Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 01:22:35 -0500 (EST)
From: Orpheus <cw_duff-AT-alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject: deleuze_Mar.94 (fwd)



	Paul Bains - no resentment -- all points taken.

	**** For those interested here is another posting from March 1994.
This is from the archives of the list. Once again this is from a period
when the actual list did not yet have its present form. Perhaps some of
the senior members on this list can give a little history about the list.

	___________________________________
From: Jonathan Beasley Murray <jbmurray-AT-csd4.csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: MP - On Approaching the Text, Part II (fwd)
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 1994 09:46:04 -0600 (CST)
Status: OR

Forwarded message:
>From MCURRENT-AT-INS.INFONET.NET Wed Mar  2 08:19:53 1994
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 1994 8:21:38 -0600 (CST)
From: "Michael J. Current" <MCURRENT-AT-INS.INFONET.NET>
Subject: MP - On Approaching the Text, Part II

     My modest scholastic advance did not count for much. . .in the face
     of the newcomer's intellectual rigor and speculative reach.  The
     arguments that my friends and I tossed back and forth among
     ourselves were like balls of cotton or rubber compared with the
     iron and steel cannonballs that he hurled at us.  We soon came to
     fear his talent for seizing upon a single one of our words and
     using it to expose our banality, stupidity, or failure of
     intelligence.  He also possessed extraordinary powers of
     translation and rearrangement: _all the tired philosophy of the
     curriculum passed through him and emerged unrecognizable but
     rejuvenated, with a fresh, undigested, bitter taste of newness
     that we weaker, lazier minds found disconcerting and repulsive_.
               Famed French novelist Michel Tournier describing his
               friend Gilles Deleuze while a student at the Lycee Carnot
               in the early 1940's [1]

- - - - -
I closed my last post with a quote from Deleuze on "reading."  In the
following posts, I will some additional Deleuze quotes, on "reading,"
theory," and the practice of "philosophy" itself.

Deleuze's concepts of "reading" and of "theory" flow from his
philosophical perspective - we will see this both in the text of
"Rhizome" and in later parts of _A Thousand Plateaus_, where Deleuze and
Guattari explicate their approach to the question of "signs." The
injunction/intention that their texts be approached as "tools,"
productive mechanisms from which each reader "takes what they need,"
borrowing from and "deforming" the text according to each person's
micro-political agenda is, I think, quite sincere.  Already, in
_Capitalism and Schizophrenia_, they have succeeded in producing an open
system that has begun to be fruitfully utilized by those working in
diverse fields from music and art to computer studies.

But there is also an element of hyperboly in some of these statements -
while Deleuze and Guattari may legitimately _desire_ to produce texts
that "work" and are utilized _outside_ of the academy and the
"intelligencia," their success in that regard has been quite limited.
*****Perhaps their works can be better thought of as texts that form a
blueprint, that seek to clear the air and create the conditions of
possibility for such "pop philosophizing," that encourage _us_ to take
up that project; rather than trying to demonstrate, in vain, that their
own texts have achieved that status.*****

Deleuze's statements in this regard are, as both "I have nothing to
admit" and _Dialogues_ make clear, a quite personal reaction to academic
philosophizing, to which he has always maintained an ambiguous
relationship.  Deleuze always worked on the margins of the academy, not
outside it, and he remains dedicated to the disciple of philosophy, as
_What Is Philosophy?_ makes clear.  He took pains to clarify that he
wished _A Thousand Plateaus_ to be thought of as a work of philosophy,
however alien it seemed to academic philosophers. (Asked in an interview
if the book was "literature," Deleuze responds that it is "Philosophie,
rien que de la philosophie, au sens traditionnel du mot.")[2]

At the same time, he feels that the way philosophy is tradititionally
taught and practiced in contemporary society tends to be neuroticizing,
stultifying and self-referential - an endless discourse of texts and
commentaries upon texts that prevent one from actually "philosophizing,"
or "speaking in one's own name."  This tendancy he blames in large part
on the complicity between philosophy as traditionally practiced and the
state, as the final quote I will present makes clear.

For me, at least, this attempt to "throw open the doors," this call to
"speak in one's own name" and the effort to make this possible, forms
the quintessence of Deleuze and Guattari's project - however flawed and
imperfect; it goes to the heart of their philosophico-political project
and of the texts and textual strategies they employ in hopes of
furthering that project. . . .

Michael

[1] Michel Tournier, _The Wind Spirit: An Autobiography_, trans. [of
_Le Vent Paraclet_, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1977] by Arthur
Goldhammer, Boston: Beacon Press, 1988, pp. 127-128.

[2] See "Entretien 1980," with Catherine Clement.  _L'Arc_ 49 (Special
issue on Deleuze), Revised Edition, 1980:99-102, p. 99.  For a sampling
of the reaction to the publication of _Mille Plateaux_ see Andre Pierre
Colombat, "A Thousand Trails to Work with Deleuze." _Sub-stance_ 66
(1991):10-23, p. 10 and notes.

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Michael J. Current    mcurrent-AT-ins.infonet.net
mcurrent-AT-nyx.cs.du.edu Presently unemployed (: G/L/B/T & AIDS policy
activist 737 - 18th Street, Des Moines, IA 50314-1031  (515) 283-2142
"AN IMAGE OF THOUGHT CALLED PHILOSOPHY HAS BEEN FORMED HISTORICALLY AND
IT EFFECTIVELY STOPS PEOPLE FROM THINKING." - GILLES DELEUZE
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