Badiou 2000

Which Deleuze?

Renewed Concept of the One

"Deleuze's fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One. What must the One be, for the multiple to be integrally conceivable therein as the production of simulacra?" (11)

The "Purified Automaton"

concept of desire and "desiring-machines" "precludes any idea of ourselves as being, at any time, the source of what we think or do. Everything always stems from afar -- indeed, everything is always 'already-there', in the infinite and inhuman resource of the One" (11-12)

choice:

• Kierkegaardian choice; not this or that, but to choose or not to choose
• choice becomes "pure" by being "automatic" : "inreality, we are ourselves chosen, far from being, as the philosophy of representation would ahve it, the center, or seat, of a decision" (12)

"This figure of the automaton, which links up easily with that of the 'machinery' that produces sense, represents the veritable subjective ideal, precisely because it demolishes all subjective pretensions. The outside, as agency of active force, takes hold of a body, selects an individual, and submits it to the choice of choosing" (12)

therefore Deleuze's though is not egalitarian or communitarian but profoundly aristocratic; "thought only exists in a hierarchized space" (12); "the condition of thought, for Deleuze, is ascetic" (13), with the result that his philosophy of life is essentially a philosophy of death (13) -- dying as the immanent moment of life, related most personally and most impersonal/exterior to the individual -- which is also thought, "for thinking consists precisely in ascetically attaining that point where the individual is transfixed by the impersonal exteriority that is equally his or her authentic being" (13)

i.e., there's an identity between thinking and dying

"Monotonous" Productions

Deleuze wants to follow the Nietzschean program of "over-turning Platonism," but:

"Immanence requires that you place yourself where thought has already started, as close as possible to a singular case and to the movement of thought. Thinking happens 'behind your back' and you are impelled and constrained by it." (14)

e.g., use of free indirect discourse

from wide variety of thinkers, "Deleuze arrives at conceptual productions that I would unhesitatingly qualify as monotonous, composing a very particular regime of emphasis or almost infinite repetition of a limited repertoire of concepts, as well as a virtuosic variation of names, under which what is thought remains essentially identical" (15)

cinema texts an example of this -- hard to use for film critics, because the film's only function in favor of Deleuze's already-produced philosophy (15-16)

• cinema used to generate concepts, but "what is generated bears no resemblance to the generating power" of cinema, only to preconceived concepts

thus, a new understanding of the principles of Deleuze's philosophy:

1. "This philosophy is organized around a metaphysics of the One.
2. "It proposes an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and asceticism."
3. "It is systematic and abstract." (17)