A looong time ago, someone here asked for anything on Deleuze's tragic end.
As chance would have it, I soon come across a very beautiful and moving
text by his close friend, Richard Pinhas, concerning Deleuze's last days
<http://www.save-the-world.com/FORM/chimere/chim_4.htm>.
I've been rather busy of late so the translation has taken me longer than
expected. I hope it is still of use to who ever made the inquiry.
Of particular interest (for me at least) is the planned book/music
composition on Revel, the Belero and the Waltz, and the "new form of
enunciation, an other enunciative-matter" it would employ. This strangely
echoes Guattari's own interest in the concept (Bakhtin's) of
utterance/ununciation in his last works.
Tim Adams
Department of Architecture
University of Auckland
New Zealand
Richard Pinhas, "Paris Atmosphere, September 1995"
Source: Chimeres: 31, (Summer, 1997)
Gilles says: IÕm having a severe attack of asthma and hangs up inhaling.
The telephone rings again. Gilles: I want to speak clearly, in a metallic
but gentle voice. A buzzing is transmitted by the receiver as if an insect
was vibrating around it: a reconstituting machine. GillesÕ voice, dry and
colourless, wan, already faraway, withdrawn and frustrated by the rhythm of
regurgitated air, to the beat of another surge of delightful oxygen. ItÕs
September, he calls unexpectedly from Saint-L?onard-de-Noblat. HeÕs back in
Paris: Gilles hangs up, mumbling the humble apology: Òsevere asthmaÓ. The
phone rings again: is the new Philosophie out in Paris? Have you read it?
What do you think? How is it? Does ÒImmanenceÓ disappoint you or not? How
do you find it? A sublime and beautiful text, ÒImmanence: A Life...Ó(1),
beyond its inheritance, it embodies both the absolute density of style and
the fundamental necessity of thought. A last pneumatic breath. I am
stunned, excited and floored by it. The pure narration of the
Deleuze-clinamen. The actual and definitely eternal version of a singular
and internal event.
The voice is normal, pale perhaps, a little breathless. No, that number of
Philosophie is not yet available, itÕs only just been advertised; but
ClaireÕs given me his copy. The last two days spent with this text have
passed extremely slowly. And again yesterday, on the embankment of the 5th
arrondissement, reading beside the Tournelle, a few steps from the Tour
dÕArgent. Harbour flotsam, a little tobacconistÕs shop with a terrace, an
enervating north wind -- sweet, light breath on the deserted embankment at
summerÕs end. Naturally I start reading the difficult and moving,
ÒImmanence: A Life...Ó. It demonstrates that philosophy is perhaps, among
other things, a quest that profoundly modulates the density of things and
the multiple variations of surface. Such style. I cry a few tears,
immediate forms of an inconsolable spontaneity. Then I rummage through the
sometimes confused and often muddled comments of the apocalyptic
post-agr?gatifs [students studying for high-level teacherÕs exam]. The
thinking is clear because it expresses the power of becoming or else the
incorporeal being of shit elements, theyÕre thinking about the agr?gation
[high qualification for teachers], theyÕre playing an old tune. Above all,
Gilles warned us not to worry about these paraphrases without great
interest or use. The aesthetic of Kerenski in the minor. This is what
Nietzsche says, ÒFrom the event, they have made an old tuneÓ. Well after
all, that is to be expected, one being sometimes controversial. GillesÕ
crafty smile. Returning to ÒImmanenceÓ, followed by sad and dark thoughts,
taking so long on some pages, I am slow, so slow, so confused. The text
consumes the afternoon, it captures me and initiates a metamorphic process.
ÒImmanenceÓ penetrates me slowly, like a divine nectar, like a subtle
poison. No doubt its strange beauty conceals like the ethereal veil of a
last text. Perception from a final address, as if things will soon be less
consistent, less luminous, less terrestrial perhaps? A world disembodied,
the world without Gilles. A philosophical question: what is the world
without Gilles? But we visit other regions, we live in other mornings,
Òbathed in a serene brightnessÓ, of the most real possibilities still
remaining. During this time he didnÕt have long to go, two months maybe. I
had been sad without knowing why. No doubt the confused and vague
perception of a veiled sorrow of a gap, at once the largest and the
smallest, a kind of simultaneously minimal and maximal distance. Gilles and
(is) our Òinterior simultanismÓ, a testing-clinamen, a block of contracted
time. That is what makes me sad: a block of condensed time insidiously
reveals that this immediate present soon becomes an immemorial past.
Intuitive (sensory) power of the transcendental empiricism.
I loiter through ÒImmanenceÓ like a delinquent adolescent, a heavenly child
dazzled by a magic object, Rimbaud of Prisunic. Reading slow, very slow,
making each word reverberate and return a scintillating echo, welcoming the
recollection of infinite conversations, smiles, and points of view from
certain years gone by. At this moment I see clearly the smile of the cat
after the cat has gone, or Caesar crossing the Rubicon in LeibnizÕs
commentary. Dazzling intuition of the Òcoalescence of the virtual and the
actualÓ. I touch at the same material of the ineffectual and feeling event
like an instantaneous cut in time. The grand scene of a ball with pale,
white masks, blurred inscriptions, sublime exhalations of time regained.
Gilles liked so much these classic pages that are so popular today. The
text annoys me, it takes too long, the entire afternoon perhaps, the sun
scraping and bathing Paris in a surreal light. Sweet light of the first
days of September, only in Paris.
I turn the page and a surprise awaits me: an article entitled ÒSuidasÓ. A
short, brief, stocky essay, an ode of love for Gilles. Some brilliant and
amusing lines that finally make me laugh out loud. Someone named Bernold
has known a certain essence, one possible modality of ÒDeleuzismÓ. Suidas,
or Soudas, late 8th-century AD philosophical collector or compiler. Did he
really live? Apocryphal. Virtual reality of a philosophical being whose
very existence is in doubt. Has he like Xenophon lived through the
Anabasis? An image: Suidas giving a commentary on Democritus and Epicurus.
Telescoping duration and the lysis of time, as if an active and powerful
chronologist takes hold of this little number of the revue Philosophie. A
rare moment of happiness and a small joy of the purist kind. The grand
laughter of the double affirmation. I quickly reread ÒImmanenceÓ one last
time for today, and remain astounded by my impression of sadness. Why this
sadness when the text is so beautiful, so powerful, so perfect?. The
quintessence of philosophy in action perhaps, and of a vital one-all that
it harbours. Becoming imperceptible in my step by step journey up to
Jussieu. I turn off on the left and lose myself once more in the Jardin des
plantes. LetÕs go see my pal the tortoise. IÕve spoken to Gilles about this
friendly tortoise whose life seems to be an enigma. It has certainly read
Nietzsche (passim), this tortoise from the Jardin des plantes. We are well
in agreement between a whisky and the translation of the Aion paidos of the
Obscure fragment by Cl?mence Ramnoux. Entered into captivity in 1870,
before the heroic Paris Commune, the tortoise is always there, immense and
brave. How old was it when it was captured, during its long transit and its
arrival in Paris in 1870? Of course the tortoise is not a conceptual
animal, but it has the right to embody slowness and the improbable: Zeno of
Elea, the famous paradox, the fast and slow movements.
On the telephone I told Gilles that I liked ÒSuidasÓ. Ha! Bernold! He makes
a little cry of delight, a expression-groan of joy. An amusing animal this
unknown Bernold? Gilles seems to be happy with my description and
enthusiastic with my praise. You like tarantulas, Bernold? No doubt, no
doubt. Returning to ÒImmanenceÓ I passed on my profound admiration. Really?
As if I had told a white lie just to make him happy, as if an undefined
doubt remained, as if perhaps it had not reached his goal. No, I stood firm
in my blissful admiration. I profoundly like this text that achieves a form
of absolute perfection, I insist and describe to him the joy that it gives
without however concealing this background of sadness and melancholy. Why
is that? As if a page turns and then I donÕt know it any more. It will not
take long for me to know why. I was probably, without knowing it then, very
receptive to GillesÕ suffering. Each word-material transmits a joy (I
repeat again) and produces a pain. From this text-event rises an
unfathomable grief that I have come to understand and incorporate. Grief
that instantaneously passed into my flesh like a machine engraving the
words onto the bodyÕs surface. In the distance watches, a guarding shadow,
the second essay of The Genealogy of Morals.
For the next week the calls never stop. Gilles talks about Ravel and the
book on music he would like to write. He would ÒovercomeÓ the book-form to
harmonize with a new form of enunciation, an other enunciative-matter,
possibly to compose. He suggests an electronic Bolero. I am speechless
because it associates in the same beautiful phrase the famous Bolero and
the little electronic refrain [ritournelle]. Reminiscing back to the late
Õ70s, he joyously recalls some stirring episodes at Vincennes and our
shared trajectory around music. He wished to stay longer with me (and of
course me with him, that goes without saying), to reminisce: we shared
these stellar moments with emotion, in a great surge of pleasure. Gilles
was very sick, he wished to talk, to be transported by a transfer; I share
fear but also happiness, a crowned idiot, this brief infinity. Certainly,
prior to the bad news, I did not understand his grand nostalgia nor
perceived his constant suffering. I did not want to, seeing him to be
eternal. Not wanting to conceive it or imagine it. To breath again, not
wanting to breath, to think to breath, machine to breath, machine that
breathes for me -- for him -- machine of machine, a subtle and terrible
connection. I am a son, says Fanny.
Here we are. For the first time perhaps, he will go back to the circle of
events at Vincennes, the music that we heard during that time. He described
his passion for Ravel, the Bolero, the waltz. The waltz above all, the
suspension of beings and time suspended. Pure aether. Have you come to
grips with ÒImmanenceÓ? IsnÕt the text too difficult, too abstract? (Gilles
detested ÒintellectualÓ abstraction).Will it be well received, will it be
well understood? For the first time, I sense in Gilles a singular anxiety,
as if it might be truly important that this text not be open to confusion,
that it be read in only one sense, bearer of a will with a double
imperative: the plane of life and the plane of composition.
At this precise moment we compose, him and I, a sequence on the plane:
symbiosis of the rhizosphere.
Two or three weeks pass by. What is doing? I call Paris, Fanny does not
want me to visit. Same story the next day. A great anxiety returns to my
cyclical depression from the end of October. He calls me back: again the
electric hissing seems to twirl around his voice. Is this the electric
sheep that androids dream?
Footnote
1. ÒLÕimmanence: une vie...Ó,Philosophie: 47, (September, 1995), pp. 3-7,
translated by Nick Millett in Theory, Culture & Society: 14, n.2, (May,
1997), pp. 3-7.
As chance would have it, I soon come across a very beautiful and moving
text by his close friend, Richard Pinhas, concerning Deleuze's last days
<http://www.save-the-world.com/FORM/chimere/chim_4.htm>.
I've been rather busy of late so the translation has taken me longer than
expected. I hope it is still of use to who ever made the inquiry.
Of particular interest (for me at least) is the planned book/music
composition on Revel, the Belero and the Waltz, and the "new form of
enunciation, an other enunciative-matter" it would employ. This strangely
echoes Guattari's own interest in the concept (Bakhtin's) of
utterance/ununciation in his last works.
Tim Adams
Department of Architecture
University of Auckland
New Zealand
Richard Pinhas, "Paris Atmosphere, September 1995"
Source: Chimeres: 31, (Summer, 1997)
Gilles says: IÕm having a severe attack of asthma and hangs up inhaling.
The telephone rings again. Gilles: I want to speak clearly, in a metallic
but gentle voice. A buzzing is transmitted by the receiver as if an insect
was vibrating around it: a reconstituting machine. GillesÕ voice, dry and
colourless, wan, already faraway, withdrawn and frustrated by the rhythm of
regurgitated air, to the beat of another surge of delightful oxygen. ItÕs
September, he calls unexpectedly from Saint-L?onard-de-Noblat. HeÕs back in
Paris: Gilles hangs up, mumbling the humble apology: Òsevere asthmaÓ. The
phone rings again: is the new Philosophie out in Paris? Have you read it?
What do you think? How is it? Does ÒImmanenceÓ disappoint you or not? How
do you find it? A sublime and beautiful text, ÒImmanence: A Life...Ó(1),
beyond its inheritance, it embodies both the absolute density of style and
the fundamental necessity of thought. A last pneumatic breath. I am
stunned, excited and floored by it. The pure narration of the
Deleuze-clinamen. The actual and definitely eternal version of a singular
and internal event.
The voice is normal, pale perhaps, a little breathless. No, that number of
Philosophie is not yet available, itÕs only just been advertised; but
ClaireÕs given me his copy. The last two days spent with this text have
passed extremely slowly. And again yesterday, on the embankment of the 5th
arrondissement, reading beside the Tournelle, a few steps from the Tour
dÕArgent. Harbour flotsam, a little tobacconistÕs shop with a terrace, an
enervating north wind -- sweet, light breath on the deserted embankment at
summerÕs end. Naturally I start reading the difficult and moving,
ÒImmanence: A Life...Ó. It demonstrates that philosophy is perhaps, among
other things, a quest that profoundly modulates the density of things and
the multiple variations of surface. Such style. I cry a few tears,
immediate forms of an inconsolable spontaneity. Then I rummage through the
sometimes confused and often muddled comments of the apocalyptic
post-agr?gatifs [students studying for high-level teacherÕs exam]. The
thinking is clear because it expresses the power of becoming or else the
incorporeal being of shit elements, theyÕre thinking about the agr?gation
[high qualification for teachers], theyÕre playing an old tune. Above all,
Gilles warned us not to worry about these paraphrases without great
interest or use. The aesthetic of Kerenski in the minor. This is what
Nietzsche says, ÒFrom the event, they have made an old tuneÓ. Well after
all, that is to be expected, one being sometimes controversial. GillesÕ
crafty smile. Returning to ÒImmanenceÓ, followed by sad and dark thoughts,
taking so long on some pages, I am slow, so slow, so confused. The text
consumes the afternoon, it captures me and initiates a metamorphic process.
ÒImmanenceÓ penetrates me slowly, like a divine nectar, like a subtle
poison. No doubt its strange beauty conceals like the ethereal veil of a
last text. Perception from a final address, as if things will soon be less
consistent, less luminous, less terrestrial perhaps? A world disembodied,
the world without Gilles. A philosophical question: what is the world
without Gilles? But we visit other regions, we live in other mornings,
Òbathed in a serene brightnessÓ, of the most real possibilities still
remaining. During this time he didnÕt have long to go, two months maybe. I
had been sad without knowing why. No doubt the confused and vague
perception of a veiled sorrow of a gap, at once the largest and the
smallest, a kind of simultaneously minimal and maximal distance. Gilles and
(is) our Òinterior simultanismÓ, a testing-clinamen, a block of contracted
time. That is what makes me sad: a block of condensed time insidiously
reveals that this immediate present soon becomes an immemorial past.
Intuitive (sensory) power of the transcendental empiricism.
I loiter through ÒImmanenceÓ like a delinquent adolescent, a heavenly child
dazzled by a magic object, Rimbaud of Prisunic. Reading slow, very slow,
making each word reverberate and return a scintillating echo, welcoming the
recollection of infinite conversations, smiles, and points of view from
certain years gone by. At this moment I see clearly the smile of the cat
after the cat has gone, or Caesar crossing the Rubicon in LeibnizÕs
commentary. Dazzling intuition of the Òcoalescence of the virtual and the
actualÓ. I touch at the same material of the ineffectual and feeling event
like an instantaneous cut in time. The grand scene of a ball with pale,
white masks, blurred inscriptions, sublime exhalations of time regained.
Gilles liked so much these classic pages that are so popular today. The
text annoys me, it takes too long, the entire afternoon perhaps, the sun
scraping and bathing Paris in a surreal light. Sweet light of the first
days of September, only in Paris.
I turn the page and a surprise awaits me: an article entitled ÒSuidasÓ. A
short, brief, stocky essay, an ode of love for Gilles. Some brilliant and
amusing lines that finally make me laugh out loud. Someone named Bernold
has known a certain essence, one possible modality of ÒDeleuzismÓ. Suidas,
or Soudas, late 8th-century AD philosophical collector or compiler. Did he
really live? Apocryphal. Virtual reality of a philosophical being whose
very existence is in doubt. Has he like Xenophon lived through the
Anabasis? An image: Suidas giving a commentary on Democritus and Epicurus.
Telescoping duration and the lysis of time, as if an active and powerful
chronologist takes hold of this little number of the revue Philosophie. A
rare moment of happiness and a small joy of the purist kind. The grand
laughter of the double affirmation. I quickly reread ÒImmanenceÓ one last
time for today, and remain astounded by my impression of sadness. Why this
sadness when the text is so beautiful, so powerful, so perfect?. The
quintessence of philosophy in action perhaps, and of a vital one-all that
it harbours. Becoming imperceptible in my step by step journey up to
Jussieu. I turn off on the left and lose myself once more in the Jardin des
plantes. LetÕs go see my pal the tortoise. IÕve spoken to Gilles about this
friendly tortoise whose life seems to be an enigma. It has certainly read
Nietzsche (passim), this tortoise from the Jardin des plantes. We are well
in agreement between a whisky and the translation of the Aion paidos of the
Obscure fragment by Cl?mence Ramnoux. Entered into captivity in 1870,
before the heroic Paris Commune, the tortoise is always there, immense and
brave. How old was it when it was captured, during its long transit and its
arrival in Paris in 1870? Of course the tortoise is not a conceptual
animal, but it has the right to embody slowness and the improbable: Zeno of
Elea, the famous paradox, the fast and slow movements.
On the telephone I told Gilles that I liked ÒSuidasÓ. Ha! Bernold! He makes
a little cry of delight, a expression-groan of joy. An amusing animal this
unknown Bernold? Gilles seems to be happy with my description and
enthusiastic with my praise. You like tarantulas, Bernold? No doubt, no
doubt. Returning to ÒImmanenceÓ I passed on my profound admiration. Really?
As if I had told a white lie just to make him happy, as if an undefined
doubt remained, as if perhaps it had not reached his goal. No, I stood firm
in my blissful admiration. I profoundly like this text that achieves a form
of absolute perfection, I insist and describe to him the joy that it gives
without however concealing this background of sadness and melancholy. Why
is that? As if a page turns and then I donÕt know it any more. It will not
take long for me to know why. I was probably, without knowing it then, very
receptive to GillesÕ suffering. Each word-material transmits a joy (I
repeat again) and produces a pain. From this text-event rises an
unfathomable grief that I have come to understand and incorporate. Grief
that instantaneously passed into my flesh like a machine engraving the
words onto the bodyÕs surface. In the distance watches, a guarding shadow,
the second essay of The Genealogy of Morals.
For the next week the calls never stop. Gilles talks about Ravel and the
book on music he would like to write. He would ÒovercomeÓ the book-form to
harmonize with a new form of enunciation, an other enunciative-matter,
possibly to compose. He suggests an electronic Bolero. I am speechless
because it associates in the same beautiful phrase the famous Bolero and
the little electronic refrain [ritournelle]. Reminiscing back to the late
Õ70s, he joyously recalls some stirring episodes at Vincennes and our
shared trajectory around music. He wished to stay longer with me (and of
course me with him, that goes without saying), to reminisce: we shared
these stellar moments with emotion, in a great surge of pleasure. Gilles
was very sick, he wished to talk, to be transported by a transfer; I share
fear but also happiness, a crowned idiot, this brief infinity. Certainly,
prior to the bad news, I did not understand his grand nostalgia nor
perceived his constant suffering. I did not want to, seeing him to be
eternal. Not wanting to conceive it or imagine it. To breath again, not
wanting to breath, to think to breath, machine to breath, machine that
breathes for me -- for him -- machine of machine, a subtle and terrible
connection. I am a son, says Fanny.
Here we are. For the first time perhaps, he will go back to the circle of
events at Vincennes, the music that we heard during that time. He described
his passion for Ravel, the Bolero, the waltz. The waltz above all, the
suspension of beings and time suspended. Pure aether. Have you come to
grips with ÒImmanenceÓ? IsnÕt the text too difficult, too abstract? (Gilles
detested ÒintellectualÓ abstraction).Will it be well received, will it be
well understood? For the first time, I sense in Gilles a singular anxiety,
as if it might be truly important that this text not be open to confusion,
that it be read in only one sense, bearer of a will with a double
imperative: the plane of life and the plane of composition.
At this precise moment we compose, him and I, a sequence on the plane:
symbiosis of the rhizosphere.
Two or three weeks pass by. What is doing? I call Paris, Fanny does not
want me to visit. Same story the next day. A great anxiety returns to my
cyclical depression from the end of October. He calls me back: again the
electric hissing seems to twirl around his voice. Is this the electric
sheep that androids dream?
Footnote
1. ÒLÕimmanence: une vie...Ó,Philosophie: 47, (September, 1995), pp. 3-7,
translated by Nick Millett in Theory, Culture & Society: 14, n.2, (May,
1997), pp. 3-7.