“ONE DAY, PERHAPS, THE CENTURY WILL BE DELEUZEAN.” Michel Foucault made this prophecy in 1969, when Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense were published.1 The philosopher of the pathways of night was implying that, of all those with whom he had debated, Gilles Deleuze alone would one day have the privilege, not of entering the Pantheon or founding a school, but of being seen as one who had renewed philosophy, and thus as one of the greatest of the moderns.
Strongly committed to the left, never having been either a phenomenologist or a critical reader of Heidegger, Deleuze was also the only one of the six whose destinies I am evoking never to have been a student at the École Normale Supérieure. He was simply a professor of philosophy,2 in the lycées of Amiens and Orléans, then in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and at the Sorbonne, then in Lyon, and finally, after May 1968, at the University of Paris VIII, at that time located in Vincennes, where he “invented” day by day, before his astonished students and in contact with Félix Guattari, his most iconoclastic book: Anti-Oedipus.3
Intent on commenting on the texts of the great philosophers, he posed at first as a historian of philosophy of sorts who criticized the idea that the teaching of the history of philosophy might pose an obstacle to the creation of concepts. But he also saw himself as belonging to a generation that had literally been assassinated with the history of philosophy: “You won’t, all the same, dare speak in your own name as long as you haven’t read this or that, and that on this, and this on that.”4
For many years his manner of conceiving and teaching the history of philosophy was to regard it as a sort of “sodomy [enculage], or, what amounts to the same thing, immaculate conception.” He imagined himself “mounting an author from behind and getting him pregnant with a child that would be his, but monstrous.”5 And then, his reading of the oeuvre of Nietzsche, as well as his exceptional relationship with literary texts, films, popular song, and painting, caused him to evolve toward a questioning, not destructive but critical or even deconstructive, of all the major constituted knowledges. Derrida said: “Deleuze certainly remains, despite many divergences, the one among all those of this ‘generation’ to whom I have always thought myself closest.”6
Like Derrida and Foucault, Deleuze was detested. Accused like Socrates of wishing to corrupt youth with his teaching, he was also blamed for an immoderate love of drugs and alcohol. For having written Anti-Oedipus he was even compared to some kind of degenerate who had proffered “the defence of the rotten on the dungheap of decadence.”7 Finally, he was branded an anti-Semite for having protested against the banning of a film judged anti-Semitic by the Ministry of Culture and withdrawn from circulation. In protest at this censorship, Deleuze had indeed criticized all the associations that had arrogated to themselves the right to judge the content of a work of art, however problematic, without having debated it, without even being capable of debating it.8
The fact is, he disconcerted his interlocutors and readers with a paradoxical attitude that always seemed to run counter to rational discourse. Deleuze was the philosopher of extremes and of laughter, of the grotesque and the sublime, of dream and desire. Without being the slightest bit romantic, he was animated by a sort of incandescent passion for creative genius that made him receptive to the most utopian, but also the subtlest, manifestations of art, poetry, and literature.
He had no hesitation, for example, in advocating a mechanistic materialism centered on the idea that there exists a strong linkage between psychical activity and brain activity. Unlike Canguilhem, who had been his master and whom he admired, he thought that science would one day make it possible to demonstrate, through cerebral imaging, that the brain is capable—in itself and apart from any subjectivity—of creating concepts and works of art. But despite that, he never endorsed the simplistic approaches of the adepts of scientism, cognitivism, and cerebral psychology, and for that matter took the view that any comparison between human behavior and animal behavior was a step in the direction of fascism. And to subvert the very idea of such an approach, he readily declared that this type of human relation to the animal horrified him, and that the only important thing in his eyes was the becoming animal of man, that man should prove his capacity to think the animal in terms of animality so as to expose himself to that which exceeds him.9
Deleuze, like his friend Foucault, despised medical power, detested any form of religion of science, and, like Canguilhem, considered normative psychology a barbarous discipline. He could not bear the idea, dominant today, that a human being can be “assessed,” instrumentalized, reduced to a thing, to the least of humans, and, worse than that, to the least of things: inert matter, detritus. He, a sufferer from tuberculosis living on borrowed time, believed that every individual subject ought to be able to consume his drugs and medicines freely with the aid of his physician—and not under the domination of an alienating power. Every individual, he said, has the right to choose his destiny, even if it puts his life at risk. A subject is only a subject because he is first of all a nonsubject, that is to say a multiple and ever-deterritorialized singularity.
Deleuze was, finally, the most “antisecurity” philosopher one can imagine, the most anticonformist, the most corrosive, the most refractory to all the attempts at destruction (of culture, of nature, of man) that have become the common lot of our age—an age whose onset he had foreseen. Hence he had the greatest admiration for the subversive power of Sartre’s discourse: “Sartre is a redoubtable polemicist…. There is no genius without self-parody. But what is the best parody? To become a conformist elder, a clever, coquettish authority? Or to aim to be the hold-out of Liberation? To fancy oneself an academician, or dream of being a Venezuelan guerrilla fighter?”10
But since he was not an adept of limitless gratification (always ruinous, he used to say) Deleuze liked to emphasize that philosophy should never let itself be used by one doctrine for the purpose of destroying another: no struggle to the death, but the necessity for conflict and the search for that which may be the most conflictual in oneself and in others.
From the same perspective, he asserted that the ingestion of harmful substances ought to be interrupted if the subject was turning into a wreck incapable of working. That was the limit. At that point, he turned into the good moralist, advocating abstinence and self-control. In the same spirit, Deleuze reproached the representatives of medical power, especially psychiatrists, with fabricating, in their hospitals, through senseless and excessive prescribing and the exercise of a psychopathological diktat, veritable mental patients depossessed of their “true” madness.
Consequently he rejected, not medical science as such, not the biological approach to the psyche, but every form of medicalization of existence At all events, Deleuze never propagandized for the use of dangerous substances and never encouraged his students to use drugs. I can bear witness to this because I was his student and did not share his views. He didn’t judge, he didn’t normalize. What interested him in love, in friendship, and in the teaching he did, was to grasp the portion of shadow and heterogeneity proper to each individuality, its portion of hubris. He thought that only the exercise of depersonalization, in other words the opening up to multiplicities, allows every person to speak in his own name.
Deleuze thereby located himself within a tradition, both Spinozist and perfectly ethical, that respects to the highest degree the suffering of all “minorities,” the mad, the vagrants, the marginal, the homosexuals. In certain respects this great philosopher of the untimely, of fibrils, and of the decentering of symbolic orders continued Victor Hugo’s fine tradition of compassion not only for the poor and the disinherited but also for those who had always been the victims of social, political, racial, and sexual persecution: the “insulted” victims, the ones treated like garbage.
Didier Eribon, a knowledgeable Deleuzean, supplies a moving piece of testimony to the sort of abject abuse that Deleuze so hated. Unlike the kind instituted or authorized by repressive powers, this kind of abuse conceals itself under a cloak of utter normality in democratic societies: ordinary acts, impossible to combat. Eribon writes:
We stand on the sidewalk for a few moments outside the door [of a gay bar], debating whether to go in. A car comes along with the windows rolled down: four or five youths inside bellow insults at us: “Pédés, pédés …[fags, fags].” The car stops and one of the occupants spits on me before I can draw back. The dribbles of spit form a kind of silver star on my blue polo shirt. My body reacts with a retch (physical) of disgust. I am on the point of vomiting…. I recall what Georges Dumézil told me about the day when, during the war, he went to visit his master and friend Marcel Mauss and saw for the first time the yellow star sewn onto his clothing. He could not take his eyes off this frightful stigma. The great sociologist then remarked to him: “You are looking at my gob of spit.” For a long time I understood this phrase in the most straightforward way: Mauss meant that he considered this bit of yellow cloth as a dirty stain, a piece of filth thrown in his face. But eventually someone pointed out to me that I was mistaken: Mauss had doubtless used the word “ crachat” [literally, “gob of spit”] in the sense of “decoration.” And indeed, one of the old demotic meanings of the word “ crachat” is that of insigne, medal, or decoration.11
Inhabited by an inner wound of which he never spoke, out of hostility toward any reduction of life to a “little private affair,” Deleuze foresaw the arrival of a one-dimensional world without culture and without soul, entirely subject to the laws of the market and the politics of things,12 a sort of factory for making wretches, modern avatars of Cosette, Jean Valjean, Thénardier, and Javert.
Even before conceptualizing this expression he had grasped its signifying power when, in the summer of 1936, at age eleven, he had observed in his own family the great fear felt by the bourgeoisie at the unexpected upsurge of those thousands of men and women, factory workers, who were for the first time invading “their” territory: beaches, seasides, rivers, highways, fields, multiple and multiplied spaces, endless countryside in which to take long bicycle rides.
This transgressive spectacle left him with the memory of a France divided in two: the one reactionary, patriarchal, familist, and territorialized that he always abhorred and that he knew would never pardon the “Jew” Léon Blum for having thus infringed on its geographic privileges; the other rhizomatic, machinelike, deterritorialized, and with which he very soon felt the urge to identify as he watched the films of Jean Renoir with delight or listened to the songs of Charles Trenet and Édith Piaf. He later became an attentive reader of Proust, Sacher-Masoch, Lewis Carroll, and many others.
The factory versus the theater, the free-running pack versus the closed field of the ego-logical and superego-ic zoo, the continents versus the nations, the subversion of fluxes against barbed wire and borders, the frivolity of the ever-rippling fold versus the fixity of the smooth, perfectly ironed fabric: such were the fruits of the formidable inventiveness of the Deleuzean factory. The philosopher of the rhizome exploded the classic representations proper to philosophic discourse, preferring to move down the hidden ways of a primitive scene, a veritable machine for making concepts, rather than endlessly reinventing the genealogy of Hamlet, Antigone, or Oedipus in commentaries.
Deleuze liked neither the tragic, nor its dramaturgy, nor the schools of thought—be they Socratic, Aristotelian, Wittgensteinian, or Freudian—because they continually threatened, he used to say, to kill off creativity by reducing singularities to families, to organized collectivities. Neither did he think that desire could be “liberated” by spontaneous action. He maintained rather, and in a sophisticated way, that desire itself is a work of the unconscious, of an unconscious conceived as an ordering of animal and musical territories,13 not like a theater or some “other stage.”
He had likewise retained, from his reading of the oeuvre of Nietzsche, the idea that it was necessary to overturn Platonism in order to find, behind the simulacra of ideas and repetitions of ideas, a Dionysian chaos composed of pain, joy, and disorder, festive and untimely chaos: “It is not in great forests or on footpaths that philosophy is elaborated, but in cities and streets, including in that which is most factitious in them.”14 With this gesture he attempted to link an ontology of multiplicity to a politics of the event,15 and it was to Heraclitus that he referred to show that nothing is ever repeated identically—one never steps in the same river twice—and that all phenomena are always multiple, fluxes irreducible to unicity.16
For all those who, like me, knew Félix Guattari and took part in the dazzling seminar that Deleuze held at Vincennes between 1969 and 1972, Anti-Oedipus is a great book. It testifies as well to the fact that in expressing their joint will to overturn dogmas through a sole authorial voice, the two friends gave the psychoanalytic conformism of the time a lesson in pleasure, revolt, and liberty that one would wish to see revived today—in different forms, naturally.
By this time Deleuze already had his famous “desiring machines” in his head. As for Guattari, his project was different from Foucault’s: Like the English and Italian antipsychiatrists, but on a different conceptual basis, he wanted to pose, and perhaps resolve, the problem of the nature of madness. Is it a mental illness or a singular revolt that aims to overturn the established order?
So the two friends set about constructing the Anti-Oedipus, as if composing an opera, through an exchange of letters in which they addressed each other with courteous formality as vous instead of the familiar tu. With its long-range writing dominated by rhizomatic rhetoric, the work, even on the formal level, set against the imperialism of the One—that is, of the symbolic structure or order—a machinelike and plural essence of desire, a factory of impulses and phantasms uniquely capable of subverting the ideals of an Oedipal and patriarchal sovereignism.
Between Gilles and Félix, the one a sedentary and Nietzschean Socrates with an admirable mastery of language and thought, the other always on the move and scattered, simultaneously inhabiting several spaces, themselves multiple, the marriage was beneficial, since it gave birth to this book that continues to be read, translated, and commented upon throughout the world, even if its composition remains, despite all, enigmatic. (Today, though, we know that Deleuze took care of the final draft, though he always declared that without Guattari he would never have written it, any more than he would their other collaborative works.) “Be the pink panther,” said the two authors, “and may your loves be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon.”17
Every week at the University of Vincennes Deleuze told his students about the adventures of a book that seemed to be writing itself all alone on the stream of a feverish and open word. Anti-Oedipus was there in the middle of the classroom like a multiple god expanding in the heart of each one of the protagonists fascinated by the Deleuzian chant, by the tonality of a voice unlike any other.
The philosopher of packs and of the multiple asserted that he wished to rethink the history of human societies, starting with the postulate that capitalism, tyranny, and despotism would run up against their limits in the desiring machines of a “successful” schizophrenia, one entirely free of the grip of psychiatric discourse: a madness in the free state, disalienated. Around this point unfolded their great critique of psychoanalysis, their offensive against the most psychologized monument of the Freudian edifice, the Oedipus complex. As manipulated by Freud’s descendants, they said, it was no longer a revisitation of the ancient tragedy but a machine for normalizing the libido and erecting a retrograde familist ideal.18
To escape from this psychologization of existence, the authors proposed to substitute a polyvalent conceptuality capable of conveying the machinelike essence of a plural desire for all the structural, symbolic, and signifying theories issuing from psychoanalysis. Against the imperialism of the unique signifier, and against the totalizing Oedipus, Deleuze proposed a schizoanalysis grounded in a psychiatry described as materialist and Marxist in inspiration. “A materialist psychiatry is one that introduces production into desire, and inversely desire into production. Delirium bears not on the father, or even on the name of the father, it bears on the name of History. It is like the immanence of desiring machines in the great social machines.”19
Since it aspired to a great synthesis of the ideals of liberation, the work logically took the psychoanalytic conformism of the time (especially Lacanian dogmatism) as its main target, along with all the catechisms of Oedipal psychology. But since Guattari belonged to the Lacanian community, and to a psychiatric tradition issuing from institutional and dynamic psychotherapy, it did not produce any revolution in the clinical approach to the psychoses.
On the other hand it was received as an innovative work by all those who thought that life itself was nothing more than a passage through a chaotic experience. Deleuze joyfully went after all the ideologies of the end of history and the end of man, denouncing their nihilism and their reactionary character. The human animal, he said in substance, must confront that which exceeds him—his most extreme passions and desires—that is to say, the Multiple and the clamor of being, on pain of sinking into a new form of servitude: the invisible neofascism of the One, always at work in the most apparently democratic societies.20
The anti-Oedipal program was of course never realized. Rather than contest the familial order, all those who were excluded from it—the homosexuals especially—sought instead to become part of it so as to transform it from inside and invent a new politics of desire. As to the madpeople whom Deleuze and Guattari had wanted to liberate from the grip of Oedipal discourse, they never became heroes of social subversion. Treated with medications and subjected to the simplistic classifications of the new psychiatric order, they are today cataloged from the start as mentally ill and rarely regarded as Rimbauldian voyagers in search of multiple continents.
Too young to have taken part in the anti-Nazi struggle, Deleuze had been formed by classic philosophy and had admired Sartre, the emblematic figure of the anticolonial struggle, before joining Foucault’s great battles in favor of minorities and the excluded. And it was through contact with Deleuze that the philosopher of the pathways of night had come to understand to what extent anti-Oedipalism might go beyond its critique of psychoanalysis and become the longed-for instrument of a deconstruction of the tendentially fascistic forms of human existence, individual and collective.
In this regard he was no doubt right to affirm that the century would one day, perhaps, be Deleuzean, because the century might one day, perhaps, come to resemble the nightmare imagined by Deleuze: the installation of an ordinary fascism, not the historic fascism of Mussolini and Hitler (so skilled in mobilizing the desire of the masses), but first and foremost “the fascism that is in all of us, that haunts our minds and our daily conduct, the fascism that makes us love power, desiring the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”21