COLLAPSE IIIResponses to a Series of Questions1 Gilles Deleuze ArnAud VillAni: Are you a ‘monster’?1 Gilles deleuze: To be a monster is first of all to be composite. And it’s true that I have written on apparently diverse subjects. But ‘monster’ has another meaning: something or someone whose extreme determinacy allows the indeterminate wholly to subsist (for example a monster à la Goya). In this sense, thought itself is a monster. AV: Physis seems to play an important role in your work. Gd: You’re right, I believe that I turn around a certain idea of Nature, but I have not yet arrived at considering this notion directly. 1. This exchange between Arnaud Villani and Gilles Deleuze took place in November 1981, and appeared in A. Villani, La guêpe et l’orchidée (Paris: Belin, 1999), 129-31. 39 COLLAPSE III, ed. R. Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, November 2007) ISBN 978-0-9553087-2-0 http://www.urbanomic.com You know the ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’:2 that’s where I explain my evolution as I see it. AV: Thought is ‘spermatic’ in your work. despite Plato’s attack on the Sophists? Gd: No. where there was still a specifiable relation between sexuality and metaphysics. AV: Thought as provocation and adventure? Gd: In what I have written. in this sense. and again in A Thousand Plateaus. true problems. despite everything and everyone. AV: You have an ability to find. Afterwards sexuality seemed to me rather to be a badly-founded abstraction. 3-12. AV: Could we trace your evolution in terms of syntheses? Gd: I see my evolution otherwise. It’s already in Difference and Repetition. 40 . I believe strongly in this problem of the image of thought and of a thought liberated from the image. but also in Proust and Signs.COLLAPSE III AV: Can we call you a ‘sophist’ in a positive sense – has the antilogos returned. Negotiations. Is there a clear relation. with sexuality? Gd: That was the case up until Logic of Sense. For me the antilogos is connected less with the tricks of the Sophist than with Proust’s ‘involuntary’. 2. there is just a rhizome between Félix and myself. Is it transposable into mathematics. but in the style of Whitehead. You ask if a mathematical or biological transposition is possible. Not in the style of Kant. very special sense. AV: Is there a beginning of a rhizome Deleuze-GuattariFoucault-Lyotard-Klossowski-etc.? Gd: That could have happened. in each case. 41 . So that ‘category’ takes on a new. AV: The conclusion of A Thousand Plateaus consists in a topological model which is radically original in philosophy. It is in this manner. biology? Gd: To my mind. the metaphysics it needs. insufficient one). this approach has led me to ask. It is that metaphysics that interests me. how a problem might be posed. No doubt it is the other way around: I feel that I am Bergsonian – when Bergson says that modern science has not found its metaphysics. that philosophy might be considered a science: the science of determining the conditions of a problem. But practically speaking. I would like to work more on this point. it’s because I believe in the necessity of constructing a concept of the problem. it seems to me. but it didn’t happen. the conclusion of A Thousand Plateaus is a table of categories (but an incomplete. I tried to do so in Difference and Repetition and would like to take up this question again. In fact.Deleuze – Questions Gd: If that’s true. light? Or else are you a pessimist as to the possibility of our being delivered from identity and the power of traces? Gd: No. in theory as in practice – every type of complaint in regard of life. takes account of this in philosophy). AV: Are you a non-metaphysical philosopher? Gd: No. AV: In your view. I’m not at all pessimistic since I don’t believe in the irreversibility of situations. in all its frightening complexity. Is there a polemical relation between these two points of view? 42 . can a century be Deleuzian. every tragic culture. that is to say. that doesn’t seem grave for the future. in art. has informed your work all along? Gd: Yes. AV: And after A Thousand Plateaus? Gd: I just finished a book on Francis Bacon. and have only two other projects: one on ‘Thought and Cinema’ and another which will be a large book on ‘What is Philosophy’ (taking up the problem of categories). neuroses. This is what disgusts me.COLLAPSE III AV: Could it be said that a love of life. I really can’t stand neuroses. To me. AV: The world is double. Take the current catastrophic state of literature and thought. years after the same revolution in science. I feel I am a pure metaphysician. macrophysical (where the image of thought works well enough) and microphysical (and your model. 43 . the notion of multiplicity. This is what is essential for me: that one of these two types refers to micro-multiplicities is only a secondary consequence. seems to me more important than that of microphysics. just as for the sciences.Deleuze – Questions Gd: The distinction between macro and micro is very important. but it belongs more to Félix than myself. it’s more the distinction between two types of multiplicities. For me. as introduced by Riemann. For the problem of thought.