Too much to say, and I don't have the heart for it today. There is
too much to say about what has happened to us here, about what has
also happened to me, with the death of Gilles Deleuze, with a death
we no doubt feared (knowing him to be so ill), but still, with this
death here (cette mort-ci), this unimaginable image, in the event,
would deepen still further, if that were possible, the infinite
sorrow of another event. Deleuze the thinker is, above all, the
thinker of the event and always of this event here (cet
evenement-ci). He remained the thinker of the event from beginning
to end. I reread what he said of the event, already in 1969, in one
of his most celebrated books, The Logic of Sense. He cites Joe
Bousquet ("To my inclination for death," said Bousquet, "which was
a failure of the will"), then continues: "From this inclination to
this longing there is, in a certain respect, no change except a
change of the will, a sort of leaping in place (saut sur place) of
the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual
will. It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something inthat
which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with
what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous
conformity: the Event. It is in this sense that the Amor fatiis one
with the struggle of free men" (One would have to quote
interminably).
There is too much to say, yes, about the time I was given, along
with so many others of my "generation," to share with Deleuze;
about the good fortune I had of thinking thanks to him, by thinking
of him. Since the beginning, all of his books (but first of all
Nietzsche, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense) have been
for me not only, of course, provocations to think, but, each time,
the unsettling, very unsettling experience - so unsettling - of a
proximity or a near total affinity in the "theses" - if one may say
this - through too evident distances in what I would call, for want
of anything better, "gesture," "strategy," "manner": of writing, of
speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the "theses" (but the word
doesn't fit) and particularly the thesis concerning a difference
that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference "more
profound" than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a
difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation ("yes, yes"), the
taking into account of the simulacrum, Deleuze remains no doubt,
despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always
considered myself closest among all of this "generation." I never
felt the slightest "objection" arise in me, not even a virtual one,
against any of his discourse, even if I did on occasion happen to
grumble against this or that proposition in Anti-Oedipus(I told him
about it one day when we were coming back together by car from
Nanterre University, after a thesis defense on Spinoza) or perhaps
against the idea that philosophy consists in "creating" concepts.
One day, I would like to explain how such an agreement on
philosophical "content" never excludes all these differences that
still today I don't know how to name or situate. (Deleuze had
accepted the idea of publishing, one day, a long improvised
conversation between us on this subject and then we had to wait, to
wait too long.) I only know that these differences left room for
nothing but friendship between us. To my knowledge, no shadow, no
sign has ever indicated the contrary. Such a thing is so rare in
the milieu that was ours that I wish to make note of it here at
this moment. This friendship did not stem solely from the
(otherwise telling) fact that we have the same enemies. We saw each
other little, it is true, especially in the last years. But I can
still hear the laugh of his voice, a little hoarse, tell me so many
things that I love to remember down to the letter: "My best wishes,
all my best wishes," he whispered to me with a friendly irony the
summer of 1955 in the courtyard of the Sorbonne when I was in the
middle of failing my agregation exam. Or else, with the same
solicitude of the elder: "It pains me to see you spending so much
time on that institution (le College International de Philosophie).
I would rather you wrote..." And then, I recall the memorable ten
days of the Nietzsche colloquium at Cerisy, in 1972, and then so
many, many other moments that make me, no doubt along with
Jean-Francois Lyotard (who was also there), feel quite alone,
surviving and melancholy today in what is called with that terrible
and somewhat false word, a "generation." Each death is unique, of
course, and therefore unusual, but what can one say about the
unusual when, from Barthes to Althusser, from Foucault to Deleuze,
it multiplies in this way in the same "generation," as in a series
- and Deleuze was also the philosopher of serial singuarity - all
these uncommon endings?
Yes, we will all have loved philosophy. Who can deny it? But, it's
true, (he said it), Deleuze was, of all those in his "generation,"
the one who "did/made" (faisait) it the most gaily, the most
innocently. He would not have liked, I think, the word "thinker"
that I used above. He would have preferred "philosopher." In this
respect, he claimed to be "the most innocent (the most devoid of
guilt) of making/doing philosophy" (Negotiations). This was no
doubt the condition for his having left a profound mark on the
philosophy of this century, the mark that will remain his own,
incomparable. The mark of a great philosopher and a great
professor. The historian of philosophy who proceeded with a sort of
configurational election of his own genealogy (the Stoics,
Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc.) was also
an inventor of philosophy who never shut himself up in some
philosophical "realm" (he wrote on painting, the cinema, and
literature, Bacon, Lewis Carroll, Proust, Kafka, Melville, etc.).
And then, and then I want to say precisely here that I loved and
admired his way -- always faultless -- of negotiating with the
image, the newspapers, television, the public scene and the
transformations that it has undergone over the course of the past
ten years. Economy and vigilant retreat. I felt solidarity with
what he was doing and saying in this respect, for example in an
interview in Liberationat the time of the publication of A Thousand
Plateaus(in the vein of his 1977 pamphlet). He said: "One should
know what is currently happening in the realm of books. For several
years now, we've been living in a period of reaction in every
domain. There is no reason to think that books are to be spared
from this reaction. People are in the process of fabricating for us
a literary space, as well as judicial, economic, and political
spaces, which are completely reactionary, prefabricated, and
overwhelming/crushing. There is here, I believe, a systematic
enterprise that Liberationshould have analyzed." This is "much
worse than a censorship," he added, but this dry spell will not
necessarily last." Perhaps, perhaps.
Like Nietzsche and Artaud, like Blanchot and other shared
admirations, Deleuze never lost sight of this alliance between
necessity and the aleatory, between chaos and the untimely. When I
was writing on Marx at the worst moment, three years ago, I took
heart when I learned that he was planning to do so as well. And I
reread tonight what he said in 1990 on this subject: "...Felix
Guattari and I have always remained Marxists, in two different
manners perhaps, but both of us. It's that we don't believe in a
political philosophy that would not be centered around the analysis
of capitalism and its developments. What interests us the most is
the analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that constantly
pushes back its proper limits, and that always finds them again on
a larger scale, because the limit is Capital itself."
I will continue to begin again to read Gilles Deleuze in order to
learn, and I'll have to wander all alone in this long conversation
that we were supposed to have together. My first question, I think,
would have concerned Artaud, his interpretation of the "body
without organ," and the word "immanence" on which he always
insisted, in order to make him or let him say something that no
doubt still remains secret to us. And I would have tried to tell
him why his thought has never left me, for nearly forty years. How
could it do so from now on?
Translated by David Kammerman
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Trans. note: Many thanks to both Peggy Kamuf and Katherine Collin
for their invaluable suggestions concerning this translation.
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