Given how much I have written about Deleuze and how much Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari I have read, I confess that I am a bit embarrassed when I come across claims/charges that Deleuze is a vitalist. When I compare the references to vitalism I come across in the biological science and history of science (this wiki are a passable account of what I understand by vitalism) that I read with my understanding on Deleuze’s ontology, I have a difficult time seeing how Deleuze fits the bill. This leads me to wonder if I’m not missing something deep and obvious about Deleuze’s ontology or what counts as vitalism, or both. As it stands, it seems to me that charges that Deleuze is a vitalist are more ways of sidestepping arguments against Deleuze’s ontology than accurate interpretations of his position. That is, they strike me as ad hominem attacks on his position designed to dismiss through the association of his ontology with a position rightly regarded as noxious today rather than real arguments against the claims that he’s actually making. Someone help me out here. What am I missing?
UPDATED (Ask and ye shall receive): Michael, over at Complete Lies (a blog I’m just now discovering… Sorry Michael!), has a post up discussing vitalism. In a comment responding to Kvon, he further clarifies the manner in which he understands vitalism:
I think the key is the distinction between “machinic” and “mechanistic.” Mechanism is the old Newtonian physics that we all grew up with, which the romantics (like Schelling) and later vitalists (like Bergson) rebelled against. I think it’s safe to say that Deleuze and Grant are both steering clear of any sort of mechanistic causality as well as any Cartesian dualism with a causal “outside” and a non-causal “inside.” From my understanding of Deleuze, when he speaks of machines, he does not mean the same thing as when Descartes speaks of automata. That’s the difference.
Under this model, mechanism would be Newtonian mechanistic causality and vitalism would be the presence of some other force or activity within the depths of things. I wonder, however, whether this opposition isn’t a bit dated. Rather than giving ourselves two options about the nature of objects (mechanistic causation versus vitalistic agency), why not instead bite the bullet and argue that Newton-Laplace et al got it wrong, and that mechanistic causation as conceived by these thinkers is an exceedingly abstract, limited, conception of matter. Here, I think, we get the transition from the physics of certain types of objects to the sciences of chemistry, biochemistry, and biology. When evoking chemical reactions, biolochemistry, and biology we don’t need to evoke occult agencies like vital forces, but are instead talking about certain physical processes that obey time’s irreversible arrow and which are iterative (especially in biochemistry and biology) in nature. Under this thesis, rather than setting up an alternative between mechanism and vitalism, the claim would instead be that we have a lot to learn about how matter works.
March 3, 2009 at 8:16 am
One of the things you appear to be missing is this:
<i.There’s a profound link between signs, life, and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that’s drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. It’s organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks. Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, and least I hope it is.
(Negotiations, Columbia UP, 1995, p. 143).
This is not the only place that Deleuze might be interpreted as describing himself as a vitalist, but it is the only one I can remember of the top of my head. There is also the comment in his introduction to Alliez’s Capital Times about the indubitable existence of a world soul.
In the light of such comments, it seems to me that to dismiss charges of vitalism made against him as ad hominem and sidestepping is rather unfair.
March 3, 2009 at 9:19 am
It seems that what may still be going on is that we’re confusing the more specific philosophical notion of vitalism (often foisted on Schelling, Bergson, Deleuze, and a few others who work with an “organic” metaphysical vocabulary) with a general and outdated scientific theory that was once called “vitalism” (wherein there was a sort of not scientifically reducible “life force” underlying organic beings that propelled them along and caused them to exist).
There does seem to be some overlap conceptually, especially around the time of Descartes and the Enlightenment, but these are not necessarily interchangeable uses of the term.
March 3, 2009 at 10:12 am
does anyone know where i can find hardt’s reading notes for AO and MP online. duke seems to have taken them down and off its site
March 3, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Anodynelite,
This sounds right, although Deleuze doesn’t help himself much with his (very rare) references to vitalism and terms like “inorganic life”.
March 3, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Hi John,
I guess my point would be that when you look at the nuts and bolts of Deleuze’s actual ontology you discover that nothing in Deleuze’s alleged vitalism resembles vitalism coming out of biology and chemistry. It seems to me that charges of vitalism against Deleuze work rhetorically by effecting a linkage between these notions of vitalism in the history of biology and chemistry with Deleuze’s own ontology in a way that is dishonest. This is why I refer to these charges as ad hominem.
March 3, 2009 at 8:06 pm
I agree with you and anodynelite that Deleuze’s alleged vitalism does not owe anything to the vitalist/mechanist debates coming out of the 17th century. Surely it is more a question of what he actually owes to Bergson, whose ontology is unashamedly vitalist?
I am confused as to why you think such a vitalism is ‘regarded as noxious today’ (whether rightly or wrongly); surely Bergson has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years if we are to go by the amount of material published about him?
March 3, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Hi John,
It could just be me. I have an immediate negative reaction whenever vitalism is evoked as I think the accomplishments of biology in the last fifty or so years have been monumental and have been accomplished through a departure from occult vitalistic hypotheses about the nature of life and its processes… At least under my reading. Certainly Deleuze is deeply indebted to Bergson, but I wonder if the claim that Deleuze draws heavily from Bergson is equivalent to the claim that Deleuze advocates Bergson’s concept of elan vital? Perhaps a more productive and generous reading would hold that Deleuze does for Bergson’s elan vital something like what Lacan does for Freud’s death drive. Unlike Freud, Lacan does not conceive death drive as some metaphysical force working within the depths of all organisms. Rather, Lacan takes seriously the phenomena Freud was trying to explain by reference to the death drive and gives a structural account of how these phenomena are produced in and through our subjection to the signifier. Likewise, it is difficult to recognize Bergson’s elan vital in Deleuze’s account of actualization or individuation, but the account of individuation is nonetheless designed to account for the same phenomenon: creativity in the universe. It seems to me that Deleuze sidesteps Bergson with respect to elan vital and instead takes up Simondon’s account of individuation to solve the same problem. My impression is that the explosion of publications surrounding Bergson are primarily emerging from Deleuzians which make up a rather small subset of the intellectual field both in Continental thought and broader philosophy. In most other contexts, charges of vitalism would, I think, be received as grievous insults similar to being charged with holding the phlogiston exists or that Ptolemy was right.
March 3, 2009 at 10:09 pm
I guess that’s fair enough although, of course, Simondon’s account of individuation is probably even less respectable in the wider intellectual field than Bergson’s vitalism. Then again, charges of being a Deleuzian probably don’t go down too well either ;)
March 3, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I wonder what you would make of Dan Smith’s discussion of Deleuze’s “non organic vitalism” in the intro to -Essays Clinical and Critical-.
I like the comparison you make about the death drive and Lacan’s account of it. If one pushes that concept a little, then we move towards something that seems very similar to this nonorganic vitalism that Smith speaks of, what Zizek is not hesistant to remind us of in the lamella. To my ears, both of these things sound very similar to desire or the undead (in Lacanina terms).
Obviously, distinctions should be drawn as they are attached to two entirely different systems of thought but one must wonder if they share an affinity even though they arrive by different paths . . . .
March 4, 2009 at 12:49 am
Byron Hawk’s A Counter-History of Composition discusses Deleuze in an attempt to resurrect vitalism (for the disciplines of Rhetoric and/or Rhetoric and Composition). It’s definitely worth a read:
http://www.amazon.com/Counter-History-Composition-Methodologies-Complexity-Literacy/dp/0822959739
March 4, 2009 at 12:49 am
Sorry, I just looked over my comment and noticed that I should have been more clear. In -DR-, D discusses four forms of repetition: Hume (habit), Bergson (memory), compulsion (Freud), and eternal return (Nietzsche). The difference between the non-organic life (deleuze) and the lacanian one (at this stage) is the unconscious. So the difference between the lamella and Deleuze’s kairos is the issue of awareness and recognition or in Lacanian terms the way it plays out in the symbolic (which of course makes me wonder how we can talk about the Real at all!). For Lacan, the undead is more primordial than the real and yet for Deleuze, it is brought into conscious thought as a matter of non-organic vitalism.
March 4, 2009 at 1:05 am
I doubt Deleuze would mind being called a vitalist (or a realist, monist, metaphysician, aestheticist, spiritualist, and about 15 other terms that are usually pejoratives even in continental philosophy) any more than any other reductive term. As mentioned, most of his positions are fairly noxious.
With that said, I view him as a model for Speculative Realism in that he demonstrates the analytical value of speculation and its potential to relate distinct processes and concepts, such that he can talk about Mozart and Artaud and wasps and geology and psychoanalysis with a unified vocabulary that draws something new or unnoticed out of all of his objects. None of his concepts are justified on their own as they’re all based on unapologetic misreadings, but they demonstrate their value through their use. The recent discussion at Perverse Egalitarianism was disturbing to me because I fail to see how Levi’s ontology could be said to be unjustified (or justified!) when it has yet to be put to work – the question of whether it’s capable of generating new “philosophical principles” seems misguided for a philosophy better understood as a mode of analysis and all judgment in that case seems premature.
One of the main issues for SR moving forward should be defining the nature of metaphysical investigation; that if the Real gets to have its input, what forms of speculation are valid, how are they to be articulated, and how closely does this speculation need to interact with the specific discussions within the philosophy of science. Particularly in the more explicitly aestheticized variations of SR, it remains unclear to me where or how science plays a role, beyond the general claim to a determinate and already articulated Real, which is taken simply as a license for metaphysical speculation with no clear criteria for value or method.
March 4, 2009 at 12:34 pm
[...] beyond life Jump to Comments Both Levi and Ben have written more on vitalism. Who knew it was such a hot topic? It is comforting to [...]
April 21, 2010 at 6:42 pm
[...] analyst Levi Bryant) is blogging about ontology, assemblages, speculative realism, Whitehead, Deleuze, and trees. Heideggerian-Latourian Graham Harman churns his stuff out at Object-Oriented [...]