Monday, July 31, 2023

Scattered Deleuze, by André Bernold and Richard Pinhas

Texts collected by André Bernold and Richard Pinhas.

Ten years ago, Gilles Deleuze passed away. Some friends begin to talk about him again and the vast project that his work has become worldwide. This discussion is conducted with a restraint (Jean Pierre Faye) that allows for the emotion of remembrance (Jeannette Colombel, Roger-Pol Droit, Pascale Criton) and ventures into paths of erudition tinged with humor (Philippe Choulet, Richard Zrehen, Charles J. Stivale, André Bernold) or polemical mood (Arnaud Villani), even delving into the realms of dreams (Raymond Bellour). An ethnomusicologist (Jérôme Cler) explains how A Thousand Plateaus has shaped his own being. Jean-Claude Dumoncel introduces us to the new deleuzian garden of Raymond Roussel. Jean-Luc Nancy finally opens up a joint meditation of Deleuze with Derrida, and René Schérer explores what an atheistic mysticism can be. Simon Hantaï sends a Fold in triple state, Hélène Bamberger and Marie-Laure de Decker share unpublished photos. Richard Pinhas shows us a manuscript entrusted to him. Timothy S. Murphy seals it all with a meticulous bibliography. Deleuze scattered? No. Deleuze is wholly assembled within the multiplicities of untimely audacity. It is us who are scattered around him.

The contributions: “Parallel Differences: Deleuze and Derrida” by Jean-Luc Nancy; “An Atheistic Mysticism” by René Schérer; “Deleuze-Sartre: Tracks” by Jeannette Colombel; “Images-Deleuze” by Roger-Pol Droit; “The Invitation” by Pascale Citron; “Deleuze Back to Back and Face to Face” by Jean-Pierre Faye; “How can one be Deleuzian?” by Arnaud Villani; “Empiricism as an Aperitif (a persistence of Deleuze)” by Philippe Choulet; “Bad Company” by Richard Zrehen; “The Dream of the Valley of the Queens” by Raymond Bellour; “Locus Altus” by Jean-Claude Dumoncel; “Millennial Deleuze, or Beyond the Tomb” by Charles J. Stivale; “Land of Dancers and Lame Rhythms” by Jérôme Cler; “Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous on Geer van Velde” by André Bernold; “An Annotated Bibliography of Gilles Deleuze, 1953-2003” by Timothy S. Murphy; “Theory of Multiplicities in Bergson”, Extracts in Facsimile from a conference by Gilles Deleuze.

One day it happens that the sorrow becomes that of even leaving the waiting of tomorrow. This day is the most everyday of all. His sorrow is enough for him without remainder, and the “other day” becomes for him the other of all the days without ceasing to be — as long as we foresee it — a day like the others. Then the exception itself, its law and its faith of the “sovereign moment” come very strangely to blend with the everyday.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Philosophical Chronicles, March 28, 2003

We should not contain a life in the simple moment when the individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in all the moments traversed by this or that living subject and measured by such experienced objects: immanent life carrying events or singularities that are only actualized in the subjects and objects. This indefinite life does not itself have moments, no matter how close they are to each other, but only intervals, between moments. It neither happens nor succeeds, but presents the immensity of empty time where one sees the event still to come and already arrived, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.

Gilles Deleuze, Immanence: a life, September 1, 1995

ANDRÉ BERNOLD, RICHARD PINHAS – Introduction

What is the nature of the proposition that Deleuze seeks to arrange? What is the driving force behind this project, inviting…

Pascale Cri ton1

Motto:

— But, sir, one must not speak of Deleuze!

— And why not, sir, I beg you?

— Because Deleuze is not a philosopher. Gilles Deleuze, after all, is only a colleague…

A member of the philosophy aggregation jury, in the early 1980s

We wanted to create a portrait. A mental portrait, as he said: “We keep making mental portraits of each other…” A physical portrait, too. To some extent. Gilles’s charm, as you will read in some of the texts gathered here, those of Jeannette Colombel, Pascale Criton, and Roger-Pol Droit, he taught, he laughed, had something so powerful that its seduction can only be described today in the most adventurous, improbable, and timid ways. The most beautiful shoulders; the most sovereign composure until the end, despite the tracheotomy. “And then, this way of tilting the upper part of the torso and slightly tilting the head, the chin resting on the hand while looking further, in the opposite diagonal… His particular way of modulating his voice in interrogative forms and especially by emphasizing the vowels of certain words… (this conditional, this sonority in the pronunciation of ai, slightly inflected)… slowdowns, wanderings, accelerations; a tense, mineral voice, from methodical progressions to drifting towards quasi inarticulate regions, like his growling Hrrrhrreinhhh…” 1

It is Pascale Criton here who expresses best what we have heard and still have in our ears2. She is right to emphasize what this exercise of thinking aloud had, at that time, in Paris, among all the teachings that were given there, an incomparable quality. It was a voice, already very beautiful and unique in itself, that constructed: it was, becoming visible through the audible in the invisible, but over very long periods, of which the irreplaceable Abécédaire and the recordings being published by Gallimard give only a necessarily restricted idea. In that blessed era now lost to us, we all had the opportunity to attend the lectures of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Schérer (a little too young then for Lévi-Strauss), and many others known and lesser-known, public, semi-public, all forming a resonance, in those years that Guattari called winter (so what about the present times: is there a winter after the winter?), and some would attend them all, carrying the word of one to the other. But no one articulated this kind of internal song within the offered thought better than Deleuze. One of the most beautiful phrases he used to illustrate an event was: “There is a concert tonight.” Deleuze’s lectures (on Tuesday mornings) all had the character of a grand style concert, a concerto, sometimes a concerto grosso, where everything was exchanged, in a Beckettian Watt combinatorial manner; the soloist in the hall and the moaning of the double basses in Gilles…

But it was not just about inviting a few witnesses willing to speak, whether as students or colleagues, as the ineffable examiner mentioned earlier, from Gilles Deleuze’s teaching. This book was supposed to be a book of friends. And certainly, many of his students and colleagues were his friends. That is well known. And these friendships have already borne fruit in many ways, primarily in Deleuze’s Foucault and Châtelet. But he had other friends, more secretive, scattered, unnoticed, imperceptible. It was these friends that we wanted to bring together, being two of them ourselves, among them, if not completely silent with them, at least unquestionably unapparent. Well, we have failed. We have encountered great difficulties. We must say this here, both to prevent the recurring disappointment one feels as a reader, seeing so many collections but so few works (except perhaps François Zourabichvili’s, and this opinion is ours alone), and because these absences, these abstentions, also constitute, in our view, a kind of tribute. Here, we cannot name them, but there are about fifteen, maybe twenty, great silent ones, and that seems remarkable and worth noting, without insisting too much.

Some of the closest ones refused outright. In all cases out of modesty. Or because of illness. Or because the time to write had passed. Or simply out of sadness: not dominating, but still, the terrible shock we felt from such a suicide, determined so contradictorily along two forever diverging lines in a time that remains unthinkable, this shock cannot dissipate. Other close friends of Gilles Deleuze, quite a few of them sympathetic to our idea, initially agreed and promised to try. But then, they couldn’t. They didn’t progress beyond a certain point. Unsurmountable timidity of the most loving, of the most loved ones, since that was what it was about; modesty without words. But even Gilles Deleuze himself had hesitated a lot before writing L’Épuisé, his text on Beckett, which we owe only to Jérôme Lindon’s insistence; and when we went through all the reasons he might have had for not writing about Beckett, he said to us: “No, it’s not that. It’s not that at all. It’s that I dare not.” The reserve we feel in speaking about Deleuze, our scruples, are, in a way, independently of our shortcomings, one of the signs, and it has already been said, no doubt, that Deleuze himself (that colleague…) truly succeeded, in his own right (as he liked to express it; it was even a language tic of his), in what he proposed to us (among other things): to achieve, through sobriety, a certain regime of non-personal life, and all the better non-personal, the more affected by intensity. It’s like with Beckett (formerly) widely cited but unquotable. Memorable, but of a memory somehow non-thetical, if that can make any sense. In other words — but it has already been said: true greatness is elusive and has no contemporaries.

But (then) there is something else, indissolubly distinct, and which relates, this time, not to the person, to the impersonal nature of Deleuze, but correlatively to his work, to his work in progress, to his work that was and remains a work in progress, in progress even today, for us. “What is the nature of the proposition that Deleuze was arranging, what was the driving force behind this project, inviting the arts, the sciences, aesthetics to make encounters?” asks Pascale Criton. Just take a look at the many books published on Deleuze over the past ten years, in France, Italy, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. Note in passing that this project really only opened up, in the open air, in the past ten years. (Let’s not forget Japan or Brazil.) We are just beginning. First, it was impossible to speak about him: he was just a colleague. Then, still impossible: he blew everything up, etc., etc. A little earlier, it was already too difficult (Difference and Repetition) or too personal, for some people’s taste (Spinoza and the Problem of Expression). Another decade, and it’s frankly unassimilable, although we diligently draw from it: A Thousand Plateaus. And so on. The Logic of Sense already offended Anglo-Saxon philosophy. What is Philosophy – just more grimacing. And the Foucault would not be “really” Foucault, and the Bacon would not be “really” Bacon… Only the two volumes on Cinema… Finally, we must face everything at once, and only recently have we begun to consider this necessity; whereas the conditions under which these books were written have changed. So we have only just begun a recapitulation, and almost school-like. There are theses, they are unassailable: they are theses. There are collages, there are gropings, there are symposiums and conferences. We repeat, we repeat ourselves. It’s the project. And as Beckett said, “all projects are absurd.”

What has just been noted is certainly arbitrary and hasty. Nevertheless, please grant us this truism: Deleuze was, throughout his work, untimely; and he still is, today more than ever. Why, in the end? Let us probe almost randomly: let us revisit his book on Leibniz, open it to its third part; and among the some fifteen thousand readers who, at its publication, acquired this work, who succeeded in going that far? What is there? Unprecedented audacity. Texts by Leibniz of unprecedented audacity, interpreted with even more formidable audacity3. Go and take a closer look. There you will find the most sumptuous examples of extreme subtlety (Leibnizian), but where audacity (Deleuzian) is even stronger. Already, some thirty years earlier, this was seen in relation to Freud, when in his Presentation on Sacher Masoch (the least cited of all his books), Deleuze somehow “perforated” Beyond the Pleasure Principle… Philosophy as the creation of concepts, yes. But such creation cannot be done without extreme audacity. But facing this audacity, what can we do? It does not depend on us. And that it does not depend on us is a simple variation of this: the untimely. Deleuze scattered? No: Deleuze is entirely gathered in the multiplicities of an untimely audacity. We are the scattered ones around him. Think of the commentators of Nietzsche in 1910… Here we are, in disarray, disparate and unsettled friends. We have witnessed this thought. We have (almost) understood everything. But do we have anything to do with this audacity — without watering it down? Undoubtedly, because we have been affected by it, each according to their abilities. It is, as Artaud says, always the same problem: that of the needle’s eye. See here the scattered pins of a move named Deleuze4.

This volume is organized into five sections. Two texts that could be called treatises, by Jean-Luc Nancy and René Schérer. Then, two sets of philosophical portraits, by Jeannette Colombel (who here presents, for the first time, the entirety of a text on Sartre that Deleuze offered her) and Roger-Pol Droit; by Pascale Criton and Jean Pierre Paye. Next, three special studies by Arnaud Villani, Philippe Choulet, and Richard Zrehen. Following that, three baroque texts, offered by Raymond Bellour, Jean-Claude Dumoncel, and Charles J. Stivale. Finally, two entirely transversal approaches, one of which, that of Jérôme Cler, pays homage to Deleuze by choosing a whole life, which is quite rare: that of an ethnomusicologist. The already classic bibliography established by Timothy S. Murphy concludes the whole; for all useful purposes.

With the agreement of Fanny Deleuze — towards whom we express our deepest gratitude and affection, to both of them, we can only say it with simplicity once again — we are able to offer the reader not only a facsimile of Gilles’s handwriting but also something curious. It is the central section of a conference on The Theory of Multiplicities in Bergson, which its current holder presents briefly further on. Gilles Deleuze’s heirs have kindly consented to this slight deviation from the intentions expressed by Deleuze regarding the publication of any unpublished texts. There are none. We present not a new text, but a sketch, a graphic representation; a document, as a variation on the well-known theses published in Bergsonism and the two volumes on cinema. Therefore, for intangible principle reasons (and not to set a precedent), we only reproduce part of these pages — for the beauty of the lines, nothing more.

There is little left to say. But, as in Beckett’s Impromptu, it is the most difficult. In the spring of 2004, Jacques Derrida wrote to one of us: “As for the collection of homages to Deleuze, I can only make you a conditional promise. It will depend on my health.” Later: “As for the Deleuze project, it will naturally depend on my strength and health, but you know that my heart is in it.” And to the publishers: “Rest assured that I will do my best to be present on this occasion next year.” We would like to keep his place here: empty. And yet, he is present at this occasion.

He is. As he explains later, Jean-Luc Nancy had “proposed to Deleuze and Derrida to respond to a few questions. They accepted the principle. It wouldn’t have been an interview but two parallel series of responses to the same questions. This protocol was established in the spring of 1995, but Deleuze’s condition worsened beyond return that summer…” Today, “the difference between Deleuze and Derrida as a proper difference — and therefore as a divided self-identity — of a time, of a present of thought that will have formed a decisive inflection, this difference remains to be thought,” says Jean-Luc Nancy. He is thanked for having started to do so here.

In addition to Jean-Luc Nancy’s generosity is that of Simon Hantai, whom we would like — in this tribute to Deleuze, for whom he mattered so much (Deleuze’s personal library includes no fewer than ten Hantaï catalogs) — to assure of our deep gratitude for his friendship, his hospitality, and for the gift of three prints, made by him, of the reproduction of one of his paintings from 1981, which he chose to include here. We wanted to show all three. The difference and repetition of the fold, in place of the notes on Beckett, Deleuze, and Derrida, which Simon Hantai also occasionally works on, but which he considers incomplete.

We warmly thank Hélène Bamberger and Marie-Laure de Decker for making available to us, with equal generosity, the photographs that finally make this book the portrait it was meant to be, and the most beautiful of which are unpublished. Lastly, thanks to Jeannette Colombel.

JEAN-LUC NANCY – Parallel Differences. Deleuze and Derrida

Difference repeats itself by differing, yet it never repeats itself identically. [...] Difference returns in each of the differences; each difference is, therefore, all the others, with the exception of the difference…

François Zourabichvili5

1

Deleuze and Derrida share…

This could be the beginning. At least, it could be a beginning in the manner of Derrida, a beginning that anticipates and eclipses, in its eruption, a never-arriving end, which will have already withdrawn.

But just one word needs to be added to make it a beginning in the manner of Deleuze: a beginning equal to itself, following an uninterrupted and always-already-commenced movement.

Now, add the difference: they share the difference.

We wished to make this statement itself something they could share. We wanted to hear them both, one close to the other and one far from the other, sharing — confronting, contrasting, perhaps even combining — their respective ways of receiving this statement, which we would have proposed to them as a starting point for a double portrait, a double silhouette in the form of a Chinese shadow of their thoughts. In this way, we would have tried to capture on the screen of our schemes, our ways of turning thought, the double profile, as discordant as discreetly jointed, of a certain identical necessity of thought in a time that can be said to have been theirs6.

2

Deleuze and Derrida share. They share absolutely, to (re)begin: that is, they participate together and each takes their part. They take part and redistribute or separate. Even before saying what it is, before specifying the task or the heritage — if it is ever possible to truly provide such precision — one must affirm of them and between them this sharing.

It has formed their contemporaneity. Not the one measured by five short years of difference (Deleuze’s seniority), but rather this one: they shared the philosophical time of difference. The time of the thought of difference. The time of the thought different from difference. The time of a thought that had to differ from those that preceded it. The time of a shaking of identity: the time, the moment, of sharing.

They share the contemporaneity of a disjunction of the identical, the same, the one — of being understood as one and as being (as one-being)7. This disjunction, they inherited: coming from Hegel as much as from Bergson, from Heidegger as much as from Sartre, and without it being as simple as one would wish to distinguish these origins, a same task came to demand thought, the task of delving into the sameness of difference itself.

The moment when this request took shape in philosophy is not indifferent: the post-Second World War era (one should say, the post-the-two-world-wars era) was the one that had to reexamine all certainties of worldviews and foundations of human order, including the very concepts of “world” and “man.” European humanity had signified to itself the terrifying impasse of its own identification: by wanting to be identical to itself and a model or principle of identity for the world, it had opened up the dehumanization of the world.

With the concepts of man and world, also shattered were those of “history,” “progress,” and more generally, continuity, homogeneity, finally being understood as an identity to itself that could be said of a substrate or process of the totality of beings. And therefore, also of nothingness understood as the negation of such being. Negativity turned under the encountered necessity of denying or rather disturbing and displacing the opposition of position and its negation. (In a way, it was putting at stake anew the heart of Hegelian dialectic, but that is another story8.)

3

Thus, we approached — like shipwrecked sailors — the shores of difference, which must have appeared so strange and disquieting to those who only thought in terms of restoring the identical, the reasonable man and reason.

However, it was necessary to confront what, in fact, could only appear strange and had to remain so, that which must lend itself to thought only by also imposing itself on it, as it always must do to its object — to give itself to it, surrender to it, abandon itself to it, never being thought of any object without becoming that object itself as the subject of its own thinking enunciation. Deleuze called this gesture “the creation of concepts,” and Derrida “touching the language,” which, undoubtedly, does not amount to the same thing, but it does amount to the difference of the same, which only returns to itself by diffracting it through its own prism. Which does not return then, which does not return to itself.

Deleuze and Derrida shared a fading of thought as thought of elevation, the statement “about” the object, and its transformation, its revaluation also as a subject without an object, a subject of the experience of thought. For their time, they thus restarted what philosophy always restarts, under the risk of being nothing more than the conception and deduction of the real, but not the test of its consistency and movement.

But that, this experience, this sense of the experience of thought, they shared it in the thought of difference, and they shared it differently. I like to consider that a happy transcendental device — a transcendental empiricism, an exis-tential, or a transcendentals themselves mobile, differential, not transcendent but rather transimmanent at that moment in our history — made this double D of philosophy possible: departure, demand, destiny, becoming, giving and saying in a double figure, a double body, under double signature. (I like it, but I’m quite certain that it’s more than just pleasing. It’s real and it’s true.)

However, in no way is it a doubling of unity. The division of the two, their disjunction, their disparity precedes them. The transcendental of difference could not give it as a unity, as a pre-given identity that both would then have executed variations of in the mode of amcebic songs. Deleuze and Derrida were not preconceived in a matrix. They are themselves the differences of difference, which did not precede them, except in being different or becoming different, as indeed it perhaps never ceased to do — the one always, always differing from itself, and the difference of the one, in turn, in no way forming a more primitive unity or a more archaically presupposed origin in itself than any possible position.

That, precisely, that same whose sameness dissolves in the very movement of its designation and implementation, that is what they shared. And, consequently, that does not in one sense amount to something they shared as a legacy or something abandoned by anyone before their doors.

4

From one door to another, from one entrance into thought to another, there is no common measure, and it is not any kind of community or continuity that I want to evoke here. On the contrary, I want to suggest nothing other than this: their parallelism. I will not prove it (besides, the existence of parallels, understood in the Euclidean sense, is an axiom), I will only provide a brief sketch. Not a study, not an analysis. I lighten myself of all reference, I merely open the game.

I do not open this game — this beating — for the pleasure of symmetry or any reconciliation. Is there a dispute, anyway? It is not certain; that would remain to be examined. Perhaps there is a difference in the manner indicated by Lyotard, as between the two Ds, as from one to the other without passage: the impossibility of providing a common rule to two regimes of sentences, to two language games. But — that is also what Lyotard wants — philosophy itself presents itself to us as this regime of the non-given rule.

A general regime of incommensurability: from one thought to the other — this Celinean twist that skips the to puts the other against the one but without passage, without common measure, without any common point, as happens with parallels. At the same time, from one thought to the other: from one, the other never ceases to be in sight, even though it remains unidentifiable, inassimilable, perhaps even impossible to recognize.

From one D to the other: that is their sharing. Each is the other of the other. They share this absence of community. It is in this way that they shared difference. Both as the other have indeed undertaken to distinguish difference for itself or in itself. They concerned themselves with it, not with the identities that it differentiates. Their non-common point — perhaps Deleuze would have called it their virtual? perhaps Derrida their spacing? — is difference itself, the sameness of difference.

Since Kant, the problem of distinction dominated, and consequently, that of the union of the distinguished — a union that certainly always distinguished them while uniting them, but finally, the problem left by Kant was understood first as that of reuniting the separated sides. Hegel carried this union in the movement of a resolution of difference, a differential resolution since, with him, the distinguished do not identify themselves other than through the identification of the identical with the passage from one to the other. Hence two interpretations of Hegel, which are undoubtedly those of each of the two Ds: either the passage itself is understood as a result (“dialectical synthesis,” representing the union of contradictions), or the result is the passage itself and therefore does not result from it.

Nietzsche identifies being with becoming, becoming with the return of the same, and the return of the same with its own differentiation (“eternal recurrence” = not an escape from time but time continually discontinuous, cutting short its accomplishment, every result, every resolution). Heidegger thinks being as the transitivity of the ek-sister, being taken out of itself, open difference in it of being to itself. The “transcendental absolutely,” with which Heidegger qualifies being, means nothing other than the different, the self-differing or self-differentiating absolutely, being as non-identifiable.

One would not summarize too badly the situation thus created by saying that the absolute Different, the Same as the Other of all existence, existing absolutely identified in pre-sence-to-itself (in itself for itself), hence non-existent, has given way or rather divided (that can be discussed) into difference that differentiates within the sameness of all things, within the sameness of the world.

5

So far, however, one can discern to what extent the differentiated terms have remained in some respects bound by their identities (the positive and the negative, being and becoming, being and beingness). This measurement is delicate to establish because we are now equipped with frameworks of interpretation that allow us – even command us – to identify in our predecessors the already engaged work of difference “itself,” just as we can no longer understand, for example, Spinoza’s substance as motionless and unchanging behind its modes. An analogous interest shared by both Ds is precisely to have led the history of philosophy, more distinctly and vigorously than ever before, in the movement of self-differentiation, of a differential and differentiating rewriting of itself, which has nothing to do with a change of hermeneutic glasses but with the becoming itself of philosophy as its own difference – as the philein of its own self opened to and by its difference, and consequently also as the singular philein, the singular attraction – attraction and repulsion – triggered between the two parallels, which have in common and have in common only their impossible junction with infinity, i.e., more rigorously, infinity as the true regime of their conjunction (i.e., the absolute object of philosophy).

Up to this point: until difference itself becomes the object, prior to any difference in terms. Up to the point where it also becomes the subject of a double philosophical gesture. No longer the terms but a difference that is no longer theirs, a difference that first differs and in relation to which the different, differentiated, or deferred terms will be merely secondary, deposited on the edges of the open gap of difference itself.

Let us focus on this unique motif: between D and D, a sharing of difference itself has taken place, for itself, by itself. The “difference itself” would be a contradiction only if one were to mistakenly consider it as a term. It would then need to be distinguished from identity. But the identity of the difference itself is the identity that does not distinguish itself from difference – by definition – and which, not distinguishing itself, relates to itself as difference.

Here, the parallels begin. Here, the difference opens: it opens between them and by opening between them, opening from one to the other and not from one toward the other, it simply opens. That is to say, it opens within itself and opens to itself: it differs within itself. Therefore, it differs from itself. It differs within itself from the self in general if the form of the self is self-identity.

Deleuze’s formula is stated as “differ with oneself.” Derrida’s is “oneself differing.”

6

The gap is considerable. On one side, the self is given and carried with difference and as difference. On the other, the self is given and lost in the difference that defers it.

Deleuze does not even say “differ z/with oneself,” as one might be tempted to say (Grévisse explains that this usage of de before avec is used to emphasize the “positive difference” between the considered terms: we might think that, indeed, it is not about a “positive difference” in this sense, that is, the difference on which the accent falls on the distinguished terms). Deleuze says “differ with oneself”: difference and self are given together, one with the other, neither formally identified as if one was the other, nor separated from each other as if one excluded the other. But Xêtre, here, is identical to difference. That’s why “univocal being” is not said of itself (which, as such, is not and cannot be said) but is said only, if at all, of all differences.

Derrida does not speak of being (not in this regard, and hardly in general). He has behind him being as a term of ontico-ontological difference, that is, being as presence and self-presence. In front of him, on the contrary, in the space opened without terms (the lost terms, engulfed in a never-happened past), the deferral of presence itself. It only presents itself in advance or belatedly to “itself.” Being will therefore not be, strictly speaking, univocal or plurivocal: but the very sense of “being,” and therefore with it the “same” sense in general, the sameness that authorizes a sense, is carried away in this “self-deferring.”

Thus, the gap widens: on one side, sense authorizes itself through differentiation, on the other side, sense negates itself in it. One places all the weight on sense as movement, as production, as novelty, as becoming; the other places an equivalent weight on sense as ideality, as recognizable identity, as presentable truth. The difference between the two sides turns out to form a double difference of sense: initial for one, terminal for the other, sense either generates itself by differentiating or loses itself by disseminating.

In a way, it is here and there a question of sense. Of what makes sense of sense. Of what, in sense, differs from a signified identity, from a given truth. But one sees it differing by opening, the other sees it being opened by differing. One is in the outburst of sense, the other in its promise promised not to be fulfilled.

7

Thus, the production of the unprecedented new differs from the supplementation of the always lost old. Thus, the life of death. And yet, it is not at all the opposition of a positive and a negative. The life of one does not exclude the death of the other, which, in turn, does not deny the life of the first. Because the life of the first differentiates itself and, in differentiating itself, also opens the dehiscence of death, the tendential repetition of the identical yet differently taken up in the events of the world. And the death of the second differentiates itself from and “in” death “itself,” opening in it the impossibility to which, in the end, the self-differing is engaged: the relation to the other as other.

Do they intersect then, these parallels? No, because everything happens in two heterogeneous spaces. On one side, the world of a fertile, agitated, mobilized chaos; on the other side, a voice that says “yes” to what it could not name a world. Heterogeneity and dissymmetry are complete. Difference is deferred in both directions, pulls from both sides, and digs the infinite between the parallels, at the point of their improbable junction.

Or again: they intersect, yes, but the point of their intersection, located at infinity, decrosses at the instant of intersection. The intersection moves away from itself: it immediately redistributes the differences on both sides of difference itself, which, thus, disjoins them as much as it conjoins them.

And this partition is immediately replayed, repeated, and divided at the same time. For one, the disjunction is included in the synthesis (in the division of self into self), while, for the other, the conjunction is excluded in the original division (of origin/at the place of origin).

One never stops pulling the double thread of this continuous dehiscence. A preceding, multiple, co-involved world, or a preceding, cut voice. A world before the world, or a voice before any voice. Germination and creativity, or a prosthesis and an archi-supplementation of any possible unity.

It can continue in many ways, on many registers: difference never ceases to replay from one D to the other, a stroke of one for a stroke of the other, constantly touching, distancing. Touching, meaning distancing: contiguous, contingent, contagious, distinct, decoupled, intact. Each one, in some way, transcends towards the other and immanents in itself to the measure of that transcendence: what, from Deleuze, opens to Derrida’s general “archie” immediately makes the archie proliferate in multiplicity, and what, from Derrida, opens to the difference of forces in Deleuze immediately distances this difference from its own play. Neither allows difference to be identified in the other, and each takes it up to reintroduce it into itself with even more difference.

Yet there are no degrees in difference. There are only when one is interested in the differing terms. But difference itself differs, absolutely, neither more nor less. It differs within itself, differs from itself, defers itself, differentiates itself. Thus, at this precise point – being absolutely different in itself – D becomes equal to D and, in this equality, begins to differ from D again.

8

As we know, it leads to two spellings. Différen—iation for Deleuze, différence for Derrida. It is very remarkable that both of them have encountered the necessity to differentiate the writing of difference, thus producing two different graphies (typographies, orthographies, polygraphies…) not, however, for the same word but for two words, one of which (différeniation) immediately names difference as a process or movement, while the other (différence) names difference as a state. Deleuze inscribes in the word différeniation, which is the usual term, the difference between différeniation and différeniation: the first corresponds to the determination or distinction (of an Idea, of a thing in its Idea, or virtual in Deleuze’s sense), the second designates the actualization of the first, that is, the embodiment in qualities and parts. The second is not the realization of the real copy of a possibility: it is the divergent expansion in act of virtual singularity in its alterity (in its differential).

Deleuze’s graphie, which he designates as a “distinctive trait,” thus distinguishes in difference the virtual of the idea (the differential of a singularity or, more precisely, each time of a concomitant group of singularities, since these singularities always proliferate prior to any individuality) and the actual of the differentiated, the thing conformed, organized in the world, which, however, does not stop its own differentiation but continues to carry it further, entering into new relationships and new modifications or modalities.

Derrida’s graphie behaves very differently: instead of tracing a differential and differentiating trait within difference itself (which is such only as différeniation and, consequently, as difference of différeniation and différeniation), this graphie reopens in the word différence the verbal value of the verb différer. Difference is the activity of deferring, but it thus introduces with it the primary and transitive value of the verb. “Différer,” indeed, differs from “différer de.” The latter is noted between terms. The former indicates the action of postponing. The “later” of difference is not chronological: it is a “later than itself” of difference that cannot coincide with itself, and thus, this “later” is also a “sooner”: difference does not coincide with itself, and therein lies its “itself-ness.”

The difference between the two graphic differences or différeniations is, therefore, very remarkable. In Deleuze, difference differs from itself as the virtual from the factual: the first is the power — but not the possibility, a simple retrospective copy of the real, according to Bergson’s lesson — of creation, i.e., the activity of innovation (rather than novelty) as a condition of a becoming that does not go toward an end but toward itself, or rather “toward” its own difference. This becoming implies a temporality, but not the rectilinear temporality that goes from t to t'; it is instead a multiple, heterogeneous temporality, open to the outside of successiveness or simultaneity of chronological time. One could say that becoming does not go toward anything other than its own différeniation as the inflection and cut of chronic time, “infinitive of a caesura” 9. It is there, one could say, at each point of inflection of différeniation, that a becoming crystallizes as coming to itself, to say it that way, of difference itself (i.e., each time of such difference or différeniation of differentiality).

In Derrida, difference retains the being of difference from reaching an end. Not only is it not primarily about the difference between terms, but difference itself cannot end: it is its own end, and this does not make it a term, i.e., difference is not identified with itself. That is precisely why “the appearing of infinite difference is itself finite” 10. Finitude is the appearing of the infinity according to which difference defers and differs. But this appearing must be understood in its strongest sense and in a sense less phenomenological (in the sense of appearing to a subject) of the word: appearing is coming into the world, coming to the world, and making-world. It also involves the contingency of this coming, and the departure that is its correlate. Death, not as the end of life, but as the departure inscribed in the coming, that is, again, as the difference of being insofar as it is at stake in existence. It is still a matter of time: a time interrupted or syncopated by difference.

However, this cut, this distancing that stretches the instant of presence, does not open onto another time and differs thereby from Deleuze’s “infinitive.” Derrida would no more grant to Deleuze than to Heidegger the possibility of a non-chronological concept of time (or of a time detached from the present, whether simultaneous or successive). What the difference turns to as death is rather an outside of time in such a way that it has no place in time but in such a way that it will always have “preceded” and “followed” time itself as the differance of the present.

9

In the end, it is on both sides of the linearly chronological course of time that the two parallels run. It is at the question of a present whose presence appeared to them carried away in a succession to which no history, no teleology could assure a calming end that Deleuze and Derrida undertook to respond.

Together, they have been the thinkers of difference itself because the difference between the points of time — and thus also between places, things, subjects, all the terms that time of our actions, the time of our lives, separates and connects — ceased before them, in their time, to lend itself to its own summary in the reunion of terms and, in general, in any form of identification whatsoever. They responded to the crisis and suffering of identity — by differentiating it.

Together, they are the thinkers of difference in identity, difference carried to the heart of identity, open in it as its very opening to itself, and that is why they are the thinkers of difference itself: not of difference posited as a distinct term, but precisely of the difference not posited, carried as the movement for which no term ends. Thus both of them — and each other — opening up the necessity of another relationship to oneself than that of an appropriation by oneself of a being for oneself: engaging the “self” in its difference from itself.

Engaging it thus in a different negativity from the annihilating or negating negativity of any process: in a negativity neither negative nor positive, in a neutrality one could perhaps say, but a differentiating and deferring neutrality, the active neutrality of that which affirms to hold to neither one nor the other of the terms disposed on the two sides of difference itself. In Deleuze, this activity always begins in the proliferation of virtualities and movements of différeniation, in Derrida, it has already begun by deferring its own beginning, which will already be infinitely finished.

Once again, one might be tempted to reduce their difference to “life/death.” But that would be wrong. The life of one, whatever its power of prolific generosity, is no less the life that death also comes to differentiate. The death of the other, whatever the tonality of its original mourning, is no less generous, even in some way generative (disseminating…) as life — but its generosity comes from elsewhere. An elsewhere, an irrecoverable alterity perhaps makes the difference here. Perhaps.

10

Both, therefore, together with each other, but not one as the other, although not one against the other either. One differently from the other, one different from the other and differing or differentiating the other. One could say that Deleuze is the deferred of Derrida — for the latter, nothing ever “happens” in the strict sense — and that Derrida is the differential of Deleuze — another Idea, another singular configuration, from which differentiation starts.

Both of them, however, calling us to — philosophy, that is to say, to an exercise, an activity, a praxis. What they share is also this: that to philosophize is to enter into difference, to leave identity and, consequently, to take the means and risks that such an exit demands. Perhaps this has been the case from the beginning of philosophy: not being able to stay where we seem to be at first, assured of a ground, a dwelling, and a history. But as soon as we move, difference comes into play, and there cannot be a single way of entering into difference.

Could I try to gather each of their calls like this: by differentiating them as an initiation and an invitation? They would be two ways of sending or addressing, summoning or interpellating through philosophy, to philosophy.

An initiation: the proposal to enter into the movement of difference, to engage oneself in such a way as to become the self of difference itself, to differentiate oneself by becoming — for example, as we know, animal, woman, imperceptible, which always means, ultimately, becoming further, more singularly, difference itself, differing oneself, becoming endlessly nothing other than the self of a renewed division of oneself — an initiate who inscribes on oneself, across oneself, the distinctive trait of one’s differentiation, and thus an initiate always again initiating.

An invitation: a call to the other, a “Come!” not launched from myself but from that or he, from she or that animal or thing that will have in “me” preceded a precedence such that it eludes all antecedence and confounds all “archy” with the mourning of ïarkhé, a “Come!” doubled with a “Yes!” which is barely another word, and this double word, this double call having no other meaning than inviting the other and, consequently, inviting oneself to this “coming” which remains suspended as the differing identity of the call and the coming.

Two parallel calls that we hear both, one as the other, and yet one without the other — without, however, excluding the possibility of hearing them in some way through each other. Perhaps each one opens to the other while absolutely distinguishing itself. Perhaps each of the two has heard the other as much as it has departed from him, out of reach of his voice. Perhaps even each has heard oneself in the other, perhaps has heard oneself differing in the other and being called by the other. Called to join it as well as called to remain on its side. Such are the calls or echoes that Nietzsche says transmit themselves from star to star in stellar friendship.

What matters is that a double voice — and it matters little under what names —, a resonance reaches us of difference itself: itself resounding in itself with this singular and shared ipséity that it falls upon us to hear. For what thus resonates is the demand for a metamorphosis of sameness in general. Two parallel calls to differ in our turn — “ourselves.”

To join each other infinitely: yes, to render ourselves and find ourselves each by our difference — provided only that it is in all effectiveness and all truth infinitely.

RENÉ SCHÉRER – An Atheist Mysticism

To pan zôon…

Plotinus, Enneads, III, 8

Fx = A0•-0 + A1•-1 + A2•-2 + A3•-3 + ... An•-n

Hoëné Wronski, Prospectus of Absolute Philosophy, 1826

I have been asked for a portrait of Gilles Deleuze. However, even though I am a friend, I have never been a close acquaintance and I cannot provide those picturesque details that add depth and weight. Either way, my portrait—the evocation of an image, rather—can only be an arbitrary reconstruction based on what belongs neither more to me than anyone else.

This portrait: a shadow, of course; a phenomenological Abschattung, between Bergsonian dynamic schema and a Kantian schematism, transitioning from concept to intuition.

Those who have fortunately heard him, seen him express himself, still have in mind and before their eyes his gesture and his gaze, the penetrating inflections of this tone that composed his inimitable charm.

The composed charm of Deleuze; I borrow here an expression from Charles Fourier, modulating it in my own way. He embodied it. All his art, his philosophical art, was the composition of charm. It was enough to see him sit down in front, among the eager audience, to hear him. He was… he fortunately still is.

For those who are not among the privileged who knew him, there is for everyone, and through the joy of technical reproduction of the image, the audiovisual recording of his lectures and this wonderful and exceptional thing that is the Abécédaire, which makes him forever alive, beyond his physical erasure. From it, we will gather decisive formulas, like the one on “desire and its arrangement”, or “There is no evil power, but wicked powers”; or we also learn the animal patience of the tick, to put our anthropological presumption, too human, in its place, claiming to be kings of Creation. A Deleuze educator like Montaigne in the Apology for Raymond Sebond, or Schopenhauer according to Nietzsche.

So I could simply refer to a projection of these sequences, where everyone would appreciate directly for themselves, thanks to the perpetuated voice and gesture of the philosopher, his art of teaching and making learn. The two words, I remind you, being synonymous in French language, in a common act of the teacher and the taught, of the one who speaks and the one who listens and receives. It is also an act of letting go of the “navel-gazing” obsession around which contemporary education strives to “structure” the child’s ego. In comparison, Deleuze is a call from the outside, the wind from the sea.

There is no mere fortuitous encounter, contingency, empirical fact, in that the image of Deleuze teaching has been fixed and revives before us; it repeats at our discretion and always remakes our learning. Any other thinker could be, undoubtedly is now, for the times to come, recorded and repeatable. But, concerning Deleuze specifically, this empiricism, as he could have said, is almost “transcendental”, that is, it touches the very conditions of the possibility of realizing what it means, coming from him, “to learn”. Because it seems to me that this sensitive and affective immersion, that this repetition in difference actualizes, illustrates one of the great ideas, one of Deleuze’s views on a learning process that will never end in the acquisition of knowledge, but which consists in a process constantly to be restarted. Only the initial act, the movement in progress, the conatus, as the classics would say, matters. The rest is a downfall, a fall, a heaviness in institutionalization. And, as soon as Deleuze appears, in his image, with this unique atmosphere that he brings with him and illuminates, it seems that we are warned, from the outset, against these weights.

However, to refer simply to the video tape of the Abécédaire would be, on my part, a slightly dubious easy solution, a sleight of hand, and this is not, obviously, what is expected of me. But, whether it is present or not in the mind, in the eyes of memory, one cannot disregard this supplement, this advantage offered by the image when it is there to prevent thought from turning to generality and abstraction. Or from becoming obscured by an excess of complexity and academic erudition, too learned references, which, basically, comes to the same thing, the proper movement of the spirit then getting lost in the letter of knowledge.

Gilles Deleuze said of Michel Foucault that he was a “seer.” This quality applies eminently to himself. He sees and makes us see what, until him, had remained unnoticed.

Now, let me come to the very content, the subject of my argument, after evoking what might appear to be only the simple envelope, the mere form. Deleuze’s initial impulse, and let us be clear, a permanent one, is to liberate all thought from what hinders and distorts it. The impulse is one of liberation, of deliverance, equally valid in what we call everyday or political life: to free from artificial divisions and rules, from powers, institutions, constraints, representations, received ideas, and clichés; from everything that diverts and blocks the initiated process. To free from everything that immobilizes, that sedentarizes: a recurring word. If there is something above all that we have learned, that we retain from him, which is his distinctive mark and light, it is this constant call to keep the movement going; close, in this respect, to Malebranche and Bergson, but I also think of Fourier. And consequently, of course, a call and a warning against the dangers that lead reflection to fixate on what should not be.

Starting with the most dangerous yet most inevitable fixation: the one concerning the self, fixation on the “I-myself,” this modern and contemporary virus from which all images of thought arise, from which all dogmatism emanates, from which all stupidity oozes.

For it is precisely around the “I-myself” that stupidity takes shape, with its fixed eyes, sure of itself, emerging from commonplaces, received ideas, and false problems. And undoubtedly, what Deleuze teaches us, the most challenging, and what must be repeatedly taken up and confirmed, is to escape this primary fixation on the self, this temptation of a subjectivity too universally shared; the one where the fruitless quest for identity and empty generality merge. It is undoubtedly to penetrate this haze or screen of subjectivity to liberate, behind or through it, the infinite space of what he calls, recognizing in them the only assured basis, the only indubitable existent: multiplicities and singularities.

Learning to transcend egotistic and anthropomorphic subjectivity – which comes to the same thing – to turn ourselves from the “being” of the self and consciousness towards “becomings,” that is the primary lesson of this apprenticeship. But, once again, it is never given once and for all; it must be repeated in all directions, on every occasion.

Certainly, freeing oneself from constraints, institutions, and even, in a certain way, from the self-person, others have done it, taught us, and Deleuze had learned it too: I think of Sartre, whose subjectivity, the “for-itself,” denies the substantiality of the self. But to say “subject” instead of “substance” is only a superficial substitution of words; for it is this very subject that must be shattered, dispersed into singularities or individualities that apply just as well to non-humans, animals, states of affairs, and events. And this is Deleuze’s great liberating revolution, the radical empiricism of dispersion, which I will call “naturalistic” or “cosmic,” of our most deeply ingrained certainties of being conscious selves.

If we manage to understand this, it seems that we have reached the heart of learning, that we have grasped the process of learning in Deleuze himself, starting from him, something he will repeat relentlessly in all forms throughout the various themes and perspectives that his philosophy will adopt. But amidst the differences, there remains a common point, a common denominator: we cannot learn without beginning to “unlearn.” To unlearn previous prejudices, of course, but above all and always, to unlearn ourselves.

Yes, I know, this formulation comes from Michel Foucault. It has been mainly commented upon in relation to him, from its occurrence in the “History of Sexuality,” the preface to “The Care of the Self,” where it was supposed to announce a “return to the subject.” But the idea is also and simultaneously Deleuzian. It is even the first idea, the first impulse, I said, of a philosophy that would invent a different conception for thought, abandoning the image or giving it another image.

Deleuze teaches us to turn away, to move away, to no longer demand the self and its establishment, but to be immediately drawn to the idea, the problem. Idea, problem – these are other things he has taught us and to which “learning” is intimately associated. They belong to the same nature, part of the same constellation.

A great Deleuzian idea, a key formula of learning according to Deleuze: ideas are not inside our heads but outside of us. They are not inside, but outside. Predominance of the outside, just as in Foucault.

Earlier, I made an allusion to Charles Fourier; the one we should evoke here is Samuel Butler, for “The Way of All Flesh,” entirely devoted to a biting and humorous critique of the stupidity of education and the rooted image of thought: “He used to think that ideas were born inside the head… He did not yet know that the worst way to catch ideas is to go hunting for them.” Everything Deleuze is in this forerunner. But because Deleuze has just taught us how to find them.

And, a great consequential paradox of this “being outside” of the idea, is that only in this way can we “think for ourselves,” can we “be ourselves.” Nietzsche, he acknowledges, is the one from whom he himself learned it:

"Nietzsche gives a perverse taste: the taste for each one to say simple things in his own name {Pourparlers, letter to Michel Cressole, p. 14).

But immediately adding:

To say something in one’s own name does not mean a self, a person, a subject. On the contrary, one acquires a proper name through the most severe exercise of depersonalization.

That is, one must learn to “open oneself to the multiplicities that traverse us,” to practice a “depersonalization of love, not of submission.”

Yes, all of Deleuze is there, already present, all his contribution, all that he will teach us. And concerning Nietzsche, whom he mentioned just now, it becomes clear that Nietzsche’s exaltation of the self, even of the “I,” has nothing to do with contemporary narcissism, which is entirely withdrawn; it is instead a way of opening up, of surrendering to the traversing forces, of increasing the intensity of the power to be and to act. Turning away from the history of philosophy that only knows how to be in conformity with the letter, Deleuze and his language leap over incompatibilities and assert paradoxes that are at the same time revelations for each individual. Speaking in one’s own name means ceasing to settle into common meanings, to respond to the “command” of teaching language, to submit (a depersonalization of submission); it means opening oneself in love to (the other – which is not necessarily another person but can be an animal, any thing, or a human too, but which does not thereby receive a special privilege. Learning is not to reproduce but to inaugurate; to invent what does not yet exist and not just repeat knowledge: “One speaks – I am still going through the same text – from the depth of what one does not know, of one’s own meaning, of one’s own development, of a set of loose singularities”; for it is necessary to dismantle the “apparatuses of knowledge,” pre-existing organizations, including that of the body, to become, to enter into “becomings” that govern and mark all creation.

I do not want to repeat too much of what is already well-known, but I will search, in this Deleuzian “learning,” for some remarkable points, milestones of a line allowing us to sketch its contours. And I will highlight three of these points, of these lines.

  1. The distinction between the true and the false, as usually conceived, as taught in schools, needs to be radically rethought. It concerns only already given solutions or partial problems, separate and of little importance, whose answer merely demands conformity to the question. It matters little whether we learn or do not learn these “truths,” do not acquire this knowledge.

We will think, concerning the dense and central pages in “Difference and Repetition” on the classic philosophical problem of error, of the famous phrase, of an unfathomable logic, from little Ernesto in Marguerite Duras’s “Summer Rain”: “I don’t want to go to school because they teach me things I don’t know” (p. 22). And also of Jean-Marie Straub’s short film, based on an initial idea from 1972 (which “Summer Rain” would develop further in 1990), presenting, in action, a sample of the pointless questions of the teacher: “Who is the president? Who is this man?” or showing a globe: “Is it a ball? A potato?” or stating truisms: “We are here and not elsewhere,” etc. Thus, Ernesto, faced with the nonsense of teaching (and learning), has no other option but to refuse it, to refuse to learn “what he doesn’t know” or that has no resonance within him, awakens no echo, corresponds only to false problems.

  1. The second point and second line allowing the identification of “learning” is in the conversation with “Cahiers du cinéma” regarding Godard and his famous formula: “Not a just image, but just an image,” defining creation and which can be applied to the operation of thought itself: “Not a just idea, just an idea”; “Two or three ideas, that’s a lot, that’s huge!”

For the problem of thought is precisely that of the invention of ideas, more than their organization into propositions and judgments we make about them. Before evaluating truth or falsehood, there is the possibility of thinking itself, and the impossibility of thinking something, as Artaud lamented in such pathetic terms to Jacques Rivière. Hence, in “Difference and Repetition,” those extraordinary, inexhaustible pages on thought emerging from a pure and dark ground, “the undetermined from which determination arises,” which, in stupidity, “rises through the ‘I’ without taking shape.” The pedagogue’s nightmare is made of “assignments” woven with banalities, nonsense, ill-posed problems, unclassifiable according to the scale of error or falseness, lying beyond any decidability.

But what is an idea if not the singular determination, emerged from the ground, language that has become independent of the command, engaging in a struggle against power? It can be the response of Duras’s Ernesto before the pinned butterfly (in the film): “What is it called? – Murder, says Ernesto,” or (in both versions) to the teacher affirming, “We are here, not everywhere,” the wholly Leibnizian reply: “Here is everywhere” (p. 81), which, at once, breaks the chain of orders and opens perspectives, traces “lines of flight” to infinity.

  1. The third remarkable point (distinct in Deleuze from those he qualifies as “ordinary,” which also mark inflections, lines of flight) in the development devoted more precisely to “learning” at the end of chapter III on “The Image of Thought.” Learning, giving birth to the beautiful names of apprentice and student (beautiful for their insertion into a cultural tradition), introduces the latter into the singularity and objectivity of the idea by pairing them, aligning them point by point with it; like – an example provided by Deleuze – the swimmer with the wave he embraces and cleaves. It is an education of the senses, a conjugation of faculties.

I would need to revisit and comment on everything. Allow me to detach merely the observation on the always unconscious, non-deliberate nature of an operation and its success, which repels authoritarian programming, and which only fortuitous encounters, fortunate events, can determine:

One never knows in advance how someone will learn, through what loves one becomes proficient in Latin, through what encounters one becomes a philosopher, in which dictionary one learns to think.

I add: where one goes to seek the forbidden words of sex, as commonly happens for children.

This admirable incidental phrase by Deleuze, which suddenly creates a remarkable point in a more abstract development, uncovers a passionate and carnal space, and the horizons of literature. In one stroke, the ponderous considerations and painful protocols of an educational psychology focused on learning, including the most recent and closest Deleuzian notions of adjustment, adaptation, and embedding, are swept away. We are asked to move to another stage, that of life itself, no longer the laboratory or the pedagogical school observatory. Rousseau and Freinet are lost from view; the flight line of childhood is delineated in novels (such as “The Pupil” by Henry James, or “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Samuel Buder, or “Anton Reiser” by Karl-Philipp Moritz, or “Narcissus and Goldmund” by Hermann Hesse). Learning follows the path of encounters and loves, not the methods of a perpetually impotent pedagogy, overtaken by passions:

“There is no method for finding treasures and no method for learning either.”

Yet, by a paradox that clings to all great ideas, it may happen that this view, this highly transgressive escape from all institutions, simultaneously discovers new properties for an education systematically oriented and usable for social purposes.

In the same text, Deleuze refers to the “training” spoken of by Nietzsche, to “a culture or paideia that traverses the individual entirely.” But I would rather think of Fourier and his harmonian education, which teaches by associating other passions and making them play through “passionate rallying.”

“How to teach grammar and make a young girl who loves garlic love it?” he asks (from “The New Industrial World,” Anthropos, Vol. VI, p. 257). “Such a young girl loves garlic and does not like to study grammar.” So, how to teach her? Precisely graft on this primary passion, place her in an industrial group of “garlic lovers”; and, as she gets to know an “Ode in honor of garlic,” she will eagerly read it and, gradually, be led to the study of lyric poetry and grammar. A humorous anecdote, certainly, but full of meaning, the meaning of life and not abstract methodology. And it should be extended by other attractive passionate relationships, which are the true companions or movements of learning. Like the relationship that Fourier also imagines, concerning the emulation at work, between “rich Crésus, aged 50, and young Sélima, aged 14,” who is “another himself in the works of carnations.” About which he adds, “Wags will say that this penchant of Crésus for Sélima is suspicious of some other affinity; it doesn’t matter if Crésus conceives love for her, he will love her all the better from the cabalistic point of view…” (Vol. V, etc.). Only civilization (“the subversive order” according to Fourier) could ignore and proscribe this natural logic of harmony between intellect and feelings, and make work repulsive, work that should be grasped in the accompanying and guiding amorous movement.

Thus, very Fourierist (or rather Fourierian) to me appear the overall inspiration and certain remarks with which Deleuze’s work is scattered, about rejecting binary exclusions, “the culture of joy, the hatred of interiority,” the affirmation of “the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power” (Pourparlers, p. 14), even though, from my perspective, it should only be a subjective connection, as Deleuze’s references tend more towards Spinoza or Nietzsche, Hume or Bergson. Yet, Fourier is mentioned in “Anti-Oedipus” as a thinker of the logic of desire, the one who has already seen and established, arranged the machine for capturing productive flows (“Again, Fourier said it all when he showed the two opposed directions of ‘capture’ and mechanization,” p. 349). But learning is part of such a mechanism, discovered and expressed, with Félix Guattari, in 1972, even more than in the analyses of 1969, which were still conducted at the level of structures and transcendentalism.

The latter remains of essential interest to shed light on another, final aspect that I would like to evoke here, of learning with Deleuze, which is the incessant emergence of new formulations, invention, or creation within a continuous process. Deleuze finally at liberty, in the true sense, “relieved” from the heavy chains of the history of philosophy. This does not mean, quite the contrary, that through authors, he does not establish his own path. Indeed, it is precisely these choices and their grafts that seem particularly interesting for what he could teach us. Learning not to be stopped by prejudices, learning to read and reread, learning to choose.

He taught us to lift Gabriel Tarde or Samuel Butler from discredit or obscurity, to revive Ballanche, to rekindle Charles Péguy. For a generation under the exclusive influence of phenomenology and Marxism, he recalled Hume and Bergson. He freed himself and freed us from sciences as uncertain as dogmatic structuralism, Lacanianism, and analytic philosophy; against the tide of all that sterilized creation, making thought most of the time a servant of power and its slogans. He restored the rights of a philosophy of nature; after an existentialism too inclined towards exclusive humanism, he recalled the animal, the woman, the child. But not—to a great extent—to “elevate” them to the “dignity of the subject.” Rather, to embrace their difference, their amorous depersonalization, and give them expression. Not on the side of the individual but of the dispersion that he called “molecular”; not on the side of attaining adulthood and its rights, but by affirming and embracing their minority, with a “minor” literature and politics.

His strength, his power—in the Spinozist or Nietzschean sense that he gave to this word, far from power—is, in a sense, to say no more than what was already thought. Or rather, what one did not dare to think, for which one had neither the word nor the idea to think and formulate. Thus, he stands opposed to common sense, the sense said to be most widely shared and the breeding ground of stupidity.

Deleuze’s “sharing” lies in this obscure region of the “shadowy precursor,” as he likes to call it, from which the flash, the idea’s brilliance, and the formulation of the problem emerge. If he addresses each one, it is not through the generality of the proposition but through the singular trait, through this “differential,” this “infinitesimal” of singularity—just as Fourier also thought—which is, in fact, most commonly shared. It is the part of the “one,” paradoxically yet even more profound, more “authentic” than the “I” of the “subject.” “Splendor of the one,” he wrote. You open Deleuze at random, and you are sure to find a formula that teaches and, at the same time, always anew, teaches us something about him, about his thought.

Learning with Deleuze is also learning Deleuze. But that does not mean knowing him.

So, finally, what about this mysticism which, for seasoned Deleuzians, shines with its shadowy brilliance at the very beginning of “Difference and Repetition,” forever fixed in its enigmatic formula: “Empiricism is the mysticism of the concept and its mathematism”? An enigma made even more piquant by a reference to Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon,” a utopia par excellence, duly cataloged by Ruyer in his valuable historical and critical summa: “Utopie et les utopies.” Yet, we are not ignorant of Deleuze’s mistrust, even aversion, towards utopia, excluded from the concept (“not a good concept”), suspected of shady relations with history. But “Erewhon” comes into play not so much because of the utopian nature of its story but because of the play on the word that its name provides: “here and now,” now, here, which is the watchword of philosophy itself, defining the task of its successful repetition outside the flow of historical time. Its installation in an aiôn that, while not fully belonging to mysticism, may be its herald and prepares its plan.

“But precisely,” the text continues, “it treats the concept as the object of an encounter, as a here-now, or rather as an Erewhon from which ‘here’ and ‘now’ endlessly emerge, differently distributed.” How—this is still the continuation of the passage that I am commenting on as I read—how can the empiricist say (“Only the empiricist can say”) that concepts are things themselves if one places the concept in the abstract, opposing it to what, in general, is its counterpart, its opposite, or its complement: the thing itself, precisely, in its sensible and concrete character? Deleuze catches us there, forcing us to look closer at this truly tangential passage, taking the concept at its word, seriously, when we thought we were invited to a hypostasis of universals considered as realities, not understanding at all how empiricism, identified with lived experience, can lead there.

The reason is that this Deleuzian empiricism, while certainly being of experience—being only that—is not of lived experience, our adherent experience, from which the concept delivers us. It tears us away from this too close adherence that blinds, from this proximity to the thing that serves as a screen. There is a text on Bergson, elaborated in a course about cinema: the body is not an adhesion but an image that marks a halt, a gap in the continuous flow of duration; consciousness is not light but a black screen on which things are reflected, and the light comes from elsewhere.

Inserted in “The Movement-Image” (p. 83-90), this analysis of the light-image, the black screen consciousness, is best read in the living delivery of the 1982 course:

“A light for no one… Consciousness is what reveals the light. Why? Because consciousness is the black screen and not the light, as believed and said: it’s amazing how it settles scores with man (laughter)… You think you are light, poor people, but you are only black screens, only opacities in the world of light.”

And, through the brain, intervals, obstacles. To bypass the obstacles, Bergson called it intuition, but for Deleuze, it is the concept that is charged with it, by delivering things freed from this screen and this body’s stop, “things in a free and wild state,” as he still writes. There is indeed empiricism, but through this dive into things, free from the subjective filter of the self and its body. An empiricism of “diving” that crosses the mirror-screen, passes, leaps. It is indeed mysticism, if there ever was one.

Mysticism has a bad reputation in philosophy. It is not liked at all. A respectable philosopher, i.e., dressed in strict attire, enamored with impassivity, fears nothing more than being suspected of mysticism. Obliged by Kantism and theoretical rigor: philosophy as rigorous science. The pinnacle, the paradox, is that Deleuze, too, mistrusts mysticism, mocks irrationality, sentimentality, and faith. He aspires to “scientificity.” He tirelessly completes or supports his reasoning with some formula in “Difference and Repetition,” in “The Logic of Sense,” or in “The Fold”: dy/dx, or differentiation/differentiation, among the most famous; and, in “A Thousand Plateaus,” with Félix, regarding the techno-scientific presentation of diagrams, they take great pleasure in it. Avoiding mysticism, distrusting romanticism, the vagueness of the soul. The affirmation, the profession of faith of atheism governs everywhere. There is only body and matter, energies and physical quanta, atomic composition of matter, the elimination of all religious overlordship, of all divine transcendence. Just as in “Anti-Oedipus,” the introduction of “machines” expels any interiority from the desiring being, any spirituality, any obscure foundation, leaving only gears, their cogs, and movements without mystery. The delirious “body without organs” of Artaud replaces the “soul”; it even becomes the formula for a sort of quasi-chemical element, CsO11.

Yes, as it has been said (I think here mainly of Charles Wolfe), the characteristic of materialism, starting and concluding with this fundamentally presupposed materialism that is that of science (as much of psychic sciences, if they exist, as physical ones), is “externalism”, or the deployment, the “unfolding” of any enclosed relationship first believed “internal”, all of Deleuze’s thinking is guided by such a requirement for exposure that coincides with rationalism itself. How, in such a framework, according to such a method, could mysticism be possible? Is there even a sense in suggesting it, in evoking its shadow for a philosophy so imbued with logical requirement and for which only determinable relations and, if one can say, extroversible relations are taken into account?

However, this mysticism is possible; the problem is well stated, and central — Fourier would have written pivotai, or occupying a hearthstone place — of this alliance between empiricism and mysticism; between the order of facts and what Kant called, in his opuscule on The Dreams of the Visionary, loss in the transcendent. Obstacle to avoid, or better, touchstone for a paradoxical reversal. Thus plainly posed, right at the threshold, this stone is a warning and a sign of recognition. Let no neutral here if he is not a mystic, if he does not forge his empiricism in accordance with a mystic; only, not against mathematical scienticity, but with it, with mathematicism (or its mathematism, if indeed the concept had a specific one).

Mathematicism: is it about supporting mathematics in themselves as the only true formal ontology, the one that gives the laws and the key to real being, and thus melting into a universal scientism an empiricism that would only be the sensitive appearance? Mathematical laws becoming the hidden reason for the experience, the Open Sesame of the mystery of things, one would then understand this almost mystical fervor with which they are believed in and revered since the Pythagoreans; under varied forms but along a constant line, going from the magic of arithmetic numbers to the invocation of differential calculus and the traversal of the hierarchy of infinites. This is how Hoëné Wronski can, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, sketch the great fresco that leads from Tha-les to Newton, from him to contemporaries, on the path of continuous function calculation, and trace the formula of an absolute mathematical knowledge, presiding over all the productions of the universe; give it a formula that plays the role of a true talisman:

Fx = A0•-0 + A1•-1 + A2•-2 + A3•-3 + ... An•-n

Supreme law, absolute concentration of science12.

No doubt Wronski, with his messianic mysticism, was one of these continuators of Kant’s critical philosophy, who raised it, after having braved the taboo of the famous “thing in itself” unknowable, to the rank of Transcendental Philosophy, or of “intuition by concept” capable of penetrating to the very arcanes of the production of things themselves. And no doubt he contributed, in his own way, that of a precursor of the modern theory of functions, to widen the field of experience, of the knowable and determinable from the experience, through a finer mathematical theorization.

Is this what Deleuze means, is this the path he takes? And with it, that of the mysticism of the absolute State, of the authoritarian transcendence of a divine monarch embodied in that of the Earthly Empire (see the great Summa Messianism of Wronski, his address to the tsar, his Pan-Slavism)? No, of course; asking the question is already having answered it. But more important and subtle is, moreover, that we must be careful not to slide, in the formula, from mathematicism to mathematics. Mathematicism is not a quantification of the concept nor its transformation into a function. It does not mean that the concept is of mathematical expression, although it may be occasionally; or better, that one can treat as philosophical concept the indication given by the mathematical formula which, in itself, only expresses a simple function. Thus, as can be seen in Difference and Repetition, in the chapter where the difference is inscribed in differential calculus, the finiteness of Kant’s criticism is defeated and surpassed by Solomon Maimon’s speculations on the power infinite that the mathematical infinitesimal allows us to glimpse. Way of all the “post-Kantianism” and of its undeniable “mysticism”, if we mean by this the capacity of the spirit to carry beyond anthropological borders and knowledge. (Solomon Maimon, the little Polish Jew who was married at 11, father at 14, and not the anti-revolutionary absolutist Wronski.)

The mathematism of Deleuze is not mathematics. It is not merely that; it is not even that at all, that is, the quantitative mathematization of philosophical concepts. This word must be understood in the sense that Heidegger gave it in his writing on “Les conceptions du monde” (The conceptions of the world), in Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part (Paths that lead nowhere), to which Deleuze certainly refers when he uses it. Mathematism demands a reversal of the formula according to which experience (the world) would be determinable because it “would be written in mathematical language.” Rather, the opposite is true: the possibility of determination, of determinability a priori, precedes the writing in numbers, letters, and functions. The concept precedes “in principle” (the Kantian interrogation that Deleuze, following Salomon Maïmon, likes to take up: Quidjuris?) experience and makes it possible. Condition of possibility, transcendentalism of empiricism: a “transcendental empiricism” or “mystical empiricism,” which are equivalent. The concept then opens up the field, the plane of experience, revealing, manifesting the unnoticed.

It is in the extension of the concept, in its field, on the plane where it is carved out, where it carves out its “pan” (pan de consistance, a term coined by Félix Guattari) that one can see, that one can speak. To see the becomings, to see the body without organs, to discover the fold, as Leibniz discovered his monads or Descartes his Cogito. The concept is thus “the thing itself,” given in and by the experience that it, paradoxically, has made possible. It is the contemplation of the world; or better, to avoid any ambiguity in the attribution of this determinative: the contemplation that the world offers to itself, that of the things of the world by themselves, their contemplation which is their act, an active contemplation, as Plotinus said13. The concept is clairvoyance (seeing clearly) and the philosopher, far from being a mere judge, is a seer.

At three singular points, Deleuze’s mysticism clings and takes hold, points that all three have to do with vision and clairvoyance.

    1. The first, which perhaps commands everything, is light: this space of light, these lines of light that characterize Bergson’s world of images, in the course that was dedicated to him, revisited in L’image mouvement; and the same space of light opposed, in the course on Spinoza, to the geometry of solids, linked to the dynamism of power. How far does the light reach? Deleuze questions. How far does its power extend? This light is the very one that radiates Plotinus' world, emanating from the One and connecting it, through an emanation that is an immanence, to particular intelligences (see Enneads IV, ch. 6 and 7, and V, 3, passages on the light that Deleuze qualifies as admirable)14. These are the first panel and the base of Deleuze’s vision. The one that extends the plane of immanence, or first, as the brief but dense and striking note in homage to Maurice de Gandillac writes, the “beaches of immanence” passing through being the incessant movement of the complicatio and explicatio, the fold and unfold15 16.
    1. The second point of mysticism, again taken from Plotinus, or better, saved in him, put in reserve, is the amazing conception of active contemplation, or contemplative activity, in rupture with the conception usually received of an opposition between contemplation and action, or theoria and praxis. On this point as well, mysticism has come into opposition with any abusively anthropocentric view, with a reductive subjectivism. Things contemplate when we throw ourselves in the middle of them. Plotinus himself, moreover, is aware of the “enormity” of the proposition, and how it lends itself to ridicule or humor. This is what he says at the beginning of the treatise inserted in the III Ennead: we are going to seem to play like children, paizontes^. But humor is an integral part of this game of thought, which is going to give it a momentum that allows it to break through the barriers between beings, the partitions and screens, the main one being that of representation. By playing with us, but with the most serious child’s play, we affirm being, the universal life of all things, the non-organic as well as the organic. They “contemplate”, they look at us, yes, as much as we look at them. In another language, one would say that they have an objective “expressivity” of their own, which is not only granted to them by us, but that they must indeed have in themselves if we are to extract it from them. Raymond Ruyer7’s view and conception. This is also that of Fernand Deligny8 when he recognizes the dignity of all forms of life, and not just that of consciousness. Mystical is this point which unhooks the anchor of the ego, lets loose the moorings of the subject.
    1. Point three, that of the seer, as Rimbaud himself conceived it, taken up by Deleuze as the basis of his own thought: “I is another”, occupying a pivotal place, at least on two occasions: when it composes one of these poetic formulas that underpin, illuminate Kant’s thought, which it literally transforms into vision; the other, to explain how Foucault’s thought goes beyond man, and how the poet, the thinker, does not work only for himself and does not speak only in his name, but in the name of the entire creation, which is what constitutes him precisely as a seer.17

I is another, and not I am, fallacious grammatical agreement that would limit this foundational (or “bottomless”) otherness to the simple modification of consciousness over time, whereas it designates a limitless fullness of the “Open”, thus designated by these other poets: Hölderlin and Rilke.

One last point: it’s that the mysticism “of the concept” is also an increase in the power of life. This point, which still has to do with light, explicitly accentuates the mysticism that it carries within it. And here, Deleuze’s mysticism — I do not say Deleuze’s mysticism in the sense that one could attribute it to him, saying that he was a mystic, but the one he indicates, towards which, unquestionably, he signals — I will not look for it very far, nor will I indulge in fanciful speculations about him. It is at hand, at a turn of the page. It is to be picked up or collected at the end of these beautiful sessions — I was about to say sequences — on Spinoza, from 1981, at a time when the course concludes on Van Gogh’s sun and Lawrence’s pantheism. These passages are so beautiful, so lyrical, so fully mystical, yes, in truth, that there would be no need but to quote them. Preferring to refer the reader to them, I will content myself with picking out a few notations, a few flashes, and in particular the very end.

This is therefore about Spinoza, about this third kind of knowledge that participates in the power of God and that of the sun. “The sun, I am something of it,” can say Van Gogh, when he “composes with it”, paints it “ground to belly”: “I have a relationship 18 19 of affinity with the sun.” And this is obviously very close to the idea of a divine presence in all things, of “pantheism”:

What does it mean, “pantheism”? Deleuze still wonders in this course. How do people who call themselves pantheists live? There are many English who are pantheists. I think of Lawrence. He has a cult of the sun.

So, in an extravagant and brilliant variation, he moves from the first kind of knowledge we have of the sun on a beach, with the “sour” people who bask in the sun, who live poorly with it, even though the particles of their bodies already compose, in a pleasant way, with those that penetrate them; to the second kind, which rises above this “practical understanding” to “compose” differently. And it is precisely here that the painter, Van Gogh, appears in a relationship of affinity; he even speaks of “communion”, of “communication” (a rare word for Deleuze, who does not like to handle it and mistrusts it; and its appearance, at this point, gives it, it seems, a special meaning in his work, a note, I would say, already mystical).

Let’s wait, though: this will soon manifest itself explicitly. For there is the knowledge of the third kind. So, there, we move on to this level of mysticism, frankly. But I better just quote:

What would the third kind be? There, Lawrence abounds. In abstract terms, it would be a mystical union.

Why abstracts? Because it’s covering a singular experience with the generality of a formula; but as this brings, on the other hand, its own clarity, it is, in a certain way, as useful as inevitable. I continue:

All kinds of religions have developed sun mysticisms. It’s a step further.

Let’s understand, relative to the second kind, that of the painter.

Van Gogh has the impression that there is a beyond that he can’t render. What is this still more [here, it goes without saying that Deleuze avoids the previous “beyond” which reminded too much of transcendence] that he won’t be able to render as a painter? Is that it, the metaphors of the sun among the mystics? But these are no longer metaphors if we understand it like this, they can literally say that God is the sun. They can literally say that “I am God”. Why? Not at all because there is identification. It’s because at the level of the third kind, we come to this mode of intrinsic distinction.

A comment, maybe: identification is rejected in the sense of an imaginary, or even probably of the operation, well known in psychoanalysis, of identification with the father, this process of personological substitution. But neither God nor the sun are persons; nor am I, for that matter; what happens is both a disjunction and an inclusion, “inclusive disjunction”, here is the “intrinsic distinction” that defines the mystic or mystic. I continue:

That is to say, there is something irreducibly mystical in the third kind of Spinoza’s knowledge: both essences are distinct, only they distinguish themselves within each other. So much so that the rays by which the sun affects me, are the rays by which I affect myself, and the rays by which I affect myself, are the rays of the sun that affect me.

Let’s understand well, again, that this is not at all about subjectivizing the process, which would be transformed into an illusion or a way of talking about a simple experience; quite the contrary, there is an example of this movement of externalization, of expulsion of all interiority and of exposure to the outside of an intrinsic relationship, supposedly interior. “It’s solar self-affection.”

But as if he realized the enormity of the formula, Deleuze adds, as soon as it is stated:

In words, it sounds grotesque, but understand that, at the level of lifestyles, it’s quite different. Lawrence develops these texts on this kind of identity that maintains the internal distinction between his singular essence, the singular essence of the sun, and the essence of the world.

Way of life illustrated by The Plumed Serpent and the “sun-jaguar” of the Aztec religion; way of life and of diffusion of light in the world full of images without subject or object of Bergson; way of this third kind of knowledge which is, in the impersonal, beyond singular incarnations, the word and the “mystical” end of all life: “Homo tantum to which everyone sympathizes and who reaches a kind of bliss”20.

In a 1947 article that he did not authorize for reproduction, Deleuze quoted Francis Ponge (but quoting Ponge is not reproducing Deleuze!): "Apart from all the qualities I have in common with the rat, the lion, and the net, I claim those of the diamond, and I completely identify with the sea as well as with the cliff it attacks and with the pebble that is created from it.".

Yes, a mysticism, the atheistic mysticism of becomings.

The clause, finally.

I read, in La Vision d’Hébal, by the Lyonnais Pierre-Simon Ballanche, restored to philosophical dignity by Difference and repetition, alongside Gabriel Tarde, Samuel Butler, Hoëné Wronski, and many others that this inexhaustible book reveals: “A soul escapes from the hands of God. Her astonishment in the midst of all things, when she rejoices to be among incorporeal intelligences; her even greater astonishment when she is imprisoned in organs; finally her astonishment when she is released from the prison of her organs21. Hébal experienced the three astonishments more than once.”

Let’s remove the reference to God, and substitute for “Hébal” the name that occupies us. That would be a rather accurate portrait of Gilles Deleuze.

February 9, 2005

JEANNETTE COLOMBEL – Deleuze-Sartre: clues

As I was leaving, Gilles handed me a large sheet of paper. “You’ll see what you can do with it,” he told me with a half-worried, half-amused look… “It’s just an idea,” he added. I hurried down the staircase of the Rue de Bizerte where he lived; I partially opened the envelope and glimpsed a text written in green ink. Too long to read on the metro. When I get home, I’ll dive into it…

This text went as far as Sartre’s thought, going back to The Transcendence of the Ego, upsetting classical philosophy, disrupting phenomenology, demonstrating how the notion of situation cannot be separated from conceptualization. I was dazzled by this understanding of the essential… of Sartre’s thought movement. What a beautiful text! But I couldn’t do what I wanted with it. It was the day after Sartre’s death and Gilles didn’t want to appear as a disciple, nor as a rebellious or even obedient son… Not as a son at all, in fact, in any way. So I contented myself with including it at the end of the book I was writing at that time, Sartre and the Party of Life. I partially reused it in Sartre in Situation. Time passed, and I present it here in all its brilliance.

Phenomenology seems to have had three moments: the great Hegelian structures, then Husserl’s semiology, study of sense and meanings; but finally something very different began with Sartre. Sartre introduces a whole pragmatics into phenomenology, and converts it into this pragmatics. That is why the essential notion of Sartre’s philosophy remains that of situation. The “situation” is not for Sartre a concept among others, but the pragmatic element that transforms everything, and without which the concepts would have neither sense nor structure. A concept has neither structure nor sense until it is put in a situation. The situation is the operation of the concept itself. And the richness and novelty of Sartrean concepts come from this, that they are statements of situations, at the same time as the situations of arrangements of concepts.

The same story has been repeated for linguistics. Alongside the study of language structures, linguistics had to approach a semantic domain that did not flow from these and was not concluded from them. But increasingly, the importance of pragmatic factors is asserted, which are in no way external to language, nor secondary, but constitute internal variables, agents of denunciation according to which languages change or create: a whole placing of language in a situation. (Sartre’s attitude towards linguistics already showed that he refused to separate language from the practical syntheses of the consciousness of someone who speaks and listens.)

Such a pragmatics is not added from the outside to the concepts, it traverses them through and through, it determines their new divisions and their original contents. It is by studying situations that Sartre brings forth the concepts he has created and imposed. From Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s “bad faith” is not separable from the staging of the café waiter, any more than the look is, from the public garden where it is exercised. So these stagings in turn do not appear only as literary or theatrical successes, added on, but as the pragmatic element that unites, at the very depth of Sartre’s thought, philosophy, theatre, literature.

A situation includes all sorts of determinations that it holds together, and that only hold together through it: data or series, opaque, compact or raw; holes like loopholes, through which something can pass; what passes through, projectiles and weapons. To build series, to dig holes and breaks, to melt at high temperature, to send an arrow, to invent new weapons, Sartre did it in all ways, through his style and thought. And if there was evolution in Sartre, it was not due to external circumstances, nor by simple confrontation with Marxism, but because the notion of situation revealed more and more its collective and political content.

You will not find in this book a presentation or an analysis of Sartre’s philosophy. We only wanted to highlight this dynamic relationship between concepts and situations — even if we invoke the cases that mobilized Sartre at the end of his life, situation-Palestine, but also situation-Larzac22

LYON

I met Gilles Deleuze when he arrived in Lyon in 1966. We knew nothing about him; in fact, this lack of knowledge favored his appointment, and the chance we had that he would teach in Lyon, as two other candidates were disqualified due to their well-known opinions. Jules Vuillemin, because he had included in his thesis the formula of Proudhon “God is evil,” could not decently be entrusted with our youth (although he was still elected to the Collège de France). The same happened with Henri Lefebvre and his obvious Marxism. But Deleuze was young, without labels, uncategorizable despite Nietzsche’s diabolism that enlightened him, whose affirmative will rose against dialectics, close to empiricisms that harm no one… But apparently not a materialist!

It all began with a lecture on reason where colleagues were a bit bewildered, but Maldiney was at home, and it marked the beginning of a friendship between the two men.

Then, the students… The word was spreading about the elegance of his speech, the gesture of his hand, the voice that took them through the paths of “difference and repetition” or into Spinoza’s immanence… Thus, his thought journeyed in the elaboration of theses.

Our friendship started from our first encounter.

We met, him and Fanny, Jean and me, at a young teacher’s place, Jean’s colleague, and a former student of Gilles. He and his wife had arranged everything discreetly: a light dinner, Fanny so light and slim in a harlequin suit, light conversation in which Gilles told, fascinated, how in an essay, he was entrusted with and described an experience of flight. “His experience was surprising,” he said dreamily, as someone who thinks about flying more than practicing it. Then Jean said, “It’s not that complicated!” — and he evoked not only the tradition of Lafcadio, the book thief, our model at the age of twenty, but also himself, descending the stairs of a department store, carrying a beautiful suitcase, and leaving with dignity without paying… “Not surprising! With your decorations, no one would suspect you!” Jean protested because in the summer, at the Nouvelles Galeries in Montbéliard, he used to carry cutlery and plates for the country house… wearing a T-shirt. So we laughed… But a few days later — and Gilles too —, we noticed that Jean had removed the two ribbons, the Resistance medal, and the War Cross, which he cherished as a discreet testimony of his conduct during the Resistance. We didn’t say anything about it at the time, but we ended up laughing about it when we met again, long after, both coming to greet a friend on the occasion of the award of the Legion of Honor for his action against AIDS — Jean was no longer there to witness it.

This anecdote reflects a friendship that starts with a “love at first sight,” where each one values the esteem of the other, and which will develop lastingly and reciprocally from couple to couple throughout their time in Lyon, then in Paris; perhaps more spaced out due to the distance and the illnesses of Jean and Gilles. A friendship with Fanny, which I cherish.

Of course, we sometimes talked about philosophy, but it was not an intellectual friendship. Gilles brought back the taste of elegance to Jean; we went to the theater — ah! Plan-chon, Richard III, and Michel Auclair at the Théâtre de la Cité — we spent our lives at the cinema… During that time, I saw almost all the films mentioned in Image-Temps. Ah! Monica Vitti and Antonioni, the early Fellini films, the Bergman films that Jean dreaded.

We listened to Gilles talk about structures in a beautiful concert hall, the Salle Molière, and they listened to me talk about Bachelard or — already — about The Order of Things at the “Union rationaliste.” We often went to each other’s places, and sometimes we went dancing at the Fedida’s. Our apartment at Place Bellecour was legendary: all the activists had been there. It was defended by student anti-fascist committees against OAS attacks during the Algerian War.

I educated myself: Kerouac, Thomas Hardy, Tropic of Cancer that Gilles had lent me, a precious volume, not reissued at the time, and which I almost lost… Gilles was curious about politics. We were still in the Communist Party — not for much longer. In the distance, the American war in Vietnam, opposed by those who shouted “Peace in Vietnam!” and supported by those who backed the Vietcong resistance groups. Of course, we went to see La Chinoise and rushed to see Pierrot le Fou. It was an “anti-humanist” period when structuralists held sway, and an issue of the ARC on Sartre rejected his passivity. In Le Nouvel Observateur, philosophers were divided: François Châtelet against François Jeanson, for or against structuralism… Gilles was more subtle.

There were children, ours were older — Gilles cared about the company my second daughter kept — theirs were younger; Julien, whom we sometimes took to the countryside on Sundays with Yves, Emilie, who didn’t speak at all at the age of two — but who, in kindergarten, probably started talking too much as the teacher taped her mouth shut; she was right to rebel!

MAY 68

Then came May 68. I was in Paris during the first demonstration. I brought back slogans, leaflets, and information. In the preparatory classes (khâgne) where I taught, as well as in university, the students were already mobilized: they occupied the premises, classes were suspended… Subsequently, general assemblies were held in the amphitheaters. Deleuze was one of the few teachers, and the only one in philosophy, to participate, not to speak but to listen. Sometimes, he was accompanied by a passing friend, like his lifelong friend, Bam-berger. Once, it was Godard.

One evening when we were having dinner at Gilles and Fanny’s, a student came up, out of breath, to warn of a fascist invasion being prepared to march on the university on Rue Pasteur. Quickly, Gilles and I rushed down the stairs to join our students, while Jean rallied anti-fascists outside for a counter-demonstration. Fanny stayed behind, saddened, to look after her sleeping children. At the university, the students collected small stones to throw at the attackers. Gilles chose white ones, like those of Little Thumb… but we didn’t need to use them: the counter-demonstration of democrats prevailed against the forces of evil.

Thus, the struggles and desires continued for more than a month. Sometimes, we went to meet the theater people gathered in Villeurbanne, at the Théâtre de la Cité, around Planchon. A young director, Patrice Chéreau, led the discussions, and Jacques Blanc bridged the gap between everyone. But everything was already fading in the haze of an empty summer. We went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Ariane Mnouch-kine, as the end of the journey.

After the struggle, we went on vacation disoriented. However, we all met again at the house of one of Fanny’s friends, in a magical house at the bottom of a cove on Cap Sicié. Gilles confided his fatigue to Jean, but also his irrevocable decision to finish his theses during the summer. He would rest at Mas Revery, whose gentleness and space we knew, in order to defend his doctorate in the fall.

We left for the Drôme. Over the phone, everything was fine: the theses were progressing… But on our return… “I have a big hole in my lung.” Quickly, hospitalization, care… No surgery yet, but everything had to be ready for the ceremony in January.

I won’t tell you about the mastery of his theses or the dialogue that only Jean Wahl supported; for us, it was a victory, that of life over illness. Jean, who had — of course — come to attend the defense and the party that followed, had a bad flu that turned into sepsis; he was also hospitalized… And Fanny and I went to the clinic and the hospital, sometimes crossing paths in the corridors.

Thus, everything revolved around pain and worry. Gilles and Fanny soon left Lyon for Paris. He was operated on and seemed cured. From then on, we met in Vincennes, where Michel Foucault had invited me to teach. With René Schérer, François Châtelet, and the others, we formed a group. The Lyon formalities with Gilles turned into informality. Gilles seemed to be doing well, but he told me that in the demonstrations — especially the GIP’s — he couldn’t run away from the police, the lung operation prevented him from doing so. He was constantly on high alert.

DIALOGUES

During the Vincennes years, Gilles Deleuze developed not a point, but a line, tracing his various approaches in philosophy. It is within the context of his Dialogues with Claire Parnet that he discusses the role of Sartre23, for himself and many other young people, in the years following the Liberation:

Fortunately, there was Sartre. Sartre was our “Outside” [...] Among all the possibilities at Sorbonne, he was the unique combination that gave us the strength to endure the new reordering. And Sartre never ceased to be that, not a model, method, or example, but a breath of fresh air, a current of air, even when it came from the Flore café, an intellectual who singularly transformed the situation of intellectuals. It’s foolish to ask whether Sartre is the beginning or the end of something. Like all creative things and people, he is in the middle, pushing from the middle24.

He grows like grass amidst the paving stones, and the terms “before, after” have little meaning. He does not plant one more tree in our minds, he does not construct a new system, but he shakes the paving stones that were then the blocks of philosophies of History, which make one feel imprisoned like in a coffin… even if it’s — as the communists said — to reach the “tomorrow that sings.”

Sartre mistrusts negation; he seeks affirmation, like Nietzsche, and believes that “contingency is an opportunity, it brings lightness as one doesn’t have to justify oneself. It is affirmative, like a birth. This affirmation does not pass through negation; it is immediate, non-dialectical.”

It is this affirmative axis that Hegel could not see because “he understood nothing about creation, and creation does not need to go through negation. When I create, I escape, I flee, I lose myself. That’s why one can predict long-term history because then it will be the individuals for whom one wants to act25.”

Of course, these are unfinished notes (Notes for the Great Morality)… but they are like grass growing amidst the paving stones, and they recall the connection established between artistic creation and morality in Existentialism is a Humanism. For both Sartre and Deleuze, “the future doesn’t mean much.” As for the past, it has already expressed its suspicion: “Retrospective illusion is shattered.” What remains is the present! The era, the era in its facticity, in the marks it bears.

In What is Literature? regarding the writer’s commitment, Sartre asserts “writing for one’s era”: “The era gives birth amid the pains of the historical events that historians will later label. It blindly experiences the meanings they will later rationally derive. It is with dead eras that history is made because an era, in its death, enters into relativity.”

Thus goes a time that “encroaches on the future, which is not yet made.” “To Do and to Do by Choosing to Do,” says Sartre in Being and Nothingness… “To Do and in Doing to Redo,” he says again in Critique of Dialectical Reason, when necessity gnaws at freedom."

“A future and a past don’t mean much,” Deleuze says in Dialogues, what matters is the becoming-present: geography, not history; the middle, not the beginning or the end; the grass in the middle that grows from the middle, not the trees with a peak and roots26."

Sartre does not explicitly rely on geography. However, in Critique of Dialectical Reason, he discovers with admiration the book of a contemporary historian, Fernand Braudel, who embeds history in territory, in the Mediterranean “experienced as a dwelling,” which exists in a present where relationships with matter and human relations transform “from individual praxis to the practico-inert.” Starting from this book, The Mediterranean in the Time of Philip II, Sartre evokes the confrontation between man and matter and the sequence of counter-finalities. The Spanish state believes it can control the flow of gold from Peruvian mines, but the precious metal circulates like a commodity, money escapes, and gold flees. “The Mediterranean thirsts for gold,” and the monetary influx will provoke the decline of the Mediterranean world. And Sartre reveals how the reversal of processes occurs. “I did not want this,” says the Chinese peasant who clears the land for cultivation and inadvertently causes floods that ruin his field. Thus, the analysis of a history founded on “systems of simultaneity” rather than the trilogy of “past-present-future” gives it a perspective, an open domain.

THE FLIGHT

“Courage, let’s flee!” exclaim the two heroes in Yves Robert’s film, breaking away from their habits during the summer of '68… And Jackson, that legendary Black Panther, affirms from his prison cell: “I may flee, but throughout my flight, I seek a weapon.” Thus, flight is not linked to fear but to escape, to becoming. This conduct, this “line of flight” dominant in English and American literature, is far from French customs. But for Sartre, it is the primal (magic-conduct) emotion and holds ontological value: “As I walked up Soufflet street, with each stride, in the dazzling disappearance of shop windows, I felt the movement of my life and the beautiful mandate to be unfaithful to everything. [...] I was born a traitor and remained one,” he adds in this text recounting his childhood (Words). Perhaps not more “unfaithful” than anyone else, but in a constant imbalance that undoes his habits: “There are no good habits because they are habits.” Soufflot street is not the conquest of the West, but contingency is the same, and the “for-itself” always in imbalance.

“The great mistake, the only mistake,” says Deleuze, “would be to believe that a line of flight consists of fleeing life; fleeing into the imaginary or art. But fleeing, on the contrary, is producing the real, creating life, finding a weapon.”

It is interesting to see how far Sartre goes in approaching differences when he must push the grass into the wind, without the gaze of others, without considering the adversary; simply, in the strong wind. From this era, from these years following the Liberation, a thousand notes were written to prepare a “concrete morality” (published posthumously, revealing this sense of differences — irreducibility of the individual in history)27.

“History is not everything… Man steps out of history at every moment.” Perhaps through the power of the imaginary, but also through the strength of the singular: there are no “generalities,” and evenings spent on the same bench, along the water, are different each time.

“History is not everything,” and there are histories far from Hegelian hegemony. Sartre claims “the history of others,” the history of suspects, of the defeated… the history of the Orient, the history of women (of which Simone de Beauvoir will leave to write The Second Sex).

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre defines situations ontologically. It’s because “he is still caught in the traps of the verb to be.” Deleuze, here, in this text, defines them by their function. And what are they apart from their pragmatism, from this inscription in facts? Philosophy of “overview,” as Sartre used to say.

In this text, I wanted to provide some clues. I did so hastily. It’s a work at the end of life, and I hope that the analysis of Deleuze’s relationship to Sartre and the small journey I wanted to take you on in Sartre will inspire some young readers to pursue them.

ROGER-POL DROIT – Images-Deleuze

When I no longer know how to love and admire people or things

(not many), I will feel like I’m dead, mortified.

G. Deleuze, Pourparlers

No calculated clichés. No staged shots. Of Gilles Deleuze, I have images as an amateur. They are not photographs. Nothing but mental sketches, seen by me alone. They have something friendly, affectionate, alive, and blurred. Blurred does not mean imprecise or neglected, even less “failed.” It is the very movement of life that is blurred, without clear borders, always trembling. The contours double, triple, fray, and unravel. Difficult to say – not a degradation, not at all the transition from a stable, full state to a situation of less clarity. No. A blur always there, before, during, after. The blur of constant movement, the one contained in the most precise gestures, the most accurate movements, an internal blur, “essential,” although it is precisely linked to the absence of essence.

Let’s try to say a few words about these images. Without sorting, as they come. Without trying to understand either. Screen-memories.

THE GAME OF SEVEN FAMILIES

The first time I met Gilles Deleuze, it was at his home in Paris, rue de Bizerte, in 1974 or 1975. I only remember he was in the kitchen playing the game of seven families with his daughter. He was laughing. Not like people laugh, taken from the outside and pulled out of themselves by laughter. On the contrary, he laughed from within. The voice, the eye, the tilt of the head, like some distant gaze, all of Deleuze was traversed by inner laughter, circulating it, letting it escape incessantly. As if he had lived on the brink of laughter, propelled by laughter, barely holding back now and then, to words and things.

Text published in Tombeau de Gilles Deleuze, dir. Yannick Beaubatie, Tulle, Mille Sources, 2000.

Bizerte, it was bizarre. The name as well as the place. The name evoked for me, without me knowing what to make of it, the Orient, the Legion, indistinct times of vanished colonial empires. This place was an anomaly. Among well-defined neighborhoods—Batignolles, Rome, rue des Dames, Ternes—it seemed placed there without identity.

Why did I come to see him? No memory. Just the kitchen and the author of Anti-Oedipus, a devilish thinker said to be perverse, playing the game of seven families with his daughter. I think he made me wait because the little girl was having fun; she must have been six or seven years old, and the game was not over. I don’t know if it’s true. No one can verify. It would be absurd, in any case. No importance. It became true, in my mind’s eye.

THE AMOROUS LOBSTER

Other scenes are vague. Deleuze at La Lorraine. I wondered why he liked this brasserie. It seemed cold, impersonal, uninteresting to me. Something pre-war Paris, which I noted without feeling. My father also liked this place, for the same reasons, no doubt, that escape me. From the rue de Bizerte, during other visits later on, I kept the image of garnet velvet, a curious piece of furniture made of black wood and velvet, somewhat from the thirties, somewhat bordello and bourgeois and yet offbeat. I think I saw that piece of furniture (the same one? precisely that one?) a few months ago in the window of an antique dealer in the Marais, and it stirred a strange emotion in me. I almost bought it, but then I preferred to walk in the street for a long time, as if it replaced it.

What remains from those years, around '75, is—among other things—the image of a lunch. It was not at La Lorraine. I had proposed to Deleuze to sign a volume of dialogues in a collection that I had started with a friend at Flammarion. The idea was to have a researcher talk about their career, encourage them to answer more or less embarrassing questions about their theoretical journey, and give them the opportunity to orally outline projects they might not have time to write. Deleuze had decided to do this book with Claire Parnet. I had obviously chosen to let them work as they wished.

Dialogues is a beautiful text. I am happy that this collaboration continued well after that, until the series of programs entitled Abécédaire. When concluding this project, Deleuze was immersed in the analysis of becoming-animal and desiring-machines. He suggested that we go to La Langouste amoureuse. This restaurant, next to Place des Ternes, was then run by a big chef who overdid it in the Falstaff register, pouring fresh cream with cognac lavishly into his sauces.

A TINY THING

Curious moments, like scraps of enigmas, grains of mysteries without content, entanglements without object—secrets without importance… I don’t know what these secretive moments meant for Deleuze, why he shrouded things for no reason. I even believe, thanks to him, that asking what a behavior “corresponds to” is a bad way to pose the question, a fabrication of false problems.

Among the images that come to mind, there is this strange phone call, a few days or weeks after La Langouste amoureuse :

Hello, this is Gilles Deleuze (he emphasizes the first syllables, in an almost Swiss manner). I wanted to tell you that the contracts have been signed. They were very kind at Flammarion. Well, there was just a tiny thing, but it really doesn’t matter. No, I prefer not to tell you about it. It involves someone you know well, so it bothers me, and it really doesn’t matter, I assure you, it’s of no interest.

I remember holding back from appearing too annoyed. Either there had been an incident, and then he should have told me since he chose to start saying it. Or he remained silent because nothing had happened, or it really didn’t matter. That’s what I was trying to convey, as gently as possible. But nothing could be done. In the end, I suggested calling him back exactly a year later, on the same day, to find out what it was about. In the meantime, the manuscript would have been submitted, and the book probably already published. That way, he could inform me without any inconvenience. He found this solution amusing.

A year later, I had “changed my life,” as they say. I didn’t call him as we had agreed. I probably will never know what it was about. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s a tiny thing.

THE TWO LINES

It was much later that I discovered the friend. How attentive Deleuze was, how accurately he knew how to read and advise, or rather incite, stimulate, encourage each one to follow their own path, help them without seeming to. Or, on the contrary, seeming to know a lot. The way he once told me, at the end of the 80s, regarding Schopenhauer, to whom I was starting to devote some work: “He’s a man for you,” left me dumbfounded. What did he mean exactly? Or rather: What did he know? Why? How? Wasn’t it just an offhand remark, a random judgment? Surely not—but I don’t know what he based it on. After all, he didn’t know me well. How did he discern?

I remember another lunch (in '92 or '93?), very long, which must have ended after four o’clock, after considerable amounts of smoked salmon, cigarettes, and intelligent advice. Deleuze commented on a sentence, for me enigmatic, from a letter he had sent me. Regarding my research on India, he explained that, in his view, there were “two lines” at work in my work. In short, from what I recall, he wanted to tell me that I could either pursue work as a historian on the evolution of European representations of India or use what I knew about Indian doctrines to disturb philosophy somewhat. I only followed the first line.

Each time, with Deleuze, in his presence, during a conversation or a lecture, the impression was always the same: an acceleration of intelligence. Suddenly, starting to think, understand, grasp lines and follow them, at an increasing speed. Immediate intensification of mobility. Afterward, one felt rather foolish… Where had it all gone?

The same when reading him. Always an effect of agitation, something vibrant. A joyful effect, an airy lightness, particles of ideas-bodies set in motion. When I read Deleuze, I hear his voice in the sentences.

THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL SWEATER

His voice had a high source. That was the image: the descending voice among the stones, carrying grains of sand, dust of rock, tiny things, particles, but coming from an internal, very high and pure mountain that did not dominate anything. I wonder if that’s what we listened to first. As much as his voice, what he said, as if both walked together, close and parallel, distinct despite everything.

Memory of a large auditorium in Paris, after François Châtelet’s death. Deleuze, although he almost never went out anymore, had come and delivered what became Périclès et Verdi, wearing a red sweater at the microphone. The little sweater was way down at the lectern, but the voice from the heights held the whole room under its hesitant flow. It was a very peculiar hesitation. Because Deleuze’s voice gave both the impression that it could stop the next instant and the certainty that it would continue. Like life.

Like the body. Was Deleuze’s body extra-terrestrial? Several traits could have made one believe that it was not strictly in line with the most common habits of the human species. Regularly, the bodies of priests, monks, spiritualists, and believers contradict their faith. On the contrary, with Deleuze, an atheist, the body in immanence left ample room for the soul, mobile and singular.

MORE AND MORE FREE?

Last meeting in Bizerte:

I hardly go out anymore. Sometimes, I walk around the block. But you know, since I move less, I feel more and more free. As if, the more my space narrows, the greater the freedom of movement becomes.

Last call before he moved to Avenue Niel:

You moved too? I won’t be able to do it. I won’t be able to start all over, reweave everything; it’s too difficult, I’m too old, I won’t be able to, I’m afraid.

It was the first and only time I heard him stop.

The visits I made to Deleuze on Avenue Niel were not numerous. As warm and beautiful as his letters were during those final years, the moments of meeting were difficult, interrupted, uncertain in duration and tone. The last time, he was connected to the breathing machine by a long green tube that allowed him to move despite everything. I didn’t like the tremendous effort he made to try to stand up.

NO INTERVIEW

The idea of interviewing him was completely ruled out for me. It’s not easy to understand why, but it might make an image. Nothing forbidden, of course. I have often interviewed philosophers and reviewed quite a number of Deleuze’s books. Nothing impossible factually. However, it was entirely excluded, for reasons that were both obvious (I always knew it wouldn’t be possible) and very obscure (I still don’t know how to formulate them, even approximately). I could write about Deleuze, receive a few handwritten lines from him, those that count in a lifetime, but the interview was not public.

Perhaps it was also because of the image produced by his voice: it is not just a thought, not a mere writing, not even philosophy, but only the gap, the vibrato of The height, the other name of laughter.

PASCALE CRITON – The Invitation

Nothing could have foreseen such a story. There was this regular movement of the index finger, bending and unfolding, slightly autonomous: "You… come closer…", confirmed with a glance over the glasses. A gesture both familiar and unexpected, creating a direction contrary to the movement and noise of the room emptying out. A sign that one cannot ignore or mistake for another, and yet close to misunderstanding, error: “What?… Me?...” In Gilles' attitude, there was a suspension, a slight slowdown that opened the way to tiny displacements. Like a duration in expression. Sostenuto. And then, this way of shifting the upper torso and slightly tilting the head, the chin resting in the hand while looking further, in the opposite diagonal, and sliding in a half-voice: “So, you are interested in chromatism…”

I was there by chance. I was waiting for a friend. I had no inclination for philosophy or any plans in that direction. I remember that Deleuze had discussed questions concerning the continuum and how chromatism in music could be a useful path to develop. He had asked if anyone in the room could provide information on this subject. I spoke up and said a few words. It happened that chromatism was already, inexplicably but surely, my main musical interest. Yet, I found very few opportunities and people to talk about it. "So, maybe we could work together…", Gilles said softly. This word work intruded curiously into this almost humming phrasing. I had no idea what he could be talking about. Then, Gilles continued by saying, “For example, you could play music for us and explain how chromatism takes different forms according to different periods and composers.” This conditional, the way he pronounced the ai sounds, slightly inflected, allowed a mixture of proximity and distance. Deleuze was closely linked to the expressive forms of time, and his slightly lingering voice allowed imperceptible fragmentations of time to infiltrate. Delay. Perhaps, beneath the thus slowed inflection of certain words, especially vowels, there was the sign of an intimate modulation in which the transitive world of chromatism precisely slips and interferes… “So, if you’d like… we could start next week.”

Thus began this informal work on chromatism. Several times, I brought a small cassette recorder and played Debussy’s La Cathédrale engloutie, Messiaen’s Chronochromie, but also African songs recorded by Gilbert Rouget. Soon, many levels intersected: Deleuze was working on the notions of war machines and state apparatus. Chromatism coexisted with the war machine! Molecularized sound material participated in operations of consistency, arrangements of strata and planes, and was associated with the work of deterritorialization. An expanded chromatism entered into relation with the machinic phylum of metal. What held me back little by little were no longer the small interventions to which I was invited, which often appeared incomplete, disjointed, uncertain… But this way, so unknown and penetrating to me, of leading the elaboration of thought aloud.

THINKING ALOUD

Deleuze’s voice was an invitation to follow the path of thought, the formation of ideas, and the movements that compose them: associations, selections, specifications, eliminations. The lectures took the form of a theater of thought in which not only the sound of the voice but also its rhythms, flow, and required registers played a major role. Gilles paid close attention to the question of orientation in thought. He summoned independent lines and created a floating state, constituting a nebula, agitated by local contractions, small tensions, subsequently extracted, displaced, applied. It is in this phase of coexistence that differential traits, couplings, and reciprocal captures are experienced, preparing deterritorialization.

This is the time for relationships without insistence, a balance between tact and outline. Allowing the idea to be built, through successive layers, revisions, abandonments, delay effects. “What do we need for it to hold?” The idea is in-between, in selection and recombination.

“What are we missing? What can help us?”

Deleuze could seek to gain some time and use various feints, as if detours were as important as the reasons for discarding certain propositions. There was, in his way of doing, something akin to searching for a chemical solution in suspension, whose success depends on the accuracy of terms, relationships, proportions. The sequence of ideas was exposed. It could be smooth or overcome by aridity and discomfort. The operations of thought were listened to in their dynamism, following the traces of mood: slowdowns, meanderings, accelerations. Tense voice, mineral, methodical sequences, or drifting towards quasi inarticulate regions, like the rocky hrrrhrreinhhh rolling from one word to another, interspersed with suspensions. And then, suddenly, a transversal line, a speed… “How to pose the question?” Grasp. Formulate. The voice changes register, digresses, detaches, charged, a bit aggressive, as on that day of March 20, 1984, regarding the gallop and the ritornello28 29:

That morning, a day in March 1984, the class28 29 was about the dialectic of depth among the neo-Platonists and the outline of a status for the crystal-image. Break. By an urgent leap expressed as a parenthesis, Deleuze launches a future working track on music, about which he asks the audience to reflect. Throughout this detour, presented as anticipated and anachronistic, Deleuze emphasizes the importance, for him, of this question and, while defending himself, openly engages in a murmuring, rocky, and groping improvisation aloud, of a thought taking shape little by little.

— What do we see in the crystal? What we see in the crystal is non-chronological time.

— The crystal or the crystal-image is not only optical…

— The crystal also has acoustic properties; the crystal-image is also sonorous.

— Every crystal reveals time… The notion of the crystal seems so rich to me…

The demonstration proceeds step by step, through support and gradual captures. The distinction between two figures of time becomes clearer, “the gallop” and “the ritornello,” two non-symmetrical variables, each with its property: acceleration vector for the gallop, circular function for the ritornello. And we follow how, after the introduction of a double “life-death” sign, an alternating and reciprocal movement between these two variables engages in a transversal variation.

Is it a method? Deleuze observes a consistency in seeking a (machinic) production made up of “multi-headed” variables and the conditions under which these variables realize an activity, a transversal coupling:

Deterritorialization [...] implies the coexistence of a major variable and a minor variable that become simultaneous: deterritorialization is always double… The two terms do not exchange or identify with each other but are drawn into an asymmetrical block, where one changes no less than the other30.

This phase of work, the specification, the search for remarkable points, the expression of singularities, relies heavily on validating relationships and generating couplings. A tense search, precisely monitoring the play of a “drama” formed by concepts and states of affairs themselves, beneath representation, beneath the logos31.

So, there will be silent operations to set up a “theater of pure determinations agitating space and time, acting directly on the soul, theater of properties and events.” There will be preliminary conditions to create discernibility, consistency, and allow active processuality32. The plane of consistency “works,” is built step by step, preparing deterritorialization against the background of a synthesis of heterogeneities articulated in three stages: i) creating a “milieu” (intensive field), 2) producing materials of expression (territory), 3) triggering an excess movement (deterritorialization).

Deleuze’s commitment to the ways of “contracting relations” was a genuine lesson. In front of a well-executed “setting up,” Deleuze could have the accents of joy and satisfaction of a gardener who has rooted here, let germinate there, grafted further away. The organization of different regimes of attention constituted an exemplary method of linking the operations of thought – which Deleuze pedagogically ensured to signal and name, and which, in some respects, was not unrelated to the movements of thought we employ in music, analysis, and composition. We trained ourselves in the exercise of evaluation, detecting determinations from a qualitative angle, and establishing conditions for an intensive experience of thought.

“So, that’s it… That’s all for today…” A small, fluty voice rose, as if from a double background, announcing the end of the class and the resumption of a new “session” the following week.

WORK

“Then…, have you worked well?” Deleuze would chant at the beginning of classes33, with his particular way of modulating his voice in interrogative forms and especially by emphasizing the vowels of certain words. No command or arrogance in the word work, but rather a playfulness in his eyes and the lower part of his face. Deleuze favored the character of the “idiot” who plays with X other meanings of words humorously, as he is not concerned with their major usage. For most of us, working was the worst of words, slavery. This word, in Gilles' mouth, could, however, take an incomparable sonority. He often said, “They won’t prevent us from working…,” as well as he could have said, “They won’t prevent us from laughing.” Working as escaping, finding a space to breathe, to shelter from nothingness. Thus, in a minor key, working is a way of settling into a time favorable to what is most dear to us. Almost a song, a chance to take. Nothingness is never far away. Our desire to live won’t be taken away.

How to measure the particular atmosphere of the seminars, the “Tuesday mornings” in Vincennes, and then in Saint-Denis: the presence of regulars, all generations mixed, of the curious, of enthusiasts concerned with philosophy, art, or driven by a vaguer disposition. All this made up a disparate and improbable composition. Were some of them students, philosophers, writers, actors, musicians? Yes, probably, but their presence was discreet, as they came to engage with this thought of the imperceptible that subsumes the springs of thought rather than brandishing them, that proceeds fumblingly, through interrogations, for each belonging or appearance. An experience shared almost in a hushed voice, close to the intimacy of work, of “real-time” elaboration of thought, rejecting stupidity and sad passions. Beyond the silence that such a limit leaves, there meanders Deleuze’s very particular appetite for making things operational, for rendering them graceful and necessary for possible explorations of thought. Rarely did a problem remain posed solely from the angle of its belonging, and for any philosophical question, sooner or later, there came:

But see how Proust defined his states and psychic experiences, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.

Or:

Only Virginia Woolf managed to make her entire life and work a passage, a becoming.

Or again:

How can music help us think a spatiotemporal diagram? The call for a collective task, to which philosophy could offer a place, a way to “hook on,” was not an empty commitment.

MUSIC

No teaching in Paris allowed me to approach fields of knowledge related to music in such a unique way, brought together in such a novel manner. A set of propositions, knowledge, methodologies, which both constitute music and reposition it, traverse it in relation to the world. Although music has not been the subject of a book, as is the case for cinema, painting, or literature, it nevertheless occupies a privileged place in Deleuze’s thought. It is invited, encouraged to join in the experience of thought, of which philosophy is not the sole specialist.

The very personal way in which Deleuze used to frame the propositions concerning music often escaped me and left me in great perplexity. The non-chronological time of the crystal-image, the non-sonorous forces of music… These expressions seemed so paradoxical to me! How can the timeless have a real impact on the sonorous? I feared getting lost in such a vast field. The world, its representation, was unraveling, language, while revealing itself, changed meaning, boundaries shifted. Sometimes, at Gilles' request, we would agree on what could be “said,” like definitions about acoustics, scales, modes, minor and major, scales, intervals, continuum, harmonic and contrapuntal organization. Then he would rearrange these elements and present them to those of us who could confirm their clarity and validity. “I must first understand,” he would say.

At other times, we explored the affects and vocal inflection in baroque music, or the animal behaviors and the forms that could arise from them, from caccia to rondo and ritornelli. This is how certain notions became crucial in A Thousand Plateaus. Later, the approach to the notions of affect and percept, developed in What Is Philosophy? though related to a certain “evidence,” remained challenging for me to grasp. Our areas of interest were clearly converging, but Deleuze had an unexpected way of cutting, shifting, and reorganizing elements from the perspective of his own method. His philosophical markers sometimes seemed far removed from the musical, technical, and practical approach I referred to, and his thought, although immediately striking upon first reception, was often slow to measure in its consequences.

Deleuze had an acute and uncompromising way of posing the question of time, of making it palpable according to each context and each author. No generality or “universal” approximation could be made about time. Time is an event, a set of determinations, casuistic coordinates of what? how much? how? who? when? I discovered an approach to time that was completely different, breaking with established conventions and acquired evidences, in the field of applied music, regarding the coordinates of space and time34. From Plotinus to Saint Augustine, from Spinoza to Leibniz, from Kant to Husserl, from Nietzsche to Bergson, from Proust to Péguy, the dimension of time invests the experience of the representation of forms and extension, both at the level of objects and techniques and at the level of thought, expression, and bodies.

Some of these topics continued more personally, outside of the classes: exchanging documents, small notes written on torn pieces of paper. We frequently revisited these areas of interest relating to the continuum and chromaticism in their relationships with expression and forms. The notion of the diagram and the transversal production of the musical model of smooth and striated spaces were the subject of readings and exchanges35. I shared with Deleuze the approach to the sound continuum of Ivan Wyschnegradsky, a Russian composer I was working with, which interested him particularly from the angle of “a plurality of continuums” coming together on a single plane36. I also shared with him the works of Gérard Grisey and explained to him the aspects of the spectral movement. We made many reflections on harmonic series, partials, and sound components, especially during the study of Leibniz, which Gilles strongly recommended I read.

EXPRESSION, MATERIAL-FORCES

What is the nature of the proposition that Deleuze seeks to arrange? What is the driving force behind this project inviting arts, sciences, aesthetics, and politics to engage in encounters? Undoubtedly, the question of time is mobilized by Deleuze as multiplicity, as a set of intensive determinations. The question of spatial and temporal multiplicities is the subject of an infinitely delicate theory of expression, which neither movement in images, nor music, nor colors can respond to, except for themselves, as this question relates to intensity, present in every domain of thought, each having its way of confronting it. On the one hand, Deleuze expresses the task of philosophy: to create concepts. And on the other hand, that of art: to push the limits of representation. The tasks are distinct; the specificities exposed in What Is Philosophy? remind each of their autonomy, their own direction. Sciences proceed by functions, philosophy creates concepts, and art deals with affects and percepts. There is no confusion; each field of individuation has its own tools. What is required for one is not necessarily required for the other.

The problem of expression is the subject of diligent research by Deleuze. Most of his encounters with literature, music, and cinema take place beneath representation, in this “distinct and obscure” region where a struggle to liberate material-forces, affects, and percepts takes place. This explains why Deleuze identifies, for each case, the place of an affect showman and carefully (intensively) seeks what has been attempted, the object and modality of capture, to give a name to this event: writing, painting… It is an operation of differentiation, “actualizing an Idea.” His interest in the conditions of the emergence of sensitive materials is constant. The processes of transcodification, the transitions to representation, the incarnation of Ideas, the modalities of thought, lead him to summon all intensive fields that can account for the ability to configure relations of bodies, signs, forces… It is by no means a matter of application, but rather the grasping of an intensive diagram that stands out through individuations, passages to existence, and captures.

Deleuze emphasizes the transitive, communicative, and “imitative” nature of sub-representative dynamisms that constitute the material-force of expressive fields:

“It constantly happens that dynamisms qualified in a certain way in one domain are taken up in a completely different mode in another domain”37.

This overlap between disparate series implies the play of passage components, agents, or “dark precursors”:

“Three dramatizations of diverse orders echo each other: psychic, organic, chemical… It is imagination that traverses the domains, orders, and levels, breaking down barriers, coextensive with the world, [...] larval consciousness constantly moving from science to dream and vice versa”11.

This transitiveness particularly interests us in understanding how Deleuze establishes an intensive plane (planomenon) that allows heterogeneous encounters in the mode of asignifying dynamisms capable of actualizing and circulating at the level of pre-material roots, among literature, painting, music, cinema, but also in sciences, philosophy, and the political field. It is not surprising that passages are established between psychic, philosophical, aesthetic, political, and scientific domains. Intensive aesthetics suggests that dynamic modalities and their determinations in sensation, thought, psychic and political subjectivation communicate. The encounter is at this level, in the connection, side by side, of intensive heterogeneous series and reciprocal captures. Extending the philosophical concept to aesthetic materials tends toward the conviction that “something else” can be gained: below the predetermined forms of representation. It is a matter of measuring the work of expression in all its dimensions, of opening a new plan for the exercise of thought. An intensive determination, spatial and temporal, traverses all arts and fields of thought: thought-cinema, thought-music, thought-plastic…

Intensive Aesthetics and Spatio-Temporal Dynamisms

Deleuze’s main interest lies in capturing materials-forces. It is necessary to liberate the virtuality of spatial and temporal varieties from what is presupposed in the idea. What determinations are given to think about the relationships between dynamisms and energy, the processuality of forces, and the representation of things in general? In 1967, Deleuze introduced in “The Method of Dramatization” 38 39 40, later taken up in Difference and Repetition, the principle of differentiation, under the dual spatial and temporal movement of dynamic determinations. The differentiation or actualization of these movements takes into account, with the utmost rigor and caution, the way the field of representation “determines” itself. The differentiation operates at the level of the formation of the idea, as an experience, according to an immanent material constructivism that can be considered the foundation for the later concepts of ritournelle and deterritorialization. Deleuze forcefully presents the principle of the reciprocity of sub-representative dynamisms, determining intensive experience (individuation) through a double complementary movement of qualification and organization. The dynamisms operate “in all forms and qualified extents of representation.” Although they are ordinarily covered by constituted extents and qualities, “they must be surveyed in all domains” 41 42. Their movements constitute the conditions for the representation of any object or state of affairs: the qualities it possesses and the extent it occupies.

The spatio-temporal dynamisms specific to each intensive milieu acquire specifications and particular modes of extension according to the field of individuation. However, every individuating system—whether physical, psychic, aesthetic, or political—responds to a set of characteristics: the milieus of individuation are agitated by differences in intensities. A world of movements, still inarticulate, blind, and without memory, for not yet qualified or composed subjects, rather patients than agents. These movements, which only the “embryo” can endure, are expressions, intensity/velocity relationships, differences, before representation and the conditions of experience. The spatio-temporal dynamisms, as vectors of intensity, determine directions of development (branchings, specifications) and partial phenomena (folds, stretches) that distribute remarkable points and singularities in the intensive field. An intensive field of individuation will be constructed on series of heterogeneous or disparate borders. The communication between these series, under the action of a differentiator (dark precursor), induces coupling phenomena between the series, internal resonance in the system, and forced movement in the form of an amplitude that overflows the base series themselves 43. Differentiation is actualization, a double movement of specification and organization. What is at stake? The qualification of a species and the organization of an extent. A ballet whose choreography is morphogenesis, individuation of an object in a spatial and temporal field, according to its two complementary aspects: qualities and extension. Species and territory.

This somewhat arid summary, characteristic of the “user’s guide” to the differential method, places us at the level of dynamisms and determinations in thought. Deleuze analyzes various systems of individuation: aesthetic, plastic, musical, literary, but also scientific, political, ethological, in which spatio-temporal determinations of representation are tested in a specific production. He identifies the strategies, captures, and modes of connection operated by these different fields of individuation. It is at the level of the effectuation of an intensive diagram that the different aesthetic, political, philosophical, and scientific fields of individuation communicate, beneath representation, at the level of dynamisms 43. And it is in this movement and in this “distinct-obscure” region that Deleuze turns to music, posing the question: how does music confront chaos, what diagram of spatio-temporal determinations does it establish to unleash its “materials-forces”?

Thought-Music

What is not yet music, but only music, in its specificity, succeeds in carrying away? What does it relate to and how does it invent its means, tools, and forms? These frequently renewed questions indicate the intensive field apprehended through the problematization of a diagrammatic assemblage capable of producing new types of reality. While the questions of spatio-temporal dynamisms and determinations of representation are posed as early as Difference and Repetition, at the level of differentiation and individuation, the productive encounter with the musical model takes shape in the 1970s, in the encounter with Félix Guattari. The development of the notion of machinic assemblage takes form in Anti-Oedipus, with a series of partitive operations (distributions of cuts on the continuous flux). An approach to semiotic heterogenesis precedes and somehow calls for the musical nomos in a strategy that seeks to distinguish itself from structuralism.

“How can music help us conceive the productions of a spatio-temporal diagram?” The determining status of spatio-temporal dynamisms predisposes Deleuze’s encounter with music, from several aspects. Music, traversed by a diagrammatic dimension, proceeds through specification (analysis of acoustic properties, components), distribution of components (typologies of intervals, series, modes, scales), and partitive stratifications (chords, aggregates, polyphony) 44.

It is an operative field, a thought device integrating geometry, topology, schemes, and spatio-temporal dynamisms. It is itself the product of overlapping categories (physical, psychic, proprioceptive…); the diagrammatic spatio-temporal field of music is in communion with the operations of differentiation (specification, distribution, coupling, internal resonance, the transversal product of relationships) and their coherence or perceptual validation. The inseparable complementarity of the qualitative aspect and the distributive (partitive) aspect, which interests Deleuze in all domains—specifically, the arrangement of spatial and temporal coordinates necessary for any object of representation—finds a “site” in the transversal material field of music.

Undoubtedly, the notion of consistency and the question of its implementation have a privileged relationship with couplings, internal resonances, and transcodings associated with the process of deterritorialization. Similar to the components of passages associated with chromatism and the work of indiscernibles, music as a vibratory material on which non-pre-established functions perform partitive operations involves laws of grouping and polyphonic distribution, which engage spatio-temporal determinations in their dual qualitative and distributive aspect. In this regard, music has a specific relationship with territory and how it is constituted, marked by a primacy of the expressive. Music, in its capacity to produce materials of expression through (re)grouping forces, through (re)organizing functions (effectuation of the diagrammatic assemblage), works within the overlapping of the semiotic and the material. This overlapping triggers something that goes beyond the territory: an autonomization of the assemblage, a creation. The production of materials of expression is accompanied by the production of tools, techniques 45. Rooted in a pre-material relationship with the territory, the establishment of a direct material/force relationship takes on its full meaning with the capture of time/energy force relationships.

Capture: Deleuze draws the musical field into the operative level of spatio-temporal dynamisms. He extracts aspects of the “musical model” and relates them to fields that are a priori exogenous, yet always with a common diagrammatic component. For instance, the model of smooth spaces and striated spaces, applies as a spatio-temporal diagram to technical, maritime, mathematical, physical, and socio-political models. It contributes, through its operations of differentiation, reciprocal definition, and distribution, to the notion of the arrangement of planes and strata. As a synthesis of disparates particularly suited to producing effects of the machine (war machine/abstract machine), the expanded field of the “musical model” becomes, in a way, emblematic of the deterritorialization assemblage. The musical nomos contracts and assimilates molecular thought under its transcodification aspect. The way musical components hold, through transversal production, conditions the “specialized vector” of deterritorialization. Music as a flux of deterritorialization crystallizes in A Thousand Plateaus, with the notion of ritournelle, in its privileged relationship with deterritorialization and becomings.

How does music emerge renewed from this encounter? In the 1970s, during a time deeply marked by structuralist tendencies, orthodoxies, and exclusive combinations stemming from linguistics or various models, Deleuze inaugurated a new relationship between expression and thought devices. My interest in chromatism and the sound continuum, engaged, among others, in my encounters with Gérard Grisey and the “spectral” movement, in my work on the ultra-chromatic approach of Wyschnegradsky, and later in my writing, has always found support in “differential” thought.

In the face of the question of dynamisms, Deleuze diagnoses the noise of sub-representative forces. He encounters, in this respect, the consistency plane of music, its realities, and its actions. The question of differentiation is closely linked to a critical position of sound relationships, explicitly present in some musicians, from Scriabin to Wyschnegradsky 46, from Varèse to Grisey, from Nono to Ligeti. Deleuze shows how the experience of differentiation, which he also calls the “test of chaos,” goes hand in hand with the molecularization of the material 47. The machinic assemblage requires a thought of the continuum in terms of connections between disparates: it necessitates the establishment of devices to name (capture) new differential relationships (couplings) and create new re-chains (new continuities). The various aspects of the molecularization of the material, foreshadowed in Varèse’s aspirations to move beyond temperament, in his need for a new technological device, in a “becoming-bird” in Messiaen, in the need for diagrammatic cutting in Boulez, tend towards the variation of an intensive continuum. The diagrammatic field of sound relationships involves a material constructivism, what Deleuze calls a “cosmic craft.” There is no limit or exhaustion of connection for objects of representation that are not given, for an experience of representation that constitutes itself as a field of individuation. Postmodern questions about the end of art, philosophy, and history have little impact in the face of the continuous transformation of the Deleuzian subject. For there is no identified subject, but a constant deterritorialization of the subject, a constant test of the “milieu” in relation to forces and dynamisms.

By performing “extractions” of diagrammatic effectuations specific to music and relating them to pre-material dynamisms and machinic assemblages, Deleuze situates music in its relation to the world. He restores its constitutive exteriority. He re-establishes its relationship with representation, the establishment of a thought device that is peculiar to it, as well as the engagement of a subjective enunciation. Deleuze thus accords a status to thought-music.

JEAN PIERRE FAYE – Deleuze back to back and face to face

“Every fragile combination is a power of life asserting itself.” This is the Deleuzian enigma. The one about the philosopher “without lungs” — but what breath…

I think of his definition, or rather his portrait of Nietzsche: “a great living being with fragile health.” He himself quotes Nietzsche’s description: “The artist, the philosopher… At their appearance, nature made a unique leap, and it is a leap of joy.”

To be affected with joy. These are the affects that express the maximum affirmation.

Here we are Spinozist, not at the beginning, in the unique substance, but in the middle, traversed by the encounter of affections. Or with Henry James, “one of those who penetrated most deeply into the becoming-woman of writing,” a dove with lost wings, but whose body awaits being wholly embraced, even as a ciphered telegram, where “only a harsh light remained.” Spinoza knows that “death is not the goal nor the end” — but instead, it is about living life for the other. It’s the multiplicity of life that matters. That is what is told — since ideas are “nothing else” than the mental narrations of nature: a Spinozian notation that Deleuze, to my knowledge, did not note, but which he finds again in his description of the novel (in English). For the encounter with relations “undermines being, makes it tilt.”

Here is Deleuze facing Heidegger’s great balance. We knew that on one side of the balance, being was placed. But the publication of the “complete edition,” this Gesamtausgabe desired and programmed by its author, has just taught us that on the other side of the balance, he had placed “arising from the experience of being, [...] the volkish thought…”

Deleuze had, in advance, almost alone in his time, dodged the balance. To a young philosopher who was writing a thesis about poetry and mentioned this philosophical name, he had only made this remark, in a wholly Socratic approval: “Ah, well! the Nazi druid…” But instead, he opposed the “and” to the “is.” “The ‘and’ as extra-being, inter-being.” Because “the multiple never ceases to inhabit each thing.”

Facing the haughty “experience of being” which Heideggerianly fell into the first stupidity: “the thought of race,” the Rassegedanke, precisely what Nietzsche had called the “clumsy babble.” Facing that, the Deleuzian individual “is by no means indivisible, but constantly divides itself by changing nature.” At the edge of the fissure, the “transformations of points” swarm. A precision in addition, “one must guess what Nietzsche calls ‘noble’: he borrows the language of the physicist of energy, he calls ‘noble’ the energy capable of transforming itself” 48 49. But I will pay attention to the term that French translations have tried to render with the word “noble”: it is “vornehm.” Deleuze immediately perceived it: “This kind of crowned anarchy, this reversed hierarchy,” when the Vornehmheit is the supreme elegance of the six Nietzschean figures of the “chandala” [...] — “the blasphemers, the immoralists, the migrants, the artists, the Jews, the gypsy jugglers”: we, he insists, “we are the spokespersons of life.”

Deleuze probably sees this concealment as a theatrical performance by the Stoic diaspora. I perceive a tension, if not an open contradiction, in the Deleuzian-Stoic proximity, often emphasized, especially with Claire Parnet. Because the increasing distance and ultimately the rejection of any handling of the “signifier” in Deleuze would oppose what is the contribution and the very core of the Stoic source from Chrysippus onwards: the semainon or lexis, the “struck air” — distinct from lekton, semainome-non or sémantème: the signified.

The rupture with Lacan, which Deleuze once announced to me as a joyful knowledge, brings with it the emergence of the rhizome. In turn, the rhizome declares the exclusion of the Chomskyan tree, conceived by him as a genealogical tree. Perhaps a lateral shift does not leave room for the wink that allows us to see the “tree” of transformational grammars as a seer, through which ambiguities are perceived acutely. In this sense, transformational trees allow for breathing among the ambiguous poisons of languages. I perceive them in the most violent narrative moments, those where history splits faster than time itself. They allow us to see how Robespierre is caught in a pincer movement in Thermidor. Or how Bonaparte, in turn, narrowly avoids being outlawed, leaving him outside for three-quarters of an hour during which his fate is decided, exposed to a double interpretation at the same time: both endangered by the Terror and accused in the same way as Robespierre. When Artaud plays Marat in Gance’s film, his face simultaneously expresses fierceness and fragility: Deleuze found satisfaction in this.

But the Stoic diaspora is like an analogue of Deleuze’s plane of immanence. It resembles the temple of Heracles at Selinunte, Sicily, where the columns seem to have been pushed to the ground by an invisible hand. But like these columns, horizontal organs, they are also the respiration of trees: they make languages breathe through the deposits of ambiguities they contain and reveal, which move history, which make days and nights waver. Deleuze’s being-for-the-world plays in this movement of narrative foliage and root-like hair. The for-world is a forest on the move, and it can become both danger and safeguard, deliverance, projection: a rhizome, and it springs forth on the scale of the Siberian taiga or the great Amazonian forest, roots in the air and breathing, producing sap and greedy for oxygen, constantly overturning the data of animal economy. We breathe through narration, which, at every instant, is the report of action, but which, in reporting it, changes it.

The Deleuzian “pure event”? The concept is one, born from narrative return, arising from an encounter, but the phantasm is another. And what about the “phantasmatic concepts,” some of which have invaded philosophy, starting from the troubled zone of the monstrous Reich, which partially held philosophy hostage and still demands ransom for it? We discussed this at length on the phone, in the final years and months when breathing was a problem, and it was difficult to see each other.

Here comes the pseudos for which Deleuze borrows Nietzsche’s definition: “the highest power of the false.” The joyful virtue of the false, illuminating sexuality, is a beautiful teaching of Nietzsche. On the contrary, the poisoned false can work over a long time of falsification and suffocation. But following and clarifying the branches, from the iris rhizome to the tropical baobab and its monkey bread — following the aerial and underground ramifications of the great phantasmatics, this is a non-Leibnizian freedom: it changes the movement of the “spit-roasts,” it transforms transformations.

With Deleuze, we were just beginning to discuss transformation.

Recording session of Nietzsche’s text, The Traveler, in 1972: Gilles Deleuze alone and in the company of his wife Fanny.

ARNAUD VILLANI – How can one be Deleuzian?

Even today, and especially in the French university, the question: “How can one be a Deleuzian?” rings out like an incredulous astonishment, the one mischievously mimicked by the author of Persian Letters aimed at those who tend to think they are the center of the world a bit too quickly.

Without first understanding all of his propositions, some of which were very technical, I very early on sensed a great power in Deleuze. I began to trust him because I had read many German and Anglo-American novels, and his analysis coincided, in its fidelity, with mine or surpassed it in its inventiveness. Not only were his writings on art what I expected, but I saw the artists around me reading him passionately and questioning me about him. Thus began a long acquaintance with his works.

I know I can trust him. He reads well what he cites, often getting the best out of it, with unparalleled honesty. He’s a truth-teller. I can testify, through all my journeys in the work, that Deleuze never passed off ignorance for knowledge. He says what he thinks, does not play the “supposed to know” subject, he does not do the trick of the mandarin who denigrates what he has not read solely to mask his ignorance.

The reception of Deleuze among French intellectuals is very revealing. A distinction has long been made between the historian of philosophy, precise, inventive, bold but in essence estimable, and the philosopher who would have retained from '68 the spontaneous anarcho-desiring of the “Mao-Spontex” and launched into rantings with Guattari. I’m not sure the French have really got over this cursory evaluation which, in general, does not affect the readings of researchers from other countries. An anecdote among a thousand: I was supposed to give a conference in Milan on Deleuze, in the early 1980s. On the train, I sat in the compartment of a young Italian woman very absorbed in her reading. I was re-reading difficult passages from A Thousand Plateaus. I took a peek at the title of the book my neighbor was reading with passion: it was Anti-Oedipus in Italian translation.

Deleuze is a great historian (see The ABC’s, at the letter H), only because he is a great philosopher. We understand this when we read his complementary thesis: Spinoza and the Problem of Expression. The dozen essential concepts that he intelligently highlights in Spinoza, we do not know if he transposes them from this author into his own research or if he sees them in Spinoza because he had already developed them for himself. If, as he puts it well, he could only become a philosophy researcher through the incessant practice of its history, it is because, from the beginning of his work as a historian of ideas, he was in possession of this definition of philosophy: “create concepts and find correlating problems, repudiate the level of the question-discussion”. That’s also why he was able to offer such fresh and powerful readings of tradition.

This requirement, to create the concepts and find the related problems, would be the pediment of Deleuzianism, if it were a “school”. The ABC’s makes it clear how the priest as a concept is linked to the problem: “Is man bound by an infinite debt?” Take the concept of monad, invented by Leibniz from the neo-Platonists and Bruno. What problem does it answer? To the possibility of a folding of perceptions in the soul. It therefore implies a modification of the Cartesian relationship between clear and distinct, in Leibniz, Baumgarten, Whitehead, Ehrenzweig.

Concepts are never at hand, “fallen from the sky”. Taking as is “politics, right, left, division, community, democracy, capitalism, human rights, rule of law” means condemning Socrates anew, giving up any desire for philosophy and succumbing to stupidity. And since we don’t want to harm him, increase his “desert” of hatred and spite.

DELEUZE’S SITUATION

If Deleuze continues philosophy and asserts that there is no question of speaking of the death of philosophy, it is because he introduces an essential break in it. He thus appears as the faithful traitor in Hölderlin’s sense.

Deleuze continues philosophy insofar as he interrupts it. Does this equate to Heidegger’s “step back”? In the Schritt zurück, two reversals occur: the Platonic moment, where several concepts change. The “classical” philosophy would then follow a homogeneous path, which Heidegger, through the gigantomachy about being, would make take a new turn, leading philosophy back to the physis. This double reversal would make visible the pre-Socratic thought, which was, until then, only a “virtual image”, aimed at where it could not be.

I am very circumspect about this theory, especially since it allows Heidegger to adopt a prophetic tone, very grand seigneur, and beautiful philological distortions, quite unnecessary.

For the real turn, the one that puts philosophy back in view of the pre-Socratics, is that of Schopenhauer relayed, when he runs out of steam (middle of the fourth part of the World'), by Nietzsche, who replaces his “Will asserts itself then denies itself” with a thundering: “Will asserts itself then reaffirms itself”. The “representation” is supplanted by the “will”. And it is Nietzsche who definitively — by insisting on the body and not only on finitude — allows us to read the pre-Socratics again, to put them back in the position of “giants” of the future.

Deleuze is in the Nietzschean current, weighed down by Spinoza and his univocity. What he says about desire that lacks nothing, or about the unconscious-factory (and not theatre), is in line with the will. But he gives a definition of philosophy as concrete metaphysics, free from the universal and all transcendence, having only movements as objects and creating problematic concepts, which once again makes philosophy take a turn. Deleuze is a refraction of philosophy, Guattari only married this movement, while also refracting it through another culture. Philosophy then bends in a way that we have never seen before, and sets off in a line of flight. It adds a microscopic gaze, and the virtual reserve that allows it to go as far as the singular, continuous and heterogeneous constitution of a real-virtual that continually passes into what we call real (actual-real) and which is only a slowing down of thought.

In this sense, Deleuze not only allows us, like Nietzsche, to return to the pre-Socratics, but also accounts for Plato: because one of the fundamentals of Deleuze is the idea as a problematic complex, where the jump from one singularity to another is constituted in an indiscernible zone, a fold. A sign testifies to the fact that philosophy from Deleuze bends like never before: that not a word there should be taken without suspicion. To work on Deleuze without having all these fundamentals in mind is to enter a field without a racquet and to complain that it does not look like tennis. In the name of these fundamentals, if Deleuze’s thought has a fertility, it is because it leaves no signifier in place and, by the very effect of this Outside that forces us to think, transforms philosophical language into a construction site always open, not at the level of words alone, but of things and bodies.

THE “GAME” OF PHILOSOPHY

Before entering this question: "How can one be Deleuzian?", where the “I” is endowed with an “aesthetic quantity of universality50” that gives it a “subjective universality”, we must notice in the language how thousands of years condense into a seemingly simple word. We find ourselves with an autobiographical, pathetic, transcendental “I” and finally grafted onto the old hypokeimenon, an “I” where a hundred eras mingle and which culminates, so it is said, as infinite and substantial freedom.

But this “I” is also the most powerful support of a state form (reproduced within each individual), where power is so deeply entrenched that its presence is no longer even noticed. And here we are, with this “I” as the constituted form of philosophy, and with all the terms of politics, art, science, which we content ourselves with taking as “struck currency”, without seeing the problematic in them, blocking any attempt to access the new, to what Deleuze calls terra incognita: a place of life where concepts can have energy, intensity, freedom of play, and not the sadness of everything that power touches.

We must know how to go to the point where the “I” becomes “game”, and paideia, paidia. If we are so stiff in philosophy, having ingested so many “chair sticks” that keep us in the decent straightness of “single thought”, it is because we live and relive the pedagogical compulsion over and over again. Let’s not forget that the eighteenth century lived only for the forced pedagogy of humanity {Letters on Aesthetic Education of Man by Schiller, or Answer to the question: what are the Enlightenment? by Kant).

How can we be surprised if there continues to develop, and especially in philosophy, a hyper-morality aiming, if not at the “best” of which we are quite incapable, at least at the “correct”? It is high time to stop inferiorizing people with this pedagogical-reformist mania of the missionary.

We confuse thinking with propriety. Deleuze’s thought can only make those who fear the “uproar” of chaos bristle. It is indeed in the name of paideia that Plato had eradicated everything that could recall chaos: sophists, cunning, deep body, poikilos or unbridled multiplicity, and the Too Much of Philebus. We compulsively repeat his gesture, sweeping away crumbs of chaos from our coat. We constantly remain as serious as Old Hegel (spoudaios), we constantly transform every paidia (game) into paideia (education). Respecting tradition is perfect, as is revaluing the fields of the past. But we must also be able to invent.

Philosophy, for twenty-five centuries, with the notable exception of Nietzsche, reproduces a professorial ideology (making kalokagathoî), whereas it is primarily a form of art and should remember that it has neither an obligation of results, nor a moral contract, nor propriety in thought to respect. When I started reading Deleuze and working freely on him, and therefore becoming him (because we metamorphose on some points into the one we “meet”, see how we change after reading Man without posterity by Stifter, Cosmos by Gombrowicz, The Birds by Vesaas, The Art of Happiness by Powys, The Teresin Requiem by Bor), I immediately encountered irrational hostility: I was associated with one who was said to be a sophist, a pornographer, a forger in writing, “malicious intelligence”, a bungler.

Thus, by asking "How can one be Deleuzian?", I introduced a first question: “What happens to the ‘I’ when it is bent in Deleuze’s system?” The answer would be: a “game”. A beautiful tribute to Deleuze would be to say that he is a machine for bending concepts, transforming them into “sabbath brooms”. “Deleuzian” means assenting to the acceleration of philosophical particles. In the Deleuzianism that takes and gives speed, we will try to forget the “good movement” of philosophy, firstly to slow down and, in the end, to forget, simply, the movement.

Moving in thought means playing. Not choosing a system of rules, but inventing the rules. But this game is serious. It is serious first because it is joyful. Let’s not resist the pleasure of reading Deleuze, and meeting his humor (which makes him chuckle incessantly in The ABCs). This Spinozist joy is first of all assent to the event, but above all to the fact that life is too big for us. Not to yield to this “too big”, to be able to see it and sustain it, is a daily heroism, without any “heroic posture” (how strange it is to see in Bartleby’s I would prefer not to the image of a heroic posture!). The artist is joyful because what crushes and kills him is what makes him live.

Reversal of the Copernican reversal. As The ABCs states51, man sometimes has no world, an animal always has one. This reverses Heidegger’s proposition about the animal “poor in world”. This world is the object of Deleuzian philosophy which puts an end to “weak” philosophies, having lost all object. The world is the set of signs emitted by those who have only “the community of those who have no community” (Jean-Luc Nancy): a stone, a gaze, the flight of an animal, a book.

The world, these are singularities thrown rhythmically and indistinguishably towards other singularities. The world is the potential difference, the waves of sensation and the arrangements made possible by the privilege of the inorganic (the lighthouse in Woolf). But the world is also the transcendent use of syntheses. Movements make the concrete world, not necessarily visible, but which must be made visible and conceivable. Conversely, transcendent overcodes (too much consciousness, not enough involuntary) isolate the powers of what they can and prevent them from inventing rules by new arrangements; they replace the real with an abstraction that we are used to naming real.

I then summarize in three theses Deleuze’s contribution to philosophy: he is the first to have a true philosophy of art congruent with contemporary productions; he is the first to give himself the means for philosophy to be a politics of resistance throughout; he reconnects with a philosophy of immanent life through his constructivism and his transcendental empiricism.

INTRANSITIVE ART

No matter how we approach the problem, art will always pose the question of a “present rendered”. And this presentation has an effect that is not without affinity with magic and induces a form of resistant presence out of respect. The original phasing of the magic-religious and art is evident by its origin and has been theorized by Simondon52. However, the object as transcendent, which appears in the stream of consciousness at the same time as the subject53, has a tendency to become evanescent, which only strengthens the position of the subject. This is Berkeley, where things become ideas which in turn become real things, it’s the technical object that merges with its function: we only see the hammer when it’s no longer hammering, it’s the disappearance of the object of desire in the Baudrillardian system54: the object is only desired as a simulacrum. And the system of these simulacra will end up desiring the Subject, in an “obscene” Code.

In short, classical philosophy has encouraged this evanescence of the object, by rendering it purely “transitive”, traversable towards something more true. Art is therefore intransitive. In front of art, we stop. We don’t rush. We don’t look for anything behind it (Kandinsky, in On the Spiritual in Art, is not at all suited, in his vocabulary, to the genius of his painting, nor to the intransitivity of art). It is by analogy with these objects that the world can stun. The idea of an “internal necessity” that governs the work, and of an internal logic, is specific to Klee (“the autonomous painting living without a motif of nature, of an entirely abstract plastic existence, [...] the preponderance going to the skeleton of the organism-painting”)55.

Deleuze’s theory of art fits with this idea of intransitivity. It crowns a tradition that makes art the bearer of contrasting multiplicities, starting from the Greek iharmonia and going to Hofmannsthal’s “spine” and “standing on its own”56. Art is what resists without diminishing. In literature, the original syntactic treatment that makes the language “stammer”, and the constraint made on language to push it to its limit, make great works “in a foreign language”; in painting, the task of “cleaning the slate”, i.e., “emptying, decluttering, cleaning57” the invisible traces that come from the noise, defines the power of art by its capacity to resist. In music, the ritornellos caught in the deterritorialization movement of the earth’s song must avoid being swallowed by it. The artist, who sees things too big for him, is stunned by this sublimity and yet knows how to stand up to it as a great intransitive. Finally, art is only valuable as a “durable58” presence, resistant to time and weariness.

But, more in detail59 60, we notice that the purely constructivist elements in the Baconian paradigm (Logic of Sensation) are intransitive devices: the “extraction” is there to ward off the narrative, the “figurative” to counter the figurative, the “diagram” to trap the cliché. Narrative, figurative, cliché, these would be “the image of art” that perfectly prevents from creating, as Deleuze evokes an “image of thought” that perfectly prevents from thinking.

But defining art by intransitivity tends to focus on the insistent presence of a rediscovered object, a “burst of real that jumps in our face”. But isn’t there also resistance and even intransitivity of constituted bodies, of settled ideas, of forms that do not want to be penetrated by movement? Art passes between things, wanting to depict the indescribable of the passage. Artistic devices will therefore be an intransitive resistance of movement to the intransigent resistance of the immobile. Bacon’s three fundamentals, the framework, the figure, and the contour, are not only a flat light, a clawed figure, a track, but above all a “challenge to paint forces, [...] assembly of a body without organs, [...] clearing of a zone of indiscernibility”.

If Bacon’s figures are as if subjected to the wind of a chaos that rises only to make them disappear, it’s because these figures are the construction of a “body without organs”. But isn’t a body without organs in the actual sense nothing more than a rag? Here is where Deleuze’s metaphysics and empiricism come together. Metaphysics provides the idea, the problem, the apex of a cone as a bird’s-eye view of all its “sections”. It contains them in a “differentiated” way. Whether the sections run on the cone or the flows on the body without organs, they move at a speed of chaos.

But, if we want a sensation to be born for art, a concept for philosophy, a function for science, there must be a point of encounter that resists this course of flows, the constellation drawn by two irregular points (capture of forces). We are in syntheses and their double usage. We connect metaphysics to empiricism, and the virtual to the actual: “differentiation”. The forces that apply to the body without organs in constituting it give rise to sensations and affections. “At the encounter of grounds at such a level of external forces, a sensation appears. [...] The Gothic line raises to the sensitive intuition of mechanical forces61.” Intensities couple, and the coupling of differences in intensive fields ensures sensation.

But it will have taken the body powerfully in-organized (without organs, or endowed with transient and fleeting organs, so that the maximum power can be exercised without any domination — it being established that power can only stop) to mobilize a blocked figure by giving it a very fast movement. Now, after the resistance which forced the “resistance-less” flux to provide a sensation, after the intransitivity which synthesized what is only transitive, a new resistance must preserve the binding: the fold as what constantly moves by a wave of resonance and yet holds firm on its continuity of heterogeneities.

Here, Deleuze’s solution is the chaoide, the cut of chaos where instantaneous apparitions/disappearances and the actuality still full of virtual (as we say: “eyes full of sleep or dream”) of a zigzagging form, which Deleuze calls a “block” of becoming. This block, the antithesis of what blocks, is what resists and yet never ceases to vibrate (the apple-ness of Cézanne, more important than the Platonic idea, according to Lawrence). It is the continuous-heterogeneous that only lets the wave of resonance of other folds pass through it. Art liberates a fantastic power of life, its presence “prevents stupidity from being as big as it would like. [...] One does not jostle an artist” {The ABC’s, s.v. “Resistance”).

DELEUZE AND THE QUESTION OF POLITICS

There is a real danger of absolute misunderstanding when one does not make the effort to transcribe Deleuzian concepts into movements. Thus, as we will see later, a work on Deleuze and the question of politics, if it is not enlightened by the invariant concepts (chaos, speed, fold, molar and molecular seen in a non-dualistic way, etc.) that account for Deleuzian politics, cannot avoid the need to start the whole problem from scratch. Of course, politics brings individuals, norms, and laws into a relationship within an ensemble named: rational intelligence (logos). At this first, visible level, there is a dualism of reality that we can call macroplural. Power and counter-power, social and liberal, right and left, we know all this well.

But praising pluralism, even if it’s democratic, is never yet understanding, let alone experimenting with the multiple. Thus, subjects, in their free conversation, make structures thought far from them and without them inhabitable. Intelligence and cunning organize our daily lives. But this first distinction of the “striated” and the “smooth” relatives only represents a “territorial arrangement”, and not a process of deterritorialization. Therefore, if we want to talk about Deleuzian politics, we must reach a second level.

This invisible level adds the line of flight that sets everything in motion, including itself. However, if it flees itself, it does so by allowing the coexistence of the bloc and singularities. The “micromultiple” becomes real, while the variety of deception or pluralism was merely apparent, leading straight back to the wrong powers of dualism. The line of flight, affecting both the molar and the molecular, ejects all dualism. The line of flight cannot be distinguished from the construction of the bloc. No eternity hovers here over the en bloc capture of singularities in the “fold.” It is the one that creates an eternity & aiôn, a flight in formation, a movement of coming and going, passing at the speed of the wind. Velocity as acceleration makes the points truly distinct indiscernible. There will be given forms, delivered by history as a shore is uncovered by the tide’s retreat, only when the process calms down. Everything is played out between the death-chaos of fixity and the too-rapid chaos of unstoppable mobility.

Philippe Mengue’s work, Deleuze et la question de la démocratie (Deleuze and the Question of Democracy), recently published (L’Harmattan, 2003), contains the ambiguity we just talked about, due to a difference in level between politics, which Mengue discusses, and the political, where Deleuze always stands. Moreover, it is evident that the author gives Deleuze no chance to develop his theory, as the virtual, the Ideas, metaphysics, syntheses, and the difference between question and interrogation are never worked on as a starting point and basis for work. More than in art, in Deleuzian politics, the fundamentals of reading operate at full capacity. That’s why the title Deleuze et la question de la démocratie (= concerning politics) has already skipped over the only question that arises: “Deleuze and the problem of the political.”

My concern is not to detail this work to show its inadequacies, rapidity, and sometimes bewildering falsehoods. I reject the assessment in the appendix62. I content myself with pointing out, to demonstrate this kind of constant gap between Mengue’s harsh critiques and the reality of Deleuze’s text (as if Mengue were not looking at Deleuze but the projections of his desire), that in the note regarding page 79, the terms thickening, fall and descent, viscosity, bogging down, supposed to prove a systematic devaluation of “social organizations,” actually concern, referring to the pages of A Thousand Plateaus, the three abstract machines, war, painting in relation to music, and becoming. No reference to “social organizations” at all!

So, let us reconsider Deleuze’s political position to attempt to understand. The specific texts can be found in What is Philosophy? Chapter 4: “Geophilosophy”; in Negotiations: “Politics”; in Anti-Oedipus: “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized” and “Introduction to Schizoanalysis”; in A Thousand Plateaus: “Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine”; and in The ABCs of Gilles Deleuze: “Left, Resistance.” But we will not be led to believe that Deleuze’s attitude towards politics is expressed only in these texts. The entire work must be taken into account because passive syntheses, regimes of signs, the virtual, resonance, the line of flight, linguistics as a slogan, the triad of syntheses and territorialization must come into play at every moment to give meaning and consistency to the Deleuzian position.

First, I will dismiss the most massive objections, astonishing in their incomprehension. It is obviously false that Deleuze is a bitter aristocrat due to the failure of the Revolution. Neither will we accept that he is a salon revolutionary, nor that micropolitics is nowhere a form of politics, although it is indeed an ethics. Calling it a brilliant anticipation of post-modernity is to employ a very abstract concept. One must be very concerned about the misinterpretation of Deleuze’s minor concept. “The majority is nobody, the minority is everybody,” says The ABCs of Gilles Deleuze (V, “Left”). Where everyone agrees to recognize it as a claim of the type: “We are all Indians, Jews, women, oppressed,” Mengue claims, without flinching, the incredible notion that the minor is the pretentious elite of an intellectual avant-garde! This absurdity allows him to demand Deleuze to show more solidarity (p. 55)! One may seriously wonder if Mengue read Kafka’s The Castle, with Pepi’s burrow-room, or the end of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, both cited enthusiastically by Deleuze; whether he took seriously Nancy’s “community of those who have no community” or Kierkegaard’s “negative communication.”

To all these kinds of fantasies imposed on Deleuze, we can counter with his definition of “being on the left” in The ABCs of Gilles Deleuze: having a perception that starts from the farthest away, where people suffer. Deleuze does not criticize democracy because he is a cryptic aristocrat. Not because it does too much, but because it does not do enough, and has not absolved itself from dubious collusions and compromises. Can anyone contest Deleuze’s statement? He is not disappointed with democracy itself, but with what we have made of it. Is that clear enough? Of course, Democracy, Western Reason, Human Rights, Habermas’s consensual free conversation are a “lesser evil.” However, Deleuze’s sharp eye and ethical demands (and heaven knows that if everyone had shared this demand, fewer totalitarianisms would have been allowed and less plundering and unfair distribution of the world’s wealth would have been sanctioned!) call for something else, something more concrete. Deleuze demands “one more effort” to be democratic, with precision. He never stopped thinking about multiplicities, masses, packs, and people. He speaks and thinks for (not in place of, but in front of) “the oppressed, the bastard, the inferior, the anarchic, the nomad, irremediably minor” (WIP, p. 105). But isn’t it obvious that democracy (Tocqueville already foresaw it63) is “linked and compromised with dictatorial states”? “What social-democracy has not ordered to shoot when misery goes beyond its territory?” (WIP, p. 102 and 103). “There is no democratic state that is not deeply compromised in the creation of human misery64.”

Furthermore, unfortunately, no one can deny that “advanced liberal democracies” are caught in the “isomorphism of the global market” (ibid.), which does not mean that democracy is equivalent to a totalitarian regime, far from it, but both are seized by a more powerful movement of capitalist inspiration. The democracy’s weak resistance to the powers (i.e., impotence, the seizure of powers) of capitalism is the essential reason why Deleuze criticizes it as a “soft” politics, which does not clearly define its concepts, friends, or rivals.

The foundations of democracy can no longer be thought, they are not concepts but mere wishes accompanied by abject self-righteousness. Mengue reproaches Deleuze for pretending that human rights are “complacent,” hypocritical. Here’s what Deleuze says:

Human rights will not make us bless capitalism. And it takes a lot of innocence or cunning for a philosophy of communication that claims to restore the society of friends or even sages by forming a universal opinion as “consensus” capable of moralizing nations, states, and the market65.

Does that mean he is anti-democratic? I am convinced it is the opposite, and there is no truer democrat than Deleuze. Unless Mengue is one of those who consider certain words untouchable and find critique for progress sacrilegious?

Let us work on political conversation and human rights. The essence of a conversation, as it only raises questions and does not pose answers, is to work like Socrates’s interlocutors: everyone thinks they know what piety, justice mean, each offers their own definition. Or rather, everyone speaks, contests, and criticizes from their own definition. Such is the pitiful fate of “the” politics, never reflecting on its foundations. “We are not talking about the same thing, it’s as if we were not speaking the same language” (The ABCs of Gilles Deleuze, s.v. “Left”). Mengue translates this truth into a perfectly false syllogism: “He doesn’t like the discussion, and since dialogue is what opposes violence, Deleuze is therefore a violent man, an aristocratic warrior, QED.”

According to Deleuze, all rumors, all affections claiming to be the unique holders of the “privilege of the heart,” all hypocritical attitudes are sheltered within political discussion:

Language, communication, are rotten, completely penetrated by money, not by accident but by nature. A deflection of language is needed. Creation has always been something other than communication. The important thing is to create vacuoles of non-communication, switches, to escape control66.

A new intervention of the idea of resistance. But who can ask a political class to define all the concepts that allow them to act? No one, for it would be an infinite task. Therefore, the philosopher has the task of thinking about the problems and concepts. The trouble is that Mengue’s aberrant criticism is discouraging any attempt in this direction. And while one may sometimes despair in France of “talking politics” due to all the confusion sedimented by decades of lies and propaganda, a book like Mengue’s would almost discourage any attempt to rethink politics.

If the philosopher regains courage and responds to his function, he can only rethink the concepts of the political from scratch, that is, create them outside politics. This demands time, retreat, non-conductivity to the voices of all the fashion’s sirens. And one should not carelessly say (Mengue, op. cit., p. 43, forgetting that “the concept is a singularity”) that Deleuze despises “the workbench, the conventional, common sense, tradition, public debate, information, and communication,” for it is first necessary to know which concepts are hiding behind these terms.

Common sense is cited in the elements of the “image of thought” that prevent us from thinking. But this common sense is the one of the obvious which, in Hegel’s view, constituted the “well-known” that, being well-known, “is ill-known.” On the other hand, how many times, in his written work or in The ABCs of Gilles Deleuze, does Deleuze use the expression, "But it’s very simple!"? He means that the concept is the most concrete of things, for it is a machine, constructed. Similarly, Deleuze would never think of rejecting “debate” if it harbored the free “rivalry” of the Greeks, this “discordant agreement” that Mengue claims but which is also the Deleuzian desire, the constant assault of pretenders, defining their friendship. It is clear that this entire false trial could have been avoided if Mengue had taken the trouble to define the concepts, in the sense that Deleuze understands them:

Those who criticize without creating [...] are the scourge of philosophy. They are driven by resentment. [...] Philosophy abhors discussions. It always has something else to do. The debate is intolerable to it, not because it is too sure of itself; on the contrary, it is its uncertainties that lead it on other, more solitary paths67.

As we understand!

Lastly, let us consider the case of human rights. Here again, let us use the spoken form of The ABCs of Gilles Deleuze (s.v. “Left”), especially since Deleuze expresses himself openly, without any censorship. The “soft thought” of a “poor period” favors the abstract because the abstract does not resist. All it takes is some talent for rhetoric. Deleuze reminds us that desire is never desire for an object or a subject, but for a situation. Since we always find ourselves in situations, the rights in general are only “great signifiers,” those that Stirner twisted as phantoms.

Thus, Deleuze, far from neglecting political problems, makes them possible. He opposes the hypocritical wish of human rights (as we saw how the brandishing of human rights in Kosovo or China had no effect! Should we recall Hegel’s text on the “valet of morality”?), “the invention of jurisprudence to end unbearable situations.” The problem is to delimit territories through international jurisprudence, case by case. Far from being idealistic, as Mengue claims, Deleuze is the last of the English empiricists (English law is jurisprudence, whereas Roman-French law is based on principles).

As for Mengue’s famous finding of the “doxical plane of immanence,” it is a logical monster. Deleuze’s micropolitics is indeed a politics (as is his aesthetics) because a plane of immanence is a “real,” and the movements occurring there are the living matrices of the actual. Thus, in the plane of immanence, there can only be intensities, flows, desire, encounters, waves, and resonances of sensations, neighbors, and velocities. On the contrary, the doxical belongs to the actual, but it is a blurry and dead actuality that has no free movement, takes approximations for consensus, fixes and locks, supervises and denounces, obeys orders, and echoes them with total irresponsibility, gargarizing vague approximations, taking an absence of concepts for the courage of new thinking.

One cannot identify arrangements in the doxic because an arrangement is concrete, we can detail its components and its mode of composition. It is not because the doxic is an intersection of diverse, multiple, “pluralistic” opinions, as Mengue says, which names a difficulty instead of dealing with it, that difference necessarily manifests itself. Repetition is “naked” and not “clothed” 68 69. The doxic plane of immanence is not even a concept as big as a hollow tooth, as human rights can be, it is the mixture of a concept (plan of speed or of immanence) and a lack of concept (slowed down or transcendent plan). However, it is clear that these two planes meet, but not confusingly and broadly. On the contrary, there is insertion on specific points of one into the other, and this is what, in the virtual, cuts out a “livable” real. The detail of these points, that’s what we would have liked to read in Mengue.

“To believe in the world,” says Deleuze in Negotiations, “is to trigger events, even small ones, that escape control or give birth to new space-times” (p. 239). Thus would be conjured the terrible soft1® repression which responds to the collusion, in the democratic idea, sanctified with its constitutive link to Reason, of the better proper to a pedagogical ideology and the profit in the repetition of self-satisfied litanies70. Deleuze’s anger is understandable:

In philosophy, we return to eternal values, to the idea of the intellectual guardian of eternal values. [...] Today, it is human rights that function as eternal values. It’s the rule of law and other notions, which everyone knows are very abstract. And it is in the name of this that all thought is stopped, that all analyses in terms of movements are blocked! Yet, if oppressions are so terrible, it is because they prevent movements, and not because they offend the eternal71.

This response in advance to Mengue implies that micropolitics cannot be understood at first. Its principles must be accepted:

    1. refuse abstraction;
    1. refuse the “big” vision, enter into micrologic;
    1. detach from providential anthropocentrism, from subjectivity, from the “dirty little secret” of individual stories;
    1. pose problematic questions and invent the concepts that suit them. Then, we can see that micropolitics is not “just a little political” (p. 160). Let’s not lose the advantage of the grass, of the miner, of the imperceptible! Let’s not waste, braced on retrograde positions, the progress of the non-propositional form of the concept “where communication, exchange, consensus, and opinion are annihilated”72. Deleuze does not want to speak but to do. Not to discuss but to become.

For Deleuze’s philosophy seizes capital and turns it against itself. By this, it reaches the non-propositional form that refuses Habermasian sociability, “nourished by Western democratic conversation73.” Utopia in the literal sense. The plane of immanence does not remain without effect, as Mengue believes. It “connects with the present relative environment, especially with the stifled forces in this environment74.”

To say that revolution is a utopia of immanence is not to say that it is a dream, something that does not realize or that only realizes by betraying itself. On the contrary, it is to pose the revolution as a plane of immanence, infinite movement, absolute overview, but as these traits connect with what is real, here and now, in the struggle against capitalism, and relaunch new struggles each time the previous one is betrayed. The word utopia therefore designates this conjunction of philosophy or concept with the present environment: political philosophy75.

MANIFESTO FOR A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

Kierkegaard said: “A herald of interiority is a strange thing76.” Do not expect to see Deleuzian theses exposed in public places: it takes a lot of time and a confident acceptance of the fundamentals. Then, having dismantled the Deleuzian machine, one is free to criticize it, if it deserves it, for the benefit of all.

If I were to answer in one sentence the question, “How can one be Deleuzian?” I would answer without hesitation: through passion, because he is one of the few philosophers who love life so much that he has woven it behind all his words. Like him, I love life as the ensemble of processes that resist death77, but without missing the inorganic. Life is resistance. And we are responsible for it in each of our gestures.

It resists in art: “There is no art of death. [...] The artist releases an impersonal life, not his own life78.” “To think is to be attentive to life. [...] The bon vivant is abject! But the great livers! To see life is to be traversed by it: life in all its power, its beauty,” Deleuze said in the article “Disease” in The ABCs of Deleuze. We have seen how Deleuze was attuned to the writers of life, Miller, Lawrence, Beckett, Kerouac, Fitzgerald, Faulkner:

They have seen something too great for them, and it breaks them: percepts at the limit of what can be sustained and concepts at the limit of what can be thought. [...] Great philosophy and great literature bear witness to life79.

A concept cracks the skull, a percept twists the nerves. Affects are becomings that overflow, exceed the forces of the one through which they pass80.

We write because something of life passes through us. We write for life81.

Not one of us is innocent of a crime: the enormous crime of not fully living life82.

It resists in politics, against all regressions that want to give us more subject and even more subject, dominated objects, power, the best and profit, and so much self-satisfaction, all in the name of Reason, which is so convenient. Life, let’s understand, is not my little individual life, but a life:

The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of inner life (subject) and outer life (object). Life of pure immanence, beyond good and evil: only the subject that incarnated it made it good or bad. Immanent life, carrying events or singularities that only actualize in subjects and objects83.

I would like to emphasize very clearly, and this overwhelms me, cracks my skull, and twists my nerves; it is too strong for me and gives me both fragility and a fantastic desire to live, that life on earth is not only that of man, but the life of the painting that “stands alone,” the life of music that becomes a bird while the bird becomes color, but the life of the orchid surrounded by its tele-organs, wasps, the life of the poet and the painter becoming imperceptible, the life of the grass as much as that of the tree, the life of the book that changes our gaze, the life of our animal, vegetal, and mineral metamorphoses.

And this powerful life, organic and inorganic, what threatens it is not the singular subject, always anomalous, acephalic, and fragmented, but the myth of the rational subject, with its abstract ideas, its sanctification of limitless progress, the feeling that the universe is made to increase one’s comfort, while day after day, abstract idea after abstract idea, hypocrisy after hypocrisy, genocides and famines multiply, and the earth becomes deterritorialized. One day, our vague propositions and well-fed conversations will leave the earth lying on the floor. One will rightly say, “The earth no longer moves.” Man, the last of the last, won’t even understand the one who, bewildered, will announce, “The earth is dead, life is dead.” All deterritorialization henceforth mineralized, all lines of flight blocked, all “shame of being a man” imbibed.

The infinite resources of grass alone would suffice to explain how and why I can and want to be Deleuzian.

ATTACHMENT

Note on Philippe Mengue’s book, Deleuze and the Question of Democracy (L’Harmattan, 2003).

Misinterpretations

P. 25, “Deleuze announces that philosophy is modern when it is anti-metaphysical,” in contrast to Deleuze’s own words: “I consider myself a pure metaphysician.” Misreading on p. 43, where it is clear that it is regrettable that material psychiatry cannot avoid being “eschatological,” while Mengue credits Deleuze with this eschatological concern (also see p. 197). P. 37, the “struggle of thought against chaos,” which does not specify that the concept is obtained not through struggle but through cutting the chaos. P. 41, the ruinous misunderstanding of minor, minority, understood as if they were elites (also see p. 56). P. 45, micropolitics becomes a tyranny of Logos, a megalomania, as Deleuze and Foucault reinvent the Platonic philosopher-king (same error on p. 101). P. 46, the accusation against Deleuze of wanting to found when everyone knows his phrase from Difference and Repetition: “to unfound.” P. 56, “thought receives its mission from the will.” P. 47, spelling errors on Un-Whole that say exactly the opposite of what Deleuze meant. P. 60, “immanence accords primacy to categories of unity, continuity, totality,” whereas Deleuze, since Difference and Repetition, speaks of flawed unity, heterogeneous continuity, totality in fragments. P. 91, “there exists a universal antagonism that will never allow any reconciliation between the molar and the molecular,” whereas Deleuze says: “The abstract machines of stratification, consistency, and axiomatics intertwine their type and exercise. [...] Of these three lines, we cannot say that one is bad and the other good” {MP 277 and 640). P. 97, “becomings are subjective affects”! P. 108, on MP p. 580, Deleuze clearly states that the isomorphism of States does not mean that they are of equal value, which Mengue seems to forget. The entire page 145 is pure incomprehension: Deleuze has not changed the core of his political doctrine. P. 177, the ignominy of life’s possibilities (in the Nietzschean sense) is transformed into “the ignominy of conditions of existence.” P. 198, the body without organs is understood as empty (and not full!). P. 199, chaos transformed, according to the good habit of philosophers, into a gap, whereas in Deleuze it is the speed of appearance/abolition. P. 200, Deleuze confused, after so many clarifications on his part, with spontaneism and anarcho-desiring. P. 205, Deleuze is credited with an “unshakable belief in historicism,” while Mengue himself made the distinction between becoming and history.

Contradictions

P. 30, the battle is essential and the philosopher a warrior; p. 37, it speaks of battle-guerrilla; p. 40, it quotes Deleuze: “The philosopher wages a war without battle, a guerrilla war.” P. 60, immanence implies totality; p. 71: “Let’s not forget, a thought of differences rejects all forms of totalization.” Theorem I is directly contradictory to Theorem II.

Injurious Attacks

Deleuze appears megalomaniacal, pretentious, elitist, aristocratic, disdainful, mean, haughty, regressive, malicious, and hostile. Remarks include “we can only smile,” “medical student’s joke,” “support for a clown” (regarding Deleuze’s support for Coluche’s candidacy for the presidency, p. 87). “He remains a buffoon, condemned to a salon revolution, a reactionary intellectual, the last of men, one who denies for the sake of denial” (p. 140). He has “paranoid outbursts” (p. 152). Deleuze “didn’t understand anything” (p. 162). And the vile assimilation between nomadism and “inhuman forced population displacements,” the infamous suggestion that deterritorialization and fascism are close (p. 161 and 118), and finally, the beautiful passage on “the babble, futile play, deception, pomposity, pretension, and rhetoric of all these revolutionary speeches” (p. 205).

Naiveties

Mengue reproaches Deleuze for not mentioning society as the power to enrich, complexify, or create new needs (and thus new pleasures), to facilitate life, to appease conflicts, to produce well-being, comfort, prosperity (p. 151). But has Mengue forgotten the imbalances between wealthy nations and the Third or Fourth World, the heavy ecological debts that this well-being incurs? Deleuze never forgets this, as he defines the left, to which he belongs, as the perception of the extreme distance (miseries, famines) before the close {The ABCs of Deleuze, s.v. “Left”). P. 91, Mengue credits the revolutionary aspect of democracy in France for transforming an agricultural economy into a major industrial power in just a few decades!

Ethically Flawed Methods

In cases where it is essential to be very precise in one’s citations, Mengue no longer cites Deleuze but Foucault or Arendt, and attributes the responsibility of the terms to Deleuze: p. 42 on the avant-garde elite, p. 37 on the warrior-thinker, p. 79 on the idea that social ties depend only on society, p. 92 for Adorno’s elitist contempt, p. 100 for the flight from the political, proven by Hannah Arendt.

Factual Errors

Kronos is not the term Deleuze uses for time, but Chronos (p. 137, 139, etc.).

PHILIPPE CHOULET – Empiricism as an Aperitif (a persistence of Deleuze)

I have always felt empiricist, that is to say, pluralist.

G. Deleuze, preface to the American edition of Dialogues

Multiply, animal

V. Hugo, The Man Who Laughs, Book II, Chap. XI

THE PHILOSOPHER AS AN IDIOSYNCRASY OF HIS CONCEPTUAL CHARACTERS84

The philosophical journey of a philosopher includes the obligatory passage through the history of philosophy — regardless of the exact relationship to this history, love/admiration, in the absence of adherence85, hate/rejection86… This link is so revealing of the formation of a thought that we can often speak of the sublime grandeur of beginnings (Lévi-Strauss), whether these beginnings are precocious (as for Hume, Spinoza or Deleuze himself) or rather late (Kant…) "It is singular to see our hero begin with empiricism: in 1947, at twenty-two years old, he presents his higher studies diploma with what will become Empiricism and Subjectivity, in front of Canguilhem and Hyppolite — sublime grandeur of certain juries… Oxymoron of the initial Deleuzian project: sublimity of empiricism.

Here we want to expose how the “young” (the first?) Deleuze grasps empiricist thought87 to read in it a source of perpetual novelty — the aperitif virtue of the key of empiricism, to use a formula of Pascal —, particularly with these questions that have become specifically Deleuzian about the thought of the multiple, of the association and of the production of concepts, and to definitively alter the very destiny of the empiricist current in the history of philosophy. As for empiricism, it has become self-evident: there is a before Deleuze and an after Deleuze. Once Deleuze has passed, one can no longer be an empiricist and reader-admirer of empiricism in the same way.

From empiricism, indeed, we had learned (sic !) essentially a formula — that it was essentially a formula, pardon me. Big gimmick, supreme injustice. “There is nothing that comes into the mind that has not previously passed through the senses”, with the emphasis on temporal priority and the inability to think of logical priority (poor empiricists!). We have regarded empiricism with compassion, indulgence, as a little thing that nevertheless deserves credit for existing, in front of the majesty of the true monument of idealism… And empiricism, discouraged, adopts this “frog’s perspective” (Nietzsche), from bottom to top: “I will never make it!” (implied: to the concept…}.

This is one of the major objections of Cavaillès, Bachelard and Husserl against empiricism: being essentially a psychology of reception, a horizontal theory of associations (the "etc.", the infinite series of “and”...), empiricism cannot conceive of this “passage to quality” that constitutes the act of knowledge by the pure concept. This is because one cannot pose the a priori as independent of the a posteriori, and therefore one must assume either a doctrine of faculties (Kant) that presents both the problem and its solution (through the presupposition of harmony or finality), or a native power of understanding (Spinoza) or reason (Hegel — cf. Canguilhem: the concept in biology is much more Hegelian than Bergsonian…). Deleuze superbly ignores this difficulty, all busy with a sensitization of the concept — Nietzschean inheritance. Fathers (in effigy) are killed as best as one can. The Deleuzian concept will become “vicinal” (What is Philosophy?, p. 87), and the abolition of the principle of norm and even of all intrinsic criteriology (since the value of a concept depends on its plane, its field and the problem that made it necessary) then indeed makes possible the greatest inventiveness, and even a formalism of creation, in which the Deleuzian Vulgate is likely to drown, by dint of incantation. The empiricist experience does indeed give birth to this definition of “the object of philosophy”: “Creating always new concepts” (What is Philosophy?, p. 10). We will return later to this problematic point.

The Deleuzian initiative consists of demystifying empiricism and using it as a war machine, a Trojan horse against idealism and rationalism. From beginning to end, he is ultimately Bergsonian — and he assumes an Anglo-Saxon heritage that will grow in importance88. The perversion89 thus begins, as we see, very early.

BIASES AGAINST EMPIRICISM

This perversion begins with the fixation of the doxic/toxic prejudices of philosophy, that is, the unveiling of the poor image of thought that this thought creates. There are three biases.

  • a) The dogma of the passage I all knowledge through the senses. Deleuze refutes the Kantian definition of empiricism: “Theory according to which knowledge not only begins with experience, but derives from it” (Empiricism, p. 121). The emphasis on the derivation of intuition from the sensible seems suspicious to him, even if it brakes the momentum of reason towards intellectual intuition by defining the human mind as intuitus derivativus, and even if Kantianism saves phenomena by retaining a certain empirical realism (Kant, p. 23): empiricism is nevertheless reduced to being just a problem of senses. However, the problem of empiricism is not the sensible but that of subjectivity {Empiricism, p. 90-92, 117-122) — Deleuze knows his Nietzsche, the one from Twilight of the Idols (“How, in the end, the ‘real world’ became a fable”): decisively, the sensible no longer poses a problem90.

The problem of empiricism is subjectivity, and very precisely first that of imagination {Empiricism, p. 124), which quickly becomes that of the transcendental, because of the question of the background of image, idea, form. “In the problem thus posed, we discover the absolute essence of empiricism” (ibid., p. 92). Just that.

  • b) Contempt for empirical epistemology: the faculty of feeling is an inferior knowledge faculty, empirical synthesis is incomplete and mutilated synthesis (Kant, p. 10). It is a form of reason, true, but it is a pragmatic form, indexed on the calculation of sensible, pathological interest, where contingency and the hypothetical prevail over a priori necessity and the categorical. In the empirical, one tinkers, one improvises, one acts without real method91. Reason cannot be a faculty of thinking principles and ends here (ibid., p. 5: empirical reason is calculation, cunning, detour, art of indirect, oblique means). Deleuze will always be the champion of contingency (the emergence of the event), against the terrorism of pure necessity (a priori): Proustian humor, against Platonic logos (Proust, p. 123-124).
  • c) Contempt for empirical desire. The inferior faculty of desiring is another form of empirical synthesis, according to Kant (Kant, p. 12). The challenge of idealism is to move the subject to the superior faculty of desiring, reason. Permanence of Deleuzian stubbornness: the love of the inferior (of the minor, the poor, the weak — there is indeed an arte povera of love for empiricism). All Deleuzian commitment in favor of prisoners, the sick, schizophrenics, the cracked, minor literature, etc. — generically: larval subjects (Difference, p. 155) — has its source in this concern about the paranoid contempt of the Superior, the Transcendent, the A Priori and the Pure (it feels like Zinoviev…) for the inferior. There is indeed a Deleuzian charity.

THE REPLACEMENT OF THE DYING: THE FERTILE PRINCIPLES OF EMPIRICISM

Deleuze revitalizes the reading of empiricism by discovering true originality in Hume, in relation to tradition. It is therefore not only a question of asking: how is empiricism recognized? We must also and above all indicate the new tasks of the philosopher-investigator (Leibniz, p. 92), on the one hand with regard to the conception of a new image of thought (a new theory of the concept, cf. Pourparlers, p. 42-43), on the other hand with regard to the proliferation of principles, and this is the decisive point. The idea will have offspring in the book on Leibniz (Leibniz, p. 91 and following), but it is already in Deleuze’s meditation on Hume. For Deleuze, the first principle, in fact, is useless (the one is only a mask, a simple image); it is the following ones that initiate mobility, life, relationship. What matters is neither atomism nor the assumption of associationism, it is the initiation of experience: “Empiricists are not theorists, they are experimenters: they never interpret, they have no principles” (Dialogues, p. 69)

  • a) The thought of reception: passivity and spontaneity, liveliness and intensity. The empirical synthesis is more destitute than the Kantian synthesis, which can invoke the division of labor of faculties (Kant, p. 34). It must deal with differences in liveliness in impressions and show its power of anticipation, especially in the experience of waiting92 93 — because if experience is life itself, what proves it, and without the analogies of experience!… It then becomes a passive synthesis. This is a constitutive synthesis, which is not made by the mind, nor by one of its faculties: it is done in the mind, preceding all memory, all reflection (Difference, p. 97). It is fundamentally temporal subjectivity: the fact that it is contraction (by which the Hume-Bergson axis is made) is accompanied by a form of bliss of reception (Difference, p. 102), contemplative bliss of the life of the living (habit of living, ibid., p. 101), made of thousands of these synthesis-habits, a system of founding Time by Memory, to ecstasy (Butler and Plotinus together, ibid, p. 102, 107-109)… This theory develops under the figures of Habitus (repetition and principle of pleasure), itself backed by Eros-Mnemosyne (principles of disguise, of displacement, and foundation of the principle of pleasure (Difference, p. 143-144,150-152), and in pages that prepare the end of Difference and repetition, about the injection of the Dionysian into the Apollonian of philosophy.

Where does this idea come from? From reading Hume, we have just seen, but there is undoubtedly also the influence of the Leibnizian doctrine of small perceptions (hence of the imperceptible) in the soul of the “empirical beasts” (Leibniz, p. 76,122,179-180), and in these forms of presentiment that are anxiety, watchfulness, the “on-his-guards”. There is indeed an archaic activity of the soul (in the sense that the only anteriority that matters is the experimental movement that it gives to itself). As far as man is concerned, this passivity of intensity will also be found in the role of names (Logic, p. 55-57, reference to Klossowski) and in the reception of the structure-other (ibid, p. 410). We will see later the function of the name in principle empiricism. What matters here is to understand that passive synthesis is the experience of the singular (impersonal/pre-individual, Difference, p. 332), and that it has nothing to do, even though it has constituting power, with active subjective syntheses (related to the work of understanding). Kant is here a foil (Kant, p. 27-28). This idea leads Deleuze to that of chaos, which is the cosmic equivalent of the fund of forms of transcendental imagination, with this difference: the Kantian transcendental founds nothing real or effective, it is a false bottom, and the secret of the human soul is not there. On the other hand, Deleuze transposes the chaos of sensations to the chaos of experiences. Kant did not recognize the richness of the treasure of the chaos of sensations. It is Hume, then Nietzsche, who will awaken Deleuze to this new freedom, which implies a rethinking of the transcendental (without subject, without nature, without being, without unity, etc.). The neighborhood with Lévi-Strauss (this time, that of the end of The Naked Man) is once again glimpsed.

  • b) The thought of states of things — always linked, not to “fact-ism” (fetishism of fact), but to the bursting forth of novelty, of invention, of working imagination. Instead of seeking the eternal, the ethereal, and the universal, empiricism seeks “the conditions under which something new occurs” (Two regimes, p. 284). It analyzes “states of things, in such a way that non-pre-existing concepts can be extracted from them” (ibid.) and the statements (Dialogues, p. 85). Hence: Deleuzian empiricism is above all a thought of effects (it leaves the cause to its metaphysical dream): Kelvin effect, Joule effect, Chrysippus effect, Carroll effect (Logic, p. 97, 128)… Let’s remember that it is on this point that Deleuze speaks of empiricist conversion, which is a nice way of saying the pre-position of belief (the immediate installation in a direction). It is not a turnaround of the soul, as in Plato. It is the pure and simple affirmation of the decisive difference, which makes an event, experience, novelty.

  • c) The Thought of the Multiple. “States of affairs are neither units, nor totals, but multiplicities” {Two regimes, p. 284). Far from the Kantian complex still living in Hegel and Sartre, Deleuze blocks the principle of synthesis to the sole passive synthesis (neither One — “being-one” —, nor Whole — “whole-being” —, nor Subject, ibid., p. 285). The multiplicity includes unification foci, totalization centers, points of subjectivation {ibid., p. 285), but it is never synthesizable, there is no end or single term of the processes. The concept itself remains multiple {What is Philosophy?, p. 36-37). Here again applies the principle of horizontality, because transcendence does not work vertically, by jumping over. There is dispersion, displacement, change 94 of field, but no fusion, no final and harmonious integration that would be the absolute act of a Subject (transcendental or rational)95. “That there is no theoretical subjectivity and that there cannot be any becomes the fundamental proposition of empiricism”, namely: “The subject is constituted in the given96.” And thus: “There is no other subject than practical” {Empiricism, p. 117). The field is ready, the field is open to receive the future assertion: ethics is (theory) practice of desire, and for this title: Spinoza. Practical Philosophy. Deleuze seizes the originality of Lucretius' empiricism, which closely links physics and ethics {Logic, 369) :

To those who ask: “What is the use of philosophy?", one must answer: who else has an interest, if only to draw the image of a free man, to denounce all the forces that need myth and the trouble of the soul to establish their power? [...] Lucretius has fixed for a long time the implications of Naturalism: the positivity of Nature, Naturalism as a philosophy of affirmation, pluralism linked to multiple affirmation, sensualism linked to the joy of diversity, practical criticism of all mystifications” {Logic, p. 375-377).

Deleuzian references are here mobilized, enlisted, for deep coherence: in structuralism, the ethical question imposes a new thought of the subject, indexed on the productive reality and the interpretations produced precisely about the products {The Deserted Island, p. 266-26997). We see the extreme novelty, straight out of Nietzsche (and his idea of the “great reason of the body”), of this superior empiricism, which “teaches us a strange “reason”, the multiple and the chaos of difference” {Difference, p. 80). It is this “reason”, more empirical than ever, which can, with the scheme of chaosmos (Joyce), propose a new difference between the empirical and the transcendental.

  • d) The Thought of Associations. Deleuze highlights one of the originalities he finds in Hume, namely that associationism98 99 is much more important than atomism, which means a prevalence of relations over terms (and even a logical antecedence of relations, which determine the value of the terms). Hume saw the importance of arrangement {Dialogues, p. 70), of the geography of relations (much more fruitful than that of the faculties of the soul in Kant) and the “Hume-arrangement” takes empiricism out of its dull and ordinary classicism:

“There is something very bizarre in Hume that completely displaces empiricism, and gives it a new power, a practice and a theory of relations…” {Dialogues, p. 21}.

Empiricism thinks of associations with an “irreplaceable subtlety” {Difference, p. 98}. It forces being and principle to recede before coordination, series, sequence, due to the power of contraction of passive synthesis {ibid., p. 98-114}. We move from is to and, as if it wasn’t only in Lacan that the î is crossed out!…

Only the English and Americans have really freed the conjunctions, having reflected on the relations {Dialogues, p. 70}.

The consequence: we must reinvent logic, which would be the logic of another reason, another grammar, another way of judging:

That’s it, empiricism, syntax and experimentation, syntactical and pragmatic, a matter of speed {Dialogues, p. 73}.

Empiricism is therefore a source for the supposedly pure activities of reason:

Thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, thinking for IS: empiricism never had any other secret. Try it, it’s quite an extraordinary thought, and yet it’s life. Empiricists think like this, that’s all {Dialogues, p. 71}.

This point is essential to understand the becoming-Deleuze of Deleuze, insofar as the theory of associations opens directly onto the thought of cinema (especially that of Godard, cf. Conversations, p. 64-66), and where it prepares the conception of the brain as rhizome, in affinity with current neurology {Conversations, p. 204}.

  • e) The formation of concepts. This is a formidable point. Deleuze reintegrates the concept into the field of empiricism (and conversely, since empiricism seemed “thin on concepts”!), since idealism and rationalism invoked the inability of empiricism to access the concept. Yet, “the concept is no less existent in empiricism than in rationalism” – simply, “it has a totally different use and nature” {Two regimes, p. 285}: a multiple-being. It is the logic of multiplicities that commands the empirical concept:

Such is the secret of empiricism. Empiricism is not at all a reaction against concepts, nor a mere appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the craziest creation of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is the mysticism of the concept, and its mathematization. But precisely, it treats the concept as the object of a meeting, as a here-now, or rather as an Erewhon from which spring, inexhaustible, the “here” and “now” always new, differently distributed. Only the empiricist can say: concepts are things themselves, but things in a free and wild state, beyond “anthropological predicates”. I make, remake and unmake my concepts from a moving horizon, a constantly decentralized center, a constantly displaced periphery that repeats and differentiates them {Difference, p. 3}.

That is why, at the antipodes of an ontology or a transcendentalism of the concept, Deleuze opts resolutely for a libertarian functionalism, which fraternizes with the limits of a wandering epistemology, sensitive to the principle & anarchy (between Negri’s Spinoza and Feyerabend’s audacities) — we say libertarian to distinguish it from administrative, bureaucratic, and nihilistic functionalism100. Yet it is in the concept itself, in itself (principle of immanence) that the fate of the concept, its operative value, is played out:

A philosophical concept fulfills one or more functions, in fields of thought that are themselves defined by internal variables (“Answer to a question on the subject”, in Two regimes, p. 326).

Contrary to the usual philosophical doxa, there is a need, even within empiricism, to think of an autonomy of the concept, but an autonomy conditioned by the field, the functions, and the demands for novelty that determine it. Deleuze neglects the critique of the concept (Kant, Bachelard, Canguilhem), to focus entirely on the function of creation (Bergson), which involves a function of abandonment, once the complex of forces that transform problems and demand the constitution of new concepts has been grasped {Conversations, p. 8-12, and Two regimes, p. 326 and 328101).

Two questions arise at this point.

The first concerns the omnipresence of the force (force). From this, we can understand Deleuze’s privileging of the force-intensity couple, but it’s less clear why he has a certain disdain (euphemism!?) for a philosophy of form (even though structures are forms, lines too, and references to Ruyer, Levi-Strauss, and… Nietzsche102 are abundant). Deleuze reduces the form sometimes to modeling (Logic, p. 408), and sometimes to the Platonic idea (The Desert Island, p. 242)… It is true that empiricism compels him to seek, like Levi-Strauss, new idealities (for example, the other-self structure, different from other-self as form, cf. Logic, p. 420). But still, what bug has bitten him? We are convinced that, starting from the axis of Leibniz-Ruyer-Levi-Strauss-Nietzsche (the latter Nietzsche), Deleuze could have developed a fascinating philosophy of concrete structure, which is hinted at towards the end of Difference and Repetition (p. 359 and following) — perhaps precisely the theory of form that is lacking in Bergsonism, starting from the question of collapse (Difference, p. 92). With Anti-Oedipus, a different problematic takes precedence.

The second question concerns the risk of newness fetishism — and thus the risk of delusion, vanity, and gratuitousness if the critique of concepts no longer plays its role as a power of limitation. Deleuze’s (supposed) response: true concept invention itself presupposes critical work, and the objection would only apply to concepts like “barber-coiffeur,” fallacious, ideological, usurping, and commercial inventions (Dialogues, p. 15-17 and 95). Modesty — up to the level of the concept “vicinal” (Dialogues, p. 87) — and humor, in fact, of Deleuze and Guattari on this point: when asked "What concepts have you created?", the answer is: “We have formed one concept of the refrain in philosophy” (Two Regimes, p. 353 — emphasis added). It is true that Deleuze’s rhetoric (and Guattari’s, nowadays…) has favored multiplication (and its avatars), neglecting gradually the question of reversal. Could we not give Deleuze and Guattari the same warning that Deleuze addressed to Kant: “Far from reversing common sense, Kant has only multiplied it103” (Difference, p. 178-179)? Should we not recall that thought is worth something only when it overturns before multiplying? — it seems to us that the art of paradox that Deleuze invokes, along with Merleau-Ponty, against common sense (Difference, p. 293), was lost at that moment. Let’s go further. What would have become of Deleuze’s thought without Guattari? Certainly, we will later say that we believe Deleuze has always been Deleuze. But the Guattari encounter played a strange trick (a clinamen!) on this becoming: with Guattari, Deleuze put his philosophy to practical work, and one can indeed say that this encounter is the proof, through its effects, of the truth (as empiricism of meaning) of Deleuze’s thought… — it inflected it without necessitating it toward chaotic lines. One may say whatever they like: Dionysus is not (clearly) a concept. Another Deleuzian work, after Difference and Repetition, was possible, as it is already there in Empiricism and Subjectivity.

THE QUESTION OF SURPASSING

The logic of sense is entirely inspired by empiricism; however, it is only empiricism that can surpass the experimental dimensions of the visible without falling into Ideas and track, invoke, and perhaps produce a phantom at the limit of an extended, unfolded experience.

Logic of Sense, 31

Against the image of thought that consists in seeing surpassing as a phenomenon or event determined by an “external” or “extrinsic” constraint or, if it is determined internally, by teleological, finalistic necessity — a purely synthetic phenomenon, so to speak — Deleuze proposes an image of surpassing that is both synthetic and analytical — and it is the analytical aspect that is essential here, in this polemical intervention, without it having any relation to a philosophy of essence104, telos, or the Concept (the concept comes after, as a product, as an effect, as creation, never as a producing agent…). It is indeed necessary to be able to state the source of this surpassing, which is at the same time internal and linked to the devices, situations, and relationships that the phenomenon, now becoming an event, sets in motion between them. This problem arises very early in Deleuze’s thought, as early as Empiricism and Subjectivity.

This is what he recalls, both in the text on Kant (Kant, p. 19-21), and in another late text (“Response to a Question on the Subject,” in Two Regimes, p. 326):

Hume marks a major moment in a philosophy of the subject105, because he invokes acts that surpass the given (what happens when I say “always” or “necessary”?).

Empiricism tackles the question of knowledge through the question of belief, through the drastic reduction of all knowledge to a form of belief106. The question of Scottish skepticism then is: “Under what conditions is a belief legitimate, one in which I say more than what is given to me?” {Two Regimes, p. 32b)107. In short, what can legitimize synthesis once we have stopped believing in a subject-substance? (the transcendental subject will take its place: another nature but the same unifying function of sensory experience or judgments, whether they are of knowledge, taste, or thought). Empiricism compels us to return to the question of synthesis, that is, to go beyond the sublime activity of the subject (apparently poetic but in fact very prosaic) to the passivity of subjectivity (apparently prosaic but in reality poeticized). Deleuze will move towards pre-individual singularities and non-personal individuations (finality of desire) {Two Regimes, p. 328). The challenge of his philosophy is to maintain surpassing in a flat and ontologically one-dimensional world: the exposition of the concept of event is the first positive step {Logic, p. 33).

This problem is very ancient, and Deleuze’s merit is to tackle it again, by posing it (and therefore resolving it) differently. It was Aristotle, at the end of the “Second Analytics,” who had formulated this “cross of empiricists,” which is the question of the origin of the organization of diversity: if everything flows, if our mind is carried away in the confused flow of sensations, how can we think something? This implies defining thought at least as an interruption, a pause — like “in a battle, in the midst of a rout, a soldier stops, then another stops, and another, until the army has returned to its original order” (in Deleuze, there is no original order). There must be an activity (of decision/decisiveness) of thought to “move to quality,” to surpass the level and field of the passive, sensible flow, where the mind is entirely devoted to becoming. Worse still: if the chain of our sensations is factually determined by the contingency of encounters, how can we inscribe a form of necessity (even a posteriori) in our images of sensible thought, how can we order our associations, identify them, and hierarchize them? This is necessary, as it guarantees a form of permanence for us (interiority) and in relation to others (communication, recognition of meaning, intersubjectivity, sharing). In other words, certainly, all the material of knowledge has passed through the senses, except the principles of organization and formation of the material as such.

Deleuze’s resolution consists of distinguishing the empirical character (contingency in sensation) from the noumenal character {Différence, p. 113) within the same passive synthesis, two regimes that allow thinking at the same time (this is the meaning of the thesis of a superior-transcendental empiricism) the flow and the halt, chance and necessity, contingency, and determination, by reversing the relationships between meaning and truth: meaning is the genesis of the true, and truth is the empirical result of meaning {ibid., p. 200). Deleuze will be properly initiated by Lewis Carroll, then Artaud, into this rhetoric of sensible flows and will find in meditation on art (Proust, Bacon, Joyce, and then cinema…) striking examples that justify a new conception of the halt (on images).

This implies, as with Aristotle, but in new terms: 1) A theory of the name, which, in its synthetic activity, prevents the regression to infinity of the chain of assembly of impressions108 — Proust is to Aristotle what Jesus is to Moses. 2) A theory of chaos: we leave behind the chaos of the material of sensation cherished by Kant, to better return to it, with Joyce, Bacon, Nietzsche — (the chaosmos). 3) A theory of events: since the halt makes sense, it must prove its truth: the signification of memories — putting a name on… — breaks with the time of the mundane flow of salons, bogged down in change {Proust, p. 26 and following.) and allows access to the revelation of essences, to the stabilized truth of non-conventional intelligence (Proust, much more subtle than Bergson on this question of intelligence…), in a form of ascending dialectic109. Proust is to Deleuze what Mrs. Verdurin is to Bergson. 4) A theory of habitus, in line with the principle that transcendental habit is the habit of forming habits, where we find our old friend, passive synthesis, and the reference to Samuel Butler, a common ground for Ruyer and Deleuze {Différence, p. 11,101-108). And we could develop this rich theme with a theory of species in Bergson, a theory of the individual and a theory of the simulacrum (as a brake on the false infinity of sensible diversity), etc.

We can also approach the problem of surpassing in this way.

  • a) The act of posing a problem^. To pose a problem is to invent (synthetic enrichment) — whereas simply discovering a problem is to reveal a purpose inherent in it, in the heart of the thing (implying that the problem was bound to be revealed, which ruins the unpredictable novelty of formulating the problem, which is its true mode of production). The very notion of the problem, revised and corrected by Deleuze, profoundly modifies the conditions of discourse on falsehood and illusion, especially with the invalidation of the notion of error {Logique, p. 163) — especially since problems can only be dialectical {Différence, p. 204 and following, 213, 232).

  • b) The definition of artifice and culture as conditions of surpassing human condition {Bergsonisme, p. 112). Deleuze quotes passages where Bergson talks about the man “who deceives Nature, overflows its plan, and rejoins naturant Nature” and the man who surpasses his condition.

  • c) The problem of imagination. It has been said enough that empirical imagination was merely reproductive (mechanical). With Hume and Bergson, and probably also with Spinoza110 111, we can say that fictions within perception {in and of perception) “consisted of pushing beyond experience a direction developed by experience itself” {Bergsonisme, p. 16). This proves essential for the invention of the new conception of subjectivity, as Bergson provides Deleuze with the complex affectivity/memory-recollection/memory contraction, which will be further “enriched” (like uranium) later on with the percepts-affects system and the new practical theory of the cinematographic image.

  • d) The problem of illusion. Indeed, this recognition (invention) of the power of imagination in acts of memory, including sensible and nervous memory — the ground is already prepared to think with Artaud — allows Deleuze to reverse the idealist relationship that classical thought maintains with the false. Instead of posing the problem in terms of error112, it must be posed in terms of illusion — as Plato had only intuited with the problem of the simulacrum. In doing so, Deleuze revives a “materialist,” immanentist tradition: Lucretius, Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche. The whole second part of Différence et répétition (from chapter III, p. 169 and following) is traversed by this red thread of the rehabilitation of illusion as the source of true philosophical problems, insofar as it allows for the liquidation of the tyranny of representation, opinion, and the common-sense couple (another cliché attributed to empiricism…).
  • e) The problem of learning. One of the new “transcendental” questions (rather than "What is…?") that Deleuze poses is precisely this: what does learning mean? How do we learn? Who learns? (N.B.: the question “Who doesn’t learn?” is also captivating or captivating, but it is… oceanic — it touches the depth(s) of foolishness)… There is an enigma, an obscurity in this act: “We never know how someone learns” {Proust, p. 31). Simply this: we learn signs, within signs, through signs. And “the sign implies heterogeneity as a relation” {ibid., p. 32)113, hence the maintenance of an endless act of synthesis — synthesis-to-death. The surpassing towards knowledge, the transition from ignorance to knowledge, is never done by imitation or resemblance. The theme of intersubjectivity, which will culminate with the structure-other in Logique du sens, gains here a new nobility, an entirely empirical, prosaic nobility: learning is not recognizing, contemplating Ideas anew; it is grasping new ideas, shifting consciousness from one train of (received) ideas to another train of (true) ideas. It is changing channels: “Freedom is to choose the level” {Différence, p. 113). Learning is an experience of transcendence in immanence — without invoking other heavens or ethereal places: “Learning surpasses memory through its goals and principles” {Proust, p. 10).
  • f) The problem of humanism, or rather Deleuze’s operative anti-humanism. The meaning of philosophy is to “surpass human condition114 ,” which means going below man (inhuman) and beyond man (superhuman). Here again, the empirical or rather meta-empirical — the recourse to meta-phy-sical experience of a certain image of thought: the critique of the identity of the self in Hume, the Spinozist refusal of the Cartesian cogito (“Man thinks,” Éthique, II, Axiom II), the exposition of the fertility of the field of the third person (the “one”), the reversal of classical relationships between the concepts of individual and person, the appeal to Nietzschean concepts obviously, and the machinization of desire that will begin to emerge with Différence et répétition and Logique du sens, and will assert itself with L’Anti-Œdipe.
  • g) The problem of waiting. The horizon of waiting. The experience of waiting, understood in a non-psychological sense (it’s not “waiting for a train,” it’s “expecting” — as in the question of causality…), assumes a passage from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous, even though the heterogeneous is irreducible, as Hume had emphasized. There is a spontaneous induction (from the particular to the general), by which we grasp the relation, the connection, and therefore already the field itself, before the separate things (atomism is thus secondary) — affinity of empiricism with structuralism. Hume’s critique of causality makes sense here, as the practical (pre-theoretical) grasping of the link is an impression of reflection (I “expect to”), reflexivity that constitutes the condition of possibility of any expectation. Hume dismisses in a way the Kantian artifices motivated by the analogies of experience, precisely pointing out the natural disposition to surpassing.

Deleuze has also noticed the Bergsonian moment of inventing differences of nature: empiricism here teaches us that perception is not the object “plus” something but the object “minus” something — minus what does not interest us in it, due to the scheme of futility {Bergsonisme, p. 15, 64) . Pragmatism necessarily involves the integration of empiricism. Bergson wrote: “To go and seek experience at its source, or rather above this decisive turn where, bending in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience” {Matière et mémoire,_ cited in Bergsonisme, p. 17-18). These differences of nature are of the order of duration — through which philosophical psychology, truly ontological, surpasses simple empirical psychological analysis (cf. Bergsonisme, p. 25, 51), which always tends, due to the bad abstraction that serves it as a tool, to deny the heterogeneous in diversity and multiplicity {ibid., p. 30-31, 75 and following). But above all this: that the question of waiting is complicated with that of intersubjectivity — the notion of structure-other, in Logique du sens and Différence et répétition, enriches primary empiricism with an unprecedented transcendental.

  • h) The question of meaning. To be understood both as signification and as direction (redefinition of the problem of finality). Deleuze, following Bergson, expresses surpassing as an irreducible qualitative leap:

We immediately install ourselves in the element of meaning, then in a region of this element. A real leap in being. (...) There is here like a transcendence of meaning and an ontological foundation of language [Bergsonisme, p. 52].

Note that applies to Deleuze himself: from Empiricism and Subjectivity, he settled not in Hume’s thinking (or in the thought of empiricism) but in his own, through a mechanism that can be called, in the noble sense, assimilation, parasitism, reterritorialization — even buggery, as Deleuze put it. Again, surpassing reductionist-mechanistic interpretations of language and the strong connection with the idea of meaning and language as milieux of existence and sense-production/creation are announced — structuralism115.

  • i) The question of common sense and sensus communis. Here, it is better to be angle than saxon! Kant and Husserl failed to break with the two Gorgons of doxa and representation [Logics, p. 131-133) — Kant even gives four forms of common sense: logical, moral, aesthetic, and teleological116! But the English empiricist tradition solves the problem before them, thanks to the native power of a culture:

The English had theoretically both empiricism and pragmatism, which made Nietzsche, and the very special empiricism and pragmatism of Nietzsche, unnecessary for them, turned against common sense ("Preface to the American Edition of Nietzsche and Philosophy, " in Two Regimes, p. 187).

It is Lewis Carroll who provides Deleuze with the tools for the definitive overturning, with the idea of another empirical logic and reason [Logics, p. 102-107, 156, and following).

The stake is to reinvent a new image of thought, with a different distribution of the empirical and the transcendental117, which allows breaking away from all the mirages of ease, evidence, spontaneity of recognizing the true, etc. In short, common sense as the “norm of sharing” and sensus communis as the “norm of identity” {Difference, p. 175) are philosophical concepts that still anchor thought in the doxa. Even the theory of reminiscence, in Plato, is concerned with this over-determination, to the extent that it also postulates the (ontological) affinity of the Soul with truth {Difference, p. 172 and following, p. 180 and following). Deleuze aims to recall here the empiricist implication of the true as a power of irruption. The true is always incredible. Where common sense and good sense say, “Incredible but true,” empiricism says, “True, therefore incredible.” As much as sense implies a leap, the true imposes a forcing, a violence {Difference, p. 181-188), which subjects the mind to a new field and chain. Spinoza, with Hume and Proust, who would have thought? It is from this strange alliance that empiricism gives birth here, strange but revealing of the modern position of problems: to learn is to instruct oneself because it is not to rediscover an (lost) identity, an essence, it is to consent to an adventure that compels us to the detour of the radical otherness of things and beings.

And we could continue this empiricist legacy, this empiricist lineage (which is, in truth, an ascent, as it involves perpetual surpassing) for a long time: the “reason of animals” (Plutarch, Montaigne, Hume, and, to a lesser extent, Leibniz118), the logic of sensation (ultimately, both… Bacon — not only the two volumes by Deleuze on the painter but indeed… the old and the new!), the thought of habit (Bergson, Proust, Butler119 — but nothing about Aristotle…) and therefore, a remarkable inference for a thought of fiction, the redefinition of artifice and culture as natures (naturantes), the affirmation of humor against irony, the invention of planes of immanence, etc. This etc. is still empirical…

IN CONCLUSION

Thus, regarding empiricism, one can say what Deleuze said about structuralism {Desert Island, p. 269): the books against it are strictly irrelevant because they cannot prevent empiricism from having productivity even in our time. Therefore, we must constantly affirm empiricism in all its forms, including the new forms needed today (historical as the expression of the perennial), persist and sign. To paraphrase the end of the book on Leibniz, we remain empiricists because it is always about sensing, experimenting, imagining, composing in the play of forces. Hegel was right (although in a different sense): empiricism is the true120.

Deleuze has always thought what he had to think: the philosopher is the larval subject of his own system {Difference, p. 156), his necessity arises gradually from contingency (the chance of encounters), based on a fundamental intuition, grasped in this first work on Hume. That is why there is only one Deleuze (despite the “three periods” that can be read in his editorial history), a compact, dense, persistent, and obstinately expressive Deleuze.

CHRONOLOGICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Empiricism and Subjectivity. PUF, coll. Epiméthée, 1953.

Instincts and Intuitions. Classiques Hachette, 1955.

Nietzsche and Philosophy. PUF, 1962.

Kant’s Critical Philosophy. PUF, coll. SUP, 1963.

Proust and Signs. PUF, 1964 (reprinted in collections Perspectives critiques and Quadrige).

The Bergsonism. PUF, coll. SUP, 1966.

Difference and Repetition. PUF, 1968.

Logic of Sense. Editions de Minuit, coll. Critique, 1969.

Dialogues (with Claire Parnet). Flammarion, coll. Dialogues, 1977.

Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation. La Différence, 1984 (2 vol.).

The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. Editions de Minuit, coll. Critique, 1988.

Conversations. Editions de Minuit, 1990.

What Is Philosophy? Editions de Minuit, coll. Critique, 1991.

Critique and Clinic. Editions de Minuit, coll. Paradox, 1993.

The Desert Island and Other Texts (texts and interviews, 1953-1974). Editions de Minuit, coll. Paradox, 2002.

Two Regimes of Madness (texts and interview, 1975-1995). Editions de Minuit, coll. Paradox, 2003.

When the fold stops being represented to become a “method,” operation, act, the unfold becomes the result of the act, which is expressed precisely in this way. Hantaï began by representing the fold, tubular and teeming, but soon folds the canvas or paper. Then, it is like two poles, that of “Studies” and that of “Tables.” Sometimes the surface is locally and irregularly folded, and it is the outer sides of the open fold that are painted, so that stretching, spreading, and unfolding alternate color patches and areas of white, modulating them on each other. Other times, it is the solid that projects its internal faces onto a regularly folded plane surface along the edges: this time, the fold has a point of support, it is knotted and closed at each intersection, and unfolds to let the inner white circulate*. Sometimes making the color vibrate in the folds of matter, other times making the light vibrate in the folds of an immaterial surface. Yet, what makes the Baroque line only a possibility of Hantaï? It is that he never stops confronting another possibility, which is the Orient line. The painted and the unpainted are not distributed like form and background, but like fullness and emptiness in a reciprocal becoming. Thus, Hantaï leaves the eye of the fold empty and only paints the sides (Orient line); but it also happens that he makes successive folds in the same region that no longer leave voids (full Baroque line).

The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1988, p. 50-51.

* On Hantaï and the folding method, see Marcelin Pleynet, Identité de la lumière, catalogue Area Marseille. Also Dominique Fourcade, Un coup de pinceau c’est la pensée, catalogue Centre Pompidou; Yves Michaud, Métaphysique de Hantaï, catalogue Venice; Geneviève Bonnefoi, Hantaï, Beaulieu.

Simon Hantaï, Fold, 1981 (painting in three states — difference and repetition). > » »>

Recording session of Nietzsche’s text, The Traveler, in 1972: Jean-François Lyotard, Fanny Deleuze, and Kyrii Ryjick.

RICHARD ZREHEN – Bad Company

One day, warriors armed with flint spears, took refuge with their wives and herds, behind an enclosure of rough stones. This was the first city. These benevolent warriors founded the homeland and the state. They ensured public safety. They initiated the arts and industries of peace which were impossible to exercise before them.

Anatole France, preface to Goethe’s Faust

Gilles Deleuze, at the beginning of Difference and Repetition, believes that a philosophy book should resemble a detective novel: it should be written at the peak of one’s ignorance, and the notion of “investigation” alone, it seems, justifies the comparison. One would like to take this suggestion from the other end and wonder, not if the detective novel should resemble a philosophy book, which any fan of the genre would dread, but if the novel-as-investigation can teach us something about philosophy, more about its method than its themes, with a preference for the “espionage” novel, because “probing the hearts and kidneys” is its concern, beyond the demarcation of what is problematic. — The lack of seriousness of the enterprise hardly needs to be emphasized.

The detective novel questions in order to establish the identity of the “perpetrator,” it wants to know who is responsible for the (mis)deed. It is tied to lack (of life, of presence of a person or a thing, of evidence, etc.), it has Oedipus (that of Sophocles) as its hero and Saint Paul as its patron: absence as evidence121. It also deals with evil, and that’s why Job belongs to its pantheon. For those who question within the horizon of "who?", producing a motive is just a moment in the investigation.

The spy novel questions to establish the reason why what was done was done, but also to assess its effects. It is confronted with the question of meaning from the outset, and would have Joseph and Daniel, great masters of interpretation, as its heroes, and Saint Jerome the translator as its patron, if it weren’t also a partial inscription of the confrontation of great machines, the states; if it didn’t deal with abundance, with the will to power, as it characterizes a regime-people. For those who question within the horizon of "why?", interpreting intentions should be to evaluate strength or weakness, but also the “dangerousness” of what is asserted.

However, the will to power cannot be observed with the naked eye: it presents and reserves itself in figures, constitutively illusory, even more so in the underground war of great machines, war of simulacra (phantasmata), populated by real deaths and false semblances, domain of Ulysses. The model of the spy novel is the optical machine and its masters, the perspectivists of the Renaissance: Brunelleschi, Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Dürer122.

Application: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold123 is a novel written by John Le Carré124 and published in 1963, during the height of the Cold War, haunted by the nuclear threat. Let’s take a brisk walk through it in search of — why not? — a perspective on the State, on Oedipus, and their interaction, to juxtapose with what Deleuze and Guattari125 will propose ten to fifteen years later, offering new scapegoats to a certain leftism fervently seeking a stick — to paraphrase Lacan. This fiction is built on a partial experience of intelligence versus fiction nourished by a “shifted” experience of psychoanalysis and political dogma…

Here, we make a twofold assumption: in this novel, the State, threatened, challenged, huddled on its defensive edge, would function like a “body” and reveal some of its “true” nature; Oedipus, the key to many renunciations, reveling in mist, ambiguous situations, and ambivalent relationships, would be seen differently.

A face-off between a voracious empire in full expansion, looking westward in Europe, beyond the territories gained at Yalta, and a declining empire, plagued by doubt and defection from some of its brightest subjects. The point of contact and friction is Berlin, the city divided in two126 by a wall after suffering the USSR’s blockade following the war.

1 LEAMAS, MUNDT, CONTROL

Alec Leamas, in his fifties, divorced, father of two teenagers with whom he has no contact — the alimony he owes them is paid by a private bank — refused a sedentary position in London out of love for the “field”:

Leamas was not a speculative man, even less a philosopher127.

He is a broken man: in two years, he lost all his East German agents, either assassinated or executed after summary trials. The book opens with the death of his last agent, Karl Riemeck, a member of the East German leadership, who falls under the bullets of the Vopos while trying to cross the border on a bicycle.

Hans Dieter Mundt, in his forties, is a former member of the Hitler Youth turned obscure official of the Abteilung (East German intelligence services). In 1959, he hastily leaves London, where he was officially a member of the East German Steel Mission, and flees to the GDR after — according to his file — killing two of his own agents to “save his skin.” After reappearing at the Abteilung headquarters in Leipzig following a year-long disappearance, he leads the Logistics department responsible for financing, equipping, and staffing the “special operations.” The next year, he emerges as the grand winner of an epic internal struggle: the number of Soviet liaison officers decreased significantly — a sign that an empire and its satellites do not always march in unison — and the ideologically uncertain old guard of the Service was eliminated. He has since occupied the coveted position of Deputy Director of Operations. His rise coincided with Leamas' descent:

Curiously, Leamas had soon realised that Mundt was the writing on the wall{The Spy,_ p. 9}._128

And Control, the master of the weary imperial machine, the head of the British Secret Services, who really has no age or name, and whose wife believes he sits on the Coal Board, is he a high priest, a contemnor of life? That’s what Leamas seems to think:

“Damn it,” Leamas was saying to himself, "I feel like I’m working for a damn priest."129

Without pretending to delicacy, Control rather sees himself as a sentinel, a watcher:

"We do unpleasant things so that ordinary people, everywhere, can sleep peacefully in their beds."130

Keeper of sleep, shield against stimulation, with the task of mitigating nuisances, suppressing noise, and producing dreams: filtering, condensing, shifting, and secondary rationalizing. A kind of artist but in service of a cause, whose glory would be not to be recognized: a manipulator, therefore. But Control is not otherwise interested in the sleep of normal people: as far as they have decided to sleep, his task — the one entrusted to him and which he freely accepted — is to ensure the conditions for the good exercise of their choice.

The weary imperial machine copes very well with the disengagement of its subjects (nothing indicates it has an interest in its subjects' absence), and it asks its operators for competence and suspension of moral judgment about the ends to focus on the mechanics of the function: domestication/channeling of emotions and asceticism, that is, movement towards a limit.

This machine is imperial but it is not totalitarian, unlike the one threatening it: it does not necessarily want its intermediate operators, the agents, to be efficient little cybernetic machines; it accommodates their weaknesses. It knows that the “human,” the too human if you will, resists:

"In our life, there is no place for feelings, is there? Of course, that’s impossible. We all play the comedy of hardness, but we’re not really like that, it seems to me… One can’t be out in the cold all the time, one sometimes needs human warmth… You see what I mean?" 131

And if, the height of this cynicism that one is tempted to attribute to him and that one hopes animates him — because one supposes that it is the required emotion to carry out the task, because it must be done, because western-decadent life is, all things considered, too soft not to be defended fiercely if necessary —, the weakness of some of his agents was also part of his strength? How not to suspect it, seeing Control offer a “last chance” to Leamas, he who recognized the finger of destiny where others could have been surprised by Mundt’s insolent perspicacity and, perhaps, start to glimpse a betrayal? A Leamas certainly convinced he deserves what is happening to him, since he can’t stand being reminded of it, but to what extent?

"— What did you feel? When Riemeck was killed, I mean. You were there, weren’t you?"

Leamas shrugged:

"—I was damn bothered!" he said.

"— It must have affected you more than that, didn’t it? It must have upset you… Nothing more natural.

"—I was upset. Who wouldn’t have been?"

"— Did you appreciate Riemeck? As a man, I mean."

"—I suppose… What’s the point of stirring all this up?"

"— How did you spend the night, at least what was left of it, after Riemeck had been killed?"

"—Tell me, said Leamas, aggressive, where are you going with this?"132

A Leamas whose judgment is thus hindered. That sorrow, love, (com)passion make one lose common sense: a fine thing! That guilt has no limit, that it is an a priori feeling, not the consequence of a synthetic judgment, is otherwise important:

"— Riemeck is the last of the series… a long series. Unless I’m mistaken, there was first the girl shot down in Wedding in front of the cinema; then, the guy from Dresden and the arrests in Jena. Like the ten little Indians. 133 And then Paul, Viereck, Landser… all dead. And finally, Riemeck."

He gave a bitter smile.

"—Quite a heavy toll. I wonder if you’ve had enough."

"— What do you mean, enough?"

"—I wonder if you’re not too tired; even burned out."

There was a long silence.

"—Up to you to decide," Leamas finally said.134

The question that arises is therefore the following: can guilt and efficiency coexist? In other words: is Oedipus spontaneously at the service of the State, his auxiliary, better: his accomplice, as Deleuze-Guattari argue? Is he a regression, necessary for the functioning of the apparatus, of what would otherwise freely and innocently hoot? Control does not seem to think so, he who seems to know that an existence not only has to be won but justified, he who treats Oedipus as a bug in the imperial machine, like an insistence or a viscosity, like a leftover to drag or recycle: if Oedipus serves the machine, it will be in spite of himself.

To recycle, in this context, means to take up in a meta-configuration, what Control will propose to Leamas after making sure that he no longer harbored any hope, but also that he knew exactly what to expect:

— I think we should try to get rid of Mundt… Yes, really, we should get rid of him if we can.

— Why? We have nothing left in East Germany. You just said it: Riemeck was the last. We have nothing left to protect…

— That’s not entirely true… but I don’t think it necessary to bother you with the details…

— Tell me, Control continued, have you had enough of spying? Excuse me for asking you again. You know, it’s a phenomenon we understand well here. In aeronautical engineers, there is a term for it… metal fatigue, I believe. If you’ve had enough, say it… If that were the case, we would need to find another way to deal with Mundt. What I have in mind is a bit out of the ordinary.135

To take care of Mundt, under the circumstances, is not to physically eliminate him — which would be the norm in this murky world — but to hit him where it hurts:

— We absolutely must succeed in discrediting Mundt… What do you know about Mundt?

— He’s a killer. He was here a year or two ago and he worked for the East German steel mission… He was supervising an agent, the wife of a man in Foreign Affairs. He murdered her.

— He also tried to kill George Smiley. And, of course, he killed the woman’s husband^. Very unpleasant, the guy. Former Hitler Youth and all that goes with it. Not at all an intellectual communist. A technician of the Cold War.

— Like us…136

Control did not smile.

— George Smiley knew the file well. He is no longer with us, but you should be able to find him. He is interested in seventeenth-century Germany. He lives in Chelsea… Guillam was also on the case… You should spend a day or two with them. They know what I have in mind137

Control, therefore, proposes to Leamas a role in a plot: to make Mundt pass for an English agent. It would be a matter of “skillfully” delivering to the East German Intelligence Services — to those of its members who might harbor resentment towards him — clues, fragments of information that would allow them to conclude in this sense. What better messenger than a burned and mistreated agent?

— I’d like to tangle with Mundt.

— Perfect… Perfect. Incidentally, if in the meantime, you happen to meet old acquaintances, there’s no need to discuss all this… Let them think we’ve treated you scandalously. It’s best to start as you mean to go on, isn’t it?138

Not accepting that the game is over, proving it by playing a new move and thus reversing the meaning and value of what has been achieved. Changing perspectives, prompting to look differently at the already identified elements. Making shadow into light. And for that, suffering a little more, as is fitting for those who want to become actors in a living tableau:

— What do you want me to do?

— I would like you to stay in the breach a little longer.

Leamas said nothing… 139

2 LEAMAS, GOLD, FIEDLER

Ostensibly marked by his failure, too old for the “field”, too old-fashioned ("blood, guts, cricket, the certificate of studies and… he speaks French!"140), Leamas finds himself, with a very small pension and a soon-to-expire contract, at the Circus141, the headquarters of the British Intelligence Services, in the Bank section, a golden cupboard for agents at the end of their careers.

On the stage thus opened to the unsuspecting (almost) everyone, Leamas begins a remarkable involution ("his will seemed to have suddenly vanished142"), quickly going down the sort of path through which Granville slowly brings Apollo down towards the frog143:

Leamas began to decompose [went to seed = to soften].

Generally speaking, decomposition is considered a slow process, but in Leamas’s case, things happened differently. In the eyes of his colleagues, he morphed from an honorably known character into a resentful alcoholic ruin, and all within a few months^f

Once started, this soft becoming, this de-synthesis, follows a well-supported course for a sad reactivity. Leamas, in discreet contact with only Control, Smiley supposedly disapproving of the operation’s principle144, starts by mishandling the rules: he skimps on work hours, borrows small sums he doesn’t repay, neglects himself, mingles with the small staff, no longer hides his drinking, vents his resentment towards his ungrateful employer and never misses an opportunity to belittle the Americans and their various intelligence services. He makes a vacuum around himself.

Then the movement accelerates: he disappears from the Service and, his pension withheld at source — he would have fiddled with the special accounts he was in charge of —, he finds himself unemployed. A week at a glue manufacturer, a week selling encyclopedias, and here he is employed by the very improbable Bayswater Psychic Research Library, led by a cantankerous and slightly mythomaniac old maid. There, he meets a young woman:

—My name is Liz Gold…

She was tall and a bit awkward, with a long torso and long legs. She wore ballet flats to reduce her height. Well proportioned but not really beautiful, a face with well-drawn but a bit heavy features. She must be in her early twenties, thought Leamas, and she’s Jewish145.

This meeting is going to disrupt the involution process. After three weeks, the young woman invites Leamas to dinner and, while sensing that he harbors a secret — “she had always known that there was something not right about Leamas146” —, she persists and renews her invitations until the moment when, sufficiently emboldened, she tries to make him talk:

And then, one evening, she asked him:

— Alec, what do you believe in? Don’t laugh. Tell me…

— I believe the eleven o’clock bus will take me back to Hammersmith.147 I don’t believe Santa Claus is the driver…

— But what do you believe in?… You must believe in something… God, for instance… I know it, Alec! You have a funny look sometimes, as if you had something special to do, like a priest. Don’t laugh, Alec, it’s true…

— Sorry, Liz, you are mistaken…

She felt he was going to get angry but she couldn’t hold back anymore:

— There’s a poison eating your brain, hate. You’re a fanatic, Alec, I know it, but I don’t know of what… a fanatic who doesn’t want to convert anyone, and that’s dangerous. You look like a man who would have… sworn revenge or something.

When he decided to speak, his threatening tone scared her.

— If I were you, he said roughly, I would mind my own business.148

First snag — and a big one — in the “cover” so conscientiously woven. The intuition of a woman in love has perceived, beneath the indifference and the disengagement, an urgency: not that of a priest, as she believes, but that of a sinner in need of salvation. Erasing this impression will prove impossible:

And all of a sudden, he gave her a big smile, a bit roguish. She had never seen him smile like this before, and Liz understood that he was charming her:

— And Liz, what does she believe in?...

— You won’t get me that easily.149

Trying to fix a blunder, as everyone knows, always makes things worse:

Later in the evening, Leamas brought up the subject again, asking her if she was a believer.

— You don’t understand… nothing at all. I don’t believe in God.

— In what, then?

— History…

— Ah! no, Liz… not that. You’re not a bloody communist, are you?

She nodded, blushing like a little girl at his burst of laughter, furious and relieved to see that he didn’t care.

That night, she invited him to stay and they became lovers.150

We can smile at this strange symmetry — to each their own daddy, family and territory — and not be surprised that these castaways end up getting along so well: at the time of the book’s release, much was made of the contrast between James Bond, the hero of Ian Fleming 151 as transfigured by the cinema, leading a high life and covered with exceptionally beautiful women, and John Le Carré’s gray and hard-working spies; and it was seen as proof of authenticity. But beyond the feeling inspired by the pathetic conjunction of these two over-determined solitudes, the question of the compatibility between bad conscience and performance, that of the possible affinity between Oedipus and power apparatuses, must be asked again.

Long experience with formulaic crime dramas on television has taught us all that an investigator is often taken off a case if they have a non-professional interest in it. Leamas cannot be a good tool in the ongoing plot since he is staking his own salvation on it, as a woman concerned about his fate clumsily portrayed to him. Yet he was chosen; moreover, he was asked to play this very role that was sure to inhabit him: discouragement, loss of purpose, depression. At the moment he disqualifies himself for his mission, it is hard to think that the masters of the machine did not consider this eventuality as highly probable, yet it did not deter them; hence, the failure is what they are seeking.

A week after this huge slip, Leamas does not show up for work. After two days, unable to bear it any longer, Elizabeth Gold goes to his apartment, gets the door open with the help of the local grocer’s hammer, and finds a feverish Leamas shivering in the cold and dark— the electricity bill has not been paid. She will take care of him, pamper him, and clean up for six days:

On Friday evening, finding him dressed but not shaved, she wondered why… Without any real reason, she felt anxious. Little things were missing from the room… She wanted to ask why but did not dare. She had brought eggs and ham and cooked them for their dinner while Leamas, lying on the bed, smoked cigarette after cigarette. When the meal was ready, he went to the kitchen to fetch a bottle of red wine…

— Alec… Alec… What’s going on? Is it over?

He got up from the table, took her hands, and kissed her as he never had before, speaking to her softly for a long time…

— Goodbye, Liz… Goodbye… Don’t follow me.152

The day after this scene, so classic and yet so incongruous, Leamas goes to the grocer’s, makes a few purchases which he claims to pay later and, while holding onto the grocery bag to which the grocer — who refuses any idea of credit — clings, lands two stunning blows on the merchant who collapses, with a fractured cheekbone and dislocated jaw.

Three months later, Leamas gets out of jail — where he has not made any friends. Within two hours, he is approached by William Ashe, a purported journalist who claims to have known him in Berlin, displays bad temper and reluctance, eventually agrees to accept money first and then to meet Sam Kiever, who is supposedly running a news agency. Shortly thereafter, Kiever proposes Leamas to work for his agency:

  • — I’m interested in you. I have an offer to make. In journalism… Actually, it’s so well paid that a man with your experience… of the international scene, a man with your background, you understand, capable of providing accurate and compelling information, could very quickly rid himself of any financial worry.153

After a few coquetries, Leamas agrees to follow Kiever to Holland, where the matter — information in exchange for payment — is supposed to be dealt with someone Leamas knows is just a representative of the “client”, responsible for the preliminary clearing:

Ashe, Kiever, Peters: there was a progression in quality, in authority which, for Leamas, reflected the hierarchy of an intelligence service; which must also reflect an ideological progression: Ashe, the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveller, and finally Peters, for whom the ends do not differ from the means.154

After the rigmarole at the Circus, the odd jobs, the pathetic love affairs, and the prison, far from England, Leamas finds himself reterritorialized:

Leamas began to talk about Berlin. Peters rarely interrupted, rarely asked a question or made a comment but, when he did, he demonstrated curiosity and technical competence, which perfectly matched Leamas’s temperament. Leamas even seemed to echo the detached professionalism of his interrogator; they had this in common.155

One could put it differently: an interview in “face to face”, a speaker recounting, during interviews that have no other reason to exist, his lying and piecemeal story to a “professional” interlocutor who is not without knowing it156 and who intervenes only rarely, a common frame of reference and space… Here is Oedipus again, caught in the act of a “slice” — this provisional (?) return to analysis of the one who has moved on to the “listening” — and transference, but: Leamas lies, out of necessity but also by calculation, Peters does not seek to “open him to the truth of his speech and heal him furthermore”, and it is Leamas who must, in principle, be paid at the end (?) of the sessions — before taking a final retirement. Figure of perversion.

However, it is impossible to indulge for long in the poisoned delights of transference love: the real, put in parentheses, is not easily deceived. On the third day of his stay in Holland, Leamas sees Peters arrive — who had not shown up for thirty-six hours:

— I have bad news… You are being searched for in England. I learned this morning. They are watching the ports.

— For what reason?

— Officially, for not having reported to a police station within the deadlines set after your release.

— And in fact?

— There is a rumor that you would have harmed the security of the state…

Leamas seemed frozen in place.

Control was behind this. Control had triggered the bullfight. There was no other explanation. Ashe and Kiever may have been pinned down, may even have spoken, but the fact remains that Control alone was responsible for the charivari… This was not part of the agreement.157

Leamas begins to understand that he has not been shown all the dimensions of the machination, and that he is certainly playing a different role from the one that had been offered to him. He is perplexed, another way of saying that he is stuck in a double bind:

How the hell was he supposed to react? By backing out, by refusing to follow Peters, he ruined the operation… But if he continued, if he agreed to go East, to go to Poland, to Czechoslovakia or God knows where, there was no reason for them to let him leave. And why would he, want to leave since he was officially wanted in the West?158

Taking the initiative to end the operation would be to give up the fantasy, which cannot go without pain. Without really balancing, and after strangely exonerating Control of much of his villainy by taking on a good part of the blame159, Leamas finally agrees to follow Peters to a country beyond the Iron Curtain, because the interrogation is not over:

— Where are we going?

— We are here. German Democratic Republic…

— I thought we were going further east.

— That will come… We thought the Germans should discuss with you.

After all, most of your work was about Germany…

— Who will I see on the German side?...

— Who do you expect to meet?

— Fiedler, answered Leamas promptly, deputy head of Security. Mundt’s man. In charge of important interrogations. A real bastard…

Fiedler, that’s who we should bet on, Control had explained, while they were dining with Guillam… Fiedler is the acolyte160 who will one day stab the high priest in the back. He is Mundt’s only rival up to the task and, moreover, he hates him. Fiedler is Jewish, of course, and Mundt is rather on the other side. An explosive mix.

— Our job, he said pointing at Guillam and himself, was to provide Fiedler with the weapon to take down Mundt. Yours, dear Leamas, will be to encourage him to use it. Indirectly, of course, because you will not meet him.161

INCIDENT

After Elizabeth Gold, Fiedler [a violin bow scraper, a bad musician 162]: the “Jews” of Le Carré seem to strangely have in common with those of Daniel Schmid in The Shadow of Angels 163 or those of Andzrej Wajda in The Promised Land 164 to be quite close to their caricature. But which one?

We are in 1963: Israel has not yet conquered all of Jerusalem or these territories, annexed by Egypt and Jordan after the 1948 War of Independence, which no ethno-cultural entity had ever thought of claiming to express its political “being.” General de Gaulle has not yet fulminated against the “elite people, sure of themselves and domineering” (press conference on November 27, 1967), losing Raymond Aron along the way, 165 nor set in motion his grand “Arab policy.” Ulrike Meinhof, daughter of a pastor and a Marxist revolutionary, has not yet explained how the Nazi anti-capitalist intuition about the Jews was correct (“Six million Jews were killed and thrown into the dung of Europe because they were money Jews… (Geldjuden) 166.” The United Nations General Assembly has not yet adopted its Resolution 3379 of November 10, 1973, stating that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Finally, the Red Army Faction (“Baader-Meinhof Gang”) has not yet separated the Jewish passengers from the Air France plane on the Tel Aviv-Paris route, hijacked on June 27, 1976, to Uganda by Idi Amin Dada by its own means (and those of the PFLP) and led the “other” passengers to Entebbe.

At this time (his subsequent evolution, as expressed in The Little Drummer Girl in 1983 and more directly in “The United States of America has gone mad” 167, is not without interest), John Le Carré is a liberal, in the old Anglo-American sense of the term: decently left-wing, anti-totalitarian, and overwhelmed by the immense “moral” debt contracted by Europe towards its Jews.

Therefore, in his works, no aesthetic-Marxist identification of the Jew as a substance-rough-in-suffering-ailing-territory like Meinhof-Schmid 168, no rustic identification of the Jew as a substance-greedy-indifferent-to-the-Land like Reymont-Wajda (the Polish aristocrat, the German, and the libidinous, cosmopolitan, and greedy Jew, all three unrestrained arrivistes, uniting to exploit the “man of the people,” not to mention the lustful Jewess confronting the “innocent” girl, the designated victim of predators). On the contrary, an identification of the Jew with suffering: Le Carré’s “Jews” are positive figures, children of the Prophets, not of Moses, not observing the Law, its unremarkable and demanding minutiae, but hating the idea of injustice — certain to be hurt. Their messianism is both impatient and disenchanted; they are Bolsheviks at heart, 169 people of faith, destined for sacrifice, betrayal, and misfortune, in other words, Christ-like figures.

It will be noticed, to conclude this interlude, that suffering is supposed to be, in itself, redemption, but that one cannot be redeemed from greed, nor can one be redeemed from avidity.

Let’s resume.

— Is it good?

Peters shrugged:

— Not bad, for a Jew…(203)

Leamas, hearing noise at the other end of the room, turned and saw Fiedler standing in the doorway.

— I should have guessed… that you would never have the guts to do your dirty job alone… Typical of your rotten half-country and your miserable little Service: you go get the big uncle to pimp for you. You’re not even a country, not even a government, you’re a fifth-rate dictatorship of neurotic politicians… I know you, you sadist… You were in Canada during the war, weren’t you? It’s the damn right place to be, right? I bet you buried your fat head in your mother’s skirts every time a plane flew by? What are you now? Mundt’s little crawling lackey, with twenty-two Russian divisions guarding your mother’s house. 170

How could Fiedler hear something from that?

— Pretend you’re at the dentist. The faster it’s done, the sooner you can go home.

— You know perfectly well I can’t go home. 171

No deafness, however, can prevent the countertransference from triggering because Fiedler is also there for that, and he knows it. The next day, through a seemingly technical remark, he announces that they both face a real “slice”:

— You pose a serious problem for us…

— I’ve told you everything I know.

— Oh no!

And smiling:

— Oh no! You’ve only told us what you were consciously aware of. 172

And with questions and remarks interspersed with “philosophical 173” considerations on the respective beliefs and imaginations supporting their projects, from suggestions to hypotheses about what the scant information provided by Leamas means – according to the tortuous scenario developed with G. Smiley and P. Guillam – about Operation Rolling Stone, an operation supposedly directed by Control himself that led Leamas to deposit significant sums of money into various bank accounts in Northern Europe, certainly meant for an agent who couldn’t be an East German, as Fiedler asserted, because he would have known it, 174, it’s no great surprise that after spending a week wandering in the hills during the day, eating poorly, drinking, and talking by the fire, Fiedler begins to feel sympathy for Leamas beyond professional interests – “You’re starting to appeal to me 175” – even showing solicitude:

— Why didn’t you call from home?

— We have to be cautious… You have to be cautious too.

— Why? What’s going on?

— The money you deposited in the Copenhagen bank…

Fiedler didn’t seem to want to say more…

— Whatever happens… don’t worry… Everything will work out, you know… You’ll have to be on your guard for a while…

— Don’t worry too much about me, Fiedler. 176

It is also discovered that Fiedler doesn’t want to learn anything from Leamas but to confirm a suspicion that has been haunting him for a long time:

— I’ve thought about it day and night. Since Viereck was bumped off, I’ve been searching for the reason. At first, it seemed fantastic to me. I thought I was jealous, that the job was getting to my head, that I saw traitors behind every tree. One ends up becoming like that in our world. But it haunted me: I had to clear it up. Strange things had already happened. He was afraid: afraid that we’d get someone who would talk too much. 177

And Leamas, who had recently congratulated himself on how well Control’s plan was working 178, is now overwhelmed by fear for the same reasons:

— What are you talking about? You’re delirious, Leamas said.

There was fear in his voice.

— It all fits together, you see. Mundt got out of England so easily— you told me yourself. And what did Guillam tell you? that they didn’t want to take him. Why? I’ll tell you why: he was their man, they had turned him. They had taken him, obviously, and it was the price of his freedom. That and all the money they were paying him.

— I’m telling you, you’re delirious… If Mundt ever finds out that you’re inventing such things, he’ll kill you…

— That’s where you’re wrong. You gave me the reason, Leamas. That’s why we need each other… The Copenhagen bank answered your letter… The money was withdrawn a week after you were there. The date of the withdrawal coincides with Mundt’s two-day trip to Denmark in February. 179

So it must be concluded that the plan worked well. By treating the given, or rather, the known, as material, by digging small holes in an apparently flawless continuity and obligingly providing ways to fill them, the English master manipulators managed to change the term of the chain and produced falsehood where there was truth through the conjunction of two Oedipal figures, close in their reverence for the ideal and their correlative discomfort with money – very “poor Christians” in the Molière sense. Or, by encouraging Fiedler to move and look at the scene from another place, the English master manipulators would have led him to discover the motifs – capable of capturing an intense desire and offering it what it needed to be fulfilled – which they populated the previously hidden landscape with.

Shortly after, both men are arrested on Mundt’s orders.

3 MUNDT, FIEDLER, LEAMAS

In the presence of Mundt (between mund = mouth and mundtot = one to whom speech is forbidden 180), Leamas is told by him that he will be called to testify in the trial against Fiedler for “sabotage and conspiracy against the security of the people.” Furthermore, the existence, nature, and extent of the scheme are perfectly known:

— So, I played my part in a plot hatched by London to trap Mundt?...

— Exactly… Fiedler acted like a fool… As soon as I read our friend Peters' report, I knew why you were sent and I knew Fiedler would fall into the trap. He hates me… Of course, your people were aware. It was a brilliantly crafted move. Who devised it, tell me? Smiley, was it him? 181

The great disillusionment is just beginning. Back in the cell he shares with Fiedler, Leamas engages in a Shakespearean exchange with him, obviously foreshadowing a very dark end:

— Suppose Mundt is right. He asked me to confess… I was supposed to admit that I was involved with British spies plotting to kill him… The whole operation would have been orchestrated by the British Intelligence to lead us, lead me, if you will, to liquidate the best man in the Abteilung…

— He tried the same tactic with me… As if I had invented this damned story.

— But… suppose you did, suppose it’s true — it’s a hypothesis: would you go as far as killing a man, an innocent man?

— Mundt is a killer, isn’t he?

— Let’s forget about him. Suppose they wanted to kill me, would London do it?

— It depends… It depends on necessity. 182

Thereupon, Leamas goes to bed, content to have Fiedler — who started the counterattack by requesting an arrest warrant against Mundt on the day of his own arrest — as an ally and convinced that both of them will send the “double agent” to his death: ignorance aiding misunderstanding.

The trial arrives, which we will pass over quickly: Fiedler presents to the court, in the most conformist jargon, all the elements — Leamas’s “revelations” being just a part of it — that led him to conclude that Mundt is a traitor, now “the agent of an imperialist power” and deserving of death. Leamas, as the prosecution’s witness, retells his adventures as he narrated them during the “interrogation,” reaffirming with even more conviction that no clandestine operation could have been mounted by his Service against East Germany without his knowledge. He has come to believe that “Fiedler might have been that ‘special interest’ Control was so anxious to protect183.”

Then comes the turn of the defense. Comrade Karden, a former Buchenwald deportee, represents Mundt — for whom Leamas would lie and “comrade Fiedler” would be an agent or pawn of a plot to destabilize the Abteilung — and questions Leamas solely about his financial situation and his relationship with George Smiley. Leamas sticks to his version: he is notoriously destitute and never had much contact with Smiley, who has also left the Service.

Karden then calls his surprise witness, Liz Gold, attracted to Leipzig under the pretext of an exchange between cells of the English and East German Communist Parties. Liz Gold, much to Leamas’s anger at first and his dejection later, tells, rather embarrassed, that Leamas knew she was a member of a party he should have hated; she had felt that the grocer’s attack was premeditated. She also reveals, which surprises Leamas but not the reader who has been informed in previous chapters, that Leamas had the luck of having friends thoughtful enough to pay all the bills he had left behind and even, she suspected, to buy back his own lease, sparing her from paying rent, compensating the grocer after the trial. Friends who had visited him one evening, showing great respect. After more or less telling her that Alec was on a mission abroad, one of the two, the older one, left a card and asked her to inform him if needed.

He lived in Chelsea… His name was Smiley… George Smiley.184

Leamas is greatly surprised but not enough to prompt him to give a performance more in line with the way things appear. He loves her so much, the one about whom he was told, by those who seem to have betrayed him, that he contributed to perfect her for a sublime purpose, that he gave so much and suffered to erase the traces of construction, to merge the vanishing point and the horizon, to transform painful opacity into transparency, allowing his brother in Ideal, “this innocent man that London might decide to sacrifice out of necessity,” to lose himself for the good of both. He can see in this mess only madness or incompetence:

They must have gone completely mad in London… He had told them… to leave her out of it. And now, it was clear that from the moment he left England, even before that, as soon as he went to prison, some sinister cretin had taken it upon himself to sort out the situation, paid the bills, compensated the grocer, the landlord, and, above all, helped Liz. It was insane, utterly absurd. What were they trying to do? Kill Fiedler, kill their agent? Sabotage their own operation. Was it just Smiley? Did his guilty conscience drive him to act like this? There was only one thing left to do: clear Liz and Fiedler and take the blame. Anyway, he was probably already done for. If he could save Fiedler’s skin… Liz might have a chance to get out of this.185

And, in a quite foolish and naive decision, Leamas decides chivalrously to surrender and expose the details of the plot, hoping to spare his beloved and exonerate the sort of double he found himself to be, but with little success, as one can imagine. A true-false Moscow trial, a parody where someone who doesn’t belong to the Party hopes to vouch for one of its suspected members… Poor Leamas. He will realize his inadequacy fully when he hears from Fiedler’s mouth the same words (or nearly) that he had said in petto:

— One detail troubles me, Mundt: they must have known that you would verify his story point by point. That’s why Leamas acted the part. But after that, they sent money to the grocer, paid the rent… What an extraordinary way of acting… for people of their experience… paying a thousand pounds to a girl, to a Party member who was supposed to believe he was penniless! Don’t tell me that it’s guilt that’s haunting Smiley186

The countertransference has escalated, and the third revelation is the right one:

Suddenly, with the terrible lucidity of a man too long deceived, Leamas understood the horrifying plot.187

And this man, too long deceived by himself, who never could admit that his post in Berlin and his adventurous mission were not due to his competence or perseverance — who else is virtuous? — but to his flaws and weaknesses, to his reckless availability, will have plenty of time to expose his bitter discovery to a lost Liz Gold, torn away from her cell in the middle of the night by that terrifying Mundt, and who is astonished to find him again, during the long journey that takes them from the Polish border to Berlin, where a passage through the Wall has been arranged for them.

— What will happen to Fiedler?

— He will be shot…

— Then why didn’t they shoot you?… You conspired with him against Mundt… Why does Mundt let you go?

— Alright… I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what neither you nor I should ever have known… Mundt is a British agent… They bought him when he was in England. We are witnessing the disgusting epilogue of a vile operation aimed at saving Mundt’s skin. Saving him from an intelligent little Jew from his own department who had begun to suspect the truth. They made us kill him, you see, they made us kill the Jew. Now you know everything, and may Heaven help us… Fiedler was too powerful, Mundt couldn’t eliminate him alone, so London decided to do it for him… And just eliminating him wasn’t enough: he could have spoken to his close ones, made his accusations public. Suspicion had to be eliminated… They needed a public rehabilitation: that’s what they organized for Mundt.188

Of course, we know they are condemned: she, because she happened to be there; he, because playing the game of identification is dangerous, and the truth of representation is death — as it is shown, obliquely and unrecognizable, in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, extensively commented on by Lacan and chosen by Lyotard for the cover of Discourse, Figure.

The spotlight will be turned on a few seconds before their attempt to climb the Wall; Liz Gold will be killed by a lone shooter during the climb; Leamas, already at the top of the Wall, without asking his distant, stern father, “Where is the lamb for sacrifice?” or "Why have you forsaken me?", will go back down to die by her side.

CONCLUSION

After this too lengthy detour, which we hope won’t discourage anyone from reading Le Carré (particularly the novels from his “Cold War” period, the most intense, the most venomous), we must return to the initial purpose and try to draw some lessons.

Firstly, we must praise this unique talent that succeeds in convincing that a very good way to make the truth appear false, which we want to preserve, is to present it as true with inconsistency: like the discrepancy between the number of heads and feet discovered in a certain painting by Duccio depicting armed men.

Similarly, we must marvel at this astonishing ability, on the part of a man who was actively engaged in the struggle against an empire that killed a lot — from the sailors of Kronstadt to the leaders of the Hungarian revolution, passing by the kulaks, the left-wing oppositionists, the Spanish anarchists, Trotsky and the artists —, who played a non-negligible role in the outbreak of the Second World War by pacting with Hitler, thus relieving his eastern front and allowing him to calmly

launch the offensive to the west, who regularly fueled the Gulag, settled the question of the “nationalities” without fuss, swallowed up many countries, etc., to share the tearful perspective of a worn-out and inadequate agent: holding Control and Smiley for monsters and weeping over the fate of a communist apparatchik who liked to quote Stalin189, who did not shy away from terrorism190, who played and lost, who, victorious, would not have been magnanimous, on the grounds that he would be “Jewish”191. The two “sides” would, essentially, be similar192.

The threat was however very real, as shown by the subsequent events, from Czechoslovakia to the assassination attempt on John Paul II, passing through Afghanistan and Poland, for example, and seeking to know, whatever the cost, the worrying intentions of the Soviet Empire — what one of its satellites could know — was certainly a justified objective, when the betrayal of some Oxford and Cambridge aristocrats (Blunt, Burgess, Philby, Maclean, etc.) installed at the heart of the British defense apparatus, disgusted by the bad manners of the rising English middle class and, above all, by the rise to zenith of the very “vulgar” North-Americans, had, among other things, cost the lives of dozens of opponents to totalitarianism and, incidentally, almost completely drained the substance of MI 5 (British intelligence services). It is even said that MI 5 was, for a time, run by an agent from Moscow193…

The success made to The Spy Who Came In from the Cold shows that part of the Western readership was already willing to accept this kind of equivalence — scandalous, needless to say? — between the “free world”, ungrateful, unjust, of little virtue, certainly, but accepting to be criticized, begrudgingly if need be, and generally accepting the verdict of the ballot box — and the “communist bloc”, was already willing to show a culpable indulgence towards Stalinism, to overlook its crimes to soften its Promise — of definitive order of the drive, of abolition of the difference of sexes (understood: of the sexual as different).

Caught in a trance ("I wrote this book in great haste over a period of about five weeks194"), the former depressed shadow man, who in 1989 would say, “We forget terror too easily… In a sense, Western propaganda was right: East Germany’s regime was hated by those it governed195,” had thus managed to communicate, in 1963, his pathos to his anti-hero196 and make an era. By answering yes to the question, “Does the West deserve what is likely to happen to it? Will it be responsible?” when it was the immediate past at issue…

To come back to the perspective that we have tried to open, let’s note that it is always possible to reject all of Le Carré because he would be in the “technical” approximation, more analyst than operational of intelligence197, because his “paste” would be too psychological, as do authentic former spies — Michael Ledeen198, for example, columnist for the National Review, a great reader of Machiavelli and controversial neo-conservative theorist. But the “psychological”, whatever is understood by it, is a given that cannot be easily dismissed: it is behind or within regularities (the quasi-automatic behaviors), the rigidities of sequences, which mean that subjects, judiciously solicited — should we say “stimulated”? — will go look at the scene offered — by those who have an interest in it — from the place desired by them.

It is what those who set out to disinform assume, and their successes — think of the Ems dispatch, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Dreyfus affair — give substance to this assumption. It is what Saint John Chrysostom warns the preacher against in his Sermon on the Priesthood. The “psychological” as a relatively stable block — the depression of Leamas, the exaltation of Fiedler, two forms of resentment — therefore serves as Dürer’s chin rest or the point of view determined by the legitimate construction (or laws of perspective) of Brunelleschi and Alberti: it is what one can lean on or adjust to orient “correctly” the gaze — of the soul?

Some consequences may concern philosophy. First, a confirmation: not retaining the variation, that is, testing a notion by its insertion into multiple sequences (according to the model of Husserl’s phenomenology), as the operational modality to prioritize in the course of concept formation, is risking missing something determinant, if Alec Leamas' misadventure can serve as a guide.

And also: not treating the relationship with others, the dimension of reception, as an aftermath of theoretical elaboration, is wise, if one is to believe Le Carré’s master plotters. This signals, in a very strange way indeed, towards the scholarly exchange, regulated by a set of protocols commanding production of arguments, establishment of proofs, justification of judgment and forms of interlocution, but it misses ethics. Calculated, thematized, reified other doesn’t ask for anything: it is content to respond. But ethics, older than philosophy, older than science, contemporary with a community and not just a language, calls for peace, and Le Carré’s world — ours? — is at war.

A caveat: it is not certain that affinity with a priori, analytic, the concept, is a guarantee of a predisposition to politics. Not only, of course, because some of the practices from which the theoretical would derive the concepts under which it intends to subsume them are more “risky” than the contemplation of essences199 and require a lot of time and a capacity for bodily engagement. Essentially because the philosophico-theoretical path (abstraction, variation, circumscription, generalization, rigor, and co-dependence) cannot be the one of non-scholarly subjects, the “ordinary people” of Control: their understanding is always veiled by their sensitivity, caught in a form-fantasy and/or in a fragment of traditional narrative to which they hold, with the ultimate mission of trying to put sexual disorder — or instinctual, if you prefer200 — in order.

In other words, to move from truth to justice, one must not deduce — a temptation always present among the lovers of truth, always convinced that it can speak in a clear voice —, not lead — religious nostalgia that the acceleration of the disintegration of the Symbolic regularly reactivates —, but painstakingly construct detour passages. It is necessary to persuade: we cannot do without rhetoric, and that is where the problems begin.

Conversely, observing subjects “in situation,” driven by the weight of the “psychological,” watching or chaining — all subjects, scholars, non-scholars, not forgetting those who believe they are not dupes —, as they do, in movement, some impressions emerge.

Firstly, they do not seem ready to become mobile, light, experimental “artists” — it’s not even certain that they can or want to: one can regret it, but on what grounds reproach them? And even if we did, what hope would we have of being “heard”?

Next, that the “politics,” undoubtedly joyful and merry, which could transform them in this sense, fluidize them, that is, radically marginalize them, is essentially impossible, and not just because its very hypothetical result would be hardly compatible with the maintenance and reproduction of a society: it is unclear how the act of communicating through affects, in or under words, gestures, images, films, music, communicating through exemplary action, therefore, could prevent the relapse into words of reason, could exempt from commentary, unless one accepts Terror; and commenting is returning to sad politics…

Finally, that subjects “in situation” — but are there any who are not? — appear to all doubt concretely of immanence, do not “believe” to deal with something that would give itself in its plane, in its surface — one must have an idea of order to know what to retain from what is presented — but with a height that would be hidden there, a transcendence that would question them because they would know all, deep down, defined by the question that solicits them.

From there to thinking that they are not without obscurely knowing what the answer consists of, that they are pushed to elaborate it, of course with the means at their disposal, in order to clarify what they had partial knowledge of — we have seen that it did not necessarily have to do with truth, that it was only a perspective proposed with more or less force —, there is only one step. And taking this step would take us out of the zone of attraction of the seductive thought of intensities — supposed to go in all directions at once, to be unpredictable or “unreadable” — which supports Deleuze-Guattari’s charge against Oedipus: Artaud (more than Zarathustra) versus Lacan.

Left to ourselves, in a way, we could then recognize in the way subjects in situation are presented by Le Carré, not submission to negativity or monetizing lack, but work, but thought making its way, close to a sense-making thought, as always, anticipated, called by Hermeneutic Emptiness, if we understand J.M. Salanskis201 well, with one detail. The typical journey in which he believes that the “fundamental hermeneutic situation… unfolds – familiarity-dispossession —> hermeneutic elaboration —> speech202” – seems to us should be complicated according to what we have “learned” from Le Carré: it would be necessary to recognize as essential to hermeneutic elaboration the presence of another, who is inevitably engaged in a work of explicitation which, necessarily different, intersects with the previous one and whose contrariety provokes the event that is this explicitation.

This last point brings us back to psychoanalysis and Oedipus. How can we overlook that psychoanalysis concerns only a tiny number? How can we forget that psychoanalysis is the subject of a free contract that can be broken at will, even if one enters it for the wrong reasons? Are there other reasons, by the way? How can we not consider that the one who ends innocently may suffer and make much more harmful encounters during drift than that of a supposed-to-know subject? A guru who knows, for example? How can we imagine that the non-totalitarian State – i.e., contained in its “economic” role of protection – could not be indifferent to the singular configurations of the subjects it machines, when the important thing is just to machine them so that it continues to run without (too much) energy expenditure and with as little interruption as possible203? It accommodates them, and if perverts can find material to enjoy there, it is a windfall for them, not a requirement of the Apparatus. Bad conscience can, possibly, jam a gear, not lubricate it.

Félix Guattari must have been annoyed by the old skeptical master of the Rue de Lille, who taught the inexorable indestructibility of desire, the danger of interpretations, and the importance of the scansion204, and Gilles Deleuze backed him up in his disproportionate charge against the hapless Oedipus. Out of friendship.

RAYMOND BELLOUR – The Dream of the Valley of Queens

The value of the dream lies in its pervasiveness. That morning, the dreamer penetrated the Valley of the Queens, and he is surprised that the dream clings to his body in this way, like a kind of dizziness that interposes in the landscape and follows him even into the tombs. Image against image, the supernatural beauty of the dream, long since erased, but noted then the day or the very evening, adheres to the ungraspable imprint remaining like an internal shadow, and affecting all vision. The indelible image that floats as if behind the head without ceasing to radiate the body, to slow down its immediate access to the surrounding reality, this image is exalted by fabulous flat visions against which it slides, in the semi-darkness of the tombs, finding in them an air of familiarity with its own quality of enigma.

In an amphitheater, students make up a small audience. Surrounded by a few people, among whom I figure, Gilles Deleuze listens to a master’s defense. A young woman reads and suddenly says something strange about Bergson (the dream does not remember what, but the dreamer knows that he was startled). And all of a sudden Deleuze grabs a kind of microphone and exclaims: “I have written five books on Spinoza and I cannot let such things be said.” He is gradually seized with a kind of fury—here again, a black hole in the dream—and he collapses to the ground. Students, other people come in and out of the door near where the scene takes place (I thought of a rudeness, a contempt born from May 68). Deleuze is on his back, living his rage (I think today of Gregor Samsa). I want to help him but “they” make me understand that this is a process that must fully live, go to its end. Then Deleuze gets up, continuing to speak alone, and leaves. I follow him while helping him to walk. There is a kind of low wall with a grid. Deleuze develops his crisis. I hug a child in tears, I know it’s Gilles' son, I tell him that his father is the last one who will have had a sense of totality, of something that would be forever lost, and that’s why I love him so much. I feel taken by a madness of tears.

We are now in the appearance of a room. We are solving technical problems. We must return to the amphitheater, give the grades—there is a series of papers, five or six. We have to put

Well done, and not Very well. But suddenly Deleuze has straightened up, transformed, beautiful, like young, barely badly shaved. He has come out of the crisis that has made him molt, and I tell him to look at himself in the mirror. The moment is striking. The transmutation is splendid. I go back to the amphitheater to fulfill my duty. And suddenly, I find myself at a table, God knows where, realizing that I completely forgot to go take care of the papers.

Often, nothing to say about the dream. Especially since fifteen years have passed and only thin notes remain that have barely been rewritten. Just a thought, then. I remember Deleuze’s mistrust of the dream (“Beware of the other’s dream, because if you are caught in the other’s dream, you’re screwed”). I am this other, and this dream is pure desire. That the very sick man who sometimes welcomed me, with almost quiet courage, that this man may live again. And live in the name of the thought that holds him, his daily crisis and his strength. It is undoubtedly, after all, the illusory character of the dream that formed for Deleuze its negative power. The lack of virtuality of an unshareable imagination. But when the dream, which often fades so quickly (at least in the dreamer that I am), thus holds in the body the crossing of the day, and of an exceptional day, devoted to the metamorphic contemplation of death, it is because it tells the desire for life, and for survival, and that the other wants nothing else.

JEAN-CLAUDE DUMONCEL – Locus Altus

On this April Thursday, my learned friend, Professor Mathias Cantorel, invited me to visit the vast garden surrounding his beautiful house in Montmorency. Locus Altus – that is the name of the property – is a peaceful retreat where Cantorel enjoys pursuing his multiple works. Three o’clock had just struck. The sun shone in a perfectly clear sky. Cantorel received me in the open air near his villa. Above a fountain called Fons Vitae, on a high marble wall (marked with the stamp “§ 86” abbreviated), there was an immense inscription to ponder, signed Z:

THE UNPARTICIPABLE

THE PARTICIPATED

THE PARTICIPANT

One could just as well say: the father, the daughter & the fiancé; the foundation, the object of pretension, the pretender.

The foundation is that which possesses something first but gives it to participate, gives it to the pretender, the possessor in second place, having passed through the ordeal of the foundation. The participated is what the unparticipable possesses first. The unparticipable gives the participated to the participants.

Cantorel had me go around the wall. And I could then see the Verso of this Recto, the inexhaustible source feeding the fountain. I stood before the noumenal Urn (also ironically called Urne de l’Urphanomeri), the famous Crater B, whose tireless activity could be seen through its transparency. The eye was certainly first struck by the incessant flashes and other electromagnetic phenomena for which the machine served as a seat. But little by little, it grew accustomed to this chaotic appearance, and I could discern the increasingly numerous and infinitely varied details that presented themselves to my view. Above all, I could finally verify the famous property of propositional superposition (1 Corinthians XIII, i) which has rightly earned the reputation of the Urn.

My hand had already rested on the small frosted glass console offered to the visitor. Depending on the multiple unsolvable problems within my sight that I had always posed in vain and which I now recalled to my mind in childish disorder, I felt my hand slightly trembling. And just as in the telephone apparatus, the simple vibration of a metal plate attracted by an electromagnet is enough to reproduce all the sounds of the human voice, the vibrations of my hand transmitted to the machine all the problems from which I felt my mind unburdening itself as I went along. But at the same time that my most serious problems seemed to abandon me, I saw their respective solutions regularly emerge from the machine in the form of figures, formulas deployed on phylacteries, sumptuously assembled symbols, or multicolored images. For each problem, a new and unpublished music was heard each time. It was a part of the solution, in which, however, an echo of the intact problem resounded. I was overwhelmed by the influx of these answers to the questions that had always haunted me. But at the same time, I knew that all these solutions were given to me here in an epigrammatic form, so skillfully condensed that deciphering them became a new task for me. Cantorel then explained to me the significance of my visit to the Garden.

— It will take no less than this visit, with its different stations, to allow you to take your first steps in the space specific to each of the solutions. But when you leave me, you will have acquired this knowledge. Afterwards, you can, ad libitum, take up each problem again in the more advanced state in which you leave it here.

While giving me this explanation, Cantorel turned to the surrounding space. I then saw that the wall at the fountain rose in the middle of a rounded belvedere. By going around this belvedere, one could look over the balustrade and see the entire Locus Altus. From this viewpoint, indeed, the garden sloped down on all sides in irregular terraces, dotted with bodies of water reflecting the blue of the sky, and among which thundered multiple waterfalls, more or less wide and high depending on the Extension and Comprehension of the problems they represented, both motionless (by their form) and moving (by their flow). Cantorel’s house, which had once been a maternity hospital, was perched on the hillside, slightly below the belvedere.

Then, moving away from the last level of free Difference to plunge into those of complex Repetition, we began our descent. While we hesitated on the first steps of a small staircase winding through beds of forget-me-nots, Cantorel declared to me:

— Today, we are lucky; the weather forecast predicts a storm. When lightning strikes crater B, all kinds of unexpected effects occur, exceeding even the stochastic programming due to Saint-Schize.

Indeed, in the hitherto serene sky, threatening clouds began to gather on the horizon. And as if to give this circumstance its full significance, I could embrace with my gaze, on the three main terraces of the estate, the three Mountains emerging from them: Mount Me, Mount of the World, and Mount God.

— The three Ideas of the third Genre, Cantorel reminded me.

On each step of the staircase, I could also verify, each time in a different form, the same Principle which I knew my visit would finally reveal to me in its thousand and thousand unexpected variations: Free Difference gives its Object — like a Child of an Idumean night — to Complex Repetition. Already imbued with this Thought without knowing where I had picked it up, I then turned to the noumenal Urn. From the distance where we could now see it, the Events (sic) that unfolded in it were already presented in a greater simplicity than when it was crushing us with its overhang. As a demonstration, the object Poem for Ariane suddenly threw itself into the Urn. Then, according to the bright points it reached there, as if seized by a mad movement that made it zigzag in all directions, I saw it successively Write itself, Dream itself, Forget itself, Search for its opposite, Humorize itself, and finally Find itself by analyzing itself in a big splash of rhymes and reasons, some hot spray of which reached us like sparks of fire. When the waters of the crater had calmed down, a female figure formed in it, in which we recognized Ariane, or Hecate. But, after a brief appearance of the faces of Theseus and Dionysus around hers, she faded away. We knew that her time had not yet come. We were however struck by the serenity of her smile.

On the terrace where we had peacefully descended, we found ourselves in front of a sundial of the greatest sobriety. In the middle of a square of sand, it was a simple blade of blued steel that protruded from the ground like a plowshare buried to split the flow of time. On both sides of the square, the path curved like the rounded flank of the hill it skirted was lost in the slow turn it made there. But the sharp point of the gnomon not only indicated the hour. A petrified trace in the sand, bringing together all the possible positions successively indicated by the end of its shadow, offered the form of a branch of a hyperbola.

— This sundial is a faithfully transposed reproduction of the gnomon of Menaechmus, Cantorel said to explain this curiosity to me, reminding me of what had happened in Plato’s Academy regarding the altar of Delos.

From my position near the balustrade, I could see on all sides other terraces. Each, among other clocks, had its sundial. There were of all sizes and styles, in a sort of recapitulation of the different ways in which Time has entered without asking permission into the different civilizations. And the water clocks seemed, on their respective terraces, so many images echoing the noumenal Urn from which Ariane’s smile remained in remanence, like a Cheshire cat’s smile. For there are cat-women as there are sphinxes. Several hourglasses were regularly turning over at a speed which, at first glance, seemed that of an anemometer.

Others seemed rather, by their slow obsessive tilting, to mark time as would have done the pendulum of an ancient noria. I asked why several sundials bore the emblems of Zeus.

— When we listen to music, Mathias Cantorel replied, or even when we retrospectively count the strokes already sprinkled in the previous moment by a clock, if we have forgotten to count them as we go along, the paradoxical present in which we then find proof in the experience of embracing or finding data lost in the past, however, only extends over a tiny span of time, a simple hem of the Present on the Past. But the lived present of Zeus encompasses in a single divine breath the entire duration of our world. And so, as many times as Zeus breathes, so many times the entire history of the cosmos comes back to play on the axis of Chronos. Moreover, Locus Altus also includes the case of asthmatic Zeus. To be honest, it includes all cases, virtual or real.

At the end of these explanations, we had indeed arrived in front of the pavilion of Eternal Return. This frail hut (called Nietzsche’s Hut), however, was built over a torrential stream which was seen to disappear on one side and then reappear on the other. After passing the hut, it suddenly widened to transform into a spray of whirlpools and turbulences, interspersed with series of rapids separated by large iridescent areas. Dragonflies were coming and going over these diversified flows.

— What is the name of this stream? I asked.

— It is the course of Duration, in the Progress it allows to Repetition, having itself inherited it from the Difference whose noumenal Urn shelters the hatching.

He added, in a lower voice:

— If one wants to trace a witch’s Line, one must first mix in measure in the Cauldron the eternal Elements suitable to the Concept.

We walked down a shaded alley that led to a kind of podium. A curtain rose, and we saw a wax Danton appear at the edge of his alcove. Cantorel pointed out a button, which I pressed. Immediately, the wax figure came to life and began reciting his speech: “It’s quite tedious to first put on your shirt, then your pants, and drag yourself to bed in the evening and drag yourself out of bed in the morning, and always put one foot in front of the other. There’s hardly any hope that it will ever change. It’s very sad that millions of people have done this, and that millions more will do the same after us, and on top of that, we are made up of two halves that both do the same thing, so everything happens twice.”

“Clearly,” commented Cantorel, “Danton is having a case of the blues here. He is under the influence of Ecclesiastes 1:2-9. He has simply forgotten that after the Old Testament comes the New Testament, not to mention the Third Testament according to Joachim de Flore.”

As I compared the life described by Danton to that of Ixion and a mule turning around a waterwheel, Cantorei corrected me:

“The true symbol of the Eternal Return,” he said, “is not the circle or the enchanted or infernal carousel, but the figure 8 lying down, the twisted circle that has the shape of the Mobius Strip.”

Then, the curtain lowered and immediately rose again. The theater scene had transformed into a circus ring, with the surrounding area covered in crimson velvet. At the back of the ring stood a curtain of the same color, topped with a shield on which a glittering 8 was inscribed, traced in golden paint. Two ushers stood on either side of the curtain. It opened to let an equestrienne pass, performing a lap on a unicycle. I don’t know why, but I realized that I could ask the question I had never dared to ask:

“What is on the other side of the curtain?”

“The answer is crystal clear in the 8 above it,” replied Cantorei. “Of course, we could endlessly make our equestrienne turn, passing and re-passing between the folds of the curtain, as if the 8 were the symbol ‘00.’ But that is not its most instructive use. It depends on another use that goes much deeper. An 8 is formed by a small circle perched on a larger one. Therefore, behind the curtain, there is the same thing as in front, but at the same time, everything is different. In front, there is the circus performer and the trapeze artist, but behind, there is only Lola, playing both roles. It is not that the Circus is poor, but we produce the maximum effect with the minimum means, like Leibniz’s God.”

“At the cost of disguises,” I remarked.

“The Theater of the Incomparables is like Locus Altus but is not Locus Altus.”

Mechanically, I pressed the button again. This time, the change happened in full view. The back wall pivoted entirely, revealing a sort of circular abyss. From the depths of this abyss emerged steeples and bell towers, among which I recognized first the four Clochers de Caen from certain Journées en Automobile. Coming from the side of Bayeux, a miniature car advanced, driven by the ingenious Agostinelli. On the back seat, Jean Santeuil held the folds of his pelisse. The car raced through the city and then disappeared in the direction of Lisieux. Thereupon, Poincaré set off on an excursion from Caen to Coutances and back.

Nervously, I pressed the button once more. The city was engulfed in the pit with perfectly smooth walls, from which rose smoky fumes worthy of the Walhalla. It was soon replaced by a plain, in the center of which the steeples of Martin-ville stood. This time, it was Dr. Percepied’s car, cracking its whip, that crossed the landscape. The printing presses of the Lettres françaises spun at full communist speed in the subterranean world of the simulacrum, creating a hellish and sodomite or Gomorrah-like noise. Finally, a rain of roses fell over the entire plain.

Then, a change of scenery occurred spontaneously. The scene represented an alley in an old neighborhood of Naples, with the sea in the background. A sign descending from the flies announced: Laundry hanging. Popular Drama. In the frame of an open window on our left appeared Mother Tapdur. She began hanging her laundry on a rope that turned on two pulleys fixed on either side of the street. Every time a piece of lingerie was hung, the matron slid the rope with loud metallic creaks, carrying the dripping laundry over the alley. Among other things, we saw undergarments, corsets, women’s panties, sanitary napkins, and sock holders. This aerial spectacle caught the attention of passing gossips. A gathering formed, from which a protest rose, increasingly loud and indignant. In the end, the noise was so great that the matron reappeared at her window and took down her laundry. However, on the rope, she hung three T-shirts that she also slid into the middle of the street. Each one had a woman’s face instead of the chest, with the name inscribed below. Their names were Gil-berte, Oriane, and Albertine. This new exhibition had the effect of calming the gossips. And the curtain fell on this denouement.

I asked:

— Have I not, this time, reached the absolute low of Locus Altus?

— Mutatis mutandis, following the Suidas method.

But the scene had already changed again. Above the curtain, a sign announced: The Dispute of the Transcendentals, Medieval Mystery. The curtain rose. At the back of the stage, five extras represented the five Transcendentals: Being, One, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Then the two characters of the drama entered: Denis the Areopagite and Saint John Damascene. Denis invoked the authority of Plato and embraced Goodness. Then Damascene, invoking Aristotle, went to embrace Being. The ordeal then took place. A coat of arms bearing two crossed keys above an ox descended from the rafters vertically to the spot where Damascene stood. Immediately, with a unanimous gesture, the five Transcendentals pointed to the courtyard side, and Denis disappeared immediately with all signs of humility. Then Being stepped forward from the group and, followed by the other four, went to embrace Damascene.

— But then, I said, how to select the Pretenders? Everything, it’s the same as anything.

As a response, Cantorel led me to a promontory. From this observatory, we could see the Fairground. The spectacle was dizzying. The formula certainly wasn’t Pythagoras' “Everything is Number,” Thales' “Everything is Water,” Hippocrates' “Everything is Connected,” or Plotinus' “Everything is Contemplation,” but rather: “Everything is spinning.”

— See, Cantorel said, as if confirming my impression: the roller coasters have the sign “Le Grand 8.”

Around this circuit, other multicolored rides spun horizontally, and vertically, there were colorful lottery wheels. A nautical theater in a ring rose with the sign Bastringue de Bayreuth. A crowd gathered in front of the lottery A win every time. Above a castle, one could read in luminous letters TEquation de Moulinsart:

Alphart = Omégart

— After all, Cantorel conceded, it must be admitted that Locus Altus is a Varieties Theater before being a Theater of Cruelty.

As we made our way around the fair, we passed under a red portico. I thought I should say:

— This Japanese portico brings an optimal touch of exoticism here.

— You are mistaken, my mentor said, it’s a monumental 71.

While I wondered why, in this wonderland, a 7C of Peirce couldn’t also be a portico, we arrived in front of a tavern. A customer with a boater hat and a lorgnette was sipping a soda while leafing through Finnegans Wake. Seeing my interest, he randomly opened the book to page 36. On that page, Cantorel showed me a curious character with a surprised look. It was a 3.

— GreatScott! Cantorel exclaimed, widening his eyes: the Existential Quantifier from Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica is in Finnegans Wake! I learn something new here every day!

Then Cantorel and the man with the lorgnette exchanged a few words:

— Pennyfair caps on pinnyfore frocks and a ring on her founger leap. Then rompride round in rote rôtie.

— Sure, ant unconnough! That’s fagforfig two feller! You do a doyle yesday!

— Sure, as mapoor goragore!

A few more steps, and we reached the Lacanum calembourustratum. One of the main attractions of Locus Altus, as we know, is the miniature (but still navigable) reproduction of Lake Maggiore, from which always emerge, in the splendor of their blooming, the three Borromean Islands: Isola Bella, Isola Superiore, and Isola Madre. On the isola Bella of Locus Altus, when you rise to its belvedere, you can even see, as before, one of the lost ornaments of the real island: the white marble ephebe holding the Borromean Knot with three Circles in the azure sky. At the same time, these islands also bear other names: they are called Pun, Nonsense, and Wordplay. On one of them, asthma rhymes with orgasm.

It was time to enter Mount Me, which presented, as a whole, the shape of a dunce cap. Beforehand, Professor Cantorel asked the ritual question that required me to give the password:

— What is a chalumeau?

— A chalumeau is a two-humped dromedary, I replied without thinking.

Then, as we listened to Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony, Cantorel read me the story of the Camel as recounted by C.S. Peirce:

We have all heard the story of the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the German, each of whom undertook to write a book about the Camel. The Frenchman went to the Jardin des Plantes, measured the camel there with meters and weighed him with grams, and then went home and wrote a book of which each sentence formed a paragraph, containing the minutest and yet the most spiritual account of the animal he had seen. I suppose it was something like Victor Hugo’s description of the cuttlefish. The Englishman spent a fortune in fitting out an expedition to Arabia where he spent 25 years and produced a three-volume octavo work full of undigested and insignificant facts. The German retired into his chamber and evolved the pure idea of a camel from the depths of his Ichheit. _

Under these conditions, we were able to penetrate into the bowels of Mount Moi. We found ourselves in front of a machine whose operation was about to captivate our attention. From the reduced model of the Noumenal Urn, a beam of light fell vertically, illuminating a brightly lit circle around the sundial marking the present moment. Professor Boex-Borel, a close friend of Suidas, was making the final adjustments to the overall device.

On the keyboard of the elementary computer, there were only two keys, labeled “Dissolved Self” and “Cracked I”. I first pressed “Cracked I”. Immediately, on the side of the Urn, at a height indicated by a mauve scale and along a length marked with a carmine line, a thin Crack formed. A ray of fuchsia light fell onto the sandy path of the sundial, marking a Hölderlin Cesura there. And at the very moment dated by the cesura, the Urn depicted Etna, into which we saw Empedocles throw himself, while on the path Hölderlin returned to Patmos. Then, from the crack in the urn, two rows of red or mauve ants emerged. Against the background formed by the urn and the beam of light (where they clung to the temporarily immobilized photons, offering them an Escher’s ladder), the two advancing rows began by drawing an 8. Then they added additional loops above and below. Because of the reflection cast by the color of the insects, the surfaces between the loops appeared like different facets of a crystal. And in a vertical path, successively marking the exact middle of all the upper loops, we saw Empedocles' sandals rise. Then they crossed the ceiling and thus disappeared from our sight.

At that moment I pressed “Dissolved Self”. The beam of light went out. In the Urn, the entire intermediate volume between its two extreme surfaces disappeared. All that remained was its upper Circle and its base Plane, between which the electrical tension had become palpable. From the circle, a lunar glow fell onto the plane where two garbage cans were placed. Along the path, a nabob led a nondescript person on a leash, while on the plane, a tramp rummaged through the garbage cans, as if fascinated by their bottoms. After that, the tramp positioned himself at the center of the plane. There, he performed the transcendental Transfer: while his right hand took stones from his right trouser pocket to place them in his left chest pocket, his left hand took stones from his left trouser pocket to place them in his right chest pocket and vice versa.

“The next time you come,” said my mentor, “you will be able to follow our two detectives Durand & Durant in their two most famous investigations: ‘Who cracked the vase of Soissons?’ and 'Is the Holy Grail soluble in Fernet-Branca?’”

“But after the cubic Altar (of the Delos of the Ancients) and the Camel (of the desert of the Moderns),” I asked, “is there not a Third Thing to encounter?”

“You’re right,” said Cantorel. “I’ll show it to you.”

By a winding road, he led me to a rock.

“You see here,” he explained, “an exact reproduction of the rock of Rioupeyroux. As you can see, this rock bears a striking resemblance to Louis XVI seen in profile.”

“Quite another thing,” I thought, “than the resemblance between the waves breaking on the shore, between father and son, or between Racine and Campistron.”

The Mountain of the World was now very close. On its first foothills, after leaving the port of Ambreboug, we reached, by a small omnibus train, the lonely valley sheltering the Abbey of Nantibec. Alternating with the nuns, the monks sang the office. We entered the monastery garden. There was the assistant gardener, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He showed me a foot of Artemisia maritima.

“Wormwood,” he explained, “is the common name of the Artemis plant. Artemis is the goddess of the Wild Nature. As for Wormwood, it has three well-known varieties: Absinthe, Genepi and Artemisia maritima. From Artemisia maritima is extracted semen-contra, that famous yellow medicine of which Anna Livia Plurabella hardly ever needs.”

“This is just a case,” replied Cantorel. “We cannot observe all your flower beds today. Could you show our visitor something that gives an idea of your work in all its generality?”

“You mean in its universality,” corrected the gardener.

He then led us near a wall that the setting sun was gilding and against which a greenhouse was leaning. I thought we were going to enter the greenhouse. But near it, on a pentagonal flowerbed, our botanist guide showed us a small sprout whose head looked like that of a daisy.

“Ürpflantze of Goethe,” he told us solemnly.

A few moments later, we reached the foot of Mount God, also known as the Mountain of Nature or Spinozist Solid, similar to the new pyramid that stands in the courtyard of the Louvre.

“We’re going to take an elevator,” warned Cantorel, “because the number of floors is infinite, being the same as the number of elevators!”

The explanatory guide for the visit to Mount Dieu was handed to us. Just as the Evening Star is the Morning Star and Israel is Jacob, this guide was the 1957 Concourt prize: La Modification, authored by a philosophy graduate. We asked for a demonstration, for which I chose the Socrates elevator. As we were on the ground floor, on the Extended Attribute, the Modification made us encounter a sculptural Socrates. But this was not one of those plaster busts found in school storage rooms. It was a statue conceived by Condillac from which we managed, while chatting, to extract a word (“The only thing I know is that I know nothing”). When the elevator door closed, I considered the vertical row of buttons controlling access to the floors. It was first indexed on the types of Russell (whose infinite number is that of natural integers), then, passing through the Borel button, it continued with the transfinite Cù of Cantor, whose series was punctuated by the K. I pressed the button for the Thought Attribute. When we arrived at our destination and the door reopened, Socrates greeted us with his “Know thyself”. Around him, on the Tau point (the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet), spread the boundless plain of Notos.

“We must now refresh ourselves,” said Cantorel.

A fresh feast of brain, marrow, and tongue in vinaigrette awaited us at the Locus Altus canteen, which we devoured with the best appetite, watering it down with Red Hackel.

After this hearty meal, we could go to the Casino for the dice throw. As it is known, this dice is none other than the Dice of Delos, known mostly as the cubic altar whose duplication Plato had attempted, concurrently with other Geometers of Greece.

“But don’t we need a cone now to perform the throw?” I asked, estimating its dimensions from those of the Dice of Delos.

"At Locus Altus, Cantorel replied to me, the dice throw takes place inside the cone itself. And here we are: the cone is the Casino and vice versa. You did not realize it, but we have gradually returned to the noumenal Urn and we have entered it. You will now see from the inside how the noumenal Urn operates. The noumenal Urn is the Great Scalar Casino where you can play on all floors 24 hours a day!

“What game is played there?”

"You understand that when you play, for example, dice (as you will do incessantly with these miniatures of the Dice of Delos that have been entrusted to you), the dice can indifferently be made of wood, ivory, or any other material. The material of the dice does not change the rules of the game, which alone matter. But at the Locus Altus Casino, a further step is taken in the same direction. You can play ball or boule, cards or checkers, it is always the same game, modified according to the floor you are on, but everywhere defined according to the following characteristics. First, there are no pre-existing rules, the game is about its own rule. Then, at each of the moves, the entirety of chance is asserted. Finally, nothing is excepted from the game, so that each of the moves, necessarily winning, leads to the reproduction of the throw under another rule. The winning combination can be, for example, the 3 obtained on the ground floor playing dice, the 1 obtained at the roulette on the first floor, the 4 obtained at cards on the second floor, etc. (without forgetting to place the comma in the right place).

“One must never tire of this game!” I remarked.

“Indeed, it is made of perpetual twists and turns.”

The storm, which had been threatening for some time already, broke out. I threw the dice in a thunderous rumble…

In the Casino, each floor housed a patio arranged around a basin. In the center of this basin was, depending on the floor, an island or a more or less numerous archipelago. A regular service of small boats linked the edges of the basin to the insular system in the center. The result obtained in the game determined the number of the boarding ship. I had drawn the number e171 and we embarked for Cythera. On other floors, departure could take place for Naxos or for the Galapagos, for the New Hebrides or for the Leeward Islands.

After a somewhat turbulent crossing, we disembarked on Cythera. I had to first undergo a test. An English schoolteacher showed me a figure formed by two closed curves nestled one inside the other, the smallest surrounding a yellow surface. I had to say what it represented.

“It’s Saint John Chrysostom delivering a homily with his eyes closed under the influence of inspiration,” I replied without hesitation.

“You’re not there,” Cantorel informed me, “it’s a hard-boiled egg seen in cross-section.”

“A forfeit!” said the schoolteacher cheerfully.

I consequently had to eat the model, and we could continue our expedition, observing along the way, to mark our path, the encounters of the Wasp & the Orchid, or the Carp & the Rabbit. In the middle of the island stood a gigantic Joyce Egg around which rows of chairs were arranged, as around a bandstand. We took our seats. The egg opened, revealing the inside of a theater, and the performance began. I asked where the actors were. Cantorel replied to me:

“In this drama, the roles F take over the actors, as always, and the rest follows: the stage spaces take over the roles and the Ideas over the spaces.”

Then, a smaller egg, which was on its egg cup, in the middle of the stage, cracked, revealing an emerald. A voice off declared: “The emerald in its facets hides a clear-eyed nixie.” The emerald shattered and the nixie appeared, smiling.

She led us, chatting cheerfully, towards the ultimate site of our visit, built by Ariane after her return from Naxos: the famous Salmon Lock. The three of us joined the onlookers who were observing the operation of the machine. The giant salmons returning from the Sargasso Sea came from the Amberbourg side, and Ariane’s installation gradually hoisted them onto the Nantibec side. Each fish obediently entered each of the successive basins of the lock when the doors opened in front of it, and, with its whale-like size, occupied the entire length and width. Then it entrusted itself to the ascending movement of the water that filled the basin and, when the next doors opened, passed joyfully into the higher reach awaiting it, with its new horizon. The spectacle, in its simplicity as well as its solemnity, silenced the entire audience. One could feel, in all their combined strength, the clever calculations of Art and the serenity of invincible Life, always following its course.

January 7, 2005

CHARLES J. STIVALE – Deleuze Millennial, or Beyond the Grave

In this study, I propose to consider the fold and its relationships with friendship in Deleuze’s writings. One of the important aspects of this reflection will be to gather elements to define the fold as a concept, and a second will be to explore Deleuzian perspectives on friendship. To do this, I first propose a general consideration of the particular concept of Deleuzian friendship by tracing its trajectory through various writings and interviews on creation, friendship, and the intellectual relationships he shared with Félix Guattari. Then, I stop at the concept of the fold from a few exemplary texts that authorize me to the pun “Beyond the Tomb,” subtitle of this reflection, with its double meaning of beyond the sepulcher and beyond tribute (“the tomb” as a genre of posthumous and laudatory poem). The texts I present here allow me to highlight several aspects of the fold vis-à-vis friendship, and to develop these perspectives in the milieu, that is, in the environment, both of Deleuzian humor and the deployment of a precise conceptual conjuncture.

DOING PHILOSOPHY, WITH FRIENDSHIP

The concept of friendship that Deleuze proposes in The Abécédaire is more generally linked to other reflections in his writings. Early in his career, Deleuze followed Proust in stating, on the one hand, that “friendship only ever establishes false communications, based on misunderstandings,” and on the other hand, that “there is only artistic intersubjectivity. Only art gives us what we vainly expected from a loved one” (Proust and Signs, 54-55). This iconoclastic understanding helps us better situate Deleuze’s remarks in The Abécédaire on the fundamental role that “encounters” play in life – as much in the experience of intensities and multiplicities, through art and literature, as in the generation of thought and the movement beyond philosophy by philosophy. But in the Dialogues with Claire Parnet, published in 1977, a decade before the production of The Abécédaire, Deleuze poses the fundamental question in this regard:

Between the cries of physical pain and the songs of metaphysical suffering, how to trace one’s thin Stoic path, which consists in being worthy of what happens, to bring out something cheerful and loving in what happens, a glimmer, an encounter, an event, a speed, a becoming? (Dialogues, 80)

Deleuze’s perspectives on friendship are directly related to the particular definition he gives to his intellectual project from the beginning of his career, a definition that shows us both his modesty and his sharp mind, as revealed by his 1973 letter to Michel Cressole:

I am from a generation, one of the last generations that was more or less murdered with the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy exercises an obvious repressive function in philosophy. [...] In my generation, many didn’t get out, others did, inventing their own methods and new rules, a new tone. I, for a long time, “did” the history of philosophy, read books on this or that author. But I compensated myself in several ways (Pourparlers, 14).

These compensations consisted in examining the authors he judged to have strongly questioned the rationalist tradition, notably Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, as well as Kant, whom Deleuze calls an “enemy”, but who nevertheless requires an effort of discernment and understanding205. According to his conception of this project, Deleuze was obliged to resort to particularly rigorous survival stratagems:

But above all, my way of getting out of this at the time was, I think, to conceive the history of philosophy as a kind of sodomy or, what amounts to the same, immaculate conception. I imagined myself coming up behind an author and having a child with him, which would be his and yet monstrous. That it is truly his is very important, because the author had to actually say all that I was making him say. But that the child should be monstrous was also necessary, because it was necessary to go through all sorts of displacements, slips, breakages, secret emissions that made me very happy {Negotiations, 15).

For the authors who correspond to this way of “doing” the history of philosophy, Deleuze refers to his 1962 work on Nietzsche and his 1966 work on Bergson. Nietzsche in particular, Deleuze says,

... pulled me out of all this [since] as for having children behind one’s back, it’s [Nietzsche] who does it to you. He gives you a perverse taste for each person to say simple things in his own name, to speak of affects, intensities, experiences, experiments (Negotiations, 15).

Thanks to Nietzsche, Deleuze opened himself up “to the multiplicities that traverse [the individual] from side to side, to the intensities that run through him” (Negotiations, 16), that is, to a depersonalization, “the opposite of the depersonalization operated by the history of philosophy, a depersonalization of love and not of submission” (Negotiations, 16). This openness to depersonalization and love led Deleuze, in the late sixties, towards two projects, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, to which we can add his first book on Spinoza. While still keeping too much of an “academic apparatus” according to Deleuze, these books nonetheless show that “there is something I am trying to shake, to make move in me, treating writing as a flow, not as a code” (Negotiations, 16). Such a mode of reading, Deleuze insists, is

... [a] way of reading in intensity, in relation to the outside, flow against flow, machine with machines, experiments, events for each one that have nothing to do with a book, tearing the book to pieces, putting it into operation with other things, anything ..., etc., it was a loving way (Negotiations, 18).

This process, of course, is not easy because it situates the “person” alongside, or in relation to, the “line of the outside”: “This is what is more distant than any external world. As a result, it is also what is closer than any inner world” (Negotiations, 150), “managing] to bend the line, to constitute a livable zone where one can lodge, face, take a support, breathe — in short think. Bend the line to be able to live on it, with it: a matter of life or death” (Negotiations, 151). This matter of life and death is no less important when it comes to friendships, despite their difficulties and the risks of disappointment they entail.

Deleuze speaks of a crucial encounter that takes place at this moment in his philosophical life, in the late sixties: “And then, there was my encounter with Félix Guattari” (Negotiations, 16), later describing him as “a group man, of gangs or tribes, and yet he is a lone man, desert populated by all these groups and all his friends, all his becomings” (Dialogues, 23). Deleuze talks about the importance, for his work, of this collaboration and this friendship in several texts, and all emphasize the significant links that Guattari was able to provoke in Deleuze’s creative process, and vice versa, of course. For example, in the interview with Robert Maggiori following the publication, in 1991, of What is Philosophy?, shortly before Guattari’s death, Deleuze says:

I think what struck me most was that he was not a philosopher by training, that he therefore took a lot of precautions with these things, that he was almost more of a philosopher than if he had been trained as one, and that he embodied philosophy in a state of creativity (Maggiori, 1991, 17-18).

SALUT, DELEUZE !

This approach from the angle of friendship helps us directly link it to the fold, but to do this, I choose an unorthodox text, which fully corresponds to Deleuzian humor. That is, to move this discussion beyond the tomb, I prefer to rely on a comic strip telling the fictional story of Deleuze’s final journey across the Acheron to meet his friends on the other shore. Published in Germany (first in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, then as a book), Salut, Deleuze ! by Martin tom Dieck and Jens Balzer shows this thinker in a whole new light. The authors summarize Salut, Deleuze at the beginning of the volume published six years later as a sequel to this first text:

In [the first] narrative, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, after his death, is taken on the Lethe by Charon, the ferryman of the dead. On the other shore, Deleuze recognizes his friends Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. After which, Charon brings his boat back to the shore of the living where he welcomes Deleuze again. The journey is repeated five times. Five times, Charon and Deleuze argue over whether repetition is the repetition of the same or whether it is the possible condition of self-metamorphosis. Is it life? Is it death? At the end of the book, Charon salutes his esteemed passenger one last time, believing that it is the last crossing. “Death and difference do not go together!” the disappearing philosopher shouts into the darkness (New Adventures, 4).

The scene begins in the countryside, and the first frame displays the title Salut, Deleuze! above a road that continues into the second frame where a man stands in the grass; he wears a hat and a coat and simply murmurs, “It’s beautiful here.” At the top of the third and fourth frames, like words inscribed in the sky, we read: “Gilles Deleuze” (frame 3), “philosopher, 1925-1995” (frame 4), while the man strolls through the grass toward the river, saying, “More beautiful than I thought.” Then he rings the doorbell of the small shack near the river, behind which lies the dock and a boat. In the fifth frame, we see the man from behind, standing at the threshold of the still-closed door while a voice from inside asks, “What do you want?” The man responds, “My name is Deleuze,” and then says, “I am expected,” and with the door open, a face and body are revealed, saying, “It’s late,” to which Deleuze replies, “I had trouble finding the place.” The only response is, “Put the money on the table.” Frame 8 shows a lamp above a small round table, a bottle, and a glass placed beside a book titled (in English) The New Adventures of the Incredible Orpheus {Greetings, 5-7).

These are the frames that open the first sequence of thirty-six, depicting Deleuze’s journey across the very dark river at night in a boat led by a very relaxed ferryman. For example, after rowing a bit, the ferryman hands the oars to Deleuze so he can open a beer as they continue to converse. The ferryman says, “Here, time fades away before eternity. It’s not that serious. How long do you think I’ve been doing this?” Deleuze looks at him without responding, his arms resting on the motionless oars. Then the ferryman asks, “And you? What were you thinking before?” To this question, Deleuze has the opportunity to offer the ferryman a copy of Difference and Repetition {Greetings, 8-10). However, the ferryman is interested in something entirely different and asks the philosopher, “But perhaps you have a final sentence for me?” (frame 26). “I collect the final sentences of illustrious men who have left the stage of life.” And he adds, “You are surely famous, aren’t you?” (frame 27, Greetings, 11).

Before Deleuze can respond, he hears the greeting, “Salut, Deleuze!” coming from the dock where he recognizes Barthes holding a lamp, followed by Foucault and Lacan. Barthes says, “You see, we haven’t forgotten you, dear Deleuze. It’s great that you’ve come!” (frame 30). “We’ve thought about two or three things! We must tell you! We must discuss it!” (frame 31). But before the discussion begins, the ferryman’s words intervene: “Tell us! What about your sentence?” Surrounded by Barthes, Foucault, and Lacan, Deleuze looks at the ferryman and replies, “Ah yes, the sentence. What to say?… What would you say, next time, to bring me some herbs?” While the ferryman leaves the dock, rowing into the darkness, the conversation resumes on the dock. As the ferryman rows, he looks over his shoulder toward the shore of the living, while the distant silhouettes of the four friends are visible under their lights. Finally, without saying a word, the ferryman arrives at the dock, leaves the boat carrying his lamp, and then, in the last frame, he sits at his table to read when he hears the “ding dong” of the doorbell again (Greetings, 12-13).

Following this initial sequence of thirty-six frames, the illustrated narrative continues with four subsequent sequences, and in each one, the authors express a rather twisted tribute, but also a fascinating critique, to Difference and Repetition, on both formal and substantive levels206. First, that Martin tom Dieck and Jens Balzer address this notoriously difficult work both seriously and playfully is a gesture of intellectual daring as well as committed friendship207. In addition, the concluding section in each sequence (frames 28-33) stages the friendship of several thinkers who undoubtedly maintained quite friendly relations in life, but who remained distinctly far from each other. The image of the three eagerly awaiting Deleuze’s arrival on the other shore is another way of gently mocking these famous French intellectuals208.

Finally, we notice a few other important elements: on one hand, the folds in Hello, Deleuze! are complicated by the detail of a book title that reappears on the ferryman’s table in the first and last sequence, namely the sequel to Hello, Deleuze! The New Adventures of the Incredible Orpheus.209 Moreover, the creative and biographical details in Hello, Deleuze! underline an approach strongly emphasized by Deleuze, that of the possibility and necessity of creating philosophy through practices that go beyond philosophy, that is, philosophy by other means (see The ABCs, “C as in Culture”). Martin tom Dieck expresses this approach well: “His philosophy then functioned as a source of inspiration for constructing narratives. However, as an illustrator, I thus became a Deleuzian without wanting or knowing it” (tom Dieck, s.p.). This mode of creativity brings me back to shifting the angle of approach, in order to consider how we could translate this vision in terms of friendship and the network of philosophical links in Deleuze’s works, especially in terms of fold, as Deleuze understands it in his book on Leibniz and the Baroque.

THE FOLD AND THE TOMB

A moment both amusing and revealing occurs in The ABCs, precisely in the section “C as in Culture,” when Deleuze talks about the possibility of getting out of philosophy by philosophy itself. He refers to his book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque as an example of this process of doing philosophy differently. Following the publication of the book, Deleuze began to receive mail from various readers, not limited to the philosophical or academic community. A letter from a representative of a group of four hundred letter folders declared to him: “Your story of the fold, it’s us!” Then another letter arrived, from some surfers who told him that they never stopped inserting themselves into the folds of nature, into the folds of the wave (life in there as the task of their very existence). For Deleuze, such exchanges, not only offered the movement he constantly pursued beyond philosophy by philosophy, but also the kind of encounters he sought in all his activities related to culture — in theater, art exhibitions, cinema, and literature — in order to engage in the very possibility of thought and creation.

The fold is of paramount importance for Deleuze, not only as a philosophical concept but also as a practical means to develop, sustain, and appreciate various intersections between ideas and cultural and existential practices. One can follow a trajectory in which the key links between the fold and friendship are fully revealed, for example, through Deleuze’s observation of the baroque sensitivity, both in the works of Mallarmé and Leibniz. It involves a play of the verbal and the visual that Deleuze summarizes as “a new type of correspondence or mutual expression, ‘inter-expression,’ fold by fold” (Le Pli, 44). According to Deleuze, this fold by fold serves as a seam along which new frills can be created, notably with Henri Michaux’s book “La Vie dans les plis,” Pierre Boulez’s composition “Pli selon pli,” inspired by Mallarmé, and with the painting of Hantai, i.e., with his method constructed through pleating (Le Pli, 47-48) 210.

I intend to examine the seam established by Deleuze based on the Mallarméan practice of various poetic expressions of friendship. Although the tomb is a genre of occasional pieces that brought Mallarmé certain renown, the “fans” (poems written on fans given as gifts) contain poetic words for the living, words that fold and unfold, open and close materially, agitating as the texts appear and disappear on the fans, the expressions undulating between the fold of the world and the fold of the soul. Some other forms of occasional pieces (related to “the poetry of the occasion,” as Marian Sugano puts it) include Mallarmé’s thanks inscribed on visiting cards, quatrains written on postcards constructed according to the recipient’s name and address in poetic form, poetic inscriptions on stones, jugs, Easter eggs, and other gifts. The fact that Deleuze’s reflection on the baroque and the fold directly involves these various forms of poetic texts suggests, in my view, that Deleuze grasps the many nuances of folding in friendship through the practice of such exchanges.

To follow Deleuze’s line of thought on the fold, one can observe his own practices of intellectual camaraderie. These practices, of course, do not resemble the modes of expression adopted by Mallarmé. However, given the means at his disposal, Deleuze produces other kinds of fans, for instance, in “L’Abécédaire,” in “Pourparlers,” and in the texts and interviews collected by David Lapou-jade in “L’Ile déserte et autres textes” (2002) and “Deux régimes de fous et autres textes” (2003) 211. One particular writing, “Les plages d’immanence” (1985), corresponds to the well-known and well-established practice of profiles of contemporary writers. Appearing in a volume of “Mélanges” offered to the philosopher, historian, and translator Maurice de Gandillac, one of Deleuze’s professors at the Sorbonne during the 1940s and a lifelong friend, these few pages are published precisely when Deleuze is preparing both “Foucault” and “Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque.” The four paragraphs of this tribute are remarkable, especially in their way of highlighting the folds of friendship while referring the reader back to Gandillac’s reflections on the same theme.

Deleuze’s perspective in this brief writing shifts from reflections on Leibniz to remarks about his former professor, “the way he emphasized this play of immanence and transcendence, these thrusts of immanence from the earth through celestial hierarchies” (Deux régimes, 245). For Deleuze, Gandillac’s writings open up “a set of concepts, logical and ontological, that will characterize so-called ‘modern’ philosophy through Leibniz and the German romantics” (Deux régimes, 245). After citing numerous works and fundamental concepts attributed to Gandillac’s research, Deleuze invokes the overall importance, “the strange content and richness,” of his master’s work:

Recognizing the world of hierarchies but at the same time making pass through it stretches of immanence that shake it more than a direct challenge, this is indeed an image of life inseparable from Maurice de Gandillac… It is an art of living and thinking that Gandillac has always practiced and reinvented. And it is his concrete sense of friendship (Deux régimes, 245-246).

The reference Deleuze makes here to friendship — to a rather obscure text by Gandillac, “Approches de l’amitié” (1945) — offers us yet another folding within the folds of friendship. Gandillac’s elaboration on the various distinctions in philosophy between love and friendship establishes implicit resonances with Deleuze’s later reflections on friendship, especially in “Dialogues” and “L’Abécédaire.” “Pure friendship,” says Gandillac, “does not exist any more than pure love,” but in contrast to love, friendship remains “the ideal form of specifically human relation” (Approches, 7; emphasis by Gandillac). Gandillac further delves into the paradox of friendship when he suggests:

I have the right to the friendship of any passerby, as he deserves mine, and we walk by each other without even looking at one another… Beyond a present sympathy, beyond a shared emotion, it demands a kind of attention that few men are capable of… True bonds are formed almost unconsciously; it is up to us then to consolidate them (Approches, 59).

While friendship does not necessarily erase the weight of this oppressive absence, “it leads us to transcend our solitude without losing ourselves in the anonymity of false community” (Approches, 62). This attitude allows us to “simply welcome the ‘familiarity’ of the friend without staging, without a fixed program… To leave room for chance, silence, inspiration, even absence, perhaps that is the secret of an accord that defies all technique” (Approches, 64). The fundamental encounter at the basis of friendship, both bad and good, suggests that there is no guarantee, a situation quite normal indeed, as “friendship would probably lose what makes its true value if we knew infallible methods to make it succeed” (Approches, 67). These “deadly risks” are precisely those, says Gandillac, that the human species must accept “freely, lucidly, simply,” so that human existence maintains its fundamental substance (Approches, 67).

It is evident that Deleuze inflects these insights, these various principles on friendship, according to his own experiences, and overlaps as well as contradictions emerge between his thinking and that of Gandillac in this regard. For example, as mentioned above, Deleuze tells Parnet in “L’Abécédaire” that, in his view, friendship has nothing to do with fidelity and everything to do with the perception of the charm emitted by individuals. Thus, Deleuze agrees with the Proustian understanding of friendship, maintaining that we become sensitive to a certain type of sign emission, and whether we want to receive them or not, we can still open ourselves to their reception (“F comme Fidélité”). Furthermore, Deleuze demonstrates a unique understanding of friendship when he tells Parnet that a person tends to reveal their charm through a kind of madness: according to him, the aspect of people “where they lose themselves a little,” where they are not quite sure where they stand, thus a small “point of madness” (“F comme Fidélité”). However, these emissions consist of numerous vectors, or lines, that Deleuze describes in “Dialogues” as “a whole geography within people, with hard lines, soft lines, lines of flight, etc.,” and he asks:

But what precisely is a meeting with someone we love? Is it a meeting with someone, or with animals that come to populate you, or with ideas that invade you, with movements that move you, sounds that pass through you? And how do you separate these things? (Dialogues, 17).

A final overlap lies in the distinction between pure friendship and the human type, a distinction that again constitutes a strategy of the in-between that both Gandillac and Deleuze explore in their own ways (as Mallarmé did with his fans and tombs), that is, through encounters in which we receive no guarantees. In this regard, the above trajectory, which gathers a range of texts and references, centers on Deleuze’s conception of the encounter and the responses to his book on Leibniz, then, in the book on Leibniz, on how the fold develops from Leibnizian and baroque perspectives; then, in Mallarmé’s work, on his unfolding of folds and friendship; in Deleuze’s writings, on his particular extension of friendship to the domain of collegial relations, notably in his homage to Gandillac; in the chapter on friendship in the latter’s book; and finally, on how these perspectives, articulated in the 1940s, transform forty years later in Deleuze’s thought, especially concerning the encounter with respect to friendship.

DELEUZE MILLENNIUM

One way to approach the various textual practices related to the phrase “Deleuze millennium”, especially in relation to folds and friendship, is to evoke the apocryphal phrase of Michel Foucault: “But one day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian” {Dits et écrits, 2:76). As I pointed out elsewhere, Foucault’s phrase was appropriated and misunderstood as a tribute to Deleuze devoid of ambiguity (see Stivale, 236). Fortunately, neither Foucault nor Deleuze were mistaken about the real value of this pseudo-prophetic statement. For Deleuze, it was a manifestation of Foucault’s “diabolical sense of humor,” but also the implicit suggestion that Deleuze was “the most naive among the philosophers of our generation, ... not the deepest, but the most innocent” (Maggiori, 1995, 9). For Foucault, the explanation is more complex: this sentence from the article devoted to Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense in 1970, “Thea-trum philosophicum” {Dits et écrits, was addressed to the Parisian initiates of

Deleuze’s work as a kind of wink. But by this sentence, he also wanted to suggest that “the century”, i.e., secular and even popular opinion, would one day recognize itself as Deleuzian, a development whose value, in his opinion, might be good, perhaps bad {Dits et écrits, 3:589). Curiously, however: having written this sentence as such, despite the implicit irony for the initiates, Foucault inadvertently provided the marketing specialists of publishing houses exactly what they needed to make Deleuze’s work as “secular” as desired212.

Referring to this particular event of quotation and meta-quotation, and also its interplay between Foucault and Deleuze and beyond, I intend to push the discussion in three directions, first with a necessary juxtaposition of The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and its twin volume, Foucault. Apart from the temporal and conceptual overlap of these two texts, each reveals Deleuze’s extreme generosity, if only because of their initial and reciprocal development in the pedagogical scene of Deleuze’s seminars, before undergoing the rigorous process of reworking, distillation, and writing. However, as if by a kind of wave effect, this complexity of development obliges me to follow a second direction, i.e., to consider the persistent and necessary question about what Deleuze exactly meant by “the fold”. The simplest answer is that this concept can hardly correspond to a single meaning. It can mean fold by fold, the fold-to-fold movement that also involves a movement into, within, and through the unfolding towards the next refold. It can mean ‘in expression’ that manifests this undulatory and creative movement, as well as the continuous and constant expression of the actual emanating from the virtual, the nascent state of the virtual destined to the actual. From this perspective, any attempt to limit an individuation as the singular representative of “the fold” would obviously betray the sense of the heterogeneity of movements and the continuity of becomings that characterize the concept.

This heterogeneous movement helps me to refold this discussion towards what I said earlier about Hello, Deleuze! in order to follow a third direction. For the tribute to Deleuze in comic strip, as well as the sentence of Foucault mentioned above, share the double gesture of generosity and humor, in a complex and profound way. These gestures seem to me to indicate the way to reflect on the becoming-secular of Deleuze, so to speak, at the turn of the century, and especially on how this becoming is linked to the folds of friendship. Just as Hello, Deleuze! humorously depicts the complexity of the various facets of Deleuze’s thought as a backdrop for overcoming the tomb, in both senses, Foucault’s sentence constitutes a possible (and perhaps profound) truth, but in a way that does not give us a simple or complete explanation, and which includes the Foucauldian humor that Deleuze had so appreciated.

In the light of these folds and refolds, we can better envisage a contradiction, or at least a paradox, in the Deleuzian perspective on friendship. I have already elsewhere been interested in the complex relationships between Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault, to which the collective appreciation of the work of Maurice Blanchot served as a common base (see Stivale, Fold of Friendship). The relative rarity of texts in which Deleuze develops in detail his perspectives on Blanchot suggests the need to fully consider, with a critical eye, the Deleuzian understanding, both of the limits of friendship and of the concept of the impersonal. These limits, however, introduce curious folds in the way interlocutors, close and distant, engage with each other, and I link these perspectives again to Hello, Deleuze! as these double-faced critiques and tributes, both comical and serious, suggest the paradox mentioned above: despite the desire to surpass the revered tomb in order to reach the critical power of the impersonal, one still feels the attraction, somehow inexorable, of the personal, especially in the way it penetrates the folds of friendship.

Yet, we can also understand these expressions from the perspective that Deleuze articulated in his last writing, Immanence: a life (see Two Regimes, 359-363), where he considers the singularity expressed by the indefinite article. The fold expresses the play &a life, or &a child, or âla work, along the crest or seam of immanence, the “beaches of immanence,” to borrow Deleuze’s phrase speaking about his professor and friend, Maurice de Gandillac. In this sense, we can better understand the various poetic and playful gestures of friendship manifested by Mallarmé in the fans, on the eggs, the postcards… None of these modes of expression represent, in themselves, the folds of friendship, but all contribute to a work that deliberately folds into what the poet conceived as The Book, but which was, in fact, a Book, in the sense of immanence which includes everything he has expressed poetically. Similarly, Deleuze tells Parnet in The Abécédaire that creation fundamentally works as a mode of resistance. He quotes Primo Levi to suggest that the artist is the one who liberates a life, a powerful life, a life more than personal, and not only his life (“R as Resistance”). However, to Parnet’s objection about Levi’s suicide, indicating that perhaps art is not enough to achieve this liberation, Deleuze vigorously responds that yes, Levi committed suicide “personally,” unable to hold up in his personal life; but Primo Levi’s words and works remain nonetheless as what Deleuze calls “eternal resistances,” impersonal, beyond the instance of personal events.

In short, the folds of friendship, in Deleuze, highlight an entire web of elements interwoven in his writings, the relationships of the folds of friendship offering a way to conceptualize the in-between, the inter-expression in Deleuze’s thought. It seems to me that the concept of fold, posed and developed towards the end of Deleuze’s life, helps us understand the concepts articulated in his older works. But the fold as a concept also has the merit of highlighting the specific play of these other concepts, while stimulating the process of “fold upon fold,” the undulatory, dynamic and recurrent movement of one fold after another, never more clearly expressed than in the folds of friendship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Yannick BEAUBATIE (ed.), Tombeau de Gilles Deleuze. Tulle, Mille Sources, 2000.

Haroldo de CAMPOS, “Barroco-ludisme deleuzien”, in Gilles Deleuze, Une vie philosophique, ed. Éric Alliez. Le Plessis-Robinson, Institut Synthélabo, 1998.

Gilles DELEUZE, Nietzsche and philosophy. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1962.

Gilles DELEUZE, Bergsonism. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1966.

Gilles DELEUZE, Difference and repetition. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1968.

Gilles DELEUZE, Spinoza and the problem of expression. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1968.

Gilles DELEUZE, Logic of sense. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1969.

Gilles DELEUZE, Proust and the signs. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1976.

Gilles DELEUZE, “The beaches of immanence”, in The Art of the confines. Mixtures offered to Maurice de Gandillac, ed. Anne Cazenave & Jean-François Lyotard. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1985 (reprinted in Two regimes of madmen and other texts).

Gilles DELEUZE, Foucault. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1986.

Gilles DELEUZE, The Fold. Leibniz and the baroque. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1988.

Gilles DELEUZE, Negotiations. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1990.

Gilles Deleuze, She deserts and other texts, ed. David Lapoujade. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2002.

Gilles DELEUZE, Two regimes of madmen and other texts, ed. David Lapoujade. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2003.

Gilles DELEUZE & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and schizophrenia. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1972.

Gilles DELEUZE & Félix Guattari, Kafka. For a minor literature. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1975.

Gilles DELEUZE & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980.

Gilles DELEUZE & Félix Guattari, What is philosophy? Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1991.

Gilles DELEUZE & Claire Parnet, Dialogues. Paris, Flammarion, 1977 (reprint 1996).

Gilles DELEUZE & Claire Parnet, L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, dir. Pierre-André Boutang. Paris, Video Éditions-Montparnasse, 1996.

Michel FOUCAULT, Said and written. Paris, Gallimard, 1994 (4 vol.).

Maurice de Gandillac, “Approaches to friendship”, in EExistence, ed. A. de Waehlens. Paris, Gallimard, 1945.

Félix GUATTARI, The Winter Years, 1980-1985. Paris, Barrault, 1986.

Robert MAGGIORI, “Deleuze-Guattari: We-Two”, in Liberation, September 12, 1991.

Robert MAGGIORI, “A ‘draft’ in the thought of the century”, in Liberation, 6 November 1995.

Jean-Luc Nancy, “The deleuzian fold of thought”, in Gilles Deleuze. A philosophical life, ed. Éric Alliez. Le Plessis-Robinson, Institut Synthélabo, 1998.

Charles J. STIVALE, The Twofold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations. New York, Guilford, 1998.

Charles J. STIVALE, “The folds of friendship: Derrida-Deleuze-Foucault”, in Angelaki 5.2, 2000.

Marian Zwerling SUGANO, The Poetics of the Occasion. Mallarmé and the Poetry of Circumstance. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1992.

Martin TOM DlECK & Jens BALZER, Salut, Deleuze ! Bruxelles, Fréon Édition, 1997.

Martin TOM DlECK & J. BALZER, Nouvelles Aventures de l’incroyable Orphée., Bruxelles, Fréon Éditions, 2002.

Martin TOM Dieck, « Entretien avec Martin tom Dieck », sur http://www.fremok.org/entre-tiens/tomdiecknouvelles.htm (20 juillet 2004).

Arnaud VILLANI, « Mallarmé selon le pli deleuzien », in Tombeau de Gilles Deleuze. Tulle, Mille Sources, 2000.

JÉRÔME CLER – Land of Dancers, and Limp Rhythms

The place: a vast plateau, intersected by a road and surrounded by mountains with snow-capped peaks until May. It is commonly known as the “plain of Acipayam.” When viewed from a pass or a mountainside – as it appears to travelers coming from the “outside world” – the plateau is occasionally marked by cheerful clusters of poplars, indicating the presence of villages.

In the surrounding mountains, a similar scene unfolds with scattered villages here and there. These houses have been built in place of former shepherd shelters on small isolated plateaus or in dispersed settlements amid a picturesque nature, surrounded by small fields that have been cleared from pine forests. Geographers and botanists agree that the flora of this hinterland is more Asian than Mediterranean, despite the sea being nearby, just an hour’s drive away. The snow-covered walls that rise between the sea and the land I am describing isolate it from the gentle marine climate. Yes, it is indeed a hinterland. In ancient times, geographers saw it as one of the healthiest climates in the world, with its abundance of sunshine, high altitude, and numerous mountain streams. We are at the heart of the ancient Kibyratide.

The people residing here today still remember that just three generations ago, they were semi-nomadic shepherds, herding their flocks along long transhumance routes from the kislaks, winter villages (kis means winter) on the coastal plains or protected valleys, to distant summer pastures, sometimes up to three hundred kilometers away. The summer pasture is called yayla, derived from yay meaning “summer,” the only season that extends from May to November. It often remained the only space left for the last sedentary groups: those who resisted the policies of settling nomads ultimately found themselves in high altitudes, on lands difficult to cultivate, enduring harsh winters without respite. There, they struggled, sometimes laboriously, to transition to subsistence agriculture. Neither fully nomadic nor fully settled, they find themselves in between or both at the same time.

Etymologically, the word yayla translates to “pasture” and commonly also to “plateau.” In all these steppe lands, from the seaside to deep Anatolia, this word is imbued with a powerful aura: freshness of the air, light, icy waters, open spaces, and proximity to the snow-capped summits.

Certainly, on the lower plateau of Acipayam, sedentariness is more ancient. Some even know that they have been settled there since the fourteenth century when the Avshar Turkmens conquered the plateau. However, in the remote mountainous regions, above 1000 meters in altitude, settlement is more recent.

All of them more or less know that their ancestors once led their herds across the great steppe. “We all came from Central Asia, from Khorassan, through there,” declared an instructor, pointing towards the mountains at the eastern end of the vast plateau.

But it was for the purpose of hearing dance music that I came to this landscape on that particular day: that was my primary aim. I had heard these tunes, from time to time, in Paris, on the sixth floor of a building in the 10th arrondissement, at Talip Ôzkan’s place, the master of the saz, my music teacher for a few years. Yet, I decided to go and find them in their land of origin – in the Acipayam plateau, where the master was born.

A land of dancers and lame rhythms.

The impossible lightness, the nonsensical elegance of the dancers – often quite corpulent – joy as a virtue at the center of this world, where all pathos seemed absent to me. The power of repetition: the music always takes its circular course, never escaping from its circle or spiral, and the dance area closes in on itself, in the village, always converging towards its center, where the dancers gather.

The rhythm, suddenly at the heart of every representation of this world where I was conducting my fieldwork, as they say in the profession. But the “field” was not just this land of poorly settled nomads, uncertain in the present; it was also the musical territory, the rhythmic territory that overlaid the landscape in its own way – the territory that my main desire was to describe and interpret. For I was about to become an ethnomusicologist, as the University termed it…

The consistency of a local repertoire: in the high-altitude villages, all dance tunes are formulaic, strictly repetitive, with a limited range, offering only a very restricted choice of variations or ornaments for each tune – as demanded by the aesthetics of this dance. The most commonly shared rhythm, the one structuring all these minimal refrains – “9 beats” grouped as 2-2-2-3, or even better “4 and a half beats” – was locally called kirik, meaning “broken” or “fragmented,” partly due to the cycle of dance figures and the “suspended step” linked to the rhythmic asymmetry.

Each of these tunes seems to be a variant or a variation of the previous one or of an absent model. A system of variations in which the theme would perpetually elude capture: “I say: a flower…” And all of this is expressed through discreet instruments – a small three-stringed lute, an oboe made of pine bark, a spike fiddle made from a hollowed-out gourd with a long neck, or a vertical Western violin.

A music that sounds like a salute, never like a farewell.

I can’t help but evoke this world, to evoke a man, Gilles Deleuze. I only knew him through his texts and through a transitive closeness, a friend of a friend… Our voices only crossed paths when André Bernold, residing in the United States, stayed at my place during his visits to Paris. “Make sure you tell him that Gilles Deleuze called, Gilles Deleuze,” he insisted, delicately thinking that perhaps his name might be unknown to me — on my part, I remained too intimidated to launch an explanation or simply express my tribute — what’s the use, over the phone… I simply sent him a CD of my field recordings, published under the title Musiques des Yayla. Milles plateaux is well translated into Turkish as Bin Yayla. Both plurals paid homage to the “Mille.”

Thus, there was a first constellation of friends, Gilles Deleuze, André, Talip. Two masters, two friends, and no less disciples — and all around us, or far above, as reflected in the sky we contemplated, André in writing, me in the practice of this music, the spaces evoked by one and the other, steppes and migrations, salute and farewell, refrain and distances. To this constellation were later added the master musicians and dancers from the villages of southern Turkey, Hayri, Akkulak, and then other friends seized by the grace of the yayla.

First memory: the attachment to the name Gilles Deleuze was primarily due to a prestige that impressed me when I was in high school in the 1970s. I was in my second year, and one of our final year classmates came to our home one day to give a presentation on Kafka and reveal what “minor literature” was. I don’t remember fully understanding his words at the time, but suddenly a name, Deleuze, was definitively inscribed in me. The name sounded remarkably, and the last syllable represented that movement of the prow — cleaving the waves. Similarly, it was the first time I heard the title Anti-Œdipe. I felt that “there was something” there that mattered. Later, while reading Proust et les signes, then Logique du sens, the same sensation of an irresistible movement. All this, along with the spirit of the times, nurtured this friendship — and the joy of seeing the new books published, an unforgettable fervor…

I felt true delight in the style itself, that progress, that generous flow. Even when I didn’t fully understand, I had the feeling of a constant accuracy of expression. Rimbaud said that poetry would be “moving forward,” and for me, that’s what the reading of the “refrain” and “becoming-animal” in Mille plateaux was like: a writing that moved forward. With the progressive revelation of the profoundly musical nature of the chapters that spoke to me the most… I could easily apply to G.D.'s text what he himself says about the two readings of Spinoza: on one hand, the “systematic reading in search of the overall idea and unity of the parts,” but on the other hand, at the same time, the affective reading, where one is drawn or deposited, set in motion or at rest, agitated or calmed according to the speed of one part or another… So the book is perfectly open to “someone who, not being a philosopher, receives from Spinoza an affect, a kinetic determination, an impulse, and who thus makes of Spinoza an encounter and a love” (Spinoza. Philosophie pratique).

All of this exactly corresponded to the call of the field — it was always the hinterland that came to meet me, not the other way around, with its kinetic determinations, its affects, its movements, and rests. The effects of the call were as strong as those of the books — perhaps even stronger: thus, among all the tunes I had already heard from my teacher in Paris, the zeybek melodies immediately seized me, like the irruption of another world into the one I was discovering and already becoming familiar with. They are slow dances, dances of warriors, of honorable bandits, Talip told me. The wide range of melodies, the richness of modal turns, the slowness of the tempo, the very lively alternation between tension and relaxation, slowness and speed, suspense in contrast with lightning-fast passages — all of this appeared to me as particularly unique and had determined my first trip. I needed to see these dances, whose music was both the most unheard-of and the most immediately familiar to me. And of course, I saw them dance: a dance of a man alone looking at the ground at his feet or into the distance, upwards — a very singular ethos, as the melodies heard in Paris had already suggested. Complex figures, reminiscent of both the bird and the warrior, or even the drunk and fragile man swaying…

Another effect of the call was also decisive: during my fourth stay, already familiar with the “field” in the center of the plain of Aciyapam, I heard an old cassette at one of my hosts' homes. It was the refrains of the hinterland, those of the mountains and yayla, played on a small three-stringed lute (üçtelli) by a man who later became my richest source, one of my closest friends, Hayri Dev. The presence or energy that imposed itself on me that day, through this mediocre recording, was decisive for the following years. These effects of the call, and there were many others, manifested as pure exteriority; I was pulled forward by an irresistible power. I also had the feeling that this affair had never “started” — it had always been there. Moreover, I had no memory of ever having the “project” to embark on this adventure. As for the irresistible, it was, of course, the movement itself of the line of flight — nothing else, in fact, “led” this movement. And so, a work began… Scientific research, certainly — but also the search for the “place” and the “formula,” as Rimbaud said.

What was confirmed during the entire period when I came and went on this “terrain” – about eight years of back-and-forth in the same villages, for “work” – was the strange superposition, the literal encounter, of this restricted world, this musical territory, with the writings of Gilles Deleuze. Gradually, I became aware of it: not immediately a consciousness that came to support the “scientific,” “analytical” approach of a Hurrian science discipline, but rather a poetic experience. Thus, I can also name, alongside Gilles Deleuze, two other close figures, Yves Bonnefoy, especially with his Arrière-pays, and André Dhôtel, for his Rhétorique fabuleuse: both of them also consistently confirmed my approach or my perspective on this ethnological “terrain” of experimentation. But for Gilles Deleuze, it involved two worlds that inter-expressed themselves, inter-evoked themselves for me. Mysterious superposition. Throughout the research, I couldn’t help but witness as if the slow construction before my eyes and under my hearing of an “illustration” of what I believed I had grasped in the “ritournelle” plateau-chapter, and, above all, what I began to grasp while observing and sharing this musical life of the yayla. The “theme,” both absent and omnipresent, generator of the repertoire, is precisely what I proposed one day to designate as the “territorial ritournelle.” It is the hummed tune, inattentively, and which takes shape and color on the small üçtelli baglama. Always the same… always different. The question then arose about the “principle of individuation”: how does one tune distinguish itself from another, how does a variation generate a new musical individual? Especially since most of these tunes have no name and are only rediscovered gropingly, with the instrument in hand. These repetitive tunes, but with a concise cycle, though not so numerous in the end, seem to abound: a multiplicity. Music is external to us; it possesses its own life. Appearances, disappearances: one day, a tune insists, imposes itself with all the magical power of the unheard-of. But the next day, it is impossible to find it again, to remember what it was… What had happened then? How could a small musical formula tirelessly repeated by several generations of musicians seem that day, at that hour, in that place, completely new, and the next day, either disappear or seem banal and suddenly deprived of yesterday’s charm?

In former times, shepherds compared the repertoire to the flock being kept in the mountains: a beast disappears behind the rocks, and we believe it is lost, but then it returns by another path. So it is with these small nameless musical pieces, appearing and disappearing.

Mostly unnamed pieces. It seemed to me that “territorial hermeneutics” allowed me to describe numerous facts of music as well as society – with all the more joy as I wanted to account for a world of nomadic origin. And in the discourse of my musician interlocutors, the repertoires were divided into “territorialized” music, the dance ritournelles, and “deterritorialized” music, such as the “long airs” (uzun hava), unmeasured rhythm laments, strongly melismatic and expressive… Another ritournelle, foreign to the highland yayla, but very present in the plains, this chant called “exile” (gurbet) evokes the distant native land, separation, and in the past, it was related, they say, to the seasonal migrations of daily laborers who left their villages for long periods. Some elders like to parody these long airs, which are quite foreign to their own musical ethos ("Yes, down in the plains, they cry all the time…"). And a young musician had explained to me that the small dance tunes, played and “meditated” on the small lute, put him “in his place,” in his proper place, unlike other repertoires he had to learn to play at wedding parties, which “eluded” him. The dance ritournelles found a point of anchoring in the places of the familiar landscape: one rock for one, a clearing for another, etc., which could serve as their name. In fact, I was more of a geomusicologist. I simply observed, or believed I observed, that the territory was rhythm, and in these matters of dance, rhythm, and meter referred to the most indigenous aspect of the music, assimilated by the nomads who settled in the land, while melodic order was more transportable and benefited from a wide geographical extension. Another friend thus joined our brotherhood, Jean During, who observed all these facts in Central Asia, between the nomadic repertoires of Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Karakalpak, and others, and the sedentary music of the Persian courts of Bukhara, Samarkand. Subsequently, several others were in turn captivated by the place and the formula…

In the end, it is about the love experienced for the music of a place, or for a yayla landscape, as André Dhôtel suggests in Rhétorique fabuleuse: “Do you know that famous musician who was accused for so many years of not knowing how to compose, and whose melodic and harmonic marvels were recognized despite his unjustifiable transitions and changes of rhythm and tones? It’s because his musical suites had been captured by a sound network unknown to him, as to ourselves, by an obvious dream that fell entirely from the sky, like the rainbow or a large flock of birds.” Transposable to infinity…

I dedicate these few lines to you, “always arriving, yet departing everywhere.”

ANDRÉ BERNOLD – Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous on Geer van Velde213

"How did you get what you got? – By nothing."

Bistami, Shatahât, 30

Philonous. — Good morrow, Hylas. I did not expect to find you abroad so early.

Hylas. — It is indeed something unusual. But my thoughts were so taken up with a subject I was discoursing of last night, that finding I could not sleep, I resolved to rise and take a turn in the garden.

Phil. — Do you like this garden? Do you like this garden?

Hyl. — Tulips and Rembrandt.

Phil. — Didn’t you come to see these sketches of van Velde?

Hyl. — Indeed.

Phil. — The drawings after the paintings in this same garden?

Hyl. — That’s it.

Phil. — The drawings by the paintings? In the watermark? The canvases in the drawings, inside the drawings? The way the drawings escape from the paintings? In what way do the drawings escape from themselves and the canvases within escape from everything? Or something else?

Hyl. — Inside, outside… What does that mean? It’s, for example, what was occupying my mind earlier, and I went out.

Phil. — Do the drawings of van Velde gathered here have any connection to your very strange question?

Hyl. — I only caught a glimpse of them, but it seems to me that yes.

Phil. — Would it be because this painter is considered to be interior?

Hyl. — Let’s leave, if you like, his critical fortune aside for a moment. It is somehow too imposing.

Phil. — Agreed. Let’s not expand his vigorous thinness.

Hyl. — One word, however. Isn’t it remarkable that true greatness is, in the end, always recognized, but almost by force, and by a force without connection?

Phil. — I’ve often thought about it.

Hyl. — What was that confession Beckett made to you, once?

Phil. — “I was so good at failing,” or something like that. “I didn’t deserve this.” This was glory.

Hyl. — And likewise, the status obtained late by the two van Velde brothers has something of a disconcerting paradox.

Phil. — It’s true of each of the two, as much as one compared to the other, and vice versa.

Hyl. — These are delicate things for us latecomers to consider. Phil. — I seem to remember that you made a very singular remark about it in the past, but you did not explain further.

Hyl. — Your memory spares me from having one.

Phil. — You claimed that there are no contemporaries. The greatness beside you cannot be embraced.

Hyl. — Everything is misunderstanding.

Phil. — “From one star to another, as Beckett says, they seem to agree.” Hyl. — That’s ironic.

Phil. — “… pale motionless and ravished out of oneself to the point of appearing as little of this earth as Mira of the Whale…”

Hyl. — That would suit Geer van Velde quite well, don’t you think?

Phil. — It’s curious, Nietzsche also said something similar, "friendship of stars…".

Hyl. — Shall we stop beating around the bush?

Phil. — We shall not.

Hyl. — For a moment now, we’ve been talking only about Beckett.

Phil. — About the relationship with Beckett, the relationships with Beckett…

Hyl. — Beckett and the van Veldes.

Phil. — Classic question.

Hyl. — Too classic. Fearsome.

Phil. — So much so that from Beckett to those he loved (and to love, for Beckett, meant something tremendous), there would be a kind of incommensurable.

Hyl. — Even though Beckett himself is the incommensurable.

Phil. — It has been somewhat forgotten. But it will be remembered again.

Hyl. — In saecula saeculorum. For what remains.

Phil. — That Beckett bent over the disjointed work, but of an inclusive disjunction… Hyl. — Enough!

Phil. —… on the disjointed work of Bram and Geer, that’s rather unfortunate, in the end. Hyl. — It complicates things for us, but much less so for the van Velde brothers themselves.

Phil. — Not to mention, as usual, the sister…

Hyl. — Jacoba van Velde…

Phil. — ... writer.

Hyl. — Yes. The Great Hall.

Phil. — Terrible book.

Hyl. — And therefore never reprinted.

Phil. — Even Chalamov, supposedly reprinted in paperback, has become unfindable214.

Hyl. — So goes freedom.

Phil. — It complicates things, you said. It’s perhaps less of a complication than something else, something else rare.

Hyl. — So what? An implication? The two brothers would be involved in the same question?

Phil. — That’s, by far, what Beckett seems to say: “Two works that seem to refute each other, but which in fact meet at the heart of the dilemma.” But upstream…

Hyl. — Or an involution?

Phil. — But upstream, I mean: long before Beckett spoke of them, long before Bram and Geer started painting…

Hyl. — An involution, could that be the relation…

Phil. — ... there was their father, one day gone on the roads like one of André Dhôtel’s characters…

Hyl. — An involution, rather than a complication…

Phil. — ... imperturbably who set them on the road side by side, one separated from the other, or like these travelers in the paintings of Jack Butler Yeats, another friend of Beckett of whom we speak so little…

Hyl. — Yes, an involution, that’s the lovely word…

Phil. — ... so little that there is about him, among us, not the slightest monograph, and barely in London a history of his life, him, the brother of the greatest Irish poet, and the son of the man Beckett admired, alongside Joyce, the most in the world, garnished with thirty-two indiscernible reproductions of his works, in black and white, whereas he is a very great painter, I say in passing…

Hyl. — ... what the involution carries over the complication…

Phil. — ... even less fortunate, in his Nachruf, than this other friend, this other very great painter, Henri Hayden215…

Hyl. — ... is that the concept is clearer…

Phil. — ... of whom at least the tireless wife takes care216, whereas Jack Yeats did not have a wife…

Hyl. — ... sharper…

Phil. — ... and were I to be accused of pettiness, I say…

Hyl. — ... since it is mathematical…

Phil. — ... but, what can you do, when Frans Hais (in his hoochdringende noot) and Murillo are exhausted even in museum bookshops…

Hyl. — Three barrows of peat per year… Drie wagens turff…

Phil. — Are you following me?

Hyl. — A hole in the big church for Frans Hais: twenty francs, says Malraux: four florins. Een openinck in de Groote Kerck voor mr. Frans Hais opt Coor n° 56… F4 [September 1, 1666]. Phil. — AHA!

Hyl. — So, an involution.

Phil. — If you like. But what do you mean by involution?

Hyl. — Didn’t I drone on about it?

Phil. — Yes. But the definition is missing.

Hyl. — I fear to give it to you.

Phil. — Why?

Hyl. — Deception.

Phil. — Let’s go.

Hyl. — A function that is its own reciprocal.

Phil. — Example?

Hyl. — The simplest. Which associates every x with one over x. Try it.

Phil. — The inverse is always its reciprocal. Bravo! Dizzying!

Hyl. — I brave ridicule for this beautiful word of involution.

Phil. — Yes, you have always loved elementary mathematics…

Hyl. — ... and all the others. We only have this madness left.

Phil. — I thought you had an interest in painting.

Hyl. — For the usual space, that’s where I reside. When I travel, it’s to mathematics.

Phil. — Your fetish of involution, what does it give you to contemplate?

Hyl. — I see, besides the two ends of the chain, as that good Pascal said…

Phil. — ... not so good after all: remember the Account of Two Conferences of 1647…

Hyl. — ... I see, besides this spiral image of an increasingly inner and almost mortal withdrawal, the advantage of escaping dialectics.

Phil. — What are we talking about?

Hyl. — About Bram and Geer van Velde.

Phil. — Well?

Hyl. — I say that the work of one relates to that of the other as a function, when it is involutive, relates to its reciprocal: starting, one from x and arriving at i/x, the other at the same time starts at i/x and finds himself at x. But this identity is valid only by the double movement…

Phil. — ... and simultaneous. Your comparison is lame: one leg in the yxes, one leg in the merdecluse.

Hyl. — Everything that is not mathematical has in the merdecluse its dwelling, you know that very well.

Phil. — And music? And mysticism?

Hyl. — Hooray! Mystical mathematical music, that’s our motto.

Phil. — Let’s brandish this slogan at the next demos.

Hyl. — MMM. The three M’s. M as in Molloy, M as in Malone, M as in \es foulis of Byzantium. I saw, a long time ago, a graffiti on the walls of Paris. It said: MOLLOY! With an exclamation mark.

Phil. — I do not see, in all this, painting.

Hyl. — It’s the banner.

Phil. — The painters will thank you for your subjective considerations.

Hyl. — “To begin, let’s talk about something else…” (Beckett).

Phil. — “Could not one attack modesty elsewhere than on these surfaces painted almost always with love and often with care, which themselves are confessions?” (same, ibidem).

Hyl. — We must resume Beckett’s efforts.

Phil. — Yes, here it is. The Painting of the van Velde or The World and The Pants, Cahiers d’art, 1945-1946.217

Hyl. — “First of all, it is important not to confuse the two works… They diverge, more and more, from each other… Like two men who, having left the Porte de Châtillon, would set out…”

Phil. — “It is then important to grasp their relationships. They resemble each other, two men walking towards the same horizon…”

Hyl. — Here is Bram van Velde: “Vision taken in the inner field. Space and body, accomplished, unalterable, snatched from time by the maker of time, sheltered from time in the time factory.”

Phil. — And here is Geer van Velde: “G. van Velde’s painting is excessively reticent, acts by radiations that one feels are defensive, is endowed with what astronomers call (unless mistaken) a great escape velocity.”

Hyl. — Further on, Geer: “What can one say of these sliding planes, these vibrating contours, these bodies as if carved from mist, these balances that a trifle must break, which break and reform as one looks… Here everything moves, swims, flees, comes back, unravels, remakes itself. Everything ends, endlessly. It is like the insurrection of molecules, the interior of a stone a thousandth of a second before it disintegrates.”

Phil. — “That’s literature.”

Hyl. — “Let’s put it more crudely. Let’s finish being ridiculous.”

Phil. — “Bram van Velde paints the expanse.”

Hyl. — “Geer van Velde paints succession.”

Phil. — “Bram van Velde turns away from natural expanse… He idealizes it, makes it an inner sense.”

Hyl. — “Geer van Velde, on the other hand, is entirely turned towards the outside, towards the turmoil of things in light, towards time. For one only becomes aware of time in the things it agitates, that it prevents from seeing. It is by giving himself entirely to the outside, by showing the macrocosm shaken by the shivers of time, that he realizes himself… It is the representation of this river where, according to Heraclitus’s modest calculation, no one descends twice.”

Phil. — Further on: “Geer van Velde has not to do with the thing alone… but with an infinitely more complex object. To tell the truth, less with an object than with a process felt with such acuity that it has acquired a solidity of hallucination or ecstasy. He always has to do with the compound.”

Hyl. — Alfred North Whitehead, 1861-1947, Process and Reality, 1927-1928 (1929).

Phil. — Plotinus (205-270 AD), eighth treatise (30) of the third Ennead, Peri phuseôs kai tou Hénos, On Nature, Contemplation, and the One (263-268)218.

Hyl. — “For one represents succession only by means of the states that succeed each other, only by imposing on them a slide so rapid that they end up melting, I would almost say stabilizing, into the image of succession itself. To force the fundamental invisibility of external things until this invisibility itself becomes a thing…”

Phil. — “Two works in short that seem to refute each other, but which in fact converge at the heart of the dilemma, the very one of the plastic arts: how to represent change?”

Phil. — Therefore, in Beckett’s presentation thus reduced to the essence of his argument, there are seven moments, seven steps, I believe, which could be simplified as follows:

    1. Bram van Velde subtracts his vision from time, Geer van Velde, on the other hand, immerses his in time. The object of Bram’s vision is the “inner field”. The object of Geer’s vision is not yet specified.
    1. However, the object of Geer’s paintings is grasped by analogy and defined:

    – a1) from the perceptual point of view, as instability of depths: “planes that slide”;

    – a2) from the point of view of drawing, as vibration, oscillation, “irradiations”; periodic dynamism, intermittence;

    – a3) from the point of view of the motif, as distribution of indiscernibles: “these bodies as if carved in the mist”;

    – a4) from the point of view of composition, as unstable balance or phase change: “these balances that a trifle must break”;

    – a5) from the point of view of perception, as constitutive participation in an inchoate and metastable state: “these balances… which break and reform as one looks”.

  • b) However, the object of Geer’s paintings is still grasped by analogy and defined more generally as movement, flow, impermanence, flow of concretion and dissolution, flow of cuts, flow of flows: “Everything ceases, incessantly.”

  • c) However, in the end, the object of Geer’s paintings is assimilated, like that of Bram’s, to interiority; no longer to the interiority of consciousness having abolished time by default (“space and bodies… torn from time by the time-maker, sheltered from time in the time factory”), but to the (paradoxical) interiority of molecular matter always partes extra partes ("one would say the insurrection of molecules, the inside of a stone…"), grasped in an unthinkable relation to its annihilation in the smallest thinkable interval of time: “the inside of a stone a thousandth of a second before it disintegrates”.

    1. These subtle and problematic analyses are reduced to a dualism: “Let’s finish being ridiculous… Bram van Velde paints the expanse. Geer van Velde paints succession.”
    1. But how does Geer van Velde go about “painting succession”?

    – a1) by showing (representing?) exteriority (“turned towards the outside”);

    – a2) chaotic exteriority (“tohu-bohu of things”);

    – a3) exteriority dependent on light, vector of time (“towards the tohu-bohu of things in the light, towards time”);

    – a4) exteriority which makes time visible through the objects it affects (“for one only becomes aware of time through the things it stirs”);

    – a5) exteriority which, while making time visible, has itself become invisible due to the effect of time: "for one only becomes aware of time through the things it stirs, which it prevents from seeing".

Provisional conclusion: the object of Geer’s vision is not, as with Bram, the internalized, idealized expanse, it is the paradoxical exteriority, outside of oneself, molecular and cosmic, luminous and invisible, which is succession, i.e. manifested time: “the macrocosm shaken by the shivers of time”.

    1. The object is thus more and something other than an object (“an infinitely more complex object”): “less an object than a process”. Geer van Velde paints a process, to which he gives “a solidity of hallucination, or ecstasy”. The image is frozen due to the “acuity”.
    1. Finally, the object of Geer’s painting is reified time; the capture of successive states of the process imposes on them “a slide so rapid that they end up blending, I would almost say stabilizing, in the image of succession itself”. We have the image of succession, the image of time, frozen in the rapidity of passing. (As Merleau-Ponty says, "what does not pass in time, is the passage of time itself.")
    1. A final leap: the external things are fundamentally invisible. Why? Because they all undergo the strange qualities that have just been enumerated? Unstable, sliding, vibrating, misty, unstable, evanescent, annihilated, chaotic and yet luminous; invisible as temporal, because temporal, and yet preventing seeing time; forced, by the acuteness, in the acceleration of the process (molecular, atomic?) they are, and hallucinatorily, ecstatically regrasped in the stabilization of this acceleration, which forms the thing finally given to be seen by the painter, who has “forced the fundamental invisibility of external things until this invisibility itself becomes a thing”. I am done.

Hyl. — Bravissimo, signor Pedante. Don’t you think that’s a lot? For one man?

Phil. — Necessarily. Beckett himself says it, in his second article (Painters of impediment, June 1948): “This is what to expect when you let yourself be fooled into writing about painting. Unless you’re an art critic.”

Hyl. — You’re certainly not an art critic. At least that’s one thing that’s well established.

Phil. — Consider that the text by Beckett that we have just skimmed through is the first he published in French (1945). It speaks as much about his own work in progress as about the van Veldes', because only affinity allows us to say anything, and also, justifies that one speaks up, against one’s own conviction, where it is least welcome. And you see, it’s a success.

Hyl. — Allow me to point out the blatant contradictions.

    1. Geer’s exteriority is an interiority.
    1. If Bram van Velde paints extent and Geer van Velde paints succession, it remains that this succession ultimately is also an extent.
    1. It is things that make time visible as they are affected by it, and it is these same things that time prevents from being seen (clearly?). Time makes invisible the things that make time visible.
    1. The object is a process whose image is fixed.
    1. The rapidity of the successions in the process is what allows the stability of the image.
    1. The image is invisibility made into a thing. The process itself, the external thing as a process, is fundamentally invisible. How then does the rapid succession of invisible states produce the visible?
    1. Time, despite all these acrobatics, therefore remains thought of as space. And this space itself remains completely undetermined, not least because it is constantly referred to the instant.

Phil. — Aren’t these aporias inevitable? Perhaps we need to go as far as Husserl to overcome them, and even then, it’s not certain. Mathematics achieves this easily, if not cheaply, then at least at a lost fund. No doubt Beckett, he is the first to admit it, should not have involved Geer van Velde in this matter, since he was himself up to his neck in it. Nobody needs anyone, and everyone can go home. “Each in his life, and we in none”: the most beautiful words exchanged long ago with Beckett. Whatever one does, whatever effort one undertakes, especially from writing to painting, one ends up with two concentric circles of opposite meaning, Apaches and 7th Cavalry.

Hyl. — So I will briefly make the case for the circulus vitiosus diabolus. In this brilliant chaos, there is an element that I deliberately forgot earlier, it is the matter of spatial exteriority, luminous yet invisible. Perhaps we could start from there. It seems to me that Beckett, more deeply than Descartes, who mattered so much to him, is thinking here of Bergson, of the most beautiful page of Bergson, often revisited and commented on by Deleuze, who is with Bergson, perhaps better than Bergson, the greatest French philosopher of the twentieth century, and certainly the only one, in the same century, to stand opposite Beckett, at the same height, far more fraternal than Adorno, although Adorno and Beckett knew each other while Deleuze and Beckett never saw each other except in spirit, and yet they had the same publisher, Jérôme Lindon, of whom Deleuze told me one day that he had never really loved only one person in his life, namely Beckett. Here is the famous passage from Bergson, in the first chapter of Matter and Memory. Essay on the relationship of the body to the mind (1896), page 186 of the Centenary edition (PUF):

“Now, here is the image that I call a material object; I have the representation of it. Why does it not appear to be in itself what it is for me? It is because, linked to all the other images, it continues into those that follow it as it extended those that preceded it. To transform its pure and simple existence into representation, it would be enough to suddenly remove what follows it, what precedes it, and also what fills it, to keep only its outer crust, the superficial film. What distinguishes it, the present image, the objective reality, from a represented image, is the necessity it has to act through each of its points on all points of other images, to transmit everything it receives, to oppose to each action an equal and opposite reaction, to be, in short, nothing more than a path on which the modifications that propagate in the immensity of the universe pass in all directions. I would convert it into representation if I could isolate it, if above all I could isolate its envelope. The representation is there, but always virtual, neutralized, at the moment it would pass into action, by the obligation to continue and to lose itself in something else. What is needed to obtain this conversion is not to illuminate the object, but on the contrary to obscure certain sides of it, to reduce it by most of itself, so that the residue, instead of remaining nested in the surroundings like a thing, detaches from it like a painting. Now, if living beings constitute in the universe “centers of indetermination”, and if the degree of this indetermination is measured by the number and elevation of their functions, it is conceivable that their mere presence may be equivalent to the suppression of all parts of objects to which their functions are not interested. They will let themselves be traversed, so to speak, by those of the external actions that are indifferent to them; the others, isolated, will become “perceptions” by their very isolation. Everything will then happen for us as if we were reflecting on the surfaces the light that emanates from them, light that, always propagating, would never have been revealed.”

Further on: “What is given is the totality of images of the material world with all their inner elements. But if you suppose centers of truly spontaneous activity, the rays that reach them and that would interest this activity, instead of passing through them, will seem to come back to draw the contours of the object that sends them.”

Further on, and this decisive passage joins what Nietzsche says elsewhere: “In a sense, one could say that the perception of any unconscious material point, in its instantaneousness, is infinitely larger and more complete than ours, since this point collects and transmits the actions of all points in the material world, while our consciousness only reaches certain parts from certain sides. Consciousness — in the case of external perception — consists precisely in this choice.”

Finally, further on: “The whole difficulty of the problem that occupies us comes from the fact that we represent perception as a photographic view of things [...]. But how not to see that the photograph, if there is one, is already taken, already printed, inside things themselves and for all points in space? [...] If one considers any place in the universe, one can say that the action of matter passes there without resistance and without loss, and that the photograph of everything is translucent there: a black screen is missing, behind the plate, on which the image would stand out. Our “zones of indeterminations” would play the role of a screen, so to speak. They add nothing to what is; they only make the real action pass and the virtual action remain.”

Phil. — That’s a big piece. Durus est hic sermo. And this seems so far from what we have here before our eyes, from these disarmed drawings, that your long quotation seems almost indecent.

Hyl. — I warned you that I’m playing the devil’s advocate, and the devil, right now, is indeed wanting to understand something about anything.

Phil. — You have often claimed in my presence that mental confusion has generally reached such an eminent degree that only the universality of a flawless imposture, distributed as many provinces as there are supposed competencies, but all of whose edges miraculously join, allows maintaining the illusion of any reality of any human process you want.

Hyl. — Yes. And this very miracle is the supreme lie, whose price is death, by asphyxiation, of the little that had taken refuge in the immense cracks. We even suffocate on the highest peaks, the cursed film covers everything, and I grant you that Bergson himself could no longer stand it, no more than Nietzsche, Husserl, Freud, or anyone you want. Moreover, Deleuze, their successor, who was really suffocating, who could no longer breathe in any way, preferred to throw himself out the window, to our great pain.

Phil. — So, why again bring up this passage from Bergson? Is this not increasing confusion by a subtlety without use and object, and misplaced, faced with the silent pleas of Geer van Velde to let him do what he has to do, and senseless finally for the anger that it will arouse, possible, among the enlightened amateur, who is already so rare, and also, sometimes, decidedly hostile to the bullshit?

Hyl. — Today, everyone tells you that they only do what they have to do, and that is the criminal bullshit. However, precisely, Geer van Velde, while truly doing what he has to do, because only artists work, all others pretend, achieves something necessary and right. But this necessity and this correctness do not explain themselves. To give you just one reason, which may not be the deepest, it is that, as Wittgenstein once noted in passing, "nothing that one does can be defended unconditionally (nichts, was man tut, lasst sich endgül-tig verteidigen). It can only be defended in relation to something else, which is established (son-dern nur in Bezug aufetwas anderes Festgesetztes). In other words, we cannot give any reason why we should (or should have) acted this way, except that by acting this way we have produced such and such a state of affairs, which must again accept as a goal. "

Phil. — Hence museums, legacies, catalogs, prefaces…

Hyl. — Hence, in a more essential way, the work itself, which is only obedience to "such and such a state of affairs produced, THAT MUST AGAIN ACCEPT AS A GOAL". Autonomy as much as unpredictable openness — within the very conditions of production. Phil. — Have we lost Bergson?

Hyl. — No. It is precisely Bergson who explains why, at the point where he appears in history, Geer must again accept as a goal a certain state of the object; how, by aiming for this goal, he is precisely doing, and only he, just what he has to do; according to what necessity, and in what truly necessary; and in what way, ultimately, Geer’s work “can only be defended attached to something else, which is established”, namely a regime of the universe.

Phil. — A regime of the universe Péri Diaitês Cosmou? Do you really know, my dear, that Geer would have laughed in your face?

Hyl. — Not sure. He was perhaps little talkative, and therefore moderately mocking, having moreover a very beautiful nose. And remember the words of him reported by Karel Schippers in his admirable text, Grand Pavois (1986): “The essential is not such and such an object, but the space that exists between the two. It’s something other than their volume or their perspective. When you look at a stone…”

Hyl. — Here is Beckett’s stone again, “a thousandth of a second before it disintegrates…”

Hyl. — Thank you. “When you look at a stone, you only see one of its sides, but apparently you can go around it, you can look at the other side and, in this case, you consider the stone as a detached object, a fragment, something that is sufficient unto itself, a complete thing. [...] Yet, the stone breathes and could not exist without space. Simultaneously or one after the other, we see all these objects larger than life, it looks like the ripe fruits of the tree of knowledge, but what thus magnifies them is the untamed space, like the wind that rushes into a sheet and makes it swell… Things are “traps” for light; there is none that does not want to let in the light; even inside the most opaque things, there is light.”

Phil. — That’s beautiful. Didn’t Alberto Giacometti also say similar things? Hyl. — But yes! Alberto and Geer belonged to the same regime of the universe. Laugh now with your Diaitês Cosmou! And since you love Greek so much, I remind you of the wonderful epitaph that, for Homer, imagined Antipater of Sidon: “He is Homer, mouth that does not age of the whole universe, agêranton stoma kos-mou pantos, and this sand where the sea roars, stranger, covers it, halirrothia, xeine, kékeuthe konis.” Every great artist has a right to this same epitaph: mouth that does not age of the entire universe, “untamed space, like the wind that rushes into a sheet and makes it swell”.

Phil. — Okay. Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Grünewald, Velasquez, Bosch, Vermeer, El Greco, Zurbaràn, Hais, Goya, mouth of the universe, untamed space. But the world according to Bergson seemed to me, just now, to burst into a less wild laughter.

Hyl — Disabuse yourself. Even in the calmest philosophy, Chrysippe, Epicure, Bergson, there are moments of insupportable savagery for those who stay not a moment too long, but in a different moment, as if facing a dizzying tableau in all its dimensions, but petrified in the indefinite succession of its countless planes. It is probably as rare to attain this ecstasy, “sheltered from time in the time factory,” before a painting as in pure thought, but isn’t this, here, Nietzsche’s madness and there, something that surfaced just now in Beckett’s text, Beckett who has never stopped flirting with the madness of the depths, but to pull it to the surface?

Phil. — As you will. But please…

Hyl. — And now, Philonous, put on your glasses so that everything can finally be sorted out. Phil. — Ah yes, my dear Hylas, it always goes that way with the views of the mind on matter, screams, okay, and then the final agreement.

Hyl. — I say: one eye on Beckett’s monocle, the other screwed into Bergson’s stereoscope binoculars, but above all the third eye wide open on Geer, please consider this. Bergson tells us that the world is made up of images, that things are moving images that act and react on each other, each image, as an objective reality, having to “act at each of its points on all the points of other images, to transmit everything it receives,… to finally be only a path on which in all directions pass the modifications that spread in the immensity of the universe”. Deleuze, “for his part”, as he liked to say, splendidly and expansively commented on this extraordinary idea of Bergson, notably in the entire chapter 4 of Image-Movement (Editions de Minuit, 1983, p. 83-103), where Beckett’s Film is also discussed as a counter-test to Bergson: “My body is an image… my eye, my brain are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images, since it is one among others?… How could images be in my consciousness, since I myself am an image, that is to say movement?… This infinite set of all images constitutes a sort of plane of immanence. The image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image, that’s matter. [...] But how to speak of images in themselves which are for no one and address no one? How to speak of an Appearing, since there is not even an eye? [...] The reason [...] is that the plane of immanence is all Light… The identity of the image and movement has for its reason the identity of matter and light. The image is movement as matter is light.”

Phil. — I know physicists who will howl to death. But Geer agrees: “Even inside the most opaque things, there is light.”

Hyl. — “In the image-movement, there are no bodies or rigid lines yet, but only lines or figures of light. The blocks of space-time are such figures. These are images in themselves. If they do not appear to someone, that is, to an eye, it is because the light is not yet reflected or stopped, and, “always propagating” etc. In other words, the eye is in things, in the luminous images themselves. “The photograph… is already taken”, etc.” “There is, continues Deleuze, a break with the entire philosophical tradition, which rather put light on the side of the spirit, and made consciousness a beam of light that pulled things from their native darkness [...]. For Bergson, it’s the opposite. It is the things that are luminous by themselves, without anything that illuminates them [...]; it is indeed a photo already taken and pulled in all things and for all points, but “translucent”. If it subsequently happens that a factual consciousness is constituted in the universe… it’s because very special images will have stopped or reflected the light, and will have provided the “black screen” that the plate was missing [...]. Our factual consciousness… will only be the opacity without which light, always propagating, would never have been revealed.”

Phil. — It’s a most bizarre cosmology, grandiose, if you want; it’s a theory of perception, or at least its prolegomena; but is it an aesthetic? How to pin all this on Geer’s back? For between perception, whatever it wants to be, and the painting or rather the drawing, for that’s what concerns us here and that we haven’t yet seen since the beginning, there is… I don’t dare say a world, but at least an abyss?

Hyl. — O mist among the utmost serenity!

Phil. — Answer!

Hyl. — Finish with my mad thought

Before the disdainful ray of supreme beauty

Dissolves it in the wind

And disappointment hides its relics in a bit of foam.

Phil. — Geer van Velde’s hand was one of the most complex Bergsonian centers of indeterminacy in the universe.

Hyl. — If Geer van Velde really dealt with the outside, then it is this absolute outside. Phil. — And his drawings that we finally see assign art its meteoritic place.

Hyl. — Some seem to reproduce the Widmannstätten patterns.

Phil. — The interior never given in classical painting, the voluminous interior, here it is as irradiation…

Hyl. — ... as refraction on the edges of the depth.

Phil. — Geer van Velde shows better than anyone that depth is the primary dimension.

Hyl. — The painting of the work of perception is the internal schema of deep exteriority, as a drawing.

Phil. — Hence the necessity of abstraction…

Hyl. — Abstraction is the reduction that makes the visible possible.

Phil. — Suppression of the parts of the object in which the luminous constitution of depth is not interested.

Hyl. — From then on, the stroke is like a prehension retracted on perception, but which absolutizes its principle…

Phil. — Restitution of the diffusion of the constitutive depth, but by subtraction.

Hyl. — Revelation of light on the layers of depth.

Phil. — Emergence of depth on the heels of light.

Hyl. — Revelation, emergence of the lines of force of internal perception to the material point of space…

Phil. — In its encounter with our perception.

Hyl. — The image, with Geer van Velde, comes from the depth and returns to depth, from the very depths of the transparent universe that his magnificent hand reveals to us.

Siao-ke-tz’eoul-keou-men, on the Sira-Mouren,

southeast of Mongolia, June 2002

In memory of Jan, Adriaan and Gijsbrecht van der Kodde

TIMOTHY S. MURPHY – Annotated Bibliography of Gilles Deleuze, 1953-2003

TEXTS BY DELEUZE

1953

« Introduction », Instincts et institutions (choix de textes). Paris, Hachette, pp.viii-xi. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume. Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

« Régis Jolivet, Le Problème de la mort chez M. Heidegger et J. P. Sartre » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLIII:i-3 (janv.-mars), p. 107-108.

« K.E. Lögstrup, Kierkegaard und Heideggers Existenzanalyse und ihr Verhältnis zur Verkündigung » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLIII:i-3 (janv.-mars), p. 108-109.

« Helmut Kuhn, Encounter with Nothingness/Begegnung mit dem Nichts » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLIII:i-3 (janv.-mars), p. 109.

« Bertrand Russell, Macht und Persönlichkeit » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLIII:i-3 (janv.-mars), p. 135-136.

« Carl Jorgensen, Two Commandments » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLIII:i-3 (janv.-mars), p. 138-139.

1954

« Darbon, Philosophie de la volonté » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLIV:4-6 (avril-juin), p. 283.

« Jean Hyppolite, Logique et existence » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLIV:y-9 (juill.-sept.), p. 457-460. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

1955

« Emile Léonard, L’Illuminisme dans un protestantisme de constitution récente (Brésil) » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLV:4-6 (avril-juin), p. 208.

« J.P. Sartre, Materialismus und Révolution » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLV:4-6 (avril-juin), p. 237.

1956

« Bergson, 1859-1941 », in Maurice Merleau-Ponty (dir.), Les Philosophes célèbres, Paris, Mazenod, 1956, p. 292-299. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« La conception de la différence chez Bergson », in Etudes bergsoniennes, IV, p. 77-112. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Ferdinand Alquié, Descartes, l’homme et l’œuvre » (compte rendu), in Cahiers du Sud, XLIIL337 (oct.), p. 473-475.

1957

« Michel Bernard, La Philosophie religieuse de Gabriel Marcel. (Etude critique) » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CXLVII: 1-3 (janv.-mars), p. 105.

1959

« Sens et valeurs » (sur Nietzsche), in Arguments, 15, p. 20-28. Nouv. version in Nietzsche et la philosophie, 1962, infra.

1960

« Cours de M. Deleuze. Sorbonne, 1959-1960. Rousseau ». Notes de cours dans les Archives de l’Ecole normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud (aujourd’hui Ecole normale supérieure de Lettres et Sciences humaines, Lyon), série CI, n° 12167 (27 pages dactylographiées).

1961

« De Sacher-Masoch au masochisme », in Arguments, 21, p. 40-46. Nouv. version in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, 1967, infra.

« Lucrèce et le naturalisme », in Etudes philosophiques, 1, p. 19-29. Nouv. version en appendice à Logique du sens, 1969, infra.

1962

Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

« 250e anniversaire de la naissance de Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, précurseur de Kafka, de Céline et de Ponge », in Arts, 872 (6-12 juin), p. 3. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

1963

La Philosophie critique de Kant. Doctrine des facultés. Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

« Mystère d’Ariane » (sur Nietzsche), in Bulletin de la Société française d’Études nietzschéennes (mars), p. 12-15. Rééd. in Philosophie, 17 (hiver 1987), p. 67-72. Nouv. version in Magazine littéraire, 298 (avril 1992), p. 21-24, infra. Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« L’idée de genèse dans l’esthétique de Kant », in Revue d’esthétique, 16:2 (avril-juin), p. 113-136. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Raymond Roussel ou l’horreur du vide » (compte rendu de Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel), in Arts (23 oct.). Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Unité de À la recherche du temps perdu », in Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 4 (oct.-déc.), p. 427-442. Nouv. version in Marcel Proust et les signes, 1964, infra.

1964

Marcel Proust et les signes. Paris, Presses universitaires de France. 2e éd. sous le titre Proust et les signes, avec un chap. suppl. « La machine littéraire », 1970, infra. 3e éd. avec un chap. suppl. « Présence et fonction de la folie. L’Araignée », 1973, infra.

« En créant la pataphysique, Jarry a ouvert la voie à la phénoménologie », in Arts (zy mai-2 juin), p. 5. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra. Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« Il a été mon maître » (sur Sartre), in Arts (28 oct.3 nov.), p. 8-9. Rééd. in Jean-Jacques Brochier, Pour Sartre, Paris, Jean-Claude Lattès, 1995, p. 82-88. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra).

1965

Nietzsche : sa vie, son œuvre, avec un exposé de sa philosophie. Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

« Pierre Klossowski ou les corps-langage », in Critique, 214, p. 199-219. Nouv. version en appendice à Logique du sens, 1969, infra.

1966

Le Bergsonisme. Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

« Philosophie de la Série noire » (sur les romans policiers), in Arts & Loisirs, 18 (26 janv.-Ier févr.), p. 12-13. Rééd. in Roman, 24 (sept. 1988), p. 43-47. Rééd. in L’Lle déserte, 2002, infra.

« Gilbert Simondon, L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique » (compte rendu), in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CLVL1-3 (janv.-mars), p. 115-118. Rééd. in L’Lle déserte, 2002, infra.

« L’homme, une existence douteuse » (compte rendu de Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses'), in Le Nouvel Observateur (ier juin), p. 32-34. Rééd. in L’Lle déserte, 2002, infra.

« Renverser le platonisme », in Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 71:4 (oct.-déc.), p. 426438. Nouv. version en appendice à Logique du sens, 1969, infra.

1967

« Conclusions. Sur la volonté de puissance et l’éternel retour », in Cahiers de Royaumont. Philosophie, VI : Nietzsche, Paris, Editions de Minuit, p. 275-287. Rééd. in L’Lle déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D. & Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch. Paris, Editions de Minuit. Contient « Le froid et le cruel », de Deleuze, et « Vénus à la fourrure », de Sacher-Masoch. Rééd. Paris, 10/18,1974.

« Une théorie d’autrui (Autrui, Robinson et le pervers) » (sur Michel Tournier, Vendredi), in Critique, 241, p. 503-525. Nouv. version en appendice à Logique du sens, 1969, infra, et en postface à M. Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p. 257-283. Rééd. in Critique, 591-592 (août-sept. 1996), p. 675-697.

« Introduction » à Emile Zola, La Bête humaine, in Œuvres complètes, t. VI (éd. Henri Mitterand), Paris, Cercle du livre précieux, p. 13-21. Nouv. version en appendice à Logique du sens, 1969, infra, et en préface à La Bête humaine, Paris, Gallimard, 1977, p. 7-24.

G.D. & Michel Foucault, « Introduction générale » à F. Nietzsche, Le Gai Savoir et fragments posthumes, Paris, Gallimard, p. i-iv (textes de Nietzsche, éd. Giorgio Colli & Massimo Montinari, trad. Pierre Klossowski).

« L’éclat de rire de Nietzsche » (entretien avec Guy Dumur), in Le Nouvel Observateur (5 avril), p. 40-41. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Mystique et masochisme » (entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal), in La Quinzaine littéraire, 25 (ier-i5 avril), p. 12-13. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« La méthode de dramatisation », in Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, 61:3 (juill.-sept.), p. 89-118. Repris et modifié in Différence et répétition, 1968, infra. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

1968

Différence et répétition. Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

Spinoza, et le problème de l’expression. Paris, Éditions de Minuit.

« À propos de l’édition des Œuvres complètes de Nietzsche. Entretien avec Gilbert [sic] Deleuze », de Jean-Noël Vuarnet, in Les Lettres françaises, 1223 (28 fëvr.-5 mars), p. 5, 7, 9. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 20>q>2, infra.

« Le schizophrène et le mot » (sur Carroll et Artaud), in Critique, 255-256 (août-sept.), p. 731-746. Nouv. version in Logique du sens, 1969, infra.

1969

Logique du sens. Paris, Éditions de Minuit. Recueille en appendice les textes déjà mentionnés (cf. supra) : « Lucrèce et le naturalisme » (devenu « Lucrèce et le simulacre »), 1961. « Pierre Klossovski ou les corps-langages », 1965. « Une théorie d’autrui (Autrui, Robinson et le pervers) » (devenu « Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui »), 1967. « Introduction » à La Bête humaine d’Émile Zola (devenu « Zola et la fêlure »), 1967. « Le schizophrène et le mot », 1968. est incorporé au texte (13e série). Rééd. Paris, 10/18,1973.

« Gilles Deleuze parle de la philosophie » (entretien avec Jeannette Colombel), in La Quinzaine littéraire, 68 (ier-ij mars), p. 18-19. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Spinoza et la méthode générale de M. Gueroult » (compte rendu de Martial Gueroult, Spinoza, vol. I), in Revue de métaphtsique et de morale, 74:4 (oct.-déc. ), p. 426-437. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

1970

Spinoza. Textes choisis. Paris, Presses universitaires de France. 2e éd., Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1981, infra, avec 3 nouveaux chap. (III, V and VI) et sans la sélection de textes de Spinoza.

« Schizologie, » préface à Louis Wolfson, Le Schizo et les langues, Paris, Gallimard, p. 5-23. Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« Un nouvel archiviste » (compte rendu de Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir), in Critique, 274 (mars), p. 195-209. Rééd. en plaquette, Fata Morgana, coll. Scholies, 1972. Nouv. version in Foucault, 1986, infra.

« Faille et feux locaux. Kostas Axelos », in Critique, 26:275 (avril), p. 344-351. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Proust et les signes », in La Quinzaine littéraire, 103 (ier-i5 oct.), p. 18-21. Extrait de « La machine littéraire, » chap. ajouté à la ire éd. de Marcel Proust et les signes, 1964, supra.

Proust et les signes. Paris, Presses universitaires de France. Rééd. augmentée de Marcel Proust et les signes, 1964, supra. Ajouté, chap. 7, « La machine littéraire ».

Annotation à Michel Foucault, « Theatrum philosophicum », in Critique, 282 (nov.), p. 904.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « La synthèse disjonctive », in L’Arc, 43, Klossowski, p. 54-62. Nouv. version in L’Anti-Œdipe, 1972, infra.

1971

« Le troisième chef-d’œuvre : Sylvie et Bruno », in Le Monde (11 juin), p. 21. Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« Gilles Deleuze » (sur 1’« affaire Jaubert »), in La Cause du peuple. J’accuse (supplément de juin).

G.D., Michel Foucault, Denis Langlois, Claude Mauriac & Denis Perrier-Daville, « Questions à Marcellin », in Le Nouvel Observateur (5 juill.), p. 15.

1972

G.D. & Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1.1, L’Anti-Œdipe. Paris, Editions de Minuit. 2e éd., 1973, chap, ajouté en appendice : « Bilan-programme pour machines-désirantes » {Minuit 2, 1973, infra).

« Hume », in François Châtelet (dir.), Histoire de la philosophie, t. IV, Les Lumières. Paris, Hachette, p. 65-78. Rééd. in F. Châtelet (dir.), La Philosophie, t. II, De Galilée à Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Venders, Marabout, 1979, p. 226-239. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« À quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme ? », in François Châtelet (dir.), Histoire de la philosophie, t. VIII, Le XXe siècle. Paris, Hachette, p. 299-335. Rééd. in F. Châtelet (dir.), La Philosophie, t. IV, Au XXe siècle, Venders, Marabout, 1979, p. 293-329. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Trois problèmes de groupe », préface à Félix Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalité, Paris, François Maspero, 1972, p. i-xi. Rééd. in Chimères, 23 (été 1994), p. 7-21, sous le titre « Pierre-Félix », infra. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D. & Michel Foucault, « Les intellectuels et le pouvoir », in L’Arc, 49, Deleuze, p. 3-10. Rééd. (avec un entretien inédit avec Catherine Clément), 1980, infra. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « Sur Capitalisme et schizophrénie » (entretien avec Catherine Bac-kès-Clément), in L’Arc, 49, Deleuze, p. 47-55. Rééd. 1980. Rééd. sous le titre « Entretien sur L’Anti-Œdipe » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 24-38, infra.

Extraits de conférences inédites données par G.D. à l’Ecole normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm et à l’Université de Vincennes en 1970-1971, et de l’intervention de G.D. au colloque Proust à l’ENS (22 janv.), cités par France Berçu, « Sed perseverare diaboli-cum », in L’Arc, 49, Deleuze, p. 23-24, 26-30.

« À propos des psychiatres dans les prisons », in APL Informations, 12 (9 janv.), p. 2.

« Ce que les prisonniers attendent de nous… » (sur le Groupe d’information sur les Prisons), in Le Nouvel Observateur (31 janv.), p. 24. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D., Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Mauriac, Jean-Marie Domenach, Hélène Cixous, Jean Pierre Faye, Michel Foucault & Maurice Clavel, « On en parlera demain. Les dossiers (incomplets) de l’écran », in Le Nouvel Observateur (7 févr.), p. 25.

« Appréciation » (sur Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure, Paris, Klincksieck, 1971), in La Quinzaine littéraire, 140 (iermai), p. 19. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « Deleuze et Guattari s’expliquent… » (entretien avec Maurice Nadeau, Raphaël Pividal, François Châtelet, Roger Dadoun, Serge Leclaire, Henri Torrubia, Pierre Clastres & Pierre Rose), in La Quinzaine littéraire, 143 (16-30 juin), p. 15-19. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Gilles Deleuze présente Hélène Cixous ou l’écriture stroboscopique » (compte rendu du roman d’H. Cixous, Neutre), in Le Monde, 8576 (11 août), p. 10. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « Capitalismo e schizofrenia » (entretien avec Vittorio Marchetti), in Tempi moderni, 12, p. 47-64 (photographies de Deleuze, de Guattari et de patients de la Clinique de la Borde). Version française : « Capitalisme et schizophrénie », in L’Ile déserte et autres textes, 2002, infra.

« Qu’est-ce que c’est, tes “machines désirantes” à toi ? » (introduction à Pierre Bénichou, « Sainte Jackie, comédienne et bourreau »), in Les Temps modernes, 316 (nov.), p. 854-856. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Joyce indirect », in Change, 11, p. 54-59. Cet article est une compilation, due à Jean Paris, de textes sur Joyce tirés de livres de G.D. : Proust et les signes, 1970, Différence et répétition, 1968 et Logique du sens, 1969 (cf. supra).

1973

G.D. & Daniel Defert, « Sur les lettres de H.M. », in Suicides dans les prisons en 1972, Paris, Gallimard, p. 38-40. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D. & Gérard Fromanger, Fromanger, le peintre et le modèle. Paris, Baudard Alvarez. Contient « Le froid et le chaud », de G.D., et des reproductions de peintures de Fromanger. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

« Pensée nomade », suivie d’une discussion, à propos d’une communication de Pierre Klossowski, in Nietzsche aujourd’hui, t. I, Intensités, Paris, 10/18, p. 105-121, 159-190. Rééd. partielle in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, entretien, in M.A. Burnier (dir.), C’est demain la veille, Paris, Seuil, p. 137-161. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « Bilan-programme pour machines désirantes », in Minuit, z (janv.), p. 1-25. Rééd. en appendice à la 2e éd. de L’Anti-Œdipe, 1972, infra.

Contribution à la Grande Encyclopédie des homosexualités. Trois milliards de pervers, in Recherches, 12. Les textes sont anonymes, et la contribution de G.D. conjecturale (il pourrait s’agir de « Sex-Pol en acte », p. 28-31). Cf. l’appel « Sale race ! Sale pédé ! », mars 1973, infra.

Réponses à un questionnaire sur « La belle vie des gauchistes » élaboré par Guy Hoc-quenghem & Jean-François Bizot, in Actuel, 29 (mars). Rééd. in G. Hocquenghem, LAprès-Mai des faunes, Paris, Grasset, 1974, p. 97,101.

« Lettre à Michel Cressole », in La Quinzaine littéraire, 161 (ier avril), p. 17-19. Rééd. in M. Cressole, Deleuze, Paris, Editions universitaires, 1973, p. 107-118. Rééd. sous le titre « Lettre à un critique sévère » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 11-23, infra.

« Présence et fonction de la folie dans la Recherche du temps perdu », in Saggi e Richerche di Letteratura francese, vol. XII, nouv. sér., Rome, Editore, p. 381-390. Chap. ajouté à Proust et les signes, 1964 (supra) et 1976 (infra).

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « 14 mai 1914. Un seul ou plusieurs loups ? » (sur 1’« Homme aux loups » de Freud), in Minuit, 5 (sept.), p. 2-16. Nouv. version in Capitalisme et schizophrénie, t. II, Mille plateaux, 1980, infra.

« Relazione di Gilles Deleuze » et discussions in Armando Verdiglione (dir.), Psicanalisi e politica. Atti del Convegno di studi tenuto a Milano T8-9 maggio 1973, Milan, Feltrinelli, p. 7-11, 17-21, 37-40, 44-45, 169-172. Version française modifiée : « Cinq propositions sur la psychanalyse », in L’Ile déserte et autres textes, 2002, p. 381-390, infra.

G.D., Félix Guattari & Michel Foucault, « Chapitre V. Le discours du plan » (sur l’espace urbain), in François Fourquet & Lion Murard (dir.), Les Equipements de pouvoir {Recherches, 13, déc. 1973), p. 183-186. Rééd. sous le titre : « Chapitre IV. Formation des équipements collectifs », in Les Equipements du pouvoir, Paris, 10/18, 1976, p. 212-220.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « Le nouvel arpenteur. Intensités et blocs d’enfance dans Le Château », in Critique, 319 (déc.), p. 1046-1054. Nouv. version in Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, 1975, infra.

G.D. & Stefan Czerkinsky, « Faces et surfaces » (discussion et six dessins de Deleuze), in G.D. & Michel Foucault, Mélanges. Pouvoir et surface, Paris, s.e., p. 1-10 (cf. « Sept dessins », in Chimères, 1994, infra). Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

1974

Préface à Guy Hocquenghem, L’Après-Mai des faunes, Paris, Grasset, p. 7-17. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « 28 novembre 1947. Comment se faire un corps sans organes ? », in Minuit, 10 (sept.), p. 56-84. Nouv. version in Capitalisme et schizophrénie, t. II, Mille plateaux, 1980, infra.

![](André Bernold – Deleuze épars-Hermann (2005)_files/Andre9 Bernold – Deleuze e9pars-Hermann (2005)-16.jpg)

« Un art de planteur », in G.D., Jean Pierre Faye, Jacques Roubaud & .Alain Touraine. Deleuze-Faye -Roubaud-Touraine parlent de “Les Autres”, un film de Hugo Santiago écrit en collaboration avec Jorge Luis Borges et Adolfo Bioy Casares, Paris. Christian Bourgois, s.p. Rééd. in L’Ile déserte, 2002, infra.

1975

« Deux régimes de fous », in Armando Verdiglione (dir.), Psychanalyse et sémiotique. Actes du colloque de Milan, Paris, 10/18, p. 165-170. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Schizophrénie et société », in Encyclopœdia universalis, vol. XIV, Paris, Encyclopædia universalis, p. 733-735. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure. Paris, Editions de Minuit.

G.D., Roland Barthes & Gérard Genette, « Table ronde », in Cahiers Marcel Proust, nouv. sér. 7, p. 87-115. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

G.D. & Jean-François Lyotard, « A propos du département de Psychanalyse à Vincennes », in Les Temps modernes, 342 (janv.), p. 862-863. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Ecrivain non : un nouveau cartographe » (compte rendu de Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir), in Critique, 343 (déc.), p. 1207-1227. Nouv. version in Foucault, 1986, infra.

1976

G.D. & Félix Guattari, Rhizome. Introduction. Paris, Editions de Minuit. Nouv. version in Capitalisme et schizophrénie, t. II, Mille plateaux, 1980, infra.

Proust et les signes. Paris, Presses universitaires de France. Version augmentée de Marcel Proust et les signes, 1964 et 1970, supra. Ajouté en conclusion : « Présence et fonction de la folie. L’Araignée » (cf. Proust et les signes, 1964, supra).

« Avenir de la linguistique », préface à Henri Gobard, LAliénation linguistique, Paris, Flammarion, p. 9-14. Ed. simultanée sous le titre « Les langues sont des bouillies où des fonctions et des mouvements mettent un peu d’ordre polémique », in La Quinzaine littéraire (ier-i5 mai), p. 12-13. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Trois questions sur Six fois deux » (sur les téléfilms de Godard), in Cahiers du cinéma, 271, p. 5-12. Rééd. in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 55-66, infra.

« Gilles Deleuze fasciné par Le Misogyne » (compte rendu du roman d’Alain Roger), in La Quinzaine littéraire, 229 (16-31 mars), p. 8-9. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Nota dell’autore per l’edizione italiana », in Logica del senso, Milan, Feltrinelli, p. 293295 (trad. M. De Stéfanis). Cf. Logique du sens, 1969, supra. Version française sous le titre « Note pour l’édition italienne de Logique du sens », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 58-60, infra.

1977

G.D. & Claire Parnet, Dialogues. Paris, Flammarion.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, Politique et psychanalyse. Alençon, Bibliothèque des Mots perdus. Les contributions de G.D. à ce volume, « Quatre propositions sur la psychanalyse » et « L’interprétation des énoncés », sont rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Ascension du social », postface à Jacques Donzelot, La Police des familles, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, p. 213-220. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Le Juif riche » (sur le film de Daniel Schmid, L’Ombre des anges), in Le Monde (18 févr.), p. 26. Rééd. in Irène Lambelet (dir.), Daniel Schmid, Lausanne, L’Âge d’homme, 1982, p. 93-95. Cf. l’appel « À propos de L’Ombre des anges »,1977, infra. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Gilles Deleuze contre les Nouveaux Philosophes » (interview), in Le Monde (19-20 juin), p. 19. Rééd. en suppl. à Minuit, 24 (5 juin 1977), in Recherches, 30, Les Untorelli (nov. 1977), p. 179-184, et in Faut-il brûler les Nouveaux Philosophes ?, Paris, Nouvelles Éditions Oswald, 1978, p. 186-194, sous le titre « À propos des Nouveaux Philosophes et d’un problème plus général ». Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Nous croyons au caractère constructiviste de certaines agitations de gauche » (pétition en faveur de la gauche italienne), in Recherches, 30, Les Untorelli (nov.), p. 149-150. Cf. 1’« Appel des intellectuels français contre la répression en Italie », 1977, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « Le pire moyen de faire l’Europe » (sur Klaus Croissant et le groupe Baader-Meinhof), in Le Monde (2 nov.), p. 6. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

Transcription d’un séminaire du 7 juin (sur les Nouveaux Philosophes), trad. (anonyme) en espagnol sous le titre « El intelectual domesticado », in Semanario cultural del periodico “El Pueblo” (21 mai 1978).

Notes d’introduction et de conclusion pour le projet de livre de Martial Guéroult, Spinoza, t. III, in Revue philosophique de France et de l’étranger, CLXVII, p. 285, 302. Attention : ces notes sont signées « G.D. » et n’ont pas été attribuées définitivement à Deleuze.

1978

G.D. & Carmelo Bene, Sovrapposizioni. Milan, Feltrinelli.

« Deux questions » (sur l’usage de la drogue) in François Châtelet, G.D., Eriik Genevois, Félix Guattari, Rudolf Ingold, Numa Musard & Claude Olievenstein, ...où il est question de la toxicomanie, Alençon, Bibliothèque des Mots perdus, 1978, n.p. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

G.D. & Fanny Deleuze, « Nietzsche et saint Paul, Lawrence et Jean de Patmos », préface à D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, Paris, Balland, 1978, p. 7-37 (trad. de Lawrence par Fanny Deleuze). Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« Spinoza et nous » et discussion, in Revue de synthèse, IIL89-91 (janv.-sept.). p. 2"'i-2~8. Nouv. version in Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, 1981 (2e éd. de Spinoza. 19^0, supra). Cf. Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, 1981, infra.

« Philosophie et minorité », in Critique, 34:369 (févr.), p. 154-155.

« Les gêneurs » (sur les Palestiniens), in Le Monde (7 avril). Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« La plainte et le corps » (compte rendu de Pierre Fedida, L’Absence), in Le Monde (13 oct.). Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Rendre audibles des forces non audibles par elles-mêmes », texte distribué lors d’une séance de synthèse de l’IRCAM (févr.). Version remaniée in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

1979

« En quoi la philosophie peut servir à des mathématiens, ou même à des musiciens — même et surtout quand elle ne parle pas de musique ou de mathématiques », in Jean Brunet, B. Cassen, François Châtelet, P. Merlin & M. Reberioux (dir.), Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre, Paris, Editions Alain Moreau, p. 120-121. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Lettera aperta ai giudici di Negri » (sur l’arrestation d’Antonio Negri), in La Repubblica (io mai), p. 1, 4. Version française : « Lettre ouverte aux juges de Negri » in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 155-159, infra.

Membre du Comité de préparation des Etats généraux de la Philosophie (16-17 juin), Paris, Flammarion, p. 6-19.

« Ce livre est littéralement une preuve d’innocence » (compte rendu d’Antonio Negri, Marx au-delà de Marx), in Le Matin de Paris (13 déc.), p. 32. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

1980

G.D. & Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, t. II, Mille plateaux. Paris, Editions de Minuit.

« 8 ans après. Entretien 1980 » avec Catherine Clément, in EArc, 49, Deleuze, p. 99-102. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

G.D. & François Châtelet, « Pourquoi en être arrivé là ? » (entretien sur l’Université de Paris VUI-Vincennes avec J.P. Gene), in Libération (17 mars), p. 4.

G.D., Francois Châtelet & Jean-François Lyotard, « Pour une commission d’enquête » (sur Vincennes), in Libération (17 mars), p. 4.

« Mille plateaux ne font pas une montagne, ils ouvrent mille chemins philosophiques » (entretien avec Christian Descamps, Didier Eribon & Robert Maggiori), in Libération

(23 oct.). Rééd. in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, sous le titre « Sur Mille plateaux », p. 39-52, infra.

1981

Spinoza. Philosophie pratique. Paris, Editions de Minuit. Version augmentée de Spinoza. Textes choisis, 1970, supra. Textes ajoutés : chap. III, « Les Lettres du mal », chap. V, « L’évolution de Spinoza », et chap. VI, « Spinoza et nous ». Cf. « Spinoza et nous », in Revue de synthèse, 1978, supra.

« Peindre le cri », in Critique, 408 (mai), p. 506-511. Extrait de Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, 1981, infra, paru en avant-première à l’édition complète.

Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation. Paris, Editions de la Différence. Le vol. I contient le texte de Deleuze, le vol. II des reproductions de peintures de Bacon. 2e éd. publiée en 1984, reprenant le texte de G.D. tel quel et davantage de peintures de Bacon. Cf. « Books », in Artforum, 1984, infra.

« La peinture enflamme l’écriture » (entretien avec Hervé Guibert), in Le Monde (3 déc.), p. 15. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« A proposito del Manfred alla Scala (1 ottobre 1980) », in Carmelo Bene, Otello, 0 la deficienza della donna, Milan, Feltrinelli, p. 7-9 (trad. Jean-Paul Manganato). Originellement publié çn notes in C. Bene, Manfred, Fonit Cetra. Version française : « Manfred : un extraordinaire renouvellement », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 173-174, infra.

1982

Préface à Antonio Negri, L’Anomalie sauvage. Puissance et pouvoir chez Spinoza, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, p. 9-12 (texte de Negri trad. par François Matheron). Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Lettera italiana », in Alfabeta, 33 (févr.).

« Les Indiens de Palestine » (entretien avec Elias Sanbar), in Libération (8-9 mai), p. 20-21. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Lettre à Uno sur le langage », in Gendai shiso (Revue de la pensée aujourd’hui), Tokyo (déc.), p. 50-58 (trad. en japonais par Kuniichi Uno). Version française in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 185-186.

G.D. & Kuniichi Uno, « Exposé d’une poétique rhizomatique », in Gendai shiso (Revue de la pensée aujourd’hui), Tokyo (déc.), p. 94-102 (trad. en japonais par Kuniichi Uno). Il s’agit d’une lettre d’Uno à Deleuze (p. 94-100), de la réponse de G.D. (p. 100-101) et de la transcription d’une conversation téléphonique entre eux (p. 101-102).

1983

Cinéma 1. Limage-mouvement. Paris, Editions de Minuit.

« L’abstraction lyrique », in Change International, 1, p. 82. Extrait de Cinéma 1, 1983, supra.

« Preface to the English Translation » de Nietzsche and Philosophy, New York, Columbia University Press, p. ix-xiv (trad. Hugh Tomlinson). Cf. Nietzsche et la philosophie, 1962, supra. Version française : « Preface pour l’édition américaine de Nietzsche et la philosophie », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 187-193.

« La photographie est déjà tirée dans les choses » (entretien avec Pascal Bonitzer & Jean Narboni), in Cahiers du cinéma, 352 (oct.), p. 35-40. Rééd. sous le titre « Sur l’Image-Mouvement » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 67-81, infra.

« Cinéma 1, première » (entretien avec Serge Daney) et « Le philosophe menuisier » (entretien avec Didier Eribon), in Libération (3 oct.), p. 30-31. « Cinéma 1, première » rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Portrait du philosophe en spectateur » (entretien avec Hervé Guibert), in Le Monde (6 oct.), p. 1, 17. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Godard et Rivette », in La Quinzaine littéraire, 404 (ier nov.), p. 6-7. Nouv. version in Cinéma 2, 1985, infra.

G.D. & Jean-Pierre Bamberger, « Le pacifisme aujourd’hui » (entretien avec Claire Parnet), in Les Nouvelles (15-21 déc.), 1983, p. 60-64. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

1984

« Preface. On the four poetic formulas which might summarize the Kantian philosophy » à Kant’s Critical Philosophy. The Doctrine of the Faculties, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, p. vii-xiii (trad. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam). Cf. La Philosophie critique de Kant, 1963, supra. Version française : « Sur quatre formules poétiques qui pourraient résumer la philosophie kantienne », in Philosophie, 9 (1986), p. 29-34. Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« Books » (sur Francis Bacon), in Hr forum (janv.), p. 68-69 (trad. Lisa Liebmann). Texte apparenté à Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, 1981, supra, inclus en préface à la trad, anglaise (l’original en français a été perdu).

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « Mai 68 n’a pas eu lieu », in Les Nouvelles (3-10 mai), p. 75-76. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Lettre à Uno. Comment nous avons travaillé à deux », in Gendai shiso (Revue de la pensée aujourd’hui), Tokyo, 12:11 (9), p. 8-11 (trad, en japonais par Kuniichi Uno). Éd. française in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 218-220, infra.

« Le Temps musical », in Gendai shiso (Revue de la pensée aujourd’hui), Tokyo, 12:11 (9), p. 294-298 (trad, en japonais par Kuniichi Uno).

« Grandeur de Yasser Arafat », in Revue d’études palestiniennes, 10 (hiver), p. 41-43. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

G.D., François Châtelet & Félix Guattari, « Pour un droit d’asile politique un et indivisible », in Le Nouvel Observateur, 1041 (oct.), p. 18.

1985

Cinéma 2. L’Image-Temps. Paris, Editions de Minuit. Cf. « Godard et Rivette », in La Quinzaine littéraire, 1983, supra.

« Les plages d’immanence », in Annie Cazenave & Jean-François Lyotard (dir.), L’Art des confins. Mélanges offerts a Maurice de Gandillac, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, p. 79-81. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

Entretien avec Antoine Dulaure & Claire Parnet in L’Autre Journal, 8 (oct.), p. 10-22. Rééd. sous le titre « Les intercesseurs » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 165-184, infra.

« Le philosophe et le cinéma » (entretien avec Gilbert Calbasso & Fabrice Revault d’Al-lonnes), in Cinéma, 334 (18-24 déc.), p. 2-3. Rééd. sous le titre « Sur l’Image-Temps » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 82-87, infra.

« Il était une étoile de groupe » (sur la mort de François Châtelet), in Libération (27 déc.), p. 21-22. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra..

« La philosophie perd une voix » (entretien sur la mort de Vladimir Jankélévitch), in Libération (8-9 juin), p. 34.

1986

Foucault. Paris, Editions de Minuit. Cf. « Un nouvel archiviste », in Critique, 1970, et « Ecrivain non. Un nouveau cartographe », in Critique, 1975, supra.

« Preface to the English Edition » of Cinema 1. The Movement-Image, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, p. ix-x (trad. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam). Cf. Cinéma 1, 1983, supra. Version rançaise : « Préface pour l’édition américaine de L’Image-Mouvement », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 251-253, infra.

« Boulez, Proust et les temps. “Occuper sans compter” », in Claude Samuel (dir.), Eclats/Boulez, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, p. 98-100. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Optimisme, pessimisme et voyage. Lettre à Serge Daney », préface à Serge Daney, CinéJournal, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, p. 5-13. Rééd. in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 97-112, infra.

« Le plus grand film irlandais » (sur Samuel Beckett, Film), in Revue d’esthétique, p. 381-382. Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« Le cerveau, c’est l’écran » (entretien avec A. Bergala, Pascal Bonitzer, M. Chevrie, Jean Narboni, C. Tesson & S. Toubiana), in Cahiers du cinéma, 380 (févr.), p. 25-32. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« The intellectual and politics. Foucault and the prison » (entretien avec Paul Rabinow & Keith Gandal), in History of the Present, 2 (printemps), p. 1-2, 2021. Version française augmentée : « Foucault et les prisons », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 254-262, infra.

« Sur le regime cristallin », in Hors Cadre, 4, p. 39-45. Rééd. sous le titre « Doutes sur l’imaginaire » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 88-96, infra.

« “Fendre les choses, fendre les mots” » (entretien sur M. Foucault avec Robert Maggiori), in Libération (2 sept.), p. 27-28. Rééd. in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 115-122, infra.

« Michel Foucault dans la troisième dimension » (entretien avec Robert Maggiori), in Libération (3 sept.), p. 38. Rééd. in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 122-127, infra. Conclusion de « Fendre les choses, fendre les mots », in Libération, 1986, supra.

« La vie comme une oeuvre d’art » (entretien sur M. Foucault avec Didier Eribon), in Le Nouvel Observateur, 1138 (4 sept.), p. 66-68. Version augmentée in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 129-138, infra.

1987

« Preface to the English-Language Edition » et notes additionnelles aux Dialogues, New York, Columbia University Press, p. vii-x, 151-152 (trad. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam). Cf. Dialogues, 1977, supra. Version française : « Préface pour l’édition américaine de Dialogues », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 284-287, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « Prefazione per l’edizione italiana » de Millepiani. Capitalismo e schizofrenia, Rome, Bibliotheca Biographica, p. xi-xiv (trad. Giorgio Passerone). Cf. Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1980, supra. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Ce que la voix apporte au texte », in Théâtre national populaire. Alain Cuny, “Lire” », Lyon, Théâtre national populaire (nov.). Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

1988

Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque. Paris, Editions de Minuit.

Périclès et Verdi. La philosophie de François Châtelet. Paris, Editions de Minuit.

« Foucault, historien du présent », in Magazine littéraire, 277 (sept.), p. 51-52. Rééd. in

« Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif ? », 1989, infra.

« Signes et événements » (entretien avec Raymond Bellour & François Ewald), in Magazine littéraire, 257 (sept.), p. 16-25. Rééd. sous le titre « Sur la philosophie » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 185-212, infra.

« Un critère pour le baroque », in Chimères, 5-6, p. 3-9. Repris in Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque, 1988, supra. Cf. Chimères, 1987-1989, infra.

« “A philosophical concept…” », in Topoi, 7:2 (sept.), p. m-112. Rééd. in E. Cadava (dir.), Who Comes After the Subject?, New York, Routledge, 1991 (trad. Julien Deleuze). Une trad, française, due à René Major, a été publiée en 1989 alors que l’original français était censé perdu ; redécouvert ensuite, il a été réédité sous le titre « Réponse à une question sur le sujet » (p. 326-328) in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 326-328, infra.

« La pensée mise en plis » (entretien avec Robert Maggiori), in Libération (22 sept.), p. I-III. Rééd. sous le titre « Sur Leibniz » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 213-222, infra.

« Les pierres » (sur les Palestiniens), in al-Karmel, 29, p. 27-28. Publié en arabe. Version française in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 311-312, infra.

1989

« Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif ? » suivi d’une discussion, in Michel Foucault philosophe. Rencontre internationale de Paris (9, 10, njanv.), Paris, Seuil, p. 185-195. Cf. « Foucault, historien du présent », in Magazine littéraire, 1988, supra. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Preface to the English Edition » de Cinema 2. The Time-Image, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, p. xi-xii (trad. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta). Cf. Cinéma 2, 1985, supra. Version française : « Préface pour l’édition américaine de L’Image-Temps », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 329-331, infra.

« Postface. Bartleby, ou la formule », in Herman Melville, Bartleby. Les Iles enchantées. Le Campanile, Paris, Flammarion, p. 171-208 (texte de Melville trad, par Michèle Causse). Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« Les trois cercles de Rivette », in Cahiers du cinéma, 416 (févr.), p. 18-19. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Re-présentation de Masoch », in Libération (18 mai), p. 30. Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« Gilles Deleuze craint l’engrenage » (sur les écoles islamiques subventionnées par l’Etat en France), in Libération (26 oct.). Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Lettre à Réda Bensmaïa », in Lendemains, XIV: 53, p. 9. Rééd. sous le titre « Lettre à Réda Bensmaïa sur Spinoza » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 223-225, infra.

Lettre à Gian Marco Montesano, in G.D., Achille Bonito Oliva & Toni Negri, Gian Marco Montesano : guardando il cielo 21 giugno 1989, Rome, Monti, n.p.

1990

« Le devenir révolutionnaire et les créations politiques » (entretien avec Toni Negri), in Futur antérieur, 1 (printemps), p. 100-108. Rééd. sous le titre « Contrôle et devenir » in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 229-239, infra.

« Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle », in L’Autre Journal, 1 (mai). Rééd. in Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990, p. 240-247, infra.

Pourparlers 1972-1990, Paris, Éditions de Minuit. Recueil de dix-sept textes deia mentionnés (cf. supra), divisés en cinq sections : I. De “L’Anti-Œdipe a 'Muiz puiieaux . — IL Cinéma. — III. Michel Foucault. — IV. Philosophie. — IV sic . Politique.

Lettre citée par le traducteur dans l’introduction à G.D., Expressionism in Philosophy Spinoza, New York, Zone Books, p. 11 (trad. Martin Joughin).

« Les conditions de la question : qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? ■■■. in Chimères, 8 (mai), p. 123-132. Nouv. version in Qu est-ce que la philosophie ', 1991. infra. Cf. Chimères, 1987-1989, infra.

« Lettre-préface » à Mireille Buydens, Sahara. L’esthétique de Gilles Deleuze, Paris, Vrin, p. 5. G.D., Pierre Bourdieu, Jérôme Lindon & Pierre Vidal-Naquet, « Adresse au gouvernement français » (sur l’opération Bouclier du désert), in Libération (5 sept.), p. 6.

« Avoir une idée en cinéma. A propos du cinéma des Straub-Huillet », in Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Holderlin, Cézanne, Lédignan, Éditions Antigone, p. 65-77. Extraits d’une conférence donnée aux étudiants de la Fondation européene des Métiers de l’image et du Son (FEMIS), diffusée dans la série Océaniques (cf. la vidéo Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création l, 1987, infra), transcrits et présentés par Charles Tesson. Texte intégral publié sous le titre « Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ? » in Trafic, 27 (automne 1998), infra, et rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

1991

« A return to Bergson », postface à Bergsonism, New York, Zone, p. 115-118 (trad. Hugh Tomlinson). Cf. Le Bergsonisme, 1966, supra. Version française : « Postface pour l’édition américaine : Un retour à Bergson », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 313-315, infra.

« Preface to the English-language Edition » Bl Empiricism and Subjectivity. An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, New York, Columbia University Press, p. ix-x (trad. Constantin V. Boundas). Cf. Empirisme et subjectivité, 1953, supra. Version française : « Préface pour l’édition américaine d’Empirisme et subjectivité », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 341-342, infra.

« Préface » à Éric Alliez, Les Temps capitaux, t. I, Récits de la conquête du temps, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, p. 7-9. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Prefazione. Una nuova stilistica » à Giorgio Passerone, La Linea astratta. Pragmatica dello stile, Milan, Edizioni Angelo Guerini, p. 9-13 (trad. Giorgio Passerone). Version française : « Préface. Une nouvelle stylistique », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 343-347, infra.

G.D. & René Scherer, « La guerre immonde » (sur la guerre du Golfe), in Libération (4 mars), p. 11. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? Paris, Éditions de Minuit. Cf. « Les conditions de la question : qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? », 1990, supra. Pages 106-108 rééd. sous le titre « Péguy, Nietzsche, Foucault » in Amitiés Charles Péguy. Bulletin d’informations et de recherches, 15:57 (janv.-mars 1992), p. 53-55.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « Secret de fabrication. Deleuze-Guattari : Nous deux » (entretien avec Robert Maggiori), in Libération (12 sept.), p. 17-19. Rééd. in R. Maggiori, La Philosophie au jour le jour, Paris, Flammarion, 1994, p. 374-381.

G.D. & Félix Guattari, « “Nous avons inventé la ritournelle” » (entretien avec Didier Eri-bon), in Le Nouvel Observateur (12-18 sept.), p. 109-110. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

1992

Version revue du « Mystère d’Ariane », in Magazine littéraire, 298 (avril), p. 20-24. Cf. « Mystère d’Ariane », in Bulletin de la Société française d’Etudes nietzschéennes, 1963, supra. Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

« Remarques » en réponse aux essais d’Eric Alliez & Francis Wolff sur Deleuze et Jacques Derrida, in Barbara Gassin (dir.), Nos Grecs et leurs modernes. Les stratégies contemporaines d’appropriation de l’Antiquité, Paris, Seuil, p. 249-250. Nouv. version in Critique et clinique, 1993, infra.

G.D. & Samuel Beckett, Quad et autre pièces pour la télévision, suivi de L’Epuisé, Paris, Editions de Minuit. Contient quatre pièces de Beckett (Quad, Trio du Fantôme, ... que nuages…, Nacht und Traume), trad, de l’anglais par Edith Fournier, et L’Epuisé de Deleuze, p. 55-106.

1993

Lettre sur Michel Foucault citée in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York, Simon & Schuster, p. 298 (trad. James Miller).

« Pour Félix » (sur la mort de F. Guattari), in Chimères, 18 (hiver), p. 209-210. Cf. Chimères, 1987-1989, infra. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Lettre-préface » à Jean-Clet Martin, Variations. La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze, Paris, Payot, p. 7-9. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

Critique et clinique, Paris, Editions de Minuit. Plusieurs textes inédits et reprises de textes déjà publiés (cf. supra).

1994

« Preface to the English Edition » de Difference and Repetition, New York, Columbia University Press, p. xv-xvii (trad. Paul Patton). Cf. Différence et répétition, 1968, supra. Version française : « Préface à l’édition américaine de Différence et répétition », in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, p. 280-283, infra.

« Sept dessins » (dessins), in Chimères, 21 (hiver), p. 13-20. Réimpr. de cinq dessins de 1973 (cf. « Faces et surfaces », 1973, supra) et deux dessins suppl. (p. 19, sans titre, et p. 20, « Chambre de malade »). Cf. Chimères, 1987-1989, infra.

G.D., Ferdinand Alquié, Louis Guillermit & Alain Vinson, « La chose en soi chez Kant », in Lettres philosophiques, y, p. 30-46. Ensemble de lettres écrites par G.D., Alquié et Guillermit à Vinson en 1964 (fac-similé de la lettre de G.D. p. 36, texte reproduit P- 37-38).

« Désir et plaisir » (sur M. Foucault, La Volonté de savoir, in Magazine littéraire, 325 (oct.), p. 59-65. Il s’agit d’une série de notes adressées indirectement à Foucault, écrites en 1977. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

1995

« L’immanence. Une vie… », in Philosophie, 47 (1er sept.), p. 3-7. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Le “Je me souviens” de Gilles Deleuze » (entretien avec Didier Eribon), in Le Nouvel Observateur, 1619 (16-22 nov.), p. 50-51.

« Extrait du dernier texte écrit par Gilles Deleuze », in Cahiers du cinéma, 497 (déc.), p. 28. Extrait d’un texte publié en appendice à l’édition en livre de poche de G.D. & Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Paris, Flammarion, 1996, p. 177-185. Cf. « L’actuel et le virtuel », 1996, infra.

1996

« L’actuel et le virtuel », partie I et II en appendice à l’édition en livre de poche de G.D. & Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Paris, Flammarion, 1996, p. 177-185. Cf. Dialogues, 1977, supra.

Citations de lettres de G.D. à Arnaud Villani in A. Villani, « Méthode et théorie dans l’œuvre de Gilles Deleuze », in Les Temps modernes, vol. 51, 586 (janv.-févr.), p. 149,151-152. Les lettres de G.D. sont datées du 17 août 1984 et du 29 décembre 1986.

Citations de lettres de G.D. à René Schérer in R. Schérer, « Retour sur et à Deleuze, un ton d’amitié », in Libération (8 mars), p. 5.

Citation d’une lettre de G.D. à Philip Goodchild in P. Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy, Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, p. 185, note 8. La lettre de G.D. est datée de février 1993.

1997

G.D. & Jacqueline Duhême, L’Oiseau philosophie, Paris, Seuil. Ce livre pour enfants contient de brefs passages des Dialogues et de Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? illustrés par J. Duhême. La préface de Martine Laffon comprend une citation d’une lettre de G.D. à J. Duhême.

Citation d’une lettre de G.D. à Timothy S. Murphy in T.S. Murphy, Wising Up the Marks. The Amodern William Burroughs, Berkeley, University of California Press, p. 7. La lettre de G.D. est datée du 26 mars 1991.

« Sur la musique (cours de Vincennes, 8 mars 1977) », in Nomad’s Land, 2 (automne-hiver), p. 5-20.

1998

« Vincennes Seminar Session, May 3, 1977. On Music », in Discourse, 20:3 (automne), p. 205-218 (trad. Timothy S. Murphy).

« Correspondance D. Mascolo-G. Deleuze », in Lignes, 33 (mars), p. 222-226. Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

« Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ? » (transcription intégrale du séminaire télévisé de la Fondation européenne des Métiers de l’Image et du Son, FEMIS, cf. la vidéo Qu est-ce que l’acte de création ?, 1987, infra), in Trafic, 27 (automne). Rééd. in Deux régimes de fous, 2003, infra.

1999

« Extraits de correspondance » de G.D. à Arnaud Villani in A. Villani, La Guêpe et l’orchidée. Essai sur Gilles Deleuze, Paris, Belin, p. 125-127.

« Réponses à une série de questions (novembre 1981) », in A. Villani, La Guêpe et l’orchidée. Essai sur Gilles Deleuze, Paris, Belin, p. 129-131.

2002

L’Ile déserte et autres textes. Textes et entretiens, 1953-1974. Paris, Éditions de Minuit (éd. David Lapoujade). Recueil de textes et d’entretiens des années 1953-1974, non inclus dans les précédents ouvrages de G.D. (cf. supra). Ajouté, un texte inédit : « Causes et raisons des îles désertes », p. 11-17, datant des années 1950.

2003

Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens, 1975-1995. Paris, Éditions de Minuit (éd. David Lapoujade). Recueil de textes et d’entretiens des années 1975-1995, non inclus dans les précédents ouvrages de G.D. (cf. supra). Ajouté, un texte inédit : « Sur les principaux concepts de Michel Foucault », p. 226-243, datant de 1984.

RADIO RECORDINGS

« Le grand rationnalisme. Athéisme de Spinoza », discussion dans l’émission Analyse spectrale de l’Occident (durée : 23 min 30). ire diffusion le 10 décembre i960. Prod. Serge Jouhet.

« Douleur et souffrance, » discussion dans l’émission Recherche de notre temps (durée : 40 min). ire diffusion le 3 avril 1963.

Entretien avec Jean Ristat sur Louis Wolfson et Le Schizo et les langues (Paris. Gallimard, 1970, supra) dans l’émission Les Idées et l’histoire (durée : 13 min). irc diffusion sur France Culture le 2 juillet 1970.

« Délire et désir », radio-montage comprenant des discussions avec G.D. enregistrées à Nanterre et des citations de L’Anti-Œdipe, ainsi que des enregistrements d’Ailen Gins-berg, Antonin Artaud & Jean-Jacques Abraham, « L’Homme au magnétophone » (durée approximative : 150 min). Diffusion sur France Culture en 1973 (?). Prod. René Farabet & Pascal Werner (?) pour l’Atelier de Création radiophonique.

G.D. & Hélène Cixous, « Littérasophie et philosofiture », discussion dans l’émission Dialogues (durée : 75 min). Enregistrement le 7 juin 1973 à l’Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes, ire diffusion sur France Culture le 11 septembre 1973. Prod. Roger Pillaudin.

Lecture du texte de Nietzsche, « Le voyageur » (Aphorisme 638, in Menschliches, Allzu-menschliches), sur le 45-tours « Ouais Marchais, mieux qu’en 68 (ex : le voyageur) » (durée : 4 min 22) du groupe de rock Schizo (Richard Pinhas). Prod. Mathieu Carrière, réal. Disques Disjuncta, Paris, 1973. Repris dans l’album Electronique Guérilla du groupe de rock Heldon (Richard Pinhas), Paris, Disques Disjuncta, 1974. Rééd. en 1993 par Cuneiform Records, Silver Spring, MD.

« Avez-vous lu Baruch ? ou le portrait présumé de Spinoza », dans l’émission Samedis de France Culture (durée : 12 min 50). Enregistrement en décembre 1977, ire diffusion sur France Culture le 4 mars 1978. Prod. Michèle Cohen.

Présentation de « Freud et la psychanalyse » dans l’émission Mi-fugue Mi-raisin (durée : 5 min). Enregistrement le 7 avril 1978, ire diffusion sur France Culture le 8 avril 1978.

Enregistrement presque inaudible, sans doute un commentaire de F Ethique de Spinoza (« L’Éthique 1 », durée : 6 min 21, et « L’Éthique 2 », durée : 4 min 48). Repris dans l’album L’Ethique par Richard Pinhas (Paris, Puise, 1981). Rééd. en 1992 par Cuneiform Records, Silver Spring, MD.

Enregistrement presque inaudible, sans doute une lecture ou un commentaire de l’Ethique de Spinoza (« Livre 5. L’Éthique », durée : 8 min 39, et « 1992. Iceland, The Fall », durée : 4 min 37). Repris dans le double album RhizosphèrelLive à Bobino, Paris, 1982, par Richard Pinhas (Silver Spring, MD, Cuneiform Records, 1994). Rhizosphère contient des notes de G.D. et de F. Guattari : une citation de Rhizome (Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1976, p. 35, supra, rééd. in Mille plateaux, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980, P- 19» supra), et une citation de Différence et répétition (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1968, p. 16, supra}.

« Michel Foucault. Savoir, pouvoir, subjectivation », séminaire tenu à l’Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes du 29 octobre 1985 au 21 janvier 1986 (34 cassettes). Cassettes sont disponibles au Centre Michel Foucault (43bls rue de la Glacière, 75013 Paris), copie interdite.

Extraits de « L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze » (cf. la vidéo L’Abécédaire de G. Deleuze, 1995» infra}, in Rhizome. No beginning no end, de Hazan + Shea (durée : 4 min 40). Repris dans l’album Folds and Rhizomes for Gilles Deleuze, Bruxelles, Sub Rosa, 1996. Repris, sous une forme différente, dans l’album Double Articulation. Another Plateau, Bruxelles, Sub Rosa, 1996.

Mise au point sur « l’herbe » (durée : 32 sec). Repris dans l’album In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze, Francfort, Mille Plateaux, 1996, mais l’enregistrement et sans doute la fabrication ont été réalisés bien avant cette date.

CD « Le Pli », par le groupe de rock Schizo (Richard Pinhas & Maurice Dantec), avec la voix de G.D., Night and Day (France), 2002.

VIDEO RECORDINGS

« Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ? » Conférence présentée dans l’émission Mardis de la Fondation, 17 mars 1987 (en couleur, durée : 50 min). Prod. Fondation européene des Métiers de l’image et du Son (FEMIS) et ARTS-Cahiers multi-média du ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. Diffusion dans l’émission télévisée Océaniques. Des idées, des hommes, des oeuvres. Rediffusion en 1989. Enregistrement vidéo sur le DVD L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, Paris, Éditions Montparnasse, 2004. Transcription : « Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ? », in Trafic, 27 (automne 1998) (cf. Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ?, 1990, supra}.

« L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, » discussions dans l’émission bimensuelle Métropolis sur la chaîne franco-allemande Arte, 15 janvier 1995. Coord. Pierre-André Boutang. Discussions filmées en 1988 par Claire Parnet. Sommaire : « A comme Animal », « B comme Boisson », « C comme Culture », « D comme Désir », « E comme Enfance », « F comme Fidélité », « G comme Gauche », « H comme Histoire de la philosophie », « I comme Idée », « J comme Joie », « K comme Kant », « L comme Literature », « M comme Maladie », « N comme Neurologie », « O comme Opéra », « P comme Professeur », « Q comme question », « R comme Résistance », « S comme Style », « T comme Tennis », « U comme Un », « V comme Voyage », « W comme Wittgenstein », « X & Y comme inconnues », « Z comme Zigzag ».

![](André Bernold – Deleuze épars-Hermann (2005)_files/Andre9 Bernold – Deleuze e9pars-Hermann (2005)-17.jpg)

Enregistrement vidéo : L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, Paris, Editions Montparnasse, 1997. Trois vidéocassettes (durée totale : 7 h 30 min). Enregistrement DVD en 2004.

PUBLICATIONS EDITED OR DIRECTED BY DELEUZE

Instincts et institutions. Paris, Hachette, 1953 (cf. suprd).

Mémoire et vie. Textes choisis d’Henri Bergson. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1957.

Membre du Comité de direction de la Revue de métaphysique et de morale de janvier-mars 1965 à janvier-mars 1975.

Cahiers de Royaumont. Philosophie, VI, Nietzsche. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1967 (cf. suprd).

G.D. &c Michel Foucault, puis Maurice de Gandillac, Friedrich Nietzsche. Œuvres philosophiques complètes. Paris, Gallimard, 1977-1995. Dix-huit volumes :

I, vol. 1 : La Naissance de la tragédie et Fragments posthumes (1869-1872).

  • I, vol. 2 : Ecrits posthumes (1870-1873).

  • II, vol. 1 : Considérations inactuelles, I et IL Fragments posthumes (été 1872-hiver 1873-1874).

  • II, vol. 2 : Considérations inactuelles, III et IV Fragments posthumes (début 1874-prin-temps 1876).

  • III , vol. 1 : Humain, trop humain. Fragments posthumes (1876-1878).

  • II I, vol. 2 : Humain, trop humain. Fragments posthumes (1878-1879).

  • IV, Aurore. Fragments posthumes (1879-1881).

  • V, Le Gai savoir. Fragments posthumes (1881-1882) (cf. « Introduction générale », 1967, suprd).

  • VI, Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra.

  • VII , Par-delà bien et mal. La Généalogie de la morale.

  • VI II, vol. 1 : Le Cas Wagner. Crépuscule des idoles. L’Antéchrist. Ecce homo. Nietzsche contre Wagner.

  • VII I, vol. 2 : Dithyrambes de Dionysos. Poèmes et fragments poétiques posthumes (1882-1888).

  • IX, Fragments posthumes (été 1882-printemps 1884).

  • X, Fragments posthumes (printemps-automne 1884).

  • XI, Fragments posthumes (automne 1884-automne 1885).

  • XII , Fragments posthumes (automne 1885-automne 1887).

  • XIII , vol. 2 : Fragments posthumes (automne 1887-mars 1888).

  • XIV, vol. 1 : Fragments posthumes (début janvier 1888-début janvier 1889).

G.D. & Félix Guattari, Chimères. Gourdon, Éditions Dominique Bedou, 1987-1989 ;

Paris, Éditions de la Passion, 1990. Publ. trimestrielle depuis le printemps 1987,

31 numéros jusqu’en été 1997. G.D. apparaît comme directeur de publication depuis le n° 2 (été 1987) jusqu’au n° 17 (automne 1992) ; ensuite, G.D. et F. Guattari apparaissent comme « fondateurs ». Cf. supra : « Un critère pour le baroque », 1988, « Les conditions de la question : qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? », 1990, « Pour Félix », 1993 et « Sept dessins », 1994.

APPEALS AND PETITIONS SIGNED BY DELEUZE (NON-EXHAUSTIVE LIST)

Éric Alliez, « Naissance et conduites des temps, capitaux » (doctorat d’État), 1987. Publié sous le titre Les Temps capitaux, t. I, Récits de la conquête du temps, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1991 (cf. supra).

Michel Courthial, « Le visage » (doctorat d’État), 1986.

Christine Faure, « Désir et révolution. Essai sur le populisme russe et la formation de l’État soviétique » (doctorat d’État), 1977.

Edgar Garavito, « La transcursivité » (doctorat d’université), 1985.

Sarah Kofman, « Travaux sur Nietzsche et sur Freud » (doctorat d’État) 1976. Publié sous le titre Nietzsche et la métaphore, Paris, Payot, 1972, et Quatre romans analytiques, Paris, Galilée, 1974.

Cyrille Martin, « Nietzsche et le corps de César. Étude sur le rapport de Nietzsche aux noms de l’histoire » (doctorat d’État), 1973.

Jean-Clet Martin, étude sur le Moyen Âge et l’art roman (grade et date inconnus). Cf. « Lettre-préface », 1993, supra. Publié sous le titre Ossuaires. Anatomie du Moyen Age roman, Paris, Payot, 1995.

Marie-José Noël, « Fourier-Socio-Diagnostic » (doctorat de 3e cycle), 1972.

André de S. Parente, « Narrativité et non-narrativité filmique » (doctorat de 3e cycle), 1987.

Giorgio Passerone, « La ligne abstraite » (doctorat d’université), 1987. Publié sous le titre La Linea astratta. Pragmatica dello stile, Milan, Guerini Studio, 1991 (cf. supra).

Jacky Quentrec, « Théories du cinéma. Une histoire du savoir cinématographique, 1907-1962 » (doctorat de 3e cycle), 1987.

Kuniichi Uno, « Artaud et l’espace des forces » (doctorat d’université), 1980.

Jean-Noël Vuarnet, « Le philosophe-artiste » (doctorat de 3e cycle), 1976.

APPELS ET PÉTITIONS SIGNÉS PAR DELEUZE (LISTE NON EXHAUSTIVE)

« Appel aux travailleurs du quartier contre les réseaux organisés de racistes appuyés par le pouvoir » (contre les violences anti-Algériens), après le 27 novembre 1971, inédit mais cité in Didier Éribon, Michel Foucault, Paris, Flammarion, 1989, p. 254.

« Appel contre les bombardements des digues du Vietnam par l’aviation U.S. », in Le Monde, 9-10 juillet 1972, p. 5.

« Sale race ! Sale pédé ! » (contre l’exclusion des homosexuels politiquement actifs de F Université), in Recherches, 12, Grande Encyclopédie des homosexualités. Trois milliards de pervers, mars 1973 (cf. supra).

« Plusieurs personnalités regrettent “le silence des autorités françaises” » (contre les violations des droits de l’homme en Iran), in Le Monde, 4 février 1976, p. 4.

« L’Appel du 18 joint » (pour la légalisation de la marijuana), in Libération, 18 juin 1976, p. 16.

« À propos de L’Ombre des anges. Des cinéastes, des critiques et des intellectuels protestent contre les atteintes à la liberté d’expression », in Le Monde, 18 février 1977, p. 26. Cf. « Le Juif riche », 1977, supra.

« Un appel pour la révision du Code pénal à propos des relations mineurs-adultes », in Le Monde, 22-23 mal I977» P- 24-

« L’appel des intellectuels français contre la répression en Italie » (contre la répression des groupes d’extrême-gauche menée par le Parti communiste italien), in Recherches, 30, Les Untorelli, novembre 1977, p. 149-150.

Cf. « Nous croyons au caractère constructiviste de certaines agitations de gauche », 1977, supra.

« Appel à la candidature de Coluche », in Le Monde, 19 novembre 1980, p. 10.

« Appeal for the formation of an International Commission to inquire about the Italian judiciary situation and the situation in Italian jails », lancé en janvier 1981, cité in Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, Brooklyn, Autonomedia, 1991, p. 238. Texte disponible dans les Texas Archives of Autonomist Marxism, c/o Harry Cleaver, Department of Economics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-1173.

« Un appel d’écrivains et de scientifiques de gauche » (soutien au syndicat Solidarité et à l’indépendance de la Pologne), in Le Monde, 23 décembre 1981, p. 5. Repris, sous forme abrégée, in Le Matin de Paris, 21 décembre 1981, p. 9.

« Appel des intellectuels européens pour la Pologne » (contre l’emprisonnement des militants en Pologne), in Libération, 30 décembre 1981, p. 36.

« Un million pour la résistance salvadorienne » (contre l’intervention de l’administration Reagan au Salvador), in Le Matin de Paris, 5 février 1982, p. 1.

« Des intellectuels préparent un Livre blanc en faveur des inculpés » (sur l’affaire « Coral », accusation infondée de mauvais traitements infligés à des enfants), in Le Monde, 22 janvier 1983, p. 12.

« Les QHS en Italie. Les familles des détenus alertent l’opinion européene » (contre les « prisons spéciales » italiennes pour les terroristes présumés), in Libération, 6 juin 1984, p. 10.

« Pour un droit d’asile politique un et indivisible », in Le Nouvel Observateur, 1041, octobre 1984, p. 18. Cf. « Pour un droit d’asile politique un et indivisible », 1984, supra.

Pétitions réclamant le report du procès des membres d’Action directe (groupe terroriste d’extrême-gauche), au motif que leur grève de la faim met leur santé en danger, 22 février 1988 (publiée in Le Monde, 23 février 1988, p. 10) et 20 mars 1988. Mentionnées in Michael Dartnell, Action directe, Londres, Cass, 1995, p. 168,170-71,179.

« La veuve d’Ali Mecili va déposer plainte contre X… pour forfaiture » (contre l’expulsion d’un suspect de meurtre pour des raisons d’« ordre public »), in Le Monde, 15 décembre 1989.

EXCERPTS IN FACSIMILE FROM A CONFERENCE OF GILLES DELEUZE – Theory of Multiplicities in Bergson

In Deleuze, the notion of multiplicities is a key concept. From the distinction or dual opposition of numerical multiplicities and qualitative multiplicities, fundamentally based on Bergson (but also on Stumpf, on Riemann, and on Husserl), Deleuze will invent concepts that are, on one hand, the intensities (that is, intensive multiplicities) and their distribution in Nietzsche’s work, and on the other hand, the plane of consistency or plane of immanence of desire populated by these real events that are desiring singularities as multiplicities. There is no real apprehension of desire without a serious understanding of these multiplicities, the power qualities that form machines and machines of machines.

The following reproductions or facsimiles are snapshots of Deleuzian thought. The aim here is not to recover an unpublished text (there are so many on the notion of multiplicity!), but to follow the way in which the formal setup unfolds, as if in a detective novel, by his own hand, we could say, this now classic opposition between quantitative multiplicities and qualitative multiplicities, between the extensive and the intensive (but also the virtual and the actual). These excerpts from a lecture titled Bergson’s Theory of Multiplicities seem to want to show us the course of thought, the very expression of thought in the process of forming. This is why the “original” handwriting grabs us like a real element of composition. The trace of the words signals towards (or from) the speed of thought, it is as if it’s the reverse side of it. Hence the importance, perhaps, of exposing a part of this unpublished lecture as being the preliminary reflection of what is concept creation in Deleuze.

P.S. — The abbreviations do not pose a problem, X for multiplicities, DI for Immediate data (Bergson), H for Husserl, etc. We regret that we do not know where and when this lecture was given, although the issue seems to situate it in the 1960s.

[Translator’s note: There is no way in hell that I am transcribing this to translate it. I’ll translate it if someone else transcribes it first.]

  1. See “The Invitation”, infra, p. 62.↩

  2. See infra, p. 55-57.↩

  3. See The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, Editions de Minuit, 1988, p. 127-132 (for example).↩

  4. As these lines fall, a letter arrives from a spirit knocker (nothing to do with Deleuze?): “The only fatality is to say demolished to this day of advances: we cannot know, none of us, to what extent the selection will operate: with a difference of a conjunction boundary: coincidence? vise? — the exercise of all morality; backwards. Let’s say, in proportion to hit and miss. A coastal fluid where intersecting dèdres succeed each other. That’s what lies beneath the black: as if abysmally in place” (Frédéric Martin, painter, and engraver in Lyon).↩

  5. Deleuze. A Philosophy of the Event (2nd version), in François Zourabichvili, Anne Sauvagnargues & Paola Marrati, The Philosophy of Deleuze, Paris, PUF, 2004, p. 80. In The Vocabulary of Deleuze (Paris, Ellipses, 2003), the same author suggests a “confrontation” between Deleuze and Derrida based on a distinction between the “deconstruction” and “perversion” of classical metaphysics.↩

  6. Let me say this: I had proposed to Deleuze and Derrida to respond together to some questions. They had accepted the principle. It would not have been an interview but two parallel series of responses to the same questions. This protocol was established between us in the spring of 1995, but Deleuze’s condition worsened irreversibly that summer. Derrida alludes to this episode in his tribute text from November 1995 (“I will have to wander alone,” in Chaque fois unique la fin du monde, Galilée, 2003, p. 235). The delay that rendered this project futile was my fault: I took too long to imagine the questions, feeling intimidated by the precision and delicacy that would be required. I was wrong, and I regret it. I should have moved forward first. But I also believe that this delay, this “too late,” was a law: the present does not understand itself in the present; its own difference must come to it from elsewhere. The difference between Deleuze and Derrida as their own difference — and consequently as an identity divided in itself — of a time, of a present of thought that formed a decisive inflection, this difference remains to be thought. That is not what I intend to do here: I sketch out some landmarks; I am still late. But if I still try to be present, it is today both out of loyalty to the missed appointment and because of (for) the friendship of André Bernold, the tenacious artisan of this present volume, who was a friend of both.↩

  7. Slightly aside from the sharing, on its edge, in thirds, is Levinas.↩

  8. At the same time, Adorno was elaborating his Negative Dialectics, placed under the sign of “the rigorous consciousness of non-identity” (French translation by Gérard Coffin, Joëlle Masson, Olivier Masson, Alain Renaut & Dagmar Trousson, Paris, Payot, 1978, p. 13).↩

  9. François Zourabichvili, Le Vocabulaire de Deleuze, op. oit., p. 24.↩

  10. La Voix et le phénomène.↩

  11. It is true that nothing resembles more a chemical formula than mystical symbols like INRI or IHS.↩↩

  12. The complete works, or nearly so, of Josef Maria Hoëné Wronski are collected under the title of Messianism, Paris, 1847. We can also mention, in 1848, Address to Civilized Nations on their Sinister Revolutionary Disorder as a Continuation of the Reform of Human Knowledge. A reform whose principle and center are the development of differential and integral calculus discovered by Newton and Leibniz into a theory of continuous functions or “indefinite summation which constitutes series”. A calculation of generating functions that leads to the absolute knowledge of the laws of the universe, the application of which to societies will, according to Wronski, “stifle the revolutionary antinomy”. The mysticism of science is a Janus bifrons.↩

  13. Plotinus, Enneads III, 8, Periphuseòs kai theòrias kai tou Henos (“Nature, Contemplation, and the One”).↩

  14. Treatises 41, 2 and 49 in the new edition that redistributes chronologically the 54 treatises composing the Enneads.↩

  15. “The beaches of immanence”, Two regimes of madmen, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2004, p. 244.↩

  16. Paizontes de tèn prôtên prin epikheirein spoudazein ei legoimen panta theôrias ephiesthai kai eis telos touto ble-pein… “Before we seriously approach our subject, if we were to say that all beings desire to contemplate and aim for this end” {Enneade III, 8, treatise 30, text established and translated by Émile Bréhier, Paris, Belles-Lettres, 1925, p. 154).↩

  17. Foucault, p. 140: “The superman, it is, according to Rimbaud’s formula, the man charged with the animals themselves… It is the man charged with the rocks themselves, or the inorganic.”↩

  18. Raymond Ruyer, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 1955.↩

  19. Fernand Deligny, Les Détours de l’agir ou le moindre geste, Paris, Hachette, 1979.↩

  20. “Immanence, a life”, Two regimes of madmen, p. 359.↩

  21. This is my emphasis. Excerpt from Ballanche, La Vision d’Hébal, Genève, Droz, 1969.↩

  22. This text is already given, partially, in the conclusion of Sartre or the Party of Life (Paris, Grasset, 1981), as well as in the introduction to Sartre in Situation (Paris, Hachette, coll. Texts and Debates, 2nd ed. Paris, Livre de Poche, 2000).↩

  23. I was not yet aware of Deleuze’s text written in 1964 and published in Arts (November 28, 1964, pp. 8-9, republished in Desert Island and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2002, pp. 109-113). In it, Deleuze proclaims the value of Critique of Dialectical Reason and praises Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize. He characterizes Sartre as a “genius of totalization,” opposing both Cartesian dualism and dialectical method. Sartre is, to him, a “private thinker” (what Nietzsche would have wished to become), with no ties to the State or the University.↩

  24. Dialogues (Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet), Flammarion, 1977, p. 19.↩

  25. 3rd Cahiers for a Morality, posthumous edition by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre from thousands of notes, many of which were lost in the post-war years.↩

  26. Dialogues, p. 31.↩

  27. See Cahier pour une morale, Gallimard, 1983.↩

  28. See Pascale Criton, “About a lecture on March 20, 1984: the ritornello and the gallop,” in Gilles Deleuze, une vie philosophique, ed. Eric Alliez, Institut Synthélabo-PUF, coll. Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1998.↩↩

  29. The lectures took place at the University of Saint-Denis, in small prefabricated buildings lining the road. Deleuze did not want a large amphitheater; he did not wish to speak into a microphone. In the rectangular room, sliding glass windows overlooked the wild vegetation of vacant lots nearby. On the blackboard, Deleuze had drawn a chalk diagram, illustrating the neo-Platonic dialectic of depth, and had written: “Depth can only emanate from a bottomless abyss: the unparticipable One.” Surrounded by a close quincunx of seats, he waited a while before starting, exchanging, as usual, some humorous remarks in a low voice.↩↩

  30. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 317.↩

  31. In my notebook, I find the following note: “1987 – Tuesday 10. This morning, Gilles had some of those moments when, in a disquieting fragility, a formidable cloud of soft, persistent, suspensive light rushes into his body. We dare hardly look at him. Only distant glances can come together, float. Qualitative time underpinning the most laborious moments.”↩

  32. “A blurry set, a synthesis of disparities, is defined only by a degree of consistency making precisely possible the distinction of the disparate elements that constitute it (discernibility),” A Thousand Plateaus, p. 411.↩

  33. Deleuze asked the audience to reflect on certain subjects from week to week. Somewhere between fiction and reality, it was sometimes a matter of writing a few pages, which he requested insistently, perhaps to discourage some participants…↩

  34. At that time, I was considering doing a thesis on the notions of time, a subject I submitted to Daniel Charles and Olivier Revault d’Allonnes. Eventually, a few years later, I did a thesis on chromaticism and the sound continuum.↩

  35. See Pierre Boulez, Think Like a Musician Today, Geneva, Gonthier, 1964.↩

  36. Pascale Criton, “Wyschnegradsky, Theorist and Philosopher,” preface to Ivan Wyschnegradsky, The Law of Pansonicity, Geneva, Contrechamps, 1996, p. 9-57.↩

  37. Gilles Deleuze, “The Method of Dramatization,” Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, 61^st year, no. 3, July-September 1967, reprinted in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974), ed. David Lapoujade, Editions de Minuit, 2002, p. 137.↩

  38. n. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, PUF, 1968, p. 284.↩

  39. Gilles Deleuze, “The Method of Dramatization,” ibid., p. 131-144.↩

  40. Particularly in chapters IV and V.↩

  41. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., p. 276.↩

  42. “Dynamism then includes its own power to determine space and time since it immediately embodies the differential relationships, the singularities, and the immanent progressions of the idea” (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., p. 282). See also “The Method of Dramatization,” Desert Island and Other Texts, op. cit., p. 136.↩

  43. Pascale Criton, “Intensive Aesthetics or the Theater of Dynamisms,” Deleuze and the Writers, Lyon, 2005.↩↩

  44. Pascale Criton, “Sound Continuum and Structuring Schemes,” in Music, Rationality, Language. Harmony: From the World to the Material, in Cahiers de philosophie du langage, n° 3, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1998, p. 73-88.↩

  45. For if “there is history only in perception [...] there is imagination only in technique” (“The Cosmic Craftsman and the Machinic Phylum,” in A Thousand Plateaus, p. 414, and the affects-percepts relationship, ibid., p. 428).↩

  46. Pascale Criton, “The Transfinite Brain,” Chimeras, n° 27, Paris, 1996.↩

  47. Pascale Criton, “Spatio-Temporal Continuants,” The Continuum, Paris, Michel de Maule, 2005.↩

  48. G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Paris, PUF, 1968, p. 331.↩

  49. Ibid., p. 60.↩

  50. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §§ 6 to 8.↩

  51. The ABCs, s.v. “Animal”.↩

  52. See the remarkable chapter 3 of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.↩

  53. Deleuze makes this very clear in his text: “Immanence: a life”, Philosophy, n° 47, and in the Annex to the Champs-Flammarion edition of Dialogues with Claire Parnet.↩

  54. Symbolic Exchange and Death, Gallimard, 1976. See also The System of Objects, Gallimard, 1968 ; For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Gallimard, 1972 ; Simulacra and Simulation, Galilée, 1981.↩

  55. Theory of Modern Art, trans. Pierre-Henri Gonthier, Denoël, 1985, p. 10 and 11. See also: “Just as the man, the painting also has a skeleton, muscles, skin. We can speak of a particular anatomy of the painting. A painting with the subject “nude man” is not to be depicted according to human anatomy, but according to that of the painting” (note from page n).↩

  56. Consult the Letter from the Traveler upon His Return, and the admirable example of Van Gogh.↩

  57. Francis Bacon, Logic of Sensation, La Différence, vol. I, p. 57.↩

  58. In the sense that Cézanne spoke of making the impression of the impressionists durable (commented on by Deleuze, for example in The ABC’s, N, “Idea”).↩

  59. On this subject, refer to my study "What is a logic of sensation?", Proceedings of the Azurean Society of Philosophy (2002-2003 year).↩

  60. Note that the book by Philippe Mengue which will be reviewed later: Deleuze and the Question of Democracy, does not distinguish between the two Deleuzian “images of thought”, the perfectly negative one, which is described in several points in Difference and Repetition, and the perfectly positive one, which consists in the plane of immanence that thought gives itself as an image to think itself. Also, the word question in the title unfortunately does not mean that Mengue poses the question (in the Deleuzian sense) of democracy.↩

  61. Logic of Sensation, p. 35.↩

  62. See the appendix at the end of this chapter.↩

  63. See Democracy in America, Volume 2, Chapter 6, “I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men who incessantly revolve upon themselves to procure small and vulgar pleasures. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others… Above these men arises an immense and tutelary power… absolute, detailed, regular, provident, and mild… It seeks to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood.”↩

  64. Negotiations, Editions de Minuit, 1990, Chapter “Politics,” p. 233. It is unnecessary to repeat that democracy is the least bad of the systems. This does not mean that we should stop searching for something new to make it just for all.↩

  65. What is Philosophy?, p. 103. Deleuze refers to an article by Michel Butel in L’Autre Journal No. 10, March 1991, pp. 21-25. We cannot avoid noticing how this quote targets Habermas’s philosophy.↩

  66. Negotiations, loc. cit., p. 238.↩

  67. What is Philosophy?, p. 33.↩

  68. According to a distinction by Carlyle in Sartor resartus, taken up by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.↩

  69. Deleuze is right to note the terribly repressive nature of capitalism (Anti-Oedipus, p. 180, 292, 312, 401, 403). Consider how aptitude tests sneak into school from kindergarten, or the tracking that each citizen is subject to for an increasingly protective, i.e., profitable, medicine. Does Mengue’s fierce opposition to this idea only signify his naivety?↩

  70. What unnoticed irony, which turns against him, in Mengue’s quotation from Hegel, op. cit., p. 188: “Negative criticism stands aloof with great airs above the thing without having penetrated it, that is, without having grasped it itself, what is positive in it. [...] It gives itself airs to strut, if there is added to it good intentions for the general good and the appearances of a good heart” (Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. Gibelin, Vrin, p. 39).↩

  71. 22 Negotiations, p. 166.↩

  72. What is Philosophy?, p. 95.↩

  73. Ibid.↩

  74. Butler’s nowhere (contained in the title of his book Erewhon) also reads as now-here, here-now (see What is Philosophy?, p. 96).↩

  75. What is Philosophy?, p. 96. This text perfectly answers all the accusations of “salon revolution” and says well that Deleuze, until the end, did not despair of the revolution, because the revolution is inscribed micrologically in each of our becomings — things or people.↩

  76. Post-scriptum to Philosophical Crumbs, “Possible and Real Theses of Lessing.”↩

  77. This definition is no longer valid; see the work of Pierre-Antoine Miquel.↩

  78. The ABCs of Deleuze, s.v. “Resistance.”↩

  79. Ibid., s.v. “Literature.”↩

  80. Ibid., s.v. “Idea.”↩

  81. Ibid., s.v., “Childhood.” See also “Drink”: “Drinking helps perceive something too powerful in life, which only they can perceive” (referring to Fitzgerald, Lowry).↩

  82. Henry Miller, Sexus, cited in Anti-Oedipus, Éditions de Minuit, 1972, p. 400.↩

  83. “Immanence: A Life” in Philosophy, No. 47, reprinted in Two Regimes of Madness, Éditions de Minuit, 2003, p. 359.↩

  84. Cf. What is Philosophy?, p. 62. — Quotes from G. Deleuze refer to a bibliography in chronological order, which is given at the end of this chapter.↩

  85. “On Nietzsche and the image of thought” (1968), in The Deserted Island, p. 192 and 199.↩

  86. Thus, against Hegel: “Gilles Deleuze talks about philosophy” (1969), in The Deserted Island, p. 200. Question: what bug bit him?↩

  87. Grasping is justified by the Proustian instruction on the nature of thought: ejection, irruption, destruction. Cf. Proust and Signs, and “Shame and Glory: T.E. Lawrence”, in Critique and Clinic, p. 146, which refers to Sodom and Gomorrah. It is indeed a “violence” freely claimed by Deleuze as a reader: to have a child with the philosopher, and behind his back…↩

  88. Small series of totems, for memory: Hume, Lewis Carroll (who will fade in favor of Artaud, cf. The Logic of Sense, p. 150, 325), Joyce, Beckett, Fitzgerald, Swift, Butler, Faulkner, Melville, Bacon, Lowry, V. Woolf, Whitehead, Blood (thanks to Jean Wahl, cf. Difference and Repetition, p. 81), W James…↩

  89. Perversion being to humor what subversion is to irony. Cf. M. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum”, in Words and Writings, Gallimard, 1994, vol. II, p. 78)↩

  90. Cf. Dialogues (with Claire Parnet), p. 68: “But it is really not worth invoking the concrete richness of the sensible if it is to make it an abstract principle.” Leibniz and the Baroque, p. 88: “We cannot know where the sensible ends and the intelligible begins: which is a way of saying that there are not two worlds” (see also ibid., p. 162, which refers to Leibniz’s New Essays, IV, chap. 16, § 12). Also, when Deleuze writes: “It is up to modern philosophy to overcome the temporal-eternal, historical-universal, particular-universal alternative” (Difference, p. 3), one can add: “sensible-intelligible”, since there is an “empiricism of the idea” (ibid., p. 356).↩

  91. It is strange to note that, in the author who accompanies (unwillingly…) Deleuze in his meditation on the relationship between sensory experience (the contingent dimension) and structure (the necessary form of links) — Lévi-Strauss —, the rise of tinkering is much more clearly assumed, regulated, and normed, in The Savage Mind, I, “The Science of the Concrete”, 1962. At the same time, Deleuze constantly declares that it is in this work in progress about empiricity in Hume, Kant, Bergson (and, to a lesser extent, Spinoza and Leibniz) that he seeks his method.↩

  92. Difference and repetition, p. 96, about Hume’s analysis of repetition, which shows the imagination as a power of contraction (first name, so to speak, of passive synthesis, ibid., p. 97).↩

  93. Some pages of Material Ecstasy, by Le Clézio, on the other hand, remind a lot of Deleuze.↩

  94. "It may be that believing in this world, in this life, has become our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion (we have so many reasons not to believe in the world of men, we have lost the world)… " (Negotiations, P- 72.-73).↩

  95. Cf. What is Philosophy?, p. 48-49, against the risks of a transcendent use of synthesis.↩

  96. Subjectivity, like the concept, is produced, it is never a first principle: it is “determined as an effect, it is an impression of reflection” {Empiricism, p. 8). The problem is no longer the donation of the subject, nor the origin of the mind {Empiricism, p. 15), it is: how is it that there are real, effective, conditions of possibility for the constitution of subjectivity? The beginning of chapter V of Empiricism and subjectivity (p. 90-92) announces the extraordinary idea of a higher, transcendental empiricism. The key to the becoming-subject of the mind is experience, in all its forms {Empiricism, p. 8, 90 and foll., 139-152). If “what develops is subject” {Empiricism, p. 90), experience in Deleuze is the opposite of the experience of consciousness in Hegel: no final unity possible, no end to freedom, experience without reason: nomadic, anarchic, erratic, surrealist. But Deleuze, even if he looks elsewhere, cannot however reduce three Hegelian problems: the surpassing, the negative, the desire. In short, the synthesis always makes a problem, but it is true that this is the Deleuzian problem par excellence.↩

  97. One is simply struck to see Deleuze systematically place structuralism under the label “anti-humanism”, while Lévi-Strauss defends the idea of a third humanism after that of the Renaissance and that of the Enlightenment…↩

  98. Let us note the criticism that M. Malherbe has made of this forced reading of Deleuze: The Empiricist Philosophy of David Hume, Vrin, 1992 (3rd ed.), p. 286. Cf. also Déborah Danowski, “Deleuze with Hume”, in Gilles Deleuze. A Philosophical Life, dir. E. Alliez, Synthélabo, 1998, p. 191-206.↩

  99. “Associationism is less outdated than the critique of associationism” {Proust, p. 71). The Hume-Proust axis, first step towards an International Associationist and towards a literarization of philosophy…↩

  100. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II, p. 12.↩

  101. Again, for this problem of forces (and intensities), Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, II, p.12. X.J↩

  102. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 57-58, Deleuze emphasizes the plastic power of the will to power, but what interests him is the content of force, not the forms. Dionysus, not Apollo: “If the will to power, on the contrary, is a good principle, if it reconciles empiricism with principles, if it constitutes a superior empiricism, it is because it is a fundamentally plastic principle, no larger than what it conditions, metamorphosing itself with the conditioned, determining itself in each case with what it determines. [...] The will to power is both the genetic element of force and the principle of the synthesis of forces.”↩

  103. co. Deleuze, in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, emphasizes four forms of common sense in Kant: logical, moral, aesthetic, and teleological… Leibniz was also a great proliferator of principles {Leibniz, p. 58, 91-92)… And Deleuze himself, despite the unary trait of the refrain…↩

  104. Against the magical presupposition of an internal motor of dialectics, Hume’s critique says, according to Deleuze: “If the subject is indeed what surpasses the given, let us not first attribute to the given the faculty of surpassing itself” (Empiricism, p. 94). As a consequence, empiricism presupposes a critique both of a philosophy of substance and a philosophy of nature (ibid.).↩

  105. Not in a philosophy of the ego or the self.↩

  106. This mise en abîme is found in Nietzsche as well, The Gay Science, § 344, “In what we are still pious.” Belief and invention are the two axes of Humean thought, cf. Empiricism, p. 90 — and that’s what makes synthesis (ibid., p. 100-102).↩

  107. Cf. Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 11: "My judgment surpasses the idea. In other words: I am a subject." On this “incomprehensible” synthesis, cf. Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 15, 90 and following.↩

  108. See Proust et les signes, p. 10, 23, 43-45, 53, 140-145, 381. Let’s think of Caillois: “The dreams of man, his deliriums, have found a place in my poems, but to receive a name, a form, a meaning. I ordered their confusion. I stopped their flight. They are fixed in my words” (“Art poétique ou confession négative,” in Approches de la poésie, Gallimard, p. 74 and m-115 for commentary).↩

  109. See Proust et les signes, p. 10-n, 32-33, 50, 95, 108,↩

  110. See Le Bergsonisme, p. 4. “We surpass experience toward conditions of experience (but these are not, in the Kantian manner, the conditions of all possible experience; they are the conditions of real experience” (ibid., p. 13). There is indeed in Kantism a teleological presupposition: we surpass experience necessarily “toward concepts” (ibid., p. 19). “Intuition leads us to surpass the state of experience toward conditions of experience” (ibid., p. 17). A word on this experimental anti-finalism: if there are ends, they are those, made of projection, of desire (Spinoza, Éthique, IV, preface), and not those of naturant Nature. If there are directions and intentions of surpassing, they are those of experience itself, not those of a (transcendental) Subject.↩

  111. Éthique, II, prop. XIV to XXXI (especially scolies prop. XVIII & XXIX).↩

  112. “Error is a very artificial notion, an abstract philosophical concept” {Logique, p. 163). It fixes the logic of truth, while illusion enlivens the logic of meaning — it is empirically compatible with the phenomenality of truth, as seen in art. Error is a hybrid and bland concept, which leads philosophical inquiry to ridicule and sterility {Logique, p. 194 and following), and it does not allow us to think the true essence(s) — transcendental — of the mind, which is foolishness or false spirit {Différence, p. 192-205, 353 and following). Nietzschean heritage: philosophy must strive with all its might to contribute to reducing the number of fools… And Deleuze makes his contribution, with a typology of illusions of representation, of “common sense” in particular {Différence, p. 340-349).↩

  113. See also Différence et répétition, p. 35-36: “Learning is not done in the relation of representation to action (as reproduction of the Same), but in the relation of sign to response (as encounter with the Other).” On this principle ignorance of learning for the apprentice and the philosopher (and even the mathematician) and the requirement of induction and adventure, Différence et répétition contains decisive pages where Deleuze overturns old problematics (especially the Platonic ones): p. 213-217, 231-234, 247-251.↩

  114. Borrowed the expression from Bergson. See Le Bergsonisme, p. 19, which quotes La Pensée et le mouvant (PUF, éd. du Centenaire, p. 1416 and 1425).↩

  115. The remarkable article How to Recognize Structuralism? (1967) is reprinted in Desert Island, p. 238-269.↩

  116. See Kant’s Critical Philosophy, p. 3-34, 52-56, 62-63, 72-73, 95- Difference and Repetition, p. 178-179.↩

  117. See Difference and Repetition, p. 174, then 289-293. Also, Desert Island, p. 243-246 (importance of Foucauldian structuralism): empirical psychology is now determined by a transcendental topology.↩

  118. Again, Deleuze takes a step aside — even though in Instincts and Institutions, 64, text 54, he cites Leibniz’s text on animals as purely empirical, and notes that it is the motif of Kant’s first objection to the empiricists {Kant, p. 5…). The meditation on Melville’s phrase, I prefer not to…, abolishes the Leibnizian principle of the preferable and the inclination due to small perceptions… But because what interests Deleuze (well, his empirical reason…) is not the form (of animal experience, sensation, thought), it is the force and intensity (Hume: the question of vivacity), or rather, the force effect and the intensity effect that the figure of the animal can have on the image of thought in… Deleuze. We see in it a reduction of the problematic field of the philosophical to the initiatic literary field (allegory and parable): Artaud, the Anglo-Saxon vein, Kafka, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or the affirmation of Humean empiricism as English novel {Dialogues, p. 68-70). The goal is always to let Dionysus flow in the veins of Apollo {Difference, p. 338). We persist in feeling that this thought lacks the second moment of the exposure of Apollo metamorphosed by the Dionysian humor — but we will be accused of reintroducing lack and dialectics…↩

  119. In Instincts and Institutions, 48 (text 40), Deleuze quotes Butler: “We can assert, with the strictest scientific accuracy, that the Rothschilds are the most astonishing organisms the world has ever seen” {Life and Habit, Gallimard).↩

  120. See Science of Logic, “Introduction,” § 6-7 (éd. Bourgeois, Vrin, 1970, p. 168-172), § 12 (ibid., p. 176-179); “Preliminary Concept,” §§ 38-39 (ibid., p. 299-301), § 50 (ibid., p. 310-314), and “Addition,” § 37 (ibid., P- 493-494).↩

  121. "On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb early in the morning… She saw that the stone had been moved from the tomb. So she ran to find Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and she said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have put him” (Gospel of John, XX, 1-2). “If Christ is not risen, your faith is vain, you are still in your sins” (First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, XV, 17). Even when the identity of the “perpetrator” is known, the empty place continues to pose a problem — and to strongly stimulate theoretical imagination — as Jacques Lacan abundantly demonstrated, by focusing on the prehistory of the detective novel in the Seminar on Edgar Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (in The Writings, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 11-61).↩

  122. In another register, we could also mention Leibniz, great calculator and great spy, who took advantage of his stay in France to discuss science and theology, to learn about the techniques he thought could benefit his compatriots and to propose to Louis XIV to launch a great expedition to Egypt, in order to divert him from making war on Holland… Following this trail would require developments too long for this article.↩

  123. Published by Gallimard in 1964, under the title The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (trans. Marcel Duhamel & Charles Robillot). The Spy Came Out of the Closet would be less connoted but more accurate. — Since the French translation is approximate and truncated, we will rely on the Pocket Books edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001), with a preface by J. Le Carré from 1989.↩

  124. John Le Carré is the pseudonym of David Cornwell, born in 1931, who joined the British diplomatic service in the late 1950s after studying in Switzerland and Oxford. While posted in Germany in 1959, he became acquainted with several prominent political figures, including Chancellor Konrad Adenauer; later, he would serve as a consul in Hamburg. The fact that the double agent Harold “Kim” Philby (1912-1988) named him to the KGB suggests that Le Carré was associated with British intelligence services. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (which was adapted into a film in 1965, directed by Martin Ritt, starring Richard Burton as Leamas, Cyril Cusack as Control, Peter Van Eyck as Mundt, and Oskar Werner as Fiedler) is J. Le Carré’s third book — a writer acclaimed for the wit of his dialogues and the sophistication of his plots — and his second spy novel. Its immense success allowed him to abandon his career and dedicate himself exclusively to writing.↩

  125. See Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Anti-Oedipus I, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1972, and A Thousand Plateaus. Anti-Oedipus II, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980.↩

  126. See Jean Pierre Faye, The Sluice, Paris, Seuil, 1964: “A city that is not named — but whose name is on everyone’s lips — a city divided in two… One half, like overexposed and all in reflections; the other half sunken in itself and engulfed: the city crossed by a border has a ‘sluice’ in its middle.”↩

  127. The Spy, p. 9.↩

  128. The Spy, p. 16: It was odd how soon Leamas had realised that Mundt was the writing on the wall. The allusion refers to the Book of Daniel: “King [of Babylon] Belshazzar made a great feast to a thousand of his lords… They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold… In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote… on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace._ Then the king’s colour changed… [He] cried aloud to bring in the astrologers… Then came in all the king’s wise men… but they could not read the writing. Then was king Belshazzar greatly troubled… Then the queen… said, 'There is a man in thy kingdom, in whom is the spirit of the holy gods; and in the days of thy father [Nebuchadnezzar] light and understanding and wisdom… was found in him…’” So Daniel was brought in before the king. The king spoke and said unto Daniel, “If thou canst read this writing, and make known to me the interpretation thereof, thou shalt be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about thy neck, and shalt be the third ruler in the kingdom.” *Then Daniel answered… I will read the writing nonetheless._ [...] *Thou hast lifted up thyself against the Lord… and the vessels of his house have been brought in before thee, and thou, and thy lords, thy wives, and thy concubines, have drunk wine…; and thou hast praised the gods… that see not, nor hear, nor know… and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified. Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin (Numbered, Numbered, Weighed, and Divided). Numbered: God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Weighed: Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Divided: Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians." (Daniel, V, 1-31).↩

  129. The Spy, p. 23.↩

  130. The Spy, p. 22 (modified translation).↩

  131. The Spy, p. 21 (modified translation).↩

  132. The Spy, p. 20-21 (modified translation).↩

  133. Ten Little Indians, nursery rhyme and famous novel by Agatha Christie in which the characters, rigorously alone on an island, are eliminated one by one until the last one, leaving the reader perplexed: either there was one more person on the island or there was cheating…↩

  134. The Spy, p. 21 (modified translation).↩

  135. The Spy, p. 22 (modified translation).↩

  136. Readers of John Le Carré’s first novel published in 1961, Call for the Dead (which can be translated as The Call [telephone] for the Dead, but also understood as [Re]call for the Dead) know that this is not entirely accurate: in this book, we first get to know George Smiley, a cultured and cuckolded spy, stationed in Germany before the war and then in Sweden, which served as his base for operating behind enemy lines until 1943, when he left the “profession”, before resuming service at the beginning of the Cold War. We then learn that while it was indeed H.D. Mundt who, in order to protect an agent from her own suspicious husband, killed the said husband, Samuel Arthur Fennan — a rising star in the Foreign Office, who had flirted with communism during his Oxford years — and who tried to kill George Smiley for the same reason, it was Dieter Frey, a former English agent who became an East German agent after the war — whom G. Smiley had known as a student when he was teaching English literature and poetry at a small German university — who killed Eisa Fennan, because she was likely to “crack” during the investigation into her husband’s death, insufficiently disguised as a suicide.↩

  137. The Spy, p. 23 (modified translation).↩

  138. Ibid., p. 25 (modified translation).↩

  139. Ibid., p. 21 (modified translation).↩

  140. The Spy, p. 19 (the paragraph is omitted in the French translation).↩

  141. Circus: the Circus, but also an abbreviation for Cambridge Circus (Cambridge roundabout), the presumed address of the British Intelligence Services.↩

  142. The Spy, p. 19 (the paragraph is omitted in the French translation. My friend Amy Ziering-Kofman, a great American Derridean with a fine ear, confirms that Leamas has a pronunciation very close to limace').↩

  143. The Spy, p. 27 (modified translation).↩

  144. “Smiley doesn’t like this business,” Control replied nonchalantly. “He finds it disgusting. He sees the necessity but doesn’t want to be a part of it” {The Spy, p. 56, modified translation).↩

  145. The Spy, p. 33-34 (modified translation). Note: with that last name, Elizabeth Gold can only be Jewish, one is tempted to say. We will return later to Le Carré’s “Jews”…↩

  146. Ibid., p. 38 (modified translation).↩

  147. In Molière’s Don Juan (Act III, Scene 1), the following exchange can be read between Sganarelle and Don Juan: “— I want to know your thoughts deeply. Is it possible that you do not believe in heaven at all? — Let’s leave it. — That is to say, no. And hell? — Eh! — Just the same. And the devil, if you please? — Yes, yes. — As little… — But still, you have to believe something in this world. What do you believe in then?… — I believe that two and two are four, Sganarelle, and four and four are eight.” In the following scene, Don Juan is stopped by a poor man who asks him for alms: “— I’m going to give you a gold louis right away, provided you swear. — Ah! Sir, would you have me commit such a sin? — Unless that, you won’t have it… — No, sir, I would rather die of hunger. — Go, go, I give it to you for the love of humanity.” L. Aimé-Martin, who prepared the edition of Molière’s Complete Works published by Lefèvre, in Paris, in 1874, specifies: “This scene was removed at the second representation, for fear that it would become a subject of scandal for the weak.”↩

  148. The Spy, p. 38-39 (modified translation).↩

  149. Ibid., p. 39 (modified translation).↩

  150. Ibid.↩

  151. “In general, the spy in literature gives a very misleading image of a secret agent’s work. The prototype is obviously James Bond, Agent 007, created in 1958 by the Englishman Ian Fleming, then soon reabsorbed by the Americans, in the cinema. His adventures highlight certain exciting aspects of the profession, but without taking into account at all the constraints inherent in the real profession of intelligence. The spy in literature is often an agent of the “Action Service”, ready for adventure, an incorrigible womanizer who paces the halls of Riviera casinos, or who goes from a plane to a car, before jumping into a speedboat. It’s a real caricature… In reality, the work of an intelligence agent has nothing to do with all this” (Pierre Marion [Director of the DGSE from 1981 to 1982], “For Mitterrand, I cleaned the Pool”, in Le Figaro littéraire, July 28, 2005, words collected by Olivier Delcroix).↩

  152. The Spy, p. 45 (modified translation).↩

  153. The Spy, p. 67 (modified translation).↩

  154. Ibid., p. 81 (modified translation).↩

  155. Ibid., p. 81 (modified translation).↩

  156. “[Leamas] was a man in conflict with himself, a man who had only one life, one confession, and who had betrayed both. Peters had seen this before. He had even seen it in men who had radically changed their ideology, who, in the intimate hours of the night, had found a new faith and alone, driven by the force of their convictions, had betrayed their calling, their family and their countries… Both were aware of it; to such an extent that Leamas had fiercely refused any human relationship with Peters. His pride forbade him. For all these reasons, Peters knew that Leamas would lie to him, perhaps by omission, but could only lie: out of pride, defiance or even pure perversity, inherent in his trade. And him, Peters, would have to point out these lies. He also knew that having a professional in front of him was against his own interests, because Leamas would filter out when him, Peters, wanted no filter. Leamas would anticipate the kind of information that Peters was looking for and, in doing so, might overlook a small detail of vital importance to the “evaluators”” (The Spy, p. 79-80, modified translation).↩

  157. Ibid., p. 99-100 (modified translation).↩

  158. The Spy, p. 100 (modified translation).↩

  159. "It is said that those condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of exaltation and that for them, like for the butterflies consumed by the flames, destruction and fulfillment are simultaneous. Once his decision was made, Leamas felt a similar feeling… He was losing his reflexes. Control was right. He had realized it last year, while he was following the Riemeck case… "(77>^ Spy, p. 96, paragraph omitted in the French translation).↩

  160. Perhaps it should be reminded to the unbelievers that we generally flatter ourselves that an acolyte is a clerk in charge of minor offices and that acolyte is, in the Catholic Church, the highest of the four minor orders.↩

  161. The Spy, p. 115-116 (modified translation).↩

  162. Since the Roman capture of Jerusalem and the (second) destruction of the Temple, observant Jews do not allow musical instruments in their synagogues to mark the mourning for their lost sovereignty. The only exceptions are string instruments (harp, violin), which are allowed during wedding celebrations, which would explain, according to some, the proliferation of the “Jewish violinist” in Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, from Chagall to Isaac Stern and Nathan Milstein, including Fiddler on the Roof (based on Tevye the Dairyman by Shalom Aleichem)…↩

  163. A film from 1975, based on Garbage, the City, and Death, a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, starring Ingrid Caven, R.W. Fassbinder, and Klaus Lôwitsch.↩

  164. A film from 1975 that won the Grand Prix at the Moscow Film Festival that year, based on a novel by Wladyslaw Reymont (The Promised Land, 1899), starring Daniel Olbrychski, Wojciech Pszoniak, Andrzej Seweryn, and Anna Nehrebecka.↩

  165. See Raymond Aron, De Gaulle, Israel, and the Jews, Paris, Plon, 1968.↩

  166. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 15, 1972. — For the anecdote, it should be noted that saving odious acts by subsequently recognizing a “noble” motivation, unknown to those who committed them, is a lively practice that “Marxists,” imbued with “Freudism,” continue to unabashedly claim. For example, Slavoj Zizek, a dialectical materialist philosopher and psychoanalyst, international director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Birkbeck, credits Eric Santner (professor at the University of Chicago) with having developed a heuristically rich notion from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, according to which “a current revolutionary intervention repeats/redeems failed attempts of the past. These attempts count as ‘symptoms’ and can be retrospectively redeemed by the ‘miracle’ of the revolutionary act. They are not so much forgotten actions as past incapacities to act, incapacities to suspend the force of social ties inhibiting acts of solidarity with the ‘others’ of society. For Santner, these symptoms can also take the form of disturbances of “normal” social life: for example, participation in the obscene rituals of the dominant ideology. According to this way of thinking, Kristallnacht [the Night of Broken Glass, in 1938] — an explosion of half-organized, half-spontaneous violence against homes, synagogues, shops, and individuals — must be seen as a carnival in the sense of Bakhtin, a symptom whose fury and violence reveal that it was a formation of defense, a masking of a previous inability to effectively intervene in the German social crisis. In other words, the violence of the pogroms itself was proof of the possibility of an authentic proletarian revolution, its excess energy marking the reaction to the (unconscious) recognition of the missed opportunity.” (Slavoj Zizek, Lenin Shot at Finland Station, London Review of Books, vol. 27, no. 16, August 18, 2005 — emphasis added.)↩

  167. Article published in The Times (January 15, 2003) to protest against the planned intervention of the United States in Iraq, in which one can read, among other things: “The imminent war was planned long before Ben Laden struck, but he made it possible. Without Ben Laden, the Bush junta would still have to explain a lot of shady affairs: how it was elected, for starters; about Enron; about its shameless favoritism toward the already-too-rich; about its boundless contempt for the poor of the planet; about ecology and a host of unilaterally revoked international treaties. It would also have to explain why it supports Israel despite its permanent disregard for UN resolutions. But Ben Laden conveniently swept all that under the rug with a sweep of his broom.”↩

  168. On the occasion of the film’s release in Paris in 1977, after a year of prohibition, a controversy erupted between Claude Lanzmann and Gilles Deleuze: for the former, wanting to stage a thin prostitute, her unrepentant Nazi father, her Yugoslav pimp, and her anonymous and future assassin protector, “A. the rich Jew,” an unlovable intention. G. Deleuze did not see it from this angle; he found merit in the film and, after signing a petition with about fifty personalities denouncing, among other things, the “irresponsibility of not analyzing its structure,” defended it in Le Monde on February 18, 1977 (“The Rich Jew,” reprinted in Two Regimes of Madness, Editions de Minuit, 2003), which irreparably soured his relationship with C. Lanzmann.↩

  169. “Fiedler had spent the whole war in Canada. Leamas remembered that now… His parents were German-Jewish refugees, Marxists, and only in 1946 did the family return to the country, eager to participate, whatever the cost, in the building of Stalin’s Germany” {The Spy, p. 119, modified translation).↩

  170. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, p. 120 (modified translation).↩

  171. Ibid., p. 121 (modified translation).↩

  172. Ibid., p. 124 (modified translation).↩

  173. “— What’s your philosophy? — I think you’re all bastards, every one of you… — That’s a point of view I accept. Primal, negative, and very stupid, but it’s a point of view. And the Circus people? — I don’t know. How would I know? — Have you never discussed philosophy with them? — No. We’re not Germans… I suppose they don’t much like communism.” (ibid., p. 131-132, modified translation).↩

  174. “— I told Peters… It’s absurd to think any operation against East Germany could have been mounted without my knowledge – without the Berlin organization’s knowledge. I would have known about it, wouldn’t I!… — Of course… You would have known about it…” (ibid., p. 129, modified translation).↩

  175. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, p. 144 (modified translation).↩

  176. Ibid.↩

  177. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, p. 147 (modified translation).↩

  178. “Fiedler was sleepwalking straight into the trap Control had set for him. It was uncanny to see Fiedler’s interests and Control’s gradually converge until they finally identified with each other: as though by agreement, they had adopted the same plan and Leamas had been assigned to carry it out.” (ibid., p. 137-138).↩

  179. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, p. 147-148 (modified translation).↩

  180. “Mundt says nothing. Leamas had grown accustomed to these silences during the conversation. Mundt had a rather pleasant voice, which Leamas did not expect, but he spoke very rarely.” (ibid., p. 161).↩

  181. Ibid., p. 162-164.↩

  182. L’Espion, p. 170-171.↩

  183. Ibid., p. 138.↩

  184. L’Espion, p. 202↩

  185. L’Espion, p. 206 (modified translation).↩

  186. Ibid., p. 211 (modified translation).↩

    1. Ibid., p. 212.

    ↩

  188. L’Espion, p. 219-221 (modified translation).↩

  189. “The Abteilung and similar organizations are a natural extension of the Party’s arm. They are at the forefront of the struggle for peace and progress. They are to the Party what the Party is to socialism: the vanguard. That’s what Stalin says… Quoting Stalin is not very tasteful… He also says: “Five hundred thousand people liquidated, that’s a statistic, the death of a single man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.” He mocked the bourgeois sensitivity of the masses…” {The Spy, p. 132, modified translation).↩

  190. “Myself, I would agree to plant a bomb in a restaurant if it could take us further down the road. After, I would count: so many women, so many children…” {ibid., p. 133).↩

  191. Ah! to be able to pity one of the misguided sons of those whom the West failed to protect or chose not to protect twenty years earlier…↩

  192. “— Suppose it was me they wanted to kill, would London do it? — It depends… It depends on the necessity… — Ah!… it depends on necessity… Just like Stalin, in fact. The road accident and the statistics. What a relief! _We are exactly the same, you know, that’s the joke!” {ibid., p. 171-172 — we underline).↩

  193. This is the subject of another remarkable book by John Le Carré, Tinker, Taylor, Soldier and Spy, published in 1974 {The Mole, translated by J. Rosenthal, Laffont, 1974). “I was inspired by foreign intelligence services. Essentially, English, American, Israeli secret services. I am very admiring of the coherent whole formed by MI 5 and MI 6, the British secret services” (Pierre Marion, “I cleaned the Pool”, op. rit.).↩

  194. The Spy, introduction, p. VII.↩

  195. Ibid., p. VIII-IX.↩

  196. “What prompted me to write it?… At this distance, any answer risks being biased. I know I was deeply dissatisfied with my professional life, that I suffered from the greatest loneliness and confusion. Maybe something of this loneliness and bitterness was reflected in Leamas. I wanted to be loved…” {ibid., p. IX).↩

  197. “You are an operational, Leamas… not an analyst. It’s clear” {ibid., p. 104).↩

  198. See, among others, this imaginary dialogue {National Review August 31, 2004) — about Lawrence Franklin, CIA analyst, accused of transmitting confidential information to two pro-Israeli lobbyists who would have quickly passed them on to the Israeli embassy in Washington — between M. Ledeen and James Jesus Angleton (1917-1987), director of CIA counter-espionage from 1960 to 1973, with an exemplary professional career (he was the one who unmasked double agent “Kim” Philby, for example), known for his love of cats, poetry and his obsession about a possible penetration of his service by a Russian “mole”:

    "JJA. — We know [that this analyst] is a professional in intelligence… Like all those who handle “classified” documents, he knows the rules: we can’t pass this type of document to “unauthorized” persons. Therefore, when a professional still decides to do so, we can be sure that he will take all precautions. You’ve read enough spy novels to know everything about “dead letter boxes” [agreed upon and non-compromising places to discreetly deposit documents], invisible writings, secret codes, the whole kit.

    ML. — Yeah. John Le Carré.

    JJA. — For Heaven’s sake! This drudge!

    ML. — Sorry."↩

  199. Even though, by wandering head lost in eternal spheres, one risks not seeing the hole in front of oneself, falling into it, and provoking the laughter of the maid, as we know.↩

  200. This is the crux of the disagreement between Herder and Kant, as O. Dekens reminds us in Herder (Paris, Belles Lettres, 2003).↩

  201. See what he says about this “idea”, borrowed from Heidegger and Gadamer and developed by him in his presentation of mathematics as always-commanded-by-the-same-wmf-^’éwzipMe', in Formal Hermeneutics (Paris, CNRS Editions, 1991, chap. 1).↩

  202. Ibid., p. 3.↩

  203. Jean-François Lyotard does not say otherwise, but much better: “Why Oedipus? Why the Archi-State in a device like capitalism whose corresponding “effect of meaning”, Deleuze and Guattari repeat, is cynicism? Nothing is less cynical than Oedipus, nothing is more guilty. Why and how would this circulation of flows regulated by the sole law of exchange value need, in addition, in a bonus of repression, the figure of Oedipus, that is to say, for Deleuze and Guattari, that of the State?… Let’s go further: the family institution itself, why should capitalism preserve it, constrain the child’s libido to fixate on it?… What is the family life of a child today, father and mother working? Nursery, school, studies, jukeboxes, cinema: everywhere children of their age, and adults who are not their parents, who say and do other things. The heroes are in the cinema and on television, not around the family table. More direct investment than ever in historical figures. Parental figures, teachers, professors, priests, they too undergo the erosion of capitalist flows. No really, assuming that psychoanalysis is indeed the oedipianization, it is not the fact of capitalism, it goes against the law of value. A salaried father, it’s an exchangeable father, an orphan son. We must support Deleuze and Guattari against themselves: capitalism is indeed an orphanage, a celibacy, subject to the rule of equivalency. What supports it is not the figure of the great castrator, it is the figure of equality: equality in the sense of the commutativity of men on a place and places to a man, of men and women, of objects, of places, of organs” (“Energumen Capitalism”, in Pulsionnal Devices, Paris, UGE-10/18, 1973, P- 37’39 – we underline).↩

  204. Cf. Jacques Lacan, Logical Time and Anticipated Assertion (op. cit., p. 197-201). Richard Pinhas drew my attention to this theme by devoting beautiful developments to the scansion – particularly the hiatus separating the time to understand from the time to act – within the framework of the EFP seminar led by Lucien Israël in the early 70s, in Strasbourg and Paris. For this, he is thanked here.↩

  205. See also Dialogues for reflections on this formation (Dialogues, 18-26).↩

  206. On a formal level, the authors play with the sequence of dialogues and frames by always repeating the same illustration in the same frame in each sequence, with seemingly minor exceptions that gradually add nuances to these illustrations and thus create formal differences through repetitions. On a substantive level, the narrative unfolds according to the successive repetitions of the crossing of the river of death, but also with a debate that develops between the philosopher and Charon the ferryman, who receives the same copy of Difference and Repetition during the four crossings and starts to read it (the book appears on the table in the hut in frame 4 of sequences 2, 3, and 4). Then, in each interview with Deleuze, the ferryman raises more and more objections to the philosopher’s arguments. When the ferryman rejects the fifth and final offer of Deleuze’s book, he tells the philosopher: “Your eternity has nothing to do with repetition. Your eternity, it’s me… I am the end… Eternity is the end… The end and the exit” (frames 25-28, Salut, 47). As I have already noted, the last word goes to Deleuze, but he says it to satisfy the ferryman’s request (from the first sequence) for a “last sentence”: “Even if it pleased us: death and difference do not go together” (frame 32, Salut, 48).↩

  207. The depiction of Deleuze in this book is not without a certain rather sweet malice, for example when the philosopher promotes his book a little too energetically, then when he explains his philosophy by punctuating several of his sentences with the professorial question: “Do you understand?”↩

  208. For example, “Lacan has already written a word. But the letter has been stolen” (sequence 3, Salut, 31). “It’s good that you’re here. Foucault was about to read us a little poem, on the self” (a recitation of the words of The Order of Things, “As if at the limit of the sea a face of sand [man will disappear],” sequence 4, Salut, 37). And “Barthes is showing us photographs of his mother” (sequence 5, Salut, 48). In an interview available on the World Wide Web, Martin tom Dieck responds to the objection that his portrayal of these famous philosophers would be too caricatured: “The question of whether I simplified his character too much doesn’t interest me much. I took him not as a philosopher, but because he had a funny side as a human [with his glasses and his very long nails], an aspect that served me well in my comic strip” (tom Dieck, s.p.).↩

  209. The second illustrated volume contains five episodes, “The Return of Deleuze,” parts I and II, “The Adventures of the Incredible Orpheus,” parts I and II, and “New Adventures of the Incredible Orpheus.”↩

  210. While other readers have well-explored the relationship between Mallarmé’s poetics and Deleuze’s philosophy — notably Arnaud Villani (in “Le Tombeau de Gilles Deleuze”) and Jean-Luc Nancy and Haroldo de Campos (in “Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique”) — none have posed the question of how this interweaving is linked to friendship or how it understands poetic forms like the tomb and many others.↩

  211. Covering the relatively brief period from 1972 to 1990, it is known that “Pourparlers” contains various letters from Deleuze (e.g., to Michel Cressole, to Serge Daney, and to Reda Bensmaïa), interviews (Deleuze alone and with Guattari) on a range of topics, from “L’Anti-Œdipe” to “sociétés de contrôle” (with Toni Negri), and some occasional pieces on cinema and politics. The more recent volumes, “L’Ile déserte” and “Deux régimes de fous,” respectively contain texts, prefaces, and reviews from the first part of Deleuze’s career (1953-1974) and then from the latter part (1975-1995). In each volume, Deleuze salutes the creative force not only of writers, filmmakers, and musicians (such as Raymond Roussel, Jarry, Jacques Rivette, Pierre Boulez, Daniel Schmid) but also of his contemporaries (like Jean Hyppolite, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Foucault, Kostas Axelos, Hélène Cixous, Guy Hocquenghem, Maurice de Gandillac, and Antonio Negri).↩

  212. Here, textually, is Michel Foucault’s clarification: “It was in 1970 – very few people know Deleuze, a few initiates understand his importance, but one day will perhaps come when ‘the century will be Deleuzian’, i.e., ‘the century’ in the Christian sense of the term, the common opinion opposed to the elite, and I would say that this does not prevent Deleuze from being an important philosopher. It was in its pejorative sense that I used the word ‘century’” {Dits et écrits, Quarto-Gallimard, II, p. 589).↩

  213. Text published, at the initiative of Sylvie Ramond, in recognize: Geer van Velde, drawings, Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, National Museum Reunions, 2002.↩

  214. Reappeared at Verdier in 2003.↩

  215. Cf. S. Beckett, P. Chabert & C. Zagrodzki, Hayden, Paris, Fragments Éditions, 2005 (reproductions in color of exceptional quality).↩

  216. Took care. Our friend Josette Hayden passed away in Paris on March 18, 2003.↩

  217. Separately reissued by Éditions de Minuit, 1991.↩

  218. Cf. René Schérer, supra, p. 33-34.↩

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