For example, Iris Marion Young acknowledges the importance of discussions of difference in the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault and Kristeva for her approach to the politics of difference (Young 1990:7). Similarly, Seyla Benhabib notes that ‘the term “difference” and its more metaphysical permutations, “différance” in the work of Jacques Derrida, and “le différend” in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, have become rallying points for two issues: a philosophical critique of Enlightenment type rationalism, essentialism and universalism, and a cultural battle cry for those who insist on the experience of alterity, otherness, heterogeneity, dissonance and resistance’ (Benhabib 1996:5).
Similarly, Alex Callinicos argues that ‘Deleuze’s significance is in part that, starting from [a] fundamentally Nietzschean position…he has sought, drawing on a variety of sources ranging from Kant and Bergson to Artaud and Scott Fitzgerald, to develop a comprehensive philosophy of difference’ (Callinicos 1982:85).
See Bogue 1989:15; Schrift 1995b:60–1. Other authors who point to the importance of this book in establishing Nietzsche as a key figure in poststructuralist thought include Leigh 1978, Pecora 1986 and Perry 1993. Derrida makes reference to Deleuze’s concept of power as the effect of difference between forces in his essay ‘Différance’ (Derrida 1982:17). Foucault also testifies to the enduring effect of Deleuze’s differential reading of the will to power on his own work: see Chapter 3, note 1. In his inaugural address to the Collège de France, Foucault remarked, speaking of his teacher Jean Hyppolite, ‘I am well aware that in the eyes of many his work belongs under the aegis of Hegel, and that our entire epoch, whether in logic or epistemology, whether in Marx or Nietzsche, is trying to escape from Hegel’ (Foucault 1984a:134). His own work develops the theme of difference in a variety of ways: in his account of Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy, in his theory of discourse, and in his theory of power. Foucault returns to this theme in the anti-teleological manner in which he interprets Kant’s question about enlightenment: Kant, he writes, ‘is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?’ (Foucault 1984b:34).
In Plato, Deleuze argues, ‘a moral motivation in all its purity is avowed: the will to eliminate simulacra or phantasms has no motivation apart from the moral. What is condemned in the figure of simulacra is the state of free, oceanic differences, of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchy, along with all that malice which challenges both the notion of the model and that of the copy’ (Deleuze 1994:265).
Notably by Baudrillard (1983). See also the entry ‘Simulacrum’ by Michael Camille in Nelson and Sniff 1996:31–44, as well as the discussion of simulationist art and art criticism in Foster 1996:99–107, 127–8.
See the extensive discussion of Bergson’s distinction between two types of multiplicity and its relation to his theory of duration in Turetzky 1998:194–210. On Deleuze’s use of Bergson’s concept of multiplicity and his relation to neoDarwinism, see Ansell Pearson 1999:155–9.
Similarly, in Negotiations he comments: ‘I see philosophy as a logic of multiplicities’ (Deleuze 1995b:147).
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Deleuze is not guilty here of misusing or mystifying mathematical concepts in the manner suggested by Sokal and Bricmont 1998:160–5. Rather, he draws upon the history of metaphysical interpretations of the calculus in order to develop a philosophical concept of transcendental Problems or Ideas from a genetic point of view, in full awareness that this is a philosophical rather than a scientific enterprise (Deleuze 1994: xvi, xxi, 170–82). For mathematically as well as philosophically informed comment on Deleuze’s remarks on the calculus, see Salanskis 1996.
Constantin Boundas discusses this concept of different/ciation and its relation to Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson in Boundas 1996:90–8.
In their discussion of pack, herd and swarm multiplicities typically found in cases of becoming-animal (see Chapter 4), Deleuze and Guattari point out that these continually cross over into one another as in the case of werewolves which become vampires when they die. As such, these mythological pack animals illustrate the transformative character of all qualitative multiplicities: ‘Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:249).
Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) was a French philosopher, criminologist and psychologist. Along with Durkheim, he was one of the founding figures in French sociology. His major works include Lois de l’imitation, Paris: Alcan, 1890 (translated as The Laws of Imitation, Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1962); La logique sociale, Paris: Alcan, 1893; Essais et mélanges sociologiques, Lyon: Stock, 1895; and L’opposition universelle, Paris: Alcan, 1897. Other works by Tarde translated into English include Penal Philosophy, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1968, and On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Tarde as the founder of a ‘microsociology’ in which the social is considered from the perspective of infinitesimal gestures which form waves of influence both beneath and beyond the level of the individual, and ‘differences’ and ‘repetitions’ that elude the dialectic of identity and opposition. Tarde is cited in Difference and Repetition (1994:25–6, 76, 307, 313–4, 326), Foucault (1988:36, 142) and The Fold (1993:109–10, 154), and in A Thousand Plateaus (1987:216, 218–219, 548, 575). In part owing to the revival of interest in Tarde inspired by thinkers such as Deleuze, a series of his major works is currently being reissued by Synthélabo/Les empêcheurs de penser en rond with prefaces by Eric Alliez, Isaac Joseph, Bruno Karsenti, Maurizio Lazzarato, Jean-Clet Martin and René Scherer.
In his discussion of Foucault’s theory of discourse, Deleuze comments that the primary elements of discourse, statements or énoncés, are not only inseparable from multiplicities (discursive formations) but are themselves multiplicities (Deleuze 1988b:6). With reference to his own concept of substantive multiplicity, he suggests that Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge represents ‘the most decisive step yet taken in the theory-practice of multiplicities’ (Deleuze 1988b:14).
‘There is no doubt that an assemblage never contains a causal infrastructure. It does have, however, and to the highest degree, an abstract line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight or deterritorialization; this line can be effectuated only in connection with general causalities of another nature’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:283).
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See Chapter 4, pp. 73–4.
‘Since every search for identity includes differentiating oneself from what one is not, identity politics is always and necessarily a politics of the creation of difference’ (Benhabib 1996:3).
On the differentialist arguments of the French new right, see Taguieff 1994. On the case of EEOC v.Sears see Scott 1988 and Milkman 1986.
See also Deleuze 1994:130. In this context, note Deleuze’s comment in ‘Intellectuals and power’ concerning the practical lesson provided by Foucault with regard to ‘the indignity of speaking for others’: ‘We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this “theoretical” conversion—to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf (Foucault 1977b: 209).
At the end of Plateau 13 ‘7000 B.C.: apparatus of capture’, they assert: ‘this is not to say that the struggle on the level of the axioms is without importance: on the contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse levels: women’s struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of the oppressed masses and minorities in the East or West’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:470–1).
Compare William Connolly’s discussion of the politics of becoming where he comments that ‘To the extent it succeeds in placing a new identity on the cultural field, the politics of becoming changes the shape and contour of already entrenched identities as well’ (Connolly 1999:57).
POWER
In an interview published in 1972, Foucault said to Deleuze: ‘If reading your books (from Nietzsche and Philosophy to what I imagine will be Capitalism and Schizophrenia) has been so important for me it is because they seem to me to go very far in posing this problem [who exercises power and where is it exercised?]: underneath the old theme of meaning, signified and signifier etc., at last the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their struggles…’ See ‘Intellectuals and Power’ (Foucault 1977b), originally published as ‘Les intellectuels et le pouvoir’, L’Arc, 49, 1972:3–10. Deleuze’s thinking about power has also influenced others such as Negri, who admitted that without Deleuze’s work on Spinoza, his own ‘would have been impossible’ (Negri 1991:267). See also Hardt 1993.
See also The Gay Science (Nietzsche 1974: bk 5, para. 107).
In his critical discussion of Nietzsche’s complicated relation to Darwinism in Viroid Life, Keith Ansell Pearson points to his rejection of the reactive concept of life prevalent in ‘English Darwinism’ in favour of an active concept of life which emphasises the priority of the ‘spontaneous’, ‘expansive’ and selfoganising ‘form-shaping forces at the expense of adaptation (Ansell Pearson 1997a:92). At the same time, he argues that Nietzsche is ‘in fact, closer to Darwin in his thinking on evolution and adaptation than to the explicit Lamarckian position frequently attributed to him’ (Ansell Pearson 1997a:87). In Germinal Life (Ansell Pearson 1999), he makes Deleuze’e engagement with biological thinkers the focus of an account of Deleuze’s own ‘philosophy of germinal life’.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche writes ‘where I found a living creature, there I found will-to-power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master’ (Nietzsche 1969a: part 2, ‘Of self-overcoming’).
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See, for example, Daybreak, bk 4, para. 262: ‘Not necessity, not desire—no, the love of power is the demon of men.’
See, for example, Schacht 1983; Schutte 1984; Warren 1988; Ansell Pearson 1994; Owen 1995.
The concept of the feeling of power is vital to understanding the application of Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power to human culture and society. The reading of Nietzsche as a champion of violence and hierarchy is only possible because of the failure to notice this concept. While in the past there have been societies in which exploitation and cruelty towards others were glorified, this does not imply that this is an inescapable feature of human social relations. The history of human culture is in part a history of the development of new means for attaining the feeling of power. There are many evaluative comments throughout Nietzsche’s writings which suggest a hierarchy among the possible means of acting upon others. These imply that the feeling of power obtained from contributing to the feeling of power of others is preferable to all other means of obtaining this feeling. For examples and further comment, see Patton 1993.
At least, it might be considered to enhance the powers of all so long as it is considered as an association entered into by equals, without regard to the bodies of women and others whose incorporation is simply a consequence of their prior subordination. But even if we imagine a body politic founded upon the effective equality of all its adult members, there are further distinctions to be drawn before we can judge the effect of this composite body on the powers of individual members: what is the quality of the power which predominates in its formation? Does this involve a primarily negative form of capture or is it an affirmative combination and transformation of the powers of its citizens? These kinds of evaluative questions raised by Deleuze’s theory of power will be considered in the next section of this chapter.
See also Deleuze and Guattari 1987:238, 293.
Similarly, but contrary to widespread opinion, Nietzsche’s concept of power does not imply that the exercise of power is inherently conflictual. Discussions of Nietzsche, as well as discussions of those influenced by him such as Deleuze and Foucault, tend to overlook this point of fundamental importance with regard to the potential utility of Nietzsche’s concept of power within political theory. See, for example, Read 1989; Bogue 1989:33.
For criticisms of Foucault’s failure to address normative issues, see Fraser 1989:17–34; Habermas 1987:282ff. For responses to these criticisms and discussions of the manner in which Foucault addresses normative issues in his later work, see the essays collected in Moss 1998 and Ashenden and Owen 1999.
In this respect, Deleuze suggests that Nietzsche is close to Callicles in the argument with Socrates over nature versus convention in Gorgias (Deleuze 1983:58).
‘From this spirit and in concert with the power and very often the deepest conviction and honesty of devotion, it has chiselled out perhaps the most refined figures in human society that have ever yet existed: the figures of the higher and highest Catholic priesthood’ (Nietzsche 1982: bk 1, para. 60).
