Differentiating Derrida and Deleuze

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 441-465

  Bearn, Gordon C F ^a  

^a LEHIGH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33846371055     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1026518220135     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. D.B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 104
2. DR 56.
3. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 371
4. "I'm going to have to wander all alone," trans. L. Lawlor, Philosophy Today, 42.1 (1998), p. 3.
5. See DR 318n28, and G. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 261n2.
6. The full passage is: "As for the method of deconstruction, I see what it is, I admire it a lot, but it has nothing to do with my method. I do not present myself as a commentator of texts. A text, for me, is nothing but a little cog in an extra-textual machine." This passage comes from Deleuze, G., Lyotard, J.-F. et al. "Discussion," after the presentation of Lyotard's "Notes sur le retour de le Kapital,"
7. and Deleuze's "Pensée nomade." In Nietzsche AuJourd'hui, 1 : Intensités. (Paris: Union Générale D'Éditions, 1973), p. 186. Thanks to an anonymous referee for help in finding this reference.
8. "I'm Going to Have to Wander all Alone," p. 4.
9. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1980), part 1, section 1.
10. Sometimes Deleuze puts the two approaches to difference and repetition in terms of two contrasting claims. (a) "Only that which is alike differs." (DR116) (b) "Only differences are alike." (DR 116)
11. These two claims are also contrasted at Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 261. Deleuze defends (b), the second claim. The rejected claim, (a), collars difference with the chains of representation, and is strongly reminiscent of Donald Davidson's approach to radically alternative conceptual schemes.
12. (See his "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," in Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).)
13. I don't think Deleuze ever draws the distinction in precisely these terms, but speaking of difference he does insist that to approach difference from within the frame of representation will reveal "conceptual difference, but not the concept of difference" (DR xv).
14. hi DR, Deleuze uses the word concept to speak about representations, and he distinguishes these representational concepts from what he there calls Ideas, of which he writes: "An Idea is an n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity" (182). These Ideas are the progenitors of what Deleuze and Guattari's WIPrefers to as concepts, which in that book are said to be the form creative Ideas take in philosophy (8). The later book sometimes distinguishes these creative philosophical concepts from more pedestrian representational concepts which are there called "prepositional concepts" (137-138, 143-144). Since I am focusing primarily on DR, where concept is used in its prepositional or representational sense, I will normally use the word concept in its representational sense, and I will not be using concept in the more or less technical sense in which WIP announces that "philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts" (5). Roughly speaking, WIP speaks of concepts in the way that DR speaks of Ideas.
15. When discussing Ideas, Deleuze remarks that Ideas are differentiated without being differenciated, hence distinct and obscure, like "intoxication, the properly philosophical stupor of the Dionysian Idea" (DR 214).
16. Why vulgar? My colleague Michael Mendelson suggests that it is vulgar, because in full fledged Leibnizian metaphysics, the reflection of each monad in every other may mean that there is, at bottom, only one complete concept.
17. See G.C.F. Beam, "The Possibility of Puns: A Defense of Derrida," Philosophy and Literature 19/2 (1995, pp. 330-335.
18. L. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), pp. 1-5.
19. Derrida can also speak of what is "beyond authenticity and inauthenticity," but his proximity to the Deleuzian position I will sketch in the fourth section is only apparent. For the beyond which I will sketch is a beyond in the direction of Yes, and Derrida's beyond is in the direction of an inevitable No: "the anyone who, beyond authenticity and inauthenticity, beyond a certain ethics, beyond das Man and man, would sign the experience of the impossible, of the double bind that makes a possible ruin of every architecture and an originary ruin of every signature" ("Summary of Impromptu Remarks," in C.C. Davidson, Anyone (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), p. 45).
20. The second motto to Derrida's Speech and Phenomena (1967) is a passage from Husserl's Ideas I, § 100: A name on being mentioned reminds us of the Dresden gallery and of our last visit there: we wander through rooms and stop in front of a painting by Teniers which represents a gallery of paintings. Let us further suppose that the paintings of this gallery would represent in their turn paintings, which, on their part, exhibited readable inscriptions and so forth.
21. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, pp. 287-290.
22. It is perhaps the notion of supplementarity which makes the role of absence in Derridean play most obvious, at the end of a discussion of Plato, for example, we can read that, "The true and the untrue are both species of repetition. And there is no repetition possible without the graphics of supplementarity, which supplies, for the lack of a full unity, another unity that comes to relieve it, being enough the same and enough other so that it can replace by addition" (Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 168). In 1967, he wrote: "The overabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented" (WD 290).
23. See G.C.F. Beam, "Derrida Dry: Iterating Iterability Analytically," Diacritics 25/3 (1995), pp. 3-25.
24. Speech and Phenomena, p. 104.
25. Dissemination, p. 127.
26. See Dissemination, p. 127. This reference to a "medium" makes one think that Derrida may still be in the grip of the Davidsonian thought that Deleuze is trying to overcome, namely, that "only that which is alike differs" (DR 116). Derrida also seems to be writing in a quasi-Davidsonian fashion during his discussion of "minimal consensus" in Ltd Inc, p. 146
27. Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 14.
28. "The Villanova Roundtable," in J.D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 17.
29. Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 168.
30. This "desert in a desert" demands being thought in its difference from Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between two sorts of desert dweller, migrants and nomads (ATP 380 ff). Derrida speaks of this "desert in a desert" at Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge: Two sources of 'Religion' at the limits of Reason Alone," trans. S. Weber, in J. Derrida and G. Vattimo, Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 19.
31. The role of truth telling here shows how far Derrida's "play" is from what might be called recreational lying ... as opposed to the deceptive workday lie.
32. "The Villanova Roundtable," pp. 22-23.
33. Specters of Marx, p. 169.
34. "A Number of Yes (Nombre de oui)," Qui Parle 2/2 (1988), p. 126.
35. J. Derrida, "A Number of Yes,", p. 131.
36. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 10.
37. The author of the post cards can write, "did not everything between us begin with a reproduction? Yes, and at the same time there is nothing more simply false, the tragedy is there" (PC 9). By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari write: "We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production" (ATP 241 ).
38. In the end, we will realize that it is not so horrible to have pizza in bed with your lover. The pure goal of being with your lover alone projects an ideal coupling on the cold steel tables of an operating theater. The Deleuzian projection is more in the direction Emmanuel Ax points in this remark on Yo-Yo Ma: "If he says that Bach, ice-skating, pizza and falling in love with love are related to each other, he means it, and believe me, he'll end up convincing you of it" (M. Saltzman, "Yo-Yo Ma," New York Times, Sunday, September 7, 1997, Section 2 "Arts and Leisure," p. 79).
39. The tone of these post cards was made clear to me by Alison Freeman.
40. See A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), volume 1, § 57.
41. Of Grammatology, p. 141.
42. This problem of how to constrain the play of significations under the name "Carroll's paradox" also helps motivate Deleuze's turn to the logic of sense in The Logic of Sense, 16 ff.
43. It is as if this paradox reveals on the one side the logic of sense and on the other the logic of power. "Carroll's paradox" refers to L. Carroll, "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles," Mind 2/2 ( 1895), pp. 278-280.
44. Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 89.
45. I felt my way towards an appreciation of this good death enjoying the best of thinking with Alison Freeman trying to make sense of the little sentence: "Just like music - why does it give us the urge to die" (Dialogues, p. 140;
46. also see ATP 348). Freeman's interpretation of the good death appears in A. Freeman, "Light without Heat," Lehigh Review 1 (Spring-Fall 1999), pp. 41-51.
47. Dialogues, p. 89.
48. This is a point familiar to readers of Derrida. At WD 36, this problem is attributed to the unique, and imperial grandeur of the order of reason." At MP xiv, Derrida suggests that this problem requires that we approach the outside of reason "obliquely." Derrida's suggestion is adjacent to Deleuze's advocacy of the diagonal, for example at ATP 295: "Free the line, free the diagonal." But the difference between Derrida and Deleuze is the distance between the impossibility (Derrida) and the possibility (Deleuze) of riding a diagonal through the frame of representation. As always, it is the difference between No and Yes.
49. "Flat multiplicities of n-dimensions are asignifying and asubjective" (ATP 9).
50. "Summary of Impromptu Remarks," p. 45.
51. This melancholy picture of acting is at home in what Deleuze calls the theater of representation (DR 10). It can be overcome by a theater of repetition which itself initiates a becoming-becoming, or as Deleuze puts it: In the theater of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a language that speaks before words, with gestures that develop before organized bodies, with masks before faces, with specters and phantoms before characters - the whole apparatus of repetition as a "terrible power" (DR 10).
52. Deleuze distinguishes his approach to repetition from the traditional approach to generality by saying that the general lives in an economy of exchange, but repetition is gift (DR l). Once again, Derrida speaks against Deleuze's Yes, for he insists that the gift cannot be experienced ("The Villanova Roundtable," 19).
53. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 27.
54. Rimbaud, Illuminations c. 1875 includes this prose poem entitled H All monstrosities violate the atrocious gestures of Hortense. Her solitude is an erotic mechanics, her languor, a dynamics of loving. Under the surveillance of a certain childhood, she has been, in numerous ages, the ardent cleansing hygiene of the races. Her door is open to misery. There, the morality of actual beings is disembodied in her passion or in her action - Oh terrifying shudder of beginning lovers on bloody soil lit by the brilliant hydrogen! - find Hortense.
55. A. Rimbaud, Illuminations: Colored Plates, ed. N. Osmond (London: The Athlone Press, 1976), p. 77. Translation GCFB.
56. This paper was originally delivered at a meeting of the L astern Pennsylvania Philosophical Association on April 10, 1999. That version was written in the shelter of regular discussions with Alison Freeman and with Michael Mendelson about repetition and related issues. I have tried to answer some of the questions raised at this paper's first hear-ing by Larry Haas, Marjorie Haas, Michael Mendelson, and Walter Brogan. Dorothea Olkowski's and Chip Colwell's reading of the penultimate draft encouraged me and, more importantly, warned me of dangers and objections on the horizon. I owe to the comments of an anonymous referee the impetus to begin the process of measuring the distance between DR and WIR This paper only nudges that process into existence.