Sleights of Reason: Norm, Bisexuality, Development by Mary Beth Mader (review)

Mary Beth Mader’s Sleights of Reason is an original and important perspective on the significance of Deleuze’s work for feminist theory, utilizing aspects of his thought hitherto unexploited for those purposes. The book contains a lucid interpretation of Deleuze, a generally well-argued and accurate analysis of the three titular concepts, and a fascinating—though not fully elaborated—set of positive suggestions about how to rethink sexuality.

The central project of Sleights of Reason is to apply Deleuze’s ontology of concepts to the specific case of “sex” so as to clarify how the operations of notions of maleness and femaleness oppress woman. In doing so, the book works at the intersection of two strands of discussion in continental feminism: investigations into the notion of “sex” and sexual difference, and inquiries about the value of Deleuze’s work for feminist projects. To that end, the book consists of what one can think of as (1) a hermeneutical portion, which constructs an interpretation of Deleuze’s theory of the concept (Chapter 1), (2) an analytical and applicative middle portion, which maps the operation of three of the concepts “that make up part of the conceptual support for the concept ‘sex’” (vii) in light of that interpretation (Chapters 2, 3, and 4), and (3) a constructive final portion, which sketches Mader’s own account of sexuality (Chapter 5).

Given Deleuze’s importance to the project, the longest section of the first chapter is devoted to interpreting Deleuze. This section provides a clear, able, and rigorous elucidation of a difficult and important part of Deleuze’s thinking. According to Mader, Deleuze’s account of “the characteristic features of the concept” (9) mean that a concept and the components that constitute it can refer only to those very components themselves, and not to anything outside of the concept. A concept may certainly seem to be about the world, but this is a pernicious artifact of its devolution into the appearance of external referentiality. Such an account of the concept explains how concepts can trick one into taking them for granted in untoward ways—their self-referentiality appears to be an external referentiality and their transparency and connection to the real becomes taken for granted.

As Mader writes, “It is one thing to attempt to identify conceptual sleights and to trace the moves that compose them. But it is quite another thing to try to offer a philosophy of what permits such sleights or, rather, to seek to describe in ontological terms what we mean when we say that sleights, ruses, or equivocations take place. How do they take place? How can we conceive of the conceptual sleights we will seek to identify? . . . The proposal sketched here is that the philosophy of the concept, or the concept of the concept, that we find in the work of Gilles Deleuze can help to answer these questions” (6). In other words, Deleuze provides a theory of what a concept is and how it works—and fails to work—that offers a resource for studying the functioning of specific concepts. Deleuze is valuable because he describes how “sleights” are possible at the level of what a concept is in its very existence, rather than at the level of how it is taken up in practices, described by particular authors, or constituted by social forces.

The notion of the “sleight” is central to the project. Though this idea is described in various ways throughout the book, the image to which Mader most often returns is that of the “Jacquemart,” a type of clock that appears to chime due to the action of a human figure on its top, while it is really another part of the clock’s mechanism producing the sound (4–6). A conceptual Jacquemart or sleight of reason, analogously, is a situation in which a concept obscures the functioning of its own components. Importantly, “It is the self-reference of the concept that permits the conceptual...