CURRENT APPROACHES IN PHILOSOPHY I. INTRODUCTION.

SELECTED
TEXTS:

‘The English and the Americans do not have the same way of beginning again as the French.
French beginning again is the tabula rasa, the search for a primary certainty as a point of origin,
always the point of anchor. The other way of beginning again, on the other hand, is to take up
the interrupted line, to join a segment to the broken line, to make it pass between two rocks in a
narrow gorge, or over the top of the void, where it had stopped. It is never the beginning or the
end which are interesting; the beginning and the end are points. What is interesting is the
middle. The English zero is always in the middle. Bottlenecks are always in the middle. Being
in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position. One begins again through the middle.
The French think in terms of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of arborescence, the
alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacle. Trees are the opposite of grass. Not only does
grass grow in the middle of things, but it grows itself through the middle. This is the English or
American problem. Grass has its line of flight, and does not take root. We have grass in the
head, not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a ‘particular nervous system’ of
grass’.
G. Deleuze, C. Parnet, ‘On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature’, in Dialogues, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York, Columbia University Press, 1987 [1977],
p. 39.

‘And to judge still better of the minute perceptions which we cannot distinguish in the crowd, I
am wont to make use of the example of the roar or noise of the sea which strikes one when on
its shore. To understand this noise as it is made, it would be necessary to hear the parts which
compose this whole, i.e. the noise of each wave, although each of these little noises makes itself
known only in the confused collection of all the others, i.e. in the roar itself, and would not be
noticed if the wave which makes it were alone. For it must be that we are affected a little by the
motion of this wave, and that we have some perception of each one of these noises, small as
they are; otherwise we would not have that of a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred
thousand nothings cannot make something’.
G. W. Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, trans. Alfred Gideon Langley,
London, The Macmillan Company, 1896 [1705], p. 48.

‘It is manifest, for example, that green arises from a mixture of blue and yellow; thus it is
possible to believe that the idea of green is also composed of these two ideas. And yet the idea
of green appears to us as simple as that of blue or that of warmth. So we are to believe that the
ideas of blue and warmth are not as simple as they appear’.
Ibidem, p. 120.

‘In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies
positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences
without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas
nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences
that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less
importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of
differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain
number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system
of values’.
F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, New York, New York
Philosophical Library, 1959 [1916], pp. 121-122.
‘Repetition constitutes the degrees of an original difference, but diversity also constitutes the
levels of a repetition no less fundamental. About the work of a great artist, we say: it’s the same
thing, on a different level. But we also say: it’s different, but to the same degree. Actually,
difference and repetition are two inseparable and correlative powers of essence. An artist does
not “age” because he repeats himself, for repetition is the power of difference, no less than
difference the power of repetition. An artist “ages” when, “by exhaustion of his brain”, he
decides it is simpler to find directly in life, as though ready-made, what he can express only in
his work, what he should have distinguished and repeated by means of his work’.
G. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 2000 [1964], p. 49.

‘As political economists are fond of Robinson Crusoe stories [Robinsonades] 1 , let us first look
at Robinson on his island. Undemanding though he is by nature, he still has needs to satisfy, and
must therefore perform useful labours of various kinds: he must make tools, knock together
furniture, tame llamas, fish, hunt and so on. Of his prayers and the like, we take no account
here, since our friend takes pleasure in them and sees them as recreation. Despite the diversity
of his productive functions, he knows that they are only different forms of activity of one and
the same Robinson, hence only different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him
to divide his time with precision between his different functions. Whether one function occupies
a greater space in his total activity than another depends on the magnitude of the difficulties to
be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. Our friend Robinson Crusoe learns this by
experience, and having saved a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins,
like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a catalogue of the
useful objects he possesses, of the various operations necessary for their production, and finally
of the labour-time that specific quantities of these products have on average cost him [...].
Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island, bathed in light, to medieval Europe,
shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent – serfs
and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clerics. Personal dependence characterizes the
social relations of material production as much as it does the other spheres of life based on that
production’.
K. Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, pp. 169-170.

‘Human beings become individuals only through the process of history. He originally appears as
a species-being, clan being, herd animal’.
K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans.
Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973 [1857-8], p. 496.

‘The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin,
belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no
way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood
natural life, as cultural historians imagine [...]. It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in
preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the
eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural
bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited
human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the
eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations the eighteenth-century individual – the
product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the
new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century – appears as an ideal, whose
existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure.

1
‘Even Ricardo has his Robinson Crusoe stories. ‘Ricardo makes his primitive fisherman and primitive
hunter into owners of commodities who immediately exchange their fish and game in proportion to the
labour-time which is materialized in these exchange-values. On this occasion he slips into the
anachronism of allowing the primitive fisherman and hunter to calculate the value of their implements in
accordance with the annuity tables used on the London Stock Exchange in 1817. Apart from bourgeois
society, the “parallelograms of Mr Owen” seem to have been the only form of society Ricardo was
acquainted with’ (Karl Marx, Zur Kritik etc., pp. 38-9) [English translation, p. 60]’.
As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically,
but posited by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day [...]. The
more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the
producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite
natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan; then later in the various
forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the
eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the
individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch
which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the
hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in
the most literal sense a zoon politikon, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside
society – a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social
forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an
absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to
each other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely
unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters,
had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics by Bastiat,
Carey, Proudhon, etc. Of course it is a convenience for Proudhon et al. to be able to give a
historico-philosophic account of the source of an economic relation, of whose historic origins he
is ignorant, by inventing the myth that Adam or Prometheus stumbled on the idea ready-made,
and then it was adopted, etc. Nothing is more dry and boring than the fantasies of a locus
communis’.
Ibidem, pp. 83-84.

«Is there any “progress” in philosophy? How would you define what it needs to do, why we
need it, and even its “program” these days?
I think there’s an image of thought that changes a lot, that’s changed a lot through history. By
the image of thought I don’t mean its method but something deeper that’s always taken for
granted, a system of coordinates, dynamics, orientations, what it means to think, and to “orient
oneself in thought” [...].
The image of thought is what philosophy as it were presupposes; it precedes philosophy, not a
nonphilosophical understanding this time but a prephilosophical understanding. There are lots
of people for whom thinking’s just “a bit of discussion.” OK, it’s a stupid image, but even
stupid people have an image of thought, and it’s only by bringing out these images that we can
determine philosophy’s preconditions. Do we, for instance, have the same image of thought that
Plato, or even Descartes or Kant, had? Doesn’t the image change in response to overriding
constraints that express, of course, extrinsic determinants, but above all express a becoming of
thought? Can we, flailing around in confusion, still claim to be seeking truth?
It’s the image of thought that guides the creation of concepts. It cries out, so to speak, whereas
concepts are like songs [...].
One might call this study of images of thought “noology” and see it as the prolegomena to
philosophy. It’s what Difference and repetition is really about, the nature of the postulates of the
image of thought» [1988].
G. Deleuze, ‘On Philosophy’, in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, New York, Columbia
University Press, 1995 [1988 and 1990], pp. 147-149.

‘It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. The figurative belief follows
from this mistake. If the painter were before a white surface, he — or she — could reproduce on
it an external object functioning as a model. But such is not the case. The painter has many
things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around
him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his
work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter
does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it.
He does not paint in order to reproduce on the canvas an object functioning as a model; he
paints on images that are already there, in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will
reverse the relations between model and copy. In short, what we have to define are all these
"givens" [données] that are on the canvas before the painter's work begins, and determine,
among these givens, which are an obstacle, which are a help, or even the effects of a preparatory
work’.
G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, London, Continuum, 2003 [1981], pp. 86-
87.

‘The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from
representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image’.
G. Deleuze, DR, p. 276.

[About Robinson Crusoe] ‘One can hardly imagine a more boring novel, and it is sad to see
children still reading it today. Robinson's vision of the world resides exclusively in property;
never have we seen an owner more ready to preach. The mythical recreation of the world from
the deserted island gives way to the reconstitution of everyday bourgeois life from a reserve of
capital. Everything is taken from the ship. Nothing is invented. It is all painstakingly applied on
the island. Time is nothing but the time necessary for capital to produce a benefit as the
outcome of work [...]. Robinson's companion is not Eve, but Friday, docile towards work, happy
to be a slave, and too easily disgusted by cannibalism. Any healthy reader would dream of
seeing him eat Robinson’.
G. Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts. 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina, Los Angeles,
Semiotext(e), 2004, p. 12 [‘Causes et raisons des îles désertes’, unpublished manuscript from
the fifties].

‘If Robinson enslaves Friday, it is not due to Robinson's natural disposition, and it is not by the
power of his fist; he does it with a small capital and the means of production which he saved
from the depths, and he does it to subjugate Friday to social tasks, the ideas of which Robinson
has not lost in his shipwreck.’.
Ibidem, p. 53 [‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Precursor of Kafka, Celine and Ponge’].