A Redemptive Deleuze?

Choked
Passages or the Politics of Contraction

Erik Bordeleau

Brussels Free University

Abstract
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. 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 connection to the Non-West, and namely China?
Keywords: spirituality,
dramatisation, politics

China,

subjectivity,

Peter

Hallward,

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

Deleuze Studies 8.4 (2014): 491508

DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0167
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dls

492 Erik Bordeleau

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 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. Spirituality 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 characterisations as attempts to problematise the
(a)politicality of modes of existence induced by Deleuzes philosophy.
Avoiding the comfort zone of simply commenting (or joyfully
banging) on Hallwards rather disincarnated critique of Deleuzes
work, I will first try to briefly and reflexively address the production
of subjectivity in Deleuzian academic milieus. The idea here is to
give Hallwards critique some sort of anthropological and practical
ground, fleshing out Deleuzian processes of political subjectivation by
relating them to the emergence, in recent years, of a transnational
Deleuzian academic community and, to a certain extent, hegemony. This
committed or self-compromising characterisation 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

A Redemptive Deleuze?

493

Deleuzes thought is ultimately useless politically speaking, and that it is

better understood as a redemptive and deceptively 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
Philosophy of Creation. The point 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 overlooked by the Badiouinspired readings of his work. What is at stake here is Deleuzes method
of dramatisation and its culmination in what I will call a politics of
contraction innerving all of his work. Deleuzes dramatisations 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.

I. 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 involve some form of contrasting 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 distinctive
enough to be envisaged not only as academic circles, but as potential
forms of the kind of spiritual or ethopoietic groups Foucault alludes to.

494 Erik Bordeleau

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 does not 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 in order to preserve the purity of
its heart, flees from contact with actuality (Hegel 1967). Interestingly,
Deleuze himself discusses 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: xx; original emphasis)

This passage strikes me as a quite convincing description of an obvious

tendency among contemporary academic Deleuzians, a tendency
disturbingly compatible with communicational consensus and openended 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 fit with omnipresent psycho-pop positive
thinking and its horror of negative feelings. Here, one might think
of ieks famous characterisation of North Americans as natural-born
Deleuzians, suggesting that Deleuzes philosophy is perfectly suited for
late capitalist yuppies (iek 2004: 183). Or again, as Stengers puts
it in her discussion about how the capacities of practitioners must be
conceived of as situated: When it is a question of politics, even
cosmopolitics, this constraint is crucial if we are to avoid the trivial
dream of an angelic future: souls, now without bodies, would assume
a relationship of perpetual peace (Stengers 2011: 395).
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 although adding
that practical struggles or Revolution never proceed by way of the
negative (Deleuze 1994: 208). Significantly, as he contemplates the
danger of the beautiful soul, Deleuze ultimately invokes Marx as
some sort of political guarantee against it: Differences, nothing but

A Redemptive Deleuze?

495

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 (207). The idea of revolution deprived
of its negativity is not politically radical enough in the eyes of iek,
Hallward and the like. For them, the invocation of Marx here does not
preserve Deleuze from ultimately being a mere spiritual thinker, unable
to properly and wilfully face the abyss of the [revolutionary] act (iek
2002: 8).

II. Redemption or Dramatisation?

Hallwards reading of Deleuze aims 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 (Hallward 2006: 3). I will propose an
alternative analysis of this undoubtedly crucial idea in the following
section. For now, suffice it to say that Hallward considers Deleuzes
philosophy as a way to escape the worlds actual constraints, a
dematerialising body of thought oriented by lines of flight that lead
out of the world (3), toward blissful virtuality. In this perspective,
becoming-imperceptible constitutes the utmost expression of Deleuzes
spiritual attempt at self-virtualisation.
Hallward situates Deleuzes thought as part of a late-modern revival
of post-theophanic conception of thought (Hallward 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 (5). Hallward considers that 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
(xii). Hallward identifies this logic of the singular 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. (Hallward 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 material and historical world. The specific is

496 Erik Bordeleau

the space of the historical as such [. . . ], the place where we make our
own history, but not in the circumstances of our choosing (Hallward
2001: xii). What matters here is how this specific, historical materialist
approach is said to allow for an active negotiation of relations and the
deliberate taking of sides, choices and risks (xii), while the singular
logic tends to dissolve any subjectsubject or subjectobject relation
into one beyond-subject (5). The keywords here are of course active,
deliberate, choices and risks, as opposed to a presumably passive
process of dissolution into the Oneness of Being.
That being said, what is most striking 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 a parallel between Deleuze and Saint Paul, simply because the
later also favours an other-worldly redemptive force (Hallward 1997:
6). This of course sounds retrospectively quite ironic when considering
that one of Hallwards main philosophical influences, Alain Badiou,
turns precisely to 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 part of the Neoplatonic tradition, suggesting that
Deleuzes project resonates with and renews that Oriental intuition
which Hegel found at work in Spinozas philosophy (Hallward 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 (Hallward 2001: 15). In
the endnote following this excerpt, Hallward indeed reveals that the
title of the book on Deleuze he was working on at that time is entitled
Creationism in Philosophy: Deleuze (342). Fortunately, Hallward was
convinced in one 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,

A Redemptive Deleuze?

497

as it highlights Hallwards unspecific and largely instrumental use of the

spiritual reference in his inquiry into Deleuzes philosophy.4 In the end,
one might ask: if Hallward really wanted to tackle the issue of the socalled redemptive or spiritual dimension of Deleuzes thought, should he
not at least have considered minimally Deleuze and Guattaris crucial
references to Taoism and witchcraft in A Thousand Plateaus (1987),
those to Zen Buddhism in Logic of Sense (1990), or better still, his
explicit insistence on the theme of belief in the world in Time-Image
(1989) or to empiricist conversion in What Is Philosophy? (1994)?
A little bit further but still not out of reach, could he not have taken
a better look at Whiteheads crucial influence on Deleuzes cosmic
vitalism, and how it potentially intersects with 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 (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 mere variation amongst neoplatonic philosophies 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 Badious and Hallwards
overtly metaphysical readings hypostase Deleuzes dramatic movement
of thought, systematically missing the practical and ethical horizon
in which speculative propositions concerning univocity can be judged
properly is it not 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. He consistently leaves 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
which concern the lived relation to events in the first place. The whole
world had passed what seemed like a physical crisis point, Deleuze
writes 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,

498 Erik Bordeleau

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. (Deleuze 1994: 1901)

With Hallward, we simply lose sight of this type of critical passage:

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 actualised and differentiated. It
could 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
transcendentalist and deeply voluntarist interpretation of creation in
Deleuzes philosophy. Like God, creation is everywhere in Hallwards
book: every single chapters title in Out of this World bears mention of
it. And even if he does not explicitly refer to creationism any more, one
cannot miss how he conceives of creation in a manner as voluntaristic
as a creationist might imagine Gods initial act of creation to be. If
Hallward proves himself to be so blind to the corporal and transversal
dimension of creative passages and transmutations in Deleuze, it is
because his radically voluntarist political stance makes him totally
oblivious to the question 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 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 and imposing its

A Redemptive Deleuze?

499

corporeal constraints. This is precisely what Deleuze means when, in a

crucial passage of 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 other 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 becomingimperceptible and its embedded reference to China that best illustrates
how creation in choked passages and dramatic becomings actually take
place in a Deleuzian perspective.

III. China and the Line6

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: ch. 5, Experimental Schizophrenia; my emphasis

At the core of Hallwards peremptory dismissal of Deleuzes

philosophys political relevance, we find the concept of becomingimperceptible. And at first sight, Hallward does seem to have a point:
for what does it mean to pass along the lines of creation and becomeimperceptible, if not to vanish and dissolve in cosmic anonymity? Is that
all that Deleuzian micropolitics has to offer? In what sense is becomingimperceptible supposed to allow for renewed ways of conceiving the
production of political subjectivities in a time of media saturation and
global mobilisation? 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

500 Erik Bordeleau

communication [. . . ] we lack resistance to the present? (Deleuze and
Guattari 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
embedded in the Far East 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 posttheophanic Deleuze with the becoming-imperceptible for exclusive
telos, Hallward simply ignores the very poetics of this crucial idea,
which is not theophanic at all 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 specifically European disease as
Deleuze and Guattari say (1987: 18), and oriental immanence and its
rhizomatic structure. Of course it is all too easy to depict an Orient of
rhizomes and immanence, they write (20); and in fact, they do not insist
much on this contrast. But it is in this context that an image appears, an
image that will permeate the entire book, that of 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.
(Miller, cited in Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 1819)

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 crosscultural representation or of how to talk properly of the cultural other.

A Redemptive Deleuze?

501

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 new, an imaginary one, or yet another located
on a shifting map? (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 19) The question of
an adequate representation of the cultural other 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 to effectively reach for the multiple.
The first seven chapters of A Thousand Plateaus 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 characterised 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 becominghard 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 organise an escape. But this remains
nevertheless all too abstract. We lack an indispensable relay between
making the 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

502 Erik Bordeleau

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 of 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, ethics and the cosmic. And
it is precisely in this passage from ethics to the cosmic that we find the
third reference to China. In the chapter Becoming-intense, Becominganimal, Becoming-imperceptible, the work on oneself and the cosmic
dimension it involves 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 monde
trans.], 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 toomuch-to-be-perceived. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 279)

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 write: 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 directly participate in the gestation of the world. Becoming
everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world (faire monde), to
make a world (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 in this very passage of the

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503

becoming-line and the making-world that we find the third Chinese

reference, which is undoubtedly 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 Lcriture potique chinoise. A painter-poet that, instead of
pursuing the resemblance, retain[s], extract[s] only the essential lines
and movements of nature (280): an artist-abstractor that is therefore
not imitative or structural, but cosmic (280). The Chinese artist
invoked in A Thousand Plateaus is the figure who, after ethical work
on herself, is able to make of the world a becoming, to pass entirely
along 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 (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
Heaven has not all the merit! (Cheng 1996: 17)

After this close reading of the emerging of the idea of becomingimperceptible in A Thousand Plateaus, a question remains: does
the micropolitical 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 the seed of a form of life 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 globalisation of precariousness? Rancire,
for example, is categorical: indirectly criticising 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 involve a dramatic
experience of stifling or of ethopoietical 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 from which no one comes back unscathed.
A Thousand Plateaus reference to Henri Michaux is crucial here, with
his evocation of major ordeals of the mind and other miserable
miracles, accelerated linearity experienced in the flesh and moments of
schizophrenia that tear down the sphere that we normally are and in

504 Erik Bordeleau

which we survey panoramas (Michaux [1956] 2002: ch. 5). Michauxs
description of the passage along the line (cited in the epigraph of this
section) expresses a sense of danger, 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 along which all of me had to
pass. This all of me suggests something both necessary and exhaustive:
the concentration of oneself must be total; its achievement cannot suffer
any failing; it is all or nothing. It is by this very condition, it is according
to this capacity or power that the body can find and create new marks.
The passage along the line entails a transformative interruption of the
ordinary relation to oneself. It involves a performative moment on
the line, in which the movement of abstraction ensures its unity, or
better, its watertightness. The becoming-line is a moment of sustained
tension, a moment of anonymity in the surpassing of oneself, a dramatic
desubjectivation that ultimately amounts to an interruption of the
identity service. And this process of desubjectivation can as well give
way to a becoming-Chinese.

IV. (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 (Hallward 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) (Deleuze 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 its drawing, a virtual becomingline.

A Redemptive Deleuze?

505

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 are we not 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 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 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 paradigmatically extracts, in a typical bad-faithsubject-to-truth way, the expression that will become his war cry against
Deleuze: the Clamor of Being. As is well known, the expression is
taken from the very last lines of Difference and Repetition, which read
as follows: 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: [. . . ]. Everything happens as if Badiou has stopped
reading at this point and refuses to consider what follows the colon, 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
should not be confused with any simple wilful belief or will of the
people, as the title goes of one recent article by Hallward. 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 contraction here and there in other words, a freedom for the end of a
world. (Deleuze 1994: 293; my emphasis)

506 Erik Bordeleau

Notes
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: xx; original emphasis).
2. Hallward would probably reject this rapprochement altogether, since he
disagrees in the first place with ieks idea that religious revelation is the
unavowed paradigm of his [Badious] notion of the Truth-Event (iek 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 (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 140). For a more conclusive reference
to Zen Buddhism in Deleuzes philosophy, Hallward should have looked, 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 contrasted with Guattaris axiological creationism. The (Guattarian)
creationist perspective celebrates the existence of every given type of being
that specifically poses the question of what counts for its mode of life.
Axiological creationism concerns the production of existence for everything for
which existence implies a gamble, a risk, the creation of a point of view
about what, from then on, will become a milieu (Stengers 2010: 37). Note that
Guattaris notion of creationism involves a radical implication in the world and
the production of a highly 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).
6. This section is a condensed and revised version of La Chine et la ligne. Une
tude de la rfrence chinoise dans Mille Plateaux (Bordeleau 2009).
7. In Deleuzes later books, there are at least three other significant references to
the East, each of them being irreducible to Hallwards simplistic theophanic
schema. In his Foucault, the Far East is associated with a culture of annihilation
(Deleuze 1988: 106); 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 Julliens idea of an
absolutisation of immanence found 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). For
a more detailed discussion of this passage in relation with the Chinese-Buddhist
idea of inferno, see Bordeleau 2013.

A Redemptive Deleuze?

507

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