davidwpritchard:

davidwpritchard:

I find Hallward’s arguments compelling, but his conclusion is unsatisfying and, I think, does a disservice to Deleuze’s thought. I understand there are strong political dimensions to Deleuzian thought, but I have read him always first and foremost as an epistemologist,…

My dear pidgin,

I hope you don’t mind if I continue the conversation here. I think I may have been a bit reductive in my own initial post, so I will try to respond to your points here while doubling back as needed to clarify my own points.

First: all philosophy is political. Everything is political. I would never deny this. But I think that the most useful is not always the explicitly political. Take, for example, the case Charles Bernstein makes against Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg is something of an icon for social activism and political protest in 20th century poetry, and his work contributes several very important and radical innovations to poetics. However, as Bernstein points out, Ginsberg himself works within a certain system when he gauges or measures his work in relation to what is considered offensive by the prevailing societal structures. Thus, Ginsberg engages in social critique by doing the opposite of what is normal. This was effective, especially when Howl was first written, but now (and at the time when Bernstein gave the interview I’m referring to, so in the mid 80’s, I believe) the radical gesture has become nothing more than perfunctory and obsolete, a proclamation of “obscenities” that relies on a societal definition of “obscene” in order to justify its utterance. 

Sorry for the digression, but the anecdote is pertinent, and brings me to what is so useful about Deleuze and Derrida. Derrida and Deleuze are models of the kind of thought that not only provides a necessary critique of certain prevailing epistemological assumptions, but that does so by realizing the argumentation itself must be altered, and that to just say “No” over and over again is to inscribe yourself into the very system you wish to criticize. Derrida, I will admit, is more formally innovative and thus perhaps more politically relevant than Deleuze (for me), but I think the claims about solipsism are misguided, even if the latent authoritarianism has a ring of truth to it. And here I also think Derrida stands out as a more thorough and incisive philosopher than Deleuze simply because he does not make overt claims to anti-essentialism. Like Nagarjuna’s Buddhist philosophy, Derrida situates himself between essentialism and anti-essentialism, realizing you can’t absolutely have either one, and that the truth of the matter is the fragile, thin, delicate path between the two. As for Deleuze’s latent authoritarianism, I think again we have to turn from the political content of the work—the Ginsberg stuff—to the form in which it is written, as well as to the epistemological implications.

An important component of Deleuze’s thought is affirmation. Most notable here is the idea of desiring-production, which is opposed to the Lacanian/psychoanalytic notion of desire as a fundamental lack which we are always trying to cover up. This has at its roots a kind of Heideggerian echo: the truth—the lack, Being, whatever—is what is concealed. For Deleuze, “everything returns to the surface,” and we proceed not because of lack, saying NO to what is not there (and ultimately to what is there, for to realize that we are covering over a lack, we have to disavow that which we have used to cover it over), but by saying YES, treating desire as productive and creative. It does sound new-agey, I admit, but I do think that this realization and affirmation, this formal departure from Romantic/Platonic Ideas, situates thought and knowledge at the surface in the material world. 

Ack, I have to run! I have only responded to half of your point, but if you are willing to wait I will gladly return and finish my point (and maybe even fine-tune some aspects of it) this evening.