LA Book Review Forum on Deleuze's Death: "A Singular, and yet, Non-Arbitrary Life" (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Death of Gilles Deleuze as Composition of a Concept (with Douglas Ord)
Deleuze Studies, 2017
There was a wide range of in memoriam and homages published in the years following Deleuze’s suicide. However, none of them succeeded in grasping ‘the evential’ aspect of his death. This paper identifies a series of errors in the literature on Deleuze’s death. It also suggests a way to overcome them by considering a singular encounter between Alice’s passage through the looking glass and Deleuze’s defenestration, which both took place on 4 November. We will show how a new conception of death as event comes out of this unseen connection.
Duration and Immanence: The Question of A Life in Deleuze
The questions that my paper shall pursue are: 1) What path leads from Deleuze's early writings to his latter-day conception of a life, and 2) What can such a conception of life mean? Our path will trace a reversal and a return, respectively, through phenomenology to Bergson. For Deleuze, a genuine concept of a life is thinkable, only when the phenomenological subject, which Deleuze considers an illusion, has been jettisoned, reabsorbed into the flux of immanence. This implies a return to a century-old philosophical renewal, namely, the reformulation of the experience of time.
A TASTE FOR LIFE (ON SOME SUICIDES IN DELEUZE AND SPINOZA)
parrhesiajournal.org
Gilles Deleuze's book-length account of Foucault's thought, Foucault, published two years after the Foucault's death, sets out to decipher the secret or latent systematicity of that thought's unfolding. 1 Such a systematicity would seem to be belied by the hazards and turns of Foucault's itinerary, marked deeply as it was by sudden shifts in perspective, object and methodology. It is this very capacity for sudden mutations that was, for many, the strength of his thought. As early as 1969, in the "Introduction" to The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault proposed the figure of the labyrinth as a way of describing the space of thought and of writing that he was moving in, admonishing readers who object to his brusque shifts in orientation in this way: "do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." 2 Deleuze underlines that, on the surface and indeed in its most interior movement, Foucault's thought proceeds by jolts, and mutates only under the bottled-up pressure of an impasse. The crisis witnessed by the long period of silence at the end of his life-between the publication of La Volonté de savoir in 1976 and L'Usage des plaisirs in 1984, on the eve of his death-is said to be exemplary of this halting trajectory. And yet after his death it becomes incumbent on thought itself, in its confrontation with Foucault's published work, to decipher the "logic of a thought" and to demonstrate the "necessary" passage from one phase or stratum of that thought to another: "Obviously, what is important is to show how one passes necessarily from one these determinations to the next." 3 That Deleuze's scansion of Foucault's work would result in the isolation of three definitive periods or moments necessarily casts a "systematic" shadow over it, while placing a special pressure on the concluding phase-in this case, Foucault's seeming return to the figure of the self and the subject in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality trilogy. More telling, Deleuze then proceeds to characterize these three periods of Foucault's thought in terms that deliberately, if not explicitly, recall the articulations found in Kant's critical system. Deleuze sees Foucault's thought unfolding in three moments dealing successively with questions of knowledge, power and the aesthetic: thought-as-archive, thought-as-strategy, thought-as-artistic. 4 To these images of thought correspond a given form or type of "rule": the determined forms of knowledge, the "constraining rules" of commands or ethical imperatives, and what Deleuze refers to the set of "facultative rules" that evaluate a given "style" of existence. And just as Kant's third critique negotiates the vast Abgrund that opens between the domains of nature
The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze
Each volume of this series of companions to major philo s o p h e rs co n tains s p ec iall y co mmis s i o n e d es s a y s b y an international team of scholars, together with a substantial bibliography, and will serve as a reference work for students and non-specialists. One aim of the series is to dispel the intimidation such readers feel when faced with the work of a difficult and challenging thinker.
Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry, 2012
“My ideal, when I write about an author,” Deleuze once said, “would be to write nothing that would cause him sadness.” Perhaps the highest praise I can offer Essays on Deleuze is my sense Daniel Smith has written nothing that would cause Deleuze sadness or “make him weep in his grave,” as thorough and careful a treatment of his thought as Deleuze’s own dealing with the history of philosophy. Versus the majority of secondary works that refer to and employ Deleuzian terminology without ever explaining it–as though the meaning of “univocity,” “difference,” “flow,” etc. were self-evident–Smith takes nothing for granted. His painstaking enquiries into the sources of Deleuze’s thought and lucid explanations cast light on these stubbornly opaque concepts. Both the breadth of material covered and its close treatment make this work a milestone in Deleuze studies. True to its title, Essays on Deleuze is a collection of 20 essays. These are divided into four sections, dealing with 1. Deleuze and the history of philosophy 2. his philosophical system 3. Deleuze’s concepts and 4. contemporary philosophy. This organizational schema is itself helpful: Smith begins with Deleuze’s thought in relation to the history of philosophy, putting the reader in a position to understand the systematic nature of Deleuze’s thought, which in turn allows one to better comprehend his concepts and their relation to contemporary figures.