Mona scoffs this off: beautiful but incorrect.
On Mon, 31 Dec of a certain celerity rid plateau, genet son of genet wrote:
There are those who believe and even claim that Gilles Deleuze was indeed
a Sufi. However Sufis do not commit suicide. Stoic perhaps, but Sufi not
so. No dervish deals death to his body no matter the illness. Deleuze's
death is the final failure of the will, the volunteeristic tradition
reaching its headlong flight of danger. The death of Deleuze was a
failure and not the glorified nonsense many have made it out to be.
Nothing Socratic or heroic about it, nothing noble or pertinent to
philosophy, in fact one could say it was a shame, a shame and so close to
the generation of which he was a part that they, Lyotard, Derrida,
Klossowski were saddened and hurt by his death and the terrible way in
which it was conducted. We feel sorry for Deleuze that the other
followers have not seen fit to be critical of this terrible last act and
the devastation and shame it has brought to the philosophical
inheritance. Whatever made him do this terrible act, the terrible act of
leaping from a window and leaving others behind to clean up the mess,
this act of failure and the final failure of voluntarism which he
represented was an end, a finish. A finish to a line of French thinkers,
and it is too bad. Too bad he could not face his end the way others have
and the way in which others have continued to face their deaths. One
thinks of Foucault and then Deleuze and one can only say, what a shameful
and even a cowardly retreat from the philo who claimed to be of this
-- Deleuze a reason to live in this world! ha! -- world; not so, not so, this is the ultimate druggy death. Better to have
retreated to something else. Jumping out of the window on the bad acid
trip of his life and his "little madness" and his "little bit alcoholic"
is not answerable, nor is it a legacy to leave anyone. Because in the end
a philosopher is judged as much by his life as by his ideas. Others have
suffered -- think of Foucault suffering from A.I.D.s he did not
leap. Deleuze leapt and in doing so lost his place, no it is not a
deleuzian century which ended two years ago. It was a Sartrean century,
a Marxian century, a Kojeve century and so much more, but not the
secondardy leavings of this failure, this delire. Deleuze said it himself
he was not important. Not the great producer of ideas, not the great
miner of new ethics and ontics; so be it. It was what it was, and not one
of the secondary attempts to arrange the unarrangeable will change this.
The century was a century of Derrida and Sartre, Hegel and Marx. In the
end will Foucault and Deleuze be recalled? We think so yes, but in the
minor mode that Deleuze claimed so much to espouse. His inability to
understand the others of his own time, the rising stars of Baudrillard
and Derrida, and the misrecognition of Derrida's importance most of all,
the great staying power of Derrida and his writing machines reveals to
us the weak links in the Deleuze machines. B.W.O. finally is not a real
thing, not a literal thing, but a madman's fantasm from poor sad dying Artaud. So Derrida was right in that last interview and so it is.
Be well and be of good cheer. Deleuze was a Christian and did not even
know it himself.
Deleuze was not Jewish and so could not see the horizon of his own
century which was formed by the great Jewish thinkers of Marx and his
commentators. Deleuze was beautiful but sad and no one was fooled by his
terminological detours about minor literatures nor his Spinozalike claims
--- Mona smiled rue as she read this! her tears SplaShed the CyberPage!
to be against sadness and other negative emotions. This was merely
crankiness on Deleuze'S part. The commentaries on his work are so weak
so badly presented one can see the weakness of the original work more
clearly now than before. There was no political reason to ignore Deleuze
as many claimed and many still blather on about. The work of
interpretation surrounding the work of Sartre and Derrida proves this
point: It is both stronger and better work. Deleuze's real commentators
have not been born yet, we are still too close to the event, and his
ideas are questionable, their place in philosophy has not risen yet and
they might never. This could also be the result of the work with
Guattari which only weakened the Deleuzian project for itself, and made
him a star that was not a real star-- I mean one that endures --but just
a satellite a flash in the philosophical pan. His suicide undermines all
of his work, just as Heidegger's later Nazi ideas makes for questions
about the value and ulitmate meaning of even his great early work.... On
the other hand, one can see everywhere the greatness of Derrida by the
results of his work, by the sheer qauntity and weight of the discourse of
it, the presence of it; of course the quality of work born of Derrida'S
work... All of this has been so relieving to realize and to see how wrong
and how much of a failure, esp. the so called co-productions with
Guattari are. Tha t is where Deleuze sadly went off the rails. That was
the Big Error, the schizo analyst is what watered the Deleuzian project
down.And everyone who looks in their heart of hearts and examines all of
this will see this is what happened to Deleuze. Look at the solo work of
Guattari: from a critical and theoretica! l perspective it has produced
nothing but a mass of incomprehensible jargon and the concrete
achievements have left nothing but more jibberish to be unmasked. Poor
sad Deleuze drawn into all of this nonsense because of his what? His
illness, his alcoholism, his whatever, his denial of responsibility for
his weaknesses before his own generation of philosophers.
All of this is part of the essay to be published next year....
Mona laughed her head off called Jill, who tracked down Franny and going for a drink they went to toast the marauder who came to polemic their dear Daddy Deleuze and his PierrePal while my Guattari gently sleeps! The Fictions of Deleuze and Guattari:A Fictional Poetic Biography:Clifford Duffy.: sufI ReSoNances End Game? MoNA ReFuteS Some Old SuFi Pie from Son of Genet
