Deleuz's narrative series

In The Logic of Sense (section 33) Gilles Deleuze defines novelists/artists as "clinicians of civilisation". Great authors are more like doctors than their patients - in that, like great clinicians, they create a set of disorders out of disorder, a table or grouping of symptoms out of disparate symptoms, so that "it is not the [Freudian Oedipus] complex which provides us with information about Oedipus and Hamlet, but rather Oedipus and Hamlet who provide us with information about the complex". For Deleuze, this creation of disorders takes on a particular character. In truth, for him, these structurings are not created from "disorder", since that would be to define the "choasmos" of differences - "disorder" in common parlance - by means of the notion of order; that is, it would be to define differences in terms of sameness - something he had spent the whole of his preceding book, Difference and Repetition, battling against. Thus the creation of disorders can only occur within a field where originary difference has been proclaimed and acknowledged, and where every notion of the same or the one is derived from, or "said of" (as he puts it) that which always and from the start differs. The exemplary novelist - Deleuze cites Joyce's Ulysses, Proust and Robbe-Grillet - disposes within this original difference two heterogeneous series of signifier and signified (section 6). These two series resonate through a single homogenous series of names where each term can be seen to relate to the preceding one and the next one, thus: n1 - n2 - n3 - n4... The first name, or signifier, relates to the second name/signifier, relates to the third etc in the familiar continuous chain of signifiers. But it is the novelist's task to consider this homogenous chain instead from the point of view of "that which alternates in this succession" - ie the alternation of signified and signifier through the terms - and to allow these to resonate. In the case of Joyce, for instance, there is a series surrounding "Bloom" which is given as the signifying set; and a corresponding signified series "Ulysses"; between which the author establishes a resonance and relation by various means. In the case of Robbe-Grillet, the two series operate on the smaller scale of descriptions of tiny "states of affairs" against "rigorous designations". In all cases, it is for Deleuze the differences between the series and their terms which "become [through the auspices of the author] primary", not the resemblances. This paper will attempt a preliminary transposition of these Deleuzian strategies onto a creative spatial field. Can a place be disposed according to this strategy of primary difference, homogenous chain of signifiers and the creative diagnosis of two resonating, heterogeneous series? In this case, what would constitute the two aspects of sense? How does this relate to the stoic disjunctive logic of the state of affairs of bodies and the entirely other order of "events", which hover over states of affair as "the battle hovers over its own field" (section 15)? It will be shown that the creation of a place must, like literature, stay true to Deleuze's words in Difference and Repetition: ... [it] opens on to the difference of Being by taking its own difference as object - in other works, by posing the question of its own difference (p195

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze as interpreters of Henri Bergson

In this essay I concentrate on the relation between Deleuze's philosophy and Merleau-Ponty's. I examine the question of whether their philosophical projects are as widely divergent as Deleuze wants the reader to believe. Since explicit references to Merleau-Ponty in the work of Deleuze are rather rare, I take the detour of examining their interpretations of Henri Bergson, a philosopher they both recognized as an important source of inspiration. More specifically, I study the references to Bergson in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze that deal with difference and immanence. I show that Merleau-Ponty merely reads Bergson as a difference thinker, whereas Deleuze stresses Bergson's immanentism. However, these two positions do not exclude one another. First of all, there are many similarities with respect to which Bergsonian concepts both authors focus on and how they interpret them. Secondly, as Deleuze's own philosophy illustrates, a philosophy of difference is not incompatible with immanentism. However, there is one passage in Cinema I. The Movement-Image in which Deleuze states that there is a fundamental difference between the battle against dualism as it is fought by Bergson on the one hand, and phenomenology on the other. Since Deleuze's search for an immanent philosophy relies heavily on concepts introduced by Bergson, this passage can help to indicate to what degree the aforementioned similarities between Deleuze's and Merleau-Ponty's immanentism hold

The movement-image, the time-image and the paradoxes of literary and other modernisms

Which modernism or modernisms circulate in Deleuze’s two-volume work on cinema? Can one meaningfully claim that both or either The Movement-Image (Cinema I) and The Time-Image (Cinema II) maintain connections with literary modernism? What relationship if any may be forged between theoretical debates in the areas of literary and film studies as these have been influenced by engagement with Deleuze’s work on cinema? The first obstacle to any successful negotiation of these questions lies in the absence in the books of any reference to the category of modernism – a fact which is after all hardly surprising in a French author of Deleuze’s generation. A second consideration is summed up well by Joost Raessens when he argues that “For Deleuze the term ‘modernity’ is not a neutral category. In effect modern cinema is a representation of differential thought which is determined [...] as a fundamental critique of the classic thought of Plato and Hegel.” Scholars often assert that Deleuze’s modernity owes much to Nietzsche, in the shape of the latter’s demand for a new approach to questions of truth and knowledge. Once life is no longer judged in the name of a higher authority such as the good or the true, the stage is set for Nietzschean transvaluation. This is a process which subjects “every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve” (TI 141) to evaluation. This normative model of a cinema which has the capacity to carry out a Nietzschean total critique by means other than philosophy presides over The Time-Image in particular. In terms of the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought, total critique is opposed, in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, to Kantian critique as well as to Hegelian sublation. The thinking images of modern cinema, more specifically of its preeminent auteurs in Deleuze’s pantheon such as Welles, Resnais, Godard, and others, can effectuate this new image of thought. Thus is rendered tangible Deleuze’s claim that films think, that cinema thinks. Thus are linked a modernism of cinema and a project which dates back to Difference and Repetition, namely the challenge to a certain image of thought. In this challenge the allies include the two philosophers who dominate the film books – Bergson and Nietzsche. This chapter assumes the position that it is impossible to consider Deleuze’s modernism as being in any way other than intrinsically linked to his overall philosophical system and therefore that it is only in this context that connections with literary modernism can be explored

‘A Part’ of the World: Deleuze and the Logic of Creation

Is there a particular danger in following Deleuze's philosophy to its end result? According to Peter Hallward, Deleuze's philosophy has some rather severe conclusions. Deleuze has been portrayed by him as a theological and spiritual thinker of life. Hallward seeks to challenge the accepted view of Deleuze, showing that these accepted norms in Deleuzian scholarship should be challenged and that, initially, Deleuze calls for the evacuation of political action in order to remain firm in the realm of pure contemplation. This article intends to investigate and defend Deleuze's philosophy against the critical and theological accounts portrayed by Hallward, arguing that Deleuze's philosophy is not only creative and vital but also highly revolutionary and ‘a part’ of the given world. It then goes on to examine Hallward's distortion of the actual/virtual distinction in Deleuze because Hallward is not able to come to grips with the concept of life in Deleuze's philosophy. We live in an intensive and dynamic world and the main points of Deleuze's philosophy concern the transformation of the world. Deleuze is not seeking to escape the world, but rather to deal with inventive and creative methods to transform society

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Bergson's theory of time seen through the work of Gilles Deleuze

In this article I examine the relation between the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze by looking at the way they refer to the time theory of Henri Bergson. It appears that, although Merleau-Ponty copies some fundamental Bergsonian insights on the nature of time, he presents himself as a critical reader of the latter. I will show that Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of Bergson differs fundamentally from the one by Deleuze, but that Merleau-Ponty's 'corrections' to Bergson fit Deleuze's reading of Bergson very well. This indicates a similarity with respect to what is at stake in the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. The critical reference that Deleuze makes to Merleau-Ponty's conception of cinema and thus of movement is hence not justified, but the result of a selective and prototypical reading of the early Merleau-Ponty

How do you make yourself a theatre without organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the concept of differential presence

This article provides an exposition of four key concepts emerging in the encounter between the philosophical man of the theatre, Antonin Artaud, and the theatrical philosopher, Gilles Deleuze: the body without organs, the theatre without organs, the destratified voice and differential presence. The article proposes that Artaud's 1947 censored radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. Drawing from various works by Deleuze, including Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus and ‘One Less Manifesto’, I conceive differential presence as an encounter with difference, or perpetual variation, as that which exceeds the representational consciousness of a subject, forcing thought through rupture rather than communicating meanings through sameness. Contra the dismissal of Artaud's project as paradoxical or impossible, the article suggests that his nonrepresentational theatre seeks to affirm a new kind of presence as difference, rather than aiming to transcend difference in order to reach the self-identical presence of Western metaphysics

Language, Subjectivity and Individuality

It is clear that within Deleuze and Whitehead’s work, there is an important re- description of the time, place and status of all subjectivity, a subjectivity which is not limited to the ‘human’. Both writers provide compelling reasons as to why, and how, contemporary analyses should avoid positing the human person as either an object or a subject. Rather, ‘human’ individuality is to be envisaged as an aspect within the wider, processual effectivity whereby the virtual becomes actual (Deleuze), or the solidarity of the extensive continuum becomes actualized into individuality (Whitehead). It may appear that I am eliding or confusing the distinction between subjectivity and individuality here. However, one of the arguments that I wish to set out in this chapter is that the validity and complexity of such a distinction can be helpfully re-thought through a sustained engagement with the work of Whitehead and Deleuze