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  • In the Event of Deleuze
  • Ronald Bogue (bio)
Gilles Deleuze
Frida Beckman
Reaktion Books
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
160 Pages; Print, $19.00

Biographies of philosophers are always tricky, given the uncertain relationship between philosophers' lives and their thought, but the problems are compounded when the philosopher lives a relatively uneventful life. Such is the case of Gilles Deleuze, who seldom traveled, founded no school, sought no followers, and promulgated no particular method. François Dosse, in his 2007 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, side-stepped the broad life/thought issue by simply shuttling between anecdotal narratives of the life and lengthy summaries of individual books. He addressed the difficulty of animating Deleuze's uneventful life by conducting multiple interviews with students, friends, and colleagues, which yielded a great deal of intriguing, if not always reliable, information. But he also enlivened his study considerably by including Guattari in his story—indeed, a great deal of the energy of Dosse's book comes from his accounts of Guattari's frenetic and incessant activism in psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutions, research collectives and political movements. In her contribution to Reaktion Books's Critical Lives Series, Frida Beckman, by contrast, focuses on Deleuze alone, and she makes the life-thought issue the center of her analysis. Hers is a "critical biography," she says, "not the kind of biography based on interviews with friends and family intended to unbury all the details of a writer's life, but rather a critical effort that endeavours to illuminate some fruitful dialogues between Deleuze's life and work." The results of this effort are truly remarkable.

In his literary studies, Deleuze repeatedly states that there can be no separation between writers' lives and their works, but he also insists that great writers never create their works directly from their personal memories and experiences. Rather, they discover and give voice to impersonal affects and percepts immanent within their experience. Something similar holds true for philosophers, who seek to extract impersonal events from their personal lives and create concepts that are responsive to those events. The mode of individuation of an event is that of the anexact, neither a concrete individual (this circle) nor a universal idea (the circle), but a process of becoming (a circle: a becoming-circle or circling). With the anexact in mind, Beckman organizes her biography around five events: A Child (Deleuze's early life); An Apprenticeship (Deleuze's philosophical portraits of Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza leading up to Difference and Repetition [1968] and The Logic of Sense [1969]); A Friendship (Deleuze's collaborative writings with Claire Parnet and Guattari and his book on Foucault); A Practice (Deleuze's works in the 1980s on Francis Bacon and cinema); and A Life (Deleuze's illness and his late essays "The Exhausted" and "Immanence: A Life"). Though these chapters demarcate a chronological sequence, Beckman remains true to the floating, non-chronological time of the event, tracing within each section transverse relations among various texts and occurrences across Deleuze's life. Her controlling concept in tracing these relations is the assemblage, which is an ad hoc collection of "forces, bodies, objects and territories . . . fueled by desire and with a particular function." Her proposal, thus, is that "if we approach Deleuze's biography in order to delineate how components of his life and work emerge and are part of larger assemblages with collective functions, then we may be able to provide an account of his life that is also, at least to some extent, illustrative of his philosophy."

The child of right-wing parents, Deleuze grew up in the shadow of his older brother, who was enshrined by his parents when he died at the hands of the Nazis, leaving Deleuze in the position of the always not quite good enough son. No doubt this background contributed to Deleuze's lifelong antipathy to bourgeois pieties, but what Beckman emphasizes are the events that allowed Deleuze to escape that background, not those that might have constrained him. Crucial were his friendship with a young literature professor, his introduction to philosophy at the Lycée Carnot, and his interaction with such luminaries as Pierre Klossowski, Jean Paulhan...

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