John Rajchman may well have provided us with the first book in English to treat Deleuze seriously as a philosopher, instead of just proceeding by comparisons of the “Deleuze and X” sort, that is, stiffly pedagogic chapters on Nietzsche and Deleuze’s reading of him, or of Spinoza, or of Bergson. Instead we have a real monograph which seeks to reconstruct the myriad “connections” of Deleuze’s thought. Rajchman’s first book, on Foucault (Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy), already demonstrated this clarity. The Deleuze Connections operates at a high level and it is thus difficult to paraphrase it in the language of a review.

Following a rather Zen-like image in Deleuze, Rajchman ‘begins in the middle’, without burdening his account with an introduction that might prepare the reader for what will follow. However, he respects chronology and begins with Deleuze’s first book, Hume and the Problem of Subjectivity (1953), and thus with the theme of a specifically Deleuzian pragmatism and empiricism. He shows the importance, for Deleuze, of a Humean sense of artifice (p. 7), giving shape and contour to our life. Instead of an ontology, an attempt to catalogue what is and provide a hierarchy of beings, we find an operational, probabilistic attitude of belief. But if everything is about connections, networks and pragmatic outcomes, is this an instrumentalism? No, Rajchman says: it is not so mechanical. Deleuze speaks of “abstract machines,” which are not to be equated with Turing machines, as they are “built from many local connections” (8, 70), they are always bound to a time and a place, to particular desires. Machines, in Spinozist fashion, are machines of desire, “desiring machines” in Félix Guattari’s formulation: “machines that ‘express life’ through construction” (72).

As to perception, Deleuze looks to works of art to find a place where sensation is ‘freed up’ (9), where one might arrive at a ‘raw’ level of sensation. In fact this is the most traditional theme in philosophy since Socrates: the violence of the relation between philosophy and doxa (opinion or convention), the violence by which philosophy attempts to shake thought out of its pieties and into innovation (10); “one can really think only where what is to be thought is not already given” (115). Deleuze contrasts this with an idea of universal communication, which would maintain an equilibrium and ensure that breaks or discontinuities are not possible (for some reason, the emergence of Habermas onto the world scene in the early 1980s seems to have irritated him especially). This rawness of perception he also finds in cinema, and it allows him to conceive of the brain as a ‘challenge’ to philosophy, a new frontier, other than in a strictly “informational” or cognitivist sense (11), as I will discuss below.

At the risk of sounding awkward, I would venture the following slogan to summarize Rajchman’s claims about Deleuze’s philosophy: the three ‘E’s of experimentalism, empiricism, and ‘eventalism’.

Instead of Kantian transcendentalism, that is, the search for the conditions of possibility of experience in which one always remains haunted by the possibility that the transcendental condition are merely modeled on empirical features of the ‘I think’, we have a Humean experimentalism, which Deleuze also finds in Bergson (16-17). The goal is to free oneself from the “problem of subjectivity,” that is, the illusion of subjectivity, so as to arrive at a level of experience prior to the division of the world into subject and object: the “plane of immanence,” as Deleuze terms it (17, 83). The way in which this “heretical empiricism,” to use Pasolini’s phrase, has to differ from a phenomenology of the Merleau-Ponty sort is not clear (8, 19; for phenomenology and art, 131f.). As he sometimes does, Rajchman takes Deleuze’s argument for granted. Let’s retain, in any case, that prior to any code, there is a world of “sense” (the logic of which Deleuze provides in the book of that title: Logic of Sense), a sense which is not public like “common sense” but is instead at the level of the production of multiplicities. Sense is not reducible to public specifications of what is comprehensible, and sensation (the combination of affects and percepts) is not reducible to private states; it cannot be “confused with subjective states or with ‘sensibilia’ or ‘sensationalism'”: Deleuze likes Cézanne’s statement, against the Impressionists, that “the sensations are in things themselves, not in us” (134).

An empiricism, but in a world of artifice, in which everything is made, “counterfeit” in the Nietzschean sense (76) that we live in and through the production of falsity, that human existence itself is radically ‘simulacral’, deceptive, “hooped together by manifold illusion,” as Yeats put it. This means that there can be no tabula rasa (145 n. 1), and no pre-set boundaries of common experience (20). So we are dealing with more of an ‘experimentalism’ (ibid.), a willingness to remain open to new forms of experience, “seeing society as experiment rather than as contract” (ibid.). Deleuze saw this at work in Foucault’s practice of history, “eventalizing” it, i.e., bringing to light the multiplicity of events that we subsume, say, under categories such as ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ (147, n. 9).

We are then in a philosophy of the event, an ‘eventalism’. But what does it mean to ‘bring events to light’? Why is this different from an ordinary history of events? Is this a nominalism or a realism? Rajchman takes the example of gender: for Deleuze, it’s not a matter of whether gender classifications are ‘essential’ or ‘conventional’; “rather, they are ‘molar’ categories which cover myriad ‘minor’ becomings, the potential for which requires our ‘realism'” (62, 80-1, 89-90). This will be the basis for the critique of psychoanalysis developed by Deleuze and Guattari: that it obscures the myriad becomings with its ‘family romance’ (90). But all these terms require some additional points of clarification: (i) what is a ‘becoming’ (devenir)? “[A] becoming is never a ‘history’ with a fixed starting and ending point” (90), it’s the exact opposite of identity; (ii) what happens once this deeper level is ‘uncovered’? It’s as if “under the ‘second nature’ of our persons and identities, there lay a prior potential Life capable of bringing us together without abolishing what makes us singular” (81-2); (iii) what is Deleuze’s “realism”? Rajchman elegantly makes use of the analysis of Italian neo-Realist cinema in Cinema 2: neo-Realism is not “realistic” because of the way it portrayed social reality, but rather because it invented a new kind of image which could show a new dimension of reality, the “intolerable” (63). (iv) As for the idea of ‘event’, I confess that to me, Deleuze’s événement feels strangely close at times to Heidegger’s Ereignis–the idea of an event or ‘occurrence’ which is more fundamental than the subject–even if Deleuze tries to wriggle out of this proximity.

It is all very well to speak of experience and especially ‘new forms’ of experience, but what does philosophy have to do with this? Here Deleuze offers one of his key original ideas, the “image of thought” (32f.) which his philosophy aims to study, under the rubric of a “noology” (precisely, the study of the images of thought, 34). For example, in Hume and Kant’s respective ways of dealing with the problem of illusion, one can see two distinct images of thought, of what thought is. The goal for Deleuze, both as a properly ‘philosophical’ contribution (i.e. an original contribution to philosophy) and as a method for practicing history of philosophy, is do away with the idea–the dogma, really–of transcendence (35), without asserting in opposition to it his idea of the “plane of immanence” as if it were universal and atemporal. Rather, placing oneself at the standpoint of immanence, one tries to work out, in each philosophy, “the moment of originality in its ‘creations'” (ibid.): so, for instance, Plato creates the concept of the Forms within a particular image of thought; Descartes takes the Jesuit form of the meditation and uses it against Scholasticism (37). Just as the plane of immanence is prior to a division of the world into subject and object, the ‘image of thought’ is prior to formalized arguments (43)–although proponents of the ‘use of argument’ in philosophy might say it’s the other way around.

Noology, the study of the images of thought, takes the place of history of philosophy for Deleuze–including the more “philosophical” histories such as those provided by Hegel or Heidegger: histories of Spirit or of Being (39). There are no great epochs, philosophy does not boil down to a ‘conversation’ either (Rorty is usually dismissed in the same breath as Habermas), nor to a contest in which one argument comes out victorious. Rather, there is a Nietzschean sense of “untimeliness” (40), and a “geophilosophy,” developed in What is Philosophy?, which seeks to describe the relation between particular spatial configurations and geographic locations, and the philosophical formations that arise therein. This kind of ‘tectonics’ of the movements of the history of philosophy is inspired by Foucault’s archival research, “when the link between what we can say and what we can see at a given time and place is fixed by discursive regularities rather than by a fixed schema” (68). But please notice that since there is no territory without a “deterritorialization” (95), there can be no definition of an identity, even a minor identity, without immediate reference to its “lines of flight” (lignes de fuite). One is always becoming something, indeed, there is ‘something’ in us which is undergoing a process of becoming; and whenever we are ‘something’, especially in the more massive sense in which we might ‘amount’ to something as a group, as a collective identity or representation, it is always decomposing fragmenting, “leaking” (the other sense of fuite) in these lines of flight.

This emphasis on the ‘image of thought’ also has an impact on the relation between philosophy, science and art: Deleuze argues for a system of connections which, Rajchman nicely points out, is neither a Quinean “naturalization” (in which the assertions of philosophy are made to conform to an ideal of natural science) nor a “textualization” which turns philosophy into literature (46-7). Space and time themselves, instead of being “forms of intuition,” as they are for Kant, are swallowed up in experimentation: our relation to them changes, with temporal indetermination (Proust) or eternity (Spinoza), along with the shift from an ‘extensive’ to an ‘intensive’ spatiality: this is what is expressed in Deleuze’s neologism from Difference and Repetition, the “asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible” (130). (NB: a directly opposite reading of Deleuze’s relation to Kant was offered fifteen years by Vincent Descombes in Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge U.P.): Deleuze is fundamentally a post-Kantian who reflects on the soul, the world and God. As with Badiou, but more honestly, this is a hostile but ‘bracing’ assessment which does not take Deleuze at face value.)

If, as we saw above, sensation itself is opened up to experimentation, then the brain becomes a matter for philosophy and art as well as for science. But Deleuze’s understanding of brain and mind and their relation differs from the usual blend of ‘equal parts of computational reductionism which isolates mental processes from their bodily context, Darwinist adaptationism of skills and techniques, and a few Gestaltist and/or phenomenological descriptions of behavior’ (137). It points more towards the idea of an “uncertain system,” with a sense of time and space that is not merely mechanical but rather an “abstract machine” (70-1). Rajchman again brilliantly uses the books on cinema (which declare, for anyone who bothers to read them, that they are about the brain–and the nervous system, cf. 133f.): automatisms or mechanisms of the mind only fully make sense if the mind is considered in isolation, but in fact “thinking is never ‘automatic’ in this way; on the contrary, it works in fits and starts” (72), which is precisely what “time-images” in cinema can show us (73). And yet our world saturates the mind/brain with information, thereby rendering it increasingly “informational” in nature (Deleuze would have immediately integrated the current interest in “neural plasticity” into his considerations; see Rajchman’s excellent discussion of his “neuroaesthetic,” 136-8). Hence the task for thinking–and for philosophy–is to escape this, to produce a new image of thought which is not entirely “informational” or “communicational”: to produce the new.

This emphasis on the movement of innovation and creation makes for a different understanding of the philosopher and his role, less as public professor and more as experimentalist: “in Deleuze’s empiricism philosophy always starts in an encounter with something outside the Academy” (23). So, for example, philosophy does not come to art and explain it by means of a pre-existing model, but, faced with this new “block of sensation,” has to invent a new concept (114-115). Thus it is not a “theory” to be “applied.” Art can help philosophy out of its dogmatism and help it produce a new image of thought; at the same time, philosophy has its own “style,” its “conceptual personae,” and cannot merely “adopt figures from other fields” (118). The movement of innovation is also present in art itself: “in a modern world of stupefying banality, routine, cliché, mechanical reproduction or automatism, the problem is to extract a singular image, a vital, multiple way of thinking and saying, not a substitute theology or ‘auratic object'” (125).

I note in passing that phenomenologists today who feel the need to add something to their diet of Husserl are turning towards Bergson, precisely on the issue of thinking and consciousness, and Deleuze is an unavoidable presence here. This concern with innovation often had psychological ramifications for Deleuze: his interest in schizophrenia and autism; in pidgins, créoles, “minor languages” and the character Bartleby in Melville; in his focus on the pragmatic dimension of linguistics. This is an expression of his more general concern with the properly experimental, hazardous dimension of experience, as noted at the beginning: there are ‘bits’ of experience which are not comprehensible as ‘sorts’ or ‘types’, and cannot be unified in a continuity; they can be expressed, for instance, in the “blocks of sensation” (85) one finds in painting. This is how empiricism and ‘artificialism’ come together, empiricism and experimentalism.

In closing, I should also mention that Rajchman provides a very helpful and original periodization of the stages in Deleuze’s work (24-25): (i) the history of philosophy, culminating in the two great ‘systematic’ works Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition (1969); (ii) the activism of the late 60s – early 70s, culminating in the more experimental works Anti-Oedipus (1973) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980); (iii) the attempt to imagine another world, after the failure of the second stage, with the cinema books (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 1983, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1985) and What is Philosophy?, co-authored again with Félix Guattari (1991).

However, it is unfortunate that the book is marred by a number of typographical errors (misspelled names, words missing, etc.), which is doubtless to be laid at the door of the publisher and its editorial deficiency, for the tone and content of the text indicate clearly that it was not written in any haste, as are so many of the academic publications we are given to read.

I have not been able to discuss some of the other crucial themes from Deleuze which Rajchman brings out well: his ‘politics’, centered on ideas such as “the people, who are always absent” and the difficulty of conceptualizing a proletariat today, or his critique and re-working of Freudian conceptions. As for themes lacking in Rajchman’s presentation itself, they include Deleuze’s relation to scientific themes (aside from the ‘neuroaesthetic’ motif), including mathematics (in Difference and Repetition and the book on Leibniz, The Fold), biology, medicine and natural history, and a fair treatment of the figure Deleuze called “the prince of philosophers”: Spinoza. Regardless, as has been said many times in this review, The Deleuze Connections is by far the best work of its kind, sensitive, extremely rich, wry and funny at times, a monograph of “serious philosophy” which is timely in an intriguing fashion, of a convenient size and nicely printed–and overall a book recommended to anyone with a real interest in philosophy of any kind.

Categories: Philosophical