This is by far the best introduction I have read to one of the most
important and challenging philosophers not of the century that just ended, but
of the one that is yet to come, as Foucault himself admits. Gilles Deleuze
provided us with nothing less than a complete philosophical system, and
although some of the recent postmodernist thought fancies treating his work as
largely anti- or meta-philosophical, it is important to stress here that May
rightfully represents Deleuze as someone who thought that philosophizing,
instead of just doing philosophy per se in a ‘professional’ way, should have
its own independence and it is normatively distinct from other disciplines
(political economy, law) in that it seeks and creates new concepts.

Unlike other introductions of Deleuze’s work (e.g. Rajchman’s) Todd May
makes the significant choice to read and introduceDeleuze’s thought as itself addressing and answering one specific
question: ‘How Might One Live?’ – also the title of the first chapter of the
book. This question and its implications is indeed the thread that connects the
whole book’s structure, and in my view helps both the amateur reader and the
studious scholar realize what I think constitutes a major interpretation of
Deleuze’s work as a deeply ethical and
political project. Michel Foucault again was absolutely right when he
characterized Anti-Oedipus as a book
on ethics in the Preface he wrote to it. Unfortunately again, much of the so
called postmodernist thinking resists such an interpretation and treatment of
Deleuze’s oeuvre by confusing any
talk about ethics and politics with modernist moralistic thought.

Nevertheless, the main thesis of the book and the central question May
is asking is split by him into two separate, albeit related, further questions:
(a) what might living consist in? (b) how might we go about living (chapter 1)?
By formulating these two questions Deleuze strives to go against both analytic
anti-ontology and metaphysical quietism as well as the poststructuralist
dismissal of conformist ontology. By contrast then he provides the terms for the
reformulation of a new ontology. The two questions asked are not just based on
some or no ontology at all, but vice versa (17). Moreover, to ask what living
consists in, as an ontological matter, is not the same thing as asking about it
as a biological one (24). This should be absolutely clear. Deleuze criticizes
both identity thinking and
anthropological, external difference, in favor of an internal, material yet
incorporeal difference. This seems quite paradoxical at first glance;
nevertheless it marks Deleuze’s so called, significant as much as elusive,
transcendental empiricism.   

            Accordingly, the above mentioned
first question constitutes a major step in the trajectory of continental
thought – from Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson and Foucault. It also focuses on the
general concept of life and covers
deep and difficult epistemological and ontological aspects of it (chapters
2-3). May, in other words, wants to depict Deleuze as a philosopher of life, a Lebensphilosoph, one who represents the
most recent development in the chain of a carefully reworked and revisionist
life philosophy, which is close, but not reduced to an old fashioned vitalism.
May masterfully describes Deleuze’s thought-provoking analysis of all these
philosophers, on whom he has written important monographs. May gives us an
excellent account on how they have influenced the Deleuzian construction of an
immanent ontology, structured by the critique of transcendence, the philosophy
of time and affirmation. There is also an allusion to Kant’s ambiguous
influence on Deleuze’s thought, which one would wish to see more of (79).   

The second question ‘how we might go about living?’ allows no general
prescriptions. It is not a question of how we should live – although it might cover the question how we should act – but a question of how we might
live (129-133). May explains to us patiently why the question of how we
should live was abandoned as being incoherent and metaphysical and why and how
it was supplemented by the question how we should act. The latter one is a
question concerning morality [Moralität],
whereas Deleuze’s own one is one of ethics
(even if not simply empirical). It is the participation in the formation of
connections. Therefore, it is neither the stability of identities, nor the
indifferent flow of difference. Building on transcendental empiricism or
incorporeal materialism, he conceives of matter as itself being virtual (as
opposed to actual) and self-organized. Virtuality means that matter is not just
passive, waiting for some kind of pre-given form, in terms of pure possibility,
to shape it. Matter preserves its capacity for disparate combinations at every
point in time; it has a differential aspect (100). The ontology of ‘how we
might live’ is an ontology of difference, and here there are no instructions
given. Without instructions we only need to experiment and engage difference.
Desire is no lack to be filled into with something, but a creator of
connections and to desire is to connect with others within an immanent plane of
pre-individual singularities. May provides us here the absolutely crucial
connection between Deleuzian ontology and contemporary science (Prigogine,
Monod).

To my mind, this leads directly into the deeply political nature of
Deleuze’s thought, inspired by the anti-conformist and ground-breaking social
movement of Paris in May 1968 (117). The stakes and conditions of the nature of
such a participation to the formation of connections, that is, actualized
difference itself, forms the basis of a postmodern republicanism that
transgresses the dry opposition, predominant in mainstream liberal political
theory, between individualism and communitarianism. Deleuze and Guattari’s work
has enormously inspired the political philosophy of Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri (Empire, Multitude). Accordingly, the politics of difference (chapter 4) is
crucially based on the existence of an ontological plane of immanence of
difference itself. Such a plane does not prioritize either individuals or
communities, groups and states; for there is no normative principle that can
justify the priority of a certain political unit. Moreover, such a politics is
radical in the following aspect: it does not involve just a redistribution of
goods to those who lack them, a mirror of a politics of the satisfaction of
needs attached to specific, contingent identities, but the creation of the
conditions that allow for the challenging of existing connections, that is,
structural reformations. The latter involves much more than political economy
and redistribution. This is because in order to challenge and experiment one
needs to be treated as and feel equal
as a peer in communication (I take it that Nancy Fraser has developed such a
Deleuzian-in-spirit approach, although she never mentions this).

Deleuze has a peculiar and ambivalent attitude towards capitalism and
Marxism an attitude justifiably highlighted by May. On the one hand, he does
not see capitalism as a bad thing in itself. In his writings with Guattari they
credit capitalism for removing much of oppressive mechanisms of the past (143).
Moreover, capitalism has the meritorious characteristic, inherent in its nature
that it deterritorializes massively. In a sense capitalism is itself an
abstract machine of deterritorialization, a continuous and ‘generalized
decoding of flows’, which frees and allows lines of flight to travel to new
territories. But then what is the problem? Would it be possible that we have already been living in state of
deterritorialization? Unfortunately capitalism is not the abstract machine of
true creation, but quite the opposite of fake creation. First, it functions by
its reliance on an axiomatic, that is, what Marx named as ‘exchange value’,
which sets the manner and not just
the rule for regulating relations. Second, it imposes what Foucault described
as discipline, and third, it uncannily allies with psychoanalysis, a view that
sees desire just as lack, and not as a line of flight (this is the subject
matter of Anti-Oedipus). Towards the
end of his life Deleuze replaces the Foucaultian model of discipline by arguing
that we have moved from discipline to societies of control (146). May, to his
credit, gives a series of examples in his effort to illustrate how Deleuzian
thought is actually a better description
of what motivates political change. In the last chapter of the book one can
witness an account of how micropolitics – in the molecular sense not of
smallness, but of quantum flow – work and produce random and unpredicted
effects. Palestinian intifada is one
of May’s many examples.  

However there are a couple of objections one might raise against May’s
representation of Deleuze’s work and thought. The first one might consist in
the objection that by introducing difficult issues in Deleuzian ontology May
oversimplifies what people see as a Deleuzian revolution in philosophizing. I
do not think this is the case at all with the book at hand. The second one has
to do with May’s insistence on the thesis that Deleuze’s anti-Platonic
philosophy is not at all interested in the notion of truth (81 note 10). This
is indeed a very difficult claim to establish and May does not help us much
when keeps quoting Deleuze’s words from What
Is Philosophy: ‘[p]hilosophy does not consist in knowing and is not
inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable or
Important that determine its success or failure…’ Is there a fundamental
misunderstanding here about the nature of truth? Could we argue that philosophy
is like art, especially when Deleuze argues that the former is not about arguments (22)? To be clear,
Deleuze criticizes the correspondence theory of truth and dismisses a notion of
truth conceived asa solution to a
particular problem (truth as solution).
His point is that this is not philosophizing, but school thinking. Solutions
refer to problems raised at a particular time, but problems are virtual,
whereas solutions are actual. The real issue for Deleuze is to elaborate, open
up a new perspective for us, not just solve a problem (86). Truth, in this
sense, would be boring! It is again the process
that is primary. In any case, one cannot abandon truth altogether, and May is
too quick to ascribe such a position to Deleuze.

To sum up and conclude, May’s introduction is absolutely stunning both
in its clarity, organization of the material and simplicity and also in its
additional focus on the concept of life.
But why it is ‘life’ the central theme, and moreover, is there any connection
to contemporary philosophy and science? To be sure, it is an absolutely crucial
concept especially nowadays with the emerging ethical and political questions
posed by biotechnologies, cloning and the environment. (For an overview of this
concept, see K. Koukouzelis & S. Olma ‘Life’s (re-)emergence’ in Theory, Culture and Society, forthcoming
introduction to a special collection of essays on ‘life’.) 
After the death of God, we are nowadays witnessing the blurring of
traditionally stable distinctions between culture and nature, and what we are
left with is simply the pressing questions May has put forward as Deleuzian. It
seems then that Deleuze might indeed be the
philosopher of our age to come; and our post-capitalist age needs not a
critique coming from a privileged point of view, be it morality itself, but a
critique involving a revolution in our way
of thought itself. Deleuze provides exactly such a critique of the dogmatic
way of thinking, by substituting identities, needs and humanistic linear
progress with strange and new entities like pre-individual singularities,
desiring-machines, and becomings-animal, molecular, woman. This is because life
(and difference) is not a thing; it is a process and it is full of vitality
(24).

© 2005 Kostas Koukouzelis

Kostas
Koukouzelis, Ph.D., Goldsmiths College, University of London

Categories: Philosophical