Anti-Vitalism: Kaufman’s Deleuze of Inertia

There is quite a lot one might say, and that has already been said, about Gilles Deleuze. In the wake of the first wave of general guides and overviews, there are now a number of Deleuzes from which to choose. There is the political, revolutionary, and transformational Deleuze who co-authored with Guattari, supplementing the latter’s anti-institutional mode of psychoanalysis with a broader notion of life as desire, which in turn inflected Deleuze’s single-authored works. There is the Bergsonian Deleuze focused on time, the Spinozist Deleuze of immanence, the Humean Deleuze who poses the problem of the imagination in its social and political forms, the Leibnizian Deleuze who affirms the perception of the infinite, and even the Kantian Deleuze concerned with the distinct and divergent faculties of thinking. There is—against all this—an anti-Deleuzian Deleuze: a Deleuze who (according to his better known critics) is so rarefied in his vision of the virtual that he has nothing to say about practical political intervention. Slavoj Žižek has insisted that it is this Deleuze—the Deleuze of the single-authored works, and not the political and revolutionary Deleuze who worked with Guattari—who arrives at a sterile dualism, in which thinking is isolated, subjective, and cut off from the world of action and events. Deleuze, Žižek insists, wants to be an immanent monist with a world of being that just is becoming, but ultimately something like a subject as nothingness returns:

This, then, is what Deleuze seems to get wrong in his reduction of the subject to (just another) substance. Far from belonging to the level of actualization, of distinct entities in the order of constituted reality, the dimension of the “subject” designates the reemergence of the virtual within the order of actuality. “Subject” names the unique space of the explosion of virtuality within constituted reality. According to The Logic of Sense, sense is the immaterial flow of pure becoming, and “subject” designates not the substantial entity whose “predicate” (attribute, property, capacity) is the sense-event but a kind of antisubstance, a negative/inverted substance—the immaterial, singular, purely abstract point that sustains the flow of sense. This is why the subject is not a person. To put it in Deleuzian terms, “person” belongs to the order of actualized reality, designating the wealth of positive features and properties that characterize an individual, whereas the subject is divided precisely in the Deleuzian sense of “dividual” as opposed to individual.

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Now it is this Deleuze—the Deleuze that most Deleuzians claim is not Deleuze at all so much as the consequence of a violent misreading—that Kaufman wants to claim as a Deleuze worth reading. The stakes would at first appear to be very low indeed, mainly to do with ontology and lineage. Kaufman asserts that Deleuze is closer to scholasticism (and especially to Aquinas) than we might think, and that he is not quite the philosopher of free, unbridled, and dynamic becoming that we might believe (and want) him to be. But there might be more to this rereading than a squabble amongst Francophile theorists: the Deleuze criticized by Peter Hallward, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou is a counter-political Deleuze, one whose conception of the virtual—because it is not subjective—does not allow us to think of how the virtual might amount to a decision or a transformation of this world. Indeed, Alain Badiou’s criticism of Deleuze links the problem of ontology to a certain mode of ethics (of which he happens to approve):

1. 1. This philosophy is organized around a metaphysics of the One.

2. 2. It proposes an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and asceticism.

3. 3. It is systematic and abstract. (17)

Dispossession and abstraction, for Badiou, are worthy of affirmation, precisely because contemporary ethical projects of inclusion, conciliation, and recognition ultimately yield a homogeneity that precludes any form of decision (and therefore any revolutionary change). For Badiou, thought is thought of the subject (and it is never quite clear how...