If Deleuze’s words are silver, will his writings be gold? – Liberation

2023-10-03 21:25:23

Long unavailable other than through “wild” recordings, the philosopher’s teaching was nonetheless extraordinarily influential. Was its written transcription really essential?

The voice is captivating. The words twirl, linger, run out of steam, resume, break to suddenly take off in a falsely humble monologue that one would swear was impromptu. The audience is captivated, even hypnotized; in some recordings we hear the breathing of the student close to his tape recorder, in others exclamations of surprise or admiration, close to ecstasy. We are in the center of post-May 1968 experimentation, the new University of Vincennes, created by decree on December 7, 1968, to be razed and buried under 30 centimeters of earth by the CRS and bulldozers, trucks, crushers and hydraulic excavators on August 27, 1980. Nothing remains of it. Nothing except the words of the master, Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher who would become in France and even more in the United States a guru, no, a god. His weekly course of three hours in a row, open to all and perfectly understandable even for neophytes, whether they are revolutionary trade unionists or stoned students, was going to migrate to the premises authorized by those in power, the University of Paris-VIII Vincennes-Saint- Denis. Recorded religiously by many of them, his conferences have nevertheless remained legendary, like certain performances by Bob Marley, Yves Klein or Maria Callas. “Philosophy seemed to be born from Deleuze’s own mouth, like from a spring of clear water. The long work of preparation was made invisible, and Deleuze created thought by speaking, he spoke philosophy as one speaks English or Spanish,” Robert Maggiori tells us in this issue. Faithful to the philosophy transmitted by speech instead of writing, as defined by Plato, Deleuze had prohibited the printed reproduction of his courses. Therefore, was it necessary to publish a book bringing them together, after an annotated and meticulous transcription work of the one who had “full of voice in his voice”?