Table Of Content1
The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influences
James Williams
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For Heloïse, Olivia and Octie
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Acknowledgements:
This work was made possible by an AHRB Research Leave Scheme Award in 2003-4.
The Carnegie Fund for the Universities Scotland funded further research in Paris libraries
in 2004-5. The British Academy funded travel for presentations of versions of the
chapters on Kant and on Lewis at the Experimenting with Intensities conference at Trent
University, Canada, and at the Australian Society for Continental Philosophy annual
conference 2005. I am very grateful for this essential and generous funding. Chapter 5
was presented as part of the “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes” series at the Sorbonne in
January 2004. Chapter 7 was given at the Values and Virtues conference in Dundee, May
2004. The final chapter on resistance was presented at the Society for European
Philosophy annual conference, University of Greenwich, July 2004. Chapter 4 was
presented at the Gaston Bachelard: The History of Society conference at Goldsmiths
College, University of London, in December 2003. Chapter 2 was presented at Carleton
University, Ottawa, in May 2004. Chapter 6 was presented in part at the ‘Que prouve la
science-fiction: raison, machines, corps et mondes’ conference, Université de Lille 3, 1-2
April 2005. The chapter on Deleuze and Kant was presented, in a different version, at the
Experimenting with Intensities conference in May 2004. Questions, criticisms and
suggestions put to me at all these occasions were invaluable in improving this work and I
am grateful to all participants – but reserve all errors as mine! Many friends, postgraduate
students and colleagues helped with support and ideas. I thank them all and, in particular,
for remedying lack of knowledge and oversight, or for helpful suggestions: Isabella Palin,
Lars Iyer, Keith Robinson, Rachel Jones, Michel Weber, Will Large, John Protevi,
Nicholas Davey, John Mullarkey, Keith Ansell Pearson, Paul Barlow, Fabio Presutti, Tim
Flanagan, Jenny Kermally and William Ross. Without the love of Claire, Rebecca,
Nathan and Alice, this book would never have been written.
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Contents:
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Deleuze and Kant: the transcendental without transcendence:
1. Deleuze’s debt to Kant
2. Forms and foundations
3. Immanence and the transcendental
4. Experience and experimentation
5. Political and ethical consequences
6. Transcendental Ideas, possibility and truth
Chapter 3. Deleuze and Levinas: towards an ethics of expression:
1. Expressionism as ground for an ethical relation
2. Deleuze and Levinas on the face and the Other
3. Expression in speech and expression as drama
4. Movement, structure, infinity
5. Method as resistance to system
Chapter 4. Deleuze and Bachelard: completeness and continuity in dialectics
1. Dialectics
2. Priorities and contexts
3. Anti-Cartesian dialectics
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4. Continuity and discontinuity
5. Syntheses of time: Deleuze’s critique of discontinuity
6. Bachelard’s arguments against continuity
7. How radical is the new?
Chapter 5. Deleuze and Whitehead: the concept of reciprocal determination
1. Dualism and immanence
2. Immortality
3. Potential and identity
4. Abstraction
5. Dramatisation
6. Stakes of a difference: Ideas and eternal objects
Chapter 6. Deleuze and Lewis: the real virtual or real possible worlds?
1. Surface differences
2. Two pragmatisms
3. On common sense as conservatism
4. Justifying the possible and the virtual
5. On the reality of the virtual
6. Spatio-temporal isolation and virtual connection
Chapter 7. Deleuze and Harman: distinguishing problems from questions
1. Problems and questions
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2. Clarity, distinctness, obscurity
3. Continuity and connection
4. Truth and problems
5. A new kind of foundation: metaphysics as experimentation
6. Guiding intuitions, curbing subjectivity
7. Bad trends in philosophy
Chapter 8. Deleuze, Negri, Lyotard: metaphysics and resistance
Bibliography
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Chapter 1. Introduction: the problem of openness in metaphysics
‘The construction of the most open, far-reaching and well-determined metaphysics.’ This
book develops an interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s work around the problem drawn-up
by this phrase. The interpretation is but one of the multiple ways Deleuze’s work can be
taken up and read. It neither aims to be comprehensive, nor faithful – in that rather sad
and unreflective sense of ‘true to’ as devotedly close to the words or spirit of a master or
of master-works. Instead, a series of tensions and contradictions that define the problem
will guide discussions of relations between Deleuze and six other philosophers (Kant,
Bachelard, Whitehead, Levinas, Lewis and Harman). The restricted terms of the
discussions should not be taken as signs of irrelevance at the level of the problem. Quite
the contrary: the problem reverberates throughout Deleuze’s many works and
contributions. Where these impact on life, so does the problem, with its tensions and
difficulties, but also with its productive power.
Since the problem and its conditions are bare and brute, the choice of thinkers is not so
much arbitrary as tendentious. Other encounters and influences could have been selected,
perhaps with more felicitous outcomes, perhaps not. These are my selections. They are
made against a background of philosophical, academic and political motivations, some of
which define a small world of academic training and competition, others much wider
social and philosophical problems, others, the simple limitations of a brain, a body and
the surroundings – near and far – that work on them over a stretch of time. Nonetheless,
in charting a way through the twin pressures of how to maximally diminish the
restraining and exclusive tendencies of metaphysics, whilst also creating structures that
interact in an enriching and deepening manner with others, the selection seemed the one
best suited to each of the main threats to a successful response to the original
metaphysical problem.
This focus on problems and their internal tensions explains the decisions not to include
certain major influences (Nietzsche and Bergson, for example) and encounters
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(Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault, to cite some of the major omissions). Whilst each of
these will be or has been the subject of important work on Deleuze, their meetings with
him seemed to take the question of metaphysics towards problems that I was not attracted
to, or capable of covering in depth. In may cases, others have already done so, much
better than I could or than my focus would allow1. A gesture towards the reasons for
selection, or at least the ones that I am conscious of, could be that this book rests on the
premises that there is a Deleuzian metaphysics, that it plays an important and
irreplaceable role in his philosophy, and that it raises significant but not fatal problems2.
But what do ‘open’, ‘determined’ and ‘metaphysics’ mean in the context of Deleuze’s
work? Here, a metaphysics is taken to be a dynamic structure of relations between
philosophical concepts and ideas. It is the productive heart of a philosophical system, not
understood as the most important basic forms, but as the interaction of the most
productive and original ones, with one another, but also with more distant and secondary
orders. A metaphysics is therefore not a separate order or set of concepts and ideas. Nor
is it a world-view, or a simplified representation of life, or a philosophical response to
physical theories. It is rather the genetic core of a philosophical system in its ongoing
transformative relation to the worlds it draws up and that, in return, feed into it (whether
these worlds be actual, virtual, possible or real – or, as we shall see, all four).
For example, were a philosophy to be constructed around two substances (mind and
body, say), the idea of metaphysics used here would lead to studies of the relations
between these terms and of their wider repercussions. Judgments that the world could be
divided into mind and body, or that truth could be defined in terms of one but not the
other, or that one was superior to the other, would be less important that the way mind
and body interacted and how that relation led to series of further dynamic effects.
Questions of openness would enter in terms of which relations and what kinds of
relations were not allowed by the philosophy, of which relations operated in setting up
the core ones, and which transformed them.
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This is not to say that any metaphysics could exhaust or capture, represent or condense,
direct or control the wider worlds or world that it interacts with. The relations are much
more complex and multi-directional. Different pressures accompany different-scaled
effects and affections across systems with no key or chart to finally decide on importance
and on priorities. A flash of inspiration in only one body at a particular time can run
through a philosophical system, just as it does through a set of literary works or a life.
Equally, though, an idea, sometime a vile and terrible idea, can have strong metaphysical
roots and go on to poison minds, bodies and societies, driving them to terrible
destruction.
Yet, one of the claims here is that metaphysics matters because, as a genetic core in
process, it is to be distinguished from other structures within a system of worlds and
lives. The distinguishing features of a metaphysics are its consistency, economy and
reach. The elements of the metaphysical structure are very tightly related (perhaps
logically, but also through many other forms of internal relations, semantically, for
example). It may not even be possible to separate the elements and retain their sense. A
principle of economy runs alongside this consistency. There can be no inoperative idea or
redundant concept, nor unproductive or uninteresting contradiction or paradox. Finally,
metaphysical structures are disproportionately powerful. They resonate through other
structures to an extent and with a transformative power that is unmatched by others, both
in terms of manner and of effect.
So, though the genetic core can make no claim to independence, since it is related to
other structures that transform it and its effects, it can make claims to greater consistency
and power. Yet power, here, must not be understood in its everyday sense of a capacity to
change others at will or at least to hold that capacity in suspense in such a way that it can
be released reliably and relatively predictably. Metaphysical structures have their own
scales and essences in terms of time and space, that is, they determine time and space, not
directly in the physical sense, but in the sense of our understanding and ideas about that
physical sense. This determination is deeply unreliable both in terms of time
(metaphysical reach can lie latent for centuries) and in terms of value judgements about
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