Deleuze’s career in philosophy took frequent detours through
domains of enquiry which if not exactly alien to the discipline, then were decidedly peripheral to its principal concerns, whether those concerns are defined in traditional terms or in Deleuze and Guattari’s own terms as the invention of concepts. Never one to subscribe to the sense of philosophy as higher/first philosophy, Deleuze not only sought out a maverick line of philosophers from Spinoza to Nietzsche – thinkers in one way or another of immanence – but also sought out concepts or problems in thinkers to whom his own thought is in profound disagreement. The most famous case of this is Kant, who despite being the primary philosopher of the tribunal (a process which Deleuze holds in disdain). However it is in his devotion to certain problems and concepts in Kant that lies one of the clues as to the role played in the development of his thought by the non-philosophers to whom he so frequently turned. When, in his series of interviews with Claire Parnet for the Franco-German television station Arte broadcast in 1995, Deleuze came to consider the letter K (…comme Kant); he dwells on two central moments which define for him the immensity of Kant’s achievement, in spite of the conservative and reactive effects of the tribunal of reason. These are the Kantian reversal whereby instead of time being subservient to movement, movement depends upon time, and the idea of a discordant accord between the faculties (as in the experience of the sublime).Our clue is in the passion evinced by Deleuze for these concepts, and for the questions they pose. The task of philosophy confronted by a system such as that of Kant becomes less a tribunal to judge the overall system as a totality, than to evaluate immanently the capacity of the concepts to create thought, or to engender new concepts responding to new problems. Eschewing therefore the transcendent position which would judge in a reactive manner the work of a philosopher (Russell on Leibniz for example), the Deleuzean approach to the history of philosophy adopts a more active and affirmative approach. In this way the philosophy of Kant can find itself reconfigured in the form of four poetic formulas. This manoeuvre is a prime example of the principle governing most of Deleuze’s work in the history of philosophy, that is “giving…a little of the joy they…”( ). The case of this particular use of Kant provides another clue as to the detours into non-philosophy in Deleuze’s career. In celebrating the Kantian reversal and its correlative discordant accord, Deleuze also makes this problem and this concept resonate in new confrontations (an example itself of philosophy as the production of discordant accords). However the confrontations are not with antagonists in a dialectical argument or dispute; rather they are encounters with non-philosophers and with the material they can bring to the Kantian dinner party.
Deleuze makes much of the fact that philosophy entails a certain sobriety, a certain asceticism, often coupled with hardship or persecution. It is perhaps Kant who most comprehensively deserves the label of sobriety, this despite his addictions – a combination brilliantly brought out in Thomas de Quincey’s book on the philosopher and which is superbly evoked by Philippe Collin’s film based on the de Quincey volume. If philosophical activity – the generation of concepts – is essentially a sober endeavour, then it will be necessary to look outside philosophy for a little joy, a little inebriation, a little passion. Even the Kantian dinner party seemed a reluctant host to just a little bit of dissolute[1]. This joy can appear when philosophy touches upon its own limit, as when Leibniz takes his philosophy close to the shores of Dionysius, but pulls back. Equally it might arise when the creation of concepts is allied – acrobatically – to the creation of percepts and affects. This is the case of Nietzsche with his cast of dwarves, giants and walkers. Nietzsche is the primary example of a philosopher taking his concepts to their limit; of a philosopher whose concepts exist in a discordant accord with their own non-philosophical components. When Nietzsche writes of ‘lightness’ he has created a concept-percept with one foot in the philosophical and the other in literature. Here then is the second clue: in order to be philosophical one must simultaneously be non-philosophical. In the interview with Parnet, under the category ‘P…comme professeur’ Deleuze recalls with fondness the distinctive nature of the public attending his cours at Vincennes. Marked by the variety of their occupations, by the diversity of their ethnic origins, and by the disparity of their relations to the philosophical as such, the cours was for Deleuze a key landscape for producing encounters between philosophy and non-philosophy, an environment wherein it was possible to pursue what he calls a ‘double lecture’ - the professional and competent on one level and the impassioned amateur on another.
[1] For an example of a virulently anti-Kantian embrace of the dissolute in philosophy see Land 1992.
An excerpt from Les derniers jours d'emmanuel Kant is can be seen at
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