by Daniel Smith
31.
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), esp. 81–125. See also LS 142–53 (“On the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy”).
32.
See EPS 273–320 (Chapters 17–19), and NP 147–98 (Chapter 5).
33.
See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 25–30.
34.
For Deleuze and Guattari's development of the concept of the “minor,” see TP 105–6, 291–2, 469–73, and K 16–27.
35.
N 177–82. See also the analyses in Paul Virilio, Speed and Politiøcs, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986).
36.
On these interrelated Foucauldian themes, see F 115–19.
Essay 10: Politics
Flow, Code, and Stock: A Note on Deleuze's Political Philosophy
1.
This article is an excerpt from a set of lectures given at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, 13–31 July 2009, in Città di Castello, Italy, organized by Peg Birmingham, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. An early version was presented as a paper at ConnectDeleuze, the Second International Deleuze Studies conference at the University of Cologne on 10–13 August 2009, organized by Leyla Haferkamp and Hanjo Berressem.
2.
I can give no notion by references or citations of what this paper owes to previous studies of Anti-Oedipus, notably Eugene Holland, Deleuze and Guattari's “Anti-Oedipus”: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1999), Nick Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), and Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari's “Anti-Oedipus”: A Reader's Guide (London: Continuum, 2008), as well as the articles included in the special issue of Deleuze Studies (2009) “Deleuze and Marx,” Vol. 3, Supplement (Sept 2009). On the relation of Marx and Keynes, see Antonio Negri, Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis, and New Social Subjects (1967–1983) (London: Red Notes, 1983).
3.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “In Flux,” in Félix Guattari, Chaosophy, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995), 98. See also 14 Dec 1971: “It is not yet important for us to have a real definition of flows, but it is important, as a starting point, to have a nominal definition and this nominal definition must provide us with an initial system of concepts.”
4.
Paul Virilio has shown that the problem for the police is not one of confinement (Foucault), but concerns the flux of the “highways,” speed or acceleration, the mastery and control of speed, circuits and grids set up in open space. See F 42.
5.
Deleuze and Guattari provide a similar list in TP 468: “The four principal flows that torment the representatives of the world economy, or of the axiomatic, are the flow of matter-energy, the flow of population, the flow of food, and the urban flow.”
6.
Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, rev. 7th edn. (New York: Touchstone, 1999).
7.
N 171. Jacques Derrida made a similar claim in Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale, Paris: Galilée, 1993), 101: “Marxism remains at once indispensable and structurally insufficient but provided that one transforms and adapts it to new conditions.” See also the analyses in Alain Badiou, D'un désastre obscur: droit, état, politique (Paris: Éditions de l'Aube, 1991), and Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, Communists Like Us (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).
8.
Jean-François Lyotard, “Energumen Capitalism” (review of Anti-Oedipus), Critique 306 (Nov 1972), 923–56.
9.
Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009).
10.
See AO 116:
From the beginning of this study we have maintained both that social production and desiring-production are one and the same, and that they have differing regimes, with the result that a social form of production exercises an essential repression of desiring-production, and also that desiring-production—a “real” desire—is potentially capable of demolishing the social form.
11.
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, 1964). Deleuze seems to have relied in part on a study of Keynes by Daniel Antier entitled L’Étude des flux et des stocks (Paris: Sedes, 1957); see 14 Dec 1971.
12.
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin, 2008), 121. In speaking of desire, Keynes often had recourse to the phrase “animal spirits”:
Most of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits … and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitiative probabilities. (Keynes, The General Theory, 161)
13.
Dynamic systems theory was formalized by Jay W. Forrester in his Principles of Systems, 2nd edn. (New York: Pegasus, 1968), who referred to stocks as “levels,” and to flows as “rates.”
14.
One can point to many examples of “decoding” that Deleuze does not mention. In the Middle Ages, for instance, usury, the lending of money at interest, was considered to be a sin—whence the figure of Jewish moneylenders such as Shylock, who were not subject to the Christian restriction: a line of flight in an otherwise overcoded economy. Similarly, it was not until 1971, a few months before Anti-Oedipus was published, that the U.S. dollar was removed from the gold standard and instead allowed to float freely on the exchange market—a further decoding of money that broke the centuries-old link between money and precious metal.
15.
TP 453. Bernard Schmitt, in his Monnaie, salaires et profits (Paris: PUF, 1966), advanced a profound theory of money that Deleuze has drawn heavily from, describing the full body of capital as “a flow possessing the power of mutation” that does not enter into income and is not assigned to purchases, a pure availability, non-possession and non-wealth. See AO 237 and N 152.
16.
See AO 290: “Molecular biology teaches us that it is only the DNA that is reproduced, and not the proteins. Proteins are both products and units of production; they are what constitute the unconscious as a cycle or as the auto-production of the unconscious.”
17.
TP 10, citing Rémy Chauvin, Entretiens sur la sexualité, ed. Max Aron, Robert Courrier, and Étienne Wolf (Paris: Plon, 1969).
18.
TP 10–11, citing François Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spellman (New York: Pantheon, 1973).
19.
See AO 141–2:
The social machine is literally a machine, independently of any metaphor, in that it presents an immobile motor and undertakes diverse kinds of cuts: selection [prélèvement] from the flows, detachments from the chain, distribution of parts. Coding the flows implies all these operations. This is the highest task of the social machine, in that the selections [prélèvements] of production correspond to detachments from the chain, resulting in a residual share for each member, in a global system of desire and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of recording, and the productions of consumption.
Essay 11: Desire
Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics
1.
A shorter version of this paper was originally presented as a talk in the “Ethics and Recent Critical Theory” lecture series at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, on 30 November 2005, organized by Gregory Flaxman.
2.
N 135: “Everything tended toward the great Spinoza–Nietzsche identity.” Deleuze devoted a full-length monograph and a shorter introductory volume to both of these thinkers: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and Nietzsche (1965); Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1
968) and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970; revised and expanded edition, 1981).
3.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay 1, §17, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 491.
4.
See WP 74:
There is not the slightest reason for thinking that modes of existence need transcendent values by which they could be compared selected, and judged relative to one another. There are only immanent criteria. A possibility of life is evaluated through itself in the movements its lays out and the intensities it creates on a plane of immanence: what is not laid out or created is rejected. A mode of existence is good or bad, noble or vulgar, complete or empty, independently of Good or Evil or any transcendent value: there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life.
5.
For instance, in a famous text, which parallels Nietzsche's analyses in the Genealogy of Morals, Spinoza argues that the notion of the Law arose among the Hebrews from a misunderstanding of affective relations. When God forbade Adam to eat the fruit of the Garden of Eden, he did so because he knew it would affect Adam's body like a poison, decomposing its constitutive relation. But Adam, unable to perceive these affective relations, mistook the prohibition for a commandment, the effect of decomposition as a punishment, and the word of God as a Law. Spinoza, Letter 19, to Blijenbergh, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley, 2nd edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 357–61. On the important question, “Can there be inherently evil modes of existence?” see Deleuze's article, “The Letters on Evil (Correspondence with Blyenbergh),” in SPP 30–43.
6.
See AO 29: “The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly: ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’” Deleuze is referring to a text in Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), Preface, 3:
The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honor, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man.
7.
I should note that Deleuze himself rarely uses the language of “drives”; in NP, he instead utilizes the language of “forces” in analyzing Nietzsche's work. See also AO 35: “It is certainly not in relation to drives that sufficient current definitions can be given to the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic; for drives are simply the desiring-machines themselves. They can only be defined in relation to modern territorialities.”
8.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1982), §119, 76.
9.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1980), Vol. 9, Notebook 6, §70, as cited in Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: The Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 292. My discussion here is indebted to Parkes's work.
10.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), §481, 267.
11.
Nietzsche, Daybreak, §109, 64–5. See Parkes's analysis in Composing the Soul, Chapter 8, “Dominions of Drives and Persons,” 273–318, especially 290–2.
12.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §36, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 237.
13.
Parkes, Composing the Soul, 292.
14.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §19, in Basic Writings, 215–17.
15.
Nietzsche, Daybreak, §119, 74.
16.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, §387, 208.
17.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §307, 245–6.
18.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §§116 and 115, 174.
19.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §36, in Basic Writings, 237–8:
Suppose nothing else were “given” except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other “reality” besides the reality of our drives … : Is it not permitted to make the experiment and to ask the question whether this “given” would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or “material”) world? … In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands it.
20.
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, §13, in Basic Writings, 480–1.
21.
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, §13, in Basic Writings, 482.
22.
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Essay II, §16, in Basic Writings, 520–1, as quoted in NP 128.
23.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), notably Chapters 20 and 21. For a related text, see The Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), Leibniz's Fifth Paper, §§14–17, 58–60.
24.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §357, 305.
25.
Leibniz, New Essays, 165, 188.
What usually drives us are those minute insensible perceptions which could be called sufferings that we cannot become aware of, if the notion of suffering did not involve awareness … We are never completely in equilibrium and can never be evenly balanced between two options. (188)
26.
Leibniz, New Essays, 166:
These impulses are like so many little springs trying to unwind and so driving our machine along … That is why we are never indifferent, even when we appear to be most so, as for instance over whether to turn left or right at the end of a lane. For the choice that we make arises from these insensible stimuli, which … make us find one direction of movement more comfortable than another.
27.
Nietzsche, Daybreak, §129, 129.
28.
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen, 1913), 171, 176.
Essay 12: Life
“A Life of Pure Immanence”: Deleuze's “Critique et clinique” Project
1.
Deleuze's Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty is an expansion of ideas first developed in “De Sacher-Masoch au masochisme,” in Arguments 5/21 (Jan–Apr 1961), 40–6. See also the short but important interview with Madeleine Chapsal, “Mysticism and Masochism,” in DI 131–4.
2.
N 142: “I've dreamed about bringing together a series of studies under the general title Critique et clinique.” For other explicit references to the project, see M 15; LS 83, 92, 127–8, 237–8; and D 120, 141. François Dosse, in his Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), notes that “most of the unpublished articles that appeared in Essays Critical and Clinical were written in Limousin,” the locale of the Deleuze family's summer house (359).
3.
See DR xv: “A philosophical concept can never be confused with a scientific function or an artistic construction, but finds itself in affinity with these in this or that domain of science or style of art.” Deleuze and Guattari analyze the precise relations between philosophy, art, science, and logic in WP. On philosophy's need for such “intercessors” or mediators, see
N 123–6.
4.
TRM 176. Deleuze was responding to a question concerning the “genre” of A Thousand Plateaus, but his response is equally applicable to all his books.
5.
Deleuze has established numerous such links in his works—between, for instance, Chekhov's short stories and Foucault's “Infamous Men” (N 108, 150); between Shakespeare's Hamlet and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (ECC 28); between Alfred Jarry and Martin Heidegger (ECC 91–8); and in the cinema, between Kierkegaard and Dreyer, and between Pascal and Bresson (MI 114–16). One might note that Stanley Cavell presents his own interest in the cinema in similar terms:” I discuss the blanket in It Happened One Night in terms of the censoring of human knowledge and aspiration in the philosophy of Kant; and I see the speculation of Heidegger exemplified or explained in the countenance of Buster Keaton.” See “The Thought of Movies,” in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6–7.