Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 01:23:52 -0500 (EST) From: Orpheus <cw_duff-AT-alcor.concordia.ca> Subject: deleuze_Mar.94 2[fwd] >From jbmurray-AT-csd4.csd.uwm.edu Wed Mar 2 09:46:52 1994 From: Jonathan Beasley Murray <jbmurray-AT-csd4.csd.uwm.edu> Subject: MP - On Approaching the Text, Part III (fwd) Date: Wed, 2 Mar 1994 09:46:50 -0600 (CST) Status: ORf Forwarded message: >From MCURRENT-AT-INS.INFONET.NET Wed Mar 2 08:22:42 1994 Date: Wed, 2 Mar 1994 8:23:54 -0600 (CST) From: "Michael J. Current" <MCURRENT-AT-INS.INFONET.NET> Subject: MP - On Approaching the Text, Part III In 1973, Michel Cressole of the University of Paris VII published the first book-length study of Deleuze. [1] He wrote a letter to Deleuze, which appeared, with Deleuze's response (in slightly abbreviated form), in the "Polemique" section of _La Quinzaine litteraire_ [2]. Deleuze' entire letter was reprinted as an appendix to Cressole's book [3]. The (abbreviated) letter was translated under the title "I have nothing to admit," and published in the special "Anti-Oedipus" issue of _Semiotext(e)_ in 1977. [4] At first glance a strange, rambling text, it in fact constitutes one of the most accessible introductions to Deleuze's project. Since I know many of you have difficulty getting your hands on this text, I have quoted it here at length - passages dealing with "philosophy," with "reading" and with a look forward from _Anti-Oedpius_ to _Mille Plateaux_. So many key themes are represented here, however, that I think the excerpts are worth reading in their entirety. Again, if you have thoughts or questions, please jump right in and post them. Enjoy! Michael - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Since our topic is a book about me - and you are the only one to blame for this - I would like to explain how I view what I have written. I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less assassinated with the history of philosophy. History of philosophy has an obvious, repressive function in philosophy; it is philosophy's very own Oedipus. "All the same you won't dare to speak your own name as long as you have not read this and that, and that on this, and this on that." In my generation, many did not pull through; some did by inventing their own procedures and new rules, a new tone. For a long time I myself have worked through the history of philosophy, read such and such a book on such and such an author. But I managed to compensate for this in several ways: first by loving authors who were opposed to the rationalist tradition of that history. I find among Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche a secret link that resides in the critique of negation, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power, etc.) What I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic. [. . . .] ......................................................................... Nietzsche whom I read late was the one who pulled me out of all this. [. . . .] He's the one who screws you behind your back. He gives you a perverse taste that neither Marx nor Freud have ever given you: the desire for everyone to say simple things in his own name, to speak through affects, intensities, experiences, experiments. To say something in one's own name is very strange, for it is not at all when we consider ourselves as selves, persons, or subjects that we speak in our own name. On the contrary, an individual acquires a true proper name as the result of the most severe operations of depersonalization, when he opens himself to multiplicities that pervade him and to intensities which run right through his whole being. The name as the immediate apprehension of such an intensive multiplicity is the opposite of the depersonalization brought about by the history of philosophy, a depersonalization of love and not of submission. The depth of what we don't know, the deepness of our own underdevelopment is where we talk from. We've become a bundle of loosened singularities, names, first names, nails, things, animals, minute events [. . . .] So I began to work on two books in this immediate direction: _Difference et Repetition_ and _Logique de sens_. I don't have any illusions: they are still full of an academic apparatus - they are laborious - but there is something I try to shake, to stir up within myself. I try to deal with writing as with a flux, not a code. And there are pages I like in _Difference et Repetition_, those on fatigue and contemplation, for example, because they reflect live experience despite appearances. That didn't go very far, but it was a beginning. And then, there was my meeting Felix Guattari, the way we got along and completed, depersonalized, singularized each other - in short how we loved. That resulted in _Anti-Oedipus_ which marked a new progression. I wonder whether one of the formal reasons for the hostile reception the book occassionally encounters isn't precisely that we worked it out together, depriving the public of the quarrels and ascriptions it loves. So they try to untangle what is undiscernable or to determine what belongs to each of us. But since everyone, like everyone else, is multiple to begin with, that makes for quite a few people. And doubtlessly _Anti-Oedipus_ cannot be said to be rid of all the fomal apparatus of knowledge: surely it still belongs to the university, for it is well-mannered enough, and does not yet represent the "pop" philosophy or "pop" analysis that we dream of. But I am struck by the this: most of the people who find this book difficult are the better educated, notibly in the psychoanalytic field. They say: What is this, the body without organs? What do you really mean by desiring machines? In contrast, those who know just a little bit, those who are not spoiled by psychoanalysis, have fewer problems and do not mind, leaving aside what they don't understand. Such is the reason for our saying that those who should be concerned with this book, theoretically at least, are fellows between fifteen and twenty. There are in fact two ways of reading a book: either we consider it a box which refers us to an inside, and in that case we look for the signified; if we are still more perverse or corrupted, we search for the signifier. And then we consider the following book as a box contained in the first one or containing it in turn. And we can comment, and interpret, and ask for explainations, we can write about the book and so on endlessly. Or the other way: we consider the book a small a-signifying machine; the only problem is "Does it work and how does it work? How does it work for you?" If it doesn't function, if nothing happens, take another book. This other way of reading is based on intensities: something happens or doesn't happen. There is nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It can be compared to an electrical connection. A body without organs: I know uneducated people who understood this immediately, thanks to their own "habits." This other way of reading goes against the preceeding insofar as it immediately refers a book to Exteriority. A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and countercurrent, of back-wash with other flows - the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other - two flows in what relationship? [. . . .] ......................................................................... This way of reading intensively, in relation to the outside - flow against flow, machine with machines, experimentations, events for everyone (which have nothing to do with a book, but with its shreds and are a new mode of operating with other things, no matter what. . . etc.) - is a manifestation of love. Such is exactly the way you approached the book. And the section of your letter I find beautiful, rather marvelous even, is that where you explain the manner in which you read it, what use you made of it on your own account. Alas! alas! Why do you have to rush right back to a reproachful attitude? "You are not going to get away with it. We are waiting for the second volume; you will still be on the same track. . ." No, that isn't true at all. We do have plans. We will follow up because we love to work together. But it won't be a sequel at all. With the help of the outside, we'll do something so different in both language and thought that those who are anticipating our work will have to say to themselves: they've gone completely crazy, or they're a couple of bastards, or they've obviously been unable to continue. Deception is a pleasure. Not that we want to make believe that we are madmen; we will go mad, though, in our own time and in our own way. Why are people in such a hurry? We certainly know that _Anti-Oedipus,_ volume 1, is still full of compromises - too full of scholarly things that still look like concepts. So, we'll change; we have already changed; we're doing all right. Some people think we're bound to stay on the same old path. There has even been some relief we'd form a fifth psychoanalytic group. Woe unto us. We dream of other things, more secret and more joyful. Compromise we shall no longer, because that won't be necessary. And we'll always find allies we want or who want us. . . . [1] Michel Cressole, _Deleuze_, Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973. [2] The exchange appears under the general title, "Gilles Deleuze: se defend, et attaque," in _La Quinzaine litteraire 161 (April 1, 1973), 16-19. Cressole's letter, titled "Deleuze,tu es bloque, coince," appears on pp. 16-17; Deleuze's (slightly abbreviated) response, titled "Cher Michel: je n'ai rien a avouer," appears on pp. 17-19. [3] Op. cit., pp. 107-118. The text has also been reprinted, under the title "Lettre a un critique severe," in Deleuze's _Pourparles 1972-1990_, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990, pp. 11-23. [4] Gilles Deleuze, "`I have nothing to admit,'" trans. Janice Forman, _Semiotext(e) 2.3 (1977), 111-116. ---------------------------Michael J. Current---------------------------- mcurrent-AT-ins.infonet.net -or- -AT-picard.infonet.net -or- -AT-nyx.cs.de.edu Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression, & Unemployment :) 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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