John Protevi

This paper brings Georges Canguilhem and Gilles Deleuze together with the contemporary biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard. I examine the concepts of adaptation and adaptivity in Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological in light of West-Eberhard’s notion of “developmental plasticity,” which is, I claim, adaptivity in the developmental register. In turn, I interpret Canguilhem’s notion of “comparative physiology” and West- Eberhard’s notion of an “eco-devo-evo” approach to biology in terms of Deleuze’s notion of multiplicity

In the first part of this talk I show how some ideas in the new "4EA" branch of cognitive science, which gets away from the computer metaphor to talk about affective cognition as the direction of action of an organism, can be illuminated by Deleuze's ontology. Now that may sound ridiculous, as Deleuze's terminology is notoriously baroque – how could it ever "illuminate" anything? So I'm going to be using plain English translations of his concepts; I think his concepts are too good, too useful, for his terminology to be such a barrier to entry. Then I'm going to use this mixture of Deleuze and 4EA ideas to examine a case study which has, besides its metaphysical and psychological implications, some ethical, political, and legal ones as well. So to deal with them we'll deal just a bit with Agamben and Foucault

The Terri Schiavo case, the latest high-profile “right-to-die” case in the United States, whose denouement saturated the US mediasphere at the end of March 2005, is a particularly complex problem in the Deleuzean sense. Its solution, which took more than 15 years, actualized lines from legal, medical, biological, political … multiplicities. The ellipses indicate the impossibility of completely delimiting the forces at work in any case (the virtual as endless differentiation) just as it indicates the necessity of cutting through them in making any one solution work (actualization as differenciation). Thus that actualization, a creative resolution of the problem, brought some aspects of the virtual into distinctness, while others faded into momentary obscurity.1 The elements functioning most intensely in the Schiavo case cut across the fields of right, medical discipline and biopower, hence at the intersection of sexuality and racism, as Foucault explains.2 The turn to a liberal notion of the right to privacy as the right to die is never simple, for we remain trapped at the intersection of discipline and biopower if we ground that right in sovereign rights of personal autonomy and bodily integrity. The challenge to a Deleuzean jurisprudence is to creatively transform that right to show its basis in de-personalization. In other words, only in an extraordinary, ethical, situation, living along the fault line..

For the most part, this is a fairly literal translation, but I have opted for a few English idioms for the sake of readability. In that spirit, I have kept the original punctuation, which results in very long sentences, but I have inserted paragraph breaks for readability. I mark these inserted breaks with this sign [¶]; unmarked breaks are in the original. In addition to providing the French for difficult translations, I also interpolate a few English words for readability. Simondon’s notes appear as footnotes; translator’s notes as endnotes

In this essay I’d like to help readers prepare to learn from Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.1 Such an essay is needed, as truer words were never spoken than when Deleuze said of it in his "Letter to a Harsh Critic": "it's still full of academic elements, it's heavy going"2 Now part of the “academic” aspect of the work comes from Deleuze having submitted Difference and Repetition to his jury as the primary thesis for the doctorat d'Etat in 1968.3 But that doesn’t lessen the need for help when first approaching the book. The context of Deleuze’s remarks in his “Letter” should be noted: he has just been noting that "the history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of the Oedipus complex."4 Deleuze continues that he tried to subvert this repressive function by various means. First, by writing on authors such as Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche who contested the rationalist tradition by the "critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power [pouvoir]." Second, and quite notoriously, by “a sort of buggery [enculage] or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception.” That is, by making the author say something in their own words that would be “monstrous.”5 These are famous lines, and the last is certainly amusing in an épater les bourgeois sort of way. But what's really important in my view comes next, when Deleuze explains what it means to finally write "in your own name," as he claims he first did in Difference and Repetition

While Agamben acknowledges the Arendtian and Foucaultian thesis of the modernity of biopower, he will claim that sovereignty and biopolitics are equally ancient and essentially intertwined in the originary gesture of all politics; sovereignty is the power to decide the state of exception whereby bare life or zoe is exposed "underneath" political life or bios. Agamben then finds in the concentration camp the modern biopolitical paradigm, in which the state of exception has become the rule and we have all become [potentially] bearers of exposed bare life in that we are all subject to what I will call a "de-politicizing predication": to use the current American jargon, being named an "enemy combatant.".