Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead

a double test

Isabelle Stengers

pp. 28-44

in: Keith Robinson (ed), Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

The challenge of reading Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead together may be characterized as the challenge of resisting the temptation of comparison. Comparison always entails the risk of reducing philosophical thoughts to a matter of opinions to be compared from an outside, apparently neutral, standpoint, that is by an unmoved reader, and this risk becomes lethal when, as is the case with both Whitehead and Deleuze, the philosophers explicitly define their own enterprise as challenging any neutral judgement. Deleuze characterizes thought as an exercise of bad will, and Whitehead never stops emphasizing that public, consensual matters of fact, precisely because we are able to characterize them in a consensual way, are shaped by language, and as such are the worst starting point for philosophy. For Whitehead, philosophy demands experimentation with language, knowing that any ready-made use of words means failure.

Cited authors

Deleuze Gilles

Whitehead Alfred North