attractors

Levi writes:

“To this day I find that I am every bit as much a DeLandian as I am a Harmanian.”

That’s correct. The issues where I differ from Levi are the same ones where I differ from DeLanda. But of course I like them both. The common heritage that I don’t share with them is, of course, the Deleuzian heritage.

My relation to Deleuze is both quite close and quite distant. Philosophically, we’re fairly distant. Though I much appreciate the rise of Deleuze’s star (we really needed a change of pace in the mid-1990’s), he has never really hit home with me philosophically. I also strongly disagree with his tendency to try to focus on names from the history of philosophy other than the very biggest names. That’s the wrong way to do it, in my opinion. The way to do it is to go right into Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, and show that they’re much weirder than the usual readings. I also think he has an excessive hostility towards individual things, just as Simondon does. I’ve heard the counter-arguments, but just look at how Deleuze botches Leibniz’s monads. It’s not just a moustache on the Mona Lisa, it’s a crime against the history of philosophy.

However, the place where I feel very close to Deleuze is tone. Indeed, I think he had a pretty big impact on my style early on, freeing me up to feel that it was OK to be even more irreverent than I already was by nature. That impetus came from Anti-Oedipus, which I read in my first-ever graduate class in Fall 1990 (taught by none other than Professor Lingis).