Table Of ContentD
‘Written by the most respected and original scholars in the field, this
E
book will prove essential reading for all those who want to understand
L
in a clear, accessible and more nuanced way Deleuze’s complex and
E
multi-faceted relation to key (but sometimes forgotten) figures in the
U
history of philosophy. I cannot imagine a better introduction to
Z
Deleuze as philosopher par excellence than this superb collection.’
E
Elizabeth Grosz, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University ’
S
The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is increasingly gaining the prestige that its
astonishing inventiveness calls for in the Anglo-American theoretical context. P
H
His wide-ranging works on the history of philosophy, cinema, painting, literature
I
and politics are being taken up and put to work across disciplinary divides and in L
O
interesting and surprising ways. However, the backbone of Deleuze’s philosophy –
S
the many and varied sources from which he draws the material for his conceptual O
innovation – has until now remained relatively obscure and unexplored. P
H
This book takes as its goal the examination of this rich theoretical background. I
C
Presenting essays by a range of the world’s foremost Deleuze scholars, and a
A
number of up and coming theorists of his work, the book is composed of in-depth L
analyses of the key figures in Deleuze’s lineage whose significance – as a result L
of either their obscurity or the complexity of their place in the Deleuzean text – I
N
has not previously been well understood. E
A
This work will prove indispensable to students and scholars seeking to G
understand the context from which Deleuze’s ideas emerge. E
Included are essays on Deleuze’s relationship to figures as varied as Marx,
Simondon, Wronski, Hegel, Hume, Maimon, Ruyer, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, DELEUZE’S
Reimann, Leibniz, Bergson and Freud.
E
d
i
t
Graham Jonesis an independent scholar and past president of the Australasian e
a d
Society for Continental Philosophy. n b
d y
J G PHILOSOPHICAL
Jon Roffeis a Lecturer in Philosophy at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. o r
n a
R h
o a
f m
f
e J LINEAGE Edited by
o
n Graham Jones
e
s and Jon Roffe
ISBN 978 0 7486 3300 5
Edinburgh University Press
22 George Square E
Edinburgh d
i
EH8 9LF n
b
www.euppublishing.com u
r
Cover image: Eye, Silver Gelatin Photogram, 2005, by Naomi Merritt g
Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com h
Deleuze’s Philosophical
Lineage
Edited by Graham Jones and Jon Roffe
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
Typeset in 11/13pt Adobe Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3299 2 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 3300 5 (paperback)
The right of the contributors
to be identifi ed as authors of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements v
List of Abbreviations vi
Introduction: Into the Labyrinth 1
Graham Jones and Jon Roffe
1 Plato 8
Gregory Flaxman
2 John Duns Scotus 27
Nathan Widder
3 G. W. F. Leibniz 44
Daniel W. Smith
4 David Hume 67
Jon Roffe
5 Immanuel Kant 87
Melissa McMahon
6 Solomon Maimon 104
Graham Jones
7 G. W. F. Hegel 130
Bruce Baugh
8 Karl Marx 147
Eugene Holland
9 Hoëne Wronski and Francis Warrain 167
Christian Kerslake
10 Bernhard Riemann 190
Arkady Plotnitsky
iv Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage
11 Gabriel Tarde 209
Éric Alliez
12 Sigmund Freud 219
Ronald Bogue
13 Henri Bergson 237
Paul Atkinson
14 Edmund Husserl 261
Alain Beaulieu
15 A. N. Whitehead 282
James Williams
16 Raymond Ruyer 300
Ronald Bogue
17 Martin Heidegger 321
Constantin V. Boundas
18 Pierre Klossowski 339
Ian James
19 Albert Lautman 356
Simon Duffy
20 Gilbert Simondon 380
Alberto Toscano
Bibliography 399
Notes on Contributors 417
Index 421
Acknowledgements
The preparation of a volume as lengthy as this necessarily incurs sub-
stantial debts. We would like to thank Naomi Merritt, for her edito-
rial assistance with the manuscript, and the exceptional cover image.
Jack Reynolds, Ashley Woodward and Paul Atkinson have each been
particularly supportive and helpful throughout the editorial process.
Thanks also to Marg Horwell for her support throughout the assem-
bly of this book.
Many from Edinburgh University Press have also been key parts
in the publication of Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage. We would like
to thank in particular Carol Macdonald, Máiréad McElligott, Tim
Clark and James Dale for their assiduity and assistance.
We would also like to thank the Melbourne School of Continental
Philosophy, one of the rare contemporary institutions in which a
serious reading and teaching of Deleuze can take place.
Finally, we would like to thank the authors who are included
in this volume, whose pieces present a very nuanced and attentive
version of Deleuze scholarship – the kind of scholarship that this
volume aims to promote.
List of Abbreviations
AO Anti-Oedipus
B Bergsonism
D Dialogues
DI Desert Islands and Other Texts
DR Difference and Repetition
ECC Essays Critical and Clinical
EPS Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
ES Empiricism and Subjectivity
F Foucault
FB Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
FLB The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
K Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature
LS The Logic of Sense
M ‘Masochism’
MI Cinema 1: The Movement Image
N Negotiations
NP Nietzsche and Philosophy
PI Pure Immanence: A Life
PS Proust and Signs
SPP Spinoza’s Practical Philosophy
TI Cinema 2: The Time Image
TP A Thousand Plateaus
TRM Two Regimes of Madness and Other Texts
WP What is Philosophy?
Introduction: Into the Labyrinth
Graham Jones and Jon Roffe
Those coming to Deleuze’s work for the fi rst time (and even those
returning to it anew) fi nd themselves confronted by the dilemma of
where to begin, of how to engage with it. Two diffi culties present
themselves. The fi rst and more immediate one is that, conceptually,
Deleuze’s work is so richly detailed and complex. Thus on opening
one of his books the reader is confronted by a plethora of concepts
that already seem to presuppose on the reader’s part an intimate
familiarity with numerous other related concepts, theories, or think-
ers. It is akin, perhaps, to a labyrinth in which one can easily become
lost, or frustratingly disheartened at the prospect of navigating such
a complex architecture.
This leads into the second, more dangerous, diffi culty – the place
of commentary in respect to such an encounter. Readers will, not
unreasonably, peruse existing interpretations in search of guidance in
relation to Deleuze’s philosophy. But whatever reassurance they fi nd
will often prove misleading, for in the fi eld that can, more or less, be
called Anglo-American ‘Deleuze Studies’, an orthodoxy seems to have
installed itself. This orthodoxy or ‘Image of [Deleuzian] Thought’
has multiple sources, and as a result requires detailed elaboration. In
the fi rst instance, it was the case for a long time that few of Deleuze’s
texts were available in English translation, making it diffi cult to
determine any larger or more accurate ‘perspective’ on Deleuze’s
project. Related to this is the fact that the texts were translated in
non-chronological order, which made it diffi cult to assess the devel-
opment and overall signifi cance of specifi c concepts and which led in
turn to the distortion and sometimes misrepresentation of concepts
or terminology (e.g. the ‘body without organs’) by various critics.
Also, and perhaps most signifi cantly, there is the acceptance at face
value of Deleuze’s own more ‘personal’ utterances in interviews (the
invocation of ‘buggery’ as his proper method in respect to the history
of philosophy, the claim that his philosophical work is to be treated
as a toolbox, and so on). This last is a more signifi cant problem than
2 Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage
the other two, whose force, in truth, has diminished in recent years,
even if their consequences have not – particularly so in respect to the
theoretical misconceptions that seem to have permanently lodged
themselves under the name of Deleuze within the domain of (so-
called) ‘cultural applications’ of theory. Too often misconceptions
are perpetuated by appropriators’ reliance on a paraphrasing of
Deleuze’s ideas drawn from secondary sources and other commentar-
ies (although this is hardly a problem restricted to Deleuze).
In summary, the orthodoxy surrounding Deleuze consists of a hier-
archy of at least three concentric rings. The outer and most general
ring sees Deleuze’s work as advocating an ‘anything goes’ or ‘theory-
shopping’ approach – an unsystematic, anarchic, ‘guerrilla warfare’
with concepts.1 This approach tends to characterise the piecemeal
appropriations of Deleuze’s concepts within an interdisciplinary
fi eld, such as cultural studies, where specifi c notions can be borrowed
with little concern for their original context or their relationship to
the writer’s oeuvre more broadly. In Deleuze’s case, this approach is
usually mediated via the notions drawn from his later work of the
‘rhizome’ or the ‘nomad’. Indeed, Deleuze’s own comments about
using theory as a ‘toolbox’, or of treating it as ‘cuts on a record’, have
unfortunately been interpreted as licence from the ‘master’ to appro-
priate, deform, or outrightly abuse his ideas according to personal
whim, without any prior understanding of their meaning or context.2
This explains why at scholarly conferences one often comes across
papers employing ‘Deleuzian’ vocabulary, usually wielded as cudgels
or inhaled like hallucinogens, that immediately demonstrate a lack of
understanding of the concepts being invoked.3
The middle ring or level of this orthodoxy is one which over-
estimates the signifi cance of the two volumes of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, representing them as the ‘essence’ or summit of
Deleuze’s project, the core of the work to which everything else is
related as either rehearsal, adjunct or auxiliary. Indeed some critics
and commentators go further, often seeing Anti-Oedipus itself as
but a draft for A Thousand Plateaus; the latter achieving a cathartic
purging of the vestigial Freudian and Marxist encumbrances of the
former – a sort of coital before and after (with a smoking gun replac-
ing the post-coital cigarette). This particular belief, we would suggest,
originally stems from, or is compounded by, the order of translation
of Deleuze’s books overall and, relatively speaking, the long-deferred
translation of several of the early works. This resulted in the develop-
ment during the late 1970s and early 1980s of some very eccentric
Introduction: Into the Labyrinth 3
readings and critical sawhorses that have not been overcome even
today. To read such accounts one could easily have believed that
Anti-Oedipus was an orphan text that had mysteriously appeared
from nowhere, and worse, that Deleuze hadn’t been writing about
philosophy for at least 25 years before its publication. The notion of
the ‘body without organs’ presents the most obvious example of this
phenomenon, having largely been interpolated on the basis of crude,
almost ‘free associative’, readings of Anti-Oedipus, removed from
the historical context and the internal conceptual development and
continuity of such earlier works as Difference and Repetition and The
Logic of Sense, or Guattari’s pre-’68 essays. Another example con-
cerns the overly literal interpretation and privileging of the concept
of machinic desire introduced in Anti-Oedipus. Similarly, early
responses to A Thousand Plateaus were often marked by whimsical
or manic interpretations of key concepts and the reifi cation and sub-
sequent valorisation of its terminology.
The central and last ring of this set of orthodoxies is that which
prides itself on being the most informed and familiar with the actual
body and intricacies of Deleuze’s work, and yet which grants an
inordinate amount of signifi cance to the infl uence of Nietzsche and
Spinoza in retrospective interpretations of the oeuvre as a whole,
often to the exclusion of other infl uences – a view that, to be fair, is
in many respects validated by Deleuze himself. Given that neither of
these fi gures have a chapter devoted to them in this volume, it should
be clear that in an important respect we do not consider Deleuze nec-
essarily to have been the best judge of his own work’s development or
signifi cance. Like the second, this last approach often tends to demote
or dismiss any notion of genuine development within the oeuvre, or
to misunderstand the nature of its ‘continuity’, instead ‘fl attening’
the actual work out into a de-historicised plane, as if the concepts
it articulates had always been ‘there’ as an essence merely awaiting
simple realisation or identifi cation.
Contrary to this orthodoxy, and to Deleuze’s own intermittent
descriptions of his work, we would present the following three char-
acterisations of Deleuze’s philosophy, under whose aegis the current
volume is presented.
First, Deleuze’s thought is one which unfolds internal to an
examination of the thought of others. The breadth and depth of the
engagements that constitute this method remain an object of serious
scholarship, and it is possible that we are just now beginning to
