Deleuze's Critique Research Articles

Anti-Oedipus: Metaphysics and method

ContextThis article is a philosophical reflection on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis and its relation to clinical practice. It draws on Guattari's clinical practice at La Borde as well as his philosophical collaboration with Deleuze, particularly their co-authored work Anti-Oedipus. First published in 1972, the book was written in the wake of the May, 1968 upheavels in France and focuses, in particular, on the interconnection between psychoanalysis and capitalism. The author is a philosopher working at the intersection of philosophical history and politics from within a Deleuzian framework. While Anti-Oedipus was seen as the liberatory, theoretical underpinning for some political movements in Europe and South America, it has also been deployed by Accelerationist theorists to intensify capitalist hegemony. Later works by Deleuze and Guattari, such as A Thousand Plateaus, counsel more prudence. This shift in tone has raised interpretive issues, as well as issues of praxis. Thus, while it remains clear that Deleuze and Guattari are arguing for liberation and the creation of the new throughout their work, the means of pursuing this remain underdetermined. ObjectivesThis article has two primary objectives. This first objective is to show that Deleuze and Guattari's critique of Oedipus arises out of Guattari's clinical practice. This critique of Oedipus is in line with Deleuze's critique of the history of philosophy and necessitates the creation of a new metaphysics to ground not only clinical practice but thought in general. The second objective is to show what method Deleuze and Guattari propose for replacing psychoanalysis. A method they call “schizoanalysis.” MethodQualitative. A single case study is used as an illustration and framework to organize the explication of Deleuze and Guattari's argument in Anti-Oedipus. ResultsThe critique of psychoanalysis creates space for a new, liberatory praxis. The fundamental principles of schizoanalysis are outlined. InterpretationsThe primary limitation of this study is that it is focused entirely on theoretical foundations. Future work would need to incorporate an analysis of empirical data, not only in relation to the history of La Borde Clinic and its outposts but also of current therapeutic regimes.

Magritte et les philosophes

Magritte et les philosophes, written by a Belgian semiotician, puts in dialogue some paintings by René Magritte with some thoughts of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Foucault, and, in a chapter on La condition humaine, even Plato. Painted in 1933, La condition humaine represents a garden as seen from a salon, but in the room there is already a painting on an easel that represents the same garden. Because the second-order painting (the painting in the painting) is placed in front of the window, we cannot see the full garden of the first-order painting. In it we see only the bottom of a hill and a part of a hedge, but in the second-order painting we see, in perfect continuity, the rest of the hill and the hedge. Thus we are inclined to think that the second-order painting covers exactly the reality it reproduces from the first-order painting and that, if we removed the second-order painting, we would see the same garden with a tree in the middle—a tree that for the moment we see only in the second-order painting.Therefore, some perceive in La condition humaine (and also in a similar painting, La belle captive) a parable of the transparency of painting. Opposing this position, Badir claims instead that “the pictures that are represented [that is, the second-order pictures] seem transparent; they give the sensation of transparency, . . . but their nature is totally different, and the painted landscapes in the [second-order] painting cannot make the representation [of the first-order painting] disappear.” We cannot superpose the painting over the reality to see whether the strokes of the painting cover exactly the lines of reality, since, if we do so, the painting gets between us and the garden. Still, we as observers cannot help but think that the second-order painting reproduces the reality behind it. But from where does that irresistible intuition come? Not from the resemblance between the picture and what it represents (since we know nothing about what is hidden by the picture), but from the continuity of the brushstrokes in the second-order painting and the lines of reality in the first-order picture.As in Plato's cave, in Magritte's room we have access to a semblance of reality, but in contrast to Plato, who regarded those shadows as pale imitations, Magritte offers us what may be a method of connecting semblance to reality less invidiously. The relation between the second-order picture and the first-order picture, between painting and reality, is not primarily a relation of analogy, since the analogy between the two orders is insinuated by other, nonanalogical relations—those of continuity and proximity between the brushstrokes of the painting and the lines of the garden. Even if Gilles Deleuze is not mentioned in Badir's book, this option seems to me to capture the gist of his critique of Platonism. When we are inclined to see a relation of analogy, Deleuze, like Magritte, wants us to pay attention to other, more diverse and more creative relations: nonanalogical relations that in some cases induce the sensation of resemblance.The title of Badir's book is Magritte and Philosophers, but it could just as well have been Magritte as Philosopher, because the classical philosophers he deals with play only a minor role as possible interlocutors for the painter. Magritte's thinking, as developed in his artwork, constitutes the main subject of this study. We learn while reading this book that painting can be a powerful tool for developing complex concepts and not merely percepts. Its argument may indeed be a critique of Deleuze's too-categorical distinction between the percepts proper to art and the concepts developed by philosophers.

Guided by Joy: Becoming-Active in Deleuze’s Spinoza

Spinoza’s Ethics makes reference to three kinds of knowledge that humans are capable of winning: imagination, reason and intuitive knowledge of God. Of these, imagination is necessarily inadequate while the latter two are necessarily adequate. In other words, we remain passive in the first type of knowledge, but come into our power of acting in the latter two. The passage from the first to the second and third types of knowledge, however, remains, in Spinoza’s text, rather obscure. This paper seeks to come to terms with how exactly the passage from passion to action is made in the Ethics while locating this particular problematic as a site at which various interpretations of Spinoza diverge with considerable stakes. I thus focus on Gilles Deleuze’s proposed answer to this problem as well as Pierre Macherey’s critique of Deleuze’s reading. I argue that the disagreement between Macherey and Deleuze is not merely interpretive, but rather indicates some of the stakes involved in assessing Spinoza’s theory of the passions and the imagination. An ‘optimistic’ appraisal of these features might lead one to Deleuze’s affirmationist project, while Macherey’s pessimism concerning the two might take a Spinozist politics in quite the opposite direction. I appreciate and assess multiple aspects of Macherey’s critique while nonetheless arguing that they do not prove damning for Deleuze’s affirmationist picture. I conclude with an analysis of vacillation of mind in Deleuze’s Spinoza, and place Deleuze’s thoughts on this note in conversation with his earlier reading of Nietzsche.

Encounters and the Differential Genesis of Thought inThe Logic of Sense

Several themes treated in chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition are addressed at greater length in The Logic of Sense, published one year later. In particular, Deleuze's critique of ‘the privilege of designation’ and ‘the modality of solutions’, along with his positive claims about the relation between sense and problems, arguably summarise a number of analyses found in The Logic of Sense. However, despite the convergence between Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as regards the sense–problem relation, The Logic of Sense does not explicitly address the other aspects of thought that Difference and Repetition considers inseparable from the sense–problem relation. In particular, the notion of ‘transcendental empiricism’ – that is, the idea that the conditions of experience themselves emerge from experience – is not explicitly mentioned in The Logic of Sense. There is no explicit discussion in The Logic of Sense of ‘encounters’ or ‘shocks’ and their role in the genesis of thought. And there is no explicit discussion in The Logic of Sense of the discordant relations between the different faculties of thought as they provoke and constrain one another in the elaboration of differential problems. This essay intends to argue that, despite the lack of explicit discussion, The Logic of Sense does advance an account of the differential genesis of thought, and along the same general lines as chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition.

Narrative Difference: Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze andUncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

How should critics approach narrative temporality in times of ecological disorder? Literary critics have attempted to bridge eco-criticism with narrative theory, shifting attention from narrative content to narrative form. Econarratology studies how narrative shapes our understanding of the environment. Yet, eco-critical interrogations of narrative form are lacking. Grounded in a homogeneous conception of time, narratology often relays a dichotomy between narrativity and “dysnarrativity”. This dichotomy fails to translate the variety of temporal processes in film. I shall highlight the problem underlying Jacques Rancière's critique of Deleuze's film-philosophy and its relevance for narrative theory. My discussion of this dispute is grounded in the examination of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Critics invariably base their analyses on Boonmee's remembrances and reduce narrative complexity to dysnarrative indeterminacy by accommodating non-human storylines into a human plot. I argue that Uncle Boonmee both confirms and bypasses the critique of linear narrative that is at heart of the Rancière-Deleuze discussion. In doing so, Weerasethakul's feature calls for a new paradigm – different, yet unlike the crystalline narrative, positively determined. By bringing the event to the fore, Deleuze offers another theoretical backdrop for event narratology, that in turn proves useful to econarratology.

Deleuze's Infernal Book: Reflections onDifference and Repetition

Deleuze's Difference and Repetition is a notoriously difficult work of philosophy. Moreover, it is a work of philosophy that has led to quite divergent interpretations. How are we to account for this phenomenon of generating such distinct interpretations and appropriations? In this article, I apply Deleuze's theory of problems, questions and individuation to Deleuze's text as a way of understanding the stylistic strategy of his writing. Given Deleuze's critique of identity and representation, he would fall into a performative contradiction if his writing were designed to transmit an identical thought from sender to receiver such that the receiver then could be said to represent Deleuze's thought. Rather, I argue, Deleuze aims to write ‘machinic’ or ‘productive’ works that lead to the production of something new through the reader's encounter with the work. Not only does Difference and Repetition theorise the process of creative individuation in the production of beings, I contend, but it also forces the reader to undergo a process of creative individuation, through which they produce a non-identical double of the work in the process of their reading that then takes on a life of its own. It is this phenomenon of the book as a machine for producing difference, I contend, that helps to account for the tremendous creative fecundity it has generated in being appropriated by a wide variety of disciplines and practices.

Critique of zeroness: understanding Deleuze’s (mis)understanding of Peirce

This article aims to explore the relation between Deleuze and Peirce, from what seems to be the main point of confrontation between them: Deleuze's statement that there would be a zeroness before Peirce's firstness. Specifically, the aim is to criticize this statement in two ways: an exogenous one, based on the critique of Deleuze's understanding of Peirce's work; another endogenous, based on Deleuze's own concepts and comments. The hypothesis is that there is no a deep conceptual divergence. The key to understand this statement lies in how Deleuze’s limited knowledge on Peirce's theory led him to frame firstness into his own philosophical work and to disregard a Peircian concept that would be more adequate than zeroness.

The Political Significance of the Face: Deleuze's Critique of Levinas

While Levinas famously claims that ethics precedes ontology and emanates from the concrete experience of the other's face, it is often forgotten that Deleuze also discusses the face in numerous writings. The purpose of this paper is to briefly outline Levinas's arguments regarding the constitution of the face to chart its ethical importance, before engaging with Deleuze's critique of Levinas's position. I show that, by distinguishing between two systems of signification – the head-body system and the face system – Deleuze agrees with Levinas that the face is an important signifier delineating the other, but destructs the notion of face to show that it: (1) is more complex and multi-dimensional than Levinas realizes; (2) emanates from a specific semiotic relationship; and (3) emanates from specific socio-historical circumstances. Showing the face is a semiotic construct based in and emanating from a specific socio-historical configuration allows Deleuze not only to conclude that the face is related to politics not ethics as Levinas claims, but also to claim that it entails the inhuman in the human. This clarifies the nature of the face in Deleuze, offers a critique of Levinas's influential thinking on ethics, brings us to a discussion of the relationship between ethics and politics and reveals what Deleuze takes the political to entail.

Introduction

Introduction Dawne McCance This special Mosaic issue, the second of three conference proceedings issues, collects papers presented at the A matter of life death conference held at the University of Manitoba from October 1-4, 2014. Most of the papers have been revised, some lengthened, into publishable essay form and, as always, we are grateful to contributors for their cooperation and more than a little proud to print their fine work. The issue opens with Dr. Françoise Dastur’s conference Keynote Address, “Mourning as the Origin of Humanity.” Against still prevalent modes of thinking that elevate humans above animals, usually by focusing on something animals “lack,” Dastur, with particularly rich references to the Western philosophical tradition, approaches humans as “strange animals who bury their dead.” Although Dastur states that “There is indeed no experience of death as such,” other essays question whether Heidegger attributed such an experience to Dasein alone and, by so doing, reinstated the tradition’s man/animal binary. Ryan C.P. Fics, in “Our Sovereign Others: Phantasms, Heidegger, Animality,” examines the “presumption that human Dasein lives death as death,” and in the course of his essay considers the notions of “phantasm,” and “dying alive,” as these emerge from Derrida’s The Beast & the Sovereign seminars. “Sovereignty,” “phantasm,” and “death” are taken up as well in Gwynne Fulton’s “Phantasmatics: Sovereignty and the Image of Death in Derrida’s First Death Penalty Seminar.” And [End Page v] Kas Saghafi in “Dying Alive,” engaging Derrida’s second seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, argues that “phantasm,” “dying alive,” and “survival” need to be thought in relation to, and with, each other. Again, “survival” is a title word in “Love, Life, Death, and Survival,” where Diane Enns, reading Derrida’s Learning to Live Finally alongside Gillian Rose’s memoir, Love’s Work, develops a poignant, poetic, and critical reflection on the death of a love. The importance of Derrida’s work for many presenters at the October conference is evident in this issue, as are the different ways in which writers draw insights from his treatments of life death. A remarkable example is Matthias Fritsch’s “Democracy, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice,” which draws from a number of Derrida’s texts to develop the argument that democracy should be rethought as a matter of “taking turns,” and that such rethinking can lead to an environmentally responsible politics. James Martell in “The Animal Mirrors: The Human/Animal Divide in Derrida and Deleuze,” by way of Derrida’s critique of Deleuze, proposes a way of moving the question of human-animal relations “beyond the traps of narcissism.” The remaining six essays offer striking and diverse contributions to this issue. Antonio Calcagno, in “Individuated Embodiment and Action: Interrogating Roberto Esposito’s Negative Self,” offers a well-informed, timely, and critical evaluation of Esposito’s biopolitics. Kara Wentworth takes readers into today’s abattoir in “Sensing Sentience and Managing Microbes: Lifedeath in the Slaughterhouse.” In “Adapting Venice: Intermedial Relations in Visconti, Sebald, and Kafka,” Russell J.A. Kilbourn takes us to Venice through Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice and Vertigo and W.G. Sebald’s first prose narrative, which adapts texts by Kafka. Dominique Hétu, in “Of Wonder and Encounter: Textures of Human and Nonhuman Relationality,” reads the novels Sous Béton and Room “as attempts to surpass the traditional and conventional life/death dichotomy by telling stories of trauma and near-death experiences through moments of wonder in meaningful encounters that bring to attention the vitality of the dead.” And last, but by no means least, are two compelling essays, Sung-Ae Lee’s “Lost in Liminal Space: Amnesiac and Incognizant Ghosts in Korean Drama” and Sarah Bezan’s “Necro-Eco: The Ecology of Death in Jim Crace’s Being Dead.” The issue reminds me of the wonder I experienced, as Mosaic Editor, at the range and quality of submissions we received from our conference Call for Papers. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2015 Mosaic

Deleuze, Diversity, and Chance

First, I would like to thank John McCumber and Joshua Ramey for taking the time to read through my book, and to come up with such insightful comments throughout. In writing the book, I tried to be as balanced as possible, particularly in my reading of Hegel. I'm very pleased that both with John on the nature of difference, and Joshua on the question of implications, we are beginning from a recognition that both Deleuze and Hegel are worthy of genuinely philosophical discussion, even if one or both of them may lose out on the slaughter-bench of the history of philosophy.In response to their papers, I want to go through John and Joshua's comments in the following order. First, I want to address John McCumber's diagnosis that it is the interpretation of the dialectic that is the problem with Deleuze's critique of Hegel. Second, I want to look at the claim that is diversity. I will then turn to the question of multiplicity in Deleuze before concluding with some comments on chance, evolution, and ethics, to address Joshua Ramey's comments.Differences in Interpretation of the DialecticTo begin, then, John McCumber, in his analysis of my critique of Hegel, holds that a different understanding of the dialectic could allow Hegel to sidestep the difficulties I present. On his reading of the dialectic, diversity does not immanently develop into contradiction, leaving the category free to operate as a Hegelian equivalent of Deleuze's concept of difference. I do not think, however, that our disagreement about the relationship between diversity and Deleuze's concept of can be put down to a in how we view the operation of dialectics. As McCumber notes, I consider the dialectic as a process of immanent development of categories, where the inherent limitations of a dialectical category lead to the emergence of new categories. On my reading, when we look at the determinations of reflection, we have a process whereby immanently develops into contradiction. As Hegel puts it, difference as such is already implicitly contradiction; for it is the unity of sides which are, only in so far as they are not one-and it is the separation of sides which are, only as separated in the same relation.1 Similarly, when Hegel talks about the concept of diversity, he notes that the indifference between beings in diversity is ultimately unsupportable:The usual tenderness for things, whose only care is that they do not contradict themselves, forgets here as elsewhere that in this way the contradiction is not resolved but merely shifted elsewhere, into subjective or external reflection generally.2Ultimately, I do not think that differences in our reading of the dialectic are pertinent here, however. While Deleuze (and I) might argue that diversity immanently develops into contradiction for Hegel, this does not mean that diversity isn't a category that can be used to describe the world. It simply means that for Hegel, understanding the world in terms of diversity gives us a partial account of the nature of the world. In the Philosophy of Nature, the categories of physical magnitude are shown to be inadequate, and are eventually sublated into the more adequate categories of animal life. This doesn't prevent us from using the categories of physical magnitude to claim, for instance, that a giraffe is 18 feet tall. This is a partial description of the animal. If we took the statement, 'a giraffe is 18 feet tall' to be an adequate definition of what a giraffe is, however, we would fall into error. Similarly, Deleuze would have to accept that if his concept of were Hegelian diversity, then Hegel would have an affirmative concept of difference. More than this, Hegel would have shown, provided the dialectic was rigorous, that affirmative was just a moment within a broader system of determinations. In fact, however, Hegel's concept of diversity is not what Deleuze means by difference. …

Deleuze, Darwin and the Categorisation of Life

I begin with Deleuze's criticism of the Darwinian concept of difference as leading to the inaccurate assumption that difference occurs within individuals and species. Deleuze radicalises Darwin's theory by disrupting the ontological stability of species and extant individualities. I examine how Deleuze's project relates to punctuated equilibrium and the discovery of the amount of variation within the human genome, showing that these recent developments make Deleuze's critique less applicable by showing that Darwinian classification schemes should include a greater openness to difference. A complete alignment between evolutionary biology and Deleuze may be impossible given the limitations of evolutionary biology, but evolutionary biology can rethink the ontological permanence it gives to species and individuals.

Traces of Identity In Deleuze’s Differential Ontology

Deleuze’s differential ontology is a sustained attempt to think and affirm difference as opposed to the unity of identity he insists philosophical thought has tended to privilege. However, by distinguishing between three senses of identity, termed identity of the identical, same, and common, I show that, while Deleuze’s differential ontology offers a powerful critique of identity in the senses of the identical and same, at numerous points in his analysis, such as the virtual-actual movement, the transcendental conditions defining different forms of thinking, and the relationship between the forms of thinking, it appears Deleuze’s affirmation of difference depends on identity in the sense of the common. Rather than using these instances to offer a critique of Deleuze’s differential ontology, I follow his exhortation to read a philosopher creatively and suggest that distinguishing between three senses of identity reveals the complexity of the difference-identity relationship and acts as a stimulus to rethinking this relationship.

The Problem of Deleuze's a body without organs and an individuality - Deleuze's critique on the Hegel's organism and individual -

The Problem of Deleuze's a body without organs and an individuality - Deleuze's critique on the Hegel's organism and individual -

Kafka's Jewish languages: the hidden openness of tradition

Abstract This essay connects Kafka's German and his Jewish linguistic sources, and explores the trans-national perspective on literary tradition they helped him create. I begin with a critique of Deleuze and Guattari's view of Kafka as a minority writer, showing how their cold war nationalism scants the positive contributions that Yiddish and Hebrew made to his work. I continue with an examination of the "twilight of containment," when this postcontemporary Kafka began to break through his cold war canonization after 1989. Other sections include: "German-Jewish Traditions: The Echoes of Yiddish," on Kafka's cultural politics; "Hebrew: Zionism in a Transnational Key"; and "Goethe's Jewish Voices," on Yiddish as a model for Kafka's new conception of national writing. I conclude by considering the Jewish and other sources of Kafka's "linguistic turn," and the general, transnational focus on tradition that Jewish languages brought to his classic texts.

Review of Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt eds.,Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music(Ashgate, 2010)

[1] In hailstorm of recent books concerning thought of Gilles Deleuze, editors Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt set Sounding Virtual apart as first coherent, comprehensive reply from field of music studies (xv).(1) This careful positioning is necessary, as there is already a substantial body of writing treating Deleuze's relationship to music, both from music-centered scholars and from cultural, film, and media studies. This includes Ronald Bogue's 2003 synthesis of Deleuze's writing on music (and painting), Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda's 2004 volume Deleuze and Music, and a four-paper colloquy in Perspectives of New Music from 2008. These last two sources share two authors each with new volume, and Buchanan and Swiboda book shares with it a balance between explicating Deleuze, tracing connections and dissonances with related thinkers, and applying result to musical examples and/or repertories. By comparison, Sounding Virtual is somewhat more comprehensive, venturing further beyond connections Deleuze himself made with music. A light editorial hand, however, ensures that Deleuze's pronouncements against totalizing conceptual cohesion are respected. What does distinguish this book is that some chapters (though not all) engage with music theory and analysis in a degree of detail that might (but shouldn't) frighten readers from other disciplines. It's this detail that gives book its traction, providing substance to sometimes substantial reorientations of Deleuze's ontological and ethical arguments, and demonstrating potential of those arguments to displace some cherished music-theoretical dogmata.[2] The first three chapters provide complementary perspectives on concepts from Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. Hulse concentrates on Deleuzian concept of in itself, which asserts that each difference is unique, and cannot be compared to other differences by a rule of measurement (as in many current conceptions of pitch space) or by its relation to an archetype (as in Schenkerian analysis). Sean Higgins recasts difference in terms of information theory as noise, which he defines as the absolute difference of empirical sound (52). Although he is careful to stress disruptive materiality of noise, its binary opposition to signal brings clarity to his recasting of Deleuze's critique of representation: noise is both material remainder effaced by categorization, and friction between our senses and faculties that leads to true thought. Christopher Hasty likewise reprises this critique, but shifts emphasis from music's materiality to activity of music, and how we might respect, both conceptually and analytically, persistence of difference in our musical experiences. The lack of friction between Hastian and Deleuzian discourses is telling, but it falls to Hulse to explicitly position Hasty's work on rhythm as quintessentially Deleuzian, providing book's most concrete connection between Deleuze and analytical practice. The different conclusions drawn by Hulse and Hasty, however, are striking. For Hulse, rigorously pursuing difference tends to dissolve identity of genres and media into huge bodies of resonance (42). By chapter's end, music's participants are left with a global reservoir of basic musical materials unbound by style, culture, or era-a utopian abrogation that discards music analysis's hard-won hermeneutic utility in a quest for radical connectivity. Hasty's seemingly more conservative position is actually closer to Deleuze: having foresworn representation and categorization, realm of Ideas, of true thought, must be nonetheless differentiated and internally structured (10). Hasty's solutions provide Ideas including tonal function and beat with a flexible analytical utility that arises from, rather than in spite of, actual musical becoming. His detailed application of these Ideas to beginning of Chopin's Scherzo, Op. …

Deleuze and Cinema in the Digital

Deleuze and Cinema in the Digital Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Pages 448. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] My ideal, when I write about an author, Deleuze once said, be to write nothing would cause him sadness. Perhaps the highest praise I can offer Essays on Deleuze is my sense Daniel Smith has written nothing would cause Deleuze sadness or him weep in his grave, as thorough and careful a treatment of his thought as Deleuze's own dealing with the history of philosophy. Versus the majority of secondary works refer to and employ Deleuzian terminology without ever explaining it-as though the meaning of univocity, difference, flow, etc. were self-evident-Smith takes nothing for granted. His painstaking enquiries into the sources of Deleuze's thought and lucid explanations cast light on these stubbornly opaque concepts. Both the breadth of material covered and its close treatment make this work a milestone in Deleuze studies. True to its title, Essays on Deleuze is a collection of 20 essays. These are divided into four sections, dealing with 1. Deleuze and the history of philosophy 2. his philosophical system 3. Deleuze's concepts and 4. contemporary philosophy. This organizational schema is itself helpful: Smith begins with Deleuze's thought in relation to the history of philosophy, putting the reader in a position to understand the systematic nature of Deleuze's thought, which in turn allows one to better comprehend his concepts and their relation to contemporary figures. He starts with Deleuze and Plato, explaining Deleuze's inversion of Platonism through a thorough analysis of the concept of the simulacrum. From there Smith explores Deleuze's relation to Scotus and Spinoza in terms of univocity, and in essay three turns to Leibniz, tracing the development of the concept of difference from the calculus. Contra widespread claims Deleuze's thought is anti-Hegelian, in essay four Smith suggests Deleuze's own project consists in the recasting of a non-Hegelian dialectics. In essay five he returns to difference in relation to Leibniz, as well as Hegel and existentialism. Section two uses the architectonic structure of Kantian philosophy as a heuristic device, explaining Deleuze's philosophical system in terms of aesthetics (theory of sensation), dialectics (theory of Idea), analytics (theory of the concept), ethics (theory of affectivity), and politics (socio-political theory) (xiii). Based on his engagements with Proust, Maimon, and Bacon, essay six shows how Deleuze's theory of sensation reconciles the Kantian dualism sensibility (as a form of possible experience) and art (as reflection on real experience). In a similar vein, essay seven shows from the perspective of an immanent and differential theory of ideas, Difference and Repetition can be read as Deleuze's Critique of Pure Reason, while Anti-Oedipus can be understood as his Critique of Practical Reason (107). Smith addresses the relation between concepts, time, and in essay eight, specifically, he asks what the nature of concepts consists in if no longer conceived as eternal-as well as exploring its implications for a concept of truth (122). Versus morality consists in prescriptive, constraining rules refer to universal, transcendent values, in essay nine Smith explains the nature of Deleuzian ethics as a set of facilitative rules that evaluate what we do, say, and think according to the immanent mode of existence it implies (147). …

Deleuze and the Image of Thought

La pensee est comme le Vampire, elle n'a pas d'image, ni pour constituer modele, ni pour faire copie. Deleuze & Guattari There is a schism in the work of Gilles Deleuze. The early Deleuze of, primarily, Difference et repetition (1968), the first book written in his voice, advocates the destruction of what he names the of thought and calls instead for a thinking image.2 For the later Deleuze, not least the writer of the 1994 Preface to the English translation of the same book, the task is to think a new of thought.3 Indeed, by the time of s« 'est-ce que la philosophie?, published the same year as the English Preface, great philosophers are defined by their ability to dresse une nouvelle de la pensee.4 It is important to delineate this difference internal to Deleuze's thought because it embodies a certain struggle philosophy has in dealing with the image. Between the Preface and that which it prefaces, between the body and that which faces the body after the fact but which nevertheless comes before it, there is a schism and in that schism we find the play of word with image, philosophy with art. Before we are thinking, thinking in an authentic or proper sense according to Deleuze, a sense which is proper because it is improper, we are caught up in an image of thought, and this of thought is inauthentic not because of what it is an of but because it is an image. Deleuze devotes a good deal of his early work to critiquing the of thought. According to its author, the most and concrete part of Difference et repetition is the third chapter, L'image de la pensee. We have cause to think that it is this section on the of thought that leads Deleuze to remark of the book that it is the first one written in his own voice. Throughout his work Deleuze characterises the idea of as a voice foreign to itself, a voice in which the foreigner or the minority is given voice. This gives us a clue as to how to understand why Deleuze himself says in the English Preface that the chapter on the of thought is the most necessary of this the first book written in his own voice. Were we to follow Deleuze's logic we would have to say that it is in this chapter that what is foreign to Deleuze's thought is voiced by him. The of thought is Deleuze's characterisation of what comes before thinking: that which philosophy implicitly presupposes and explicitly projects, a pre-philosophical and natural and hence dogmatic of what thinking is. The dogmatic supposes that what thought wants, wants both materially and wilfully, is the true. Morality leads us to presuppose this. It is pre-supposed in the sense that everybody knows what it means to think, as though it were common sense. We all have this common picture of what it means to think. It's an in which subject and object and being and beings are already assigned their proper place and relation one to the other. And so long as philosophy holds to this it does not matter what it goes on to think conceptually. If the of thought guides the creation of concepts then those concepts will be part of the same projected. Moreover, it is the supposition of a natural capacity to think in this way that permits philosophy to claim to begin without suppositions. It is a supposition which is endowed with the power to undercut the conditions of the present moment and its attendant perversions. It is not a particular of thought that worries Deleuze; it's that thought is pre-conceived as an image in general. This is philosophy's subjective presupposition and the frame of Deleuze's critique. Nous ne parlons pas de telle ou telle de la pensee, he says, variable suivant les philosophies, mais d'une seule Image en general qui constitue le presuppose subjectif de la philosophie dans son ensemble.5 Part of the image, its stance as it were, is that thought is construed as naturally upright. …

Memory and the Metaphysics of Music: Battersby's Move Away from Deleuze and Guattari

This essay seeks to further elucidate and critically assess the distinct philosophical position of Christine Battersby through examining in closer detail her critique of Deleuze and Guattari. It begins by discussing Battersby's reading of Deleuze and Guattari's materialist metaphysics, which focuses on their evocation of the ‘refrain’ in A Thousand Plateaus. Through tracing their account of the material processes of repetition within the world of sound and music, Battersby acknowledges that Deleuze and Guattari offer an enticing alternative to the ‘top-down’ Kantian metaphysics of form over matter. However, she argues, the key problem is that Deleuze and Guattari seek to ‘bypass memory’, and end up establishing a false dichotomy between memory and repetition. In consequence, Deleuze and Guattari's ‘rhizomatics’ and ‘surface becomings’ block any investigation into the long-term patterns of repetition and memory that constitute specifically sexed, embodied modes of existence. Battersby turns instead to Kierkegaard's concept of repetition, which, she claims, brings memory and repetition together, showing that ‘repetition can mark out depths as well as surfaces’. The essay goes on to reassess Battersby's critique. It suggests a possible route for defending Deleuze against Battersby's charge that he seeks to ‘bypass memory’ by pointing out the pivotal role occupied by Bergson's concept of memory within Deleuze's solo-authored work. The essay concludes, however, by arguing that Battersby's critique of Deleuze as a resource for feminist philosophy nevertheless remains valid. This is because Deleuze's reworking of Bergson's concept of ‘virtual’ memory takes us no further towards the deeply ingrained material and historical patternings of female existence that Battersby seeks to give priority in her quest to overturn the androcentrism of western metaphysics.

Of nomadic unities: Gilles Deleuze on the nature of sovereignty

This paper develops Deleuze's critique of the political ideal of sovereignty by examining his philosophy of nature. In their exultation of the ideal of sovereignty, traditional forms of political theory reflect only one aspect of nature. That is, its tendency toward unity. As such, they obscure what is most ‘true’ of nature, and what is most ‘true’ of peoples and individuals, which is their tendency toward multiplicity. While Deleuze's work has received significant attention in IR, the value of his philosophy of nature for the more concretely political problem of sovereignty is still to be fully realised. Beyond its under-representation in debates concerning political problems, Deleuze's work also suffers from misrepresentation. There is an abiding misconception of Deleuze as a theorist of the possibility of a ‘world without sovereignty’. This paper dispels that particular misconception by demonstrating Deleuze's attention to the necessity of the recurrence of the problem of sovereignty as a condition for an understanding of political agency.

The Fetish is Always Actual, Revolution is Always Virtual: From Noology to Noopolitics

By most accounts Deleuze's engagement with Marx begins with the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia he co-authored with Félix Guattari. However, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition alludes to a connection between Deleuze's critique of common sense and Marx's theory of fetishism, suggesting a connection between the critique of the image of thought and the critique of capital. By tracing this connection from its emergence in the early texts on noology, or the image of thought, to the development in the critique of state thought in A Thousand Plateaus, it can be argued that what initially appears as an entirely infra-philosophical problem, concerned with the presuppositions of philosophy, is not only a political problem as well, but ultimately bears on the very nature of the conjunction between thought and politics, making possible a re-examination of what is meant by revolutionary thought. It is a transition from noology to noopolitics. In the end it can be argued that revolutionary thought is no longer an eschatology, attempting to discern the signs of the future revolution in the present, but a thought oriented towards everything that exceeds the fetish of society, towards the virtual relations and micropolitical transformations that constitute society but exceed its representation.