COLLAPSE III

Responses to a Series of Questions1

Gilles Deleuze

Arnaud Villani: Are you a ‘monster’?1

Gilles Deleuze: To be a monster is first of all to be

composite. And it’s true that I have written on apparently
diverse subjects. But ‘monster’ has another meaning:
something or someone whose extreme determinacy allows
the indeterminate wholly to subsist (for example a monster
à la Goya). In this sense, thought itself is a monster.

AV: Physis seems to play an important role in your work.

GD: You’re right, I believe that I turn around a certain idea

of Nature, but I have not yet arrived at considering this
notion directly.
1. This exchange between Arnaud Villani and Gilles Deleuze took place in November
1981, and appeared in A. Villani, La guêpe et l’orchidée (Paris: Belin, 1999), 129-31.

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COLLAPSE III, ed. R. Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, November 2007)
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 COLLAPSE III

AV: Can we call you a ‘sophist’ in a positive sense – has the

antilogos returned, despite Plato’s attack on the Sophists?

GD: No. For me the antilogos is connected less with the

tricks of the Sophist than with Proust’s ‘involuntary’.

AV: Thought is ‘spermatic’ in your work. Is there a clear

relation, in this sense, with sexuality?

GD: That was the case up until Logic of Sense, where

there was still a specifiable relation between sexuality and
metaphysics. Afterwards sexuality seemed to me rather to
be a badly-founded abstraction.

AV: Could we trace your evolution in terms of syntheses?

GD: I see my evolution otherwise. You know the ‘Letter

to a Harsh Critic’:2 that’s where I explain my evolution as
I see it.

AV: Thought as provocation and adventure?

GD: In what I have written, I believe strongly in this

problem of the image of thought and of a thought liberated
from the image. It’s already in Difference and Repetition, but
also in Proust and Signs, and again in A Thousand Plateaus.

AV: You have an ability to find, despite everything and

everyone, true problems.

2. Negotiations, 3-12.

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 Deleuze – Questions

GD: If that’s true, it’s because I believe in the necessity

of constructing a concept of the problem. I tried to do so
in Difference and Repetition and would like to take up this
question again. But practically speaking, this approach has
led me to ask, in each case, how a problem might be posed.
It is in this manner, it seems to me, that philosophy might
be considered a science: the science of determining the
conditions of a problem.

AV: Is there a beginning of a rhizome Deleuze-Guattari-

Foucault-Lyotard-Klossowski-etc.?

GD: That could have happened, but it didn’t happen. In

fact, there is just a rhizome between Félix and myself.

AV: The conclusion of A Thousand Plateaus consists in a

topological model which is radically original in philosophy.
Is it transposable into mathematics, biology?

GD: To my mind, the conclusion of A Thousand Plateaus is a

table of categories (but an incomplete, insufficient one). Not
in the style of Kant, but in the style of Whitehead. So that
‘category’ takes on a new, very special sense. I would like
to work more on this point. You ask if a mathematical or
biological transposition is possible. No doubt it is the other
way around: I feel that I am Bergsonian – when Bergson
says that modern science has not found its metaphysics, the
metaphysics it needs. It is that metaphysics that interests
me.

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 COLLAPSE III

AV: Could it be said that a love of life, in all its frightening

complexity, has informed your work all along?

GD: Yes. This is what disgusts me, in theory as in practice –

every type of complaint in regard of life, every tragic culture,
that is to say, neuroses. I really can’t stand neuroses.

AV: Are you a non-metaphysical philosopher?

GD: No, I feel I am a pure metaphysician.

AV: In your view, can a century be Deleuzian, light? Or

else are you a pessimist as to the possibility of our being
delivered from identity and the power of traces?

GD: No, I’m not at all pessimistic since I don’t believe

in the irreversibility of situations. Take the current cata-
strophic state of literature and thought. To me, that doesn’t
seem grave for the future.

AV: And after A Thousand Plateaus?

GD: I just finished a book on Francis Bacon, and have

only two other projects: one on ‘Thought and Cinema’ and
another which will be a large book on ‘What is Philosophy’
(taking up the problem of categories).

AV: The world is double, macrophysical (where the image

of thought works well enough) and microphysical (and
your model, years after the same revolution in science, in
art, takes account of this in philosophy). Is there a polemical
relation between these two points of view?

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 Deleuze – Questions

GD: The distinction between macro and micro is very

important, but it belongs more to Félix than myself. For
me, it’s more the distinction between two types of multi-
plicities. This is what is essential for me: that one of these
two types refers to micro-multiplicities is only a secondary
consequence. For the problem of thought, just as for the
sciences, the notion of multiplicity, as introduced by
Riemann, seems to me more important than that of micro-
physics.

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