The Principles of Deleuzian Philosophy

Abstract

What gives us the right to speak of a Deleuzian philosophy, a philosophy at first sight concerned solely with interpreting other philosophers and writers? And granted there is such an entity as ‘Deleuzian philosophy’, is this philosophy a practically and politically consequential one, as so many interpreters have hoped? This book begins from Deleuze’s method of ‘free indirect discourse’ to locate and explicate Deleuze’s philosophy. Through free indirect discourse Deleuze burrows under the texts of a thinker to attain the underlying question, which he inherits critically to expound his own philosophy of ‘transcendental empiricism’. This philosophy however was politically impotent, for its final practical conclusion was that one had to ‘wait for failure’, which is strictly impossible. This book goes on to argue that it is the self-recognition of this impasse that forced Deleuze into a veritable wager, the collaboration with Guattari. For Deleuze not only recognised the existence of this practical/political impasse, he also understood its source: the strong structuralist influence in his philosophy. And he had the intuition that in Guattari there were the germs of a way of thinking that could move beyond structuralism (more specifically its culmination in Lacanian psychoanalysis). Finally, this new Deleuzian practical philosophy is explicated through an examination of Deleuze’s ambiguous relation to Foucault: Deleuze would ultimately opt for ‘desire’, not Foucault’s ‘power’, as the elementary unit of political analysis, because it is the assemblage of desire that makes possible the specific constellation of power in a given society.