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'''Gilles Deleuze''' ((January 18, 1925 - November 4, 1995), [[French]] [[philosopher]] of the late 20th century.
  
'''Gilles Deleuze''' ((January 18, 1925 - November 4, 1995), French [[philosopher]] of the late [[20th century]].  From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on [[philosophy]], [[literature]], [[film]], and [[fine art]].  His most popular books were the two volumes of ''[[Capitalism and Schizophrenia]]'': ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]'' (1972) and ''[[A Thousand Plateaus]]'' (1980), both co-written with [[Félix Guattari]].  His books ''[[Difference and Repetition]]'' (1968) and ''The Logic of Sense'' (1969) led [[Michel Foucault]] to declare that "one day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian."  (Deleuze, for his part, said Foucault's comment was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid."<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 4.</ref>)
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From the early 1960s until his [[death]], Deleuze wrote many influential works on [[philosophy]], [[literature]], [[film]], and fine art.  
  
==Life and work==
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His most popular books were the two volumes of [[Gilles Deleuze|Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus]] (1972) and [[Gilles Deleuze|A Thousand Plateaus]] (1980), both co-written with [[Félix Guattari]]
Deleuze was born in Paris and lived there for most his life. His initial schooling was undertaken during World War II, during which time he attended the Lycée Carnot.  He also spent a year in [[khâgne]] at the prestigious Henry IV school.  In 1944 Deleuze went to study at the [[University of Paris|Sorbonne]].  His teachers there included several noted specialists in the history of philosophy, such as [[Georges Canguilhem]], [[Jean Hyppolite]], [[Ferdinand Alquié]], and [[Maurice de Gandillac]], and Deleuze's lifelong interest in the canonical figures of modern philosophy owed much to these teachers.  Nonetheless, Deleuze also found the work of non-academic thinkers such as [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] strongly attractive. He [[agregation|aggregated]] in philosophy in 1948.
 
  
Deleuze taught at various [[Secondary education in France|lycées]] until 1957, when he took up a position at the Sorbonne. In 1953, he published his first monograph, ''Empiricism and Subjectivity'', on [[Hume]]. He married Denise Paul "Fanny" Grandjouan in [[1956]].  From 1960 to 1964 he held a position at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. During this time he published ''Nietzsche and Philosophy'' (1962) and befriended Michel Foucault.  From 1964 to 1969 he was a professor at the [[University of Lyon]]. In 1968 he published his two dissertations, ''Difference and Repetition'' and ''Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza''.  
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==
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Žižek’s most famous engagement with Deleuze takes [[place]] in ''[[Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences]]''. Žižek seeks to parse there both the [[theoretical]] and [[practical]] components of Deleuze’s philosophy from a [[Lacanian]] perspective. Žižek values Deleuze as a critic of [[psychoanalysis]], a [[figure]] supplying theoretical underpinnings for [[materialist]] and anti-[[capitalist]] activism, and an all-around staple of [[leftist]] academic [[thought]]. In ''[[Organs without Bodies]]'', Žižek challenges some fundamental assumptions [[about]] Deleuze’s [[materialism]], namely the tensions within his oeuvre regarding the [[nature]] of becoming. Žižek insists that there are two Deleuzes. The more accepted Deleuze champions the multitudinous nature of becoming in ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]''. However, the second Deleuze is much more aligned with [[Jacques Lacan|Lacanian]] and [[Hegelian]] thought. The title of Žižek’s book is meant to expose those aspects of Deleuze’s thought that situate him, ostensibly, on the ideologically suspect side of contemporary digital [[capitalism]]. Žižek claims that in his [[intellectual]] privileging of flows of pure becoming Deleuze prefers the [[reality]] of the [[virtual]] to the reality of the [[material]]: potential trumps actual in this [[system]]. Reality for Deleuze, Žižek contends, is actualized through an “infinite potential field of virtualities” (''OWB'': 4). This is not unlike Lacan’s [[notion]] of [[the sinthome]], defined as “traces of [[affective]] intensities” (''OWB'': 5). For Žižek, [[affect]] is the key [[concept]] that aligns Deleuze with [[Lacan]]. In drawing an [[ontological]] [[distinction]] between [[being]] and becoming, Deleuze ascribes a transcendental quality to the [[process]] of becoming. Becoming, then, is closely aligned with [[repetition]] ([[another]] concept deeply significant to Lacan’s system of thought), for only in the repetition of becoming can the new emerge. In addition, by being [[Hegelian|anti-Hegelian]], Deleuze essentially repeats [[Hegel]] by supplying an antithesis that results in a [[dialectical]] production of something new. To Žižek this mode of repetition indicates Deleuze’s similarity to Hegel, in that both stress becoming through repetition. By becoming-[[other]] to Hegel, Deleuze ironically supports and augments his philosophy.
  
In 1969 he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes/St. Denis, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform which drew a number of talented scholars, including [[Foucault]] (who suggested Deleuze be hired), and the psychoanalyst [[Félix Guattari]]. Deleuze taught at Vincennes until his retirement in 1987.
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Deleuze’s approach to the [[body]] centres on [[becoming-machine]]. We are [[desiring-machines]] whose affects result from the interaction of [[external]] (supplementary) and [[internal]] parts. The interplay of the material and its “virtual shadow”, and the multiple singularities that erupt across this immanent plane, constitute Deleuze’s notion of “[[transcendental empiricism]]” (''OWB'': 19). The machinic explains why Deleuze reveres the medium of film. In this art [[form]], for Deleuze, “gazes, [[images]], movements, and ultimately [[time]] itself” are liberated from their place in discrete [[subjects]]. Instead, they flow through a literal [[machine]]: the camera (''OWB'': 20).
  
Deleuze suffered a severe respiratory ailment in the last decade of his life, and in [[1995]], he committed suicide, throwing himself from the window of his apartment.
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The [[political]] turn taken by Deleuze allegedly resulted from him being “[[Félix Guattari|guattarized]]” (ibid.). Evidence backing the [[claim]] that [[Guattari]] politicized Deleuze can be found by comparing and contrasting his early and late works. Žižek suggests that Deleuze turned to Guattari in an attempt to escape the deadlock resulting from his previous attempts to reconcile [[materialism]] and [[idealism]]. ''[[Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia|Anti-Oedipus]]'' (which Žižek calls Deleuze’s worst book) and ''[[The Logic of Sense]]'' encapsulate the two Deleuzes. Deleuze’s idealism involves acknowledging that [[bodily]] realities can be produced from virtual flows. Deleuze’s notion of the quasi-cause is helpful, in that it supplies an alternative to reductionism. Quasi-cause is the non-[[symbolic]], non-[[linguistic]] and non-sensical [[event]] that disrupts the smooth flow and functioning of a fi eld. It is not unlike the jarring [[moment]] of the [[Real, the (Lacan)|Lacanian Real]]. Deleuze offers an [[Organ]] ''sans'' Body in the form of [[the Gaze]] in ''[[The Time-Image]]''. Again, Deleuze’s [[affirmation]] of an [[energy]], an affect and an organ that is [[autonomous]] from bodies yet territorializes [[them]] resembles Lacan’s own [[theory]] of the [[Gaze]]. Subjects erroneously assume that they possess it, but it resides in an elusive point [[outside]] the [[subject]]. In both Deleuzian and Lacanian thought the gaze disrupts subjects, but is in them more than themselves.
  
The novelist [[Michel Tournier]], who knew Deleuze when both were students at the Sorbonne, described him thus:
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Deleuze ultimately politicizes his philosophy by focusing on an immanent [[excess]] that is essential to [[revolutionary enthusiasm]] thought through the Lacanian lens of [[desire]]. [[Dialectical materialism]], in this Deleuzian system, can fruitfully benefit from [[understanding]] the autonomous flows of [[sense]] as ecstatic [[jouissance]]. This [[model]] can provide the tools to [[help]] [[the multitude]] organize. Tracing Deleuze back through [[Baruch Spinoza|Spinoza]], Žižek shows another connection to psychoanalysis: [[Partial object|partial objects]]. [[Partial]] [[objects]] quasi-cause desire; they mobilize it. Autonomous affects can fulfil this [[role]], as can [[concrete]] [[Fetish|fetish objects]]. Understanding Deleuzian becoming through [[Spinoza]], and eventually [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] and [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]], is a process that Žižek colourfully refers to as “taking Deleuze from behind” (''OWB'': 45). Žižek philosophically “buggers” Deleuze, who himself used the term to describe how he would derive new [[meaning]] from twisting a philosopher’s [[concepts]]. Deleuze desires to produce monstrous off spring through buggery. In enacting the same [[practice]] himself, Žižek hopes to produce a monstrous off spring of himself and Deleuze that is “deeply Lacanian” (''OWB'': 48). Žižek wonders if Hegel, as a [[dialectician]], is the only philosopher who is immune to being buggered like this, because his thought-system has the practice built into it. Returning to Lacan, Žižek connects Deleuze’s concept of flat [[ontology]] to the systemic function of the Lacanian [[Real]]. Both hearken to a concept of [[constitutive excess]]. The [[true]] [[difference]] between Deleuze and Hegel involves divergent notions of [[flux]] and [[gap]].
  
"The ideas we threw about like cottonwool or rubber balls he returned to us transformed into hard and heavy iron or steel cannonballs. We quickly learnt to be in awe of his gift for catching us red-handed in the act of cliche-mongering, talking rubbish, or loose thinking. He had the knack of translating, transposing. As it passed through him, the whole of worn-out academic philosophy re-emerged unrecognisable, totally refreshed, as if it has not been properly digested before. It was all fiercely new, completely disconcerting, and it acted as a goad to our feeble minds and our slothfulness."<ref>Mary Bryden (ed.), ''Deleuze and Religion'' (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 201.</ref>
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Many of Žižek’s other works mention Deleuze, and most contain similar [[analyses]] to those found in ''[[Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences|Organs]]''. In ''[[The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality|The Metastases of Enjoyment]]'', Žižek unites Hegel, Deleuze and Lacan under the notion of [[the event]] and [[the logic of the signifier]]. He argues there that Deleuze’s notion of [[the Sense-Event]] attempts to [[suture]] the gap between [[words]] and things, thereby challenging [[Platonic]] notions of [[space]] by reconciling [[Ideas]] with their material copies. He also further engages with Deleuze’s responses to psychoanalysis. In ''[[Living in the End Times]]'', Žižek accuses Deleuze of misreading [[castration]] by failing accurately to conceptualize the role of [[the unconscious]]. Here, he outlines Deleuze and Guattari’s parsing of the disparity between production and reproduction, a [[binary]] that defines their stake in [[dialectical materialism]]. Deleuze’s dialectical materialism also emerges in ''[[The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality|Metastases]]'', where he mentions a problem that is allegedly both Deleuzian and Lacanian: the passage from bodily depth to surface event. Here, Sense and Gaze also align as autonomous forces that resist being pinpointed or assigned a [[cause]]. The passage from the [[penis]] to [[Phallus|the phallus]] is also ascribed to Deleuzian (through Lacanian) thought in ''Metastases'', as the [[phallus]] is described, by Žižek, as a [[master-signifier]] and figure of non-sense that [[structures]] an entire symbolic field; one that regulates and distributes sense. In this formulation we see another Lacanian–Deleuzian reconciliation. For Deleuze, penis versus phallus encapsulates the difference between form and [[content]] (the organization and coordination of sensible, [[erogenous zones]]). Here, Žižek also attests that Deleuze conflates bodily depth with [[transcendental]] depth, a crucial [[slippage]].
  
==Philosophy==
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In ''Metastases'', Žižek also points out that Deleuze’s [[analysis]] of [[masochism]] rightly argued that [[sadism]] and [[masochism]] are asymmetrical. In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek praises Deleuze’s account of masochism for off ering an insightful formulation of [[Kantianism|Kantian]] [[moral]] law. In ''Ticklish'', he attributes to Deleuze a “[[perverse]] [[rejection]] of [[hysteria]]” by way of the latter’s alleged call for [[polymorphous perversity]], and the rejection of [[the symbolic]] [[master]]-signifier, in ''[[Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia|Anti-Oedipus]]'' (TS: 250). De- and re-territorialization ''vis-à-vis'' [[capitalism]] are also associated with Deleuze. More accounts of a politicized Deleuze are also to be found in ''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', including distinctions between war machine and [[state apparatus]], a notion of “nomadic resistance” that implicates [[Antonio Negri]] (LC: 339), the [[economy]] as a [[quasi-cause]], revolutionary becoming and the notion of the [[post-human]].
Deleuze's work falls into two groups: on one hand, monographs interpreting modern philosophers ([[Spinoza]], [[Leibniz]], [[Hume]], [[Kant]], [[Nietzsche]], [[Bergson]]) and artists ([[Proust]], [[Kafka]], [[Francis Bacon (painter)|Francis Bacon]]); on the other, eclectic philosophical tomes organized by concept (e.g., difference, sense, events, schizophrenia, cinema, philosophy).  Regardless of topic, however, Deleuze consistently develops variations on similar ideas.
 
  
===Deleuze's interpretations===
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In ''[[Less Than Nothing]]'', in addition to rehashing arguments found in earlier works (the phallus [[structuring]] the sensible field, Deleuze as Hegelian), Žižek develops his analysis of Deleuzian quasi-cause with respect to capitalism. Žižek argues that Deleuze “regresses” to the [[logic]] of [[representation]], evidenced by his admission of [[money]] as subject. This is another example of [[capital]] as pseudo-cause, and the virtual as a site of production. Money, like the phallus, becomes a non-sense signifier that structures a field. Žižek has discussed Deleuze on the website [[Lacan.com]]. In the entry “[[Deleuze’s Platonism]]”, he challenges the notion that Deleuze is anti-Hegelian. Citing the interplay between the virtual and the actual as the zone of production for the new, he attests that this process is akin to the [[Dialectic|Hegelian dialectic]]. Deleuze opposes representation, yet understands ideas as materially real, creating a tension. In “[[Deleuze and The Lacanian Real]]”, Žižek asserts that Deleuze has landed in a trap through the notion of the virtual element [[present]] only in its effects, for [[negation]] and the [[absence]] of meaning (a [[signifier]] without a [[signified]]) is itself inscribed into a system of meaning. In sum, this last [[sentence]] appears to encapsulate Žižek’s fundamental critique of Deleuze: in attempting to do away with a dualistic system of meaning, Deleuze’s thought falls back into its binaries.
Deleuze's studies of individual philosophers and artists are purposely heterodox.  In ''Nietzsche and Philosophy'', for example, Deleuze claims that Nietzsche's ''[[On the Genealogy of Morals]]'' is a systematic response to Kant's ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'', a claim that would strike almost anyone who has read both works as curious at best, as Nietzsche nowhere mentions the First Critique in the ''Genealogy'', and Nietzsche's moral concerns in the ''Genealogy'' are far removed from the epistemological focus of Kant's book.  Likewise, Deleuze claims that univocity is the organizing principle of Spinoza's philosophy, despite the complete absence of the term from any of Spinoza's works. Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers as "buggery", as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different.<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 6.</ref>  The various monographs are best taken not as attempts to faithfully represent "what Nietzsche (or whoever) meant" but as articulations of Deleuze's philosophical views.  This practice -- Deleuze ventriloquizing through other thinkers -- is not willful misinterpretation so much as it is an example of the creativity that Deleuze believes philosophy should enact.  A parallel in painting might be Bacon's [http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/762.html ''Study after Velasquez''] -- it is quite beside the point to say that Bacon "gets Velasquez wrong".  (Similar considerations apply to Deleuze's uses of mathematical and scientific terms, ''pace'' [[Alan Sokal]].)
 
  
===Metaphysics===
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==References==
Deleuze's main philosophical project in his early works (i.e., those prior to his collaborations with Guattari) can be baldly summarized as a systematic inversion of the traditional relationship between [[Identity (philosophy)|identity]] and [[Difference (philosophy)|difference]].  Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities.  To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference, and that difference ontologically comes first.  Apparent identities such as X are composed of endless series of differences, where X = the difference between x and x', where x = ... .  Difference goes all the way down.  To say that two things are "the same" obscures the difference presupposed by there being two things in the first place.  To confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, etc.) fail to attain difference in itself.
 
 
 
Like Kant and Bergson, Deleuze considers traditional notions of space and time as categories imposed by the [[subject (philosophy)|observer]].  Therefore he concludes that pure difference is non-spatio-temporal; it is an ideal, what he calls "the virtual".  (The coinage refers not to the "virtual reality" of the computer age, but to Proust's definition of the past: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.")  While Deleuze's virtual ideas superficially resemble Plato's forms and Kant's categories, they are not originals or models, nor are they abstract conditions of possible experience; instead they are the conditions of real experience, the internal difference in itself.  "The concept they [the conditions] form is identical to its object."<ref>"Bergson's Conception of Difference" in ''Desert Islands'', p. 36.</ref>  A Deleuzean idea is not a wraith-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations <ref>See "The Method of Dramatization" in ''Desert Islands'', and "Actual and Virtual" in ''Dialogues''.</ref>. 
 
 
 
Thus Deleuze, alluding to Kant and [[Schelling]], at times refers to his philosophy as a ''transcendental empiricism''.  In Kant's [[transcendental idealism]], experience only makes sense when organized by intellectual categories (such as space, time, and causality).  Taking such intellectual concepts out of the context of experience, according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs.  (For example, extending the concept of causality beyond actual experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause.)  Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking (see below, ''Epistemology'').
 
 
 
Simultaneously, Deleuze claims that being is univocal, i.e., that it has only one sense.  Deleuze borrows the doctrine of [[ontological univocity]] from the medieval philosopher [[John Duns Scotus]].  In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many eminent theologians and philosophers (such as [[Thomas Aquinas]]) held that when one says that "God is good", God's goodness is only analogous to human goodness.  Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that "God is good", the goodness in question is the exact same sort of goodness that is meant when one says "Jane is good".  That is, God only differs from us in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God, a man, or a flea. 
 
 
 
Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference.  "With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference.  Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being."<ref>''[[Difference and Repetition]]'', p. 39</ref>  Here Deleuze echoes Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one [[substance]], [[God]] or [[Nature]].  For Deleuze, the one substance is an always differentiating [[process]], an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding.  Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = [[monism]]".<ref>''A Thousand Plateaus'', p. 20.</ref>
 
 
 
''Difference and Repetition'' is Deleuze's most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, but like ideas are expressed in his other works.  In ''Nietzsche and Philosophy'' (1962), for example, reality is a play of forces; in ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]'' (1972), a "[[body without organs]]"; in ''What Is Philosophy?'' (1991), a "plane of immanence" or "chaosmos".
 
 
 
===Epistemology===
 
Deleuze's unusual metaphysics entails an equally atypical [[epistemology]], or what he calls a transformation of "the image of thought".  According to Deleuze, the traditional image of thought, found in philosophers such as [[Aristotle]], [[Descartes]], and [[Husserl]], misconceives of thinking as a mostly unproblematic business. Truth may be hard to discover -- it may require  a life of pure theorizing, or rigorous computation, or systematic doubt -- but thinking is able, at least in principle, to correctly grasp facts, forms, ideas, etc.  It may be practically impossible to attain a God's-eye, [[neutral point of view]], but that is the ideal to approximate: a disinterested pursuit that results in a determinate, fixed truth; an orderly extension of common sense.  Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the metaphysical flux, instead claiming that genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories.  Truth changes what we think; it alters what we think is possible.  By setting aside the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a "thought without image", a thought always determined by problems rather than solving them.  "All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either.  It's just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation.  Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational -- not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors.  Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift."<ref>''Desert Islands'', p. 262.</ref> 
 
 
 
Deleuze's peculiar readings of the history of philosophy stem from this unusual epistemological perspective.  To read a philosopher is no longer to aim at finding a single, correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosopher's attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality.  "Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don't tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. [...] The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is nonetheless present in what he did say."<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 136.</ref> 
 
 
 
Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the [[Concept#Gilles Deleuze's definition of Philosophy|creation of concepts]].  For Deleuze, concepts are not solutions to problems, but constructions that define a range of metaphysical thinking, such as [[Plato]]'s forms, [[Descartes]]'s cogito, or [[Kant]]'s doctrine of the faculties.  In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analyzing reality in very different ways.  As philosophy creates concepts, the arts create new sensory combinations (what Deleuze calls "percepts"), and the sciences create theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or [[absolute zero]] (which Deleuze calls "functives").  According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others: they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, "separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another."<ref>''Negotiations'', p. 125.</ref>  Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical.  Instead of asking, "is it true?" or "what is it?", Deleuze claims that better questions would be "what does it do?" or "how does it work?"
 
 
 
===Values===
 
In ethics and politics, Deleuze again echoes Spinoza, albeit in a resoundingly Nietzschean key.  In a classical [[liberalism|liberal]] model of society, morality begins from individuals, who bear abstract [[natural rights]] or duties set by themselves or a God.  Following his rejection of any metaphysics based on identity, Deleuze criticizes the notion of an individual as an arresting or halting of differentiation (as the etymology of the word "individual" suggests).  Guided by the [[ethical naturalism]] of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze instead seeks to understand individuals and their moralities as products of the organization of pre-individual desires and powers.  In the two volumes of ''Capitalism and Schizophrenia'', Deleuze and Guattari describe history as a congealing and regimentation of "[[desiring-production]]" (a concept combining features of [[Freud]]ian drives and [[Marxist]] [[labor (economics)|labor]]) into the modern individual (typically neurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society of continuous control), and capitalism (an anarchy domesticated into infantilizing commodification).  Deleuze, following [[Marx]], welcomes capitalism's liberating destruction of traditional social hierarchies, but inveighs against its homogenization of all values to the aims of the market. 
 
 
 
But how does Deleuze square his pessimistic diagnoses with his ethical naturalism?  Deleuze claims that standards of value are internal or "immanent": to live well is to fully express one's power, to go the limits of our potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards.  Modern society still suppresses difference and alienates persons from what they can do.  To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become -- though we cannot know what that is in advance.  The pinnacle of Deleuzean practice, then, is creativity.  "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge.  If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment.  What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?" <ref>''Essays Critical and Clinical'', p. 135.</ref>
 
 
 
== Bibliography ==
 
By Gilles Deleuze:
 
*''Empirisme et subjectivité'' (1953). Trans. ''Empiricism and Subjectivity''.
 
*''Nietzsche et la philosophie'' (1962). Trans. ''Nietzsche and Philosophy''.
 
*''La philosophie critique de Kant'' (1963). Trans.''Kant's Critical Philosophy''.
 
*''Proust et les signes'' (1964, 2nd ed. 1970). Trans. ''Proust and Signs''.
 
*''Le Bergsonisme'' (1966). Trans. ''Bergsonism''.
 
*''Présentation de Sacher-Masoch'' (1967). Trans. ''Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty''.
 
*''Différence et répétition'' (1968). Trans. ''[[Difference and Repetition]]''.
 
*''Spinoza et le problème de l'expression'' (1968). Trans. ''Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza''.
 
*''Logique du sens'' (1969). Trans. ''The Logic of Sense''.
 
*''Spinoza - Philosophie pratique'' (1970, 2nd ed. 1981). Trans. ''Spinoza: Practical Philosophy''.
 
*''Dialogues'' (1977, 2nd ed. 1996, with Claire Parnet). Trans. ''Dialogues''.
 
*''Superpositions'' (1979).
 
*''Francis Bacon - Logique de la sensation'' (1981). Trans. ''Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation''.
 
*''Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement'' (1983). Trans. ''Cinema 1: The Movement-Image''.
 
*''Cinéma II: L'image-temps'' (1985). Trans. ''Cinema 2: The Time-Image''.
 
*''Foucault'' (1986).
 
*''Le pli - Leibniz et le baroque'' (1988). Trans. ''The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque''.
 
*''Périclès et Verdi: La philosophie de Francois Châtelet'' (1988).
 
*''Pourparlers'' (1990). Trans. ''Negotiations''.
 
*''Critique et clinique'' (1993). Trans. ''Essays Critical and Clinical''.
 
*''Pure Immanence'' (2000).
 
*''L'île déserte et autres textes'' (2002). Trans. ''Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974''.
 
*''Deux régimes de fous et autres textes'' (2004). Trans. ''Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995''.
 
 
 
In collaboration with [[Félix Guattari]]:
 
*''Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe.'' (1972). Trans. ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]'' (1977).
 
*''Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure.'' (1975). Trans. ''Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature.'' (1986).
 
*''Rhizome.'' (1976).
 
*''Nomadology: The War Machine.'' (1986).
 
*''Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux.'' (1980). Trans. ''[[A Thousand Plateaus]]'' (1987).
 
*''Qu'est ce que c'est la philosophie?'' (1991). Trans. ''What Is Philosophy?'' (1996).
 
 
 
== See also ==
 
*[[affect (philosophy)]]
 
*[[concept]]
 
*[[deterritorialization]]
 
*[[percept]]
 
*[[rhizome]]
 
*[[Gilbert Simondon]]'s theory of psychic and collective [[individuation]]
 
*[[minority (philosophy)]]
 
*[[Schizoanalysis]]
 
*[[Plane of immanence]]
 
 
 
== Endnotes ==
 
 
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[[Category:Postmodern theory|Deleuze, Gilles]]
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[[Category:Philosophy|Deleuze, Gilles]]
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[[Category:Psychoanalysis|Deleuze, Gilles]]
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
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[[Category:Index|Deleuze, Gilles]]
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[[Category:Slavoj Žižek|Deleuze, Gilles]]
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[[Category:Looking Awry|Deleuze, Gilles]]
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]

Latest revision as of 08:36, 24 May 2019

Gilles Deleuze ((January 18, 1925 - November 4, 1995), French philosopher of the late 20th century.

From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art.

His most popular books were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with Félix Guattari

In the work of Slavoj Žižek

Žižek’s most famous engagement with Deleuze takes place in Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. Žižek seeks to parse there both the theoretical and practical components of Deleuze’s philosophy from a Lacanian perspective. Žižek values Deleuze as a critic of psychoanalysis, a figure supplying theoretical underpinnings for materialist and anti-capitalist activism, and an all-around staple of leftist academic thought. In Organs without Bodies, Žižek challenges some fundamental assumptions about Deleuze’s materialism, namely the tensions within his oeuvre regarding the nature of becoming. Žižek insists that there are two Deleuzes. The more accepted Deleuze champions the multitudinous nature of becoming in Anti-Oedipus. However, the second Deleuze is much more aligned with Lacanian and Hegelian thought. The title of Žižek’s book is meant to expose those aspects of Deleuze’s thought that situate him, ostensibly, on the ideologically suspect side of contemporary digital capitalism. Žižek claims that in his intellectual privileging of flows of pure becoming Deleuze prefers the reality of the virtual to the reality of the material: potential trumps actual in this system. Reality for Deleuze, Žižek contends, is actualized through an “infinite potential field of virtualities” (OWB: 4). This is not unlike Lacan’s notion of the sinthome, defined as “traces of affective intensities” (OWB: 5). For Žižek, affect is the key concept that aligns Deleuze with Lacan. In drawing an ontological distinction between being and becoming, Deleuze ascribes a transcendental quality to the process of becoming. Becoming, then, is closely aligned with repetition (another concept deeply significant to Lacan’s system of thought), for only in the repetition of becoming can the new emerge. In addition, by being anti-Hegelian, Deleuze essentially repeats Hegel by supplying an antithesis that results in a dialectical production of something new. To Žižek this mode of repetition indicates Deleuze’s similarity to Hegel, in that both stress becoming through repetition. By becoming-other to Hegel, Deleuze ironically supports and augments his philosophy.

Deleuze’s approach to the body centres on becoming-machine. We are desiring-machines whose affects result from the interaction of external (supplementary) and internal parts. The interplay of the material and its “virtual shadow”, and the multiple singularities that erupt across this immanent plane, constitute Deleuze’s notion of “transcendental empiricism” (OWB: 19). The machinic explains why Deleuze reveres the medium of film. In this art form, for Deleuze, “gazes, images, movements, and ultimately time itself” are liberated from their place in discrete subjects. Instead, they flow through a literal machine: the camera (OWB: 20).

The political turn taken by Deleuze allegedly resulted from him being “guattarized” (ibid.). Evidence backing the claim that Guattari politicized Deleuze can be found by comparing and contrasting his early and late works. Žižek suggests that Deleuze turned to Guattari in an attempt to escape the deadlock resulting from his previous attempts to reconcile materialism and idealism. Anti-Oedipus (which Žižek calls Deleuze’s worst book) and The Logic of Sense encapsulate the two Deleuzes. Deleuze’s idealism involves acknowledging that bodily realities can be produced from virtual flows. Deleuze’s notion of the quasi-cause is helpful, in that it supplies an alternative to reductionism. Quasi-cause is the non-symbolic, non-linguistic and non-sensical event that disrupts the smooth flow and functioning of a fi eld. It is not unlike the jarring moment of the Lacanian Real. Deleuze offers an Organ sans Body in the form of the Gaze in The Time-Image. Again, Deleuze’s affirmation of an energy, an affect and an organ that is autonomous from bodies yet territorializes them resembles Lacan’s own theory of the Gaze. Subjects erroneously assume that they possess it, but it resides in an elusive point outside the subject. In both Deleuzian and Lacanian thought the gaze disrupts subjects, but is in them more than themselves.

Deleuze ultimately politicizes his philosophy by focusing on an immanent excess that is essential to revolutionary enthusiasm thought through the Lacanian lens of desire. Dialectical materialism, in this Deleuzian system, can fruitfully benefit from understanding the autonomous flows of sense as ecstatic jouissance. This model can provide the tools to help the multitude organize. Tracing Deleuze back through Spinoza, Žižek shows another connection to psychoanalysis: partial objects. Partial objects quasi-cause desire; they mobilize it. Autonomous affects can fulfil this role, as can concrete fetish objects. Understanding Deleuzian becoming through Spinoza, and eventually Kant and Hegel, is a process that Žižek colourfully refers to as “taking Deleuze from behind” (OWB: 45). Žižek philosophically “buggers” Deleuze, who himself used the term to describe how he would derive new meaning from twisting a philosopher’s concepts. Deleuze desires to produce monstrous off spring through buggery. In enacting the same practice himself, Žižek hopes to produce a monstrous off spring of himself and Deleuze that is “deeply Lacanian” (OWB: 48). Žižek wonders if Hegel, as a dialectician, is the only philosopher who is immune to being buggered like this, because his thought-system has the practice built into it. Returning to Lacan, Žižek connects Deleuze’s concept of flat ontology to the systemic function of the Lacanian Real. Both hearken to a concept of constitutive excess. The true difference between Deleuze and Hegel involves divergent notions of flux and gap.

Many of Žižek’s other works mention Deleuze, and most contain similar analyses to those found in Organs. In The Metastases of Enjoyment, Žižek unites Hegel, Deleuze and Lacan under the notion of the event and the logic of the signifier. He argues there that Deleuze’s notion of the Sense-Event attempts to suture the gap between words and things, thereby challenging Platonic notions of space by reconciling Ideas with their material copies. He also further engages with Deleuze’s responses to psychoanalysis. In Living in the End Times, Žižek accuses Deleuze of misreading castration by failing accurately to conceptualize the role of the unconscious. Here, he outlines Deleuze and Guattari’s parsing of the disparity between production and reproduction, a binary that defines their stake in dialectical materialism. Deleuze’s dialectical materialism also emerges in Metastases, where he mentions a problem that is allegedly both Deleuzian and Lacanian: the passage from bodily depth to surface event. Here, Sense and Gaze also align as autonomous forces that resist being pinpointed or assigned a cause. The passage from the penis to the phallus is also ascribed to Deleuzian (through Lacanian) thought in Metastases, as the phallus is described, by Žižek, as a master-signifier and figure of non-sense that structures an entire symbolic field; one that regulates and distributes sense. In this formulation we see another Lacanian–Deleuzian reconciliation. For Deleuze, penis versus phallus encapsulates the difference between form and content (the organization and coordination of sensible, erogenous zones). Here, Žižek also attests that Deleuze conflates bodily depth with transcendental depth, a crucial slippage.

In Metastases, Žižek also points out that Deleuze’s analysis of masochism rightly argued that sadism and masochism are asymmetrical. In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek praises Deleuze’s account of masochism for off ering an insightful formulation of Kantian moral law. In Ticklish, he attributes to Deleuze a “perverse rejection of hysteria” by way of the latter’s alleged call for polymorphous perversity, and the rejection of the symbolic master-signifier, in Anti-Oedipus (TS: 250). De- and re-territorialization vis-à-vis capitalism are also associated with Deleuze. More accounts of a politicized Deleuze are also to be found in In Defense of Lost Causes, including distinctions between war machine and state apparatus, a notion of “nomadic resistance” that implicates Antonio Negri (LC: 339), the economy as a quasi-cause, revolutionary becoming and the notion of the post-human.

In Less Than Nothing, in addition to rehashing arguments found in earlier works (the phallus structuring the sensible field, Deleuze as Hegelian), Žižek develops his analysis of Deleuzian quasi-cause with respect to capitalism. Žižek argues that Deleuze “regresses” to the logic of representation, evidenced by his admission of money as subject. This is another example of capital as pseudo-cause, and the virtual as a site of production. Money, like the phallus, becomes a non-sense signifier that structures a field. Žižek has discussed Deleuze on the website Lacan.com. In the entry “Deleuze’s Platonism”, he challenges the notion that Deleuze is anti-Hegelian. Citing the interplay between the virtual and the actual as the zone of production for the new, he attests that this process is akin to the Hegelian dialectic. Deleuze opposes representation, yet understands ideas as materially real, creating a tension. In “Deleuze and The Lacanian Real”, Žižek asserts that Deleuze has landed in a trap through the notion of the virtual element present only in its effects, for negation and the absence of meaning (a signifier without a signified) is itself inscribed into a system of meaning. In sum, this last sentence appears to encapsulate Žižek’s fundamental critique of Deleuze: in attempting to do away with a dualistic system of meaning, Deleuze’s thought falls back into its binaries.

References