The Wellspring of Vessels is Higher than the Wellspring of Light (Gilles Deleuze and Materialist Dialectic)

This article is dedicated to clarifying the relationship between the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the materialist dialectic. Drawing upon the texts of Louis Althusser and Markus Gabriel, this article reformulates the central question of the materialist dialectic—the question of “educating the educators”—into a question of access to a sub-semantic “set of all sets.” Such a reformulation allows two main stages in the history of the materialist dialecticto be highlighted: materialist dialectics I, identifying the sub-semantic as such with practice, and materialist dialectics II, which develops the strategies of access to the sub-semantic as given in its non-givenness and excess. An examination of Deleuze’s philosophy in the dynamics of its development allows us to consider it as a preparation for a transition towards materialist dialectics III, granting a non-reductionist and concrete access to the sphere of the “set of all sets.”