[Reader-list] On Deleuze

[abir bazaz]

PIERRE GUYOTAT on Deleuze-Guattari list...


Too much to say, and I don't have the heart for it
today. There is too much to say about what has
happened to us here, about what has also happened to
me, with the death of Gilles Deleuze, with a death we
no doubt feared(knowing him to be so ill), but still,
with this death here (cette mort-ci), this
unimaginable image, in the event,would deepen still
further, if that were possible, the infinite sorrow of
another event. Deleuze the thinker is, above all, the
thinker of the event and always of this event here
(cet evenement-ci). He remained the thinker of the
event from beginning to end. I reread what he said of
the event, already in 1969, in one of his most
celebrated books,The Logic of Sense. He cites Joe
Bousquet ("To my inclination for death," said
Bousquet, "which was a failure of the will"), then
continues: "From this inclination to this longing
there is, in a certain respect, no change except a
change of the will, a sort of leaping in place (saut
sur place) of the whole body which exchanges its
organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not
exactly what occurs, but something inthat which
occurs, something yet to come which would be
consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the
laws of an obscure, humorous conformity: the Event. It
is in this sense that the Amor fati is one with the
struggle of free men" (One would have to quote
interminably).
There is too much to say, yes, about the time I was
given, along with so many others of my "generation,"
to share with Deleuze; about the good fortune I had of
thinking thanks to him, by thinking of him. Since the
beginning, all of his books (but first of all
Nietzsche, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of
Sense) have been for me not only, of course, vocations
to think, but, each time, the unsettling, very
unsettling experience - so unsettling - of a
proximity or a near total affinity in the "theses" -
if one may say this - through too evident distances in
what I woul
ing better,
"gesture," "strategy," "manner": of writing, of
speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the "theses"
(but the word doesn't fit) and particularly the thesis
concer