Objectal human

on the place of psychic systems in difference and repetition

Jon Roffe

pp. 42-59

in: Jon Roffe, Hannah Stark (eds), Deleuze and the non/human, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

That ancient rhetorical trope, symbolic patricide, is alive and well in contemporary philosophy. One need look no further than the fate of Gilles Deleuze at the hands of those who amass beneath the plural banner of contemporary philosophy for proof of this. Of course the great, unavoidable irony is that the position of father is often only occupied post mortem, symbolic murder being at the same time the installation of this or that thinker at the head of yesterday's table. I mean here simply that in the rush to stake new theoretical ground beyond "post-modernism", hermeneutics and deconstruction, wild empiricism, correlationism — in sum, all of those avatars of imperialism our autochthonous fairy tales warn us about in such dire tones — Deleuze's name comes to stand in for everything we must not anymore want or think, despite his demonstrable innocence in many regards. This prosecutory fervor leads to critical attacks that engage very little with the work itself, unconsciously exemplifying Walter Benjamin's ninth thesis for the critic: "Polemics mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studied the better" (2008: 67).

Cited authors

Deleuze Gilles

Benjamin Walter