Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Deleuze and the Postcolonial: Conversations, Negotiations, Mediations
- 1 Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Postcolonialism and the Subaltern
- 2 Postcolonial Theory and the Geographical Materialism of Desire
- 3 Postcolonial Visibilities: Questions Inspired by Deleuze's Method
- 4 Affective Assemblages: Ethics beyond Enjoyment
- 5 The Postcolonial Event: Deleuze, Glissant and the Problem of the Political
- 6 Postcolonial Haecceities
- 7 ‘Another Perspective on the World’: Shame and Subtraction in Louis Malle's L'Inde fantôme
- 8 Becoming-Nomad: Territorialisation and Resistance in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
- 9 Violence and Laughter: Paradoxes of Nomadic Thought in Postcolonial Cinema
- 10 The Production of Terra Nullius and the Zionist-Palestinian Conflict
- 11 Virtually Postcolonial?
- 12 In Search of the Perfect Escape: Deleuze, Movement and Canadian Postcolonialism
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- EUP JOURNALS ONLINE
6 - Postcolonial Haecceities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Deleuze and the Postcolonial: Conversations, Negotiations, Mediations
- 1 Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Postcolonialism and the Subaltern
- 2 Postcolonial Theory and the Geographical Materialism of Desire
- 3 Postcolonial Visibilities: Questions Inspired by Deleuze's Method
- 4 Affective Assemblages: Ethics beyond Enjoyment
- 5 The Postcolonial Event: Deleuze, Glissant and the Problem of the Political
- 6 Postcolonial Haecceities
- 7 ‘Another Perspective on the World’: Shame and Subtraction in Louis Malle's L'Inde fantôme
- 8 Becoming-Nomad: Territorialisation and Resistance in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
- 9 Violence and Laughter: Paradoxes of Nomadic Thought in Postcolonial Cinema
- 10 The Production of Terra Nullius and the Zionist-Palestinian Conflict
- 11 Virtually Postcolonial?
- 12 In Search of the Perfect Escape: Deleuze, Movement and Canadian Postcolonialism
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- EUP JOURNALS ONLINE
Summary
If philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside of Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe.
(Foucault 1999: 113)It is impossible to understand how they have got as far as the capital: however, they are there, and every morning their numbers seem to grow.
(Kafka, from a draft of The Great Wall of China)Arnaud Bouaniche has recently drawn attention to the curious way in which Gilles Deleuze opens his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988) with a dialogue excerpted from Bernard Malamud's novel The Fixer (1966), a dialogue which Bouaniche (2006: 131) describes as ‘a perfect mise en abyme of the change in perspective’ that, in his opinion, occurred in Deleuze's work after May 1968, and which points to the position that Spinoza occupied in Deleuze's thought. What Bouaniche emphasises, and what is of particular interest for us as we try to understand the nature of the relations between Deleuze and his ‘mediators’, is that when one character in the dialogue is ordered by the other, a judge, to explain what brought him to read Spinoza and what meaning he took from this encounter, the character in question
emphasises not the speculative content or the theoretical propositions in Spinoza's thought, but thepractical effectsthat they have had not only on him as a reader and an individual (‘After that I wasn't the same man’), but also on their author (‘[Spinoza] was out to make a free man of himself’), having decided, in the words of the judge, to approach the problem ‘through the man rather than the work’.
(Bouaniche 2006: 131; emphasis added)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Deleuze and the Postcolonial , pp. 119 - 162Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010