2 - Adieu to Negativity: Deleuze
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
Gilles Deleuze is the affirmative philosopher par excellence; as he writes in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962): ‘Affirmation itself is being, being is solely affirmation in all its power’. The striking consistency of Deleuze's affirmationism throughout his life and thought is often, however, deliberately fractured when he is assimilated into the contemporary affirmationist bloc. This insertion is usually achieved by severing his thinking from his equally affirmative co- written work with Félix Guattari (most especially Anti- Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980)). In this fashion Deleuze is (re-) constructed through his own self- identification as a ‘pure metaphysician’, but what is lost, as Éric Alliez notes, is the political Deleuze who, with Guattari, articulated lines of flight as the liberation of capital's flows towards a new absolute deterritorialisation. We have here an almost perfect example of the kind of ‘deferred’ temporality we identified in our introduction – Deleuze happens ‘twice’. In the first instance Deleuze is the ecstatic libertarian philosopher of lines of flight, which become mired in their congruence with capital's deterritorialised flows, and this then dictates the necessity of the second instance of Deleuze reborn as ‘pure metaphysician’, depoliticised but a useful ally in the re- foundation of grand philosophy. In fact, in contemporary affirmationism we have the uneasy co- existence and oscillation between both these figures of Deleuze: militant and metaphysician.
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- Information
- The Persistence of the NegativeA Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, pp. 51 - 79Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010