This is the first of a series of extracts from my forthcoming book on Deleuze (to be published in the same P&R ‘Great Thinkers’ series as the Derrida and Foucault volumes). It comes from the first section of the Introduction, in which I give four reasons why Christians should pay attention to Deleuze’s thought, and set the stage for an encounter between Deleuze and Reformed/evangelical theology. To see all the excerpts released so far, please click here.
Introduction
One of the ugly and besetting sins of academics is our tendency to complain about our students. They are lazy; they are intellectually incurious; they seek to cut corners and do the least work possible; they will complete no work unless they are awarded a mark for it, and so on. When we peel back the layers of this self-righteousness litany, however, it often amounts to little more than saying “my students are not like me”, or more accurately, “my jaundiced view of my students is not like the sparkling image I have of myself”. This, if we stop to think about it, is probably a very good thing both for ourselves and our students.
Once in a while, however, a colleague will offer a judgment of a student that, far from being high-handedly dismissive, perfectly captures something that you always knew but couldn’t put words to. I vividly remember hearing one such incisive comment, in the course of a telephone conversation in which a colleague was inviting me to examine a doctoral candidate in contemporary French thought. At one point in the conversation she threw in a remark to the effect that “the candidate is good, but she’s a member of the church of Deleuze”. It wasn’t a condemnation, more an observation. For this candidate, it was Gilles Deleuze or bust: her intellectual Bible was Deleuze-only; she was an orthodox Deleuzian and did not suffer heretics gladly.
Deleuze can do that to you. He is one of those French thinkers—Foucault is another, Derrida perhaps a little less so—who continues to gather passionate disciples ready to dedicate the best years of their intellectual lives to becoming more Deleuzian than thou. This is no more meant as a condemnation than was my colleague’s comment on the phone. Deleuze, as we shall see, offers a comprehensive and in many ways a compelling account of reality, humanity and politics that has fascinated and continues to fascinate many. But that is not why I have written this book on him for a Christian publisher. Deleuze is less cited than Foucault and often as difficult to read as Derrida, so why should Christians in particular and curious readers in general bother to expend their precious energy on understanding and engaging with his thought? Let me offer four reasons up front.
My first reason to read Deleuze is not the most exciting of the bunch, but it serves as a foundation for the following three: Deleuze is indispensable if we want to come to terms with the period in mid- to late twentieth century thinking that has—for better or, mostly, for worse—often carried the label “postmodern”.[1] In my own institution as well as in many others there is a steady stream of PhD theses engaging with Deleuze’s thought. The journal Deleuze Studies, published by Edinburgh University Press, now runs to twelve volumes, and the book series ‘Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies’ (also with EUP) boasts over thirty titles. For what it’s worth, at the time of writing Google Books records 1,100,000 references to Deleuze.
If Deleuze rivals Foucault in the volume of academic activity his writing generates these days, he rivals Derrida in its breadth. He has made defining contributions well beyond philosophy to disciplines as diverse as psychoanalysis, feminism, cinema, literature, ecology, queer theory and politics, and this is reflected in the breadth of books on his thought. The list of titles beginning “Deleuze and…” runs to eighty volumes, including Deleuze and Education, Deleuze and Sex, Deleuze and Art, Deleuze and Race, and not forgetting Deleuze and Theology and Deleuze and Religion.
Deleuze’s writing is not of purely academic interest, however, and this brings me to my second reason why Christians would do well to understand and engage with his thought. The extent to which Deleuze has both predicted and helped shape contemporary Western society is rivalled among recent French thinkers only perhaps by Foucault, and it was Foucault himself who famously predicted in 1970 that “perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian” (“Un jour peut-être, le siècle sera Deleuzien”).[2] If Derrida and Foucault help us to understand how our society got where it is today, then perhaps Deleuze best of all can help us to understand where it may be headed tomorrow.
Moving now to the substance of Deleuze’s thought, my third reason to commend him to your readerly attention is that he questions the self-evident with an uncanny and unusual tenacity. He takes some of the most prized shibboleths of our contemporary society, such as the truism that “we are all human deep down” or the value of multiculturalism, and reveals in them surprising and dangerous currents of oppression.[3] We may or may not agree with his analyses, but it certainly fulfils one of the characteristics of all good philosophy: it makes us think again about things we thought we knew, and it invites us to see things differently.
Spread throughout Deleuze’s work, from the 1968/1994 Difference and Repetition to the 1993/1998 Essays Critical and Clinical, are references to the so-called “underground man” in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. What intrigues Deleuze about Dostoyevsky’s nameless anti-hero is his refusal to fall into line with accepted commonplaces. He “cannot keep two and two from making four” but “will not RESIGN himself to it either (he prefers that two and two not make four)” (ECC 81-2, emphasis original). The underground man exemplifies the trait which, according to Deleuze, Dostoyevsky shares with other great novelists, namely that “things remain enigmatic yet nonarbitrary”, yielding “a new logic, definitely a logic, but one that grasps the innermost depths of life and death without leading us back to reason” (ECC 82).
Always to question the self-evident soon becomes tiresome and predictable, but never to do so can quickly reveal itself to be naïve and dangerous. What Deleuze commends in Dostoyevsky’s underground man is finding the right level of questioning, the level that reveals the enigmatic nature of our common-sense assumptions without shrugging them off as completely arbitrary. This idea of finding the “enigmatic yet nonarbitrary” sweet-spot of questioning also serves as a good first introduction to Deleuze’s own approach to problems in philosophy and society. The common caricature of “postmodernism” is that it holds meanings and values to be, precisely, arbitrary. Let it be said very clearly at the outset of this book that Deleuze unambiguously rejects this view. However, the no less common reaction to this idea that meanings and values are arbitrary for “postmodernism” is that meanings and values are matters of “common sense”, a positon which Deleuze rejects just as emphatically. He is neither postmodern nor an enemy of postmodernism here; his thought inhabits an enigmatic region that can be reduced neither to arbitrariness nor to merely regurgitating what “everyone knows”.
Many philosophers have a tendency to begin by assuming that we all already agree on the rules of analysis and logic, and then proceed to squabble over who is applying those rules most consistently or most effectively. Rather than denouncing those who are not acting according to the accepted laws of the game, we shall see below that Deleuze raises the question of whether we are playing by the right rules to begin with.[4] Who cares who scores the most touchdowns if the game we are supposed to be playing is baseball? Whether we end up agreeing with Deleuze or not, one effect of this questioning of commonplace assumptions is that he shows us that we all think and see the world and ourselves in a particular way, and that we could very well see them in a different way. Furthermore, if we accept—as surely we must—that new ways of seeing the world make possible new ways of being and acting in it, then we begin to see some of the transformative potential of Deleuzian thought. Deleuze wants to make us see the world differently, in order that we may act differently in it.
The fourth and final reason I will offer for engaging with Deleuze’s thought is perhaps of special interest to Christian readers: he challenges common Christian and new atheistic attitudes to the consequences of the death of God. Two equally egregious misunderstandings haunt the reception of the death of God. On the one hand, Christians are often far too hasty to say that, without God, all we are left with is the absence of all truth, moral anarchy, and meaninglessness.[5] On the other hand, a view common among the new atheists asserts that when we take God out of the picture pretty much everything else can stay just as it was, including our understanding of existence, truth, meaning and ethics.[6] There is, to be sure, a grain of truth in both these positions. The new atheists are correct that, when we attempt to think without God, we do not necessarily have to abandon notions of truth or ethics altogether. The hasty Christians are correct that, when we attempt to think without God, we cannot persist with the very same notions of truth and ethics that prevailed when God was in the picture. But both positions move too quickly, and go too far, in prosecuting their respective arguments.
What Deleuze gives us, against the background of this simplifying dichotomy, is a very sophisticated account of what happens to truth and ethics in a system of thought that does not rely on God as traditionally understood, a system which will necessarily be radically different to one that does rely on God. Of course it will: to paraphrase Deleuze in the words of a now classic meme, “one does not simply” take God out of the picture. Getting rid of God changes everything, including what we mean by existence, truth and ethics, and Christian critics of non-religious thought would do well to move beyond the mantra of “no God = no truth = no ethics”.
[1] The term “postmodern” appears in Deleuze’s works very infrequently. It occurs in brief references to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, and in a critical reading of Frederic Jameson’s distinction between “modernism” and “postmodernism” (F xxiii-xxv). Deleuze and Guattari were, as Philip Goodchild rightly notes, “scornful of the notion of ‘postmodernity’” in Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard (Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London: Sage, 1996) 2).
[2] Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum”, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 2, trans. R. Hurley et al., vol. 1 (New York: The New Press), 343. For a discussion of the complex and ambiguous meanings of the remark, see Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, xxi-xxii.
[3] This move of revealing society’s sacred cows to be cruel and oppressive resembles Michel Foucault’s unmasking of the supposed humanitarianism of the care of those with mental illness in the nineteenth century, and the “disciplinary power” that characterizes modern penitentiary systems that no longer practice torture or execution. See my Foucault, Great Thinkers (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Press, 2018).
[4] This point is made by Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003) 4.
[5] The logic of this sort of position is that, if there is no moral law such as the Bible offers—transcendent, underwritten by God, absolute and universal—then there can be no morality at all. It is telling that Nietzsche is frequently framed as the poster boy for this moral vacuum, whereas Deleuze takes from Nietzsche an ethics that, while it is very far from the Christian position and not without its own problems, is not an ethical nihilism.
[6] I discuss some of the problems with this position under the banner of “imitative atheism” in Difficult Atheism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
