The question has been raised of what Deleuze would do if he were a blogger today, and the answer depends on the phantasms and the “battle tactics” of the respondent. But one could ask the seemingly whimsical, but in fact more concrete, question: Was Deleuze a blogger? I say more concrete because in fact it allows us to examine Deleuze’s relation to his audience, objections, questions, and to the temporality of the exposition of his ideas. Deleuze’s courses can be seen as “oral blogs”, at the cadence of once a week, with room at the end for comments, or what he called “interventions”.
Deleuze repeatedly stated that philosophy should be addressed to both philosophers and non-philosophers. This entails more than just the anecdotal fact that he was happy when he had a diverse public. Deleuze emphasised that concepts have an affective and a perceptual dimension that do not just permit but actually require a non-philosophical understanding. I attended his classes for 5 years and never once did I see him show irritation at even the most naïve and ill-informed question or at the most actively aggressive. He would listen and then launch into a new post that would reply to the question directly or indirectly or both. Or he would say that this was a question that the intervener must pose to himself. Deleuze never replied by saying that he had already treated that question in one of his books. And when during the year he published a new book he made no reference to it in class. I think that this was consonant with his desire to have non-students attend his course on an equal basis with students, as he did not presume that everyone had the time or the money to invest in research outside the class. Deleuze declared that he did not like being “interrupted”, and that he much preferred questions posed the following week. I assume that he held in horror a question that amounted to a request to think in someone else’s place and to relieve them of the burden of thinking for themelves. A question that incited him to re-think what he had already said was much to be preferred. (Of course a simple request for information or the clarification of a term was no interruption at all). The aim was to pursue his own individuation while favorising the individuation of the members of the audience. Blogging at its best does this too.
interesting piece of observation.