On Some Features of Philosophy in Salut, Deleuze!

Ulrich Meurer Becoming Line: On Some Features of Philosophy in Salut, Deleuze! Doxa opposes the conceptual ‘heights’ of philosophical writing to the ‘low’ realms of popular imagery. While a philosophical comic book thus appears as impossible hybrid, the non-conceptual or affective components of thinking and the possibility of ‘mental images’ or ‘noosings’ both challenge the division between intellectual speculation and graphic depiction. In this context, Martin tom Dieck’s and Jens Balzer’s comic book Salut, Deleuze! may at times be shrugged off as mere illustration and reductionist populari- zation of thought. Meanwhile, the comic book seems to attempt the transformation of pictorial likeness into a decidedly Deleuzian, non-individual and machine-like principle of ‘faciality’. From there, it heads for a deterritorialization of face and landscape and leaves classical concepts of codification or individuality behind. In so doing, Salut, Deleuze! ad- umbrates a graphic ‘line of flight’ and hints at philosophy’s vital connection to nonphilosophy. 1. Ascensional Psychism Thought is characterized by its diverse and manifold directions: in the ‘Eighteenth Series’ of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze delineates an exten- sive mental topography, he traces a set of axes and orientations along which philosophical thought may develop. In the process, the pre-Socratic philosopher is described as a speleologist or caver who always stays at the bot- tom of things and is immersed in the earth: Empedocles hurls himself into the crater of Mount Etna (and Diogenes Laertius asserts that only his brazen sandal comes back).1 On the other hand, there are those who do not expect lore and wisdom to come from the autochthonous deep, but “laterally, from the event, from the East”:2 the Megarians, Cynics, and Stoics are constantly thinking at and about the surface, they think amidst the quasi half-baked and ephemeral occurrences, right in the middle between the riches of profundity and the promises of idealism. And it is precisely this last concept, the realm of Platonic ideas, which marks the third and certainly most familiar direction of thought: “The popular and the technical images of the philosopher seem to have been set by Platonism: the philosopher is a being of ascents; he is the one who leaves the cave and rises up. The more he rises the more he is purified.”3 Morality, ascetic ideals, the discarnate first cause, the lofty idea of thought, all this belongs to the elevated – philosophers inhabit an intelligible heaven. 1 Cf. Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of the Philosophers, 8.69. 2 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. by Constantin V. Boundas, trans. by Mark Les- ter (London: Athlone Press, 1990), p. 129. 3 Ibid., p. 127. 198 Ulrich Meurer Although thought is thus defined by a great variety of spatial orientations, from the abyss of a volcano to the ΎϱΗΐΓΖΘЗΑϢΈΉЗȞ, although it might take place here and there or up and down, the prevalent image of philosophy is that of a cloudy apogee. From this point of view, i.e. from the per- spective of nonphilosophy, there is neither difference nor distance between the height of Plato, the depth of Empedocles and the middle of Diogenes: all is altitude. Moreover, if we assume for the moment that such position reckonings cannot be anything other than relative and retroactive, it be- comes obvious that it is ‘popular culture’ and its inherent doxa which allots height to the ‘high culture’ of philosophy and defines its own position in contrast to it. 2. Show and Tell Socrates doesn’t write, but involves people in dialogues. Plato writes these dialogues down. Kant writes from early in the morning to his lunch hour, afterwards he confines himself to reading. Nietzsche writes aphorisms using a typewriter which was sent from Denmark in 1881, Derrida knows that even what is not written is writing. Deleuze and Guattari write together, and no one understands how this is possible… The written word is typical for philosophy. Notable, however, is every philosophy outside of writing, when someone jumps into a volcano or, for love of the moon and stars, falls into a well – while the witty Thracian maidservant’s laugh at the philosopher’s tumble nevertheless attests to her popular notion of thinking.4 Even further outside philosophy than these anecdotes (the an-ekdoton being precisely what remains unedited, what is not written down or ‘given out’), even farther away lies the image. Philosophy writes, but it hardly ever produces images. And whenever it does, its images are still located inside the realm of lan- guage: allegory, myth, symbol, hypotyposis (Kant’s hand-mill…).5 Therefore, what is a ‘philosophical comic book’ supposed to be? Can it exist at all? According to Scott McCloud’s theory of comics in the form of a comic, that would be an impossible hybrid, for occidental civilization is based on the fundamental decision between writing and image, while graphic novels and comic books tend to override this decision with their characteristic indecisiveness. To him, cultural evolution means segregation until pure writing and, on the other hand, pure images appear. One is the domain of concepts, the other belongs to the field of the visual, while pop 4 Cf. Plato, Theaitetos, 174a. 5 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 352..

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