Untimely Deleuze (1): Against Coarse Chronologies

Ben Woodard at Naught Thought posted a short meditation on our possibly post-deleuzian epoch. It reads a little like an internal memo to the SR and OOO gentes, but has just enough wondering out loud openness for me to feel included in the convokative affect.

Woodard’s title begins “Post-Deleuze?”, and I am grateful that he includes the question mark, although I am suspicious as to its sense. Woodard seems to be situating Deleuze in a diachrony where citing Deleuze 20 years ago had a certain weight that it can no longer have today. Something not so good called “new materialism” tries to live up to the need to let go of the language of the subject but still retains a closeness to “pseudo-phenomenological narratives” invoking the affects of enchantment and fascination.

But a return to the cyborg, only this time a “self-critical, negativity embracing, cyborg” seems to be the better solution as it embodies a dispositional thought no different in kind from other powers and processes.

This solution closely resembles Deleuze’s own in NEGOTIATIONS, where he says about writing, but it is also applicable to to thinking, “Writing is a flux among other fluxes, and which has no privilege  in relaton to the others” (my translation). “Cyborg” belongs to the same register as “desiring-machine”, a fuzzy overcoming of a dualism between life and machine that corresponds to the time (the conceptual time, not necessarily the chronologically situated time) of ANTI-OEDIPUS. Deleuze claimed that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with dualism as long as it is a preliminary step towards pluralism. Contrary to a popular misconception, negativity is omnipresent in Deleuze, being concentrated especially in the prefix “de-” (decoding, desubjectivating, destratifying, deterritorialising, etc. ), even to the point of saying that “deterritorialisation comes first”.

Zourabichvili himself says two paragraphs before the sentence Woodard quotes from him (or rather, misquotes. He does not say “there is no ontology of Deleuze”, but rather “There is no “ontology of Deleuze”", which I think in context is very different, and he then proceeds to remove all the fuzziness Woodard finds so objectionable):

“If our approach was resolutely ahistorical, it’s because we wanted to bring forth the systematics of Deleuze while avoiding the overly coarse chronological traps (in many respects, for example, the turn of ANTI-OEDIPUS is a trompe l’oeil, since the true renewal of concepts – becoming-animal, refrain, war-machine, etc. , takes place only later).” LA PHILOSOPHIE DE DELEUZE, p6 (my translation).

So my provisional conclusion is that Deleuze was already “post-Deleuze”, and I would be wary of neat little chronological schemas that may themselves “weaken the name of Deleuze”.

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