Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics

Claire Colebrook

Abstract
In On Touching Derrida locates Jean-Luc Nancy (and, briefly, Gilles
Deleuze) within a tradition of haptic ethics and aesthetics that runs
from Aristotle to the present. In his early work on Husserl, Derrida
had already claimed that phenomenology’s commitment to the genesis
of sense and the sensible is at one and the same time a commitment
to pure and rigorous philosophy at the same time as it threatens to
over-turn the primacy of conceptuality and cognition.Whereas Nancy
(and those other figures whom Derrida cites, such as Merleau-Ponty)
express a faith in a return to the sensibility of flesh, Derrida presents
his own work as manifestly more cognisant of the necessary distance
between flesh and sense. Another ‘approach’ to the haptic is suggested
by Gilles Deleuze, whose work Derrida locates within phenomenological
presence, despite Deleuze and Guattari’s trenchant rejection of ‘the lived’
and the human organism that inevitably subtends any discussion of the
relation between sensibility and sense. Rather than decide for or against
this border between flesh and cognition, between post-deconstruction
and deconstructive rigour, this essay examines this curious border of
touch between philosophy and sensibility, and does so by referring to
William Blake’s problem of returning the signs of sense to the sensibility
of the hand.

*
How do proper names operate in theory? I ask the question of theory,
not philosophy, insofar as theory is both the invasion and disruption of
literary studies that occurred on or about 1976 with certain threatening
and enticing French authors, and the capacity of a distanced and critical
view of a scene whose own relations are not immediately self-evident.
Theory can at one and the same time be marked and dated as an event,
as a style of thinking, writing and invoking proper names, at the same as
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 23

it is also a potentiality that has always been one of thought’s tendencies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s theory wars and theory
encounters. Proper names, such as those of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc
Nancy and Gilles Deleuze can function as territorializing ‘placards’:
the mention of a name places oneself in a territory, creates a body of
thinkers and a position of enunciation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).
To use names as markers of an orientation in thinking – to see Deleuze
as offering a vitalism, or Derrida as offering a post-structuralism – is
at once the constitutive gesture of theory, which would place itself
in a self-conscious terrain opposed to unthinking naivety; at the same
time it is also a form of anti-theory, a consignment of the potentials
of a corpus to a name within chronological time. In Deleuze’s use
of proper names and ‘isms’ we can discern both these gestures of
theory: Bergsonism and Cezanne-ism are, positively, ways of releasing
problems from a corpus. To consider evolution creatively – to really
read Bergson – is to take the problem of life beyond the problem of
human spirit towards which it was directed by Bergson himself (Deleuze
1988). To truly see a Cezanne painting is to recognise the problem of
figure and colour that is actualised in the canvases of Francis Bacon
(and that in turn opens a virtual future of canvases that will sustain
and radicalise the problem of the analogical, or the tracing of distinct
figures from visual intensities) (Deleuze 2004). A proper name is both a
territory, an orientation and stability that is required for thinking, and
a de-territorialising potential or the opportunity to take a body of work
beyond its actualised embodiment. Theory may, then, be the mention of
proper names that will enclose thinking in a certain habitus. Theory may
also be an imperative to deterritorialise a mode of thinking: the potential
of taking the style of a problem beyond its actualised and historically
contextualised form. When, today, we speak of the end of theory, the
death of theory or existing in a state beyond or after theory, we use
theory names in a territorializing and diagnostic sense: a proper name
can mark a fall into unthinking rigidity (Docherty 1990, 2003). This
occurs both with the sense of the invasion of theory, when we can see
an otherwise benevolent literary and philosophical scene as corrupted by
the intrusion of (usually foreign) names, and within theory itself, as when
Deleuze and Guattari will appear to grant certain names – Aristotle,
Descrates, Hegel, Freud, Lacan – a certain malevolence that a properly
vital thinking ought to overcome.
In Jacques Derrida’s On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (2005) it is
possible to see these two gestures of theory, which are quite distinct from
philosophical gestures, for they do not concern the pure articulation of
24 Claire Colebrook

problems so much as thought’s capacity to fall back into ‘isms.’ This

can be positive, when Derrida will insist on not dismissing too quickly
a text that might seem to be nothing more than one more instance of
a tired naivety, but it can also have a sloganising quality, or at least it
can be read in such a manner. ‘Jean-Luc Nancy’ (and to a certain extent
‘Deleuze,’ and the other thinkers who might have come closer to touch
than Derrida himself) functions as a name that is at one and the same
time a problem or potentiality that Derrida would applaud, as releasing
a force that is in tune with his own work, and the marker for a stupidity
that one might diagnose as not, yet, properly philosophical. Names are
both historical markers and future potentials.
Consider as an example here Derrida’s early work on Husserl, which
is picked up once again in On Touching. Husserl is at once the
limit of thought’s potentiality. Husserl’s problem of tracing circulating
texts, signs and doxa back to genesis is required by the very sense,
structure and possibility of truth: there is no question of remaining at
a merely empirical level, where meaning could be reduced to a historical
event within the world (Derrida 1978). The question of the emergence
of sense is not a misguided, accidental or avoidable philosophical
endeavour. Even so, that question’s very urgency and essentiality is
also its impossibility. Questions or problems – what we might refer
to as theoretical events – that would strive not simply to live in pure
immediacy but enquire into the possibility of the sensible, empirical,
haptic or material must by their very nature fail. Theory fails: the
look or distance that would intelligently differentiate itself from mere
presence and naivety must also, in the very structure of its questioning,
be other than the life from which it emerges. But theory can also be
lived and institutionalised as the attribution of this naïve failure to
others. Before looking at how the names of Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy and
others operate in Derrida’s own text, we might note how they function
today, territorially. One could, from within a Deleuzian industry, regard
‘Derrida’ as a pernicious linguisticism or transcendentalism that failed to
approach life and the sensible (Protevi 2001). Similarly one could, from a
more responsible attention to conditions, regard Deleuzianism as a flight
from actuality (Badiou 2000, Hallward 2006), or – as Derrida appears
to do in On Touching – regard Deleuze (like Nancy) as symptoms of
a seduction by the haptic and sensible that a properly articulated
philosophy would avoid.
I would suggest, to add to Deleuze and Guattari’s three styles of
proper name – names as they function in art, science and philosophy – a
fourth style of name, the names that operate in theory (Deleuze and
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 25

Guattari 1994). Science names, such as ‘Maxwell’s demon’ or ‘Faraday’s

law’ designate functions and impartial observers, ways of considering
movements of matter independent of an embodied subject. Names in art
occur in the manner of what Deleuze refers to as the ‘northern line’ or
what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the ‘feminine line’: it is possible
to call a landscape Turner-esque, or a sentence Joycean, or even perhaps
to create a Pinter-like dialogue: we can view a work and see that it is a
Pollock, even if we cannot yet discern what it says (and it may even not
have emanated from the actual hand of a Turner, Joyce or Pinter but
simply be recognisable as a style or mode of line). A proper name in art
marks out a certain way of allowing matter to stand alone. A philosoph-
ical concept is, in contrast with scientific functions and art’s affects and
percepts, intensive. If we consider the haptic as an extensive concept
(a non-philosophical concept or generalisation) it merely gathers, as so
many proper names, all those writers who might try to overcome the
cognitive relation between the sense and the world in order to arrive at
something like touch itself. And these names would, necessarily, mark
out errors or failures, for there cannot be an immediate grasp of touch
itself; to think about touch is already to be in relation, to be distanced,
to no longer be present. But an intensive concept, if there could be such
a thing, would not gather together all the names and failures that have
naively tried to return thinking to its genesis; it would strive to create an
orientation for thinking. It may not be possible, actualisable, to arrive
at touch itself, at an extensive concept of the haptic; but a concept of
the haptic would direct thought beyond its cognitive, generalising or
territorializing tendencies. An intensive concept of the haptic would not
be the touch of this hand towards this tactility, or this eye towards this
light, or even imaginable as organs and affects in general. An intensive
concept would be an infinitive: what occurs if we allow ourselves to
think (if not know) what it might be to touch, but without the reduction
of the sensible to being? What I would begin to suggest is that this
concept of the haptic operates in a philosophical-theoretical manner
in Of Touching that is not too distinct from Derrida’s own Kantian
concepts, including the very concept of deconstruction. That is, we
may not be able to point to instances of justice, democracy, forgiveness
and so on; nor may we say that this or that is deconstruction, as some
sort of method. Concepts signal the unthinkable in thought: I cannot
know, intuit, grasp or give an ostensive definition of any of these
undeconstructibles, but they do operate in thinking as disorientations,
ways of awaking us from our literalist slumbers. The haptic, as a
theoretical concept, signals that which must be thought but which is
26 Claire Colebrook

also unthinkable: that which represents the laziest of empiricisms – a fall

back into the lull of putative immediacy – and that which should always
be thought beyond categories, the actual, the human, the intentional,
meaning and sense. Even so, in addition to this philosophical-theoretical
tendency the ‘haptic’ also functions in On Touching in a territorializing
sense, and does so through a mention of proper names.
If there is something like theory that is distinct from philosophy, it
occurs less in the creation of pure problems and concepts, and more in
the questions we ask about the textual, archival and historical genesis of
those concepts. Whereas philosophy, presumably, would be the capacity
to think and create concepts, theory is the location of those pure
problems in conditions of textual emergence. Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari define ‘conceptual personae’ as crucial functions in philosophy:
would it be possible to imagine modern philosophy without a doubting,
mathematically oriented, solitary and meditative Descartes, or a critical
Copernican turn without an overly-punctual and dutiful Kant? When
philosophers create concepts they also effect certain personae, which
are neither biographies nor general norms regarding selfhood. Personae
attach to concepts because concepts are not ways of enumerating what
might be taken to exist, but enable styles of existence. Descartes’ cogito,
as Heidegger (1967) noted, begins from a relation to the world, where
what is said to be will be that which can remain present, and where
presence in turn is that which is extended in space. Heidegger already
suggests that any understanding of existence presupposes a comportment
to the world, but Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the persona argues
for a relation not of presupposition but of attendant styles and forces.
Concepts are creations that enable relations among terms and that also
institute modes of life, productions of an ‘image of thought’ (Deleuze
1994). Philosophical concepts are intensive because they do no merely
name already assembled bodies into a collected set (as an extended
gathering of entities) but create orientations and relations that effect
a certain mode of time; but this means that the force of concepts is
tied to sense, where sense is a mode of living, a drama (Deleuze 1983).
The Cartesian conceptual persona is a drama of doubting, even one’s
own body and imaginings, in order to arrive at some beginning point
of pure thought, while Kantian enlightenment proceeds by staging the
abandonment of origins in order to recognise, responsibly, that one is
already within relations. Creating a concept, or opening up a style of
thinking, therefore requires a conceptual persona, or some image of one
who thinks, of what it is to think. (Deleuze suggested in Difference and
Repetition that thought might take place without an image, that it might
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 27

be possible to create concepts without some attendant norm of good

thinking. Would this mean that one no longer did philosophy, that there
might not be a ‘one’ who would love wisdom, and that one might have
arrived at theory: a looking that was not preceded or grounded in some
proper image of one who undertakes the force of thought?)
If theory has its attendant personae, these are not conceptual persona,
for theory as an institutional event has had less to do with the creation
of concepts, with beginning thought again, and more to do with forms
of territorialisation. Proper names create placards or refrains, ways in
which one marks out one’s terrain, distances oneself from any number
of other bodies, and places a series of monumental markers around
oneself to both enable, and perhaps forestall, encounters. What are the
theoretical personae of Deleuze and Derrida? One could answer this
question by attending both to the gestures within each name’s corpus
that produce certain possibilities of recognition, and to the ways in
which those gestures have produced territories. Thus it was always
the case that the persona of Derridean deconstruction was created
through gestures of critical effacement. In Of Touching the adoption
of a voice or style – that of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy or Franck – is
taken on with a deferential commitment to the possibility of the other
philosopher’s project, and then followed by a mournful recognition
of impossibility. Derrida at once hails the bold gesture of Nancy’s
meditation on the sensible, following the journey of Nancy’s voice
towards a touch that might exceed sense and logic, and then – from
within that yearning logic – recognises that such a pure touch would
always have been philosophy’s desire and its impossibility. Perhaps we
can begin to discern, here, the problem of this book, which is a problem
of how one approaches the philosophical archive when one is archiving
oneself. How will Derrida use the personae of the philosophers through
whom he created concepts, and how will he create (in addition, and
alongside) those concepts a series of theoretical personae?
In order to approach this distinction between concepts and theoretical
personae I will begin rather bluntly. We all know the Derridean
theoretical persona, which was nowhere more evident than at the time
of his death in the newspaper obituaries that ‘mourned’ the passing of
this scandalous Frenchman who doubted thinking, meaning, sense and
reason.1 And perhaps, against this, ‘we’ theorists have tried to rescue
the philosopher or theorist in Derrida from such domesticating gestures,
insisting on the rigour, excess, affirmation and legacy that could not
be reduced or understood in such a manner.2 Against the caricatured
persona of ‘theory’ one might try to retrieve a Derridean persona that
28 Claire Colebrook

would once again take up a voice or proper name in order to open its
potentiality, rather than recognise it as one more instance of an ‘ism’.
It is just that theoretical persona – a voice that defers to, and desires
what an other voice would seek to find beyond philosophy, while
lamenting the impossibility of such a ‘beyond’ – that has enabled a
certain Deleuzian theoretical persona to overtake what remains of
‘theory.’ The notion of a death or end of theory, or a time after theory,
has itself produced its theoretical personae: an ethically irresponsible
textualism that is now ameliorated by a return to history, or – as in
the case of Deleuzism – an overly linguistic or critical Derrida, now
answered by a return to life. If ‘Derrida’ functions as a personification
for a critical failure of nerve, for a remaining within the conditions
for the possibility of experience (with experience narrowly defined as
meaningful experience), ‘Deleuze’ stands for a release from critique
and an affirmative, possibly literalist, project of genesis, emergence and
vitalism. What I want to examine in the essay that follows is not so
much the legitimacy or correctness of Derridean deconstruction versus
the vitalism of Deleuze, but the ways in which these personae – of a
responsible linguistically-nuanced critique on the one hand and a post-
linguistic affirmation of life on the other – themselves replay certain
rigidities in thinking.
I want to approach these thought figures, or theoretical territories,
through a particular motif gestured to in On Touching: the
deconstruction of Christianity. That idea, so crucial to the forward
movement of Nancy’s thought, is touched on in passing by Derrida,
and this brevity of touch (I would suggest) has a certain force of its
own, perhaps a resistance to thinking that we might so easily overcome
piety. The very idea of a deconstruction of Christianity is at once
an idea indebted to Derrida (as deconstruction) and, as an idea, a
refusal or negation of everything that ‘Derrida’ has come to stand for:
would it be possible, so easily, for us to overcome transcendence, and
would such a possibility have arrived, perhaps before or beyond Nancy,
in Deleuze and Guattari? The very possibility of a deconstruction of
Christianity is, as the relation among present and absent personae in On
Touching demonstrates, at once the most inevitable and vital of ideas,
and uncannily devoid of force.
To telescope the idea of the deconstruction of Christianity as put
forward by Nancy: once Christianity commits itself to monotheism, and
once monotheism is, in turn, committed to the complete divinity of God,
the idea of God destroys itself from within. If it is the case that God
is absolutely and divinely creative, then all that exists must emanate
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 29

from His being, but as divine emanation and creation there could not
be a radical distinction between creator and created, between natura
naturans and natura naturata. There is, then, an inevitable progression
to Nancy’s position of sensible immanence that is offered (by Nancy)
as philosophy’s and history’s fulfilment. For Nancy the sensible is not
an escape from philosophy and monotheism, a naïve retreat to some
beyond of sense; it is the fulfilment of sense. Insofar as I posit a God
who would be the very genesis of all that is, I move from transcendence
to immanence. It might be possible to begin the thinking of ‘the sensible’
by attributing genesis to a transcendence, a God ‘who’ authors this
world. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Nancy suggests that the logic of
transcendence arises from the sensible, that has always been thought
as the sensible apprehension of being. Also, like Deleuze and Guattari,
he suggests that transcendence will overcome itself. Once we try to think
the origin of all that is, the very ground of being, then we arrive properly
not at the origin of sensibility, but sensibility as origin. Once we think of
God, not as a god who could be figured like any other being, but as the
condition for all figures, then God is nothing other than this sensible,
immanent, and never delimitable existence. There is not a finitude,
beyond which we might posit or think an ungraspable infinite; the finite
as finite is always intimating what is not itself, and must remain finitely
incomplete. Transcendence is impossible, and undoes itself. Thought
destroys its self-immolation before an infinite that would be other than
this finite world; thought arrives – naturally, properly – at its own fragile
singularity.
Gilles Deleuze (2004) makes a similar argument about the becoming-
secular of Christianity in his book on Francis Bacon. The very project
of painting the divinity of Christ’s flesh, the striving to present spirit in
matter, ultimately arrives at the spirituality of matter, of paint become
spirit. The enslavement to transcendence, so often figured today in the
Deleuzian literature as an enslavement to the linguistic tradition or the
‘signifier,’ is not only presented as avoidable; it would be an act of
unthinking stupidity, or life-denying malevolence to remain attached
to transcendent figures beyond life. This is the force of Deleuze and
Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (1994) which charts its way through
a series of names – from Plato to Whitehead – all of whom indicate a
potentiality for immanence. Phenomenology, they suggest, comes close
to arriving at immanence, but fails when it places immanence within the
plane of ‘the lived.’ Their philosophical task, similar to Nancy’s, would
be to release and realise this positive potentiality of immanence that
must, and should, arrive if thought is not to remain pious. Philosophy
30 Claire Colebrook

and its properly immanent trajectory is offered by Deleuze and Guattari,

as directly revolutionary, as a release from transcendent piety.
Now when Derrida cites Deleuze along with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty,
Aristotle and a series of others, he suggests that this supposed release
from piety, or the inevitable deconstruction of Christianity, cannot take
place. Indeed, it is the haptic or the return to life itself, touch itself,
this finitude here and now, that allows Derrida to align a philosophical
corpus with a not-properly-philosophical commitment to sensibility. So
why, and how, we might ask, does Derrida pass quickly over this idea
of Nancy’s – this notion of the inevitability of immanence – and instead
focus on what does not undo itself: all those appeals in Nancy (and
phenomenology before him) to flesh, touch, the haptic and the lived? For
Derrida, those moments in phenomenology, and in Nancy, are moments
of unthinking piety, moments when thought appeals to some life itself
that would be beyond, before or perhaps between the sense ‘we’ speaking
beings make of life. Or, to speak more simply, and in terms of the
personifications enabled by the industry of deconstruction, the appeal to
flesh and the lived, like Nancy’s seemingly deconstructive appeals to the
immanence of the sensible, are unthinking lapses into the metaphysics
of presence: the ideal of some ‘in itself’ that then gives itself to be
thought. Those referential moments in Nancy, like Husserl’s references
to subjectivity, Merleau-Ponty’s invocations of the lived and Franck’s
appeal to the flesh, can be read as (perhaps inevitable) symptoms of a
thinking that cannot but – as thinking – present itself as the expression of
a more proper ground.
To claim, as both Nancy and Deleuze will do, that Christianity
deconstructs itself, and exposes its own impossibility, is no longer to
behave as the unthinking and pious believer (no longer the vitalist
affirmer of life), but to adopt the persona of the destroyer of piety.
It is the possibility of this destruction that presents itself in a blunt
form in an opposition between Deleuze and Derrida, but which needs
to be thought as far more complex that a distinction between theories.
We have two (inextricably intertwined) possibilities that confront us
with the idea of the destruction of pious transcendence, and the power
of proper names. And I want to demonstrate this by taking a simple
literary example. In the preface to ‘Milton’, William Blake declares
war on the received archive and the daughters of memory, and then
proclaims: ‘believe Christ & his apostles that there is a Class of Men
whose delight is in Destroying’ (Blake 1966, plate 2). Setting aside the
problem of naming and authority – the invocation of Christ to sweep
away the ‘Stolen and Perverted Writings’ of the classics – let us confront
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 31

this appeal to destruction, for it has a double force. On the one hand
Blake declares war on destruction, on all those writers who would
dampen, deaden and impede the intellect, and he does so in the name
of ‘mental fight’ and ‘spiritual war.’ On the other hand, in destroying
destruction, Blake must believe in a spirit or force of war that could
overcome the deadening piety of tradition. Such a double sense occurs in
any act of self-archiving: to destroy and overcome the past requires both
an identification of the way an archive can limit the imagination, at the
same time as imagination it must – in destroying – take up some weapon,
figure, force or piety of its own. Now, let us translate that double sense
of war and self-archiving into the way names operate in On Touching:
Deleuze’s name is placed alongside Nancy as one who would believe
in the haptic, and who would – in the supposed war on transcendence
and the infinite – once more subject thought to an unthinking naivety or
piety. From a Deleuzo-Guattarian commitment not only to the haptic,
but to the ‘war machine’ that would destroy the force of law and
transcendental conditions, the failure to arrive at the haptic is a failure
to arrive at real conditions.
So now I want to ask a stupid question: who is right? Is it possible to
think beyond the linguistic paradigm and consider the life from which
such systems emerge; would this amount to the final abandonment
of piety, with the absent god of language no longer being the great
mediating condition that figures our subjection? Or is such a turn to
life and genesis that would present itself as the overcoming of all piety
the most unthinking of pieties, a vitalism that sacrifices itself (and the
responsibility of thinking) before a life and force that it must always
figure as its own? I want to reiterate that this is a stupid question,
indeed a malevolent question, in which thinking dramatises its own
paralysis as an opposition between theoretical personae. Such a stupidity
is, of course, no accident and is enabled (at the very same time as it is
forestalled) in both Derrida’s and Deleuze’s texts. By citing both Nancy
and Deleuze as symptoms of a fall back into an appeal to the presence of
the lived, Derrida creates a persona, but he is able to do so only because
the possibilities of theoretical personae – of transforming problems into
proper names – is one of the ways in which theory has always destroyed
itself.
The move to Deleuze in theory today is a move to life, an affirmation
of the forces that generate figures, and a liberation from any body as
such that might deprive thought of its immanent power. Deleuze can
operate as a way of upping the anti-; however radical deconstruction
might have been in the move beyond the mind of man to the signifier,
32 Claire Colebrook

it failed to move beyond the signifier to life. But one can also, after
Deleuze, maintain a hold on deconstructive ethics. So, is it a question,
as it might appear to be from a certain way of reading On Touching,
that however desirable or seductive an approach to the sensible might
be, we remain with a relation to the sensible? How might one decide
on the responsibility of these warring proper names: is it responsible
to recognise that a thought of the sensible is always a thought of the
sensible, distanced and difficult? Or, is the imperative to go beyond
the conditions of thinking to life and vitality itself, beyond all the human
agonisings, the only genuine ethic of philosophy?
In On Touching Derrida argues both that a certain privileging of
the haptic is essential and necessary to Western metaphysics and that
this essence and necessity can be discerned in the work of Deleuze.
On the one hand such a definition and an inclusion might come as a
surprise. Isn’t Western metaphysics constituted by a originary privileging
of pure ideality: that there can be a sense or eidos grasped in a pure
act of apprehension without any medium of touch or affect? Isn’t it
this philosophical gesture par excellence which requires writing (or the
body through which thought conveys itself) to be posited as secondary,
parasitic and accidental? It is that logocentric notion of philosophy as
thought thinking itself that might appear to be targeted by an emphasis
on the body, matter, affect or the sensible.3 In his reading of Husserl’s
reduction, which would bracket any factual or worldly being of the
sign and instead turn back to its origin in constituting sense, Derrida
insists that Husserl is the completion and apotheosis of metaphysics.
What else is metaphysics if not the drive to incorporate, master and
recognise as always already its own those dispersed fragments of history,
writing, language and the body that would at first glance seem to
preclude thought’s self-mastery? In this regard we could place Derrida
with Deleuze in the post-phenomenological tradition dedicated at one
and the same time (following Husserl and Heidegger) to the destruction
of received and constituted systems in favour of genesis and (against
Husserl and Heidegger) to the demonstration that such a genesis is plural
and anarchic, incapable of being grasped as thought’s own. One way of
thinking about the relation between Deleuze and Derrida has been to
argue that while both are similarly critical of the metaphysical privileging
of foundational and constituting mind, Derrida will only demonstrate
the limits of thought from within, while Deleuze will take that next post-
or anti-Kantian step and intuit the geneses that make up the subject
of thought and life. So, Derrida’s inclusion of Deleuze within a haptic
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 33

tradition running from Aristotle to Merleau-Ponty might not be an act

of distancing, for we could see Derrida’s manoeuvre in On Touching to
be one of acknowledging the haptic as a way beyond the metaphysical
focus on the voice and the eye. The haptic is not the tactile, a touch
taken by the commanding hand for the sake of the viewing eye and the
speaking mouth; the haptic begins from the body without organs, not
yet distributed or organised around the mind of man oriented toward
cognition.
On the other hand, Derrida’s inclusion of Deleuze within a
metaphysics of ‘hapto-manualism’ brings to the fore a critique of certain
of Deleuze’s non-phenomenological precursors who would step outside
or beyond metaphysics without regard for any supposed necessary
or essential metaphysical implications. In his early work on Bataille,
Derrida (1978) demonstrates the ways in which the abandonment of
mastery and the refusal of a relation to life, far from being a counter-
Hegelianism plays into a metaphysics of presence. And the same applies
to Derrida’s early essay on Artaud and the brief mention of Bergson in
the essay on Heidegger’s note in Being and Time (Derrida 1982). Any
appeal beyond the relations of the concept, any attempt to overcome
the relation of mastery that would determine all that is other than
the self through the self’s own system, must nevertheless grasp that
radical alterity and otherness as its own outside. Or as Derrida argues in
response to Bergson’s attempt to overcome a vulgar and chronological
clock time that reduces the flux of life to so many equivalent units:
once we ask about the meaning of time we have already violated the
pure difference of temporality – a supposed ‘time in its pure state’ – and
subjected time to the concept. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that
Deleuze’s emphasis on the emergence of thought and signification from
flows of life might appear as one critical manoeuvre among others
targeted by Derrida in order to consider the more critical approach to
touch and the sensible in Jean-Luc Nancy. On the one hand, then, the
haptic would be the violation of thought’s mastery of itself. On the other
hand the appeal to the haptic would be the most naïve of empiricist
gestures, a too simple attempt to think the immediate, unself-conscious
and not-yet-divided-from-itself being of life. So one could now parcel out
the proper names as follows: either a becoming-Deleuzian in which we
abandon the locations and points of view of human speech to become-
imperceptible, or we recognise that insofar as we write and speak we are
always already within relations, and therefore always located as finite in
relation to an infinite that remains undeconstructible and never arrives.
34 Claire Colebrook

What, then, is the metaphysical opening to the infinite, or the necessity

and responsibility of thinking that would preclude us from remaining
at the level of the haptic, tracing thought’s power and limit from
touch alone? Such a question might allow us to think beyond a simple
opposition between Deleuze and Derrida, beyond an opposition between
a Bergsonian and vitalist appeal to life, and a Kantian recognition
that life is always given to thought as this or that finite life. Perhaps
the best way to approach this problem – the question of the limits of
metaphysics, or whether one can think life beyond the concepts we
have of it – is to begin with the structure of the question itself, and
how that question functions today in the creation of oppositions. Is
it the case that once we are asking the question of experience, trying
to account for experience, we have already lost that supposedly pure
and unmediated moment of presence in which life would not already
be submitted to an order of sense or conceptuality not its own? Or is
it the case that a focus on conditions, limits, inscription and a history
of texts and names precludes us from attaining the proper level of vital
ideas and problems? One thing is certain; as long as we approach the
names of Deleuze and Derrida theologically – as authorities whose texts
might disclose the proper direction of theory – we remain in a theoretical
Manichaeism that opposes vital life to structuring text. In the terrain
or territory of theory both these names, of Deleuze and Derrida, have
been read not only as proper disclosures of the unfolding of existence,
but as answers to the problem of life’s genesis. Either there is one vital
life that offers itself through all the differences of existence, and can
only be diminished by a consideration of its textual supports (Deleuze)
or, we only know life as always already divided and dispersed through
something like text (Derrida). To oppose Deleuze to Derrida, or writing
to life, in this manner is to appeal once again to auto-affection: in the
beginning is not a body or essence that comes into existence, for in the
beginning is the event, act, difference or distance from which a body
brings itself into being.
So let us consider two possibilities. First, it is possible that the current
sense of becoming-Deleuzian, having overcome Derridean limits and
linguisticism, is a violation of both the problem of life and the problem
of différance. To see Derrida as referring all experience, existence and
events to one condition of dispersal from which terms would follow
is to allow writing or text to function as yet one more self-productive
but absent ground. But to see Deleuze as having successfully overcome
a history of mediation to arrive at life itself – time in its pure state – is
to reduce his work to a retrieval of Bergsonian vitalism, or materialism,
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 35

while forgetting the ways in which life, for Deleuze, violates and perverts
itself.4 Second, while one might want to say, then, that the opposition
between Deleuze and Derrida is too simple and stupid, too lacking
in nuanced and post-dialectical distinctions, the territorial readings of
Deleuze and Derrida cannot be dismissed as mere accidents or parasitic
excrescences. For there is a use of proper names by both authors that
would assign the other’s body of work to a form of piety, a falling
back into a belief in the haptic as such or writing as such. Deleuze
and Guattari’s minimal references to Derrida accuse him of just that
fetishisation of writing and signification: as though one regime of
signs could overcode or reterriotrialise all others. But Derrida, also,
requires his symptomatic proper names, and this might indicate that
something like philosophy – or the creation of concepts and thinking as
such – cannot take place today, and can only operate as theory, as the
reading through of other texts as symptoms. But if auto-affection is no
longer possible, is the idea of a body that undoes itself so easily thought
(whether that be a God who arrives at immanence, a text that destroys
its own thesis, or a body that frees itself from organs)?
In On Touching Derrida will make a number of deconstructive
manoeuvres regarding the conditions for the possibility of auto-
affection. First, that supposedly immediate touch before submission to
the system of conscious concepts, before experience, is no longer one’s
own, discrete and singular, and is already invaded by and conditioned by
what is not itself. To feel, to sense, or to live this here and now as one’s
own is to already mark it as bearing a relation to oneself, and to have
this self that feels is already to be alien from oneself. To be or live in this
pure presence of ipseity requires auto-affection; and one can only feel
oneself touching the other if one has already placed oneself in relation.
Relations cannot therefore unfold from the self, for selfhood or ipseity
presupposes relationality. Second, auto-affection or the recognition of
oneself as a self which would be required if one is to experience or take
up a relation to what is not oneself has always required a normative
image of the body. The body is the vehicle through which the self lives
and orients its being. This is certainly the case for the phenomenology of
the lived body that runs from Kant, for whom we do not need to prove a
world of space and time outside ‘me’ precisely because that ‘inner’ me is
already spatial, to Merleau-Ponty for whom the world is infolded from
the ‘I can’. The body is therefore not a container for mind but active,
orienting, synthesising – not in the world but for the world. The body has
always (received through the history of these proper names) been a body
of auto-affection; all its responses and motilities are not acts of some
36 Claire Colebrook

distinct and housed mind but themselves intentional and life-oriented.

Metaphysics is not undone by but presupposes the auto-affective body:
the body that effects and knows itself through being in the world.
There is a tendency now to read Derrida as a primarily linguistic
philosopher, focussed on the conditions through which life is thought
and lived. Deleuze, by contrast, is a vitalist, no longer concerned with
linguistic mediation (or any other form of mediation) and even less
concerned with ideality. Deleuze’s virtual, according to those who would
place him beyond Derrida, is material. The world cannot be reduced
to its actualised conditions of relations, for there are also physical
potentials that are not yet actualised and that allow us to think of
matter in itself possessing virtual powers (De Landa 2002). Let us begin,
though, by challenging this too simple polarity, so that we can think
our way towards the more profound problem of life which exercises
both philosophers and sets both apart from phenomenology’s attention
to the lived. First, for Derrida we need to note that it is not the case that
writing, différance, the trace or text are relations or subjective conditions
through which the world is lived; nor is it the case that such terms can be
identified with language. Indeed, it is just that concept of language as a
system of mediation that would somehow either befall or constitute life
that Derrida’s thinking sets out to challenge. What Derridean thinking
enables is both a critique of life and a new theory of life that is at an
undermining of the philosopheme of theory. Theoria is the look or gaze
we direct to the world. Critical theory becomes a question of how such a
look is possible; as long as we think of Derrida and Deleuze as theorists
whom we might apply to problems, we see them as tools for thinking,
when perhaps it is just that notion of theory – or thought looking to
its own emergence and possibility – that underpins the Kantianism and
phenomenology whose names litter both the Derridean and Deleuzian
corpus.
For Kant theoretical knowledge is knowledge of the given, and so
critical theory is an account of how the world can be given to a thinking
subject. For phenomenology that question is insufficiently theoretical,
for what really needs to be accounted for is the genesis of ‘the subject’,
the being to whom the world is given. In Merleau-Ponty that condition
of the given will be flesh, no longer a subject who must live towards the
world, but a subject always already in the world. But we are always still
in theory, turning back to touch our own emergence. And we might say
that this is how the word theory functions today, as a distance taken
from those who simply ‘do’ or ‘read’ literature by those who will ask
how such doing or reading is possible. Certain forms of theory will,
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 37

therefore, refer to the conditions and assumptions that are in play before
reading; theory would be a turning back to the position of reading, an
attention to the lens or context through or from which we read.
But such a reference to conditions and such a notion of theory as self-
reflection and critique does not yet yield that positive and affirmative
dimension upon which Derrida insists. One way of thinking about
positivity and affirmation would be through the concept of life. If theoria
is primarily the problem of the received, lived, intuited and given, where
the given is given to some subject, then it might be possible to think
beyond theory and beyond the lived to life. If, as Paul de Man argued,
there can be no theory of narrative we can think about this negatively
and critically: any attempt to offer an account of the emergence of
narrative would itself take some narrative form – a before and after – and
would therefore have presupposed what it tries to explain. This would
mean that we would always already be within narrative, rhetoric and
lived time, never capable of intuiting time in its pure state. But is there
not a positive way of thinking theory and narrative, not as conditions
within which ‘we’ (as linguistic beings) move, but as the production
or unfolding a space of relations? Here both theory and narrative (like
writing, trace, text, différance) would have to lose their narrow critical
sense. Writing would not be the condition within which we approach the
lived, for before the lived as such there would have to be something like
writing. This would require, in turn, that a certain notion of life would
have to be re-thought.
This is why a meditation on touch, flesh and the body is not a
consideration that comes to Derrida late in his philosophical career,
through and with Nancy. If the normative understanding of self-affective
life has allowed us to place writing and text after the immediacy and
presence of touch, then only a different thought of the living being
will allow us to move beyond the language of the ‘linguistic turn’.
Vitalism, then, far from being the revolutionary post-Derridean and
vibrantly post-human liberation that Deleuzians often claim it to be,
would be the metaphysical gesture par excellence. Consider, before the
vitalisms of Bergson, James and Husserl – for despite his critique of
Lebensphilosophie Husserl demanded that reified and technical systems
be returned to their animating spirit – the vitalism of William Blake:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling
them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers,
mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous
senses could percieve. And particularly they studied the genius of each
38 Claire Colebrook

city & country. placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed,
which some took ad-vantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realise
or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronouncd
that the Gods had orderd such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside
in the human breast.
(Blake 1966, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, plate 11)

In the beginning is the expansive and creative act, flowing from ‘enlarged
and numerous senses.’ That originally living and animating force,
through repetition, becomes systematised and reified until the instituting
sense is forgotten. From an originally productive, active, spontaneous
and creative poetry to the system of priesthood: this might seem like
the first step in overturning Platonism. But Platonism has never been a
simple negation of life in favour of an ordering Idea, and the resistance
to the Platonic distance of ideas from life goes back as far as Aristotle.
(In Difference and Repetition Deleuze defends a radical and reversed
Platonism, against Plato and Aristotelian naturalism). In Plato’s own
texts the Idea is privileged because it is the genetic principle which
gives being and life to matter, so that even as far back as Plato we
can say that there has been a vitalist lament regarding the fall of
thinking into inert systems, such as the thinking that would be devoted
to rhetoric or semblance rather than the life of things. Not only does
Blake’s celebration of energy and animation anticipate Bergson’s appeal
to a creative life before the fall into the efficiency of the intellect, and
recall centuries of mourning regarding the loss of life and spirit in
merely technical systems (including theory); it also brings to the fore
the persistent vitalism of the normative body. Enlarged and numerous
senses: the unfallen body is receptive to the flux of life, responsive and
creative: giving to the world an animation that would be impossible if
the body were one thing among others. The condition for the possibility
of the lived is the lived and living body.
There has always been a grounding of the genesis of the world in a
vital body in a tradition, as Derrida notes, that runs from the proper
potentiality of Aristotle, for whom the human body is oriented to
perceiving the reason of the world, to phenomenology. There is always
in the return of systems to life, a normative image of life, which is also a
normative image of the body, and thereby a normative image of touch,
of the haptic. The properly living being from which the question of
philosophy ought to begin can never be the body within the world,
but must be that body that can recognise itself as the ground from
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 39

which something like a lived world is possible. Touch, in order to be

the touch or sense of some being, must be other than the self. The self’s
being to itself, though, requires an original auto-affection: mine-ness is
given through the mouth that in speaking departs from itself only to
recognise itself, a hand that in touching its own body relates to and
remarks its own sensible being. Thus there is always a being of the
sensible: to be sensed requires an intentional relation, and the relation
must depart from, be felt by, and returned to, one who feels. Derrida’s
notions of writing, trace, différance or text are not cognitive or linguistic
conditions but ways of thinking the non-self-ownness of auto-affection.
And perhaps we can think this through most radically in his critique of
the haptic.
In its naïve and celebratory form we will say that the haptic is
the affirmation of a sensibility, affect, encounter or sensibility not yet
subjected to the reified systems of the intellect. Before there is a subject
who feels there is this influx or explosion of sensation. Before it is
thought, conceptualised, lived as this or that distinct and differentiated
being, there is the absolute immanence of the lived. Before a world
mastered and distributed in extension for an ‘I’ who thinks, or a world
to be received, there is intensity and influx, only subsequently, belatedly
and after the fact taken as the world of res extensa. Is Derrida’s response
merely the Kantian objection that any appeal to that world of pure
non-relations is itself only grasped from some relation, some ‘I’ who
would seek to overcome in apocalyptic manner its enclosure within the
norms of thinking? Is his thought a rejection of an appeal to the body,
to sensation, to the haptic in favour of thinking? This might appear to
be the case at first and would reinforce that simple opposition between a
critical Derrida focused on responsibility, conditions and intentionality
and a vitalist Deleuze focused on emergence. But if we look now at
Deleuze’s consideration of the haptic this can help us see what is at stake
in the long-running Derridean meditation on a certain normativity of the
body in philosophy.
To begin with, just as Derrida is critical of Bergson’s appeal to a pure
intuition before a fall into clock time and the dispersion of temporality
into technical units, so Deleuze is critical of Bergson’s refusal of intensive
quantities. Both Derrida’s and Deleuze’s objections to Bergson’s vital
intuitionism concern the positivity of the non-relational. Time is not a
pure flowing forth that can always remain in touch with itself, related
to all its subsequent moments, available always as an animating and
retrievable force. The condition for living on, for time’s maintenance, is
a certain punctuality or separation. Lived time is the time of this being,
40 Claire Colebrook

which must therefore be marked or syncopated from one moment to the

next. Time in its pure state would not be the continuous flow at one
with itself, but would have to be a carrying over of a no-longer and
an anticipation of a not yet. This leads us then to Deleuze’s objection
to Bergon’s refusal of intensive quantities; there is not a pure quality,
Deleuze insists, that then falls into measure. It is always a question
of certain thresholds being reached, a certain quantity, that will allow
for the unfolding of ‘a’ quality. In both cases we need to go beyond a
certain notion of the haptic as the pure event of force, quality, flux or
sensible that would be felt in itself without the system and difference
of the intellect, a haptic that would indeed imply a body that would be
nothing more than its open and responsive affectation without loss or
remainder, to a more radical notion. That radical ‘before’ or beyond of
the haptic would not be an originary condition – say, the ‘life from which
all particular sensations emerge or unfold – but what Deleuze refers to as
smooth space.
Deleuze’s concept of smooth space and the haptic are defined with
reference both to Riemann’s smooth multiplicities and Worringer’s
(1953) Abstraction and Empathy. While the mathematical background
refers to a topology and not to metric space – to the creation of ori-
entations or distances that cannot be measured by a common unit –
the notion of smooth space is given aesthetically by reference to the
‘Northern Line’. According to Worringer, primitive art is not yet the
subject’s orientation to a body recognised as enlivened like one’s own,
but is a pure abstract form laid over the chaos encountered. By contrast,
modern art is empathetic: an enjoyment taken in the vital spirit of
another organism. Primitive art according to Worringer is therefore a
haptic art of close-range and does not have any depth or perspective.
For Deleuze these two aesthetic modes – the pure abstraction of flat
geometric forms and the naturalistic and representative empathy that
uses line to trace the vitality in an other body – have as their condition
a more radical potentiality of line that can be thought of neither as the
organisation of space, nor as the drawing out of a non-spatial inner
life of another organism. This line – thought from the possibility of
a smooth space that has no proper orientation or geometry – yields a
more radically haptic aesthetic. Not the sense or pure force of matter
to body without the intervention of conceptuality, but the movement
from which all bodies or matters are unfolded. There has been much
work done on Deleuze’s concept of the spatium and its relation both to
mathematical topologies drawn from Riemann and to physical concepts
of phase space. To define the intense spatium in this way would both
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 41

increase the divide between a literalist-naturalist Deleuze and a criti-

cal/Kantian Derrida, and would preclude us from appreciating the ways
in which both Derrida and Deleuze move beyond phenomenological
notions of ‘the lived’ and physical notions of the vital in order to think
movements, connections, syntheses and lines that are not the product of
active or embodied intentions – certainly not expressions of a distributed
corporeal cognition – for what such lines reveal is that there is no sense
in general.
There is no lifeworld or horizon which is, though not present
to any single subject, nevertheless constituted in and through some
intersubjective community. Marking this distinction requires thinking of
the line neither as the act of a subject who differentiates his world (so not
as the linguistic construction of reality) nor a line which would be the
pure and abstract force of a subject who had kicked himself free from
all notions of the vital; not, therefore, a pure avant-garde return of the
line to absolute liberty. Instead the line would be at once vital (bearing
its own tendencies, producing its own connections, unfolding its own
worlds) and destructive of the lived. We could not return the line to
some preceding intent of which it would be the actualisation. The line
would be haptic, sensible, corporeal and vital only in its break from the
body proper. Here, at this point, it makes sense to return to Blake. For
no poet stressed more vehemently the act of line and difference against
the nightmare world of the undifferentiated. At the same time no poet
revealed the life of line; for in his most prophetic moments of poetry and
visual achievement, the reading and seeing of Blake disturbs a voice that
would read to disclose a sense that that eye would recognise. Blake’s is
a haptic aesthetic: the eye feels the struggle of the hand, the resistance
of the material, the matter that bears its own tendency for relations that
would not be grounded in some prior intent. The voice that reads Blake
at once adopts the apocalyptic tone of declaration, accusation, judgment
and distance from communication at the same time as the eye that hears
Blake struggles to sustain the coherence of the poetic object. This is
neither abstraction from the lived nor a representation of the lived so
much as a line, which in presenting living form, and in aiming to destroy
priestly system and return to inspiration, is always poised between sense
and nonsense, between the living body and the line that would bring the
being of the body to ideal presence.
The ‘example’ of Blake is, I would suggest, telling. This is not only
because we can think of the ways in which Derridean literary criticism,
through the Yale school, helped us to define a Romanticism that was
always already concerned with questions of the genesis of sense. It is
42 Claire Colebrook

also because to read Blake through or after Deleuze and Derrida is

not to apply theory. Rather the question of life, touch, the difference
between the text and the bodies it touches has always been the spirit
of poetry. The Christian tradition of visual art and poetry within which
Blake is writing, precisely because it is a tradition concerned with the
incarnation, sets itself the task of presenting matter as spirit, of allowing
matter itself to vibrate. Thus Blake’s work is at one and the same
time Christian, for ‘everything that lives is holy’ and therefore always
expressive of some spirit beyond the body; at the same time it is the
deconstruction of Christianity, for the holy life in everything that lives
can never be grounded in a single act of genesis or creation. The truly
holy, truly spiritual and truly living could never be limited to the borders
of a body.

References
Badiou, Alain (2000), Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Blake, William (1966), The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey
Keynes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, plate 2.
Blake, William (1966), The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey
Keynes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, plate 11.
Clough, Patricia Ticineto and Jean Halley, eds. (2007), The Affective Turn:
Theorizing the Social, Durham: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988), Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam, New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles (2004), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W.
Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1978), Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction,
trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1982), ‘Ousia and Gramme: A Note on a Note in Being and Time’,
in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques (2005), On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Docherty, Thomas (1990), After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism, London:
Routledge.
Docherty, Thomas (2003), After Theory, New York: Basic Books.
 Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics 43

Hallward, Peter (2006), Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,
London: Verso.
Heidegger, Martin (1967), What is a thing? trans. W. B. Barton, Jr. and Vera
Deutsch, Lanham: University Press of America.
Protevi, John (2001), Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic, New
Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press.
Worringer, Wilhelm (1953), Abstraction and Empathy, New York: International
Universities Press.

Notes
1. As an example: ‘Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the
method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and
contradiction, and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent
contradictions of language itself, robbing texts – whether literature, history
or philosophy – of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence.’ Jonathan
Kandell, ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74,’ The New York Times,
10 October 2004.
2. An obituary authored by Derridean scholars, Derek Attridge and Thomas
Baldwin, was published in The Guardian on 11 October 2004: ‘Imitations of the
Derridean style seldom succeed, and it is not surprising that a caricature version
of Derrida emerged. But this flamboyantly self-regarding figure, dismissing the
search for truth, declaring historical knowledge to be impossible, denying that
there is anything beyond language – and doing all this in a relentless series of
puns and neologisms – bore no resemblance to the person himself.’ The caption
below the picture of a somewhat startled Derrida read, ‘Jacques Derrida: deep
thinker or truth thief?’
3. See the introduction by Patricia Ticinento Clough to The Affective Turn:
Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough, with Jean Halley (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007).
4. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘That is the only way Nature operates – against itself.’
A Thousand Plateaus, p. 242.

DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000360