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Angelaki Deleuze and Guattari's Last Enigmatic Message This article was downloaded by: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] On: 4 March 2011 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 911796916] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Angelaki Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713405211 Deleuze and Guattari's Last Enigmatic Message Isabelle Stengers To cite this Article Stengers, Isabelle(2005) 'Deleuze and Guattari's Last Enigmatic Message', Angelaki, 10: 2, 151 — 167 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09697250500417399 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250500417399 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 10 number 2 august 2005 experimenting with what is philosophy? or many, Gilles Deleuze’s last message, What Fis Philosophy?, written together with Felix Guattari, came as a surprise, even as something of a disappointment. Indeed, in What is Philosophy? we face a strong differentiation between the creations which are proper to philo- sophy, to science, and to art. I will leave art aside and concentrate on the differentiation between philosophy as a creation of concepts, and science as dealing with functions. More precisely, I will try to approach the striking affirmation that concepts isabelle stengers and functions may well intersect, but only after each has achieved its own specific self-fulfilment. ‘‘It is in their full maturity, and not in the process DELEUZE AND of their constitution, that concepts and functions necessarily intersect, each being created by their GUATTARI’S LAST 1 own specific means.’’ ENIGMATIC MESSAGE This affirmation, proposed without any expla- nation, has caused many to wonder or even to feel betrayed. Deleuze and Guattari were associated with the affirmation of productive connexions, the creation of deterritorializing processes escaping This question will be my starting point. But I fixed identities, transgressing boundaries and static will not stay within Deleuze and Guattari’s text classifications, destroying the power of exclusive but rather follow Deleuze’s own advice: we disjunction, that is the either/or alternatives, such should be interested in tools for thinking, not as, for instance, doing either science or philosophy. in an exegesis of ideas. An idea is always engaged Many would have anticipated a joyful celebration in what he called a matter, always a specific one. Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 22:32 4 March 2011 of a free experimental interplay between scientific An idea needs to be so engaged in order for the references and philosophical ones. Some would how and the why this idea indeed matters, have taken for granted that the open character of the kind of difference it makes, to come into the process of the constitution of scientific enun- processual existence, what Deleuze calls ‘‘actua- ciations would have been emphasized, as well as its lization’’ or ‘‘effectuation.’’ This is all the more undetermined boundaries with politics, econom- so when we deal with the enigma of a choice: the ics, cultural imperialism, and so on. Why did they ‘‘why’’ of this choice should not lead back to choose to produce a seemingly ‘‘classical picture,’’ the authors’ intentions; it is a question that puts with a mature science facing a mature philosophy, the reader of What is Philosophy? at risk, a as illustrated by ‘‘great philosophers’’? question the answer to which must be created ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/05/020151^17 ß 2005 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250500417399 151 last enigmatic message and effectuated following a line that belongs specific ‘‘bad will,’’ what forces it to think and neither to the initiators nor to the reader but create, as opposed to goodwill, being allowed to happens ‘‘between them.’’ think by consensual evidence. Even the joyful Not commenting but effectuating means experi- affirmation of productive connexions may turn menting with a line that is not that of the book, but into ‘‘goodwill,’’ leading ‘‘to an absolute disaster which, if the effectuation is not a failure, should for thought whatever its benefits might be, connect different aspects of this book that other- of course, from the viewpoint of universal wise would appear as independent. The effectua- capitalism.’’5 tion line I will experiment with stems from my The experimentation on What is Philosophy? I conviction that, in spite of the seemingly ‘‘classi- will propose stems from this guess. I will try and cal’’ outlook of What is Philosophy?, which address disappointed Deleuzian ‘‘friends,’’ who disappointed many readers, this book may well wonder about Deleuze’s suddenly ‘‘acritical’’ turn, be the most ‘‘political’’ of Deleuze’s books.2 It is who deplore the fact that he seems to have his one book that addresses its reader as if he were suddenly forgotten he has been thinking all his perhaps a friend, but at that twilight hour ‘‘when life ‘‘against’’ the image of thought associated with one distrusts even the friend,’’ even the one who dominant philosophy, and has chosen to celebrate had most enthusiastically followed the great open- all ‘‘great philosophers.’’ I will experiment with ing of possibilities that Deleuzian themes have the feeling that, at this twilight hour, What is inspired. Here, the crucial problem may well be Philosophy? asks us to consider what Deleuze’s that ‘‘we lack resistance to the present,’’3 and to favourite ‘‘conceptual persona,’’ the idiot, keeps resist here does not mean to criticize or to saying while others hurry towards consensual denounce but to construct. goals: that ‘‘there may be something more For instance, when we read that ‘‘philosophers important.’’ ‘‘Something more important’’ does have not been sufficiently concerned with the not mean something which would transcend our 4 nature of the concept as philosophical reality,’’ disagreements and reconcile us around a sacred the point would not be, or would not only be, to cause. The idiot is unable to mobilize or convince; deal with a question of special interest for perhaps he can slow down the mobilization and philosophers, a closure on a professional domain, have some mobilized certainties stutter. it would be part of the problem of this lack of The idiot will never acknowledge that some- resistance, a problem that science and probably art body has correctly understood what was more also share, entailing the very strong likelihood of important. It is the task for everyone to learn and their destruction. But the point is also not ‘‘how to feel where and how his or her slowing down and avoid destruction’’ as if it were the central stuttering actually happened. My experimental question, as if our world would lose its very soul reading stems from the feeling that Deleuze and if philosophy, or science, or art were to become Guattari were both addressing their epoch, that is part of a destroyed past. If, as I read it, What is their friends, and distrusting it and them, asking Philosophy? is indeed a political book, the point is Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 22:32 4 March 2011 us to think with the epochal fact that bad will as that learning how to resist is a task which tolerates such can no longer be taken for granted. This is no economy. No great masterword (mot d’ordre) why my reading will take the reader to a still more designating a common enemy may spare those who belong to a threatened practice from asking acritical position. It may well be that what we what kind of specific vulnerability this enemy is vitally need now is to honour what forces us to exploiting since he (or it) does not need to use escape goodwill and consensual thought, what violent, repressive means. Thus the seemingly indeed causes us to diverge and to think, each modest task of a ‘‘pedagogy of the concept’’ may with diverging means. And it may well be that well be the only way for philosophy to situate itself what we have to honour will designate us as among other threatened practices, each from the survivors, having to disentangle ourselves from point of view of its own specific capacity to resist. all the words which designated our survival as For each of them, the point would be its own something we did deserve. 152 stengers matters of fact and states of affairs dramatize this challenge I will designate them all using the opposite term that I suspect the Let us first address the question of scientific translators wished to avoid: ‘‘matters of fact.’’ functions, and begin with a small problem It seems that Deleuze and Guattari accept that of translation. When the translators of What is functions may be defined by a reference which Philosophy? dealt with the claim that scientific would be characterized as a ‘‘matter of fact,’’ that functions refer to ‘‘des e´tats de choses,’’ they chose is as ‘‘holding together’’ by themselves, and not as to translate ‘‘e´tats de choses’’ as ‘‘states of affairs.’’ obtaining their definition from the states of affairs This has rather strange consequences when those and the power dimensions that those states of ‘‘states of affairs’’ are contrasted with ‘‘things’’ affairs include.
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