Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze by Knox Peden

Author:Knox Peden [Peden, Knox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

Toward a Science of the Singular

Gilles Deleuze between Heidegger and Spinoza

All that Spinozism needed to make the univocal an object of pure affirmation was to make substance turn around the modes.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 19681

Among the major thinkers of twentieth-century French philosophy, few had as wide a field of interest as Gilles Deleuze. The diversity of objects that garnered Deleuze’s attention—from the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch to the paintings of Francis Bacon2—is exceeded only by the diversity of intellectual resources called upon to develop his thinking in the first place. Aside from the canonical thinkers covered in his monographs of the 1950s and 1960s, Deleuze’s philosophical writings refer to a set of themes and writers that can seem affected in its eclecticism and willful in its obscurantism.3 For example, his major philosophical statement Difference and Repetition (1968) takes us from the occultism of Józef Maria Hoene-Wronski’s post-Kantian consideration of differential calculus to the biophysical gnosticism of one of Deleuze’s contemporaries, Raymond Ruyer.4 These figures are joined by a cast of characters that is alternately ancient, medieval, and modern; the preface to The Logic of Sense is titled “From Lewis Carroll to the Stoics.”5 Deleuze’s idiosyncrasy is often taken for granted in general assessments of recent French thought.6 In order to acquire some purchase on the sources of his complex project, as well as its fundamental arguments and concerns, let us begin by considering the impact of two proximate influences on Deleuze who are familiar faces from our account: Ferdinand Alquié and Martial Gueroult.

On January 28, 1967, Deleuze delivered a lecture to the Société française de philosophie titled “The Method of Dramatization.”7 Keeping with a long-standing tradition in French academia, the event provided him the opportunity to publicly share a condensed version of his doctoral work with his peers. Alquié was in the audience, along with Maurice de Gandillac, Jean Beaufret, and Alexis Philonenko, among others. Most of the material Deleuze presented was culled from the fourth and fifth chapters of Difference and Repetition, the work to be submitted as his major doctoral thesis several months later. Beginning as an excursus on philosophical methodology—arguing for questions of who and how to replace those of what—the bulk of the talk explicated his conception of the relation of the virtual to the actual as an equally ontological and epistemological phenomenon. Deleuze emphasized the role of spatiotemporal dynamic processes in generating both new concepts and new physical entities. Revising Kant’s account of the relation of ideas to concepts, Deleuze insisted that the play of ideas takes place on a virtual plane and that concepts serve as their actualization. In themselves, ideas qua ideas are virtual multiplicities analogous to the multiplicity inherent in all being; like sensations, they are virtual, since they evade empirical verification, and multiple, since they express change. The common denominator is intensity: “Though experience always puts us in the presence of intensities already developed [développées] in extensions, already covered over with qualities, we must conceive, precisely as a condition

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