Alain Badiou: The Adventure of French Philosophy

Let us begin these reflections on contemporary French philosophy with a paradox: that which is the most universal is also, at the same time, the most particular. Hegel calls this the "concrete universal", the synthesis of that which is absolutely universal, which pertains to everything, with that which has a particular time and place. Philosophy is a good example. Absolutely universal, it addresses itself to all, without exception; but within philosophy there exist powerful cultural and national particularities. There are what we might call moments of philosophy, in space and in time. Philosophy is thus both a universal aim of reason and, simultaneously, one that manifests itself in completely specific moments. Let us take the example of two especially intense and well-known philosophical instances. First, that of classical Greek philosophy between Parmenides and Aristotle, from the 5th to the 3rd centuries BC: a highly inventive, foundational moment, ultimately quite short-lived. Second, that of German idealism between Kant and Hegel, via Fichte and Schelling: another exceptional philosophical moment, from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries, intensely creative and condensed within an even shorter timespan. I propose to defend a further national and historical thesis: there was-or there is, depending where I put myself-a French philosophical moment of the second half of the 20th century which, toute proportion gardée, bears comparison to the examples of classical Greece and enlightenment Germany.

Sartre's foundational work, Being and Nothingness, appeared in 1943 and the last writings of Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, date from the early 1990s. The moment of French philosophy develops between the two of them, and includes Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan as well as Sartre and Deleuze-and myself, maybe. Time will tell; though if there has been such a French philosophical moment, my position would be as perhaps its last representative. It is the totality of this body of work, situated between the ground-breaking contribution of Sartre and the last works of Deleuze, that is intended here by the term 'contemporary French philosophy'. I will argue that it constitutes a new moment of philosophical creativity, both particular and universal. The problem is to identify this endeavour. What took place in France, in philosophy, between 1940 and the end of the 20th century? What happened around the ten or so names cited above? What was it that we called existentialism, structuralism, deconstruction? Was there a historical and intellectual unity to that moment? If so, of what sort?

I shall approach these problems in four different ways. First, origins: where does this moment come from, what were its antecedents, what was its birth? Next, what were the principal philosophical operations that it undertook? Third, the fundamental question of these philosophers' link with literature, and the more general connection between philosophy and literature within this sequence. And finally, the constant discussion throughout this whole period between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Origins, operations, style and literature, psychoanalysis: four means by which to attempt to define contemporary French philosophy.

Concept and interior life

To think the philosophical origins of this moment we need to return to the fundamental division that occurred within French philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century, with the emergence of two contrasting currents. In 1911, Bergson gave two celebrated lectures at Oxford, which appeared in his collection La pensée et le mouvement. In 1912, simultaneously, in other words, Brunschvicg published Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique. Coming on the eve of the Great War, these interventions attest to the existence of two completely distinct orientations. In Bergson we find what might be called a philosophy of vital interiority, a thesis on the identity of being and becoming; a philosophy of life and change. This orientation will persist throughout the 20th century, up to and including Deleuze. In Brunschvicg's work, we find a philosophy of the mathematically based concept: the possibility of a philosophical formalism of thought and of the symbolic, which likewise continues throughout the century, most specifically in Lévi-Strauss, Althusser and Lacan.

From the start of the century, then, French philosophy presents a divided and dialectical character. On one side, a philosophy of life; on the other, a philosophy of the concept. This debate between life and concept will be absolutely central to the period that follows. At stake in any such discussion is the question of the human subject, for it is here that the two orientations coincide. At once a living organism and a creator of concepts, the subject is interrogated both with regard to its interior, animal, organic life, and in terms of its thought, its capacity for creativity and abstraction. The relationship between body and idea, or life and concept, formulated around the question of the subject, thus structures the whole development of 20th-century French philosophy from the initial opposition between Bergson and Brunschvicg onwards. To deploy Kant's metaphor of philosophy as a battleground on which we are all the more or less exhausted combatants: during the second half of the 20th century, the lines of battle were still essentially constituted around the question of the subject. Thus, Althusser defines history as a process without a subject, and the subject as an ideological category; Derrida, interpreting Heidegger, regards the subject as a category of metaphysics; Lacan creates a concept of the subject; Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, of course, allotted an absolutely central role to the subject. A first definition of the French philosophical moment would therefore be in terms of the conflict over the human subject, since the fundamental issue at stake in this conflict is that of the relationship between life and concept.

We could, of course, take the quest for origins further back and describe the division of French philosophy as a split over the Cartesian heritage. In one sense, the postwar philosophical moment can be read as an epic discussion about the ideas and significance of Descartes, as the philosophical inventor of the category of the subject. Descartes was a theoretician both of the physical body-of the animal-machine-and of pure reflection. He was thus concerned with both the physics of phenomena and the metaphysics of the subject. All the great contemporary philosophers have written on Descartes: Lacan actually raises the call for a return to Descartes, Sartre produces a notable text on the Cartesian treatment of liberty, Deleuze remains implacably hostile. In short, there are as many Descartes as there are French philosophers of the postwar period. Again, this origin yields a first definition of the French philosophical moment as a conceptual battle around the question of the subject.

Four moves

Next, the identification of intellectual operations common to all these thinkers. I shall outline four procedures which, to my mind, clearly exemplify a way of doing philosophy that is specific to this moment; all, in some sense, are methodological ones. The first move is a German one, or rather, a French move upon German philosophers. All contemporary French philosophy is also, in reality, a discussion of the German heritage. Its formative moments include Kojève's seminars on Hegel, attended by Lacan and also influential upon Lévi-Strauss, and the discovery of phenomenology in the 1930s and 40s, through the works of Husserl and Heidegger. Sartre, for instance, radically modified his philosophical perspectives after reading these authors in the original during his sojourn in Berlin. Derrida may be regarded as, first and foremost, a thoroughly original interpreter of German thought. Nietzsche was a fundamental reference for both Foucault and Deleuze.

French philosophers went seeking something in Germany, then, through the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. What was it that they sought? In a phrase: a new relation between concept and existence. Behind the many names this search adopted-deconstruction, existentialism, hermeneutics-lies a common goal: that of transforming, or displacing, this relation. The existential transformation of thought, the relation of thought to its living subsoil, was of compelling interest for French thinkers grappling with this central issue of their own heritage. This, then, is the "German move", the search for new ways of handling the relation of concept to existence by recourse to German philosophical traditions. In the process of its translation onto the battleground of French philosophy, moreover, German philosophy was transformed into something completely new. This first operation, then, is effectively a French appropriation of German philosophy.

The second operation, no less important, concerns science. French philosophers sought to wrest science from the exclusive domain of the philosophy of knowledge by demonstrating that, as a mode of productive or creative activity, and not merely an object of reflection or cognition, it went far beyond the realm of knowledge. They interrogated science for models of invention and transformation that would inscribe it as a practice of creative thought, comparable to artistic activity, rather than as the organization of revealed phenomena. This operation, of displacing science from the field of knowledge to that of creativity, and ultimately of bringing it ever closer to art, find its supreme expression in Deleuze, who explores the comparison between scientific and artistic creation in the most subtle and intimate way. But it begins well before him, as one of the constitutive operations of French philosophy.

The third operation is a political one. The philosophers of this period all sought an in-depth engagement of philosophy with the question of politics. Sartre, the post-war Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Althusser and Deleuze were political activists; just as they had gone to German philosophy for a fresh approach to concept and existence, so they looked to politics for a new relation between concept and action, in particular, collective action. This fundamental desire to engage philosophy with the political situation transforms the relation between concept and action.

The fourth operation has to do with the modernization of philosophy, in a sense quite distinct from the cant of successive government administrations. French philosophers evinced a profound attraction to modernity. They followed contemporary artistic, cultural and social developments very closely. There was a strong philosophical interest in non-figurative painting, new music and theatre, detective novels, jazz and cinema, and a desire to bring philosophy to bear upon the most intense expressions of the modern world. Keen attention was also paid to sexuality and new modes of living. In all this, philosophy was seeking a new relation between the concept and the production of forms-artistic, social, or forms of life. Modernization was thus the quest for a new way in which philosophy could approach the creation of forms.

In sum: the French philosophical moment encompassed a new appropriation of German thought, a vision of science as creativity, a radical political engagement and a search for new forms in art and life. Across these operations runs the common attempt to find a new position, or disposition, for the concept: to displace the relation between the concept and its external environment by developing new relations to existence, to thought, to action, and to the movement of forms. It is the novelty of this relation between the philosophical concept and the external environment that constitutes the broader innovation of twentieth-century French philosophy.

Writing, language, forms

The question of forms, and of the intimate relations of philosophy with the creation of forms, was of crucial importance. Clearly, this posed the issue of the form of philosophy itself: one could not displace the concept without inventing new philosophical forms. It was thus necessary not just to create new concepts but to transform the language of philosophy. This prompted a singular alliance between philosophy and literature which has been one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary French philosophy. There is, of course, a longer history to this. The works of those known to the 18th century as philosophes - Voltaire, Rousseau or Diderot - are classics of French literature; these writers are in a sense the ancestors of the postwar alliance. There are numerous French authors who cannot be allocated exclusively either to philosophy or to literature; Pascal, for example, is both one of the greatest figures in French literature and one of the most profound French thinkers. In the 20th century Alain, to all intents and purposes a classical philosopher and no part of the moment that concerns us here, was closely involved in literature; the process of writing was very important to him, and he produced numerous commentaries on novels-his texts on Balzac are extremely interesting-and on contemporary French poetry, Valéry in particular. In other words, even the more conventional figures of twentieth-century French philosophy can illustrate this affinity between philosophy and literature.

The surrealists also played an important role. They too were eager to shake up relations regarding the production of forms, modernity, the arts; they wanted to invent new modes of life. If theirs was largely an aesthetic programme, it paved the way for the philosophical programme of the 1950s and 60s; both Lacan and Lévi-Strauss frequented surrealist circles, for example. This is a complex history, but if the surrealists were the first representatives of a 20th-century convergence between aesthetic and philosophical projects in France, by the 1950s and 60s it was philosophy that was inventing its own literary forms in an attempt to find a direct expressive link between philosophical style and presentation, and the new positioning for the concept that it proposed.

It is at this stage that we witness a spectacular change in philosophical writing. Forty years on we have, perhaps, grown accustomed to the writing of Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan; we have lost the sense of what an extraordinary rupture with earlier philosophical styles it represented. All these thinkers were bent upon finding a style of their own, inventing a new way of creating prose; they wanted to be writers. Reading Deleuze or Foucault, one finds something quite unprecedented at the level of the sentence, a link between thought and phrasal movement that is completely original. There is a new, affirmative rhythm and an astonishing inventiveness in the formulations. In Derrida there is a patient, complicated relationship of language to language, as language works upon itself and thought passes through that work into words. In Lacan one wrestles with a dazzlingly complex syntax which resembles nothing so much as the syntax of Mallarmé, and is therefore poetic - confessedly so.

There was, then, both a transformation of philosophical expression and an effort to shift the frontiers between philosophy and literature. We should recall-another innovation-that Sartre was also a novelist and playwright (as am I). The specificity of this moment in French philosophy is to play upon several different registers in language, displacing the borders between philosophy and literature, between philosophy and drama. One could even say that one of the goals of French philosophy has been to construct a new space from which to write, one where literature and philosophy would be indistinguishable; a domain which would be neither specialized philosophy, nor literature as such, but rather the home of a sort of writing in which it was no longer possible to disentangle philosophy from literature. A space, in other words, where there is no longer a formal differentiation between concept and life, for the invention of this writing ultimately consists in giving a new life to the concept: a literary life.

With and against Freud

At stake, finally, in this invention of a new writing, is the enunciation of the new subject; of the creation of this figure within philosophy, and the restructuring of the battlefield around it. For this can no longer be the rational, conscious subject that comes down to us from Descartes; it cannot be, to use a more technical expression, the reflexive subject. The contemporary human subject has to be something murkier, more mingled in life and the body, more extensive than the Cartesian model; more akin to a process of production, or creation, that concentrates much greater potential forces inside itself. Whether or not it takes the name of subject, this is what French philosophy has been trying to find, to enunciate, to think. If psychoanalysis has been an interlocutor, it is because the Freudian invention was also, in essence, a new proposition about the subject. For what Freud introduced with the idea of the unconscious was the notion of a human subject that is greater than consciousness-which contains consciousness, but is not restricted to it; such is the fundamental signification of the word "unconscious".

Contemporary French philosophy has therefore also been engaged in a long-running conversation with psychoanalysis. This exchange has been a drama of great complexity, highly revealing in and of itself. At issue, most fundamentally, has been the division of French philosophy between, on one side, what I would call an existential vitalism, originating with Bergson and running through Sartre, Foucault and Deleuze, and on the other a conceptual formalism, derived from Brunschvicg and continuing through Althusser and Lacan. Where the two paths cross is on the question of the subject, which might ultimately be defined, in terms of French philosophy, as the being that brings forth the concept. In a certain sense the Freudian unconscious occupies the same space; the unconscious, too, is something vital or existing yet which produces, which bears forth, the concept. How can an existence bear forth a concept, how can something be created out of a body? If this is the central question, we can see why philosophy is drawn into such intense exchanges with psychoanalysis. Naturally, there is always a certain friction where common aims are pursued by different means. There is an element of complicity - you are doing the same as I am - but also of rivalry: you are doing it differently. The relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis within French philosophy is just this, one of competition and complicity, of fascination and hostility, love and hatred. No wonder the drama between them has been so violent, so complex.

Three key texts may give us an idea of it. The first, perhaps the clearest example of this complicity and competition, comes from the beginning of Bachelard's work of 1938, La psychanalyse du feu. Bachelard proposes a new psychoanalysis grounded in poetry and dream, a psychoanalysis of the elements-fire, water, air and earth. One could say that Bachelard is here trying to replace Freudian sexual inhibition with reverie, to demonstrate that this is the larger and more open category. The second text comes from the end of Being and Nothingness where Sartre, in his turn, proposes the creation of a new psychoanalysis, contrasting Freud's 'empirical' psychoanalysis with his own (by implication) properly theoretical existential model. Sartre seeks to replace the Freudian complex-the structure of the unconscious-with what he terms the 'original choice'. For him what defines the subject is not a structure, neurotic or perverse, but a fundamental project of existence. Again, an exemplary instance of complicity and rivalry combined.

The third text comes from Chapter 4 of Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari. Here, psychoanalysis is to be replaced by a method that Deleuze calls schizoanalysis, in outright competition with Freudian analysis. For Bachelard, it was reverie rather than inhibition; for Sartre, the project rather than the complex. For Deleuze, as Anti-Oedipus makes clear, it is construction rather than expression; his chief objection to psychoanalysis is that it does no more than express the forces of the unconscious, when it ought to construct it. He calls explicitly for the replacement of "Freudian expression" with the construction that is the work of schizoanalysis. It is striking, to say the least, to find three great philosophers, Bachelard, Sartre and Deleuze, each proposing to replace psychoanalysis with a model of their own.

Path of greatness

Finally, a philosophical moment defines itself by its programme of thought. What might we define as the common ground of postwar French philosophy in terms, not of its works or system or even its concepts, but of its intellectual programme? The philosophers involved are, of course, very different figures, and would approach such a programme in different ways. Nevertheless, where you have a major question, jointly acknowledged, there you have a philosophical moment, worked out through a broad diversity of means, texts and thinkers. We may summarize the main points of the programme that inspired postwar French philosophy as follows.

1. To have done with the separation of concept and existence-no longer to oppose the two; to demonstrate that the concept is a living thing, a creation, a process, an event, and, as such, not divorced from existence;

2. To inscribe philosophy within modernity, which also means taking it out of the academy and putting it into circulation in daily life. Sexual modernity, artistic modernity, social modernity: philosophy has to engage with all of this;

3. To abandon the opposition between philosophy of knowledge and philosophy of action, the Kantian division between theoretical and practical reason, and to demonstrate that knowledge itself, even scientific knowledge, is actually a practice;

4. To situate philosophy directly within the political arena, without making the detour via political philosophy; to invent what I would call the 'philosophical militant', to make philosophy into a militant practice in its presence, in its way of being: not simply a reflection upon politics, but a real political intervention;

5. To reprise the question of the subject, abandoning the reflexive model, and thus to engage with psychoanalysis-to rival and, if possible, to better it;

6. To create a new style of philosophical exposition, and so to compete with literature; essentially, to reinvent in contemporary terms the 18th-century figure of the philosopher-writer.

Such is the French philosophical moment, its programme, its high ambition. To identify it further, its one essential desire - for every identity is the identity of a desire - was to turn philosophy into an active form of writing that would be the medium for the new subject. And by the same token, to banish the meditative or professorial image of the philosopher; to make the philosopher something other than a sage, and so other than a rival to the priest. Rather, the philosopher aspired to become a writer-combatant, an artist of the subject, a lover of invention, a philosophical militant-these are the names for the desire that runs through this period: the desire that philosophy should act in its own name. I am reminded of the phrase Malraux attributed to de Gaulle in Les chênes qu'on abat: 'Greatness is a road toward something that one does not know'. Fundamentally, the French philosophical moment of the second half of the 20th century was proposing that philosophy should prefer that road to the goals it knew, that it should choose philosophical action or intervention over wisdom and meditation. It is as philosophy without wisdom that it is condemned today.

But the French philosophical moment was more interested in greatness than in happiness. We wanted something quite unusual, and admittedly problematic: our desire was to be adventurers of the concept. We were not seeking a clear separation between life and concept, nor the subordination of existence to the idea or the norm. Instead, we wanted the concept itself to be a journey whose destination we did not necessarily know. The epoch of adventure is, unfortunately, generally followed by an epoch of order. This may be understandable-there was a piratical side to this philosophy, or a nomadic one, as Deleuze would say. Yet 'adventurers of the concept' might be a formula that could unite us all; and thus I would argue that what took place in late 20th-century France was ultimately a moment of philosophical adventure.

This text by Alainn Badiou was published in New Left Review 35, September-October 2005.

Alberto Toscano: The coloured thickness of a problem

This is Alberto Toscanos preface to Eric Alliez book "The signature of the world : or, What is Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy?" translated by Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano.

A new Meno would say : it is knowledge that is nothing more than an empirical figure, a simple result which continually falls back into experience ; whereas learning is the true transcendental structure which unites difference to difference, dissimilarity to dissimilarity, without mediating between them - not in the form of a mythical past or former present, but in the pure form of an empty time in general. (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition)

The strictures of quality assessment and the self-reinforcing imperatives of the market have consigned philosophers, as of late, to a regime of publication - of poubéllication, to adopt Lacan’s portmanteau quip - dominated by the exhaustive introduction, the definitive treatment, or the comparative exercise in ecumenical interdisciplinarity. What is most insidious about this synoptic regime, whose hegemony is strongest in the Atlantic, or Anglo-American, sphere, is that its steady, irrepressible advance takes place under the seemingly unimpeachable banner of pedagogy. This predicament is all the more symptomatic when it comes to the presentation of thinkers gathered under the exquisitely equivocal heading of ‘Continental’. In this instance, we are faced with a generalised practice of reduction of complexity (‘the gnomic, impenetrable dicta of philosopher X finally made clear, accessible...’) uneasily accompanied by the claim, often emblazoned on the book’s packaging, that what we are dealing with is the ‘most radical’, ‘newest’, ‘most extreme’ intellectual project to date. It is rarely the case that the claims made on behalf of the thinker under consideration exert any influence on the approach, the style, the mode of presentation. A kind of degree zero of writing, unaware of itself, often suffices. In the case of Deleuze and Guattari, this serves to exacerbate the paradox of an ideal of untrammelled communication being put to the service of a philosophy which condemns that very ideal as a capitulation to opinion (doxa), as a collusion with the most reductive and regressive tendencies in contemporary capitalism. This situation, the outcome of a disciplinary conjuncture which sees the circulation of ideas being ever more restricted to a wilfully pre-constituted ‘projected readership’ is all the more difficult to resist inasmuch as it is driven by a forced (re)production of the ‘new’, which, to all intents and purposes, makes the promotion of the unexpected into the sine qua non of intellectual life. But, as What is Philosophy ? and The Signature of the World tell us, the concepts of philosophy are not the distant cousins of the ones constantly hatched in the sleek interiors of advertising companies around the globe. Or, to take the point a bit further, everything points to the conclusion that a philosophy moulded by the demands of marketing is necessarily a philosophy incapable of thinking in and through capitalism.

The reasons why these questions of philosophical culture and transmission might be exacerbated when the work of Deleuze and Guattari is at stake do not just boil down to these authors’ engagement with the question of capitalism and their trenchant polemic against its regimes of communication and consumption. Both in collaboration and in their separate writings, Deleuze and Guattari foreground the issue of pedagogy, and the related notion of apprenticeship, with remarkable insistence (it would not be otiose to contrast their efforts on this score with those of contemporaries such as Lacan, Derrida or Rancière, or, perhaps more fruitfully, with the overt preoccupations of American pragmatism). The crux of the matter is that pedagogy is not restricted to a set of operations aimed at facilitating access to a preexisting object, nor, conversely, is it a divining practice that coaxes, from a subject of teaching, some latent cognitive content. Following upon Spinoza’s treatment of the common notions, Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, subtracts apprenticeship, or learning, from the representational logic of instruction, making it into a matter of the sub-representational contemplation or better contraction of singularities, into the ability to extract a material schematism, or spatio-temporal dynamism, out of one’s encounter with what he elsewhere terms, following Blanchot, the outside of thought. In view of Alliez’s distinctive concern with the sensible conditions of philosophy, science and art, with the transversal character of aisthesis as both affect and experiment, passive synthesis and invention, it is important to note the intimate bond between philosophical apprenticeship and the question of sensibility as presented by Deleuze. It is this bond, sealed by the dependence of conceptualisation on an encounter, which turns learning away from an objective method and toward the necessarily ‘subliminal’ nature of the Idea, which makes philosophical culture something other than (scientific) knowledge. As Deleuze writes : ‘There is no more a method for learning than there is a method for finding treasures, but a violent training, a culture or paideïa which affects the entire individual [...]. Method is the means of that knowledge which regulates the corroboration of all the faculties. It is therefore the manifestation of a common sense or the realisation of a Cogitatio natura, and presupposes a good will as though this were a “premeditated decision” of the thinker. Culture, however, is an involuntary adventure, the movement of learning which links a sensibility, a memory and then a thought, with all the cruelties and violence necessary...’. Learning, and the indirect apprenticeship that a commentary constitutes, are thus not vanishing mediators between an initial situation of non-knowledge or ignorance and a final state of completed - which is to say representable - knowledge. Instead, as the constitution or invention of a determinate or differentiated problematic field, learning is the very essence of philosophy as an experience of construction whose concern is not with the production of stable propositions in a present voided of virtuality or becoming. As a truly transcendental exercise, learning (and the commentary as one of the guises learning takes) eschews the empirical actuality of a solution, endeavouring instead to link the subjectivity of the apprentice (or the commentator) to ‘the singular points of the objective in order to form a problematic field.’ Rather than as a mediator between the (ignorant) reader and the (final) text or doctrine, a commentary can thus be conceived as a novel problematisation of the ideal connections that define a particular philosophical object, a repetition of the text that does not seek to identify its theses as much as turn heterogeneity into consistency, uniting differences to differences, and open the work in question both to the ‘empty time’ or Aion of the event and to the specific virtualities of a contemporary situation.

Expanding upon some of the pedagogical suggestions offered by Difference and Repetition, What is Philosophy ?, with its exploration of the auto-positional nature of the concept, provocatively enjoins us to think the pedagogy of the concept, the delineation of its parameters of construction and components, as being one with the pedagogy of the concept, the concept’s own becoming and variability with regard to ‘its’ encounters with a non-philosophical outside. Likewise for the notion, delved into at length by Alliez both in the main text and the appendices, of a phenomenology of the concept, in which the cognitive, perceptual and sensory attributes of the concept are, in the order of construction, prior to any ascription of phenomenological properties to (the concept of) a subject. The tensions and contradictions raised by subjecting the work of Deleuze and Guattari to what I initially called the synoptic regime are compounded once we consider the correlate to the pedagogy of the concept, the stratigraphic revolution in the practice of the history of philosophy. Here lies perhaps the most significant contribution of Alliez’s own work, which, beginning with Capital Times, combines (1) a radical recasting of the very notion of philosophical history, (2) a polemical genealogy of modernity understood in terms of different conduits of time, as these relate to the constitution of capitalism, and (3) a reactivation through virtualization of past philosophies and their distinctive temporalities. Despite the somewhat heavy-handed dichotomy of geology and genealogy in What is Philosophy ? we can say that both a stratigraphic approach and a counter-genealogy of the kind practiced by Alliez are committed to treating philosophers and their concepts outside of the linearity, continuity and divisibility that characterize the customary teaching of the history of philosophy. By the same token, they view the reactivation of the virtualities of a given philosophy in terms of their potentially subversive re-insertion into a present conjuncture, which is why, as Alliez writes, ‘from a philosophical point of view, the history of philosophy is only worth our while is it begins to introduce some philosophical time into the time of history’, according to a ‘principle of contingent reason’ which remains attentive to the intimate resonances between the singularities of a concept and non-philosophical becomings and events. Whence an open battle against any brand of teleology in the history of philosophy, whether this be the moral teleology of Critique, the dialectical teleology of self-consciousness, or the passive nihilism that characterizes the anti-telological teleology of postmodernism, the litany of the end of philosophy. Against all these options and tendencies, Deleuze and Guattari, as Negri has noted, present us with ‘a discontinuous history of singularity’.

Whilst today’s pseudo-scholasticism is set on the saturation of secondary markets dominated by canonized names (even when the canon is a canon of ‘marginals’), there is in the work of Alliez, as informed by his own ongoing and innovative research into the tensions and transformations in Mediaeval and Renaissance thought that set the stage for the divergent trajectories of philosophical modernity, in its dialogue with the groundbreaking efforts of contemporary historians of philosophy such as Alain de Libera and Jean-François Courtine, a rare sensitivity to the sheer daring and intellectual complexity manifested by the scholastic practice of reading and commentary, in all its guises. What transpires from this attention to and reactivation of Mediaeval textual practices is both a novel style of philosophical composition and a very distinctive approach to the history, or better genealogy, of philosophy, as well as the history of the history of philosophy. Much like the commentaries of the Mediaevals, it is fair to say that The Signature of the World is not at all an ‘easier’ read than What is Philosophy ?, nor that it provides a kind of heuristic algorithm which, industriously applied, would allow us to reduce the difficulty and complexity of the original. Not a guide, and certainly not a substitute, it demands to be read alongside the text of Deleuze and Guattari ; only thus can it perform the signal task of the commentary : to intensify the complexity of the text by selecting and modulating certain moments and perspectives within it, to reorient the reader by inflecting its topology, and, most importantly, to spur the labour of new repetitions, new habitations of the text giving rise to novel connections and redistributions of its singular points. Unabashedly systemic, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is not by that token doctrinal, in the sense it would allow itself to be reduced or represented by a set of conveniently enumerable theses. The commentary, in this sense, is not a contribution to the construction of an orthodoxy, with all its attendant disciplinary effects, but a necessarily partial, perhaps partisan, effort to revitalise a philosophy, by a judicious combination of detailed excavation, on the one hand, and the potentially catalytic adjunction of new components, on the other.

Is it possible to write about a philosophy, without representing it, without reducing it to a set of easily registered and reproduced theses, indexes and subdivisions ? Or, to specify the question in terms of Deleuze and Guattari, if (their) philosophy is a theory of multiplicities, and the concept itself is best designated as an intensive or virtual multiplicity, is it at all warranted to treat their thought as a quantitative multiplicity, one that could be measured, divided and represented - or, to abide with our concern, expounded and introduced - without fundamentally changing its status ? These doubts about representing an anti-representational thought should not in the least be confused with a crypto-theological injunction to silence, be it tragic, therapeutic or sublime. On the contrary, besides the crucial conceptualization of the role of repetition in the history of philosophy, with which Alliez opens Chapter I and which he explores further in ‘Deleuze Virtual Philosophy’ (Appendix I), Deleuze provides us a fertile model for an other, non-representational and non-propositional, pedagogy when it comes to philosophers and their texts, what he calls counter-actualization. The ‘ethics’ of philosophy, the focus of the first Chapter of The Signature of the World, is not only the appraisal of systems of thought through the Spinozist lenses of pure immanence - the mobilisation and perception of what Alliez calls ‘the non-discursive auto-enunciation of the event’ - it is also a matter of what it might mean to be ‘worthy’ of a philosophy in the same sense that Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, spoke of being worthy of an event. To wrest Deleuze and Guattari from a synoptic regime of doctrinal introduction - the repetition that makes no difference - is also a question ‘of becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us, the Operator ; of producing surfaces and linings in which the event is reflected, finds itself again as incorporeal and manifests in us the neutral splendour which it possesses in itself in its impersonal and pre-individual nature, beyond the general and the particular, the collective and the private.’ The commentator as quasi-cause or Operator of a philosophy, rather than the knowing purveyor of conceptual generalities, as adequate to a series of propositions as they are blind to the Event in or of a philosophy : here lies the role for philosophical commentary and philosophical history of the notion of the virtual. When it is not reified into standing for the mystical heart of production, the virtual allows us to delve into the specificity of philosophy as a kind of trans-historical machine for counter-actualization, which, instead of being tied to the constrictive and sterile parameters of objective or representational fidelity, tells us that the most ‘constructed’ of repetitions will also be the most expressive, that the most abstract will also be the most concrete, which is to say, the commentary that goes deepest into the problematic field that generates the philosophical concepts which ‘secondary literature’ can only grasp as a static sequence of propositions. Whilst the latter is dead set on studiously actualizing a philosophy’s problems into a digestible and well-ordered series of propositions, whose internal disparateness and heterogeneity has been thoroughly evacuated, the true commentary’s task, again to quote The Logic of Sense, is ‘to be the mime of what effectively occurs, to double the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification with a distance, like the true actor and dancer, to give the truth of the event the only chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualization. [...] To the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned forever in its actualization, counter-actualization liberates it, always for other times’. And, this being the interventionist and conjunctural character of the commentary, for our time, breathing life into the concept (and the concept of the concept) by allowing it to resonate with the different virtualities, different potentials.

This is just by way of supporting evidence for the assertion that philosophical pedagogy, as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari and traversed by Alliez, is necessarily a counter-pedagogy, an ethics of philosophy and philosophical writing that rejects the currently dominant picture according to which we should aspire to an information transfer with the least possible noise - a position this that happily ignores the Deleuzian redistribution, again in Difference and Repetition, of the clear-and-obscure over against the distinct-and-confused (the use of Deleuze and Guattari as guarantors of a rhapsodic, sloganeering and awkwardly ‘poetic’ style is merely the counterpart of such academicism, equally failing to attain the consistency of the concept). Such a counter-pedagogy is intimately wedded to the very distinctive concern with ontology, and more specifically with ‘onto-ethology’, advocated by Alliez. Against the preparation of concepts for conspicuous consumption so prevalent today, the aim of onto-ethology is instead to traverse, in order to reactivate them, the singularities that compose a concept. This is inevitably accompanied by a reinsertion of the concept - and in particular the ‘concept of the concept’ advanced by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy ? - into the contemporary philosophical conjuncture, to elicit new interferences with the domains of art and science. In this regard, there is no hard and fast distinction between the prescriptive or interpretive concerns we’ve been rehearsing up to now and the constructive and expressive practice of philosophy itself. What is Philosophy ?, as read by Alliez, is emphatically not a meta-philosophical tract or propaedeutic, but a bona fide ontological intervention, a potent reconfiguration of philosophical practice inseparable from a novel sequence of conceptual invention which, as Alliez shows, namely with respect to the status of science and the appraisal of Bergsonism, both prolongs and transforms the collaborative work undertaken in the earlier Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes. Given the equation of expressionism and constructivism that constitutes the privileged axis for Alliez’s reading, we cannot sunder the affective and sensory qualities of the concept, of the concept as an inhabited, virtual reality, from its conditions of formation and transmission. If there is a privileged channel between art and philosophy it has to do with the former’s capacity to mobilise and activate the sensible components of the concept, and thus to function as a possible catalyst or relay for philosophical activity itself.

Once again, the uniqueness of Alliez’s text in the current panorama of presentations and interpretations is linked, despite its well-founded suspicion of any prescriptive methodological appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari, to its fidelity vis-à-vis the intimate link or even equation between the conditions of exercise of philosophical practice (which is to say the parameters for the construction of concepts) and what we are often lazily led to consider as the ‘claims’ of a given philosophy. Onto-ethology rescinds the representational logic whereby such claims might try to legitimate themselves. It does so by elucidating how the practical immersion into concepts and their singularities (components) is not some supplementary epistemological exercise but rather lies at the very heart of ontology. Conversely, by drawing the consequences of the dismantling of the representational image of thought, with its connections to the static or quantitative multiplicities mentioned above, it circumvents the imperious demands of critique ; if ontology as onto-ethology simply is the entry into the concept with its material resonances, its expressive potential, its non-philosophical outside - if the concept must perennially be reconstructed, differed in its repetition, linked to a perspective in and of the world - then we have abandoned any privileged vantage point that would allow us immanently to draw out the limits or boundaries of speculation and thereby attain the legislative eminence of meta-philosophy. The crucial lesson of What is Philosophy ?, then, as ‘repeated’ by Alliez, is precisely that any separation of ontological from expressive (and sensible) content, any sundering of philosophical ‘statements’ from their conditions of production, from the experience of construction, freezes philosophy into an easily manipulated, but ultimately lifeless, collection of propositions. By trying to attain the status of propositional knowledge, by trying to purify itself of the ‘obscure’ perceptive and affective components of the concept in the image of an impoverished, cleansed science, which is to say by severing its connections with art, philosophy would evacuate itself of its specificity, its attention to the life of the concept.

Alliez’s relentless attention to the pedagogical link between the construction and expression of the concept, his raising of montage and style to matters of philosophical import, also leads him to provide a path through the thought of Deleuze and Guattari which, in its connections and consequences, goes against the grain of much of the diverse and often inconsistent (rather than positively metastable) field of ‘Deleuzism’ which has been gaining mass if not momentum in the years following the publication of What is Philosophy ? This goes to demonstrate, if further demonstration were needed, that the pedagogical and presentational angle we’ve chosen to highlight is not the province of propaedeutic or meta-philosophical questions, but is endowed with all the speculative dignity and political charge of ontology, in its Spinozist incarnation. Two ‘doctrinal’ topics are most obviously affected by Alliez’s traversal of What is Philosophy ? It is worth dwelling on these at some length both to assay the considerable consequences of his particular portrait of the ‘pedagogy of the concept’ and to begin to imagine how such an intervention might help to reconfigure current debates and undermine a certain consensual reading of Deleuze (and Guattari) which currently seems to be making some headway. These two topics are the image of science, on the one hand, and the relation between ontology, phenomenology and aesthetics, on the other. Both, we shall argue, hinge on the status accorded to notions of subjectivity and point of view.

Much as the obvious sympathy displayed by Deleuze and Guattari toward certain currents in scientific theory might tempt us to align their project with some contemporary research programme - complexity theory, for instance - the speculative engagement with science in What is Philosophy ?, reconstructed and expanded with considerable originality by Alliez, militates against any notion of a philosophy that would provide the ontological supplement for a given scientific theory, as much as it puts paid to the project of a critical eminence of philosophy over science. The passage from the perspective of critique to the project of ontogenesis and heterogenesis, from conditions of possible experience to conditions of real experience, signifies the relinquishing of any epistemological pretension, in full awareness that ontological scepticism, realism and their derivatives are hardly the urgent concern of today’s science, with its surfeit of ideal-material entities, quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. Rather than trying to shore up a particular research programme or, vice versa, employ it to provide philosophical practice with some spurious legitimacy, What is Philosophy ?, as traversed by Alliez, is preoccupied with delineating the constructive specificity of science, its manner of engaging with the chaos that beckons thought. It does this by focussing on individuation in science (of the states of things or affairs, of functions, limits and partial observers) and correlatively on the individuation of science - whence the seemingly paradoxical heading of Chapter 2, ‘The Aetiology of Science’ - against the objectivist ontology that pervades the determinist or mechanist tradition. Such a tradition is wedded to the essentially transcendent - because non-relational and force-free - individuation of non partial-observers ; there is thus a correspondence between the view from nowhere of the scientia dei and the abstract ontology of the object which only an attention to the problematic and polemical constitution of scientific objectivity can undermine. It is this joint conception of the heterogenesis of thought and the ontogenesis of being which represents the hallmark of what Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus term transcendental materialism. To regard the latter as the ontology of a given scientific approach would be to ignore that the ‘image of science’ outlined in What is Philosophy ? is a construction produced from within philosophy and its history, specifically against mathesis universalis, Laplacean determinism, the physics of states, rather than a kind of ideological supplement or support for a particular scientific theory.

At the opposite and complementary extreme of the proto-analytic and post-positivistic, ‘Quinean’, take on the relation between philosophy and science is the creeping tendency to elide the ‘new materialism’ of Deleuze and Guattari with the various phenomenologies of embodiment that take Merleau-Ponty as their principal referent. The originality of Alliez’s stance in this respect lies, first, in reading the confrontation with aesthetics in What is Philosophy ? (which prolongs Deleuze’s work in The Logic of Sense and Francis Bacon : The Logic of Sensation) as a practical refutation of any confusion between the thinking of the Body without Organs and the Merleau-Pontyian concern with the flesh ; second, in identifying the passage to a materialist phenomenology of the concept as the best antidote to the ambient pieties of intentional consciousness and its collapse into absolute alterity (Levinas) or spiritualist immanence (Michel Henry) - ‘a phenomenology of the concept to put an end to all phenomenologies’, as Alliez writes in De l’impossibilité de la phénoménologie. The indissoluble link between the pre-individual character of sensibility and affect and the unabashed artificiality of artistic invention, taken as the prism through which to grasp the singularity of contemporary art, is thus employed against any notion of art as the site of a manifestation of subjectivity. Whilst the eliciting of certain figures of subjectivity from the capture of chaos in certain assemblages of percepts and affects is certainly not to be discounted, the consistency of the artwork cannot be simply enveloped in a perceiving subject without lopping off one of the two halves of aesthetics (sensation and experiment, passivity and artifice) which Deleuze so insistently endeavoured to think in unison. From this standpoint, that of ‘the sensible idea of a material indiscernibility between Art and Life’, phenomenology ‘denatures’ the plane of immanence by forcing life into the confines of a teleologically ordered subjectivity, commanded by the principles of good sense and common sense. Concurring with Badiou’s polemical characterisation of Deleuze’s project in his review of The Fold, though reversing the verdict, Alliez identifies the wager of this philosophy in the notion is of a self-description of Life in a ‘virtual phenomenology of the concept’ as experience and experiment (whence the characterization of Deleuze’s philosophy as an empiricism). The term phenomenology, of course, is used in the most provocative a of guises, since the notion of description is here divorced from any figure of subjective interiority, intentionality or embodiment. The ‘self’ in self-description indicates a kind of torsion or fold of the plane of immanence in the fractured individuality of the philosopher (Difference and Repetition) and the self-positing of the concept (What is Philosophy ?). However, against the circulating opinion that notions of subjectivity are simply alien to Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) philosophy, Alliez, following the entire thematic of the ‘brain’ in What is Philosophy ? and the arguments of shorter texts such as ‘The Conception of Difference in Bergson’, ‘HowDo We RecognizeStructuralism’, ‘Immanence : A Life...’, or ‘The Actual and the Virtual’, does allow us to move toward a novel conception of subjectivity no longer wedded to the Cartesian subject of knowledge or the phenomenological subject of perception. Whence the importance of the Leibnizian discussion of Whitehead in What is Philosophy ?, where the ‘question is no longer that of the methodological dependence of the object in relation to the subject, but of the ontological auto-constitution of a new subject on the basis of its objects’. Following Whitehead, the subject (or rather ‘superject’) arises from the prehension of its world, meaning that the ontology of the sensible is not separable from the constitution of material processes and assemblages themselves. This neo-Leibnizian philosophy of subjectivation also provides speculative support for the thesis that contemporary art does not provide a site for the reflection of a pre-existing phenomenological subject but elicits the machinic production of new subjects, new fulcrums of prehension. The humanist telos of the phenomenology of perception, always more or less implicitly bound to the ‘proper function’ of embodiment, is dissolved by an experimentation with the senses that doubles the constructivism of the concept. A constructivism this not so distant from the kind articulated by the great Soviet director and constructivist Dziga Vertov, when he wrote : ‘The mechanical eye, the camera, rejecting the human eye as crib sheet, gropes its way through the chaos of visual events, letting itself be drawn or repelled by movement, probing, as it goes, the path of its own movement. It experiments, distending time, dissecting movement, or, in contrary fashion, absorbing time within itself, swallowing years, thus schematizing processes of long duration inaccessible to the normal eye.’

In a review greeting the appearance of What is Philosophy ?, Antonio Negri spoke of that book as the first philosophical system of the 21st century, ‘a common philosophy alternative to capitalist modernity. In its rigorous materialism it presents itself as a common philosophy, in its instance of absolute immanence it liquidates the postmodern’. Also ascribing to the thesis of a turn away from foundationalism but toward ontology, instead of hermeneutics, Alliez himself rehearses a variety of appellations to capture the uniqueness of Deleuze and Guattari’s approach : metaphysical materialism, ontology of the virtual, empiricism as speculative materialism, a finally revolutionary philosophical materialism, Ideal-materialism of the pure event, experimental naturalism, practical vitalism, ontology of experience, virtual phenomenology of the concept. We could even say that one of the principal aims of these commentaries and variations on the difference of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is to displace the commonplace assurances that still permeate philosophical discourse about terms such as idealism, realism, naturalism, phenomenology and, above all, materialism. As we have seen, Alliez suggests that philosophical materialism need not entail a subservience to some variety of scientific realism (whether deterministic or otherwise) and that, through an attention to the processual, expressive and constructive character of contemporary art, it can also present itself as a ‘material meta-aesthetics’. In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is portrayed as a hitherto unheard of convergence of an ontology of ‘fluid and crystalline’ matter as the site of processes of assemblage and individuation and a thinking of practice which encompasses a range of activities from conceptual construction to political organisation. The separation within materialism of a determinist or mechanist tendency, on the one hand, and a philosophy of praxis or ‘materialism without matter’ (to quote Balibar), on the other, is diagonally undermined by a thinking of the heterogenesis of material objectivity and subjective action from a pre-individual field, divergently accessed by philosophy, science and art. It is here that the equation of expressionism and constructivism - inasmuch as ‘expression is the constitutive activity of being’ - is doubled by the indiscernibility of experience and experiment, such that material individuation and conceptual invention can be thought on the same plane. This also explains why, against both the phenomenology of intentional consciousness and the determinist thinking of a lifeless matter, Alliez sustains the polemical thesis, based on a philosophical lineage which includes Leibniz, Gabriel Tarde and A.N. Whitehead that it is only by resuscitating, within the context of contemporary science, a certain perspectivism or panpsychism that one can really be faithful to materialism, a materialism for which matter turns into a sensed-sensing energy with multiple centres, foldings or perspectives that precede the formation of measured and measuring subjects. Or, to slightly change register, any naturalism that doesn’t prioritize natura naturans (the pre-individual) over natura naturata (the individuated) will remain a thinking of possible rather than real experience.

But what is perhaps most significant about Alliez’s operation, and what might also account for the scanty attention given to What is Philosophy ? by most Deleuzeans, is the absolute centrality he accords to the question of thought, which he places at the very heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s recasting of materialism for the 21st century as a materialism of the concept. For What is Philosophy ? clearly shows that it is impossible to answer the question without also expanding it to ‘What is Thought ?’ and to the conflicts, interactions and interferences between philosophy and non-philosophical thought, as well as between thought and the tendencies and transformations that traverse the contemporary world. In a sentence that perhaps best encapsulates the crux of his project, Alliez writes : ‘In practice, the question is that of a theory of thought capable of diagnosing in our becomings the ontological conditions for the real experience of thought’. These ontological conditions are therefore not invariant schemas of possibility, but the consequence of real transformations in the problematic fields or abstract machines that engender our actual predicament and our philosophical legacy. The practical and interventionist (or polemical) impetus of this kind of enquiry cannot be ignored ; constructivism cannot do without the insertion of ontology into a present state of affairs and the counter-actualization of this state of affairs through a sensitivity to the event and its material repercussions. This is why ‘thought only says what it is by saying what it does’ (‘Deleuze Virtual Philosophy’, Proposition I). Eschewing an interrogation of this anti-epistemological and non-rationalist theory of thought as a practice of invention and counter-actualization, most treatments of Deleuze and Guattari have either reduced their philosophy to a kind of dogmatism that represents matter in a set of theses regarding its flux-like nature, its dynamism, its processes of stratification and... its non-representable character, or sutured it (to paraphrase Badiou) to a condition (be it science, art or politics) which is no longer a condition of real experience but more like a pretext. Whence the use of certain artistic products or movements as illustrations of a putative Deleuzo-Guattarian doctrine or the depiction of a given research programme as the experimental extension of their materialist ontology. In both instances we lose the specificity of philosophical practice, together with its articulation and sometimes polemical discontinuity with regard to other forms of thought, turning the risky ethics and ethology of thought into a pacifying ideology, the paradoxical representation, rather than real repetition, of a thought without an image. Where the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari is often reduced to an updated variant of classical materialism, an adjunct to new scientific models or a less Christian branch of phenomenology, Alliez, armed with the insights of neo-Platonism, Bergsonism and Tardean monadology, points to ‘the speculative identity of a philosophy of intuition and a philosophy of the concept’, manifested in the turn from essence to ethology, as the hallmark of this philosophical system for the 21st century.

If the ‘involuntary adventure’ of culture, as Deleuze notes, is what allows us to ‘penetrate the coloured thickness of a problem’ [l’épaisseur colorée d’un problème], we can only hope that The Signature of the World will contribute, against the forced generation of slogans and facile certainties, to intensifying the problematic character of the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which, conceived as an intensive multiplicity in its own right, as a system in heterogenesis - perfectly determinate without being inert - demands the creativity of commentary rather than the sterile tedium of exposition.

Badiou and Deleuze on individuation, causality and infinite modes in Spinoza

Below there is a link to a paper by Jon Roffe, presented at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy Research Day on Spinoza and the Infinite, December 2005: "In lieu of an introduction, let me simply say that my subject here is Alain Badiou’s discussion of Spinoza’s ontology in his masterpiece L’être et l’événement.

He proposes a reading that foregrounds a concept which is as central and celebrated to his philosophy as it is strictly excluded by Spinoza: the void. In short, Badiou contents that for all Spinoza’s effort to offer an ontology of total plenitude, the void returns in his philosophy under the (at first sight) unlikely name of infinite mode. What follows is organised into three moments. I will first give an exposition of Badiou’s intricate critique of Spinoza. Next, I will challenge on a number of points Badiou’s exposition of Spinoza, notably his treatment of infinite and finite.1 It is my contention that Badiou only presents the version of Spinoza amenable to his theoretical orientation, and that a more substantial account of the issues opens up alternatives to the reintroduction of the concept of void in order to provide his philosophy with consistency. Turning then to Deleuze, I will argue that he provides just such an alternative, on the basis of his account of the relationship between modal essence and individual existing modes."

Read more at:
http://www.mscp.org.au/research/roffe_spinoza_infinite.pdf

Marguerite Duras: India Song

India Song, 1975, 120 min., 35mm

"The formal approach is like nothing before in film history: the 'drama' is entirely aural, and the elegant visuals counterpoint it by creating an atmosphere of sumptuous enervation." (Time Out)

This legendary and long-unavailable work by novelist, playwright and film director Marguerite Duras is an audiovisual poem haunted by the intoxicating dream of decadent colonialism and impossible love. The separately recorded soundtrack is a tapestry of ambient sounds, nostalgic music and Duras’ superb prose, uttered by off-screen voices as the mouths of the protagonists remain closed: the ever-invisible beggar woman from Lahore, the consul’s beautiful wife Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), and the lovelorn vice consul, howling “her Venice name in deserted Calcutta.” Shot by master cinematographer Bruno Nuytten.

BIOGRAPHIES

Marguerite Duras (Gia Dinh, Indochina, 1914 - Paris, 1996), one of the towering figures of 20th century French literature, is associated both with the nouveau roman (new novel) and (feminine writing). She published her first novel, Les Impudents, in 1943. Her huge bibliography (73 books, including more than 40 novels) includes landmark texts such as Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952, The Sailor from Gibraltar, filmed by Tony Rchardson in 1966), Moderato cantabile (1958, filmed by Peter Brook in 1960), Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), L'Amante anglaise (1967, The English Lover), Détruire, dit-elle (1969, Destroys, She Said), and Agatha (1981). She reached a large popular audience with her semi-autobiographical novel, (The Lover, 1984), based on her experiences as a young girl born in French Indochina -- that won the prestigious Goncourt literary price, sold 1.5 million copies, was translated into 40 languages and made into an English-speaking film by Jean-Jacques Annaud in 1992. In 1991, she published a slightly different book, L'Amant de la Chine du Nord (The North China Lover), then, in Yann Andrea Steiner (1992); she created a "Durasian" hero based upon the companion with whom shared her life since 1980.

She also wrote a number of plays and screenplays -- the most famous being (1959), directed by Alain Resnais.

She knew no borders between the novel, the theatre, the cinema and journalism. For example, she first wrote Des journées entières dans les arbres (Whole Days in the Trees) as a short story, (1954), and then a play (1968) and finally into a film (1976). In 1967, she made La Musica (1967, co-directed with Paul Seban), the first of the 19 films she directed till Les Enfants in 1984.

Selected filmography: Détruire, dit-elle (1969); La Femme du Gange (1976); Le Camion (1977); Le Navire Night (1978); L'Homme Atlantique (1981).

Delphine Seyrig (Beirut, Lebanon, 1932 - Paris, 1990) has graced European cinema since her alluring performance as the mysterious woman in Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961). She had actually started her career (under the monicker of "Beltiane") in Alfred Leslie's and Robert Frank's famous avant-garde film Pull My Daisy, shot in New York in 1959. Following Marienbad, Seyrig acted for the best French directors: Alain Resnais (Muriel ou Le Temps d'un retour, 1963), François Truffaut (Baisers voles, 1968), Jacques Demy (Peau d'Ane, 1970). She also worked with Luis Buñuel (La Voie Lactée, 1969; Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972) and was an exquisite Countess Bathori in the cult lesbian vampire film Daughters of Darkness (1971) by Dutch director Harry Kümel.

It is, however, with female directors that she developed a special bond. She made four films with Marguerite Duras (La Musica, 1967; India Song, 1975; Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta desert, 1976; , 1977) and three with the German avant-garde director Ulrike Ottinger (Freak Orlando, 1981; Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse, 1984; and Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia, 1989 -- her last screen appearance).

Her most noted collaboration was with Belgian-born director Chantal Akerman. She was unforgettable as the title role in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) -- a film that marked the 1970s as thoroughly as India Song did. She continued working with her in Letters Home (1986) and The Golden Eighties (AKA Window Shopping, 1986).

A dedicated feminist, Seyrig directed militant films, that are currently being restored by the Centre Simone de Beauvoir in Paris: Maso et Miso vont en bateau (1975, Maso and Miso Go Boating) Scum Manifesto (1976) and the documentary Sois belle et tais-toi (1981, Be Seen and Not Heard) in which she interviews actresses.

http://www.calarts.edu/redcat/season/0506/fv/duras.php

Papers by Alberto Toscano

Here are the links to a few more papers Alberto Toscano has published on the Goldsmiths website:
(2003) Antagonism and Insurrection in Italian Operaismo (PDF 254kb).
(2005) Liberation Technology: Marcuse’s Communist Individualism (PDF 485kb)
(2005) Fanaticism and Social Theory (PDF 202kb)