Gilles Deleuze's ABCs

The Folds of Friendship

Charles J. Stivale

Publication Year: 2008

Friendship, in its nature, purpose, and effects, has been an important concern of philosophy since antiquity. It was of particular significance in the life of Gilles Deleuze, one of the most original and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. Taking L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze—an eight-hour video interview that was intended to be aired only after Deleuze's death—as a key source, Charles J. Stivale examines the role of friendship as it appears in Deleuze's work and life. Stivale develops a zigzag methodology practiced by Deleuze himself to explore several concepts as they relate to friendship and to discern how friendship shifts, slips, and creates movement between Deleuze and specific friends. The first section of this study discusses the elements of creativity, pedagogy, and literature that appear implicitly and explicitly in his work. The second section focuses on Deleuze's friendships with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Claire Parnet, and Félix Guattari and reveals his conception of friendship as an ultimately impersonal form of intensity that goes beyond personal relationships. Stivale's analysis offers an intimate view into the thought of one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Preface

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pp. ix-xvii

Friendship as forms of lived and active practice was as fundamental for Gilles Deleuze as was his creation of the concepts that constituted for him the very meaning of philosophy. As I argue explicitly in the introduction, and in the subsequent chapters implicitly, friendship is not, and indeed cannot be, one single type of practice in all instances. Hence, I pursue an exploration of what ...

Abbreviations for Works

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pp. xix-

Introduction: Millennial Deleuze, or Beyond the Tombeau

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pp. 1-16

To address the fold and its relations to practices of friendship in Deleuze’s writing, two considerations are immediate: to explore Deleuze’s diverse perspectives on friendship, and to define the fold as a concept. In some ways, the discussion of these concepts constitutes the subject of this book, and I will return to friendship and its folds for Deleuze throughout the study. I first offer ...

ONE: ABCs and the Fold

1. From Zigzag to Affect, and Back: Creation, Life, and Friendship

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pp. 19-32

The Proustian insistence on the primal importance of creation, on the seeking mind’s confrontation with the unknown, points implicitly to one of Deleuze’s most cherished topics, the spark that gives rise to creativity, thought, and, indeed, all creation. In this chapter, I study different movements of and about creativity as they emerge in Deleuze’s (and Deleuze-Guattari’s) thought, first ...

2. The Folds of Pedagogy and Friendship

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pp. 33-47

Until 1987 Gilles Deleuze maintained an active career as a teacher, holding a weekly seminar in which he developed many of the different topics and concepts that he prepared subsequently for publication.¹ In this chapter, I make use of summaries from L’Abécédaire in order to consider Deleuze’s pedagogical engagement, a political and ethical commitment to the active creation of con-...

3. The Literary, Signs of Style, and Friendship

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pp. 48-65

Not until the end of his career did Gilles Deleuze finally turn fully or, more accurately, return fully to literature, in a slim volume of essays entitled Essays Critical and Clinical. Of course, Deleuze’s writing rarely strayed from literature as he worked through his philosophical concepts, alone or in various collaborations. And as I noted above, one of the most important texts of the ...

TWO: Folds and Friendship

4. The Folds of Friendship: Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault

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pp. 69-83

In a poignant text published in the 7 November 1995 issue of the Parisian newspaper Libération, Jacques Derrida writes that with Gilles Deleuze’s death, “I will have to wander all alone in this long conversation we were supposed to have together” (il me faudra errer tout seul dans ce long entretien que nous devions avoir ensemble).¹ Derrida evokes their friendship as based not merely ...

5. Deleuze/Parnet in Dialogues: The Folds of Post-Identity

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pp. 84-98

In the mid-1970s a slim volume appeared in France, co-authored by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet and entitled Dialogues. Published in the midst of an ongoing collaboration with Guattari, Dialogues was another mark of Deleuze’s continuing work with his juniors, in this case with a former student from his seminar in Vincennes.¹ ...

6. Foucault’s Folds: Deleuze and the Interstices of Friendship

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pp. 99-117

That Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze shared a range of philosophical, social, and critical interests while also maintaining an uncommon friendship is hardly open to dispute. Given their strong intellectual and personal bonds, Deleuze preferred to discuss Foucault’s concepts in depth and breadth rather than anecdotally, notably in the interviews from 1986 (concurrent with the ...

7. Deleuze’s Laugh: Friendship and the Impersonal

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pp. 118-141

While Gilles Deleuze would be loathe to accept the accolade of great author, throughout L’Abécédaire, he laughs a lot—at questions Parnet asks, within his own responses, sometimes at the expense of others, sometimes at his own expense, and most frequently, in the interstices of his insights and comments. From a rich audiovisual corpus, we can point to many key moments of laugh-...

E-ISBN-13: 9780801896767
E-ISBN-10: 0801896762
Print-ISBN-13: 9780801887239
Print-ISBN-10: 0801887232

Page Count: 208
Illustrations: 1 line drawing
Publication Year: 2008

Series Title: Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society
Series Editor Byline: Stephen G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner, Series Editors