ABSTRACT
In revisioning the rhythms of philosophical work such that they could enact the work of critique without descending into the applicative production of judgments, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze invited a methodological turning of philosophy itself. Foucault’s major gain with the genealogy that orients The Will to Know has everything to do with his long-term investment in the idea that something as important to us as our sexuality can be motivated by something as foggy as an indeterminate problematization. Symptomatology in Deleuze thus functions similarly to genealogy in Foucault: both reveal the complexity of a compositional mesh that would otherwise typically be reduced to a kind of homogenized unity. Symptomatology transforms an over-determined sequence into a differential series which it thereby sets into flight. The object of Deleuze’s symptomatology in Coldness and Cruelty is the mesh of masochism, a clinical concept that Deleuze passes through a literary analysis in order to isolate its specificity or singularity.
