. For Deleuze, however, the Hegelian system is a movement in words and representations, not a movement of life or evolution. But is this not to fall back on an utterly abstract and pre-Hegelian opposition between mind and matter? Deleuze’s point is that life cares little about the abstractions of dualistic metaphysics and their sublation, proceeding, as it does, by contamination, contagion, conversion, and other forms of transversal communication. In other words, evolution is machinic, a matter of technics and not of Geist.

Critical philosophy is indelibly marked by a model of recognition. Deleuze will always insist, however, that what is most profound about life and its evolution— making it truly monstrous—is that which escapes recognition and goes unrecognized. Moreover, the distinction between the creation of new values and the recognition, or speculative comprehension, of established values is not one that is to be conceived in the manner of a historical relativism, that is, it is not a question of established values that were once new now becoming old and tired, or of new values needing to be established. ‘What becomes established with the new is precisely not the new’, Deleuze writes. In other words, the new is not at all a question of establishing anything, for the establishment is always old and tired. ‘For the new’, he continues, ‘in other words, difference—calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognita’ (Deleuze 1968:177; 1994:136).

The death of God, and all that He stood for, is characterized as ‘monstrous’ in the sense that difference is produced and engineered in the ‘event that is still on its way and wanders’ (Nietzsche 1974: section 125). God’s death is frankly immaterial. The reason why news of His death takes time to come home is not that its deep truth has to penetrate the cultural unconscious, but, on the contrary, that it will take some time for consciousness to appreciate that such a death makes no difference at all to the movements of the unconscious which have assumed tectonic form. Gods are never, in fact, encountered, and even hidden gods are only forms of recognition. Rather, what is encountered are ‘the demons, the sign-bearers: powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive, and the instant’ (Deleuze 1994:145). These are powers which serve only to cover difference with more difference, transporting difference to the nth power, heralding only the becoming of the overhuman which constitutes the ‘superior form’ of everything that ‘is’, staging a demonic comedy of existence, and bringing into play the joyful universe of difference and repetition. Only this kind of unfolding of the truly monstrous (inhuman when it comes into contact with all earthly seriousness to date) power of difference and repetition can provide insight into the joyful character of la gaya scienza, and explain how it is possible for Nietzsche to write that he does not reply to the impending gloom consequent upon God’s demise with any sense of involvement, with anxiety (Sorge) and fear, but only with a sense of relief and tremendous exhilaration. It is on the basis of a ‘universal un-grounding’ that the philosopher, who finds himself posted between, and stretched in the contradiction between, today and tomorrow, is able to play the teacher and advocate of a ‘monstrous logic of terror’, for he is able to speak of ‘cheerfulness’. The comic is liberated in order to make it an element of the overhuman (the highest humour). It is a sign of unwisdom to want to judge the atheist from the standpoint of the believer or from the viewpoint of grace. Rather, joyful sophia will judge the believer by exposing the atheist which inhabits him, ‘the Antichrist eternally given “once and for all” within grace’ (Deleuze 1994:96). We shall not be made whole, but eternally cut to pieces as promises of life. A post-Darwinian culture informed by a ‘pessimism of strength’ (self-overcoming) finds itself able not only to tolerate a world without God and the necessity of design but also able to delight in a world of disorder and chaos, ‘a world of chance, to whose essence belongs the terrible, the ambiguous, the seductive’ (Nietzsche 1968: section 1019).

Deleuze refuses to subsume all species of movement, different kinds of ‘being’, under the logic of the victorious universal. As Nietzsche wrote in his untimely meditation on history, the Hege...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contributors
• 1: Deleuze Outside/Outside Deleuze
• Part I: Philosophy
• Part II: Minor Politics Minor Literature
• Part III: Vital Science Viral Life
• Part IV: Art and Wildstyle