The Philosophy of Giles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

Question 1

How can Deleuze be described as a philosopher?

Answer 1

• Creater of concepts
• A Philosopher of Difference
• A remorselessly ‘horizontal thinker’

Question 2

In terms of writing about Deleuze what could be sufficed?

Answer 2

• Sufficed to simply write several thousand ‘ands…’
• For in a certain sense, that truly is the play of the world after Deleuze

Question 3

What should be the aim and use of Deleuze?

Answer 3

• Doomed to failure if we aim to finding definte, final and universally applicable truth in Deleuze’s writings
• Rather should aim at finding the infinite complexities, the paradoxes, and behind them, the interesting ways of reasoning, narrating and arguing -> we will be rewarded plentifully

Question 4

How was ontology percieved prior to Deleuze?

Answer 4

• Almost exclusively from Platonic tradition
• Find a way to account for the world through our finite and limited language and representations
• Transcendent form of ontology

(Woodward et al., 2009)

Question 5

What type of ontology do D&G follow?

Answer 5

• ‘Process’ ontology
  
  • Emphasise ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being

Question 6

How is difference concieved for Deleuze?

Answer 6

Does not mean difference in resemblance but a radical alterity where encounters produce something new rather than more of the same

(Woodward et al., 2009)

Question 7

As materialists how is D&G’s ontology viewed?

Answer 7

• Dedicated to immanence rather than transcendence
  
  • Transcendental distinctions are flattened
• Monism rather than follow a dualism

Question 8

What are haecceities?

Answer 8

Blocks of uniqueness

Question 9

What property do haecceities hold?

Answer 9

• Hold the property (if they can said to hold a property at all) that makes individuation unique
• These unfold within and through th eplane of immanence

Woodward et al. (2009)

Question 10

How does Deleuze view subjectivity?

Answer 10

• D&G paint a world of non-personal, pre-personal and trans-personal relations of becoming
• Ongoing creative evolution that refuses to ever really settle down into more familiar patterns of subject and object
• Creativity without a subject who-creates or a subject-creates as an end point

Wylie (2016)

Question 11

What does Parr (2010) note about a philosopher’s concepts?

Answer 11

• Produce connections and a style of thinking
• To transalte a term or to define any point in a philosopher’s corpus involves an understanding of a more general orientation, problem or milieu
• This is in relation to the ‘image of thought’
  • The concepts of philosophy both build and build upon an image of what it is to think

Question 12

How are concepts expressed?

Answer 12

• Concepts are expressed in terms of the contingent circumstances and dynamics of each related event
• Concepts cannot be conceived as a priorito circumstances of their production

Question 13

What does a move from reiterative history of philosophy to the practice of philosophy mean?

Answer 13

• Means engaging with inherited concepts in new ways
• Engaging in new lines of thinking and new connections
• This is when philosophy takes on a positive power to transform thinking

Question 14

How are concepts experimentation rather than representation (Doel, 1999)?

Answer 14

• Bogue (1989) notes that Deleuze uses concepts as the building blocks of an alternative world
• D&G view concepts as the means by which we move beyond what we experience so we can think of new possibilities r
  
  • Relate variables according to new concepts as to create productive connections

Question 15

What do a Deleuzian lexicon of terms evoke?

Answer 15

• Need for permanent revolution through new organisations of throught and energy

Hubbard et al. (2002)

Question 16

How can philosophical vocabulary be concieved as an assemblage?

Answer 16

• An assemblage that faces in two directions (Parr, 2010)
• Gives a sort of order to a life which bears a much greater complexity and dynamism
• Enables creation of further and more elaborate orderings

Question 17

What does a Deleuzian philosophical vocabulary do?

Answer 17

Gives sense to our world, but allows us to produce further difference and further world: a new Earth

Question 18

What does Deleuze note about metaphors?

Answer 18

• In Dialogues II, Deleuze holds that there are no literal words nor metaphors

Question 19

What is the “danger of arbitary metaphors”?

Answer 19

• They are reliant on a transfer of sense from primary to secondary signification
• Hence the need to create extraordinary words on the condition that they put to the most ordinary use and the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002)
• D&G use deterritorialised terms, that is, terms which are torn from their area in order to reterritorialised another notion (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002)

Question 20

What is the ontological starting point for Process Philosophy?

Answer 20

• Ontological starting point that movement proceeds position
• Concerned with exploring what is possible at a particular juncture (Doel, 1999)

Question 21

In the world of Deleuze what dwells?

Answer 21

• The world of Deleuze is not a world of classifiable things but of events (Lecercle, 1985)
• Dwelling on change, becoming and consistency rather than on fixity, being, and constancy (Doel, 1999)
  
  • Hereinafter, nothing left but the play of joints (and…and…and)

Question 22

What is the novelty of Deleuze?

Answer 22

Novelty of Deleuzian not in its refusal of any systematic character but in the nature of system envisioned (Patton, 1996)

Question 23

How does ATP demonstrate the open system of Deleuze’s Process Philosophy?

Answer 23

• Architecture of the book deploys a logic of multiplicities in which same concepts reoccur, but always in different relations to other concepts
• Does not advocate an intellectual anarchism in which the only rule would be the avoidance of any rule, but rather deploys variable, local rules to construct an array of concepts