Deleuze and History (Deleuze Connections)

248 Pages·2009·0.79 MB·English

by  Claire Colebrook

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questionofhistory.ThisbookaimstoopenupDeleuze’srelevancetothoseworkingin
history,thehistoryofideas,sciencestudies,evolutionarypsychology,historyof
philosophyandinterdisciplinaryprojectsinflectedbyhistoricalproblems.
Theessaysinthisvolume(manybyinternationallyrecognisedDeleuzescholars)
coverallaspectsofDeleuze’sphilosophyanditsrelationtohistory,rangingfromthe
applicationofDeleuze’sphilosophytohistoricalmethod,Deleuze’sownuseofthe
historyofphilosophy,hisinterpretationsofotherhistoricalthinkers(suchasHume
andNietzsche)andthecomplextheoriesoftimeandevolutioninhiswork.
Contributorsinclude:PaulPatton,DavidDeamer,CraigLundy,ManuelDeLanda,
JohnProtevi,IanBuchanan,TimFlanagan,JamesWilliams,EveBischoffand
JayLampert.
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Deleuze and History
Deleuze Connections
‘‘It is not the elements or the sets which define the multiplicity. What
defines it is the AND, as something which has its place between the
elements or between the sets. AND, AND, AND – stammering.’
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues
General Editor
Ian Buchanan
Editorial Advisory Board
Keith Ansell-Pearson
Rosi Braidotti
Claire Colebrook
Tom Conley
Gregg Lambert
Adrian Parr
Paul Patton
Patricia Pisters
Titles Available in the Series
Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory
Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds), Deleuze and Literature
Mark Bonta and John Protevi (eds), Deleuze and Geophilosophy
Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music
Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (eds), Deleuze and Space
Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen (eds), Deleuze and the Social
Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr (eds), Deleuze and the Contemporary
World
Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy
Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (eds), Deleuze and Politics
Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (eds), Deleuze and Queer Theory
Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and History
Laura Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance
Forthcoming Titles in the Series
Mark Poster and David Savat (eds), Deleuze and New Technology
Ian Buchanan and Laura Guillaume (eds), Deleuze and the Body
Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan (eds), Deleuze and
Contemporary Art
Paul Patton and Simone Bignall (eds), Deleuze and the Postcolonial
Chapter Title iii
Deleuze and History
Edited by Jeffrey A. Bell and
Claire Colebrook
Edinburgh University Press
©in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2009
©in the individual contributions is retained by the authors
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3608 2 (hardback)
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The right of the contributors
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has been asserted in accordance with
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v
Contents
Introduction 1
Claire Colebrook
1 Events, Becoming and History 33
Paul Patton
2 Of the Rise and Progress of Philosophical Concepts:
Deleuze’s Humean Historiography 54
Jeffrey A. Bell
3 Theory of Delay in Balibar, Freud and Deleuze: Décalage,
Nachträglichkeit,Retard 72
Jay Lampert
4 Geohistory and Hydro-Bio-Politics 92
John Protevi
5 The Thought of History in Benjamin and Deleuze 103
Tim Flanagan
6 The Cannibal Within: White Men and the Embodiment of
Evolutionary Time 121
Eve Bischoff
7 Ageing, Perpetual Perishing and the Event as Pure Novelty:
Péguy, Whitehead and Deleuze on Time and History 142
James Williams
vi Deleuze and History
8 Cinema, Chronos/Cronos: Becoming an Accomplice to the
Impasse of History 161
David Deamer
9 Deleuze’s Untimely: Uses and Abuses in the Appropriation
of Nietzsche 188
Craig Lundy
10 Is Anti-Oedipusa May ’68 book? 206
Ian Buchanan
11 Molar Entities and Molecular Populations in Human
History 225
Manuel DeLanda
Notes on Contributors 237
Index 239
1
Introduction
Claire Colebrook
Post-structuralism, Postmodernism and Historicism
Perhaps no writer of the twentieth century has done more to intensify the
experience of time as Gilles Deleuze. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri
Bergson, who had already insisted that the human intellect tends to spa-
tialise time in order to make its efficient and ready way in the world
(Bergson 1931), Deleuze went even further than Bergson in calling for a
thought of time in its pure state: an intuition of duration that would not
impose a uniform clock time on the diverse fluxions of this creative uni-
verse. As I will argue in the conclusion of this chapter, it was Deleuze’s
argument in favour of intensive quantities – against Bergson’s rejection
of this notion in Time and Free Will (1910) – that led the way for Deleuze
and Guattari to posit a human history beyond humanity: that is, Deleuze
and Guattari produce a ‘deep’ history that accounts for the emergence of
the human according to man’s capacity to reduce all intensities to calcu-
lable quantities; this reaches its zenith in capitalism, but can also be over-
come in capitalism through death. Death, for Deleuze and Guattari, will
be the human being’s capacity to experience the annihilation of all its
coded, historicised and all too human quantities. Man, for Deleuze and
Guattari, is produced in history – in narrated, managed, political and
epochal time – as an animal who organises matters according to
manageable quantities; time in its pure state is intuited, and becomes
revolutionary, when intensities are experienced as having their own dura-
tion. (We can think, today, of the way human history is confronted with
a multitude of other durations, from the slow geological time whose
production of fossil fuels is now bringing ‘man’s’ own history into crisis,
to the high speeds of imaging and nano-technologies that will create non-
human modes of production.) However, it is Deleuze’s very inflation of
the importance and distinction of time that seems to entail a critique and
2 Deleuze and History
possible annihilation of history: any narrative, mapping or sequence that
would place events in a causal order, and would try to understand rela-
tions among individuals, environments, social systems, power structures
and political movements, would of necessity have to downplay the
incommensurability of durations. Often, as many of the essays in this
volume indicate, Deleuze and Guattari did seem to argue against the
explanatory power of historicism, and in this regard we could place them
within a post-Marxist and post-1968 milieu that would reject grand
narratives and causal explanations in favour of events.
Whereas Marxism, which ranges from a vulgar economic determin-
ism to a complex understanding of history as an interpretive horizon
(Jameson 1981), ultimately must – as Marxism – rely on a minimal
degree of historical sense, the concept of the event has been theorised in
such a way as to account for a radical break or rupture with history, pre-
dictability, causation, continuity and any notion of human time as an
adequate mapping of life in general. Various forms of Marxism had
attempted to be post-Hegelian: attending to material conditions and non-
conscious or unintentional lines of causality without presupposing an
inevitable economic trajectory that would unfold from some proper
human essence. Perhaps the most significant of such ventures was that of
Louis Althusser, for whom the economy was determining only in ‘the last
instance’, and for whom the subject was an effect of ideology (Althusser
1971). There could be no retrieval of man as a praxis-oriented individ-
ual from the alienation of labour and political structures; for Althusser
the subject was an effect of such structures, with the structure of ideol-
ogy being crucial in the experience of oneself as a seeming agent. Ideology
was not an unfortunate illusion that the study of material history might
erase. On the contrary, the very notion of a self who might view, com-
prehend and master his own historical narration was an effect of ideol-
ogy. The only properly Marxist response, for Althusser, was science: an
examination of economic relations that would reveal the contradictions
of capitalism. The ideal would not be the liberation of humanity in its
practical, social, communicative and labouring essence, but an overcom-
ing of the lures of subjectivity as the locus of truth. Althusser was, in
this regard, in tune with a much broader movement opposed both to
hermeneutics (or the interpretation of history to disclose its underlying
sense) and its accompanying notions of experience or ‘the lived’. There
was no longer any question of discerning the authentic human poten-
tiality prior to its fall into alienation and historical causation; for the very
experience of history as a human narrative was imaginary: there is no
reason or intentionality in history, but we nevertheless live our economic
Introduction: Deleuze and History 3
(or inhuman) conditions and events as though they made sense or were
in accord with some general march of human reason (Jameson 1978).
Both Althusser and Fredric Jameson and, much later, Alain Badiou,
would draw positively upon the work of Jacques Lacan: there is no
subject of intentionality who goes through time and history and whose
agency we can track. On the contrary, there is only a random and con-
tingent series of events and it is from this sequence of the ‘real’ that we
posit a subject who must have been their hidden or alienated cause. The
subject is not the victim of history so much as the lure or illusion we posit
when we create history as a meaningful and intentional sequence (Žižek
1999).
One way of understanding postmodernism or post-1968 thought is as
a general retreat from history in favour of disrupted and disruptive
localised claims each with their own timelines and schemas of narration.
Fredric Jameson has lamented this loss of a sense of history and has
aimed to retain a properly Marxist attention to narrative modes of under-
standing, even if such narratives are now read as socially symbolic acts
that are required to order a history that is an ultimate but unrepre-
sentable ‘real’. But in many respects Marxists like Jameson and Terry
Eagleton (1997), who see postmodernism as an impoverished restriction
of politics to differential textual relations, are arguing a losing battle, for
even if one wishes to maintain historical sense it is hard to do so in an
age of globalism with its competing narratives, worldviews, timelines
and increasingly inhuman scales of temporality. In the case of Jean-
François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), the rejection of
grand narratives precludes any unified understanding of the flow of time
and necessitates, instead, a regime of incommensurable phrases. In terms
of historical understanding this might appear to lead to historicism, or
the rejection of a unified history in favour of a series of competing his-
torical narratives or ‘petit récits’, all articulating local and located view-
points. More influential for the practice of historians was Michel
Foucault’s argument for an archaeology of knowledge: there can be no
continuous historical narration precisely because the very notion of the
narrator (‘man’ or ‘humanity’) alters and varies, as does the very experi-
ence of time and space that is narrated (Foucault 1972). Foucault
referred to the ‘historical a priori’, indicating that history was at once a
priori (and therefore not the history of ‘man’ or subjectivity) at the same
time as the a priori was itself historical. The very relation between the
‘inside’ and ‘outside’, or thought and its exterior, is itself historically con-
tingent (Foucault 1970). Today we may think of life as intrinsically his-
torical, with ‘man’ becoming what he is through time; but this is itself an