Deleuze has constructed a formidable and elaborate ontology

What we get is a postmodern Deleuze that is more personal fantasy and what one expects to find, rather than a Deleuze who has constructed a formidable and elaborate ontology in close, vigorous dialogue with thinkers such as Parmindes, Plato, Aristotle, Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Maimon, Hegel, Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, Bergson, Nietzsche, Simondon, the Stoics, Lucretius, and a host of other thinkers that currently escape my recollection.

Moreover, there’s been a tendency for this scholarship to be organized around unproductive friend/enemy distinctions (Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel are bad guys and Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Bergson are good guys) where arguments and thinkers can simply be rejected as being “philosophers of the State” without argumentation. Admittedly I take delight in writing about Hegel, Descartes, phenomenology, or Lacan in part simply because it violates and disrupts this code that I see to be unthinking and unphilosophical; though this probably is not good for my credibility as a Deleuze scholar.

Oh well, I’m not certain I ever wanted to be a scholar anyway, but would prefer to draw on thinkers that give me conceptual resources to articulate what I only vaguely am trying to say (a lot of times I feel like a croaking frog, unsure of what I’m trying to get at)...Deleuze is a far more rigorous and careful thinker than his defenders often give him credit for being. ~ by larvalsubjects on March 17, 2007