The Dramatic Power of Events:

The Function of Method in

Deleuze’s Philosophy

Didier Debaise FNRS; ULB – Université Libre de Bruxelles

Translated from French by Alex Feldman, PhD Student at Penn
State University

Abstract
Deleuze’s text on dramatization has a peculiar place in his philosophy.
In this text, he attributes, for the first time in his own name, a singular
function to philosophy. I aim to show that all the notions developed
in ‘The Method of Dramatization’ – such as the transformation of the
status of Ideas, the first development of a theory of individuation, the
decentring of subjectivity, the critique of representation – are part of one
general function: to grant events the importance they call for. If a method
is required for such an endeavour, it is because thought must become the
site of the maximal intensification of what – beyond a psychological or
an anthropological point of view – is of importance.
Keywords: Deleuze, dramatization, constructivism, pragmatism,
Simondon, events

I. The Invention of a New Method

Deleuze’s text ‘The Method of Dramatization’ occupies a unique place
in his work: it establishes a primary function for philosophy, one that
Deleuze develops in his own name. His earlier books already posed this
question, of course, but cautiously, through alliances and reworkings.
From Empiricism and Subjectivity to Nietzsche and Philosophy, with

Deleuze Studies 10.1 (2016): 5–18

DOI: 10.3366/dls.2016.0208
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/journal/dls
6 Didier Debaise

Kant’s Critical Philosophy in between, what was in question for him was
already the new conditions of practising philosophy. The monographs,
moreover, only posed, in an obsessive manner, a single question: what
new function could be attributed to philosophy? The text on the
‘Method of Dramatization’ is in no way removed from this inquiry,
but it occupies within it a position that is strikingly unique, and that
distinguishes it from the earlier texts. It is as though, in a text that at once
synthesises, condenses to the extreme, and heralds the developments of
Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Deleuze seeks to re-
articulate the heterogeneous heritages of his earlier monographs around
a focal point that would give them a new direction. For this reason,
the text on dramatization is, in a certain sense, one of Deleuze’s most
abstract: its sole object is the question of the function of philosophy.
How then should we read the text? Does its interest lie only in
that it allows us to follow the metamorphoses of Deleuze’s work
and, in particular, the passage from the monographs to Difference
and Repetition and The Logic of Sense? Is it only, in the end, a
document from the archives whose only relevance would be its help
in understanding certain parts of Deleuze’s philosophy? Awkwardly
positioned, the text, it would seem, has no consistency of its
own. Furthermore, adding another layer of difficulty, the notion of
dramatization tends to disappear and ceases to occupy anything but
a secondary place in Deleuze’s thought. To be sure, it appears again
several times thereafter, as for example in Difference and Repetition,
but in a more modest and decentred manner, inscribed within a
particular domain. In that book, it incontestably loses its status as a
general method; indeed, the term ‘method’ that had been attached to it
disappears completely.
Nevertheless, the text contains something that is completely
irreducible and that gives it the form of a self-standing manifesto. To
put the question in its most general form: what is the function of
dramatization? The answers in the text are plural: transforming the
status of Ideas, approaching Ideas in terms of the question of thinking
individuation, decentring subjectivity, a critique of representation, etc.
But does this plurality not suggest an attitude of convergence, a necessity
common to the ensemble of displacements carried out therein? The
answer seems to remain in suspense in the text, as if it could only be
given in the margin of each of the problems it treats, as if the necessity of
the method as such must be situated each time in a specific displacement
(of the status of the concept, of the individual, of the construction of
Ideas). It seems to me, however, that there is indeed a general function,
 The Dramatic Power of Events 7

which I would like to characterise in the following way: to give events

the importance that they call for. The sole aim of dramatization is the
intensification of events. It matters little then whether it is treated at
first, as in the opening pages of the text, in terms of the ontological
problem of Ideas or whether, subsequently, it is taken at the level of an
ethics of events. Is it ontological, ethical or aesthetic? These questions
have no meaning, for they presuppose that dramatization belongs to a
particular domain, that it brings along with it conceptual determinations
that would commit it one way or another.
Now, it cannot be repeated enough here that dramatization has
no content of its own, determines no particular experience as such,
and has no ontological value. The title announces something entirely
fundamental, which will tend to disappear to Difference and Repetition:
that it is essentially a matter here of the exposition of a method. It would
be in vain, then, if we sought to find in the text an ontology, a general
theory or a set of propositions ordered in a system. Instead, we should
say of dramatization at this moment in Deleuze’s thought what James
said of pragmatism: ‘It does not stand for any special result. It is a
method only. But the general triumph of that method would mean an
enormous change in what I called in my last lecture the “temperament”
in philosophy’ (James 1997: 97). A method, then, and nothing more.
If we interpret it exclusively in terms of a method, we must view
dramatization as a construction, an artificial attitude, something non-
intuitive engaging thought. Given a concept or an event, the question is
to know how to intensify its importance. And if a method is needed, it is
because the question of intensification, of the increase in importance of
events, is not a natural attitude; it implies a change, an inversion in the
habitual course of thought, a certain askēsis of thought that allows it to
be exercised in a new way.

II. The Constitutive Difference of Dramatization

In every method, there is, as a postulate, a general presupposition or an
initial principle that is posited rather than derived. When Whitehead, for
example develops his speculative philosophy in the terms of a method,1
he does not hesitate to posit creativity as an ultimate and necessarily
indemonstrable principle, referring everything else, including thoughts,
experiences and beings, to accidents or incarnations of creativity. The
first term is posited and justified only through its consequences. The
method of dramatization, needless to say, does not escape this require-
ment. It implies that something is posited that, by necessity, cannot
8 Didier Debaise

be demonstrated, but can only be evaluated by its effects. Deleuze lays

this principle out quite clearly when he writes, ‘Given any concept, we
can always search for its drama’ (Deleuze 2004: 98/137; translation
modified).2 It is a direction given to the method, a movement of thought
that will determine the linking together of the concepts of the drama-
tization. Although such a suggestion at first glance lacks any content of
its own and is limited to indicating a difference between concept and
drama, it is nevertheless fundamental; it determines the very possibility
of the method. Let us take it literally: we see then that two distinct
elements are posited in it. First, the suggestion supposes that there nec-
essarily is at least one drama for each concept. In other words, whatever
the concept under consideration may be, insignificant or major, norma-
tive or descriptive, epistemological or ontological in function, we would
necessarily have to suppose or postulate that there is a drama associated
with it. What is striking here is the extremity of the scope of Deleuze’s
suggestion, for it implies that this link can be neither accidental nor
empirical, but that it belongs to a fundamental or essential dimension of
concepts. There would thus be something in the very nature of concepts,
in their formation or in their genesis that belongs to the realm of drama.
Without this postulate concerning the transcendental dimensions of the
concept, of course, the method of dramatization would have no mean-
ing. Next, Deleuze affirms that the drama is ‘to be searched for’. This
point is just as central as the first since it presupposes that the drama not
only does not clearly belong in the concept with which it is associated,
but also, if we follow the consequences all the way, that it differs from
the concept in nature. In what follows in the text, Deleuze makes use
of the language of inquiry: signs in the concept of an invisible drama, a
silent exercise of an underlying dynamic, indices of a dramatic activity
that is inherent in it. The drama is absolutely hidden and is articulated
in an entirely different logic than that of the concept itself. It is this
difference that the method will carry to its maximal point, as condition
of intensification: two heterogeneous logics that run into each other
without either one of them being able to be taken back into the other.
Deleuze gives an example of this. Starting with the concept of truth,
he sets in place the presupposition of the method, namely that there is
a dual logic that animates the problem of truth, one side of which is
manifest while the other is necessarily hidden:

Take the concept of truth; it is not enough to ask the question: ‘what is the
true?’ As soon as we ask who wants the true, when and where, how and
how much?, we have the task of assigning larval subjects (the jealous man,
 The Dramatic Power of Events 9

for example) and pure spatio-temporal dynamisms (sometimes we cause the

very ‘thing’ to emerge, at a certain time, in a certain place; sometimes we
accumulate indexes and signs from moment to moment, following a path
that never ends). (Deleuze 2004: 98–9/137)

The concept of truth includes a certain number of components specific

to it and yet that vary ceaselessly (as for example in the fluctuations
of the concept of adequation across its history), congealing in the
question ‘what?’ However, the drama that occupies the concept of
truth does not belong to any of truth’s components, but rather to an
entirely heterogeneous logic, carried almost to its maximal different,
and secretly active in the concept; only the pragmatic questions ‘Who?
When? Where? How? and How many?’ allow us to bring it to the
surface:
Then when we learn that the concept of truth in representation is divided in
two directions – the first according to which the true emerges in an intuition
and as itself, the second according to which the true is always concluded
from indices or inferred from something else as that which is not there – we
have no trouble discovering beneath these traditional theories of intuition
and induction, the dynamisms of inquisition or admission, accusation or
inquiry, silently and dramatically at work, in such a way as to determine
the theoretical division of the concept. (Deleuze 2004: 99/137–8)

There are two directions: on the surface, towards the theories of

intuition and induction that form the components of the concept; in
depth, towards the silent drama that accompanies the concept. The first
principle of dramatization posits just this difference in nature between
concepts and dramas that the first principle of dramatization posits, a
difference that finds its justification in the always empirical articulation
of the two. Where does the drama stop? Who are the characters? What
dynamics animate them? The method of dramatization makes no claim
to establish once and for all their coordinates. What it brings to light
is the logic that, below what the concepts claim to be, actually makes
them act.
For this reason, the method of dramatization belongs to a particular
art that Deleuze associated with Nietzsche’s ‘art of distrust’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 5–6/11). It is not surprising that dramatization
appears for the first time in Nietzsche and Philosophy, which remains
quite marked by it. Nietzsche himself develops the Idea in a posthumous
fragment:
Here a philosophy—one of my philosophies—gets a word in, a philosophy
that in no way desires to be called ‘love of truth,’ but which, out of pride
10 Didier Debaise

perhaps, claims a more modest name: a repugnant name even, which thus
for its part contributes to its remaining what it wants to be: a philosophy
for me—with the motto: satis sunt mihi pauci, satis est unus, satis est nullus
[A few are enough for me; and so is one; and so is no one at all].—This
philosophy is called, to wit: the art of distrust, and above its door it writes:
memnēs’ apistein [do not forget to distrust].3

A philosophy of distrust of what the concept claims to be. And if

Nietzsche speaks of it as an art, it is because distrust does not come
down to pessimism or to any affective subjective tonality, but rather to
a technique that must make us sensitive to an essential dimension of
concepts. Nietzsche clarifies its sense and function in another fragment
from the same period:
Up to now, overall, each person trusted in his concepts, as in a miraculous
dowry that had come from some just as miraculous world: but in the end
it was only the bequest of our most distant ancestors, of the slyest and
stupidest. This piety toward what is pre-existent in us is probably due to the
moral element of knowledge. The first need then is for an absolute skepticism
with respect to all traditional concepts of philosophy (a skepticism that one
philosopher perhaps already possessed once—Plato: naturally, he taught the
contrary). (Nietzsche 1967: 215/34[195])

Finishing with the extraordinary ambiguity of a Plato who taught

the opposite of what he did – trust, against the background of an
absolute pessimism – Nietzsche has already laid out the essential terms of
dramatization. The fragment indicates a shift: the fact that piety towards
concepts has become intolerable in the present. A new sensibility is
at work, which is expressed in questions of a new sort: what do
the concepts of truth and objectivity do to those to whom they are
addressed? What wills secretly animate them? Through what narrative
and what techniques of fabulation do they manage to present themselves
as natural? This fragment is not merely central for understanding the
genesis of the dramatic method; Deleuze will also return to it later,
especially in What Is Philosophy?,4 where he announces that necessity
of the creation of concepts.

III. Constructing a New Plane

The method is an art of distrusting given concepts. But this art is not
sufficient, for it can only give us one direction, one possible movement
of thought; it can only indicate the difference between what the concept
expresses explicitly and what it silently sets in motion. To move, then,
 The Dramatic Power of Events 11

directly to the question of the dramatic content of the concept, what

exactly is the drama belonging to each concept? The question seems to
be obvious, and yet with it we are confronted with a major difficulty.
Consider the final sentence of the text on dramatization: ‘Beneath
every representation there is always the Idea and its distinct-obscure
depth, a drama beneath every logos’ (Deleuze 2004: 103/144). On the
one hand, then, we have the concept, representation and logos, which
are not equivalents, but rather occupy a similar place in the logic of
dramatization; on the other hand, we have the drama and the Idea (to
which we will return in more detail), which form the constitutive but
necessarily hidden dynamic of the first grouping. The question can now
be made more precise: how can we grasp the drama, outside of any
concept, any logos or any representation? It is obviously not sufficient to
say that we should simply install thought in the dramatic dimension, for
then the question arises of the conditions of such a sub-representative
experience. We should remember, then, that when Deleuze uses the
terms logos, representation and concept, he does not mean exclusively
clear and distinct consciousness, thereby leaving a margin for other
modalities of experience, such as intuition, sensibility, or imagination;
it is these anthropological and human modalities of experience that are
put into question here as well. As Aline Wiame writes in this issue of
Deleuze Studies, we must keep in mind that ‘Deleuze clearly asserts that
looking for a psychology or anthropology in the drama of Ideas would
be a misunderstanding since this drama does not privilege mankind in
any way.’ Hence, the drama is not the site of any direct experience, of
a vision or apprehension that would manifest it in an immediate form
freed from its conceptual moorings. Drama can be an object of thought
only in an indirect and truly constructed form.
To put it in the form of a paradox, one might say that drama is
discovered only insofar as it is first constructed or invented. If thought
did not construct beforehand what it was looking for, drama could never
appear in the conceptual order in the form of signs and indices. For this
reason, the interpretation I am putting forward of the dramatization
text points toward a form of constructivism whose leitmotiv would
be: thought is capable of moving beyond its natural condition (that
is, its tendency to the generalisation of the forms of anthropological
experience) through the construction of absolutely abstract entities.5
My usage of the term ‘constructivism’ is perhaps surprising in the case
of ‘The Method of Dramatization’. Indeed, in that period, the term
is not mentioned a single time by Deleuze, and we will have to wait
until What Is Philosophy? for it to enter into his lexicon. It is only
12 Didier Debaise

in the latter text that Deleuze will be able to write: ‘Every thought is
a Fiat, expressing a throw of the dice: constructivism’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 75/73) or: ‘Constructivism disqualifies all discussion—
which holds back the necessary constructions—just as it exposes all the
universals of contemplation, reflection, and communication as sources
of what are called “false problems” emanating from the illusions
surrounding the plane’ (82/79). Is not the same requirement to pose and
construct the conditions of a problem already operative in the method
of dramatization? In What Is Philosophy?, the object of constructivism
is the concept insofar as it is created, whereas in ‘The Method of
Dramatization’, it is the Idea as such, the dramatic Idea underlying
the concept. But if the site of investment of constructivism as well as
the terms have changed somewhat, the necessities that animate it have
remained similar.
To understand the form of constructivism that is implied in
dramatization, we will need to look at the Idea. There is no need here to
examine all of the aspects of the Idea as deployed by Deleuze, a project
that would inevitably lead us into the treatment of it in Difference and
Repetition. Our question is not therefore to know what the Idea is
in general, nor is it a matter of its characteristics, nor of the history,
particularly on the neo-Kantian side, in which Deleuze situates it. What
interests us is exclusively the status, such as it is posed at that moment,
of the Idea insofar as it pertains to method. Our problem is thus more
circumscribed: to what modality of thought does the Idea refer? How
does this notion of the Idea allow us to have the experience of a drama
while remaining on this side of our faculties of knowledge? In a word,
what interests us in the notion of the Idea is that it is the condition
for a thought that goes beyond all anthropological experience, beyond
the anthropological limitations of knowledge. The central point then is
that the Idea is uncoupled from all inscription in a faculty (sensibility,
imagination or reason) and that it is defined solely as a distribution, a
mode of relation between singularities. It designates only this mode of
distribution, this field of singularities, and consequently Deleuze only
gives a very brief account of the fact that it belongs to a pre-individual
and impersonal space.
But the question we have posed remains: why is this space of
distribution of singularities the site of a constructivism proper to the
method of dramatization? To respond, we must clarify the terms in
which the very notion of the Idea is posited: what is a singularity?
How can singularities be distributed and form the dramatic space that
underlies every concept? Deleuze, especially in The Logic of Sense, gives
 The Dramatic Power of Events 13

several definitions of singularities that round out the ‘The Method of

Dramatization’ on this point: ‘Singularities are distributed in a properly
problematic field and crop up in this field as topological events to which
no direction is attached’ (Deleuze 1990: 104/127). This passage indicates
two things that are central for understanding the relationship between
singularities and the Idea. First, Deleuze here repeats something that he
insists on constantly throughout both the text on dramatization and
The Logic of Sense: singularities are not attached to any direction;
they are topological events. The reason behind such insistence is that
Deleuze wants to free singularities as radically as possible from all
intentionality, finality or logical order that would refer them once again
back to a form of representation. Singularities burst forth like cracks in
an equilibrium, like bifurcations, or tipping points, as I will come back to
later. Next, what seems to me just as fundamental in this passage is the
absolutely indissociable link between singularities and the constitution
of a ‘problematic field’. By emphasising the strict relationship between
the two, one which is not exterior but which rather defines the very
existence of the singularities, Deleuze intends to carry out a reductio
ad absurdum on every conception of singularities as such, on every
conception in which they would be taken as beings existing in their own
right and perceivable in their own reality. The notion of singularity has
no signification or consistency if we do not bring it back directly to its
function in a problematic field.
To make this clearer, we will have to return briefly to Deleuze’s
use of Simondon’s philosophy during this period: Deleuze borrowed
from him the notion of ‘pre-individual singularity’ and ‘problematic’
and also dedicated a brief but intense review to him in 1966 in the
Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger – one year before
the text on dramatization. Simondon defines singularities by functions:
they are cracks in an equilibrium,6 triggers of individuation, points of
bifurcation in a pre-individual field. He gives very brief examples of
them: a singularity ‘can be the stone that triggers the dune, the gravel
that is the germ of an island in an alluvial flow’ (Simondon 1964: 36).
The stone is obviously not a singularity in itself, nor is the pebble of
gravel, in which case they would be individuals in Simondon’s sense, but
rather it is the stone-that-triggers-the-dune, a crack in the equilibrium
of a highly tensed space or problematic field that is indeed a singularity.
Simondon harbours many legitimate reservations, like Deleuze himself,
about the use of examples; always too close to the objects of experience,
they induce a falsified vision of singularities. These examples should
merely be occasions for a ‘leap of imagination’ toward the most abstract
14 Didier Debaise

dimensions of singularities, expressed solely in functionalist terms such

as cracks, germs, bifurcations, ruptures of equilibrium. In The Logic of
Sense, Deleuze’s examples are particularly close to Simondon’s vision of
singularities:
Singularities are points of fusion, condensation and boiling; points of tears
and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, ‘sensitive’ points. Such
singularities, however, should not be confused either with the personality of
the one expressing herself in discourse, or with the individuality of a state of
affairs designated by a proposition, or even with the generality or universality
of a concept signified by a figure or a curve. (Deleuze 1990: 52/67)

The points of fusion and condensation of The Logic of Sense correspond

to the cracks in equilibrium, the points of bifurcation or the triggers
of individuation. But it bears repeating that it is the most abstract of
the singularities that interest Simondon and Deleuze. Has anyone ever
experienced a point of condensation or fusion? Can we imagine what
a point of sadness or joy – that is, the singular moment of the passage
from one to the other – could be? We feel and we undergo, certainly,
what a joy can be in the duration and extension proper to it, in the
tonalities that inhabit it, but what about the limit point of joy, the
moment where it bifurcates toward something else? Deleuze calls these
singularities ‘the true transcendental events’ (Deleuze 1990: 103/124) in
order to distinguish them from empirical events.
What exactly then is the status of the singularities and of the
problematic field? Simondon inscribes them within the framework of
a philosophy of nature that is in the lineage of Anaximander’s physis:
One could call nature this pre-individual reality that the individual carries
with him, seeking to recover in the word nature the signification that it
had for the pre-Socratics; the Ionian philosophers saw in it the origin all
of the species of being, anterior to individuation; nature is the reality of
the possible underneath the species of that apeiron from which, according
to Anaximander, all individuated form emerges: nature is not the contrary
of man, but the first phase of being, the second being the opposition of the
individual and milieu, which complements that of the individual with respect
to the whole. (Simondon 1989: 196)

The notions of singularity and of problematic field, or metastable

space, thus have an uncontestably fundamental ontological status in
Simondon. Singularities designate the primordial forms of being from
which substantial and individual existence derive:
We would like to show that a reversal must be carried out in the search for
the principle of individuation, and that we can do this by considering as
 The Dramatic Power of Events 15

primordial the operation of individuation from which the individual comes

to exist and whose unfolding, regime, and finally modalities he reflects in his
characteristics. (Simondon 1989: 12)

Deleuze finds in singularities the same elements, the same requirements;

the text on dramatization, however, deploys them in a domain that is
apparently more limited, for, as I have been arguing, the problem posed
by the text is only the constitution of a method. All concepts of the text
can thus be interpreted as instruments of this method. We do not have
to ask whether singularities have the status of existing apart from the
method, nor whether nature is indeed composed, as Simondon affirms
in the passages just cited, of pre-individual singularities. The method of
dramatization concerns only the conditions of possibility of an ontology
freed from repetition. To put the same point differently, Deleuze’s
interest in the text is not to propose an ontology or a philosophy of
nature, but to establish a method that would allow him to restore to
thought its dramatic dimensions. Only after that can a new ontology
truly take form.
Picking up where we left off on method, let us pose the question of
the status of singularities. A point of fusion, a crack in an equilibrium, a
tipping point are all pure abstractions and are not objects of a possible
experience; they are constructions, artefacts of thought, pure beings of
the imagination whose function is to bring to light, underneath the
regularity of an experience or of a spatio-temporal event, dimensions of
another order. Singularities intensify the sense of an event. Hence, if joy
or sadness are given as empirical events, what makes them necessary and
important belongs, beyond all psychology, to the capacity of thought to
dramatize them, to intensify all the moments of overturning, of cracking,
of imperceptible breaks. This is the meaning I would like to give to the
imperative laid out in the text, according to which what is at issue is
to give the events a ‘transcendent bearing, beyond empirical examples’
(Deleuze 2004: 98/136; translation modified).

IV. Resisting Stupidity

Let us clarify then how the Idea as distribution of singularities can
become the site of an intensification of importance. In Simondon’s
example, as well as Deleuze’s, we also come back to the difference
between the space of the regularity and continuity of events, so familiar
to our experience, and the remarkable points (points remarquables),
16 Didier Debaise

which remain on this side of all possible experience. It is this new

function that Deleuze attributes to thought:

The problem of thought is tied not to essences but to the evaluation of

what is important and what is not, to the distribution of singular and
regular, distinctive and ordinary points, which takes place entirely within
the inessential or within the description of a multiplicity, in relation to the
ideal events which constitute the conditions of a problem. (Deleuze 1994:
189–90/245)

If Ideas have a sense, it is insofar as they, once returned to their true

dramatic conditions, allow us to free the noteworthy or remarkable
dimension in the event: its importance. The method of dramatization
implies, then, a profoundly artificial attitude. The usual role of concepts,
after all, is to extend a practical activity, and that means composing an
order of regularity and continuity, the conditions of all prediction or
anticipation.
The Idea has no other purpose than that of an intensification of the
difference between the distinctive and the regular. Now, Deleuze starts
from an unusual observation that will give the method of dramatization
all of its necessity: rarely has the confusion of the distinctive and the
regular been so celebrated. From the image of the sciences to the norma-
tive forms of experience, with ethics in between, we find ourselves today
in the midst of a growing indistinction between the singular and the
regular, the distinctive and the ordinary. Thought, caught in the repre-
sentative order, seems to have lost the sense of importance. The danger
haunting thought in its contemporary form is what Deleuze designates
with the term stupidity (bêtise), which, from Nietzsche and Philosophy
to Difference and Repetition, with ‘The Method of Dramatization’ in
between, forms one of his constant obsessions in this period. Thus, in
Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze writes, ‘When someone asks “what’s
the use of philosophy?” the reply must be aggressive, since the question
tries to be ironic and caustic. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turn-
ing stupidity into something shameful’ (Deleuze 1983: 106/120). In the
end, the method’s sole requirement, what renders it indispensable and
what Deleuze, from the book on Nietzsche on, associates with the very
vocation of philosophy, is to resist stupidity. We would be wrong to treat
stupidity as an accident of thought, an empirical or simply psychological
situation; what the term designates for Deleuze is the majoritarian form
of thinking, its fundamental tendency. Deleuze repeats this sentiment
several times in Nietzsche and Philosophy: ‘Stupidity is a structure of
thought as such: it is not a means of self-deception, it expresses the
 The Dramatic Power of Events 17

non-sense in thought by right’ (Deleuze 1983: 105/120) but also in

Difference and Repetition: ‘Stupidity is defined above all by its perpet-
ual confusion with regard to the important and the unimportant, the
ordinary and the singular’ (Deleuze 1994: 190/245). Deleuze invokes
no exteriority that would place us once and for all outside the dangers
of a thought that confuses the distinctive and the ordinary, for which
everything is worthy of being thought and anything could be the object
of attention. Such a form of thinking has lost the sense of the difference,
the intensity of what is important at a given moment. If we need a
method, it is because we must move toward new ways of exercising
thought, ways unknown to our current uses. Thought must become the
site of the intensification of what is important, beyond all psychology or
anthropology. In this way, ‘The Method of Dramatization’ takes up the
requirement established by Bergson in The Creative Mind: ‘Philosophy
should be an effort to go beyond the human condition’ (Bergson 1948:
227/218; translation modified).

Notes
1. I am thinking here principally of the opening pages of Process and Reality, where
Whitehead defines speculative philosophy: ‘This course of lectures is designed as
an essay in Speculative Philosophy. Its first task must be to define “speculative
philosophy,” and to defend it as a method productive of important knowledge’
(Whitehead 1978: 4). For a more detailed analysis of the characteristics of this
method and of its contemporary relevance, I take the liberty of referring the
reader to my book (Debaise 2006).
2. Throughout, the second page number refers to the non-English edition.
3. [Translator’s note: Unfortunately, there is to date no complete translation of the
1967 critical edition of Nietzsche’s work in English, as there is in French. In
their translation of What Is Philosophy?, Tomlinson and Burchell cite the 1968
Kaufmann–Hollingdale translation of The Will to Power (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 219 n.6), but I have been unable to locate the fragment in that volume. The
passage in question dates from 1885 and is numbered 34[196] in the system that
Colli and Montinari, the editors of the German, have used; for the French, cf.
Nietzsche 1967: 215–16. I have translated this and the following fragment from
the German, but have borne in mind the decisions of the French translators.]
4. See in particular Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 6–7/11–12.
5. On the importance of a redefinition of the notion of abstraction, cf. Stengers
2011.
6. The notion of equilibrium here refers to what Simondon calls a ‘metastable’
equilibrium, that is, a tensed equilibrium, beyond stability, linked by a strong
potential energy. Without this metastable equilibrium, a singularity could in
no case ‘crack an equilibrium’. It is the fragile and unstable character of a
heterogeneous relation that gives the singularity the possibility to transform the
equilibrium.
18 Didier Debaise

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