L'Ab=E9c=E9daire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet -- Ib
[Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer, with Claire Parnet]
Directed by Pierre-Andr=E9 Boutang (1996)
Overview prepared by Charles J. Stivale
L=92Ab=E9c=E9daire, Ib- D through F
(D as in Desire, E as in 'Enfance' <Childhood>, F as in Fidelity)
<The following is the first part of a three-part overview of the
eight-hour series of interviews between Gilles Deleuze and Claire
Parnet that were filmed by Pierre-Andr=E9 Boutang in 1988. Destined to
be broadcast only after Deleuze's death, these interviews were shown
with his permission on the Arte channel between November 1994 and
spring 1995, i.e. during the year prior to his death.
Rather than provide a transcription and translation into English, I
try to provide the main points of the questions posed by Parnet and
Deleuze's responses, and all infelicities and omissions are entirely
my responsibility.>
"D as in Desire"
Parnet begins by citing the biographical entry on Deleuze in the
_Larousse_ dictionary (1988), that refers to his work with Guattari on
(among other topics) desire, citing _Anti-Oedipus_ (1972). Since Deleuze is
considered to be, says Parnet, a philosopher of desire, so what is it?
Deleuze starts by saying, almost with regret, "it's not what we
thought it was, even then. It was a big ambiguity and a big
misunderstanding, or rather a little one." However, he then addresses the
question in great, and often moving detail. First, like most people in
writing a book, they thought that they would say something new,
specifically that people who wrote before them didn=92t understand what
desire meant. So as philosophers, Deleuze with Guattari saw their task as
that of proposing a new concept of desire. And concepts, despite what some
people think, refer to things that are extremely simple and concrete.=20
What they meant to express was the simplest thing in the word: until now,
you speak abstractly about desire because you
extract an object supposed to be the object of desire. Deleuze
emphasizes that one never desires something or someone, but rather always
desires an aggregate <ensemble>. So they asked what was the nature of
relations between elements in order for there to be desire, for these
elements to become desirable. Deleuze refers to Proust
when he says that desire for a woman is not so much desire for the
woman as for a _paysage_, an environment, that is enveloped in this
woman. Or in desiring an object, a dress for example, the desire is
not for the object, but for the whole context, the aggregate, "I
desire *in* an aggregate." Deleuze refers back to the second "letter" in
the primer, on drinking, alcohol, and the desire not just for drink,
but for whatever aggregate into which one situates the desire for drinking
(with people, in a caf=E9, etc.).
So, there is no desire, says Deleuze, that does not flow into an
assemblage, and for him, desire has always been a constructivism,
constructing an assemblage <agencement>, an aggregate: "aggregate of
the skirt, of the sunray, of a street, of a woman, of a vista, of a
color... constructing an assemblage, constructing a region."
Parent asks if it's because desire is an assemblage that Deleuze
needed to be two, with Guattari, in order to create? Deleuze agrees that
with Felix, they created an assemblage, but that there can be assemblages
all alone as well as with two, or something passing between two. All of
this, he continues, concerns physical phenomena, and for an event to occur,
some differences of potential must arise, like a flash or a stream, so that
the domain of desire is constructed. So every time someone says, I desire
this or that, that person is in the process of constructing an assemblage,
nothing else, desire is nothing else.
Parnet links this to _Anti-Oedipus_ in asking that it's the first
book in which he discussed desire, so the first he wrote with another.
Deleuze agrees; they had to enter into what was a new assemblage for them,
writing *`a deux*, so that something might "pass". And this something was a
fundamental hostility toward dominant conceptions of delirium <d=E9lire_>,
particularly against psychoanalysis. Since Guattari had been through
psychoanalysis and Deleuze was interested in it, they found common ground
to develop a constructivist conception of desire. So Parnet asks him to
define better how he sees the difference between this constructivism and
analytical interpretation. Deleuze sees it as quite simple, with
psychoanalysts speaking of desire just like priests, under the guise of the
great wailing about castration, which for Deleuze is a kind of enormous and
frightening curse on desire.=20
In _Anti-Oedipus_, they tried to oppose psychoanalysis on three main
points, none of which he would change at all:
1) Opposing the psychoanalytical concept of the unconscious as a
theater, with its constant representation of Hamlet and Oedipus, they
see unconscious as a factory, as production. The unconscious produces, like
a factory, exactly the opposite of the psychoanalytical vision.
2) Delirium, linked to desire, is the contrary of delirium linked solely to
the father or mother; rather we "d=E9lire" about everything, the whole world=
,
history, geography, tribes, deserts, peoples, races, climates, what Rimbaud
referred to (in "Mauvais Sang", _Une Saison en enfer_) as "I am an animal,
a Negro": where are my tribes, how are my tribes arranged, surviving in the
desert? Delirium, says Deleuze, is
geographical-political, whereas psychoanalysis links it always to
familial determinants. Psychoanalysis never understood anything at all,
says Deleuze, about phenomena of delirium. We "delire" the world and not
one=92s little family. And all this intersects, he continues: when he
referred to literature not being someone=92s little private affair, it=92s n=
ot
a delirium focused on the father and mother.
3) Desire is established and constructs in an assemblage always putting
several factors into play, whereas psychoanalysis reduces desire to a
single factor (father, mother, phallus), completely ignorant of the
multiple, of constructivism, of assemblages. Deleuze refers to the animal,
the image of the father, and then to the Little Hans
example he and Guattari used, but also to a second example, how the
animal (horse, in Little Hans) can never be the image of the father,
since animals proceed usually in a pack. Deleuze refers to Freud's
reduction of a dream that Jung told him, Freud insisting on "the
bone", singular, that he believes he heard Jung say, when Jung actually
said he dreamed of an ossuary, a multiplicity of bones. So desire
constructs in the collective, the multiple, the pack, and one asks what is
one's position in relation to the pack, outside, alongside, inside, at the
center? All phenomena of desire.
Parnet sums up by asking if _Anti-Oedipus_ as a post-May 68 text
was a reflection of the collective assemblages of that period.
Exactly, Deleuze responds, the attack against psychoanalysis and the
concept of delirium of races, of tribes, of peoples, of history, of
geography -- all conformed to '68, trying to create an "air sain", a
healthy region, inside all that was blocked off and fetid. A delirium that
was cosmic, delirium on the end of the world and on particles and on
electrons.=20
Parnet continues with a reference to these "collective assemblages" by
asking if Deleuze could recount some of the
amusing or not so amusing anecdotes about misunderstandings that
occurred, for example at Vincennes, around putting these concepts into
practice. She recalls that when they undertook their schizoanalysis against
psychoanalysis, lots of students thought it meant that it was cool to be
crazy. Rather than recount funny stories, Deleuze links the
misunderstandings generally to two points, which were more or less the
same: some people thought that desire was a form of spontaneity, others
thought it was an occasion for partying <la f=EAte>. For D&G, it was
neither, but it mattered little since assemblages got created, even
those that Parnet (and Deleuze) refer to as "the nuts" <les fous>
who had their own discourse and constructed their own assemblages.
So, Deleuze continues, on the level of theory, these
misunderstandings -- spontaneity or _la fete_ -- was not the so-called
philosophy of desire, which was rather: don't go get psychoanalyzed,
stop interpreting, go construct and experience/experiment with assemblages,
search out the assemblages that suit you. What is an assemblage, he asks?
It's not what they thought it was, but for Deleuze, an assemblage has four
components or dimensions:=20
1) Assemblages referred to "states of things", so that each of us
might find the "state of things" that suit us (he gives the example of
drinking, even just drinking coffee, and that we find that "coffee
drinking" that suits us as a "state of thing").
2) "Les =E9nonc=E9s", little statements, a kinds of style, each of us
finding a kind of style of enunciation (he refers again to the Russian
revolution's aftermath, with again finding a style of cinema; or new
types or styles of enunciation following of Mai '68).
3) An assemblage implicates territories, each of us chooses or
creates a territory, even just walking into a room.
4) An assemblage also implicates processes of
deterritorialization, movements of deterritorialization.
It's within these components that desire flows, says Deleuze.
Parnet wonders if Deleuze feels at all responsible for people who took
drugs, who might have read _Anti-Oedipus_ a bit too literally, as if he
might have incited youths to commit stupid acts <conneries>, and Deleuze's
response is quite moving. He says that they always felt quite responsible
for anyone for whom things went badly <tournait mal>, and he personally
always tried for things to go well. He said he never played around with
things like that, his only point of honor, never told anyone to go on, it's
ok, go get stoned, but always tried to help people make it through. He
continues, saying that he is to sensitive to the smallest
detail that might cause someone suddenly to slide over into blankness
<=E9tat de blanc). He never blamed anyone, said anyone was doing
anything wrong, but he felt the enormous weight of the directions some
lives could take, people and especially young people who would take
drugs to the point of collapse, or drinking "=E0 la sauvage." He wasn't
there to prevent anyone from doing anything, not serving as a cop or a
parent, but tried nonetheless to keep them from entering into a
"tattered state" <=E9tat de loque>. The moment there was a risk of
someone cracking up, "je ne le supporte pas," I can't stand it. An old man
who cracks up, Deleuze says, who commits suicide, he at least has already
lived his life, but a young person who cracks up, Deleuze says it is
_insupportable_. He was always divided, he concludes, between the
impossibility of blaming anyone [donner tort =E0 quelqu=92un] and the absolu=
te
refusal that anyone turn into a "tattered state." He admits that it is
difficult to figure out what principles apply, one just deals with each
case, and the least one can do is to prevent them from veering into
"tattered states."
Parnet pushes this direction by asking about the effects of
_Anti-Oedipus_, and Deleuze continues saying that AO was meant to
keep people from turning into this "tattered state," the clinically
schizo state. Parnet points out that the book's enemies criticized it
for seeming to be an apology for permissivity. Deleuze says that if
one reads it closely, one will see that it always marked out an
extreme prudence. The book's lesson: don=92t become a tattered
rag; to oppose processes of schizophrenization of the repressive
hospital type. For D&G, he says, their terror was in producing a
"hospital creature". The value of what the anti-psychiatrists called
the "trip" of the schizophrenic process was precisely to avoid
conjuring the production of "loques d'h=F4pital", tattered creatures.
Parnet asks if _Anti-Oedipus_ still has effects today, and Deleuze
says yet, it's a beautiful book, the only book in which that concept
of the unconscious was posed, with the three points of multiplicities of
the unconscious and of delirium, the world/cosmic delirium and not the
family delirium, and the unconscious as a machine/factory, not a theater.
He says he has nothing to change in these points, and he hopes that it's a
book still to be discovered.
"E as in 'Enfance' <Childhood>"
Parnet recalls that Deleuze spent his entire life in the 17th
arrondissement of Paris, so asks him if he grew up in a bourgeois
family with politically conservative (de droite) tendencies.
Deleuze speaks with a certain amusement of his early life, saying
that his life in the 17th has been something of a "chute," a fall from
the rather chic _quartier_ near the Arc de Triomphe where he was born,
to various apartments during the war, to the rue d'Aubigny for a
number of years with his mother, and then, as an adult, to his _quartier_
rue de Bizerte, a 17th artisanal, "prolo". Deleuze says he's not sure at
this rate where he'll end up in a few years.
As for his family, yes, they were bourgeois "de droite," on the right,
but he says he has few memories from his childhood (he points out that it
seems that his earliest memories disappear, and that=92s he=92s not an
archive). He does recall certain crises, lack of money that saved him from
going to study "chez les Jesuites" (with the Jesuit priests), since he had
to go the public high school rather than to the private, Catholic one due
to the family money difficulties; also, the period before the war and the
terror in the conservative bourgeoisie of the [Socialist] Popular Front,
which for them represented the arrival of total chaos. They were
anti-Semite, and particularly against Leon Blum [Socialist, leader of the
Popular Front government] who was for them worse than the devil. Deleuze
insists that one cannot understand how P=E9tain could seize power without
understanding the pre-war hatred of Blum's government.
So he recalls coming from a completely uncultivated bourgeois
family "de droite", with a father (Deleuze recalls him fondly, also
recalling the atmosphere of crisis and his father=92s violent feelings
against the left, as a veteran of WWI). He was engineer, inventor whose
first business failed just before the war, then worked in a factory making
dirigibles, taken over by the Germans to make rubber rafts.
Deleuze recalls that when the Germans arrived, invading from Belgium, he
was in Deauville (in Normandy, where his family spent summers), so he was
put in high school for a year there. He recalls how an image from Deauville
illustrates the immense social change of the Popular Front. With the
introduction of paid vacations, people who never traveled could go to the
beach and see the sea for the first time. Deleuze recalls the vision of a
young girl from the Limousin standing for five hours in rapt attention
before the extraordinary spectacle of the sea. And this had been a private
beach, for the bourgeois property owners. He also recalls the class hatred
translated by a sentence pronounced by his mother -- "h=E9las" (alas), says
Deleuze -- about the impossibility of frequenting beaches where people
"like that" would be coming. For the bourgeois like his parents, giving
vacations to the workers was the loss of privilege as well as the loss of
territory, even worse than the Germans occupying the beaches with their=
tanks.
Deleuze says that it was there in Deauville, without his parents and
his younger brother, where he was completely nil in his studies, until
something happened, such that Deleuze ceased being an idiot. Until
Deauville, and the year in the lycee there that he spent during the "funny
war," he had been null in class, but at Deauville, he met a young teacher,
Pierre Halwachs (son of a famous sociologist), with fragile
health, only one eye, so deferred from military duty. For Deleuze, this
encounter was an awakening, and he became something of a disciple to this
young "ma=EEtre". Halwachs would take him out to the beach in winter, on the
dunes, and introduced him, for example, to Gide=92s _Les Nourritures
terrestres_, to Anatole France, Baudelaire, other works by Gide, and
Deleuze was completely transformed. But since they spent so much time
together, people began to talk, and the lady in whose pension Deleuze and
his brother were staying warned Deleuze about Halwachs, then wrote to his
parents about it. The brothers were to return to Paris, but then the
Germans invaded, and so they took off on their bicycles to meet their
parents in Rochefort... and en route, they ran into Halwachs with his
father! Later in life, Deleuze met Halwachs, without the same admiration,
but at age 14, Deleuze feels he was completely right.
Parnet asks about his return to Paris, attending lyc=E9e Carnot.
Deleuze was placed in a class with a philosophy professor named
Vialle, while he could have been in one taught by Merleau-Ponty.
Deleuze says that he doesn=92t recall exactly why, but Halwachs had helped
him feel something important in literature, yet from his very first classes
in philosophy, he knew this was something important, that he would to this
for the rest of his life. (Deleuze recalls that this was right when the
German massacre of the French village of Oradour was announced, and that
there quite a politicized atmosphere). He recalls Merleau-Ponty as being
rather melancholic, whereas Vialle, who was at the end of his career, was
someone that Deleuze liked enormously. Learning about philosophical
concepts struck him with the same force as, for some people, encountering
striking literary characters, Eugenie Grander, that philosophy was entirely
as animated as any literary work. Henceforth, he no longer had any
scholastic problems, did quite well as a student. Parnet asks about the
political atmosphere, and Deleuze says that there were people of all
political stripes, but it was not the same political awareness or activity
as in peacetime. His class members had a certain political consciousness
due to the presence of the classmate Guy Moquet, a student participating in
the Resistance and killed by the Germans a year later. But Deleuze recalls
that politics were something rather secretive during the Occupation since
there were classmates of all political stripes, from the Resistance to
Vichy sympathizers.
Parnet says that it seems that, for Deleuze, his childhood really
has little importance. Deleuze responds, yes, necessarily so. He
considers the writing activity to have nothing to do with an
individual affair, not something personal or a small private affair.
Writing is becoming, he says, becoming-animal, becoming child, and one
writes for life, to become something, whatever one wants except becoming a
writer and except an archive. Although he does respect the archive, but it
has importance for doing something else. He insists that speaking of his
own personal life has no interest, nor does being a personal archive.
Deleuze takes a book he has at hand by a great Russian poet Ossip
Mandelstam, and reads a passage in which the author speaks about how little
importance memory has and especially for writing. Deleuze agrees fully, and
takes from Mandelstam the idea that one learns not to speak, but to stutter
<Deleuze cites Mandelstam in his essay "Begaya-t-il" in _Critique et
clinique_; cf. _Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy_). That's what
writing is, says Deleuze, stuttering in language, pushing language to the
limit, stuttering, becoming an animal, becoming a child, not from one's own
childhood, but rather "the childhood of the world." A writer does not
appeal directly to his private life -- what Deleuze calls totally
disgusting, truly shit ("une d=E9goutation, la vraie merde") -- does not dig
through family archives, but rather remains a child of the world. A writer
becomes, but not a writer, nor his own memorialist.
Parnet plays the devil's advocate role (a "very dangerous role,"
Deleuze chides her) by asking if Nathalie Sarraute's _Enfance_
constitutes an exception. Deleuze agrees, that Sarraute invents a
child of the world, drawing from set formulae and expression to invent
a world language. Parnet asks him if he had to undergo some kind of strict
exercise to limit this interest in childhood, that somehow it must burst
forth, and Deleuze suggests that this kind of thing happens all by itself.
He goes on to ask what is there of interest in
childhood? Perhaps relations with one parents, siblings, but that's of
only personal interest, to the individual, but not to write. Rather what=92s
interesting is to find the emotion of child, not the child that one once
was, but also the sense of being _a_ child, particular any child ("un
enfant quelconque"). Deleuze refers to someone recounting seeing a horse
die in the street before the age of the automobile, and he translates this
into the task of becoming a writer: Deleuze cites Dostoeivski, the dancer
Najinksi, Nietzche, all of whom witnessed a horse dying in the street.
Parnet says, and Deleuze agrees, that for him it was the Popular Front
demonstrations, and watching his father struggle between his honesty and
his anti-Semitism. But Deleuze insists, "I was _a_ child," and the
importance of this indefinite article is the multiplicity of a child. "Un
enfant: l'article indefini est d'une richesse extreme", he concludes: The
indefinite article has an extreme richness.
"F as in Fidelity"
It is clear from Parnet's introduction that since the letter =91A=92 was
taken up with "animal," she could not use it for "amiti=E9"/friendship, so
she chose "fidelity" for friendship. She evokes a number of Deleuze's
close friends with whom he shared many years of "fidelity" in his
friendships. Parnet asks if fidelity and friendship are necessarily linked,
and Deleuze says immediately that it's not a question of fidelity. Rather,
friendship for him is a matter of perception. What does it mean to have
something in common with someone? Not ideas in common, but to have a
language and even a pre-language in common. There are people that one can
never understand or speak to even on the simplest matters, and other with
whom one might disagree
completely, but can understand deeply and profoundly even in the most
abstract things, based on this indeterminate basis that is so mysterious.
Deleuze's hypothesis is that each of us is apt to seize a certain type of
charm, a perception of charm, i.e. in a gesture, a thought, even before the
thought is signifying, a modesty, a charm that goes to the roots of
perception, to the vital roots, and this constitutes a friendship. He gives
the example of a phrase one might hear from someone, a vulgar, disgusting
phrase that leaves an indelible impression about that person, no matter
what he/she can ever do. The same is for charm, only opposite, the
indelible effect of charm as a question of perception, perceiving someone
who suits us, who teaches us something, opens us, awakens us, emits signs,
and we become sensitive to that emission of signs, one receives them or
not, but one can become open to them. And then one can spend time with
someone else saying things that are absolutely unimportant.
Deleuze laughs as he says that he finds friendship extremely
comical, and Parnet reminds him of how he sees friendship in terms of
couples. Deleuze discusses one very close friend, Jean-Pierre, with
whom he has had a long friendship, and they constitute one kind of
couple that he likens to the characters in Beckett's _Mercier and
Camier_, whereas with Guattari, it's more a couple of the _Bouvard and
Pecuchet_ sort, trying to create their huge encyclopedia that touches
on all fields of knowledge. It=92s not a question, he says, of imitating
these grand couples, but friendship is made of these kinds of relations,
even when one disagrees.=20
But Deleuze says then that in the question of friendship, there is a
mystery that is connected directly to philosophy. He here turns to the
concept of the friend as developed by the Greeks. The philosopher is a
friend of wisdom, a concept that the Greeks invented: as someone tending
toward wisdom without being wise, with a number of pretendents functioning
in a rivalry of free men in all domains, with eloquence, trials that they
pursue (the pretendent is what he calls "the Greek phenomenon par
excellence"). Philosophy is a rivalry toward something, and in looking at
the history of philosophy, one sees that for some writers, philosophy is
precisely this connection to friendship, and for others, a connection to
_fiancailles_ (engagement), e.g. Kierkegaard (fiancailles rompues, broken
engagement). Parnet cites Blanchot and his concept of friendship, and
Deleuze says both Blanchot and Mascolo are the two current writers who give
the greatest importance to friendship as the very category or condition of
the exercise of thought. Not an actual friend, but friendship as a category
or condition for thinking <cf. _Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_/_What Is
Philosophy?_ for their development of this concept>.
Deleuze concludes that he adores distrusting the friend, but
despite this distrust <Deleuze cites a German poet, that there is an hour
at which one must distrust the friend>, and he says that he distrusts his
friend Jean-Pierre, but he does so with such gaiety, that it does no harm.
There is a great community of friendship so that it works out. But Deleuze
insists that these are not all events, not tiny little private matters;
when one says "friend" or "lost engagement," one has to know under what
conditions thought can be exerted/expressed (s=92exercer). Proust said that
friendship is zero, personally and for thought, no thought in friendship,
but rather in jealous love, as the condition of thought for Proust.
Parnet asks a final question about his friendship with Foucault which was
not a friendship of the couple, was deep but distant. Deleuze says that
Foucault was someone of the greatest mystery for him, perhaps because they
knew each other too late in life. Deleuze says he feels a great regret
toward Foucault, while having respected him enormously. He says that
Foucault was the rare case of a man who entered a room and everything
changed. Foucault, like all of us, was not simply a person, but rather it
was like another gust of air or something atmospheric occurred, an
emanation. Foucault corresponds, says Deleuze, to what he mentioned
earlier, about not needing to speak to appreciate and understand each
other. Deleuze's memory is particularly of Foucault's gestures, dry,
strange, fascinating, like gestures of metal and wood.
Finally, Deleuze says that all people only have charm through
their phobias. What is charming is the side of someone that shows that
they're a bit unhinged ("o=F9 ils perdent un peu les p=E9dales"). If you
can't grasp the small trace of madness in someone, you can't be their
friend. But if you grasp that small point of insanity, "d=E9mence," of
someone, the point where they are afraid or even happy, then you can
find the source of his/her charm.
***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Charles J. Stivale
Professor of French, Chair
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202
office: 313-577-3002/6240 / fax: 313-577-6243
WWW:
http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/romance/romance.html
