Deleuze and the Author By Niall KENNEDY Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Kingston University for the award of PhD. October 2016. Acknowledgements. I wish to thank my supervisors, Professor Peter Hallward and Professor Eric Alliez, for their invaluable guidance, advice and support. This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of Catherine and Dermot Kennedy, to whom I owe a very great deal. I also wish to thank Maire Kennedy, Sorcha Nic Lochlainn, and Caoimhe Nic Lochlainn for support, advice, comfort and reassurance. This dissertation is dedicated to James P. and Mamie Kennedy, and to Daniel Joseph and Margaret McLaughlin. Abstract This thesis argues that Gilles Deleuze, as philosopher, reader, and critic, recognised the central importance of a defined authorial subjectivity, closely associated with a philosophical or intellectual project, and that his analyses of philosophy, literature, visual art and cinema were shaped and determined by his recognition of that authority. In this respect, my reading challenges those critics who find in the work of Deleuze an assault on ‘author-centric’ interpretations of texts, and more generally on the concept of a unified self, and which uphold experimentation on the part of the reader or critic rather than interpretation. I argue that Deleuze has a coherent and meaningful conception of an author as a consciousness which persists through time, learns, plans and makes projects, differentiates itself from the work of other authors, is inspired and creative, takes positions in relation to the inheritance of artistic and philosophical traditions, and which is capable of entering into collaboration with others. Through close reading of Deleuze’s texts, I demonstrate that he consistently relies on the authorial function to impose unity and coherence on the distinctive - and often remarkable - body of work of an individual theorist or practitioner. I argue that the historical, political and social situation of an author is of great importance to the analysis of a text. Finally, unlike Roland Barthes or other critics invested in the ‘death’ or displacement of the author, I argue that Deleuze considers the competing interpretations of a text advanced by the reader or spectator to be of little or no importance. Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 The Key Features of the Authorial Function……………………………………………. 4 Genius, Originality, and the Involuntary Production of Meaning……………. 23 The Death of the Author and the Birth of the Reader…………………………….. 33 Subjectivation, Individuation and the Rhizome-Book…………………………….. 37 Chapter 1: Deleuze and the Philosophical Author…………………………………. 44 The Problem of Philosophy……………………………………………………………………. 47 Originality, Opposition, Critique……………………………………………………………. 59 The Philosopher Within Time……………………………………………………………….. 74 Chapter 2: Deleuze and the Literary Author…………………………………………. 82 ‘The Search’ and the Apprenticeship of a Style…………………………………….. 83 Method, Choice and the Spider……………………………………………………………. 98 The Authorial Limit-Function……………………………………………………………….. 116 Chapter 3: Deleuze and Visual Artists…………………………………………………… 123 Intention, Will and the Preparation of the Painting……………………………… 126 Genius, Originality and Significance…………………………………………………….. 139 The Political Context of the Visual Artist……………………………………………… 148 Chapter 4: Deleuze and Cinema………………………………………………………….. 155 Style, Technique, Form……………………………………………………………………….. 157 Montage – Philosophical and Aesthetic………………………………………………. 168 Collaboration……………………………………………………………………………………… 184 Personal History, Fabulation and the Intercessor………………………………. 197 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………. 207 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………. 219 List of Abbreviations Works by Gilles Deleuze (ES) Empiricism and Subjectivity (NP) Nietzsche and Philosophy (PS) Proust and Signs (DR) Difference and Repetition (LS) The Logic of Sense (S) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (FB) Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation (C1) Cinema 1 – The Movement-Image (C2) Cinema 2 – The Time-Image (F) Foucault (ECAC) Essays Critical and Clinical (DI) Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (TRM) Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Works by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (AO) Anti-Oedipus (K) Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (ATP) A Thousand Plateaus (WIP) What is Philosophy? Works by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet (D) Dialogues II Introduction My thesis will seek to make an intervention in a major theoretical debate on the continued importance of the figure of the author, and on what Michel Foucault terms ‘the authorial function’, to our understanding of philosophy and art, an intervention which takes as its focus the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s philosophy is often characterised as both ‘anti-identitarian’ and anti-hierarchical. This is because in his philosophical texts, notably Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that we should think of difference in itself, rather than as a secondary or negative moment in the reproduction of identity. His well-known critique of representation in art, and thought more generally, starts from his premise that ‘infinite representation does not free itself from the principle of identity as a presupposition of representation’ (DR,60). A philosophy with difference at its centre, on the other hand, which would thus seek to free itself, at least to some extent, from this principle of identity, presents a challenge to any model of the production of thought which depends on identities that are fixed and stable, a question to which I shall return in this introduction. In his interviews and short opinion pieces, too, Deleuze often rails against the position in France of public intellectuals, educators and opinion-formers, whose exalted position he views as both an outgrowth of state power, and the cause of a society trained to respect authority and ‘good sense’. At first glance then, the reader might expect Deleuze to be engaged in those currents of mid-twentieth century French thought which downplay or even attempt to nullify the significance of the author altogether. Instead, one might think he would celebrate the free play of interpretation enabled by an alternative critical paradigm which emphasises the salient importance of the response of the diverse body of readers or 1 spectators to our understanding of a given philosophical text or work of art. However, I shall argue that Deleuze still has a strong reliance on a quasi-transcendental authorial function, the operation of which determines his approach to the texts of the philosophers and artists he writes about, and in particular, determines his injunctions to his readers on the correct way to read the texts he analyses. Deleuze often does not acknowledge – and sometimes explicitly denies – the role played by the authorial function in his own philosophy. He states for example in an interview on the subject of the French ‘New Philosophers’ that ‘the expressing subject takes itself all the more seriously in relation to empty propositions’. He thus contrasts his own work with the vanity and emptiness of the New Philosophers: ‘We’ve been trying to uncover creative functions which would no longer require an author-function for them to be active (in music, painting, audio-visual arts, film, and even philosophy)’ (TRM, 139). Nevertheless, without an understanding of the central importance of the figure of the author to Deleuze’s own methods of analysis, I believe that we cannot properly understand his diverse range of texts on philosophy, literature, visual art or cinema. Deleuze in fact often uses an author-centric approach to structure his own body of work, given that a great many of his books deal principally with the thought or work of one philosopher or artist only, and contain a proper name in their titles, sometimes in association with a major concept. The fact that he often chooses to structure his analyses of broad fields of thought around one ‘great name’ is indicative of an approach to philosophy and art that both uses the figure of the author to imprint meaning on a text or a field of thought, and to limit the acceptable range of critical responses to it. 2 This thesis therefore will intervene in a crowded and growing field of critical work on Deleuze. I believe that part of its original argument is its treatment of Deleuze in relation to the authorial function in general – that is, as it exists in a broadly similar form across his whole body of work, in relation to all the different branches of thought that he writes about. Most scholars implicitly follow the methodology Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari outline in What is Philosophy? in which they analyse three different branches of thought (art, philosophy, science) separately, but draw parallels between them. By the same logic, much of the critical commentary on Deleuze and the author or authors focuses exclusively on Deleuze’s relationship to only one class of thinker: philosophers, novelists, film-makers, artists and so on 1. Even that minority of critics, such as Julie Kuhlken, who gesture towards bridging this division in the literature by positing intermediate classes of thinker, such as ‘artist-philosopher’, do not fundamentally challenge the original distinction. Instead, Kuhlken suggests that an ‘artist-philosopher’ merely denotes a philosopher who works in close association with an artist, using his or her work as a resource. ‘To call someone an artist-philosopher