Gilles Deleuze – Become a producer instead of an author

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who was born 100 years ago on January 18th in Paris, published a clever, evil text in 1977 on the “New Philosophers” – that bunch of opportunists, ex-Maoists, 1968 renegades and others disguised as a French school of thought liberal jumping jacks, including intellectual actors such as Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy to count.

Deleuze, who became known as a critic of psychoanalysis (of both Freud and Lacan) together with his friend, the anti-psychiatrist Félix Guattari, in the early 1970s, published his text “A Propos Des Nouveaux Philosophes” as a seven-page supplement in in the literary magazine “Minuit” in the form of an interview with himself. In it he attested that the “Nouvelle Philosophy” was nothing but “empty thinking”. Why, he asks, was she able to have such great success despite this “emptiness”? Because the only really “new” thing about those philosophers is their media marketing. They had adapted “optimally to the economy and the market” and, as we can now add, they were successful not despite but because of their emptiness.

The “New Philosophers” appeared particularly as critics of communism. The “new” thing about them was that they no longer wanted to celebrate it, as they had done before, when they either operated in the orbit of the French Communist Party or wanted to overtake it on the left. This pleased not only the bourgeois establishment, but also those ex-revolutionaries who now wanted entry there after the proletarian revolution in France had obviously failed. For Deleuze, the new philosophers were a mere product of journalism, which, Deleuze continued, “discovered itself as an autonomous and self-sufficient thought.”

In the meantime, the “New Philosophers” no longer use marketing, but are created by it. The market’s call goes out to its volunteers: who writes the bigger books, who gives the most interviews, who speaks more clearly? As a result, says Deleuze, a book is ultimately less important than the newspaper article that is written about the book: “Intellectuals and writers, even artists, are called upon to become journalists if they want to play the game. It is a new type of thinking, interview thinking, conversational thinking, quick thinking – which, as we now know, is no longer one. The elimination of philosophy took place under the guise of the philosophical: the term “new philosophy” was prophetic; there is almost no other philosophy left today.

What passes for philosophy today is bad columnism and class struggle from above, and even the thinking that believes it is following Deleuze is defeated by it. The “New Philosophers” by the grace of the company are, at best, philosophy-philologists; their books are not books about thinking, but merely books about philosophy. In the worst case scenario, they are activists of their meager personal interests and the book is just an advertising gimmick for action: they don’t think, they just retell the results of other people’s thinking. As activists, they challenge others to think before they even start thinking. Even philosophy today only wants to report – even though its job is to understand and make things understandable.

The “new” philosophy is ultimately fiction; She doesn’t see the forest because of all the descriptions of the trees, and when she refers to the forest, she describes it like a hiker in a sea of ​​fog. Deleuze, on the other hand, cited the creative aspect. The “new” philosophizing gives the “media the minimum of intellectual legitimacy in order to stifle creative attempts that would explode them. The more cretin-like debates on television, the more little narcissistic auteur films, the less creativity is possible on television and elsewhere.«

In the spirit of Brecht and Benjamin, Deleuze suggested that one should “refuse to assert requirements” and advised intellectuals to “become producers rather than authors who only claim the impudence of domestications or the to have jokes from court jesters.”

“Philosophy,” Deleuze wrote elsewhere, “is not communicative, nor is it contemplative or reflexive: it is creative or even revolutionary by nature, since it does not stop creating new concepts. The only condition is that these terms have a necessity, but also a strangeness; and they have both to the extent that they represent an answer to real problems. The term prevents thought from becoming a mere opinion, point of view, discussion, chatter.”

Happy Birthday, Gilles Deleuze!