sausages, the law, and the fold

Bismarck famously and wittily stated that “those who love sausages and the law should not watch either being made.”

My own version of that statement is this, and it won’t be loved by all of my readers: “Those who love Leibniz should not read Deleuze’s The Fold.”

Let me start by saying that I’m very fond of Deleuze in principle. I generally love his attitude. My first direct contact with Deleuze’s work was in Fall 1990 in the Lingis seminar at Penn State where Anti-Oedipus was on the reading list. And though I never became a convert (it always felt just a bit short of making a coherent case), I’m still proud of telling everyone at the time: “in my opinion, Deleuze is actually a more important philosopher than either Derrida or Foucault.” It’s hard to remember now, but almost no one was saying that in 1990. Maybe Dan Smith and Brian Massumi and a handful of others were saying it, but “pretty much no one” would not be an exaggeration. Even Lingis himself raised his eyebrows at that statement at the time. Derrida and Foucault were gods at the time, and Deleuze a sort of entertaining fringe figure, not much more important than Baudrillard in the eyes of many. (And by the way, I think Baudrillard is a more serious figure than is currently imagined.)

So, I love Deleuze’s attitude and probably soaked up a bit of stylistic irreverence from Anti-Oedipus in those early years. I even liked Guattari a lot more than most people did, having been led from his wonderful Semiotext(e) interviews to scattered selections of his own writings. And I loved all the “moustache on the Mona Lisa” and “sodomy of the great philosophers” tropes. I really do wish Deleuze well.

But… there are times when I find his act fairly outrageous, and his treatment of Leibniz is perhaps the most extreme such case. Maybe it’s just because I’m a fan of Leibniz, but it seems to me like arguably Deleuze’s worst reading of any philosopher.

And the thing is… Leibniz is already so weirdly fascinating that he is in no need of “sodomy”. It reminds me of a discussion I once read about how Hollywood always changes stories for film adaptations. This is understandable, but there are a certain number of cases where Hollywood’s weird distortions actually make the story less interesting than the original. And I’m afraid that’s how I feel about Deleuze’s Leibniz.

Why am I mentioning this now? Because my Maastricht talk on December 1 is on Leibniz, and I figured I ought to explain why I dislike Deleuze’s reading so much as part of that lecture. In fact, I dislike it so much that I’ve been afraid to open it again since 1995, the last time I read it. It horrifies me.

To any Deleuzians among my readers: sorry. I like your man, but not on this point. His Leibniz is not only unrecognizable to me, but also relatively uninteresting.