Charles J. Stivale (editor) - Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts

The conception of friendship that Deleuze proposes in LAbcdaire relates more broadly to his reflections elsewhere. Early in his career, Deleuze followed Marcel Proust in affirming, on one hand, that friendship never establishes anything but false communications, based on misunderstandings, and, on the other hand, that there is no intersubjectivity except an artistic one and that only art gives us what we vainly sought from a friend (PS: 42).in LAbcdaire on the fundamental role that encounters (rencontres) play in life. He sees these as equally important in experiencing intensities and multiplicities through art and literature, in generating thought and thereby in moving beyond philosophy through philosophy. And in his earlier Dialogues with Parnet (1977), Deleuze asks a fundamental question in this regard:

Between the cries of physical pain and the songs of metaphysical suffering, how is one to trace out ones narrow, Stoical way, which consists in being worthy of what happens, extracting something gay and loving in what occurs, a glimmer of light, an encounter, an event, a speed, a becoming?

(D: 66, trans, mod.)

Deleuzes idiosyncratic definition of his intellectual project in the early years reveals both his modesty and his rapier wit, presented in his 1973 letter to Michel Cressole:

I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy Many members of my generation never broke free of this; others did, by inventing their own particular methods and new rules, a new approach. I myself did history of philosophy for a long time, read books on this or that author. But I compensated in various ways.

(N: 5-6)

His approach was to look at authors whom he judged to challenge the rationalist tradition, notably Hume, Lucretius, Nietzsche and Spinoza, as well as Kant, who Deleuze treated as an enemy, yet whose work required an effort of discernment and understanding. According to his recollections of this project, Deleuze had to adopt particularly rigorous survival strategies:

I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery [enculage] or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind, and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.

(N: 6)

Among the authors that correspond to this image of doing histor of philosophy, Deleuze cited Nietzsche in his 1962 work and Bergson i his 1966 work. Nietzsche in particular, Deleuze maintained, extricate me from all this, since Nietzsche gets up to all sorts of things behin your back, giving Deleuze a perverse taste for saying simple thing in [his] own way, in affects, intensities, experiences, experiments (N: 6). Through Nietzsche, Deleuze opened himself to the multiplicitie everywhere within [individuals], the intensities running through them that is, a depersonalization opposite [that] effected by the history of philosophy; its a depersonalization through love, rather than subjection (N: 6-7) . This opening toward depersonalization and love led Deleuze towards two projects at the end of the 1960s, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense , to which one can add his first boo on Spinoza. While still heavily laden with many academic elements these books were, for Deleuze, an attempt to jolt, to set in motio something inside me, to treat writing as a flow, not a code (N: 7). Such a mode of reading, Deleuze argued, is:

[an] intensive way of reading, in contact with whats outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything, [this] is reading with love [une maniere amoureuse] .

(N: 8-9)

Of course, this is not an easy process, for it is one that situates the person along, or in relation to, the line Outside:

something more distant than any external world. But its also something closer than any inner world managing] to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe in short, think. Bending the line so we manage to live upon it, with it: a matter of life and death.

(N: 111)

Deleuze summed up a crucial encounter at this point in his career, at the end of the 1960s, with the phrase And then there was my meeting with Flix Guattari (N: 7), later describing him as a man of the group, of bands or tribes, and yet he is a man alone, a desert populated by all these groups and all his friends, all his becomings (D: 16). Deleuze discussed the importance for his work of this collaboration and friendship in a number of texts, and all suggest the significant connections that Guattari was able to provoke in Deleuzes creative process and, of course, vice versa. For example, in an interview with Robert Maggiori following the 1991 publication of What Is Philosophy? and shortly before Guattaris death, Deleuze noted: