In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Usefulness of Deleuze for Life
  • Bruce Baugh (bio)
Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1996)

It is perhaps the fate of Gilles Deleuze to be known primarily through his relations to others: to Felix Guattari, with whom he wrote his most celebrated works, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and to Michel Foucault, who famously declared, “Perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian.” But Deleuze maintained that a thing’s being is constituted only through its relations to specific “others.” The proper name “Gilles Deleuze” invoked in this collection is not that of the person who died in 1995, but a series of relations (such as Deleuze-Nietzsche, Deleuze-Spinoza, Deleuze-Kant, Deleuze-Bergson, Deleuze-Leibniz), of pairings and encounters of forces, issuing in resonances that, by linking up in a series, produce a new force, with a new trajectory. To paraphrase one of the contributors, the question this collection asks is: where is precisely that route called Gilles Deleuze leading, and what is its value?

This question cannot be answered independently of another: where are we going? As Francois Zourabichvili writes (p. 189), this is a double question: not only where are we in fact heading now, but what course are we to chart for ourselves using “a compass of life”? Deleuze’s increasing popularity in cultural studies, philosophy and criticism attests to the affinity between Deleuze’s way of posing these questions and our own, and the usefulness of his theories for finding a way forward. It is “the usefulness of Deleuze for life” that is the focus of these essays, which for the most part depart from the scholarly norm of a commentary that accurately captures a philosopher’s thoughts. What is the use of Deleuze for an understanding of other philosophers? for an understanding of art? for an understanding of modernity and post-modernity? for an understanding of bodies, human or otherwise? for a politics that would be capable of negotiating new relations among humans and others, women and men, children and adults, feeling and thought? Pierre Macherey rightly points out that for Deleuze, a commentary is “an attempt to put the text to work, to bring its theoretical and practical concerns into play, and bring out ‘another language in its language’ through a kind of repetition freed from the phantoms of identity, and productive of differences” (p. 148). A good commentator is concerned, in Zourabichvili’s words, not simply with “the cold architecture of the concept,” but with knowing whether “one captures... only those vital resonances capable of making sense of it, and if one has gone far enough with those resonances, if one has sufficiently ‘potentialized’ the concept” (p.212).

By this Deleuzian criterion, the essays in this collection succeed in varying degrees. If the question is: what is the being of the sensible, and how does it relate to art?, then the Kant-Deleuze coupling in Daniel W. Smith’s essay will resonate, not only because Smith demonstrates how Deleuze’s theory of the sensible forms the basis for a post-Kantian aesthetics of force, but also because his exposition of Deleuze’s theory of the sensible, and of sensation, is the clearest and best organized I’ve read. Smith helpfully situates Deleuze’sthought in relation to other thinkers (Kant, Bergson, Hermann Cohen, Leibniz), enabling the reader to “take a bearing” on the direction of Deleuze’s thought.

A similarily impressive and thorough exegesis can be found in Constantin Boundas’ Deleuze-Bergson pairing, which adds a Bergsonian complement to Smith’s post-Kantian interpretation of Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism.” Boundas’ explanation of Deleuze on “the actualization of the virtual” illuminates Deleuzian difference, and its difference from structuralist and Derridean difference. Both Smith and Boundas stick closely to Deleuze’s own thought, but together, their essays constitute an excellent introduction to Deleuze’s ontology, and in particular, that of his great work, Difference and Repetition (1968).

Difference and Repetition is also the focus of Jean-Michel Salanskis’ essay, which attempts a more critical and distanced interrogation of Deleuze’s account of the Idea as a differential structure. Salanskis’ question is: to what extent does Deleuze properly...

Share