FUGITIVE PAPERS

Joan Fowler: For a New Narrative?

Fergus Daly: Philosophical Stalkers

David Godbold: This Way Up!

Tim Stott: Subjunctive Commitments

Maeve Connolly: Close Encounters with Art

ISSUE # 3, AUTUMN 2012 fugitivepapers.org

A Quarterly on Art in Ireland

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Ive recently had occasion to re-watch dozens of Film Noir classics and have noticed that, amongst the many delectable repetitions the genre has to o er, a refrain, usually but not always voiced by the criminal, and almost always using exactly the same words, reappears across several lms: if theres one thing I cant stand its someone trying to put something over on me. When I hear these words I invariably sympathize, regardless of the extent of the speakers crimes. In our daily lives were used to coming up against people who, in noir parlance, have an angle and try to dupe us this can have serious repercussions when its someone in an unmerited position of power, making decisions from a perspective of ignorance or from a perverted sense of defensiveness. When it comes to philosophers and theorists we expect a little bit more integrity, but dont always get it. In noir, even the gangsters have integrity: in the words of Dylans song: to live outside the law you must be honest.

As a student, one of the things that attracted you to certain French philosophers was a need to escape the hypocrisy around you; you craved that encounter with a mind whose ideas chimed with his or her behaviour: the reason you read outside the curriculum at all was in search of that heightened sense of integrity. e French could always be relied upon to provide that little something that seemed (literally) foreign to everything around you: a correlation between a persons ideas and their mode of being. is was the era when Heideggers close relationship to the Nazi party was a live issue.

As a teenager groping around for a good reason to do anything at all, the only tenable source of a personal ethics had seemed to me to be J. D. Salingers notion of the Fat Lady. In Franny and Zooey, Zooey advises the despairing Franny, who has given up on life, to do it for the Fat Lady. Salingers book suggests that this notion of the Fat Lady could mean many di erent things, from the poetic to the transcendent, depending on your needs, including the one dramatized in the story that I was more than prepared to buy into: the dial tone after you hang up from a call to a loved one. If my newly acquired interest in the writings of Gilles Deleuze didnt feel like it was interfering with the Salingeresque fervour that had led me to believe that critique should always try to aspire to the condition of poetry, it was because poetic statements provoke thought: tensions that only making new connections resolves. In contemporary art and cinema (which were the art forms I wanted to write about), invention is at such a peak that help from critics is often needed to set hibernating faculties in motion, enabling spectators to perceive whats at issue intellectually and a ectively in a work. And the mark of the great critics I loved was to know that these faculties can only be piqued indirectly. Poetic criticism problematizes the simplistic, dominant descriptive type of critique; it keeps the work open, half-made, allowing us half- nished responses to half- nished creations, no longer promoting the dominant signi cations being pedalled to us from every quarter. Deleuzes philosophical rigour didnt preclude a poetic approach to everything he analyzed.

I was very struck by all the passages in Primo Levi where he explains that Nazi camps have given us a shame at being human[We] can feel shame at being human in utterly trivial situations too: in the face of too great a vulgarization of thinking, in the face of TV entertainment, of a ministerial speech, of jolly people gossiping. Gilles Deleuze (Negotiations, 1995)

Rancire and Badiou: jolly people gossiping

Fergus Daly

8 FUGITIVEPAPERS / ISSUE #3

essay #2: fergus daly

many of them suered too much so they want to make others suer. [...]And others are proud of their handful of justice and for its sake commit outrages against all things, such that the world is drowned in their injustice. Ah, how awful the word virtue sounds from their mouths! And when they say: I am just, it always sounds like: I am just avenged! (Nietzsche, us Spoke Zarathustra, 1885)

Lhomme du ressentiment as a type (from the priest to the psychoanalyst) continues to ourish in the Western world, Deleuze diagnosing the dialectic as the types image of thought and this as his motto: you are evil therefore I am good.

Deleuzes anti-dialectical thinking is exemplied in his account of how he approaches the task of writing. For the artist or lmmaker youre writing about to no longer be an object excludes both the simplistic descriptions of work you nd in newspaper reviews, and the condescending essays of self-promotion that abound in the art world. Deleuzes insistence is fundamentally against writerly narcissism and the two poles it veers between: one, the I was so close to this author, he spoke to me on his deathbed and therefore I can speak in his name variety, the other, the Im so on top of this material I can easily spot its contradictions and dismiss it out of hand kind: Badiou and Rancire respectively.

Discovering Deleuzes Cinema books in the 1980s was an incredible experience, especially if you were studying philosophy. ese were cinemas own unarticulated concepts, you could use them in your own way, as Deleuze promoted, without seeming to be importing a foreign set of ideas into your work. e Deleuze method enabled critics to avoid applying to the cinema concepts borrowed from another discipline. Instead, Deleuze had taken the ideas expressed in cinema but not conceptualized by it, and philosophized with them, thereby inventing concepts that could only be formed philosophically but were nevertheless specic to the cinema. To give a simple example: if you philosophize about the close-up you philosophize about a cinematic concept. But if you psychoanalyze it, it becomes a partial object and therefore is reduced to being a psychoanalytic concept. is gave me grounds for my distrust of Screen magazine, the mindset of which always seemed just one step removed from a police interrogation, especially if you were a cinephile, its canon of acceptable auteurs limited to Douglas Sirk and a few others.

is intensive way of reading, in contact with whats outside the book, as a ow meeting other ows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything. . . is reading with love. (Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1995)

When criticism reeks of being just a job, or as undertaken in the hopes of career advancement, or as a favour to an artist friend or colleague, its lack of passion can induce despair. With Deleuze you could feel the love for the material in every word he wrote. Whatever body of work he tackled he maximized it. He took the latent powers in the work and thought them to the nth degree, with the maximum perspective possible. Avoiding inert description doesnt mean you look for the hidden truth or meaning of the work or for the artists intentions in creating the work, but the work becomes a functioning machine throwing out all kinds of eects: meaning -eects yes, but more importantly vitalistic eects ways of arriving at a pre-individual world of ux and becoming.

To maximize means to explore what a body of work can do, take it to its limit in terms of possible lines of experimentation, liberating its potentialities, its conceptual complication and consistency and infusing it with a maximal degree ofmodication whilst remaining within the authors own terms of reference.

Before the earth had time to settle on Deleuzes grave came Alain Badious repulsive, narcissistic book Deleuze: e Clamor of Being (1997), an act of vengeance without precedent in the history of philosophy (although, in another eld, it resembles Salieris feeding o the corpse of Mozart). Badiou had been stalking Deleuze since the 1970s, dispatching his cronies to break-up Deleuzes classes at Vincennes, ostensibly for not toeing the Maoist party line but undoubtedly due to the co-author of Anti-Oedipus garnering the attention that Badiou himself craved. With Deleuzes death, Badiou behaves like a stalker nally gaining access to the inner sanctum of his object of worship, only to be confronted with a broken mirror reecting back to him an empty Platonic simulacrum of existence. Badious e Clamor of Being is a pitiful attempt to put himself on the same level as Deleuze through confusing the two philosophers ideas, to take on the others identity and present his own Platonic philosophy as Deleuzes.

In the University Library, its static amiability a hindrance more than a help to anything resembling thought, trying to collage together passages for your rst philosophy essay, to suddenly slam into these words of Deleuze couldnt but provoke an unprepared for evolutionary leap:

ink of the author you are writing about. ink of him so hard that he can no longer be an object, and equally so that you cannot identify with him. Avoid the double shame of the scholar and the familiar. Give back to the author a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and politics that he knew how to give and invent. (Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, 1977)

Disappointed by the teachers that had been thrust upon you, so many careerists with little or no interest in creative thought, clinging on for dear life to their ill-gotten academic positions, it was inspiring to discover that the inextricable bond between ethics and thinking was the very issue at stake in thinkers like Deleuze (and Foucault). As someone wrote at the time: Deleuze...at last an academic who can actually think! (it came as no

surprise to learn that Deleuzes contribution to the writing of Anti-Oedipus had excluded him forever from holding a Chair at the College de France). Foucault too saw thinking and behaviour as inseparable his contempt for the empty rhetoric of much left-wing posturing earning him the suspicion of many. But its his love and admiration for the integrity of Jean Cavaills that jumps o the page in this diagnostic account of how ones thought and mode of existence can easily become severed:

Among the French philosophers who participated in the Resistance during the war, one was Cavaills, a historian of mathematics who was interested in the development of its internal structures [Jean Cavaills was tortured and executed in Arras in 1944]. None of the philosophers of engagement Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty none of them did a thing. (e Foucault Reader, 1984)

e implication is that you can never know in advance who will step forward in a life and death situation. e historical epistemologist shut away all-day in a library or the existentialist radicals of Left-Bank cafs and street demonstrations?

Foucaults history lesson seemed to be conrmed by Deleuzes philosophy which tied together ethics and ontology:

Evaluations are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate. is is why we always have the beliefs, feelings and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or style of life. (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962)

One of Deleuzes main targets was the man of ressentiment, a notion he took from Nietzsches diagnosis of the type who invented the idea of evil (and religion) as a means of vengefully poisoning those who are capable of joy.

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Its a typical homme du ressentiment move: you are perceived as great, your philosophy and mine are close, therefore I am great. Badiou even invokes (in true stalker-style) a secret intimate correspondence between Deleuze and himself. With his rival o the scene, he attempts to enshrine forever a version of Deleuzes philosophy, so distorted and perverse as to be unrecognizable, to undo all the progress the philosopher had made in enacting a reversal of Platonism and to bury Deleuzes work with his body.

As with Foucaults account of the existentialists, Badious revolutionary fervour is tarnished by the dishonesty of his writing. With Rancire it is less head-on bitterness that seems to drive him than perhaps a taste for the international lecture circuit, a craving to be feted at Art Biennials and all that goes along with that lifestyle. Whereas Badiou wilfully distorts what Deleuze has written, Rancire pretends to forget it. Ressentiment is a hydra-headed monster. Pretending to forget is a ubiquitous strategy in philosophy and criticism, allowing as it does authors and the book market to re-present old ideas as if they were new. Rancires claims not to have read Deleuze prior to writing about him in 1995 (and, he insists, he didnt initiate it but was asked to do so by followers of Deleuze) are a laughably typical trope

of the homme du ressentiment: he must punish the object of his discomfort: Now look what you made me say!!!

One way to minimize an author is to present his work as representing precisely the opposite of what it really says, eg Badious version of Deleuze. Another is to pretend to forget that the problem you raise in the thinkers work is one already treated at length in that work, eg Rancires approach. Both Badiou and Rancire minimize Deleuzes philosophy whereas when Deleuze writes on an author he always maximizes him or her (even those he considered enemies like Kant).

Rancire, in a series of talks and essays, famously attacks Deleuze for the allegorical nature of his conceptualization of cinematic images: Deleuze does not show us the time-image, he draws for us a face that allegorizes what it signi es: the disjunction, the disaccord of the sensible givens. Rancire posits Deleuzes cinematic philosophy as running up against a blank wall, blocked by a fundamental contradiction. He pretends to forget that the contradiction he picks on is a contradiction only from the point of view of his own dialectical thinking. e notion of contradiction has no place in Deleuzes thought. Deleuzes rejection of metaphor and allegory is based on a more fundamental distrust of the literal/ gurative dualism that the idea of metaphor is grounded on. If, in Rancires view, Deleuzes attempt to suspend the entire power of the work of art to the pure sensible fails, its because he confuses a plot element for a new type of image, mistaking content for expression, intrigue for formal invention, and thereby not taking account of the dialectical interplay between the representative regime and the aesthetic regime that is constitutive of cinema. But it only looks like this to Rancire because he pretends to forget that Deleuzes philosophy is based on constructing an anti-dialectical image of thought, and that as a result the form of content and the form of expression are not separable

in the way they are conventionally understood. Rancire omits to mention the hundreds if not thousands of pages Deleuze (alone and in his work with Guattari) had devoted to constructing an entirely new philosophy of language, where language is seen as only one element in a very complex conceptualization of collective regimes of enunciation. Rancire again pretends to forget that his idea of the three aesthetic regimes constituting the distribution of the sensible is itself borrowed (and tweaked) from Deleuze and Guattari, and from Deleuzes incredibly generous account of Foucaults philosophy. So, from the outset, his entire engagement with Deleuze reeks of bad faith.

e phrase pretending to forget must be stressed because elsewhere Rancire has shown that, when it suits him, such as in his recent preface to Shirani Takashis book Deleuze et une Philosophie de LImmanence, he has a perfectly adequate grasp of Deleuzes philosophy. To add insult to injury, Rancires recent book on Bela Tarr, purporting to present le systme Tarr according to Rancire, proves to be a simple and uninspired application of Deleuzian concepts to the lms of Bla Tarr: di erence and repetition, intensities and interstices, virtualities and voyants, crystals of time and cosmic forces. For

the most part, Rancires book consists of simple commentary, paragraph after endless paragraph of descriptions, of plots and scenes, and of lists of themes and their occurrences throughout Tarrs body of work. Any attempt to theorize leads Rancire to employ Deleuzian terminology because he seems bereft of ideas of his own; he has no active response to Tarrs lms. Again, he minimizes the auteur he chooses to write about. As Deleuze said:

you have to have monographs on auteurs, but then these have to be grafted onto di erentiations, speci c determinations, and reorganizations of concepts that force you to reconsider cinema as a whole. (Negotiations, 1995)

is is a level of ambition Rancire can only dream of. Deleuze always singularizes an auteur, pinpointing precisely what is new in his work, what it is that makes him unique, whereas thinkers like Badiou and Rancire try to pigeonhole Deleuzes concepts as exemplars of paradigms spanning centuries, even millennia, a method whereby every invention of thought can be smothered in sameness.

IMAGES: Page 7: Pulp Fiction Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx.Left: Nicolas de Stal, Ressentiment (1948), oil on canvas.Above: Mehmet Dere, Ressentiment (2009-2011), red lacquer paint on MDF.