Deleuze on Nietzsche (difference in terms of the horizontal axis of movement) yikes. Notes…
- ‘origin’ means a plurality of differences.
- A genealogy is an effort to separate oneself from them. For Nietzsche, geneology is fundamentally an evaluation. Evaluation entails a distancing; distancing is the element of difference.
- Nietzsche’s thought is resolutely antidialectical and suspicious of all identities. The object against which the philosopher of difference pits himself is ‘the hierarchy of forces’ – or intensities – which express it. This hierarchy of forces is the object’s value . If the object for Nietzsche is always a play of forces, this means that in reality it is another subject -
- Nietzsche’s philosophy begins to make the very distinction between subject and object problematic. Indeed, subject and object are metaphysical categories; they presuppose the notions of unity and identity. They are categories of a ‘vertical’ philosophy (like Hegel’s). The singular aspect of all vertical philosophy is the separation in it of the truth of the concept from the reality to which it refers. Thus for Plato the concept ‘good’ is distinct from any material manifestation of the good; the world of appearance is deemed to be separate and distinct from the world of essence, or reality. By contrast, Deleuze’s Nietzsche refuses these distinctions.
- Good and bad are values; there is no objective good, only subjective values – or, more rigorously, there are only values, that is, differences; the apparent, ‘subjective’ world is the only world there is. The vertical axis of objective truth is thus overturned by Nietzsche in favour of the horizontal axis of values.
- Style, too, turns philosophy into a practice,
- there is no transcendental, philosopher-subject over and above the products of philosophy – as there is no actor separate from his acts, or any cause separate from its effects. ‘Subject’, ‘actor’, and ‘cause’ are metaphysical notions characteristic of the vertical axis. The latter axis embodies what is entrenched and relatively unchanging, whereas the horizontal axis is always in movement.
- Deleuze makes substantial use of the principle of horizontality in his readings of Spinoza, Proust, Leibniz, and Lewis Carroll. Thus for Spinoza ‘expression’ is not an appearance through which an essence is expressed. Nor is morality a set of ideals to which one might aspire. Expression is rather a way of being and acting in the world, while morality is ‘an ethics of joy’ which enhances the power of acting. With Proust, the focus is on signs – not on signs as representations of objects, meanings, or truth, or – as one might have thought in the case of Remembrance of Things Past – on signs as vehicles for memory, but on signs as entities which teach something. InProust’s writing, to interpret signs is to go through a fundamental learning process, which, in the case of the work of art, shows that signs are linked to essences, and that essences are constituted through differences (they are not unities, but singular qualities) within which subjects are implicated. Again, Deleuze shows that when Leibniz invented the concept of the ‘fold’ in philosophy – a concept inspired by the Baroque period in the history of art – he opened the way to a new practice of philosophy as the constitution of disjunctive figures. The fold is the mode of unity of these figures (e.g., the monad). More precisely, the fold is the relationship of difference with itself. Finally, the horizontal emerges in the reading of Lewis Carroll in a book – The Logic of Sense – constructed (or assembled) in series. Series can, by definition, proliferate; and, as Lecercle points out, ‘proliferation is always a threat to order’. The horizontal would thus be equivalent to the proliferation of series.
In his collaborative work with Felix Guattari, the principle of horizontality which marks Deleuze’s own philosophy is strikingly evident in the critique of Freud and psychoanalysis. For Deleuze and Guattari, Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex serves to confirm the dominance of hierarchical and ‘tree-like’ thought. The Oedipus principle, they say, inevitably leads to the notion of an original event, or trauma, which the authors of Anti-Oedipus find unimaginatively reductive. Unlike Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari refuse the theory of desire founded on lack and, in effect, also reject Freud’s concept of repression. For Freud, the very possibility of the distinction between subject and object depends on the notion of repression. Repression occurs in the process of the child’s separation from the mother and its entry (as Lacan sees it) into the symbolic order – the order of the Law and the Name of-the-Father. This ‘father principle’ – the principle of the origin as identity – is firmly rejected by our authors. For them, there is no distinction between the individual – defined by desire – and the collectivity – defined by the law; rather, there is only a social desire. As a result, desire is always in movement, always made up of different elements depending on the situation; it is machine-like, rather than an Oedipal theatre of representation. The phrases, ‘desiring machines’ and ‘body without organs’ reinforce the theory’s horizontality. We have seen that desire is not a desire based on lack – which is negative but is always in movement and reforming itself: it is an affirmative process of flows and lines of flight. The ‘body without organs’ (the term is borrowed from Antonin Artaud) is, perhaps predictably, not at all an organic body (a body with organs, ‘the body of Oedipal reduction’), but a body like the body politic, one that is always in the process of formation and deformation. The body without organs is produced in a connective synthesis, and is neither an image of the body, nor a projection. In short, the body without organs is ‘rhizomatic’ and not engendered, or tree-like.
Overall, there is no doubt that Deleuze is one of the most self-consciously creative philosophers of the contemporary era. Although he does in fact write from the position of someone who is steeped in the history of philosophy, his philosophy seems to have struck a democratic chord in many English-speaking countries. One wonders, though, whether the very radical pursuit of horizontality inspired by Nietzsche might not harbour its own kind of purity. For we seem to have, at least in Deleuze’s more overtly political writings, a Nietzscheanism without reserve: Nietzsche’s ‘yes’ is raised to the ‘nth’ degree, and ‘no’ is erased. In the rush to avoid repression and the negative in the interest of unfettered creativity, it is important to ask whether, as some psychoanalysts have suggested, the result of this creativity might be a decrease in war (organised vertically) but with an increase in the potential for violence. The very importance of Deleuze’s philosophy demands that such an issue be fully investigated.