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87 280 1 PB PDF
Stephan Gnzel
BTK Berlin
s.guenzel@btk-fh.de
ABSTRACT. In contrast to other poststructuralist theorists, Gilles Deleuze did not seek
for a break-up with phenomenology. Instead, he followed his credo that the task of
philosophy is to take elements of existing philosophies and turn them into
something different. The same applies for his adoption of phenomenological
positions. This paper traces back the various roots of phenomenological thinking in
his writing focusing on Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Maurice MerleauPonty. Concerning Sartre, Deleuze in opposition to Foucault admits that he
learned philosophizing from Sartre by gaining insight into the necessity of
concepts to be dramatized in order to become vital. Deleuzes relation to Heidegger
is rather ambiguous since Deleuze is in favor of the idea of ontological difference,
but at the same time he criticizes the territorial implications of Heideggers history
of being. Finally, and most inspiring to Deleuze, was Merleau-Pontys concepts of
flesh and folding which was carried further by Deleuze to gain a topological
aesthetic.
He freely compared himself to a wave, a crest among other crests, and the entire
sea pulled upwards by a hemstitch of foam.1
Sartre on Merleau-Ponty
Entering into an existing wave. There's no longer an origin as starting point, but
a sort of putting-into-orbit.2
Deleuze on Surfing
There are different ways of answering the question how Deleuze's work relates
to phenomenology. One way is to describe how it relates to authors who can be
called phenomenologists, in the sense of being successors to Husserl. Another
way is to define the aim of phenomenology and then examine the parallels to
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Deleuze's work. Connected to this, the question can be posed whether his
philosophy is a questioning or a development of the phenomenology of the 20 th
century even, whether Deleuze's philosophy itself may be regarded as
phenomenology.
The following will pursue all three strategies and move from Deleuze's
relation to individual phenomenologists to the phenomenological arguments
he takes up, and to the impact Deleuze in turn has on phenomenology. This
requires some comments on the profile of his philosophy: This is done with the
help of his concepts of conceptual dramatization and territorial processes, as well as
Deleuze's notion of immanence. It is in his characterization of his philosophy as
transcendental empiricism that Deleuze comes closest to phenomenology.
Furthermore, the concept of geophilosophy is mentioned, which has to be read as
a direct answer to the later writings of Husserl.
To begin with a step which can be seen as the most explicit one: The direct
reception of phenomenological philosophers by Deleuze, whose positions and
concepts he affirms or criticizes. Three names are important in this respect:
Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Deleuze judges Sartre predominately
positively, Heidegger mostly negatively and Merleau-Ponty ambivalently.
However, it is the connection to the latter which should turn out to be the most
productive conceptually.
Deleuze understood his own practice of reading the philosophical classics as
radical hermeneutics. In his own words, his interpretations aim at taking an
author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring,
yet monstrous.3 He grants this treatment to Hume, Bergson, and especially
to Kant, when in small monographs he bestows upon their thinking a
consistence oftentimes not recognizable in their own writing. But this alone
does not justify the strong claim to an impregnation of the philosopher by the
reader. Significantly, Deleuze produces this consistency by departing from a
point in the respective philosopher's writing that has been neglected, a sort of
soft spot in that work. But in contrast to the method of deconstruction, this soft
spot is not used against the respective philosophy, thus always arriving at the
aporia of any philosophy. Rather, such a Deleuzian reconstruction or repetition
is supposed to bring forth another (differential) philosophy.
DELEUZE 1995a, p. 6.
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emphasized it allowed for another form of thinking. Deleuze's key term is that
of dramatization, which he presented to the French Association of Philosophy
at the Sorbonne in a talk accompanying his professoral thesis Difference and
Repetition which was published in 1968. Dramatization for Deleuze is the
coming alive of a concept: The metamorphosis into a bug in Kafka, for
example, is the dramatization of the concept of becoming minor according to
Deleuze. This becoming minor then serves as a critique of classical ontologies,
whose primary category of being always refers to a static universality.
With this philosophical notion of literature, Deleuze has given philosophy a
new means of analysis. In What is Philosophy?, the last book that he and Flix
Guattari co-wrote, they call this means conceptual persona: A conceptual
persona is a proto-literary figure that appears in philosophical texts not only to
illustrate a concept, but to dramatize its function. Deleuze correctly talks of a
diagrammatism. This is to say, philosophy is not about representing (the
world), but about bringing into relation the elements of a concept, and a
conceptual persona may achieve just that. The first example Deleuze and
Guattari mention is the Cartesian cogito. The ego or the 'I' in Descartes'
Meditationes does not so much represent a doubting Descartes in his room, but
introduces various states of the ego: Starting from a state of unfounded
certainty, and moving via a state of doubt towards a state of affirmed
knowledge. In this philosophical play, according to Deleuze, the I first turns
into an idiot, before becoming a knower, inasmuch as the concept of cogitans is
staged by means of the conceptual persona cogito: In this drama it is not
Descartes who doubts, but the doubting I is part of the concept of the I that
thinks.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the same applies to Husserl's figure of the alter ego:
Phenomenology, too, makes use of conceptual personae, in order to
conceptually dramatize the irreducibility of the second person. They describe
this staging as follows:
There is [] a calm and restful world. Suddenly a frightened face looms
up []. The other person appears here as neither subject nor object but
as [] a possible world, the possibility of a frightening world. This
possible world is not real, or not yet, but it exists nonetheless. [] Here
[] is a concept of the other that presupposes no more than the
determination of a sensory world as condition. On this condition the
other appears as the expression of a possible. The other is a possible
world as it exists in a face that expresses it and takes shape in a
language that gives it a reality.5
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which may already be perceived on less basal levels. Working with tools, for
example, may be described as follows: The hand seizing the hammer
deterritorializes it from its as Heidegger would say Vorhandenheit [presenceat-hand]. At the same time, the hammer is reterritorialized on the hand (as
Heidegger would say, it now is zuhanden [ready-to-hand]), while the hand
deterritorializes itself from the body in order to enter into a symbiosis with the
tool. That is to say, the hand, too, reterritorializes itself on the tool. Rather than
separating the modes of being of Vorhandenheit [presence-at-hand] and
Zuhandensein [readiness-to-hand], as Heidegger would do, Deleuze and
Guattari consider both to be the two sides of one and the same process.
When applied to Heidegger's descriptions of the functioning of the German
language, this means that the German reterritorialises the Ancient Greek,
which had first been deterritorialized in the course of the history of philosophy
when its original meaning was lost. Deleuze and Guattari criticize Heidegger
for only analysing one side of this process: For, along with the
reterritorialization of the Greek in the German language there occurs a
deterritorialization of the German. This is to say, a national language gets
estranged and becomes a philosophical mode of expression. It no longer
corresponds to German as a national identity, insofar as any kind of retrieval
may only be had in exchange for a transformation.
Thus, the people of philosophy for Deleuze and Guattari is always an inferior
people, a people in the process of becoming. Its identity must not be confused
with a specific geopolitical nationality. This danger of confusion, of course, is
located precisely in the nexus of language and nation. According to Deleuze
and Guattari, the (a priori) inferiority of philosophy can be evinced by looking
at cultural history, as philosophy as an institution i.e. science came about
in a movement of deterritorialization: In the movement of flight of the first
philosophers, who came from the despotic empires of the East to Asia Minor,
into a milieu which allowed for a formation of philosophy. Unlike Hegelian
historiography of philosophy, which views this incident as a necessary event,
Deleuze and Guattari refer to it as a contingent meeting of immanence (that is
philosophical thought as denial of transcendence) and external conditions:
Democracy and capitalism.
In Deleuze and Guattari's words, here the relative deterritorialization of early
capitalism encountered the absolute deterritorialization of thought. Exchange
economy and philosophy work immanently, thus are congenial they only
differ in their respective aims: While capitalism aims at reterritorializing itself
in an extant, majoritarian people, philosophy aims at reterritorializing itself in
an inferior people that is in the process of becoming.
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means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of
objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections
as the transition from one state to another: To extract a bloc of sensations, a
pure being of sensations.19 What they want to hint at by using Peirce's terms of
the percept and the analogously formed term affect is that art extracts the
receptive and spontaneous elements from perception, separates them from the
perceiver to let them have an autonomous existence in the work of art. This
very disposition of art is the reason that phenomenology not only can turn
towards art but has to, because for Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty art follows the
same project as phenomenology. Only it does so by means which must not be
those of language: Art practices epoch (in this case towards the carrier of
perception) and displays phenomena as such.
Deleuze writes: [P]henomenology must become the phenomenology of art
because the immanence of the lived to a transcendental subject must be
expressed in transcendent functions that not only determine experience in
general but traverse the lived itself here and now, and are embodied in it by
constituting living sensations. [] A curious Fleshism inspires this final avatar
of phenomenology and plunges it into the mystery of the incarnation. It is both
a pious and a sensual notion, a mixture of sensuality and religion, without
which, perhaps, flesh could not stand up by itself []. 20 Hence it was obvious
for Deleuze that phenomenology sooner or later would have to become a
phenomenology of art and encounter the christological topic of the flesh. In its
disposition it is the elimination of validity and transcendence, which means of
God, ego, body, world and also of the Other. What remains is the pure
immanence of becoming in the process of differentiation. Flesh (or whatever it
will be called) is in this case the substrate of becoming.
Deleuze's Czanne is named Francis Bacon. It seems as if Deleuze wanted to
call after Merleau-Ponty that in Czanne the true painter of the flesh has not
yet been found. Nearly all of Bacon's paintings display bodies that are
deformed in curious ways. The spirituality21 that Deleuze talks about is
pushed to its borders in Bacon's paintings and thus becomes all the more
visible. This is shown in a provocative way in Bacon's study of Velasquez's
portrait of the pope. Bacon transforms the static representation of power into a
kind of negative transubstantiation. The flesh is flowing from the pope's bones.
He seems to be sitting in an ejector seat that is catapulted into the air rather
than sitting on a throne as he does in Velasquez' painting. The successor of St.
19 DELEUZE & GUATTARI 1994, p. 167.
20 DELEUZE & GUATTARI 1994, p. 178.
21 DELEUZE 2003, p. 46.
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Peter is really transforming into a piece of meat, into a lump of flesh. The
expression flesh of the world can only be used metaphorically with respect
to Czanne, Bacon's images, however, are truly showing the bare flesh. At the
same time the phenomenological understanding of corporeality is being
radicalized: If the interweaving of the body with the world is taken seriously,
then the body must become indistinguishable from the world and is, quasi,
dissolved into it.
Deleuze and Guattari have chosen the term Body without Organs 22 for this
cosmic or opened body. Such a body for them designates a kind of virtual
corporeality, a condition in which the body has not been assigned to certain
tasks. It does not function, it is not a tool it is without organs. And this spot
marks the interrelation between aesthetics and ethics: If the purpose of art lies
in isolating perception in the form of percepts and affects, then the ethical
imperative demands to dispose oneself of one's organs. The phenomenological
epoch is to be practiced on one's very own body.
Concluding I would like to address one last common feature and, after
having talked about aesthetics and ethics, I would like to thematize ontology as
well. A helpful approach can be found in Merleau-Ponty's concept of folding.
It is in particular in his book on Leibniz that Deleuze joins the topological
ontology of Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty has described the being of man as a
folding of being or a fold within being. This was directed against Sartre who
defined man with reference to Kojve's reading of Hegel as a hole in being. 23
One can read about foldings or foliaceousness in the context of MerleauPonty's so called intraontology:24 This term designates the attempt to express
the Cartesian dualism of inside (thinking) and outside (being) by complex
spatial figures. The concept of folding lends a spatial figure to the notion of
intentionality. The being-to-the-world is thus understood as a protuberance, a
drapery in the fabric of the world instead of the subject as an instance
exempted from the world.
Deleuze claims, that this idea of folding has emerged in the Baroque.
Especially its architecture and mathematics pointed to an alteration in the
understanding of the world and its perception. Put into terms from art-history:
The flat space of the image is being displaced by a deep space. As the art
historian Heinrich Wlfflin has noticed in Principles of Art History (1915) for the
realm of architecture, representations using a central perspective adhere to a
thinking stressing the foreground. All figures are lined up on the same level,
22 DELEUZE & GUATTARI 1987, p. 150.
23 MERLEAU-PONTY 2012, p. 223.
24 MERLEAU-PONTY 1968, p. 225.
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space appears despite or because of its perspectivity as being flat. It was only
with the staggered arrangement in the Baroque that paintings, by means of the
placing of objects, created a substantial impression of depth. Wlfflin called
them plane type and recessional type 25 of pictorial spaces, Deleuze and
Guattari called the two stylistic extremes smooth space and striated
space,26 the latter standing for Renaissance, the former for Baroque art.
What phenomenology can learn from the descriptions of art history is,
according to Deleuze, to no longer understand being substantialistically as
either one or another, but to understand phenomena as the result of counter
rotating process of smoothing and striation (parallel to the reciprocal act of
reterritorialization and deterritorialization). Thus Deleuze is ultimately
meeting Merleau-Ponty's demands for a topological thinking, which Deleuze
thought to be realized in the work of one of Merleau-Ponty's major critics:
Michel Foucault. It is Foucault's archeology, which Deleuze considered to be
able to understand man as foldings27 of the modern episteme, as
protuberances of a discursive formation. And as a matter of fact it can be
shown that Foucault's archeology can be aligned with the phenomenological
project to reach the constituents of being by way of going back from the given.
It speaks in Deleuze's favor that he does not see a break between
phenomenology and structuralism but that he understands structuralism as an
attempt to give phenomenology a monstrous child
Translated by Philipp Hofmann
References
DELEUZE, G. 1988. Topology: Thinking Otherwise, in G. DELEUZE, Foucault,
trans. S. Hand. Minneapolis, Mn./London: University of Minnesota Press,
pp. 47-132.
1994 [1968]. Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia
University Press.
1995a [1973]. Letter to a Harsh Critic, in G. DELEUZE Negotiations, trans. M.
25 WLFFLIN 1950, p. 73.
26 DELEUZE & GUATTARI 1987, p. 353.
27 DELEUZE 1988, p. 97.
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