Comments on: Critique by Necessity: More Random Reflections on Marx and Deleuze http://roughtheory.org/2007/07/15/critique-by-necessity-more-random-reflections-on-marx-and-deleuze/ Theory In The Rough Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:20:06 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: N Pepperell http://roughtheory.org/2007/07/15/critique-by-necessity-more-random-reflections-on-marx-and-deleuze/#comment-931 Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:07:12 +0000 http://www.roughtheory.org/content/critique-by-necessity-more-random-reflections-on-marx-and-deleuze/#comment-931 Thanks for this – I wanted to read Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense before moving on to material that engages more directly with social theoretic issues – it’s all on the reading list… ;-P I’ve been blogging on the connections with Marx mainly because I wasn’t expecting so much of this, and so explicitly, in this particular work – although there are obviously plenty of passages, not simply on Marx, that point the ontological work explicitly to the potential for practical transformation.

But yes, this post above was left half done (if even that) – it doesn’t discuss the issue of the positions not being criticised. I faded in the midst of writing it… and have been a bit tired to do a follow up around the issue of critical standpoint and how that concept (not how Deleuze would put it, but part of the point of these posts for me is to map across the different vocabularies that I use) is put into play in the work.

Two hellish days of teaching coming up, so it will likely be a bit before I can return to any of this, unfortunately.

]]> By: Sinthome http://roughtheory.org/2007/07/15/critique-by-necessity-more-random-reflections-on-marx-and-deleuze/#comment-930 Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:30:26 +0000 http://www.roughtheory.org/content/critique-by-necessity-more-random-reflections-on-marx-and-deleuze/#comment-930 Difference and Repetition, of course, is not a work of political philosophy but of ontology, though it is certainly ripe with implications for social and political thought. It seems to me that a number of discussions in political theory suffer from not attending enough to ontological questions. In the secondary literature on Deleuze there is a marked tendency to do exactly what you’re describing: abstractly negating other positions on the grounds that they are “representational”. This is a paradoxical move to say the least, in that Deleuze’s position of immanence and his anti-representational stance necessarily commits him to giving some sort of account as to how the world comes to be viewed in these terms. For this reason, it is not enough to simply give an account of the genesis of negation, but Deleuze is also obligated to give a genetic account of the postulates underlying the Image of Thought. A good deal of the work that I do in Difference and Givenness consists in unfolding precisely such a genetic account, and treating the Image of Thought not as a simple error (failed adequation between reality and description of reality), but as a sort of transcendental illusion produced not by reason (Kant), but within immanence itself. A good deal of this critique is developed in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, where Deleuze argues that Kantian critique does not go far enough in that 1) it fails to ground the values upon which it is based, and 2) it doesn’t reach a properly genetic perspective. The next question then becomes that of how it is possible to break through these positions. Deleuze develops this extensively throughout Difference and Repetition in his account of the encounter, that disrupts the smooth functioning of habitus that underlies what he refers to as “good and common sense”, or the spatio-temporal structures that underly the Image of Thought.

The place to look for Deleuze’s political thought vis a vis Marx is Anti-Oedipus, where these ontological principles are unfolded in the social domain, and where “schizoanalysis” is developed as an activist form of theory that is designed not simply to describe the world or explain it, but to locate those sites of change and deterritorialization at odds with the reterritorializing forces of Oedipus (where Oedipus is loosely to be understood as the form of the State and identity).

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