Rorty turned the litany of proper names into a new style of argument. His favorite names range widely in twentieth-century French and German thought, yet he practically never mentions Deleuze or meaningfully comments on his work. That may seem strange, given Rorty’s eagerness for allies and abundant references to Foucault and especially Derrida, who were friends, colleagues, even collaborators with Deleuze, but it does not seem strange to me. Having known the man I cannot avoid the impression that Rorty would find Deleuze’s work repulsive, and not worth the patience it would take to figure out why. He does not feel that way about Heidegger or Derrida. So it is not that he is disinclined to do the work. But something about Deleuze had, I think, the wrong odor and put him off. I think he responded the same way to Lacan and Žižek. This alienation is ironic because of all recent French philosophers it is Deleuze alone who studied the American pragmatists and wrote appreciatively of Anglophone philosophy including pragmatism.
Rorty tended to be drawn to Continental philosophers he can somehow assimilate to pragmatism as he understands it, describing residual disagreement in terms of inconsistent or inadequate pragmatization. He tries such readings on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Habermas, Derrida, and Foucault, and makes one feeble effort to include Deleuze. “On my view, James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling” (Rorty 1989, xviii). Which road is that? We hear no more about Deleuze, but he says Foucault is following a path broken out by Nietzsche, “the attempt to free mankind from [what Nietzsche called] the ‘longest lie,’” namely, “the notion that outside the haphazard and perilous experiments we perform there lies something (God, Science, Knowledge, Rationality, or Truth) which will, if only we perform the correct rituals, step in to save us” (Rorty 1982, 208). It is at the end of this Nietzschean line that James and Dewey are already waiting, which makes these pragmatists more original and path breaking than the Europeans, having worked their way past obstacles Foucault (and Deleuze?) still struggle with. He says, “I think Dewey and James are the best guides to understanding the modern world that we’ve got,” and explains his neopragmatism as the effort to put pragmatism “into better shape after thirty years of superprofessionalism” (Rorty 2006, 20).
Thirty years of superprofessionalism refers to the period (1950–1980) between the last of Dewey and the first of Rorty. Those were the heroic years of American analytic philosophy. Dewey’s homespun ways came to seem amateurish. Logic was the thing, and it was logic à la Frege and Russell, not Peirce or Dewey. Logical positivism was part of the mix, but the real genius of this phase of analytic philosophy, as Rorty reads it, is the internal criticism of positivism epitomized by Quine and Kuhn. Each complements the deficiency of the other. What Quine lacks in historical nuance Kuhn supplies, and what Kuhn lacks in dialectical genius Quine amply compensates. Then came Sellars, then Davidson. Add Carnap and Wittgenstein and we have Rorty’s major influences before he even started reading Heidegger and Derrida. Now, he says, James and Dewey were already on the other side of analytic superprofessionalism, foreseeing what Rorty calls a post-Philosophical culture, a possible future Foucault (and Deleuze?) fail to appreciate.
Deleuze seems to like the pragmatists as process philosophers and friends of Becoming (his cinema philosophy also uses Peirce’s theory of signs). I think he might have viewed Rorty’s nominalism as evidence of the appalling influence of Wittgenstein (as indeed it is). For Deleuze, “Language has no self-sufficiency, at least that is my view. It follows that language has no significance of its own. It is composed of signs, but signs are inseparable from a whole other element, a non-linguistic element, which could be called ‘the state of things,’ or better yet, ‘images’” (Deleuze 2007, 201). That is the “radical empiricism” Rorty banishes from pragmatism. He also strives to avoid acknowledging philosophical problems. Rorty does not like such problems, and practically all his work as a philosopher is dedicated to debunking them, while Deleuze did all he could to multiply problems. Problems are different from solutions. They come first, relatively a priori, and have a productive vagueness that is not negative but is rather a kind of positive not-knowing. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze argues for a truth of problems that antedates the truth of propositions. The truth of propositions is correspondence, but the truth of questions is productivity. The “truth” of problems is the sense (sens) of problems. A true problem makes sense; its presence for us is a productive not-knowing that contributes meaning and direction to inquiry and experiment. “Truth and falsity primarily affect problems,” he says. “The problem or sense is at once both the site of an originary truth [the problem] and the genesis of a derived truth [a solution]” (Deleuze 1994, 159).
When truth is a quality of problems before it arises in solutions, error is no longer the worst thing that can happen to thought. Worse than mistaken answers is not seeing true questions, which is not error but stupidity. In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze proposes the use of philosophy to harm stupidity, to make us ashamed, sad before our own stupidity, and exposing all forms of self-satisfaction in thought (Deleuze 2006, 107). Truth in this sense is what is productive about questions, a productive not-knowing. Later he identifies this productivity with concepts. Philosophy is, then, not a matter of finding the truth, not even the true questions. It is creating concepts. Problems are productive not for the truth of their answers but the creativity of their concepts.
Deleuze passionately wanted to sustain a practice of philosophy. “I believe in philosophy,” he says. “I am all in favor of it. Thus, questions that address ‘the death of philosophy’ or ‘going beyond philosophy’ have never inspired me” (Deleuze 2007, 365). By contrast, Rorty is implacably ill-disposed to a lease on life for philosophy. Let it pass into the past, like theology. He wanted questions like, “Are you a realist or a skeptic?” to come to sound as meaningless as the Inquisitor’s question, “Are you a Cather or a Manachee?” What to Deleuze is philosophical creativity Rorty would perhaps see as a counterproductive effort to ensure that philosophy continues to have some important-sounding work to do. He may have thought that Deleuze was trying to resuscitate what Rorty calls “Philosophy with a capital P,” which would be an ironic mistake on Rorty’s part because “Philosophy with a capital P” closely resembles what Deleuze calls the dogmatic image of thought, the criticism of which is a constant of his work. So it would be wrong to suppose Deleuze is stuck in “onto-theology” and hence an obstacle to the post-Philosophical future Rorty envisions. He is an obstacle, but not for that reason.
Rorty’s one sustained discussion of Deleuze’s work is a Times Literary Supplement review of Nietzsche and Philosophy. What he writes is more imperceptive and dismissive than are Deleuze’s stray expressions of derision for Rorty’s work. 1 The most Rorty can say about one of the best books ever on Nietzsche is that Deleuze manages to make “Nietzsche’s sillier remarks sound vaguely plausible” (Rorty 1983, 619). He describes Deleuze’s interpretation of active and reactive forces as “slapdash Naturphilosophie” and finds it “hard to see why someone of Deleuze’s talents should cultivate and imitate the more fatuous side of Nietzsche” (Rorty 1983, 619). What he likes most is where Deleuze is least original, an “anti-Hegelian polemic” that (as Rorty sees it) makes points made earlier by Heidegger and recently by Derrida. “It is as if Deleuze had despaired of outdoing Heidegger and Derrida in the ‘end of metaphysics’ line, and had decided that nothing would be more subversive than to cook up a new metaphysics under the Nietzschean guise of ‘genealogy’” (Rorty 1983, 619). He finds the result much like Bergson’s process philosophy. “Levi-Strauss says of Bergson that he ‘reduced being and things to a state of mush in order to bring out their ineffability.’ Deleuze dissolves everything into a mush of reactive forces in order to bring out their underlying nastiness” (Rorty 1983, 619).
The review also passes judgment on the newly translated Anti-Oedipus. Reading this work seems to have been a chore, and left Rorty feeling hostile. He finds the argument just too easy. “One can display one’s brilliance simply by gearing up and down between levels of abstraction and degrees of vagueness as needed.… One can thus say practically anything one likes and make it sound harshly inevitable” (Rorty 1983, 619). He chastises Deleuze for pretending to live “in what Lukács called Grand Hotel Abgrund, located light-years away from the world which provokes our day-to-day moral and political deliberations” (Rorty 1983, 620). Misprisioned in this labyrinth of incomprehension, Deleuze is confidently dismissed. “What is good in Deleuze is not particularly new, and what is new—the beginnings of the ‘philosophy of desire’—threatens an even more tedious ‘modern scholasticism’ (Deleuze’s own description of phenomenology) than the one it hopes to replace” (Rorty 1983, 620).
Language like that makes one despair of productive interaction between these two thinkers. Yet there have been peace feelers from the Deleuzean side, as this volume demonstrates. Paul Patton believes that “of all the French ‘postmodernists,’ Deleuze is the one who comes closest to many of Rorty’s views” (Patton 2010, 61; see also this volume, 146). He sees potential agreement on three themes: historicism, nominalism, and liberalism. Each is worth a closer look.
“Historicism” is a notoriously polyvalent word. For Rorty, it seems to mean the historical contingency of language games. He says the “historicality of our existence is best expressed by the fact that we take the assertion of p to justify that of q because we are creatures of our own time” (Rorty 1986, 349). In a more reductive vein, he says people are “nothing more than sentential attitudes—nothing more than the presence or absence of dispositions toward the use of sentences phrased in some historically conditioned vocabulary” (Rorty 1989, 88). This is the historicism alluded to in a passage magisterially referring all at once to Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, James, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. These writers “have kept alive the historicist sense that this century’s ‘superstition’ was the last century’s triumph of reason, as well as the relativist sense that the latest vocabulary… [may] be just another of the potential infinity of vocabularies in which the world can be described” (Rorty 1979, 367). The opposite of historicism is the aspiration “to escape the vocabulary and practices of one’s own time and find something ahistorical and necessary to cling to,” an otherworldly aspiration he considers definitive of “the Western philosophical tradition” and “the culture for which that tradition speaks” (Rorty 1982, 165).
To Rorty, historicism is a line of flight—flight from “metaphysics,” from “Platonism,” from “epistemology,” and from analytic philosophy, the territory Rorty first captured and was then captured by. From a Deleuzean perspective this historicism looks like a confession of capture by history and language. It designates limits that supposedly define the subject and deny the vitality that escapes such obstacles. Deleuze might reply that history does not tell us what we are; at most it can inform us of how we are changing, or how different we have become (Smith 2012). The becoming, the events, escape historical determination. “‘Becomings’ are much more important than history… they’re two quite different things” (Deleuze 1995, 30), a difference he explains as follows: “What history grasps in an event is the way it is actualized in particular circumstances; the event is beyond the scope of history” (Deleuze 1995, 170). He says history “is not experimentation, it is only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the experimentation of something that escapes history,” that is, events, becomings. Any experiment has a historical context and would be unthinkable apart from it, but that context does not determine what it is possible to become. “Without history, experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but experimentation is not historical. It is philosophical” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 111).
It seems hard to find Rorty’s historicism in Deleuze, for whom history is not an ultimate obstacle, an ultimate context, an insuperable horizon conditioning creation. What about nominalism? That too is a complicated word. For Rorty it basically means a vast linguistic reductionism. Everything is really just something about language, and there is nothing so historically contingent as language games. “All our knowledge is under descriptions suited to our current social purposes” (Rorty 1999, 48). “Language provides our only cognitive access to objects” (Rorty 1999, 55). It is as if all the more material artifacts and techniques upon which human life depends were byproducts of language and not, as is likely, the other way around. Whether in science or morals, all we have to go on, all we have to care for, are the agreements that preserve consensus. The only right that matters, whether in morality or science, is the agreement of conversational peers. To do the right (morality) and to get it right (science) are dialogical, dialectical, rhetorical accomplishments of conversation. Science is a conversation, morality and politics are conversations, conversation is “the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood” (Rorty 1979, 389). Hence the amazing power Rorty vests in language games, what he calls the “power of redescription” (Rorty 1989, 89). Anything, really anything, can “be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed” (Rorty 1989, 7).
Is this Deleuze? Let me briefly review some of what he says about language. The discussions in The Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus seem most relevant. In the latter work Deleuze and Guattari argue for the priority of pragmatics over semantics and syntax. The units of grammar and meaning owe their value to what speakers are able to do with language. They think this priority of the pragmatic destroys Saussure’s assumption that speech activates a language system that is intrinsically ordered by purely formal differences. Part of the Deleuze-Guattari theory is that the elementary unit of language is an order-word. The primary speech act, the primary pragmatic effectiveness of language, is not to make a statement or express a belief. It is to set things in order, drawing arbitrary distinctions, making dichotomous divisions, and extracting obedience to these unnatural differences. The primary relationship of language is not between word and perception or fact. It is a relationship of saying to saying, speech repeating speech. Language begins not with song or metaphor but indirect discourse, saying what another said. The priest says what the gods say, the law says what the father says, the official says what the king says, and so on. A relation between words and things is mediated by a relation of words to other words, a relation that unfolds in an economy of authority and obedience. This linguistically mediated authority makes orders compelling and speech credible and thus active in practical reasoning, which is the government effect of truth (what passes for true) analyzed by Foucault (Allen 1993).
Language, so understood, a pragmatically organized political economy of order-words, is further qualified as “major,” meaning a socially dominant language around which minor languages swarm. “Minority” in their meaning is not quantitative or extensional. It is a quality, an intensity, a virtual potency. They explain minority (in languages, literatures, and peoples) as seeds or crystals of becoming, capable of triggering uncontrollable movement and disrupting what major usage treats as codified, canonical, or orthodox. Major and minor are not two kinds of language, but two ways of using language. The major voice presumes that variables have been replaced with constants, as if everybody knows what a word means or how a syntactic structure is used. In a minor voice, constants return to free variation. Majority implies uncontroversial norms by which to judge (and potentially disqualify) the use of language. Minor usages are not sublanguages, idiolects, or dialects but the becoming-minor of a language, as if language itself were taking flight from the attempt to codify it.
In The Logic of Sense Deleuze says that sense (sens) is an effect and an event, subsisting in language but happening to things. Patton points out that this at first baffling idea makes ready sense when recast in terms of the theory that actions are events under descriptions (Anscombe 1963; Davidson 1980). Events happen to things, but what event, what action, with what effect, depends on the predicates with which the event is described and in that sense subsists in language. Every event falls under many true descriptions, and it takes language to make sense, or to act, to have an intention, or even cause an effect. That explains why Deleuze says events “make language possible” (Deleuze 1990, 181). There is language because events happen, not because facts exist. It is not beings that make language possible, offering themselves as the meaning of names. It is events, becomings, that language requires to make sense. If there were no events, there would be no sense to signify. To be what language describes is to happen, to happen to be.
Some of these ideas are likely to win Rorty’s approval if only because they are expressible in the trusted idiom of Davidson’s philosophy. Rorty would perhaps cheerfully bid farewell to Saussure’s distinction between language and speech, an idea Chomsky already made obsolete and Davidson has no use for, but while the priority of pragmatics may sound like something that would appeal to a pragmatist, Davidson disallows it. In his terms, what words mean, their sense, has to be solved for by an interpretation of what people believe and desire and do with words. One must solve simultaneously for pragmatics, semantics, and syntax. Neither is prior to the others. Rorty would probably like the suggestion that language does not mediate between signs and reality. Words relate more primitively to other words than to nonlinguistic things. Davidson makes the same point about reference. “If the name ‘Kilimanjaro’ refers to Kilimanjaro, then no doubt there is some relation between English (or Swahili) speakers, the word, and the mountain. But it is inconceivable that one should be able to explain this relation without first explaining the role of the word in sentences; and if this is so, there is no chance of explaining reference directly in non-linguistic terms” (Davidson 1984, 219).
Semantic meaning and truth-value are for Davidson intra-linguistically determined, and do not depend on a relation between language and something categorically different. One could perhaps express this as Deleuze does, and say that every statement contains a reference to another statement. The further claim in Deleuze that this intra-linguistic social relation tends to make statements authoritative, compelling, or credible, is simply the idea that the relation of utterance to utterance tends to rationalize linguistic content. How could it not? Just as most beliefs are true (to mention a notable Davidsonian theorem), so most orders are legitimate and most commands compelling (Davidson 1984, 137). If the order-words (or the sentences that use them) include words that compel belief, then caring about truth becomes another form of obedience.
Rorty might read Deleuze’s distinction between major and minor languages in terms of T. S. Kuhn’s idea of normal and revolutionary science, which Rorty generalized in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature to normal and abnormal discourse. A scientific revolution is an exemplary Deleuzian deterritorialization. It is also true that any new revolutionary territory is promptly coded all over again, becoming an image of the order against which it struggled to be born. That is the post-revolutionary phase Kuhn calls normal science. What Rorty calls edifying discourse is a minoritarian flight from this overcoded territory, or in his terms “a protest against attempts to close off conversation.” “The danger which edifying discourse tries to avert is that some given vocabulary, some way in which people might come to think of themselves, will deceive them into thinking that from now on all discourse could be, or should be, normal discourse. The resulting freezing-over of culture would be, in the eyes of edifying philosophers, the dehumanization of human beings” (Rorty 1979, 377). In Deleuzeoguattarian terms, we resist capture by a majoritarian language. Deleuze might take umbrage at the equation, but what he calls minor language is Rorty’s edifying discourse.
Rorty could assimilate the argument from The Logic of Sense to Frege’s idea that predication has a primacy in language that names do not, but I suspect he would balk at the idea that events make language possible. I think he would want to ask why we should play Deleuze’s language game. Why care whether being is prior to becoming or sameness prior to difference? It sounds theological. The proposition that being is prior to becoming might seem to Rorty as pointless as the opposite proposition that difference is original and prior to identity. Whether we describe the world in Deleuzean terms of becoming or in Parmenidean terms of being makes no difference to anything else we do. No pragmatic truth-value is at stake in this contest between gods and giants. Rorty might argue that identity no less than difference depends on the language game. There is no more determination or reality for identity or difference than the actuality of these usages. But this argument forgets about events, and Rorty’s idea of language presupposes them. They are what is described and redescribed. They are the differences that make words make sense. What he called the power of redescription is the power of the predicate to describe an effect, that is, an event. But Rorty does not want to go there. That is Bergson and Whitehead and the worst part of James. That is slapdash Naturphilosophie. It is against his historicism— events are conditioned by their past. And against his nominalism—any creativity of events is conditioned by the language games in play.
Rorty’s experience with philosophy all the way through doctoral research and the beginning of his teaching career was broadly in the context of “process philosophy,” especially Whitehead, which is sympathetic to Bergson, from whom Deleuze inherits a lot (Gross 2008). But once analytic philosophy and especially the nominalism of Carnap and Quine got a grip on Rorty, he never looked back. There may be something Oedipal in his brutal dismissal of Deleuze’s Bergsonian reading of Nietzsche. Deleuze might say that refusing to take events seriously is refusing to take serious philosophy seriously. Rorty would agree. He was almost obstinately opposed to anything that promised to make philosophy interesting again, or valuable in the way that Deleuze thinks it is. He says that “pragmatism should pride itself on being a form of low cunning rather than being exciting” (Rorty 2006, 135). Pragmatism is utterly banal, and there is no better philosophy than pragmatism. At this point Rorty and Deleuze do not merely disagree. Rorty subverts the intellectual form of life that can take Deleuze seriously. “I think it would be a good idea for philosophers to bourgeoisify themselves, to stop trying to rise to the spiritual level at which Plato and Nietzsche confront each other” (Rorty 2007, 79). We have had enough experiments in philosophical creativity and do not need more. Rorty pipes, like a piper of Last Men from Zarathustra’s Prologue, calling solitary philosophers to join the herd.
Deleuze does not seem to say much concerning language that Rorty could not acknowledge, but that does not make him one of Rorty’s nominalists. The decisive point of that nominalism is not the agreement I have elicited but the power Rorty ascribes to redescription. The success or failure of his pragmatism depends on people coming to appreciate both the power and the contingency of language games. Rorty wonders, “Can the ubiquity of language ever really be taken seriously? Can we see ourselves as never encountering reality except under a chosen description?” (Rorty 1982, xxxix). Anything at all is good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, only under a description. Redescribe the events and their value may completely change. That is the power of redescription. There is no power greater, and it is a historical, contingent, but still relatively transcendental condition on what can be said or done or even happen to exist. We are stuck in language, a fateful closure that is insurmountable, from which there is no flight.
Deleuze agrees that language captures us, or at least that it tends to. “You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you’re just a deviant” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 159). But for Deleuze this effort to codify and regulate language is a challenge, a provocation to thought, not a fate. Deleuze’s concept of capture is well explained as the reduction of the singular to the ordinary, with all of the stratification, regularization, normalization, representation, and stupidity that entails (Smith 2012, 144). Rorty sometimes shows a grisly determination to reduce anything putatively singular, especially in philosophy, to something banal and unproblematic, as if his work were not the creation of concepts but their deflation, especially when they engender the illusion of serious philosophy. In an extraordinary passage he says, “I desperately wanted to be a Platonist—to become one with the One, to lose myself in Christ or God or the Platonic form of the Good or something like that. Pragmatism was a reaction formation” (Rorty 1998b, 50). He even wonders whether he may overdo it. “I need to put a leash on my nominalism.… I cannot get away with my stance of tough-minded hypostatization-bashing empiricism without falling a bit too much under the sway of the metaphysical logos” (Rorty 1998a, 349). Or the father’s No.
Deleuze says that when you “invoke something transcendent you arrest movement, introducing interpretations instead of experimenting” (Deleuze 1995, 146). Is that not what “language” and “history” are for Rorty, ultimate obstacles limiting in advance the possibilities of thought and action? We cannot escape history; we cannot escape language. We are ultimately captured and need irony to live with it. Such thinking is obviously at odds with the whole movement of Deleuze’s thought. Language and history can capture people, but there is no ultimate obstacle. The very idea assumes a transcendence Deleuze never ceased to oppose.
Antirepresentationalism is the centerpiece of Rorty’s pragmatism. Classical pragmatists wanted to say, “Let us bring concepts and truth back to life, to experience, to pragma and praxis!” Rorty does not like to talk about experience, or any praxis that cannot be reduced to a language game. Language in place of experience, that was the “linguistic turn” he identified with early and loyally (Rorty 1967). Bring concepts back to language-practice, language games, conversation. The value of conversation for Rorty’s pragmatism comes not from its civility, or not only from that. Conversation is important for what it is not. Conversation means not representation, not isomorphism, not correspondence. The value of conversation is its resistance to Platonic redescription. Rorty links representation and truth, that is, metaphysical truth, the truth of correspondence or adequation. On his analysis, the only reason philosophers invented ideas of representation and correspondence is to make sense of the intuition that truth is some adequacy or verisimilitude in the relation between the soul and the things themselves, but pragmatist debunking shows how optional this Greek idea of truth is, which eliminates the only reason anybody had to postulate representations and correspondence.
I think Deleuze might agree with this argument. That is why he says practically nothing about truth except to locate it at the center of Representation, his shorthand for what he also calls the dogmatic image of thought. Representation means thinking ruled by identity, analogy, opposition, and similarity. These rules confine difference to derivative relations among entities that already have an identity of their own, thus ensuring that identity and being are primary and becoming and difference mere accidents of being. For Rorty a “philosophically interesting” concept is one that serves metaphysics and epistemology by elucidating the connection between truth and representation. Rorty’s pragmatist says, “No ontological Truth, so no interesting philosophy.” Deleuze says, “No ontological Truth, so interestingly philosophy lies elsewhere.”
Nietzsche seemed to think that a question he raises about truth was his best contribution to philosophy. “Here again I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friend): What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?” (Nietzsche 2006, 119). Rorty agrees with Derrida and Foucault that this is a new and important question. Deleuze apparently does not. He seems averse to making truth a philosophical concept, even a polemical one. In a letter (1977) to Foucault, he writes, “Why [do you] feel the need to resuscitate the truth even if [you] make it into a new concept?” Jacques Donzelot recounts how “Deleuze often spoke to me about that, saying, ‘Jacques, what do you think, Michel is completely nuts, what’s this old idea about truth? He’s taking us back to that old idea, veridiction! Oh, it can’t be!’” (Dosse 2010, 318). His concern may be that once truth is at stake we are captured. What can a philosopher do when “the truth” is at stake? Either dogmatically claim to have this truth, or critically negate somebody else’s dogmatic claim, or be a skeptic and doubt all so-called truth. Foucault tends to be critical, Rorty skeptical, but Deleuze wants out.
Obviously he appreciates the theme of truth’s value in Nietzsche. As he explains it, Nietzsche dramatizes the question of truth. Earlier philosophers were stuck in the form of the question, “What is…?” When they tried to think about truth (which was not often) they could do no more than ask, “What is truth, that is, what essence, nature, or idea?” The answer seemed obvious and uncontroversial. It is thought’s adequacy to things. Nietzsche abandons the “What is it?” form of question, which can only lead to essences. His questions are psycho-dramaturgical. Not, what is truth? Rather, who wants the truth? How much truth, and on what occasions (Deleuze 2004, 98–99)? One thing Nietzsche discovers is that philosophy’s will to truth is a willful depreciation of the false. Since life relies on error, this “love of truth” turns out to mask a nihilistic hatred of life. That is how Deleuze reads Plato on the simulacrum. Plato depreciates the power of the false, and takes the body’s reliance on error for a reason to despise it. Being, truth, the real: these concepts are avatars of nihilism, ways of mutilating life, making it submit to the negative. Considered in itself, “the world is neither true nor real but living” (Deleuze 2006, 184). The dogmatic image conceals all the forces and values that actually determine thought. For “truth” cannot determine thought to think anything. It is not a goal (as Rorty would agree). That is why the philosophers, while proclaiming their undying allegiance to Truth have at the same time been “thoroughly civil and pious” (Deleuze 2006, 104).
That civil piety is a clue to Deleuze’s aversion. Truth is final, formed, official, a treasure to guard. That places truth among the majoritarian values of royal science, or the State form of thought. Even Davidson conforms to this majoritarian perspective. He justifies placing a concept of truth at the center of philosophy because it is indispensable to the scientific explanation of semantic phenomena. It is, he argues, impossible to explain such phenomena without what, after Tarski, Davidson calls a “truth-predicate” (taking the form, “… is true in language L if and only if…”). Once he has this predicate defined, his semantic theory proves that most statements and beliefs are true, really plain outright true. Current standards and norms are therefore good. It is not that we should not question them. We cannot, not all at once, not radically, only in carefully sequestered cases. The value of truth belongs overwhelmingly to the present rather than to a possible future. The language Davidson’s theory of meaning describes is a major language, its truth a majoritarian value, its truth-predicate an order-word.
Nietzsche’s dramatization of truth reveals majoritarian baggage, burdening even so austere a thinker as Davidson. Truth is not a concept to experiment with. It is probably not a concept, an event, or even a philosophical problem or question at all. That is what Rorty wants to persuade his reader of too. That, and not the puerile equation of “true” and “useful,” is pragmatism’s insight concerning truth. On Rorty’s view, pragmatism is not a new theory of truth. As he sees it, the combined force of James, Dewey, Quine, Davidson, Sellars, and Brandom, honorary pragmatists all, is to make truth no longer an attractive or compulsory thing to have a theory of. Rorty belabors this philosophical Aufhebung of truth, whereas Deleuze simply takes it as read and moves on to philosophical concepts from other material. Truth is not suspect, not problematic, but merely uninteresting, while the interesting emerges as a value superior to truth, as Whitehead proposed: “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true” (Whitehead 1929, 259). In Deleuze’s refrain, “Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 82). “Thought as such produces something interesting when it accedes to the infinite movement that frees it from truth as supposed paradigm and reconquers an immanent power of creation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 140).
Rorty’s antirepresentationalism makes “true” a banal, bourgeois, conversational compliment. When we say that a statement is true, we are not saying that it is verified by reality or corresponds with the facts, but we are merely recommending it to others as one that works. Deleuze might again agree but reply that the rehabilitation of truth in such inane terms amply justifies ignoring it in philosophy. There is nothing abstract about truth, nothing wild or chaotic. It is banal, quotidian, overcoded, territorial, sedentary, striated, major, royal, you name it! None of these qualities amounts to saying that truth does not exist or is unattainable. They imply only that truth is inhospitable to philosophical creativity. There will never be a concept of truth. Not even Davidson has a concept of truth. On the contrary, his argument is that such a concept is impossible. His definition of truth is completely external—a recursive list, not an essence (Davidson 2006). Truth has no virtuality, no freedom; it is all territory, overcoded to the eyeballs, and like an atom cannot shatter. Nothing can fly off. All you can do is try to make it swerve, which is what Rorty expects from “metaphor” and “poetic imagination.”
Referring to his well-known ironism, Rorty says that “irony is, if not intrinsically resentful, at least reactive” (Rorty 1989, 88). It is a reaction to the death of God, to ineluctable contingency, to history without purpose, and language without truth. The reaction evades nihilism and does not embrace it (as relativism does). What Rorty calls contingency means what Nietzsche called the death of God. Pragmatism is a way of not being nihilistic about contingency. Postmodern liberalism is a way of not being nihilistic about contingency. Ironism is nihilism pragmatically evaded and life tragically affirmed.
The limitation of this evasion of nihilism, reactive but not resentful, is confinement in the actual. Irony is a way of remaining in the actual, perhaps without awe, but also without intensity; dull, banal, bourgeois— values Rorty tries to rehabilitate. 2 Rorty selects these words from Horace for an epigraph to an ironical essay on “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature”: “To stand in awe of nothing, Numicius, is practically the only way to feel really good about yourself” (Rorty 1998c, 124). Pragmatism exhorts us to a godless way of thinking. We should “try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance” (Rorty 1989, 34). With Rorty’s kind of irony you do not have to resent anything for provoking a reaction. You react to the very worst thing, the death of God, comprehensively. From then on life is just pragmatic problem solving.
What Rorty wants to protect most from nihilism is liberalism. Here is not the place to go into what “liberalism” means. I take the term as read in Rorty. The best service of ironism is to allow the liberal to evade the unanswerable question of the value of liberal values. In Rorty’s terms, a so-called modern liberal believes liberal social and political norms owe their priority to deep truths about human nature: important, long-hidden truths that first saw the light in the Enlightenment. Rorty’s postmodern liberal dismisses the philosophy of the Enlightenment but says that liberal norms and institutions remain worthy of commitment despite their groundless contingency. We should be glad for this alternative if we agree with him that “the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism… has become an impediment to the preservation and progress of democratic societies” (Rorty 1989, 44), and if we think that “liberal culture needs an improved self-description” (Rorty 1989, 52). Not a new foundation, justification, or principle (as, for example, in Habermas). Instead, a new attitude, a new stance, insouciant about foundations, ironical about justification, skeptical of principles. “There is no neutral, noncircular way to defend the liberal’s claim that cruelty is the worse thing we do.” That is because “we cannot look back behind the processes of socialization which convinced us twentieth-century liberals of the validity of this claim and appeal to something which is more ‘real’ or less ephemeral than the historical contingencies which brought those contingencies into existence” (Rorty 1989, 197).
Rorty acknowledges the groundlessness of liberal values but isolates this intellectual concession ironically and evades the nihilistic subversion of solidarity. Liberals are liberals because from their perspective no other politics seem seriously to vie with liberalism at its best. Ironic ethnocentrism is not a new justification of liberalism. It marks the point where the justification of norms comes to an end. It is that bedrock upon which, as Wittgenstein said, “my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (Wittgenstein 1967, §217). It is impossible to justify liberal values to pure reason, or to Thrasymachus, or to a logical Nazi, if such a thing can be imagined! The expectation of universality for values presupposes what Rorty’s nominalism and historicism cannot abide, namely, that language does not go all the way down, that contingency is ultimately relieved, that history gives way to common human nature.
Patton finds in Rorty and Deleuze a shared “commitment to broadly ‘liberal’ or progressive politics” (Patton 2010, 75; see also this volume, 158). Deleuze obviously belongs to the Left and identifies as a “Marxist,” which he explains as the conviction that “any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed” (Deleuze 1995, 171). He does not sneer at liberal political values, as Marx or Nietzsche did, but he also will not cheer them on or denounce their detractors, as Rorty prefers. What I think Deleuze would resist in Rorty is not liberalism but presentism, Rorty’s satisfaction with the liberal concepts of the present, uninterested in any putative philosophical creation of concepts. Rorty says, “Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs. J. S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much the last word” (Rorty 1989, 63). “I just can’t think of anything I learned from post-Mill writings that added much” (Rorty 1998b, 64). This satisfaction is probably at odds with Deleuze, who seems to advocate permanent conceptual revolution, “acting counter to [our] time, and therefore acting on our time, and let us hope for the benefit of a time to come” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 112).
The precise place of politics in Deleuze’s philosophy remains elusive. Lefebvre thinks he might like what Bergson likes (Lefebrve 2012). Hallward thinks Deleuze likes creativity in philosophy so much that he cannot like anything in politics, except, as it were, privately (Hallward 2006). Perhaps the most plausible suggestion is Patton’s, which is that Deleuze’s philosophy engages “with forms of becoming-revolutionary that are active in present social and political life,” and in that way assists “in opening up paths to new forms of individual and collective life” (Patton 2010, 191). From this perspective it is the concept of deterritorialization that “bears the weight of the utopian vocation which Deleuze and Guattari attribute to philosophy” (Patton 2000, 9). Absolute deterritorialization is “the normative ideal at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics” (Patton 2010, 144). Absolute deterritorialization is an abstract, nonorganic life, potent with a reserve of freedom or movement, and active in all relative deterritorialization, meaning every historical line of flight. Patton thinks this freedom, expressed in creative transformation, is “incompatible with liberal concepts predicated upon the continued existence of the stable subject of freedom”—criticism Rorty would find lame, his postmodern liberalism having no use for this idea of the subject. (Patton 2010, 144). But there does seem to be in Deleuze a presumptive priority for becomings over beings, for flight over capture, for minorities over majorities. “What is primary in a society,” he says, “are the lines, the movements of flight… these constitute the social field, trace out its gradation and its boundaries, the whole of its becoming” (Deleuze 1987, 135). Elsewhere he adds, “Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable” (Deleuze 1995, 171).
On Patton’s reading, deterritorialization and allied concepts provide “a normative framework within which to describe and evaluate movements or process” (Patton 2000, 136). Smith concurs: “Within any assemblage what is normative is deterritorialization, that is, the creation of lines of flight or resistance that allows one to break free of a given norm, or to transform the norm. What must always remain normative is the ability to critique and transform existing norms, that is, to create something new” (Smith 2003, 308). I find this expectation unlikely because lines of flight swerve in every direction. Hitler rode a line of flight to infamy. Processes of deterritorialization do not drift leftward, as Deleuze acknowledges. “We can’t assume that lines of flight are necessarily creative, that smooth spaces are always better than segmented or striated ones” (Deleuze 1995, 33). “Flight lines are not necessarily revolutionary, on the contrary, but they are what power arrangements are going to seal off and tie up” (Deleuze 2007, 127). A “normative framework” for progressive politics will therefore require more than the bare concept of deterritorialization, and one is left wondering what, in Deleuze, that further component would be.
Deleuze explains Leftism as a ceaseless work of “making visible things that would otherwise remain hidden… the job of the Left, whether in or out of power, is to uncover the sort of problem that the Right wants to hide at all costs” (Deleuze 1995, 127). I think a question Rorty might want to ask is whether certifiably Deleuzian philosophical concepts are as good or better than the usual liberal analysis at exposing those hidden things. Is there really something we can do better with Deleuze’s concepts than with appeals to democracy, rule of law, human rights, and so on? Can philosophically creative concepts really do a better job at responding to minorities and tracking lines of flight than courageous independent journalism?
Deleuze carefully avoids something Rorty loves to criticize, which is when philosophers take on Kant’s idea of philosophy as a tribune, and claim the authority to pass judgment on everybody’s “foundations.” Deleuze mocks this tribunal more ruefully than Rorty, and it plays no role in his valorization of philosophy. “We really have to see philosophy, art, and science as sorts of separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another. With philosophy having in this no reflective pseudoprimacy nor, equally, any creative inferiority” (Deleuze 1995, 125). But valorize philosophy he certainly does. “Philosophical thinking has never been more important than it is today” (Deleuze 1995, 32). For Rorty the importance and creativity of philosophy required that pseudoprimacy, as a dream requires unconscious repression. Take it away (with banal pragmatism) and there remains no specifically philosophical creativity. It is all art, or science, or “cultural politics.”
Rorty does not want philosophy creating concepts and might be skeptical of the very idea. He also does not want liberalism associated with any “philosophically interesting” concepts, just as Rawls wants a political rather than metaphysical concept of justice, one that takes no stand on potentially controversial matters of “private” conviction. The post-Philosophical culture Rorty envisions would be as indifferent to “philosophical creativity” as we are to the inquisitorial creativity that multiplied the varieties of heresy. Rorty may never have imagined that a philosopher would valorize philosophy the way Deleuze does, but I doubt that careful study of the work would soften him up to what Deleuze wants to do in philosophy, which I suspect Rorty would still want to debunk as the worst of Heidegger and Nietzsche married to the worst of Bergson and James.
Rorty is less a skeptic than a debunker. Skeptics intensify problems, and debunkers try to make them go away, which was always Rorty’s line. What differentiates him from Stanley Cavell is also a distinction from Deleuze. 3 Cavell and Deleuze want to intensify philosophy’s questions, searching for new points of intensity, which they develop with philosophical concepts. That is something Rorty seems implacably opposed to, with no will to compromise. That seems to be the issue that finally divides them. It comes down to a stark choice. Either we have Deleuze and proud talk of philosophical creativity, or we have Rorty’s post-Philosophical culture, where Deleuze slides into the barbaric past along with unintelligible theologians like Porphyry and Duns Scotus. If that is the future Rorty wants, then the question of any philosophical agreement with Deleuze seems moot.
1 See the derisive dismissal of a “popular conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive conversations at Mr. Rorty’s” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 144), and the obscure statement that “Rorty’s ‘rules of democratic conversation’ are [not] enough to create a concept” (Deleuze 2007, 383). On “Deleuze’s aggressive non-conversation with Rorty,” see Clark 2008.
2 See “The Banality of Pragmatism and the Poetry of Justice” in Rorty 1999.
3 See “Cavell on Skepticism” in Rorty 1982.
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