Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  6.

  Gilles Deleuze, “Lettre-préface,” in Mireille Buydens, Sahara: L'Esthétique de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 5; and N 143. The term “non-organic life” is derived from Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic (London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927), 41–2, who used it to describe the vitality of the abstract line in Gothic art (see TP 496–8).

  7.

  Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, Book 3, Chapter 3, in The Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 443.

  8.

  See NP 1: “We always have the beliefs, feelings, and thoughts we deserve, given our way of being or our style of life.” On the distinction between ethics and morality, see N 100, 114–15; and SPP 17–29. Règles facultatives is a term Deleuze adopts from the sociolinguist William Labov to designate “functions of internal variation and no longer constants” (F 146–7 n18).

  9.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay 1, §17, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 491.

  10.

  N 143; WP 171. See Deleuze's summary of Melville's conception of the relation of the novel to “Life” in ECC 81–2:

  Why should the novelist believe he is obligated to explain the behavior of his characters, and to supply them with reasons, whereas life for its part never explains anything and leaves in its creatures so many indeterminate, obscure, indiscernible zones that defy any attempt at clarification? It is life that justifies; it has no need of being justified … The founding act of the American novel, like that of the Russian novel, was to take the novel far from the order of reasons, and to give birth to characters who exist in nothingness, survive only in the void, defy logic and psychology, and keep their mystery until the end … The novel, like life, has no need of justification.

  11.

  Deleuze was responding to a question posed to him during the Cerisy colloquium on Nietzsche in 1972; see Nietzsche aujourd'hui (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 10/18, 1973), Vol. 1, Intensities, 186–7. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari have distanced themselves from certain Heideggerian problematics that Derrida has taken up: “The death of metaphysics or the overcoming of philosophy has never been a problem for us” (WP 9). Deleuze none the less cites Derrida on numerous occasions, and the many lines of convergence between their respective works remain to be explored.

  12.

  M 133. The history of medicine, Deleuze suggests, can therefore be regarded under at least two aspects. The first is the history of diseases, which may disappear, recede, reappear, or alter their form depending on numerous external factors (the appearance of new microbes or viruses, altered technological and therapeutic techniques, and changing social conditions). But intertwined with this is the history of symptomatology, which is a kind of “syntax” of medicine that sometimes follows and sometimes precedes changes in therapy or the nature of diseases: symptoms are isolated, named, and regrouped in various manners. While external factors can make new symptomatologies possible, they can never determine them as such. See, for instance, Deleuze's comments on post-World War II developments in symptomatology in N 132–3.

  13.

  See LS 237: “From the perspective of Freud's genius, it is not the complex which provides us with information about Oedipus and Hamlet, but rather Oedipus and Hamlet who provide us with information about the complex.”

  14.

  See, in particular, Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Philosopher as Cultural Physician” (1873), in Philosophy and Truth, ed. Daniel Brezeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 67–76, though the idea of the philosopher as a physician of culture occurs throughout Nietzsche's writings. For Deleuze's analysis of the symptomatological method in Nietzsche, see NP x, 3, 75, 79, 157.

  15.

  On all these points, see the important passage in AO 132–6, especially on the status of psychosis in literature (Artaud). For Freud, the libido does not invest the social field as such except on the condition that it be “desexualized” and “sublimated”; any sexual libidinal investment having a social dimension therefore seems to him to bear witness to a pathogenic state, either a “fixation” in narcissism or a “regression” to pre-Oedipal states. For Deleuze's reflections on the present state of “the space of literature” and the fragile conditions for the literary production, see N 22–3, 128–31. On the effect of marketing on both literature and philosophy, see Deleuze's critique of the “new philosophers,” “À propos des nouveaux philosophes et d'un problème plus général,” Minuit 4, supplement (5 Jun 1977), n.p.

  16.

  See Gilles Deleuze, “De Sacher-Masoch au masochisme,” in Arguments 5/21 (Jan–Apr 1961), 40–6: 40. For an analysis of the role of the “sexual instinct,” whose various transformations and inversions were used to account for the “perversions” in nineteenth-century psychiatry, see Arnold I. Davidson, “Closing Up the Corpses,” in The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1–29.

  17.

  Deleuze summarizes the results of his clinical analyses in eleven propositions in the last paragraph of the book (M 134). For the analyses of Sade's and Masoch's literary techniques, see M 25–35. For the relation to minorities, see M 9–10, 93; N 142.

  18.

  DI 133. “Mystique et masochisme,” 12–13. Asked why he had treated only Sade and Masoch from this point of view, Deleuze replied,

  There are others, in fact, but their work has not yet been recognized under the aspect of a creative symptomatology, as was the case with Masoch at the start. There is a prodigious table [tableau] of symptoms corresponding to the work of Samuel Beckett: not that it is simply a question of identifying an illness: but the world as symptom, and the artist as symptomatologist. (DI 132)

  19.

  See N 142: “The Recherche is a general semiology, a symptomatology of different worlds.”

  20.

  See Deleuze's discussion of the three components of the “critique et clinique” project in D 120–3; the third component (lines of flight) is discussed in the latter sections of this essay.

  21.

  Gilles Deleuze, “Schizophrénie et positivité du désir,” in Encyclopédie Universalis (Paris: Encyclopédie Universalis France, 1972), Vol. 14, 735; English translation in TRM 17–28.

  22.

  The definition of schizophrenia as a process has a complex history. When Émile Kraepelin tried to ground his concept of dementia praecox (“premature senility”), he defined it neither by causes nor by symptoms, but by a process, by an evolution and a terminal state; but he conceived of this terminal state as a complete and total disintegration, which justified the confinement of the patient in an asylum while awaiting his death. Deleuze and Guattari's notion is closer to that of Karl Jaspers and R. D. Laing, who formulated a rich notion of process as a rupture, an irruption, an opening (percée) that breaks the continuity of a personality, carrying it off in a kind of voyage through an intense and terrifying “more than reality,” following lines of flight that engulf both nature and history, both the organism and the mind. See AO 24–5.

  23.

  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “La Synthèse disjonctive,” L'Arc 43 (1970), special issue on Pierre Klossowski, 56.

  24.

  TP 4; N 23. See also TRM 25: “Let us resign ourselves to the idea that certain artists or writers have had more revelations concerning schizophrenia than the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.”

  25.

  This text is included in the English translation under the title “The Literary Machine” (PS 105–69).

  26.

  PS 145; for the comparison with Joyce's epiphanies, see PS 155.

  27.

  PS 146. The notion that “meaning is use” comes from Wittgenstein, though to my knowledge Deleuze makes only two references to Wittgenstein in his books. In the first, he writes approvingly that “Wittgenstein and his dis
ciples are right to define meaning by use” (LS 146); in the second, he writes that Whitehead “stands provisionally as the last great Anglo-American just before Wittgenstein's disciples spread their mists, their sufficiency, and their terror” (FLB 76). His disapproval perhaps stems from the reintroduction, by certain of Wittgenstein's followers, of a form of common sense in the guise of a grammar that would be properly philosophical and a form of life that would be generically human.

  28.

  PS 156. See also 145, where Deleuze cites Malcolm Lowry's description of the “meaning” of his novel (Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, ed. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1965), 6:

  It can be regarded as a kind of symphony, or in another way as a kind of opera—or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, and so forth. It is superficial, entertaining and boring, according to taste. It is a prophecy, a political warning, a cryptogram, a preposterous movie, and a writing on the wall. It can even be regarded as a sort of machine: it works too, believe me, as I have found out.

  29.

  AO 324. See also “Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines,” in Félix Guattari, Chaosophy, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e),1995), 145:

  How can elements be bound together by the absence of any link? In a certain sense, it can be said that Cartesianism, in Spinoza and Leibniz, has not ceased to reply to this question. It is the theory of the real distinction, insofar as it implies a specific logic. It is because they are really distinct, and completely independent of each other, that ultimate elements or simple forms belong to the same being or to the same substance.

  30.

  PS 105–69. Thomas Wolfe, in his essay “The Story of a Novel,” in The Autobiography of an American Artist, ed. Leslie Field (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), describes his compositional technique in similar terms:

  It was as if I had discovered a whole new universe of chemical elements and had begun to see certain relations between some of them but had by no means begun to organize and arrange the whole series in such a way that they would crystallize into a harmonious and coherent union, From this time on, I think my effort might be described as the effort to complete that organization.

  31.

  See Ernst Mayr, “An Analysis of the Concept of Natural Selection,” in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 98: “Selection would not be possible without the continuous restoration of variability.”

  32.

  TI 129. On the philosophical use of scientific functions, see N 123–6.

  33.

  See “Klossowski, or Bodies-Language,” in LS 292–4, where Deleuze contrasts “the order of God” with “the order of the Anti-Christ.”

  34.

  FLB, Chapter 5, 59–75; and LS 110–11. For the distinction between the virtual and the actual, Deleuze relies on the model proposed in Albert Lautman's theory of differential equations in Le Problème du temps (Paris: Hermann, 1946), 42. Lautman argues that a singularity can be grasped in two ways. The conditions of a problem are determined by the nomadic distribution of singular points in a virtual space, in which each singularity is inseparable from a zone of objective indetermination (ordinary points). The solution appears only with the integral curves and the form they take in the neighborhood of singularities within the field of vectors, which constitutes the beginning of the actualization of the singularities (a singularity is analytically extended over a series of ordinary points until it reaches the neighborhood of another singularity, and so on).

  35.

  Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Ficciones (New York: Grove, 1962), 98, emphasis added. For Deleuze's various references to this story, see FLB 62; LS 114; TI 131; DR 73; F 145 n3.

  36.

  TI 303. For Leibniz's narrative, see his Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard, ed. Austin Farrer (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985), §§405–17, 365–73.

  37.

  TI 126–55. The following themes are summaries of this chapter, some of which are developed in more detail in The Fold, where Deleuze makes use of Leibniz's work to develop a concept of the “Baroque.”

  38.

  See LS 174:

  The whole question, and rightly so, is to know under what conditions disjunction is a veritable synthesis, instead of being a procedure of analysis which is satisfied with the exclusion of predicates from a thing by virtue of the identity of its concept (the negative, limitative, or exclusive use of disjunction). The answer is given insofar as the divergence or the decentering determined by the disjunction become objects of affirmation as such … an inclusive disjunction that carries out the synthesis itself by drifting from one term to another and following the distance between terms.

  For the concept of the rhizome, see TP 3–25, esp. 7.

  39.

  N 126. See also TI 133: “Narration is constantly being modified in each of its episodes, not according to subjective variations, but as a consequence of disconnected spaces and de-chronologized moments.”

  40.

  For Deleuze's analysis of the three types of portmanteau words in Lewis Carroll's work, see “Of Esoteric Words,” in LS 42–7. Deleuze cites Carroll's explanation of the disjunctive portmanteau word:

  If your thoughts incline ever so little towards “fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious”; if they turn, even by a hair's breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming”; but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious”. (46)

  41.

  See Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986), esp. Chapter 2. For Deleuze's analyses, see DR 22, 121, and LS 39, 85. Roussel's language rests not simply on the combinatorial possibilities of language—the fact that language has fewer terms of designation than things to designate, but none the less can extract an immense wealth from this poverty—but more precisely on the possibility of saying two things with the same word, inscribing a maximum of difference within the repetition of the same word.

  42.

  On Gombrowicz, see DR 123, and LS 39; on Joyce, see DR 121–3, and LS 260–1, 264.

  43.

  Joë Bousquet, Les Capitales (Paris: Le Cercle du Livre, 1955), 103, as cited in LS 148. It is in the context of his discussion of Bousquet that Deleuze defines ethics in terms of the relation of the individual to the singularities it embodies: an active life is one that is able to affirm the singularities that constitute it, to become worthy of the events that happen to it. “Everything was in order with the events of my life before I made them mine,” writes Bousquet. “To live them is to find myself tempted to become their equal.” A reactive life, by contrast, is driven by a ressentiment of the event, grasping whatever happens to it as unjust and unwarranted. “Either ethics makes no sense at all,” writes Deleuze, “or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us” (LS 149).

  44.

  Antonin Artaud, “Here Lies,” in Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1977), 540; and Vaslav Nijinsky, Diary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), 20, 156, as cited in AO 15, 77. On the role of included disjunctions in the schizophrenic process, see Deleuze and Guattari, “La Synthèse disjonctive,” 59: “Schizophrenization: a disjunction that remains disjunctive, and which none the less affirms the disjoint terms, affirms them through all their distance, without limiting one by the other or excluding one from the other.”

  45.

  ECC 154.

  Beckett's great contribution to logic is to have shown that exhaustion (exhaustivity) does not occur without a certain physiological exhaustion … Perhaps it is like the front and back side of a single thing: a keen sense or science of the possible joined, or rather disjoined, with a fantastic decomposition of the “self.” (ECC 154
)

  Deleuze himself, however, draws a sharp distinction between the virtual and the possible; see DR 211–14.

  46.

  WP 173. Deleuze's monographs in the history of philosophy all inhabit such a zone of indiscernibility, which accounts for the sense that they are fully “Deleuzian” despite the variety of figures he considers.

  47.

  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” as cited in TP 245.

  48.

  MI 102. We might note here a shift that seems to take place in Deleuze's terminology. In Spinoza, an “affection” (affectio) indicates the state of a body in so far as it is affected by another body, and an “affect” (affectus) marks the passage from one state to another as an increase or decrease in the body's power as a function of its affections. This terminology, which Deleuze analyzes in detail in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, is largely retained throughout A Thousand Plateaus. In The Movement-Image and What is Philosophy?, however, Deleuze replaces these terms with perception and affection respectively, reserving the word “affect” for the pure qualities or powers that are extracted from affections and achieve an autonomous status.