Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet
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Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet REVISED EDITION DIALOGUES II European Perspectives European Perspectives A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism Lawrence D. Kritzman, Editor European Perspectives presents outstanding books by leading Euro pean thinkers. \Vith both classic and contemporary works, the series aims to shape the major intellectual controversies of our day and to facilitate the tasks of historical understanding. For a complete list of books in the series, see pages 177-79 Dialogues II Revised Edition GILLES DELEUZE and CLAIRE PARNET Translated by HUGH TOMLINSON and BARBARA HABBERJAM Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, \Vest Sussex Originally published in Fr ance 1977 by Flammarion, Paris Copyright© 1977 Flammarion English edition first published 1987 Translation, preface, and translator's introduction copyright© 1987 The Athlone Press Translation, preface, and translator's introduction copyright © 2002 Continuum Copyright© 2007 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. [Dialogues. English] Dialogues II I Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet; translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. - Rev. ed. p. em. - (European perspectives) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-14134-5 (cloth: alk. paper)- ISBN 978-0-231-14135-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) I. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995-Interviews. 2. Philosophy. 3. Aesthetics. 4. Psychoanalysis and philosophy. I. Parnet, Claire. II. Title. III. Title: Dialogues 2. IV. Title: Dialogues two. V. Series B2430.D453D4313 2007 084'.1-dc22 2006031862 Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 987654321 p 10 987654321 Contents Priface to the English Edition Gilles Deleuze Vll Translators' Introduction Xl 1. A Conversation: What Is It? What Is It For? 2. On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 36 3. Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse 77 4. Many Politics 124 5. The Actual and the Virtual translated by Eliot Ross Albert 148 6. Pericles and Verdi: The Philosophy of Franc;ois Chatelet 7i·anslated by Joseph Hughes 153 Notes 167 Index 174 Preface to the English Language Edition I have always fe lt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the condi tions under which something new is produced (creativeness) .1 In so-called rationalist philosophies, the abstract is given the task of explaining, and it is the abstract that is realized in the concrete. One starts with abstractions such as the One, the Whole, the Subject, and one looks fo r the process by which they are embodied in a world which they make conform to their requirements (this process can be knowledge, virtue, history ...). Even if it means undergoing a terrible crisis each time that one sees rational unity or totality turning into their opposites, or the subject generating monstrosities. Empiricism starts with a completely different evaluation: analysing the states of things, in such a way that non-pre existent concepts can be extracted from them. States of things are neither unities nor totalities, but multiplicities. It is not just that there are several states of things (each one ofwhich would be yet another); nor that each state of things is itself multiple (which would simply be to indicate its resistance to uni fication). The essential thing, fr om the point of view of empiricism, is the noun multiplicity, which designates a set of lines or dimensions which are irreducible to one another. Every 'thing' is made up in this way. Of course a multiplicity vm Dialogues includes fo cuses of unification, centres of totalization, points of subjectivation, but as fa ctors which can prevent its growth and stop its lines. These fa ctors arc in the multiplicity to which they belong, and not the reverse. In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the clements, but what there is 'between', the between, a set of relations which are not separ able from each other. Every multiplicity grows from the middle, like the blade of grass or the rhizome. We constantly oppose the rhizome to the tree, like two conceptions and even two very different ways of thinking. A line does not go from one point to another, but passes between the points, ceaselessly bifurcating and diverging, like one of Pollock's lines. To extract the concepts which correspond to a multiplicity is to trace the lines of which it is made up, to determine the nature of these lines, to see how they become entangled, connect, bifurcate, avoid or fa il to avoid the fo ci. These lines are true becomings, which are distinct not only from unities, but from the history in which they are developed. Multiplicities are made up of becomings without history, of individuation without subject (the way in which a river, a climate, an event, a day, an hour of the day, is individualized). That is, the concept exists just as much in empiricism as in rationalism, but it has a completely different use and a completely different nature: it is a being-multiple, instead of a being-one, a being-whole or being as subject. Empiricism is fu ndamentally linked to a logic - a logic of multiplicities (of which relations are only one aspect). This book (firstpublish ed in France in 1977) aims to high light the existence and action of multiplicities in very different domains. One day Freud sensed that the psychopath ex periences and thinks multiplicities: the skin is a collection of pores, the slipper, a fieldof stitches, the bone is extracted from an ossuary ... But he constantly fe ll back on the calmer vision of a neurotic unconscious which plays with eternal abstractions (and even !vielanie Klein's partial objects still Priface to the English Language Edition 1x refer to a unity, even if it is lost, to a totality, even if it is to come, to a subject, even if it is split). It is very difficult to reach a thought of the multiple as such, which is become noun [substantij] and which does not need to refer to anything other than Itself: the indefinite article as particle, the proper name as individuation without subject, the verb in the infinitive as pure becoming, 'a Hans becoming horse ... .' It seemed to us that the great project of English and American literature was to get close to such multiplicities: it is in this literature that the question 'What is it to write?' has undoubtedly received the answer which is closest to life itself, to vegetable and animal life. It also seemed to us that the highest objective of science, mathematics and physics is multiplicity and that both set theory and the theory of spaces are still in their infancy. It seemed to us that politics is at stake as well and that in a social field rhizomes spread out everywhere under the arborescent apparatuses. This book is made up of such a collection of musings [reveries] on the fo rmations of the unconscious, on literary, scientific and political fo rmations. This book itself was 'between' in several senses. It was between two books, the Anti-Oedipus, which Guattari and I had finished, and A Th ousand Plateaus, which we had begun and which was our most ambitious, most immoderate and worst received work. This book happened, therefore, not merely between two books, but between Felix Guattari and me. And as I wrote it with Claire Parnet, this was a new point which made possible a new line-between. What mattered was not the points - Felix, Claire Parnet, me and many others, who fu nctioned simply as temporary, transitory and evanescent points of subjectivation - but the collection of bifurcating, divergent and muddled lines which constituted this book as a multiplicity and which passed between the points, carrying them along without ever going from the one to the other. Hence, the first plan fo r a conversation between two people, in which one asked questions and the other replied, no longer x Dialogues had any value. The divisions had to rest on the growing dimensions of the multiplicity, according to becomings which were unattributable to individuals, since they could not be immersed in it without changing qualitatively. As we became less sure what came from one, what came from the other, or even from someone else, we would. become clearer about 'What is it to write?' These are lines which would respond to each other, like the subterranean shoots of a rhizome, as opposed to the unity of the tree and its binary logic. This really was a book without subject, without beginning or end, but not without middle, corresponding to Miller's phrase: 'The grass grows between ... it is an overflowing, a lesson in morality ... .' Gilles Deleuze, 1986 Translators' Introduction Dialogues was commissioned as a conventional book of inter views in a series of the same name which included interviews with writers such as Roman Jakobson and Noam Chomsky. However, as Deleuze says in the preface to this edition, it soon became clear that the 'interview' fo rmat was inappropriate: that the mechanism of 'question and answer' had the effect of fo rcing him into a position in which he had nothing to say. What was needed was a fo rmat in which a 'dialogue' could take place without a fo rced, external ordering being placed on Deleuze's thought.