Jean-Clet Martin, French philosopher and author of numerous works on Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, looks back on the exceptional conceptual inventiveness of this unclassifiable thinker, born in January 1925.
From his university life, let us remember his unparalleled sense of pedagogy while he taught at the universities of Clermont-Ferrand, Lyon and Vincennes, his gravelly and breathy voice, his classes which fill the room, his great friendship with Michel Foucault or the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, with whom several works were written jointly, by Anti-Oedipus has What is philosophy? passing through A thousand plateaus. Of his work, often criticized for its “anarchism” or his “dandyism”let's remember a crazy invention of concepts: “diagram”, «variation», “repetition”, “multiplicities”…
To those who criticize him for succumbing to the attraction of novelty and “good word”from making small talk, he defends himself in the“ABC”river interview filmed in 1988: “A bad philosopher is someone who does not invent a concept. He expresses opinions. (…) Whatever kind of concept I tried to create, I can tell what problem it addresses, and why. Otherwise it would be chatter.” Inventing concepts is for him the very task of philosophy. It's establishing an event, marking a «avant» and a “After”. After Kant, the concept of «temps» never again had the same meaning and will be relaunched by The time image.
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“These concepts are for him arrangements, explains the philosopher Jean-Clet Martin, who publishes this January 22 New metaphysical meditations: Imaginary existences (Kimé editions). A staircase is arranged according to a fold, not just by the elements that compose it. In the same way, a concept is interesting by what it brings together, by the new problematic field that it defines. In The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroquepublished in 1988, Deleuze explains precisely that the fold is “something which opens in the middle, between things, which is not fixed, since there is no identity prior to its construction, its detours”.
“Relationships matter more than terms. There is no subject there that would be posited from all eternity, or innately, and there is also no object that is frontally opposed to the subject, in this kind of complex articulation that we have inherited from Kant, specifies Jean-Clet Martin. Deleuze thus breaks with centuries of an ontology which posits the primacy of «substance». For him, there is no identity first, only “different ways of folding”. Deleuze takes the example of baroque construction, compared to classical construction. “Baroque is an architecture where there are folds everywhere, where the furniture is completely twisted, where the light will enter indirectly through indirect orifices”explains Jean-Clet Martin. What main concepts to remember? Anthology.
Difference
Deleuze, writing his thesis in 1968 on Difference and repetition, wonders about what “do” the difference. “When we are in the identity already made, we will say for example that two apples are identical… We see clearly that it takes several to say that they are similar. They are therefore always exterior, they are not given in the same space, since I cannot place the second at the same point A as the first without the two interfering with each other. explains Jean-Clet Martin. And to specify: “To be identical presupposes the difference of two things. We have the fault of thinking the opposite and assuming that identity is primary, perhaps in the manner of Descartes who made the 'I' a substance. Deleuze considers on the contrary that every subject is an event which occurs at the end of a complex and never closed process.
Repetition
For Deleuze, the concept of difference is inseparable from that of “repetition”. As Jean-Clet Martin explains, “it is necessary that in order to be the same, for A to be equal to A, that it is already other. The same only has meaning if it fits into the other. There is no author who is given as someone who would have seen his system ready-made without any theatrical rehearsal, let's say. Montaigne is in the essay, he tries and repeats a lot, in layers. Nietzsche in the same way… And Deleuze will repeat the authors at will by modifying them in turn, by introducing very different gaps in their texts to perceive what they thought before the work was made, the difficulty of the problem faced , the initial intuition undoubtedly very different from what we remember about them, too academic. There is no heaven of Ideas where everything would be written in advance… Repetition is our only weapon in a certain way, a way of stuttering at first to gradually find the right refrain.”
-Diagram
“The difference is not only external. He takes the example chosen by Hegel, of the flower which becomes an apple. They are changed… For Hegel, the difference becomes interior, and produces a becoming.” But Deleuze is not satisfied with this answer. He goes beyond Hegel and Leibniz in their vision of difference. “The difference will be of the order of immanence, but he will not compare this to a dialectical process as with Hegel, finding this too mechanical, reducing what is always repeated to the same process like a prayer”specifies Jean-Clet Martin. “Deleuze then replaces the idea of dialectic with what he calls the diagram. There is the same prefix isas in dialectic, but the diagram is much more affected by singularity, richer in intensity, changing.he continues.
Surface
For Deleuze, the question of meaning has too often been sought from the side of depth, as with Heidegger, in love with an obscure foundation, or from the side of transcendence, as with Plato, with this light from the sun which reveals the truth about everything. “Deleuze, on the contrary, wants to position himself at the interstice between these two extremes which are mechanically opposed, and prefers to develop the idea of surface. He surveys the surfaces, between height and depth, a space of movement, nomadic by extension, by neighborhoods”explains Jean-Clet Martin. Survey «a kind of mapa rhizome, that sums up Deleuze's gesture well. The philosopher often makes an analogy with those whose lifestyle shakes up our sedentary existence. But even at home, in your room, thoughts wander “motionless with long steps» said Valéry. This is a form of “deterritorialization” instead of being locked in a closed space, the power of the image, of the dream… Sometimes of a metamorphosis as in the work of Kafka.
Event
Becoming is like a journey, it is better defined thanks to the notion of event, which Deleuze places at the forefront of his philosophy. “Let’s take a relationship between two stations, Paris station and Amiens station. The philosopher would perhaps be the one who refuses to settle into the terms of departure and arrival, and is never satisfied with the beginning or the end. In reality everything happens between, relationships are richer than terms. This was recognized by the Anglo-American philosophers who traveled widely, from East to West, crossing deserts, or even by boat, in the feeling of brotherhood with the whole world. Literature often takes things in the middle, without being satisfied with an outcome. This is where the story takes place, explains Jean-Clet Martin. The relationship is ultimately something that eludes the beginning and the end. This logic of Deleuze relationships makes them the material of the event.”
Variation
What is variation? “The concept for Deleuze is something which is in variation. A variation supposes a multiplicity. It is a variety that finds itself caught on a line that Deleuze sometimes calls a line of flight. She goes through a mobile arrangement, a metamorphosis that evolves, a bit like a labyrinth that grows at the edges. Particularly in the work of Borges, but also in that of Kafka who thinks in burrows or even in divergent corridors, in door frames which open onto other worlds each time. We particularly feel the impression of this in the cinema of Orson Welles, 'Citizen Kane' which evolves in fragments, whose connections produce the puzzle of a life where Kane is constantly caught up in different relationships, without just one identity. come and reduce it to the same thing. Who is Kane? This is the question of the entire film. It is only variation… Between two worlds without being able to locate it for good.”
concrete
By his way of seeing the creation of concepts, Deleuze's thought is in no way a philosophy of abstraction. “Deleuze likes to compare the art of creating concepts to a construction, in particular to the assembly of a piece of wood by the carpenter or to the manufacture of the sword by the metallurgist, explains Jean-Clet Martin. “An arrangement is necessarily concrete, testifies to a concrete entanglement. The concrete is returning to what 'concretes', enters into 'concretion' or 'concrescence'. This is obviously the case with cinematographic editing and the multiple techniques for producing often strange, surprising connections, capable of holding a multiplicity together. The idea is not to be satisfied with dispersion, nor deconstruction. We don’t live from dismemberment.”
And to specify: “Deleuze is a constructivist, does not seek to dissolve everything but, for each thing, in its difference, the possibility of standing, of concretizing through an event, in the moment which becomes our only recourse. We should not believe that Deleuze is just chaos. For him, the essential thing is to extract from chaos a road, a path, a plan on which we can affirm a will to exist, once and for all times. If only through an event that brings together the hardest elements, the collision of solid materials or exchanges that are sometimes much more liquid. Our lives are of course liquid in places, while still wanting to be reconstituted in affirmations, powers of existence without equivalent.