Among Anglophone philosophers, the market for French imports is not what it used to be. Once upon a time, the introduction of structuralism and poststructuralism galvanised an unprecedented demand for what came to be called ‘French Theory’. In the 1970s and 1980s, an astonishing array of Francophone philosophers, scholars and theorists were introduced to audiences in the US, UK and elsewhere. Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, René Girard, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan and Jean-François Lyotard were but a few of the French legion whose works were ardently translated and voraciously consumed. More than anything else, French Theory bears witness to a reception history whose enthusiastic and even inflationary excesses are likely to strike us as ‘days of wine and roses’ – not just ethereal but impossibly remote.1
Naturally, a handful of luminaries from this older generation of French philosophers remain (e.g., Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière), and a smattering of ‘younger’ philosophers have achieved notoriety in the Anglophone world (e.g., Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Quentin Meillassoux). But my point is that the milieu of philosophy, the so-called marketplace of ideas, has undergone a profound transformation. Today, the significance of a philosopher, French or otherwise, seems to have been hitched to the fluctuations of academic vogues and the rapid cycling of intellectual paradigms. The philosophical marketplace is characterised by breathtaking speeds and sudden accelerations which outstrip our powers of comprehension, leaving us with the most impoverished of theoretical measures: is it trending? In a sense, what we call theory resembles nothing as much as a futures exchange in which (as most any graduate student can tell you) intellectual investment becomes a matter of speculation. Of course, futures markets were initially developed to manage risk, but the means of hedging one’s bets – derivatives – have introduced risks that seem to typify, mutatis mutandis, the theory market. Inasmuch as I’ve suggested that this market increasingly renders intellectual investment speculative, the nature of the wager no longer concerns a philosopher, a theory or a discourse so much as it refers to what economists call the ‘underlying’, a contract whose value is contingent on the performance of an underlying entity. In a sense, value has been displaced onto market factors to which philosophy is indexed.
No doubt, this is a ruefully nihilistic portrait of our state of affairs, but it’s in the context of this cynical calculus that, I think, the importance of Anne Sauvagnargues’s work can be appreciated. For those who do not yet know her work, Sauvagnargues is among the most rigorous, creative and wide-ranging continental philosophers working in France, or any-where else, today. Her philosophical project, especially as we find it in Artmachines, offers a singular rejoinder to the marketplace of philosophy: the book before you formulates a style of thinking whose intelligence and humour, joy and vitality, presage a different way of pursuing philosophy and, I would add, a different modus vivendi. Not that she is unaware of dangers faced by philosophy today or insensitive to their extent: rather, it seems to me that Sauvagnargues continually manages to make the sad passions visited on philosophy the impetus to affirm the practice of philosophy as both ‘critical and clinical’, diagnostic and creative. Indeed, one of the great virtues of Sauvagnargues’s work is that she demands rigour without sacrificing the living latitude – the wiggle room – within which something new can be created. Her thinking is unfailingly precise but never petty.
A professor at L’Université de Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense, Sauvagnargues has written (and co-written) several books of philosophy, edited several more, and authored scores of articles on a stunning variety of subjects. Having said that, she is surely best known for her authoritative and masterful engagements with the work of Gilles Deleuze. Over the course of roughly the last ten years, Sauvagnargues has developed a reading of Deleuze’s philosophy that, far from simply determining what he means, insists on the contours of a meticulous and delicate intellectual periodisation. We might call her method telescopic in so far as she is capable of taking any given enunciation, in any given text, and opening it like the compartments of a telescope onto the continuum of a past and the future. With Sauvagnargues, the prospect of anything like hermeneutics is displaced by a cartography composed of so many lines and vectors, trajectories and transversals. There may be no one better at unfurling the history of Deleuze’s own philosophical inventions, no one who better understands the complex and shifting landscape, and no one better equipped to resist the reification of concepts (i.e. clichés) to which Deleuze is so often subjected. Like the late, great François Zourabichvili, Sauvagnargues’s capacity to map Deleuze’s concepts without sacrificing their intrinsic complexity remains virtually unsurpassed.
Like many, I first encountered Sauvagnargues’s work in the course of reading La philosophie de Deleuze (2004), a co-authored book that included her fabulous long essay (really, a kind of novella) ‘Deleuze, de l’animal à l’art’. While the essay established the coordinates of her own approach – namely, metaphysics, aesthetics and vitalism, though only in so far as each term is defined anew – it also made clear, to anyone who read it, the invention of a singular philosophical voice and a style. This unique combination of rigour and lyricism, precision and invention, was confirmed with the publication of Deleuze et l’art, Sauvagnargues’s first monograph, the following year. Published in English in 2013, Deleuze and Art duly situates Deleuze’s philosophy in the domain of aesthetics, but if anything, her contention is that aesthetics ought to be situated at the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy. Whether she is meditating on Proust’s fiction, or digressing about Ozu’s cinema, or reflecting on Michaux’s ‘pictorial experiments’, Sauvagnargues peers beyond the veil of ontology to affirm the genetic and creative dimension of Deleuze’s philosophy.2 To put it another way, philosophy is inextricably related to art qua aesthetics, but only in so far as aesthetics itself is understood in light of the affects that we communicate and experience, the modes of existence that we inhabit, the ecology of ideas we nurture. Indeed, Sauvagnargues’s project properly recalls the remarkable ambition that Nietzsche formulates in his ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’: ‘to look at science [Wissenschaft] through the prism of the artist, but also to look at art through the prism of life’.3
Doubtless, this endeavour defines the book for which Sauvagnargues remains best known, Deleuze, L’empiricism transcendental (2008). Her title is taken from the definition Deleuze gave his own philosophy, especially in Difference and Repetition (1968), and if such a thing is possible, Sauvagnargues succeeds in producing a book commensurate to Deleuze’s own. Still, the most fascinating, counterintuitive and perhaps misunderstood aspect of L’empiricism transcendental is its author’s refusal to privilege Difference and Repetition as the locus classicus of Deleuze’s philosophy. Unlike many of his best readers and worst detractors, Sauvagnargues fundamentally resists this conceit, preferring instead to telescopically locate Deleuze’s monograph in the mobile lines of the philosopher’s own becoming. And it is along that line that Sauvagnargues exerts the force of her own philosophical predilections, feeling her way into moments of transition, modulation and metamorphosis that bear us into the living thought of Deleuze’s philosophy. To my mind, L’empiricism transcendental is among the best books ever written about Deleuze, and there is every reason to believe that, once the book is translated, its influence will become even more profound.
In a sense, the great virtue of Artmachines is to have confirmed Sauvagnargues as a supreme scholar of Deleuze’s philosophy while also correcting the impression that she is, so to speak, a ‘Deleuzian’. I have to admit that I have always disliked this term, regarding it as the inelegant expression of particularly bad faith.4 But if the term is indifferent to the nature of Deleuze’s thought, it’s no less crude with respect to Sauvagnargues’s own philosophy. The essays comprising Artmachines, all but one of which were published over the past decade, amply demonstrate the remarkable diversity of Sauvagnargues’s work. The collection unfolds a rich menagerie of philosophers, scholars, scientists and artists, and while Deleuze is among the most significant of her ‘conceptual personae’, Artmachines leaves no doubt that Sauvagnargues’s philosophical assemblage constitutes a polyvocality of its own. In this respect, one could imagine the subtitle of this collection duly followed by an ellipsis, since readers will discover scintillating discussions of Spinoza or Bergson, Ruyer or Deligny, among a host of others. But what makes Artmachines such a brilliant and compelling introduction to Sauvagnargues’s philosophy is that it discloses the fundamental coordinates of her own cartography in the triumvirate of Deleuze, Guattari and Simondon.
It should be noted that the essays to follow appear together, in this volume, for the first time, since they have been selected and arranged so dexterously that we might otherwise have the impression that Artmachines was conceived in toto and written in kind. The ingenuity of Suzanne Verderber’s edition is to have brought out the continuities and evolutions, the problems and predilections, which characterise Sauvagnargues’s thought. Above all else, the book demonstrates that her philosophy, while committed to Deleuze, is no less engaged with the psychiatrist Félix Guattari and the philosopher Gilbert Simondon; indeed, we might go so far as to say that these are the three axes of Sauvagnargues’s philosophy and that her uniqueness consists in having formulated their collective assemblage. To understand as much, we should admit the sense in which this proposition is liable to seem obvious, even redundant. After all, Deleuze and Guattari famously undertook a collaboration that, however intermittent, spanned roughly twenty years, beginning with Anti-Oedipus (1972) and concluding with What is Philosophy? (1991). The fact remains, however, that when one discusses Deleuze’s philosophy, his proper name often implicitly includes (and effaces) Guattari’s. Hence, Sauvagnargues is among those scholars who have long sought to counteract this tendency, and in this context we can understand her refusal to canonise Difference and Repetition as the paradigmatic expression of Deleuze’s thought. After all, that familiar conceit elides the subsequent collaboration with Guattari, no less the broader question of a ‘Guattari Effect’.5
Thus, Artmachines strives to illuminate Guattari’s contributions and to underscore the degree to which the psychiatrist, activist and founder of CERFI (Centre d’études, de recherches et de formation institutionelles) transformed the philosopher down to the very concept and expression of his style. Consider, Sauvagnargues says, Deleuze’s successive editions of his book on Proust (see Chapter 1). In the 1964 version, ‘Deleuze observed that “style is not the man; style is essence itself,” and defined this essence, in the 1970 version, as the “formal structure of the work.”’ But in the 1976 version, where Deleuze says that ‘style is never a matter of a man, it is always a matter of essence (nonstyle)’, Sauvagnargues reveals how Deleuze actually recasts the ‘formal structure’ of style according to Guattari’s signature concept – transversality. The latter ‘marks a decisive break with centred forms of organisation, with vertical hierarchies and their horizontal correspondences, and which torques structure on its machinic diagonals and anarchic connections’. Even more to the point, Sauvagnargues turns to Guattari because his own feverish invention of concepts augurs the deviant path that Deleuze will follow: the very transition of philosophy ‘from structure to the machine’ derives from Guattari’s own psychiatric practice and theory.
Artmachines maps the transversal line that carries style, so to speak, from Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism to Guattari’s schizological production, but along this line we discover the final aspect of Sauvagnargues’s assemblage, and it is with Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and ontogenesis that we might appropriately conclude. Gilbert Simondon is likely the least known of her three conceptual personae. Simondon was the subject of intermittent admiration during his life as well as after his death (in 1989), but his work has attracted renewed interest in recent years, and Sauvagnargues is surely among those who have helped to stoke this new readership.6 Though much of his foundational work, dating back to his dissertation, remains untranslated, Simondon’s deeply original philosophy – ranging from evolution to phenomenology, from cybernetics to biology – already inspires a small cottage industry outside of France. In Artmachines, though, Simondon’s importance consists in extending the concept of style, usually understood as matter of art and aesthetics, into the semiotic machines of philosophy and even science. For Sauvagnargues, ‘art, literature, philosophy and science all possess the capacity to produce new individuations, with their personae and their respective modes of experimentation’. While these are distinct fields, they each undertake (pace Simondon) ‘the creation of such individuations, completely differentiated and new, which consequently do not pre-exist their enunciation or their semiotic effectuation. This is the “transductive” function of style’ (Chapter 1).
More than borrowing Simondon’s ‘felicitous expression’, Sauvagnargues configures the concept of style on the basis of a concept, ‘transduction’, which goes to the very heart of the philosophy of individuation. Simondon describes transduction as ‘an individuation in progress’ (Chapter 3), which is to say that it consists in an interval, but that the ‘interval is substance’7 – the modulation of matter. The process of individuation is uncertain (‘metastable’), but Sauvagnargues’s point is that, for this reason, it also inventive. ‘Transduction provokes a system to enter a new state, an unpredictable change of phase’, and on this point she appeals to Simondon’s own formulation: invention means that the terms created by dint of ‘the operation do not pre-exist this operation’ (Chapter 1). In effect, readers will discover that Sauvagnargues’s rigorous appropriation of Simondon nevertheless makes him the conduit along which, once more, metaphysics is seen from the perspective of art, and art is seen from the perspective of life. The ‘most direct and explosive consequence’ of this procedure, she adds, is to be found ‘in the movement from representation, from reproduction, in short, from all of the old ontologies of the image that separate and superimpose model and copy, to a philosophy of becoming, of individuation, and of metamorphosis’ (Chapter 3). With Artmachines, Sauvagnargues gives us precisely such a philosophy.
NOTES
1. See, for instance, François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). While I take ‘French Theory’ to designate the invention of a reception history, this is not to deny the history of modern French philosophy. For an account of this history (if not a particularly sympathetic one) see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
2. It’s worth noting that, among many other things, Sauvagnargues has produced some of the most remarkable pages ever written on Oscar Michaux. See, in particular, her chapter on ‘The Violence of Sensation’, in Deleuze and Art, especially pages 136ff.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5.
4. Of course, Deleuze had a great deal to say about proper nouns and the possibilities they retain for the creation of singular modifiers – the way, for instance, a name can evoke the characteristic features and movements of thought apart from any determinate subjectivity (for instance, ‘Kafkaesque’). Still, there is a difference between the mobilisation of the name for this operation and the baptism of a name for the purpose of affiliation: while a philosophical gesture can be Platonic, Cartesian or Kantian, this ought not to be conflated with what it means to call someone a Platonist, Cartesian or Kantian. The latter makes the proper name the object of belonging, as if we had strayed from philosophy into politics or theology: can one be identified with a philosopher in the same way that one is called a Marxist or a Reaganite, a Catholic or a Mooney? The predilection seems run to against the grain of Deleuze’s notorious affinity for a life ‘without qualities’, for ‘becoming imperceptible’, and for ‘forgetting oneself’. Only on the basis of this ascesis, he insists, does philosophy open itself to the habitation of new ways of thinking: affiliation with a philosopher, any philosopher, contradicts the premise and practice of philosophy itself – to ‘think otherwise’.
5. I’ve borrowed this line from Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey’s fine collection, The Guattari Effect (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). Notably, Sauvagnargues’s own essay in that collection, ‘A Schizoanalytic Knight on a Political Chessboard’, has been included in this volume.
6. Among other things, see the special volume of Pli from 2012 dedicated to ‘Deleuze and Simondon’.
7. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 478. Notably, Sauvagnargues elaborates this point by drawing on Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Deleuze’s two books on the cinema.