General Information
Course Description
9527 - Geologies of Gilles Deleuze - An examination of an aspect of the works of Gilles Deleuze which has often been forgotten: his work as an historian of philosophy. Between his first text in 1954 and his doctoral dissertation in 1968 (Difference and Repetition), the corpus of Deleuze constitutes commentaries, readings and interpretations of canonical works (by Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson). Even if his interpretations are, most of the time, considered iconoclastic in relation to the tradition, it is nevertheless, in scholarly editions that they are published. The conceptual apparatus of those works is most of the time reconfigured according to the needs of Deleuze's own philosophy, which will come later.
The objective of this seminar is to explore the strata which grounds his major concepts and to recognize the act of reading to which Deleuze is committed while he is producing his interpretations. For example, his reading of Bergson who, at the time of the publication of his book (Bergsonism, 1962), was not a trendy philosopher, allows Deleuze to ultimately ultimately his notions of becoming and mapping, and to build his theoretical essays on cinema. Deleuze's works as historian of philosophy are the conditions of possibility of his own discourse, and even if not inscribed in a totalizing and chronological history, each of his works seem to raise the question: how to think after Nietzsche.
We will, in the first place, establish a repertory of Deleuzian notions (becoming-animal, rhizomes, collective assemblage of enunciation, desiring machine, sense, repetition, etc.) Which appears in the post-1968 works, focusing on the problematics of subjectivity. After, we will explore the interpretation and interaction of five philosophical works (on Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Leibnitz), reading interdiscursively the commentary of Deleuze, the works of those philosophers and canonical interpretations, in order to delimit what is left aside and what is kept by Deleuze, building his own conceptual framework. In this way, we will map the geological foundations of Deleuze's discourse.
