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Structuralist heroes and points of heresy: recognizing Gilles Deleuze’s (anti-)structuralism

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Abstract

This article is concerned with the status and stakes of Gilles Deleuze’s “break” with structuralism. With a particular focus on a transitional text of Deleuze, the 1967/1972 article “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” it asks how Deleuze understood structuralism and why, after his encounter with Félix Guattari and Guattari’s own transitional text, 1969’s “Machine and Structure,” Deleuze felt the need to break with structuralism. It argues that reading these two texts together allows us to see that Deleuze already perceived tensions within the structuralist project, and argues that Guattari’s non-structural account of the machine allowed Deleuze to clarify this perception, and see it as necessitating a departure from structuralism. To close, however, it turns to recent work by philosophers such as Étienne Balibar and Patrice Maniglier that re-examines the structuralist moment and identifies an ongoing legacy that the “poststructuralism” of Deleuze and Guattari may be part of. By considering Deleuze and Guattari’s break with structuralism in light of this work, this article considers how the polemical rejection of structuralism by Deleuze and Guattari may not fully account for the ongoing legacy of the structuralist program and the persistence of a structuralist problematic in their thought.

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Notes

  1. Deleuze and Guattari (1983), Dosse (2010, p. 230).

  2. Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Alliez (2011, p. 38).

  3. Alliez and Goffey (2011).

  4. Deleuze (1990, 1994, 2004a), Guattari (2015).

  5. Smith (2006), Thornton (2017).

  6. Thornton (2017, pp. 456–57n3).

  7. Balibar (2015).

  8. For Saussure language was to be understood as “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of others” (1959, p. 114). See Dosse (1997a, p. xxii).

  9. Dosse (1997a, pp. 16–17).

  10. Alliez (2015, p. 141).

  11. Dosse (1997a, p. xxii). The pull between the two possibilities of structuralist approaches, as constituting a “science of man” (ibid., p. xxv) and as encompassing the sciences of man, will turn out to be one of the major tensions at the centre of structuralism.

  12. Barthes (1972, p. 213), Deleuze (2004a, p. 170).

  13. See Charles Stivale’s introduction to HRS for more context (1998, pp. 251–58). Marc Rölli offers a detailed account of the place of structure in Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, stressing its genetic, temporal articulation, densely but acutely summarized as follows: “The philosophical concept of structure developed by Deleuze can be defined by means of a number of criteria: elements, relations, singularities, temporality, seriality, unconsciousness. ‘Structure’ can be defined as the problematical, differential or virtual idea of multiplicity. Or to put it another way, the idea is characterised by a threefold internal determination, which organises itself serially and has at its disposal a temporal mode of actualisation which is not exhausted in a linear transition from one actual state to another” (2016, pp. 205–206).

  14. Deleuze (2004a, p. 174). Craig Lundy argues that this is also how Foucault, Althusser, and Derrida engaged with structuralism (2013, p. 76).

  15. Williams (2005, p. 55).

  16. Ibid., p. 54.

  17. Dosse (2010, pp. 227–228). The version of “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” that Deleuze sent to Althusser was a transcription of a lecture he delivered in December of 1967, and the published 1972 version is substantially expanded. However, the basic form of the two is the same, with the major additions being the fourth criterion on the differenciator and differentiation, an integration of some of the “final critiques” into an account of structuralism and temporality, and the increased prominence of these “final critiques,” albeit no longer named as critiques but rather as the final criterion, “From Subject to Practice.” While this section is developed significantly, the general theme in each concerns the difficulties that structuralism faces when trying to accommodate practice. Some of these changes have been detailed by Ted Stolze (1998). It is unfortunately difficult to determine when exactly the changes from Deleuze’s 1967 lecture sent to Althusser and the essay’s 1972 published version were made, though the appearance of themes from Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense in a form that seems not yet fully developed suggests that this took place, at least for the most part, before the publication of those texts. As such I believe it is justified to take this text to be “before” Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, albeit with some care required in overstating this, in particular with regards to the final criterion. Care must also be taken with situating the Althusserian aspects of HRS in the broader context of Deleuze’s thought, as the final HRS is informed by the detailed feedback Althusser and, indirectly, Pierre Macherey provided Deleuze. As Warren Montag has highlighted, Althusser’s response to Deleuze is written in the context of the rethinking of the notion of structure, in dialogue with Macherey’s critique of literary structuralism, that Althusser undertook after Reading Capital (2013, pp. 96–100). Moreover, that Spinoza is crucial to the alternatives to structuralism presented by each of Deleuze, Althusser, and Macherey, presents a rich topic for further inquiry. See also Peden (2014).

  18. See Althusser (2009, p. 7), Foucault (2002, pp. 16–17) and Lacan (2006, p. 189).

  19. Deleuze (2004a, p. 173).

  20. Ibid., p. 171.

  21. Kurzweil (1986).

  22. Deleuze (2004a, p. 174).

  23. Dosse (1997a, p. xxv), Lévi-Strauss (1966, p. 247), Macksey and Donato (1972, p. x), Deleuze (1970, p. 195).

  24. Balibar (2003), Maniglier (2010).

  25. Deleuze (2004a, p. 176).

  26. Ibid., p. 178.

  27. Ibid., p. 180. Here Deleuze steps back from the critical remarks of his 1967 lecture on structuralism’s neglect of temporality.

  28. Ibid., p. 178.

  29. Ibid., p. 185.

  30. Ibid., p. 189.

  31. Ibid., pp. 189–90.

  32. Ibid., p. 190.

  33. Derrida (2001, p. 354). Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” first delivered at the 1966 symposium “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” is widely noted as an early turn away from structuralism, although like HRS it is marked by ambivalence. As with HRS, to the extent that Derrida puts forward a critique of structuralism, it is via characteristics of structuralism already latent or even explicit, and the basic structuralist problematics Derrida sets off from are left open. Like HRS, “Structure, Sign and Play” can easily be read as being at work internal to structuralism. It is not clear whether Deleuze was aware of Derrida’s piece in 1967, but by 1968 both he and Guattari are making positive reference to Derrida, explicitly (Deleuze 1994, pp. 318-319n28) or, in Guattari’s adoption of “supplementarity” (1984, p. 178), implicitly. On Derrida’s 1966 presentation, see Smith (2019).

  34. Deleuze (1990, pp. 103–105, 71–73).

  35. Deleuze (2004a, p. 191).

  36. Ibid.

  37. The account of structure in The Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990, 48) has only a small number of (nevertheless significant) deviations from the account in “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” (see Bowden 2011), while across Difference and Repetition Deleuze speaks of the structural characteristics of the problematic Idea (Deleuze 1994, pp. 183–184).

  38. See Maniglier (2012, p. 22), Maniglier (2021), Bowden (2011).

  39. Deleuze (2004a, p. 175).

  40. Deleuze (2020, p. 33).

  41. Deleuze (1990, p. 35).

  42. Ibid., p. 93.

  43. Ibid., p. 186.

  44. Ibid., pp. 157–158.

  45. Lapoujade (2017, p. 143).

  46. Ibid.

  47. Deleuze (1994, pp. 58, 148), Lapoujade (2017, p. 147).

  48. Negri (2011, p. 157).

  49. Guattari (1984).

  50. Guattari (2015, pp. 381–382n1).

  51. Guattari (2015, p. 319). See the “desiring machines” of Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 1 and passim) and the “machinic assemblages” of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 4 and passim).

  52. Guattari (2015, p. 320).

  53. Ibid., p. 321. Here there remains a proximity to Lacan, not through what Deleuze and Guattari would call, in Anti-Oedipus, the “transcendent Phallus” (1983, p. 59), but rather through the objet petit “a,” the “infernal machine” that “erupts at the heart of structural equilibrium” (ibid., p. 83; Guattari 2015, p. 323). In Guattari’s words, “the theory of the object ‘a’ perhaps sows the destruction of the signifier’s totalitarianism” (Deleuze 2004b, p. 222). See Charis Raptis’s study of the “two poles” Deleuze and Guattari identify in Lacan’s theory of desire (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 27; Raptis 2018).

  54. Guattari (2015, p. 323).

  55. Ibid., p. 318.

  56. Ibid., p. 319.

  57. Ibid., p. 318; Guattari (1972, p. 240).

  58. Derrida (2001, p. 352).

  59. Collett (2019), Deleuze (1994, pp. 86–91).

  60. Deleuze (2004a, p. 170).

  61. Ibid., p. 179.

  62. Ibid., pp. 189, 188.

  63. Guattari (2015, p. 327).

  64. See Thornton (2017, p. 468).

  65. Guattari (2015, p. 322).

  66. Ibid.

  67. Deleuze (1990, pp. 181, 71).

  68. Alliez (2015, p. 139). This theme is developed in its most sophisticated form in A Thousand Plateaus, with the clearest link to a flight from structuralism to be found in the plateau entitled “587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 111–148).

  69. Dosse (2010, p. 224).

  70. Ibid., p. 230.

  71. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 143).

  72. Balibar (2015, p. 67); Milner (2002, p. 144).

  73. Maniglier (2010, pp. 59–61); Balibar (2011, p. 17).

  74. Maniglier (2005, p. 15); Maniglier (2010, p. 56).

  75. Balibar (2003, p. 3).

  76. Balibar (2011, p. 17).

  77. Balibar (2003, pp. 10, 11).

  78. Ibid., p. 18.

  79. Balibar (2015).

  80. Ibid., p. 50.

  81. Ibid., p. 54.

  82. Ibid., p. 67.

  83. Ibid., p. 73.

  84. Ibid., pp. 73, 17.

  85. Balibar (2014, p. 25).

  86. Deleuze and Parnet (2006, p. 38).

  87. Lapoujade (2017, pp. 224–225).

  88. Maniglier (2005, p. 468).

  89. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 234).

  90. Deleuze (1991, p. 98).

  91. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 237).

  92. Maniglier (2021, pp. 25, 37).

  93. Balibar (2011, p. 22).

  94. Bianco (2020). See also Dosse (1997b, pp. 28–29) on Derrida.

  95. Viveiros de Castro (2014); Mercier (2019).

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Campbell, I. Structuralist heroes and points of heresy: recognizing Gilles Deleuze’s (anti-)structuralism. Cont Philos Rev 55, 215–234 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-021-09562-9

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