Critical Horizons 4:2 (147-156)© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003

Jan Bryant, John Cash, John Hewitt, Wei Leng Kwok, DaniellePetherbridge, John Rundell, Gabriele Schwab, Jeremy Smith

Deleuze/Derrida:The Politics of Territoriality

While it has not gone unnoticed, the uncannycloseness and affinity of concerns in the workof Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze hasbarely begun to be explored. Given the factthat the very same series of major themes runsthrough the work of both philosophers — dif-ference/différance, repetition and iterability,language and subjection, politics and territo-riality, law and juridical acts — this avoidanceis so striking that it cannot be dismissed as amere coincidental omission. This issue ofCritical Horizons stages a series of encountersthat begin to redress this lack.1

Derrida and Deleuze have barely quoted andwilfully ignored each other all too long, liketwins who secretly pretend that the other isnot even there. Jacques Derrida entitled hiseulogy on Gilles Deleuze “Il me faudra errer

tout seul” and Leonard Lawler translated thistitle as “I’m going to have to wander allalone.”2 Derrida’s own word ‘errer’, however,also contains the suggestion of an ‘error’ —

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the risk of ‘erring’ that Deleuze left as a legacy for Derrida who then spoke,somewhat mournfully, of the long discussion the two were supposed to havetogether, yet systematically escaped in their own time.

Both knew, of course, that such discussion would one day inevitably emergefrom their work and Derrida inserted himself, somewhat pre-emptively, intoDeleuze’s ‘serial singularity’ with his laconic statement “Yes, we will haveall loved philosophy, who can deny it?”3

Derrida’s statement is, in fact, a highly performative understatement. Morethan a mere love for philosophy, he shares with Deleuze a lasting passion forliterature, often for the same authors. Theoretically, Derrida and Deleuze sharea persistent critical concern and engagement with psychoanalysis and Marxismas well as a philosophical preoccupation with issues of space, territory, anda concomitant politics of appropriation and resistance. They also share theirdislikes and, as Derrida confesses, they have the same enemies.

Together they have changed the century’s sense of writing and speech, fiercelyresisting what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘signifying regime’. What mat-ters in this resistance, however, is — to invoke Gregory Bateson as anotherphilosopher of difference — the “difference that makes a difference.”4 Onemight be tempted to think of a narcissism of minor differences but, as Derridainsists, such minor differences have monumental consequences. Think, forexample, of the following statement by Deleuze and Guattari: “Lies anddeception may be a fundamental part of the signifying regime, but secrecyis not.”5 What would Derrida have to say in response? Or, if Derrida asksabout Freud “what the imitation, projected and liberated in a machine, ofsomething like psychical writing might mean,” what would Deleuze’s dif-ferent notion of the writing machine be?6 And if Derrida concludes: “if thereis neither machine nor text without psychical origin, there is no domain ofthe psychic without text,” how does this statement implicitly engage Deleuzeand Guattari’s notion of the ‘presignifying semiotic?’ The latter emerges informs of corporeality as gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite — forms that, asthe authors assert, coexist heterogeneously with the vocal form and there-fore beg the question of the body.7 Derrida begins The Ear of the Other witha quote from Zarathustra: “. . . for there are human beings who lack every-thing, except one thing of which they have too much — human beings whoare nothing but a big eye or a big mouth . . .”8 Deleuze and Guattari write:

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The face is the Icon proper to the signifying regime, the reterritorializa-

tion internal to the system. The signifier reterritorializes on the face. [. . .]

The signifier is always facialized. Faciality reigns materially over that

whole constellation of significances and interpretations [. . .] Conversely,

when the face is effaced, when the faciality traits disappear, we can be

sure that we have entered another regime, other zones infinitely muter

and more imperceptible where subterranean becomings occur, becomings

molecular, nocturnal deterritorializations overspilling the limits of the

signifying system.9

How would Derrida assess such different regimes in his own terms?

Questions such as these urge us to push the stages of encounter betweenDerrida and Deleuze beyond both resemblances and narcissisms of minordifference. The articles in this issue of Critical Horizons all attempt to do thisin various ways.

In his article “Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze” Paul Pattonengages the politics of the concept and its implied ethics. According to Pattonboth Derrida and Deleuze are concerned with a pragmatic future-orientedand non-representational philosophy that envisions new ways of acting uponthe world. For both, the creation of concepts involves the elaboration of new vocabularies able to disrupt established ways of acting and thinking.While Deleuze and Guattari develop a micropolitics of desire founded on thedynamics of unconscious affect, Derrida traces the unconscious in the oper-ation of writing (écriture), generating paradoxically ‘aconceptual concepts’such as the trace, the supplement, différance, metaphoricity and iterability.Iterability, in particular, is paradoxical for it calls for the need to think ruleand event, concept and singularity at the same time. While Patton acknowl-edges some fundamental differences between Derrida’s deconstructive phi-losophy and Deleuze and Guattari’s constructivism, his essay focuses onshared commitments such as those which Foucault referred to as the ‘unfin-ished work of freedom’. For Derrida this commitment requires the pursuitof something radically other, which entails, as he writes in Psyche, ‘a certainexperience of the impossible’. As Derrida suggests in his thinking about for-giveness, this commitment also needs to reach beyond the institution, powerand the law. Justice and democracy therefore have the structure of a promiserather than that of a regulative Idea.

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Patton emphasises a similar future-oriented perspective when he links Derrida’snotion of iteration with Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of deterritorialisationand becoming. Since systems of any kind — conceptual, linguistic, social oraffective — can operate as territories, deterritorialisations activate freedom ormovement and follow a commitment to an open future. Patton concludesthat, not unlike Derrida’s notion of justice as a promise, concepts such asbecoming and deterritorialisation are therefore not meant to substitute forexisting concepts of justice, rights, democracy or freedom, but rather holdthe promise of other forms of justice, democracies, freedoms and new rights.

John Barton’s essay takes up the problem of iterability from a different per-spective that focuses on speech acts and the politics of the performative.Interested in linguistic actions that politicise the meanings, uses and contextsof language, Barton performs a conceptual encounter between Derrida’s notionof iterability and Deleuze’s concept of ‘proposition’ and its production of‘sense’ as it is formulated in terms of the ‘order-word’. While speech-act the-ory is, for Derrida, fundamentally a theory of right or law, of convention andpolitical ethics, his notion of iterability is meant to account for non-standard,literary and marginal uses of language or a language of events. Iterabilityrenders possible both rule or convention and transgression, transformation,simulation and imitation. Like Derrida, Deleuze also speaks of a ‘languageof events’, propounding, together with Guattari, a theory of language as anassemblage of order-words. Order-words link acts to statements by socialobligation. They are propositions, according to Barton, which cause an eventor the expressed ‘sense’ of a proposition to come into being, while also reg-ulating and constituting social and political relations.

Barton argues that this theory of order-words shares three crucial featureswith Derrida’s theory of iterability: the critique of the communication modelof language, the assumption that language constitutes the subject, and thepoliticisation of language as a set of social conventions and cultural practices.For Deleuze and Guattari as for Derrida there is neither a position outsideof language-use, nor a homogenised theory of linguistics. Like order-words,Barton further argues, iterability politicises the transmission of social imper-atives and hierarchical relations. Deleuze’s theory of the order-word andDerrida’s theory of iterability therefore offer complementary ways of con-ceptualising the ways social realities can be constructed. Much of this theo-

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rising is, as Barton points out, organised around discussions of law and pol-itics, foregrounding the role of judicial speech acts and interpellative perfor-matives. Both Derridean and Deleuzian politics of the performative refrainfrom asking what a political event is and instead ask how it functions as aperformative in a given social reality.

Unlike Patton and Barton, Jeffrey Atteberry anchors his thoughts in the sparsemoments of Derrida’s direct engagement with the work of Deleuze, particu-larly in “I’m going to have to wander all alone” and in Le Toucher, Jean-LucNancy. In the latter, Derrida addresses Deleuze and Guattari’s rhetorical choiceof the term ‘haptic’ over the alternative ‘tactile’. While, according to Deleuzeand Guattari, the choice invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfila non-optical function, Derrida detects a certain ‘value of proximity’ in theirdescription of haptic vision as ‘close’, a value, in other words, that for Derridabears residues of a metaphysics of presence. This suspicion informs Derrida’sreading of Marx that is arguably inspired by a desire to present a critique ofcapitalism different from the one developed in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand

Plateaus. In his exploration of such concerns, Atteberry focuses mainly on thedifferences that are played out around the notion of ‘living labour’ and thefact that it remains invisible and secret to capital.

For Derrida the productive force of secret living labour extends to systemsof economy generally, including conceptual labour. Within the proliferatingprocess of metaphorisation, différance, for example, appears as a productiveforce. And presuming that rhetorical choices determine the value a thoughtassumes in a process of exchange, Derrida worries about a possible recu-peration of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhetoric of proximity within a metaphysicsof presence. Atteberry ends his reading with a critique of Hardt and Negri’sEmpire, focusing on their own rhetorical gesture toward a literalisation ofphilosophical rhetoric. In the process of this literalisation, Atteberry argues,living labour assumes the classic attributes of subjectivity, lending itself to afetishisation of ‘the poor’. What is reduced in this literalisation is preciselythe secret, the unformulated, or what Deleuze calls ‘the unthought’ that isnot external to but lies at the very heart of thought. If Derrida claims thatnothing is more terrifying to the exercise of power than secrecy, then Atteberryclaims that insisting on the secret and the unthought within writing andspeech is a political move toward a reform of power. We might, in fact, take

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this as a concrete instance that supports Paul Patton’s claim that both Derridaand Deleuze remain committed to Foucault’s notion of the unfinished workof freedom.

Gregg Lambert also addresses issues of power, domination and control inwhat he sees as the emergence of ‘the new philosophy of Right’ in bothDeleuze and Derrida. He approaches this topic from the perspective of the‘Right to Desire’, claiming that the most far-reaching effects in current globalpolitics emerge no longer from political representation but from a transfor-mation internal to the nature of right itself. Deleuze’s insistence on the uncon-scious investment in the right to desire is attentive to this shift in politics,according desire priority as an agent of social transformation. Desire, how-ever, is prima facie politically neutral. It can be employed in a revolution-ary way (by the schizo) or in a fascist way (by the fascist double). Recognisingthis political danger, Lambert poses the most critical question within this pol-itics of desire: if the desire for power is nothing negative in itself, and caneven be thought of as having an affirmative and positive affect, as Deleuzeoften asserts, then from where do the more violent expressions of domina-tion, oppression, and sadism arise?

Lambert addresses this question by examining the notion of natural law froma Deleuzian perspective, concluding that desire is not natural but immanentlysocial, belonging to the milieu of institutions. It invests the entire social fieldand its action can be defined as the ‘invention’ of new environments. Deleuze’spolitics of desire thus rests on the modulation of power by the nature of itsunconscious investments. Conversely, by instituting ‘lack’ into subjective rela-tions of power, Lambert argues, state power insures a form of desire thatapproximates sadism in its investment of limiting, constraining and controlling.

By contrast, Derrida’s philosophy of right keeps distance from the questionof desire, focusing rather on the ethical and juridical moments in the dis-course of rights. Derrida is less concerned with the subject who desires thanwith the subject who makes a promise or a commitment. By putting pres-sure on the discourse of rights itself, Derrida tries to avoid their inherent apo-ria, that is, ‘the question of who has the right of right?’ This is the place whereLambert sees the possibility of staging a fundamental opposition betweenthe philosophies of Deleuze and Derrida. The latter, he speculates, mighthave avoided engaging Deleuze’s philosophy in order to avoid rejecting it

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on the grounds of the right to desire. For Derrida, this discourse of rightsmust be unhinged from its old foundations and measured against a situationwithout precedent. This is why it belongs to a thinking to come. Lambertargues that on this plane, though, it is not a matter of whether one definesoneself in the last analysis as Deleuzian or Derridean. Rather the fundamentaldistinction between these two philosophies concerns where we first pose thequestion of right or the analysis of power.

In her “Hume Reads Freud: Empiricism as Rhetorical Event,” Robyn Ferrellreads Deleuze and Derrida against the grain and in so doing brings theminto discursive alignment. Notwithstanding an apparent dissimilarity, Ferrellargues that there is an unstated elective affinity between Derrida and Deleuze,especially when their work is read as an implicit argument against Kantiantranscendental philosophy marshalled from two historical sides of Kant’sown program — Hume’s empiricism, when read by Deleuze, and Freud’smeta-psychology, when read by Derrida. In other words, against Kant andhis interpreters Ferrell argues that ‘reality’ is not made sense of through representations that themselves are reliant on and subordinated to an a

priori of reason. Nor is it substantially and empirically real and unmediated.And so we are faced with a double problem: the meaning of this ‘it’ and itsrepresentation.

From the side of the post-Kantian Freud (and Derrida) only a partial answercan be given to this question. There is always the permanent condition of thepartiality of an other (the unconscious/difference). Furthermore, this par-tiality of the unconscious (or in an another language the imagination) is neverdisinterested or impartial (for Freud at least), and functions as an empiricalor quasi-empirical constraint. In other words, Freud leaves us with the sensenot only that representation can never soak up what is being represented,but also that the ‘it’ is something he constantly grappled with throughout hiswork as a whole.

From the side of the pre-Kantian Hume — and Deleuze — the question ofrepresentation can once again only be answered partially, and not only in thewriting, but in the modes of capturing and machining. The empirical, the ‘it’,the real, always denotes a series of reference points that allude capture. Ferrellargues that in Deleuze’s reading of Hume’s work, reference to the empiricalrefers to experience and the conventions or habits that shape our ‘thinking’

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experience, and in this sense it is practical. In other words, reasoning is builtup, so to speak, from the material available — it is practical or pragmaticrather than theoretical or pure. There is then a circumstantial collection ofimpressions, givens, habits and conventions through which Deleuze’s Hume,like Derrida’s Freud, emphasises the empirical world as a world of differ-ences (or in another language, contingencies) that cannot be fully capturedand rendered intelligible.

Anthony Larson, in his article “Gatsby and Us” shares Ferrell’s interest inDeleuze’s critique of representation — not as an epistemological issue, but as a literary one. He draws a connection between Deleuze’s enthusiasm forliterature and a desire for pragmatics by asking what the practical uses ofliterature are, and how philosophy can help expose these uses? As Larsonsuggests, Deleuze’s notion of ‘stuttering’ reveals how literature forces thedecomposition of language. New syntaxes, new languages are constructedwithin a language so that the linguistic system is ‘brought up against its lim-its’. His article offers a close reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,carrying him from an initial and more conventional reading of the text to asecond, Deleuzian one. This double reading offers both transcendence andimmanence, and leads to the possibility that literature might offer practicalresults by teaching us how we might actively position ourselves so as to influ-ence change towards immanence.

Adrian Parr also pursues these sentiments of change in her review of PaulPatton’s and John Petrovi’s volume of essays, Between Derrida and Deleuze. Itis one of a small but growing body of literature that presents an encounterbetween these two philosophers.10 In her essay, Parr considers the ways thecontributors to this collection — Leonard Lawler, Daniel Smith, TasminLorraine, Branska Arsic, Jeffrey T. Nolan, Alphonso Lingis, John Protevi andPaul Patton — critically confront the associations that are to be found betweenDeleuze and Derrida. A point of initial divergence in the two thinkers, workis Derrida’s debt to Kant, Husserl and Levinas, philosophers of transcen-dence, in contrast to Deleuze’s concern with immanence, read through Spinoza,Leibniz and Nietzsche. A concern of Parr, and Patton and Petrovi, is to exposethe ethico-political strain that connects these philosophers and Parr concludesthat it is in the very folding of transcendence with immanence that the ethico-political trajectories are revealed from a range of perspectives and through

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the variety of concerns raised in the book’s essays. As Parr points out, whileDeleuze and Derrida have each engaged in differing theoretical enterprises,they share a commitment to a philosophy of pragmatics, to a philosophicaltask that questions how philosophy can be used. For Parr, this continues tooffer considerable scope and she asks, in the end, how the task of experimentinscribed in these thinkers work, might be applied to the escalating problemswe now face.

At a time when new totalitarianisms, new techniques of discipline and inter-vention, and new forms of psychological torture loom large, the questionsthat Deleuze and Derrida raise gain a new urgency. For both, what is at stakeis indeed what Paul Patton argued, namely that Deleuze as well as Derridashare a commitment to what Foucault called the ‘unfinished work of free-dom’. In sympathy with Deleuze, reserving judgement is a matter of infinitehope, a point that many of the authors pursue in varying ways in this issueof Critical Horizons.

Acknowledgement

Critical Horizons wishes to thank the Critical Theory Institute at the Universityof California — Irvine for its collaboration with this Issue. In particular, wewish to acknowledge the central roles played by Gabriele Schwab, the organ-iser of the conference on Derrida and Deleuze held by the Critical TheoryInstitute from which some of the papers for this Issue were drawn, and ErinFerris, the conference coordinator, for their assistance with this Issue.

Notes

1 The articles by Paul Patton, John Barton, Jeffrey Atteberry and Gregg Lambert were

first presented at a Derrida/Deleuze: Psychoanalysis, Territoriality, Politics conference

conducted by the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California — Irvine

in April of 2002. The conference was attended by Jacques Derrida who also cre-

ated its title. As well as these four articles published herein, the Critical Theory

Institute is planning to publish a collection of essays drawn from the Derrida/Deleuze

conference with Columbia University Press, under the title Deleuze/Derrida and

Psychoanalysis.2 Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, eds., Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass,

Chicago, University of Chicago, 2001, pp. 189-196.3 Ibid., p. 193.

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4 Gregory Bateson, “Form, Substance and Difference,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind,

New York, Ballantine Books, 1972, pp. 448-465.5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, p. 115.6 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans., Alan Bass, Chicago, University of

Chicago, p. 199.7 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 117.8 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, eds., Christine McDonald, Lincoln, University

of Nebraska, p. 3.9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 115.

10 Also see, J. Protevi, Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic, London

& New York, The Althone Press, 2001; P. Patton, Reconsidering Difference, 1997;

P. Patton, “Strange Proximity,” 1996.

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