ABSTRACT
I commence with this angle of approach because, with me, the authors here offer contributions precisely in this spirit, seeking to extend the folds of friendship through which Deleuze lived, wrote, and taught.1 Such glimmers of light and encounters with Deleuze's writing engage readers in an exhilarating, productive, yet disconcerting process of becoming-unhinged that we come to enjoy, indeed to relish, in the energy that reading Deleuze requires. The charm of Deleuze's writing demands of us a kind of thinking otherwise, and thus the contributors here offer to readers, other-wise, a guide to specific works and concepts developed by Deleuze from a range of disciplinary interests and
in LAbécédaire on the fundamental role that "encounters" (rencontres) play in life. He sees these as equally important in experiencing intensities and multiplicities through art and literature, in generating thought and thereby in moving beyond philosophy through philosophy. And in his earlier Dialogues with Parnet (1977), Deleuze asks a fundamental question in this regard:
Between the cries of physical pain and the songs of metaphysical suffering, how is one to trace out one's narrow, Stoical way, which consists in being worthy of what happens, extracting something gay and loving in what occurs, a glimmer of light, an encounter, an event, a speed, a becoming? (D: 66, trans, mod.)5
Deleuze's idiosyncratic definition of his intellectual project in the early years reveals both his modesty and his rapier wit, presented in his 1973 letter to Michel Cressole:
I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy ... Many members of my generation never broke free of this; others did, by inventing their own particular methods and new rules, a new approach. I myself "did" history of philosophy for a long time, read books on this or that author. But I compensated in various ways. (N: 5-6)
His approach was to look at authors whom he judged to challenge the rationalist tradition, notably Hume, Lucretius, Nietzsche and Spinoza, as well as Kant, who Deleuze treated as an "enemy", yet whose work required an effort of discernment and understanding.6 According to his recollections of this project, Deleuze had to adopt particularly rigorous survival strategies:
I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery [enculage] or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind, and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed. (N: 6)
Among the authors that correspond to this image of "doing" history of philosophy, Deleuze cited Nietzsche in his 1962 work and Bergson in his 1966 work. Nietzsche in particular, Deleuze maintained, "extricated me from all this", since Nietzsche "gets up to all sorts of things behind your back", giving Deleuze "a perverse taste ... for saying simple things in [his] own way, in affects, intensities, experiences, experiments" (N: 6). Through Nietzsche, Deleuze opened himself to "the multiplicities everywhere within [individuals], the intensities running through them", that is, a depersonalization "opposite [that] effected by the history of philosophy; it's a depersonalization through love, rather than subjection" (N: 6-7). This opening toward depersonalization and love led Deleuze towards two projects at the end of the 1960s, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, to which one can add his first book on Spinoza. While still heavily laden with many "academic elements", these books were, for Deleuze, "an attempt to jolt, to set in motion something inside me, to treat writing as a flow, not a code" (N: 7). Such a mode of reading, Deleuze argued, is:
[an] intensive way of reading, in contact with what's outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything, ... [this] is reading with love [une maniere amoureuse]. (Ν: 8-9)
Of course, this is not an easy process, for it is one that situates the "person" along, or in relation to, the "line Outside":
something more distant than any external world. But it's also something closer than any inner world ... managing] to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe - in short, think. Bending the line so we manage to live upon it, with it: a matter of life and death. (N: 111)
Deleuze summed up a crucial encounter at this point in his career, at the end of the 1960s, with the phrase "And then there was my meeting with Félix Guattari" (N: 7), later describing him as "a man of the group, of bands or tribes, and yet he is a man alone, a desert populated by all these groups and all his friends, all his becomings" (D: 16). Deleuze discussed the importance for his work of this collaboration and friendship in a number of texts, and all suggest the significant connections
that Guattari was able to provoke in Deleuze's creative process and, of course, vice versa. For example, in an interview with Robert Maggiori following the 1991 publication of What Is Philosophy? and shortly before Guattari's death, Deleuze noted:
What struck me most [about Guattari] was that since his background wasn't in philosophy, he would therefore be much more cautious about philosophical matters, and that he was nearly more philosophical than if he had been formally trained in philosophy, so he incarnated philosophy in its creative state.
