Aug 9, 2020 03:54 PM
https://www.thenation.com/article/cultur...her-texts/
EXCERPTS: . . . Gilles Deleuze was more reclusive than many in the cohort referred to, primarily in Anglo-American circles, as “French theory,” and in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary -- 25 books published during his lifetime...
[...] What Is Philosophy?, his final collaboration with the psychiatrist Félix Guattari, was published in English in 1994, the year before he died, and posited an answer to its titular question: “Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.” Like painting, architecture, music, or cinema, as he wrote in his two-volume study of the last art form, philosophy lays “claim to the new materials and means that the future makes possible.” [...] He described this methodology as “buggery” or “immaculate conception”: “I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.”
He wasn’t kidding. As the Explain Deleuze meme satirically attests, the author’s writing is known to be painfully difficult, even impenetrable; this is the foremost reason that commentaries on his work now comprise “Deleuze studies,” a distinct if interdisciplinary field. It is to this community alone, perhaps, that the publication of Letters and Other Texts is a highly anticipated release: the third and presumably final volume of outtakes edited by David Lapoujade and published by Semiotext(e), more than a decade after Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 and Two Regimes of Madness, 1975–1995. While these earlier editions were among the first to make available English translations of shorter texts that many would consider key to understanding Deleuze’s thought—such as “Intellectuals and Power,” a 1972 interview between Deleuze and Foucault collected in Desert Islands -- the pieces compiled in Letters are much less canonical; for that reason, they fascinate as much as they unnerve, leaving the door of the vault open behind them in suggestion that there isn’t much left to find. By collecting these remnants, Letters secures Deleuze’s passage into the realm of a historical figure -- like his forebears, an object of study -- once and for all, a quarter-century after his death. What the book lacks in the biographical intrigue readers pryingly desire, it makes up for in a scholastic gravitas befitting its subject, further clarifying the development of Deleuze’s corpus if not the intimacies of his personal life.
[...] Deleuze dedicated the 1950s and ’60s to single-author studies, culminating in two dissertations defended in the wake of May 1968: one on Spinoza ... and another that would become his most important book ... that inverts Kant’s “transcendental idealism.” This “transcendental empiricism,” Deleuze explained to a correspondent later, “maintains that there is a difference in nature between the empirical and the transcendental…, presupposes that the transcendental is itself experience, experimentation, and finally posits a complete immanence between the two.”
It is here that Deleuze’s work most resembles the deconstruction of Derrida [...] and the perceived failure of their students to change the world that spring usually serves as the historical signpost that imbued poststructuralism with such promise. The idea that identity is an effect of difference, rather than its cause, allowed this generation of French philosophers to move beyond Marx and Freud and consequently helped empower the evolution of identity politics in the American academy in the 1980s and ’90s, resisting codification and critique by neoliberals from Bernard-Henri Lévy to Camille Paglia simultaneous with its co-option on the right. If our experience of difference actualizes the formation of ideas, Deleuze concluded, then “the concepts of knowledge, morality, religion, etc. can only dissolve” under the scrutiny of critique. Any apparent unity is revealed, in fact, to be the sum of heterogeneous molecules; observed through Deleuze’s microscope, the one becomes many.
Intellectual historians credit Deleuze for inventing a left Nietzscheanism in his second monograph, Nietzsche and Philosophy. When the book was published in 1962, the German philosopher was widely read as a reactionary, not least because of his appropriation by the Nazis, and Deleuze played a prominent role in rehabilitating his reputation in France. (Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist and subsequent English translations in the preceding decade performed an analogous function in the United States.) Deleuze characterized Nietzsche as a philosopher of difference, filiating his work to Spinoza (who was Jewish) and interpreting On the Genealogy of Morality as an attempted revision of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This strategy is representative of Deleuze’s method, as he explained in a letter to one of his commentators, Arnaud Villani, in 1986... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Gilles Deleuze was more reclusive than many in the cohort referred to, primarily in Anglo-American circles, as “French theory,” and in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary -- 25 books published during his lifetime...
[...] What Is Philosophy?, his final collaboration with the psychiatrist Félix Guattari, was published in English in 1994, the year before he died, and posited an answer to its titular question: “Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.” Like painting, architecture, music, or cinema, as he wrote in his two-volume study of the last art form, philosophy lays “claim to the new materials and means that the future makes possible.” [...] He described this methodology as “buggery” or “immaculate conception”: “I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.”
He wasn’t kidding. As the Explain Deleuze meme satirically attests, the author’s writing is known to be painfully difficult, even impenetrable; this is the foremost reason that commentaries on his work now comprise “Deleuze studies,” a distinct if interdisciplinary field. It is to this community alone, perhaps, that the publication of Letters and Other Texts is a highly anticipated release: the third and presumably final volume of outtakes edited by David Lapoujade and published by Semiotext(e), more than a decade after Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 and Two Regimes of Madness, 1975–1995. While these earlier editions were among the first to make available English translations of shorter texts that many would consider key to understanding Deleuze’s thought—such as “Intellectuals and Power,” a 1972 interview between Deleuze and Foucault collected in Desert Islands -- the pieces compiled in Letters are much less canonical; for that reason, they fascinate as much as they unnerve, leaving the door of the vault open behind them in suggestion that there isn’t much left to find. By collecting these remnants, Letters secures Deleuze’s passage into the realm of a historical figure -- like his forebears, an object of study -- once and for all, a quarter-century after his death. What the book lacks in the biographical intrigue readers pryingly desire, it makes up for in a scholastic gravitas befitting its subject, further clarifying the development of Deleuze’s corpus if not the intimacies of his personal life.
[...] Deleuze dedicated the 1950s and ’60s to single-author studies, culminating in two dissertations defended in the wake of May 1968: one on Spinoza ... and another that would become his most important book ... that inverts Kant’s “transcendental idealism.” This “transcendental empiricism,” Deleuze explained to a correspondent later, “maintains that there is a difference in nature between the empirical and the transcendental…, presupposes that the transcendental is itself experience, experimentation, and finally posits a complete immanence between the two.”
It is here that Deleuze’s work most resembles the deconstruction of Derrida [...] and the perceived failure of their students to change the world that spring usually serves as the historical signpost that imbued poststructuralism with such promise. The idea that identity is an effect of difference, rather than its cause, allowed this generation of French philosophers to move beyond Marx and Freud and consequently helped empower the evolution of identity politics in the American academy in the 1980s and ’90s, resisting codification and critique by neoliberals from Bernard-Henri Lévy to Camille Paglia simultaneous with its co-option on the right. If our experience of difference actualizes the formation of ideas, Deleuze concluded, then “the concepts of knowledge, morality, religion, etc. can only dissolve” under the scrutiny of critique. Any apparent unity is revealed, in fact, to be the sum of heterogeneous molecules; observed through Deleuze’s microscope, the one becomes many.
Intellectual historians credit Deleuze for inventing a left Nietzscheanism in his second monograph, Nietzsche and Philosophy. When the book was published in 1962, the German philosopher was widely read as a reactionary, not least because of his appropriation by the Nazis, and Deleuze played a prominent role in rehabilitating his reputation in France. (Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist and subsequent English translations in the preceding decade performed an analogous function in the United States.) Deleuze characterized Nietzsche as a philosopher of difference, filiating his work to Spinoza (who was Jewish) and interpreting On the Genealogy of Morality as an attempted revision of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This strategy is representative of Deleuze’s method, as he explained in a letter to one of his commentators, Arnaud Villani, in 1986... (MORE - details)