Whilst both Buller and Diprose employ Foucauldian notions of power, retreating from dominant models of oppression, agency and rights, and each potentially share a common understanding of the mechanisms of identification and abjection, it is ultimately on the matter of sexual difference that their texts diverge. Whereas Butler engages in a vigorous polemic against the founding structure of exclusive disjunction (which distributes sex into two discrete classes) Diprose simply "concedes" the matter. Neither thinker, it would .seem, is willing to embrace a radical notion of immanent, non-reciprocal differentiation and each continue to attest to the view that negativity is determinative. However, Butler's work facilitates an understanding of sex as both political and surprising which when cleansed of its latent Hegelianism promises to materialize wild, erotic and beautifully unnatural becomings. Bolton Institute Notes I, Bodies
That
Matter:
On the
pp.2R8, £ 10 99. The Bodies
Discursive
of Women:
Limits Ethics.
of Sex.
Emhiidimeiil
Judith Buller. Roulledge 199.3. and .Sexual Difference,
Rosalyn
IJiprose, Roullcdge 1994. pp. 176. £ 11.99.
Deleuze Conference: Call for Papers The conference will be devoted to the work of Gillcs Deleuze and will be held at the University of Western Australia in Perth from 5-7 December 1996 (which directly follows the annual cultural studies conference which is also being held in Perth). The main themes of the conference arc: Dcleuze and literature, Dclcuze and lllni, Dclcuze and philosophy, Dclcuzc and feminism, and Dclcuzc and Guatteri. Enquiries to: Ian Buchanan, Department of English, University of Western Australia. Nedlands., Perth. Western Australia 6970. Phone: (09) 380 2074. Fax: (09) 380 1030. E-mail:
[email protected].
Journal
of the liritish
Society
for Fhcnonwnology.
Vt)l. 27, No. 2. M a y l*>96
^OOiC
^VIEWS
G I L L E S D E L E U Z E : A N APPRENTICESHIP I N PHILOSOPHY, by Michael Hardt, London: UCL Press, 1993, pp.134 + notes, bibliography and index. In his excellent text Hardt attempts to identify and trace the development of the fundamental themes of Deleuze's thought. For Hardl the key landmarks in Deleuze's "philosophical apprenticeship" are the texts he published during the 1950s and '60s on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza. Hardt devotes considerable attention to the intellectual context of Deleuze's thought and to the question of how to read his texts. Hardt resists the reduction of Deleuze's project (and poststructuralism generally) to the terms of postmodernism. For Hardt, Deleuze "operates on the highest planes of ontological speculation" (xiii) and, in contradistinction to postmodernism, is engaged in the investigation of "new grounds for philosophical and political inquiry ... in the articulation and affirmation of alternative lineages that arise from within the tradition itself' (ix). Hardt claims that the Anglo-American appropriation of poststructuralist thought has often failed to appreciate the extent to which it was defined by a rejection of the "framework of generalised Hegelianism" (x) that had dominated French thought for many years. Hardt suggests that the two principal concerns of poststructuralism were (i) "how to evade a Hegelian foundation" {ibid.) and (ii) the resulting "problem of recuperation" (xi). For Hardt it is Deleuze who "mounts the most focused and precise attack on Hegclianism" (xi) and he claims that "the cutting edge of Deleuze's thought is a persistent, implacable siege on Hegelianism, an attack on the negative" (xviii). Hardt identifies two central aspects of Deleuze's response to these fundamental concerns of poststructuralism, (i) the formulation of "a nondialectical conception of negation" and (ii) the development of "a constitutive theory of practice" (xii). The core of Hardt's text consists of a series of readings of Deleuze's main texts on Bergson, Nietz.sche and Spinoza in which Hardt traces a rigorous developmental thread. Hardt describes this evolution as, "the trajectory I seek to trace from a logic of being to an ethics and finally a politics of being" (125, fn.5). Hence, for Hardt, Deleuze's texts on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza demonstrate that "the principles that animate being are the very same principles that animate an ethics and a practical constitution of political organization" (57). Hardt shows how Deleuze develops, through his encounters with Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, a radical ontology in which "he denies any preconstituted structure of being or any teleological order of existence ... the only nature available to ontological discourse is an absolutely artificial conception of nature, a hybrid nature, a nature produced in practice" (xiii-xiv). For Hardt, Deleuze appreciates that "only materialism can adequately grasp this understanding of being" (114) an approach to ontology which is "as new as (he infinitely plastic universe of cyborgs and as old as the tradition of materialist philosophy" (xiv). As Hardt puts it, "pure ontology and absolute materialism: lhe.se are the complimentary positions that Deleuze sustains against the tide of his contemporaries" (79). Hardt shows how Deleuze develops an
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"immanent and materialist ontological discourse" (xiii) that affirms the "superficiality and plenitude" of being ( I 15). The "positivity and materialism" (1 14) of Deleuz.c's ontology rests, Hardt argues, on his retrieval of an "alternative tradition" (Lucretius, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Bergson, etc) distinct from "the masterline of metaphysical speculation" (Plato. Hegel and Heidegger) (115). At the heart of Deleuze's project is, Hardt claim.s. the development of an ontology of difference and multiplicity as an alternative to the Hegelian ontology of determination and negation. Hardl claims that Deleuze draws support in this endeavour from the Scholastics' reflections on causality and their thematisation of the caiixa sui nature of being. In particular, Hardt claims the Scholastics' account of efficient (or "internal") causality "provides a key to a coherent account of Deleuzc's entire discourse on difference" (xv). Through an explication of four principal themes - ontology, affirmation, practice and constitution (112-122) - Hardt outlines the radical conception of a democratic political practice implicit in Deleuze's thought. In Hardt's view "Deleuze can help us develop a dynamic conception of democratic society as open, horizontal, and collective" (119-120). In a typical gesture, Hardt claims that, "one need not reject ontology lout court, in order to affirm the openness of ends in society" (ibid) as he states. "Deleuzian being is open to the intervention of political creations and social becomings ... this openness is precisely the "producibility" of being that Deleuze has appropriated from Scholastic thought ... what links the ontological to the political, is the expression of power: the free conflict and composition of the field of force" (ibid.). Hardt shows how Deleuze contrasts vertical structures of imposed and predetermined "order" with horizontal, democratic processes of "organisation" characterised by "a continual process of composition and decomposition through social encounters on an immanent field of forces" (120-121). Throughout his text Hardt considers some of the critiques of Deleuze's thought that have been proposed by such Hegelian orientated commentators as Butler (52-53), Houlgate (37-38) and Rose (22-25). The.se powerful and lucid sections of Hardt's text warrant serious attention by those interested in the Hegel/Nietzsche relation and the different, irreconcilable, lineages generated by their thought. Although Hardt does not deny the power and importance of Deleuze's later texts the status he accords the "early" Deleuzc, and his "historical" texts in particular, is contentious. For Hardt, Deleuze's later texts "are in large part reworkings of the cluster of problems developed in this formative period of intense and independent research" (xx). Whatever problems there may be with this claim there is no doubt that Hardt demonstrates the crucial importance of the texts produced during "the period of Dclcuzc's subterranean research" (ibid.). Of course, even within the period Hardt addres.ses he is selective. Surprisingly, given the neo-Kantian structures and terminology of Anti-Oedipus, Hardt ignores Kant's Critical Philosophy although he devotes considerable attention to Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche in terms of the radicalisation of Kantian critique (27-30, 50-53, 115-116). Hardt's relentlessly ontological interpretation of Deleuze rai.ses, as Hardt appreciates (xiii, 123n.3), the question of the relation between Deleuze and Heidegger even though Delcuze was "never fascinated by the work of Martin Heidegger" (I25n.6). Although Hardt seems to reductively misconstrue Heidegger's notion of "Bcing-in-the-World" (114) it is incontestable that Heidegger was never a "materialist" and probably true that his conception of being is not as "superficial" as Deleuze's!
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Many will undoubtedly find Hardt's reading of Deleuze to be overly cautious and too conservative. Hardl acknowledges that his relentlessly ontological reading of Deleuze may seem "excessive" (xix). Nonetheless the sobriety, clarity and rigour of Hardt's text will make a significant contribution to the continual growth of serious philosophical discussion ol Dclcuze. Haidt's text provides a much needed, informed di.scussion of a materialist anti-humanist thinker of difference and multiplicity who.se powerful rethinking of ontology, ethics and political practice offers a radical alternative to the Hegelian and phenomenological traditions that have thus far dominated "Continental" philosophy in the English-speaking world. Jim Urpeth University of Greenwich E N I G M A T I C O R I G I N S : T R A C I N G T H E T H E M E OF H I S T O R I C I T Y T H R O U G H HEIDEGGER'S WORKS, by Hans Ruin. Stockholm, Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1994, pp.x-i-294, SEK2I8. For the epigraphs of the introduction and each of the seven chapters of Enigmatic Origins the author has succeeded in finding sentences in which Heidegger writes of a Riitsel, that is to say, a riddle, puzzle or enigma. Heidegger keeps his readers guessing. Ruin explains why. He docs .so through an investigation of topics which include the "proto-historicality" of intentional analysis, the many senses of "history", the hermeneutic situation, hearing and keeping silent, historicity as address of another, guilt and conscience, the historicization of temporality, the time of historicity, the Augenblick, historicity and truth, and the other beginning. The works of Heidegger on which these investigations draw are mainly though not solely Contributions to Philosophy and those preceding it. Ruin demonstrates his familiarity also with the extensive .secondary literature on his chosen topic. He has chosen not to treat the topic of the history of being and of metaphysics. " I have refrained here from discussing the content of Heidegger's history of being, since my principal interest is the meaning of "the historical' as itself a mode of being (or rather as the mode in which being is given)." His principal interest is. as he puts it elsewhere, "the being of the access to being", hence the way discursive language both helps and hinders thai access. But does this not mean that the relation of the discursive language of the historiography (Historie) of metaphysics to historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) is one way of access to the enigma of access? In any case, it is to be hoped that Ruin will treat the history of being in another publication. The present one demonstrates that he is very well equipped to do so. He is especially enlightening on the issue of historicism understood as a form of relativism. He brings out why Heidegger considered that to be a non-issue. In doing so he is informative about the historical sources of the debate over historicism in the work of Dilthey, Rickert and Husserl. As for the continuation of that debate. Ruin observes that .several contemporary commentators including Richard Rorty assimilate Heidegger's construal of historicality to the very historicism it is meant to undercut. He cites Rickcrt's statement "Histoiicism as a Weltanschauung is something that philosophy will always have to combat". Heidegger combats it by combatting Weltanschauimg philosophy, or, it would be more correct to say, by simply letting it be. Another question fruitfully developed in the book is that of indebtedness. "To be historical is to exist in the medium of loss and indebtedness, and to do so in a
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