A Redemptive Deleuze? ChokedPassages or the Politics of Contraction

Erik Bordeleau Brussels Free University

Abstract

When they want to discredit the political relevance of Deleuzes thought,Hallward considers counter-effectuation as a redemptive gesture,and Rancire describes Deleuzes history of cinema as a history ofredemption. Each time, redemption refers pejoratively to a breakout of this world and a form of apolitical passivity, in an attemptto reduce Deleuze to be a mere spiritual thinker, simply renewingthat Oriental intuition which Hegel found at work in Spinozasphilosophy (Hallward 2006: 6). But is it all that simple? How shouldwe envisage the relationship between creativity and redemption, politicsand passivity in Deleuzes work? And in what way does that concernDeleuzes philosophy connection to the Non-West, and namely China?

Keywords: spirituality, China, subjectivity, Peter Hallward,dramatisation, politics

Contemplating is creating, mystery of passive creation, sensation.Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 212

In the conclusion of Time-Image, discussing Syberbergs cinema,Deleuze opposes the time-image and the creative fabulation to therealm of information. Quite surprisingly, this opposition is placedunder the sign of redemption: redemption, art beyond knowledge, isalso creation beyond information. (Deleuze 1989: 270) This passagefinds a strange one might say apocalyptic echo toward the end ofDifference and Repetition, where arts highest possibility is defined as

Deleuze Studies 8.4 (2014): 491508DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0167 Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/dls

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the production of a repetition or contraction, that is, a freedom for theend of a world (Deleuze 1994: 293).Incidentally, when they want to discredit the political relevance

of Deleuzes thought, Hallward considers counter-effectuation as aredemptive gesture, and Rancire describes Deleuzes history ofcinema as a history of redemption (Rancire 2001: 150). Each time,redemption refers pejoratively to a break out of this world and a formof apolitical passivity, in an attempt to reduce Deleuze to be a merespiritual thinker, simply renewing that Oriental intuition whichHegel found at work in Spinozas philosophy (Hallward 2006: 6). Butis it all that simple? How should we envisage the relationship betweencreativity and redemption, politics and passivity in Deleuzes work? Andin what way does that concern Deleuzes philosophy relation to theNon-West?It will become clear soon enough that I mostly disagree with

Hallwards rigorous yet quite reductive reading of Deleuze. As I shallargue in more details, Hallwards spiritual anathema directed againstDeleuze, although suggestive in many ways, largely misses its target.Nevertheless, I do believe it is important to give an echo to Hallwardscritique and to directly put into discussion the so-called spiritualaspects and effects of Deleuzes philosophy. Spirituality is a trickyword, and we can easily see how it can work as an insult, especially whencoming from the pure politics end of the contemporary philo-politicalspectrum. Let me thus say for now that where Hallward wishes to naildown Deleuzes philosophy using words like redemptive or spiritual,I will read these characterisations as attempts to problematise the(a)politicality of modes of existence induced by Deleuzes philosophy.Avoiding the comfort zone of simply commenting (or joyfully

banging) on Hallwards rather disincarnated critique of Deleuzeswork, I will first try to briefly and reflexively address the productionof subjectivity in Deleuzian academic milieus. The idea here is togive Hallwards critique some sort of anthropological and practicalground, fleshing out Deleuzian processes of political subjectivation byrelating them to the emergence, in recent years, of a transnationalDeleuzian academic community and, to a certain extent, hegemony. Thiscommitted or self-compromising characterisation of some potentiallyundesirable side-effects that might derive from a Deleuzian stancearticulates around the danger, acknowledged by Deleuze in the firstplace, of becoming beautiful souls through the affirmation of puredifferences. This first section could thus be read as a sort of distantbut potentially sympathetic echo to Hallwards repeated affirmation that

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Deleuzes thought is ultimately useless politically speaking, and that it isbetter understood as a redemptive and deceptively academic way outof this world.I will then move to a more direct discussion of some of Hallwards

thesis, which he mainly develops in three different occasions: in a 1997article entitled Gilles Deleuze and the Redemption from Interest, inhis 2001 book Absolutely Postcolonial, and most importantly in his2006 monograph on Deleuze, Out of this World: Deleuze and thePhilosophy of Creation. The point will be to show just how unspecific,instrumental and, in the end, little convincing Hallwards use of thespiritual reference is in his inquiry into Deleuzes philosophy. This willbe followed by a rather contrasting reading of Deleuze focused on someof the many choked passages he dramatically stages in his writings andwhich are, symptomatically indeed, mostly overlooked by the Badiou-inspired readings of his work. What is at stake here is Deleuzes methodof dramatisation and its culmination in what I will call a politics ofcontraction innerving all of his work. Deleuzes dramatisations are of theforemost importance if one is to seriously take into account his complexand stimulating relation to the Non-West and namely, China.

I. The Problem of the Beautiful Soul

Give me a body then!Deleuze 1989: 189

In the Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault defines spirituality asan ethical work on oneself (un travail intrieur dordre thique).Discussing the concrete social conditions of this ethical work, its relationto the moral law and the kind of practical challenges it involves, Foucaultgoes on to suggest that the care for the self and its ethopoietical effectsnecessarily involve some form of contrasting social belonging:

The care of the self cannot appear and, above all, cannot be practiced simplyby virtue of being human as such, just by belonging to the human community,although this membership is very important. It can only be practiced withinthe group, and within the group in its distinctive character. (Foucault 2005:117)

I think that, for the sake of this article at least, Deleuzian milieus and theintense affective commerce they generate are consisting and distinctiveenough to be envisaged not only as academic circles, but as potentialforms of the kind of spiritual or ethopoietic groups Foucault alludes to.

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From this (insider) perspective, the first element that I would like todiscuss in echo to Hallwards critique is the danger of becoming beautifulsouls. As far as I know, Hallward does not directly use this term todescribe Deleuzes position; nonetheless, it is easy to imagine how hecould have done so, describing a Deleuzian subjectivity that refusesacting, moving out of history and in order to preserve the purity ofits heart, flees from contact with actuality (Hegel 1967). Interestingly,Deleuze himself discusses the problem of the beautiful soul in the prefaceof Difference and Repetition and later in this same book:

There are certainly many dangers in invoking pure differences which havebecome independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. Thegreatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautifulsoul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed frombloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed.[. . . ] The notion of a problem, which we see linked to that of difference,also seems to nurture the sentiments of the beautiful soul: only problems andquestions matter. (Deleuze 1994: xx; original emphasis)

This passage strikes me as a quite convincing description of an obvioustendency among contemporary academic Deleuzians, a tendencydisturbingly compatible with communicational consensus and open-ended relational aesthetics. Indeed, it is easy to imagine how amisunderstood philosophy of difference can very well blend withexistential liberalism, or how a vulgar understanding of Nietzschescritics of resentment can fit with omnipresent psycho-pop positivethinking and its horror of negative feelings. Here, one might thinkof ieks famous characterisation of North Americans as natural-bornDeleuzians, suggesting that Deleuzes philosophy is perfectly suited forlate capitalist yuppies (iek 2004: 183). Or again, as Stengers putsit in her discussion about how the capacities of practitioners must beconceived of as situated: When it is a question of politics, evencosmopolitics, this constraint is crucial if we are to avoid the trivialdream of an angelic future: souls, now without bodies, would assumea relationship of perpetual peace (Stengers 2011: 395).Deleuze spells out the danger of the beautiful soul by asserting not

only the affirmative and potentially aggressive and selective power ofdifference, but also the contractive power of wrath,1 although addingthat practical struggles or Revolution never proceed by way of thenegative (Deleuze 1994: 208). Significantly, as he contemplates thedanger of the beautiful soul, Deleuze ultimately invokes Marx assome sort of political guarantee against it: Differences, nothing but

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differences, in a peaceful coexistence in the Idea of social places andfunctions . . . but the name of Marx is sufficient to save [the philosophyof Difference] from this danger (207). The idea of revolution deprivedof its negativity is not politically radical enough in the eyes of iek,Hallward and the like. For them, the invocation of Marx here does notpreserve Deleuze from ultimately being a mere spiritual thinker, unableto properly and wilfully face the abyss of the [revolutionary] act (iek2002: 8).

II. Redemption or Dramatisation?

Hallwards reading of Deleuze aims to unveil the unifying redemptivelogic he finds at work in his philosophy. Part of the interest andoriginality of Hallwards reading is that it gives great importance tothe idea of becoming-imperceptible, which he describes as the exclusivetelos and the redemptive re-orientation of any particular creaturetowards its own dissolution (Hallward 2006: 3). I will propose analternative analysis of this undoubtedly crucial idea in the followingsection. For now, suffice it to say that Hallward considers Deleuzesphilosophy as a way to escape the worlds actual constraints, adematerialising body of thought oriented by lines of flight that leadout of the world (3), toward blissful virtuality. In this perspective,becoming-imperceptible constitutes the utmost expression of Deleuzesspiritual attempt at self-virtualisation.Hallward situates Deleuzes thought as part of a late-modern revival

of post-theophanic conception of thought (Hallward 2006: 160), that is,a conception of the world in which God expresses himself in all things,and all things are an expression of God (5). Hallward considers that thistheophanic conception of the world merges with what he calls a singularmode of individuation, defined as an ongoing, self-constituent process ofdifferentiation that creates its own medium of existence or expansion(xii). Hallward identifies this logic of the singular as the main modusoperandi of postcolonial studies:

Singular configurations replace the interpretation or representation of realitywith an immanent participation in its production or creation: in the end,at the limit of absolute postcoloniality, there will be nothing left, nothingoutside itself, to which it could be specific. (Hallward 2001: xii)

Opposed to that logic of the singular we find what Hallward calls thespecific, a mode of apprehending the real that takes into account theactual constraints of the material and historical world. The specific is

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the space of the historical as such [. . . ], the place where we make ourown history, but not in the circumstances of our choosing (Hallward2001: xii). What matters here is how this specific, historical materialistapproach is said to allow for an active negotiation of relations and thedeliberate taking of sides, choices and risks (xii), while the singularlogic tends to dissolve any subjectsubject or subjectobject relationinto one beyond-subject (5). The keywords here are of course active,deliberate, choices and risks, as opposed to a presumably passiveprocess of dissolution into the Oneness of Being.That being said, what is most striking in Hallwards description of

Deleuzes project is how little specific he is in associating Deleuze withjust about any religious strands of thought. In his quite influential 1997article Gilles Deleuze and the Redemption from Interest, Hallward evendraws a parallel between Deleuze and Saint Paul, simply because thelater also favours an other-worldly redemptive force (Hallward 1997:6). This of course sounds retrospectively quite ironic when consideringthat one of Hallwards main philosophical influences, Alain Badiou,turns precisely to Paul in his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism(1997) in order to further exemplify his notion of the Truth-Eventand the conversion process of his subject to truth, as the title ofHallwards book on Badiou goes.2 Fortunately though, in AbsolutelyPostcolonial and Out of this World, Hallward becomes somewhat morespecific, dropping the reference to Paul and mostly insisting on Bergson,Spinoza, Ibn-Arabi, Suhrawardi, Meister Eckhart, Plotin, Eurigena andjust about anybody part of the Neoplatonic tradition, suggesting thatDeleuzes project resonates with and renews that Oriental intuitionwhich Hegel found at work in Spinozas philosophy (Hallward 2006:6).3 To understand just how all these references ultimately work asan all-encompassing and virulent spiritual anathema, one has to keepmind that in his book Absolutely Postcolonial, Hallward comes to definethe singular mode of individuation as some sort of creationist power,thus suggesting that Deleuzes philosophy might best be approachedas the reinvention (in apparently post-Darwinian terms) of a genuinelycontemporary version of radical creationism (Hallward 2001: 15). Inthe endnote following this excerpt, Hallward indeed reveals that thetitle of the book on Deleuze he was working on at that time is entitledCreationism in Philosophy: Deleuze (342). Fortunately, Hallward wasconvinced in one way or another that it would be better to dropthis reference to creationism, which indeed is nowhere to be foundin what became Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy ofCreation. Nevertheless, I do believe this anecdote is most significant,

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as it highlights Hallwards unspecific and largely instrumental use of thespiritual reference in his inquiry into Deleuzes philosophy.4 In the end,one might ask: if Hallward really wanted to tackle the issue of the so-called redemptive or spiritual dimension of Deleuzes thought, should henot at least have considered minimally Deleuze and Guattaris crucialreferences to Taoism and witchcraft in A Thousand Plateaus (1987),those to Zen Buddhism in Logic of Sense (1990), or better still, hisexplicit insistence on the theme of belief in the world in Time-Image(1989) or to empiricist conversion in What Is Philosophy? (1994)?A little bit further but still not out of reach, could he not have takena better look at Whiteheads crucial influence on Deleuzes cosmicvitalism, and how it potentially intersects with Process theology?5

The main reason why Hallward believes he can call Deleuze aredemptive philosopher without considering Deleuze and Guattarisenunciative position as sorcerers in A Thousand Plateaus and theiralmost indecent reference, academically speaking, to Carlos Castanedasinitiatory journey, and more generally, to anything that would bringus closer to what in Anti-Oedipus (1983) is defined as the livingcenter of matter (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 19), has probably todo with how he fully endorses Badious interpretation of univocalontology as a mere variation amongst neoplatonic philosophies of theOne. Here, I agree with Daniel Smith when he suggests that onemust not be led astray as [Alain Badiou seems to have been] bythe prefix uni in the term univocity: a univocal ontology is bydefinition irreconcilable with a philosophy of the One (Smith 2001:174). Along the same line, I would argue that Badious and Hallwardsovertly metaphysical readings hypostase Deleuzes dramatic movementof thought, systematically missing the practical and ethical horizonin which speculative propositions concerning univocity can be judgedproperly is it not for this very reason that Spinozas ontology iscalled an ethics? Hallward largely ignores the question of the modesof existence and its corresponding material passages and ethical misesen jeu. He consistently leaves aside all these moments where Deleuzedescribes and stages movements of plunging into chaos, dramaticpassages on the line, struggles for creating planes of consistency, all ofwhich concern the lived relation to events in the first place. The wholeworld had passed what seemed like a physical crisis point, Deleuzewrites in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994: 189); The event,once willed, is actualized on its most contracted point, on the cuttingedge of an operation (Deleuze 1990: 149); A concept is therefore achaoid state par excellence; it refers back to a chaos rendered consistent,

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become Thought, mental chaosmos. And what would thinking be if itdid not constantly confront chaos? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 208);or again, on a more openly revolutionary mode:

We must condense all the singularities, precipitate all the circumstances,points of fusion, congelation or condensation in a sublime occasion, Kairos,which makes the solution explode like something abrupt, brutal andrevolutionary. Having an Idea is this as well. It is as though every Idea hastwo faces, which are like love and anger: love in the search for fragments,the progressive determination and linking of the ideal adjoint fields; anger inthe condensation of singularities which, by dint of ideal events, defines theconcentration of a revolutionary situation and causes the Idea to explodeinto the actual. It is in this sense that Lenin had Ideas. [. . . ] Anger and loveare powers of the Idea. (Deleuze 1994: 1901)

With Hallward, we simply lose sight of this type of critical passage:everything is said to divinely flow upward on some sort of philosophicalstairway to heaven, in a unilateral (and apolitical) movement towardGod and its own redemptive dissolution. Instead of putting so muchemphasis on the theophanic, it would have been much more interestingto see Hallward discussing Deleuzes conception of the dynamic anddramatic processes by which Ideas are actualised and differentiated. Itcould have brought him to ask Deleuze, more than thirty years afterMaurice de Gandillac: Is your dramatization a theodicy? (Deleuze2004: 107)In the last instance, what is at stake here is Hallwards

transcendentalist and deeply voluntarist interpretation of creation inDeleuzes philosophy. Like God, creation is everywhere in Hallwardsbook: every single chapters title in Out of this World bears mention ofit. And even if he does not explicitly refer to creationism any more, onecannot miss how he conceives of creation in a manner as voluntaristicas a creationist might imagine Gods initial act of creation to be. IfHallward proves himself to be so blind to the corporal and transversaldimension of creative passages and transmutations in Deleuze, it isbecause his radically voluntarist political stance makes him totallyoblivious to the question of the soul and its contractive power, or whatDeleuze, in the conclusion of What Is Philosophy?, calls the mystery ofpassive creation, sensation (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 212). Deleuzescosmic vitalism indeed requires a conception of creation that is notsimply a matter of how to actively access God or the Truly Creativeas Hallward would like us to believe. It always involves an intimateand complex relation to an outside felt as necessity and imposing its

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corporeal constraints. This is precisely what Deleuze means when, in acrucial passage of Time-Image, he requires a (forced) body for thought:

Give me a body then: this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The bodyis no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it hasto overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plungesinto or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Notthat the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, andforces us to think what is concealed from thought, life. Life will no longer bemade to appear before the categories of thought; thought will be thrown intothe categories of life. The categories of life are precisely the attitudes of thebody, its posture. We do not even know what a body can do: in its sleep,in its drunkenness, in its efforts and resistances. To think is to learn whata non-thinking body is capable of, its capacity, its postures. (Deleuze 1989:189)

To put it in other words: one has to feel oneself as trapped (sprouvercoinc) (Deleuze 1989: 170), for creation takes place in chokedpassages (Deleuze 1995: 133). Paradoxically enough consideringHallwards view on the matter, it is perhaps the very idea of becoming-imperceptible and its embedded reference to China that best illustrateshow creation in choked passages and dramatic becomings actually takeplace in a Deleuzian perspective.

III. China and the Line6

To have become a line was a catastrophe, but, even more, it was a surprise,a prodigy. All of me had to pass along this line. And with the most appallingjolts.

Henri Michaux [1956] 2002: ch. 5, Experimental Schizophrenia; my emphasis

At the core of Hallwards peremptory dismissal of Deleuzesphilosophys political relevance, we find the concept of becoming-imperceptible. And at first sight, Hallward does seem to have a point:for what does it mean to pass along the lines of creation and become-imperceptible, if not to vanish and dissolve in cosmic anonymity? Is thatall that Deleuzian micropolitics has to offer? In what sense is becoming-imperceptible supposed to allow for renewed ways of conceiving theproduction of political subjectivities in a time of media saturation andglobal mobilisation? In what way does it contribute to a redemptiveinterruption of the flow of information or connect with Deleuze andGuattaris famous statement about how, nowadays, we do not lack

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communication [. . . ] we lack resistance to the present? (Deleuze andGuattari 1994: 108)Considering Hallwards spiritual anathema and the way he confines

Deleuzes philosophy to be a mere theophanic extension of someoriental intuition, what is most delightfully striking perhaps in theunfolding of the idea of becoming-imperceptible is to see just howembedded in the Far East it appears to be in the first place. For aclose reading of Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus revealssomething that has remained relatively unnoticed among Deleuzeand Guattaris readers: the progressive emergence of the concept ofbecoming-imperceptible in that book is intimately intertwined withreferences to China, the main one referring to the figure of the Chinesetraditional painter-poet. Significantly, while going into much detailwhen elaborating his wild spiritual orientalist argument about a post-theophanic Deleuze with the becoming-imperceptible for exclusivetelos, Hallward simply ignores the very poetics of this crucial idea,which is not theophanic at all and refers to what could arguablybe considered one of Deleuzes (and Guattaris) most significantengagements with the Non-West in his work namely China.7

The first reference to China in A Thousand Plateaus is made rightin the introduction, amidst a discussion opposing transcendence andthe search for the root-foundation, a specifically European disease asDeleuze and Guattari say (1987: 18), and oriental immanence and itsrhizomatic structure. Of course it is all too easy to depict an Orient ofrhizomes and immanence, they write (20); and in fact, they do not insistmuch on this contrast. But it is in this context that an image appears, animage that will permeate the entire book, that of grass:

China is the weed in the human cabbage patch. . . . The weed is the Nemesisof human endeavor. . . . Of all the imaginary existences we attribute to plant,beast and star the weed leads the most satisfactory life of all. [. . . ] Eventuallythe weed gets the upper hand. Eventually things fall back into a state of China.The weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It growsbetween, among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender,the poppy is maddeningbut the weed is rank growth . . . : it points a moral.(Miller, cited in Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 1819)

This first reference, through Henry Millers work (it is a quote fromhis Hamlet), is quite unaccommodating, seemingly giving way toan unrestricted orientalism. But A Thousand Plateaus is not exactlyconcerned with questions about adequate or politically correct cross-cultural representation or of how to talk properly of the cultural other.

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In fact, if they do question rapidly the validity of such a deliriousdescription of a weed China, they immediately redirect this interrogationinto an openly prospective sense: Which China is Miller talking about?The old China, the new, an imaginary one, or yet another locatedon a shifting map? (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 19) The question ofan adequate representation of the cultural other is thus methodicallylet in abeyance. Methodically, that is, insofar as the introduction ofA Thousand Plateaus seeks to define a method not so much to describebut to effectively reach for the multiple.The first seven chapters of A Thousand Plateaus read as so many

approaches toward a radical critique of psychoanalysis, linguistics andultimately, of the problem of the signifier. Progressively, the ideaof making the multiple takes shape, through concepts like collectiveassemblages of enunciation (agencement collectif dnonciation) and theBody without Organs, up to the asserted necessity of undoing the face:

If human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantlethe face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine,not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but byquite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings thatget past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traitsthemselves finally elude the organization of the face. (Deleuze and Guattari1987: 171)

The expression escaping the face marks a distance in relation toantagonistic models (face-to-face politics, so to speak), and defines amicropolitical field characterised by the exigency to dis-occupy identity.It is in the midst of this philosophical journey that we find the secondChinese reference, which comes up in a totally unexpected way arapturous line of flight: Cross the wall, the Chinese perhaps, but atwhat price? At the price of a becoming-animal, a becoming-flower orrock, and beyond that a strange becoming-imperceptible, a becoming-hard now one with loving (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 187). If theChinese reference here remains quite unspecific (which Chinese are wein fact talking about?), its direction and its function, nonetheless, areindisputable: it is a breach made in the horizon of the signifier, avanishing point from which to organise an escape. But this remainsnevertheless all too abstract. We lack an indispensable relay betweenmaking the multiple, undoing the face and becoming-imperceptible:art, an artistic doing, which the third reference makes more intelligible.The conception of art exposed in A Thousand Plateaus takes on

the developments on incorporeal transformations and the shaping up

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of bodies that were initiated in the discussion on linguistics and thesignifier. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is never something like art forarts sake that is at stake, but a conception of art that directly involveslife:

Art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines, in otherwords, all of those real becomings that are not produced only in art, and allof those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art, taking refuge inart, and all of those positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize onart, but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying,asubjective, and faceless. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 187)

Deleuze and Guattari insist repeatedly on the active nature of the lineof flight, which is never a flight into passivity or imagination. If that wasthe case, it would immediately lose its political dimension, as Hallwardmisguidedly suggests. The theme of the line, which runs through all of AThousand Plateaus, ties together art, politics, ethics and the cosmic. Andit is precisely in this passage from ethics to the cosmic that we find thethird reference to China. In the chapter Becoming-intense, Becoming-animal, Becoming-imperceptible, the work on oneself and the cosmicdimension it involves are summed up in the idea of becoming likeeverybody else. First, the properly ethical challenges are brought forth:

If it is so difficult to be like everybody else, it is because it is an affair ofbecoming. Not everybody becomes everybody [and everything: tout le monde trans.], makes a becoming of everybody/everything. This requires muchasceticism, much sobriety, much creative involution: an English elegance, anEnglish fabric, blend in with the walls, eliminate the too-perceived, the too-much-to-be-perceived. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 279)

Deleuze and Guattari insist on the very materiality of this work ofelimination and reduction at the level of the living tissues of the human.They then write: By process of elimination, one is no longer anythingmore than an abstract line (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 280). Whatmatters here is that this becoming-line involves a radical putting at stakeof existence, in the realm of impersonality. Becoming-line is a highlydramatic contraction a life in one stroke, a stroke of life.To become-line is never to close oneself up: on the contrary,

it is an essential condition to communicability and availability, away to directly participate in the gestation of the world. Becomingeverybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world (faire monde), tomake a world (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 280). Drawing lines thatworld: this is the meaning of the becoming-imperceptible and everybodyput forth in A Thousand Plateaus. It is in this very passage of the

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becoming-line and the making-world that we find the third Chinesereference, which is undoubtedly the most serious and suggestive one.At the meeting point of ethics and the cosmic, Deleuze and Guattariencounter the traditional Chinese painter-poet as described by FranoisCheng in Lcriture potique chinoise. A painter-poet that, instead ofpursuing the resemblance, retain[s], extract[s] only the essential linesand movements of nature (280): an artist-abstractor that is thereforenot imitative or structural, but cosmic (280). The Chinese artistinvoked in A Thousand Plateaus is the figure who, after ethical workon herself, is able to make of the world a becoming, to pass entirelyalong the lines she draws, in the impersonality of creation. One is thenlike grass, Deleuze and Guattari finally say, because one has made anecessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneselfeverything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing inthe midst of things (280). It is perhaps Li He, a Buddhist Chinese poet ofthe late Tang dynasty, who best sums up this etho-cosmic participativebecoming with the world:

The brush perfects the creationHeaven has not all the merit! (Cheng 1996: 17)

After this close reading of the emerging of the idea of becoming-imperceptible in A Thousand Plateaus, a question remains: doesthe micropolitical horizon of thought, culminating in the idea ofbecoming-imperceptible, really lead to any actual production of politicalsubjectivities? Do we not find in it the seed of a form of life exclusivelyconcerned with existential flexibility and ways of adapting to allcircumstances, in brief, a perfect guide for survival in the era ofneoliberal productivism and globalisation of precariousness? Rancire,for example, is categorical: indirectly criticising Deleuze among othersand disqualifying any focus put on metamorphosis and becomings, heunambiguously states: There is no such thing as Dionysian politics(Rancire 1998: 200).The becoming-imperceptible and the becoming-line involve a dramatic

experience of stifling or of ethopoietical claustrophobia, as Wittgensteinwould put it. There lies the politics of contraction that innerves allof Deleuzes work: choked passages where one experiences oneself asstuck, plunges into chaos from which no one comes back unscathed.A Thousand Plateaus reference to Henri Michaux is crucial here, withhis evocation of major ordeals of the mind and other miserablemiracles, accelerated linearity experienced in the flesh and moments ofschizophrenia that tear down the sphere that we normally are and in

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which we survey panoramas (Michaux [1956] 2002: ch. 5). Michauxsdescription of the passage along the line (cited in the epigraph of thissection) expresses a sense of danger, a perilous threshold, a challengewhich is simultaneously intimate and tearing off the outside: to becomea line, only a line, the horror of a line along which all of me had topass. This all of me suggests something both necessary and exhaustive:the concentration of oneself must be total; its achievement cannot sufferany failing; it is all or nothing. It is by this very condition, it is accordingto this capacity or power that the body can find and create new marks.The passage along the line entails a transformative interruption of theordinary relation to oneself. It involves a performative moment onthe line, in which the movement of abstraction ensures its unity, orbetter, its watertightness. The becoming-line is a moment of sustainedtension, a moment of anonymity in the surpassing of oneself, a dramaticdesubjectivation that ultimately amounts to an interruption of theidentity service. And this process of desubjectivation can as well giveway to a becoming-Chinese.

IV. (Un)timely Contractions

In the conclusion of Out of this World, Hallward claims that by posingthe question of politics [. . . ] in the apocalyptic terms of a new people anda new earth [. . . ], the political aspect of Deleuzes philosophy amountsto little more than utopian distraction (Hallward 2006: 162). In thelight of this article, we can easily imagine that what Hallward intendsby apocalyptic politics is yet another way to evoke the redemptivedissolution of all things in the ecstatic process of absolute creation.Yet, to a certain extent, I agree with Hallward that Deleuzes politicsdoes involve some sort of apocalyptic component. One might think ofDifference and Repetitions foreword here, with its somewhat crypticaffirmation that this book should have been an apocalyptic book (thethird time in the series of times) (Deleuze 1994: xxi); or again, inthe conclusion of What Is Philosophy?, where we read that as thebrain plunges into chaos, In this submersion it seems that there isextracted from chaos the shadow of the people to come in the formthat art, but also philosophy and science, summon forth (Deleuze andGuattari 1994: 218). But instead of interpreting these passages in termsof ethereal or utopian dissolution, I believe we should read them in termsof ethical, aesthetical, political and, ultimately, temporal contractions.Redemption? A limit happens and in its drawing, a virtual becoming-line.

A Redemptive Deleuze? 505

In this regard, and as far as a people to come is concerned, I wouldsuggest, following Agambens distinction in The Time that Remains,that the word messianic is more accurate than apocalyptic to describethis process of temporal-liminal contraction. For are we not intimatelyconfronted here with the very necessity of a time-image, that is, not animage of the end of time (apocalypse proper), but rather an image tobring (chronological) time to an end a messianic or contracted timethus understood as the time the mind takes to realize a time-image(Agamben 2005: 66)? What matters here is how value is introduced inthe world, or in other words, how a certain mode of existence is inten-sified and brought to its creative limit. To believe in the world, then, isindiscernibly active and passive; it is to contemplate and be contracted.It is a convincing account of this movement of exacerbation

of difference or (un)timely contraction which is utterly missing inHallwards reading of Deleuze. Nowhere is it clearer than at the verypoint where Badiou paradigmatically extracts, in a typical bad-faith-subject-to-truth way, the expression that will become his war cry againstDeleuze: the Clamor of Being. As is well known, the expression istaken from the very last lines of Difference and Repetition, which readas follows: A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voicedmultiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamor ofBeing for all beings: [. . . ]. Everything happens as if Badiou has stoppedreading at this point and refuses to consider what follows the colon, thatis, the affirmation of the disjunctive and dramatic play of difference andrepetition as such: . . . on condition that each being, each drop andeach voice has reached the state of excess in other words, the differencewhich displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp,causes them to return (Deleuze 1994: 304).If we define politics as a matter of contraction in the element of ethics,

the problem of believing in this world becomes politically crucial andshould not be confused with any simple wilful belief or will of thepeople, as the title goes of one recent article by Hallward. In order to bebrought to a level of political intensity, the problem of believing in theworld, in this specific world, requires envisaging a singular end to it itsEternal Return, in the terms ofDifference and Repetition. A singular endthus, so that

Difference may at last be expressed with a force of anger which is itselfrepetitive and capable of introducing the strangest selection, even if this isonly a contraction here and there in other words, a freedom for the end of aworld. (Deleuze 1994: 293; my emphasis)

506 Erik Bordeleau

Notes1. Nevertheless, we believe that when these problems attain their proper degree

of positivity, and when difference becomes the object of a correspondingaffirmation, they release a power of aggression and selection which destroysthe beautiful soul by depriving it of its very identity and breaking its good will(Deleuze 1994: xx; original emphasis).

2. Hallward would probably reject this rapprochement altogether, since hedisagrees in the first place with ieks idea that religious revelation is theunavowed paradigm of his [Badious] notion of the Truth-Event (iek 2000:183), arguing instead that the model for Badious fidelity is not religious faithbut mathematical deduction pure and simple (Hallward 2003: 149).

3. Perhaps due to the excitement of having found yet another religious referencein Deleuzes writing, Hallward symptomatically misreads a reference to ZenBuddhism in What Is Philosophy? (Hallward 2001: 11), missing the yet simplefact that in this passage, Deleuze and Guattari establish a correspondencebetween Zen Buddhism andWittgensteinian silence of logic, notwith their ownphilosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 140). For a more conclusive referenceto Zen Buddhism in Deleuzes philosophy, Hallward should have looked, forinstance, at the passages in Logic of Sense where he discusses the wise (stoic)mans humoristic stance and the ethics of the mime.

4. Hallwards demeaning use of the word creationism should therefore beradically contrasted with Guattaris axiological creationism. The (Guattarian)creationist perspective celebrates the existence of every given type of beingthat specifically poses the question of what counts for its mode of life.Axiological creationism concerns the production of existence for everything forwhich existence implies a gamble, a risk, the creation of a point of viewabout what, from then on, will become a milieu (Stengers 2010: 37). Note thatGuattaris notion of creationism involves a radical implication in the world andthe production of a highly specific mode of existence.

5. For an interesting discussion of the partly missed encounter between Deleuzeand Process Theology, see Isabelle Stengers, Beyond Conversation. The Risks ofPeace (2002).

6. This section is a condensed and revised version of La Chine et la ligne. Unetude de la rfrence chinoise dans Mille Plateaux (Bordeleau 2009).

7. In Deleuzes later books, there are at least three other significant references tothe East, each of them being irreducible to Hallwards simplistic theophanicschema. In his Foucault, the Far East is associated with a culture of annihilation(Deleuze 1988: 106); in The Fold, with what he calls the Eastern line as opposedto the full Baroque line. Then, in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze discusses hisnotion of the plane of immanence in contrast with Franois Julliens idea of anabsolutisation of immanence found in antic Chinese thinking (Deleuze 1994:74). From the perspective of the production of subjectivities, it is certainlythe passage in Foucault that is most interesting. In the chapter Foldings, orthe Inside of Thought, a certain Orient is opposed to the Western subjectivefolding: The appearance of a folding of the outside can seem unique to Westerndevelopment. Perhaps the Orient does not present such a phenomenon, and theline of the outside continues to flow across a stifling hollowness: in that caseasceticism would be a culture of annihilation or an effort to breathe in such avoid, without any particular production of subjectivity (Deleuze 1988: 106). Fora more detailed discussion of this passage in relation with the Chinese-Buddhistidea of inferno, see Bordeleau 2013.

A Redemptive Deleuze? 507

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