The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze

In the small but growing circle of Deleuze scholars on this side of the Atlantic, there has been a notable shift in recent years regarding the aspects of Deleuze’s thought that receive emphasis. Early on, with the publication and subsequent translation of (and the stir in France about) Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze was treated here as primarily a political philosopher in the Nietzschean mold. Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with Felix Guattari, was (justly) taken to be political theory that was influenced by the events of May ‘68 in France, and was also (not quite so justly) taken to be emblematic of the entirety of Deleuze’s thought.

In recent years, however, there has been a shift from the study of his political views toward his ontological ones, and with that shift has come a corresponding shift in attention from the later works, many of them co-authored with Guattari, toward the earlier ones. Deleuze’s central work Difference and Repetition, long neglected here, appeared in translation by Paul Patton (one of the authors under review here) in 1994, and, alongside other earlier works, allows English speakers a full range of study of all of Deleuze’s major early works. Combined with the focus placed on Deleuze’s ontology by Constantin Boundas, his most significant promoter in North America, scholars of Deleuze’s thought are now as likely to read the collaborative works with Felix Guattari through the eyes of Deleuze’s earlier studies as the other way around.

It is less surprising, then, than it once would have been that of the three books under review here — all of them major contributions to Deleuze studies — two of them focus largely on Deleuze’s ontology. Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (originally published in French in 1997) and John Rajchman’s The Deleuze Connections both approach his thought by means of his ontology. Paul Patton’s Deleuze and the Political, by contrast, concerns itself mostly with Deleuze’s later work. However, that book also has significant chapters on Deleuze’s ontology.

When I use the term “ontology” in reference to Deleuze’s work, I want to be a bit cautious. Whether or not Deleuze “has” an ontology, or has an epistemic commitment to any of his ontological posits, is a source of debate among Deleuze scholars. John Rajchman, for instance, comments that Deleuze’s thought “puts experimentation before ontology, ‘And’ before ‘Is.’” (p. 6) In invoking the term, then, I mean only to refer to the ontological concepts that find their way into Deleuze’s work, and not necessarily to any overarching ontological structure that may or may not lie there.

Badiou’s text is perhaps the most well known and most controversial of the three. Badiou, a formidable ontologist in his own right, argues that Deleuze’s project, in contrast to most of the interpretations given to it, is to articulate a thinking rooted in not multiplicity but rather in univocity. “Deleuze’s fundamental problem,” he writes, “is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One.” (p. 11) In arguing for this claim, Badiou places himself squarely in context of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. I would like to spend a moment rehearsing Badiou’s interpretation and criticism of Deleuze before turning to the alternatives provided by Rajchman and Patton.

According to Badiou, there are three central principles governing Deleuze’s thought:

1. 1. This philosophy is organized around a metaphysics of the One

2. 2. It proposes an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and asceticism.

3. 3. It is systematic and abstract.”

(p. 17)

Of these three, it is the first one that founds the other two and thus receives the bulk of his attention.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze traces a historical lineage that begins with Duns Scotus and runs through Spinoza to Nietzsche that takes Being to be univocal...