Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Deleuzism: A Metacommentary Kalliopi Nikolopoulou Ian Buchanan. Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. 209 pp. Deleuzism addresses two questions: “How should we read Deleuze?” and “How should we read with Deleuze?” (196). As such, the book navigates two different—if not even opposed—courses. It presents a philosophical exegesis, and at the same time it translates (or transcodes, in its terminology) a philo-sophical method into cultural studies. This latter sociopolitical application often surfaces under the philosophical alias of “transcendental empiricism,” and the book’s underlying premise is that philosophy should be understood in the Marxian sense of praxis, a “chosen tool” for the “transformation of the society itself” (32). Indeed, the figure of the twofold is prominent throughout. The book opens with a claim that every written book has a silent, unwritten twin, and it concludes by inscribing Deleuze within a dialectical tradition, albeit an anti-Hegelian one that resists the third moment of synthesis. Both these claims spring from Deleuze’s and Buchanan’s dislike of what they see as philosophical expressionism—the attempt to bridge two incommensurable registers (psychoanalysis’s manifestation of the latent, Platonism’s representation of the origin, and Hegel’s correspondence of appearance to reality). Although this wholesale critique is debatable (Lacan, for instance, is all but blind to the excess of the signifier), Buchanan’s charge against expressionism begins with an eloquent claim shared by Deleuze, Melville, Borges, and Blanchot: “Every writer writes two books . . . one for which we need only ink, and another which is inscribed in blood and anguish on our soul” (3). A belief in expression, for Buchanan, “amounts to thinking one can read the book of the soul in the book written in ink, which cannot be done because that book, as Blanchot said, is defined by its absence” (3). However, Buchanan immediately concedes this strongest of his claims by bypassing Blanchot’s radicalism and admitting to “still want[ing] to read that other book” (3). His term for this “new hermeneutic” of reading absence is Deleuzism. If not expressionist in its interpretive devices, Buchanan’s surmounting of unreadability is still expressionist in its motivation and desire. The author remains tempted by the translation into ink, since otherwise he would have to betray his Deleuzian loyalty to immanence —readability as empiricism’s imperative call—for a transcendental and infinite sense of absence. Worse, despite the pessimism Buchanan sees in Deleuze, such [End Page 213] a position would be a truly pessimist one, for it would deny any utopian impulse the author also attaches to Deleuze’s thought. Politics cannot rely on unreadability, and in the last instance the book must instrumentalize its most radical claim and sacrifice the anti-expressionist Deleuze to get to the political Deleuze. In reading this “other book,” Deleuzism attempts a systematization and historicization of the “private” categories and style of Deleuze while showing how this privacy can be mobilized toward transformative readings of culture: for example, Deleuze’s “becoming-woman” read as the utopian possibility of a universe beyond gender difference, or the relation of desire and schizophrenia to capitalism in analyses of Blade Runner, the Bonaventure Hotel, and popular music. At times, Deleuze’s figure recedes behind these analyses, which seem more responses to or defenses of Jamesonian cultural studies. In particular, the analysis of the relation between capitalism and schizophrenia develops problematically. Schizophrenia, for Deleuze an unsynthesizable disjunction and a genuine mode of resistance against capitalism (and perhaps against Hegelian totalization) is at the same time the very mechanism through which capitalism proliferates its flows. Schizophrenia is loudly applauded as the most privileged and “pure” act of resistance against capitalism (164) and only grudgingly recognized as capitalism’s most growing investment (162). He criticizes the fragility of capitalism, which demands the regulation of the very flows, currents, and currency that make it possible, implying with Deleuze a privileging of schizophrenic disjunction, yet Buchanan’s own continuing investment in the Deleuzian vocabulary of “flows” and “schizzes” reaches here its own need for damming and channeling. Without either justifying the conditions of capitalism or dismissing the revolutionary potential of the pathologized, it seems that only a somewhat controlled hydrography could...