Re: I have nothing to admit


"I have nothing to admit"
Gilles Deleuze

This text originally appeared as "Cher Michel, je na'i rien a avouer," in
_La Quinzaine litteraire_ 116 (April 1-15, 1973), pp. 17-19. [A slightly
augmented version of the text was published under the title "Lettre a
Michel Cressole," as an appendix to Cressole's book _Deleuze_, published
in France by Editions Universitaries in 1973. The current translation,
by Janis Forman, appeared in _Semiotext(e)_ 2.3, 1977, pp. 111-116. [The
_Anti-Oedipus_ Issue]

Reproduced without permission, for educational purposes only.

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Dear Michel,

You are charming, intelligent, spiteful to the point of being
wicked. You could do even better, though. . . The letter you sent me,
invoking sometimes what people say, sometimes what you think on your own,
and the two mixed together, reflects some sort of jubilation brought
about by my supposed misfortune. On the one hand, you tell me that I am
cornered in every way, in my life, in teaching, in politics, that I've
become a dirty hit star, that in any case it won't last forever and that
I'll never get out of the rut. On the other hand, you tell me that I've
always trailed behind, that I suck your blood and sample your poisons.
You are the true experimenters, the heros, and I remain on the sidelines,
looking at you and taking advantage of you. That isn't at all the way I
feel about it. I'm so fed up with schizos, true or false, that I joyfully
convert to paranoia. Vive la paranoia! What do you want to inject into
me with your letter, if not a little resentment (You're cornered, you're
cornered, "admit it.") and a little bad conscience (shame on you, you're
lagging behind. . .). If that was all you had to tell me, it wasn't
worth the trouble. What you seek in your book about me is revenge. Your
letter is full of sham commiseration an a real zest for vengeance. . . .

Of course, benevolence is not your strong point. When I am no
longer capable of loving and admiring people and things (not very many),
I'll feel dead, mortified. But as for you, it seems that you were born
sour; all art is in allusions. "I won't be taken in. . . I'm writing a
book on you, but I'll show you. . ." Of all possible interpretations
you'll generally choose the most wicked or the vilest. First example: I
love and admire Foucault. I've written an article on him. And he, one on
me, from which you quote the following sentence: ~Perhaps the century
will be called Deleuzian one day." Your comment: they send each other
flowers. It seems you can never get the idea that my admiration for
Foucault is real and that Foucault's statement is just a crack intended
to make those people laugh who love us and to make the others rage. . .

Second example: my nails, which are long and untrimmed. At the
end of your letter, you say that my worker's vest (which isn't true, I
wear a peasant's vest) is well worth Marilyn Monroe's pleated blouse, and
my nails, the sunglasses of Greta Garbo. And you inundate me with
ironic, evil advice. Since you refer to my nails several times, let me
tell you what they are all about. People can say that my mother used to
cut them and this is linked to the Oedipus complex and castration (a
grotesque interpretation but psycho- analytical). They can also notice,
if they have a look at my fingertips, that being deprived of normal
protective fingerpads, I cannot touch an object, especially a piece of
cloth, with the pads of my fingers without a nervous twinge, which
requires me to restore to the protection offered by long nails (a
teratological and selectionist interpretation). They can also say, and
it is true, that I dream not of being invisible, but imperceptible and
that I compensate for this dream by having nails that I can tuck into my
pocket, so much so that nothing seems more shocking to me than someone
who looks at them (a psycho-social interpretation). Finally they can
say: "You shouldn't bite your nails because they are yours, if you love
nails. eat someone else's, provided that is what you want, and if you can
(a political interpretation, Darien). But you had to choose the most
degrading interpretation: he wants to distinguish himself, to act his
Greta Garbo part. Anyway, isn't it strange that none of my friends ever
noticed my nails, finding them completely natural, planted there by
chance as if they had been sowed by a gust of wind, which no one would
bother to talk about?

Let me come back to your first criticism; you state and
reiterate: blocked and cornered you are, *admit it*. Attorney-general, I
admit nothing. Since our topic is a book about me - and you are the only
one to blame for this - I would like to explain how I view what I have
written. I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was
more or less assassinated with the history of philosophy. History of
philosophy has an obvious, repressive function in philosophy; it is
philosophy's very own Oedipus. "All the same you won't dare to speak
your own name as long as you have not read this and that, and that on
this, and this on that." In my generation, many did not pull through;
some did by inventing their own procedures and new rules, a new tone.
For a long time I myself have worked through the history of philosophy,
read such and such a book on such and such an author. But I managed to
compensate for this in several ways: first by loving authors who were
opposed to the rationalist tradition of that history. I find among
Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche a secret link that resides in the
critique of negation, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority,
the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power, etc.)
What I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the
Dialectic. My book on Kant is something else. I like it, I wrote it as
a book on an enemy; in it I try to show how Kant operates, what makes up
his mechanisms - High Court of Reason, measured use of faculties,
submissiveness all the more hypo- critical as the title of legislators is
bestowed upon us. But what really helped me to come off at that time
was, I believe, to view the history of philosophy as a screwing process
or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I would
imagine myself approaching an author from behind, and making him a child,
who would indeed be his and would, never- theless, be monstrous. That
the child would be his was very important because the author had to say,
in effect, everything I made him say. But that the child be monstrous
was also a requisite because it was necessary to go through all kinds of
decenterings, slidings, splittings, secret dis- charges which have given
me much pleasure. I consider my book on Bergson to be typical in that
respect. And today there are people who laugh and reproach me for having
written even on Bergson. Perhaps because they knew nothing about
history. They don't know how much hatred focused on Bergson at the
beginning, within the French university, and how he attracted all sorts
of madmen and marginals, fashionable or not. And whether this went on in
spite of him or not is of little importance.

Nietzsche whom I read late was the one who pulled me out of all
this. For it is impossible to submit him to such a treatment. He's the
one who screws you behind your back. He gives you a perverse taste that
neither Marx nor Freud have ever given you: the desire for everyone to
say simple things in his own name, to speak through affects, intensities,
experiences, experiments. To say something in one's own name is very
strange, for it is not at all when we consider ourselves as selves,
persons, or subjects that we speak in our own name. On the contrary, an
individual acquires a true proper name as the result of the most severe
operations of depersonalization, when he opens himself to multiplicities
that pervade him and to intensities which run right through his whole
being. The name as the immediate apprehension of such an intensive
multiplicity is the opposite of the depersonalization brought about by
the history of philosophy, a depersonalization of love and not of
submission. The depth of what we don't know, the deepness of our own
underdevelopment is where we talk from. We've become a bundle of
loosened singularities, names, first names, nails, things, animals,
minute events: the opposite of hit stars. So I began to work on two
books in this immediate direction: _Difference et Repetition_ and
_Logique de sens_. I don't have any illusions: they are still full of an
academic apparatus - they are laborious - but there is something I try to
shake, to stir up within myself. I try to deal with writing as with a
flux, not a code. And there are pages I like in _Difference et
Repetition_, those on fatigue and contemplation, for example, because
they reflect live experience despite appearances. That didn't go very
far, but it was a beginning.

And then, there was my meeting Felix Guattari, the way we got
along and completed, depersonalized, singularized each other - in short
how we loved. That resulted in _Anti-Oedipus_ which marked a new
progression. I wonder whether one of the formal reasons for the hostile
reception the book occasionally encounters isn't precisely that we worked
it out together, depriving the public of the quarrels and ascriptions it
loves. So they try to untangle what is undiscernible or to determine
what belongs to each of us. But since everyone, like everyone else, is
multiple to begin with, that makes for quite a few people. And
doubtlessly _Anti-Oedipus_ cannot be said to be rid of all the formal
apparatus of knowledge: surely it still belongs to the university, for it
is well-mannered enough, and does not yet represent the "pop" philosophy
or "pop" analysis that we dream of. But I am struck by the this: most of
the people who find this book difficult are the better educated, notably
in the psychoanalytic field. They say: What is this, the body without
organs? What do you really mean by desiring machines? In contrast,
those who know just a little bit, those who are not spoiled by
psychoanalysis, have fewer problems and do not mind, leaving aside what
they don't understand. Such is the reason for our saying that those who
should be concerned with this book, theoretically at least, are fellows
between fifteen and twenty. There are in fact two ways of reading a
book: either we consider it a box which refers us to an inside, and in
that case we look for the signified; if we are still more perverse or
corrupted, we search for the signifier. And then we consider the
following book as a box contained in the first one or containing it in
turn. And we can comment, and interpret, and ask for explanations, we
can write about the book and so on endlessly. Or the other way: we
consider the book a small a-signifying machine; the only problem is "Does
it work and how does it work? How does it work for you?" If it doesn't
function, if nothing happens, take another book. This other way of
reading is based on intensities: something happens or doesn't happen.
There is nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret.
It can be compared to an electrical connection. A body without organs: I
know uneducated people who understood this immediately, thanks to their
own "habits." This other way of reading goes against the preceding
insofar as it immediately refers a book to Exteriority. A book is a
small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow
among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into
relationships of current and countercurrent, of back-wash with other
flows - the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money,
politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and
masturbating with the other - two flows in what relationship? As for our
own exteriority (at least one of our exteriorities) it has been a large
group of people (especially young ones) who are fed up with
psychoanalysis. They are "cornered," to use your phrase, because they
continue, more or less, to be analyzed. They already criticize analysis,
but they criticize it in psycho- analytical terms. (For example, a
secret source of inner glee: how can boys belonging to the FHAR [Front
Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire], girls to the MLF [Mouvement de
Liberation de la Femme], and so many others be analyzed? Doesn't it
bother them? They believe in it? What on earth are they doing on the
couch?) It is the existence of this trend that made _Anti-Oedipus_
possible. And if psychoanalysts, from the dumbest to the most
intelligent, react for the most part with hostility to this book, but are
defensive rather than aggressive, their reaction is evidently not a
result of its content alone, but of this trend which is going to grow,
according to which people are more and more fed up with being told about
"papa, mama, Oedipus, castration, regression," and with the properly
imbecilic image of sexuality in general, and of their own in particular,
that they are offered. As we say, the psycho- analysts will have to take
the "masses" into account; the small masses. We receive beautiful
letters in the respect, sent from a "lumpenproletariat" of
psychoanalysis, much more beautiful than the articles of the critics.

This way of reading intensively, in relation to the outside -
flow against flow, machine with machines, experimentations, events for
everyone (which have nothing to do with a book, but with its shreds and
are a new mode of operating with other things, no matter what. . . etc.)
- is a manifestation of love. Such is exactly the way you approached the
book. And the section of your letter I find beautiful, rather marvelous
even, is that where you explain the manner in which you read it, what use
you made of it on your own account. Alas! alas! Why do you have to rush
right back to a reproachful attitude? "You are not going to get away
with it. We are waiting for the second volume; you will still be on the
same track. . ." No, that isn't true at all. We do have plans. We will
follow up because we love to work together. But it won't be a sequel at
all. With the help of the outside, we'll do something so different in
both language and thought that those who are anticipating our work will
have to say to themselves: they've gone completely crazy, or they're a
couple of bastards, or they've obviously been unable to continue.
Deception is a pleasure. Not that we want to make believe that we are
madmen; we will go mad, though, in our own time and in out own way. Why
are people in such a hurry? We certainly know that _Anti-Oedipus,_
volume 1, is still full of compromises - too full of scholarly things
that still look like concepts. So, we'll change; we have already
changed; we're doing all right. Some people think we're bound to stay on
the same old path. There has even been some relief we'd form a fifth
psychoanalytic group. Woe unto us. We dream of other things, more
secret and more joyful. Compromise we shall no longer, because that
won't be necessary. And we'll always find allies we want or who want us.
. . .

As for the bunch of you, you are still busy provoking,
publishing, making up questionnaires, forcing public confession ("admit,
admit. . ."). Why should we? What I anticipate is just the opposite: an
age of clandestine- ness, half voluntary and half obligatory, which will
shelter the new born desire, notably in politics. You want me cornered
professionally because I spoke at the faculty of Vincennes for two years
and they say, you say, that I don't do a thing there anymore. You think
that everything I've said was contradictory, "refusing the position of
professor, but condemned to teach, putting on the harness when everyone
had let it drop." I am not concerned about contradictions, and I'm not a
righteous soul living out the tragedy of its condition: I have spoke
because that was what I really wanted. I have been supported, insulted,
interrupted by militants, fake madmen, real madmen, fools, very
intelligent people; there was some lively fun at Vincennes. It lasted
two years. That's enough; things have to change. . . .

Thus I have nothing to "admit." The relative success of _Anti-
Oedipus_ compromises neither Felix nor myself. In a sense it doesn't
concern us, since we're involved in other projects. So let me turn to
your other criticism, which is harsher and more dismaying. What you say
is that I've always been trailing behind, sparing my strength, taking
advantage of the experiments of others - homosexuals, drug addicts,
alcoholics, masochists, madmen, etc. - and vaguely sampling their
delights and their poisons without ever risking a thing. You can turn
against me one of my texts in which I ask how once can avoid becoming a
professional lecturer on Artaud, a worldly amateur of Fitzgerald. But
what do you know about me once it is said that I believe in secrecy - in
the power of falsehood rather than in accounts which bear witness to a
deplorable belief in accuracy and truth? If I don't move, if I don't
travel, I have taken motionless trips just like everyone else, and I can
measure them only by my emotions, express them in the most oblique and
diverted way in what I write. And who cares about my relations with
homosexuals, alcoholics, or drug addicts, if I manage to achieve the same
results as theirs by other means?

The problem is not one of being this or that in man, but rather
one of becoming human, of a universal becoming animal: not to take
oneself for a beast, but to undo the human organization of the body, to
cut across such and such a zone of intensity in the body, everyone of us
discovering the zones which are really his, and the groups, the
populations, the species which inhabit him. Why shouldn't I speak of
medicine without being a doctor if I speak of it as a dog? Why shouldn't
I speak of drug without being drugged, if I speak about it as a little
bird? And why shouldn't I invest a speech on something, even if this
speech is completely unreal and artificial, without anyone asking me my
credentials for delivering it? Drugs sometimes cause delirium. Why
shouldn't I rave about drugs? What can you do with your very own
"reality"? Yours is dull realism. And then, why do you read me? Your
argument of cautious experimentation is an invalid, reactionary one. The
sentence from _Anti-Oedipus_ that I prefer is: no, we have never seen
schizophrenics. . . .
--
---------------------------Michael J. Current----------------------------
mcurrent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -or- @ins.infonet.net -or- @nyx.cs.du.edu
Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression, & Unemployment :)
737 - 18th Street, #9 * Des Moines, IA * 50314-1031 *** (515) 283-2142
"AN IMAGE OF THOUGHT CALLED PHILOSOPHY HAS BEEN FORMED HISTORICALLY
AND IT EFFECTIVELY STOPS PEOPLE FROM THINKING." - GILLES DELEUZE
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