Anti-Oedipus became a sensation upon publication and a widely celebrated work that shifted contemporary philosophy. It is seen as a key text in the micropolitics of desire, alongside Lyotard's Libidinal Economy
The traditional understanding of desire assumes an exclusive distinction between "production" and "acquisition." This line of thought—which has dominated Western philosophy throughout its history and stretches from Plato to Freud and Lacan—understands desire through the concept of acquisition, insofar as desire seeks to acquire something that it lacks. This dominant conception, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is a form of philosophical idealism. Alternative conceptions, which treat desire as a positive, productive force, have received far less attention; the ideas of the small number of philosophers who have developed them, however, are of crucial importance to Deleuze and Guattari's project: principally Nietzsche's will to power and Spinoza's conatus. Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is a positive process of production that produces reality.
Difference and Repetition is a work of prodigious conceptual invention in which Deleuze draws upon his earlier readings of Plato, Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche and Kant, as well as elements of contemporary science and art, to weave together a physics and a metaphysics of difference. If this amounts to a critique of the philosophy of representation which has dominated European thought since Plato.. by proposing a retrospective analysis on the basis of an alternative.... 'Representation' is replaced by the expression or actualization of Ideas, where this is understood in terms of the complex notion of 'different/ciation'. The system is 'grounded' only in the repetition of difference, or the repetition of Ideal problems, which precisely amounts to a non-ground or groundlessness.
For example, the term 'multiplicity', which is now well established in the translations of Deleuze's work, is derived from the French mathematical term multiplicité used to refer to those Riemannian objects which English mathematicians would call 'manifolds'.
There are certainly many dangers in invoking pure differences which have become independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. The greatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed...
However, Hofstadter’s clever meta-games in his book’s structure and style are made explicit, a pedagogical magician who explains each step of the trick as she performs it. Deleuze doesn’t explain his method, but rather assumes that you will be affected by his magic trick.
Also like Nietzsche, Deleuze is uninterested in simply listing propositions. He intends for his work to shape the reader, and to lead the reader to share his concerns.
To the extent that the secondary literature fetishizes Deleuzian terminology (smooth/striated, rhizome, molar/molecular, nomadic) it is completely misunderstanding this aspect of his method. Elie During said that you can’t merely refer to ‘the multiple’; ‘the multiple’ still had to be done.
Deleuze proposes an alternative metaphysics that eschews any transcendence in favor of what he terms a ‘transcendental empiricism’; a metaphysics of immanence .
**It’s inadequate and insufficient to simply name ‘immanence’ and expect one’s audience, steeped in identitarian concepts their entire lives, to suddenly be capable of thinking the world through difference and generativity; to imagine the individuation processes that constitute the ‘becoming’ of an individual, instead of the conformance of the individual to a type, a ‘being’.**
Deleuze attacks Hegel and others in what we can call—though Deleuze did not—the “identitarian” tradition first of all by means of a radicalized reading of Kant...
Deleuze criticizes Kant for copying the transcendental field in the image of the empirical field. That is, empirical experience is personal, identitarian and centripetal; there is a central focus, the subject, in which all our experiences are tagged as belonging to us.
Deleuze evades the challenge of deriving an “ought” from an “is” by instead seeking to find the problematic that describes a system and finding ‘lines of flight’ that indicate potential disequilibria. He relies here upon Spinoza’s Ethics, second only to Nietzsche as his strongest influence. In the Ethics, Spinoza proposed a world in which power, specifically power to affect and be affected, was primary
Later, these ideas would be reframed in the terms of autopoieitic systems, as Guattari engaged with Maturana and Francisco Varela’s work in systems theory.
Spinoza’s ethic of joy, of increasing one’s power to affect and be affected, was joined by Deleuze with Nietzsche’s will to power and a reformulated eternal return
Later, these ideas would be reframed in the terms of autopoieitic systems, as Guattari engaged with Maturana and Francisco Varela's work in systems theory.
Every GitHub pull request is an act of deterritorialization, and every merge is one of re-territorialization.
While leftist illusions about the new president were still intact, he even wrote a speech on culture that Mitterrand delivered at the Sorbonne, which in retrospect is rather like Noam Chomsky penning a speech for Bill Clinton.
It was clear from an early stage that this teacher of high school philosophy was destined to become one of the great antiphilosophers of Western civilization, in an honorable lineage stretching from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud to Wittgenstein, Adorno, Benjamin, and Derrida.
In ditching Marx and Freud for Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, he was already in the 1960s heralding the reaction against so-called grand philosophical narratives that, in the wake of the failed politics of 1968, would become the hallmark of postmodernism
There are those who regard Deleuze as a philosophical genius and those who see his work as a political cul-de-sac. There are also perverse creatures like myself who hold both views simultaneously. Of all the dissident French thinkers of modern times, Deleuze was the most obvious heir to the great Gallic lineage of anarchic avant-gardism, with origins in Rimbaud and Georges Bataille. His work is also ridden with Romantic-vitalist error, the influence of which can be found in any off-the-peg piece of postmodern theory today. The dogmas are tediously familiar: All multiplicity, decentering, or dispersion is positive, while all unity or homogeneity is suspect; all marginality is creative, while all majorities and consensuses are oppressive; small-scale political action is to be commended, while large-scale, state-centered projects are to be treated with thorough-going skepticism.
Simply, the time has come for us to ask what philosophy is. We had never stopped asking this question previously, and we already had the answer, which has not changed: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.
The philosopher is the concept's friend; he is potentiality of the concept. That is, philosophy is not a simple art of forming, inventing, or fabricating concepts, because concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries, or products. More rigorously, philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts...the object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new. Because the concept must be created, it refers back to the philosopher as the one who has it potentially, or who has its power and competence.
Also, if you haven’t read Deleuze or his commentators, you might find yourself an unlikely ally, especially as interpreted by his more scientifically oriented American friends like DeLanda, Protevi, and Shaviro. They’re working toward a version of realism coherent with modern science which is not as patently silly as OOO :)
Before getting to grips with Deleuze’s understanding of ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’, the most important term to understand is the concept. As we’ll come to see, both difference and repetition are, in some ways, opposed to the idea of the concept. What is a concept? Very roughly, a concept is a ‘general’ idea that is ‘instantiated’ in particular instances of that idea. For instance(!), you have a concept 'horse', on the one hand, and then particular horses, horses which actually exist, on the other. The idea is that the concept always remains the same such that for the diversity of actually existing horses, there is always one and the same concept 'horse'. The concept ‘horse’ in other words, is defined by its identity. The concept ‘horse’ is identical across all the particular instances of actual horses (however much the latter vary).