Journal of the History of Ideas

I. FROM LITERATURE TO PHILOSOPHY

To understand the very beginning of Deleuze's intellectual trajectory, and especially his fascination with Sartre, one must locate its starting point at the crossroads of literature and philosophy. It's for this reason that—to adopt sociological categories—his work is closer to the "literary" pole of French philosophy than to the "scientific."¹⁰

During and shortly after the Phoney War, Deleuze and his elder brother Georges avoided the danger in Paris by spending a year in Deauville, Normandy. There, his vocation for literature was inspired by his teacher Pierre Halbwachs.¹¹ On August 4, 1942, the Figaro littéraire published one of the young student's literary compositions, in which he commented on a phrase from the marquis de Vauvenargues with quotations from Pascal, [End Page 798] Proust, Amiel, Péguy, Stendhal, and Hugo. The following academic year, Deleuze studied philosophy at the Lycée Carnot, under the guidance of Pierre Vial. Between 1943 and 1945, he had two other teachers: the Hegelian Jean Hyppolite, during the hypokhâgne at the Lycée Henri-IV, and the Cartesian Ferdinand Alquié (who would eventually supervise Deleuze's secondary dissertation, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 1968), during the khâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.¹² These two figures, whom Deleuze "loved and admired," prepared him for the competitive entrance examination for the École normale supérieure.¹³ Along with the medievalist Gandillac, who would supervise Deleuze's primary doctoral dissertation (Difference and Repetition), and the historian and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem, Hyppolite and Alquié were essential in his formation. At the beginning of the 1945–46 school year, having failed that entrance exam for the École normale,¹⁴ Deleuze received a grant to complete his licence (bachelor's degree) under the direction of a professor belonging to a provincial university. At the end of this period, Hyppolite and Canguilhem, who were then teaching in Strasburg's university, supervised Deleuze's master's dissertation (diplôme d'études supérieures) on Hume, which he defended in 1947 and which would become the book Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953).¹⁵

These academics, however, were not Deleuze's chief source of inspiration. He would later confide that "his man" was Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher du jour. "I was looking for my man [Sartre] in the preparatory classes: Alquié was Descartes, and Hyppolite was Hegel. But I hated Descartes and Hegel."¹⁶ As the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, one of Deleuze's closest friends during the 1940s, claimed, Sartre's Being and Nothingness was an injunction for an "imitatio Christi": fascinated by the book, the [End Page 799] group of youngsters wanted to be like their favorite philosopher.¹⁷ Sartre was, without a doubt, the primary inspiration for Deleuze's "conversion" to philosophy, as he had been for many other students of their generation. It is no surprise that two of Deleuze's "Sartrean" friends of the 1940s, Michel Tournier and Michel Butor, became novelists after failing the agrégation in philosophy. Sartre, at once philosopher and novelist (as Deleuze would put it in the Abécédaire), showed that concepts in philosophy functioned like fictional characters in literature.¹⁸ Deleuze did not write literature, but he would develop philosophical treatments of novelists dear to Sartre, such as Proust, Kafka, Gide, and Fitzgerald; while Sartre used philosophical characters such as the garçon de café, in What is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Félix Guattari would coin the notion of "conceptual personas," which are functions used to deploy new concepts in philosophical texts.

In a short essay published just after Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in 1964, Deleuze explained why he considered him his maître. His style was not "professorial," as was Maurice Merleau-Ponty's, and his philosophy was not a "second-hand absurdism," as in the case of Albert Camus. Sartre represented a "radical novelty": he imposed a series of new philosophical and literary references, an original "artistic or literal technique," a series of "new themes," a "new style," a "new way of formulating" problems.¹⁹ While he introduced these novelties, embodying the avant-garde, Sartre was simultaneously a systematic thinker—a former normalien and an agrégé, which distinguished him from the novelist-philosophers of his generation who did not have academic titles, such as Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski—and his work was respected and discussed by reputable philosophers, including Alquié.²⁰ However, unlike his academic peers, Sartre abandoned teaching and maintained a heterodox position. As a deprofessionalized philosopher, he was a "breath of fresh air" (souffle d'air frais), able to bring students out of the scholastic practice of philosophy proper to the Sorbonne.²¹ In his own homage to Sartre, also originally published [End Page 800] in 1964, Tournier recounted that immediately upon its publication, Being and Nothingness became a sacred text for a whole generation.²² Deleuze and Tournier had spent the winter of 1943–44 devouring the sacred—massive, encyclopedic—text. They also read Sartre's older, less-known philosophical essays, novels, and critical essays, attended the first performances of The Flies and No Exit, and witnessed the first polemics around the meaning of "existentialism" and the success of the journal Les temps modernes.

II. PERSONALISM(S)

While he was absorbed in reading Being and Nothingness, Deleuze had an active social life largely thanks to Tournier, who, being a year older, was already studying philosophy with Gandillac in the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly.²³ During the Occupation, Gandillac and Davy²⁴ started an intellectual circle, which gathered in Paris, in the apartment of Marcel Moré, a wealthy Catholic stockbroker,²⁵ and in La Fortelle, a castle located in the countryside around Paris. Davy, a lecturer at the École pratique des hautes études, specialized in history of theology and mysticism; in 1947 she obtained her doctorate in philosophy, with a dissertation on Guillaume de Saint-Thierry directed by Étienne Gilson, a preeminent French historian of medieval philosophy.²⁶ Davy, along with Gandillac, attempted to create an atmosphere [End Page 801] like that of the intellectual meetings the writer Paul Desjardins had organized in the abbey of Pontigny from 1910 until 1939. Gandillac had studied at the École normale in the same class as Sartre, and, like his classmate, he spent a year in Berlin. Briefly fascinated by the monarchist party Action française, then by the Neo-Thomist philosophy of Jacques Maritain, Gandillac joined the personalist movement and published articles about culture, society, and politics in its main venue, the journal Esprit, created in 1932.²⁷ The founder of both the movement and the journal was the Catholic scholar Emmanuel Mounier. Influenced by Péguy, Bergson, Maritain, and Max Scheler, Mounier had elaborated a philosophical, political, and religious agenda intended to overcome the framework of Neo-Thomism.²⁸ He formulated an anthropology centered on the notion of the person as an embodied spiritual being, and he sketched a political idea of community opposed to the alleged abstraction of both liberal democracy and communism, expressing the necessity of a more social dimension of Christianity.

After defending a doctoral dissertation on Nicholas of Cusa, supervised by Émile Bréhier, during the German Occupation, Gandillac, along with other contributors to Esprit, slowly departed from Mounier's personalism. This diverging group came to be known as "Quelques-uns" (the few), or the "Groupe Moré." After the Liberation, some of the members, who had contributed to journals such as the Nouvelle équipe française and Les cahiers de la nouvelle époque, created a new periodical, Dieu vivant.²⁹ Its profile was very different from that of Esprit: Moré and some of his peers were convinced that Christians should focus on the individual and eschatological dimensions of Christianity. These positions were described as an outright "anti-Esprit."³⁰ Mounier objected that Dieu vivant was promoting an "apocalyptic and existential Christianity" that was unable to address social problems.³¹ [End Page 802]

Before 1945, the Catholic core of the group determined its themes, including topics such as the nature of evil and sin, death and life after death, the difference between religious and profane types of community, Christian civilization, poetic thinking, and the meaning of love and friendship. On March 5, 1944, for instance, Deleuze and Tournier were present during the famous discussion about the notions of evil and sin, which also involved Bataille, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, and Maurice Blanchot.³² Many students born during the 1920s participated in these informal intellectual gatherings organized by Gandillac, Moré, and Davy. Among them, in addition to Deleuze and Tournier, were Butor and Olivier Revault d'Allonnes.³³ The context encouraged some to present iconoclastic positions in order to stand out. One way to be noticed was to endorse Sartre's controversial positions, which, since the publication of Being and Nothingness, had been recognized as completely atheistic. For his alignment with this philosophy, but also for his radicality and intelligence, many considered Deleuze to be a "new Sartre."³⁴

III. EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND NEO-THOMISM

Like many other Catholic thinkers, the members of the Groupe Moré were not indifferent to Sartre's philosophy—nor, in general, to existentialism and phenomenology. This interest was tied, on one hand, to the consequence of the modernist controversy and the success of Neo-Thomism and, on the other hand, to the peculiar relation between Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and Catholic philosophy.

One of Husserl's mentors was the psychologist Franz Brentano, a former Catholic priest and scholar of Aristotle, who used concepts drawn from scholasticism. Husserl's seminars in Göttingen attracted students who would eventually convert to Catholicism, such as Edith Stein, and still others who almost converted, such as Alexandre Koyré. While Stein wrote an essay in [End Page 803] which she compared Husserl's philosophy to that of Aquinas,³⁵ Koyré decided to write his dissertation on the proofs of God's existence—Essai sur l'idée de Dieu et les preuves de son existence chez Descartes (Essay on the idea of God and the proofs of his existence in Descartes) (1922), directed by Gilson—because he wanted to find convincing arguments for his attempted conversion to Christianity.³⁶ In the meantime, some Neo-Thomist scholars meddled in contemporary philosophical debates as a way of asserting their existence after the modernist controversy. Using Thomism as a model, by comparing contemporary doctrines to the medieval, it was possible to partially validate some positions, and to discard others as heterodox. In 1952, Gilson wrote, "From Descartes to the atheist existentialism of our day, philosophical rationalism has lived comfortably on the metaphysical capital accumulated by the theologians of the Middle Ages."³⁷ Two phenomenological notions, already addressed by Brentano, attracted the Neo-Thomists: intentionality, used to characterize mental acts, and immanence, used to describe the relationship between consciousness and its noetic contents.³⁸ As Baring has underlined, many Neo-Thomists were disappointed by Husserl's alleged idealist turn in the Ideas and "criticized the priority of immanent consciousness over the real, existing world."³⁹ Outside of phenomenology, the term "immanentism" had been largely used in a polemical way—like "modernist" and "modernism"—to designate doctrines promoting the "immanence" of God in the world; thus, in a sense it was closely [End Page 804] aligned with pantheism.⁴⁰ In Action (1893) Maurice Blondel popularized what he called the "method of immanence," aimed at discovering, in the human phenomenon of action, the point of contact between the natural dimension of reality and the supernatural dimension expressed by sacred texts. Moreover, immanence was sometimes tied to the doctrine of the "univocity of being." During the thirteenth century, John Duns Scotus stated that being is univocal. Conversely, Aquinas insisted on the fundamental difference between the sense of being used for creatures and that used for the transcendent God. The notion of intentionality was discussed as well during the modernist controversy, by scholars with a phenomenological training. For instance, in his Habilitationsschrift, Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning (1915), Martin Heidegger engaged in medieval scholastic debates with the aim of discussing phenomenology's most important concepts and considered Duns Scotus the first to sketch the notion of intentionality.

In the lectures that he gave at the Sorbonne—translated in 1931 under the title Cartesian Meditations—Husserl mentioned the work on Descartes's scholastic heritage published by Gilson and by his own former student Koyré.⁴¹ An important conference organized by the Société Thomiste in 1932 concerned phenomenology and gathered, among others, Stein, Koyré, Maritain, and Gilson. While Koyré defended Heidegger's position concerning the similarity between Duns Scotus's doctrine and phenomenology, Maritain underlined the points of contact between Thomism and phenomenology and the importance of studying Husserl's texts with the aim of criticizing philosophers such as Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart. A few months later, in a book about Aquinas, Distinguish to Unite; Or, The Degrees of Knowledge, Maritain discussed and criticized Husserl's theory of knowledge. With the erudite L'être et l'essence (Being and essence),⁴² Gilson discreetly entered the contemporary debate, inscribing phenomenological and existentialist categories in the framework of scholastic debates.⁴³ Gandillac would [End Page 805] follow this path and would discuss Husserl and Heidegger in his studies on medieval philosophy.⁴⁴

After the huge success of Sartre's Being and Nothingness, there were multiple reasons for Catholic philosophers to be interested in his work: Sartre was using Husserl and Heidegger, authors who, as we have seen, were familiar to Catholic philosophers; he claimed the Protestant theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as one of his primary references; he promoted an idea of philosophy as a private practice; he challenged Aristotle and Aquinas in stating that "existence precedes essence"; finally, despite being an atheist, he posed the question of the place of man in an absurd world, a question that could also be read through eschatological lenses. The Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote that existentialism had to choose between overcoming itself and denying itself: either transcendence and a divine horizon or materialism that he considered to be a doctrine depending from "the postulate of absolute immanence."⁴⁵ Gandillac and Davy published articles on Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir;⁴⁶ thus, it is not surprising that, according to Butor, phenomenology and existentialism were very present in the debates at the Fortelle.⁴⁷

IV. AGAINST INNER LIFE

This context is essential for understanding the beginning of Deleuze's trajectory and his first essays, published between 1945 and 1948. At the end of 1945, he published "Description of Woman: For a Gendered Philosophy [End Page 806] of the Other" in Poésie 45,⁴⁸ followed by "Words and Profiles" in Poésie 46.⁴⁹ This journal was significant for publishing the first writings of young existentialists like Alain Clément,⁵⁰ who probably introduced Deleuze to the editorial board and to whom he dedicated his first essay, and also essays by famous poets, novelists, literary critics, and philosophers, including Sartre's famous essay on Francis Ponge, "L'homme et les choses" ("Man and Things") in 1944. In 1946 Deleuze also published "Mathesis, Science and Philosophy," to introduce Études sur la mathèse (Studies on Mathesis) by Johann Baptist Malfatti, which appeared in "Sources et Feux," a book collection directed by Davy for the editor Griffon d'Or.⁵¹ The same year, Deleuze wrote a short genealogy of the idea of inner life, "From Christ to the Bourgeoisie,"⁵² and dedicated it to Davy; in 1947, he wrote a short introduction to an edition of Diderot's Memoirs of a Nun, again published by Griffon d'Or.⁵³ Finally, in 1948, he reviewed Davy's book Aimer toutes les mains (To love all hands).⁵⁴

These texts are the clumsy and precocious first steps of a young student aping his teachers with varying degrees of success.⁵⁵ Deleuze's texts attest as well to the literary and philosophical canon by which he was indoctrinated: Gide, Valéry, Proust, the humanist versions of Descartes and Hegel to whom Alquié and Hyppolite introduced him. Most of all, these essays bear the trace of Sartre's pivotal importance.⁵⁶ [End Page 807]

To assess Deleuze's positions, it is useful to consider the last issue of Espace, where "From Christ to the Bourgeoisie" was published. Like Poésie, this journal emerged from the experience of the war.⁵⁷ The first issues published in 1945 include some of the young "existentialist" authors who published in Poésie, including Clément.⁵⁸ Espace's last issue was thematic, entitled: "From the Age of Reason to the Ungrateful Age: Chronicle of Inner Life ("De l'âge de la raison à l'âge ingrate, chronique de la vie intérieure")." The title referred to Sartre's 1945 novel The Age of Reason and that issue, published with the help of Alquié, was entirely devoted to the harsh criticism of the notion of inner life that Sartre had inaugurated ten years earlier.⁵⁹

In the collective "Présentation" that introduced the volume, the editors identified their generation as the first willing to do away with the concept of inner life and to instead face their ungrateful age without pathos. Inner life included what "poets and women call feeling, what confessors call the soul, and what philosophers call affective consciousness."⁶⁰ The editors denigrated the practices of keeping intimate diaries and of auto-analysis as well as the "indecent masturbation" involved in the "expression of personal feelings." These criticisms implicitly promoted the rejection of the authorial signature in literature.⁶¹ The "categories of inner life promoted by the bourgeoisie, humanism and civilization"⁶² masked a reality, the external world, and they had to be phenomenologically "bracketed" (mises entre parentheses). The editors' conclusion was especially striking: "There are no moral values. There is no destiny, nor Providence. The future of man is not man, nor the world, but the inhuman."⁶³ Sartre's project was presented, first and [End Page 808] foremost, in the negative. It involved the denunciation of humanism, conceived as the belief in the existence of interiority.⁶⁴ It condemned all the manifestations of humanism: spiritualist philosophy, psychology, bourgeois values, authorial subjectivity, but also and foremost Christianity. If, following phenomenology, philosophy had to simply describe experience, it was then necessary to renounce the importance traditionally given to interiority and to human subjectivity. In "Transcendence of the Ego," Sartre explained that the ego had to succumb to the phenomenological epoché. The ego appears "only at the level of humanity," and therefore at an empirical level. In a pithy sentence that Deleuze and his friends paraphrased freely, Sartre concluded that "the Transcendental Field, purified of all ego-logical structure, … is a nothing, since all physical, psycho-physical, and psychic objects, all truths, all values are exterior to it."⁶⁵

Deleuze and Tournier appropriated Antoine Roquentin's scream from Sartre's Nausea: "I want no secrets or soul-states, nothing ineffable; I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with inner life," "I will not be as fool to call myself anti-humanist: I'm not a humanist, here it is."⁶⁶ Sartre's first novel presents a gallery of portraits of humanists: the "Catholic humanist," the "radical humanist," the "left-wing humanist," and the "provincial humanist," incarnated in the character of the "Autodidact."⁶⁷ Derrida rightly stressed that it is, in fact, "in the dialogue with the Autodidact that Roquentin levels the worst charges against humanism, against all humanist styles."⁶⁸

The radicalization of Deleuze's group was impelled by Sartre's attempt to compromise with his critics in his lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism." As Baring has explained, the return and proliferation of different types of "humanisms" at that point was a way to criticize all forms of totalitarian "inhuman" regimes, and was a strategy related to the upcoming French elections.⁶⁹ In fact, in a question addressed to Sartre toward the end of "Existentialism Is a Humanism," the Marxist Pierre Naville contended that, at that time, everyone wanted to be a humanist. Thirty years later, Derrida [End Page 809] reached similar conclusions: during the 1940s, humanism was the common presupposition of French philosophy.⁷⁰

In his memoir, Tournier came back to the stinging disappointment provoked by Sartre's lecture on humanism. He, along with Deleuze and their friends, considered their idol, Sartre, to have turned back to humanism and to the notion of inner life, transforming himself into precisely the pathetic character of the Autodidact.⁷¹ An anonymous journalist reported the dissatisfaction of "some young Sartreans," "some desperate people," who, outside of the conference room, were claiming that Sartre was wrong and that they absolutely were anti-humanist.⁷²

V. A COMPACT SYSTEM

Tournier was one of these desperate youngsters. A few months after Sartre's lecture, he published his first philosophical essay in Espace. Its title, "L'impersonnalisme," was a clear attack on personalism, and was probably written in response to discussions that took place inside the Groupe Moré. Davy's thought underwent a change during the 1940s, mostly inspired by her confrontation with Simone Weil's unpublished writings. This change would coalesce in her monograph The Mysticism of Simone Weil.⁷³ As Brenna Moore has recently claimed, Davy criticized Maritain's and Mounier's personalism but did not follow the path of Dieu vivant, a journal that she nicknamed Dieu-mort-né (Stillborn God).⁷⁴ She found in Weil's late writings⁷⁵ a distrust for the notion of person and an ethics and a politics based on a process of purification aimed at reaching an impersonal level.⁷⁶

Despite a possible convergence, Tournier's attempt was not inspired by Christian mysticism but rather by a radicalized interpretation of Sartre's philosophy. [End Page 810] Tournier would later claim that this essay, where he implicitly settled with his master, was an out-and-out "miniature of a philosophical system," a "compact system."⁷⁷ While accepting Sartre's phenomenological concepts of epoché and phenomenon, Tournier argued for the concept of a world of phosphorescent objects, as opposed to the notion of intentionality conceived as a beam of light that consciousness casts upon things.⁷⁸ Tournier's conception seems to be compatible with the theology of Meister Eckhart who, according to Gandillac, promoted the idea of the "intentional immanence of the known object."⁷⁹ It was also inspired by the thought of Ponge, in which, according to Sartre, "things exist" by themselves without the need of subjectivity, and in which "one has to take their side," that is, "the side of the inhuman."⁸⁰

Inside this impersonal world, something emerges: the "other," considered as "the expression of a possible world" appearing within the first, objective world. This definition of otherness is found in the third part of Being and Nothingness, where the Other (with the capital "O") is what makes possible the objectivation of consciousness and the possibility of reflexivity.⁸¹ Sartre had used the term expression earlier in Being and Nothingness, writing that expressions, gestures, acts, and conducts, are "organized forms" depending on "an organizing unity" or "system" "located outside of our experience," the Other.⁸² The Other is an infinite series of possibilities,⁸³ and its transformation into an object reduces them into "dead-possibilities."⁸⁴ The Other is what provides meaning to phenomena such as acts and conduct, and even to the instruments one can use.

Tournier introduced slight changes to Sartre's philosophy. Only one of the "others" was called "the Other" with a capital letter [l'Autrui], namely the ego, or the Cartesian cogito. The Other, wrote Tournier, is not [End Page 811] the condition of existence of the world, but rather "a contingent or historical event, or, to borrow the Sartrean expression, an 'adventure that happens to the world.'"⁸⁵ In contrast to Sartre's, Tournier's Other is not what transforms one into an object, making reflexivity possible, but is the ego itself. The other is both my ego and the other's ego—something that emerges from the "objective world" or, as Sartre would have called it, from the prereflexive consciousness. Tournier sets the idea of the depersonalization of consciousness found in "Transcendence of the Ego" against the third part of Being and Nothingness. In Being and Nothingness, this depersonalization, which was intended to abolish the difference between the certitude of my ego and the other's ego, is considered insufficient to save phenomenology from the danger of solipsism. Tournier, by contrast, seems to believe that depersonalization must be taken to its extreme consequences, even at the risk of falling back into solipsism. What rationale underlies these theoretical torsions? To respond to this question, one must return to Deleuze's early essays, and to the discussions that took place in the circle of Gandillac, Davy, and Moré.

VI. SHAME AND COMMUNITY

The constitutive elements of Tournier's "miniature of a philosophical system" are present in most of the essays published by Deleuze. In the first, "Description of Woman," he explicitly credited Tournier for interpreting the concept of the Other as "expression of a possible world," but, given that "L'impersonnalisme" was published two years after Deleuze's first essay, it is likely that their respective modifications of Sartre's philosophy emerged from their conversations.

"Description of Woman" presupposes a realist interpretation of Sartre's phenomenology similar to Tournier's. Deleuze underlines that, in the immanent world of perception, things are meaningful in themselves, without the need for an ego: it is the Other that expresses the possibility of another world and causes the emergence of subjectivity. Just like Tournier, Deleuze focuses on the problem of otherness in permutations derived from Sartre, but the theoretical tensions he creates are slightly different from Tournier's. According to Tournier, the other is nothing but the ego (both mine and others'), while, according to Deleuze, who remains more faithful to Being and Nothingness, [End Page 812] it is the Other which allows for the emergence of the personal ego. Against Sartre, however, Deleuze argues that, in Being and Nothingness, the philosopher risks reducing the other to another empirical ego, whereas it has to be treated as an a priori other. As he writes in "Words and Profiles," "this strictly objective world, this world without a subject, holds in itself the principle of its own negation, its own annihilation…. That is the Other: 'the expression of a possible world.'"⁸⁶

Deleuze begins his analysis at the level of pure experience, proceeding to describe the existential behaviors (conduites existentielles) that can be adopted after subjectivation due to the male-Other's arrival, since he makes a distinction between the male and female Other. The fundamental passion—already described by Sartre in the first chapter of the third part of Being and Nothingness—is that of shame, or mediocrity.⁸⁷ Shame is brought on by the male-Other's objectifying gaze. Shame, Sartre claims, "reveals to me that I am this being … in order for me to be what I am, it suffices merely that the Other looks at me."⁸⁸ The shameful ego can react in a defensive way, constructing a fictional interiority, denying the Other's possible world, reducing him to a simple behavior without meaning, objectifying it. Humanism, and therefore personalism, contradicts Sartre's philosophical point of departure: humanism treats the Other as an ego, as a person endowed with an inner life, and not as the simple expression of an external possible world inside a pre-personal "objective" world. In "From Christ to the Bourgeoisie," Christianity seems to be the last avatar of humanism. It "has subjectified nature in the form of the body and natural life where sin takes hold, and it also subjectified spirit in the form of spiritual 'life.'"⁸⁹ It cannot reconstitute a unity between the two without calling on an interior life, containing eternal values, the proof of God's existence.

Nonetheless, the shameful ego can create a common world, starting from the world announced by the Other; this common world, which is based on friendship, is incarnated in a "group," a "team" (équipe), or even a "community" (communauté).⁹⁰ Sartre used the image of the team to render Heidegger's notion of Mitsein or "being-with." According to Sartre, the Other cannot be reduced to a mere instrument (ustensile) used to obtain something; therefore, the Dasein is always also a Mitsein, a being-with, and the [End Page 813] world is also a Mitwelt, a shared world. But the Mitsein is not yet a community—only a state of solitude and unconscious communion.⁹¹ To the Mitsein, Deleuze opposes the "team," the result of a deliberate choice posterior to the emergence of a series of possibilities expressed by the male-Other. Given that the world we experience is not the only one possible, the Other, who reveals another possible world, offers a friendship. Friendship inside the "team" is considered the best way to escape mediocrity.⁹²

The type of friendship characteristic of a team has political consequences, insofar as the members of the team fight for the realization of a possible world revealed by the leader of the team, conceived as a type of Other. This behavior is opposed to different types of individualistic behaviors grounded in the idea of an interior life. Both Christian, and, later, bourgeois values, call for a revolution; this revolution is not external, however, but internal, since it is the result of a spiritual conversion. In a footnote to "From Christ to the Bourgeoisie," Deleuze opposes Charles de Gaulle's exterior revolution to the interior one promoted by Marshal Pétain, drawing on the denunciatory tones of Sartre's Flies. In the play, the people of Argo, invaded by flies and tortured by remorse, are a metaphor for masochistic France after the defeat of the Phoney War, a nation unable to react to German Occupation.⁹³

VII. FRIENDSHIP AND REVOLUTION

Based on a discussion of the problem of Otherness, but in contrast to Tournier's "compact system," Deleuze's essays deal with more "concrete" phenomena, such as desire, community, and friendship. Deleuze's primary reference is the third chapter of the third part of Being and Nothingness: "First Attitude toward Others: Love, Language, Masochism"; "Second Attitude toward Others: Indifference, Desire, Hate, Sadism"; and "'Being-With' (Mitsein) and the 'We.'" This part of the book was one of the most discussed by Sartre's readers: it links closely with his fiction and plays and seems to lay the groundwork for the formulation of what Sartre had promised ten years before, in "Transcendence of the Ego," and which he continued to [End Page 814] promise at the end of Being and Nothingness—namely "an ethics and a politics."⁹⁴

To Sartre's interlocutors interested in social and moral problems, the third part of Being and Nothingness was either the target of their attacks—such was the case for most Catholic and communist intellectuals who argued that Sartre's philosophy led to individualistic, pessimistic, and immoral consequences—or the starting point for a dialogue. This was the dialogue that Sartre sought when, in the autumn of 1945, he gave his lecture on humanism, and it is precisely this dialogue that Deleuze and Tournier would have wanted never to happen: a negotiation with the humanists could weaken Sartre's original doctrine.

The Groupe Moré discussed, taking into account Being and Nothingness, problems such as the nature of the Other and its sexuality, love and friendship, community and society, and the status of religion and spirituality. Deleuze's "Mathesis, Science and Philosophy" and "From Christ to the Bourgeoisie"—dedicated to Davy, who seemed to be reacting to Deleuze's criticism in her own essays⁹⁵—should be interpreted as implicit responses to essays written by Davy and Gandillac.⁹⁶

In "Approches de l'amitié" (Reflections on friendship) Gandillac problematized his positions concerning friendship in an explicit dialogue with Sartre.⁹⁷ Following Being and Nothingness, Gandillac distinguished friendship, which accepts communion, from sexual love, in which the individual relationship isolates the two lovers and the friend group from the abstract community created through political institutions. Gandillac included friendship within religious experiences: he presents Christ as the helpful friend who does not refuse his friendship to anyone and "offers the most precious gift: that of the perfect life."⁹⁸ On this point, Davy claimed that [End Page 815] the community constituted by the Church would be the base of a revolution that would allow the passage from the old humanity to a new one.⁹⁹ Finally, Gandillac discussed Sartre's concept of Otherness: how to avoid the objectification implied by the gaze? The double risk of friendship consists in masochism and sadism—the subject either submits to his friend's desire or treats the friend as a simple means to accomplish his own desires. In both cases, it is the "spirit of seriousness" (esprit de sérieux) that prevails, reducing the For-itself to an In-itself. "If I become 'inseparable' from my friend," Gandillac claimed, "it does not mean that I was waiting for him, just as … the community [collectivité], conceived as a nut, waits for the bolt."¹⁰⁰ Gandillac, therefore, expressed doubts about the possibility of a moral philosophy grounded on Being and Nothingness. Community, which is supposed to aim at the edification of the people involved, is based on friendship, and friendship supposes a mutual trust, not the simple accomplishment of an anonymous task such as—as Sartre wrote in his description of the Mitsein— "working on the same assembly line."¹⁰¹

In "From Christ to the Bourgeoisie" and "Mathesis, Science and Philosophy" there are echoes of this debate. In his use of the famous pages on Being-for-Others in Being and Nothingness, Deleuze attempted to preserve Sartre's impersonalism. If the Other were treated as an "expression of a possible world," the political and moral problems implied in a conception of friendship that conceives the Other either as an In-itself or as a For-itself could be avoided. What Deleuze called the "revolutionary friendship" characteristic of his conception of community was therefore not altruistic nor merely instrumental: "The leader is the one who offers friendship, not love, but friendship within a group. Friendship, the team consists of realizing the possible external world that the leader has revealed…. And the revolutionary spirit offers us an end that must be realized through the strength and quantity of teammates."¹⁰²

As in "Description of Woman" and in "Words and Profiles," Deleuze's priority was to maintain Sartre's radicalism, preserving it from misinterpretations or compromises. The humanist compromise was possible because the Other was treated as an ego. That interpretation would lead Sartre's system—as "Existentialism Is a Humanism" had shown—to humanistic and [End Page 816] moralistic consequences. Just like Tournier,¹⁰³ Deleuze thought that, because of his quest for recognition and dialogue, Sartre, as the novelist Roger Nimier puts it, had "slipped into the ditch of humanism."¹⁰⁴

VIII. THE FUTURE OF INHUMANITY

In 1967 for the journal Critique, Deleuze reviewed Tournier's first novel, Friday, a retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. As Tournier himself admitted during an interview,¹⁰⁵ the novel was entirely constructed around "L'impersonnalisme." Deleuze's interpretation follows along similar lines.¹⁰⁶ The review, "A Theory of Otherness," would later be included as an appendix in Logic of Sense (1969) and is paraphrased in part at the end of the last chapter of Difference and Repetition. This text should therefore be interpreted as an attempt to provoke a confrontation with his friend. Deleuze presents Tournier's novel as the antithesis to a novel based on internal analysis.¹⁰⁷ Tournier's hero, Robinson, has "very little interiority."¹⁰⁸ His final goal is the dehumanization of his world, achieved by eliminating the figure of the Other. The Other is not another ego, but the condition through which we perceive; it is not a person, but an a priori, a "structure of the perceptive field," without which this field as a whole would not function as it indeed does. The Other—Deleuze mentions the example of the terrorized face, defined as the expression of a possible world—is the manifestation of the possibility of a world different from the present one; the Other gives rise to the splitting of subject and object, the passage of time, and the possibility of error. Along the same lines: objects, separated from the subject, appear only thanks to the Other. In the absence of the Other, subject and object are one and the same thing. Deleuze, following Tournier twenty years earlier, [End Page 817] conceived of consciousness not as a "light on objects," but as a "pure phosphorescence of things in themselves."¹⁰⁹ This notion of phosphorescent objects was already present in Deleuze's first book on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), a revised version of his DES (diplôme d'études supérieures) dissertation of 1947.

Robinson's logbook, which takes the form of a first-person narration within Tournier's novel, is strictly a description of experience. "To exist," Robinson asks, "What do the words mean?" "It means to be outside," he responds. "That which is outside exists. That which is within does not exist. My thoughts, images and dreams do not exist. If Speranza is no more than a sensation, or a bundle of sensations, then she does not exist. And I myself exist only insofar as I escape from myself to join the others."¹¹⁰ During his stay on the island, the protagonist's experience of depersonalization and of a gradual fusion with the island, with the exterior world, is nothing but regression to the objective phosphorescent world described by Tournier in his 1945 essay and by Sartre in "Transcendence of the Ego." Robinson distinguishes between two types of knowledge. The first is mediated by the Other, while the second is immediate. In this latter case, there is no distinction between consciousness of an object and the object itself; there is no distinction between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, between Robinson and the island Speranza. At this naïve, primary, and instinctive level, we find ourselves confronting what Sartre called the "solitude of the known."¹¹¹ This is the transcendental field that Sartre described as "a world whose objects, in addition to their qualities of warmth, odor, shape, etc…. [have] the qualities of repulsive, attractive, delightful, useful, etc." and where "these qualities … [are] forces bearing a certain power over us."¹¹² According to Deleuze, these two levels must be kept absolutely separate, and knowledge, conceived as a temporal identification with the world, cannot but "escape" personal identity. In an undated manuscript, probably from 1946 or 1947, and included in a letter sent to Alquié, Deleuze neatly separates the problem of personal identity (moi) from that of the transcendental.¹¹³ [End Page 818]

Tournier describes this world in his book Vol du vampire (The flight of the vampire), mentioning Roquentin's "little crisis of madness" in Nausea as its jumping-off point. This crisis, which induces nausea, is nothing but Sartre's metaphysical experience, the "profound intuition of the authentic ground of things." This crisis starts with the "rupture of all links with others [autrui], with the instauration of a ferocious and inhuman solitude." Looking at his face in the mirror, Roquentin, writes Tournier, sees "nature without men."¹¹⁴ According to Tournier, this expression, used by Sartre, invokes the fourth day of Creation,¹¹⁵ the moment in which God had created light and night, plants and animals, but not yet man: "This nature without men cannot be seen … by a knower." It is "by itself, absolutely." The experience of nausea is therefore not a meaning "projected" by the subject; rather, it is objectively inscribed in things: "The nausea is not in Roquentin's state of mind. It is the very nature of things that surround it, and to which he belongs, things between the things."¹¹⁶

Why did Tournier follow Rousseau and use Defoe's novel, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, to describe pure experience? And why did he set out a parallel between the desert island and the transcendental field? Deleuze wrote in "From Christ to the Bourgeoisie" that, before the arrival of Christianity, there was "a union of Nature and Spirit" consisting in an "external world." The transcendental field is nothing but the world before the original sin, before the fall, due to the appearance of the Other and, therefore, of the ego. The State of Nature is the world in which there is no separation between subject and object, a complete fusion of man and nature. This parallel is even suggested in No Exit, when Sartre uses the famous formula "Hell is other people," and when, in Being and Nothingness, he claims, "My original fall is the existence of the Other."¹¹⁷ In this book, Sartre evokes the "pantheistic intuitions" which Rousseau "several times described as concrete psychic events in his history." Rousseau claimed that "on those occasions, he melted into the universe, that the world alone was suddenly found present as an absolute presence and unconditioned totality."¹¹⁸ This state of fusion and full presence in which the Other [End Page 819] is absent, in which nothing "separates the knower from the known,"¹¹⁹ is very similar to the transcendental field. In this sense, in knowledge, Sartre argues—using the expression that Tournier would use in "L'impersonnalisme" and, later, in Friday—there is a "pure solitude of the known." Even Gandillac suggested a parallel between Being and Nothingness and Defoe's novel when, in his 1945 essay on friendship, he underlined the absence of friendship between Robinson and Friday, who is transformed into something between "a clever dog, a female companion and a servant," responding to "a pure need for a Mitsein, which is still instrumental."¹²⁰

During the 1950s, Deleuze wrote a short essay indirectly dealing with the problem of genesis and origin, "Desert Islands," in which he invoked Giraudoux's Suzanne et la Pacifique and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. At the same moment, while he was teaching Rousseau at the Sorbonne, he published an essay on the philosopher,¹²¹ portraying him—in drawing a very "Pongesque" portrait—as someone who wanted to restore "our natural relationship with things," to preserve us from "all too human" relationships.¹²²

In his doctoral dissertations, in a much more erudite way, Deleuze developed the consequences of this "ontological" reading of Sartre's idea of the transcendental field. The problem of the transcendental and of its relationship with the empirical was progressively connected to the problem of Being and of its relationship with individuated beings. Starting from Expressionism in Philosophy, which he published in 1968 but had nearly finished at the turn of the 1960s,¹²³ Deleuze studied Spinoza's scholastic heritage, briefly discussing the doctrines of Aquinas, Suarez, Meister Eckhart, and especially Duns Scotus. Following the works of Gilson and Gandillac,¹²⁴ he found in Duns Scotus's doctrine of the univocity of [End Page 820] Being¹²⁵—which he presented as an alternative to the Aquinas's doctrine of analogy of Being—and then in the idea of the substance proposed by Spinoza—considered by Deleuze as the fiercest of Descartes's enemies, and, by Gilson, one of the possible outcomes of a mis-reading of Duns Scotus¹²⁶—inspiration for sketching a philosophy of "immanence," a term he used as early as 1948, in his review of Davy's Aimer toutes les mains.¹²⁷ Had the connection between the notions of transcendental field and of substance, namely between the noetic and ontological register, been inspired by a short digression on Spinoza in "Transcendence of the Ego," where Sartre compares the pre-reflective consciousness to the substance?¹²⁸ We cannot be certain. In any case, in Expressionism and Philosophy, Deleuze read the relation between the univocal Being and individuated beings as an immanent relation of expression, a notion with which he was obsessed during the 1940s and 1950s.¹²⁹ That none among the rest of the cohort of scholars born during the interwar years interested in problems proper to modern and contemporary philosophy engaged in the study of medieval concepts may suggest that the content of Deleuze's "mature works" bore the trace of debates that happened twenty years earlier. [End Page 821]

IX. THE "CONVERTS TO THE OBJECT"

During the late 1940s, Deleuze and Tournier were not the only ones to interpret Sartre this way. Many in their generation were fascinated by the idea of an "inhuman" world and likewise condemned Sartre's humanism for either theoretical or political reasons.¹³⁰ In 1948, Jean-François Lyotard participated in an inquiry, promoted by Les temps modernes, regarding those born in 1925. According to Lyotard, Sartre's generation gave to those who were born during the 1920s the idea that "man was able to do whatever he wanted" with the world, but, that this very world showed all "its hostile thickness." Lyotard's generation reacted with "radical rupture"; they decided to turn away from humanism: not toward the subject, action, and humanity, but toward the object, passivity, inhumanity. If "they have killed Man"—Lyotard confessed—then "we desert the party of humanity [parti pris de l'homme] for the party of things [parti pris des choses] …: our common desire [is] to exist in the manner of the in-itself."¹³¹ The same attitude can be found in Alain Robbe-Grillet's first novels and his essays. According to Robbe-Grillet, the task of the new literature was to reach an inhuman level, with no metaphors filling the gap between man and world. In one of his most famous essays, published in For a New Novel, Robbe-Grillet argues against the existentialist humanism of the absurd: "The world is neither significant nor absurd. It is, quite simply…. Things are things and man is only man."¹³² Novelists should elaborate a style of writing deprived of human traces. According to Robbe-Grillet, humanization was still present in Camus's Plague, in Sartre's Nausea, and in even in Ponge's Le parti pris des choses. As he would later explain,¹³³ this material writing (chosisme) was conceived as a radicalization of the Sartrean idea of an empty and impersonal consciousness.¹³⁴ [End Page 822]

As time passed, the distance between Sartre and the philosophical establishment grew, on account of the incompatibility between the Sartrean "humanist" model of the engaged intellectual and the growing professionalization of philosophers like Deleuze. In a letter to Alquié at the beginning of 1948, Deleuze expressed "disgust" with "Sartre's book on Baudelaire," calling it "absolutely commercial," as well with Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity.¹³⁵ To Deleuze, who was at the time a young teacher of philosophy influenced by the "structuralist" historian of philosophy Martial Gueroult, Sartre's way of philosophizing started looking unserious.¹³⁶ He wrote to Alquié that he believed philosophy cannot start from the characters' "attitudes," but only from something like an "abstract and systematic" "monologue."¹³⁷ At the same time, Lanzmann wrote to Alquié from Tübingen—where, in the framework of a postwar diplomatic project, he was teaching French literature—to express the same rejection of the current "abounding humanism" characteristic of both Les temps modernes and Esprit, considering it to be a frivolous philosophy for "novelists." Lanzmann admitted that he had run the risk of becoming a "sinister humanist, romantic and confusionist …, convinced that the world is absurd," but that he was saved by "three rationalists": Alquié, Deleuze, and Tournier.¹³⁸

Deleuze's generation had made a clear choice between two possible interpretations of Being and Nothingness that Alquié described in a 1945 essay in Cahiers du Sud. In "L'être et le néant selon Jean-Paul Sartre" ("Being and Nothingness according to Jean-Paul Sartre"), he stressed the coexistence of two contradictory aspects in the book: on one hand, resignation and pessimism, and on the other hand, engagement and voluntarism; on one hand, materialism, and on the other hand, a sort of spiritualism; on one hand, an inhuman realism that took man to be an "adventure that comes to being," and on the other hand, an idealism according to which consciousness is what gives sense to the world. According to Alquié, "many young [End Page 823] people believed they had found a long-awaited doctrine, the philosophical expression of their state of mind."¹³⁹ A number of these young people chose the inhuman side of Sartre's work, criticizing the phenomenological, human, and idealistic side.

Sartre's generation did not understand the meaning of the new generation's "inhumanist" attitude. On July 20, 1946, Alquié wrote a short review of the latest issues of three journals, Espace, Jeune Révolution (no. 2), and Les temps modernes (no. 9), where Sartre published his important essay "Materialism and Revolution."¹⁴⁰ Alquié denounced the "experiment" attempted by Clément, Deleuze, and Tournier, considering it to be a contradictory synthesis of materialism and idealism. His students were risking theoretical stasis, since they had been "stuffed" (remplies) with Sartre to the point of "overflowing" (en déborder).¹⁴¹ Moreover, they had been unable to solve the supposed contradictions of Being and Nothingness, constructing the alleged "third party"—between idealism and materialism—that Sartre had described in "Materialism and Revolution." Thus, they simply invented a "new way of speaking"; for example, instead of saying "I perceive the world," one would say "the World offers itself to the Other." According to Alquié, Tournier's and Deleuze's inventions were "almost useless," and, just like Ponge, they were nothing but "freshly converted to the object."¹⁴²

Sartre had already criticized Ponge's choice of taking the side of the inhuman, the side of things. On his account, the attempt was destined to fail, for a completely inhuman world is impossible and "consciousness, tearing itself out of the object, [always] discovers itself."¹⁴³ Inhumanism led to an unexpected result, the reintroduction of "contemplative consciousness which, exactly because it is consciousness of the world, is necessarily situated outside the world."¹⁴⁴ Sartre recalled that his apparent turn toward humanism [End Page 824] disappointed many of the younger generation attached to "the part of non-humanism contained in Nausea." He described "the generation of 1925" as victims of a "teenage daze" that made them despise their fathers. For him, the disorientation of those young people threw them into the arms of the Communist Party—which was indeed the case for some of Deleuze's friends, such as Revault d'Alonnes and François Châtelet—or into a "desperate" nihilism, consisting either in the betrayal of the facts or in a "dandyism," which was in part the case for Deleuze. Five years later—Sartre claimed—they all changed their minds: "With the arrival of the Marshall Plan this generation of dancers and madmen had been hit in the face by the Cold War…. They do what they have to do, modestly, earn their daily bread, have a 403, a country house, a wife, some children. But, all of a sudden, hope and despair has abandoned them. These kids were about to live, they were 'on their way': their train stopped in the middle of the countryside. They will go nowhere and will do nothing."¹⁴⁵

The train that Deleuze and his friends were on certainly made a stop in the middle of the countryside, but it remained there only for the necessary time, in conformity with the restrictions of the rail network, and then changed course, taking a direction that differed profoundly from the one their mentors encouraged them to take. In the case of Deleuze, his philosophical trajectory would bear the traces of the peculiar discussions that happened during the short period spanning from 1943 until 1948 and would be marked by his own conceptual obsessions. [End Page 825]