Review: [untitled] Author(s): Daniel W. Smith Reviewed work(s): Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze ; Hugh Tomlinson Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), pp. 455-456 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202745 Accessed: 30/11/2009 18:58 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Religion. http://www.jstor.org Book Reviews allegory in her analysis, Lebowitz offers neither an adequate definition nor a satisfactory defense of her use of this notion. The extensive critical debate triggered by Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979) makes this oversight all the more puzzling. My point is not that Lebowitz should have included additional references to support her argument. To the contrary, a more careful examination of the important discussions now going on among critical theorists calls into question the very understanding of literature on which Lebowitz bases her argument. Lebowitz seems unaware of questions recently raised concerning the relationship between author and work, the expressive function of literature, the nature of mimesis, the difference between sign and symbol, the workings of fabulation and recit, and so forth. A consideration of these questions suggests that Kierkegaard anticipates many of the insights of some of the most thoughtful and provocative contemporary critics. Kierkegaard's works are literary-but in ways that are more radical and interesting than Lebowitz suspects. MARK C. TAYLOR, Williams College. DELEUZE, GILLES. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by HUGH TOMLINSON. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. xiv + 221 pp. $25.00 (cloth); $10.00 (paper). This seminal work, now ably translated two decades after its 1962 publication in Paris, not only initiated a new era of Nietzsche interpretation in Francewhich was introduced to English readers in The New Nietzsche (ed. David Allison [New York: Delta, 19771)-but, perhaps more importantly, also remains one of the pivotal texts in Gilles Deleuze's own influential "postmodernist" philosophy. Like Heidegger, whose collected lectures on Nietzsche had just appeared in 1961, Deleuze relies heavily on the unpublished notes of the Nachlass. It is there that Nietzsche interprets the world in terms of "force," that is, as "dynamic quanta" in perspectival "relations of tension." For Nietzsche, all phenomena-things, events, words, thoughts, societies, spirits, and so forth -have a multiple sense depending on the forces (the gods) that take possession of them or are expressed in them. Thus, in place of a topology of concepts (which asks, "What is . . ?"), Nietzsche substitutes a whole typology of forces (which asks, "Which one ... ?")-the types of the master, the slave, the priest, and so on. Deleuze's dense book sets out to define these different forces and to analyze their varying combinations, not only in terms of their quantity (dominant/dominated) but also, and primarily, in terms of their quality (active, acted, reactive). However, there are three notions in particular that make their first appearance in the course of this study that account for the far-reaching impact of this book. First, the development of such a theory of force leads to the deeper and properly Deleuzian problematic of difference. For the point of all this talk about force is precisely that there is no force in general without the difference between forces. "Difference in quantity is the essence of force and of the relation of force to force," writes Deleuze. "To dream of two equal forces, even if they are said to be of opposite senses, is a coarse and approximate dream, a statistical dream in which the living is submerged but which chemistry dispels" 455 The Journal of Religion (p. 43). Nietzsche's critique of the nihilistic enterprise of denying life is thus transformed, in Deleuze's work, into a critique of the egalitarian and "indifferent" tendency of philosophy to reduce differences a critique, he says, that "operates on three levels: against logical identity, against mathematical equality, and against physical equilibrium: against the three forms of the undifferentiated" (p. 45; Deleuze's emphasis). In Derrida, it is this conception of difference that constitutes textuality; in Deleuze, difference ("the unequal in itself")-and not, as in Kant, space and time-is the empirical condition by which the identities of the sensible world appear. Second, Deleuze interprets the word power in the will to power as the genetic element that determines these differential relations of force. "Power is therefore not what the will wants, but on the contrary, the one that wants in the will" (p. xi). It is this notion of power and its complex mechanisms that becomes increasingly influential in the later work of Michel Foucault ("I could give no notion by references or quotations what this book owes to Gilles Deleuze and the work he is undertaking with Felix Guatarri" [Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 309]), and that might account for his half-serious and oft-quoted prediction that perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian. Finally, it is in the complex function of repetition (as eternal return) that Deleuze locates the affirmation of these free differences and the means by which Nietzsche paradoxically gave identity to difference. "Identity in the eternal return," he writes, "does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs" (p. 48). Pierre Klossowski, in a book dedicated to Deleuze, has perhaps taken these observations to their conclusion. The doctrine of the eternal return--that there has never been a first time (no origin) and that there will never be a last time (no teleological or eschatological end of history)is really only the "simulacrum" of a doctrine, for the identities it affirms are always decentered or "cracked": their difference is interiorized, they differ from themselves. Whence Nietzsche's affirmation of masks, his positive notion of the false, and his insistence that the intellect is merely a caricature of delirium. As Klossowski concludes, "if we demystify it is only to mystify further, no longer to abuse, but to favor those obscure forces" (Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux [Paris: Mercure de France, 1969], pp. 194-95). The implications of these three ideas and their appropriation by other thinkers can only hint at the fecundity of this study. Like much of Deleuze's early work, it is written in a straightforward and fairly technical style that contrasts sharply with the flamboyance of the later Capitalisme et Schizophrenie (Paris, 1972). As one French reviewer commented, it is excellent, but dry, very dry. Nonetheless, Nietzsche and Philosophy remains a touchstone for an entire generation of French thinkers. One can only hope that more of Deleuze's important texts will be made available to English readers in the near future. DANIEL W. SMITH, Chicago, Illinois.