What Is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read this book three times over 10 years, before I really began to appreciate it. In a way, A Thousand Plateau‘s success kind of blinded people to what Deleuze and Guattari were doing. So this next book, feels more like a snap back. It’s not the poetry approach, it’s not the postmodernism. Here’s an analytic account of concepts. What makes a concept? How does it work?
What is Philosophy comes close to approximating the relationship between domains and logic. But there is still a tendency here to wax about relationships rather than to cut to an essential conciseness. Although they hit on many conceptual relationships I agree with their essential categorization of concepts (philosophy, science and art) reads too much like a list. To understand conceptualization as confronting chaos is correct. But the event that undergrids Deleuze’s conception of a mark on chaos, a primary cut to determine logic remains mostly hidden from view, instead of more spoken implicitly as an organizing feature. To understand, we need to get at the agential relationships! We must not mistake organization for productive generation.
For an analytic book, this already short book could be made tighter. Instead of hitting us quickly with the range of application, perhaps it’s better to speak simply and directly about the relationships involved and then approach the extension. In some ways, Badiou’s work on mathematics can actually be of great use here, to help outline the struggle, to give people a different method of approaching an age old question.
So in some ways, their 3 part categorization goes against answering the question “What is Philosophy” since philosophy is included as just another kind of concept. The mode that they are heading towards, but do not reach, I feel, is the deterministic view of logical apparatii, best caricatured by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in which we get the pure code of expression. Needless to say this is just another example of conceptualization, but the formalist approach, which is only one way, can help Deleuze and Guattari approach the concise outline of concept’s agency better than some of their other angles.
In a sense, the three kinds of concepts is more of a crutch for organizing their own exposition than serving to give us an understanding of the range of how concepts themselves can be extended. To that end, the conclusion feels a little strained to me, a bit too repetitious, where they reach a limit as to how to continue explaining what they have failed to outline.
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