## Frida Beckman (2017). *Gilles Deleuze*. : . > [!INFO] > Type:: [[]] > Title:: Gilles Deleuze > Author(s): [[Frida Beckman]] > Year:: 2017 > Tags:: > DOI:: > Citekey:: beckman_gilles_2017 > ZoteroURI:: [Open in Zotero: Gilles Deleuze](zotero://select/items/@beckman_gilles_2017) > ReviewedDate:: [[2023-10-03]] ## Citation ```latex [@beckman_gilles_2017] ``` ## Related ```dataview TABLE file.aliases AS "Title" FROM [[@beckman_gilles_2017]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ``` ## Summary - ## Annotation Extracted Annotations: 28/03/2021, 15:37:21 28/03/2021, 15:37:21 Gilles Deleuze had a rather determined disinterest in the life of the author. Or, to qualify this somewhat, the lives of authors, at least as supposed mirrors to their work, rarely seemed relevant for Deleuze. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=9 ) Martin Heidegger, summarizes and thereby dismisses the biography of Aristotle, one of the most influential philosophers of all time: `He was born, he thought, he died. ' Like many philosophers, Heidegger considered the life of the philosopher as little but anecdotal [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=9 ) because their thinking emerges not from their historical context but from some eternal abode in which all remains perfect [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=10 ) Jacques Derrida cites Heidegger's dismissal of Aristotle's biography not to support but to disclaim it, and suggests that we need to rethink the exclusion of a writer's life `as a corpus of empirical accidents' '. Philosophers' biographies, he argues, must be put `back into the picture' [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=10 ) it is also increasingly uncommon to draw direct parallels between author and text [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=11 ) This might different in film. What film is about the narcissistic practice? Then it should be biographical stories or even portrait in each films [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=11 ) In the case of Deleuze, it speaks not just against his views on the life of the author but against his philosophy as a whole to focus on and give a chronological account of a life, an account that defines and inevitably delimits all the things that it expressed. Such a process `closes down' life by giving it a limit, a shape, a final signified in the form of a defined individual and a delimited life story. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=11 ) The first and most central is Deleuze's own fundamental scepticism towards the individual as a given unity [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=11 ) And while there is a lingering sense that there may be some connection between the life of philosophers and their thinking, as Peter Osborne notes, it is rare to find biographies that manage to deliver a reflexive and satisfactory account of this connection [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=12 ) Deleuze frequently turns out to be a reference to their joint work. This tendency is not limited to a post-Deleuzo-Guattarian context but was noted by Deleuze himself in the 1970s: as he writes in a letter to Guattari, `people erase you and abstractify me [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=13 ) The concept of the assemblage (agencement) is developed by Deleuze and Guattari to help them rethink the notion of the individual. A statement is never individual, they argue, but always collective. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=14 ) These forces form an assemblage when its set of components becomes machinic. machinic. The notion of the machinic is important because it indicates that the assemblage is active while stressing its nonpersonal and nonhuman dimension [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=14 ) The concept of the assemblage resists the idea of the individual or personal and suggests that a statement, rather than referring back to a subject, `occurs necessarily as a function of a national, political, and social community [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=14 ) There is a way, Deleuze argues, of using a name, not to denote an ego or person or subject, but as a denotation of the intensities and multiplicities that run through an individual [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=14 ) I have tried to enable that room for play by taking inspiration from Eleanor Kaufman's argument that working with Deleuze must be an act of `betraying well' . [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=16 ) As Kaufman points out, another perverse but surprisingly frequent way of approaching Deleuze's work is by means of a loyal reading of his texts and a faithful application of his concepts that, too, speaks fundamentally against his philosophy [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=16 ) Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=86 ) Essentially, and as summarized by Gregg Lambert, the critical and clinical project relies on three main tenets: [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=86 ) writers are sometimes better diagnosticians of life [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=86 ) certain literary works produce a `symptomatology', that is, a set of signs indicating shifts in the arrangement of language, as well as labour and life [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=87 ) certain writers can diagram potential resistance to such arrangements [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=87 ) Deleuze's work on [[Marcel Proust|Proust]] shows how he links word and symptom more generally [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=87 ) For Deleuze, divisions between signifier and signified create a mistaken separation between expression and world. This is a rather crucial element to understand­ ing Deleuze's critique of representation. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=87 ) Every symptom is a word, but first of all every word is a symptom [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=87 ) We have seen how the time-image in cinema can challenge the conventional modes of perception characteristic of the sensory- motor schema. For Deleuze, literature too has the ability to confirm or disrupt habitual groves of thinking. `Writing', he and Parnet suggest, `is very simple. Either it is a way of reterritorializing oneself, conforming to a code of dominant utterances, to a territory of established states of things: not just schools and authors, but all [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=87 ) those who write professionally, even in a nonliterary sense', or `it is becoming' [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=88 ) Deleuze sees narrative structures as potentially narrowing down expression insofar as they rely on and maintain conventional conceptions of temporality and causality [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=88 ) If Deleuze was a little at odds with contemporary French and European preoccupations of the time, he also did not fit very well into the idea of and growing interest in Continental philosophy in a North American context [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=93 ) The North American interest in Continental philosophy was heavily shaped by Heidegger's work and it therefore largely remained blind to versions of European philosophy that did not invest in this tradition [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=93 ) All he felt he could talk about was what he was writing about, when he was writing about it – a few years later even this was gone, or at least he would have to learn it again from the beginning [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=94 ) He says in an interview with Parnet that what we suffer from is not `any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we've nothing much to say' [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=94 ) Deleuze, as well as Guattari and Foucault, was met with hostility from members of the audience. Foucault was accused by a member of the audience of being paid by the cia and Ti-Grace Atkinson, a writer, philosopher and radical feminist, accused them all of being `phallocrats' . [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=95 ) early and rather fleeting uses of his work, such as that by Fredric Jameson, made him come across as a postmodern aesthete [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=96 ) As we will see, it took until the early 1990s before feminist thinkers, including notably Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, really began to see the point of Deleuze's philosophy. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=99 ) The cinema books, with their taxonomical ambition, are particularly susceptible here for what could easily become a rather inactive and nonthinking method of application. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=99 ) But the charm is not the person. It is what makes people be grasped as so many combinations and so many unique chances from which such a combination has been drawn. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=115 ) that true creativity depends on the realization that the canvas is already full of layers and that our job is to work with these layers to make them express themselves differently. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=115 ) Making a map is an open and experimental practice that accommodates connectivity [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=116 ) And indeed, `There are no Deleuzians,' Constantin V. Boundas argues; `there are only people using Deleuze-blocs and Deleuze diagonal lines of transformation for the sake of creating concepts in philosophy, sensations in the arts, and modes of living in ethics and politics that are not necessarily (and sometimes not at all) Deleuze's. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=116 ) Deleuze's work posits particular difficulties in this respect. Because his work revolves so clearly around the importance of creative engagement – of approaching authors from behind – there is something almost inevitably paradoxical about coming after Deleuze in the sense that in order to be faithful, we must not be faithful. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=118 ) we can see also how it is not always easy for Deleuze to negotiate the combination of the impersonal and the embodied. This becomes particularly apparent when it comes to his understanding of sexuality [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=120 ) He suggests himself that there is in [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=120 ) his work a relationship between sexuality and metaphysics `that can be put into words' up until The Logic of Sense, but that after that comes to appear more `like an ill-grounded abstraction [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=121 ) Deleuze's work, Marcelo Svirsky argues, provides the conceptual tools to resist a `royal science of politics' that claims political effort into its dominant discourse, and enables us to think innovatively about activism [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=124 ) Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 137. [Link](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/FBX8PMXR?page=144) ### Related ```dataview LIST FROM [[@beckman_gilles_2017]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ```