Justin Murphy - Based Deleuze: The Reactionary Leftism of Gilles Deleuze

Justin Murphy

I have tried to write a short and accessible book about the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). This book was conceived and written in one immanent movement, from July 20th to August 20th, 2019.

An unexpected benefit of publishing at the speed of cyberspace is that many of my most scathing critics wrote public reviews before I even started writing. Where they obtained the predictive power to comment on a book not yet written, I do not know. But thanks to their generous public sharing, I had the opportunity to systematically pre-empt and hopefully resolve all of the major critiques and objections that this book would otherwise tend to elicit.

This book does not intend to provide a comprehensive and balanced portrait of Deleuzes thought. Critics will accuse me of cherry-picking quotes, running roughshod over crucial contextual factors, and ignoring much of the scholarly literature, to produce an absurd and politically motivated image of Deleuze. They will not be entirely wrong! This book is just one portrait, from one angle, of a rich and complex body of work. Of course, it is motivated by my own interests and desires. Of course, it only exposes one slice of its object this is probably the only worthwhile way to write about another thinker. And it is certainly the only kind of secondary literature (writing about someone elses writing), that anyone would ever choose to read for stimulation and edification. For most of modern intellectual history, this was typically expected of any commentary worth its salt. Only today does there exist a peanut gallery capable of objecting to such an approach, a consequence of the massification of higher education.

Scholarly norms in the humanities today are morbid to the extreme, as their evolution in the past few decades has been driven primarily by the need to filter out increasing applicants. This pressure has laced them with more and more resentment. Any piece of academic commentary must first cite at least a few dozen pieces of recent scholarly research, not because one necessarily owes anything to those pieces of research, but as a proof-of-work mechanism: an arbitrarily long and undesirable task the completion of which signals ones fitness for the scholarly system. As more people have college degrees, more people can try for an academic career, which means competitive escalation of proof-of-work requirements. Now, in some subfields, ones bibliography is expected to be 50% women, and so on. Of course, all of these trends are presented as substantive improvements of one kind or another, but the underlying logic is as wasteful and brutal as the ancient practice of potlatch (burning your slaves to demonstrate credibility) or Bitcoin mining (burning electricity to demonstrate credibility). Academia is a competitive game that runs on the same principles (despite its cottage industry of anti-Bitcoin moralism!). The main difference is that Bitcoin does this transparently in defection from status quo financial institutions, whereas academia does this opaquely to enhance its moral authority and rent-seeking within status quo institutions.

The massified civilizational tumor that is higher education today has now spawned many people who spent years submitting to its arbitrary disciplines but never received the reward of any stably remunerative professional membership. These are often smart, interesting people who have earned degrees by patiently citing countless useless articles, on topics that never really made any sense to them, using absurdly parochial sub-field languages that interest or please nobody but ones advisor. Such people are a potential market for original and interesting books; they are exactly the types of people who ought to be most interested in reading a strange and idiosyncratic interpretation of a popular philosopher.

With as many educated people as we have floating around today, and with costs of publication approaching zero, we ought to see a bewildering variety of sophisticated and idiosyncratic books! Both supply and demand should be higher than ever. And yet, there is no particularly burgeoning economy of defecting academics, even if there are quite a few hangers-on and bottom-feeders the trauma of academic socialization-without-integration is just too great to bear, it seems. Resentful at the years they wasted paying dues, now they feel nothing but revulsion at the sight of intellectual life that has ceased to pay its dues. They cling to the most dejected and disingenuous peripheries of an Academy that has not only mercilessly stultified them but no longer even pretends to offer them anything now or in the future. Rather than realize this, update their model of the world, defect from a rotten game, and get to work both enjoying and producing the bizarre fruits of the Outside, they specialize in objecting.

Critique is well and good, but when people object to the existence of a book, whether that objection is one of cherry-picking or being pseudo-intellectual or whatever they only announce themselves members of this morbid para-academic peanut gallery, this informal labor union of resentful retards rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Now that this peanut gallery has been explained, they can be safely ignored.

Perhaps the most reasonable critique of my portrait of Deleuze is what scientists call face invalidity. Thats a fancy way of saying it just sounds wrong, or fails the sniff test; its too incongruous with too many obvious facts, that its implausible just on the face of it. As I discuss in the chapter On Troubled Land, I initially rejected Nick Lands pro-capitalist portrait of Deleuze on grounds of face invalidity. Deleuze had explicitly endorsed too many notions, principles, and causes of left-wing anti-capitalism for Lands Deleuze to be plausible. In that chapter, I explain how and why my rejection gave way to a certain recalibration of my beliefs, so I wont rehearse that story here. Suffice it to say that I respect why many readers will be similarly skeptical of the Deleuze they meet in the following pages.

If my portrait of Deleuze seems impossible on the face of it, then perhaps we should inquire into who or what has generated the face of Deleuze we currently take for granted. Even the quickest look at the academic consensus on Deleuze will make any reader far less confident in whatever theyve already heard about Deleuze. Consider the following masterpieces of scholarship one might find conducting research on Deleuze:

• Un-Glunking Geography: Spatial Science After Dr. Seuss and Gilles Deleuze (Doel )
• Deleuze and Guattari in the Nursery: Towards an Ethnographic, Multi-Sensory Mapping of Gendered Bodies and Becomings (Emma and Mellor )
• Becoming Rhizomatic Parents: Deleuze, Guattari and Disabled Babies (Goodley )
• Ecosystem Service Commodities - a New Imperial Ecology? Implications for Animist Immanent Ecologies, With Deleuze and Guattari (Sullivan )
• Immaculate Defecation: Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari in Organization Theory (Srensen )
• Virtually Sustainable: Deleuze and Desiring Differenciation in Second Life (Hickey-Moody and Wood )
• Transgender Without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-Affective Theory of Gender Modification (Crawford )
• Deleuze on Viagra (Or, What Can a Viagra-Body Do?) (Potts )

Do these titles inspire confidence? Do you believe the institutionalized culture generating these titles would likely impart to the public an accurate and useful image of a complicated French philosopher? And yet Most of what you think you know about Deleuze has come to you, through osmosis, from the same kind of geniuses who crafted these titles.