Deleuze: Concepts as Continuous Variation

Abstract

(Justin S. Litaker interviewed Daniel W. Smith. Mr. Litaker focused his questions on continuous variation of concepts in Deleuze). JSL: How did you come to be interested in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and what sustains your interest? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] DWS: I first became interested in Deleuze when I was in graduate school. I was reading Nietzsche when the English translation of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy came out. So I read the book and was amazed at the way Deleuze had systematized Nietzsche's thought. At the time, there weren't many translations of Deleuze's works available, so I went to the library at the University of Chicago and discovered Difference and Repetition on the shelves. I thought it must contain the secret of Deleuze's work, which was only hinted at in Nietzsche and Philosophy. So right at the start, Nietzsche and Philosophy instilled in me a kind of conviction that Deleuze was worth reading, and that there was much more in his work that I needed to find out about. I had also been reading Vincent Descombes' book Modern French Philosophy, and he had isolated Derrida and Deleuze as the focal points of contemporary French philosophy. So I knew that Deleuze was more than a historian of philosophy, and that he had a project of his own, which was, at the very least, oriented around the concept of difference. There and then, I decided that I needed to learn French in order to read Difference and Repetition. You asked what has sustained my interest in Deleuze through the years. For one, I've never tired of reading Deleuze. Even now, I don't think I have a complete sense of what Deleuze is up to. I think this is partly because of his manner of writing, which has been described as "free indirect discourse." Deleuze has written numerous monographs in the history of philosophy-on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Leibniz, Bergson, and so on-but in each book he is also reading and using these thinkers toward his own philosophical ends, so that in Nietzsche and Philosophy, for instance, there is a becoming-Nietzsche of Deleuze as well as a becoming-Deleuze of Nietzsche. Readers are thus caught up in what Deleuze would call a becoming, or a zone of indiscernibility. Reading Deleuze is more like following a trajectory or a continuous movement that you never have done with, rather than arriving at a set of doctrines or positions that would lie at the heart of Deleuze's thought. JSL: Has this process of becoming or continuous movement affected your own reading of Deleuze? DWS: Absolutely. Right now I'm trying to write a book on Deleuze. At one point, Deleuze says that he still believes in philosophy as a system, and I initially thought, well great, I'll try to elucidate Deleuze's system of philosophy. I thought I'd approach Deleuze's system using Kant as a model, since Kant has a very architectonic idea of what philosophy is. So I borrowed five rubrics from Kant's system: aesthetics (the theory of space and time, the theory of art, the theory of sensibility), analytics (the theory of concepts in the Transcendental Deduction), Dialectics (the theory of the idea), ethics, and politics. I figured I would start from Kant, then show how Deleuze modifies Kant, and in the process of doing that I would be able to produce some version of what Deleuze's system is. That, at least, was my initial idea for the book. But of course it has all turned out to be much more complicated than that. Although Deleuze says he is interested in philosophy as a system, he also says he thinks of his own system as being "heterogenetic," that is, it is itself a genesis of the heterogeneous, the production of the new, the production of difference. What this means is that Deleuze's own system modifies itself over the course of its development. Deleuze gives an example of this in his preface to the Italian translation of his book Logic of Sense, where he takes as one of his examples his own concept of intensity. …