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Abstract
Deleuze’s text on dramatization has a peculiar place in his philosophy.
In this text, he attributes, for the first time in his own name, a singular
function to philosophy. I aim to show that all the notions developed
in ‘The Method of Dramatization’ – such as the transformation of the
status of Ideas, the first development of a theory of individuation, the
decentring of subjectivity, the critique of representation – are part of one
general function: to grant events the importance they call for. If a method
is required for such an endeavour, it is because thought must become the
site of the maximal intensification of what – beyond a psychological or
an anthropological point of view – is of importance.
Keywords: Deleuze, dramatization, constructivism, pragmatism,
Simondon, events
Kant’s Critical Philosophy in between, what was in question for him was
already the new conditions of practising philosophy. The monographs,
moreover, only posed, in an obsessive manner, a single question: what
new function could be attributed to philosophy? The text on the
‘Method of Dramatization’ is in no way removed from this inquiry,
but it occupies within it a position that is strikingly unique, and that
distinguishes it from the earlier texts. It is as though, in a text that at once
synthesises, condenses to the extreme, and heralds the developments of
Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Deleuze seeks to re-
articulate the heterogeneous heritages of his earlier monographs around
a focal point that would give them a new direction. For this reason,
the text on dramatization is, in a certain sense, one of Deleuze’s most
abstract: its sole object is the question of the function of philosophy.
How then should we read the text? Does its interest lie only in
that it allows us to follow the metamorphoses of Deleuze’s work
and, in particular, the passage from the monographs to Difference
and Repetition and The Logic of Sense? Is it only, in the end, a
document from the archives whose only relevance would be its help
in understanding certain parts of Deleuze’s philosophy? Awkwardly
positioned, the text, it would seem, has no consistency of its
own. Furthermore, adding another layer of difficulty, the notion of
dramatization tends to disappear and ceases to occupy anything but
a secondary place in Deleuze’s thought. To be sure, it appears again
several times thereafter, as for example in Difference and Repetition,
but in a more modest and decentred manner, inscribed within a
particular domain. In that book, it incontestably loses its status as a
general method; indeed, the term ‘method’ that had been attached to it
disappears completely.
Nevertheless, the text contains something that is completely
irreducible and that gives it the form of a self-standing manifesto. To
put the question in its most general form: what is the function of
dramatization? The answers in the text are plural: transforming the
status of Ideas, approaching Ideas in terms of the question of thinking
individuation, decentring subjectivity, a critique of representation, etc.
But does this plurality not suggest an attitude of convergence, a necessity
common to the ensemble of displacements carried out therein? The
answer seems to remain in suspense in the text, as if it could only be
given in the margin of each of the problems it treats, as if the necessity of
the method as such must be situated each time in a specific displacement
(of the status of the concept, of the individual, of the construction of
Ideas). It seems to me, however, that there is indeed a general function,
The Dramatic Power of Events 7
Take the concept of truth; it is not enough to ask the question: ‘what is the
true?’ As soon as we ask who wants the true, when and where, how and
how much?, we have the task of assigning larval subjects (the jealous man,
The Dramatic Power of Events 9
perhaps, claims a more modest name: a repugnant name even, which thus
for its part contributes to its remaining what it wants to be: a philosophy
for me—with the motto: satis sunt mihi pauci, satis est unus, satis est nullus
[A few are enough for me; and so is one; and so is no one at all].—This
philosophy is called, to wit: the art of distrust, and above its door it writes:
memnēs’ apistein [do not forget to distrust].3
in the latter text that Deleuze will be able to write: ‘Every thought is
a Fiat, expressing a throw of the dice: constructivism’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 75/73) or: ‘Constructivism disqualifies all discussion—
which holds back the necessary constructions—just as it exposes all the
universals of contemplation, reflection, and communication as sources
of what are called “false problems” emanating from the illusions
surrounding the plane’ (82/79). Is not the same requirement to pose and
construct the conditions of a problem already operative in the method
of dramatization? In What Is Philosophy?, the object of constructivism
is the concept insofar as it is created, whereas in ‘The Method of
Dramatization’, it is the Idea as such, the dramatic Idea underlying
the concept. But if the site of investment of constructivism as well as
the terms have changed somewhat, the necessities that animate it have
remained similar.
To understand the form of constructivism that is implied in
dramatization, we will need to look at the Idea. There is no need here to
examine all of the aspects of the Idea as deployed by Deleuze, a project
that would inevitably lead us into the treatment of it in Difference and
Repetition. Our question is not therefore to know what the Idea is
in general, nor is it a matter of its characteristics, nor of the history,
particularly on the neo-Kantian side, in which Deleuze situates it. What
interests us is exclusively the status, such as it is posed at that moment,
of the Idea insofar as it pertains to method. Our problem is thus more
circumscribed: to what modality of thought does the Idea refer? How
does this notion of the Idea allow us to have the experience of a drama
while remaining on this side of our faculties of knowledge? In a word,
what interests us in the notion of the Idea is that it is the condition
for a thought that goes beyond all anthropological experience, beyond
the anthropological limitations of knowledge. The central point then is
that the Idea is uncoupled from all inscription in a faculty (sensibility,
imagination or reason) and that it is defined solely as a distribution, a
mode of relation between singularities. It designates only this mode of
distribution, this field of singularities, and consequently Deleuze only
gives a very brief account of the fact that it belongs to a pre-individual
and impersonal space.
But the question we have posed remains: why is this space of
distribution of singularities the site of a constructivism proper to the
method of dramatization? To respond, we must clarify the terms in
which the very notion of the Idea is posited: what is a singularity?
How can singularities be distributed and form the dramatic space that
underlies every concept? Deleuze, especially in The Logic of Sense, gives
The Dramatic Power of Events 13
Notes
1. I am thinking here principally of the opening pages of Process and Reality, where
Whitehead defines speculative philosophy: ‘This course of lectures is designed as
an essay in Speculative Philosophy. Its first task must be to define “speculative
philosophy,” and to defend it as a method productive of important knowledge’
(Whitehead 1978: 4). For a more detailed analysis of the characteristics of this
method and of its contemporary relevance, I take the liberty of referring the
reader to my book (Debaise 2006).
2. Throughout, the second page number refers to the non-English edition.
3. [Translator’s note: Unfortunately, there is to date no complete translation of the
1967 critical edition of Nietzsche’s work in English, as there is in French. In
their translation of What Is Philosophy?, Tomlinson and Burchell cite the 1968
Kaufmann–Hollingdale translation of The Will to Power (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 219 n.6), but I have been unable to locate the fragment in that volume. The
passage in question dates from 1885 and is numbered 34[196] in the system that
Colli and Montinari, the editors of the German, have used; for the French, cf.
Nietzsche 1967: 215–16. I have translated this and the following fragment from
the German, but have borne in mind the decisions of the French translators.]
4. See in particular Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 6–7/11–12.
5. On the importance of a redefinition of the notion of abstraction, cf. Stengers
2011.
6. The notion of equilibrium here refers to what Simondon calls a ‘metastable’
equilibrium, that is, a tensed equilibrium, beyond stability, linked by a strong
potential energy. Without this metastable equilibrium, a singularity could in
no case ‘crack an equilibrium’. It is the fragile and unstable character of a
heterogeneous relation that gives the singularity the possibility to transform the
equilibrium.
18 Didier Debaise
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