Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher whose work resists facile classifications such as Postmodern or Poststructural. Indeed, the concept at the core of his methodology -- if we can still use that word -- is difference. According to the odd logic...
[more]Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher whose work resists facile classifications such as Postmodern or Poststructural. Indeed, the concept at the core of his methodology -- if we can still use that word -- is difference. According to the odd logic of difference, a thing -- a text, a chair, a concept -- is a manner or mode of assembling the world. A given chair, for example, is not a derivation of an ideal chair, as Plato suggested. On the contrary, each chair is an event, at once the idea and the example, or what Deleuze calls a "repetition" of chair: each chair is a (re)defining of what a chair is. Thus there is no static model against which an individual is identified; there is instead a multiplicity of self-defining things. (Deleuze's philosophy has certain affinities with phenomenology, chaos theory, and autopoiesis.)
Given the autonomy of things and the flux of difference, Deleuze does not ascribe to preformed categories or histories such as patriarchy, metaphysics, the Oedipal complex, or culture. He reads each text individually, as it itself demands, and as if it were (re)defining the world. The readings that result are affirmative: they elaborate on the internal logic and unique configuration of the world that a given text contains. Reading Leibniz, Deleuze discovers the logic of the Baroque fold, which, like Leibniz's philosophy, is a world of folds within folds; reading Spinoza, he rides a wind of Expressionism. Reading film, he discovers an entire cinematic language, a filmic logic and mode of making meaning happen. In Sacher-Masoch, he discovers a masochism unlike anything Freud discusses. In Proust, he doesn't find meditations on memory, but a linguistic apprenticeship, an elaborate pedagogy. In each case, Deleuze lets the text speak for itself, functioning with a vocabulary made on the go -- rather than with the inherited language we think we know so well.
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