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7. Deleuze and Nomadology
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7 DELEUZE AND NOMADOLOGY ■ The masters according to Nietzsche are the untimely. . . . Nietzsche says that under the huge earth-shattering events are tiny silent events. —Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands A shadow is skulking through the borderlands of religious thought. It is Deleuze’s “nomad.” The nomad is more than a sign of impermanence , or what Deleuze understands as the permanently “deterritorialized .” The nomad signifies the errant and global movement of thought that at last bursts the bonds of Judeo-Hellenism, mathematical formalism, or even the rhetoric of poststructuralism. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s “Treatise on Nomadology,” the fundamental challenge of philosophy is not overcoming metaphysics, subverting ontotheology, or deconstructing the language of presence. It is to find “a way to extricate thought from the State model.”1 The project of emancipating thinking from the “state model” is an unmistakable allusion to the problem of Hegel that lowers over all poststructuralism and Continental philosophy in the twentieth century and beyond. For Heidegger and Derrida, the problem of Hegel is the finality of presence, the inability of philosophy to think the negative, not simply in a dialectical sense, but as a trace that either veils or irremediably vanishes. In his groundbreaking book on Nietzsche, which on publication in the early 1960s tilted French philosophy in the direction we now call “postmodernism,” Deleuze sets himself “against the dialectic” and “against Hegelianism.” Virtually all postmodernist watercourses S O U R C E S 142 emanate from Nietzsche in some manner of speaking. In a larger sense they all derive from different strategic critiques of Hegelian idealism . One line of critique runs from Nietzsche through Heidegger and Derrida, and it is this trajectory that generally bears the stamp of the postmodern “image of thought,” as Deleuze puts it. But Deleuze’s own image of thought has a quite different genealogy. Deleuze bypasses Heidegger (as well as Derrida, who was for a while his colleague and contemporary), inasmuch as he takes for granted the “overcoming” of metaphysics and ontotheology, and elaborates in manifold symphonic registers the Nietzschean semiotics of the singular site and the singular event as opposed to the universal principle or concept. All phenomenology is ultimately “semeiology.” Deleuze lays out this project at the opening of Nietzsche and Philosophy: “A phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and semeiology. The sciences are a symptamatological and semieological system.”2 The Singularity of the Sign Deleuze’s “new image of thought” is to think “culture” where Hegel thinks the Idea and Heidegger thinks the riddle of ontology. Whereas the philosopher of the concept is a philosopher of the state, the philosopher of culture, like Nietzsche himself, thinks the world’s “disguises .” In other words, such a philosopher thinks only in terms of signs. Why does the thinker need culture? It is because “thought never thinks alone and by itself; moreover, it is never simply disturbed by forces which remain external to it. Thinking depends on forces which take hold of thought.”3 A symptomatology, or semiotics, does not disclose but “interprets” phenomena, “treating them as symptoms whose sense must be sought in the forces that produce them.”4 It is this “quality” of generative forces, or their differential relations, that Nietzsche had in mind, according to Deleuze, when he minted the perplexing phrase “will to power,” which has nothing to with either volition or domination, but serves as a trope for the creative production of meaning, for the pure affirmation of the singular. “Willing is not an act like any other. Willing is the critical and genetic instance of all our actions, feelings and thoughts.” The “method” of the semiotic is that of “relating a concept to the will to power in order to make it a symptom of the will without which it could not even be thought.”5 In other words, semiotics “values” the exception, or what is excluded from the realization of the concept, [34.229.223.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:39 GMT) D E L E U Z E A N D N O M A D O L O G Y 143 or the general predicate, in the negative logic of the dialectic. This exception is neither “rational” nor “irrational,” a terminology that is prejudiced by the hegemony in Western thought of subject-predicate rationalization through the proper syntactical operations of discursive logos. Socrates, who...