The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

Matthew Hyland reviews Greg Lambert's book - the latest release from the academic Deleuze factory - and finds some unexpectedly lucid passages amidst the excess baggage

Excuse, if you can, a personal reminiscence. When I started reading Deleuze as a graduate student in the early 1990s, I was attempting vainly to become as anomalous, as irrelevant, as nonsignifying as possible in relation to an academic world still starryeyed about poststructuralist doxa, from Freud and Saussure to Derrida, Kristeva and Lacan, as drip fed through US literary theory. For a while talking about Deleuze proved that you lived not on the edge but in the margin for error; like insisting on writing everything longhand, it showed you up as born in the wrong time. Then I met a Carlos Castenada fan who was writing a PhD on ‘A Thousand Plateaus and Grunge Rock Culture.’ Over the next few years, during which the philosopher jumped out of a window, his vocabulary was absorbed in countless grotesque ways into every kind of technofuturist effusion. The first serious thinker of the virtual since Henri Bergson probably had little chance of escaping this fate in his last decade. His ever-growing fan base seems to have accepted eagerly the invitation in A Thousand Plateaus to read non-sequentially, skipping over whatever you couldn’t understand. For many this seems to include the entire pre-Guattari oeuvre, or the actual concepts attached to mantras like ‘body without organs’ or ‘desiring machines.’ Meanwhile many more skeptical thinkers disdain his work, assuming, given the remarkable consensus between its critics and defenders, that it’s correctly glossed by both sides as an antihistorical celebration of ‘deterritorialized’ flows and violent ruptures which are ultimately capital’s own.

In this context, US-based Assistant English Lit Professor Gregg Lambert gets his book off to an unpromising start. ‘Nonphilosophy’ actually refers to Deleuze’s fairly uncontroversial emphasis (curiously vaunted here as a unique insight) on the interdependence of philosophy and neighbouring practices. Unfortunately, though, the term’s appearance in the title of a book many will see but few will read is likely to perpetuate the nonsense that, like certain contemporaries, he was trying somehow to ‘transgress’ against the discipline. More seriously, Lambert ascribes to Deleuze a melancholy postmodern humility not far removed from ‘weak thought.’

Reduced to a sort of transcendental shame by the shadows of ‘Auschwitz and Hiroshima’, Deleuze’s ‘horizontal’ philosophy has allegedly abandoned the right claimed by Kant to judge other faculties. Then a (moderately) strange thing happens. Without any warning, Lambert absconds from his role as historical explainer and plunges into the depths of what may be Deleuze’s most hermetic, least ‘non-philosophical’ work: the dizzyingly universal (i.e. immodestly ambitious) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Written in

the 1980s, long after the other monographs (or acts of conceptual sodomy, as Deleuze notoriously described them) Le pli re-enacts the construction of Leibniz’s allegorical order, referred to as ‘the most insane concept creation ... ever witnessed in philosophy.’ In a way the repetition is double, as Deleuze also uses Leibniz’s figures to project into an allegorical firmament those of his own defining concepts (sense-event/state of affairs, immanence/singularity) latterly drowned out in his followers’ confused ‘cry for multiplicity’ or as the minimum prerequisite for flight from the colourfully padded cell of contemporary common sense, but until now never as the pragmatism of resignation.

In these passages Lambert address with rare lucidity the ‘implication’ of thinking ‘life’ within matter. Each part of the argument, each logical or imaginary variation, extends and complicates the diagram. ‘Life’ and ‘matter’ are qualitatively different and inseparable; never opposed, but mutually implicated along a continuous ‘fold’, whose course (unlike anything in the tedious world of fractals and ‘complexity’) cannot be derived from any fixed co-ordinates. This infinitely divisible continuity is ultimately indivisible, in that no discreet point can be isolated within it.

Scientific objectivity, which must break time down into an endless series of tiny, internally synchronous episodes, founders here, as flourishing variables defile the heart of the closed experimental field. No uncertainty principle can staunch the contaminating flow: the embarrassed ‘observer’ might try preemptively to measure her (purportedly one-sided) ‘influence’, but subject and object’s reciprocal becoming, too fast and too slow for the senses, ridicules any such attempt. Hence the need for philosophical and allegorical invention, whose form violently ruptures analogy between sense-data and meaning, exposing thought to what it cannot represent directly to itself, i.e. the extensionless, ‘infinitive’ yet strictly material reality of temporal difference. (A reality named ‘tendency’ by Bergson, who recognised the method’s violence against reflection as a ‘contortion’ of the Kantian sublime.)

Approaching the same problems with another set of diagrams, Lambert also gracefully evokes Leibniz’s ‘monad’, used by Deleuze as allegorical cipher for the (Bergsonian) concept of duration as infinitely contracted matter. The monad stands for ‘an infinitely contracted point in an infinitely divided plain’. Each of these moments in the continuum of variation ‘encrypts’ or ‘includes’ an infinitesimally different world, yet no such point exists as a distinct ‘thing’ with extension of its own.

This manifold affront to techno-scientific authority is clearly also urgently political, given its proximity to life-and-death struggles over new enclosures of language, bodies and time. Yet Lambert barely glances at scientific, social or political horizons, except, infuriatingly, to link Deleuze with a sort of contemplative conservatism, claiming that his philosophy ‘helps us believe in the world as it is.’

Despite his total failure to address its worldly implications, Lambert shows a rare comprehension of Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism,’ continuously revealing that his thought’s extravagant anti-naturalism necessarily entails his ruthless materialism, where most commentators either dwell on one of the two, implying that the other is not quite what it seems, or marvel at the sustained ‘contradiction’ as at some virtuoso magic trick. Just as unusual, incidentally, is Lambert’s recognition that Antonin Artaud was not a reporter on ‘extreme’ phenomena, and certainly not, as Derrida believes, a ‘limit-case’ proving through heroic failure that Differance can never be destroyed. In fact the writhing Momo’s account of endless violation by and violence against swarming ‘beings’ that ‘think for’ him charts horribly but straightforwardly the structure of bio-linguistic administration, or ideology if you insist, that was ascendant at the time and has since become ubiquitous.

The awkwardness of these insights sits alongside the earlier banalities about Deleuze’s historical position and the later swathes of philosophically inflected literary criticism, suggesting a compromise either with the demands of the North American academy (write two books FAST for any hope of tenure) or with publishers’ neurotic pragmatism. Lambert begins with an outburst of scorn for ‘commentary’, and he hardly mentions Bergson or Spinoza, two figures without whom it’s impossible to get a sense of Deleuze’s wider project. It’s easy to imagine that he might have preferred to write an uncommercially short book allegorising thought/flesh, vision/sound and allegory itself through the conjunction of Deleuze and Leibniz. Can these names still bear anachronistic witness to a ‘possible world’ not ruled by measure of achievement, in which misshapen, stunted intellectual products escape being grafted onto a bulk of paper signifying nothing but your money’s worth?

The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze // Gregg Lambert // Continuum, 2002 // ISBN 0826459560 // pb £16.99

Matthew Hyland <asperger AT caramail.com> is co-founder of Wolverine, the journal of Childish Psychology, a regular contributor to Datacide and plays guitar and Farfisa organ in Mean Streaks. See also Hyland’s web exclusives on Metamute.com