Collapse 3 - Robin Mackay.pdf

(6493 KB) Pobierz
Computer Deleuze
4
COLLAPSE III
Editorial Introduction
Robin Mackay
Welcome to our third volume, the greater part of which is
devoted to the work of Gilles Deleuze.
1
Alongside a number
of searching examinations of his work, it also features two
previously untranslated texts by Deleuze himself. Although
assembled under the working title ‘Unknown Deleuze’, the
volume announces no scandalous revelation, no radical
reinterpretation; rather, this title simply indicates a humble
acknowledgement of the fact that,
philosophically speaking,
Deleuze remains something of an enigma.
It is not without trepidation that we devote almost an
entire volume to one particular philosopher; even more so
given the ever-accelerating trend of secondary commentary
and the rash of titles claiming to apply Deleuze’s thought to
1. In the second part of the volume we present a record of the conference ‘Speculative
Realism’, which elaborates certain themes taken up in
C
ollapse
Volume II. Since
these themes were already introduced in that volume, we will remark here only
that one should not anticipate a discursive statement of fully-formed philosophi-
cal positions, but rather a continuation – in the absence of the extended interviews
featured in previous volumes – of
C
ollapse
’s commitment to the publication of
‘live philosophy’. ‘Speculative Realism’ is a conversation between four philosophers
who think outside partisan affiliations to particular thinkers or schools, and thus
is genuinely exploratory. Its ‘unfinished’ aspect reflects its status as a document of
contemporary philosophy in the making, in which new conceptual approaches are
proposed, the borders between science and philosophy probed, and the history of
thought mined for fresh insights.
5
COLLAPSE III, ed. R. Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, November 2007)
ISBN 978-0-9553087-2-0
http://www.urbanomic.com
COLLAPSE III
areas as diverse as dance, feminism and geography. These
latter might be taken as proof enough of the continuing
fecundity of Deleuze’s philosophy, but they belie the fact
that it is still difficult to situate his work philosophically.
Interdisciplinary appropriations too often compound this,
turning ‘Deleuzianism’ into a game of recognition and thus
merely succumbing to a new image of thought (everyone
knows
what a rhizome is …) Although doubtless such
works can and do succeed in producing worthwhile and
productive syntheses, it is difficult to assess their claim to
represent Deleuze’s thought without a renewed, properly
philosophical effort to examine the latter. But should this
even matter, given that Deleuze himself told us simply to
use concepts ‘like a toolbox’? Such a riposte typifies the
most deleterious aspect of the ‘success’ currently enjoyed
by Deleuze; for any precision tool must be mastered before
it is ‘put to work’, and for this one must understand, in turn,
its own workings and its interaction with the rest of the
conceptual ‘equipment’ in hand.
The first of our texts by
G
illes
D
eleuze
himself, a
short interview from 1981, offers a review of the enduring
concerns of his ambitious philosophical project. Despite
its brevity, the exchange merits translation because it sees
Deleuze, despite his antipathy to being asked ‘general
questions’,
2
speaking on a general level about his philo-
sophical work, even going so far as to make a distinction
– heretical by the lights of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
–
between his own concerns and those of Félix Guattari
in that work. In this exchange Deleuze recapitulates and
reaffirms the major themes of his thought – a renewed
2.
Dialogues II,
1.
6
Editorial Introduction
philosophy of nature; the problem of the image of thought;
the construction of a science of the problem, and of a new
metaphysics; the battle against neurosis and the typology
of multiplicities. The other contributors to our volume take
up, in various ways, the question of the interconnection of
these themes – how do they come to be integrated into
a
philosophy?
With a style that combines the resources of the
conceptual, the poetic, the mythical and the etymologi-
cal,
A
rnAuD
V
illAni
has constantly aspired in his work
to do justice to the richness of Deleuze’s thought, just as
this thought itself, he argues, aims above all to do justice
to the ‘burl’ of the real.
3
Gerard Manley Hopkins, who
Villani cites here, is indeed an intriguing reference-point
for Deleuze, with his language of ‘inscapes’ and ‘instress’,
‘oftening’ or repetition, and ‘cleaves or folds’ in the ‘burl of
being’; but it is Villani’s aim, without annulling this poetic
affinity, to distance Deleuze from any model that would
have us rely on God’s grace (Hopkins) – and equally, on
the grace of the universal (Badiou)
4
– to take us from one
‘cleave of being’ to another.
For, as critics who attribute to Deleuze a politically
suspect ‘aestheticism’ point out, it is in the practical sphere
that an affirmation of ‘life, in all its frightening complexity’
5
is not enough: this complexity must be negotiated, reduced,
decided upon. Against charges that Deleuze falls short of
this exigency, Villani emphasizes the importance of the
moral and political in his work, arguing that the central
3. A. Villani, present volume, 52.
4. See E. Alliez, ‘Badiou: The grace of the universal’,
Polygraph,
vol. 17, 2005:267-73.
5. G. Deleuze, ‘Questions’, present volume, 42.
7
COLLAPSE III
problem of a Deleuzian metaphysics is that of ‘isolating the
conditions of possibility for a complex act’.
6
Indeed, Villani
suggests that philosophy itself begins precisely when we try
to think experience without sublimating its infinite riches
by investing them in back-worlds. Succeeding in this would
mean that action, no longer having a special status to whose
strictures the poetic and noetic would have to be submitted,
would multiply their infinite riches: like the sensible and
thought, it would remain true to the ‘burl of being’ rather
than fearfully ceding to a vicarious relation to it. Ethical
action would not betray the infinitude of experience but
would affirm it in its every work.
Such complexity would not at all preclude action from
being ‘pointed’, punctual;
7
only it would be a matter of an
intense, implicated concentration rather than a decisive
rupture: singular in the sense of the haecceity, the non-sub-
stitutable moment, rather than levelling all moments with a
dis-qualified void. Here Villani pinpoints the most troubling
consequence of the demand – increasingly made in respect of
Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) work – that a philosophy should
prove its political mettle before even being considered as
philosophy. This is a question of beginnings: in beginning
with the infinitude of lived experience, Deleuze wished
to see the ‘drastical’ rise to it; whereas in beginning with
the demand for ‘decision’, we decide in advance against a
truly philosophical – metaphysical – thought, thus impov-
erishing action and making political ‘truth’ the locus for
an effect closer to the positive feedback of
hype,
drastically
6. Villani, present volume, 56.
7.
Ibid.,
58.
8

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin