Claire Colebrook - Deleuze and the Meaning of Life

Deleuze and the Meaning of Life

Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy
Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA

Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Bloomsbury. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research.

Adornos Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan

Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller

Being and Number in Heideggers Thought, Michael Roubach

Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes

Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake

Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon OSullivan and Stephen Zepke

Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham

Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston

The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri

Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner

Foucaults Heidegger, Timothy Rayner

Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi

Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy

Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler

Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis

Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin

Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell

Heideggers Early Philosophy, James Luchte

Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler

Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer

Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, edited by Jeffrey Metzger

Nietzsches Ethical Theory, Craig Dove

Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte

The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Dttmann

Sartres Phenomenology, David Reisman

Time and Becoming in Nietzsches Thought, Robin Small

Whos Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert

iek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman

Claire Colebrook

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Claire Colebrook, 2010

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Vitalism in its narrow sense might be identified with a handful of relatively recent names: Henri Bergson, Raymond Ruyer, William James; and a broader tendency in twentieth-century thought to criticize the ways in which systems, such as language or logic, have their origin in animating life but then come to operate independently of the thought and sense that is their condition of emergence. This modern version of vitalism would be a re-articulation and complication of an age-old problem of the relation between praxis and techne, between a living body whose movement furthers its own life, and a perverse extension of those technical movements into systems that ought to be enhancing but that may also develop an alienating, monstrous and autonomous life of their own. Vitalism is at once the most recent of problems, concerned with how we explain lifes capacity not to flourish, not to maximize its potential, and also an essentially regressive problem: for the very concept of a life that might fall into alienation threatens to take a whole series of developments and technologies and place them as secondary or parasitic to an original and generating fecundity that we regard as belied or lost by technical extensions. Such technical extensions and alienations need not be confined to the relation between man and machine but are often diagnosed within man himself. Vitalism is not just the problem of the human beings relation to life (whether or not he is alienated from the order of the living), for it also concerns the structure of the human being itself and the relation among its powers.

Henri Bergson criticized the intellects capacity to manage the world through concepts that reduce difference for the sake of efficiency, a capacity that then becomes life-denying when the intellect turns these necessary reifying manoeuvres on itself (Bergson 1931). William James, similarly, thought that concepts were originally formed to further our living being but could, once they fell into unthinking over-use, become deadening structures that precluded us from feeling life in its complex intensity:

No abstract concept can be a valid substitute for concrete reality except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver. The interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but one of a thousand purposes. When others rear their heads, it must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. (James 1896, 70)

Raymond Ruyer, reacting against cybernetics and other forms of mechanistic determination of the living being, insisted on the distinction between the logic we impose on an event after its completion, and the original orientation which might have taken any number of paths precisely because it was not ordered from one part to another but operates with a meaningful sense of the whole (Ruyer 1954). James, Ruyer and Bergson did not simply advocate a return to living origins and a retreat from all forms of articulation; on the contrary, they were all concerned with the ways in which a short-term attention to speed developing techne for efficiency would ultimately lead to an absence of any real future. It is because the organism wishes to master itself and its world to move quickly through its world without stalling to consider all the complexities and differences that it will develop concepts and means for speeding up motion, even if these same concepts will ultimately render it close to immobile:

Our reason, incorrigibly presumptuous, imagines itself possessed, by right of birth or by right of conquest, innate or acquired, of all the essential elements of the knowledge of truth. Even where it confesses that it does not know the object presented to it, it believes that its ignorance consists only in not knowing which one of its time-honoured categories suits the new object. In what drawer, ready to open, shall we put it? In what garment, already cut, shall we clothe it? Is it this, or that, or the other thing? And this, and that, and the other thing are always already something already conceived, already known. The idea that for a new object we might have to create a new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply repugnant to us. The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making to measure. But, rather than go to this extremity, our reason prefers to announce once for all, with a proud modesty, that it has to do only with the relative, and that the absolute is not in its province. This preliminary declaration enables it to apply its habitual method of thought without any scruple, and thus under pretense that it does not touch the absolute, to make absolute judgments upon everything this belief is natural to the human intellect, always engaged as it is in determining under what former heading it shall catalogue any new object; and it may be said that, in a certain sense, we are all born Platonists. (Bergson 1913, 489)