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Deleuze, os movimentos aberrantes
DAVID LAPOUJADE é um dos autores mais interessantes da nova safra de pensadores franceses. Professor da Sorbonne, ex-aluno e amigo pessoal de Gilles Deleuze, por muito tempo hesitou em escrever sobre o antigo mestre. Passados vinte anos desde a morte do filósofo, no entanto, o autor não resistiu à tentação de se debruçar sobre o seu pensamento de maneira sistemática. O resultado é este livro magistral: com sua escrita clara e delicada, Lapoujade recusa as interpretações mais correntes da obra de Deleuze. Aqui, são os movimentos aberrantes que tomam o proscênio. Irracionais, possuem uma lógica própria que o livro analisa e faz ressoar com a atualidade mais candente. Afinal, são esses movimentos aberrantes que apontam para os novos modos de povoamento da terra — não apenas humanos, animais, físicos ou químicos, mas também de populações afetivas, mentais e estéticas; combatendo, assim, as formas de organização sociopolíticas que ainda pesam sobre nós.
320 pages, Paperback
First published October 16, 2014
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About the author
David Lapoujade
20 books9 followersDavid Lapoujade is a French philosopher and a professor at the Université Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne. In addition to editing the posthumous collections of Deleuze's writings, Desert Islands and Two Regimes of Madness (both published in English by Semiotext(e)), he has written on pragmatism and the work of William James.
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April 12, 2019
My encounter with Gilles Deleuze in my late teens and early twenties was not only the defining philosophical encounter of my years in academia but indeed of my whole life. I ended up reading all of his books at least in part, most in their entirety. I returned to his book with Guattari on Kafka and minor literature two years ago and occasionally read contemporary works of Deluzean scholarship, though not especially often. The last book on Deleuze that I read was OUT OF THIS WORLD: DELEUZE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF CREATION by Peter Hallward, a book with no shortage of detractors, though one I enjoyed very much. That being said, I believe David Lapoujade’s ABERRANT MOVEMENTS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF GILLES DELEUZE is clearly superior to Hallward’s perhaps more accessible volume precisely on account of its density and rigour. The claim against Hallward would seem to boil down to the fact that his attempts to simplify cause him to be erroneous. I am of the opinion that whether that is the case or not doesn’t end up being terribly critical. It does not strike me as likely that Lapoujade will receive a great deal of criticism along those lines, but I will point out that the very final paragraph of Lapoujade’s book is extremely consonant with Hallward. I must admit that in approaching ABERRANT MOVEMENTS I was not without internal murmurings of reservation. We are made to understand that the book focuses on “aberrant movements” and the “irrational logic” central to Dleuze’s philosophical project. Again, my experience of Deleuze was of a philosopher who immediately made a kind of profound sense, far more than did any other philosopher I previously read, so it would seem clear that I didn’t find the stuff “irrational.” There was nothing at all irrational to me about transcendental empiricism, radical contingency, schizoanalysis, the One-Many (One-All), the rhizome, chaosmos etc. Creation, experimentation, and demystification, the trinity of ESSAYS CRITICAL AND CLINICAL, could not possibly have struck me as more self-evidently salubrious. The first Deleuze book I read was CINEMA 1: THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE, and I remember very clearly how absolutely right the concept of “the Open” seemed to me even before it made strict sense. Let’s pause and consider “even before it made strict sense.” Let’s note that Lapoujade at one point draws attention to how Deleuze always talks about a “clairvoyance” or intuition, “an inaugural flash of a plane of immanence.” That seems to be a central kind of revelatory mode inherent to my encounter(s) with Deleuze! Deleuze articulated things that were congruent not always with my own already formulated ideas so much as with my intuitions. I took a graduate seminar course on Deleuze with a professor named Bela Egyed who I already knew to be brutal with grades. He gave me an A. He told me that he thought I understood Deleuze better than most philosophers do because I am an artist. Testament to how close I found Deleuze’s thinking to my own experience of life, I wrote my final paper on Deleuze and lived experience (paying special attention to SPINOZA: PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY, NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY, ANTI-OEDIPUS, and A THOUSAND PLATEAUS). Lapoujade says that Deleuze focuses on life but never reduces it to lived experience. I said something close to the opposite. I said that there is a philosophy of lived experience in Deleuze. But what else does Lapoujade say? He says that aberrant movements and irrational logic are a byproduct of faculties forced to their extreme limits. I was, as a young man, something of a limit fiend. I drank heavily and did a lot of drugs. I felt profoundly connected to Artaud & co., passionately engaging far out literature, music, and cinema on a daily basis, as a matter of course. Perhaps for a “limit person” Deleuze does describe lived experience. Perhaps this is what Egyed meant when he said that artists are often better situated than philosophers when it comes to Deleuze. At any rate, I never felt Deleuze was irrational. As for “aberrant movements,” well, Deleuze explicitly talked about his own work in terms of “aberrant movements,” in NEGOTIATIONS and elsewhere. He has beat us to the coinage. Who are we to gripe? And certainly there can be no doubt in my mind after having read his book that Lapoujade has appropriated the terminology in the best good faith. ABERRANT MOVEMENTS looks at the entirely of Deleuze’s philosophical oeuvre, but if we were going to isolate the key texts under consideration we would have to focus on DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, THE LOGIC OF SENSE, and the two CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA books authored in collaboration with Félix Guattari. I think most serious students of Deleuze will agree that this seems practically a matter of course. If you had to chose four key works it is quite likely that you would choose those four. It is also useful to me, because I have always found DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION and THE LOGIC OF SENSE his most challenging texts and am always in the market for cogent readings. Generally I write my Goodreads reviews in a single long (they are becoming increasingly long) single-paragraph deluge. On this occasion I am going to deviate. I am going to move in blocks corresponding to each of Lapoujade’s chapters. I want to collect what I believe to be a whole bunch of key points both to share (I suppose) and for my own future consultation. It is an extremely dense book and I took an outrageous amount of notes. Part of what follows will be an attempt to sift through the chaff. I am not going to spend any real time on John Rajchman’s introduction. It is a fine introduction, salient and worthy. Rajchman talk about the “conjunction and,” the “chaosmatic,” and places the origination of Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari in its contexts. As one would. He also reminds us that in testifying to the vitality of thought, Deleuze asserted that thought is more like life than like theory. Perhaps this is indeed the key here. Perhaps it is Life itself that is the laboratory of aberrant movements. That is certainly the crux of my own position.
LAPOUJADE’S INTRODUCTION.
The very famous line about seeking to “tak[e] an author from behind and giv[e] him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions.” This does indeed seem to suggest an aberrant practice. Tee hee. “Perversion is an essential operation in Deleuze and the pervert an essential figure of his philosophy, like the famous ‘schizo’ of ANTI-OEDIPUS.” Aberrant movements are not “arbitrary” and are “anomalies only from an external point of view.” They are catalogued only because they insist upon themselves indefatigably. They are constitutive, primary. From A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: “Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature.” The irrational and the illogical cannot be conflated! Not only is Deleuze not illogical, his whole body of work is a Logic. Logic, as with Spinoza, is his scene, and “the forces of life ceaselessly produce new logics that subject us to their irrationality.” Philosophy mobilizes battles immanent to the whole field of philosophy and battles immanent to the “populous solitude” of the thinker himself. There is peril inherent to combat and the unleashing of vital forces. From A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: “Why is the line of flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having destroyed everything one could?” Lapoujade, near the end of his introduction, suggests that death is the presiding philosophical problem undergirding Deluze’s thought. The aberrant is found by faculties at the limits of themselves. It is very intense at the limit. One can be destroyed there.
CHAPTER 1. Central to Deleuze is the requirement that the “image of thought” routinely justify its necessity in relation to its ground. The question “quid juris?’ and its corresponding geography. (WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?: “thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth.”) To some extent Deleuze practices critique in the tradition of Kant. The field, the ground. The ground is conditioned by the legislative transcendental principle, which “selects among claims, distributes rights, and which confers legitimacy in accordance with which land or domains are distributed,” and the executive empirical principle, “whose function is to govern the domain once it is distributed.” But ground is a core problem. DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION: “Something from the ground rises to the surface, without assuming any form, but, rather, insinuating itself between the forms; a nonformal base, an autonomous and faceless existence. This ground which is now on the surface is called depth or groundlessness.” In the face of groundlessness and depth or abyss, Deleuze seeks to keep ground at the surface and this is where plane comes in (plane of immanence, plane of consistency). A plane is the surface which acts like a sieve and upon which determination is made. Not only thought, not only philosophy, proves its efficacy in terms of its relation to its plane, but all sets of relations do so, be it in art or science or Nature itself, a plane for every set of relations to establish their relations. This is the ground of groundlessness. The “ungrounding” of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION leads to the “deterritorialization” of the works with Guattari. “The Earth merges with deterritorialization itself; it is an earth in infinite movement, with neither bottom nor support.”
CHAPTER 2. The reversal of Platonism in which difference and repetition serve to “reverse the identity and circularity specific to the ground.” DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION: “Is this not the most general characteristic of the ground—namely, that the circle which it organizes is also the vicious circle of philosophical ‘proof,’ in which representation must prove what proves it, just as for Kant the possibility of experience serves as the proof of its own proof?” From the same text: “difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing.” We are talking about a differentiating plane, a condition of difference immanent to the actual appearance of phenomenal-type differences, groundless ground of difference, disjunctive synthesis and univocity of multiplicities. Legislation of difference essentially becomes the domain of the transcendental. Judgments are mostly garbage because they look to a ground for their legitimacy. Another aberrant movement: “leaping like a demon beyond the limits that judgement assigns beings.” All of this leads to new formulations of justice and the topography of a “new earth.”
CHAPTER 3. Repetition as condition of temporality. Three primary kinds of repetition: habit, memory, the eternal return. The first two syntheses create an empirical-transcendental doublet and circular Chronos in which “the grounded is made subject to the ground.” The third synthesis a “purely logical” time “beyond all duration,” an abstract line (which can hardly be said to behave at all like a line). Interesting discussion of “irreconcilable temporalities” in the novels of Henry James.
CHAPTER 4. Could be said that transcendental empiricism abolishes representation and proceeds from Kant in its “immediate relation” between phenomenon and noumenon beyond the site of the transcendental subject. Debt of the three syntheses and transcendental empiricism to Gilbert Simondon.
CHAPTER 5. THE LOGIC OF SENSE: “[Sense] is exactly the boundary between propositions and things.” Naturally, Deleuze is compelled to follow sense to its limit, the outside part of language that is not actually outside of (as in extrinsic to) language, a place where language abandons propositions and things and has only sense, a nonsense which is only sense. Artaud, the schizo, “infra-sense.” But before the schizo the pervert is hero, the pervert who escapes the neurosis of the everyday on one side and the depths of psychosis on the other. What is THE LOGIC OF SENSE, Deleuze's self-admitted attempt to give structuralism its transcendental philosophy, but a perversion of structuralism? Perhaps we might even call the pervert a connoisseur of aberrant movements within structure. The pervert prevails only so long as “sense must be ‘saved.’” From Structuralism to machinism (and Guattari). From “what does it mean?” to “how does it work?” The relationship with depth changes; “the nonsense of the depths is deployed at the surface according to the intensive variations of the body without organs.”
CHAPTER 6. Body without organs as an unbinding and the schizo logic one of “inclusive disjunctions.” Primacy of the nature/history correlation (relating to production of the unconscious). The deterritorializations of capital with the paranoid State acting as “a kind of postmortem ground.” The molecular and the molar. The schizo and the paranoiac in relation to the limit.
CHAPTER 7. Move from ANTI-OEDIPUS to A THOUSAND PLATEAUS a move from logic of desire to a logic of multiplicities and a look at how the earth is populated. Plane of consistency, abstract machines, concrete assemblages, the three strata (physicochemical, organic, anthropomorphic). Instead of a transcendental element, A THOUSAND PLATEAUS fields the double articulation inherent to creation of stratified assemblages on planes of organization and of consistency. Aberrant movement between strata, aberrant movements that deterritorialize language. At first there was desire and the social and nothing else. Further in: there are only molecular multiplicities.
CHAPTER 8. ANTI-OEDIPUS presents us with three kinds of social formations: Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Peoples. A THOUSAND PLATEAUS presents us with five: primitive lineal societies, State apparatuses, urban societies, nomadic societies, and international organizations. Lapoujade clarifies the concept of the “nomad,” showing it to be somewhat analogous to Leibniz’s concept of the “monad,” and investigates at length nomadic war machines in relation to the State apparatus. In showing how capitalism leads to a kind of privatization of the means of subjection, and that this subjection fundamentally reveals itself as an enslavement to machines, Lapoujade would seem to provide confirmation of the increasing relevance of A THOUSAND PLATEAUS in our age of devices of hyper-connection, at once deterritorializing and reterritorializing. Also born out by history in ways that are all too obvious (environmental calamity and mendacious inequality etc.) is Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that capitalism “makes the earth increasingly uninhabitable the more thoroughly it encompasses it.”
CHAPTER 9. Even if the concept of “nomad” is to an extent analogous with that of “monad,” what nomads and minorities are most especially opposed to, as basic modes of populating the earth, is “moanadic automatism,” the split population that has incorporated axiomatics of subjection. Many commentators, such as Antonio Negri, have been frustrated by their inability to discern in Deleuze and Guattari any theoretical basis for concrete political action. Lapoujade reminds us that for Deleuze and Guattari all action, perhaps especially radical or disruptive political resistance, is conditioned by confrontation with the impossible and informed by experience of the intolerable, case by case. The importance of remembering that all becomings are molecular. The idea of an entirely personal journey of transformation is naturally anathema to a logic of multiplicities. If people and populations remain stratified within a double articulation—content/expression, words/things, language/image—the plane of consistency returns and our proximity to it becomes a powerful experience of limit (and its not-extrinsic outside part). A THOUSAND PLATEAUS routinely seeks to reach what it calls, in one lovely sentence, a “matter more immediate, more fluid, more ardent than bodies and words.” When Deleuze begins to write about the control society it becomes clear ultimately that his philosophy has always been about freeing the brain from enslavement.
CHAPTER 10. Every kind of conceivable reality is fostered by delirium. In addition, Deleuze has already taken from Leibnitz the precept that every perception is hallucinatory. But approaching limit is what most counts. Hence advocacy on behalf of the schizo, nomads, minorities. Lapoujade writes that “we don’t return to the desert—among other people—except by breaking with our own humanity, by tearing ourselves from ourselves, by following the vectors of deterritorialization of the new earth. This is the meaning of the immobile nomadism Deleuze and Guattari talk about, the demonic leap, when vision is finally made transvision.” Desert = body without organs = plane of immanence = chaosmos = Idea = matter = light in itself. This equation is only intelligible in terms of the extreme volatility of its unstable elements. Note: “we are no longer dealing with monads expressing one and the same world but with nomads astride divergent worlds.” That, my friend, is inclusive disjunction. “To create new individual, amorous, collective, and political bodies, but also new statements, fabulations, and deliria—that is the at once aesthetic, political, and philosophical task.” Indeed! A radical philosophy of Life, no? It is Lapoujade’s belief that Deleuze’s ultimate conclusion is that only new deliria can make us believe in the world again. I have found that this holds.
LAPOUJADE’S CONCLUSION. Aberrant movements are an unassailable activity of faculties at their limit and serve as the apotheosis of logic extrapolated as far as it can go. You know what? They answer to the question “quid juris?” Aha! I see what you are doing there! Just because Deleuze hooks up with Guattari does not mean he ever stopped formulating something like critique in the Kantian mode! A THOUSAND PLATEUAS: “You never reach the Body Without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, so what is this BwO?—But you’re already on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveller and nomad of the steppes.” Guess what? It is not only a matter of of “quid juris?” There is another question: “quid vitae?”
MY CONCLUSION. Well, goddammit, yes, exactly. “Quid vitae?” That is the question. It was my question, it is my question. How can it do anything but suggest an ethics even if Lapoujade isn’t prepared to put is ever so starkly in those terms? I have no compunction. What is philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari named a book WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? and basically said that philosophy is a kind of metascience of concepts. Right. But it is also something to, you know, do with your life. It is a way. Like painting or writing or generating cinemas. As such it is a way of populating the earth. It is a groundless ethics of habitation. It is the answer to “quid vitae?” Lapoujade has already hinted at the role of joy. Right. Life is for joy and delirium in conjunction with endless ways of being destroyed. “Quid vitae?” Yes. Creation, experimentation. Some kind of goddamn (yeah, unstable) praxis. What them psychoanalysts call the jouissance. Yeah, unstable. The intensity of a passionate living engagement!
LAPOUJADE’S INTRODUCTION.
The very famous line about seeking to “tak[e] an author from behind and giv[e] him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions.” This does indeed seem to suggest an aberrant practice. Tee hee. “Perversion is an essential operation in Deleuze and the pervert an essential figure of his philosophy, like the famous ‘schizo’ of ANTI-OEDIPUS.” Aberrant movements are not “arbitrary” and are “anomalies only from an external point of view.” They are catalogued only because they insist upon themselves indefatigably. They are constitutive, primary. From A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: “Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature.” The irrational and the illogical cannot be conflated! Not only is Deleuze not illogical, his whole body of work is a Logic. Logic, as with Spinoza, is his scene, and “the forces of life ceaselessly produce new logics that subject us to their irrationality.” Philosophy mobilizes battles immanent to the whole field of philosophy and battles immanent to the “populous solitude” of the thinker himself. There is peril inherent to combat and the unleashing of vital forces. From A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: “Why is the line of flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having destroyed everything one could?” Lapoujade, near the end of his introduction, suggests that death is the presiding philosophical problem undergirding Deluze’s thought. The aberrant is found by faculties at the limits of themselves. It is very intense at the limit. One can be destroyed there.
CHAPTER 1. Central to Deleuze is the requirement that the “image of thought” routinely justify its necessity in relation to its ground. The question “quid juris?’ and its corresponding geography. (WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?: “thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth.”) To some extent Deleuze practices critique in the tradition of Kant. The field, the ground. The ground is conditioned by the legislative transcendental principle, which “selects among claims, distributes rights, and which confers legitimacy in accordance with which land or domains are distributed,” and the executive empirical principle, “whose function is to govern the domain once it is distributed.” But ground is a core problem. DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION: “Something from the ground rises to the surface, without assuming any form, but, rather, insinuating itself between the forms; a nonformal base, an autonomous and faceless existence. This ground which is now on the surface is called depth or groundlessness.” In the face of groundlessness and depth or abyss, Deleuze seeks to keep ground at the surface and this is where plane comes in (plane of immanence, plane of consistency). A plane is the surface which acts like a sieve and upon which determination is made. Not only thought, not only philosophy, proves its efficacy in terms of its relation to its plane, but all sets of relations do so, be it in art or science or Nature itself, a plane for every set of relations to establish their relations. This is the ground of groundlessness. The “ungrounding” of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION leads to the “deterritorialization” of the works with Guattari. “The Earth merges with deterritorialization itself; it is an earth in infinite movement, with neither bottom nor support.”
CHAPTER 2. The reversal of Platonism in which difference and repetition serve to “reverse the identity and circularity specific to the ground.” DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION: “Is this not the most general characteristic of the ground—namely, that the circle which it organizes is also the vicious circle of philosophical ‘proof,’ in which representation must prove what proves it, just as for Kant the possibility of experience serves as the proof of its own proof?” From the same text: “difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing.” We are talking about a differentiating plane, a condition of difference immanent to the actual appearance of phenomenal-type differences, groundless ground of difference, disjunctive synthesis and univocity of multiplicities. Legislation of difference essentially becomes the domain of the transcendental. Judgments are mostly garbage because they look to a ground for their legitimacy. Another aberrant movement: “leaping like a demon beyond the limits that judgement assigns beings.” All of this leads to new formulations of justice and the topography of a “new earth.”
CHAPTER 3. Repetition as condition of temporality. Three primary kinds of repetition: habit, memory, the eternal return. The first two syntheses create an empirical-transcendental doublet and circular Chronos in which “the grounded is made subject to the ground.” The third synthesis a “purely logical” time “beyond all duration,” an abstract line (which can hardly be said to behave at all like a line). Interesting discussion of “irreconcilable temporalities” in the novels of Henry James.
CHAPTER 4. Could be said that transcendental empiricism abolishes representation and proceeds from Kant in its “immediate relation” between phenomenon and noumenon beyond the site of the transcendental subject. Debt of the three syntheses and transcendental empiricism to Gilbert Simondon.
CHAPTER 5. THE LOGIC OF SENSE: “[Sense] is exactly the boundary between propositions and things.” Naturally, Deleuze is compelled to follow sense to its limit, the outside part of language that is not actually outside of (as in extrinsic to) language, a place where language abandons propositions and things and has only sense, a nonsense which is only sense. Artaud, the schizo, “infra-sense.” But before the schizo the pervert is hero, the pervert who escapes the neurosis of the everyday on one side and the depths of psychosis on the other. What is THE LOGIC OF SENSE, Deleuze's self-admitted attempt to give structuralism its transcendental philosophy, but a perversion of structuralism? Perhaps we might even call the pervert a connoisseur of aberrant movements within structure. The pervert prevails only so long as “sense must be ‘saved.’” From Structuralism to machinism (and Guattari). From “what does it mean?” to “how does it work?” The relationship with depth changes; “the nonsense of the depths is deployed at the surface according to the intensive variations of the body without organs.”
CHAPTER 6. Body without organs as an unbinding and the schizo logic one of “inclusive disjunctions.” Primacy of the nature/history correlation (relating to production of the unconscious). The deterritorializations of capital with the paranoid State acting as “a kind of postmortem ground.” The molecular and the molar. The schizo and the paranoiac in relation to the limit.
CHAPTER 7. Move from ANTI-OEDIPUS to A THOUSAND PLATEAUS a move from logic of desire to a logic of multiplicities and a look at how the earth is populated. Plane of consistency, abstract machines, concrete assemblages, the three strata (physicochemical, organic, anthropomorphic). Instead of a transcendental element, A THOUSAND PLATEAUS fields the double articulation inherent to creation of stratified assemblages on planes of organization and of consistency. Aberrant movement between strata, aberrant movements that deterritorialize language. At first there was desire and the social and nothing else. Further in: there are only molecular multiplicities.
CHAPTER 8. ANTI-OEDIPUS presents us with three kinds of social formations: Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Peoples. A THOUSAND PLATEAUS presents us with five: primitive lineal societies, State apparatuses, urban societies, nomadic societies, and international organizations. Lapoujade clarifies the concept of the “nomad,” showing it to be somewhat analogous to Leibniz’s concept of the “monad,” and investigates at length nomadic war machines in relation to the State apparatus. In showing how capitalism leads to a kind of privatization of the means of subjection, and that this subjection fundamentally reveals itself as an enslavement to machines, Lapoujade would seem to provide confirmation of the increasing relevance of A THOUSAND PLATEAUS in our age of devices of hyper-connection, at once deterritorializing and reterritorializing. Also born out by history in ways that are all too obvious (environmental calamity and mendacious inequality etc.) is Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that capitalism “makes the earth increasingly uninhabitable the more thoroughly it encompasses it.”
CHAPTER 9. Even if the concept of “nomad” is to an extent analogous with that of “monad,” what nomads and minorities are most especially opposed to, as basic modes of populating the earth, is “moanadic automatism,” the split population that has incorporated axiomatics of subjection. Many commentators, such as Antonio Negri, have been frustrated by their inability to discern in Deleuze and Guattari any theoretical basis for concrete political action. Lapoujade reminds us that for Deleuze and Guattari all action, perhaps especially radical or disruptive political resistance, is conditioned by confrontation with the impossible and informed by experience of the intolerable, case by case. The importance of remembering that all becomings are molecular. The idea of an entirely personal journey of transformation is naturally anathema to a logic of multiplicities. If people and populations remain stratified within a double articulation—content/expression, words/things, language/image—the plane of consistency returns and our proximity to it becomes a powerful experience of limit (and its not-extrinsic outside part). A THOUSAND PLATEAUS routinely seeks to reach what it calls, in one lovely sentence, a “matter more immediate, more fluid, more ardent than bodies and words.” When Deleuze begins to write about the control society it becomes clear ultimately that his philosophy has always been about freeing the brain from enslavement.
CHAPTER 10. Every kind of conceivable reality is fostered by delirium. In addition, Deleuze has already taken from Leibnitz the precept that every perception is hallucinatory. But approaching limit is what most counts. Hence advocacy on behalf of the schizo, nomads, minorities. Lapoujade writes that “we don’t return to the desert—among other people—except by breaking with our own humanity, by tearing ourselves from ourselves, by following the vectors of deterritorialization of the new earth. This is the meaning of the immobile nomadism Deleuze and Guattari talk about, the demonic leap, when vision is finally made transvision.” Desert = body without organs = plane of immanence = chaosmos = Idea = matter = light in itself. This equation is only intelligible in terms of the extreme volatility of its unstable elements. Note: “we are no longer dealing with monads expressing one and the same world but with nomads astride divergent worlds.” That, my friend, is inclusive disjunction. “To create new individual, amorous, collective, and political bodies, but also new statements, fabulations, and deliria—that is the at once aesthetic, political, and philosophical task.” Indeed! A radical philosophy of Life, no? It is Lapoujade’s belief that Deleuze’s ultimate conclusion is that only new deliria can make us believe in the world again. I have found that this holds.
LAPOUJADE’S CONCLUSION. Aberrant movements are an unassailable activity of faculties at their limit and serve as the apotheosis of logic extrapolated as far as it can go. You know what? They answer to the question “quid juris?” Aha! I see what you are doing there! Just because Deleuze hooks up with Guattari does not mean he ever stopped formulating something like critique in the Kantian mode! A THOUSAND PLATEUAS: “You never reach the Body Without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, so what is this BwO?—But you’re already on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveller and nomad of the steppes.” Guess what? It is not only a matter of of “quid juris?” There is another question: “quid vitae?”
MY CONCLUSION. Well, goddammit, yes, exactly. “Quid vitae?” That is the question. It was my question, it is my question. How can it do anything but suggest an ethics even if Lapoujade isn’t prepared to put is ever so starkly in those terms? I have no compunction. What is philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari named a book WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? and basically said that philosophy is a kind of metascience of concepts. Right. But it is also something to, you know, do with your life. It is a way. Like painting or writing or generating cinemas. As such it is a way of populating the earth. It is a groundless ethics of habitation. It is the answer to “quid vitae?” Lapoujade has already hinted at the role of joy. Right. Life is for joy and delirium in conjunction with endless ways of being destroyed. “Quid vitae?” Yes. Creation, experimentation. Some kind of goddamn (yeah, unstable) praxis. What them psychoanalysts call the jouissance. Yeah, unstable. The intensity of a passionate living engagement!
April 29, 2021
"The image evaporates at the very moment the desert repopulates. But how does it repopulate? With which entities? How do the virtual populations that agitate the desert come to populate it effectively? We are on the plane where there are no longer any human beings, no longer any bodies; they have disintegrated and decomposed. There is no longer any subject or object. There is no longer anything but the desert of pure intensive matter, with its conjunctions of flows and its distributions of singularities, its molecular populations. Finally, bodies are thought and produced differently. In the desert we make molecules delirious in order to form other bodies, other beings, the molecular child, woman, or bird. What is this delirium? Bodies are no longer given, with their opacity and shadow. They are, so to speak, deduced from the light. They are formed from the desert's dust."
October 19, 2018
Among the best interpretations of Deleuze--if not *the* best. There's little I can add. If you love Deleuze but have misgivings with Deleuze scholarship, this is a breath of fresh air from beginning to end.
October 24, 2018
Gets dry + kinda boring part way but decent
May 8, 2024
Leído en Cactus, este libro de Lapoujade es aún mejor que Las existencias menores (sobre Souriau), que La alteración de los mundos (sobre Philip K. Dick) o William James; si una pensaba que había comprendido comme il faut la filosofía de Deleuze, al empezar a leer este libro se da cuenta de que no. La filosofía de Deleuze como un acontecimietno en sí mismo, como una redistribución de las potencias, proviene de un pensamiento de genio -¿el último genio?- que atraviesa toda la historia de la filosofía -toda-, la reinterpreta y la conjuga con una profundísima visión sobre el Arte. Deleuze es un filósofo tremendamente intuitivo, que escoge con esmero y precisión sus problemas y sus conceptos; el proyecto de Deleuze es todo aquello que se puede desear en este siglo nuestro, y Foucault se quedó corto -el milenio será deleuziano. Sobre la obra de Lapoujade, decir que pasa por todos los libros de Deleuze y que, evidentemente, tiene pasajes más áridos que otros, pero que vale la pena seguir, aunque sea arrastrándose, hasta el final. Magnífico.
December 26, 2020
reevaluation of Deleuze's entire ouvre from the perspective of grounding/foundation (as laid out in the recently translated essay "What is grounding?"). on the one hand, this is a somewhat heterdox perspective (though becoming more popular within D studies) and Lapoujade mostly sticks to the philosophical side of this question (though referencing fellow travelers Sibertin-Blanc, Viveiros de Castro on political issues). on the other hand, the book remains entirely internal to D - because it takes up no new relation, condition, or context for thinking with these terms, it is limited in its argument and its applicability and appears as a guidebook rather than a new contribution. still, even as the latter, it's immensely helpful, especially with respect to D&R and LoS - and connecting these to the system set up in Geology of Morals.
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March 25, 2022Got covid when I was ~80% done with this. My brain doesn’t currently have the power to finish it. So it was decent.
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