Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( də-LOOZ, French: [ʒil dəløz]; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.An important part of Deleuze’s oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson, with particular influence derived from Spinoza. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams’s criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the “greatest philosophers”. Although he once characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician”, his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literary theory, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari did not offer a single, direct treatise on Islam but instead, their work is interpreted and applied to Islam, particularly through their concept of the rhizome. Scholars use Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas, such as atheism as a secretion of religion, assemblages, and nomadology, to analyze Islam’s inherent diversity and non-hierarchical potential, challenging Orientalist views of a rigid, monolithic Islam. This framework allows for an understanding of Islam not as a single, fixed structure, but as a dynamic, ever-changing system with internal contradictions and lines of flight.
Key Concepts and Their Application to Islam
Rhizome vs. Tree: Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a rhizome—an interconnected, non-hierarchical network—is often used to analyze the heterogeneity within Islam. This contrasts with the arborescent (tree-like) structure of Western thought, which emphasizes a singular origin and hierarchical organization.
Atheism as Secretion: A central idea is that all religions, including Islam, “secrete atheism”. This concept is used to explore the potential for radical, non-dogmatic forms of thought within Islamic Sufism and other traditions that question established religious authority.
Assemblage: The “machinic assemblage” is a useful tool for mapping the complex, interconnected web of political, social, and cultural factors that constitute Islam, rather than reducing it to a singular “political Islam”.
Nomadology: The concept of “nomad thought” can be applied to understand the dynamic, non-territorial aspects of religious practice and belief, though scholars also note that Deleuze and Guattari sometimes linked nomadic aspects of religion to violence. Critique of Traditional Views of Islam
Challenging Orientalism: Deleuze and Guattari’s framework offers a way to move beyond the Orientalist tendency to portray Islam as inherently rigid, fanatical, and static.
Beyond Monolithic Interpretation: By focusing on the inherent multiplicity and “lines of flight” within Islamic thought, their work provides a non-essentializing, fluid, and empirical way to understand Islamic belief systems. “Deleuzo-Islam” and its Implications
Inversion of Orthodoxy: Scholars like Michael Knight have used these concepts to explore what he terms “Deleuzo-Islam,” a framework that seeks to understand Islam through these non-hierarchical, decentralized principles, leading to a pursuit of an “inversion of orthodoxy”.
Focus on Actualization: The approach emphasizes how Islamic concepts, texts, and practices are actualized and transformed through their connections to various forces and communities, rather than being fixed in a transcendent realm.
In Deleuze’s theory, especially in works with Félix Guattari, repression is not merely a Freudian denial of desire but a fundamental process of social and psychic territorialization where desire is captured, coded, and made productive for the existing social order, like capitalism. Instead of stifling desire, this “anti-production” rechannels it into controlled forms (like money or commodified desires) to ensure the stability of the system and create docile subjects rather than truly liberating revolutionary desire.
Desire vs. Repression:
Desire as Revolutionary: For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is a potent, productive force capable of creating new social formations. It is a “desiring-machine” that naturally connects and flows.
Social Repression: To maintain the status quo, social structures (like capitalism or psychoanalysis) redirect this productive energy.
Psychic Repression: Individuals are then psychically “trained” to internalize these social codes, making them complicit in their own repression and the reproduction of the system.
The Process of Territorialization:
Deterritorialization: Capitalism, for example, can initially “deterrritorialize” or free up desires by breaking down old codes.
Re-territorialization: However, this freedom is temporary. The system then recaptures and re-territorializes desire, channeling it into specific, profit-driven avenues (e.g., consumerism, specific forms of expression).
Examples:
Capitalism: Uses the “free interchange of money” to repress and codify desire for profit
Psychoanalysis: Reduces desire to an Oedipal, sexual complex, thereby domesticating and limiting it within familial structures. Consequences:
Docile Subjects: The combined effect of social and psychic repression makes individuals “docile” and serves the interests of power structures.
Anti-Production: This process is called “anti-production” because it blocks the full, revolutionary potential of desire, limiting it to serve established systems rather than generating true novelty. In essence, Deleuze’s concept of repression moves beyond simple inhibition to reveal how desire itself is harnessed and transformed to create and sustain particular social and psychic realities, rather than being simply suppressed or eliminated.
Does this diagram I made accurately reflect the description …In Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, the Body without Organs (BwO) refers to a state of being that resists organization and stratification, a concept they drew from the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, a man tormented by delusions of God’s attack on his internal organs. For Deleuze and Guattari, Schreber’s experience illustrates the negative side of a BwO, a “catatonicized” body vulnerable to re-stratification, while also serving as a conceptual link to a desired positive BwO: a fluid, unorganized state of pure potential and intensified experience, rather than the rigid, fixed structure of an organism.
Schreber’s Case and the BwO
Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911)
was a German judge who, in his memoirs, detailed his experiences with psychosis, including the belief that God was attacking his body.
Organ-Machines and Desiring-Machines
: Deleuze and Guattari interpreted Schreber’s persecution by divine forces as an attack from “organ-machines” and “desiring-machines”.
A Negative Body without Organs
: Schreber’s experience is presented as a negative example, a BwO that is not a liberating state but a tortured one where his body is pierced and controlled by these machines, resisting organization only to be tormented.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Concept of the BwO
Rejection of Organism
: The core idea of the BwO is its resistance to being an organism, which is a body with fixed, hierarchical, and integrated parts.
A Plane of Intensity
: The BwO is a smooth, unorganized surface, a potentiality or plane of pure intensity where flows of desire and experience are not channeled by pre-defined structures but are allowed to circulate freely.
A “Becoming”
: To “make oneself a body without organs” is not about becoming a negative state like Schreber’s, but actively experimenting to create connections, activate potentials, and transform one’s body beyond existing categories.
A Positive Alternative
: The positive BwO, envisioned as a “full” or “healthy” state, actively organizes and re-organizes flows to create new potentials, rather than succumbing to the rigid patterns of the organism.
In essence, Schreber’s case demonstrates the potential pitfalls of lacking organization, while Deleuze and Guattari’s concept offers a positive, liberating alternative—a fluid, malleable body that resists fixed categories and encourages continuous becoming.
YouTube
Deleuze on the Image of Thought - YouTube
An introduction to Deleuze (what is philosophy) - YouTube
Concept Creation in Philosophy
Philosophy, according to Gilles Deleuze, is fundamentally about the creation of concepts. This idea is central to his book What is Philosophy?, co-written with Felix Guattari. They argue that philosophy's primary role is not about consensus or universal truth but about innovatively responding to ever-changing problems. The key element in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is that concepts must evolve as new problems arise, suggesting a dynamic rather than static understanding of philosophical inquiry. Philosophy, in this view, constantly reinvents itself by creating new concepts to address new issues, which differentiates it distinctly from sciences that often seek permanent solutions to problems.
Philosophy and Its Social Role
Deleuze and Guattari highlight philosophy’s social implications by insisting it involves more than just academic debate; it plays a critical role in managing societal chaos. They contrast philosophy with science by suggesting that while science aims to stabilize and give precise names to elements of chaos (like categorizing emotions), philosophy deals with chaos by creating concepts that help us navigate complex human experiences without reducing their intensity. This process is described metaphorically: if science is a dam that controls and manages the flow of water, philosophy is like a sailboat that maneuvers through the winds of chaos, using them to move forward without seeking to tame them completely.
Accessibility and Complexity in Philosophy
Despite their profound contributions to philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari’s writings are notorious for their complexity and dense academic jargon, which can alienate those not deeply versed in philosophical study. This presents a paradox in their work; while they advocate for philosophy's active role in public discourse, their own texts remain largely inaccessible to the general public. This raises questions about the practical application of their philosophical ideas outside academic circles and whether philosophy should adapt to be more inclusive while retaining its depth and complexity.
“Philosophy is the art of creating concepts.”
“Communication only leads to consensus, which inevitably reinforces the dogmas of our society.”
“Philosophers always create concepts in response to problems.”
“If one can still be a Platonist, a Cartesian, or a Kantian today, it is because one is justified in thinking that their concepts can be reactivated in our problems and inspire those concepts that need to be created.”
“Philosophy gives consistency to chaos while preserving its intensity.”
Quotes
- “It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.” ― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia