Abstract
In discussions surrounding philosophical texts, the word “system” or “systematic” serves as a caveat, be it tacit or overt. One is cautioned against mistaking a part — a single passage, book, idea, or position — for the entirety of a philosophy. The text in question is positioned as a piece of some larger, “systematic” enterprise. As much as any philosopher Deleuze has heightened our awareness of the numerous types of system and images of system-building within the history of philosophy. In particular, Deleuze has made us aware of the fact that not every “plane of composition,” not every instance of philosophical rigor, and not every relation of part to whole can be captured by the more familiar metaphors of the philosophical imagination: the organism (where each part plays a specific, fully determined role within an overall structure), the tree (the root and the body or the trunk and its branches), the building (with its foundation and vertically successive floors). If only philosophers had the decency of conforming to these metaphors. If only reading philosophy were as simple as following discrete premises on their linear path to a conclusion. If only understanding a philosophy were as easy as an elevator ride: stop on each floor until you reach the top or descend until you reach the ground.
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Notes
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy As a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), pp. 158–9.
John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 2000), pp. 138–9;
Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002).
See Gilles Deleuze, “Bergson, 1859–1941,” and “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974), ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina (Brooklyn: Semiotext(e), 2006). The book in question is Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
For Deleuze’s reading of Plato see Difference and Repetition, pp. 59–68, 126–8; and “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” published as the first appendix of Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 253–66.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 203.
From Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 71.
This interview can be found in Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, Revised Edition: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Brooklyn: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 176.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 9;
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (1972–1990), trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 136;
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Janis Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 1.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ass. Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 194. With regards to the notion of the end of philosophy, and the argument that this end presupposes another end — that of history — Kojève’s most important lectures were not included in the English-language Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. These were subsequently published in the journal Interpretation. See in particular: Alexandre Kojève, “Hegel, Marx And Christianity,” trans. Hilail Gildin, in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 1:1 (Summer 1970), pp. 22, 26–7, 35–8;
Joseph J. Carpino, in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 3:2, 3 (Winter 1973), p. 116.
Queneau’s novel is saturated with references to the Battle of Jena, and the “Sunday” of the title is connected to the problems raised by Bataille in relation to Kojèvian temporality. The charming if vacant protagonist Valentin Bru is concerned, above all else, with figuring out how to kill time. See Raymond Queneau, The Sunday of Life, trans. Barbara Wright (New York: A New Directions Book, 1977), pp. 169–70. In 1952 Bataille’s Critique contained a review of Queneau’s fiction by Kojève titled “Les romans de la Sagesse.” Bataille’s December 6, 1937 letter to Kojève, in which he characterizes himself as unemployed negativity, can be found in Denis Hollier, The College of Sociology, pp. xx, 89–93. See also Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share Vol.1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989). In The Accursed Share, economies are defined as much by useless (or indirectly useful) forms of expenditure.
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. xii, 90–2, 203–8.
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Naked Man, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1981), p. 629. The development of Lévi-Strauss’ opinion of philosophy can be discerned in the movement between the partial critique found in Tristes Tropiques and The Savage Mind, to the strident dismissal found at the end of The Naked Man. See Tristes Tropiques: An Anthropological Study of Primitive Societies in Brazil, trans. John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1971), pp. 55–60;
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 12.
The objection to this claim would appeal to two related assertions in Deleuze’s work with Guattari. In Anti-Oedipus, capitalism is labeled the end of history and capitalism is linked to the “death of writing.” When the authors declare that capitalism is the end of history, they are not saying that capitalism is coming to an end. Capitalism is the end of history in the sense of the meaning of history. But this does not point that capitalism represents the necessary, terminal point of history. Capitalism is a contingent formation. Within this formation, we can retroactively discern a common feature of precapitalist societies: coding or the fact that production is governed by a set of values or beliefs. This feature becomes visible within capitalism through contrast. Decoding is an essential feature of capitalism; the logic of production within capitalism is a quantitative calculus: How much will it cost? How much surplus value can be extracted and realized? Accompanying but not governing this quantitative calculus is a wave of fragmentary belief and value systems. The assertion that writing is dead is a play on the theme of the death of God. The statement is designed to illuminate a peculiar feature of intellectual life: the noise surrounding the classical notion of interpretation, the fanfare surrounding the critique of this notion, occurs within a social formation in which writing and images are consumed unmediated by the question, “What does it mean?” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 140, 224–26, 240.
See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969).
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 147–9.
Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by Donfald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 181.
Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 94.
See Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantine Baundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 106.
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: an Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), pp. 128–32;
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 129. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 15.
Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge Press, 2003), pp. 12–3.
Todd May, Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas and Deleuze (University Park, IL: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), p. 172.
Martial Guéroult, “The History of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem,” Monist, 53 (1969): 563–87.
This way of formulating the Deleuzian real is the thesis of Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (New York: Verso, 2006).
John Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 1.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 208.
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 275–83;
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), pp. 31, 48–58.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 36–7.
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2005), pp. 37–8.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 28, 292–3, 304, 313.
Besides Deleuze’s Bergsonism, the most helpful works on this transition are William May, “The Reality of Matter in the Metaphysics of Bergson,” in International Philosophical Quarterly, 10: 4 (1970);
P.A.Y. Gunter, “Bergson’s Theory of Matter and Modern Cosmology,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 32 (1971).
Allan B. Wolter, The Transcendentals and Their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus (St. Bonaventure, New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1946).
Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (New York: Verso, 1999), p. xvii.
Deleuze, seminar on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, 14 of January 1974.
Gilles Deleuze, seminar on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, 14 of January 1974.
Brad Inwood, and L. P. Gerson, trans., Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, II: 28–9, II: 44 (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 1988).
Constantin V. Boundas, “What Difference does Deleuze’s Difference Make?” in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantine Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 3–30.
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© 2010 Jay Conway
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Conway, J. (2010). Affirming Philosophy. In: Gilles Deleuze: Affirmation in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299085_4
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