|
 Philosopher
of the Month
November
2003 - Gilles Deleuze
Matthew
Ray
Gilles
Deleuze, like Jacques Derrida, is a recent French philosopher and
historian of philosophy whose name is associated with such movements
as post-structuralism, post-modernism and deconstruction. Yet the
association, in Deleuze's case, is almost wholly fortuitous: Deleuze
has often expressed confusion over the whole notion of post-modernism;
has sometimes implicitly attacked deconstruction; and is so far
from being concerned with the structuralist and post-structuralist
problematic of language that he has sought to undercut much of its
mysterious force by returning to the English philosopher J. L. Austin's
famous analysis of language as being one amongst many acts. Yet
Deleuze and Derrida do, at least, have this much in common: being
modern Parisian philosophers, the history of philosophy that they
engage with includes Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as much as it does
Plato, Descartes and Kant.
Derrida
suggests that since language is a public medium, knowledge of our
self cannot, strictly speaking, be direct and unmediated. Deleuze
however disagrees, and in his book A Thousand Plateaus (1980),
written with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, he
bypasses this preoccupation with language by approaching the topic
by means of an analysis of speech acts. According to the theory
first systematised by Austin in the 1960s, language does not comprise
propositions devoid of social context, but rather it comprises actions.
Therefore, linguistic communication is not, as has generally been
supposed, primarily the communication of information, it is rather
the production of performance of a speech act. For example, an order
shouted from a sergeant to a private is an action with certain determinate
results in the physical, social and political world. All other examples
of language can also be interpreted this way. This de-mystification
of language allows Deleuze to return to a direct, empirical intuition
of the self, absolutely unmediated by language, and thus he is not
concerned to derive the essence of the unconscious from or through
its linguistic effects, as in both deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
This
anti-Lacanian intuition of the self as raw pre-personal desire is
most elaborately constructed in his unorthodox two-volume collaboration
with Guattari: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (comprising Anti-Oedipus
(1977) and A Thousand Plateaus). The argumentative structure
of this work is difficult to discern and it is couched in a technical
vocabulary which goes largely unexplained. Nevertheless, we can,
at least, say that it is a critique of psychoanalysis which suggests
that psychoanalysis must be replaced with what Deleuze and Guattari
call, some would say irresponsibly, 'schizoanalysis'. It is not
that we are to become like schizophrenics. Indeed, the schizophrenics
inside psychiatric hospitals, Deleuze and Guattari believe, are
not mentally ill, but have simply taken a wrong turn to the degree
that they have allowed themselves to be defined as a clinical entity
within the Freudian Oedipal framework. It is rather that those schizophrenics
who assume other identities and multiple personalities have found
an engaging truth about the unconscious: that contrary to the orthodoxy
of psychoanalysis, it is cosmically unconcerned with our attachments
to our mother and father and to personalities generally. Hence the
title of the first volume: Anti-Oedipus. Other works by Deleuze
supplement this anti-psychiatry with more specifically philosophical
arguments: in Difference and Repetition, for example, we are treated
to an argument for the existence of non-conceptual experience (sub-representative
experience, as it were) of difference, which obviously feeds into
his model of immediate non-conceptual and non-verbal experience
of desire.
Finally,
in addition to his programme of tearing down the fetishisation of
language and liberating our schizophrenic desire, Deleuze is also
a historian of philosophy and a lot of his work consists in commentaries
on the texts of major philosophers like Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza,
Bergson and Nietzsche. These works characteristically involve an
enthusiastic digression upon one or other of the primary author's
themes that imbues it with a status and emphasis that it did not
originally seem to possess; a method which has often led critics
to believe, not unfairly, that the work in question tells us more
about Deleuze than it does about the subject of the commentary.
His book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche and Philosophy, is a case in point,
revolutionising Nietzsche studies with its extraordinary emphasis
on the importance of the difference between active and reactive
forces in Nietzsche.
Deleuze
died in pitiable circumstances in 1995, but the influence of his
works has endured: both the work of the early Lyotard and that of
the early to middle Derrida (particularly in the seminal essay Diffèrance,
which quotes Nietzsche and Philosophy) have clearly been written
under a more or less lengthy Deleuzean shadow.
Suggested
reading
Bogue, R. 1989. Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. 2002 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus.
London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Continuum.
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured early December 2003
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