It seems it may be best to start with difference. After all, this is a site that takes its name from a core concept of Monsieur Deleuze. But deterritorialization we can wrestle with at a later date. First…
I arrived at Marxism through a self-guided multi-year survey of the Western Philosophical Tradition. But this quasi-academic path intersected with my real world experiences as a journalist, a parent, and a patient in the US healthcare system. Another driving force was Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, which for me perceptually rescued socialism from a fringe position. Ultimately everything came to a head, and I started to feel in my bones that the system we all live under, the economic mode of production we call capitalism, needs to be destroyed before it destroys all of us.
I like the animating spirit to Marx’s philosophy, such as the famous dictum from his Theses on Feurbach (1845):
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
After joining DSA and engaging in activism both on the ground and online (too much of it online, but it was the early days of COVID alas), I’d always hear about praxis. Studying the Russian Revolution, it was easy to trace a through line from Marx’s ideas to the overthrow of centuries of autocratic rule. Thoughts have power, and for me no one demonstrated that better than Marx.
As I continued my studies while remaining tethered to the real world, and witnessing the defeat of Bernie and the rise of Trump, I became a bit more versed in the philosophical frameworks underpinning Marx’s critique of capitalism, including dialectical materialism. It made sense to me, and it felt good to trace the ideas from Kant to Hegel to Marx, ultimately arriving at the logical conviction that capitalism is destined for failure through an ongoing process of contradiction.
But then, along came Gilles. I think what attracted me first about Deleuze was his admiration of Nietzsche, who became my own first philosophical love after finding a worn copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra on my father’s bookshelf. But over the years I had grown to believe that Nietzsche’s views were so antithetical to socialism that he should perhaps be renounced entirely. Not so fast, said Deleuze. Marx and Nietzsche can co-exist.
From an interview in 1995, the same year Deleuze jumped out of a window and died, Deleuze said:
“I read Marx at the same time I read Nietzsche. This was a nice pairing for me. And I still find validity in many of those concepts. There’s a critique there, a radical critique. You will find references to Marx and marxism all throughout Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Today, I can say that I feel completely marxist. For example, the article that I published on the “Society of Control” [reprinted in Negotiations] is completely marxist, even though I discuss things that Marx knew nothing about.
I don’t understand it when people try to say that Marx was wrong. And even less when they claim that Marx is dead. There are so many urgent tasks today: we need to try to understand the global market, what it is and how it moves. To do that, one must turn to Marx.”
In many ways Deleuze felt like the perfect marriage of my philosophical interests, not just with Nietzsche, but Spinoza (my father’s personal favorite), and Bergson’s enigmatic ideas about time. Then diving into the concepts borne from his collaboration with Felix Guattari, found in Capitalism Schizophrenia, like Desiring-Production, Assemblages, Deterritorialization, Rhizomes, Lines of Flight…I wanted to devour all of it.
Eventually, perhaps late 2020, I came across a series of lectures on youtube about Deleuze by Todd May, a longtime philosophy professor at Clemson University (now at Warren Wilson College), who has published books on Deleuze and other post-structuralists (May has also reached some renown for his philosophical advisory role on The Good Place though I must confess I couldn’t really get into the show). The lectures took place in Denmark at the DISPUK Institute (which trains professionals in Narrative Therapy, something May touches on repeatedly) between April and May 2017.
These lectures, seven in total, with each running about two hours long, are not polished productions by any means. The sound and picture quality isn’t great and they haven’t been edited to remove small talk and minutes-long bantering about page numbers in various versions of the text. But I was immediately hooked, firstly due to May’s sheer affability. He just seems like a really nice guy, with infectious enthusiasm and a good helping of nervous energy. What really grabbed me though was how May kicks off the whole series with a tidy historical prelude to Deleuze’s thought, centering on the nature of identity.
He starts with a fairly conventional take on modern philosophical history. First, Existentialism and the idea that the individual is free to create meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe (Sartre’s famous “existence precedes essence”). Then Structuralism, which emerged as a critique of Existentialism, arguing that human identity and behavior are shaped by broader systems and structures rather than individual freedom. For Levi-Strauss it was myths and kinships as universal systems. For Lacan it was the Unconscious structured like a language. Structuralists disagreed on the specific determinant of identity (e.g., unconscious, economy), but shared the belief that identity is ultimately reducible to an overarching structure.
Enter the post-structuralists, who want to move away from the idea that there’s a single, fixed system that determines identity. Instead, Foucault argues that identity is shaped by many overlapping forces—like power, history, and social norms—that change over time.
MAY: One of the ways in which the Foucault was taken up in narrative work was to say, look, who we are as a product of practices outside us that produces us being these kinds of beings, if we have problems, that may well be in part because what’s going on outside of us is disempowering for us…But if, if we are the product of these disempowering histories and if they are histories rather than essences, what does this mean? It means they can be changed.
It was at this point I thought, “oh, is this what he is getting at”? I downloaded the lecture to my phone and kept it going as I took my afternoon walk. I was 45 minutes in and Deleuze had barely been mentioned. I wasn’t quite sure where May was going, but since this was a lecture aimed at working therapists, May ties Foucault’s thought to developing an “alternative practice”:
May: And that alternative practice is one that will experiment with other ways of being, other ways of taking things up. That will, in the end, challenge the identities that…are currently on offer. But you can see how it is that by moving… from a discussion of essences to a focus on history, what’s happening is we’re no longer seeing our identities as products of things within us, but rather as products of a contingent, changeable, reworkable history.
Up to this point, I was completely on board, and would have been happy going further down the Foucault rabbit hole of experimentation and alternative practices. But May has deftly used this entire prelude to set up one question:
May: I would argue that the reason that Foucault became so important for narrative work was the shift in thinking from essences to thinking in terms of history. But this leaves open the question: is there any other way to stop thinking in terms of identities being the product of essence?
This is how May gets us to Deleuze:
May: What Deleuze does is he takes the path that one might think is the least promising path to take in order to try to do this. Rather than working through history, he works through ontology.
I’m a bit of a sucker for jargon. It’s probably one of the reasons I like Marxism. But I’m still not sure I’ve ever used the word reification properly. Same with ontology. Thankfully, May gives some helpful background on what is generally defined as” the philosophical study of existence”, highlighting two key perspectives.
- The first is a study of “what there is,” focusing on identifying the fundamental components of reality. This view categorizes philosophers into materialists, who argue that only physical matter exists; idealists, who assert that reality consists solely of ideas or mental phenomena; and dualists, like Descartes, who propose that reality comprises two distinct substances—physical and mental—though grappling with how these interact.
- The second perspective shifts to a broader inquiry into “being” itself, emphasizing the nature and essence of existence beyond specific categories of entities. This approach, while distinct, intersects with the first perspective by exploring what it means for something to exist at all. However, May points out a tension here:
May: If we’re talking about what, ultimately, there is, aren’t we going to come back to essences?…It seems the wrong place to turn right and yet that’s where Deleuze goes…So it’s not surprising that there will be twists and turns in this particular task. What I’m hoping we’ll see is that with this development of a Deleuzian ontology, when we see it, when we have a good grip on it, it will present itself as a potentially compelling way to think about who we are and who we might be, moving past ideas of identity.
Yeah, still no idea where it’s going, but I love when brilliant people work themselves into a corner. I wanna know how he wiggles out. The lecture attendees are hooked too. May suggests breaking for cake, but they want to push on. This is when May brings up Deleuze’s seminal work, which will form the basis of his lecture series, Difference and Repetition.
May: It’s probably nearly a consensus among people who study Deleuze that this is his key work…if you look at his later works, you’ll see everything is framed in Difference and Repetition.
Well shit. I’ve come to the right place.
May: One way to begin to open this up would be to say…by the term difference, he doesn’t mean difference, at least in any way that we’ve ever thought about it.
I walk down the tree-lined path of Riverside Park, engrossed and confused.
May: I’m going to illustrate. We tend to think of difference as secondary and identity as primary. So for instance, if I’ve got the book in the pen, right? Here’s an identity. Here’s an identity. And we use the term difference to simply mean the difference between two identities. So what’s the difference? Well, one you can write with, one you read, one’s heavier than the other.
They have similarities too, right? They both have black in them. But there’s a tendency to think about identities as the things that are there first. And difference as whatever it is, right, that distinguishes one thing from another. So identities are primary, difference is secondary.
If that’s the case, then our ontology is going to be ultimately an ontology of identities. Because identities are primary. Remember we’re talking about what there is, what ultimately there is.
So the question for Deleuze is, can we think of difference, not simply as something that comes from identities, but difference, he says, in itself. Not difference as the difference between two identities, but can we think of difference on its own, simply as difference.
This was so much to process on that chilly afternoon four years ago and still is for me today (walking amongst the trees certainly helps the ideas seep in). But there is so much power in this idea of the primacy of difference to me that I feel compelled to explore it over the next few entries so that it may lay the foundation for a cinematic methodology, even at the expense of eschewing the foundation of Marx’s philosophical framework.