1Ph.d. Mogens LærkeCarlsberg Foundation
Gilles Deleuze and the system of nature and philosophy
1
§ 1There is one point where I must agree with Alain Badiou. Deleuze’s philosophy is a classicalmetaphysical system:Let us say that Deleuze’s philosophy, like my own, is decidedly classical. And it isquite easy to define, in this matter, what classicism is. Classical is every philosophythat does not submit to Kant’s critical injunctions; that acts as though the trial intended by Kant was nothing and never happened.
2
Such a statement ought not to surprise anybody familiar with Deleuze’s texts: “I believe in philosophy as a system [...]. I feel like a very classical philosopher”, Deleuze explains himself quite clearly in his letter-preface to Jean-Clet Martin’s book
Variations
from 1993.
3
We findsimilar statements in
Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?
:In any case, we never had any problems concerning the death of metaphysics or theovercoming of philosophy: it is all useless, tiresome nonsense. Today, one speaksabout the bankruptcy of systems, but it is only the concept of system that haschanged.
4
How can we explain this strange theoretical parable that leads a contemporary philosopher like Deleuze to claim a classical metaphysical heritage?One could simply point towards his work on the classical metaphysicians: Two booksand several articles on Spinoza one book on Leibniz. Everybody knows what Deleuze owes tothe
Ethics
(a conception of immanence) and to the philosophy of the
Monadology
(aconception of the individual).
5
Both
Différence et répétition
and
Logique du sens
refer tothese two post-Cartesian metaphysics at crucial places in the argument. The two books in the project
Capitalisme et schizophrenie
are shot through with explicit and implicit references toSpinoza. In
Pourparlers
, Deleuze himself describes l’
Anti-Oedipe
as a sort of ”Spinozism of the unconscious,”
6
and in
Mille
plateaux
we find Spinoza’s
Ethics
described as a sort of schizoanalytic manual:Finally, the great book on the BwO [Body without Organs], wouldn’t that be the
Ethics
? [...] The drug addicts, the masochists, the schizophrenics, the lovers, all theBwO’s honor Spinoza. The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency of desire.
7
As for Leibniz,
Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque
from
1988
develops the systematic backgroundfor the notion of subjectivity as a ”fold,” which Deleuze had already proposed two yearsearlier in
Foucault
.
8
But Leibniz plays an important role in other areas as well. It is he whoinvented the original logical relation of ”(in-)compossibility” – i.e. an (in-)compatibility between an individual concept and a world – that according to
Logique
du
sens
governs thestatic ontological genesis of the world. Compossibility determines which intensities are nestedin the folds of the virtual world that they actualize.
9
I have on another occasion tried to showhow much Deleuze’s concept of individual ”becomings” in
Mille
plateaux
owes to Leibniz’s
2account of the nature of organic bodies and of transsubstantiation in his letters toBartholomeus Des Bosses.
10
Etcetera
.There is a classical heritage in Deleuze’s philosophy because he borrows elementsfrom classical philosophers. But more importantly, he also claims to be a systematicmetaphysician in the same sense that they are, i.e. his philosophy is structurally organized in away comparable to a classical metaphysical system. What does
system
signify in this context?It is the full meaning of this that I would like to bring forward in the following by readingDeleuzianism as a fourfold rationalism: as a system of
upright
reason
; of
natural
reason
; of
unified
reason
; and of
universal
moral
reason
. I do not intend to
prove
that Deleuze’s philosophy is such a fourfold rationalism. This would not only be terribly pretentious, but alsovery reductive: nothing should prevent a reading from moving in the exact opposite direction.The ambition is rather to see
what
kind
of
coherence
(if any) the
assumption
of such afourfold rationalism can yield.§ 2Let us assume, then, that Deleuzianism is an apology rather than a critique of reason; that it isa defense for a particular kind of reason that Deleuze sometimes calls
problematic
(
Différence
et
répétition
) and sometimes
creative
(
Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?
). If this assumption istrue, rationalism in the Deleuzian sense would be an effort to reverse a movement of unreasonthat has left the world upside-down. Such an ambition of putting reason back on its feet stemsfrom Spinoza (the critique of finalism in the
Ethics
) and from Nietzsche (the critique of thereversal of values in the
Genealogy
of
morals
). But to make reason stand up by itself is alsothe general ambition of classical metaphysicians: they all consider themselves partisans of “upright reason” (
recta
ratio
). Contrary to most classical metaphysicians (Spinoza excepted),however, Deleuze defines
recta
ratio
as the opposite of the
sensus
communis.
We can say thatDeleuze’s philosophy is a tremendous effort to rethink the way in which reason might still bedefendable, and that a book like
Mille plateaux
develops the conditions of possibility for alegitimate
recta
ratio
, albeit an upright reason that often appears oddly inclined or curiously bent – precisely because it is not attached to the
sensus communis
. This is again a lesson fromSpinoza, but this time from the
Tractatus theologico-politicus
: reason has been terriblycorrupted. Not only do we rave
without
reason, but we rave
with
reason (
insanire cum
ratione
).
11
The image of thought depicts what is crooked as upright, what is reactive as active,what is negation as affirmation. And it is not simply a question of a “bad” or “untrue”representation. The image of thought corrupts the
representandum
itself. Those subjugated tothis image are creating nature according to their own delirium, Spinoza remarks, “as thoughthe totality of nature was raving with them” (
quasi tota natura cum ipsis insaniret
).
12
LikeSpinoza, Deleuze ventures to create a new image of thought that puts reason back on its feet.Odd thing to say about a schizoanalytic, but it is nevertheless adequate: it is the world that iscrazy, not the schizophrenic.§ 3But the question remains: what reason? what rectitude? First of all, Deleuzian
recta
ratio
is nomore a critical reason than a critique of reason. The first aspect a “classicist” reading of Deleuze must bring to the foreground is the one also noticed by Badiou: the refusal of thecritical turn.
13
Deleuze’s philosophy is
not
a critical philosophy. It is a
creative
metaphysics
.First, although he has learned much from this much-respected adversary, Deleuze is not aKantian. Second, it would require a creative rereading of the German post-war critique of theEnlightenment to consider Deleuze’s philosophy a “critique of reason” in the tradition of
3Adorno and Horkheimer (although, admittedly, this is quite possible). Finally, it would beoutright wrong to consider Deleuzianism – as some unwilling critics would have it – as an“anti-rationalism” (Bang your head here!). Deleuze’s philosophy is a constructivism. Its first principle is
creation
.A reader of Deleuze attached to the critical potentials of his philosophy will object thefollowing: What about
Nietzsche et la philosophie
? This book establishes a very intimaterelationship between critique and creation. One might even think that they are interchangeableterms. They converge in the Nietzschean notion of “evaluation”.
14
And it is true: creation andcritique are aspects of a same philosophical balance of reason allowing us to evaluateexistence according to the criteria of becoming. According to Deleuze, Nietzsche blames Kantfor having severed the tie between judgment and creation, and thereby proposing a critiquethat “does not create values.”
15
But it is the criterion of creation that conditions that of critique. It is not the critical potential that allows us to evaluate a concept we have created.Rather, what a concept is capable of creating is the measure of its critical potential: a conceptrepresents a critical force to the extent that it affirms a power of “thinking otherwise” (
penser
autrement
).
16
In Nietzsche it is sometimes difficult to determine exactly how this relation of mutual conditioning between critique and creation is inclined, leaning sometimes to one side,sometimes to the other. But one should always be careful not to confound Deleuze and the philosopher he is commenting upon: he rarely agrees completely with them. It is only Nietzschean philosophy that “remains abstract and hardly comprehensible if one does notdiscover against whom it is directed.”
17
Deleuze’s philosophy, no less than Nietzsche’s, is ananti-Hegelianism. But, contrary to Nietzsche, it is not this opposition that defines the contoursof the Deleuzian system.The advantage of thinking Deleuze according to this creative vector can be explained better if we consider the consequences of maintaining the opposite. In short, incliningDeleuze’s thought towards a critical philosophy would amount to considering him a badversion of Michel Foucault, a Foucauldian who does not know how to stay within the limitshe has set for his own thought. In a lecture from 1978 in the French Philosophical Society onthe question “What is Critique?,” Foucault explains that all critical thought, including hisown, is necessarily haunted by the fact that it cannot not exist without the thing that itcriticizes.
18
This is the limit that Foucault sets for his own critical thought: it cannot exist inand by itself. The heritage that he claims is that of the Kantian enlightenment.
Sapere
aude!
isfirst of all the courage to propose a
counter power
, a power “to say no to government” (in avery broad sense, to say no to any “direction of the mind” in Cartesian vocabulary). Critiqueis the art of “not being governed like this, not for this, not by them” (
ibid
.). It is in itself amarvelous project, but it does not have anything to do with Deleuze’s, no matter how muchDeleuze himself adapts and bends Foucault’s thought to fit his own in
Foucault
.
19
Deleuze’s ambition is quite different: It is not to think otherwise than a form of thought
x
which has become unbearable, but to make any form of thought
x
think otherwisethan itself, to make it “stammer,” to make it exist by affirming a becoming in it. He is tryingto make existing forms of thought create their own monsters through awkward combinationswith other forms of thought (immaculate conception = disjunctive synthesis).
20
And throughthis perverse eclecticism, he tries to create something that stands up by itself, that
dures
(duration = creative evolution = differing with oneself). The philosophy of immanence is amonument rather than a weapon, a combinatorial art of “
agencements
” rather than thestrategic art of “
dispositifs
” (a Foucauldian notion connoting the strategic distribution of forces in a situation of war). Even when Deleuze is speaking about war-machines, he is building machines, not leading a combat. Contrary to Foucault, he does not primarily criticizeforms of government, but creates a
system for orientation in thought
, an “orientation-machine” as Artaud Villani has called it.
21
Everybody knows it: this is a Kantian theme, this
of 00
Mogens Laerke - Gilles Deleuze and the system of nature and philosophy
262 Reads
Info and Rating
| Category: | |
| Rating: | |
| Upload Date: | 05/04/2011 |
| Copyright: | Attribution Non-commercial |
| Tags: |
Leave a Comment