Deleuze, The Dark Precursor Kaufman, Eleanor Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Kaufman, Eleanor. Deleuze, The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.17314. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/17314 [ Access provided at 28 Sep 2021 20:06 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Deleuze, The Dark Precursor rethinking theory Stephen G. Nichols and Victor E. Taylor, Series Editors Deleuze, The Dark Precursor Dialectic, Structure, Being ELEANOR KAUFMAN The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore ∫ 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2012 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaufman, Eleanor. Deleuze, the dark precursor : dialectic, structure, being / Eleanor Kaufman. pages cm. — (Rethinking theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4214-0589-6 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-1-4214-0648-0 (electronic) — isbn 1-4214-0589-x (hdbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 1-4214-0648-9 (electronic) 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995. 2. Dialectic. 3. Structuralism. 4. Ontology. I. Title. b2430.d454k38 2012 194—dc23 2011047318 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. To Hank Okazaki, his family, his friends, and Ojai This page intentionally left blank [Guattari] would have to be compared to an ocean, always seeming to be mobile, with constant flashes of light. He can jump from one activity to another, he hardly sleeps, he travels, he doesn’t stop. He never ceases. He has extraordinary speeds. I would be more like a hill, I move very little, am incapable of doing two projects at once, my ideas are fixed ideas, and my rare movements are interior ones. —Gilles Deleuze, Deux régimes de fous, 218 This page intentionally left blank contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Deleuze’s Scholasticism 1 part one: dialectic 1 Solid Dialectic in Sartre and Deleuze 31 2 Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Mind 45 3 Klossowski and Orthodoxy 59 4 Cinema and the Tableau Vivant 76 part two: structure 5 Betraying Well (Ziˇˇ zek and Badiou) 87 6 Lévi-Strauss and the Joy of Abstraction 96 7 Extreme Formality and the World without Others 109 part three: being 8 French Thought and the Space of American Literature 125 9 Bartleby, the Immobile 137 10 In the Middle of Things 146 11 Midnight, or the Inertia of Being 152 12 Living Virtually in a Cluttered House 169 Notes 185 Bibliography 221 Index 235 This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments I would like to thank my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, Matt McAdam; my series editor, Victor Taylor; my copy editor, George Roupe; and my research assistants, Michelle Lee and Simchi Cohen. And I would like to acknowledge two decades of institutional support for this project, from the Duke Program in Literature, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the University of Virginia English Department, and especially the Department of Comparative Literature and Humanities Dean Timo- thy Stowell at the University of California, Los Angeles. I am also deeply indebted to a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for funding my studies in Medieval philosophy, the results of which appear here for the first time. It is too much to enumerate the many individuals, including students from four institutions where I taught courses on this material, who gave me guidance and made this project possible, but a good number of them are cited in the extensive footnotes. I will simply mention here my greatest practical-ontological models, my parents, Marvin and Marion Kaufman. And also Cesare Casarino, Brian Selsky, and E.K., the friend who, in the most terrible ordeal, alone discovered the road to Deleuze’s philosophy— and guided me onto it. Earlier versions of the chapters in this book first appeared as noted in the following list. Chapter One: ‘‘Solid Dialectic in Sartre and Deleuze,’’ Polygraph 14 (2003): 115–28. Chapter Two: ‘‘Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Mind,’’ in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, eds. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Chapter Three: ‘‘Klossowski, Deleuze, and Orthodoxy,’’ Diacritics 35:1 (2005): 47–59. xi Chapter Four: ‘‘Deleuze, Klossowski, Cinema, Immobility: A Response to Stephen Arnott,’’ Film-Philosophy 5:33 (November 2001), www.film-phi losophy.com/vol5-2001/n33kaufman. Chapter Five: ‘‘Betraying Well,’’ Criticism 46:4 (2005): 651–59. Also in Deleuzian Events: Writing History, ed. Hanjo Berressem and Leyla Haferkamp (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2009). Chapter Six: ‘‘Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze, and the Joy of Abstraction,’’ Criticism 49:4 (Fall 2007): 429–45. Chapter Seven: ‘‘Extreme Formality: Sadism, the Death Instinct, and the World without Others,’’ Angelaki 15:1 (April 2010): 77–85. Also with some thematic revision as ‘‘Ethics and the World without Others,’’ in Deleuze and Ethics, eds. Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Chapter Ten: ‘‘In the Middle of Things,’’ Polygraph 8/9 (1996): 21–25. Chapter Eleven: ‘‘Midnight, or the Inertia of Being,’’ Parallax 12:2 (2006): 98–111. Also in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, eds. Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson, and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). Chapter Twelve: ‘‘Living Virtually in a Cluttered House,’’ Angelaki 7:3 (December 2002), 159–69. xii Acknowledgments Deleuze, The Dark Precursor This page intentionally left blank introduction Deleuze’s Scholasticism gainst the tendency to privilege the joint works of Gilles Deleuze Aand Félix Guattari and questions of becoming and flux, nomadism, deterritorialization, lines of flight, and movements of all sorts so often associated with the name Deleuze, I offer this small study. At its most basic, this study argues for Deleuze as a powerful—perhaps the French twentieth century’s most powerful because most unrealized—thinker of stasis (which in Greek indicates both a standing still and an internal revo- lution or disturbance). But beyond that it claims this thought of stasis to be an outgrowth of ontological commitments, often downplayed in the critical literature and arguably by Deleuze himself, that are presented as a question of the genesis of structures, and what is beyond or outside the given structure, yet for that all the more crucial to its operation—essen- tially the zero or empty point of the structure, to draw on a structuralist vocabulary that Deleuze helps refine. It is the ongoing and implicitly gen- erative role of the empty static point (the third synthesis of time) that this study seeks to consider in all its implications. It must be emphasized that this is not a project that Deleuze himself takes up in any systematic fashion. Indeed, it is only with hindsight that one perceives a latent systematicity with the force of an epiphany, and chapter 7 on sadism and the world without others is this study’s late epiphany, so it might be advised as a starting point for the more themat- ically or methodologically oriented reader. The other chapters in their fashion engage the implications of this Deleuzian dialectical-ontological stasis structure in other domains or in juxtaposition with other thinkers. In this sense, though I couldn’t be more opposed in principle to the idea of ‘‘applying Deleuze’’ (and perpetually caution students, with little success, against such an endeavor), this study, if not exactly an application, might be considered an implication of Deleuze’s structural ontology, an implica- tion being that internal domain where the point at which the structure is 1 observable can in no way resemble its larval core, yet is only really percep- tible with that framework in mind. This larval core, which is a static and timeless one, is in some sense entirely transcendent, as my discussion of creation in the final section of this introduction outlines, but in another sense it is entirely immanent if not empirical, in a more properly Deleuzian spirit. Yet the terms ‘‘immanence’’ and ‘‘transcendence’’ do not appear with great frequency in this study simply because it seems to me that something else is at stake. The introduction argues against a vitalist read- ing of Deleuze, insofar as life itself is ultimately a formal—and bifurcated —structure, and it further suggests that much of Deleuze’s thought falls into this pattern where the formal structure exists alongside yet distinct from the topos (e.g., life) that is in question. Hence the opposition of immanent and transcendent does not fully capture this structural adja- cency. Insistence on absolute immanence cannot fail to call up the specter of a transcendent ontological remainder, and from within the transcen- dent perspective the field can only be populated with immanent examples, as it is in Scholastic thought, and it is more on this latter side of the equation that I would provocatively locate Deleuze. The term ‘‘Scholasticism’’ might understandably raise eyebrows—perhaps even more than the terms ‘‘dialectic,’’ ‘‘structure,’’ and ‘‘being’’—when associated with the name Deleuze. To be sure, Deleuze is not committed to a transcendental theology in any straightforward sense, nor is he grappling with Aristotle or engaging in disputations. Yet insofar as Deleuze is one of the philosophers in the twentieth-century French tradition most explicitly engaged with ontological questions whose stakes are enormous, and uses a method of strong distinction to outline a rigorous set of concepts, his approach and general topic are in no way diametrically opposed to Scho- lastic thought.