deleuze and on writing

An interesting discussion of the task of philosophers in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? where he gives advice on how to write and what about . . .

[P]hilosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, "Let's discuss this." Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussable problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." Nothing is less exact, and when philosophers criticize each other it is on the basis of problems and on a plane that is different from theirs and that melt down the old concepts in the way a cannon can be melted down to make new weapons. It never takes place on the same plane. To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All those debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment.

The money quote has to be the last two or three sentences. Reads like (an English translation of) a speech by Robespierre. But notice, too, the importance the two authors give to 'concepts.' This is not a casual aside: the first chapter of the book is 'What Is a Concept?' In the third chapter 'Conceptual Personae' are discussed.

Then this comment on science and concept:

It is pointless to say there are concepts in science. Even when science is concerned with the same "objects" it is not from the viewpoint of the concept; it is not by creating concepts. It might be said that this is just a matter of words, but it is rare for words not to involve intentions and ruses . . . . The power of the concept is attributed to science, the concept being defined by the creative methods of science and measured against science. The issue is then whether there remains a possibility of philosophy forming secondary concepts that make up for their own insufficiency by a vague appeal to the "lived." Thus Gilles-Gaston Granger [a French University professor widely published - jsr] begins by defining the concept as a scientific proposition or function and then concedes that there may, nonetheless, be philosophical concepts that replace reference to the object by correlation to a "totality of the lived" [totalité du vecú]. [See Gilles-Gaston Granger, Pour la connaisance philosophique, chap. 6 - jsr] But actually, either philosophy completely ignores the concept, or else it enjoys it by right and at first hand, so that there is nothing of it left for science -- which, moreover, has no need of the concept and concerns itself only with states of affairs and their conditions. Science needs only propositions or functions, whereas philosophy, for its part, does not need to invoke a lived that would give only a ghostly and extrinsic life to secondary, bloodless concepts. The philosophical concept does not refer to the lived, by way of compensation, but consists, through its own creation, in setting up an event that surveys the whole of the lived no less than every state of affairs. Every concept shapes and reshapes the event in its own way. The greatness of a philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts. So the unique, exclusive bond between concepts and philosophy as a creative discipline must be tested in its finest details. The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. The French original was published in 1991.

Comments

[Nate]

Sam,

One doesn't have to be an idealist to have doubts about "state of affairs" talk. Ayer, for instance, prefers we just talk about sense contents and sense experiences, with talk of objects being understood to be just an abbreviated and thus more efficient way to talk about sense data. I'm out to lunch on the issue and don't find either position - realism or antirealism - very interesting.

As for surplus value and critique, I don't think there's much that's very interesting about this point either and I don't think the analysis/critique does much work after one has found it compelling. It orients one but tells one very little about what to do. It's also not something one needs to read Marx to get, there are a number of people who have arrived at similar enough conclusions (Marxism is not the sole idiom for arriving at propositions equivalent to those about surplus value.) It's also very simple, as far as I'm concerned. Employers are likely to want things (lower wages, higher work rates) which differ from employees (higher wages, lower work rates), and there's a power struggle over that. A common marxist mistake is to not pay enough attention to the forms of that struggle as they vary historically, geographically, by social location, etc. That is a tremendously important area for enquiry, but not philosophical enquiry, including the philosophical aspects of Marx's work. Which means I agree with you that literary studies et offers very little of value outside itself, politically speaking.

I'd say that's generally true for basically everything that happens within the academy, though, not solely to theoretical puruits. I think it's true for almost everything that anyone gets paid to do and everything one an make a profession out of. (The revolution will not be salaried.)

That doesn't mean any of that is worthless, but it does mean that any sense of world historical political import in the professional interpretation and presentation of books, particularly theoretiacl books, is mistaken. (As are most senses of world historial political import generally.) The importance of those things lie elsewhere and are, in my opinion primarily aesthetic, like both Pils and Pinot Noir (I prefer PBR and Newcastle, myself) or reading Shakespeare and Greek tragedy.

best,
Nate

[Sam]

Ayer, for instance, prefers we just talk about sense contents and sense experiences, with talk of objects being understood to be just an abbreviated and thus more efficient way to talk about sense data.

I agree with this to some extent, tho the positivist urge may allow humans (like those in philosophy departments) to underestimate inductive concerns, whether economic, historical or biological, and I think you would agree those are often not trivial concerns. Though I am willing to follow Ayers or Lord Russell at least part way when they address epistemology, sense data and acquaintance, etc., at some point I hear Marx not to say Thomas Hobbes whispering in that bit of sense data AKA my ear: is that object which is denoted by the noun "stomach" merely sense data? Or, er, other parts? Yes, an Ayersian would I guess assert the sensation of hunger is merely sense data, but his doubts of the reality of the objects which cause or correlate with that sense data do not extend so far as to keep him from consuming a tasty McDataBurger. Thus, at some point, a person, or at least someone not in the professional epistemology bidness, actually kicks the can and says, Bully Naturalism--and Quine himself, however detested by postmod left, himself kicked the can in that direction.

[Nate]

hi Sam,
I don't think Ayer would say "the term 'stomach' means merely 'X collection of sense contents" but rather that there's very little interesting or important to the question either way (ie, it's metaphysical and hence nonsense because not subject to verification). I'm ambivalent myself, in part because despite myself I have an ambivalent like for metaphysics. In any case, I think the question would be better post as when do utterances misfire systematically - as I think they do when people say "soul" to people with beliefs like me - and to start inquiry there. The problem, though, is that I think it's likely that there's no a priori delimitation of utterances that misfire: some people say "soul" to each other and seem to not misfire, for instance. Quine says something loosely related to this somewhere - about how one can preserve any theory or hypothesis at all, as long as one imports enough subsidiary hypotheses. Given that I think that is so, I think assertions of realism/anti-realism don't have too many stakes, though I still get hung up on those questions personally. I think the stakes are also not what they are sometimes held to be. I think the claims frequently function as an assertion - though cloaked in a question - something like "you can't have belief X without having belief Y" (for instance, you can't oppose the Iraq war without a fully worked out moral calculus involving nonrelative moral values). That's empirically false, people do belief Xs without Ys all the time. The weaker claim "you can't have belief X in a consistent or noncontradictory fashin without having belief Y" is easier to push but even so, if Quine's right about the ability to introduce subsidiary hypotheses then that goes as well. Which means that much of the time all of this amounts, I think, to an implied demand "speak like this, not like that" and attacks on this or that idiom are essentialy just emoting (Ayer is absolutely right in his emotivism, as far as I'm concerned.)

Sam, you got a blog?

take care,
Nate

[Sam]

"Quine says something loosely related to this somewhere - about how one can preserve any theory or hypothesis at all, as long as one imports enough subsidiary hypotheses"

Yes, but Quine ultimately holds there is quite a difference between statements concerning a "soul" or Pegasus or Hamlet, and statements concerning stomachs, or the Great Depression, molecules, prime numbers, etc. doesn't he? Reference, not so far from Russell's ideas of acquaintance, kicks in (as it does I think for Ayer), and a sort of pragmatist criteria of efficaciousness leads Quine to hold to physicalism and naturalism, or so it seems. Which is to say, semantics and nomenclature are more a problem for philosophers than for biologists or economists: there's little doubt of what biological taxonomy refers to, though most realize the taxonomy is provisional like any scientific discource. Which is to say, like you, I think much of the metaphysics of semantics and logic is sort of misplaced: Quine writes dozens of essays basically claming, yes, the sciences are justified, at least ontologically. Of course naive moralists and theologians don't care for that: Tant Pis. But why don't we have a problem with semantic issues in say Galbraith or Marx? The ontological status of the Reals or Fregean entities is sort of a moot or at best secondary point: the most platonic of philosophers or mathematicians more or less refutes his own metaphysics every day at lunch, however tres sauvvage that may appear. And in some sense the "etiology of lunch" (say the specifics of the cattle market, not to say the Burgerocracy ) a more interesting and troublesome issue.

[David]

"The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing."

[Nate]

Clever, David. But your ability to say this and my ability to understand that you mean to say this discussion (or at least one discussion, that between me and Sam) is off topic demonstrates that there is at least some general level of same thing being talked about such that we are able to communicate. And if I've misunderstood you and you meant the remark in some other fashion, then you can clarify, which would prove my point.

What's funny about this quote, though, as I said above, is its explicit stating that nonsameness is nonproductive and nonworthwhile. I believe this is analogous to Badiou's crticism of Deleuze - Deleuze is a thinker of oneness. Even if the quote is correct, which I'm not sure it is, why should a proliferation of the nonsame be a problem? More to the point, why should it be a problem on Deleuzian grounds? In the same vein what the quote implies is that it is what the philosopher - and the originary philosopher of X work - who counts. Since others depart from that, they don't count. Quite the sovereigntist (legistating) urge there.

[John Ransom]

Hi Nate. You write,

Even if the quote is correct, which I'm not sure it is, why should a proliferation of the nonsame be a problem? [end]

Unless the English translation garbled the French (which is certainly possible) the quotation is exact. I don't think Deleuze is saying the proliferation of the nonsame is a problem, because you can have that without useless discussions that go nowhere. Haven't we all witnessed roundtables that work exactly the same way as Deleuze suggests?

One more snippet:

In the same vein what the quote implies is that it is what the philosopher - and the originary philosopher of X work - who counts. Since others depart from that, they don't count. Quite the sovereigntist (legistating) urge there. [end from Nate]

I do think Deleuze is saying that the philosopher is more important than other fields. Isn't that along the same line as Shelley's famous quip that poets are the true legislators of mankind? And: I don't think Deleuze would be upset by the idea that philosophers want to engage in a 'sovereigntist (legislating)' activity.

[Sam]

"participants never talk about the same thing"

In some sense this seems correct, but psychoanalytic or phenomenological types of discourse are as afflicted with problems of definitions and denotation as is writing based on inductive claims, are they not. Psychoanalytic terms such as "ego" or even "subject" or "desire" do not seem definable with any degree of accuracy, tho of course that doesn't prevent hundreds of pages being written about them. Knowing that Deleuze more or less denies the possibility of definition by identity (and thus analyticity?), it seems he may be committed to some form of reference (or more broadly, induction). where language/statements are significant when capable of some type of confirmation. Or perhaps his programme is even more radically solipsistic.

Skimming through a few pages of Deleuze , I sense he was more inclined to a somewhat materialist and deterministic position (a sort of Hume meets Spinoza sans Gott or ghost), than to the Kantian side of things, and was no idealist....I do not see any indications that D (at least by himself) suggests concepts or any sort of abstract entities possess some transcendent or necessary quality independent of the individual.....so then how is the philosopher exalted above say economists or reporters or web designers......

[Nate]

hi John,

I was unclear, sorry, due to being in my usual hurry. I wasn't accusing David or you of misquotation. Rather, I think that Deleuze may be wrong in the passage which you quote accurately. That said, I think we disagree on the interpretation of that line.

You're absolutely right that there are discussions which are unproductive, dull, etc (and I take it David's quote was intended to imply that at least some discussions in this thread are among these). But, if Deleuze's claim is simply "there are some discussions of an unproductive and unpleasant character such that a philosopher would do well do avoid them" then, well, that's rather banal, isn't it? And he states it quite poorly, because the quote sounds not like a claim about some discussions but about discussions as such.

I read the quote more strongly than you do. I think Deleuze is saying that nonhomogeneity in discussion means discussion can provide no advance whatsoever, thus justifying the philosopher shunning discussion. The quote says, as I read it, that discussion will not produce advance along the lines valued by the philosopher, because of nonhomogeneity among discussants. Thus, at least in this particular register, production requires sameness.

This may not be a controversial point among folk who know Deleuze (is it?). I don't feel I really know Deleuze, but this really struck me as contrary my impression based on the bits I've read and my encounters with Deleuzians. I'd taken Deleuze as being a thinker of the proliferation of differences. In this particular case, the aforementioned proliferation (qua a form of production) is predicated on sameness. I may be wrong in thinking production for Deleuze means the proliferation/creation of differences, and I may be wrong in thinking that "takes things no farther" means "is unproductive," but that's currently how I read the quote here.

On Deleuze as legislator and philosophy as first discipline, it's interesting and surprising that you've confirmed my impression. Neither of those aspects speak to me personally, but I'm not invested in arguing the merits of either position right now, we can happily agree to disagree as far as I'm concerned. I just remarked because this was something else which struck me as also being contra my impression of Deleuze.

I'm reasonably convinced that the passage you quote supports your reading. Like I said the position which Deleuze has in the passage on your reading seems un-Deleuze to me and very, very old fashioned philosopher positions and, frankly, unattractive. I'd be quite interested to see you, Discard, and Anthony hash this out. You all know Deleuze better than I do. That is, if it wouldn't violate the spirit of Deleuze's work too much for y'all to productively discuss it. ;)

best,
Nate

[David]

Okey doke, I will explain myself. No, I was not pointing out the fact that you were "off topic"; rather, I was pointing out the fact that this discussion is being conducted by people who have clearly not read the book in question. The only person here who seems to have read and understood What is Philosophy? is Discard, and no one seems to have heeded his/her comment. All this business about whether D+G think Philosophy is "first" has nothing whatsoever to do with the text. Heidegger would say you've succumbed to "idle chatter." The statement "The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy" only defines the relationship between "concept" and "philosophy" as D+G deploy these names in the text, but it does not tell you what a concept or philosophy is. Note the title. What Philosophy "is" becomes a philosophical problem, which an adequate concept of philosophy intends to solve--a concept that cannot be summarized in a few sentences but takes the length of a book to create.

"Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated?"

[s0metim3s]

I don't think Deleuze would be upset by the idea that philosophers want to engage in a 'sovereigntist (legislating)' activity.

I don't see it. Care to substantiate?

[John Ransom]

s0metim3s asks, first quoting me:

I don't think Deleuze would be upset by the idea that philosophers want to engage in a 'sovereigntist (legislating)' activity.

I don't see it. Care to substantiate? [end]

All I'm thinking of is the desire and necessity to create values, as is also discussed by Nietzsche. There's a good link-up between what Deleuze and Guatarri are discussing here and Foucault's 'Preface' to Canguilhem's _Normal and Pathological_. Here are some notes from p. 21 of that Preface by Foucault:

"man lives in a conceptually architectured environment. This does not mean he has been diverted from life by some oversight, but only that he lives in a certain way. He has a relationship with his environment such that he does not have a fixed view of it. He can move on an undefined territory, that he must move about to receive information, must move things in relation to one another to make them useful. Forming concepts is a way of living, not of killing life; one way of living in complete mobility and not immobilizing life. [end Foucault]

Foucault's comment is what got me interested in Deleuze and Guatarri's book on philosophy, since it really is a book about concept formation. A concept -- such as Revolution coming out of the French Revolution or sympathy from the Scottish moral theorists -- effectively legislates concerning the ways in which the world around us will be experienced.

Both Foucault's comment and Deleuze and Guatarri's book can be thought of as belonging to the third stage after camel and lion, and so can be thought of as post-nihilist.

"To create new values -- that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create itself freedom for new creating -- that can the might of the lion do.

"To create itself freedom, and give a holy Nay even unto duty: for that, my brethren, there is need of the lion."

and a little further:

"But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?

"Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea."

[John Ransom]

David writes:

All this business about whether D+G think Philosophy is "first" has nothing whatsoever to do with the text. Heidegger would say you've succumbed to "idle chatter." The statement "The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy" only defines the relationship between "concept" and "philosophy" as D+G deploy these names in the text, but it does not tell you what a concept or philosophy is. [end]

The statement "the concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy" does not "only define the relationship between 'concept' and 'philosophy.'" That's because Deleuze, despite perhaps what you expect, explicitly brings in a third term and its relation to the concept, namely, science.

The flow of Deleuze and Guatarri's comment is like this, as I read it. First they mention the idea that science has priority over philosophy. Then the authors introduce the condescending consolation prize philosophy is granted by, among others, Prof. Gilles-Gaston Granger. This is that philosophy is to be content with some vague "totality of the lived" as its domain. The authors explicitly reject this compromise:

"philosophy, for its part, does not need to invoke a lived that would give only a ghostly and extrinsic life to secondary, bloodless concepts. The philosophical concept does not refer to the lived, by way of compensation, but consists, through its own creation, in setting up an event that surveys the whole of the lived no less than every state of affairs."

They end as follows:

"The greatness of a philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts. So the unique, exclusive bond between concepts and philosophy as a creative discipline must be tested in its finest details. The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy."

The whole section is a polemic against the priority of science and a counter-argument in favor of the notion that there is a "unique, exclusive bond between concepts of philosophy." Exclusive of whom? Of scient-ists.

Regarding Heidegger and idle chatter: Arendt's criticism of Heidegger seems apt. Locating inauthenticity in the idle chatter of the They exacerbates the divide between philosophy and life. See Arendt, "What is existentialist philosophy?" in _Essays in understanding_: see also April Flanke, "beyond banality and fatality: arendt heidegger and jaspers on political speech" New German Critique No. 86 (Spring, 2002), pp. 3-18

[Nate]

David,

I see. Not off topic, but rather currently incapable of being properly on topic. Fair enough, actually, at least in my case. I've only read the first half, which I found underwhelming so I shelved the rest in favor of other books. I may have misunderstood that first half. A number of folk who I respect very much intellectually speak highly of the book. Perhaps my lackluster experience of it is due to lackluster reading on my part.

On the other hand, from my neophyte's chair John looks as much like he's understood the book as anyone else - you two may have the relationship of disagreeing discussants rather than that of someone who knows and someone who doesn't.

As for concepts and all that as names, I'm willing to accept your point that D&G mean the terms only in their sense, not about other uses of those terms or what are really homophones for those terms. They fail to adequately foreground that, though, as they often sound not like they're talking about metaphors of their own creation but about things as they definitely are. As, for instance, when they instance that philosophy must pass through conceptual personae. That may mean "here is how we choose to understand the history of philosophy" but it sounded to me like "here is what philosophy really does."

I can accept that it takes a book to work out the positions in WITP?. I think Russell took over 100 pages to argue for (prove) very basic mathematical operations. I'm not sure it takes a book to acquire those positions, though (it took a book, and many, many drafts thereof, for Marx to work out the stuff in v1 of Capital, I'm not sure one needs to look at every letter of that book to get the points, though), nor does the length of time/book required to work out an argument necessarily mean anything about the summarizability of that argument.

Finally, I'm unsympathetic to most talk trying to define philosophy, not just Deleuze. There's problem that recurs across many of those I've read, including Deleuze's (actually a very Hegelian problem, seeking something like a self-grounding totality). A philosophical concept of philosophy presupposes a concept of philosophy - otherwise one can't know if one's concept is a philosophical concept or not.

take care,
Nate

[Craig]

John - it is the relation to truth and not to values that is in question when you suggest that philosophy is a sovereign discourse. Foucault says so himself a number of times: philosophy is the discourse that polices truth. Insofar as a philosophical discourse is practiced under the sign of truth, then it is also a sovereign discourse that legislates the difference - and the means of knowing that difference - between the true and the untrue. The question, then, is there a possibility of a new form or type of philosophy whose horizon is not the true? It seems to me that philosophy, in Deleuze and Guattari's sense, is about the proliferation of concepts which need not have a truth-value at all. (In what sense is the "war machine" true?) This brings us back to his much noted hated of Hegel: for him, Hegel legislated truth (absolute knowledge) and, thus, qua philosophy in Deleuze's sense was lack. This is also why he picks up on marginal strands in the history of philosophy dealing with the philosophy of the concept: Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc - including himself, Althusser, Foucault, Canguilheim and Bachelard.

[Sam]

"The greatness of a philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts. So the unique, exclusive bond between concepts and philosophy as a creative discipline must be tested in its finest details. The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy."

Having perused only a slight handful of excerpts from WITP and Deleuzean texts, I for one am hardly qualified to offer any accurate summations or assessments of the work in question. Nonetheless D & G's suggestion that philosophical concepts are "sovereign" and necessarily demarcated from propositions or statements should at least be called into question, and that needn't imply one is thereby taking sides with rash mechanists such as WVO Quine, or, Mon Dieu, joining the Republican party. The quote itself suggests that concepts are to be tested for some type of shall we say "applicability"; indeed, the quote nearly reads as a rather quaint sort of pragmatist utility criterion. And given that philosophical concepts are to be measured in some unspecified fashion, there would not appear to be much of a distinction between proposition and concept (or concept comprised of propositions; and if we are to agree a debate of concept vs proposition is merely "idle chatter," then D & G might be better read as a type of dogma of the phenomenological variety--which Heideggerian thought unfortunately seems to tends towards).

"...he picks up on marginal strands in the history of philosophy dealing with the philosophy of the concept: Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc..."(Craig, above)
hmmm, well, might as well add a couple more 'marginal' thinkers: Leibniz, Kant!!??

[Craig]

It's the strands and not the thinkers who are marginal - as the quoted sentence clearly states.

[David]

John: it is not a question of priority but of demonstrating how science and philosophy (and art) are separate but equal. To philosophy's Concept, there is Science's Function and Art's Affect, which play similar roles in thought but are distinct from the concept. It frustrates me when people think they can Evaluate a book they haven't read (carefully). I'm no genius, but at least I've read the book.

Nate: "they often sound not like they're talking about metaphors of their own creation but about things as they definitely are."

D+G: "philosophy, for its part, does not need to invoke a lived that would give only a ghostly and extrinsic life to secondary, bloodless concepts. The philosophical concept does not refer to the lived, by way of compensation, but consists, through its own creation, in setting up an event that surveys the whole of the lived no less than every state of affairs."

So in other words, they are not talking about how things really are but how they might be. But read Nancy's "The Deleuzian Fold in Thought" in Deleuze: A Critical Reader. It sets up a very interesting and helpful distinction between Deleuze's philosophy and other Continental philosophers. Here's a taste: "Deleuze does not attempt to speak about the real as an exterior referent (the thing, man, history, what is). He effectuates a philosophical real. Philosophical activity is this effectuation. For him, to create a concept is not to draw the empirical under the category: but to construct a universe of its own, an autonomous universe, an ordo et connexio which does not imitate the other, which does not represent it or signify it, but which effectuates it in its own way.... It is a philosophy of nomination and not of discourse. It is a matter of naming the forces, the moments, and the configurations, not unravelling the meaning or following it back. Naming, in itself, is not a semantic operation: the point is not to signify things but rather to index by means of proper manes the elements of the virtual universe."

Sam: "The quote itself suggests that concepts are to be tested for some type of shall we say "applicability"; indeed, the quote nearly reads as a rather quaint sort of pragmatist utility criterion." Yes, I think this is the crucial point to consider. Their criteria is a bit mysterious: "there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life" (WIP, 74). What does this mean!? It is as if one cannot judge a concept without plunging into the chaos from which it has emerged, and once this passage has been made, if life has not become more interesting, then it is a bad concept. But I'm expressing it badly. It seems to be Deleuze's most Nietzschean yes-saying moment but also his most Heideggerian; for these concepts are not deduced rationally but are Events that appear like "jolts" or "spasms" (like the lightning flash in Heidegger's Turning). I think his discussion of chance in Francis Bacon is essential to this point; I can't do it justice, but I will say that Alain Badiou in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism uses this concept of chance to develop a "wholly secularized concept of grace":

"Everything hinges on knowing whether an ordinary existence, breaking with time's cruel routine, encounters the material chance of serving a truth, thereby becoming, through sunjective division and beyond the human animal's survival imperatives, an immortal." (Badiou, 66).

Powerful stuff.

P.S. "All those debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment." How embarrasing.

[John Ransom]

Craig writes:

The question, then, is there a possibility of a new form or type of philosophy whose horizon is not the true? It seems to me that philosophy, in Deleuze and Guattari's sense, is about the proliferation of concepts which need not have a truth-value at all. [end]

Well, do these concepts really have to have no truth value? How about *effects* of truth? We know that both Nietzsche and Foucault -- and Deleuze has written excellent books on both -- try to prod us awake into the realization that truth is not absolute, that it is earthly and carnal. Nietzsche famously opens up _Beyond Good and Evil_ in the section titled 'Prejudices of philosophers' with the following question: "Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?" If the answer is, 'we want truth because it is useful for life,' then he's ready for a response: ignorance, untruth, and uncertainty can be equally useful for life. Foucault problematizes discourses that have effects of truth regarding gays, sexuality, the mad, and criminals. But that doesn't mean 'truth' is now forever ruled out of court. Criticizing one form of truth does not require the rejection of truth tout court, and to act as if it does is to backhandedly assume that truth is the metaphysical 'one' that the thinkers under consideration reject. Here's a proposition that is true, even if it is still contested: "Gays and lesbians are not mentally ill, but rather members of the community with a sexual orientation different from the straight kind." Or: "Gays and lesbians are normal people who have a same-sex orientation to sexuality and relationships." Those kinds of statements have as their background the effort, not only to delegitimate old truths but to create new ones. That's the 'child' part of Nietzsche's thumb-nail sketch of the cycle of values in Zarathustra.

[Nate]

Thanks for the reference David, I'll check out that Nancy piece.

[Discard]

Nate says: "The quote says, as I read it, that discussion will not produce advance along the lines valued by the philosopher, because of nonhomogeneity among discussants. Thus, at least in this particular register, production requires sameness." [end]

I think this hatred of discussion is best placed in the context of D&G's refusal of "communication" as philosophical model. In fact, it is discussion which requires sameness -- or more exactly, i think, it is the habit or practice of discussion which _produces_ sameness. And it is this capitulation of philosophy to communication/discussion which has enabled its happy coexistence with global capitalism. D&G set up, against this, philosophy as production of concepts (not "the concept"); against discussion, which requires sameness, is set rivalry, polemos, a kind of struggle. It is not that D&G are against productive interactions or proliferation of difference, it is that discussion/communication prevents the conditions of philosophical polemos proper to productivity. It is conversation which is legislating, it legislates with a smile; like human rights, conversation enables the appearance of expansive, productive difference in the same moment that it acts against it (see the passage on p. 107).