1

Erik Bordeleau
Postdoctoral Fellow, McGill University
erik.bordeleau@mail.mcgill.ca


A Redemptive Deleuze?
Choked passages or the politics of contraction

Contemplating is creating, mystery of passive creation, sensation.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 212)

In the conclusion of Time-Image, discussing Syberbergs cinema, Deleuze opposes
the time-image and the creative fabulation to the realm of information. Quite
surprisingly, this opposition is placed under the sign of redemption: redemption,
art beyond knowledge, is also creation beyond information. (Deleuze 1989: 270)
This passage finds a strange one might say apocalyptic echo toward the end of
Difference and Repetition, where arts highest possibility is defined as the production
of a repetition or contraction, that is, a freedom for the end of a world (Deleuze
1994: 293).

Incidentally, when they want to discredit the political relevance of Deleuzes thought,
Hallward considers counter-effectuation as a redemptive gesture, and Rancire
describes Deleuzes history of cinema as a history of redemption (Rancire 2001:
150). Each time, redemption refers pejoratively to a break out of this world and a
form of apolitical passivity, in an attempt to reduce Deleuze to be a mere spiritual
thinker, simply renewing that Oriental intuition which Hegel found at work in
Spinozas philosophy (Hallward 2006: 6). But is it all that simple? How should we
envisage the relationship between creativity and redemption, politics and passivity
in Deleuzes work? And in what way does that concern Deleuzes philosophy
relation to the Non-west?

It will become clear soon enough that I mostly disagree with Hallwards rigorous yet
quite reductive reading of Deleuze. As I shall argue in more details, Hallwards
2
spiritual anathema directed against Deleuze, although suggestive in many ways,
largely misses its target. Nevertheless, I do believe it is important to give an echo to
Hallwards critique and to directly put into discussion the so-called spiritual
aspects and effects of Deleuzes philosophy. Spiritual is a tricky word, and we
can easily see how it can work as an insult, especially when coming from the pure
politics end of the contemporary philo-political spectrum. Let me thus say for now
that where Hallward wishes to nail down Deleuzes philosophy using words like
redemptive or spiritual, I will read these characterizations as more or less
successful attempts to problematize the political (or apolitical) modes of existence
induced by Deleuzes philosophy.

In order to push myself out of the comfort zone of simply commenting (or joyfully
banging) on Hallwards rather disincarnated critique of Deleuzes philosophy, I will
first try to quickly address the question of the production of subjectivity in
deleuzian milieus as such (and put myself at stake by the same token). I will try to
flesh out the question of the political modes of existence by giving some sort of
anthropological or practical ground to Hallwards critique and by directly relating it
to the emergence of what we could define as the emergence of a transnational
deleuzian academic community (and/or hegemony?). This committed or
compromising characterization of some potentially undesirable side-effects that
might derive from a deleuzian stance articulates around the danger, acknowledged
by Deleuze in the first place, of becoming beautiful souls through the affirmation of
pure differences. This first section could thus be read as a sort of distant but
potentially sympathetic echo to Hallwards repeated affirmation that Deleuzes
philosophy is ultimately useless politically speaking and that it is better understood
as a redemptive (academic) way out of this world.

I will then move to a more direct discussion of some of Hallwards thesis, which he
mainly develops in three different occasions: in A 1997 article entitled Gilles Deleuze
and the redemption from interest, in his 2001 book Absolutely Postcolonial, and most
importantly in his 2006 monograph on Deleuze, Out of this world: Deleuze and the
3
philosophy of creation. My main interest will be to show just how unspecific,
instrumental and, in the end, little convincing Hallwards use of the spiritual
reference is in his inquiry into Deleuzes philosophy. This will be followed by a
rather contrasting reading of Deleuze focused on some of the many choked passages
he dramatically stages in his writings and which are, symptomatically indeed,
mostly overlook by the badiousian readings of his work. What is at stake here is
Deleuzes method of dramatization and its culmination in what I would call a
politics of contraction innerving all his work. In the last instance, I will argue that
Deleuzes dramatizations are of the foremost importance if one is to seriously take
into account his complex and stimulating relation to the Non-West and namely,
China.

The problem of the beautiful soul
Give me a body then!
(Deleuze 1989: 189)

In the Hermeneutics of the subject, Foucault defines spirituality as an ethical work
on oneself (un travail intrieur dordre thique). Discussing the concrete social
conditions of this ethical work, its relation to the moral law and the kind of practical
challenges it involves, Foucault goes on to suggest that the care for the self and its
ethopoietical effects necessarily imply some form of distinctive social belonging.

The care of the self cannot appear and, above all, cannot be practiced simply
by virtue of being human as such, just by belonging to the human community,
although this membership is very important. It can only be practiced within
the group, and within the group in its distinctive character. (Foucault 2005:
117)

I think that, for the sake of this article at least, deleuzian milieus and the intense
affective commerce they generate are consisting and distinct enough to be
envisaged not only as academic circles, but as potential forms of the kind of
spiritual or ethopoietic groups Foucault alludes to.
4

From this (insider) perspective, the first element that I would like to discuss in echo
to Hallwards critique is the danger of becoming beautiful souls. As far as I know,
Hallward doesnt directly use this term to describe Deleuzes position; nonetheless,
it is easy to imagine how he could have done so, describing a deleuzian subjectivity
that refuses acting, moving out of history and to preserve the purity of its heart,
flees from contact with actuality (Hegel 1807: 667) Interestingly, Deleuze himself
discusses directly the problem of the beautiful soul in the preface of Difference and
Repetition and later in this same book:

There are certainly many dangers in invoking pure differences which have
become independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. The
greatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul:
there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from
bloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed.
() The notion of a problem, which we see linked to that of difference, also
seems to nurture the sentiments of the beautiful soul: only problems and
questions matter (Deleuze 1994: p.xx)


This passage strikes me as a quite convincing description of an obvious tendency
among young contemporary academic deleuzians, a tendency disturbingly
compatible with communicational consensus and some kind of relational aesthetics.
Indeed, it is easy to imagine how a misunderstood philosophy of difference can very
well blend with existential liberalism, or how a vulgar understanding of Nietzsches
critics of resentment can very well fit with omnipresent psycho-pop positive
thinking and its horror of negative feelings. Here, one might think of Zizeks
famous characterisation of north-Americans as natural-born deleuzians, suggesting
that Deleuzes philosophy is perfectly suited for late capitalist yuppies. (Zizek 2004:
183) Or again, as Stengers beautifully puts it,

Ds lors quil est question de politique, ft-elle cosmopolitique, le rve
dchapper { lhistoire est le cauchemar trivial dun devenir anglique : les
mes, de navoir plus de corps, serait en relation de paix perptuelle ()
(Stengers 2003b: 378).
5

Deleuze spells out the danger of the beautiful soul by asserting not only the
affirmative and potentially aggressive and selective power of difference, but also the
contractive power of wrath,
1
adding that practical struggles or Revolution never
proceed by way of the negative. (Deleuze 1994: 208) Interestingly, as he
contemplates the danger of the beautiful soul, Deleuze ultimately invokes Marx as
some sort of political guarantee against it. Differences, nothing but differences, in a
peaceful coexistence in the Idea of social places and functions ... but the name of
Marx is sufficient to save [the philosophy of Difference] from this danger. (Deleuze
1994: 207) Most probably, Marx or the idea of revolution deprived of its negativity
isnt politically radical enough in the eye of Zizek or Hallward. For them, the
invocation of Marx here doesnt preserve Deleuze from ultimately being a mere
spiritual thinker, unable to properly and wilfully face the abyss of the
[revolutionary] act (Zizek 2002: 8).

Redemption or Dramatization?

Hallwards reading of Deleuze is centered on the attempt to unveil the unifying
redemptive logic he finds at work in his philosophy. Part of the interest and
originality of Hallwards reading is that it gives great importance to the idea of
becoming-imperceptible, which he describes as the exclusive telos and the
redemptive re-orientation of any particular creature towards its own dissolution.
(2006: 3) I will propose an alternative analysis of this particular idea in the next
section of this text. For now, suffice it to say that Hallward considers Deleuzes
philosophy to be essentially a way to escape the world actual constraints, a
dematerializing body of thought oriented by lines of flight that lead out of the world
(2006: 3), toward pure virtuality. In this perspective, becoming-imperceptible
appears to be the clearest expression of Deleuzes philosophy of self-virtualization.

1
Nevertheless, we believe that when these problems attain their proper degree of positivity, and when
difference becomes the object of a corresponding affirmation, they release a power of aggression and
selection which destroys the beautiful soul by depriving it of its very identity and breaking its good will.
(Deleuze 1994: p.xx)
6

For Hallward, Deleuzes philosophy is best understood as part of a late-modern
revival of post-theophanic conception of thought (2006: 160), that is, a conception
of the world in which God expresses himself in all things, and all things are an
expression of God (2006: 5). In Hallwards thought, this theophanic conception of
the world merges with what he calls a singular mode of individuation, defined as
an ongoing, self-constituent process of differentiation that creates its own medium
of existence or expansion (2001: XII). Hallward identifies this singular logic as the
main modus operandi of postcolonial studies: singular configurations replace the
interpretation or representation of reality with an immanent participation in its
production or creation: in the end, at the limit of absolute postcoloniality, there
will be nothing left, nothing outside itself, to which it could be specific. (2001: XII).
Opposed to that logic of the singular we find what Hallward calls the specific, a
mode of apprehending the real that takes into account the actual constraints of the
outside world. As Hallward puts it, the specific is the space of the historical as such
(), the place where we make our own history, but not in the circumstances of our
choosing (2001: XII). What matters here is how this specific, historical materialist
approach is said to allows for an active negotiation of relations and the deliberate
taking of sides, choices and risks (2001: XII), while the singular logic tends to
dissolve any subject-subject or subject-object relation into one beyond-subject
(2001: 5) (my emphasis). The keywords here are of course active, deliberate
choices and risks, as opposed to a presumably passive process of dissolution in
the Oneness of Being.

This being said, what is most striking perhaps in Hallwards description of Deleuzes
project is how little specific he is in associating Deleuze with just about any religious
strands of thought. In his quite influential 1997 article Gilles Deleuze and the
redemption from interest, Hallward even draws parallel between Deleuze and Saint
Paul, simply because the later also favours an other-worldly redemptive force
(1997: 6). This of course sounds retrospectively quite ironic when considering that
one of Hallwards main philosophical influences, Alain Badiou, turns precisely to
7
Paul in his Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism (1997) in order to further
exemplify his notion of the Truth-Event and the conversion process of his subject to
truth, as the title of Hallwards book on Badiou goes.
2
Fortunately though, in
Absolutely Postcolonial and Out of this World, Hallward becomes somewhat more
specific (!), dropping the reference to Paul and mostly insisting on Bergson, Spinoza,
Ibn-Arabi, Suhrawardi, Meister Eckhart, Plotin, Eurigena and just about anybody of
the Neoplatonic tradition, noticing on the way that Deleuzes project resonates with
and renews that Oriental intuition which Hegel found at work in Spinozas
philosophy (2006: 6).
3
To understand just how all these references ultimately work
as an all-encompassing and virulent spiritual anathema, one has to keep mind that
in his book Absolutely Postcolonial, Hallward comes to define the singular mode of
individuation as some sort of creationist power, thus suggesting that Deleuzes
philosophy might best be approached as the reinvention (in apparently post-
Darwinian terms) of a genuinely contemporary version of radical creationism.
(2001: 15) In the endnote following this excerpt, Hallward goes so far as to reveal
that the title of the book on Deleuze he was working on at that time is entitled
Creationism in philosophy: Deleuze. (2001: 342) Fortunately, Hallward was
convinced in a way or another that it would be better to drop this reference to
creationism, which indeed is nowhere to be found in what became Out of this World:
Deleuze and the philosophy of Creation. Nevertheless, I do believe this anecdote is
most significant, as it highlights Hallwards unspecific and largely instrumental use
of the spiritual reference in his inquiry into Deleuzes philosophy.
4
In the end, one

2
Hallward would probably reject this rapprochement all together, since he disagrees in the first place with
Zizeks idea that religious revelation is the unavowed paradigm of his [Badiou] notion of the Truth-Event
(Zizek, 2000: 183), arguing instead that the model for Badious fidelity is not religious faith but
mathematical deduction pure and simple. (Hallward 2003: 149).
3
Perhaps due to the excitement of having found yet another religious reference in Deleuzes writing,
Hallward symptomatically misreads a reference to zen Buddhism in What is philosophy? (Hallward 2001:
11), missing the yet simple fact that in this passage, Deleuze and Guattari establish a correspondence
between zen Buddhism and Wittgensteinian silence of logic, not with their own philosophy (1994: 140).
For a rapprochement to Zen Buddhism in Deleuzes philosophy, Hallward should have look, for instance,
at the passages in Logic of Sense where he discusses the wise (stoic) mans humoristic stance and the ethics
of the mime.
4
Hallwards demeaning use of the word creationism should therefore be radically distinguished from
Guattaris axiologic creationism (Guattari 1992: 47). La perspective crationniste clbre
lexistence de tel ou tel type de vivant posant de manire spcifique la question de ce qui compte dans son
8
might ask: if Hallward really wanted to tackle the issue of the so-called redemptive
or spiritual dimension of Deleuzes thought, should have he not at least consider
minimally Deleuze and Guattaris crucial references to Taoism and witchcraft in A
Thousand Plateaus ([1980] 1987), those to Zen Buddhism in Logic of Sense
([1969)1990), or better still, his explicit insistence on the theme of belief in the
world in Time-Image ([1985] 1989) or to and empiricist conversion in What is
Philosophy? ([1991]1994)? A little bit further but still not out of reach, could have he
not give a better look at Whiteheads crucial influence on Deleuzes cosmic vitalism,
and how it potentially relates to Process theology?
5


The main reason why Hallward believes he can call Deleuze a redemptive
philosopher without considering Deleuze and Guattaris enunciative position as
sorcerers in A Thousand Plateaus and their almost indecent reference, academically
speaking, to Carlos Castanedas initiatory journey, and more generally, to anything
that would bring us closer to what in Anti-Oedipus ([1972] 1983) is defined as the
living center of matter (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 19), has probably to do with
how he fully endorses Badious interpretation of univocal ontology as a kind of
neoplatonic philosophy of the One. Here, I agree with Daniel Smith when he
suggests that one must not be led astray (As Alain Badiou seems to have been) by
the prefix uni in the term univocity: a univocal ontology is by definition
irreconcilable with a philosophy of the One (Smith 2001: 174). Along the same line,
I would argue that Badiou and Hallwards overtly ontological readings
systematically hypostases Deleuzes dramatic movement of thought, systematically
missing the practical and ethical horizon in which speculative propositions
concerning univocity can be judged properly isnt it for this very reason that
Spinozas ontology is called an ethics? Hallward largely ignores the question of the
modes of existence and its corresponding material passages and ethical mises en jeu.

mode de vie, la production dexistence de tout ce dont lexistence implique un pari , un risque, la
cration dun point de vue sur ce qui, ds lors, devient milieu. (Stengers 1997 : 44). It is interesting to
note how, for Stengers, Guattaris creationism involves a radical implication in the world and the
production of a specific mode of existence.
5
For an interesting discussion of the partly missed encounter between Deleuze and Process Theology, see
Isabelle Stengers Beyond Conversation. The Risks of Peace (2002).
9
He consistently leave aside all these moments where Deleuze describes and stages
movements of plunging into chaos, dramatic passages on the line, struggles for
creating planes of consistency, all of that which constitute our relation to events in
the first place: the whole world had passed what seemed like a physical crisis point.
he says in Difference and repetition (Deleuze 1994: 189); the event, once willed, is
actualized on its most contracted point, on the cutting edge of an operation ()
(Deleuze 1990: 149); A concept is therefore a chaoid state par excellence; it refers
back to a chaos rendered consistent, become Thought, mental chaosmos. And what
would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos? (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 208); or again, on a more openly revolutionary mode:

We must condense all the singularities, precipitate all the circumstances,
points of fusion, congelation or condensation in a sublime occasion, Kairos,
which makes the solution explode like something abrupt, brutal and
revolutionary. Having an Idea is this as well. It is as though every Idea has
two faces, which are like love and anger: love in the search for fragments, the
progressive determination and linking of the ideal adjoint fields; anger in the
condensation of singularities which, by dint of ideal events, defines the
concentration of a 'revolutionary situation' and causes the Idea to explode
into the actual. It is in this sense that Lenin had Ideas. ()Anger and love are
powers of the Idea () (1994: 190-191)


With Hallward, we simply lose sight of this type of critical passages: everything is
said to divinely flow upward on some sort of philosophical stairway to heaven, in a
unilateral (and apolitical) movement toward God and its own redemptive
dissolution. Instead of putting so much emphasis on the theophanic, it would have
been much more interesting to see Hallward discussing Deleuzes conception of the
dynamic and dramatic processes by which Ideas are actualized and differentiated. It
might even have brought him to ask Deleuze, more than thirty years after Maurice
de Gandillac: is your dramatization a theodicy? (Deleuze 2004: 107)

In the last instance, what is at stake here is Hallwards transcendental and deeply
voluntarist interpretation of creation in Deleuzes philosophy. Like God, creation is
10
everywhere in Hallwards book: every single chapters title of Out of this world bears
mention of it, and it is undoubtedly the focal point of the book. And even if he
doesnt explicitly refer to creationism anymore, one can just feel how he conceives
of creation in a manner as voluntaristic as a creationist might imagine Gods initial
act of creation. If Hallward proves himself to be so blind to the corporal dimension
of creative passages and transmutations in Deleuze, it is because his deeply
voluntarist political stance makes him totally overlook the problem of the soul and
its contractive power, or what Deleuze, in the conclusion of What is Philosophy?,
calls the mystery of passive creation, sensation (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 212).
Deleuzes cosmic vitalism indeed requires a conception of creation that is not simply
a matter of how to actively access to God or the Truly Creative as Hallward would
like us to believe. It always involves an intimate and complex relation to an outside
felt as necessity or material constraint. This is precisely what Deleuze means when,
in a crucial passage of the Time-Image, he requires a (forced) body for thought:

Give me a body then: this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The body
is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has
to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into
or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not that the
body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us
to think what is concealed from thought, life. Life will no longer be made to
appear before the categories of thought; thought will be thrown into the
categories of life. The categories of life are precisely the attitudes of the body,
its posture. We do not even know what a body can do: in its sleep, in its
drunkenness, in its efforts and resistances. To think is to learn what a non-
thinking body is capable of, its capacity, its postures. (Deleuze 1989: 189)


To put it in another words: one has to feel oneself as trapped (sprouver coinc)
(Deleuze 1989: 170), for creation takes place in choked passages. (Deleuze 1995:
133) Paradoxically enough considering Hallwards view on the matter, it is perhaps
the very idea of becoming-imperceptible and its embedded reference to China that
best illustrates how creation in choked passages and dramatic becomings actually
take place in a deleuzian perspective.

11
China and the Line
6

To have become a line was a catastrophe, but, even more, it was a surprise, a prodigy.
All of me had to pass along this line. And with the most appalling jolts.
Henri Michaux ([1956] 2002 : chap. 5, Experimental schizophrenia)

As we have seen earlier, at the heart of Hallwards peremptory dismissal of
Deleuzes philosophy political relevance, we find the concept of becoming-
imperceptible. And at first sight, Hallward does seem to have a point: for what does
it mean to pass on the lines of creation and become-imperceptible, if not to vanish
and dissolve in cosmic anonymity? Is that all what deleuzian micropolitics have to
offer? In what sense is becoming-imperceptible supposed to allow for renewed
ways of conceiving the production of political subjectivities in the era of media
saturation and global mobilization? In what way does it contribute to a redemptive
interruption of the flow of information or connect with Deleuze and Guattaris
famous statement about how, nowadays, we do not lack communication () we
lack resistance to the present? (1994: 108)

Considering Hallwards spiritual anathema and the way he confines Deleuzes
philosophy to be a mere theophanic extension of some oriental intuition, what is
most delightfully striking perhaps in the unfolding of the idea of becoming-
imperceptible is to see just how oriental-embedded it appears to be in the first
place. For a close reading of Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus reveals
something that has remained relatively unnoticed among Deleuze and Guattaris
readers: the progressive emergence of the concept of becoming-imperceptible in
that book is intimately intertwined with references to China, the main one referring
to the figure of the Chinese traditional painter-poet. Significantly, while going into
much detail when elaborating his wild spiritual orientalist argument about a post-
theophanic Deleuze with the becoming-imperceptible for exclusive telos, Hallward
simply ignores the very poetics of this crucial idea, which is not theophanic at all

6
This section is a much shorten and revised version of La Chine et la ligne. Une tude de la rfrence
chinoise dans Mille Plateaux (Bordeleau 2009).
12
and refers to what could arguably be considered one of Deleuzes (and Guattaris)
most significant engagements with the non-west in his work namely China.
7


The first reference to China in A Thousand Plateaus is made right in the introduction,
amidst a discussion opposing transcendence and the search for the root-foundation,
a proper European sickness, and oriental immanence and its rhizomatic structure.
Of course, it is too easy to oppose an Orient of rhizomes and immanence they say;
and in fact, they do not insist much on this opposition. But it is in this context that an
image appears, an image that will permeate the entire book: grass.

"China is the weed in the human cabbage patch. ... The weed is the Nemesis of
human endeavor.... Of all the imaginary existences we attribute to plant, beast
and star the weed leads the most satisfactory life of all. () Eventually the
weed gets the upper hand. Eventually things fall back into a state of China.
The weed exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows
between, among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender,
the poppy is maddeningbut the weed is rank growth ...: it points a moral."
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 18-19)


This first reference, through Henry Millers work (it is a quote from his Hamlet), is
quite unaccommodating, seemingly giving way to an unrestricted orientalism. But A
thousand Plateaus is not exactly concerned with questions about adequate or
politically correct cross-cultural representation or of how to talk properly of the
cultural other. In fact, if they do question rapidly the validity of such a delirious
description of a weed China, they immediately redirect this interrogation into an
openly prospective sense: Which China is Miller talking about? The old China, the

7
In Deleuzes later books, there are at least three other significant references to the Orient, which are
absolutely irreducible to Hallwards simplistic theophanic schema. In his Foucault, Orient is associated
with a culture of annihilation; in The Fold, with what he calls the Eastern line as opposed to the full
Baroque line. Then, in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze discusses his notion of the plane of immanence in
contrast with Franois Jullien idea of an absolutisation of immanence in antic Chinese thinking (Deleuze
1994: 74). From the perspective of the production of subjectivities, it is certainly the passage in Foucault
that is most interesting. In the chapter Foldings, or the Inside of Thought, a certain Orient is opposed to
the western subjective folding : The appearance of a folding of the outside can seem unique to Western
development. Perhaps the Orient does not present such a phenomenon, and the line of the outside continues
to flow across a stifling hollowness: in that case asceticism would be a culture of annihilation or an effort to
breathe in such a void, without any particular production of subjectivity. (Deleuze 1988: 106).
13
new, an imaginary one, or yet another located on a shifting map? (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 19) The questioning about an adequate representation is thus
methodically let in abeyance. Methodically that is, insofar as the introduction of A
Thousand Plateaus seeks to define a method not so much to describe but preferably
to effectively attain the multiple.

The seven first chapters of A Thousand Plateaus can be read as so many approaches
toward a radical critique of psychoanalysis, linguistics and ultimately, of the
problem of the signifier. Progressively, the idea of making the multiple takes shape,
through concepts like collective assemblages of enunciation (agencement collectif
dnonciation) and the body without organs, up to the asserted necessity of undoing
the face:

If human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle
the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine,
not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite
spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get
past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits
themselves finally elude the organization of the face () (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 171)

The expression escaping the face marks a distance in relation to antagonistic
models (face-to-face politics so to speak), and defines a micropolitical field
characterized by the exigency to dis-occupy identity. It is in the midst of this
philosophical journey that we find the second Chinese reference, which comes up in
a totally unexpected way a rapturous line of flight: Cross the wall, the Chinese
perhaps, but at what price? At the price of a becoming-animal, a becoming-flower or
rock, and beyond that a strange becoming-imperceptible, a becoming-hard now one
with loving. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 187) If the Chinese reference here
remains quite unspecific (which Chinese are we in fact talking about?) its direction
and its function, nonetheless, are indisputable: it is a breach made in the horizon of
the signifier, a vanishing point from which to organize an escape. This remains
nevertheless all too abstract. We lack an indispensable relay between making the
14
multiple, undoing the face and becoming-imperceptible: art, an artistic doing,
which the third reference makes more intelligible.

The conception of art exposed in A Thousand Plateaus takes on the developments on
incorporeal transformations and the shaping up of bodies that were initiated in the
discussion on linguistics and the signifier. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is never
something like art for arts sake that is at stake, but a conception of art that directly
involves life:

Art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines, in other
words, all of those real becomings that are not produced only in art, and all of
those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art, taking refuge in art,
and all of those positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art,
but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying,
asubjective, and faceless. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 187)

Deleuze and Guattari insist repeatedly on the active nature on the line of flight,
which is never a flight into passivity or imagination. If that was the case, it would
immediately lose its political dimension, as Hallward misguidedly suggests. The
theme of the line, which runs through all of A Thousand Plateaus, ties together art,
politics, ethic and the cosmic. And it is precisely in this passage from ethic to the
cosmic that we find the third reference to China. In the chapter becoming-intense,
becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible, the work on oneself and the cosmic
dimension it implies are summed up in the idea of becoming like everybody else.
First, the properly ethical challenges are brought forth:

If it is so difficult to be "like" everybody else, it is because it is an affair of
becoming. Not everybody becomes everybody [and everything: tout le
mondeTrans.], makes a becoming of everybody/everything. This requires
much asceticism, much sobriety, much creative involution: an English
elegance, an English fabric, blend in with the walls, eliminate the too-
perceived, the too-much-to-be-perceived. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 279)

15
Deleuze and Guattari insist on the very materiality of this work of elimination and
reduction at the level of the living tissues of the human. They then say: by process
of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 280) What matters here is that this becoming-line involves a radical
putting at stake of existence, in the realm of impersonality. Becoming-line is a highly
dramatic contraction a life in one stroke, a stroke of life.

To become-line is never to close oneself up: on the contrary, it is an essential
condition to communicability and availability, a way to participate to the gestation
of the world, as Anne Cheng puts it, refering to the taoist tradition. Becoming
everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world (faire monde), to make a world
(faire un monde). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 280) Drawing lines that world: this
is the meaning of the becoming-imperceptible and everybody put forth in A
Thousand Plateaus. It is at this very passage of the becoming-line and the making-
world that we find the third chinese reference, which is undoubtedbly the most
serious and suggestive one. At the meeting point of ethics and the cosmic, Deleuze
and Guattari encounter the traditional Chinese painter-poet as described by
Franois Cheng in his Lcriture potique chinoise. A painter-poet that, instead of
pursuing the resemblance, retain, extract only the essential lines and movements of
nature (1987: 280) : an artist-abstractor that is therefore not imitative or
structural, but cosmic (1987: 280). The chinese artist invoked in A Thousand
Plateaus is the figure which, after a ethical work on herself, is able to make of the
world a becoming, to pass entirely on the lines she draws, in the impersonality of
creation. One is then like grass Deleuze and Guattari finally say, because one has
made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself
everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst
of things. (1987: 280). It is perhaps Li He, a buddhist chinese poet of the late Tang
dynasty, who best sums up this etho-cosmic participative becoming with the world:

The brush perfects the creation/
16
Heaven has not all the merit!

After this close reading of the emerging of the idea of becoming-imperceptible in A
Thousand Plateaus, a question remains: does the micropolitics horizon of thought,
culminating in the idea of becoming-imperceptible, really lead to any actual
production of political subjectivities? Do we not find in it all the germs for a form of
thought exclusively concerned with existential flexibility and ways of adapting to all
circumstances, in brief, a perfect guide for survival in the era of neoliberal
productivism and globalization of precariousness? Rancire for example is
categorical: indirectly criticizing Deleuze among others and disqualifying any focus
put on metamorphosis and becomings, he unambiguously states: There is no such
thing as Dionysian politics. (Rancire 1998: 200)

The becoming-imperceptible and the becoming-line necessarily involve a dramatic
experience of stifling or of ethopoetical claustrophobia as Wittgenstein would put it.
There lies the politics of contraction that innerves all of Deleuzes work: choked
passages where one experiences oneself as stuck, plunges into chaos no one comes
back unscathed of. In A Thousand Plateaus, Henri Michaux is one of the proper
names that evoke these major ordeals of the mind and other miserable miracles,
accelerated linearity experienced in the flesh, moments of schizophrenia that tear
down the sphere that we normally are and that surveys panoramas (2002: chap.5).
In Michauxs description of the passage on the line previously cited at the beginning
of this section, there is a sense of danger, of a perilous threshold, a challenge which
is simultaneously intimate and tearing off the outside: to become a line, only a line,
the horror of a line on which "all of me had to pass. This all of me suggests
something thoroughly necessary and exhaustive: the concentration of oneself must
be total; its achievement cannot suffer any failing; its all or nothing. It is at this
condition, it is according to this very capacity or power that the body can find and
create new marks. Doesnt the passage on the line entail a politico-nihilist moment
of interruption of the ordinary relation to oneself? Doesnt it involve a performative
moment on the line, in which the movement of abstraction ensures its unity, or
17
better, its watertightness? The becoming-line would therefore be a moment of
sustained tension, a moment of anonymity in the surpassing of oneself, a dramatic
desubjectivation that amounts ultimately to an interruption of the identity service.
And this desubjectivation could as well take the form why not? of a becoming-
Chinese

(Un)timely contractions

In the conclusion of Out of this world, Hallward claims that by posing the question
of politics () in the apocalyptic terms of a new people and a new earth (), the
political aspect of Deleuzes philosophy amounts to little more than utopian
distraction. (2006: 162) In the light of this article, we can easily imagine that what
Hallward intends by apocalyptic politics is yet another way to evoke the
redemptive dissolution of all things in the ecstatic process of absolute creation. Yet,
to a certain extent, I agree with Hallward that Deleuzes politics does involve some
sort of apocalyptic component. One might think of Difference and Repetitions
foreword here, with its somewhat cryptic affirmation that this book should have
been an apocalyptic book (the third time in the series of times) (1994: xxi); or again,
in the conclusion of What is Philosophy?, where we read that as the brain plunges
into chaos, In this submersion it seems that there is extracted from chaos the
shadow of the "people to come" in the form that art, but also philosophy and science,
summon forth () (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 218). But instead of interpreting
these passages in terms of ethereal or utopian dissolution, I believe we should read
them in terms of ethical, aesthetical, political and, ultimately, temporal contractions.
Redemption? A limit happens and in it drawing, a virtual becoming-line.

In this regard, and as far as a people to come is concerned, I would suggest,
following Agambens distinction in The Time that remains, that the word messianic
is more accurate than apocalyptic to describe this process of temporal-liminal
contraction. For arent we intimately confronted here with the very necessity of a
time-image, that is, not an image of the end of time (apocalypse proper), but rather
18
an image to bring (chronological) time to an end a messianic or contracted time
thus understood as the time the mind takes to realize a time-image? (Agamben
2005: 66) What matters here is how value is introduced in the world, or in other
words, how a certain mode of existence is intensified and brought to its creative
limit. To believe in the world then, is indiscernibly active and passive; it is to
contemplate and be contracted.

It is precisely a convincing account of this movement of exacerbation of Difference
or (un)timely contraction which is utterly missing in Hallwards reading of Deleuze.
Nowhere is it clearer than at the very point where Badiou extracts, in a typical ill-
faith-subject-to-truth way as far as I am concern, the expression that will become his
war cry against Deleuze the Clamor of Being. As it is well-known, the expression
is taken from the very last lines of Difference and Repetition, which goes as follow: A
single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same
Ocean for all the drops, a single clamor of Being for all beings: () (emphasis
added). Everything happens as if Badiou stop reading at that point and refuses to
consider what follows the colons, that is, the affirmation of the disjunctive and
dramatic play of difference and repetition as such: on condition that each being,
each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess in other words, the
difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp,
causes them to return. (Deleuze 1994: 304).

If we define politics as a matter of contraction in the element of ethics, the problem
of believing in this world becomes politically crucial and shouldnt be confused with
any simple willful belief or will of the people, as goes the title of one recent
Hallwards article. In order to be brought to a level of political intensity, the problem
of believing in the world, in this specific world, requires envisaging a singular end
to it its Eternal Return, in the terms of Difference and Repetition. A singular end
thus, so that Difference may at last be expressed with a force of anger which is itself
repetitive and capable of introducing the strangest selection, even if this is only a
19
contraction here and there - in other words, a freedom for the end of a world.
(Deleuze 1994: 293)

20
References :

Agamben, Giorgio (2005) The Time that Remains, Stanford: Stanford University
Press.

Bordeleau, Erik (2009) La Chine et la ligne. Une tude de la rfrence chinoise
dans Mille plateaux , in Giroux, Lemieux, Chnier (eds.) Contrhommage pour Gilles
Deleuze. Qubec : Les presses de luniversit Laval.

Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari Flix ([1991] 1994) What is Philosophy?, New York:
Columbia University Press

Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari Flix ([1980] 1987) Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. A
Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Flix ([1972] 1983) Capitalism and Schizophrenia I. Anti-
Oedipus, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles ([2002] 2004) Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, New York:
Semiotext(s)

Deleuze, Gilles ([1990] 1995) Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, ([1968] 1994) Difference and repetition New York: Columbia
University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles ([1969] 1990) Logic of Sense, New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles ([1985] 1989) Cinema 2. The Time-Image, London: The Athlon Press.

Foucault, Michel ([2001] 2005) The Hermeneutic of the Subject, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan

Guattari, Flix (1992) Chaosmose, Paris : Galile.

Hallward, Peter (2006) Out of this World. Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,
New York: Verso.

Hallward, Peter (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.

Hallward, Peter (2001) Absolutely Postcolonial. New York: Manchester University
Press.

Hallward, Peter (1997) Gilles Deleuze and the Redemption from Interest, Radical
Philosophy, N.81, pp. 6-21.
21

Hegel (1807) The Phenomenology of Mind, Translated by J. B. Baillie,
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/ToC/Hegel%20Phen%20ToC.htm

Michaux, Henri ([1956] 2002) Miserable Miracle (translated by Louise Varese) New
York: NYRB Classics.
http://www.lycaeum.org/books/books/miserablemiracle/miserablemiracle.html

Rancire, Jacques (2001) La fable cinmatographique, Paris : Seuil.

Rancire, Jacques (1998) La chair des mots. Politiques de lcriture, Paris : Galile.

Stengers, Isabelle ([1997] 2003a) Cosmopolitiques I. La guerre des sciences, Paris : La
dcouverte.

Stengers, Isabelle ([1997] 2003b) Cosmopolitiques II. Pour en finir avec la tolrance,
Paris : la dcouverte.

Smith, Daniel (2001) The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuzes Ontology of Immanence,
Mary Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion, London: Routledge.

Zizek, Slavoj (2004) Organs without Bodies, New York: Routledge.

Zizek Slavoj (2002) Revolution at the Gates, New York: Verso.

Zizek, Slavoj (2000) The Ticklish Subject, New York: Verso.