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September 22, 2005
This is another quote from John Protevi's review of Eric Alliez, The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?:
Here of course we see the refreshing courage of Deleuze and Guattari -- and that of Alliez -- in ignoring all qualms about the "end of metaphysics." Hence not only is there a need to draw a distance between Deleuze and Guattari's ontology and that of Badiou -- as when Alliez correctly notes that contemporary philosophy finds itself staging "the idea of a maximal ontological tension between Deleuze and Badiou".. -- and the need to note the affinity of Deleuze and Guattari's endeavor with the great speculative metaphysics of Whitehead -- which will occupy Alliez throughout his third chapter -- but also an unacknowledged confrontation with the Derridean / Levinasian "post-phenomenologists."
I've never understood all the talk about the end of metaphysics at all, other than in the Heideggerian sense of exhaustion of scientific metaphysics (ontology) Another way that I can make sense of this is in terms of a positivist conception of science. On this account the critique of religion, the end of metaphysics, and the displacement of philosophy are rolled in together to give us empirical enquiry and science.
We also seem to have a postmodernism that interprets Nietzsche as radicalising the critique of metaphysics, Heidegger declaring Nietzsche the last metaphysician, and Derrida declaring that Heidegger's 'Being' as the metaphysics of presence … cannot be continued. Hence we reach a dead end----the end of metaphysics.
This suggests that the end of metaphysics’ is a development in continental philosophy that took place in the course of the nineteenth century and has as its focus the Nietzsche-Heidegger axis, which is then interpreted as the main motor behind the debate on metaphysics in contemporary philosophy.
In his review Protevi says that Deleuze and Guattari's start doing metaphysics as they are engaged in the attempt "to sketch a programme of physical ontology up to the task of superseding the opposition between 'physicalism' and 'phenomenology' :
'...the best philosophical work in Alliez's book is done in the third chapter, "Onto-Ethologics," which comments on the shortest part of What is Philosophy?, the conclusion, "From Chaos to the Brain." Here Whitehead steps to the fore, as the question is the "undoing the dependence of the point of view on a preformed subject" (53). To reinforce To reinforce the importance of this point Alliez cites Deleuze from his book on Leibniz, The Fold: "a subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what inhabits the point of view"'
What we get is the Whiteheadean "ontological auto-constitution of a new subject on the basis of its objects" connected to Varela's work on self-organization in neural assemblages and the development of the concept of "enaction," or the co-arising of subject and world.
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