Todd May - The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze

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The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze

5:3 | © 2001 Todd May

Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of

Being (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2000 (orig. pub. 1997)).

Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political

(New York, Routledge, 2000).

John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

1.

In the small but growing circle of Deleuze scholars on this sideof the Atlantic, there has been a notable shift in recent yearsregarding the aspects of Deleuze's thought that receive emphasis.Early on, with the publication and subsequent translation of (and the stir in France about) Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze was treated hereas primarily a political philosopher in the Nietzschean mold.

Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with Felix Guattari, was (justly)taken to be political theory that was influenced by the events of May '68 in France, and was also (not quite so justly) taken to beemblematic of the entirety of Deleuze's thought.

2.

In recent years, however, there has been a shift from the studyof his political views toward his ontological ones, and with thatshift has come a corresponding shift in attention from the later works, many of them co-authored with Guattari, toward theearlier ones. Deleuze's central work Difference and Repetition,long neglected here, appeared in translation by Paul Patton (oneof the authors under review here) in 1994, and, alongside other earlier works, allows English speakers a full range of study of allof Deleuze's major early works. Combined with the focus placed on Deleuze's ontology by Constantin Boundas, his mostsignificant promoter in North America, scholars of Deleuze'sthought are now as likely to read the collaborative works withFelix Guattari through the eyes of Deleuze's earlier studies as theother way around.

3.

It is less surprising, then, than it once would have been that of the three books under review here -- all of them major contributions to Deleuze studies -- two of them focus largely on

Deleuze's ontology. Alain Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (originally published in French in 1997) and JohnRajchman's The Deleuze Connections both approach his thought

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by means of his ontology. Paul Patton's Deleuze and the

Political, by contrast, concerns itself mostly with Deleuze's later work. However, that book also has significant chapters onDeleuze's ontology.

4.

When I use the term "ontology" in reference to Deleuze's work, Iwant to be a bit cautious. Whether or not Deleuze "has" anontology, or has an epistemic commitment to any of hisontological posits, is a source of debate among Deleuze scholars.John Rajchman, for instance, comments that Deleuze's thought"puts experimentation before ontology, 'And' before 'Is.'" (p. 6)In invoking the term, then, I mean only to refer to theontological concepts that find their way into Deleuze's work, and not necessarily to any overarching ontological structure that mayor may not lie there.

5.

Badiou's text is perhaps the most well known and mostcontroversial of the three. Badiou, a formidable ontologist in hisown right, argues that Deleuze's project, in contrast to most of the interpretations given to it, is to articulate a thinking rooted innot multiplicity but rather in univocity. "Deleuze's fundamental

problem," he writes, "is most certainly not to liberate themultiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of theOne." (p. 11) In arguing for this claim, Badiou places himself squarely in context of Difference and Repetition and The Logic

of Sense. I would like to spend a moment rehearsing Badiou'sinterpretation and criticism of Deleuze before turning to thealternatives provided by Rajchman and Patton.

6.

According to Badiou, there are three central principles governingDeleuze's thought:

"1. This philosophy is organized around ametaphysics of the One2. It proposes an ethics of thought that requires

dispossession and asceticism.3. It is systematic and abstract." (p. 17)

Of these three, it is the first one that founds the other two and thus receives the bulk of his attention.

7.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze traces a historical lineagethat begins with Duns Scotus and runs through Spinoza to

Nietzsche that takes Being to be univocal. This lineage holds thatBeing is said in one and the same sense about all things of which

it is said. Deleuze endorses this view, in large part because, in Nietzschean fashion, it precludes the resort to some sort of transcendent by which this world would be judged. From the


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beginning of his work Deleuze rejects the intervention of anysort of transcendent into philosophy, and the univocity of Beingis in keeping with that rejection.

8.

Badiou notes that if Deleuze takes this path, one of the hurdles

he has to clear is that the world appears as a multiplicity. Howcan Being be univocal and yet seem to be multifarious. InBadiou's view, Deleuze's strategy is to hold that Being is to beconceptually approached from two different angles, one fromthe side of univocity and the other from the side of multiplicity.It is the first side that Deleuze privileges. As Badiou puts it, "The

price one must pay for inflexibly maintaining the thesis of univocity is clear...ultimately, this multiple can only be that of the order of simulacra." (p. 26)

9.

In itself, that position is not problematic. Where it does developdifficulties, however, is that this dual angle of vision cannot bemaintained without resort to transcendence, which is whatDeleuze wants to avoid in the first place by invoking theunivocity of Being. For instance, in Deleuze's distinction

between the virtual univocity of Being and its actualization inthe multiplicity of things, the virtual cleaves from the actual and

becomes transcendent: "Deleuze's virtual ground remains for mea transcendence." (p. 46) Although Deleuze tries to maintainimmanence by invoking the idea of the virtual and the actual as

distinct but indiscernible, this move, in Badiou's eyes, undercutsthe possibility of the virtual serving as a univocal ground of Being.

10.

It would take a much longer essay to assess the charge thatBadiou has leveled against Deleuze. Let me only suggest herethat I believe Badiou is right in saying that transcendence is athreat to Deleuze's thought, but it is not at all clear that it isunavoidable. When Deleuze claims in Difference and Repetition

that Being is difference in itself and in Bergsonism that

Bergson's ontological past is pure difference in kind, he isopening up the possibility of a virtuality that is as multiplicitousas the actualities that emerge from it. In focusing on theunivocity of Deleuze's concept of Being, then, Badiou may haveconflated univocity with identity, a move that would certainlylead to transcendence but which Deleuze himself rejects.

11.

In The Deleuze Connections, John Rajchman, in contrast toBadiou, follows the more standard route of focusing on Deleuzeas a thinker of multiplicity. In Rajchman's view, the driving forceof Deleuze's thought is the promotion of experimentation, and this promotion requires that there be many different and not

predetermined ways in which various things can connect with


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one another (thus the book's title) with no transcendent guidingor evaluating principle. "Deleuze would see a 'superior empiricism' prior to any transcendental subjectivity or intersubjectivity -- a sort of philosophical experimentalism thatwould suppose a 'pure immanence,' with no first or transcendental elements, or which would not be immanent to

anything prior, either subjective or objective." (p. 17) 12.

In contrast to what Deleuze calls, again in Difference and

Repetition, the "dogmatic image of thought," which unfoldshierarchically from first principles as a universal explainer or guide and ultimately requires some sort of groundingtranscendence, he offers an empiricism that unfolds (to use alater image of Deleuze and Guattari's) rhizomatically, in shootsand connections emanating from a middle without ends: a freemultiplicity that allows for all sorts of nomadic couplings and

connections that are irreducible to an overarching structure.

13.

For such a thought to occur, it requires a logic entirely differentfrom the traditional logic of predication. It requires a logic of conjunction and connection. That is why Rajchman, in the quotecited earlier, claims that Deleuze focuses on the And rather thanthe Is. Deleuze does not by any means reject ontology; heembraces it. But Deleuze's ontology is not based on a logic of

predication. It is based on a logic of connection, conjunction,

and inclusive disjunction. 14.

Here we can see the sharp contrast between Rajchman's view of Deleuze and Badiou's. For Badiou, Deleuze's logic, because of his overriding commitment to the univocity of Being, mustalways be a dualist tension of the One and the Many. For Rajchman, on the other hand, the placement of multiplicityrather than univocity at the core of Deleuze's thought issues outinto a logic as multiplicitous as the ontology it seeks to construct.For Rajchman, then, the univocity of Being is quite clearly a

univocity of difference, an interpretation that seems to me morein keeping with the movement of Deleuze's thought than theunivocity ascribed to Deleuze by Badiou. While Badiou,according to the requirements of his own thought, isuncomfortable with any univocity and thus seeks to discredit itin Deleuze, by contrast Rajchman, in seeing that for Deleuzeunivocity is a way to maintain both immanence and multiplicity,gives it a more sympathetic and to my mind proper reading. I

believe that there are tensions in Deleuze's thought that tend toward transcendence, and have addressed some of them in myown work, but I find them more at the margins than at the center of his work.

15.


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Near the end of The Deleuze Connections Rajchman offers amotivation for reading Deleuze that seems to me to be right ontarget and that offers a transition into Paul Patton's more

political reading of Deleuze. Rajchman writes that, "In a modernworld of stupefying banality, routine, cliché, mechanicalreproduction or automatism, the problem is to extract a singular

image, a vital, multiple way of thinking and saying, not asubstitute theology or 'auratic object.'" (p. 125) Deleuze, in hisview, has offered that way of thinking; Rajchman, in my view,has offered an excellent guide to it. What Paul Patton does is toshow how that way of thinking might be read on the politicallevel.

16.

Patton, like Rajchman, is a clear and incisive interpreter of Deleuze. It is probably not out of place to confess here thatwhen I began to study Deleuze, Patton's essays had more

influence on me than any others I read. This is partly because of their political character and partly because, in the thicket of Deleuzian concepts with which I was confronted, he alwaysseemed to prove a clear guide. Deleuze and the Political bringstogether the themes that dominated those essays into anoverview of Deleuze's political thought (which he engaged inlargely in collaboration with Felix Guattari) and how thatthought emerges from the context created by his ontologicalapproach. Since Patton's ontological approach is largelyconsonant with Rajchman's, I will focus on the political

contribution Patton sees Deleuze as making. 17.

As Patton notes, Deleuze does not do political philosophy in anytraditional sense. He does not ask what a just society would beor inquire into the nature or conditions of justice or rights. His

political views are influenced by Nietzsche, whose own viewsstem from his interpretation of the dominating forces of a givensocio-political arrangement. Nietzsche saw himself as a politicaldiagnostician whose goal was to see in the symptoms of asituation its arrangement of active and reactive forces. Further,

he saw himself as trying to promote the active ones whilediscouraging the reactive ones. Deleuze takes up this approachin his own work, focusing upon the multiplicity of active forcesthat can be released rather than on the question of what peopledeserve as members of a given society. That is why his politicsdoes not simply occur at the level of the individual or the state --although they do make appearances -- but also at the

pre-individual, supra-individual and pre-state, and supra-statelevels as well.

18.

In order to capture what Deleuze is after in his political work,Patton introduces the concept of "critical freedom." "Criticalfreedom differs from the standard liberal concepts of positive


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and negative freedom by its focus upon the conditions of changeor transformation in the subject, and by its indifference to theindividual or collective nature of the subject." (p. 83) A few

pages later he writes, "It is the freedom to transgress the limits of what one is presently capable of being or doing, rather than justthe freedom to be or do those things." (p. 85) In Nietzschean

terms, critical freedom concerns the ability to allow the activeforces to be in play rather than taming them in the name of thecurrent values of a given community.

19.

As Patton notes, the Deleuzian concept of "becoming" is centralto this way of seeing things. A becoming is not a state of being

but a transformation, a movement between things. Thatmovement may be between any number of things (think here of Rajchman's concept of connections), but it is always, to useanother Deleuzian term, "minoritarian." A becoming is always a

matter of becoming something other than what is offered by thedominant conceptual categories of a given society; it is amovement away from the given toward that which a societyrefuses or is as yet unable to recognize. It is, in short, adisruption of current understandings and ways of being in thename of what Rajchman above called the singular, the vital, and the multiple.

20.

Given this view, there is inherent in any socio-political

arrangement a destabilization between those forces that seek tomaintain order -- what Deleuze calls "reterritorializing" forces --and those "deterritorializing" forces which subvert that order. Hesees societies as composed of various lines or vectors of territorialization and deterritorialization which need, like

Nietzsche's active and reactive forces, to be interpreted in agiven context in order to discover how to proceed. All

proceeding, however, can only be by experimentation, since theoutcome of any given intervention cannot be accurately

predicted. Whether a given deterritorialization will be successfulor interesting or will liberate active forces cannot be assured in

advance, because the "lines of flight" that thesedeterritorializations take intersect with the other lines or vectorsof a given society in unforeseeable ways.

21.

Patton notes that the history of societies is never a matter of whether the deterritorializing or reterritorializing forces prevailat a given moment, but of how they are interacting in theunfolding of that society. "Thus, when Deleuze and Guattariargue that societies are defined by their lines of flight or deterritorialisation, they mean there is no society that is notreproducing itself on one level, while simultaneously beingtransformed into something else on another level." (p. 107)


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22.

Given this overview, it is not difficult to see the continuity of Deleuze's political thought with his ontological approach. In bothcases Deleuze attempts to disrupt stasis and identity by means of concepts that are fluid and differential. In both he seeks toundermine what might appear to be inescapable or rigid

categories by introducing ways of thinking that are multiple,non-hierarchical, and, at times, intentionally ambiguous.Whether in the end the difficulties that Badiou ascribes toDeleuze's thought will undermine its ability to offer a coherentand interesting approach to understanding ourselves and our world, or whether, even if it possesses the power that Rajchmanand Patton find in it, it will be taken up as a guide, remains to beseen. Foucault once wrote, in an oft-quoted remark, that one daythe century (which is now the last century) might become knownas Deleuzian. As Deleuze himself would be the first to suggest,such predictions can never be known in advance.

Todd May is a Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University.He has written extensively on the thought of Michel Foucaultand Gilles Deleuze. His fifth book, Our Practices, Our Selves,

Or, What it Means to be Human, has just been published byPenn State Press. He can be reached at [email protected]

Copyright © 2001, Todd May and The Johns Hopkins University Press allrights reserved. NOTE: members of a subscribed campus may use this

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