Gilles Deleuze

The fold : Leibniz and the baroque

1. Growth in Prayer 2. Prayer that is Jesus 3. The Human response to God 4. The Way to perfection 5. Doctor of the Dark Night 6. Sustained Passion 7. Alone with Him Alone 8. A Stark Encounter with the Human Condition 9. Consecrated Life.

Literature and Life

To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the illformed or the incomplete, as Witold Gombrowicz said as well as practiced. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or -vegetable, becomesmolecule, to the point of becoming-imperceptible. These becomings may be linked to each other by a particular line, as in J. M. G. Le Clezios novels; or they may coexist at every level, following the doorways, thresholds, and zones that make up the entire universe, as in H. P. Lovecrafts powerful oeuvre. Becoming does not move in the other direction, and one does not become Man, insofar as man presents himself as a dominant form of expression that claims to impose itself on all matter, whereas woman, animal, or molecule always has a component of flight that escapes its own formalization. The shame of being a man-is there any better reason to write? Even when it is a woman who is becoming, she has to become-woman, and this becoming has nothing to do with a state she could claim as her own. To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or undifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a

From sacher-masoch to masochism

Sacher-Masoch (1835–95) was born in Lemberg, Galicia, and was of Spanish and Bohemian descent. His family held official positions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his father was director of police in Lemberg. The theme of the police will haunt the work of Masoch. But above all the problem of minorities (Jewish, Little-Russian, etc.) will be one of his principal sources of inspiration. Masoch participates in the grand tradition of German Romanticism. He conceived his work not as perverse, but as generic and encyclopedic: a vast cycle which was to constitute a natural history of humanity, under the general title The Legacy of Cain. Of the six envisaged parts (love, property, money, the state, war, death), only the first two were finished. But right from the beginning, love for Masoch could not be separated from a complex with cultural, political, social and ethnological elements. Masoch’s tastes in amorous matters are well known. Muscle appeared to him as an essentially feminine substance; he wanted the woman he was in love with to wear furs and carry a whip. This woman is never sadistic by nature; rather, she is slowly persuaded and trained for her role. He wanted to be bound to her by a contract with precise clauses; one of these clauses, for instance, required him to dress up as a servant and take a new name. He had a desire for a third party to intervene between him and the woman he loved, and he acted to make this happen. Venus in Furs, his most famous novel, presents a detailed contract. His biographer Schlichtegroll and Krafft-Ebing reproduced other examples of Masoch’s contracts (cf. Psychopathia Sexualis 238–40). It is Krafft-Ebing who, in 1869, will give the name of masochism to a perversion – to the great displeasure of Masoch himself. Sacher-Masoch was by no means an auteur maudit. He was honoured, fêted and decorated. He was celebrated in France, receiving a triumphant reception and the Légion d’honneur, and was fêted in the Revue des Deux Mondes. But he died saddened by the neglect into which his work had fallen. • • •

Postskriptum über die Kontrollgesellschaften

Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995) ist neben Michel Foucault der profilierteste Vertreter einer franzosischen Philosophie, die auch fur die Sozialwissenschaften von erheblicher Relevanz ist. Die Spannweite seiner Arbeiten ist auserordentlich gros und reicht von einer ausgefeilten Kino-Theorie („Cinema 1: L’image-mouvement“, 1983; deutsche Fassung: „Das Bewegungs-Bild. Kino 1“, 1989; „Cinema 2: L’image-temps“, 1985; deutsche Fassung: „Das Zeit-Bild. Kino 2“, 1991) bis zu grundsatzlichen Betrachtungen uber Geisteskrankheiten und Kapitalismus (mit Felix Guattari: „Anti-Odipus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie I“, Frankfurt 1974; mit Felix Guattari: „Tausend Plateaus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie II“, Berlin 1992).

DESCRIPTION OF WOMAN: for a philosophy of the sexed other1

Woman does not yet have a philosophical status. This is an urgent problem. The philosophies of the Other (Autrui) are strange to us, we are ill at ease with them, and for a simple reason: the world proposed to us by the Other is an asexual world. Reciprocities, communications, communions – these mixtures of consciousnesses are the extremely pure work of souls. Sartre seemed to have seen this insufficiency in the philosophies of the Other when he criticized Heidegger for having allowed “human reality” to be asexualized.2 So Sartre himself devoted a chapter to desire, and another to love. But the progress is only apparent. What now becomes sexed is the person who makes love – it is the lover and not the beloved. The beloved is sexed only insofar as he or she is in turn a lover. We find here the classic illusion of a reciprocity of consciousnesses: the Other would simply be another “I” that has its own structures only in the sense that it is itself a subject. But this is to dissolve the problem of the Other. It is as if the lover alone were sexed, as if it were the lover who conferred the opposite sex on the beloved; moreover, it is as if there were no essential difference between habitual love and homosexuality. Such a vision is contrary to any sincere description, in which it is the Other as such – and not another “I” – that would be revealed in its sex, that would be objectively lovable and would impose itself on the lover. Phenomenology must be a phenomenology of the beloved. Sartre’s world is much more desolate than the other: a world of objectively asexual people, with whom one can only think of making love – an absolutely monstrous world. The great principle: things do not have to wait for me in order to have their signification. Or, at least, I have no consciousness of their having waited for me – which from the descriptive point of view amounts to the same thing. Signification is inscribed objectively in the thing: for example, there is fatigue, and that is all. There is this large round sun, this uphill street, this tiredness in the small of the back. As for myself, I am here for nothing (Moi je n’y suis pour rien). It is not me who is fatigued. I do not invent anything, I do not project anything, I make nothing come into the world; I am nothing, not even a nothingness; above all, I am not “nothing but an expression.” I do not attach my little significations to things. The object does not have a signification, it is its signification: fatigue. Now this strictly objective

THE IDEA OF GENESIS IN KANT'S AESTHETICS

“The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics,” which appears here in English translation, was first published in 1963 in the French journal Revue d’Esthetique. Earlier that same year, Gilles Deleuze had written a short book entitled Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties.1 “The Idea of Genesis” takes up and develops a number of themes in this earlier work, and provides an essential complement to its analysis of the Critique of Judgment. The essay is not only a remarkable contribution to aesthetic theory and Kant studies, but constitutes an important element of Deleuze’s lifelong engagement with Kant’s work. Kant’s Critical Philosophy, though ostensibly an introductory text, in fact approaches Kant’s thought in a rather novel manner. In Kant, the traditional problem of the relation between subject and object is internalized; it becomes the problem of the relation between subjective faculties that differ in nature (receptive sensibility and active understanding). This is the meaning of Kant’s Copernican revolution: the finite subject becomes constitutive. But this raises an entirely new philosophical problem, which Deleuze points to in the subtitle of his book: our faculties differ in nature, and yet they are exercised harmoniously. How is this possible? The “doctrine of the faculties,” and the nature of the various accords entered into by our faculties, is the thread that Deleuze follows through the whole of the critical philosophy. Deleuze’s argument, in brief, is as follows. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the faculties enter into a harmonious accord under the legislation of the understanding in the speculative interest. In the Critique of Practical Reason, the faculties enter into a different accord under the legislation of reason in the practical interest. What Kant discovers in the Critique of Judgment, however, is that the regulated accords of the first two critiques are possible only because the faculties are first of all capable of a free and indeterminate accord. In Deleuze’s reading, this is the “great discovery” of the third critique: every harmonious accord of the faculties finds its ground in a fundamental discord of the faculties, a “discordant accord.”2 “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics” pursues this same theme in the context of a more detailed reading of the Critique of Judgment. The essay goes beyond the material contained in Kant’s Critical Philosophy in at least two important respects. On the one hand, it provides a remarkable reconstruction of the “order of reasons” found in Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.” In doing so, it attempts to reconcile some of the fundamental difficulties of the text (Why is the analytic of the sublime inserted

Statements and profiles

Deleuze wrote this essay in 1946 at the age of twenty-one. It is the direct continuation of his first essay, “Description of Woman.” In that previous essay Deleuze was attacking Sartre’s notion of love. This continuation starts where the first essay left off: “Impurity belongs to the dynamic of woman or, if one prefers, to a moral description.” This is the question that Deleuze takes up in “Statements and Profiles.” Impurity and vice only have a place because there is a division between nature and culture. For Deleuze this is the caesura that opens up the possibility of love. The question addressed in this essay is: what fascinates us about the Other? Sartre gave his answer when he interpreted Proust as follows: “Through her consciousness Albertine escapes Marcel even when he is at her side, and knows relief only when he gazes on her while she sleeps. It is certain then that the lover wishes to capture a ‘consciousness.’” Deleuze opposes this interpretation by Sartre with another interpretation of Proust. Deleuze finds in Proust a fascination with the involuntary signs that the beloved emits, the natural signs that do not express a consciousness. In short, it is alienated nature that fascinates us in the beloved and not the consciousness of a person. From the side of culture the interruption of nature into the behavior of the subject can only appear in the form of a vice. In this essay Deleuze profiles a series of vices that expose the involuntary passions normally masked by culture. Culture in this essay is represented by friendship with the male-Other that makes the world exterior by alienating us from the immediate world of nature. The signs that pass between friends are voluntary and empty. They reveal the solitary and mediocre existence of the subject within culture. Vice, on the other hand, reveals a fascinating world of nature restored, of a returning to immediacy of things to themselves. This is why the vice of the Other is so fascinating: it reveals an interior world of nature from which we are excluded by culture. So, in contrast to Sartre, Deleuze posits the interior world of the Other that is distinct from the consciousness of the Other. He locates it in the essential secret of the involuntary signs. This is why Deleuze is so concerned with slander in this essay. Words no longer have the function of designating things; rather, they become signs that wound the body. They have been denuded of their cultural value and have been returned to nature. They seek to gilles deleuze

The Movement-Image: Bergsonian Lessons on Cinema: Lecture 18, 11 May 1982

Lecture given by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze at the University of Paris 8, 11 May 1982. This is lecture 18 of a 21-lecture seminar Deleuze taught between November 1981 and June 1982.

Supplement: on the work of david hume

In this supplement to a work co-authored with André Cresson, David Hume, sa vie, son œuvre, left untranslated until now, Deleuze lays the groundwork for what he will later develop as an “ethics without morality.” Contrary to morality, ethics engenders its general rule for action out of the immanence that grants it the power to affect and to be affected, that is, to increase or decrease its capacity to compose new empowering relations between beings, and between beings and the world. The power to act is synonymous with the capacity to imaginatively create relations, in order to exist. In this way, the imagination reveals its ontological significance. Here we discern Deleuze’s Humean impulse encountering a fundamental Nietzscheanism. The translator’s introduction attempts to make explicit his specific philosophical motive, at this point only formative but, eventually, foundational for his later thought.