Prologue

Gilles Deleuze, one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers, was born in the 17th arrondissement of the French capital in 1925. Little Gilles was your average Parisian child, with a fondness for collecting stamps in his spare time, as Deleuze was to recall later in life. The Second World War began when he was fifteen; evacuated to Normandy, it was there that lessons on French literature given by a young professor awakened his intellectual curiosity. The encounter with philosophy was to take place not long after, in his final year of lycée. Recognising in his very first philosophy class his calling for the discipline, he took up a life of research as a matter of course. His thesis at the Sorbonne on the British Empiricist David Hume became his first publication. Following a decade of intermittent ‘silence’, in the 1960s he produced study after study in close succession, radically reconstituting every field he deigned to intervene in. But it was his 1972 ...

Afterword

Deleuze placed his hopes on the contingency of the encounter, by which thinking is forcibly drawn out. In fact, there is something irreducibly paradoxical about the encounter understood as contingency. Instinctively, the word ‘necessity’ brings with it an inexorable sense of universality, whereas the word ‘contingency’ basks in particularity. For this reason, a philosophy which privileges contingency would seem in the same stroke to be one which values the singular above all. After all, each contingent encounter can only take place in a singular and particular circumstance. And yet, the very conception itself, according to which the contingent encounter is what calls forth thinking, is one which can be applied anytime anywhere, irrespective of the specific circumstance. Whether this conception is universally valid or not, at the very least it is one which possesses a general sphere of applicability. And to that extent, it can be said to be abstract....

Politics: Desire and Power

This chapter explicates Deleuze’s mature political philosophy through a contraposition with Foucault’s. Where Foucault sees the elementary unit of socio-political analysis as ‘power’, Deleuze argues for ‘desire’. That is not to say that Deleuze wished to supplant Foucault’s analyses; quite the contrary, for he rated them on par with those of Marx. Rather, Deleuze felt it necessary to complete and reinforce Foucault’s theory of society based on ‘power’ with the prior notion of ‘desire’, because it is only the assemblage of desire (and not the Lacanian monologic Desire) that can explain why a certain system of power is able to arise and perdure. From here it is possible to identify correctly the respective theoretical levels of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: the former lays the foundation for a theory of society in terms of desire, while the latter is a more ‘Foucauldian’, pragmatic analysis of the concrete workings of desire.

Principle: Transcendental Empiricism

If one is to give Deleuzian philosophy a name, this name would be ‘transcendental empiricism’. As the name suggests, this philosophy can be understood as a crossing of Hume and Kant. If Kant opened the possibility in philosophy for an investigation into the transcendental domain, he nevertheless assumed the existence of a transcendental subject of apperception, whose genesis he would not question. Through Hume, it becomes possible to question this genesis, and prior to the genesis of the subject Deleuze discovers the Other (through Michel Tournier), and singularities/events (through Leibniz). These events correspond to the local egos of psychoanalysis, not yet integrated into a global ego, or subject. This chapter shows that Deleuze took Freudian psychoanalysis very seriously and sought to complete it, taking Freud to task for arresting his thinking prematurely. For the maxim of transcendental empiricism is that ‘we cannot break off thinking when we please’.

Method: How to See Things in Free Indirect Discourse

By what right do we speak of ‘Deleuzian philosophy’? If, encountering his monographs on other thinkers and artists we cannot help the sense that we are privy there to elements of Deleuze’s own philosophy, this is because ‘reading’ is Deleuze’s veritable philosophical method. Taking its cue from Badiou, this chapter will analyse Deleuze’s frequent use of ‘free indirect discourse’, a mode of speech as it were ‘in between’ the direct and indirect discourses, very seldom found in philosophical writing. Far more prevalent in literature, this discourse has traditionally been employed in order to write as if from inside the minds of the characters; in much the same way, through free indirect discourse Deleuze attains the underlying question compelling an author to think; and it is in the critique of this question that Deleuze sets forth his own philosophy.

Practice: Thinking and Subjectivity

This chapter investigates the practical implications of Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘transcendental empiricism’. For Deleuze it is thinking that constitutes the most authentic form of practice, and this because thinking is always invoked by an encounter with the ‘sign’. However it is not the case that we innately know how to read the sign; its reading must be learnt through an apprenticeship. Spontaneously we do not stumble at the sign, we simply bypass it, and Deleuze explains this through Bergson’s distinction between successful and failed (attentive) acts of perception. Only in the latter is there a genuine encounter with the sign, through which we can begin to see the world differently. And yet this practical philosophy, it is argued, was doomed to reach an impasse because its ultimate practical exhortation is to ‘wait to fail’, which is strictly impossible. The stage has been set for Deleuze to encounter Guattari.

Transition: From Structure to the Machine

This chapter shows that Deleuze was not only aware of the practical impasse of his philosophy, he understood its source: the strong structuralist element in his thinking. However he could not, by himself, find a way out of this impasse, which is why he embarked upon the collaboration with Guattari that would result in the book Anti-Oedipus. The structure of ‘waiting for failure’, where failure is itself the mark of success, is in fact a staple of structuralist, in particular Lacanian reasoning, which posits as the centrepiece of structure an ‘empty square’, the ‘object=x’ of a primordially thwarted Desire which can explain all subsequent desires. If there is in Deleuze a notion of ‘repetition’ that resists this reduction to the originary ‘zero point’, it is nevertheless overwhelmed by the weight of Deleuze’s formative structuralism. This is the ‘theoretical’ explanation of the necessity of the encounter of Deleuze and Guattari.