Letters and Other Texts

by Gilles Deleuze, David Lapoujade (Editor)

A posthumous collection of writings by Deleuze, including letters, youthful essays, and an interview, many previously unpublished.

Genres: Philosophy, France

310 pages, Paperback

Published June 23, 2020

About the author

Deleuze is a key figure in poststructuralist French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.

Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.

He often collaborated with philosophers and artists as Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Carmelo Bene, François Châtelet, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Lapassade, Kateb Yacine and many others.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

The letters part of this is a collection from a number of Deleuze's colleagues, students, and contacts, most well-known within French culture. These provide all sorts of insights about Deleuze's personal life and professional relationships, and depending on one's interests, these are a treasure trove of information, especially since these have only be available in the IMEC archive until now. The second section includes some Deleuze drawings plus "diverse texts", mainly book reviews but also a course outline on Hume, that is, texts heretofore unavailable. The most interesting text, to my mind, is his and Guattari's interview with Raymond Bellour, never published for various reasons. The final section is filled with his publications "from youth", unauthorized early texts by Deleuze that the family has now authorized, in a controlled and edited context, since the texts have been published elsewhere anyway. All in all, a long awaited translation of a volume available in French since 2015. What the correspondence reveals, above all, is Deleuze's generosity and patience with all of his correspondents.

As for the "authorized" aspect of this volume, the Deleuze family is bound to Deleuze's wishes to limit publication of texts that he did not have a chance to review. Their efforts in this regard are extensive, for example, blockage of the unauthorized publication of a 5-volume transcription of the Deleuze seminars, by a Swiss publisher Eidos, which no longer exists (and other than a favorable book review online by Jean-Clet Martin, https://diacritik.com/2019/04/16/dele..., no seller or library has this edition).

So, conjoined with the other two volumes of Deleuze's occasional texts -- Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974) and Two Regimes of Madness and Other Texts (1975-1995) -- this volume provides a partial, somewhat sporadic, definitely quirky view of the author's very active intellectual life, from the 1940s up to his death in 1995.

[Fabiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

"- Can it be said that a love for life in its terrifying complexity has guided you throughout your work?
Yes, what disgusts me theoretically and practically is any type of complaint about life, any tragic culture...in other words, neurosis. I have difficulty dealing with neurotics." (78)

"My dream would be to write but no longer talk at all." (81)***

"...And there is no sexuality without politics." (239)

Its hard to formulate a coherent statement-piece on a compilation of texts and letters, but I think that somehow captures the rhizomatic shadow of Deleuze. The multiplicity of works his thought resides in, the non-linear yet ever so related state of fluxes and intensities. To say Deleuze has influenced me is a blatant disservice to his impact on my philosophical career. There is so much beauty in his art/writing, something we can only aspire to emulate, not recreate. D is often mentioned with G, but separately they host such complex individual ideas on psychoanalysis and investigations into the sociopolitical factors that affect desire and the role of the libidinal, to say the least.

Its one thing to read a "book," though we know AO/ATP are so much more than words on a page, but to read the personal letters and see drawings of such an intellectually gifted man is beyond moving. If I could have one conversation with the man, I probably wouldn't say anything but listen to him come and go, as the lines of flight intended.

***I really could not resonate with a statement any more than I do with this one. Maybe I am too full of doubt to ever arrive at a place where I can speak confidently on philosophical subjects such as these. Especially in the classroom setting we reward seemingly quick and "novel" ideas, but rarely sit down with the questions of what they really mean. I am often deterred from speaking these things (partially because I used to get made fun of for the "mechanical" way I speak and was basically bullied out of it) for the very reason that I dont think you can capture many concepts in totality offhand. I keep saying that we take the wrong things too seriously, and for this I continue to be proven right.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

2020, year of COVID-19 and any other number of supplementary reasons to board up the windows and noise-proof your garret, might be an especially good year to look to Gilles Deleuze for a little guidance. How might one come to find oneself at ease is the pursuing of social distancing and relative indolence to extremities hitherto unexplored? If I am not mistaken, it is the artworld superstar Moyra Davey, herself a woman living with multiple sclerosis, who writes, in an essay included in the collection INDEX CARDS put out by New Directions in late May of this year, just in time for the Summer of COVID, that she takes consolation from Deleuze’s argument that there is nothing quite so ideal as a convalescence, provided one is not compelled to suffer too terribly and is likely to survive. Deleuze suffered increasingly from serious respiratory issues. Later in life, the philosopher’s indisposition made it easier from him to transition into retirement, and in letters to friends and associates he will have repeated occasion to excuse himself from tasks he is unable to perform, events he cannot attend. If one’s ailments can be rather convenient looked at from a certain angle, there can be no ignoring that Deleuze’s suicide in November of 1995 was a result of his health-related woes having become so severe that they could simply no longer be endured. That the legacy and influence of this great and radical thinker live on is testified to by the fact that, twenty-five years after his death, we have the final collection of minutiae delivered to us, rendered in English, my hardly being alone in considering this a major event. Sure, LETTERS AND OTHER TEXTS is most likely to appeal to those who already are or have been ardent supplicants, though I shouldn’t imagine it would be a case of this being an absolute and inalienable fact of the like-it-or-not variety. I had read most of Deleuze’s major works by the age of twenty-three or thereabouts, and took a seminar course on Deleuze at the graduate level in which I comported myself admirably enough to earn an A from a professor I had previously found to be abstemious with them. The first Deleuze I ever read was THE MOVEMENT IMAGE, his first of two Bergsonian concept blocks relating to the cinema, but it was ANTI-OEDIPUS, the first of the two CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA tomes co-authored with Félix Guattari, that excited me in ways I don’t think any other philosophical text ever previously had. That I found myself not unlike a fish in water with ANTI-OEDIPUS made sense to the aforementioned Hungarian professor under whom I studied, his contention being that the artistic types are always more at home with Deleuze and Guattari than are the stern-browed philosophers. Beginning my undergraduate studies in 1997, I have often said I arrived at the post-structuralist banquet as it was starting to wind down. We do ourselves a disservice if we imagine the broad and dynamic post-structuralist field as one reducible to smug reductions and simplified diagnostics. Though it was something I already knew, I found it useful to be reminded last year, in reading David Lapoujade's wonderful ABERRANT MOVEMENTS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF GILLES DELEUZE, that my turn-of-the-century hero had once described his 1969 book THE LOGIC OF SENSE as his effort to give to structuralism its transcendental philosophy. The first letter collected in the opening section of LETTERS AND OTHER TEXTS, written to Alain Vinson and dated April 11, 1964, touches, in fact, directly on a problem in Kant’s transcendental idealism, Vinson having evidently previously sent Deleuze an inquiry regarding Kant and the bifurcated relationship of phenomena and will in relation to the thing-in-itself substrate. Deleuze suggests that that “the voluntary reasonable thing-in-itself is a particular case, a specification of the thing-in-itself substrate,” but that the problem Vinson has elucidated is crucial: the supersensible, the substrate, ends up becoming what I would be inclined to imagine Donald Rumsfeld might call the super-thing we know that we don’t know. Deleuze makes reference to the heavy lifting Schopenhauer sought to make the will do in this respect. Deleuze’s first major work of philosophical exegesis is of course his 1953 EMPIRICISM AND SUBJECTIVITY, the study on Hume in which Deleuze inaugurates the para-field we will come to know as “transcendental empiricism.” A number of studies on major philosophers follow: NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY (1962), KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY (1963), BERGSONISM (1966). PROUST AND SIGNS—a work in which a relationship to semiotic chains, it is argued, ought to replace a focus on memory in consideration of the basic operational mode of Marcel Proust’s multi-volume RECHERCHE—appears in 1964, between the Kant and Bergson books, its being the text I believe to be closest in spirit to Jacques Lacan, who had come to replace Freud as de facto figurehead of International Psychoanalysis from a context directly oriented toward address/redress vis-à-vis structural linguistics. Much of Deleuze’s trajectory through the 60s is traced in his letters. Writing to Jean Piel (who had taken over editorial stewardship of CRITIQUE after the death of Geroges Bataille in 1962), Deleuze apologizes for not being able to produce a piece on Céline anytime in the near future, expressing his enthusiasm, in light of his current work on Sacher-Masoch, for a “Robinsonade,” FRIDAY, OR, THE OTHER ISLAND, which the book’s author, Michel Tournier, is shopping around. Later, in 1968, writing to Piel again, Deleuze correlates, in passing, Lewis Carroll’s work to an emerging (lowercase) logic of sense. Perhaps the most striking letter of all those collected in the volume under consideration is dispatched to Piel not long after this. May 7th of 1968! Which is to say during the ACTUAL MAY OF 1968!! LOGIC OF SENSE is now taking on a life of its own, promising to become a significantly lengthier work than had originally been foreseen, though Deleuze is still uncertain as to the prognosis regarding its spread. Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud are already united in the work at hand with a direct consideration of the schizophrenic, stated explicitly in the letter in just those terms, even though Deleuze will not meet institutional psychiatrist and future collaborator Félix Guattari until the two men are introduced in the Limousin region during the spring of 1969 (where Deleuze is, naturally, convalescing). Many letters from Deleuze to Guattari are collected in the opening section of LETTERS AND OTHER TEXTS. In one instance Deleuze provides his young colleague with a telling pep talk: “The idea that conditions are not yet right to do it, either because things are not going well in the current inferno, or that you yourself are not doing well, seems false to me; because it is the same as saying that one can only truly write when things are going well, instead of seeing writing as a modest but active and effective factor in getting out of the inferno for a moment and in feeling better oneself.” A new pursuit is on, in search of new structure for, if not entirely of, the unconscious. Deleuze confesses that he is still a little hazy with respect to Guattari’s conception of the machinic in July of 1969, but it is energizing to witness Deleuze himself become energized as he makes headway conceptualizing both the recording and the production of the unconscious within the context of a new set of concepts pertaining to the machinic (“the schizo metonymically expresses the machine of industrial society…it treats you like an IBM machine treats its information…”). Already, by April of 1971, Deleuze is writing derisively in a letter to the great Pierre Klossowski as concerns “Marxist-psychoanalytical immobilism.” In his brief introductory “Presentation” to LETTERS AND OTHER TEXTS, the avuncular David Lapoujade makes clear that Deleuze never kept the letters sent to him by correspondents, nor did he consider his own epistolary efforts part of the legitimate body of work. Passing mention is made likewise of the famous fallings-out Deleuze had with noteworthy correspondents the likes of Klossowski and Michel Foucault. Many readers will be aware of the legendarily fractious and sectarian nature of the politics endemic to French intellectual circles, parodied recently as these tendencies are in Laurent Binet’s literary farce THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE. Deleuze will casually mention in his letters former friends with whom he is no longer on speaking terms, but specificities relating to disputes remain entirely off limits, nary a mention made. What is all too evident is the hyperbolic praise Deleuze bestows on friends like Foucault and Klossowski with whom he is eventually to fall out (telling Klossowski in ’71, for example, that he, Klossowski, is surpassing or supplanting Wilhelm Reich, who Deleuze argues “remained at the level of a critique of ideologies since he did not see the point of inserting drives into the infrastructure”). I find myself extremely eager all of a sudden to read THE DELIRIUM OF PRAISE by Eleanor Kaufman, which I am highly annoyed to discover retails for $220.86 on Canadian Amazon. I would like to at this point move on from the letters, ending on what I believe to be a highly apposite note. Again, any given person is likely to have certain “notions,” shall we say, as regards post-structuralism as a general field of historically-conditioned discourse. I have also myself become increasingly aware of numerous philosophers or theorists—such as Terry Eagleton in his not especially useful book on materialism in Nietzsche, Marx, and Wittgenstein—who are inclined to disacknowledge any distinction between ontology and metaphysics, stuffing both fields of sense together under the umbrella of the latter terminology in order to disparage them. Sent a questionnaire by Arnaud Villani in 1980, Deleuze responds to the question “Are you a non-metaphysician philosopher?” by insisting outright: “No, I see myself as a pure metaphysician.” Just before putting it in the starkest possible terms, Deleuze has already formulated it thusly: “Bergson says that modern science did not find its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needed. I am interested in this metaphysics.” It is worth emphasizing this crucial point (!). The second two thirds of LETTERS AND OTHER TEXTS consists of, firstly, mature essays not previously included in the two extant collections of minutiae brought to us by Semiotext(e), and, secondarily, early juvenilia (though ambitious essays, to be sure) that Deleuze wrote in the 40s and of which he did not later on wish to be reminded. (The estate has allowed for the publication of the early pieces, because they have been circulating anyway, and in bowdlerized form). Everything is fascinating, and much of it—if intermittently—is extremely strong. In “Three Readings: Bréhier, Lavelle, and Le Senne,” we have a nifty prognosis from the year 1955: “It seems like there is a second age beginning now, a return to the origin where critique and philosophy of values are not separate.” We witness the emergence of themes in the notes Deleuze has prepared for his Hume course (1957-1958). Identity, the “supposed existence of a self.” We are somewhere between D. H. Lawrence / Aldous Huxley and the molecular becomings of Félix Guattari. “A variable flux and yet belief in the invariability of a variable collection. Memory is the faculty producing a resemblance in the most variable perceptions. It is necessary for discovering personal identity. I am a collection of perceptions, a theater without a place.” A piece on Sacher-Masoch and gynecocracy (regression to a primitive communism). In addition to the primacy of contract and the inversion of parental law: the archaic dimension. We are in proximity here to Georges Bataille (and probably also Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Rouch, et cetera). The big selling point of the second section is a lengthy 1973 interview with Deleuze and Guattari conducted by the film scholar Raymond Bellour, the whole thing wild, occasionally hilarious, and exceedingly of its time. Bellour is steeped in Lacan (as is 1973 film theory) and persistently insists upon pursuing the subject of lack, much to the consternation of Guattari, who is both sour and obviously enjoying an opportunity to play enfant terrible. Deleuze is slightly more magnanimous. Sure, yes, we aren’t saying there is no such thing as lack, but it is a tiresome epiphenomenal business unrelated to desire in and of itself…plus a real drag to talk about; it sure isn’t likely to do the patient much good. Both men express their committed belief in the “right to nonsense.” Guattari, the institutional psychiatrist, does end up having something quite lovely to say about the actual practice of schizoanalysis: “What is the role of an analytical group or an analyst? It is to help decipher the potential for connections.” It makes me think of Ernst Lubitsch’s tender/comic cinematic masterpiece CLUNY BROWN (1946), in which young lady plumber Jennifer Jones bangs her wrench haplessly against the clanging pipes until the connection happens for her, the blockage is removed, and she achieves her schizoanalytic line of flight. What of the juvenilia? Those five pieces from 1945 to 1947? We might definitely imagine it is the most precocious teenager in the world, dressed up as Sartre for Halloween, who is speaking when young Deleuze writes such things as “With sadness they talk about Dasein, and we no longer know if they are speaking words or spitting out bits of flesh.” Still, we are undeniably bearing witness to the aberrant movements of a lively young logician in these pieces. He routinely conceives of the masculine-Other as an externality presenting a world or a possible one, and the Woman as an interiority, appropriately moist. As this young writer is obviously totally brilliant, it is no surprise that he will later regret having signed his name to some of these musings. That being said, in “Words and Profiles” he finds himself articulating a dread in Proust that is the same one Chantal Akerman will explore in her masterpiece LA CAPTIVE (2000): a sort of terror regarding a latent lesbianism imputed or projected; “Jealousy is the revelation of the Woman within the loved one.” In 1946’s “Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy,” Deleuze conceptualizes a mathesis in which “the life of knowledge is identified with the knowledge of life,” it’s alternative cogito: “sum, ergo cogito; sum, ergo genero,” this a “living art of medicine.” The final piece, an introduction to a 1947 edition of Diderot’s LA RELIGIEUSE, notifies us that the kid has already figured out that total lived submission to institutions is not only undesirable…it isn’t even bloody possible...