Vernon W. Cisney - Deleuze and Derrida: Difference and the Power of the Negative

Deleuze and Derrida

In loving memory of my mother, who taught me to dream

Je vous aime et vous souris do que je sois.
I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am.
Jacques Derrida

Deleuze and Derrida

Difference and the Power of the Negative

VERNON W. CISNEY

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Vernon W. Cisney, 2018

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ISBN 978 1 4744 0470 9

The right of Vernon W. Cisney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation. When I submitted my completed dissertation to the faculty at Purdue University in 2012, the dedication page read as follows: For Jody, Jacob, and Hayley, who have sacrificed so much, so that I could chase a dream. Though the journey of our life together post-graduation has offered entirely different challenges than did the journey through dissertation, defence, and graduation, this sentiment is now stronger than ever. To Jody, it is undeniably the case that I would not be the person I am today without you. From high school through grad school to today, you have been my partner and my love. Thank you for your willingness to embark upon this journey with me; to sell our home, give up our steady factory jobs, uproot our children and move them halfway across the country; and most importantly, thank you for your steadfast love and friendship. You have provided me with moral encouragement when your own faith was weak, you have never let me give up on myself, and you have often provided the much-needed gentle (and not so gentle) prodding to keep me on track. It is, and always has been, you and me against the world, baby. For all this and so much more, thank you.

To Jacob and Hayley, you are the centres of my world, and the lights in my moments of darkness. Your mother and I began the academic journey when you were both too young to really understand why, much less to offer your own input or words of protest. From Illinois to Tennessee, to Indiana, to Pennsylvania, your lives have been repeatedly disrupted and restructured by my dreams; but, showing little concern for yourselves, you have been my most inspired and fiercely loyal supporters. I thank you. You are now pretty much grown, complete with your own scars, goals, ambitions, and perspectives on the world. I am daily amazed at your strength of character, as well as the depth and richness of your mental, emotional, philosophical, and moral landscapes. You are my two favourite people in the world. I am so grateful for the way you fill my life, and so excited to see where your own lives will take you in the years to come.

This book would not have been possible without the wonderful folks at Edinburgh University Press. I am incredibly lucky to have landed with you, as I could not have asked for a more supportive and encouraging professional relationship. This is now our third book together, we are in talks for a fourth, and I look forward to what I hope will be a long and productive partnership. To Carol Macdonald, thank you for taking a chance on me when I was but a graduate student, thank you for taking a chance on this book in particular when I know that there were forces working against it, but most importantly, thank you for your faith in me. To Carol, to Ersev Ersoy, and to Kirsty Woods, thank you so much for your seemingly infinite patience as I continued, in true Derridean fashion, to infinitely defer my submission of the manuscript. To Rebecca Mackenzie and the design staff, thank you for creating such a kick-ass cover for my book. Thank you to the two anonymous reviewers whose insights and suggestions have helped me immeasurably. To countless other unknown persons typesetters, designers, press operators, laminator operators, bindery workers, truck drivers, sales and marketing staff, conference workers, and others I am certainly forgetting thank you.

I want to thank Gary Aylesworth, for first exposing me to the thought of Derrida in an undergraduate course on continental philosophy at Eastern Illinois University. I would also like to thank Mary-Beth Mader, for giving me my first classroom exposure to Deleuze, in a graduate seminar at the University of Memphis titled Continental Philosophies of Science. Those pages on Aristotle from Difference and Repetition were what first hooked me. Thank you to Valentine Moulard-Leonard and Erinn Gilson for very early conversations and presentations on Deleuze at the University of Memphis in 2005 that fanned the flames. Thank you to Peter Gratton for conversations on the negative at IPS in Italy, July 2014. Thank you as well to Henry Somers-Hall for an extremely important conversation on the question of contradiction at the 2014 SPEP in New Orleans. This discussion in particular greatly impacted the final version of this book. In addition, thank you to Justin Litaker for countless illuminating conversations on Deleuze. I want to thank Jonathan Beever and Nicolae Morar who feel more to me like brothers than friends for providing emotional support and philosophical input through the initial writing of this book. To Jonathan in particular, who provided indispensable comments on the final version of this book, I thank you.

I would also like to thank the students in the philosophy programme at Gettysburg College. In particular, thank you to the students in my spring 2015 Spinoza seminar, who grappled extensively with me over the question of the yes and the no, affirmation and negation. In addition, thank you to Spencer Bradley and Ian Garbolski, who have conducted independent studies with me on Deleuze, Guattari, and Badiou. Thank you to Matthew Bajkowski, who conducted an independent study with me on the Medievals. Thank you as well to Jonathan Lucido and Frank Scavelli, with whom I worked closely in an independent study on Goethe, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

There are a few friends whose support has been positively indispensable to me through the past few years. To Kerry Walters, Steve Gimbel, and Loretta Gruodis, thank you. Steve and Kerry, not only are you both outstanding and accomplished scholars, but you are, more importantly, both genuinely good and decent human beings, willing to go to the mattresses for a friend, no matter the personal cost to you. I owe you all more than I could ever possibly repay. Thank you.

Some sections of this book have been published elsewhere, and I am grateful for the permission to reuse these passages in this book. Some content from my Differential Ontology entry on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy appears in is reprinted with permission from Springer Science and Business Media, and was originally published as Jacques Derrida and the Future in a collection titled Husserls Ideen, edited by Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon (Dordrecht, 2012).

Finally, I would like to thank the members of the dissertation committee who oversaw this project in its earlier incarnation: Arkady Plotnitsky, Chris Yeomans, Leonard Lawlor, and Daniel W. Smith. You are all of you tremendously accomplished scholars, whom I respect both personally and professionally. Your criticisms were invaluable as I reconsidered this project over the past few years. To Chris, Dan, and Len, thank you for your continued friendship and professional support. Thank you to Dan for countless Sgt. Preston burgers and glasses of Lagavulin during the writing of this book. Thank you to Len and to Dan for stoking the fires of passion for the thought of Derrida and Deleuze. Thank you to all of you for the professional and scholarly examples you have set for me. Thank you.