WHY DELEUZE? LECTURE: MARCH 11, 2010 RIETVELD ACADEMIE AMSTERDAM
Gilles Deleuze
1. Because Deleuze defines philosophy as an act of creation.
2. Because his concept of thinking is about the invention of something new.
3. Because to affirm the possibility of the new means resisting the bad effects of resentment and disappointment.
4. Because Deleuze’s philosophy is an ontology that breaks up with idealism, negativity and bad and good consciousness.
5. Because its insistence on the creativity of the human subject is a strong weapon against narcissism.
6. Because its definition of reality as a play of forces opens up to the implicit incommensurability of the world.
7. Because this incommensurability is simply another name for what Deleuze calls the becoming or (with Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault) the exterior (le dehors).
8. Because the becoming (or the exterior) defines the infinitude in the here and now.
9. Because with its idea of a transcendental empirism he is refusing both pseudo-options of a simple realism and a simple idealism (or particu-larism and universalism).
10. Because his philosophy defines the position of the human subject in between opinion and chaos.
11. Because the insistence on the dynamics of thinking as de-territorialization, makes out of philosophy more an experience then an academic knowledge-procedure.
12. Because the image of philosophy he defends implies the necessity to contact the unknowable and the unlivable (chaos, exterior, incommensurability).