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October 24, 2004
Now that I have some time to myself I've started reading Gilles Deleuze's doctoral thesis, 'Difference and Repetition', published in 1968. I had flipped through this complex big book written in the traditional academic style when I was working the long hours in Canberra, but I had neither the time or space to sit down and read it.
What I was able to read was part of the smaller Dialogues where the emphasis is not on correctness of ideas, but on new and different ideas. This text highlights how my training in philosophy was a plunging into the history of philosophy (analytic, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno etc) with its dangers of scholasticism. There were few gusts of fresh air to take us outside the academic confines of the history of philosophy. Nietzsche was the gale of fresh air blowing through the musty corridors.
Deleuze makes a good point in Dialogues when he says:
"The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the repressor's role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so's book about them. A formidable school of intimidation which manufacturers specialists in thought--but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking."
More on this by Dylan over at Poetics of Decay.
I haven't read Deleuze's book on Nietzsche, even though it is deemed to be a key French study on Nietzsche, which would help me to make sense of Klossowski's text on Nietzsche. From what I have read, Deleuze's text is about Nietzsche's metaphysics expressed in his 'The Will to Power'; an expression that constructs reality as a plurality of forces, with the play and interaction of forces forming the basis of existence.
Dipping in and out of it on the plane to and from Canberra I had noticed that 'Difference and Repetition', was about metaphysics. It marked the (poststructuralist) turn away from Hegel and Marx towards Nietzsche and Freud in French culture, was a rejection of the metaphysics of representation (model-copy scheme), the transcendent and the universal. It also develops a philosophy of difference that creates a new ontology of change (the the flux of existence) that is freed from a subordination to a logic of identity.
I presume that Hegel stands for a logic of identity that subordinates difference. Does it continue the old reading of Hegel as being all about the (movement of the concept) and not a changing material reality? This is the standard reading of the empiricists, who make their simple appeal to lived experience in the sense that all knowledge that we possess is derived from the senses and the senses alone.
Hegel appears to be the arch-enemy in Difference and Repetition:--the "French Hegel" is the repressive voice of reason whose dialectic represents the most extreme development of the logic of the identical.
Deleuze, however, is an empiricist with a difference. In the Preface to 'Difference and Repetition' he writes:
"Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts nor a simple appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever." (p.xx)
As we have seen this idea of philosophy as an empiricist creation of concepts, or constructivism, is explored in 'What is Philosophy?'
What I found refreshing with Deleuze is that he does not divorce philosophy and its history from the fortunes of the wider world of civil society; Deleuze, following Nietzsche, intimately linked philosophy to civil society and the state, and to the forces at work there.
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