Jason Read, "A Universal History of Contingency"

"A Universal History of Contingency:

Deleuze and Guattari on the History of Capitalism"

Jason Read, Borderlands

 

It would be a mistake to read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference (you know, that much heralded theory that finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures, the one that we are told we 'need so badly' in our age of dispersion and specialization where 'hope' is lacking). One must not look for a 'philosophy' amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions and surprise concepts: Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel. —Michel Foucault (1983)

Retrospective

1. One of the difficult characteristics of the writing of Gilles Deleuze, alone and in collaboration with Félix Guattari, is, in Deleuze's terms, its extremely "untimely" nature. Philosophical and theoretical positions that have generally been abandoned or rendered untenable by the passage of time are advocated by Deleuze and Guattari only to be subsequently twisted so as to be rendered unrecognizable. There are multiple specific examples of this: the turn to vitalism, to naturalism, or to pre-critical philosophical positions, but more generally it is possible to say that Deleuze and Guattari write as if the general breakdown of the lofty aspirations of philosophy, the critique of metaphysics and of the systematizing pretensions of philosophy, had not happened. Or do they? Even as Deleuze and Guattari seem to produce a metaphysics and even a cosmology that encompasses everything from the geological history of the earth to the contemporary technological and political transformations of capital they do so with such a perverse humor that it is impossible to assume what is at stake in such writing. Is this simply the worst sort of totalizing metaphysical philosophizing, or is it all just some sort of joke? Or is something altogether different happening — another practice of philosophy, that is neither a return of the grand systematic aspirations of philosophy nor the dismantling of it?

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