Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (review)

This book offers a committed challenge to some of the constraining forces commonly brought to bear on Deleuzian plurivocity and creativity. One such restrictive perception is that of Deleuze as a ‘one-off ’, a radical but maverick figure who — partnership with Guattari excepted — resists affiliation with other contemporary thinkers. Another is that the ‘Deleuzian concept’ is one that can be consistently attributed to Deleuze throughout his career. A third would be that Deleuze’s future-bound explorations —what this study terms his ‘utopianism’ — take place in a realm separate from the givens of historico-political processes. Paul Patton, an insightful Deleuzian commentator of long standing, builds on some of his earlier research strands for this project, which uses a suitably transversal itinerary. In a three-part analysis he first tackles the domain of referentiality, showing how Deleuze and Guattari, notably in Mille plateaux, present their concepts not as finite propositions but as mobile vehicles for thought, travelling from one plateau to another. Embracing what has to date tended to be a more francophone than Anglo-American diagnosis, he ushers Deleuze towards Derrida (in terms of the openness of their conceptual strategies) before introducing the figure of Rorty (in relation to the latter’s pragmatism). In his second part Patton considers the crucial status of the event, which repeatedly (though, one might say, inconclusively) preoccupied Deleuze. On what bases may we relate the ‘pure’ event to the ‘happened’ or historical event? Patton chooses the historical reality of colonization as a test tube for viewing the effervescent colonizer–colonized encounter, showing how the Deleuzian thinking of event has something to contribute to mechanisms of decolonization, and illustrating this by a telling analysis of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. In the third section Patton moves to counter the notion that Deleuze’s political philosophy, especially in his later work, speaks from the sphere of idiosyncratic empiricism rather than from that of public reason or ethical norms. Deleuze and Guattari’s micropolitical focus was couched in language capable of framing future macropolitical norms, he argues, and their suspicion of prevailing liberal democracies was context specific rather than hovering around democracy itself. Further, the normative turn increasingly apparent in Deleuze’s late writing allows for a surprising and yet productive comparison with Rawls’s concepts of a just society that is not immutable but is available for new ways of becoming-democratic. Patton’s analysis can at times seem a little ungainly in its tentacular reaches. Anticipating this reaction, he humorously justifies it by reference to a Deleuze who could effect the feat of rendering a ‘transcendentalized Hume, a Bergsonian Nietzsche, and a self-deconstructing Kant’ (p. 3). Moreover, what draws all Patton’s argumentative moss together is, paradoxically, the rolling stone of Deleuze’s successive transformations. As Patton sees it, ‘mobile concepts are a way of taking into account the permanent possibility of changes to what is politically possible’ (p. 209). This theme, pursued across a multiplicity of arenas, is what in the final analysis makes this book both convincing and exhilarating.