TIME AND AFFECTS

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Notes

1. It is worth noting that 'problem', not 'need', is the main biological category. Life forms are cases of solutions to problems; hence life for Bergson, instead of an irrational force, is a creative power that includes and produces forms of rationality. See chapter 2 of Bergson (1998).

2. Along with Bergson, Nietzsche is obviously the other main reference on this issue.

3. With a few exceptions, Deleuze has been less discussed in feminist theories than other philosophers of his generation like Foucault or Derrida. For a history of Deleuze's reception in feminist and gender studies, see Claire Colebrook's 'Introduction' to Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook's Deleuze and Feminist Theory (2000). Some feminist interpretations of Deleuze will be discussed below.

4. It would be a mistake to separate in Deleuze's oeuvre his studies in the history of philosophy-Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Kant or Leibniz-or literature and art-Proust, Kafka, Bacon, cinema-from his other works. It would also be a mistake to separate the books he wrote alone from those he co-signed with Flix Guattari. This is not to deny the contribution and originality of Guattari as a theorist but to claim the consistency of Deleuze's philosophy. This cannot be cut up according to quick periodisations, let alone according to a divide between the 'history of philosophy' and 'philosophy as such'. This is a divide he explicitly rejects, and for very good reasons. Franois Zourabichvili strongly insists on this point in his introduction to the new edition of Une philosophie de l'vnement (2004, 5–6).

5. On the idea of spatio-temporal dynamisms as syntheses of speeds, directions, and rhythms that subtend perceptible spaces and qualities just like organic and inorganic bodies, see also Deleuze (1994, 244ff.) and 'The Method of Dramatization' (2003, 134).

6. Another metaphor is that of a swarm of bees. In a different register, Pedro Almodovar's film All About My Mother (1999) is also a good example of a Spinozist conception of bodies and individualities.

7. Like Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze is also influenced by von Uexkll's work on animal worlds, whom he considers as developing an ethology consistent with Spinoza's insights. On the question of ethology in Spinoza and Deleuze's interpretation of it, see Gatens and Lloyd (1999, 101ff.).

8. Rosi Braidotti, who for a long time has drawn attention to the importance of Deleuze's conception of the body for feminist theory, has repeatedly argued that Deleuze can help to articulate a new form of materialism in which the corporeal materiality of the body is not erased and at the same time is not reduced to a biological given. In her view, such a new materialism is strategically critical for feminist theory and the production of a feminine feminist subject. It would allow us to think an 'embodied and therefore sexually differenciated structure of the speaking subject' to play against a traditionally universal (disembodied and male) subject (1994b, 161). See also her Nomadic Subjects (1994a). It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss such a strategy on its own terms, even if it should be noted that the very same philosophical tradition has more often than not identified femininity with, precisely, materiality and corporeality and, therefore, those notions should be used carefully. What I would like to remark, for the present purpose, is that the notion of embodiment, taken too literally, fails to grasp all the implications of the shift from the question of 'What is a body?' to that of 'What can a body do?' This second question, as will become increasingly clear, concerns a temporal and affective becoming of bodies that goes beyond the phenomenological notion of an embodied subject and is irreducible to this notion.

9. On the necessity of pre-philosophical presuppositions for philosophy, see Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 18ff.). On the importance and pervasiveness of dimensions of faith in all the layers of social and culture life and their irreducibility to religious creeds, see William E. Connolly (2005).

10. In my view, Judith Butler's work-and not only her most recent texts but already Gender Trouble (1999) and Bodies That Matter (1993)-aims precisely at undoing the distinction between sex and gender. The emphasis on performativity is a way of displacing the distinction between 'biological sex' and 'cultural gender' and not of claiming that everything is 'culturally constructed'.

11. The importance of this aspect of Deleuze's has been underlined by Rosi Braidotti (2000). In the same volume, Eleanor Kaufman develops the other side of Deleuze's philosophy of immanence and univocity, which looks at the incorporeal dimension of thought (2000).

12. In the terminology of A Thousand Plateaus (2000), the first are the hard, or molar, segments, opposed to the molecular layers. It is both philosophically and politically critical to note, however, that for Deleuze the molecular does not coincide as such with everything that is positive and vital: the description of fascism as a molecular phenomenon should be a sufficient warning for readers against such a misunderstanding.

13. Here, in A Thousand Plateaus, we are referred back to the Bergsonian idea of a coexistence of very different durations, superior or inferior to ours, all of them in communication. On Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson's complex concept of temporality, see also my Gilles Deleuze: Cinma et philosophie (2004). Elisabeth Grosz (2000) has underlined the importance of Bergson's conception of time for Deleuze and called attention to the political bearings, in particular for feminist movements, of a notion of time that proposes an unpredictable future. She does not, however, seem to make the distinction between 'the new' and 'the future' that is crucial to both Bergson and Deleuze and without which their call for futurity might be understood as just one more version of the belief in progress and in a teleology inherent to history.

14. Braidotti, who consistently insists on the value of Deleuze's philosophy for feminist theory, is nevertheless very critical about his dismissal of sexual difference, his uncompromising criticism of identities and, in particular, his politics of becoming-minoritarian on the grounds that feminist politics would need a feminine and feminist subject (1994b, 169). Elisabeth Grosz's essay 'A Thousand Tiny Sexes' (1994) is more nuanced on this issue, but nonetheless shares some suspicion about a non-identitarian politics that would run the risk of marginalising women's struggles (see particularly 1994, 208-09). On this specific, but truly important, point, Judith Butler (who is no Deleuzian), is nevertheless more attuned to Deleuze whenever she reminds us that not only do we not need to agree on any notion of women's identity to do politics but also that quests for identity can produce dangerous effects of exclusion. Among her numerous texts on this question, see especially Gender Trouble (1999, 3-8), and Undoing Gender (2004, 205ff.).

15. This is why becoming is always a becoming-minoritarian that should not be confused with belonging to a minority. By the same token, there is nothing essentially liberating about 'women'; the importance of becoming-woman is entirely relative to a specific form of dominant history. Just as there is no truth of sex, so is there no truth of femininity.