[Reader-list] On Deleuze

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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
concerning a difference that is not reducible to
dialectical opposition, a difference "more profound"
than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a
difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation ("yes,
yes"), the taking into account of the simulacrum,     
Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many
similarities, the one to whom I have always considered
myself     closest among all of this "generation." I
never felt the slightest "objection" arise in me, not
even a virtual one,against any of his discourse, even
if I did on occasion happen to grumble against this or
that proposition in Anti-Oedipus(I told him about it
one day when we were coming back together by car from
Nanterre University,after a thesis defense on Spinoza)
or perhaps against the idea that philosophy consists
in "creating" concepts. One day, I would like to
explain how such an agreement on philosophical
"content" never excludes all these differences that
still today I don't know how to name or situate.
(Deleuze had accepted the idea of publishing, one day,
a long improvised conversation between us on this
subject and then we had to wait, to wait too long.) I
only know that these differences left room for nothing
but friendship between us. To my knowledge, no shadow,
no sign has ever indicated the contrary. Such a thing
is so rare in the milieu that was ours that I wish to
make note of it here at this moment. This friendship
did not stem solely from the (otherwise telling) fact
that we have the same enemies. We saw each other
little, it is true, especially in the last years. But
I can still hear the laugh of his voice, a little
hoarse, tell me so many things that I love to remember
down to the letter: "My best wishes, all my best
wishes," he whispered to me with a friendly irony the
summer of 1955 in the courtyard of the Sorbonne when I
w
 exam. Or
else, with the same solicitude of the elder: "It pains
me to see you
spending so much time on that institution (le College
International de Philosophie). I would rather you
wrote..." And then, I recall the memorable ten days of
the Nietzsche colloquium at Cerisy, in 1972, and then
so many,many other moments that make me, no doubt
along with Jean-Francois Lyotard (who was also there),
feel quite alone, surviving and melancholy today in
what is called with that terrible and somewhat false
word, a "generation." Each death is unique, of course,
and therefore unusual, but what can one say about the
unusual when,from Barthes to Althusser, from Foucault
to Deleuze, it multiplies in this way in the same
"generation," as in a series -and Deleuze was also the
philosopher of serial singuarity - all these uncommon
endings? Yes, we will all have loved philosophy. Who
can deny it? But, it's true, (he said it), Deleuze
was, of all those in his "generation," the one who
did/made" (faisait) it the most gaily, the most
innocently. He would not have liked, I  think, the
word "thinker" that I used above. He would have
preferred "philosopher." In this respect, he claimed
to be "the most innocent (the most devoid of guilt) of
making/doing philosophy" (Negotiations). This was no
doubt the condition for his having left a profound
mark on the philosophy of this century, the mark that
will remain his own, incomparable. The mark of a great
philosopher and a great professor. The historian of
philosophy who proceeded with a sort of
configurational election of his own genealogy (the
Stoics, Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume,Kant, Nietzsche,
Bergson, etc.) was also an inventor of philosophy who
never shut himself up in some philosophical "realm"
(he wrote on painting, the cinema, and literature,
Bacon, Lewis Carroll, Proust, Kafka,Melville, etc.).
And then, and then I want to say precisely here that I
loved and admired his way -- always faultless -- of
negotiating with the image, the newspapers,
televis
mations
that it has undergone over the course of the past ten
years. Economy and vigilant retreat. I felt solidarity
with what he was doing and saying in this respect, for
example in an interview in Liberationat the time of
the publication of A Thousand Plateaus(in the vein of
his 1977 pamphlet). He said: "One should know what is
currently happening in the realm of books. For several
years now, we've been living in a period of reaction
in every domain. There is no reason to think that
books are to be spared from this reaction. People are
in the process of fabricating for us a literary space,
as well as judicial, economic, and political spaces,
which are completely reactionary, prefabricated,and
overwhelming/crushing. There is here, I believe, a
systematic enterprise that Liberation should have
analyzed." This is "much worse than a censorship," he
added, but this dry spell will not necessarily last."
Perhaps, perhaps.Like Nietzsche and Artaud, like
Blanchot and other shared admirations, Deleuze never
lost sight of this alliance between necessity and the
aleatory, between chaos and the untimely. When I was
writing on Marx at the worst moment, three years ago,
I took heart when I learned that he was planning to do
so as well. And I reread tonight what he said in 1990
on this subject: "...Felix Guattari and I have always
remained Marxists, in two different manners perhaps,
but both of us. It's that we don't believe in a
political philosophy that would not be centered around
the analysis of capitalism and its developments. What
interests us the most is the analysis of capitalism as
an immanent system that constantly pushes back its
proper limits, and that always finds them again on a
larger scale, because the limit is Capital itself." I
will continue to begin again to read Gilles Deleuze in
order to learn, and I'll have to wander all alone in
this long conversation that we were supposed to have
together. My first question, I think, would have
concerned Artaud,his interpretation of
manence" on which he
always insisted, in order to make him or let him say
something that no doubt still remains secret to us.
And I would have tried to tell him why his thought has
never left me, for nearly forty years. How could it do
so from now on?

    Translated by David Kammerman