Anti-Oedipus and Other Reflections: Lecture 2, 03 June 1980

<p><em>The Deleuze Seminars</em> is a collection of audio recordings, transcriptions, and English translations of, and supplemental materials from, the lectures French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave during his career at the University of Paris 8.</p>

<p>“Anti-Oedipus and Other Reflections” was a two-lecture seminar given in late May and early June of 1980. Here, Deleuze reflects on his well-known book, <em>Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia</em> (co-authored with Félix Guattari, 1972; English translation 1977), and other concepts he had been developing up to and at that time.</p>

<p>In many ways, this final session at Vincennes is a model session in which Deleuze constructs a philosophical problem and its justifications. First, he reviews the importance of lines of flight, suggesting life consists in living on lines of flight with their inherent dangers from possible lines of destruction, and referring to Blanchot’s <em>The Work of Fire,</em> he insists on the immeasurable distance between “he” and “I”, whereby one is deprived of the power of “I”, on the basis of which the whole of language can be organized, perhaps as a matter of style. Contrasting Émile Benveniste’s work on how the third-person pronoun, Deleuze reaches the core of his problem in construction: whereas in Blanchot, language submits to a surface tension that pulls language toward its periphery, toward the “he” that no longer designates any person, in Benveniste, a concentration or interior centering occurs that drags the whole of language towards the personal pronouns. Blanchot implicitly rejects such “personology” in favor of a movement that surpassed the “I” and “you” towards a third-person “he”/“it” that is even more profound and pertains to no person, notably the derivation of people individuated as events evident in writers as diverse as Kafka, the Brontë sisters, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. From this, Deleuze shifts to the question of morality, contrasting Benveniste’s moralism of the person to a morality of the tribe, reading Joë Bousquet’s phrase, “My wounded existed before; I was born to embody it”, meaning that an event can only exist insofar as it is <em>effectuated </em>or realized in people or things, yet always with something in the event that surpasses its effectuation. This sense of the event brings Deleuze to Bousquet’s phrase, “The problem is to become worthy of what happens to us”, to accept the event, not in resignation, but as something incorporeal, no longer <em>my </em>wound, but the <em>it-</em>wound. Then, Deleuze entertains several students’ questions, one on death and suicide, another on the sense of “being worthy”, another on his use of the term “morality”. In response to the latter, Deleuze refers to Spinoza’s use of the term “ethics”, linking it as well to “ethology”, and concluding the construction of the philosophical problem by returning to Blanchot’s use of personal pronouns, particularly his use of the “he/it” (<em>il</em>), linking this to the “it” of the event. Finally, in departing from Vincennes, Deleuze mentions that while he does not know what he will be teaching, his dream would be to organize a course on “What is philosophy?”, but that anything he teaches will depend on those who attend his courses</p>

<p>This dataset in its second version contains the two Open Document Texts of the transcription and translation of the session (in odt format), three .mp3 audio files of the recorded lecture as well as an aggregate mp3 of the entire lecture, and the original Paris 8 French transcription. In version 1, also available here, the session’s transcription and translation are published as both pdf and plain text files, as well as also available three .mp3 audio files and the aggregate mp3 of the entire lecture.</p>

<p>Note: The French transcription for the part 2 audio file is incomplete. The last (approx.) 16 minutes has not been transcribed. The transcription ends at the (approx.) 39:21 mark of the part 2 audio file, the (approx.) 1:41:30 mark of the complete audio file.</p>

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<p><em>Les Séminaires de Deleuze</em> sont une collection d'enregistrements audio, de transcriptions et de traductions en anglais et de documents complémentaires des conférences que le philosophe français Gilles Deleuze a donné lors de sa carrière à l'Université de Paris 8.</p>

<p>«Anti-Œdipe et autres réflexions» était un séminaire de deux conférences donné à la fin de mai et au début de juin 1980. Deleuze réfléchit sur son livre bien connu <em>Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe</em> (co-auteur de Félix Guattari, 1972 ; traduction anglaise 1977), et d'autres concepts qu'il avait développés jusqu'alors.</p>

<p>Dans la conférence du 3 juin 1980, les sujets de discussion comprennent: les lignes de fuite; la géoanalyse et la psychanalyse; le danger des lignes de fuite et la vie; linguistique; l'écrivain, philosophe et théoricien littéraire français Maurice Blanchot; l'écrivain germanophone Franz Kafka; la distance entre le <em>Je</em> et le <em>il</em>; les écoles de pensée sur le <em>Moi</em>; le langage et le <em>il</em> impersonnel; la singularité pure; le psychologue, philosophe et médecin français Pierre Janet, son <em>De l'Angoisse à l'extase</em> et l'hystérie; le linguiste et sémioticien français Émile Benveniste et le pronom personnel; le philosophe allemand G.W.F. Hegel, <em>Phénoménologie de l'esprit</em>, la dialectique et le concept de <em>Hic et Nunc</em>; le concept linguistique de '<em>shifter</em>' (d’embrayeur); le philosophe allemand Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz et le<em> pur être de collection</em>; individuation, personne et événement; la pensée anglaise; une morale de l'individuation, avec l'exemple de la tribu; le poète français Joë Bousquet et l'idée «ma blessure me préexistait»; l'effectuation de l'événement; la dignité face à l'événement; et l'éthique.</p>