ABSTRACT
This essay addresses the notion of the personnage conceptuel that appears in Deleuze’s later philosophical reflections with Guattari concerning the special nature of “philosophical enunciation”. While in some respects, “conceptual personae” originate and function very much like clichés in language, they circulate and are reproduced through the powers of repetition and abstraction. Consequently, as with clichés, in order to achieve a maximal degree of repetition and consensus, by means of the conceptual personae entire philosophies are pared down, and a few simple features or sentences are extracted from the work in order to convey an abstract image of thought. What interests me most, however, is the nature of those philosophers and their conceptual personae that produced such an extreme range of positive and negative evaluations concerning the fundamental expression of their philosophies, and so the changing nature of the conceptual personages can be made dramatically evident in these special cases (e.g., Plato and Platonism, Descartes and Cartesianism, Spinoza and Spinozism, Kant and Kantianism, Hegel and Hegelianism, and here we might also add several contemporary personages associated with the philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, etc.); that is, each proper name must be accompanied by multiple conceptual personae that begin with the prefix “anti-”.
