Searching for Intimacy, Searching for Deleuze

Fiona Murray

doi:10.1177/15327086211037962

Abstract

In this article, the author is in Paris searching for Gilles Deleuze. She wants to become more intimate with him, spending slow time exploring his work. In her search for intimacy with Deleuze, she follows a map that she buys at a bouquiniste, and she chooses to take the roads toward an ontological conception of love, to an intimacy that blurs boundaries between public and private and between love and politics. Through this exploration, she develops an understanding of a diasporic intimacy that leads her further away from the structures of intimacy often found in the Oedipal home, to an intimacy that is more transient but not less significant. She finds that there is intimacy in the passing smile of a child, in the telling of a philosopher’s secret and from the offering of a paw from a stray dog. In these intimate gestures, she finds a strange and productive tenderness capable of redirecting becomings.

Highlights

It is Autumn 2017, and she has just submitted her doctoral thesis
Her thesis is a stolen vehicle, a getaway car, that behind its claims of significance, eventually runs out of fuel. It is merely the rupture in the middle of an event that means questions of continuity become more central (Massumi, 2017). She walks through the opulent Place Des Victoires, where its grand architecture spills cascades of fruit carved from stone from its rooftops
Gilles Deleuze doesn’t necessarily ground her, but he does continue to penetrate thought even from firmly underneath a pile of other books, eventually creating a rhizomatic mapping that guides her work while forcing it always to be produced from the edges of what she can comprehend

Summary

Introduction

It is Autumn 2017, and she has just submitted her doctoral thesis. She is in Paris, searching. Gilles Deleuze doesn’t necessarily ground her, but he does continue to penetrate thought even from firmly underneath a pile of other books, eventually creating a rhizomatic mapping that guides her work while forcing it always to be produced from the edges of what she can comprehend.

Results

Conclusion