Thursday, November 02, 2006
(5:01 AM) | Anonymous:
Recent Trends in English Language Deleuze Scholarship.
N.B.: I'm not very happy with this post, but I spent enough time writing it I thought I should put it out there. If it faciliates any discussion I'll be happy, but please don't take this as a final statement of mine on anything or anyone. Also I want to say thank you to everyone who donated. I am able to go see Stengers and I'll even be able to eat. A special thank you goes out to Ms. thought who is ever the gracious host or host arranger. Seriously, best person I've met on this god forsaking rock (England). I'll do my best when I report on the event.That there is now a Deleuze industry is both troubling and exhilarating to me. That I ever read Deleuze at all is strange, since my education began as a theologian under a man very entrenched in the transcendental theology of Barth. Philosophically, in those early days, I was more attracted to Derrida and others who would teach me to read cleverly and whose philosophy was all about 'openness'. I won't pretend that I didn't read naively at this point. I have to credit a review of Daniel Bell's The Refusal to End Suffering with the first mention of Deleuze, in a provocative statement about there being only slaves with no masters in the current situation. Being attracted to Nietzsche through fear of losing my faith (and hope!) but still being highly liberal (not quite left at this stage) this thesis was attractive. And so when I went to Barnes and Noble and, strangely enough, saw Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy I bought it and struggled to get through it. It was different from anything I'd read before, from any of the other philosophers who I had been attracted to (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Derrida) and I didn't know how to read it. Then I ordered Anti-Oedipus and looked at it, often while taking a shit (Sinthome should like that), in complete confusion. I was 20 and my education before college was not what I would call good. The most philosophically inclined training I received was from a Christian apologist who did not fit with my punk rock ways. All philosophy was confusing at this point, but this was a different confusion. This made no sense to me at all when I attempted to read it 'academically', which at this point meant little. I finally made it through the book when I was in Paris and had the time to struggle through it. I was 21 and the day I finished it I wrote a letter to my friend Sarah with huge chunks of quotations scribbled in my infantile handwriting. Something about it made sense in the context of our friendship. That I read both Anti-Oedipus, Goodchild's Capitalism and Religion, and five books of Nietzsche's at this time says something about the speed in which I move through thought. I still tarry with these three more than anything else, to the point that I feel like I've internalized Nietzsche even when he doesn't accord with my essence. I've read Deleuze's Nietzsche book five times, each time slowly, and it remains, perhaps naively, at the centre of my understanding. Everything in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is just a building upon that book, a going further with Nietzsche's thought (further than poor Nietzsche could have gone). And the only undergraduate paper I think had any originality dealt with this book and his advancement in the book on Foucault.
That long preamble serves as a kind of confession. I think it is obvious to see that I rarely read books as an academic. Nietzsche I read to lose my faith completely, because I wanted it gone. Deleuze and Goodchild I read because I wanted to have some conceptual tools with which to understand the current situation. Reading Anti-Oedipus I had no interest in psychoanalysis (still do not), but in Capitalism and it's going beyond. I read him and he allowed me to embrace life in its chaos, a reading that is now suspect to many academic Deleuzians. But I don't read that way, I read ethically - which may be a kind of naivety.
With that, take these comments with a grain of salt. There have been some serious improvements in Deleuze scholarship lately. Perhaps this is in part a response to the poor reading by Zizek and the reductionary one given by Badiou in The Clamour of Being (Deleuze is not a neo-Platonist and artificially detaching him from the work done with Guattari obscures much of his thought). I see a few new things coming out of this. There is a kind of Lacanian Deleuze rising that takes seriously some of the historical evidence concerning the ambiguous relationship between A-O and Lacan himself (though the school of Lacan is surely under attack). Daniel W. Smith seems to be going in this direction in recent articles and his book, may it ever be published, may touch on this more deeply. The other move is towards taking Deleuze as a philosopher more seriously. Much of the secondary work on Deleuze in the English-speaking academy has focused on a 'critical theory' Deleuze and has done some interesting things with his thought in relation to art and aesthetics. Often times these readings take a very moral reading of Deleuze, making hard moral distinctions between his concepts that are not actually there. The danger present in this new move against this moralism is a kind of scholasticism, which I read as a further artificial detaching of Guattari from his philosophy. While new books coming out on certain concepts in Deleuze's philosophy are welcome, I worry that these will facilitate quibbling over p's and q's instead of facilitating new ways of thinking which would be to truly take Deleuze seriously. The other trend coming out is a kind of scientific Deleuze, of the DeLanda/Protevi stripe. There are some interesting things here as well, though I think it is predicated on a collapsing of the virtual with the possible and ignores the historical context surrounding the philosophy. This move doesn’t seem to have the support DeLanda assumes for it and that his whole project seems predicated upon it is troubling. Coupled with his distaste for the political stance of Deleuze and Guattari and we have a depoliticised scientific Deleuze, though Protevi’s work attempts to heal that. His own work in Deleuze and Geophilosophy creates some interesting inroads into geography and other hard earth sciences, but it remains underdetermined.
In my own reading I tend to do an ecological reading of Deleuze that some seem to see as highly suspect (a reading I premise in part on the importance of Guattari for Deleuze). Rightfully so, since I have yet to articulate it in a coherent manner as I plan to make steps towards in my masters thesis. Coupled with my attachment to the Bergsonian aspects of Deleuze and I find myself out of the mainstream of the new scholasticism. Which is fine, if at the end of the day it turns out that Deleuze will be read as a dead academic, I want no part of it. If Deleuze is as highly ethical as I read him, following Goodchild, then these scholastic elements will go more towards constructing a Deleuzianism on par with the Spinozism that so distorted Spinoza. Perhaps what is needed then is critical readings of Deleuze on par with his own books where we create a zone of indeterminacy between Deleuze and our own thinking.
Another question is what relation Deleuze will have with the two new big issues in philosophy (as I see them): religion and nature. Neither of these words have hard determinate meanings, but both are the fundamental problem of contemporary philosophy and both are present in Deleuze’s thought in ways very contrary to what has been hegemonic in philosophy. But, again, that remains incoherent until I can explicate more clearly.
