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May 20, 2006
I have just bought Keith Ansell Pearson's Germinal Life: The difference and repetition of Deleuze--which I mentioned here. As I bought the book yesterday I've just begun to read it. Someone else has already done so.
The concern is with a "bio-philosophy" or philosophy of life which is not dealt with in any systematic fashion in Deleuze's texts. Ansell Pearson says:
The aim of this book is to illuminate the character of Deleuze's philosophy by situating it in the context of a neglected modern tradition, that of modern biophilosophy...Deleuze is difficult to place in the philosophical discourse of modernity largely, I suspect, because fo the peculiar character of his philosophical thought with its investments in biology and ethology....I believe that the character fo Deleuzes "Bergsonism' has been little understood, and yet I want to show that it plays the crucial role in the unfolding of his philosophy of 'germinal life'.
Bergson, on this interpretation, is extremely important for the way Deleuze rethinks the problems of philosophical modernity, his conception of philosophy as an autonomous practice, and for thinking beyond the human condition.
Ansell Pearson then says:
The critical question to ask, and which I simply pose here, is this: does thinking beyond the human condition serve to expand the horizons by which we think that condition and deepen its possible experience, or is the 'change of concept', in regard to the overhuman, so dramatic that it requires the dissolution of the human form and the end of the 'human condition? Such a question takes us, I believe, to the heart of Deleuze's project and brings us into a confrontation with its peculiar challenge, as well as its most innovative and demanding aspects.
I must confess to having very little idea of what is going here in relation to 'thinking beyond the human condition.' I have no idea what that phrase means. My best guess is that it links back to Nietzsche, the 'overman', and the revaluation of values.
I don't even know what 'germinal life 'means. Something to do with modern neo-Darriwnism, molecular biology and a mechanistic account of evolution that places all the emphasis on natural selection as the mechanism that guarantees the reproducion of life from one generation to the next? Does this connect with the 'selfish gene' of Richard Dawkins and a metaphysics that holds there no design, no purpose, no evil, no good-- only blind pitiless indifference. DNA just is. And we dance to its music
I'm on a step learning curve.
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