Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? An Introduction to Political Pragmatics

194 Pages·2006·1.79 MB·English

by  Gregg Lambert

Who’s Afraid of Deleuze
and Guattari?
Gregg Lambert
Continuum
Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy
Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin
Deconstruction and Democracy– Alex Thomson
Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History– Jay Lampert
Deleuze and the Unconscious– Christian Kerslake
Derrida and Disinterest– Sean Gaston
Heidegger and the Place of Ethics– Michael Lewis
Husserl’s Phenomenology– Kevin Hermberg
New Heidegger– Miguel de Beistegui
Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement– T. Storm Heter
Wittgenstein and Gadamer– Chris Lawn
Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and
Guattari?
Gregg Lambert
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane,
11 York Road Suite 704
London New York,
SE1 7NX NY 10038
© Gregg Lambert, 2006
‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems: 1909–1939, volume
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
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be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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ISBN: 0826490484 (hardback)
Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements vii
Foreword: Why the Revolution (of Desire) Did Not Take Place 1
I Expression
1 Once More for a ‘Minor Literature’ – This Time with Feeling! 13
2 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Language 43
II Psychoanalysis
3 ‘Deterritorializing’ Psychoanalysis 67
4 Slavoj Zˇizˇek – It’s ‘Body without Organs’ (BWO), Dummy! 81
III Politics
5 On ‘the Grandeur of Marx’ 103
6 On ‘the Right to Desire’ 129
IV Power (seminar on Foucault)
7 How ‘Power Makes Us See and Speak’ 139
8 Why ‘Power Produces Truth as a Problem’ 155
Notes 171
Bibliography 177
Index 181
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Preface and Acknowledgements
InThe Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, my focus was primarily on Deleuze’s writ-
ings from the mid 1980s, especially on the ‘baroque’ philosophy of Leibniz
(The Fold), cinema (The Movement Image and The Time-Image), and literature
(Essays Critical and Clinical). More recently, I have been interested in revisiting
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ project (Anti-Oedipus; A
Thousand Plateaus), which on the one hand has suffered from being underap-
preciated and too hastily dismissed (by Badiou and Zˇizˇek, for example) and,
on the other, too quickly assimilated to the objectives of other desires such as
multi-culturalism, identity politics, even the politics of ‘the multitude’. Who’s
Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? is written in the style of an ‘intervention’ – not
without a sense of humour – and is intended to be of interest to diverse aca-
demic and even popular audiences: philosophical, literary and cultural schol-
ars of Deleuze and Guattari to be sure, but also general and academic
audiences who are merely curious about what all the hubbub has been about.
It is especially intended for those who are/have been already predisposed ‘to
be afraid’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s influence and are not even likely to be
readers of their works in the past. It is intended, therefore, as a re-evaluation of
the dominant legacy of the ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ project in philoso-
phy, literary criticism and cultural studies since the early 1980s, which is dis-
cussed in terms of its reception and interpretation by major figures (Jameson,
Zˇizˇek, Hardt and Negri, and Agamben). The intention of my argument – in
some cases, my polemic – is to open their project to a fresh evaluation in the
light of the limitations of this reception-history, as well as to introduce some of
the often ignored pragmatic elements of their work in the regions of expres-
sion (language), politics and culture.
In keeping with the more overt pedagogical style, the book is divided into
sections on expression, psychoanalysis, politics and, lastly, power. Each section
contains a reading of the work of a major figure associated with the reception-
history of Deleuze and Guattari’s work from the early 1980s to the contempo-
rary moment. The section on expression contains a long treatment of
Jameson’s early reception of Deleuze and Guattari from The Political
Unconscious(1981) as well as his most recent arguments against Deleuze from
A Singular Modernity (2002). The section on psychoanalysis addresses Zˇizˇek’s
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
recentOrgans without Bodies(2004); the section on politics treats the question
of Deleuze’s supposed distance from (or proximity to) Marx, and concludes
with an evaluation of Hardt and Negri’s appropriation of Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept of ‘geophilosophy’ and nomadic politics in Empire (2000);
finally, the last section returns to Deleuze’s own writings from the mid 1980s,
which I continue to privilege as the most crucial period in the philosopher’s
work, and contains an extensive discussion of the critical importance of
Foucault’s influence on Deleuze’s later conception of power and desire in
Foucault(1988).
First of all, I wish to acknowledge and to thank the editors and collaborators of
journals and edited collections in which previous versions of some of the follow-
ing sections have appeared: Charles Stivale (ed.), Deleuze: Key Concepts(London:
Acumen, 2005); Ian Buchanan, co-editor of Deleuze and Space (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2005); John Cash and Gabriele Schwab (eds),
Critical Horizons, Fall 2003; Bradley McDonald (ed.), Strategies, 15.1 (2002). I am
also grateful to the students and colleagues who have graciously supported,
encouraged and participated in my ruminations on Deleuze and Guattari over
the past four years; the graduate students and faculty who participated or made
materially possible the seminars I gave on ‘The Analytics of Power’ at Emory
University (fall 2004); the University of Tasmania (summer 2005); and Syracuse
University (fall 2005), especially Cathy Caruth, Jill Robbins, Claire Nouvet,
Brent Young, Brian Smith, Robyn Ferrell, Jack Reynolds, Jo Reynolds and the
faculty, staff and graduate students of the English department of Syracuse
University, who allowed me to play hooky from my administrative duties as
chair of the department to finish the manuscript in March 2006. In addition, I
would like to thank Branka Arsic, Ronald Bogue, Constantine Boundas, Rosi
Braidotti, Ian Buchanan, Peter Canning, Tom Conley, William Egginton,
Gregory Flaxman, Dorothea Olkowski, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Paul Patton, Jean-
Michel Rabate, Daniel W. Smith, Victor E. Taylor, Mihza Lee and David Wills –
all of whom have supported this work at some stage and have been a source of
friendship and inspiration. Finally, I would like to thank Sarah Douglas and the
Continuum editorial staff for their continuing support and their patience.
Gregg Lambert, Syracuse, New York, April 2006
Foreword: Why the Revolution (of Desire)
Did Not Take Place
The origins of this study can be found in a question that has preoccupied
Marxism for some time as well: ‘Why did the revolution not take place?’ That
is, in its classical formulation, why did it not take place in the countries like
England or Germany where conditions were forecast that would seem to make
it favourable, if not inevitable, rather than in Russia or China where the
economic conditions were less than ideal? Likewise, in approaching the ques-
tion of revolution proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in what they called their
‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ project, I will ask why this revolution did not
take place, particularly in the United States, which was first of all its
inspiration.
This question has preoccupied me for many years and constitutes the bulk
of my writings and lectures on the reception of the ‘Capitalism and
Schizophrenia’ project since my first book on the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze, which concerned itself mostly with Deleuze’s solely authored writ-
ings from the period of the mid 1980s, and his writings on Leibniz in particu-
lar. In this earlier work, I had mostly ignored the works that comprised the
Capitalism and Schizophrenia project written in collaboration with Félix
Guattari, although I didn’t realize this until later on when it was pointed out
by a puzzled reviewer.
This book is offered not as a corrective to my earlier oversight as much as it
represents the realization of finally having something interesting to say on the
subject of this oeuvre. Nevertheless, it is also not offered as a commentary on
the volumes that comprise the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project – there
are already many of these commentaries out already and they are mostly excel-
lent – but rather for the most part is an attempt to engage with the initial
reception and interpretation of these works by critics and scholars in the
United States. It is an interesting piece of intrigue that the translation of the
first volume of this project, Anti-Oedipus, in many ways preceded a larger famil-
iarity with Deleuze’s individual writings by English-speaking audiences in the
United States, Great Britain and Australia. The appearance of the Kafka book
in 1986 was quickly followed by the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, which