irrational numbers: 20th Century Spinozist : Rancière on Deleuze

February 28, 2005

20th Century Spinozist : Rancière on Deleuze

As a companion piece to Infinite thought's review/report of Jacques Rancière's recent London lecture, I thought I would post a quick (=possibly flawed) translation of the short interview with Rancière which appeared in Magazine Littéraire's 2002 issue dedicated to Deleuze.

Rancière takes a unique and fascinating approach to Deleuze as aesthetician, focusing here on a characteristic tendency in Deleuze's aesthetic writing to apparently collapse the regime of representation whilst simultaneously using figures drawn from specific representations, or certain fictional traits, as abstract models for his analysis.

I remember being struck on first reading of this interview by how well this describes an aspect of Deleuze's book on Bacon that had bothered me vaguely: the way in which 'abstract machines' such as that of the triptych, or the observer, are said to organise the paintings whilst not corresponding to their figural equivalents (the 'actual' observers, the 'actual' panels of the tryptych.) This can be hugely puzzling, in that one asks (and the question is the same in many other eccentric instances in A Thousand Plateaus) how it is that these machines, supposedly operating on a level anterior to any figuration, nevertheless seem to be modelled after certain figurations, or "fictions"?

Rancière suggests (but very schematically, given the brief compass of this interview) that this movement and its tension, is a symptom of a sort of inevitably falling back onto the plane of radical immanence of the figuration, and a necessary symptom of Deleuze's attempt to consummate the end of representation and simultaneously 'fulfil the destiny' of the aesthetic.

Now this simultaneous disavowal of representation and inveterate dependence on allegory or metaphor can be read as nothing more than a dissembling, whether conscious or not - and this is arguably the position Badiou takes on Deleuze in his Clamour of Being (ie. that Deleuze claims to have 'done away with' metaphor whilst constantly using metaphor to back up his ideas). Although Badiou recognises as constitutive of Deleuze's thought the movement from the 'simulacra' to radical immanence, and the peripatetic narrative Deleuze makes of this movement, he apparently fails to see anything in this movement but a failure of philosophical probity...

A problematisation of this approach is consequent upon Ranciere's more general complication of the definition of the post-representative regime of art: it is defined not by the autonomy of the art object, a "freedom" which would be cognate to that of the radically free-floating sign of postmodernity (the very blithely-assumed unconstrained 'freedom' that is Badiou's nemesis), but a mixed regime in which the artistic will is bound to a certain automatism. In which, we can assume, the escape from representation is never achieved, but is expressed in a constant becoming.

(One last brief comment; this recourse to a falling back into representation, to a constant movement between absolute and relative immanence also connects with a very difficult chapter on Derrida I am currently trying to read, from Laruelle's Philosophies de la Difference. Laruelle argues that a philosophical decision is always made to set up such tensions, which in the absence of an interrogation into this founding decision can constitutively never be 'resolved' but rather act as the 'paradoxal motor' that drives the interminable philosophical peripitaeia.)

Posted by robin at February 28, 2005 08:24 PM