Theory & Event

The title was in my amazon.com shopping chart for a year or more. Though the publication date was August, 2005, I received it seven months later. In other words, I’ve been looking forward to this one. With a ‘spatial turn’ having become more or less mainstream across the humanities and social sciences, and with Deleuze’s influence growing in geography, a collection addressing his philosophy of space was well due. This volume is part of Edinburgh’s successful series ‘Deleuze Connections’; the other titles are Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Deleuze and Literature, Deleuze and Music, Deleuze and Cinema and Deleuze and Geophilosophy. Forthcoming titles include Deleuze and the Contemporary World, Deleuze and the Social and Deleuze and Philosophy. As with Derrida and Foucault before him, Deleuze is spawning forth his own little industry of interpretations and loyalties. Whether he would have wanted it this way or not is another question, but I am certain that space is a philosophical category he would have been delighted to have seen explored through his ontology.

How then to voice my disappointment? I could start with recalling moments of the recent film Zizek! when Slavoj Zizek fulminates against those who accuse him of not calling into question his Lacanianism, when they themselves have never said a critical word about Derrida. Zizek’s philosophy, it is true, cannot be reduced to Lacanian psychoanalysis, in that he departs from Lacan by adding Marxism to his theoretical mix. At one point Zizek has to switch off the Lacan video, visibly irritated with his master’s stuffy intellectualist arrogance. His frustration about the lack of true involvement with master thinkers can surely be applied to Deleuze, whose reception has not only been overwhelmingly uncritical, but has also been inexplicably one-sided. To wit, most Anglophone scholars have consistenly read Deleuze as the champion of nomadism, creativity and, generally, the unhinging of spatiality. Deleuzians have cared little for Deleuze’s rethinking, especially with Felix Guattari, of the geographical fixations of capitalism, mental illness, the nation-state, imprisonment, racism and fascism. Few read Deleuze and Guattari for an explanation of how there are bad things in this world. Likewise, the ‘space’ examined in the book under consideration is, to my mind, not the concept of space Deleuze and Guattari develop in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. Deleuzian space, and Deleuzoguattarian space, is one of differences leading to the individuation of systems; of flows forming networks of state and capitalist power; of territories made up from mobilities that exceed them; of desiring-machines that are necessary for the enduring relations of inequality.

Another book in the series, Deleuze and Geophilosophy, has already done a good job in condensing the affinities between Deleuzian ontology, complexity theory and human geography’s emphasis on the contestations of place.¹ What Deleuze and Guattari call ‘geophilosophy’ in What is Philosophy? is very clearly from the start about the de- and reterritorializations of empire, exploitation, information technology, border patrol, Eurocentrism and professionalism (about bad things).² In the final chapter of Deleuze and Space, Gregg Lambert acknowledges a planetary dimension of geophilosophy, offering some criticism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire.³ Capitalism has a congingent geography of uneven development and local divisions of labour. Going back to the ancient creation myth of Gaia and Kronos, Lambert argues that the logic of this geography cannot be completely explained with historical materialism. Even then, unlike what one would expect of geophilosophy, Lambert stops short at making what is probably the most crucial (and difficult) argument to make about space: social formations, economies and ecosystems have always been not just threatened, but defined by their intertwining. This understanding of space has become central to human geography and globalization studies, as many will know from the writings of Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Edward Soja or Manuel Castells. Still, a fine-tuning of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical anthropology with their own ontological and political tools could greatly enhance a critical philosophy of human spatiality.

So what Deleuze...