Historicity and Holism: The example of Deleuze

“Historicity and Holism: The Example of Deleuze” charts new directions for work in the humanities, by offering a relatively novel conception of history as a framework for intellectual work (historicity), derived from a relatively novel view of language found in the early Heidegger and some analytic philosophy (holism). To this end, various phases of the project of Gilles Deleuze are examined. First, Deleuze’s setting out of (transcendental) genesis and becoming in the early works is interrogated and shown to be subtended by a dualism that potentially makes such becoming inconceivable (as Felix Guattari in his own way suggested in his essay “Machine and Structure”). Secondly, Deleuze’s approach to discourse, with its privileging of sense, is contrasted to Heidegger’s referential and world-based treatment of speech in Being and Time. On these bases, a new configuration of history, becoming, and truth (historicity) is expounded at the beginning of this paper’s final section, the workings of which are there further disclosed through a treatment of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of stratigraphy in their What Is Philosophy? Stratigraphy begins to model the operation of historicity, though it must be corrected, as stratigraphy, an inherently spatial concept, ultimately retreats from what historicity implies in respect to truth and time.