A Review of Hallward's Out of This World

Jason Read provides a critique of Hallward's reading and a defense of Deleuze and Guattari in response to the thesis that Deleuze is an otherworldly and spiritual philosopher. Echoing a defense I've heard quite often lately, Read contends that Deleuze's thought undergoes substantial transformations in his encounter with Guattari. The strategy is thus to throw out the Bergsonain Deleuze of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, and to preserve the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. What this strategy fails to take into account is that the two cinema books are both published after A Thousand Plateaus (1980 for ATP, and 1983 and 1985 for the cinema books) along with Deleuze's final published essay "Immanence: A Life..." (1995), all of which affirm the Bergsonian ontology. While I am sympthetic to the ontological claims that Read makes, I simply do not think they reflect the letter of Deleuze's text. As such, it seems to me that Deleuze's ontology requires some "philosophical therapy" so as to sever it from its Bergsonism.

In this regard I agree with Toscano's proposal when he writes,

"...if we are concerned with looking beyond the constituted individualities which are the province of represention to the productive tendencies that they express, we cannot rest content with a turn towards an abstract impersonal ground. Instead we need to focus on individuations and preindividual singularities, on the speeds and affects that dramatize the virtual ideas and produce actual entities and their correlative space-times. Univocity should accordingly be recast in terms of a concept of ontogenesis that refuses any transcendence, emancipated from its excessive dependence on the abstract postulate of a virtual totality that both enfolds and neutralizes the production of actualities. It is THIS concept of THE Virtual (and not of ideas as virtual multiplicities) that results in the derealization or indetermination of the actual identified by Badiou" (194).

Here Toscano proposes de-suturing Deleuze's account of the pre-individual and individual from the Bergsonian account of memory that leads Deleuze to make mysticist claims such as when he says things like, "the philosopher and the pig, the criminal and the saint all contribute to one and the same indivisible song. Each one chooses his pitch or his tone, perhaps his words, but the tune is certainly the same, and under all the words, in every possible tone, and in every pitch, the same tra-la-la" (DR, 83-4), which could have come straight out of Plotinus or Eckhart.

Sometimes I find myself infuriated with Deleuzian secondary literature, as there is often a sort of worship of the master and prohibition against criticizing various of his claims. I think this is a problem endemic to continental philosophy and theory as practiced in the United States. All too often "churches" develop around the names of various European theorists, and research becomes a matter of endlessly writing sancrosant studies of particular thinkers or "applying" these thinkers, rather than working on problems. In the discipline of philosophy, at any rate, it is largely impossible to get papers accepted at the major continental conferences (such as SPEP) unless they are on another thinker. Thus, for instance, if you are a phenomenologist you cannot get a paper accepted that practices phenomenology, but can only get a paper accepted that deals with phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Marion, etc. In order to practice phenomenology, you're required to show how a figure like Husserl had already engaged in this or that particular sort of phenomenological inquiry, thereby hiding behind the coat-tails of the master in question. Compare this, by contrast, with Kripke presenting his lectures later entitled Naming and Necessity while still a graduate student in the 1970's (he was born in 1958), or the comparable example of how Wittgenstein's Tractatus came to be published. Of course, these are exceptional individuals, but the point here is that they were encouraged to work on problems, not figures by the organization of Anglo-American leaning philosophy departments. In that context, figures are only of interest in helping one to work with problems and it is the problems and solutions that are treated as the object of inquiry not texts, which is vastly different than the temperament of American continental philosophy departments (and no I am not suggesting that all continentalists start practicing Anglo-American philosophy).

The case is seldom any different with regard to Deleuzian scholarship. And in the case of criticism directed at Deleuze, the predominant response is almost always that one has misread Deleuze (that they haven't been good disciples of the master), rather than acknowledging that there could possibly be substantial and philosophical disagreement on a particular issue (again, such disagreements need to be filtered through a master such as Badiou or Zizek, rather than directly enunciated). It is surprising that those influenced by the writers of a book entitled Anti-Oedipus nonetheless so often display such an Oedipal structure of thought (here understanding the discourse of the master and the masculine side of the graphs of sexuation as being structural formulations of the Oedipus). Put in Hegelian terms, it could be said that the form of scholarship surrounding Deleuze stands in contradiction with the content of this scholarship. At the level of scholarship we are enjoined to proliferate differences and cast off Oedipal authority, but at the level of form this is only accepted so long as Deleuze is recognized as the master and creative production doesn't deviate from Deleuze or question Deleuze and Guattari revealing that they're castrated subjects ($) that are incomplete. The paradoxical result is that we get an endless monotony of the same in this scholarship, until figures such as Hallward or Badiou appear. The paradox is that to be truly Deleuzian one must not be Deleuzian. The point here isn't one of arguing that we shouldn't be influenced by thinkers, but of criticizing a particular academic organization in philosophy departments in the United States in which commentary and applied theory drawn from masters is seen as the only legitimate modus operandi. I'm exaggerating, of course, but not much. Of course, this could all be a fantasy bound up with my sense that my name was stolen from me and making any alienation in another's name unbearable to me. Yet as Lacan points out in the case of psychosis, a subject is not defined as psychotic by whether their delusion is true or false, but by the manner in which they relate to the Other. At any rate, Toscano's proposal allows one to preserve what is truly worthwhile and exciting in Deleuze, while avoiding his mystical moments.