Why a Deleuze dictionary? It might seem a particularly craven, disrespectful, literal-minded and reactive project to form a Deleuze dictionary. Not only did Deleuze strategically change his lexicon to avoid the notion that his texts consisted of terms that might simply name extra-textual truths, he also rejected the idea that art, science or philosophy could be understood without a sense of their quite specific creative problem. A philosopher's concepts produce connections and styles of thinking. Concepts are intensive: they do not gather together an already existing set of things (extension); they allow for movements and connection. (The concept of 'structure' in the 20th century, for example, could not be isolated from the problem of explaining the categories of thinking and the image of an impersonal social subject who is the effect of a conceptual system; similarly, the concept of the 'cogito' relates the mind to a movement of doubt, to a world of mathematically measured matter, and to a distinction between thought and the body.) To translate a term or to define any point in a philosopher's corpus involves an understanding of a more general orientation, problem or milieu. This does not mean that one reduces philosophy to its context - say, explaining Deleuze's 'nomadism' as a reaction against a rigid structuralism or linguistics. On the contrary, to understand a philosophy as the creation of a plane, or as a way of creating some orientation by establishing points and relations, means that any philosophy is more than its manifested terms, more than its context. In addition to the produced texts and terms, and in addition to the explicit historical pressupositions, there is an unthought or outside - to the problem, desire or life of a philosophy. For Deleuze, then, reading a philsopher requires going beyond his or her produced lexicon to the deeper logic of production from which the relations or sense of the text emerge. This sense itself can never be said; in repeating or recreating the milieu of a philosopher all we can do is produce another sense, another said. Even so, it is this striving for sense that is the creative drive of reading a philosopher. So, when Deleuze reads Bergson he allows each term and move of Bergson's philosophy to revolve around a problem: the problem of intuition, of how the human observer can think from beyond its own constituted, habituated and all too human world.
It would seem, then, that offering definitions of terms in the form of a dictionary - as though a word could be detouched from its philosophical life and problem - would not only be at odds with the creative role of philosophy; it would also sustain an illusion that the philosophical text is nothing more than its 'said' and that becoming-Deleuzian would be nothing more than the adoption of a certain vocabulary. Do we, in systematising Deleuze's thought, reduce an event and untimely provocation to one more doxa?
If Deleuze's writings are difficult and resistant this cannot be dismissed as stylistically unfortunate, as though he really ought to have just sat down and told us what 'difference in itself' or 'immanence' really meant. Why the difficulty of style and vocabulary if there is more to Deleuze than a way of speaking? A preliminary answer lies in the nexus of concepts of 'life', 'immanence' and 'desire'. The one distinction that Deleuze insists upon, both when he speaks in his own voice in Difference and Repetition and when he creates his sense of the history of philosophy is the 'image of thought'. Philosophy begins from an image of what it is to think, whether that be the grasp of ideal forms, the orderly reception of sense impressions, or the social construction of the world through language. The concepts of a philsophy both build and build upon, that image. But if the history of philosophy is a gallery of such images of thought - from the conversing Socrates and the mathematical Plato, to the doubting Descartes and logical Russel - some philosophers have done more than stroll through this gallery to add their own image. Some have in 'schizo' fashion, refused to add one more proper relation between thinker and truth, and have pulled thinking apart. One no longer makes one more step within thought - tidying up a definition, or correcting a seeming contradiction. Only when this happens does philosophy realise power or potential.
Philosophy is neither correct nor incorrect in relation to what currently counts as thinking; it creates new modes or styles of thinking. But if all philosophy is creation, rather than endorsement, of an image of thought, some philosophers have tried to give a sense or concept to this creation of thinking: not one more 'image of thought' but 'thought without an image'. Deleuze's celebrated philosophers of univocity confront the genesis, rupture or violence of thinking: not man who thinks but a life or unthought within which thinking might happen. When Spinoza imagines one expressive substance, when Nietzsche imagines one will or desire and when Bergson creates the concept of life, they go some way towards to really asking about the emergence of thinking. This is no longer the emergence of the thinker, or one who thinks, but the emergence of something like a minimal relation, event or perception of thinking, from which 'thinkers' are then effected. This means that the real history of philosophy requires understanding the way philosophers produce singular points, or the orientations within which subjects, objects, perceivers and images are ordered.
Ay assemblage such as a philosophical vocabulary (or an artiistic style or a set of scientific functions) faces in two directions. It both gives some sort of order or consistency to a life which bears a much greater complexity and dynamism, but it also enables - from that order - the creation of further and more elaborate orderings. A philosophical vocabulary such as Deleuze's gives sense or orientation to our world, but it also allows to produce further differences and futher worlds. On the one hand, then, a Deleuzian concept such as the 'plane of immanence' or 'life' or 'desire' establishes a possible relation between thinker and what it is to be thought, giving us some sort of logic or order. On the other hand, by coupling this concept with other concepts, such as 'affect' 'concept' and 'function', or 'plane of transcendence' and 'image of thought' we can think not just about life or the plane of immanence but also of how the brain imagines, relates to, styles, pictures, represents and orders that plane. This is the problem of how life differs to itself, in itself. The role of a dictionary is only one side of a philosophy. It looks at the way a philosophy stratifies or distinguishes its world., but once we have seen how 'a' philosophy thinks and moves this should then allow us to look to other philosophies and ther worlds.
There is then a necessary fidelity or infidelity, not only in any dictionary or any reading, but also in any experience or any life. Life is both efected through relations, such that there is no individual or text in itself; at the same time, life is not reducible to effected or actual relations. There are singularities or 'powers to relate' that exceed what is already given. This is the sense or the singularity of a text. Sense is not what is manifestly said or denoted; it is what is opened through denotaton...
To be continued (only by popular demand).
by Claire Colebrook
Excerpt from the introduction of The Deleuze Dictionary Edited by Adrian Parr (2005). Edinburgh University Press.
