Books by Daniel W Smith
Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Table of Contents:
Introduction - Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail, and Daniel Smith
Part I Encounter... more Table of Contents:
Introduction - Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail, and Daniel Smith
Part I Encounters
1. Deleuze and Foucault: A Philosophical Friendship - François Dosse
2. Theatrum Philosophicum - Michel Foucault
3. Michel Foucault's Main Concepts - Gilles Deleuze
4. When and How I’ve read Foucault - Toni Negri (translated by Kristopher Klotz)
Part II Method and Critique
5. Philosophy as Cultural Critique in Foucault and Deleuze - Colin Koopman
6. Foucault’s Deleuzean Methodology of the Late 1970s - John Protevi
7. Deleuze’s Foucault: A Metaphysical Fiction - Frédéric Gros (translated by Samantha Bankston)
Part III Convergence and Divergence
8. Speaking Out For Others: Philosophy’s Activity in Deleuze and Foucault (and Heidegger) - Len Lawlor and Janae Sholtz
9. Philosophy and History in Deleuze and Foucault - Paul Patton
10. Becoming and History: Deleuze’s Reading of Foucault - Anne Sauvagnargues (translated by Alex Feldman)
11. Foucault and the Image of Thought - Kevin Thompson
12. The Regularities of the Statement: Deleuze on Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge - Mary Beth Mader
Part IV Desire, Power and Resistance
13. Desire and Pleasure - Gilles Deleuze
14. Against the Incompatibility Thesis: A rather Different Reading of the Desire-Pleasure Problem - Nicolae Morar and Marjorie Gracieuse
15. Biopower and Control Societies - Thomas Nail
16. Two Concepts of Resistance: Foucault and Deleuze - Dan W. Smith
Appendix
17. Meeting Deleuze - Paul Rabinow
18. Foucault and Prison - Paul Rabinow
"I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-t... more "I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times.' Letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970.
Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.
Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault are widely accepted to be central figures of post‐war French p... more Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault are widely accepted to be central figures of post‐war French philosophy. Philosophers, cultural theorists, and others have devoted considerable
effort to the critical examination of the work of each of these thinkers, but despite the strong biographical and philosophical connection between Foucault and Deleuze, very little has been done to explore the relationship between them. This special issue of Foucault Studies is the first collection of essays to address this critical deficit with a rigorous comparative discussion of the work of these two philosophers.
This collection of essays thus brings together both senior and junior scholars from diverse backgrounds to clarify the implications of this important philosophical encounter between Foucault and Deleuze.
Marco Altamirano’s essay focuses on the shared concepts of “milieu” and “machine,” in Deleuze and Foucault. Vernon W. Cisney’s essay defend’s a Deleuzian politics by drawing on an important political concept shared with Foucault: “becoming other.” William E. Connolly’s essay offers an exploration of creativity and the ambiguous role it plays in the understanding of freedom that we find in Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault. Erin Gilson’s essay offers an original account of the shared methodology of “problematization” found in both
Deleuze and Foucault. Wendy Grace’s essay traces Deleuze and Foucault’s shared Nietzschean philosophical origins. Chris Penfield’s essay articulates a theory of “transversal politics”
common to both Deleuze and Foucault. Finally, Dianna Taylor’s essay compares the respective ontologies of Deleuze and Foucault.
Published Papers by Daniel W Smith
The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, 2012
This article examines Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum, which Deleuze
formulated in the... more This article examines Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum, which Deleuze
formulated in the context of his reading of Nietzsche’s project of “overturning Platonism.” The
essential Platonic distinction, Deleuze argues, is more profound than the speculative distinction
between model and copy, original and image. The deeper, practical distinction moves between
two kinds of images or eidolon, for which the Platonic Idea is meant to provide a concrete criterion
of selection “Copies” or icons (eikones) are well-grounded claimants to the transcendent
Idea, authenticated by their internal resemblance to the Idea, whereas “simulacra” (phantasmata)
are like false claimants, built on a dissimilarity and implying an essential perversion or
deviation from the Idea. If the goal of Platonism is the triumph of icons over simulacra, the
inversion of Platonism would entail an affirmation of the simulacrum as such, which must thus
be given its own concept. Deleuze consequently defines the simulacrum in terms of an internal
dissimilitude or “disparateness,” which in turn implies a new conception of Ideas, no longer
as self-identical qualities (the auto kath’hauto), but rather as constituting a pure concept of
difference. An inverted Platonism would necessarily be based on a purely immanent and differential
conception of Ideas. Starting from this new conception of the Idea, Deleuze proposes to
take up the Platonic project anew, rethinking the fundamental figures of Platonism (selection,
repetition, ungrounding, the question-problem complex) on a purely differential basis. In this
sense, Deleuze’s inverted Platonism can at the same time be seen as a rejuvenated Platonism
and even a completed Platonism.
“Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Deleuze and Badiou Revisited,” in Southern Journal... more “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Deleuze and Badiou Revisited,” in Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2003), 15 September 2003, ISSN 0038-4283, pp. 411-449
Pierre Klossowski's Living Currency, which Michel Foucault called 'the greatest book of our time'... more Pierre Klossowski's Living Currency, which Michel Foucault called 'the greatest book of our time' , takes its title from a parody of a classical utopia that appears at the end of the book. 1 Klossowski imagines 'a phase in industrial production where producers are able to demand "objects of sensation" from consumers as a form of payment. These objects would be living beings' (LC 72-3). 2 Human beings, in other words, would be traded as currency: employers would pay their male workers 'in women' , female workers would be paid 'in boys' , and so on. This is neither prostitution nor slavery, where humans are bought and sold using monetary currency. Rather, it is humans themselves that are used as currency, a living currency, and they can function as currency because they are sources of sensation, emotion and pleasure. Far from being imaginary or ideal, however, Klossowski insists that this counter-utopia already exists in contemporary capitalism. 'The whole of modern industry, ' he writes, 'even though it does not literally resort to such exchanges, rests on a form of trade mediated by the sign of an inert currency that neutralizes the nature of the objects being exchanged. It thus rests on a simulacrum of this kind of trade. ' Living Currency is an exploration of this claim that the monetary economy is a simulacrum or parody of the economy of the passions.
The 'Apparatus of Capture' plateau expands and alters the theory of the state presented in the th... more The 'Apparatus of Capture' plateau expands and alters the theory of the state presented in the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus, while at the same time providing a final overview of the sociopolitical philosophy developed throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It develops a series of challenging theses about the state, the first and most general of which is a thesis against social evolution: the state did not and could not have evolved out of 'primitive' hunter-gatherer societies. The idea that human societies progressively evolve took on perhaps its best-known form in Lewis Henry Morgan's 1877 book, Ancient Society; Or: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (Morgan 1877; Carneiro 2003), which had a profound influence on nineteenth-century thinkers, especially Marx and Engels. Although the title of the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus-'Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men'-is derived from Morgan's book, the universal history developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is directed against conceptions of linear (or even multilinear) social evolution. Deleuze and Guattari are not denying social change, but they are arguing that we cannot understand social change unless we see it as taking place within a field of coexistence. Deleuze and Guattari's second thesis is a correlate of the first: if the state does not evolve from other social formations, it is because it creates its own conditions (ATP 446). Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the state begins with a consideration of the nature of ancient despotic states, such as Egypt or Babylon. What was the origin of such empires? And how did they acquire their astonishing dominance? Marx proposed a famous answer to
If God does not exist, everything is permissible.' Deleuze likes to invert this Dostoyevskian for... more If God does not exist, everything is permissible.' Deleuze likes to invert this Dostoyevskian formula from The Brothers Karamazov, because, he says, the opposite is in fact the case: it is with God that everything is permissible. This is obviously true morally, since the worst atrocities have always managed to find a divine justification, and belief in God has never been a guarantor of morality. But it is also true aesthetically and philosophically. Medieval art, for example, is filled with images of God, and it would be tempting to see this merely as an inevitable constraint of the era, imposed from without by the Church. Deleuze suggests a different hypothesis. In the hands of great painters like El Greco, Tintoretto and Giotto, this constraint became the condition of a radical emancipation: in painting the divine, one could take literally the idea that God must not be represented, an idea that resulted in an extraordinary liberation of line, colour, form, and movement. With God, painting found a freedom it would not have had otherwise-a properly pictorial atheism. 1 The same was true in philosophy. Until the revolution of the eighteenth century, philosophers were constantly speaking of God, to the point where philosophy seemed completely compromised by theology and the demands of the Church. But, in the hands of great philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, this constraint became the condition of an equally extraordinary liberation. With God, philosophical concepts were freed from the traditional task that had been imposed on them-the representation of things-and allowed to assume fantastic dimensions. With the concept of God, everything was permissible. Or almost everything, for thinkers (like Spinoza) who went too far with the concept, or went too fast, often did so at their own peril. Deleuze thus harbours neither the antagonism of the 'secular' who find the concept of God outmoded, nor the angst or mourning of those for whom the loss of God was crisis-provoking, nor the faith of those who would like to retrieve the concept in a new form. He remained fascinated with theological concepts, and regarded medieval theologians in particular as a magnificent breed of thinkers who were able to invent, in the name of God, remarkable systems of logic and physics. Indeed, at several points in his writings, he picked up on certain
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that a general theory of society must be a generalise... more In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that a general theory of society must be a generalised theory of flows. This is hardly a straightforward claim, and this paper attempts to examine the grounds for it. Why should socio-political theory be based on a theory of flows rather than, say, a theory of the social contract, or a theory of the State, or the questions of legitimation or revolution, or numerous other possible candidates? The concept of flow (and the related notions of code and stock), I argue, is derived from contemporary economic theory, and most notably John Maynard Keynes. Deleuze and Guattari remained Marxists, not only because they held that contemporary political philosophy must inevitably be centred on the analysis of capitalism, but also because they held, following Marx himself, that the Marxist analysis of capital must constantly be transformed and adapted to new conditions. Thus, while certain aspects of Marx's analysis disappear from Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they are supplemented by the addition of new concepts adequate to the contemporary state of capitalism. The paper concludes, then, with an analysis of the role played by the concepts of flow, code and stock in Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy.
In the popular mind, metaphysics is often characterized as the philosophical theory of everything... more In the popular mind, metaphysics is often characterized as the philosophical theory of everything that pertains to the Beyond, to what is beyond experience-God, the soul, the spiritual, belief in the afterlife (Adorno, 2000, p. 6). No doubt this is what led F. H. Bradley to quip that metaphysics is simply an attempt to find bad reasons for what one is going to believe anyway (cited in van Inwagen, 2002, p. 14). Translated into philosophical terms, this would imply that metaphysics is a philosophy of the transcendent as opposed to the immanent. Nietzsche famously ridiculed metaphysics as a doctrine that assumes the existence of a world behind or beyond the world that we know and can know (the 'two worlds'). In Zarathustra, he dubbed this other world the Hinterwelt, the 'back-world', and he called those metaphysicians who concerned themselves with this other world Hinterwelter, 'backworldsmen' (an allusion to the word 'backwoodsmen', Hinterwälder) (Nietzsche, 1954, p. 142). 1 Nietzsche's target was primarily Platonism: behind the world of phenomena or appearances, there was supposed to be concealed a truly real, permanent and unchanging world of essences, existing in itself, and the task of metaphysics was to unravel and reveal this other transcendent world. In this regard, metaphysics can be seen to be the result of a secularization of mythical and magical thinking-Plato's Ideas have been called gods turned into concepts (Adorno, 2000, pp. 5, 18). Yet it would be simplistic to identify metaphysics with transcendence tout court. In its most general sense, metaphysics is an attempt to determine the constitutive structures of Being on the basis of thought alone, and thus it is a form of philosophy that takes concepts (or Ideas or Forms) as its object. This is why, from the start, metaphysics has been intertwined with problems of logic and epistemology, culminating in Hegel's teaching that logic and metaphysics were really one and the same, immanent to each other. It is true that in Plato, the most transcendent of metaphysicians, these concepts were deemed to be of a higher order of being than existing things; yet even in Plato's late period, one can already find the phenomenal world asserting itself increasingly against the Idea, perhaps under Aristotle's growing influence. The primary object of metaphysics, in other words, is not transcendence per se but rather the relation between transcendence and immanence, between essence
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Books by Daniel W Smith
Introduction - Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail, and Daniel Smith
Part I Encounters
1. Deleuze and Foucault: A Philosophical Friendship - François Dosse
2. Theatrum Philosophicum - Michel Foucault
3. Michel Foucault's Main Concepts - Gilles Deleuze
4. When and How I’ve read Foucault - Toni Negri (translated by Kristopher Klotz)
Part II Method and Critique
5. Philosophy as Cultural Critique in Foucault and Deleuze - Colin Koopman
6. Foucault’s Deleuzean Methodology of the Late 1970s - John Protevi
7. Deleuze’s Foucault: A Metaphysical Fiction - Frédéric Gros (translated by Samantha Bankston)
Part III Convergence and Divergence
8. Speaking Out For Others: Philosophy’s Activity in Deleuze and Foucault (and Heidegger) - Len Lawlor and Janae Sholtz
9. Philosophy and History in Deleuze and Foucault - Paul Patton
10. Becoming and History: Deleuze’s Reading of Foucault - Anne Sauvagnargues (translated by Alex Feldman)
11. Foucault and the Image of Thought - Kevin Thompson
12. The Regularities of the Statement: Deleuze on Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge - Mary Beth Mader
Part IV Desire, Power and Resistance
13. Desire and Pleasure - Gilles Deleuze
14. Against the Incompatibility Thesis: A rather Different Reading of the Desire-Pleasure Problem - Nicolae Morar and Marjorie Gracieuse
15. Biopower and Control Societies - Thomas Nail
16. Two Concepts of Resistance: Foucault and Deleuze - Dan W. Smith
Appendix
17. Meeting Deleuze - Paul Rabinow
18. Foucault and Prison - Paul Rabinow
Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.
effort to the critical examination of the work of each of these thinkers, but despite the strong biographical and philosophical connection between Foucault and Deleuze, very little has been done to explore the relationship between them. This special issue of Foucault Studies is the first collection of essays to address this critical deficit with a rigorous comparative discussion of the work of these two philosophers.
This collection of essays thus brings together both senior and junior scholars from diverse backgrounds to clarify the implications of this important philosophical encounter between Foucault and Deleuze.
Marco Altamirano’s essay focuses on the shared concepts of “milieu” and “machine,” in Deleuze and Foucault. Vernon W. Cisney’s essay defend’s a Deleuzian politics by drawing on an important political concept shared with Foucault: “becoming other.” William E. Connolly’s essay offers an exploration of creativity and the ambiguous role it plays in the understanding of freedom that we find in Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault. Erin Gilson’s essay offers an original account of the shared methodology of “problematization” found in both
Deleuze and Foucault. Wendy Grace’s essay traces Deleuze and Foucault’s shared Nietzschean philosophical origins. Chris Penfield’s essay articulates a theory of “transversal politics”
common to both Deleuze and Foucault. Finally, Dianna Taylor’s essay compares the respective ontologies of Deleuze and Foucault.
Published Papers by Daniel W Smith
formulated in the context of his reading of Nietzsche’s project of “overturning Platonism.” The
essential Platonic distinction, Deleuze argues, is more profound than the speculative distinction
between model and copy, original and image. The deeper, practical distinction moves between
two kinds of images or eidolon, for which the Platonic Idea is meant to provide a concrete criterion
of selection “Copies” or icons (eikones) are well-grounded claimants to the transcendent
Idea, authenticated by their internal resemblance to the Idea, whereas “simulacra” (phantasmata)
are like false claimants, built on a dissimilarity and implying an essential perversion or
deviation from the Idea. If the goal of Platonism is the triumph of icons over simulacra, the
inversion of Platonism would entail an affirmation of the simulacrum as such, which must thus
be given its own concept. Deleuze consequently defines the simulacrum in terms of an internal
dissimilitude or “disparateness,” which in turn implies a new conception of Ideas, no longer
as self-identical qualities (the auto kath’hauto), but rather as constituting a pure concept of
difference. An inverted Platonism would necessarily be based on a purely immanent and differential
conception of Ideas. Starting from this new conception of the Idea, Deleuze proposes to
take up the Platonic project anew, rethinking the fundamental figures of Platonism (selection,
repetition, ungrounding, the question-problem complex) on a purely differential basis. In this
sense, Deleuze’s inverted Platonism can at the same time be seen as a rejuvenated Platonism
and even a completed Platonism.
Introduction - Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail, and Daniel Smith
Part I Encounters
1. Deleuze and Foucault: A Philosophical Friendship - François Dosse
2. Theatrum Philosophicum - Michel Foucault
3. Michel Foucault's Main Concepts - Gilles Deleuze
4. When and How I’ve read Foucault - Toni Negri (translated by Kristopher Klotz)
Part II Method and Critique
5. Philosophy as Cultural Critique in Foucault and Deleuze - Colin Koopman
6. Foucault’s Deleuzean Methodology of the Late 1970s - John Protevi
7. Deleuze’s Foucault: A Metaphysical Fiction - Frédéric Gros (translated by Samantha Bankston)
Part III Convergence and Divergence
8. Speaking Out For Others: Philosophy’s Activity in Deleuze and Foucault (and Heidegger) - Len Lawlor and Janae Sholtz
9. Philosophy and History in Deleuze and Foucault - Paul Patton
10. Becoming and History: Deleuze’s Reading of Foucault - Anne Sauvagnargues (translated by Alex Feldman)
11. Foucault and the Image of Thought - Kevin Thompson
12. The Regularities of the Statement: Deleuze on Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge - Mary Beth Mader
Part IV Desire, Power and Resistance
13. Desire and Pleasure - Gilles Deleuze
14. Against the Incompatibility Thesis: A rather Different Reading of the Desire-Pleasure Problem - Nicolae Morar and Marjorie Gracieuse
15. Biopower and Control Societies - Thomas Nail
16. Two Concepts of Resistance: Foucault and Deleuze - Dan W. Smith
Appendix
17. Meeting Deleuze - Paul Rabinow
18. Foucault and Prison - Paul Rabinow
Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.
effort to the critical examination of the work of each of these thinkers, but despite the strong biographical and philosophical connection between Foucault and Deleuze, very little has been done to explore the relationship between them. This special issue of Foucault Studies is the first collection of essays to address this critical deficit with a rigorous comparative discussion of the work of these two philosophers.
This collection of essays thus brings together both senior and junior scholars from diverse backgrounds to clarify the implications of this important philosophical encounter between Foucault and Deleuze.
Marco Altamirano’s essay focuses on the shared concepts of “milieu” and “machine,” in Deleuze and Foucault. Vernon W. Cisney’s essay defend’s a Deleuzian politics by drawing on an important political concept shared with Foucault: “becoming other.” William E. Connolly’s essay offers an exploration of creativity and the ambiguous role it plays in the understanding of freedom that we find in Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault. Erin Gilson’s essay offers an original account of the shared methodology of “problematization” found in both
Deleuze and Foucault. Wendy Grace’s essay traces Deleuze and Foucault’s shared Nietzschean philosophical origins. Chris Penfield’s essay articulates a theory of “transversal politics”
common to both Deleuze and Foucault. Finally, Dianna Taylor’s essay compares the respective ontologies of Deleuze and Foucault.
formulated in the context of his reading of Nietzsche’s project of “overturning Platonism.” The
essential Platonic distinction, Deleuze argues, is more profound than the speculative distinction
between model and copy, original and image. The deeper, practical distinction moves between
two kinds of images or eidolon, for which the Platonic Idea is meant to provide a concrete criterion
of selection “Copies” or icons (eikones) are well-grounded claimants to the transcendent
Idea, authenticated by their internal resemblance to the Idea, whereas “simulacra” (phantasmata)
are like false claimants, built on a dissimilarity and implying an essential perversion or
deviation from the Idea. If the goal of Platonism is the triumph of icons over simulacra, the
inversion of Platonism would entail an affirmation of the simulacrum as such, which must thus
be given its own concept. Deleuze consequently defines the simulacrum in terms of an internal
dissimilitude or “disparateness,” which in turn implies a new conception of Ideas, no longer
as self-identical qualities (the auto kath’hauto), but rather as constituting a pure concept of
difference. An inverted Platonism would necessarily be based on a purely immanent and differential
conception of Ideas. Starting from this new conception of the Idea, Deleuze proposes to
take up the Platonic project anew, rethinking the fundamental figures of Platonism (selection,
repetition, ungrounding, the question-problem complex) on a purely differential basis. In this
sense, Deleuze’s inverted Platonism can at the same time be seen as a rejuvenated Platonism
and even a completed Platonism.