Do you speak Deleuzian?

These are passages from 2003 from an abandoned review essay on recent books on Deleuze. I should have finished it. The genre of the book review is sometimes liberating. Getting this far might have helped me to do something else. I hope so.

Jacques Ranciére, for whom every act of commentary is a kind of elaborate and variously prolonged mis-saying, states in the course of an attempt to avoid the impossible in the case of Deleuze, that:

la pensée de Deleuze, je ne sais pas très bien encore ce qu’elle est, je le cherche…Comprendre un penseur, ce n’est pas venir coïncider avec son centre. C’est, au contraire, le déporter, l’emporter sur un trajectoire où ses articulations se desserrent et laissent en jeu. (in Alliez ed., 525)

Of course Ranciére here reminds us of the fact that a Deleuzean mis-saying will make the object of this act of critical ventriloquism speak in another tongue, the langue étrangere which Deleuze himself took inspiration from in Proust. At times Deleuze has ended up with surprising bedfellows: there has been a Hegelian and a Platonic Deleuze. We have also had the much earlier schizoanalysis-promoting philosopher mutate into Oedipus-generating daddy Deleuze. Every book on Deleuze to be published – and there have been a great many of these – has to find its own way of mis-saying the object of its scrutiny. So, does An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze speak Deleuzean, and if so with what accent?

Well in what is a first for a collection of essays on Deleuze to be published in English the accent is primarily French. Juliette Simont who has elsewhere published an impressive study of Kant, Hegel and Deleuze here augments the insights on the Kant-Delueze relation as articulated in that volume, under the title ‘Intensity or the Encounter’. The concept of sense in Deleuze is directly related to the need which he feels to take his distance from the concept of common sense as it is found in Kant in particular. Simont summarises the dogmatic image of thought lying behind the latter in these terms:

I (the subject) am the happy concord of my faculties, when they apply, with full necessity, to an object supposed to be the same (in Khalfa 27).

The preordained concord of the faculties ensures that common sense remains in common, and that it does not lose its coordinates in becoming dispersed in all directions as in dreams and paradoxes (Simont points out). Thought which emerges out of an encounter can be a violence to the thinker, says Plato (Deleuze points out in Proust et les signes), because the faculties are out of concert. But “l’usage disjoint de facultés n’est qu’un ‘prélude’ à la dialectique qui les réunit toutes ensemble en un même Logos” (132).

The sensible is for Kant an affront to thought, and yet the realm of the senses must be in accord and under the command of sensus communis. The affront is perhaps primarily in the fact that tiny sensations are imperceptible. Between 0=absence of sensation and 1=sensation there lie other tiny sensations (micro-perceptions?) or, as Simont puts it, time (is this analogous to drusiness?). “Henceforward everything which seemed impossible to master within the sensible…becomes…an object of possible knowledge” (32).

A dual concpetion wherein matter is the raw blind material subject to formation and form by consciousness is thereby established. The Kantian ‘manifold’ is informed, thus becoming an object of knowledge (33). Understanding may come too late (never being able to gain access to tiny sensations they are for us a pure past Simont points out: 40) but the fact remains that here we are confronted by two heterogeneous domains. That of which we can have an understanding, namely the phenomenal world, on the one hand, and that of which we can have no understanding, namely the noumenal world on the other.

Deleuze gives the name sentendium to that which is invisible in sensation: “that which should be felt but cannot be and which calls memory up” (41). So it is that each faculty is elaborated on a void, while each other faculty confronts from outside but then in turn confronts in its own domain, the effect of these lacunae resonating from one faculty to the other (paraphrasing Simont 41).

In this discord of the faculties God becomes time and the human a ‘caesura’, “the caesura which turns the 0 into a 1 and exhausts the 1 into an 0” (47) as the essay concludes.

Intensity is a recurrent concern in Deleuze’s work. If intensity is one of the modalities of the imperceptible then in the realm of vision and hearing cinema is for Deleuze both “inhuman and superhuman because of durations inferior or superior to our own” (Deleuze cited Ménil in Khalfa, 98). Alain Ménil has been an incisive commentator on Deleuze’s work on cinema. Perhaps the formost contribution his essay may make as a corrective to the still prevalent misconcpetions of the distinction whch Deleuze makes between the two regimes of the image is that it pertains “to a taxonomy obedient solely to the law of perception and not to a chronology more or less supplied by the history of cinema” (88). Picking up a question to which the contribution of Simont is also attentive, he points out how time image films (and the possibility of the direct time image haunts cinema since its inception as Deleuze himself notes, cited 90), in their inversion of the relation of time to movement, permit the direct presentation of time, albeit time out of joint (89). It is only once the possibilities of the movement image have been exhausted that the direct image of time becomes observable. The confusion arises when exhaustion comes to be thought of as strictly speaking historically locatable: this, he asserts, is to confuse the possible and the virtual – a distinction upon which Deleuze often insisted. The second corrective offered in passing by Ménil is that “the very idea of assigning an art to some philosophical directive sits ill with the Deleuzean conception of art, science and philosophy” as this is elaborated in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (93).

As Deleuze stated in Proust “La philosophie, avec toute sa méthode et sa bonne volonté, n’est rien face aux pressions secretes de l’oeuvre d’art” (119). The three volumes on cinema, literature and art written by Ronald Bogue and published in quick succession by Routledge represent a frenetic attempt to enshrine this idea by sheer force of numbers. The book on cinema makes little or no attempt to speak of films not mentioned by Deleuze or films made since the first volume was published twenty years ago, but then it is called Deleuze on Cinema, and if Dorothea Olkowski is to be believed then at least other Deleuzeans can content themeselves that there is at least something that might remain to be written.

However the volume on literature makes another this time more surprising decision: not to mention Klossowski, Tournier or Zola. That these are essays of philosophy rather than literary criticism does not itself explain the omission. Indeed the omission represents something of a contradiction in view of Bogue’s claim that he will not seek to describe a general system of literature as this might be extracted from the work of Deleuze. On the one hand not to refer to these important essays might bear out his desire not to find a general system, but on the other it might be objected that in omitting them Bogue is enabling a system to emerge willy-nilly. At any rate the three essays are part of the same volume, The Logic of Sense, which receives extensive treatment anyway in Bogue’s book. Bogue’s reputation however as one of the most important commentators on Deleuzean aesthetics (if such a thing exists[1]) has been well-earned, and his chapters on machinic are to be commended for the way in which they tease out the nuanced relation between the two meanings of the Abstract Machine as these appear in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari.
[1] See Ranciere's comments in the edited volume La Vie Philosophique.