# Gilles Deleuze's Last Message by Isabelle Stengers



## somnambulist (May 13, 2011)

What is Philosophy ?, published in 1991, was Gilles Deleuze’s last book. This may appear as a matter of contingency since there was a rumour, some time before his death, that Deleuze was preparing a book on Marx. However, contingency in this case is not interesting, because Deleuze knew he was approaching the threshold.

Whoever has seen his Abécédaire, or has read A Thousand Plateau’s “Apparatus of Capture”, knows that the theme of the threshold is very specific with Deleuze, as it is connected with his past experience with alcohol. “There is a conceptual difference between the “limit” and the “threshold” (… ) What does an alcoholic call the last glass ? The alcoholic makes a subjective evaluation of how much he or she can tolerate. What can be tolerated is precisely the limit at which, as the alcoholic sees it, he or she will be able to start again (after a rest, a pause…). But beyond that limit there lies a threshold that would cause the alcoholic to change assemblage (…) It is of little importance that the alcoholic may be fooling him – or herself, or makes a very ambiguous use of the theme “I am going to stop”, the theme of the last one. What counts is the existence of a spontaneous marginal criterion and marginalist evaluation determining the value of the entire series of “glasses””. (TP, 438)

We may find, in What is Philosophy ?, a nearly clinical description of what it may mean to feel the approach of the limit when the demands of philosophical creation are concerned : “Weary thought, incapable of maintaining itself on the plane of immanence, can no longer bear the infinite speeds of the third kind that, in the manner of a vortex, measure the concept’s copresence to all its intensive components at once. It falls back on the relative speeds that concern only the succession of movement from one point to another, from one extensive component to an other, from an idea to another, and that measure simple associations without being able to reconstitute any concept.” (WPh ?, 214).

What I will characterize as Deleuze’s last message has nothing to do with the way he eventually crossed his last threshold ten years ago. There is no message there, as it was not the act of a philosopher, but the act of someone who knew that the threshold that really mattered for him had already been crossed, that he would never be able to start writing an other “last book”. All we can say is that he did not fool himself about it. Indeed his death as a philosopher was broadcasted about one year before his physical death, with the Abécédaire picture, filmed in 1988-1989 and broadcasted on Arte between November 1994 and spring 1995. The explicit condition for the making of film, as announced at its beginning by Deleuze himself, was that it would be broadcasted after his death only.
I remember repeating again and again, when I heard his way of departing, “it is not sad”. What is really sad, or pathetic, what Deleuze refused, is the fate of those who have crossed the threshold and do not know it : “those weary old ones who pursue slow-moving opinions and engage in stagnant discussions by speaking all alone, within their hollowed head, like a distant memory of their old concepts to which they remain attached so as not to fall back completely into the chaos.” (WPh?, 214)

If what counts is the existence of a marginalist evaluation determining the value of the entire series, as a positive problem of limit, not a catastrophic problem of threshold, Deleuze’s last message is indeed this book titled “What is philosophy ?”. Not a weary book at all, but an old age book, when the point has been reached “where one can finally say, ‘What is it I have been doing all my life ?’” (WPh?, 1). Before that point “there was too much desire to do philosophy to wonder what it was”. The answer to the question will not of course pass a judgement on the entire series of books and teaching, when Deleuze was doing philosophy and not wondering what he was doing. To determine the value of the series is not to judge, it is not to tell what was hidden behind each term of the series, and it is not to define where the series was leading, its aim or final truth. Determining the value is thus not coming back to the past, in order to elucidate it. Reaching the point where you can ask, “what is it I have done all my life ?” is reaching the point where “my life” becomes “a life”, with all the terms of the series coexisting and resonating together as they escape the times and circumstances that marked each of them.

However, it is not because Deleuze did reach such a point that I feel authorized to associate his last book with a message. The starting point for this association was in fact my own experience when reading What is philosophy ? Till then I had never felt like commenting or teaching a Deleuze’s book. I used his concepts only when they had become tools for my own hand, when I would not explain them but be able to take them on. I felt that this was what those books asked. Even when teaching, Deleuze would never answer a question, enter into a discussion or explain himself. He would listen and smile. Maybe what you would feel as an answer would come later, but in an indirect way and as an event. You would never know what kind of part, if any, your question or suggestion had played in what you received as an answer. Here, for the first time, I felt as if I was addressed, as if something that matters had to be conveyed to me - not to me as a person but as somebody who would have to go on living in this world for some time. Writing or teaching in direct reference to What is philosophy ? is not, for me at least, a matter of explaining or of using, but of receiving and continuing. Deleuze loved the Nietzschean image of the arrow thrown as far as possible, without knowing who will pick it up, who will become a relayer. His last book addresses relayers, or more precisely puts them in the position of feeling addressed as eventual relayers.

Αποδώ


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