Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (review)

At the start of his insightful but perplexing and ultimately disappointing study of Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project, Ian Buchanan takes special note of Deleuze's statement, inspired by Melville, that every writer composes two books, one in ink, the other "written in the soul, with silence and blood" (3). This insight inspires Buchanan to find ways to read this "other book" within Deleuze's project by arguing that "some new hermeneutic relation must be established—Deleuzism" (3). To do so, Buchanan's approach also creates two distinct, yet overlapping books within one volume: on the one hand, successive commentaries on Deleuze's works (with and without Félix Guattari) as well as on various cultural and critical texts, and on the other hand, a recurrent metacommentary on Buchanan's own critical project and its implications for elucidating the Deleuze-Guattarian corpus. That the goals and claims of the second "book" fail to do justice to the strength and occasional brilliance of the former may cause frustration and, indeed, confusion for any reader seeking a clearer understanding of the projects that Buchanan proposes to elucidate, his own as well as Deleuze's.

Divided into two sections, aptly entitled "Deleuzism" (three chapters) and "Applied Deleuzism" (four chapters), the volume commences with an introduction in which Buchanan sets the terms for the metacommentary woven throughout the volume. Chapter 1 addresses the "adequacy of desire" in Deleuze's project, and one strength here is Buchanan's extensive and lucid explanation of desire's deployment in Anti-Oedipus in relation to the three syntheses. As announced in the introduction, Buchanan feels compelled to cast Deleuze as a reconstructed (by Buchanan) dialectician despite himself (e.g., 15-16) and to depict the Deleuze-Guattarian syntheses of desire as "retoolings of a classic Marxist terminology," that is, the rewriting of false consciousness, naturalization, and ideology as effects (30). Chapter 1 ends with Buchanan proposing to unfold Deleuze's "two-handed philosophy"— the creation of concepts as solutions for problems—through a "physics [which] is needed to explain cosmic synthesis" but also "a metaphysics [which] is needed to present it" (34).

In chapter 2, Buchanan argues that he must "entertain the possibility, more or less savagely repressed by Deleuze and his disciples, of a dialectical reading, a reading which breaks free of his rhetoric by apprehending it as rhetoric" (41). In this way, Buchanan claims to do what no one has done previously, to look beyond the mere "distraction" of Deleuze's "great hermeneutic revolution of asking how texts work and not what they mean" in order to ask instead "what does Deleuze's philosophy do?" (41). Deleuzism then "is an attempt to engage with [Deleuze's] work as he himself engaged with the work of others, and, it is hoped, as much a demonstration as it is an application" (43). Besides pressing forward his argument for the necessity of a dialectical reading of Deleuze's and Deleuze and Guattari's works (cf. 46-47), Buchanan also insists that we understand Deleuze's philosophical project as adhering to an only slightly modified form of structuralism (48-53), from the "abyss" of which Deleuze is saved, Buchanan maintains, thanks to his "intensely modernist treatment of style" (52). Within this confusing proliferation of critical stances, Buchanan still manages to do an excellent job of explaining the conceptual deployment in What Is Philosophy? (61-68). Yet at the end, he concludes that Deleuze's inherently dialectical thrust emerges therein as the "point of contemplation" that Deleuze's philosophy reaches "[w]hen one view of the world, previously thought pure, gives way to another, and in doing so admits to itself that purity was only ever a fantasy," i.e. the contemplative that Buchanan equates with the dialectical (68).

Consideration of Deleuze's "method" in chapter 2 leads Buchanan to consider Deleuze's "transcendental empiricist ethics" in chapter 3, and specifically how Deleuze's philosophical project works, i.e. "what he meant by his constant...