Andrew,

I've not been following this thread, busy elsewhere but I did read your
last post and wondered if you knew about a fascinating letter Deleuze wrote
in which he mentions his aims for _Difference et Repetition_.

Below are two excerpted paragraphs from it, originally titled "Cher Michel,
je na'i rien a avouer", published as "Lettre a Michel Cressole". In English
it apparently goes by: "I Have Nothing to Admit".

regards,
Kenneth

"At the inexistent center of a formless place"
==============

Deleuze excerpt: I Have Nothing to Admit

Let me come back to your first criticism; you state and reiterate: blocked
and cornered you are, *admit it*. Attorney-general, I admit nothing. Since
our topic is a book about me - and you are the only one to blame for this -
I would like to explain how I view what I have written. I belong to a
generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less assassinated
with the history of philosophy. History of philosophy has an obvious,
repressive function in philosophy; it is philosophy's very own Oedipus.
"All the same you won't dare to speak your own name as long as you have not
read this and that, and that on this, and this on that." In my generation,
many did not pull through; some did by inventing their own procedures and
new rules, a new tone. For a long time I myself have worked through the
history of philosophy, read such and such a book on such and such an
author. But I managed to compensate for this in several ways: first by
loving authors who were opposed to the rationalist tradition of that
history. I find among Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche a secret link
that resides in the critique of negation, the cultivation of joy, the
hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, the
denunciation of power, etc.) What I detested more than anything else was
Hegelianism and the Dialectic. My book on Kant is something else. I like
it, I wrote it as a book on an enemy; in it I try to show how Kant
operates, what makes up his mechanisms - High Court of Reason, measured use
of faculties, submissiveness all the more hypocritical as the title of
legislators is bestowed upon us. But what really helped me to come off at
that time was, I believe, to view the history of philosophy as a screwing
process or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I
would imagine myself approaching an author from behind, and making him a
child, who would indeed be his and would, nevertheless, be monstrous. That
the child would be his was very important because the author had to say, in
effect, everything I made him say. But that the child be monstrous was also
a requisite because it was necessary to go through all kinds of
decenterings, slidings, splittings, secret discharges which have given me
much pleasure. I consider my book on Bergson to be typical in that respect.
And today there are people who laugh and reproach me for having written
even on Bergson. Perhaps because they knew nothing about history. They
don't know how much hatred focused on Bergson at the beginning, within the
French university, and how he attracted all sorts of madmen and marginals,
fashionable or not. And whether this went on in spite of him or not is of
little importance.

 Nietzsche whom I read late was the one who pulled me out of all this. For
it is impossible to submit him to such a treatment. He's the one who screws
you behind your back. He gives you a perverse taste that neither Marx nor
Freud have ever given you: the desire for everyone to say simple things in
his own name, to speak through affects, intensities, experiences,
experiments. To say something in one's own name is very strange, for it is
not at all when we consider ourselves as selves, persons, or subjects that
we speak in our own name. On the contrary, an individual acquires a true
proper name as the result of the most severe operations of
depersonalization, when he opens himself to multiplicities that pervade him
and to intensities which run right through his whole being. The name as the
immediate apprehension of such an intensive multiplicity is the opposite of
the depersonalization brought about by the history of philosophy, a
depersonalization of love and not of submission. The depth of what we don't
know, the deepness of our own underdevelopment is where we talk from. We've
become a bundle of loosened singularities, names, first names, nails,
things, animals, minute events: the opposite of hit stars. So I began to
work on two books in this immediate direction: _Difference et Repetition_
and _Logique de sens_. I don't have any illusions: they are still full of
an academic apparatus - they are laborious - but there is something I try
to shake, to stir up within myself. I try to deal with writing as with a
flux, not a code. And there are pages I like in _Difference et Repetition_,
those on fatigue and contemplation, for example, because they reflect live
experience despite appearances. That didn't go very far, but it was a
beginning. ---

For anyone interested, the entire piece is available to read or download at:

http://bush.cs.tamu.edu/~erich/misc/nothing_to_admit






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