Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95)

1. Histories of philosophy and philosophical works

Born in Paris, Gilles Deleuze spent the period of the Second World War studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. His teachers included Ferdinand Alquié, Georges Canguilhem, Maurice de Gandillac and Jean Hyppolite. Deleuze particularly admired Alquié and Hyppolite, but found them both to be stuck in the history of philosophy. For him, only Sartre escaped that history, and introduced a breath of fresh air into the post-Liberation situation of the intellectual in France. Deleuze’s academic career proceeded in the usual manner: Professeur de Lycée, Professeur de l’Université de Provence, researcher at the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques, Professeur de l’Université de Paris VIII. His public life is perhaps defined more by what did not happen than what did. He seldom travelled outside France, never joined the Communist Party, never embraced existentialism, phenomenology, or Heidegger; but he never renounced Marx, nor was Deleuze himself denounced during the upheavals of May 1968 in France. He died in 1995, by suicide, under conditions of deteriorating health.

By his own account, all the authors in the history of philosophy who interested Deleuze had something in common: they all escaped from the history of philosophy in some respect. Beyond this they had few relationships with one another: the Stoics, Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Leibniz, and especially Spinoza. Their likeness had to be produced by a technique that explored what happens between them, in an encounter for which no single philosopher served as a model. In Deleuze’s rewritings of the history of philosophy, as well as in his two early philosophical works, Différence et répétition (Difference and Repetition) and Logique du sens (The Logic of Sense), what results is the production, not of history at all, but of ‘philosophical geography’, the line between two ideas forming an ideal space that is neither the one nor the other, but is in flux. Deleuze carries this out by grasping each philosophy ‘in the middle’ rather than by seeking its first principle.

An example of Deleuze’s monstrous production can be found in his engagement with Kant in La Philosophie critique de Kant (Kant’s Critical Philosophy) which he called ‘a book on the enemy’. If Kant harmonizes the faculties in order to ground the architectonic of rationality, Deleuze focuses on how Kant makes possible the disjunction of the faculties. This incites the terrible struggle between imagination and reason and understanding and inner sense, a struggle whose importance lies in the notion that this discord produces an accord, even though the faculties are no longer determined by their succession in time or their contiguity in space, and are unregulated, as well, by any law.

Such a reading is no doubt indebted to Deleuze’s admiration for Hume: not the Hume whose empiricism is claimed by the binary first principle: sensible ideas-intelligible ideas, but the Hume who substitutes the external and changing relation A and B, for the internal and essential relation A is B. Such a move realizes philosophical geography by undermining the verb ‘to be’ and establishing the moving series: and, and, and. Of equal importance, the substitution of ‘and’ for ‘is’ makes way for the concept of systems, unities or wholes that are open, as opposed to unities that transcend their parts. Finally, since philosophers have by and large begun with the concept of unity and then derived multiplicity from it as its contrary, to think multiplicity as what is, without a closed unity, Deleuze insists that we have to learn to think in terms of time instead of space. This is Deleuze’s view of Bergson’s contribution to philosophy, that in the world (and equally in cinema) matter, the movement-image, is produced by the expansion or relaxation of memory-duration, the time-image. Bergson – upon whom, Deleuze remarks, so much hatred was focused within the French university – argued, against Riemann and Einstein, that duration is what differs with itself originally. It is internal difference, a world of intensive magnitudes preserved, virtually coexistent in memory as the repetition of multiple planes, and so not as a numerically multiple exteriority.

Even before Bergson, Deleuze found in Nietzsche the guarantee that memory is the return, not of ‘to be’, of what is the same, but of becoming and difference. Following Hume, Deleuze argues that, for Nietzsche, all bodies consist of multiple relations between forces; will to power wills becoming and difference when it experiments with forces. When a force extends its power as far as it is able, its will is the expression of the power that it is and, in willing, it affirms difference and chance.

Connecting Hume, Nietzsche, the Stoics, and especially, Spinoza, Deleuze discovered what he called ‘a secret link which resides in the critique of negation, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power’. What guides this is, in part, a profound and consistent anti-Hegelianism. In Le Bergsonisme (Bergsonism) this anti-Hegelianism is oriented by Bergson’s objection to the imprecision and generality of Hegel’s notions of unity and multiplicity. In Nietzsche et la philosophie (Nietzsche and Philosophy) it is guided by Nietzsche’s critique of negative slave morality, values based upon a logic that states, ‘You are evil; therefore, I am good’, and upon the false conception of action as external rather than internal to power. This critique is clarified in Deleuze’s work on the Stoics and Spinoza, where it is played out in terms of a conception of the body as multiple and active.

For the Stoics, there are two planes of being: bodies and events. Bodies are beings in depth; they are real, existing in space and temporally, in the present. On the other plane, we find ‘incorporeal acts’ – sense, the formalization of expression, ideational events at the surface of bodies. Mixtures deep inside bodies are the causes of incorporeal events, that is, of sense: becoming green, becoming poisoned. These becomings are the effects of bodily mixtures and are not reducible to bodies. Deleuze’s logic of becoming undermines propositional logic, for the attribute is not a quality related to a subject by the indicative ‘is’; any verb in the infinitive operates as limitless becoming. This has the additional effect of referring to no subject, no I claims the event which is always referred to simply as ‘it’.

Deleuze wrote two books on Spinoza: Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza) which served as part of his doctoral thesis, and Spinoza: philosophie pratique (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy). For Deleuze’s project of geographical philosophy, Spinoza’s importance lies in the fact that, practically alone among philosophers, Spinoza asks what a body, understood as an assemblage of affects or becomings, can do, and how this leads to the practical or ethical question of how to increase our power to think, exist and act. The answer is, on Deleuze’s account, a matter of a body’s capacity to be affected in encounters among bodies, each of which is a dynamic and open multiplicity, an assemblage. Bodies that are compatible increase one another’s power to act; incompatible bodies decrease power for one or both of them. As a decrease in power is the normal situation for human beings, so the ‘sadness’ that characterizes the human condition is the first point of attack. On the practical or ethical level, Deleuze-Spinoza recommends a two-pronged approach: first, devalue sad passions; second, carry out an analysis of the systems of relations of the parts of bodies to determine which relations are compatible. This sparks the production of a geography that moves from merely joyful passive affections, to compatible relations as the cause of joy and finally, to the Spinozan ethical imperative: become active!