Deleuzian-Žižekian Bridge Concepts
(Or, Metalogical Rêverie)
Special announcement: Terence Blake will be teaching a year-long course on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and how it interfaces with Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy in 2025. You can sign up for the individual year-long course, or get access by becoming a member of The Portal. To find out more about this project, see: Deleuze and Analysis.
Last summer I discuss the connections between the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek with pluralist philosopher Terence Blake. Blake gives us a unique and first hand account of the history of French philosophical theory and the consequences for the link between classical modern philosophy and postmodern continental philosophy. Here we get an overview of the conceptual development of the thought of Deleuze and how it intersects with psychoanalysis and also the emergence of Žižek’s philosophical career.
Terence Blake is a philosopher whose postgraduate work focused in epistemology and the philosophy of science. He admired and worked on the pluralist thought of Paul Feyerabend and James Hillman before discovering the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard and taught himself French to be able to read their books in the original language. ANTI-OEDIPUS and RHIZOME in particular were a revelation. Today Blake is interested in contemporary French philosophy on the general theme of “pluralism, individuation, and a world of becoming”, principally: Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, François Laruelle, Bruno Latour, Alain Badiou, but I also like Hubert Dreyfus, Stanley Cavell, and William Connolly.
Throughout the video we discuss:
Started philosophical career in continental philosophy as a Hegelian before becoming fascinated with creative frenzy in French philosophy
Deleuze is a pluralist philosopher of multiplicities, but didn’t like that his work was being reduced to difference due to Difference and Repetition
In Deleuze’s follow up, Logic of Sense, difference is not only not a key concept, but not mentioned, and multiplicities come back into their own
Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus seemed to re-invent dogmatism of Lacanian psychoanalysis of the imaginary and the symbolic (before Lacan’s real phase)
Lacan liked Anti-Oedipus but there was a struggle for Lacan’s legacy between Deleuze and Jacques-Alain Miller; Miller won with hard line against Anti-Oedipus
Deleuze took up Bergson, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and renames the philosophical canon conceptually, too much work to put it into Hegelian terms
Žižek revised the standard for reading Hegel and seems to give us material to go further than Hegel, or at least understand the half-thought aspect of Hegel
Deleuze didn’t know Žižek’s interpretation of Hegel, and Deleuze’s strategy of renaming previous concepts in philosophy makes it hard to compare/contrast
Key problem: Deleuze sees contradiction as already codified into a crystallised opposition and prefers instead absolute deterritorialisation
Absolute deterritorialisation could be abridge concept between Deleuze and Žižek’s Hegelian notion of absolute negativity
To find out more about Terence Blake’s work, see:
Deleuze and Analysis Course (year-long course starts January 15th)
