Passed over in Silence: Deleuze, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and an Ethics of Learning

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I very much enjoyed reading this article. It is very well written and makes a useful contribution to the field. More specifically, I was impressed by the way in which the article connects ethics and metaphysics, as well as the connections between Deleuze, Spinoza and Wittgenstein. I suspect that experts in the latter two philosophers will have much to gain from this article in particular. To this end, more elaboration on Wittgenstein (and the key commentators in this field) in section 3 could be of strategic help, as this could help convince those sceptical about Deleuze. But this is only a suggestion and is not a change that I think is necessary (the author comes back to Wittgenstein near the end, but may have lost the Wittgenstein crowd by this point).

As a second suggestion, I wonder whether Deleuze’s late essay Immanence: A Life might contain relevant content for the author’s arguments, given its focus on ethics, immanence and singularities: ‘A singular essence, a life…’.

As a third and final suggestion: In the beginning of section 2 the author makes clear the importance of the opening of DR to their arguments, especially the phrase about the ‘internal repetition of the singular’. It could strengthen the argument to note the connections of this aspect to Peguy, since this is the source of the two examples of Bastille Day and Monet’s water lilies. For more on this see the second half of Craig Lundy’s chapter on Peguy in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage II. I can see how heading in this direction might be tangential to the author’s objectives, and perhaps adding in another philosopher would be one too many – but I thought that I’d mention it just in case there were some useful connections.

I strongly recommend this articular for publication.

Author Response

I appreciated this reviewer’s comments. They did not really require that I do much to the current essay. They did suggest adding some discussion of Peguy. Although I considered this, I felt my essay was already long and I don’t really consider myself expert enough in Peguy to say anything extremely interesting about him. As a result, I did not follow through on their suggestions.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Several secondary literature works need to be cited - especially from specialized journals from the last five years.
The paper contains many pages with too many citations; in addition, secondary literature should not be cited (exceptionally, citations can be given in the foot-notes).

Author Response

I added some of the citations I think the reviewer might have been looking for. My central focus was on the primary texts and given the paucity of discussions of the themes I develop here there was not much secondary literature to cite.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article is not without merits, but is based on a wrong premise: that "there are only a handful of references to ethics in Deleuze’s work, and much of it critical when referring to moral theories" (and for this reason, states the author, "there has only been a handful of attempts to plumb the depths of this work for its ethical implications"). Not only does the author refer exclusively to a very narrow part of the vast body of secondary literature on Deleuze (limited to Anglophone interpreters, mostly from the analytical tradition), which per se could have been a way to endow their reading with a specific twist; the author also seem not to be aware of the fact that Deleuze explicitly builds an ethical position on Spinoza's ethics in his lectures on Spinoza at Vincennes and in "Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy", a Spinozian/Nietzschean ethics of potency that reverberates profoundly in most of his works, including those with Guattari. This leads to profound misunderstandings. One could propose an alternative interpretation (in this case an ethics of learning), but must at least consider the connections with Deleuze's explicit ethical position. In sum, the article presents a barely recognizable Deleuze starting from wrong assumptions, due to the lack of knowledge on the subject and of the related secondary literature. It is possible that this is a problem internal to the Anglophone literature on Deleuze, also due to the lack of translated courses. However, again, I cannot but reject this well-crafted, yet wrong article. 

Author Response

I think this reviewer does not fully appreciate the development of Deleuze's thoughts over the course of the 70s-90s, where the Nietzsche-inflected themes that were important in the 1960s, themes that were coupled with Deleuze's work on Spinoza as well, gave way to a more Spinozist project. This project becomes most clear in What is Philosophy? where Deleuze and Guattari refer to Spinoza as the "prince of philosophers," and it is evident in Deleuze's last essay, "Immanence: a life". I did not highlight this development in the original draft, but I have done so now. I think this should largely address the concerns this reader had.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author still does not take into account the main text that needs to be analyzed in this case, Deleuze's courses on Spinoza, either because they do not know them or because they want to craft a certain image of Deleuze, that however is not justified by the texts. The hermeneutic exercise has limits. At least, they should declare it and acknowledge the fact that their reading is deliberately partial and aims to give Deleuze a new role in the history of thought, not philologically accurate, but potentially interesting to some. This remains in any case a philosophical fantasy. 

Author Response

I appreciate the reviewer's feedback, and I appreciate their concern that I should refer to Deleuze's Spinoza lectures. I have indeed read these lectures. His lectures on painting, as well as those on Spinoza, film, and Foucault are indeed amazing. That said, it is not uncontroversial to treat unpublished lectures and notes on a par with published books and essays, books where the author has had the chance to go back and rework them to their satisfaction. This is an issue that is also at play in Nietzsche scholarship as well. The consensus among most Nietzsche scholars is to give a decided preference to the published works, while not ignoring the unpublished fragments, especially if they support one's reading of the published works. Now admittedly Deleuze's lectures are more polished and refined than many of Nietzsche's unpublished fragments are, but if my reading of Deleuze is not undermined by relying upon and preferring the published texts, then I will give a preference to those and I have not gotten feedback, until now, that it is a mistake to do this, and certainly not a philsophical fantasy. If anything, this is a risk one is more likely to take on with unpublished notes and manuscripts. Indeed I have a fairly large body of work in the form of books, refereed articles, and chapters in edited collections where my reading of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Spinoza, has not been found to be fundamentally mistaken. My work in this essay largely builds on my earlier work. I think it would be nice to sit down and discuss these issues with the reviewer, and it might indeed be to our mutual benefit, for I am indeed open to the possibility that there are readings of Deleuze to be found in the lectures that are not to be found in his published work, but I do not see that my reading, relying on the published texts as I do, is mistaken or that it crafts a particularly limited image of Deleuze by doing so.