Iginla tribute: repost

<To the requests for an unsullied version of the Iginla text, here
is what I hope consists of a faithful transcription. -- CJ Stivale>



Date: Sun, 10 Dec 95 13:31:03 -0600
From: Biodun o. Iginla <iginl001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: jjcohen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: imaginary geographies


Gilles Deleuze: In Memoriam (1925-1995): Personal Note

Biodun Iginla, University of Minnesota Press

Copyright @ Biodun Iginla (1995)

(Prepared simultaneously for Social Text, boundary 2, The:
Minnesota Daily, and Lingua Franca .)

Michel Foucault once said: "This century will perhaps be Deleuzian
one day."

    On Saturday, November 4, 1995, I lost the only intellectual
father I ever had: Gilles Deleuze committed suicide by jumping
out the window of his apartment on avenue Niel in the 17th
arrondissement of Paris. He was 70 years old. A graduate school
friend of mine (he had also studied with Deleuze) who happened to
be in Paris (he's a French citizen but resides in Missoula,
Montana) called me in Minneapolis to tell me about the event a
few hours after the Paris media picked it up. I was not all that
surprised about his suicide. I knew he had been suffering from
severe respiratory problems ever since one of his lungs collapsed
several years back. And I also knew that for about one and half
years before his suicide he had been tied to a respiratory
machine and told not to receive any visitors and to cut back on
his writing. And I also knew he recently had a tracheotomy. But I
was surprised about the manner in which he committed suicide:
defenestration.

    Uncannily, on Saturday afternoon, before I got the call from
Paris, while discussing Yitzak Rabin's assassination (and other
dismaying world events this fin-de-millennium) with Hilary
Radner, perhaps my closest friend (and Deleuzian sister) in the
US at this point, I told her that if only I could call Deleuze
right then in Paris to ask him his opinion of the current
epistemic rupture that we're experiencing on all registers and
levels, I would, but that alas, he's more or less sequestered, by
his doctors, from contact with the outside world.

    One crisp but pleasant fall evening in October 1990, I
visited Deleuze at that apartment. He had just moved in. Two
months before, in August, when he was still living on rue de
Bizerte (also in the 17th), in response to a desperate plea from
me to intervene, on my behalf, with Je'rome Lindon, his formidable
publisher at E'ditions de Minuit, on the matter of securing, for
the University of Minnesota Press, the English-language rights to
his _Pourparlers_ (a collection of his interviews), he had written
me a letter (always in longhand and always promptly and
generously) by way of apology, to explain to me why the
English-language rights to _Pourparlers_ was being picked up by
Columbia University Press instead of by Minnesota Press. I had
thought I had the inalienable filial right to secure those
rights, because after all, Minnesota Press had published eight of
his books for the Anglophone world, and I was (and still am) his
student (why not say it, his "son," clearly "oedipal," against
the grain, as it were, of _L'Anti-Oedipe_ ) and currently, his
editor. He explained in that letter that the idea for _Pourparlers_
had come from Columbia Press, so they had the dibs for the
English-language rights on it. I had told him in my plea that I
would be in Paris that October after the Frankfurt Book Fair, and
that I would very much like to visit him. In his letter, he said
he also would very much like to see me after an intervening
fourteen years. He was alone when I arrived. He met me by the
elevator and led me into the spacious (for Paris) and tastefully
decorated apartment.  We sat around for two hours in the living
room and drank red wine and chatted about the old days (he had
retired from teaching in 1987) and about contemporary events
(specifically, about what he called "the terrorism of the Western
State machine against the people of the third-world," which, as
he knew well, had a strong resonance for me, an American citizen
of third-world heritage). He reminisced about some of his old
students, the ones he had lost contact with, about whatever might
have become of them.  He said unfortunately, he didn't--that he
couldn't possibly -- remain in contact with all  of his students.
"There were so many of you," he said. When I saw that he was
getting tired, I decided to leave. I said goodbye. He walked me
to the elevator. He shook my hand vigorously. I took the elevator
downstairs, and disappeared into the crisp but pleasant Paris
night. Of course, I had no idea that I would be seeing him for
the last time.

    I first met Gilles Deleuze in the spring of 1975 at
Universite' de Paris (VIII) (then at) Vincennes. I was attending
his seminar on the philosophy of the rhizome. I was then a
graduate student in comparative literature at the University of
Minnesota. As far as I can recall with certainty, the following
is one of the first coherent concepts that I grasped in the early
days of that seminar:

    "A book has neither object nor subject; it is made up of
variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.
To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of
matters, and the exteriority of their relations.  It is to
fabricate a God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in
all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity,
strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of
deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of
flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and
viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All
this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A
book is an assemblage of this kind....It is a multiplicity."

    This concept has served me well in my publishing career. It
is not by chance, I don't think, that this concept found its way
to print in the introduction to _Mille Plateaux_: vol. 2 de
Capitalisme et Schizophre'nie, published by E'ditions de Minuit in
1980. Many of Deleuze's ideas from that seminar (and a subsequent
one= in the spring of 1976 that I also attended) found their way
into that book (co-authored with Fe'lix Guattari). It is also not
by chance that Minnesota Press published the book for the
Anglophone world (in a splendid translation by Brian Massumi) in
1987, before my tenure at the Press.

    Again: I'm not really surprised by his suicide, but I did not
know why he chose defrenestration as the best way to go. But
then, for two days, I searched his numerous texts (21 by himself
and 7 co-authored mostly with Guattari) for clues.  I found two:

    In 1969, in _Logique du sens_,  he wrote that the philosopher's
image, more fabulous than scientific, seems to have been fixed by
Platonism: the philosopher is that ascendant being who emerges
from the cave, rising and purifying himself with the pure ideas
he loves, very platonically.

    Later on in the text, he comments on the Presocratic
philosopher, Empedocles, who committed suicide by jumping into
the volcano Etna:

    "The Presocratic philosopher does not emerge from the cave:
On the contrary, he figures that he's not engaged enough, not
engulfed enough...Empedocles's sandals must be distinguished from
the wings of the Platonic soul: His sandals signify that he is of
the earth, under the earth, and autonomous.  Presocratic
philosophy subverts Platonic conversion."

    In 1993, in his Afterword to Samuel Beckett's _Quad_, Deleuze
wrote: "The exhausted person is 'more' than the weary person. The
weary person only exhausts reality, whereas the exhausted person
exhausts the possible. Does he exhaust the possible because he is
himself exhausted, or is he exhausted because he exhausts the
possible? He exhausts himself because he exhausts the possible,
and inversely....The most horrible position to be in is to wait
for death, sitting without being able to stand or sleep, waiting
for the final curtain that would put one to sleep forever."

    In 1990, I became Deleuze's editor at Minnesota Press, after
Lindsay Waters (currently executive editor at Harvard University
Press) and Terry Cochran (currently on the faculty in comparative
literature at University of Montre'al).  I think arbitrary (rather
than motivated) coincidences are quite rare in academia and
publishing.

    In 1973, before I met Deleuze in person, Tom Conley (surely
an early mentor and long-term friend of mine of some twenty-two
years; after a twenty-four-year tenure in French and Italian at
the University of Minnesota, currently professor of romance
languages at Harvard University; and the translator of Deleuze's
_Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque_ for Minnesota Press) got me to read
_L'Anti-Oedipe_, and it became my bible.

    In 1977, I was Lindsay's teaching assistant in the humanities
program (where he was visiting professor for one year) at the
University of Minnesota before he joined the Press in 1978. Terry
Cochran succeeded him when he went to Harvard Press in 1983.
Terry was in the same comparative literature program with me in
1978, and we both had Wlad Godzich (who first  brought Deleuze to
Minnesota under the aegis of his prestigious Theory and History
of Literature--THL--series) on our dissertation committees.

    In 1979, after my four-year teaching assistantship ran out at
the University y of Minnesota, I was Wlad's research assistant
(via the Federal Work-Study program when he was chair of
comparative literature. At that point, he was negotiating with
Lindsay about starting the THL series at Minnesota Press.

    In 1980, I drifted out of the world of American and European
academia into the (closed and incestuous) world of New York
commercial publishing.

    In 1981, I read _Mille Plateaux_ when I thought I was powering
up a career in n New York commercial publishing, and the book
displaced _L'Anti-Oedipe_ as my Bible.

    In 1987, I lost the only biological father one can ever have.

    In 1989, I emerged out of the (closed and incestuous) New
York trade publishing world and drifted back to Minnesota to
become Terry's assistant at the University of Minnesota Press.

    In 1990, I succeeded Terry when he left Minnesota Press.

    In 1992, Deleuze lost Fe'lix Guattari, his closest friend and
writing partner.

    In 1993, I wrote Deleuze after I secured the English-language
rights to his last book, _Critique et clinique_, and told him that
I would be in Paris once again after Frankfurt Book Fair, and
could I again drop in for a visit.  He responded promptly
(again, always in longhand) that he was happy that Minnesota
Press was translating the book, but alas, he couldn't see me this
time: His doctors had told him not to receive any visitors
because of "the state of his health."

    In 1994, I got my last letter from him. I had written to ask
whether he would like to write the foreword (no matter how short)
to the American edition of _Critique et clinique_.  (He analyzed
the work of several American writers in the= book.) He said in
his letter that even though he would very much have liked to
write such a foreword, his health, as he put it "was tormenting
him at the= moment" and that "it was quite painful for him to
move around, even to undress."

    Ever since his suicide, colleagues and friends have asked me
whether Deleuze was depressed. I told them I didn't know, but
that his suicide wasn't that surprising given what he had been
going through, that I was simply surprised d at the manner he did
it. And then I browsed his texts looking for clues. (I have since
shared my discoveries with a few friends and colleagues.) One
thing for sure: He was not depressed for most of his life, which
for him, was his work.  After all, the body of his work
constitutes at once and among other things: the critique of
negativity; the hatred of interiority;  the celebration of
forces; the affirmation of life; and the cultivation of joy.
Didn't he (with Guattari) in _L'Anti-Oedipe_ tell the analysand
looking for a cure to "get up from the couch and go out for a
walk in the sun"? At the time of this writing, no details about
the defenestration have been forthcoming from the French print
media, which are not of the tabloid American and British kind.

    Gilles Deleuze: I say "In Memoriam" on behalf of my intimate
Press friends and colleagues, my domestic US and international
theoretical family members (quite a few of whom are personal
friends), and former students of Deleuze everywhere, including
Australia and Japan. He lives on in all of us who have read--and
learned from--him. We are all, in a sense, his orphans: the very
metaphor he used for the unconscious. Our deepest sympathies for
Fanny, his widow; Julien, his son; and E'milie, his daughter.

    It is also not by chance that among his close friends were
Jean-Franc,ois Lyotard, Re'da Bensmaia, Marcel He'naff, He'le`ne
Cixous (who founded Vincennes after May '68 and hired him there
in 1969), and Toni Negri, all of whom are Minnesota Press authors
and also personal friends of mine.

    I conclude with an anecdote that another student of Deleuze's
and also a Minnesota Press author, Roger Celestin, shared with
me. In 1976, the day after the Jonestown (Guyana) massive cult
suicide-massacre, there was a transit strike in Paris. That day
at the seminar in Vincennes, the usually packed room had only
about twenty-five students. (I was not in class that day: The
strike had left me stranded way south at the Cite' Universitaire
on boulevard Jourdan in the 14th arrondissement.) Deleuze looked
around the room at the students before beginning his lecture and
said, while picking his famous long fingernails: "Perhaps we
should start our own cult?"

    Gilles Deleuze: In Memoriam: 1925-1995. In a sense, this
century is already Deleuzian. For example, he had worked out
theoretically the distinction between actual and virtual reality
at least two decades before cyberists and techno-evangelists
started talking about the distinction between real life (RL) and
virtual reality (VR). What Jacques Derrida said about Maurice
Blanchot can also be applied to Deleuze: "[He] waits for us still
to come, to be read and reread... I would say that never as much
as today have I pictured him so far ahead of us."

    I know in my guts that he would want all of us, his sons and
daughters, to celebrate and affirm life (according to an adage
from my Yoruba heritage "Eat life before it eats you"), in spite
of everything negative going on currently, at this
fin-de-millennium.

    Biodun Iginla is Senior Editor at the University of Minnesota
Press.

Biodun Iginla
Senior Editor, Acquisitions
University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South #290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
612-627-1974 (office-voice)
612-627-1980 (office-fax)
612-721-9666 (home-fax)
Internet: iginl001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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