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Available at http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Les-deux-pensees-de-
Deleuze-et-de
As for what you call “the concrete creation of the possible” there
must, as a rule, be silence. No one knows how to anticipate that
which can only be created (witness Deleuze's obstinate silence at
the end of “Postscript on the Societies of Control”): it is not possible
to highlight the axes of a new kind of struggle because these
struggles are already at work (cf. “May '68 didn’t happen”). Yet this
theoretical aporia doesn’t necessarily mark the destitution of
thought: it could be, rather, the courage of a thought which exposes
itself to time. The role of the philosopher in the actualisation of open
possibilities is another matter, and Deleuze makes himself quite
clear on this point, most notably in an interview with Foucault in
1972: the time of the philosopher as guide of the masses is over,
dispatched by philosophy itself, whose internal transformation
encourages the philosopher to think of himself as having a different
kind of status. Not that the role of philosophy in “becomings-
revolutionary” is negligible, in fact one might say it’s the sole
purpose of the philosopher-as-scout; but philosophy, like other
disciplines, assumes a role inasmuch as its practices are
not immutable and its own transformations resonate with the
transformations of other practices, theoretical or militant. In this
sense, transformations - and their political potential - go
through philosophy. In a book like A Thousand Plateaus, the practice
of these resonances is a very condition of the transformation of
philosophical discourse and what should be studied [in this work] is
the Deleuzoguattarian outline of an immanent or “literal” discourse.
“Literality”, that is to say the nomadic distribution of
meaning arising from the division between proper and figurative
sense, is nothing other than the production of certain effects in the
political field. For instance, to take up the example of Cinema II
regarding the transformation of political cinema in the second half
of the 20th century, statements like “bankers are killers” and
“factories are prisons”, at a certain level must be heard literally, not
as metaphorical agit-prop clichés. Certainly, bankers are rarely
killers in the proper sense, but on the other hand, if we all we have
here is metaphor, the system of banking remains unscathed and
we are confined to merely imagining certain humanitarian
adjustments. However, everyone more or less intuits this literal
understanding, maybe it’s even an aspect of this “fact of
modernity”; what remains to be done is to produce philosophical
conditions in it; to seize it with a discourse that shows its
legitimacy and explores its virtualities. This is an essential
dimension of Deleuze's work since Difference and Repetition - an
essential, but puzzling dimension, since most people think that
Deleuze's discourse is metaphorical or do not understand how this
can be tenable.