Two Regimes of Madness. Gilles Deleuze. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995

by David Lapoujade, Editor. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, Translators
Semiotext(e), distributed by The MIT Press, Massachusetts, USA, 2008
424 pp. Paper, $19.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-062-0.


Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg
University of Plymouth


martha.blassnigg@gmail.com



Originally published by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris in 2001, edited by David Lapoujade and translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina for Semiotext(e), Two Regimes of Madness by Gilles Deleuze, Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, constitutes the second major collection of short texts by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, following on Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974). Some of the flaws of the translation have already been pointed out in a review on the earlier edition by John Sellars in Metapsychology, Vol. 10 (40), 2006. This review will not reiterate this aspect but highlight a selection and overview on some concepts that Deleuze illuminates in these texts, which have been influential in the transdisciplinary reception of his work.

As a collection of short texts and interviews, this book can not been seen isolated from the oeuvre of the author, and in the time span it covers, it coincides among other publications with Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux, 1980), Deleuze’s cinema books (Cinéma 1: L’Image-Movement, 1983; Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps, 1985), reflected in this edition in various forewords to their international translations, and his work on Michael Foucault. However, even for the non-Deleuzian reader it offers accessible insights into his system of thought, in particular in the interview passages whose conversational style very much marks how Deleuze saw a significant modus to facilitate the communal sharing of ideas. These conversations are characterised by his usual modesty and sharp observational mind, and it is not surprising, given the political implications of his philosophy, that this collection also includes several short statements on contemporary political affairs such as the Palestinian agency in peace negotiations, pacifism in the international context, the impact of May ’68 on French society and the Gulf War.

Some of the outstanding concepts that Deleuze illuminated in these texts and conversations are his and Guattari’s conception of schizophrenic machines and the organ-machine with its flows and breakdowns, the organless body as a critique of capitalism in light of his and Guattari’s earlier work Anti-Oedipus as a critique of psychoanalysis’ institutionalised constraints on desire to sanction social imperatives. Furthermore he treated the notion of the dispositif as an assemblage of lines or forces, immanence, the brain as the screen, the issue of time in Boulez, Proust, Bergson and the cinema, and the question of the subject. An especially insightful area, reminiscent of Bergson’s separation of joy and pleasure, is Deleuze’s distinction between desire and pleasure. In this context his use of the concept of ‘lines of flight’ becomes most tangible: he called these “shooting points of deterritorialization in assemblages of desire” (p. 127). In this text, in particular, Deleuze emphasised some core distinctions of his own work from Foucault’s in that he showed his strategy to redefine the concept of desire as assemblages and relational networks, while Foucault refused to use the term due to a disability to detach its meaning from a psychoanalytical understanding of a lack. Deleuze’s insightful comments on Foucault’s contemporary work, for example in ‘Michael Foucault’s Main Concepts’, are a recursive theme in this collection, which in some of the interview conversations reveal some of the most concise reflections on Deleuze’s own philosophical system.

The significance of Deleuze’s oeuvre in the wider intellectual community of creative and political thinkers is revealed in ‘On the New Philosophers’, originally distributed in bookstores in France in 1977 by Minuit, where Deleuze’s micropolitics become paramount. In this text he critiqued the “wholesale return to the author” (p. 139), the importance of concepts for political activism, and his strategy for creative innovation as opposed to pure reactionism expressed through hollow intellectual rhetoric. The collection also contains among other texts a round table conversation between Barthes, Deleuze, Genette, Doubrovsky, Richard, Ricardou on Proust; an interview on the differences between Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980); a concise overview on Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) critique of psychoanalysis in ‘Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis’; and last but not least touching reflections on his collaboration with Felix Guattari, and Deleuze’s last essay ‘Immanence: a Life.’

Of particular interest for an interdisciplinary community are Deleuze’s comments on writing about painting following his publication on Bacon and his gripping account of ‘What is the Creative Act?’ where he again exemplified what it means to do philosophy as distinct from, as well as interrelated with, other disciplines in the Arts and Sciences. Furthermore with a similar emphasis appear his ‘Preface to the American Edition of
Difference and Repetition’
and his brief elaboration on ‘How Philosophy is Useful to Mathematicians or Musicians’ where his profound concern with cross-disciplinary thinking reflects in his comments on the contemporary approach of Vincennes University. Deleuze conceived of philosophy not as a reflection on other fields, but rather as a state of an active and interior alliance with them through mobile relations, each responding to one another, but each in terms which are proper to its own discipline (p. 307). Considering himself a classical philosopher, Deleuze understood the major role of philosophy in the generation of concepts for the novel redistribution of ideas:

“For me philosophy is an art of creation, much like music or painting. Philosophy creates concepts, which are neither generalities nor truths. They are more along the lines of the Singular, the Important, the New. Concepts are inseparable from affects, i.e. from the powerful effects they exert on our life, and percepts, i.e. the new ways of seeing or perceiving they provoke in us.” (p. 238)

Deeply imbued by his Bergsonism, his philosophy is constructive and forward moving, directed toward constant renewal in which he also saw the artist’s power; it is characterised by nascent actionism in constant negotiation between abstraction and the concrete in the intersecting lines of processes and dynamics of becoming. Especially in his reflections on his friend Michel Foucault’s work, Deleuze points the finger to the cracks and contingencies where new lines of flight may be detected and revolutions might arise on the micro level. These are also expressed in his notion of a geo-philosophy, his and Guattari’s conception of multiplicity, deterritorialisation and rhizomatic thinking. While this collection with only a brief reference list of the original sources of the texts seems mainly geared toward the informed reader, it should be considered as more than an additional resource for Deleuze’s published works. Various outstanding texts themselves rather provide a rhizomatic glossary in conversational style with entrances, assemblages and offshoots of some of Deleuze’s main concerns, ideas and concepts. In the spirit of his philosophy these, although more fully elaborated in his major works, might in their concise exemplification inspire to new lines of thought and creative becomings (creativeness) and inspire further readings of undoubtedly one of the great creative and innovative minds of the 20th century.