John Rajchman,
The Deleuze Connections.
MIT Press, 2000.
ISBN: 0 262 68120 X
120 pp
US$16.00 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by MIT Press)

Uploaded 25 July 2002

There are two main reasons why Gilles Deleuze has come to be recognised as an important intellectual figure.

On the one hand, he made a significant contribution to the history of philosophy. His studies on Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza were each instrumental in re-activating discussion around a thinker whose contemporary significance had waned. In his major philosophical treatise, Difference and Repetition, Deleuze developed an erudite critique of identity and representation that helped re-configure the historical coordinates of post-war thought. In these studies, along with a range of other writings, he showed himself to be a master of his discipline, pursuing traditional philosophical questions in novel ways. So much so, that Michel Foucault described him as the “only real philosophical intelligence in France.”

On the other hand, people take notice of Deleuze because he developed a distinctive approach to practising philosophy that might be loosely described as “artistic”. In his early book on Nietzsche, Deleuze highlights this aspect of his work by championing life over knowledge and creativity over critique.

In his later work, Deleuze continues to present himself as a type of artist-philosopher by repeating the maxim that “to think is to create”. He exemplified this in his 1980 collaboration with Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, by editing together a colourful kaleidoscope of conceptual images. And, in accordance with this creative orientation, he discouraged the simple application of his theoretical concepts, insisting that others compose their own “images of thought”.

The challenge facing any commentary on Deleuze is how to account for both these aspects of his work. Those who engage with the intricacies of Deleuze’s philosophy, and the deft way that he situates himself within the history of thought, generally fail to harness the constructive vitality of his work. Conversely, commentators who take up Deleuze’s creative imperative often end up chanting his terminology like liturgical flaneurs, and reducing his thought to an overly excited form of rhetoric.

In his recent book, The Deleuze Connections, John Rajchman synthesises the two aspects of Deleuze’s importance by posing the following problem: “can one extract from Deleuze a style of thought, a way of doing philosophy, which might carry on today in much altered circumstances, artistic and political, from those that divided up philosophy after the Second World War through which Deleuze himself navigated?” (4).

In pursuing this pragmatically crafted problem, Rajchman cleverly side-steps the traps that beset most commentaries on Deleuze. He avoids becoming bogged down in the philosophical canon, and hemming Deleuze into that history, by extending his thought into a series of problems related to advanced capitalism and contemporary culture. And he rescues Deleuze’s artistry from naivete by treating it as a carefully styled method, which was hewn from thoughtful inquiry into epistemological and ontological questions.

Rajchman’s portrait of Deleuze is both entertaining and refreshing. Throughout the book, Deleuze’s eyes appear to be following an English-speaking audience. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of empiricism in Deleuze’s work, and the debt that he owes to philosophers David Hume, William James and Alfred North Whitehead. Rajchman also highlights Deleuze’s references to writers such as Herman Melville and Lewis Carroll, the artist Francis Bacon, and especially the cinema of post-war Hollywood.

But while his readers are being seduced by the Frenchman’s gaze toward the Atlantic horizon, Rajchman casually discards the frames of reference that anglo-american audiences have used to characterise Deleuze’s milieu. He points out that Deleuze considered the end of metaphysics to be “tiresome blather” (21); that he was not interested in “deconstructing” or undoing identity (57); that he had no time for the stylistic and typographical density of post-structural textuality (117); and, perhaps most importantly, that Deleuze was not at all taken by the idea of postmodernism
(126).

Rajchman makes most of the above points with a brevity that doesn’t lend itself to ongoing discussion or deliberation. His approach is to brush the cliches and generalities aside in order to let Deleuze take us in new directions. As he says in the introduction, this book simply wont “work for those minds that are already settled, already classified, armed with the now increasingly useless maps of ‘postmodernism’, ‘poststructuralism’, or the old continental-analytic divide” (5).

This strategy is one of the most charming and frustrating aspects of Rajchman’s book. It’s a strategy that Deleuze himself often used in order to orient himself to assembling new forms of thought, rather than seeking out common ground for well-mannered conversation. In taking up this Deleuzian strategy, however, Rajchman forgoes providing particularly thorough evidence or accurate referencing for the claims that he makes.

Rajchman certainly has an extensive and intelligent understanding of Deleuze’s work, but this edition isn’t very well footnoted and consequently doesn’t offer an absolutely reliable point of reference for Deleuze scholars. A fairly innocuous mistake, for example, is Rajchman’s claim that Deleuze began using the phrase “image of thought” in his book on Proust, when in fact Deleuze developed this concept in his earlier book on Nietzsche. But flaws of this type are harmless errors of fact that could easily be amended in a second edition, and they certainly shouldn’t deter people from appreciating the cogency of Rajchman’s argument.

So, what is Rajchman’s argument?

As I said earlier, Rajchman is concerned with extracting a style of thought from Deleuze, and his argument is that this style essentially involves constructing connections in an experimental or empirical fashion. Rajchman not only develops this argument through the philosophical topics that he addresses, but also through the structure of the publication itself. He describes the six chapters of the book as contiguous zones in a map of Deleuze’s philosophy (4). As such, they function as a fuzzy-edged mosaic of connected parts that remain open to a broader geography of possibilities. Once again, this is consistent with one of Deleuze’s own compositional strategies, which involved serialising the essay-genre of the French intelligentsia in order to create empirical collages of concepts on the move.

As the six zones of Rajchman’s book unfold, different lines of thought trail off the page and are then picked up again in subsequent passages to be woven back into the bigger picture. The various sections of the map find their strongest moment of resonance in the final chapter on art and cinema. Here, Rajchman draws together a number of key points from his previous chapters in order to explain why Deleuze’s aesthetic constitutes a dynamic intersection of rigorous logic and experimental life.

Rajchman argues that, for Deleuze, the images of art and cinema “make sense” on their own terms; through the procedures by which they form an intelligible material. As such, the meaning of these images can not be reduced to externally applied linguistic systems or symbolic codes. Moreover, artists and film-makers aren’t involved in using inert materials or pre-existing discourse to represent their ideas. Instead, they are drawn into the internal dynamic of their practice; into a “becoming-art” or “artistic volition”, which distributes new external configurations of subjectivity and thought. In other words, art is not about communication or recognition, it is about “the emergence of something new and singular, which precedes us and requires us to ‘invent’ ourselves as another people” (123).

Deleuze’s concern with producing conditions in which something new might arise, is the dominant refrain of Rajchman’s argument. He identifies this in Deleuze’s approach to “philosophy” and “life”, but emphasis is ultimately placed on his definition of “aesthetics”, as a “logic of sensation” that offers our contemporary world a way of experimenting with what is yet to come.

Stephen Zagala