Betraying Well

As with many prominent thinkers, there is a striking imperative that circulates among those who read Deleuze: a drive to fidelity, or more nearly to not betray the master's thought, the trap that so many who write in his wake purportedly fall into. The world of Deleuze criticism is rarely immune from the dialectic of fidelity and betrayal that is arguably so far removed from Deleuze's thought. Of course such a pronouncement is itself a judgment that only repeats this particular logic. It is the merit of Slavoj Žižek's Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences and Alain Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, both written from a certain position of infidelity, to dramatize this controversial force of dualism that underlies if not belies Deleuze's oeuvre.¹

Both Žižek and Badiou are critical of the position of the Deleuzian disciple, each evoking after a fashion the paradox whereby to be truly faithful to the spirit of the Master, one must betray the letter of his teaching. As Žižek puts it, "there are, accordingly, two modes of betraying the past. The true betrayal is an ethico-theoretical act of the highest fidelity: one has to betray the letter of Kant to remain faithful to (and repeat) the 'spirit' of his thought. It is precisely when one remains faithful to the letter of Kant that one really betrays the core of his thought, the creative impulse underlying it" (13). In a similar though even more direct vein, Badiou remarks on the problem of betrayal as also a problem that his work encounters, implicitly equating his status as a master thinker to that of Deleuze. His target is one shared with Žižek, those Deleuzians who champion radical flux and pure positive libido—in short, the body without organs—and who take the works coauthored with Guattari, namely Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, as their central inspiration. Badiou characterizes this as a "crucial misunderstanding " and comments: "that Deleuze never did anything of an explicit nature to dissipate this [misunderstanding] is linked to that weakness rife among
philosophers—in fact, none of us escape it—regarding the equivocal role of disciples. As a general rule, disciples have been won over for the wrong reasons, are faithful to a misinterpretation, overdogmatic in their exposition, and too liberal in debate. They almost always end up by betraying us" (96). Here, Badiou, like Žižek, not only denounces the bad betrayals of the disciples, but gives us the hope that his form of betrayal will be a truer and better one.

The correspondence between Žižek's and Badiou's readings of Deleuze, which at a certain level might seem to have very little in common, is an assertion of a latent dualism, even a hidden dialectical energy, in Deleuze's repeated insistence on a Spinozist notion of the One and Deleuze and Guattari's repeated diatribe against the Hegelian dialectic. Though others, most notably Fredric Jameson, have pointed to this underlying dualism, its proclamation—or more nearly implication in the cases at hand—still carries a distinctly heterodox force.² This reading against the grain is bound up in the very style of the reading: for Badiou, it is the reduction of all of Deleuze's work to one central and repeated concept, namely the assertion of Being as univocal, a problematic from which Badiou hardly strays; for Žižek, and this somewhat in spite of his insistence on engaging with the Deleuze of The Logic of Sense over and above the Deleuze and Guattari of Anti-Oedipus, what counts as Deleuze is much more all over the map, at times hardly resembling Deleuze at all. Indeed, the second half of the book (the part called "Consequences" that discusses cognitive science, film—particularly Hitchcock—and cultural politics ranging from fascism to the Zapatistas to Hardt and Negri's Empire) does not even mention Deleuze by name with great frequency (not that it needs to). This section, if not the whole book, is certainly much more recognizable as peculiarly Žižekian in its broad-ranging series of paradoxical structures whereby the...