DELEUZE’S ‘Written by the most respected and original scholars in the field, this book will prove essential reading for all those who want to understand in a clear, accessible and more nuanced way Deleuze’s complex and multi-faceted relation to key (but sometimes forgotten) figures in the history of philosophy. I cannot imagine a better introduction to Deleuze as philosopher par excellence than this superb collection.’ Elizabeth Grosz, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is increasingly gaining the prestige that its PHILOSOPHICAL LINEAGE PHILOSOPHICAL astonishing inventiveness calls for in the Anglo-American theoretical context. His wide-ranging works on the history of philosophy, cinema, painting, literature and politics are being taken up and put to work across disciplinary divides and in interesting and surprising ways. However, the backbone of Deleuze’s philosophy – the many and varied sources from which he draws the material for his conceptual innovation – has until now remained relatively obscure and unexplored. This book takes as its goal the examination of this rich theoretical background. Presenting essays by a range of the world’s foremost Deleuze scholars, and a number of up and coming theorists of his work, the book is composed of in-depth analyses of the key figures in Deleuze’s lineage whose significance – as a result of either their obscurity or the complexity of their place in the Deleuzean text – has not previously been well understood. This work will prove indispensable to students and scholars seeking to understand the context from which Deleuze’s ideas emerge. Included are essays on Deleuze’s relationship to figures as varied as Marx, Simondon, Wronski, Hegel, Hume, Maimon, Ruyer, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, Reimann, Leibniz, Bergson and Freud. Edited by Graham Jones Graham Jones is an independent scholar and past president of the Australasian and Jon Roffe Society for Continental Philosophy. DELEUZE’S Jon Roffe is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. PHILOSOPHICAL Edited by Graham Jones LINEAGE and Jon Roffe ISBN 978 0 7486 3300 5 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square E dinburgh Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Cover image: Eye, Silver Gelatin Photogram, 2005, by Naomi Merritt Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage Edited by Graham Jones and Jon Roffe EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS © in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2009 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11/13pt Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3299 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 3300 5 (paperback) The right of the contributors to be identifi ed as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Contents Acknowledgements v List of Abbreviations vi Introduction: Into the Labyrinth 1 Graham Jones and Jon Roffe 1 Plato 8 Gregory Flaxman 2 John Duns Scotus 27 Nathan Widder 3 G. W. F. Leibniz 44 Daniel W. Smith 4 David Hume 67 Jon Roffe 5 Immanuel Kant 87 Melissa McMahon 6 Solomon Maimon 104 Graham Jones 7 G. W. F. Hegel 130 Bruce Baugh 8 Karl Marx 147 Eugene Holland 9 Hoëne Wronski and Francis Warrain 167 Christian Kerslake 10 Bernhard Riemann 190 Arkady Plotnitsky iv Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage 11 Gabriel Tarde 209 Éric Alliez 12 Sigmund Freud 219 Ronald Bogue 13 Henri Bergson 237 Paul Atkinson 14 Edmund Husserl 261 Alain Beaulieu 15 A. N. Whitehead 282 James Williams 16 Raymond Ruyer 300 Ronald Bogue 17 Martin Heidegger 321 Constantin V. Boundas 18 Pierre Klossowski 339 Ian James 19 Albert Lautman 356 Simon Duffy 20 Gilbert Simondon 380 Alberto Toscano Bibliography 399 Notes on Contributors 417 Index 421 Acknowledgements The preparation of a volume as lengthy as this necessarily incurs sub- stantial debts. We would like to thank Naomi Merritt, for her edito- rial assistance with the manuscript, and the exceptional cover image. Jack Reynolds, Ashley Woodward and Paul Atkinson have each been particularly supportive and helpful throughout the editorial process. Thanks also to Marg Horwell for her support throughout the assem- bly of this book. Many from Edinburgh University Press have also been key parts in the publication of Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage. We would like to thank in particular Carol Macdonald, Máiréad McElligott, Tim Clark and James Dale for their assiduity and assistance. We would also like to thank the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, one of the rare contemporary institutions in which a serious reading and teaching of Deleuze can take place. Finally, we would like to thank the authors who are included in this volume, whose pieces present a very nuanced and attentive version of Deleuze scholarship – the kind of scholarship that this volume aims to promote. List of Abbreviations AO Anti-Oedipus B Bergsonism D Dialogues DI Desert Islands and Other Texts DR Difference and Repetition ECC Essays Critical and Clinical EPS Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza ES Empiricism and Subjectivity F Foucault FB Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation FLB The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque K Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature LS The Logic of Sense M ‘Masochism’ MI Cinema 1: The Movement Image N Negotiations NP Nietzsche and Philosophy PI Pure Immanence: A Life PS Proust and Signs SPP Spinoza’s Practical Philosophy TI Cinema 2: The Time Image TP A Thousand Plateaus TRM Two Regimes of Madness and Other Texts WP What is Philosophy? Introduction: Into the Labyrinth Graham Jones and Jon Roffe Those coming to Deleuze’s work for the fi rst time (and even those returning to it anew) fi nd themselves confronted by the dilemma of where to begin, of how to engage with it. Two diffi culties present themselves. The fi rst and more immediate one is that, conceptually, Deleuze’s work is so richly detailed and complex. Thus on opening one of his books the reader is confronted by a plethora of concepts that already seem to presuppose on the reader’s part an intimate familiarity with numerous other related concepts, theories, or think- ers. It is akin, perhaps, to a labyrinth in which one can easily become lost, or frustratingly disheartened at the prospect of navigating such a complex architecture. This leads into the second, more dangerous, diffi culty – the place of commentary in respect to such an encounter. Readers will, not unreasonably, peruse existing interpretations in search of guidance in relation to Deleuze’s philosophy. But whatever reassurance they fi nd will often prove misleading, for in the fi eld that can, more or less, be called Anglo-American ‘Deleuze Studies’, an orthodoxy seems to have installed itself. This orthodoxy or ‘Image of [Deleuzian] Thought’ has multiple sources, and as a result requires detailed elaboration. In the fi rst instance, it was the case for a long time that few of Deleuze’s texts were available in English translation, making it diffi cult to determine any larger or more accurate ‘perspective’ on Deleuze’s project. Related to this is the fact that the texts were translated in non-chronological order, which made it diffi cult to assess the devel- opment and overall signifi cance of specifi c concepts and which led in turn to the distortion and sometimes misrepresentation of concepts or terminology (e.g. the ‘body without organs’) by various critics. Also, and perhaps most signifi cantly, there is the acceptance at face value of Deleuze’s own more ‘personal’ utterances in interviews (the invocation of ‘buggery’ as his proper method in respect to the history of philosophy, the claim that his philosophical work is to be treated as a toolbox, and so on). This last is a more signifi cant problem than 2 Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage the other two, whose force, in truth, has diminished in recent years, even if their consequences have not – particularly so in respect to the theoretical misconceptions that seem to have permanently lodged themselves under the name of Deleuze within the domain of (so- called) ‘cultural applications’ of theory. Too often misconceptions are perpetuated by appropriators’ reliance on a paraphrasing of Deleuze’s ideas drawn from secondary sources and other commentar- ies (although this is hardly a problem restricted to Deleuze). In summary, the orthodoxy surrounding Deleuze consists of a hier- archy of at least three concentric rings. The outer and most general ring sees Deleuze’s work as advocating an ‘anything goes’ or ‘theory- shopping’ approach – an unsystematic, anarchic, ‘guerrilla warfare’ with concepts.1 This approach tends to characterise the piecemeal appropriations of Deleuze’s concepts within an interdisciplinary fi eld, such as cultural studies, where specifi c notions can be borrowed with little concern for their original context or their relationship to the writer’s oeuvre more broadly. In Deleuze’s case, this approach is usually mediated via the notions drawn from his later work of the ‘rhizome’ or the ‘nomad’. Indeed, Deleuze’s own comments about using theory as a ‘toolbox’, or of treating it as ‘cuts on a record’, have unfortunately been interpreted as licence from the ‘master’ to appro- priate, deform, or outrightly abuse his ideas according to personal whim, without any prior understanding of their meaning or context.2 This explains why at scholarly conferences one often comes across papers employing ‘Deleuzian’ vocabulary, usually wielded as cudgels or inhaled like hallucinogens, that immediately demonstrate a lack of understanding of the concepts being invoked.3 The middle ring or level of this orthodoxy is one which over- estimates the signifi cance of the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, representing them as the ‘essence’ or summit of Deleuze’s project, the core of the work to which everything else is related as either rehearsal, adjunct or auxiliary.