Jon Roffe

Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty : Immanence, univocity and phenomenology

Introduction Essays that employ a ‘compare and contrast’ methodology can be tedious, sometimes even spurious, but they can also produce a third event that is more than merely the sum of its parts. It is particularly worthwhile to try for that in regard to the work of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, because of myriad oppositions that surround and confound their reception: most obviously, the too prevalent post-structuralist vs. phenomenologist paradigm (which is also often accompanied by an epochal successor/predecessor pre-determination of the substance of any argument), but also the bifurcation between philosophers of transcendence and philosophers of immanence that it has been argued afflicts contemporary European thought. In this latter respect, Deleuze, who is heavily indebted to Spinoza and Nietzsche, and advocates pure immanence and poststructuralist ‘difference’, is considered to be on one side of the paradigm, whereas the sometimes existentialist (read transcendence) and phenomenologist of consciousness (read sameness), Merleau-Ponty, is on the other. While there is some truth to both of these broad sketches as a means of understanding aspects of contemporary European philosophy, they are far more problematic when Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty are taken as sitting on opposing sides. Ultimately we will argue that something like a coexistence of planes obtains between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, notwithstanding some initial appearances to the contrary and the fact that there has been very little secondary work examining their inter-relation. This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology (which are at least as cutting as Derrida’s more famous and prolonged engagement with phenomenology), particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze and Guattari directly engage with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of what they call the “final avatar” of phenomenology – that is, the “fleshism” that MerleauPonty proposes in his unfinished but justly famous work, The Visible and the Invisible. It will be argued that both Deleuze’s basic criticisms of phenomenology, as well as he and Guattari’s problems with the concept of the flesh, do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and

Badiou's Deleuze

1. The History of a Disjunctive Synthesis 2. Is Deleuze a Philosopher of the One? 3. Method 4. The Virtual 5. Truth and Time 6. The Event in Deleuze 7. Thought and the Subject 8. A Singular Palimpsest

Deleuze and the Non/Human

Deleuze and the Non/Human brings together leading international voices to consider the place of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in the nonhuman turn. It examines recent debates about the figure of the nonhuman in fields such as new materialism, speculative realism, animal studies, and the environmental and ecological Humanities and scrutinizes the debt to Deleuzes work that is evident in these emerging fields. Accordingly, the contributors to the volume are drawn from across the academy. Deleuzes philosophy already anticipated many of the current debates about the non/human. The proposed volume continues this engagement, extending some of these lines of investigation, in disciplines such architecture, literary studies, gender studies, philosophy, geography and cultural studies. At the same time, its goal is to open up a critical line of questioning about what the nonhuman means in Deleuzes work itself. Deleuze and the Non/Human is thus both about the non/human from Deleuzes point of view, and about Deleuze from the point of view of the various problematics that can be included in the nonhuman turn. Deleuze and the Non/Human makes a timely intervention in a broad set of interdisciplinary debates, and demonstrates once again the force of Deleuzes philosophy for our critical examination of the contemporary condition.

Time and Ground

In his 2006 After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux presents a striking and far-reaching critique of what he calls correlationism: the view that there is no epistemological access to being as it is in itself, but only knowledge of being as it is for us. On the basis of his refutation of this doctrine, he comes to propose what he takes to be the fundamental principle of rational ontology: that there is no reason why things are the way they are, and they can change at any point, equally for no reason. “Time and Ground” argues that this principle of unreason elaborated by Meillassoux cannot be as fundamental as he claims, because all change and stasis presupposes a more profound temporal order.

Lacan Deleuze Badiou

Presents a critical intervention into the key conceptual dissensions between contemporary Continental philosophys three most influential thinkers. The writings of Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou stand at the heart of contemporary thought. While the collective corpus of these three figures contains a significant number of references to each others work, these are often simply critical, obscure, or both. Lacan Deleuze Badiou guides academics working philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory through the sensitive moments in their respective work and identifies the passages, connections and disjunctions that underlie the often superficial statements of critique, indifference or accord. The first book to examine Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou together; reconstructs a fundamental conceptual history of Badiou, Deleuze and Lacans influences and intellectual context; it identifies and examines the key themes in contemporary European thought: the event, time and truth and shows how Deleuze and Badiou have followed and contravened the Lacanian intervention without reverting to pre Lacanian positions.

Introduction: Deleuze and the Non/Human

The double figure of the wasp and the orchid features at a number of key moments in the work of Gilles Deleuze. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari use this figure to illustrate a series of significant interrelated concepts, including the rhizome, becoming, de- and reterritorialization. They are fascinated by the way certain orchids display the physical and sensory characteristics of female wasps in order to attract male wasps into a trans-species courtship dance, which they describe as ‘against nature’.1 As these wasps move from flower to flower, desperately trying to copulate with them, so too does the pollen which has been transferred to their bodies. Through this seduction the wasps are unsuspectingly co-opted into the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. This is a signal example of what Deleuze and Guattari call a becoming: the wasp, enlisted into the reproductive cycle of the orchid, engages in a becoming-orchid. This is not, they stress, an act of imitation, but a genuine incorporation of the body of the wasp into the orchid’s reproduction. The same is true in turn for the orchid itself, which engages in a becoming-wasp, not by copying the female wasp, but by crossing over into the zone of indiscernibility between it and the wasp in a series of de- and re-territorializations.

Objectal Human: On the Place of Psychic Systems in Difference and Repetition

That ancient rhetorical trope, symbolic patricide, is alive and well in contemporary philosophy. One need look no further than the fate of Gilles Deleuze at the hands of those who amass beneath the plural banner of contemporary philosophy for proof of this. Of course the great, unavoidable irony is that the position of father is often only occupied post mortem, symbolic murder being at the same time the installation of this or that thinker at the head of yesterday’s table. I mean here simply that in the rush to stake new theoretical ground beyond ‘post-modernism’, hermeneutics and deconstruction, wild empiricism, correlationism — in sum, all of those avatars of imperialism our autochthonous fairy tales warn us about in such dire tones — Deleuze’s name comes to stand in for everything we must not anymore want or think, despite his demonstrable innocence in many regards. This prosecutory fervor leads to critical attacks that engage very little with the work itself, unconsciously exemplifying Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis for the critic: ‘Polemics mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studied the better’ (2008: 67).

Deleuze and the Nonhuman Turn: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz

Recently the category of the human has been besieged from all sides. Not only has it been revealed to have been complicit with the violent exclusions of those considered to be less-than-human, understood as a normative notion (women, nonheterosexuals, people of color, the disabled) but its metaphysical security has also been challenged by the flourishing of theoretical interest in the nonhuman: forces, animals, objects and plants. How do you position your own work in relation to the critique of the human — in both its liberal and metaphysical forms — and how do you see the nonhuman turn developing?

The Writing of Price

We have arrived at an elementary definition of the market as the exclusive and univocal medium of price, and a schematic concept of price as integrally quantitative and essentially contingent. It remains to determine the precise nature of the relationship between price and the market, on the one hand, and the relationship between the market and the social on the other. The latter problematic will be treated in the second half of the book, but the first will receive, in this chapter and the next, two complementary answers: that price is inscribed, and that price is intensive. These features are doubled by determinations proper to the market conceived as a medium: the market will be defined as an inscriptive and intensive surface.

Probability and Contingency

To begin with the obvious: there are many markets, and many kinds of markets. It would be easy to insist as a result that the use of the indefinite article in ‘ the market’ is nothing more than a matter of convenience, and that any attempt to elaborate a theory of the market in the singular is bound to fall into either triviality, overgeneralization, or both. Perhaps.