Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (review)

The opening words of this study declare an ambition 'to go right to the heart of Deleuze's philosophy'.Two hundred pages later, on arrival at the heart, a mini-dagger is plunged in: '[T]hose of us who still seek to change our world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration elsewhere'. Where that 'elsewhere' might lie hangs in the air, and appropriately so, in a book that presents Deleuze as forever piloting out of the world of the actual. For Hallward, Deleuze's brand of univocal ontology, which pervades his thought, sets up a dynamic and indissociable link between being, creativity and thought. Being becomes creativity by sidestepping the material, the creatural. Pure thought is attained, in other words, by becoming imperceptible. This is not, as Hallward is at pains to point out, synonymous with annihilation; a more sympathetic framework would be that of theophany, to be understood not as transcendence but as a kind of infused creative force or energy. Hallward's itinerary is a meticulous one, leading through the constraints of the creatural – 'human beings have a particular affinity for thoughtlessness' (p. 55) – to subtractive processes such as mystical kenosis or other forms of deterritorialization, and the liberating potentialities of art, literature and pre-eminently (because requiring no medium) philosophy. One curious aspect of this analytical journey is that its culmination comes as something of a downer as well as of a surprise. Somewhere out of this committed and often exhilarating encounter with the feasibly 'redemptive' Deleuze, I anticipated the retrieval of a plastic Deleuzism which remains (at least in part) serviceable and prophetic for the twenty-first century. The withholding of this diagnosis is quite rightly the prerogative of the author. However, it could be argued that working towards that position entails some over-determination of contrasting positions. Hallward aligns Brian Massumi's argument for the worldly bound orientation of Deleuze's thought alongside his dismissal of presentations of Deleuze as 'the prophet of an exuberant bodily or "fleshy materialism"'(p. 176). In the other corner, he characterizes Deleuze's subtractive process as being 'positive and affirmative', in contrast with the 'ascetic and negative' (p. 86) emphasis to be found in Simone Weil, said to be founded upon 'misery, suffering and affliction'.Yet, this is a restrictive reading ofWeil. Across the range of her writings can be found a subtle array of lenses which supply expansive perspectives even in the presence of creaturely travail (see, for example, her correspondence with the poet Joë Bousquet, whose notion of being born to embody his pre-existent wound is discussed by Hallward though without direct reference to Bousquet). Nevertheless, Hallward is adept at situating Deleuze within a broad intellectual landscape, and is particularly good at exploring Bergsonian resonances within Deleuze's thought. This would not be an easy to read book for a newcomer to Deleuze. Is the book-jacket claim to appeal 'as much to readers new to Deleuze's philosophy as to those already familiar' a case of the contents not matching the label on the tin? The risk is undeniably there. However, this book does repay the effort of engaging with it. Written with verve and intensity, it provokes productively, and is to be recommended for that.