Below are some excerpts from an article by Deleuze, a brilliant 20th century French philosopher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze
I couldn't find the article in English so I translated the parts you can read below. Certain phrases were more difficult than others to translate and I think my translation kills the text in certain respects. For instance in relation to a concept of ”coming into being” which I translated with ”-becoming”, or the point where ”directions” and ”alignments” is mentioned in relation to geography I found no way to capture the original wordplay in English.
While you're reading think about the terms: becoming, alliance, discussion, conversation and thinking. What relation do they have to philosophy and the history of philosophy? What relation do they have to your conception of philosophy and to the layman's understanding of these concepts?
Do you think the article is dated? Maybe in relation to how Deleuze talks about Marx, Freud, Saussure and Chomsky? I found it interesting to compare what he says at that point of the article to the Philosophy & Spirituality forum in relation to the New Age, realist and neo-Buddhist language-games.
When Deleuze speaks of philosophy he usually means the canon of Western philosophy and academic philosophy. He writes from a continental tradition (with a knowledge of the analytical as this is also within western philosophy), but also he writes for a future beyond philosophy – a future philosophy – a picture-less philosophy. Deleuze once said ”I wish to leave philosophy, but as a philosopher”...
Gilles Deleuze: CON-VERSATION What is it and what is it good for?
from Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet ”Un entretien, qu'est-ce que c'est, á quoi ca sert?” Dialogues © Flammarion, Paris 1977
It is very difficult to ”explain oneself” -- in an interview, a conversation, a discussion. When someone asks me a question I usually notice that I quite frankly don't have anything to say. Just as with anything else you think of questions. If you haven't been allowed to make up questions with components that come from everywhere and anywhere, if others ”ask” them for you, then you don't have much to say. The art of formulating a problem is very important: you think forth a problem and a problematic before you find a solution. Nothing such arises in an interview, a conversation or a discussion. Not even thinking, whether it is on its own or together with someone or several others, is sufficient. Above all else not thinking. It is even worse with objections. Every time someone has an objection to make I get an urge to say: ”OK, OK, let us go on to something else”. Objections never provide anything. It's the same when someone asks me a general question. The goal is not to answer questions, but to come away from them, to get oneself out of them. Many believe that just by constantly repeating the same question that they can get themself out of it. ”How're things with philosophy? Is it dead? Should we get beyond it?” It is very troublesome. You return to the question to get yourself away from it. But it never happens that you get out of something. The movement arises always behind the back of the thinker, or in the moment they blink. Either you've already gotten away from it, or you never will. The questions are, in general, striving towards a future (or a past). The future of women, the future of revolution, the future of philosophy, and so on. But while you aren't getting anywhere with these questions there are different becomings conspiring in quietude and which are nearly impossible to perceive. We think to much in historical terms, whether they are the personal or the universal. These things-coming-into-being are geography with its concentrations and directions, entries and exists. There is a woman-becoming that may not be confused with women, their past and future and women must go into this becoming to take themselves out of their past, their future and their history. There is a revolutionist-becoming which is not the same thing as the future of revolution and which must not necessarily proceed militarily. There is a philosophy-becoming which has nothing to do with the history of philosophy, and which sooner proceeds through those that the history of philosophy has not succeeded in classifying.
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The history of philosophy has always been a messenger for the power within philosophy and even within thinking. It has playing an oppressive roll: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so and so's book about them? A powerful school founded on threats which creates specialists in thinking, but which even makes those that stand outside conform themselves after this specialization that they disregard. A picture of thinking, which is called philosophy, has historically seen, been founded, which completely prevents people from thinking. The relationship between philosophy and the state has not been created just because most philosophers until recently were ”public teachers” (but this fact has had a very different meaning in France and Germany). It is a relationship with and old lineage. For thinking borrows its suitable philosophical picture of the state as a beautiful, substantial or subjective interiority. It creates a spiritual state in a true sense, like an absolute state, which in no way is a dream because it works excellently in the world of perception. Whereof the weight av concepts such as universality, method, questions and answers, judgment, confession or recognition, right ideas, to always have right ideas. Hence the weight of the themes such as the republic of spirits, the investigation of reasoning, the court of reason, ”the right of pure reason”, with domestic ministers and the justices of pure reason. Philosophy is permeated by a project which implies that it shall become the official language in a pure state. The act of thinking adjusts itself in this way to the real state's goal, the dominating opinions as well as the demands from the establish order. Nietzsche has said everything in this question in ”Schopenhauer as Educator”. That which is crushed and pointed out as something bothersome is all that which belongs to a thought without picture, nomad-life, the war machine, becoming, alliance contra nature, capture and flight, in-between powers, less important language or variations in the language and so forth. Disciplines other than philosophy and the history of philosophy can naturally get this function to be oppressive for thinking. Today one can even say that the history of philosophy has gone bankrupt and that ”the state no longer needs the sanctions of philosophy”. But hard competition has already taken over. Epistemology has continued in the same spirit as the history of philosophy. Marxism threatens with a judgment over history or sooner with a judgment by the people which is even more disturbed than the other. Psychoanalysis aims more and more to the function of ”thinking”, and allies itself without cause to linguistics. These are the new tools for power within thinking itself and Marx, Freud and Saussure form a peculiar Oppressor with three heads, one veritable dominating language. To interpret, change and formulate are the new forms for ”right”# ideas. Even Chomsky's syntactic plot is a plot of power. Linguistics was successful while information developed as a factor of power and forces on us an image of language and thought as a correspondence with the transmission of command words and organizing of redundancies. It is of no greater meaning to ask oneself if philosophy is dead when many other disciplines are taking over its function. We do not reclaim any right to insanity, when insanity in the degree it suits through psychoanalysis and linguistics together, so the degree has been permeated by right ideas, by the strong culture or a history without becomings, so that the degree has its clowns, teacher and small bosses.
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Astronomists count on the possibility that all sorts blackholes in a spherical array are collecte din the center in the form of a unique hole of a quite large mass... White wall – black hole, for me this is a typical example of the way in which work is sustained between us, neither coming-together or juxtaposition without a broken line which runs between both, spreading, tentacles.
This is the pick-up method. No, ”method” is not a good word. But pick-up as a process is a word [...] Pick-up is a stammering. It has a value in contrast to Burroughs cut-up: nothing that is clipped away, filed and overlapped without multiplications in accordance with increased dimensions. Pick-up or the double theft, the a-parallel development, arises not between persons but between ideas where every idea is deterritorialized in the other according to a line or a few lines which neither exist in the one or the other and which bring with themselves a ”block”. [....] It is now or never that is is current to use this method: you and i can use it without another block and from another direction, with your ideas we can produce something which does not belong to either of us, something which exists between 2, 3, 4... n. It is no longer ”x explains x, signed x”, ”Deleuze explains Deleuze, signed interviewer”, but ”Deleuze explains Guattari, signed by you”, ”x explains y signed z”. The conversation should in such a way obtain a real function. In nearness to...One must multiple the sides, break apart every circle for the sake of the polygon.
Edited by Lakefingers (05/18/06 02:53 AM)
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