INTRODUCTION

During the studio era the American film industry was dominated by eight companies, the Big Five (Paramount, Loew's [MGM], 20th Century-Fox, Warner Bros and RKO) and the Little Three (Columbia, Universal and United Artists). The Big Five were vertically integrated companies: they produced their films at self-owned studios; they developed a network of offices in the United States and around the world to market their films and deliver them to the theatres; and they owned a relatively small number of theatres in the United States and in key European countries where they exhibited their own (as well as each other's) films. The Little Three were organised in the same way as the Big Five but were not integrated on the same level: Columbia and Universal produced and distributed their own films but did not own any theatres, while United Artists was mainly a distribution company even though, for a time, it owned a small number of theatres in certain key markets. According to Douglas Gomery, the eight studios produced about three-quarters of all features made, while this product was responsible for about 90 per cent of the box office takings. This suggests that roughly one-quarter of all films were made and distributed outside the eight studios, while 10 per cent of all dollars spent on cinema-going were for films made and distributed by non-studio outfits.

What does it mean today to speak of intensities in the domain of political philosophy? The intensive, says Deleuze, is the untimely. To be untimely, for Deleuze, is the essential task of philosophy, its paradoxical intensity – and on this point, I am in total agreement with him. But still the question must be raised – what is it to be untimely today, in our postmodern situation? That is the point.

In order to open a space for reflection on these questions, I would like to examine the difficulty and the problem that Gilles Deleuze encounters when he discusses the birth of philosophy. To understand the sense in which democracy presents him with a problem, I will specify his own philosophical context. In fact, I propose to take a certain distance from Deleuze's political philosophy, but my intention is not at all to invalidate or to devalue it; I maintain that his is among the few capable of helping us to understand our present. My objective is to circumscribe a political attitude that I qualify as being arrogant towards democracy – rather than anti-democratic. This attitude has been widespread in France in the ambience that followed May 1968, and continues to be among us in the intellectual world of the human sciences and, particularly, philosophy. This attitude strikes me as lacking untimeliness – at times, even as harmful and not justified by the principles that lie at the foundations of the Deleuzian philosophical system of the multiple.

In his article, ‘Un, multiple, multiplicité(s)’ (2000), Badiou reiterates his earlier objections to Deleuze: (1) Deleuze's conception of ‘set’ is anachronistic because it is pre-Cantorian. It ignores the extraordinary immanent dialectic that mathematics has bestowed (dotē) this concept since the end of the nineteenth century; (2) Deleuze's concept of multiplicity remains inferior (because of its qualitative differentiation) to the concept of multiple emerging from the history of contemporary mathematics; and (3) the qualitative determination of multiplicities makes it impossible to subtract them from their equivocal re-absorption into the One (of classical ontology). In the same article, Badiou complains that those who attacked his interpretation of Deleuze (that is, Arnaud Villani and José Gil) (1998) missed their mark because they failed to take into account the ontological alternative he provides in L‘être et l'évènement (hereafter EE):

It is not my intention to revisit the question of whether Deleuze is, or is not, committed to a unitary conception of Being. Instead, I want to focus my attention on Badiou's own ontology. In particular, I want to examine the implications that Badiou's mathematical ontology has for his theory of the event.

To be ‘Deleuzian’ represents for me a sign, not of recognition between accomplices in the context of something that could function as a ‘Deleuzian school’, but rather a sign of conniving or a ‘sign of intelligence’, according to the expression that Janicaud liked to use. I am thinking of a sign sent, not to a person (even if she is captivating), but rather to the objects that swirl around her – to her themes, her style and mannerisms, her concepts, or, if you prefer it, to the ‘mist that she brings to the room’ of your life when she writes, speaks or thinks. Above all, it is not a matter of ‘reverence’, because to be Deleuzian is to be ‘on the look out’, in order to test how far the concepts of Deleuze's philosophy may be stretched, without breaking.

How Does One Enter Deleuze?

I entered Deleuze's philosophy because, without initially understanding all its propositions, I could sense within it a great power. I started trusting it, because I had a complete literary formation, and I read a lot of German and Anglo-American novels. I had noticed that Deleuze's analysis coincided with mine, or went beyond it, in directions that were enriching my own. At the same time, I began to notice that his writings on art were what I had been waiting for for a long time, and I saw the artists around me reading Deleuze and finding him helpful in their practice.

The reader will notice that Gilles Deleuze barely makes an appearance in what follows. This essay is, for all intents and purposes, an essay about David Hume. Yet, this is an admittedly odd reading of Hume; a reading that refuses to engage him on epistemological terms but is, rather, committed to reading Hume as a ‘minor’ literary figure. Of course, Deleuze wrote a book on Hume and his insights on Hume's theories of sensation pepper the gamut of his philosophic oeuvre to the point that Deleuze declares that: ‘[T]he logic of sense is inspired in its entirety by empiricism’ (Deleuze 1990: 20) With this in mind, the following is an attempt to expand on the political implications of what Deleuze, in his Preface to Empiricism and Subjectivity, refers to as our ‘habit of saying I’ when speaking of our selves. The hope, then, is to think of Hume as a swerve, a line of flight oddly postured between Anglo-American and poststructural theories of aesthetics and politics.

I begin with an ending. In the final version of his will, written a few months before his death, Hume makes one last revision to his oeuvre.

In a 1990 interview, Deleuze addresses the question of the relationship of politics to art via a reflection on the modern problem of the ‘creation of a people’. The artists Deleuze admires (he names here Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Klee, Berg, Huillet and Straub) have a deep need of a people, but the collectivity they invoke does not yet exist – ‘the people are missing [le peuple manque]’ (Deleuze 1990: 235/174). Artists cannot themselves create a people, and the people in their struggles cannot concern themselves directly with art, but when a people begins to take form, an interactive process emerges that connects art and the people:

Deleuze nowhere elaborates at length on the idea of fabulation, but it forms part of a rich complex of concepts central to his approach to the ethics and politics of art. It is also a rather elusive concept, which is Bergsonian only in a special sense that deserves some investigation.

This essay stages a confrontation between the state of precariousness at the level of being and thought in Deleuze's vitalist ontology of the continuum and that of Badiou's ontology of the multiple, which lacks the virtual One-All. It wishes to show how a philosophy based on the continuity between being and thought (Deleuze) and a philosophy settling for the disjunction between thought and being (Badiou) situate precariousness according to different co-ordinates.

Deleuze establishes a kind of continuity between being and thought such that, in their simultaneous genesis, an identity between Physis and Nous is sketched, with the result that the engendering process of the mind coincides with the process of generation of things themselves. Being is apprehended as organic life – as a field of immanence in a state of becoming, agitated by fluxes and differences in intensity and produced in a variety of actual cases. Its production occurs along the lines of a genesis inscribed in the virtual-actual couple that is opposed to the schema of the possible-real. The possible-real shuts itself up in the circle of the similar, rendering impossible the emergence of anything original and making the real a mere copy of the possible. Existence, in this case, turns out to be nothing but a selection from a depository of possibles that are already always given. On the other hand, the virtual-actual couple is able to account for the univocity of a being that is never distinct from its existing concretions – its expressions – by positing every actual solution as an ephemeral, creative differenciation, with no resemblance to the virtual problems that it develops. Events are the novel singularities that flash endlessly inside states of affairs.

‘Essences’ have had a hard time of it in philosophy over the last forty years; on both sides of the analytic-continental divide, ‘essentialism’ is a dirty word. Yet what if we have no adequate idea of what an essence is? It is one of Deleuze's great virtues that he forces us to think about these questions in new ways, particularly with the theory put forward in his Spinoza books of ‘particular essences’. Since essences are traditionally construed in a more or less Platonic way, as universals or classes which group together individuals in virtue of a set of common characteristics, the notion of a particular essence sounds like a contradiction in terms. In Platonism, according to its received meaning, we have on one side essences (Forms, Ideas or Types), which are universal, unchanging, selfidentical, unitary and eternal, and on the other side we have particular beings, which are changeable, different from themselves, divided into different qualities, and exist in the world of time and space. Platonic essences are fixed and transcendent, real but ideal, abstract and invariant. Deleuze's reading of Spinoza proposes, on the contrary, essences that are mobile and immanent in material things, real and material, concrete and subject to variation. If ‘essentialism’ is belief in Platonic essences – invariant, universal and necessary characteristics that exist somehow independently of the variable particulars these characteristics ‘identify’ as belonging to a certain class or type, and which remain changeless and self-identical through all the changes in contingent states of affairs – or in something that can be seen as issuing from this Platonic notion, then Deleuze's theory of particular essences is in no way essentialist.

In this essay I will explore the eco-philosophical aspects of the ethics of becoming, with reference to the project of nomadic subjectivity and sustainability. The urge that prompts this investigation is not only abstract, but also very practical. Nomadic philosophy mobilises one's affectivity and enacts the desire for in-depth transformations in the status of the kind of subjects we have become. Such in-depth changes, however, are at best demanding and at worst painful processes. My political generation, that of the baby-boomers, has had to come to terms with this harsh reality, which put a check on the intense and often fatal impatience that characterises those who yearn for change.

We lost so many of its specimen to dead-end experimentations of the existential, political, sexual, narcotic or technological kind. Although it is true that we lost as many if not more of our members to the stultifying inertia of the status quo – a sort of generalised ‘Stepford wives’ syndrome – it is nonetheless the case that I have developed an acute awareness of how difficult changes are. Which is not meant as a deterrent against them; on the contrary: I think that the current political climate has placed undue emphasis on the risks involved in pursuing social changes, playing ad nauseam the refrain about the death of ideologies. Such a conservative reaction aims at disciplining the citizens and reducing their desire for the ‘new’ to docile and compulsive forms of consumerism.

Philosophies of difference, where difference maintains its grounds from beginning to end without being eclipsed by identity, are exceedingly rare. In fact, if we subtract from their ranks those which, in their struggle to maintain the primacy of difference, succumb to the ineffable and turn their back on the creation of concepts, the number of philosophical heterologies turns out to be minuscule. And of course it is not by chance that the fortunes of philosophical heterologies are better served inside process philosophies. Although to be a process philosopher is not a guarantee that one will also be a philosopher of pure difference, movement and the reflection on movement that constitute the raison d'être of the philosophies of process offer a rich soil for the nurture of tou heterou philia. In the distance travelled between the Heraclitian river with its flowing waters being eternally qualified as alla kai alla (different upon different) and the Bergsonian durée, the birthrights of difference are well protected. But a process philosophy, in order to support a purely heterological thought, has to be capable of doing without subjects steering the process (or being steered by it), without substantive names designating ‘blocks’ in motion, and without points of origin or destination marking the allowed trajectory. Only a process philosophy where process and product are the same can hope to prevent the subordination, in the final analysis, of difference to identity.

Introduction

One of Deleuze's primary aims in Difference and Repetition is to present a new theory of Ideas (dialectics) in which Ideas are conceived of as both immanent and differential. What I would like to examine in this paper is the relation between Deleuze's theory of Ideas and the theme of immanence, particularly with regard to the theory of Ideas found in Kant's three critiques. In using the term ‘Idea’, Deleuze is not referring to the common-sense use of the term, or the use to which empiricists like Hume or Locke put it, for whom the word ‘idea’ refers primarily to mental representations. Rather, Deleuze is referring to the concept of the Idea that was first proposed by Plato, and then modified by Kant and Hegel. Plato, Kant and Hegel are the three great figures in the history of the theory of Ideas, for whom Ideas are as much ontological as epistemological. Deleuze's name could no doubt be added to that list, since he has modi- fied the theory of Ideas in a profound and essential manner.

In what follows, however, I would like to focus primarily on Deleuze's relation to Kant rather than Plato or Hegel. Deleuze tends to index his own theory of Ideas on Kant, and with regard to the theory of Ideas his relations to Plato and Hegel are, in a sense, somewhat secondary. There are two reasons for the priority Deleuze gives to Kant on the question of dialectics.

Is it possible to answer the question of politics in the work of Deleuze, without going through desire and its variants? Deleuze's work spans twenty-six publications, authored by him or written in collaboration with the psychiatrist Félix Guattari. In these texts, Deleuze deals with the thought of Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Foucault, with the writings of Kafka, Proust, Sacher-Masoch, with Francis Bacon's painting, and with cinema and theatre. Politics, however, because only traces and indices of it exist in his texts, seems to be permanently put to question. At first sight, it is not even clear that there is, in his work, a political thematic – if by ‘political thematic’ we understand the organisation of the polis. We find no political treatise and no political programme to analyse or to comment upon. And if we look at the political orientation of the philosopher, it does not appear to be particularly fecund – its main traits are very basic: Deleuze travelled little, had never been a member of the Communist Party, had never been a phenomenologist or a Heideggerean, did not renounce Marx, did not repudiate May 1968 (Beaubatie 2000: 263).

On the other hand, Anti-Oedipus, the subtitle of which is Capitalism and Schizophrenia, deals with fundamental political themes. In it, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the state, the war machine, revolution, minorities as well as molar and molecular structures. The question of fascism is analysed in it and a universal vision of history is proposed.