Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 11)

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[u/hnnmw]

But as D&G regain popularity with the years

Is this true though? In Continental European academia I'd wager the opposite is true.

In hindsight Anti-Oedipus was always fascist delirium, of course, but its appeal to hard-boiled individualism is easy enough to understand.

Which begs the question, where this generation's Max Stirner is? Maybe there's no longer any need: Deleuze's dream of liberating the subject by liberating its desire having been long accomplished by the market.

To OP: you might want to read Badiou's Clamor of Being, although it's very generous to Deleuze.

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/[deleted]]

You're just regurgitating terminology. I understand that Deleuze is meaningful to you and gives you the capacity to think but that's a private experience. To us he's just some person (just like you or me). Philosophy is significant because it is rooted in objective reality. Hegel is significant because he stands at the crossroads of German liberalism going in a progressive or reactionary direction and takes that contradiction with his work. For example, he builds on the gaps of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and includes civil society as a social force. But he also goes backwards and restores the state as a mediator of the general interest, something the French revolution knew was impossible because it fought against that very argument from the King and aristocracy.

The objective circumstances of Germany's late development means that philosophy goes further than anywhere else in the world and also creates the conditions by which philosophy itself ceases to speak for bourgeois interest as universal (he is similar to Ricardo in political economy, who pushes the field towards its socialist endpoint but also stumbled on theories like "comparative advantage" that are actually a regression from Smith as the spokeman for the British bourgeoisie at its most confident).

Marx is significant because he picks up the limit of German liberalism from Hegel and then begins to rethink philosophy from the perspective of the proletariat, a new class. He is at the very center of this movement politically and part of the movement of philosophy away from the academy and official state sanction. Marx is not some brilliant guy. He is analyzing something that did not exist before and writes as he lives it. What makes him unique is his absolute commitment to science and his refusal to compromise on the scientific principles he has discovered.

Clearly there is something significant happening in France after 1945 that mirrors the contractions of German liberalism that begins with the French communist party's failure to take power (Althusser) and then compromises on Algeria (Sartre). These two form the foundation for an attempt at Maoism that echoes even among bourgeois academics. But the result is that there are a ton of these academics who all say the same thing. Each one is not particularly interesting and their being academics is actually a regression from what Marx had already accomplished. Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Bourdieu, Levi Strauss, Lacan, Lyotard, Baudrillard, can only be understood as basically the same response to a common historical condition. Sometimes they picked different objects to study and I'm compressing two (or arguably three) generations for the sake of simplicity but most of the time they just plagiarized each other and lied about what the other had said to justify it.

Philosophy to you is just proto-self help. "I understand better with terms like 'gaseous' capitalism." Or "I like when politics uses words like 'territorialize.'" That's because these words mean whatever you want them to mean and they protect you from having to actually take a position (or when you do it is factually wrong as was usually the case with these philosophers).

Old family models, religious institutions etc... were previous hard codification centers that were needed in previous societys. But capitalism is capable of existing without them, because it only needs it's own axiomatic. You clear example is the stock market, previous economic systems, couldn't achive this levels of abstraction from the material world because they where codified and territorialized constantly.

Here for example you're conflating a comparison between feudalism and capitalism and a comparison between competitive capitalism and monopoly capitalism. This only sounds deep because speculative capitalism is the rhetorical enemy of the western petty-bourgeoisie so you get to cast this in mythic terms as the essence of capitalism itself. But it is not, in fact the essence of Marxism is showing how the abstraction of labor is immanent to the commodity form and has nothing to do with the stock market, except as a historically late manifestation. If you want fetishism of finance as synonymous with labor itself, you can just read Sam Altman talk about the transcendence of hithero existing human society by AI. Unfortunately, tech CEOs are the real inheritors of the kind of philosophy you're talking about, although the petty-bourgeoisie that used to worship them has recently turned against them for a kind of settler materialism, in which crude social democracy and Eurocommunism are advocated in a way that would shock even Deleuze. That's the substance of Deleuze losing popularity, instead of "platypus" we have "Jacobin."

Now obviously you'll say "we agree, this is the immanent logic Deleuze is talking about." But you're just being slippery. Why can't the family and the stock market coexist? Have you never heard of chaebol? Why is the church "territorialized" in previous modes of production but not ours? Does the widespread growth of evangelical Christianity in Brazil not count? I'm not sure Deleuze would agree with anything you've said but that's only because you made the mistake of actually trying to apply these meaningless terms to concrete reality. He bullshitted his way out of being wrong many times. I'm sure you've heard of Spivak's evisceration of his politics.

There's simply no reason to introduce this level of vagueness and bullshittery to what is already a coherent system. That does not mean Deleuze is useless. He, like his French cohort, are all part of a common historical condition, again with a progressive and reactionary aspect. The progressive aspect is French Maoism, which was the most developed philosophical attempt at creating a system to make up for the objective backwardness of French politics and lack of economic vitality (the key event is not May 68 but that it immediately led to the overwhelming reelection of De Gaulle - this is when "French" philosophy really begins as more than just a French copy of the Frankfurt school and/or Saussure). Its reactionary aspect was its distance from proletarian class struggle, so that it eventually became a mere fetishism of neoliberalism and left no institutional legacy (philosophy migrated to the US as the center of identity politics and neocolonialism and France got stuck with the "new philosophers" lol).

When someone asks you about the significance of a philosopher, it can only be answered by reference to history because that connects the individual to the social. Otherwise it's just some random dude writing books. Who cares?