Clayton Crockett on the Deleuze/Badiou debate–Philosophy in the 21st Century

Alain Badiou--Student of Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser

Introduction:  by Creston Davis

The greatest living French philosopher, Alain Badiou, passionately articulates one of the most striking claims made in philosophy today.[1] This claim is as simple as it is radical:  Truth happens in a material event that fundamentally and irrevocably breaks with the status quo (or any logic articulated in terms of pure un-breakable immanence).  Consequently along with this revolutionary “Event” Badiou opens up an entirely new horizon of being and possibility whose locus is found within the subject whose very identity is inextricably bound up in this Truth-Event.  Thus, with a new Event of truth there is necessarily a new subject devoted to that truth.

This claim is most shocking because philosophy in the 20^th century (from the Vienna Circle to Heidegger and finally Derrida) has failed to live into the radicality of what thought is—of the revolt of thinking as such:  “There is no philosophy” Badiou tells us “without the discontent of thinking in its confrontation with the world as it is.”[2]

However, contemporary philosophers and critics by no means uniformly accept Badiou’s claim that philosophy is most fundamentally about a revolt against the established epistemologies of our time.  Indeed many leading thinkers, although they may greatly respect Badiou’s sheer brilliance, fundamentally disagree with him.  Clayton Crockett, a leading theorist takes Badiou to task as he side with Gilles Deleuze in articulating the stakes for a real radical philosophy for our time.  In what follows is part of a chapter that Professor Crockett has written in his forthcoming book about the Deleuze/Badiou debate on the very nature of philosophy and political struggle.

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[1] This claim was made by Fred Jameson.

[2] Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, Translated and Edited by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003) pages 39-40.

CLAYTON CROCKETT

Clayton Crockett is Associate Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of three books, including Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, forthcoming from Columbia University Press in the Insurrections series. He is currently writing a book on Deleuze and Badiou, from which this essay is drawn.

The Clamor of Being

Badiou-- A Philosopher of Love

Deleuze: The Clamor of Being is one of the strongest readings of Deleuze that exists, and Badiou does an incredible job at synthesizing and presenting an image of Deleuze’s philosophy in order for us to consider it at a more profound level. Badiou is committed to, and equal to the challenge of, bestowing a Cartesian clarity upon everything that he engages, which includes nearly every sphere of human thought and activity. Before engaging this critique, I want to say that I am ambivalent about polemics; on the one hand I appreciate and admire Badiou’s incredible ability to polemicize, especially on matters of politics, and what I admire above all else is his uncompromising resistance to the onslaught of neo-liberal capitalism at a time when seemingly everyone was at least resigned to it, if not actively celebrating it; on the other hand, I do appreciate Foucault’s caution: “never engage in polemics,” at least in terms of philosophy.[1] My resistance to polemics in philosophy may be the result of my status as an outsider in strict disciplinary terms, such that I do not have to choose between say Badiou and Deleuze, Deleuze and Derrida, Derrida and Zizek, Zizek and Negri, Negri and Agamben, Agamben and Vattimo, etc. Or it may simply be a putting into practice of the Deleuzian AND: “multiplicity is precisely in the ‘and’.”[2]

In order to construct an image of himself as a Master philosopher, Badiou constructs an image of Deleuze as alter-Master-ego, and offers a fixed, frozen representation of Deleuze to readers. It is masterful, but it is also a distortion, this “aristocratic, hierarchized space” (12), from which the image of Deleuze is drawn. Badiou offers us an austere, ascetic and aristocratic Deleuze, who pursues his rigorous philosophy in ironic solitude completely apart from the turbulence of history.  In order to reduce Deleuze to this frozen image, Badiou is forced to claim Deleuze as a classicist, a metaphysician in the traditional style, while overlooking or downplaying what is new in his thought.

In The Clamor of Being, Badiou relies heavily on the quote from Difference and Repetition which provides the title: “A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings.”[3] This quote is taken from the last page of Difference and Repetition, although it appears in a slightly different and more compressed form in Chapter I: “A single voice raises the clamor of Being” (DR 35). In the conclusion, it is more like a crescendo to culminate the incredible work of the book, and while Badiou takes from the last sentence, he does not reproduce the entire sentence. The phrase following the quote above reads: “on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess—in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in so turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return” (DR 304). This condition is important, because it expresses the Nietzschean imperative that only what becomes returns, only difference returns as difference (not the same). We can only say that “Everything is equal!” and “Everything returns!” “at the point at which the extremity of difference is reached,” which is not a return to the One but a bursting open (DR 304).

Here Being is the One-All, and all of Deleuze’s work is read as the submission of thinking to “a renewed concept of the One.”[4] (CB 11). A single voice or a single event (we could also think about the indeterminate article—a life…), is a singular voice or a singular event. As Alfred North Whitehead writes in Process and Reality, “the many become one, and are increased by one,” that is, become many again.[5] The sameness of this process is a result of Badiou reading it under the sign of identity or monotony, and of his reading Deleuze too much in Heideggerian terms. Badiou claims that Deleuze is “less distant from Heidegger than is usually believed,” which is true (CB 21). But then Badiou makes too much of Deleuze’s invocation of Parmenides along with Heidegger in the quote from Difference and Repetition. Badiou assimilates Parmenides (read through Heidegger) to Deleuze’s philosophical position: “Parmenides maintained that Being and thought were one and the same thing. The Deleuzian variant of this maxim is: ‘it is the same thing which occurs and is said’” (CB 20). Badiou refuses to confront the radically Nietzschean heart of Deleuze’s philosophy: only that which becomes (becomes different) returns.

This over-emphasis on the past also determines Badiou’s mis-reading of the distinction between the virtual and the actual. Although he correctly understands and appreciates how Deleuze does not oppose the active and the passive, he fails to apply the same logic to this fundamental distinction.  Badiou appreciates how Deleuze deploys the conception of neutrality to avoid being caught between such “premature attributions as active and passive (CB 34). This subtlety is lost when applied to the virtual/actual opposition: “‘virtual’ is without any doubt the principal name of the Being in Deleuze’s work” (CB 43). An actual being possesses its being by means of the virtual, or its own virtuality. In this sense, “the virtual is the ground of the actual,” despite Deleuze’s repudiation of the notion of ground (CB 43).

Badiou charges Deleuze with a “Platonism of the virtual,” because Badiou cannot read Deleuze otherwise than in terms of Platonism. Deleuze emphasizes the reality of the virtual to overcome the traditional Aristotelian opposition between actual and potential; in this sense the virtual has its own reality. But that does not mean that Deleuze grounds the actual in the virtual. Badiou ontologizes the virtual over against the actual, and reads the virtual as a Platonized pure past of form and fold. I will show, however, that while this distinction between virtual and actual is incredibly important for Deleuze, actual and virtual are distinguished but not opposed. According to Badiou, Deleuze’s “virtual ground remains for me a transcendence,” but that is because he reads the virtual as a ground, a strong foundation for the actual, and this move also precludes Badiou from appreciating what is new in Deleuze’s philosophy.

This issue gets at the heart of the dispute between Deleuze and Badiou, as Badiou reproduces some of Deleuze’s judgments about the unbridgeable impasse between them in correspondence from the early 1990s. Basically, Deleuze argues that Badiou is unable to establish a genuine thinking of multiplicity by means of set theory, and according to Badiou this is because Deleuze views sets as actualities, or states of affairs. Because they cannot rise (or descend) to the level of the virtual, sets cannot be fundamental in regard to ontology, even though Badiou argues that all of Deleuze’s figures (fold, interval, chaos) can also be schematized in and as sets (CB 47). Badiou claims that in rejecting his set theory as too actual, Deleuze is preserving and protecting the priority of the virtual.

The Virtual in the Film--The Minority Report

According to Badiou, the virtual is real, which means that it is the actualization and affirmation of itself. “Ultimately,” he writes, “what counts is the divergent process of actualization by which the real is arrayed within itself as the intermingling of virtualities invested, in differing degrees of power, in the beings they actualize” (CB 49). By over-determining the difference between virtual and actual, Badiou charges that the virtual plays with and manifests itself, which is a repetition of identity and a manifestation of the One.  If it is the process of actualization that constitutes reality, then the virtual loses its absolute priority over the actual, and reality functions as a third term along the line of neutrality in relation to the contract between active and passive.

By reading the virtual as the ground of the actual and as a transcendent in this way, Badiou delivers Deleuze entirely over to his precursor, Bergson. Furthermore, he reduces the three syntheses of time in Chapter II of Difference and Repetition to two, matter and memory, present and past, so that every event is simply the folding of an immutable Being, which is One. Badiou claims that Bergson is Deleuze’s “real master, far more than Spinoza, or perhaps even Nietzsche” (CB 39). If Bergson provides the key to interpreting Deleuze, then Badiou’s explanation of Bergson becomes decisive for Badiou’s reading. I am not contesting Bergson’s influence, but to conflate Deleuze with Bergson is to misunderstand what is new and original about Deleuze’s thought.

In Deleuze, Badiou focuses on the concept of movement, which ultimately takes place as a Whole, which is the spiritual reality of duration. He quotes Cinema 1, where Deleuze writes that “movement has two aspects…, that which happens between objects and parts, [and] that which expresses the duration of the whole” (quoted in CB 40). These two aspects of movement oscillate to and from Being and beings, which is “from a case to the One, then from the One to the case,” in which thought “intuits the movement of the One itself” (CB 40). Badiou’s reading of movement under the sign of the One neglects the dramatic breakthrough of Cinema 2, which thinks “beyond the movement-image.” Cinema 2 represents the decisive text with which to read Difference and Repetition as well as Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The idea of the time-image bursts the bonds of the movement-image, and the notion of thought constrained in and by movement, including the political. Here Badiou claims that “the movement of Being itself” is “only the interval, or the difference, between these two movements” (CB 40). This reading flattens Deleuze, because it reduces thinking and being to movement, following Badiou’s emphasis upon a “Bergson-Deleuze.” Towards the end of the book Badiou sets up a contrast between Bergson and Brunschvicg in order to claim Brunschvicg as an ancestor in a line of descent paralleling but opposing the vitalism of the immanent One.

According to Badiou, “the new is a fold of the past” in Deleuze’s work (CB 91). The fold is the folding of an outside to create an inside, which constitutes the subject. Thinking and living come from outside; they affect an individual rather than emerge from it. Badiou identifies the fold with memory, such that “everything new is an enfolded selection of the past” (CB 91). By reading Deleuze’s philosophy from the perspective of the The Fold, and by asserting that the fold is a new fold of an old virtual past, Badiou completes the assimilation of Deleuze to his reading of Bergson and disposes of everything new in Deleuze’s work. Despite the “attention Deleuze gives to the most radically new forms of art and psychiatry, of science and the movement of different politics,” Badiou cannot ignore the fact that, “under the jurisdiction of the One, the thought of the new plunges the latter into that part if it which is its virtual-past” (CB 91). Badiou opposes this thought of the new as a fold of the past, but this equation of fold with virtual with past is a serious distortion of Deleuze’s thought. Deleuze’s conception of temporality is extremely complex, but it is not linear and I do not think it is Platonic. I think The Fold is more of an epistemological and less of an ontological work, at least in the terms in which it is generally understood, and that it is a mistake to privilege The Fold as the lens through which to read Deleuze’s entire philosophy.

Gilles Deleuze

Above all, in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being Badiou is forced to render Deleuze’s thought in terms of representation and identity. Everywhere Badiou posits or uncovers identities: the identity of being and thinking (“a nonprincipled identity of thought and being” CB 80; “the subject…is the identity of thinking and being CB 90), the “identity of thinking and dying” (CB 14), the identity of time and truth (“time is truth itself,” which is nothing temporal; thus, “the absolute being of the pas is indiscernible from eternity” CB 61), the unicity of the dice-throw (“there is only one throw of the dice” CB 73), and the identity of Being as One-All. This logic of identity consumes The Clamor of Being, despite the critique of identity in Difference and Repetition.

Badiou claims that Deleuze’s anti-dialectical method “rejects all recourse to mediations” (CB 32). This claim results in commentators strongly influenced by Badiou like Peter Hallward who say that Deleuze lacks any theory of relations. Deleuze rejects internal relations of property based on his critique of identity; if beings lack identity then they lack proper parts and thus internal relations. This criticism of internal relations constitutes his critique of organisms, the notion of an internal proper arrangement and teleological functioning of being. Relations exist; however, they are external to their terms. Relations do not belong to their owners, to what is being related. If meditation is a relation predicated on identity, which it is in most stereotypical readings of Hegelian mediation, then Deleuze rejects mediation. But that does not mean that Deleuze rejects all relations. They just have to be reconceptualized in non-identitarian terms.

Badiou suggests that Deleuze’s intuition consists in “perpetual reconcatenation” (CB 36), which is a double movement. This double movement is the logic of Deleuze’s thought and it is more based on a kind of intuition (a “distinct-obscure” understanding) as opposed to a rigorous logic. Here in The Clamor of Being Badiou explains correctly that “for Deleuze, every construction of thought goes from A to B, then from B to A” (CB 36). The double movement introduces a kind of disorientation, or non-sense, that plunges thought into chaos. According to Badiou, “nonsense is nothing other than the univocity of Being,” but I think this goes too far. Badiou sees Deleuze as mastering the descending statements of sense and the ascending statements of nonsense that culminates in univocal Being and rig the game for the One. Badiou introduces levels of ascent and descent that are not simply present, and he reads Deleuze’s entire philosophy from the standpoint of movement.

This focus on movement also governs Badiou’s reading of the eternal return of the same. Although Badiou notes that Deleuze opposes all identity and all sameness, he says that sameness is the affirmation of the return itself. In this way, “the return is the creation of the Same for the different, and by the different” (71). In a similar way, according to a similar movement, Deleuze is accused of mastering both chaos and order, sense and nonsense, chance and determinism. In the throw of the dice, Badiou argues that Deleuze rejects a series of throws and restricts himself to one throw. “In all throws, the same Throw returns,” according to Badiou, “because the being of the cast is invariable in its productive determinism: to affirm all chance in a single moment” (CB 74). Badiou accuses Deleuze posthumously of a productive determinism, of determining both sides of any situation by recourse to a One that is transcendent but hidden within the immanent process of becoming. By contrast, Badiou holds himself apart as the master of subtraction, a Platonism shorn of the One. Deleuze emphasizes the production of being rather than subtraction from it, but I dispute the charges of determinism, which results from the identification of chance and the predetermined totality of Being that occupies and affirms it. According to Badiou, there can be no genuine multiplicity without the One except that multiplicity given by means of set theory. In Being and Event, set theory sets out an irreducible mathematical multiplicity, and any state or situation comes into existence by subtracting from this multiplicity in a counting-as-one.

But part of the problem of multiplicity in this engagement between Badiou and Deleuze concerns the number of multiplicities. As the translator of Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Louise Burchill,  points out,  and as Deleuze and Guattari explain in a brief critique of Badiou in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze operates with more than one conception of multiplicity.[6] According to Deleuze and Guattari, There must be “at least two multiplicities,” not because they prefer dualism, but “because the multiplicity is precisely what happens between the two.”[7] Badiou compresses the number of multiplicities into one, in order to oppose a unitary concept of multiplicity to the One. Since Badiou affirms his axiomatic definition of multiplicity, he fuses the Deleuzian multiplicities into a single, univocal multiplicity that is anchored in a hidden One.

In an extremely powerful and technical essay on “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities,” Daniel W. Smith points out that Badiou not only compresses multiplicity into a single concept, he also amalgamates a number of distinct ideas of the One together.  Badiou’s conception of the One refers variously to Neo-Platonism, the Christian God, Spinoza’s Substance, Kant’s Whole, Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, and Bergson’s élan vital, among others In this way, the count-as-one of the One means that “the concept of the ‘One’ effectively becomes little more than a marker in Badiou’s writings for any non-set-theoretical ontology.”[8] Smith explains that although Deleuze does make use of a concept of the One (the “One-All” as a plane cut out of chaos), he is not a philosopher of the One in Badiou’s sense.

Badiou confuses One-ness with univocity, which are strictly speaking incompatible. As Smith makes clear, Deleuze argues in Difference and Repetition that “the term ‘Being’ can be said in a single and univocal sense” only “if Being is said univocally of difference as such.”[9] To declare that “Being is One” and that “Being is univocal” is technically inconsistent, and such is Badiou’s inconsistency that his reading tries to distort Deleuze’s thesis from the latter to the former. Smith charges that although Badiou sets up a serious encounter between his own and Deleuze’s thought, Badiou fails to engage the central ground of opposition between them, which is the concept of mathematical multiplicity. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being “does not contain a single discussion of Deleuze’s theory of multiplicitites,” writes Smith.[10] Rather than critique Deleuze’s mathematical conception of multiplicity directly, Badiou distorts Deleuze’s philosophy by claiming that Deleuze is secretly a philosopher of the One.

The true dispute between Badiou and Deleuze concerns the ontology of mathematics, according to Smith. And what is striking about Badiou’s critique is that he attempts to eliminate the mathematical nature of Deleuze’s ontological multiplicity. By eliminating Deleuze’s discussion of mathematics, Badiou is able to claim that Deleuze is a pre-Socratic philosopher with a naïve vision of philosophy as a physics of being.[11] Although Deleuze’s work has many connections with contemporary physics, as Manuel De Landa points out, this is not an exclusion or denigration of mathematics. Deleuze undertakes an extraordinary derivation of differential calculus in Chapter IV of Difference and Repetition, and mathematical ideas constantly inform his thought.

Badiou asserts that ontology is mathematics, but what he really means is that ontology is “axiomatic set theory,” as Smith points out.[12] Smith contrasts Badiou’s axiomatics with Deleuze’s mathematical ontology, which is concerned with problematics. Axiomatics is what Deleuze and Guattari call a “major” or “royal” science in A Thousand Plateaus, whereas problematics concerns the constitution of a scientific theory, which is more “minor” or “nomadic.”[13]Royal science operates according to a “hylomorphic” model which sharply distinguishes between matter and form, which is a “legal or legalist” model.[14] Royal science works with striated but homogeneous space, which is already cut up into categories. By contrast, nomadic science deals with a smooth, dynamic space that follows diverse movements without logically opposing them. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “there are itinerant, ambulant sciences that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered like so many ‘accidents’ (problems).”[15] Badiou legislates propositions based on set theory, whereas Deleuze enters into the dynamism of problems and attempts to think on their terms and from their basis.[16]

In Difference and Repetition, as Smith explains, Deleuze works out a problematics for the construction of differential calculus. As calculus developed from Leibniz and Newton, it functioned by means of differential equations, the famous dx, that worked with dynamic and continuous notions that could not be strictly formalized. The mathematical solution of calculus concerns the passage from a more geometrical and intuitive model to an algebraic model, where the infinities received precise formalization in “purely arithmetic terms” by Karl Weierstrass.[17]

According to Deleuze, Weierstrass provides a “‘static’ interpretation of the differential and infinitesimal calculus, in which there is no longer any fluction toward a limit.”[18] This fixing of dynamic, geometrical concepts culminates Dedekind’s achievement of “rigorously defining the continuity of the real numbers in terms of a ‘cut,’” and then Cantor’s axiomization of infinity in discrete sets.[19] Arithmatics involves making discrete, and eliminating continuity, although the question of the continuum reemerges at the level of sets—Cantor opts for the continuum hypothesis in terms of sets whereas Badiou rejects the continuum hypothesis and consistently affirms sets as discrete multiples. Deleuze affirms the seemingly more obsolete, continuous version of calculus not because he is a conservative aristocratic philosopher, but because continuity offers a link to intuition, and intuition explains how scientific discovery works. The formalization or axiomaticization of sciences, including mathematics, comes after the initial insight, which is fraught with messy and contradictory implications. Royal science comes along and purifies scientific theories, and Badiou clearly opts for axiomatic royal science. Deleuze understands how these dynamic intensities end up disappearing in the solutions, but they manifest themselves at the level of problems. And philosophy for Deleuze is all about setting up problems. According to Smith, “Deleuze uses the calculus as a model for his conception of immanent Ideas.”[20] In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze wants to show how theories come into existence, which is a chaotic process, before they get cleaned up.

Is Deleuze finally an "Upper-Middle-Class" Philosopher?

Deleuze appeals to differential geometry and “the problem of n-dimensional curved surfaces” in Gauss and Riemann as an alternative to the arithmetic formalization of set theory. Badiou, on the contrary, dismisses Riemannian space as a “preliminary figure of the One” and reduces it to a subset of set theory.[21] I am relying on Smith’s technical understanding of mathematics, and I am in no way an expert in mathematical theory, but it seems that Deleuze is using a certain history and experience of mathematics to construct his philosophy. Furthermore, Deleuze is showing how philosophical construction is similar to scientific invention, even though he later distinguishes them more clearly in What is Philosophy?. Finally, geometry and minor science are significant because they preserve a link to experience: as Smith says, it is the calculus that “establishes this link between mathematics and existence.”[22] Deleuze prefers minor sciences, no matter what field in which they lie, because they resist the autonomy and self-sufficiency of science, which becomes a kind of transcendental power to legislate thought and action.

Badiou is a more royal philosopher, in these terms. His axiomatization of mathematics in terms of set theory fixes continuity and becoming, and excludes precisely what he wants to occur, namely an event. As Smith writes,

Badiou, by contrast, in taking axiomatics as his ontological model, limits his ontology to the pole of mathematics that is constituted on the elimination of event, and he therefore necessarily denies events any ontological status: ‘the event is forbidden; ontology rejects it.’[23]

Badiou desires an event so powerfully that he sets up his ontology to exclude it, and then he theorizes about its irruption beyond being, in a way completely unforeseen and unpredicted. Deleuze, however, encompasses events, multiple events, within his ontology, which is not solely mathematical but does not exclude mathematical events either.

In his book Organs Without Bodies, Slavoj Zizek offers his own reading of Deleuze, which is informed by Badiou’s critique. Zizek does not completely accept Badiou’s argument, but he does affirm his suspicion of the “idealism” of Deleuze’s vitalism in terms set by Badiou. As opposed to Deleuze’s philosophy, where “Difference refers to the multiple singularities that express the One of infinite Life,” in Badiou’s work “we get multitude(s) without any underlying Oneness,” which Zizek prefers.[24] This preference for Badiou’s mathematical multiplicity is ironic, considering that Zizek does not pursue his engagement with and critique of Deleuze along the lines laid out by Badiou. Furthermore, Zizek ends up criticizing Badiou’s insistence on a mathematical ontology. Zizek claims that

ultimately, one should reject Badiou’s notion of mathematics (the theory of pure multiplicity) as the only consistent ontology (science of being): if mathematics is ontology, then, to account for the gap between Being and Event, one either remains stuck in dualism or one has to dismiss the Event as an illusory local occurrence within the encompassing order of being.[25]

Zizek rejects Badiou’s account of mathematical multiplicity, even though he relies on it to criticize Deleuze. That is, Zizek recognizes that there is not only one kind of multiplicity—there are multiple multiplicities, as discussed above.

Zizek is one of our most important contemporary philosophers, as well as a brilliant and incisive thinker and writer, but Organs Without Bodies is not his best book. It is a loose and somewhat episodic encounter, using the occasion of an engagement with Deleuze to develop some of Zizek’s own impressions about contemporary art, science and politics (the “Consequences” of the subtitle). Zizek understands by “organs without body” “the virtuality of the pure affect extracted from its embeddedness in a body.” The title reverses Deleuze’s use of Antonin Artaud’s phrase, “body without organs,” or BwO, where an organ refers above all to the hierarchy and teleology that characterizes an organism and its functioning. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari oppose Artaud’s BwO to the signifying organs of psychoanalysis. They declare that “the BwO is what remains when you take everything away,” but psychoanalysis “does the opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it botches the BwO.”[26]

The core reading of Deleuze consists of developing an opposition between two distinct logics, one that applies to The Logic of Sense, and another that characterizes his work with Guattari, mainly in Anti-Oedipus. Zizek constructs a “deadlock” of two opposing tendencies in Deleuze’s work, “on the one hand, the logic of sense…the logic of the radical gap between generative process and its immaterial sense-effect,” and “on the other hand, the logic of becoming as PRODUCTION of beings.”[27] This deadlock leads Deleuze to embrace the second option, with Guattari, which is according to Zizek the wrong choice.

The reason Zizek prefers the former logic of The Logic of Sense is because this logic understands sense as the “EFFECT of bodily-material processes-causes,” which is more materialistic, whereas Anti-Oedipus is idealist precisely because bodies are produced out of more ideal “virtual intensities out of which bodies emerge through actualization.”[28] This opposition already exists within The Logic of Sense, where Deleuze hesitates between a formal and a material genesis. Formal genesis indicates “the emergence of reality out of the immanence of impersonal consciousness as the pure flow of Becoming,” whereas material genesis explains “the emergence of the immaterial event-surface itself out of bodily interaction.”[29] Again, Zizek prefers the latter, material, genesis. “Body without organs” refers to the formal genesis that dominates Anti-Oedipus, which is “arguably Deleuze’s worst book,” whereas “organs without body” pertains to the material genesis that prevails in The Logic of Sense.[30] An organ no longer attached to the body is Lacan’s phallus, which is not simply the male sex-organ, but the signifier par excellence. Zizek claims that Deleuze’s dark precursor is structurally similar to the phallus, because “the dark precursor is the signifier of a metadifference.”[31]Later, Zizek suggests that the phallus functions as the signifier of castration, which is another kind of difference, and this makes it the quintessential “organ without a body.”[32]

The question, however, is to what extent Zizek manufactures this opposition of logics in The Logic of Sense? I see Anti-Oedipus as compatible with The Logic of Sense, although there is a shift in perspective Deleuze becomes much more suspicious of structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and he writes The Logic of Sense from above, so to speak, from the level of sense and language as it reaches down towards bodies, whereas Anti-Oedipus is written from below, at the level of desiring machines, looking up. The collaboration with Guattari is experimental and in some respects irreverent, and misleading if read in isolation from Deleuze’s other works such as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. I assert that Anti-Oedipus is more compatible with The Logic of Sense than Zizek declares. Zizek constructs the deadlock that he finds in Deleuze’s logic, and then he accuses Deleuze of making the wrong choice, when in fact there is no fundamental opposition between what Zizek calls Deleuze’s material and formal logic.

Later in Organs Without Bodies, Zizek criticizes the faddish emphasis on micro-politics and micro-fascism by leftists influenced by a superficial reading of Deleuze and Guattari. On the one hand, Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a desperately serious project, an attempt to push capitalism to its limits at least in theory, and it is quite a stretch to suggest that Deleuze could be considered “the ideologist of late capitalism” simply because some of his ideas are simulated in vulgar fashion at the level of consumer culture.[33] On the other hand, it is a symptom of late capitalism that politics in the grand style gives way to a trivialized micro-politics, but to champion and sloganize a “libidinal micro-politics” is to severely mis-understand and mis-use Deleuze.[34] In political terms, what Zizek most strongly criticizes is a caricature of Deleuze, including the guilt-by-association of vitalism with fascism.[35] I argue that Deleuze’s philosophy is vitally relevant for political thinking today, against the critiques of Badiou and Zizek, and this political reading depends on a reading of Cinema 2. At the same time, I agree with Zizek that the form of politics or micro-politics that predominates in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is not the most relevant or useful form of political engagement, and I prefer to read Capitalism and Schizophrenia from the standpoint of Cinema 2.

Towards the end of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari reach an impasse because their treatise on nomadology inevitably runs up against the apparatuses of capture by the state, which is another name for Althusser’s ISAs. The aesthetic line of flight that Deleuze subsequently takes first with Francis Bacon and The Logic of Sensation and then with the two Cinema books involves the extraction of a philosophy and a politics from its embeddedness in movement. Deleuze and Guattari take an analysis of politics in terms of movement and territory as far as it can go in A Thousand Plateaus, and they run aground, just as most forms of post-68 political thinking ends up in deadlock, compromise or despair. But Cinema 2 is not just a book on cinema, and it is not simply a renewal of philosophical thinking, although it is also that. It is a revolutionary political treatise, because it engaged with the direct production of a time-image. Deleuze delves deeply into thought, in an attempt to create a new brain for our species, which is an explosive political activity.

It’s about restoring the links of belief with the world, which are frayed and broken. Most of our thinking and our actions are clichéd and resemble a bad movie. Their possibilities are prescribed and proscribed by the State. But both Badiou and Deleuze (as well as Zizek) know that the State does not think!

The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema, it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.[36]

The time-image is the restoration of the link between humanity and the world. “Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears.”[37] The power and possibility of modern cinema is its ability to restore our belief in the world, here and now.

The problem is not simply the loss of the world: we have lost our belief in ourselves, politically, ethically and as a people. Deleuze says that “if there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet…the people are missing.”[38] Deleuze transfers his hopes to third-world cinema, a cinema of and for minorities, as a vehicle for inventing the people who are missing, but this is not any simple identity politics. “Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people.”[39] Isn’t this what genuine political movements do? Invent a people, which is a form of populism similar to that expressed by Ernesto Laclau’s On Populism. The invention of a people today involves the construction of a time-image, a new way to think, to directly short-circuit the clichés, manipulations and self-deceptions of the State. An invention of a people is an Event, the production of the Event. Most events occur under the signature of a name, but the name is not a proper name but rather a conceptual persona under which the event is consolidated. These conceptual personae can be named Chavez or Morales or Marcos or Aristide—most of these progressive names are Latin American today, but this is no ethnic or cultural essence. It is the contingent but necessary condition—partly socioeconomic and partly historical and partly ecological—for an event today.

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[1] See Alain Badiou, Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), and Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p.4.

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p.44.

[3] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.304. Hereafter, quotes are given in parentheses in the text.

[4] Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p.11. Hereafter, quotes are given in parentheses in the text.

[5] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1980), p.?.

[6] See Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, p.xviii.

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.152.

[8] Daniel W. Smith, “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Badiou and Deleuze Revisited,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2003), Vol. XLI, pp.411-449, quote p.431.

[9] Ibid., p.431.

[10] Ibid., p.412.

[11] See Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, p.102: “Deleuze was a pre-Socratic in the sense that the Greeks themselves referred to those thinkers; as physicists, by which we are to understand ‘thinkers of the All’.”

[12] Smith, “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities,” p.412.

[13] Ibid., p.412.

[14] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p.369.

[15] Ibid., p.372.

[16] In her book Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), Clare Colebrook also asserts that Deleuze’s philosophy is fundamentally concerned with problems: “Deleuze took nothing for granted and insisted that the power of life—all life and not just human life—was the power to develop problems,” p.1.

[17] Smith, “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities,” p.418.

[18] Quoted in ibid., p.419.

[19] Ibid., p.419.

[20] Ibid., p.426.

[21] Ibid., p.429.

[22] Ibid., p.433.

[23] Ibid., p.413.

[24] Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), p.29.

[25] Ibid., p.107.

[26] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.150.

[27] Ibid., p.21.

[28] Ibid., p.21.

[29] Ibid., p.22.

[30] Ibid., pp.21, 30.

[31] Ibid., p.81.

[32] Ibid., p.83.

[33] Ibid., p.184.

[34] Ibid., p.190.

[35] See ibid., p.191.

[36] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.171.

[37] Ibid., p.172.

[38] Ibid., p.216.

[39] Ibid., p.217.