This is the second of a series of extracts from my forthcoming book on Deleuze (to be published in the same P&R ‘Great Thinkers’ series as the Derrida and Foucault volumes). It argues why Deleuze’s thought was appropriate for its historical and cultural moment, and offers some reflections on how to engage with a body of philosophy on its own terms. To see all the excerpts released so far, please click here.

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp purchased a “Bedfordshire” model porcelain urinal from a Manhattan ironworks, signed it “R. Mutt”, dated it “1917”, called it Fountain and submitted it to the first annual exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists as one of his now famous “readymades”. The piece has attracted ridicule and adulation ever since, and in one BBC survey Fountain was voted the most influential work of modern art .[1]

Figure A.1: Marcel Duchamp, Fontaine (1917), replica 1964, Tate Gallery, London.[2]

If Fountain is not to your artistic taste, then how about Maxime Maufra’s Marée basse à la plage de Port Blanc, presqu’Île de Quiberon (Low Tide at the Beach at Port Blanc, Peninsula of Quiberon), painted in the same year as Duchamp’s urinal:

Figure A.2 : Maxime Maufra, Marée basse à la plage de Port Blanc, presqu’Île de Quiberon (1917)​, private collection.

Now let me ask you a question about these two works of art. Which is a better reflection of its time? Lest we need to be reminded, in 1917 Europe is plunged deep in one of the bloodiest wars in its history, with the mechanized slaughter of shells, gas and machine guns tearing through the flesh of hundreds of thousands of the continent’s youth. The first day of the battle of the Somme alone (1 July 1916) saw 57,470 casualties and 19,240 dead. Which of these two works of art resonates more with the senseless, barbaric horror of engulfing Europe—and, by 1917, the USA as well—at this time? Which resonates more with the crisis of traditional culture that it precipitated?

Maufra’s canvas is as relevant to its geo-political moment as organising a poetry reading on the deck of the sinking Titanic: it may be a fine pursuit at another time and place, but it is not what the present circumstances call for. Duchamp’s Fountain, by contrast, was created only three days after the United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917 and screams, as David Lubin has argued, an “‘obscene’ comment on the obscene nature of the war.”[3] Context dictates what is relevant and required: We don’t crack corny jokes at a funeral, any more than we expect a stand-up comic to sing funereal dirges. There is a time and place for Duchamp’s Fountain, and 1917 in the bubble of the stuffy, self-congratulatory Manhattan art world was just that time and just that place.

The principle does not hold only for artworks. New wine needs to be poured into new wineskins: each historical moment has its own way of writing literature, its own way of dressing, of speaking. So why not its own way of philosophizing? What would a philosophy look like that reflected the Western world of the mid- to late twentieth century? What would be its concerns and its concepts? This is the very question that Gilles Deleuze addresses in a 1968 interview with Jean-Noel Vuarnet:

philosophy, too, must create worlds of thought, a whole new conception of thought, of ‘what it means to think,’ and it must be adequate to what is happening around us. It must adopt as its own those revolutions going on elsewhere, in other domains, or those that are being prepared. (DI 138).

For Deleuze, the age of student uprisings, of sexual and social revolutions, needs its own way of thinking, just as in 1917 needed its Fountain:

We get the feeling that we can’t go on writing philosophy books in the old style much longer; they no longer interest the students, they don’t even interest their authors. So, I think everyone is on the look-out for something new. (DI 141)

This is by no means a claim that philosophy should merely mirror its historical moment; in fact for Deleuze it is very important indeed that philosophy “is always against its time” and a “critique of the present world” (NaP 107). To be a critique of the present world, however, is not the same as to be a critique of the world of a century ago. It is with this idea, then, that we begin our exploration of Deleuze’s thought: He is seeking to fashion a way of thinking that is appropriate to his time. And our opening question is: What might be the contours of a way of thinking appropriate to late twentieth-century Western society?

 

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm

[2] © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018.

[3] https://blog.oup.com/2017/05/marcel-duchamps-political-work-art/