Wednesday, January 18, 2006
(12:01 AM) | Anonymous:
Happy Deterritorialized Birthday Gilles Deleuze.
Gilles Deleuze would be eighty-one today if he had not taken his own life on the 4th of November ten years ago. Do not expect any grand discussion of his suicide, where one relates it to Spinoza's conception of suicide or Nietzsche's conception of overcoming. That certainly could be done, but I'm not the one to do it. (You all know I'm more suited to comment on how handsome he is in this picture.) I can only express my gratitude for the thought that came from his life and the radical redirection my own thinking took after I experienced reading Deleuze.
In many ways I find myself wanting to pledge my fidelity to Deleuze and Deleuzianism, knowing that this would demand precisely the opposite. It's strange the chance encounters we have with thinkers, the new paths they set us charging down, the new commitments our acceptance of their thought calls for. Those of us who do work in philosophy, especially what goes by the misnomer of European philosophy, are often accussed of guruism. I can't deny that there is some sting in that charge, but why would we ever want to think with those with whom we didn't have a profound respect.
Today I look for a line of escape, knowing that I am all the time being reterritorialized within an insane regime of signs, but looking nonetheless. Happy Birthday Gilles, keep exposing the fissures in our being and following those lines in and through us.
