Why no longer?
(This review is forthcoming in the fall issue of Symposium)
In his most recent book, Jay Lampert leads us back to one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most complex philosophical expositions of time and repetition without fuss or fanfare. He weaves for us an account of history that is both rich and concise. In a wonderfully honest and generous paragraph near the end of the penultimate chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Lampert asks: “How is someone trained in philosophy supposed to know how to name even one genuine event of ‘today,’ let alone analyse one convincingly as part of his book? What qualifies someone like me to diagnose it in an interesting way, so as to avoid making amateurish or pop-postmodern pronouncements? … Does any case study, short of one that inaugurates an entirely new world-historical Regime of Signs, show what a historical event is qua event, or show in general how the now captures the ‘why?,’ or how the ‘why?’ captures the now?” (154). Lampert’s poetic modesty does not preclude scholarly rigour; it reinforces it. Witness not only his illuminating digressions on Hume, Hegel, Bergson, and Derrida but, and much more encouragingly, his sense of responsibility to detail: 4 arguments for intratemporality, 13 for the pure past, and 2 for the dark precursors of the future; 4 major genealogies of the syntheses of time, 4 similarities and 6 differences with Derrida on dates, and 7 confrontations with Hegel on that selfsame topic; 13 layers to Alice’s obsession with size, 12 features to discuss in relation to the question of why an event occurs when it does, 5 senses of “falling back into history,” and 4 elements to the theory of consistency.
Lampert unpacks a most subtle and challenging set of questions that have preoccupied, if not defined, the long tradition of western philosophy. From Plato to Hegel, the rehabilitation of multiplicity, of difference, and indeed of chaos under the rubric of the One has had to confront the question of repetition and time, time after time, only to relegate it quite often to the status of a seduction. Contra those who have understood repetition as the reproduction in time of an origin or a preceding state of affairs, Deleuze elaborates a repetition “for its own sake” (« une répétition pour elle-même »), a repetition that accounts for that which does not return, for that which is a becoming without origin or destiny. This is a repetition that does not operate in time; it produces time. This is the repetition Lampert deploys to elucidate not one grand “Philosophy of History” but—count them—nine forms of past, of present, and of future, nine forms of succession and simultaneity, and, finally, nine “movements of the name of history.” Lampert braids his concepts, crosses them, stacks them, aligns them, serially, co-extensively, but always deftly and rigorously, in order to argue that “the succession of befores and afters is a triple by-product of there being three simultaneous simultaneities. What takes the place of the classical concept of history is nothing other than these multiple forms of co-existence with their multiple subordinate forms of serial distribution. Once it is proved that an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous, it will follow that the succession-effects of the names of history run simultaneously, and that the past is a real place on the body” (9).
Here, the typical questions of a philosophy of history, of a universal history, (“How come?” “Why now? “What next?”) are all questions of contingency. I believe that these questions very quickly extend into the broader concerns around memory, desire, and life. Indeed, repetition does not belong exclusively on the stage of world historical events with their progressions, interruptions, and recapitulations; repetition also pertains to the passage from one affect to the next, from one performance to the next, and from one observation to the next. A philosophy of history that takes the syntheses of time for a point of departure, a philosophy of history as thought by Deleuze and Guattari and subsequently pursued and elaborated by Lampert is hence a philosophy of psychology, of art, and of science as well. This is why Lampert’s text is neither an introduction to one aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought nor is it an exhaustive account of that aspect. It is rather a plateau, as Deleuze and Guattari deployed the practice in the second volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a plateau that revisits and repeats, which is to say rearticulates, the as of yet unarticulated—or perhaps that which is beyond articulation—becoming.
I would like to take a moment and consider not Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History but Lampert’s History of Philosophy. I am convinced that Lampert is qualified to “diagnose” (and this is his term), and has indeed diagnosed, the genuine philosophical event “Deleuze-Guattari.” This is why I would like to invite him to deploy his philosophy of history as a measure and an understanding of his history of the philosophy of history, of his history of philosophy tout court, with all of its attendant simultaneities and serialities. If the past never actually dies, if, as Lampert affirms, “an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous … [and] the past is a real place on the body” (9), what then is the status of Deleuze and Guattari’s own past on their philosophical body? What, for instance, is the status of their long standing investments in psychoanalysis, intellectually, as with Deleuze from his Presentation of Sacher Masoch to Difference and Repetition, to both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and clinically, as with Guattari the Lacanian-trained psychoanalyst, member of the Ecole freudienne, and institutional psychotherapist at the La Borde clinic? I pose this question of the so-called “past” because I am not sure how to reinterpret Lampert’s deployment of the double dating of any event—that the first time it appears is when it appears for the second time—without Freud’s nachträglichkeit or Lacan’s après coups. I am also not sure how to re-assess the discussion in Difference and Repetition without Deleuze’s treatment of Freud’s elaborations on the pleasure principle and its beyond as a founding mechanism of repetition. I am even less sure how to understand the syntheses of desiring production in Anti-Oedipus as the “motor of history” without reference to the laws of the dynamic unconscious (condensation and displacement) and their structuralist renderings (metaphor and metonymy)?
Deleuze and Guattari’s psychoanalytic past is nowhere to be seen in Lampert’s account. It has become “imperceptible.” Is it excess baggage or last year’s fashion? Is it a passing phase which, once “diagnosed,” is easily overcome? Has it been castrated and/or repressed? Has it been excised, sublated, or deteritorialised beyond recognition? Is it no longer? Lampert, via Deleuze and Guattari, and as far as I can observe, never poses the question of endings, of how the “why?” not only captures the “now” but can perhaps sometimes suffocate it and render it “no longer.”
