Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 (review)

Originally published by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, in 2001, edited by David Lapoujade and translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina for Semiotext(e), Two Regimes of Madness constitutes the second major collection of short texts by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, following on Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974). Some of the flaws of the translation have already been pointed out in a review of the earlier edition by John Sellars in Metapsychology, Vol. 10 (40), 2006. This review will not reiterate this aspect but will highlight a selection and overview on some concepts that Deleuze illuminates in these texts, which have been influential in the transdisciplinary reception of his work.

As a collection of short texts and interviews, this book cannot be isolated from the oeuvre of the author; in the time span it covers, it coincides with among other publications Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux, 1980), Deleuze's cinema books (Cinéma 1: L'Image-Movement, 1983; Cinéma 2: L'Image-Temps, 1985), reflected in this edition in various forewords to their international translations, and his work on Michel Foucault. However, even for the non-Deleuzian reader it offers accessible insights into his system of thought, in particular in the interview passages whose conversational style very much marks how Deleuze saw a significant modus to facilitate the communal sharing of ideas. These conversations are characterized by his usual modesty and sharp observational mind, and it is not surprising, given the political implications of his philosophy, that this collection also includes several short statements on contemporary political affairs, such as the Palestinian agency in peace negotiations, pacifism in the international context, the impact of May 1968 on French society, and the Gulf War.

The outstanding concepts that Deleuze illuminated in these texts and conversations include his and Guattari's conception of schizophrenic machines; the organ-machine with its flows and breakdowns; and the organless body as a critique of capitalism in light of the critique in his and Guattari's earlier work Anti-Oedipus on psychoanalysis's institutionalized constraints on the desire to sanction social imperatives. Furthermore, he treated the notion of the dispositif as an assemblage of lines or forces; immanence; the brain as screen; the issue of time in Boulez, Proust, Bergson and the cinema; and the question of the subject. An especially insightful area, reminiscent of Bergson's separation of joy and pleasure, is Deleuze's distinction between desire and pleasure. In this context his use of the concept of "lines of flight" becomes most tangible: he called these "shooting points of deterritorialization in assemblages of desire" (p. 127). In this text, in particular, Deleuze emphasized some core distinctions of his own work from Foucault's, in that he showed his strategy to redefine the concept of desire as assemblages and relational networks, while Foucault refused to use the term due to an inability to detach its meaning from a psychoanalytical understanding of lack. Deleuze's insightful comments on Foucault's contemporary work, for example in "Michel Foucault's Main Concepts," are a recursive theme in this collection, and, in some of the interview conversations, reveal some of the most concise reflections on Deleuze's own philosophical system.

The significance of Deleuze's oeuvre in the wider intellectual community of creative and political thinkers is revealed in "On the New Philosophers," originally distributed in bookstores in France in 1977 by Minuit, where Deleuze's micropolitics become paramount. In this text he critiqued the "wholesale return to the author" (p. 139), the importance of concepts for political activism and his strategy for creative innovation as opposed to pure reactionism expressed through hollow intellectual rhetoric. The collection also contains, among other texts, a roundtable conversation between Barthes, Deleuze, Genette, Doubrovsky, Richard and Ricardou on Proust; an interview on the differences between Anti...