Deleuze and History (review)

'On pense trop en termes d'histoire, personnelle ou universelle. Les devenirs, c'est de la géographie' (Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, with Claire Parnet (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 8). Deleuze's frequently quoted antipathy towards history, allied to the significance of his philosophy of non-linear temporality, suggests that the present volume was always going to hold a decisive place in Edinburgh's ambitious attempt to capture what now looks increasingly like Foucault's siècle deleuzien. The antipathy stems in part from the philosopher's schooling in a French system where the insistence on knowing one's history of philosophy makes tradition a paralysing and repressive 'agent de pouvoir' (Dialogues, p. 19). Deleuze's posited solution of philosophical enculage describes less an abandonment of history than a re-exploration of its hidden surfaces, a Proustian return to the moments once passed over in silence but whose eruption opens the present on to the future. More could be done to redress the sense that history does not already throw up instances of experience that sit ill with the restrictive representational schema of the world that we impose. Indeed, as is implied by the focus of essays on history in Hume, Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Benjamin, it is usually philosophers, rather than historians, who are responsible for the models of historical time on which Deleuze draws, or with which he takes issue. The volume opens and closes with typically superlative essays by Claire Colebrook and Manuel DeLanda, the former situating Deleuze in relation to the dialectical conceptions of metaphysicalized History he rejected, before discussing the theory of death he is often accused of eliding. DeLanda returns, via the historian Fernand Braudel and some of the themes discussed in his own A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (New York: Zone, 2000), to reproach Deleuze and Guattari for being insufficiently materialist, or Deleuzo-Guattarian, in their generalized claims about the historical evolution of capitalism. A similarly ambitious, albeit more Deleuzian, reading of prehistory is offered by John Protevi. Other pieces deal with the psychoanalytic and philosophical influences on Deleuze's rejection of a linear thinking of time. With the exceptions of Ian Buchanan on L'Anti-Œdipe and May '68, and, elsewhere, discussions of cinema and nineteenth-century concepts of historiography and masculinity, there is a bit of an absence of history. The emphasis is more on temporality and a (useful) nuancing of the crude distinction between linear factual history and the inappropriability of the transhistorical event. The collection is therefore less for historians looking to broach theory than for philosophers seeking to ground some of Deleuze and Guattari's more abstract claims in relation to their various borrowings from history, notably in Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980) and Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991). It thus runs the risk of reinforcing the idealizing tendencies DeLanda laments. The diversity of topics broached means that the Deleuzians for whom this feels written will find much to enjoy, though, including the challenge of occasionally impenetrable, Deleuzesque language ('recondite proem' being an instance that particularly sticks in the mind).