Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference

by Jeffrey A. Bell

From the early 1960s until his death, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. One of Deleuze's main philosophical projects was a systematic inversion of the traditional relationship between identity and difference. This Deleuzian philosophy of difference is the subject of Jeffrey A. Bell's Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos . Bell argues that Deleuze's efforts to develop a philosophy of difference are best understood by exploring both Deleuze's claim to be a Spinozist, and Nietzsche's claim to have found in Spinoza an important precursor. Beginning with an analysis of these claims, Bell shows how Deleuze extends and transforms concepts at work in Spinoza and Nietzsche to produce a philosophy of difference that promotes and, in fact, exemplifies the notions of dynamic systems and complexity theory. With these concepts at work, Deleuze constructs a philosophical approach that avoids many of the difficulties that linger in other attempts to think about difference. Bell uses close readings of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Whitehead to illustrate how Deleuze's philosophy is successful in this regard and to demonstrate the importance of the historical tradition for Deleuze. Far from being a philosopher who turns his back on what is taken to be a mistaken metaphysical tradition, Bell argues that Deleuze is best understood as a thinker who endeavoured to continue the work of traditional metaphysics and philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2006

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derived from the Greek term khaos - meaning void, chasm or abyss - the very notion of chaos has always held a certain allure, as if a depth awaiting to be plumbed, an enigma awaiting its unraveling. Rather than acknowledging the rights of chaos however, the history of philosophy has long attempted to tame its excesses, playing out as the story of the imposition of order on disorder, from ataxia to taxis (as with Plato’s Demiurge who quite literally ‘ordered’ the universe at its beginning). What then, would it meant to forge a systemic philosophy ‘at the edge of chaos’? How, having given up the desire to still the flux and flow of chaos, would one be able to lay claim to the mantle of systemic philosophy? Such are the questions that animate Jeffrey Bell’s brilliant book on the work of Gilles Deleuze, who, perhaps more than any other philosopher of the modern era, realized the need to engage with and work through the tumult of chaos if philosophy itself were to have a future worth attending to.

Thus it’s to a double pronged challenge that Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos addresses itself: on the one hand, to affirm the viability of systemic philosophy against those who would argue for its perpetual deconstruction; on the other, to show how such systemic thinking would not merely be one more in a long line of metaphysical systems, but would in fact contest the very terms of the tradition so as to inaugurate a reimagining of what it would mean to think systemically in the first place. Ultimately, it’s to a conception of the universe as a ‘chaosmos’ – a self-organizing, dynamic state poised half-way between both chaos (disorder) and cosmos (order) – that Bell will turn to in order to cash out his reading of Deleuze. Too much chaos, and we’d be plunged into the vapors of the formless; too much cosmic order, and change would be unthinkable. Hence: to dwell at the ‘edge’ of chaos, Goldilocks-like.

Drawing in particular on the efforts of Manuel Delanda and his magnificent reworking of Deleuze in the terms of dynamic systems theory, much of Bell’s book is in fact given over to fleshing out the philosophical precedents of Deleuze’s engagements with science. In a series of readings that span the tradition from Aristotle, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, right through to the contemporary philosophies of Heidegger, Derrida, and Whitehead, Bell clearly stakes out the way in which Deleuze’s properly philosophical work dovetails right into some of the most exciting and interesting findings of the new sciences of complexity as spelled out by the likes of Ilya Prigogine and Stuart Kauffman. In other words, there’s simply a hell of alot covered in the book’s 250 or so pages. However, not only does Bell have an exquisite grasp of the vast array of material that he assembles before him, but his ability to synthesize, compare, and contrast the works considered within is nothing short of extraordinary. Indeed, to anyone with an interest in both the topology of continental philosophy as well as its relations to contemporary science (guilty!), Bell’s book is in fact something of a godsend.

It bears mentioning too that while the scope of the study is impressively large in itself, so too is its attention to detail and commitment to scholarship. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than with the opening chapter on Spinoza in which Bell intensively engages both with the Ethics and the wider world of Spinoza scholarship in a surprisingly exacting discussion of some of the most technical and hotly contested aspects of Spinoza’s thinking. In an academic space where many are simply content to repeat the word of the master, Bell’s putting in the hard-yards to go back to the source(s) makes for both welcome and refreshing reading. This is to say nothing of the chapter on Nietzsche, which contains perhaps the most compelling account of Deleuze’s relationship to the German philosopher that I know of in the literature today. Perched as it is on the margins of philosophy and science, tradition and (post-)modernity, Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos is essential reading for all who would heed Nietzsche's lesson that to 'give birth to a dancing star', one ought to have a little chaos in oneself.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of the book is engagement with Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida's criticisms of the latter, which builds towards the discussion of Deleuze (and Guattari's) philosophy of difference in the final chapters. The applicability of Deleuze's ontology, the rhizome and BwO and assemblages, to the scientific concepts of chaos and complexity is left almost to the coda.

This is an interesting read to see how thought has moved away from typically Cartesian Enlightenment ideals to a more subtle, nuanced, and dynamic philosophy shifting away from identity and into...well, something more true to the movements and fluxes of life-as-lived. The movement from Whitehead's process philosophy into Deleuze's mature thought was almost worth the read in itself (playing to my interest in the dynamic and the chaotic).

The concepts here are not especially light material, but for those motivated (and entertained by such) there is a wealth of ideas to play with, particularly in the area of how stability and order can emerge from a mess of chaos.