Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? (review)

Gregg Lambert’s latest volume, Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, is less a book devoted to Deleuze’s philosophy and more a look at how Deleuze has been read and received in an American intellectual situation dominated by the concerns of identity politics, multiculturalism, feminism, postcolonialism, and Marxism. This book is timely in that it seems, finally, that the Anglophone interest in Deleuze has now reached the saturation point with the amount of scholars studying his work growing almost exponentially. A critical appraisal of this phenomenon would certainly be a more welcome addition to the corpus of secondary literature than yet another introduction or reader’s guide. This book does not set out to provide such an overview of the field of Deleuze studies, but rather presents a series of critiques of the most influential authors—Jameson, Žižek, Hardt and Negri—to have engaged with Deleuze since the 1980s.

The task of mobilizing Deleuze for a contemporary critical practice has proved a surprisingly frustrating task. On the one hand, Deleuze offers his philosophy as a toolbox of concepts to be used for practical ends, while on the other, his avowed interest in cultural phenomena—politics, film, literature, etc.—was in a sense undermined by his almost fanatical (at least for the generation of thinkers of which he was a part) insistence on the practice of pure metaphysics, so that it appears to a skeptical observer that his interest in culture masks a counter-motive. On this skeptical view, culture and politics were important to Deleuze only to the extent that they could be used as means to extend his philosophical project beyond the realm of the academic institution in which, especially during the 1960s, he felt trapped. Given this predicament, Lambert opens with the polemic that Deleuze’s work was never, in fact, intended for the institutional reception that is now taking place with gusto, particularly in English and cultural studies departments. Lambert’s refreshing approach is to argue that the “revolution of desire,” which Deleuze and Guattari famously put forward in their explosive Anti-Oedipus (1972), is antithetical to the current academic engagement with their work. The “revolution of desire” has failed to take place precisely because Deleuze has not, to any sufficient degree, found a way to break out of the academic institution in which he is, once again, decisively trapped.

Lambert’s reading focuses on the means by which Deleuze’s work has been contained, defused, or diverted by various intellectual agendas. Accordingly, the great Thermidorean enemy of the revolution of desire is Fredric Jameson, whose Marxist hermeneutic Lambert opposes, in the most vituperative passages of the book, to the anti-hermeneutic of Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). From Jameson’s perspective, the local and molecular struggles emphasized by the revolution of desire, once translated into the American context, would be tantamount to a collective desire to unify the various counter-cultural strands into a cohesive Left political movement. The role of the Marxist critic would then be to reassemble the fragmented totality through the mediation of literature. For Deleuze and Guattari, any such longing for a reunified social totality would be disastrous. For Lambert, then, the politics of desire have not been completely plugged; rather, their flow has been diverted into a desire to protect the position of the critic and his/her institutional position. This, of course, would be the ultimate perversion of Deleuze and Guattari’s project. One wonders, however, whether Lambert’s reading of Jameson, in particular The Political Unconscious, is fully convincing in this regard. Was not Jameson one of the first perspicacious Anglophone readers of Deleuze and Guattari, and were not the latter among the few so-called poststructuralists whom Jameson did not dismiss as politically regressive? Also, one feels that Lambert, while paying great attention to the American academic context, places too little emphasis on the French political situation, that is, the Stalinism of the French Communist Party and the role this played in...