Todd May | The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze | Theory ...

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3may.html

The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze

5:3 | 2001

Todd May

Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of

Being (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000 (orig. pub. 1997)).
Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political
(New York, Routledge, 2000).
John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
1.

In the small but growing circle of Deleuze scholars on this side

of the Atlantic, there has been a notable shift in recent years
regarding the aspects of Deleuze's thought that receive emphasis.
Early on, with the publication and subsequent translation of (and
the stir in France about) Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze was treated here
as primarily a political philosopher in the Nietzschean mold.
Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with Felix Guattari, was (justly)
taken to be political theory that was influenced by the events of
May '68 in France, and was also (not quite so justly) taken to be
emblematic of the entirety of Deleuze's thought.
2.

In recent years, however, there has been a shift from the study
of his political views toward his ontological ones, and with that
shift has come a corresponding shift in attention from the later
works, many of them co-authored with Guattari, toward the
earlier ones. Deleuze's central work Difference and Repetition,
long neglected here, appeared in translation by Paul Patton (one
of the authors under review here) in 1994, and, alongside other
earlier works, allows English speakers a full range of study of all
of Deleuze's major early works. Combined with the focus placed
on Deleuze's ontology by Constantin Boundas, his most
significant promoter in North America, scholars of Deleuze's
thought are now as likely to read the collaborative works with
Felix Guattari through the eyes of Deleuze's earlier studies as the
other way around.
3.

It is less surprising, then, than it once would have been that of

the three books under review here -- all of them major
contributions to Deleuze studies -- two of them focus largely on
Deleuze's ontology. Alain Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamor of
Being (originally published in French in 1997) and John
Rajchman's The Deleuze Connections both approach his thought

1 of 7

9/1/2015 9:23

Todd May | The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze | Theory ...

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3may.html

by means of his ontology. Paul Patton's Deleuze and the

Political, by contrast, concerns itself mostly with Deleuze's later
work. However, that book also has significant chapters on
Deleuze's ontology.
4.

When I use the term "ontology" in reference to Deleuze's work, I

want to be a bit cautious. Whether or not Deleuze "has" an
ontology, or has an epistemic commitment to any of his
ontological posits, is a source of debate among Deleuze scholars.
John Rajchman, for instance, comments that Deleuze's thought
"puts experimentation before ontology, 'And' before 'Is.'" (p. 6)
In invoking the term, then, I mean only to refer to the
ontological concepts that find their way into Deleuze's work, and
not necessarily to any overarching ontological structure that may
or may not lie there.
5.

Badiou's text is perhaps the most well known and most

controversial of the three. Badiou, a formidable ontologist in his
own right, argues that Deleuze's project, in contrast to most of
the interpretations given to it, is to articulate a thinking rooted in
not multiplicity but rather in univocity. "Deleuze's fundamental
problem," he writes, "is most certainly not to liberate the
multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the
One." (p. 11) In arguing for this claim, Badiou places himself
squarely in context of Difference and Repetition and The Logic
of Sense. I would like to spend a moment rehearsing Badiou's
interpretation and criticism of Deleuze before turning to the
alternatives provided by Rajchman and Patton.
6.

According to Badiou, there are three central principles governing

Deleuze's thought:
"1. This philosophy is organized around a
metaphysics of the One
2. It proposes an ethics of thought that requires
dispossession and asceticism.
3. It is systematic and abstract." (p. 17)
Of these three, it is the first one that founds the other two and
thus receives the bulk of his attention.
7.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze traces a historical lineage

that begins with Duns Scotus and runs through Spinoza to
Nietzsche that takes Being to be univocal. This lineage holds that
Being is said in one and the same sense about all things of which
it is said. Deleuze endorses this view, in large part because, in
Nietzschean fashion, it precludes the resort to some sort of
transcendent by which this world would be judged. From the

2 of 7

9/1/2015 9:23

Todd May | The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze | Theory ...

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3may.html

beginning of his work Deleuze rejects the intervention of any

sort of transcendent into philosophy, and the univocity of Being
is in keeping with that rejection.
8.

Badiou notes that if Deleuze takes this path, one of the hurdles
he has to clear is that the world appears as a multiplicity. How
can Being be univocal and yet seem to be multifarious. In
Badiou's view, Deleuze's strategy is to hold that Being is to be
conceptually approached from two different angles, one from
the side of univocity and the other from the side of multiplicity.
It is the first side that Deleuze privileges. As Badiou puts it, "The
price one must pay for inflexibly maintaining the thesis of
univocity is clear...ultimately, this multiple can only be that of
the order of simulacra." (p. 26)
9.

In itself, that position is not problematic. Where it does develop

difficulties, however, is that this dual angle of vision cannot be
maintained without resort to transcendence, which is what
Deleuze wants to avoid in the first place by invoking the
univocity of Being. For instance, in Deleuze's distinction
between the virtual univocity of Being and its actualization in
the multiplicity of things, the virtual cleaves from the actual and
becomes transcendent: "Deleuze's virtual ground remains for me
a transcendence." (p. 46) Although Deleuze tries to maintain
immanence by invoking the idea of the virtual and the actual as
distinct but indiscernible, this move, in Badiou's eyes, undercuts
the possibility of the virtual serving as a univocal ground of
Being.
10.

It would take a much longer essay to assess the charge that

Badiou has leveled against Deleuze. Let me only suggest here
that I believe Badiou is right in saying that transcendence is a
threat to Deleuze's thought, but it is not at all clear that it is
unavoidable. When Deleuze claims in Difference and Repetition
that Being is difference in itself and in Bergsonism that
Bergson's ontological past is pure difference in kind, he is
opening up the possibility of a virtuality that is as multiplicitous
as the actualities that emerge from it. In focusing on the
univocity of Deleuze's concept of Being, then, Badiou may have
conflated univocity with identity, a move that would certainly
lead to transcendence but which Deleuze himself rejects.
11.

In The Deleuze Connections, John Rajchman, in contrast to

Badiou, follows the more standard route of focusing on Deleuze
as a thinker of multiplicity. In Rajchman's view, the driving force
of Deleuze's thought is the promotion of experimentation, and
this promotion requires that there be many different and not
predetermined ways in which various things can connect with

3 of 7

9/1/2015 9:23

Todd May | The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze | Theory ...

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3may.html

one another (thus the book's title) with no transcendent guiding

or evaluating principle. "Deleuze would see a 'superior
empiricism' prior to any transcendental subjectivity or
intersubjectivity -- a sort of philosophical experimentalism that
would suppose a 'pure immanence,' with no first or
transcendental elements, or which would not be immanent to
anything prior, either subjective or objective." (p. 17)
12.

In contrast to what Deleuze calls, again in Difference and

Repetition, the "dogmatic image of thought," which unfolds
hierarchically from first principles as a universal explainer or
guide and ultimately requires some sort of grounding
transcendence, he offers an empiricism that unfolds (to use a
later image of Deleuze and Guattari's) rhizomatically, in shoots
and connections emanating from a middle without ends: a free
multiplicity that allows for all sorts of nomadic couplings and
connections that are irreducible to an overarching structure.
13.

For such a thought to occur, it requires a logic entirely different

from the traditional logic of predication. It requires a logic of
conjunction and connection. That is why Rajchman, in the quote
cited earlier, claims that Deleuze focuses on the And rather than
the Is. Deleuze does not by any means reject ontology; he
embraces it. But Deleuze's ontology is not based on a logic of
predication. It is based on a logic of connection, conjunction,
and inclusive disjunction.
14.

Here we can see the sharp contrast between Rajchman's view of

Deleuze and Badiou's. For Badiou, Deleuze's logic, because of
his overriding commitment to the univocity of Being, must
always be a dualist tension of the One and the Many. For
Rajchman, on the other hand, the placement of multiplicity
rather than univocity at the core of Deleuze's thought issues out
into a logic as multiplicitous as the ontology it seeks to construct.
For Rajchman, then, the univocity of Being is quite clearly a
univocity of difference, an interpretation that seems to me more
in keeping with the movement of Deleuze's thought than the
univocity ascribed to Deleuze by Badiou. While Badiou,
according to the requirements of his own thought, is
uncomfortable with any univocity and thus seeks to discredit it
in Deleuze, by contrast Rajchman, in seeing that for Deleuze
univocity is a way to maintain both immanence and multiplicity,
gives it a more sympathetic and to my mind proper reading. I
believe that there are tensions in Deleuze's thought that tend
toward transcendence, and have addressed some of them in my
own work, but I find them more at the margins than at the center
of his work.
15.

4 of 7

9/1/2015 9:23

Todd May | The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze | Theory ...

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3may.html

Near the end of The Deleuze Connections Rajchman offers a

motivation for reading Deleuze that seems to me to be right on
target and that offers a transition into Paul Patton's more
political reading of Deleuze. Rajchman writes that, "In a modern
world of stupefying banality, routine, clich, mechanical
reproduction or automatism, the problem is to extract a singular
image, a vital, multiple way of thinking and saying, not a
substitute theology or 'auratic object.'" (p. 125) Deleuze, in his
view, has offered that way of thinking; Rajchman, in my view,
has offered an excellent guide to it. What Paul Patton does is to
show how that way of thinking might be read on the political
level.
16.

Patton, like Rajchman, is a clear and incisive interpreter of

Deleuze. It is probably not out of place to confess here that
when I began to study Deleuze, Patton's essays had more
influence on me than any others I read. This is partly because of
their political character and partly because, in the thicket of
Deleuzian concepts with which I was confronted, he always
seemed to prove a clear guide. Deleuze and the Political brings
together the themes that dominated those essays into an
overview of Deleuze's political thought (which he engaged in
largely in collaboration with Felix Guattari) and how that
thought emerges from the context created by his ontological
approach. Since Patton's ontological approach is largely
consonant with Rajchman's, I will focus on the political
contribution Patton sees Deleuze as making.
17.

As Patton notes, Deleuze does not do political philosophy in any

traditional sense. He does not ask what a just society would be
or inquire into the nature or conditions of justice or rights. His
political views are influenced by Nietzsche, whose own views
stem from his interpretation of the dominating forces of a given
socio-political arrangement. Nietzsche saw himself as a political
diagnostician whose goal was to see in the symptoms of a
situation its arrangement of active and reactive forces. Further,
he saw himself as trying to promote the active ones while
discouraging the reactive ones. Deleuze takes up this approach
in his own work, focusing upon the multiplicity of active forces
that can be released rather than on the question of what people
deserve as members of a given society. That is why his politics
does not simply occur at the level of the individual or the state -although they do make appearances -- but also at the
pre-individual, supra-individual and pre-state, and supra-state
levels as well.
18.

In order to capture what Deleuze is after in his political work,

Patton introduces the concept of "critical freedom." "Critical
freedom differs from the standard liberal concepts of positive

5 of 7

9/1/2015 9:23

Todd May | The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze | Theory ...

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3may.html

and negative freedom by its focus upon the conditions of change

or transformation in the subject, and by its indifference to the
individual or collective nature of the subject." (p. 83) A few
pages later he writes, "It is the freedom to transgress the limits of
what one is presently capable of being or doing, rather than just
the freedom to be or do those things." (p. 85) In Nietzschean
terms, critical freedom concerns the ability to allow the active
forces to be in play rather than taming them in the name of the
current values of a given community.
19.

As Patton notes, the Deleuzian concept of "becoming" is central

to this way of seeing things. A becoming is not a state of being
but a transformation, a movement between things. That
movement may be between any number of things (think here of
Rajchman's concept of connections), but it is always, to use
another Deleuzian term, "minoritarian." A becoming is always a
matter of becoming something other than what is offered by the
dominant conceptual categories of a given society; it is a
movement away from the given toward that which a society
refuses or is as yet unable to recognize. It is, in short, a
disruption of current understandings and ways of being in the
name of what Rajchman above called the singular, the vital, and
the multiple.
20.

Given this view, there is inherent in any socio-political

arrangement a destabilization between those forces that seek to
maintain order -- what Deleuze calls "reterritorializing" forces -and those "deterritorializing" forces which subvert that order. He
sees societies as composed of various lines or vectors of
territorialization and deterritorialization which need, like
Nietzsche's active and reactive forces, to be interpreted in a
given context in order to discover how to proceed. All
proceeding, however, can only be by experimentation, since the
outcome of any given intervention cannot be accurately
predicted. Whether a given deterritorialization will be successful
or interesting or will liberate active forces cannot be assured in
advance, because the "lines of flight" that these
deterritorializations take intersect with the other lines or vectors
of a given society in unforeseeable ways.
21.

Patton notes that the history of societies is never a matter of

whether the deterritorializing or reterritorializing forces prevail
at a given moment, but of how they are interacting in the
unfolding of that society. "Thus, when Deleuze and Guattari
argue that societies are defined by their lines of flight or
deterritorialisation, they mean there is no society that is not
reproducing itself on one level, while simultaneously being
transformed into something else on another level." (p. 107)

6 of 7

9/1/2015 9:23

Todd May | The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze | Theory ...

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3may.html

22.

Given this overview, it is not difficult to see the continuity of

Deleuze's political thought with his ontological approach. In both
cases Deleuze attempts to disrupt stasis and identity by means of
concepts that are fluid and differential. In both he seeks to
undermine what might appear to be inescapable or rigid
categories by introducing ways of thinking that are multiple,
non-hierarchical, and, at times, intentionally ambiguous.
Whether in the end the difficulties that Badiou ascribes to
Deleuze's thought will undermine its ability to offer a coherent
and interesting approach to understanding ourselves and our
world, or whether, even if it possesses the power that Rajchman
and Patton find in it, it will be taken up as a guide, remains to be
seen. Foucault once wrote, in an oft-quoted remark, that one day
the century (which is now the last century) might become known
as Deleuzian. As Deleuze himself would be the first to suggest,
such predictions can never be known in advance.
Todd May is a Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University.
He has written extensively on the thought of Michel Foucault
and Gilles Deleuze. His fifth book, Our Practices, Our Selves,
Or, What it Means to be Human, has just been published by
Penn State Press. He can be reached at mayt@CLEMSON.EDU

Copyright 2001, Todd May and The Johns Hopkins University Press all
rights reserved. NOTE: members of a subscribed campus may use this
work for any internal noncommercial purpose, but, other than one copy
sent by email, print, or fax to one person at another location for that
individual's personal use, distribution of this article outside of the
subscribed campus, in whole or in part, without express written permission
from the JHU Press is expressly forbidden.

7 of 7

9/1/2015 9:23