There is a surprising lack of work on the relationship between the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the rich tradition of American pragmatist thought. In the ever-growing secondary literature on Deleuze, one can find only a handful of article-length pieces on the topic. Certainly, no sustained, book-length work exists that examines the philosophical affinities and divergences between Deleuze’s thought and pragmatism, despite the fact that Deleuze explicitly refers to American pragmatism and “pragmatics” in a number of places, and approvingly cites the work of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce.1 Indeed, even apart from these explicit references, there are clear but as yet unexplored overlaps between a number of Deleuzian and pragmatist themes and concepts, including, for example, constructivism; antirepresentationalism; opposition to Cartesian conceptions of the subject; and the rejection of dichotomies such as those between fact and value, mind and world, and so on. By engaging with these explicit references and such points of overlap, then, the present volume hopes to fill, at least in part, a major lacuna in the literature on Deleuze.
The silence on the side of Deleuze scholarship with regard to pragmatism is matched by an equally significant silence with regard to Deleuze on the side of pragmatists. Philosophers working in the tradition of American pragmatism in the last thirty-five years have taken considerable interest in contemporary French and European philosophy. Figures such as Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida have been examined in detail for the contributions they can make to pragmatist approaches to philosophical problems. Indeed, Richard Rorty and Richard J. Bernstein are particularly well known for their engagement with such thinkers. To our knowledge, however, Deleuze has never been the subject of even an article-length study by a pragmatist, despite his avowed interest in pragmatism and several of this movement’s founding members.2 The importance of the present volume thus lies in, not only the much needed addition it makes to the secondary literature on Deleuze, but also in its sustained attempt to open up Deleuze’s philosophy to thinkers currently working in the pragmatist tradition. Indeed, we hope that the inclusion in this volume of work by several leading and emerging pragmatist scholars will make a substantial contribution to this effort.
In order to frame the work undertaken in the essays comprising this collection, it is appropriate to say a few words here about Deleuze’s complex relationship with American pragmatism in conceptual, but also historical, terms. Let us turn first of all to the figure of William James. It is not without significance, we believe, that Deleuze cites William James in a number of his works, including in those that “bookend” his oeuvre: his first monograph, Empiricism and Subjectivity, and his last published text, “Immanence: A Life.”
In his book on Hume, Deleuze describes James’s work as exemplifying in its own way the Humean thesis that “relations are external to their terms.” He writes that, “when James calls himself a pluralist, he does not say, in principle, anything else” (1991, 99). Now, while this single reference to James may appear offhand, it in fact reveals the profound influence on Deleuze of the work of his teacher at the Sorbonne, Jean Wahl, and of Wahl’s studies of William James, the American pragmatists and Anglo-American philosophy more broadly. Indeed, Wahl’s 1920 work, Les philosophies pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique (published in English translation in 1925 as Pluralist Philosophies of England and America), takes William James as its central figure and explores in detail the theme of the “externality of relations to their terms” in James and Russell and the different kinds of pluralisms this entails (1925, 139–144, 244–250). Given that Deleuze acknowledges the tremendous influence of Wahl as the primary disseminator of Anglo-American philosophy in France (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 58), it is undoubtedly through Wahl’s work and its Jamesian inflections that Deleuze would have first encountered the importance of the notion of external relations in Anglo-American empiricism.3
The influence on Deleuze of Wahl’s study of James and pragmatism in Pluralist Philosophies can also be seen in Deleuze’s citation of the work of the poet Benjamin Paul Blood in Difference and Repetition (1994, 57). Deleuze writes, “Blood expresses transcendental empiricism’s profession of faith as a veritable aesthetic,” and then quotes the poet. The quotation, however, is not taken directly from Blood’s The Anaesthetic Revelation. It is rather taken from Wahl’s translation of James’s citation of Blood’s work in the last text James wrote for publication, “A Pluralistic Mystic” (1910).4 In the note to this quotation, Deleuze then appears to acknowledge a connection between his own “transcendental empiricism” and Wahl’s work on James’s “radical empiricism” and the corresponding pluralistic critique of Hegelian monism and its doctrine of purely internal relations. Deleuze writes: “All Jean Wahl’s work is a profound meditation on difference: on the possibilities within empiricism for expressing its poetic, free and wild nature; on the irreducibility of difference to the simple negative; on the non-Hegelian relations between affirmation and negation” (1994, 311n18).
Another reference to James, this time in Deleuze’s The Fold, also arguably bears the mark of Wahl’s study of James’s pluralism (Deleuze 1993, 100). In Pluralist Philosophies, Wahl had explained how, for James, the pluralistic conception of reality is “distributive,” as opposed to “collective” (Wahl 1925, 138–139, 165–167). In other words, for James, whereas Hegelian monistic rationalism affirms that the whole is the only genuine and existing unity with all parts depending on it as such, pluralism asserts that the parts themselves are genuine and existing “distributive unities” that must be taken both as “eaches”—each on its own account—and as “strung-along” or “additive,” always in possible, mediated or actual connection (see James 1977a, 258–259, 457–459, 807–809). Indeed, this distributive conception of reality is a correlate of the pluralistic thesis that there are relations external to their terms. For to assert by contrast that relations are uniquely internal to their terms is to affirm a collective conception of reality, which is to say, a single, great totality within which things are necessarily connected or internally related. For James, then, distributive reality is a reality of “plural facts,” and the so-called whole is only their resultant. These plural facts “lean on each other, but the whole of them, if such a whole there be, leans on nothing” (James 1977a, 195, 457).
Deleuze argues in The Fold that the Leibnizian world of monads exists distributively in this Jamesian sense (1993, 100). Each monad must be taken both on its own account and together with the others, but in such a way that the “whole”—the world—is not an actual, substantial thing or preexisting totality in its own right. On the one hand, as Deleuze explains, each existing monad is a distributive unity that “mirrors” the world on its own account, independently of the others. For Leibniz, the world is actual only in the form of the particular predicates “included” in the concept of each existing monad, each monad thus expressing or mirroring the entire world from a particular point of view (Deleuze 1993, 104). For example, Adam, Caesar, and Christ are existing monads or distributive unities. The predicates “sinner,” “emperor,” and “savior” are included in their respective concepts, and the actual world exists only in the form of such inclusions. On the other hand, the world that is mirrored by each monad, insofar as it is to be distinguished from the monad, must be understood to be the common horizon of all the monads taken together. The world as a common horizon of all the “eaches”—that is, the world in which Adam sins, Caesar becomes emperor, and Christ atones for the sins of humanity—is thus said by Deleuze to be not actual, but rather a “virtuality” that each monad actualizes in particular but related ways, and through which what is included in the concept of each monad is connected to what is included in the concepts of the other monads (23). A monad’s predicates can thus be said to be relations or events, that is, insofar as each predicate is a relation to existence and to time: to the entire world of monads that each monad mirrors in its own way (52). But if these predicates or relations or events are internal to each monad, it is the world as the common, virtual horizon of the monads taken together that functions as the external law of predication, where this means that the “sufficient reason” for predication cannot be localized in any particular monad, but could only be determined through an “infinite analysis” of the series of related elements constituting the entire world (51–52, 74).5
It is this distributive conception of reality, this “mosaic philosophy” or “philosophy of plural facts” (James 1977a, 195), that Deleuze celebrates once again in Essays Critical and Clinical (1998). In “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” Deleuze argues that it is Melville who sketches out the traits of what would become Jamesian pragmatism. What is crucial, though, for Deleuze, is that this pragmatism
is first of all the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago. Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits… a Harlequin’s coat… an infinite patchwork with multiple joinings. (86)
Here again, we clearly recognize James’s pluralistic conception of reality as distributive, and a pragmatism that, like its “hero,” Bartleby, “will fight ceaselessly… against the Universal or the Whole” (Deleuze 1998, 87–88). Interestingly, too, we continue to see the importance for Deleuze of Wahl’s work on James. In particular, when Deleuze continues in a note that the themes of
this world-as-archipelago or this patchwork experiment… are to be found throughout Pragmatism, and notably among William James’s most beautiful pages: the world as “shot point blank with a pistol” [le monde comme “tiré à bout portant d’un pistolet”] (193n21),
it appears that he is quoting Wahl, not James. It is Wahl who, translating freely, writes that, for James, “les parties de l’univers sont comme tirées d’un pistolet—à bout portant” (1920, 124). James himself never uses the expression “point blank” (à bout portant) in this way. Wahl adds it and Deleuze repeats it. James rather writes, in “On Some Hegelisms” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays (1907, 264), that the “parts [of the real] seem… to be shot out of a pistol at us,” which appears in Loÿs Moulin’s 1916 standard French translation of this work as “il semble que [les] parties [du réel]… viennent nous frapper comme des balles de pistolet” (James 1916, 275).6
Deleuze cites James in a number of other instances throughout his work. In his essay, “Michel Tournier and the World without Others,” included as an appendix to The Logic of Sense (1990), Deleuze alludes to James’s plural-istic critique of Hegel’s absolute “block-universe” as “the pure plethora of necessary being with the oxygen of possibility all suffocated out of its lungs” (James 1907, 292). Deleuze here takes James’s longing for the “oxygen of possibility” to be the invocation of an “a priori Other structure,” which accounts for the manner in which “concrete Others” appear as the expressions of a plurality of different possible worlds (Deleuze 1990, 318). Some years later, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari also allude to James’s interest in mystical and psychic phenomena—as manifested, no doubt, in works such as The Varieties of Religious Experience and “Impressions of a Psychical Researcher” (see James 1977a, 758–782, 787–799)—as an attempt to pose the problem of the “communication of unconsciouses” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 276n).
Finally, in his last published text, “Immanence: A Life” (2001), Deleuze includes a reference to David Lapoujade’s analysis of James, “Le Flux intensif de la conscience chez William James.” With this note, Deleuze seems to allude to a strong connection between his own notions of “transcendental empiricism” and “pure immanence,” and James’s notions of “radical empiricism” and “pure experience.” As Lapoujade (2000) and others have argued, in their use of these notions the two philosophers would appear to share a commitment to the existence of an impersonal and pre-individual field that is ontologically prior to determined objects and subjects. They also appear to share a corresponding opposition to atomistic or “simple empiricism” and to forms of transcendence such as totalizing monism.7 Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari themselves put it in What Is Philosophy?, when “immanence is no longer immanent to something other than itself it is possible to speak of a plane of immanence. Such a plane is, perhaps, a radical empiricism” (1994, 47, emphasis added).
It seems clear, then, that James’s work, primarily via Wahl’s presentation of it, had a significant influence on Deleuze; or at least that Deleuze came to recognize in James’s philosophy an important precursor to his own. But James was not the only classical pragmatist to whom Deleuze had occasion to refer. Indeed, Deleuze’s single most sustained engagement with a pragmatist philosopher occurs in the Cinema books, where he finds in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce a theory of signs adequate to the conceptualization of images introduced by Henri Bergson in Matter and Memory. Bergson himself acknowledges Peirce at a number of points in his major philosophical writings. However, it is almost certainly the case that Deleuze’s interest in Peirce again arose initially as a consequence of the early influence of Wahl, who references the work of Peirce in Plural-ist Philosophies. Wahl notes especially Peirce’s probabilistic “tychism,” which “teaches us that chance explains regularity itself” (1925, 96). It is this “tychism” that accounts for Deleuze’s passing reference to Peirce in his work on Francis Bacon, at the point where he discusses the painterly “diagram” as “a chaos, a catastrophe, [that] is also a germ of order or rhythm” (2003, 83–94). Here, in his reflection on Bacon and the logic of sensation, Deleuze appreciates the way in which Peirce’s “great semiological theory” attaches analytic importance to the notion of the diagram as an a-signifying and nonrepresentative “possibility of fact” that “must be ‘utilized’”; but he is troubled simultaneously by the way in which Peirce ultimately “reduces the diagram to a similitude of relations” (2003, 94, 83, 162n5).
This critical appreciation of Peirce largely reiterates the assessment first made by Deleuze and Guattari in the context of the “pragmatics” associated with the “several regimes of signs” they describe in A Thousand Plateaus. Here, they define “pragmatics” as “the study of the signifying regime that first testifies to the inadequacy of linguistic presuppositions” (1987, 112). Their analysis begins with Peirce’s terminology of signs classified as “indexes,” “symbols,” and “icons.” According to Deleuze and Guattari, “index” refers to “the territorial status of things constituting the designatable.” The term “symbol” indicates how signification operates “in a constant movement of referral from sign to sign.” The “iconic” aspect of a sign refers to the content it receives through the mental act of interpretation bearing upon these signifying relations (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 112; cf. Short 2007, 214ff). Viewed from the standpoint of the slippery mobility of significance that results when signs are defined according to their changing positions in relative signifying chains, Peirce’s challenge is to discover interpretive regularities and consistencies that can validate a belief. Accordingly, for him, the pragmatic role of a semiotic “diagram” is to trace “frequencies” within the generative processes of sense making, so that it becomes possible to discern rules for understanding (and operating within) regular semiotic orders. Deleuze and Guattari therefore think of the Peircean diagram as a “kind of ‘wall’ on which signs are inscribed, in relation to one another and in relation to the signifier” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 133).
Deleuze and Guattari, however, are less concerned with the “problem” of mobile significations, and more concerned with the despotic or authoritarian modes of operation that are required to “fix ideas,” and so to establish a regular “regime of signs.” For them, signification and interpretation—and associated processes of subjectification and subjection—are operations of semiotic capture; but these same processes can also provide potential lines of escape from dominant orders of sense. Signs are powerful in effect because they colonize a semiotic “territory”: they are established upon a fluid reality according to their position in a signifying chain, as discerned by an interpretive point of view; their symbolization is then a “territorializing” consequence of the qualitative signifying relations that impart to them their sense. When a pragmatics of the sign takes as its objective the discovery of rules that can map lawful regularities in signifier-signified relations, one becomes in danger of “growing increasingly submissive to the normalization of a dominant reality” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 131). However, it is also the case that minor interpretations can “deterritorialize” signs, perhaps divesting them of their conventional position in a signifying chain or causing them to “leap” unconventionally across semiotic regimes, potentially producing a transforming effect upon an established regime of signs or even creating entirely new conjunctions of significance prompting the emergence of new regimes of signs (1987, 136ff). According to Deleuze and Guattari, this complex process of semiotic release and capture—of critical deterritorialization and creative reterritorialization—is the proper aim of pragmatic thought: “Experiment,” they urge, “don’t signify and interpret!” (1987, 141).
In their view, experimental pragmatism calls for a very different “diagram” to the kind offered by Peirce. They think the Peircean diagram remains burdened by the “inadequacy of linguistic presuppositions,” from which they seek to liberate thought. For Deleuze and Guattari, experimentation “beyond” or “outside” established strata of signification calls for “a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute” (1987, 142). Adequately conceived, “the diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality” (1987, 142). In short, for them, an “abstract” diagram that seeks to represent the notional laws that register relative frequencies patterning signifying relations is “not abstract enough” (1987, 141). Accordingly, when Deleuze and Guattari engage their pragmatic analysis of “several regimes of signs,” they explain how:
[t]he distinction between indexes, icons, and symbols comes from C.S. Peirce […]. But his distinctions are based on signifier-signified relations (contiguity for the index, similitude for the icon, conventional rule for the symbol); this leads him to make the “diagram” a special case of the icon (the icon of relation). Peirce is the true inventor of semiotics. That is why we can borrow his terms, even while changing their connotations. First, indexes, icons and symbols seem to us to be distinguished by territoriality-deterritorialization relations, not signifier-signified relations. Second, the diagram as a result seems to have a distinct role, irreducible to either the icon or the symbol. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 531n41)
His “borrowing” of Peircean terms is something Deleuze continues in the Cinema books. In the Preface to the French edition of Cinema 1, Deleuze describes his cinema study as “a taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of images and signs” (1986, xiv). To this end, he employs Peirce’s typology of “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness” as a frame for the analysis of types of images, welding this to Bergson’s critique of the idea of duration suggested by the original technology of the “cinematographic” image. In the fourth chapter of Creative Evolution, Bergson decries the “cinematographical mechanism” of thought, which arises when the screen shows us a series of “immobile views.” For Bergson, the spatializing tendency of the intellect to conceive movement in terms of a sequence of stills alienates thought from the superior method of “intuition,” which the mind must strive to exercise if it is to become cognizant of the real character of duration itself, and the virtual continuity that is the nature of ontological becoming. For Bergson, then, “rests placed beside rests will never be equivalent to movement” (Bergson 2011, 157). Deleuze’s aim in the Cinema books is to demonstrate how Bergson not only misunderstood the potential of cinema to conceptualize adequately the “mobile sections of reality,” but also how he anticipated its potential for imaging real duration (Deleuze 1986, 3). Deleuze seeks to explain how cinematic signs not only give a “movement-image,” but also give rise to a “time-image” as an intuitive idea of real duration. To this end, he argues that the cinematic invention of a “time-image” beyond the “movement-image” accords with the ontology provided earlier by Bergson in Matter and Memory.
In this context, Deleuze finds in the tripartite semiology of Peirce a system for categorizing sign relations, appropriate for Bergson’s ontology of the image (see Peirce 1998, 267). By defining how phenomena can be known in terms of their qualities of “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness,” Peirce conceives signs on the basis of “images and their combinations, not as a function of determinants which were already linguistic” (Deleuze 1989, 30). This entails, firstly, a materialist orientation that accords with Bergson’s equivalence of “images” and “bodies.” Secondly, signification attests to the relational continuity of thought because, in being thought, a sign connects to another image (or sign) that signifies it.
Deleuze maps onto Peirce’s categorization of signs a variety of innovative cinematic concepts, which he develops from Bergson’s account of human perception in Matter and Memory. These concepts include the “perception-image,” the “action-image,” the “affection-image,” and the “mental-image.” According to Deleuze, Peirce and Bergson both begin with the simple fact of a thing’s appearance, its “pure possibility” or “firstness.” However, the perception of a thing coincides with its power of affection, and action results as a consequence of the affection between things. For Deleuze, the “affection-image” and the “action-image” taken together correspond to Peircean “secondness.” Finally, the “relation-image” is necessarily considered as part of a “mental-image,” and in this respect belongs to the moment of interpretation inherent in “thirdness,” when the mind comprehends the rules of relationship governing sign combinations. The “relation-image” is also a “movement-image” because in conceiving the synthetic relation obtaining between things, the mind understands their involvement in a process of becoming: images thus participate in “mobile sections of duration.” In this way, “relation-images” make thought itself the object of an image, showing the way its dynamism and its habits bear upon the signifying process. Now, it is in this context that Deleuze insists that the “cinematic brain” makes its special contribution to philosophy, since cinema has developed a power to image “irrational” sensory elements (“opsigns” and “sonsigns”) that open up a realm of thought “beyond” the signifying action of the mental-image: this is the point at which Deleuze leaves Peirce, in order to posit the existence of a “time-image” which expresses pure duration “beyond movement itself” (Deleuze 1986, 11).
Considering how Deleuze juxtaposes Bergson and Peirce in the Cinema books, it is surprising that his essays on Bergson do not elaborate the significant connection that existed between Bergson and the early pragmatist thinkers.8 Indeed, although Deleuze’s introduction to American pragmatism was most likely filtered through the influence of Wahl, his attention to pragmatist themes was likely fueled by his interest in Bergson. Deleuze would have been aware of Bergson’s engagement with his contemporaries James and Dewey, since this connection is well attested in Bergson’s writing. Bergson, of course, wrote the preface for the 1911 French translation of James’s Pragmatism. But even before that, in an essay published in Revue Philosophique de la France et de L’Étranger in August 1905, Bergson explained the relation of his thought to that of James, noting that his concept of durée réelle was developed before he knew of James’s work on the streamed immediacy of perceptual experience (James 1977b, 191n101.3). We know that Bergson was also aware of Dewey’s writing, since he cites the latter in his essay on “Intellectual Effort,” published in 1902 (Bergson 1975, 215; Dewey 1972; see Jiseok 1999). Bergson and Dewey probably met in person when Bergson visited Columbia University in 1913. Dewey wrote an introduction to the Bergson Bibliography published by Columbia University Press that same year (Dewey 2008b). However, by this time the two had already established an epistolary relationship: Bergson wrote to Dewey in 1911 to correct a misunderstanding after Dewey published “Perception and Organic Action,” a piece which was critical of the ideas Bergson had expressed in the first chapter of Matter and Memory (Bergson 1999; Dewey 2008a; see Jiseok 1999).
Further evidence of the relationship between Bergson and the early American pragmatist philosophers is provided by the contents of the Bergson archive at the Bibliothèque Saint Geneviève in Paris, which preserves original editions of books and articles sent by James to Bergson. In turn, the William James archive in the Houghton Library at Harvard records their friendly correspondence over many years, and it holds copies of Bergson’s Essai sur les données immediates de la conscience (1889), Matière et mémoire (1891), and L’Évolution créatrice (1907). Each work is annotated extensively by James, and the books are inscribed by Bergson to James (James 1977b, 191n101.3). In view of this evident connection between Bergson and the classical pragmatists, it is perplexing that Deleuze does not mention these thinkers in his Bergsonism. Although he never cites Dewey at all,9 his silence concerning James and Peirce in the context of his study of Bergson is all the more surprising when we consider how his interest in their work—as well as in the “minor literature” of James’s brother Henry—is registered at a number of points elsewhere in Deleuze’s oeuvre.10
We have drawn attention to Deleuze’s explicit references to American pragmatism and particular pragmatists such as James and Peirce. We have also sketched a historical picture of the paths by which certain pragmatic ideas influenced Deleuze’s philosophy, notably via the work of Wahl and, at least in implicit fashion, that of Bergson. While these remarks provide some contextualization and justification for discussing Deleuze’s relation to pragmatism, the contemporary philosophical significance of this relationship depends more on the thematic and conceptual connections between Deleuze’s philosophy and pragmatist thought. Identifying and elaborating these connections, as well as a variety of failures to connect, is the aim of the different contributions to this volume. We should immediately note, however, that pragmatism is a diverse tradition that, ever since its beginnings in the work of James and Peirce, has been marked by internal debates over just what pragmatism is. Some assert that to be a pragmatist is to adopt some form of the Peircean “pragmatist maxim,” which enjoins us to clarify our concepts with reference to their practical effects.11 But even the three great “classical” pragmatists—Peirce, James, and Dewey—understood this maxim in very different ways (see Hookway 2013, §§2–3). Others, such as Wahl (1925), argue that pragmatism is inseparable from a particular view of reality or nature, but again, the Jamesian metaphysical picture of reality as open, distributive, and “in the making” seems to have little in common with the scientific naturalism of, for example, Quine. Others again, such as Putnam (1994), understand pragmatism to be characterized by its simultaneous anti-skepticism, fallibilism, anti-dualism, and affirmation of the primacy of practice. However, as debates between contemporary pragmatists have amply demonstrated, pragmatists who defend the general theses adumbrated by Putnam may nevertheless fundamentally disagree about the approach to be taken to various central philosophical notions, such as truth, objectivity, or experience.
Given the difficulties faced in specifying exactly what pragmatist philosophy is, we obviously cannot expect to be able to identify Deleuze as a pragmatist in a way that is unproblematic. Nor is this our aim in assembling this volume. To attempt to characterize Deleuze as first and foremost a pragmatist would be a gross simplification, not only of his philosophy but also of the ways in which various pragmatists and neopragmatists have thought about what is distinctive in pragmatism. Nevertheless, as a number of contributors to this volume convincingly argue, Deleuze does, at various points in his oeuvre, exemplify some of the themes taken to be characteristic of pragmatist thought. He also treats a number of concepts in ways that are suggestively close to some pragmatists. At the same time, as other contributors demonstrate, there are significant and more or less productive misunderstandings and differences of philosophical approach on both sides of this encounter that mitigate against simply adding Deleuze’s name to the pragmatist canon.
The chapters in this volume are arranged in two chronologically ordered parts, according to whether they address Deleuze’s relation to classical or contemporary pragmatisms. The first considers connections that exist or can be constructed between certain Deleuzian concepts and the philosophies of the classical pragmatists (Peirce, James, and Dewey), as well as some of the tensions between them. The second explores more recent developments in pragmatist philosophy in the effort to discover potential or actual points of resonance or disjuncture with Deleuzian ideas.
The beginning chapters consider some points of thematic connection joining Deleuze and Peirce. Chapter 1, by Jeffrey A. Bell, examines how both philosophers use a concept of “habit” in order to account for the emergence of individuated, determinate identities. Bell explains how, with the notion of “passive synthesis,” Deleuze does not presuppose an identity that predetermines a process of individuation. This construction instead presupposes an indeterminate chaos. That habit is integral to Peirce’s theory of belief is well established, but Bell argues that its ontological and metaphysical significance, and its implications for understanding pragmatism, have not received the attention they deserve.
Chapter 2, by James Williams, investigates three pragmatic approaches to the sign and three associated kinds of pragmatism, which he finds in the works of Barthes, Deleuze, and Peirce. Williams demonstrates that the disruptive nature of the encounter with the sign raises problems for its practical reception. While Peirce’s approach remains empirical and is therefore fallible, rather than rationally secure, Williams argues it is less experimental and creative than Deleuze’s apprenticeship or Barthes’s aestheticism. For Peirce, truth is the external aim of his pragmatism, rather than an inherent property of the encounter with the sign.
The following chapters turn to investigate the nature of the relationship between the philosophies of Deleuze and James. In Chapter 3, Gregory Flaxman affirms Deleuze’s profound debt to the “radical empiricism” of William James, which anticipates and inflects the “superior empiricism” of Difference and Repetition. He also suggests we can extend Deleuze’s pragmatism to include his discussions of American literature. Flaxman contends that the intimate relations between philosophy and literature, which lie at the heart of Deleuze’s radical empiricism and his constructivism, can be grasped in the coupling of the philosopher William James with his younger brother, the novelist Henry James.
In Chapters 4 and 5, the authors express a less sympathetic view of the conjunctions observable between Deleuze and James. Jon Roffe considers how elements of Deleuze’s account of “A Life” appear to resemble William James’s “immediate flux of life”: “not only does James seem to invoke a putatively immanent field that is logically prior to the positioning of subject and object, he also emphasizes a kind of distortion that arises upon the advent of this positioning.” However, for Roffe, this is revealed as a false resemblance when viewed in light of Deleuze’s treatment of the Kantian problem of “transcendental illusion” in Difference and Repetition. Insofar as it has no theory of “necessary deception,” James’s thought ultimately pursues different ends to that of Deleuze, and according to incompatible methods.
Stéphane Madelrieux argues that Deleuze misunderstood pragmatism in three ways. He claims, “He misunderstood it firstly in that he assimilated pragmatism to pluralism. He missed it a second time since he borrowed the definition of pluralism from Bertrand Russell and not from William James. And he missed it a third time because his own version of pluralism does not stand up to the pragmatist method for making ideas clear.” In short, Deleuze offered a pluralism without pragmatism. As a consequence of this, Madelrieux suggests James’s pluralism was integrated into French philosophy to the detriment of his pragmatism, and he accordingly concludes that “the French reception of an empiricist and pragmatist pluralism is yet to happen.”
The final two chapters in this first part of the collection consider potential points of thematic overlap or philosophical disagreement arising between Deleuze’s frameworks and those of John Dewey. In Chapter 6, Simone Bignall argues for a constructed alliance between Dewey and Deleuze that can shed light on the pragmatic implications of Deleuze’s thought, particularly in consideration of the democratic social values and activist programs that are of explicit interest to Dewey, but which remain implicit in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical works. In the concept of “the event,” Deleuze provides an account of existence similar to Dewey’s, as a dynamic multiplicity that is partly precarious and partly stable in its relational processes. An appreciation of this point of convergence enables improved understanding of the manner in which Deleuze’s concepts and philosophical concerns lead to a mode of thinking and of communication that advances the idea of “democracy as a way of life.”
John J. Stuhr’s chapter closes the first half of the collection by interrogating the consequences—the purpose or the use—of “calling Deleuze a pragmatist.” Focusing especially on Deleuze and Dewey, he argues that “if one is to compare in a genuinely pragmatic way the philosophy of pragmatism with the philosophy of Deleuze, one must compare their temperaments, their attitudes, their working preferences, their visions.” Stuhr thereby seeks to elucidate the usefulness of understanding Deleuze as a kind of pragmatist by focusing on the issue of philosophy itself: he enquires how Deleuze and Dewey understand the nature of philosophy, and seeks to understand the useful ways in which Dewey’s notion of philosophy as criticism of criticism and Deleuze’s account of philosophy as concept creation may be understood as interwoven.
The second half of the collection, titled “New Pragmatisms,” explores the philosophical significance of a number of points of convergence and divergence between Deleuze’s philosophy and the thought of several contemporary pragmatists. The opening two chapters of this section effectively constitute a debate as to the philosophical proximity of Deleuze’s and Rorty’s work. Paul Patton argues that, of all the French thinkers Rorty discusses, Deleuze is the one whose views come closest to his own. Patton then examines three important points of convergence: firstly, that Deleuze is a philosophical ironist in Rorty’s sense; secondly, that both philosophers advance antirepresentationalist approaches to thought and language; and finally, that both thinkers understand philosophy to have a pragmatic and political vocation involving the creation of new vocabularies. Patton concludes, however, that Deleuze and Rorty understand the political potential of such vocabularies in quite different ways.
Barry Allen, by contrast, argues that Rorty’s lack of positive engagement with Deleuze should not be surprising. Allen concedes that Deleuze and Rorty share a commitment to antirepresentationalism and to progressive politics. However, the two philosophers diverge considerably from one another when it comes to thinking through the details of what progressive politics consists of. Above all, however, Allen argues that the major difference between Deleuze and Rorty centers on the nature and value of philosophy itself. Whereas Deleuze valorizes philosophical creativity, Rorty wishes to usher in a post-philosophical culture.
Chapter 10, by Sean Bowden, explores the relationship between antirepresentationalism and objectivity in Rorty, Brandom, and Deleuze. He shows that while Rorty jettisons objectivity in favor of “solidarity,” Brandom’s antirepresentationalist semantics conceives of objectivity as a constraint imposed by the inherent perspectivalness of discourse. Brandom’s conception of objectivity, however, doesn’t include the idea of something “out of our control” constraining thought. Bowden then argues that Deleuze’s conception of “problematic Ideas” responds to this objection by embedding a Brandomian-style inferentialism in a “thick,” pragmatist account of experience.
In the following chapter, Simon B. Duffy develops an account of Deleuze as a “speculative subject naturalist pragmatist.” Taking up Macarthur’s and Price’s notion of “subject naturalism” and its priority over “object naturalism,” Duffy turns to some of the distinctions within philosophical naturalism developed by Brian Leiter in order to qualify Deleuze’s subject naturalism as “speculative.” Duffy argues that this can be seen in Deleuze’s development of a “metaphysics of the calculus” that models an antirepresentationalist account of the relation between ideas and their objects. He concedes, however, that Macarthur and Price may see Deleuze’s work as too “ontological” for their subject naturalist pragmatist program.
In Chapter 12, Wojciech Małecki and Simon Schleusener explore the points of overlap and divergence between the work of Deleuze and that of the pragmatist Richard Shusterman. In particular, Małecki and Schleusener identify Deleuze’s and Shusterman’s shared commitment to a pragmatic conception of the body, and their common concern to link the body and the affects to questions regarding the political. However, the two philosophers part company over the question of the meaning and value of “health,” with Shusterman privileging the “actual” dimension of bodies, and Deleuze focusing on the “virtual” or transcendental conditions that subtend them.
In the penultimate chapter in this volume, Jack Reynolds evinces some skepticism with regard to the possibility of a rapprochement between Deleuze’s work and the work of several contemporary pragmatists. Reynolds explicates and juxtaposes the metaphilosophical commitments of Deleuze, Nicholas Rescher, Sami Pihlström, and Joseph Margolis, particularly with respect to their understanding and treatment of the “methodological triumvirate” of transcendental reasoning, methodological naturalism, and common sense. Reynolds concludes that a key stumbling block to any rapprochement is Deleuze’s commitment to a form of transcendental philosophy and its associated critical ambition.
In the final chapter of the collection, Claire Colebrook stages an encounter between Deleuze’s philosophy and pragmatist thought in such a way as to reorient the reader’s thinking about pragmatism. Playing on the two etymological senses of pragmatism—relating to both praxis and ta pragmata (or things)—she calls for a shift in how we might practically understand “things”: a shift from things understood in the well-known pragmatist manner as “things of concern” in our world, to things as having their own concerns and their own worlds—worlds which are in complex differential communication with our own.
Taken together, it is not the aim of these chapters to show that Deleuze should be read as a pragmatist, any more than it is to suggest that elements of pragmatist philosophy should be considered “Deleuzian.” However, we do suggest that collectively these chapters demonstrate that the relationship between Deleuze’s philosophy and the rich and diverse tradition of pragmatist thought is worthy of further exploration. The successive analyses of convergence with and divergence from the theses and concerns of classical and contemporary pragmatism serve to clarify and extend Deleuze’s philosophy. Conversely, these manifold encounters are also a means to enrich and further develop pragmatist thought. Above all, our aim is to bring Deleuze into the ongoing discussions over the nature and significance of pragmatist approaches in philosophy while also bringing overtly pragmatist concerns to current and future Deleuze scholarship. The inspiration behind this volume and the achievement of its contributors is to further develop the space of encounter between a major current of twentieth-century French philosophy and the preeminent currents of New World pragmatism.
1 The sole exception is Inna Semetsky’s Deleuze, Education and Becoming (2006). Nevertheless, Semetsky’s monograph has a relatively restricted focus, insofar as it deals only with the conceptual affinities between Deleuze and two of the American pragmatists, Peirce and Dewey, and in the context of reinvigorating educational discourse.
2 The single exception to this is John J. Stuhr’s “From the Art of Surfaces to Control Societies and Beyond: Stoicism, Postmodernism, and Pan-Machinism” (Stuhr 2003, 95–114). This chapter, however, is not so much a “study” of Deleuze and pragmatism as a creative construction of a Deleuzian-pragmatist “line of flight.” The only other candidate for an exception would be Richard Rorty’s very short and very hostile review of Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983). For more on Rorty’s review of Deleuze’s Nietzsche, and on Deleuze’s equally brief and unsatisfying dismissal of Rorty’s “conversationalism” in What Is Philosophy?, see Barry Allen’s and Paul Patton’s contributions to this volume.
3 Moreover, as Dosse suggests, it was almost certainly Wahl who would have “convinced Deleuze to disinter Hume” (2010, 110). For more on the influence of Wahl on Deleuze, see Flaxman’s and Madelrieux’s chapters in this volume. See also Zamberlin (2006, 40–67).
4 In his translation of Difference and Repetition (1994), Paul Patton modifies Deleuze’s citation of Wahl’s translation and quotes directly from Blood’s The Anaesthetic Revelation.
5 A second reference to William James can also be found in The Fold, where Deleuze alludes to an affinity between the “perspectivism” of William and Henry James and that of Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Whitehead (Deleuze 1993, 20). For more on this, see Gregory Flaxman’s contribution to this volume.
6 A further reference to James can be found in Essays Critical and Clinical (1998, 123–124): to his Principles of Psychology and the argument therein that emotions are the effects, as opposed to the causes, of corporeal modifications. Deleuze argues that James’s “order is correct,” but also that affects are not the effects of the body. Affects are rather “critical entities” that subsequently judge what the body does on its own account.
7 See also on this Jon Roffe’s contribution to this volume.
8 For a recent discussion of this, which explains the limits of the rapprochement between Bergson and pragmatist philosophy, see Allen (2013).
9 It is worth mentioning, however, that Deleuze was well placed to engage with Dewey’s philosophy through the work of Gérard Deledalle, Dewey’s well-known French translator and commentator. Deleuze cites Deledalle’s work on Peirce in the Cinema books (1986, 231n14; 1989, 287nn10 and 12). He also refers to Deledalle’s work on the history of pragmatism in his essay on Bartleby (Deleuze 1998, 193). What is less well known is that Deledalle was at the Sorbonne at roughly the same time as Deleuze (1943–1947) and was also a student of Jean Wahl. Deleuze would have been aware of Deledalle’s doctoral work on Dewey, along with his 1967 translation of Dewey’s Logic—The Theory of Inquiry, and his book L’Idée d’expérience dans la philosophie de John Dewey (1967).
10 On the connection between Deleuze and the James brothers, see the chapter by Gregory Flaxman in this volume.
11 As Peirce famously put it in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1992 [1878]): “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (132).
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