Review: Gilles Deleuze, Letters and Other Texts, David Lapoujade (ed.), trans. Ames Hodges

Abstract

This book is an odd collection of Deleuze ephemera: letters, some ink drawings, reviews, interviews, and a few writings from early (1940s–1950s) in his academic career. These materials are epiphenomena: archival remnants that present us with a certain ambivalence. On one hand, these remnants will entertain Deleuze scholars, whose scholia will value Deleuze’s exam and course preparation materials on David Hume as well as the 15 letters to Félix Guattari collected here wherein we discover the first mention of a work of art as an ‘abstract machine’ (p. 43). On the other hand, Deleuze lived and worked so that there would be no need for an archive. Deleuze was no archivist. We know this not only because he destroyed his correspondence with Alain Badiou in late 1994, but also because Deleuze’s work tells us as much time and again. In the letters presented here we read: ‘Don’t think that I am a compulsive letter writer or that I have a sense of dialogue, I hate it’ (p. 72). Even the editor David Lapoujade writes that ‘there are no letters from these correspondents because Deleuze did not keep any mail’: ‘he differed in this way from other authors who considered their letters to be extensions of their work’ (p. 7). The ephemera presented here must be complemented with the more significant posthumous volumes of Deleuze’s work that we have in English, namely Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974 (2004) and Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 (2006). But this only helps if these texts intensify our relation to the work published by Deleuze, to the sheer inexhaustibility of the concepts presented there: multiplicity as a substantive repetition as opposed to reproduction, duration and immanence.