Andrew Culp - Dark Deleuze

C1 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986)

C2 Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989)

D Dialogues 2 (with Claire Parnet; 2007)

DI Desert Islands (2004)

DR Difference and Repetition (1994)

ECC Essays Critical and Clinical (1997)

F Foucault (1988)

FB Francis Bacon (2005)

H Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature (1991)

L The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993)

LS Logic of Sense (1990)

N Negotiations (1997)

NP Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983)

P Proust and Signs (2000)

PI Pure Immanence (2005)

S Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990)

TR Two Regimes of Madness (2007)

AO Anti-Oedipus (1977)

K Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986)

TP A Thousand Plateaus (1987)

WP What Is Philosophy? (1994)

S UMMARIZING HIS DEEPLY IDIOSYNCRATIC WORK, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes writing about others as a sort of buggery or immaculate conception that is the result of taking an author from behind and giving him a child (N, 6). Deleuze is still quick to distinguish his project from outright falsification. He strictly limits himself to what an author actually says; he attends to a thinkers shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions to give him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous (N, 6). More than thirty years after making these remarks, Deleuze now has plenty of little monsters of his ownrootless rhi-zombies, dizzying metaphysicians, skittish geonaturalists, enchanted transcendentalists, passionate affectivists. My aim is to give him another child that shares his last name: Dark Deleuze.

Deleuze once told a friend that a worthwhile book performs at least three functions: polemics, recovery, and creativity. In writing the book, the author must reveal that (1) other scholarship commits an error; (2) an essential insight has been missed; and (3) a new concept can be created. You will find all three is this book. First, I argue against the canon of joy that celebrates Deleuze as a naively affirmative thinker of connectivity. Second, I rehabilitate the destructive force of negativity by cultivating a hatred for this world. Third, I propose a conspiracy of contrary terms that diverge from the joyous task of creation.

Picking out a particular strain of thought: scholars of new materialism turn to realist ontology by way of Deleuzes metaphysics of positivity. The basis for the realist side of Deleuze is perhaps best evinced by his biography. Those who knew Deleuze consistently note his firm commitment to joyful affirmation and his distaste for the ressentiment of negativity. Beatifying this sentiment, Deleuze has been used to establishing a whole canon of joy. In the canon of joy, the cosmos is a complex collection of assemblages produced through the ongoing processes of differentiation. The effect of the Joyous Deleuzes image of thought is a sense of wonder, accompanied by the enjoyment of creating concepts that express how the world really exists.

A different Deleuze, a darker one, has slowly cast its shadow. Yet this figure only appears when we escape the chapel choir of joy for the dark seclusion of the crypt. Emerging from scholars concerned with the condition of the present, the darkness refashions a revolutionary Deleuze: revolutionary negativity in a world characterized by compulsory happiness, decentralized control, and overexposure. This refashioned Deleuze forms a countercanon out of the perfused negativity of his concepts and affects. On the level of concept, it recognizes that negativity impregnates Deleuzes many prefixes of difference, becoming, movement, and transformation, such as de-, a-, in-, and non-. On the level of affect, it draws on Deleuzes talk of indiscernibility, concealment, the shame of being human, and the monstrous power of the scream. The ultimate task of this approach is not the creation of concepts, and to the extent that it does, Dark Deleuze creates concepts only to write apocalyptic science fiction (DR, xxxxii).