In the previous chapter we inquired into the ‘practice’ envisioned by Deleuzian philosophy. For Deleuze, philosophical practice is made up of several components, whose consistency comes from the central activity of ‘thinking’.

Now Deleuze does not conceive of thinking as impelled by an act of will. Thought can only arise through an ‘encounter’ with a ‘sign’ that compels its exercise. Except, in order to receive this sign as a sign, one must first train oneself in its reading, one must undergo an ‘apprenticeship’. From here, Deleuzian practice opens up to the dimension of ‘education’ which prepares this apprenticeship. To that effect, Difference and Repetition, in the process of developing a theory of the ‘problem’, had carefully constructed what we could call a Deleuzian pedagogy.

It is undeniable that the practice conceived in Deleuzian philosophy is both realistic and enticing. Nonetheless, we could not but observe here a major blind spot. Towards the end of his life, Deleuze had shown, in the context of an analysis of cinema, how this vision of thinking as practice could be extended to the domain of activity proper, so to speak. With a nod to Bergson's theory of recognition, Deleuze proposed that it was the failed ‘attentive recognition’ which could actualise virtualities and give birth to the new; it is here that we can see the contours of a ‘second type of subjectivity’, what he called a subjectivity ‘added to matter’, irreducible to ‘subjectivity’ so-called (subjectivity of the first type).

It is inevitable that a philosophy which sees thinking as something externally enforced should result in such an account of practice. Nonetheless, it is impossible for us to pass over the fact that the new account of subjectivity is defined in terms of ‘failure’. For it is impossible to seek to fail. Here we see Gilles Deleuze the philosopher treading a treacherous precipice, between the need to eliminate all spontaneity and activity as ultimately whirling around in the sterility of extant schematisms, and the equally pressing desire not to submit to post-desperation apathy. True too is the fact that Deleuze in no way elevated ‘failure’ into the exclusive object of a forlorn and unfounded hope, instead emphasising the importance of preparation through education with characteristically supple theorising.