“the national sage”

In Guerrilla Metaphysics, I cited the following interesting passage from Harold Bloom:

“[Samuel] Johnson is to England what Emerson is to America, Goethe to Germany, and Montaigne to France: the national sage.”

This seems spot-on, even if there are some subtle differences in how each of these figures is viewed in his home country. In all four cases, if you find yourself locked in an argument inside a given national context and are able to cite the relevant figure mentioned above as supporting your views, it always feels a bit like a knockout punch.

The reason I mention this is because something funny has happened over the past generation: Gilles Deleuze has become something like “the national sage” of continental philosophers. People now cite Deleuze’s bits of worldly wisdom as if they were obviously irrefutable (such as the remark about how all true philosophers run away from debates, though is far from the only example).

The same holds for Deleuze’s remarks about the history of philosophy, which are treated as the words of the national sage even in the cases where those remarks are fairly wild. Whenever someone in continental philosophy circles opens his or her mouth and cites Deleuze’s view on any given period in the history of philosophy, you can almost bet the citation won’t be critical in spirit. Hell, even analytic philosophers are now saying things like: “Continental philosophers are all idiots when they read the history of philosophy– except for Deleuze.” Who would have believed it about the guy who compares commentary to sodomy and to painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa?

I don’t make these remarks in the spirit of a complaint (since I rather enjoy Deleuze’s irreverence in both the life wisdom and history of philosophy categories), but simply want to highlight my profound surprise at this development.

It was far from inevitable. My first graduate course in Fall 1990, with Alphonso Lingis, was basically a course on Deleuze and Baudrillard. At the time, the comparison seemed completely apt: they seemed like two smart-alecky French thinkers who were very fun, but who might also have something to teach us despite lying hopelessly far from the mainstream. The mainstream in 1990 was more or less exhaustively described by Derrida and Foucault. Deleuze wasn’t really in the mix, despite some ahead-of-their time people like Massumis and the Smiths and the Williamses.

And now, just over two decades later, Deleuze is more or less our national sage. Is that permanent, or does it have an expiration date after another generation or two? I can’t begin to guess.