'A Part' of the World: Deleuze and the Logic of Creation (original) (raw)

The Politics of Creation: Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation

Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 2007

The aim of this review article is to outline Peter Hallward’s position on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze as put forward in Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. Hallward claims that Deleuze’s philosophy ultimately leads to a form of asceticism, removing the possibility of political action. I argue that this misunderstanding on Hallward’s part rests on three errors: intuition is taken as being purely subtractive, virtuality is taken as undeterminable, and the role of science in reconnecting the virtual with the actual is ignored. I conclude with a positive account of a Deleuzian theory of action.

Formulating God: The ongoing place of theology in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

Culture, Theory and Critique, 2011

In spite of common assumptions to the contrary, the debt to religion found in Deleuze’s philosophy is undeniable when one considers his use of the concept of univocity, which he takes primarily from Duns Scotus and finds at work in Spinoza. It seems to be generally accepted, however, that this concept is abandoned in Deleuze’s later career along with many of the religious overtones that necessarily accompanied this concept in his earlier work. Given that the general doxa around Deleuze is that God’s only place in Deleuze’s latter work is as the source of judgements we must resist (an interpretation that owes as much to Nietzsche as to Artaud), this is, perhaps, understandable. However, this doxa is not fair to the extent of the debt Deleuze owes to theology so, whilst Deleuze scholarship has recently turned its attention to the religious underpinnings of much of Deleuze’s thought, in this paper we wish not only to retrace these theological antecedents but to also examine the ways in which a specific concept that is rooted in philosophical theology is unpacked in the very genesis of Deleuze’s own thought. In doing this, we will ascertain the extent to which Scotus’ conception of univocal predication can be said to infuse Deleuze’s entire philosophical project, rather than just a specific portion of it, and how, then, God always inhabits the Deleuzean system even after Deleuze has forsaken an explicitly theological vocabulary.

Introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (Cambridge: CUP, 2012)

Gilles Deleuze belongs to that group of philosophers, often taken to typify the continental approach to philosophy, for whom the difficulty we encounter in reading them is not simply one of the content of their claims and arguments, but also one of penetrating their style of writing itself. This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that Deleuze not only seemingly employs language in order to destabilize and obfuscate his philosophical arguments, but also revises his basic philosophical terminology between his numerous writings, from the early work of intensive depth, virtuality, and preindividual singularities, to the body without organs, machinic phylum, and plane of immanence of his collaborations with Guattari. 1 This leads us to the problem of how we read Deleuze. Do we see the obfuscation of language, the various appropriations of the sciences, and the experiments in philosophical writing as attempts to cover over a paucity of argumentation? Do we take up this rejection of traditional metaphysical language, seeing it as a rejection of the tradition of metaphysics itself, or do we strip the language away in the hope of finding underneath it a philosophical position that can be distinctly expressed in another, more palatable language? Similarly, we might ask what the reason is for the proliferation of philosophical systems developed by Deleuze, both in his historical monographs and his own philosophical writings. The continual reinvention of basic philosophical concepts might be taken to signal a failure of Deleuze's philosophical enterprise, an inability to formulate a definitive yet consistent philosophical outlook. Finally, Deleuze presents us with the problem of understanding the relation of these various projects. Deleuze's engagements with the history of philosophy, science, aesthetics, and ethics seem reminiscent of the

Deleuze’s Philosophical Heritage

Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, 2012

In this paper, I want to look at Deleuze’s philosophical heritage in two different senses. In the first part of the paper, I explore his relationship to perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger plays a central role in Deleuze’s early philosophy, and even when in his later collaborations with Guattari their explicit references to Heidegger are dismissive, Heidegger’s influence can clearly be detected, particularly in their critiques of other philosophers. In the second part of the paper, I look at Deleuze’s own contribution to philosophy, and to see how this contribution has been assessed by one of the most influential contemporary French philosophers, Alain Badiou. For Heidegger, Deleuze, and Badiou, perhaps the central problem for philosophy emerges from thinking about totality. For all three, the traditional metaphysical view of totality, derived from Aristotle’s concept of paronymy, occludes rather than solves the problem of how we characterise our most general concepts. As we shall see, Heidegger’s diagnosis of metaphysics, as constituted by what he calls onto-theology, is shared by all three philosophers, while their responses to this diagnosis differ. Deleuze and Badiou both reject Heidegger’s poetics of being in favour of the language of mathematics, but the question I want to explore in the final part of the paper is, which mathematics? The mathematics of the continuous, or the mathematics of the discrete?

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.