John Protevi on Peter Hallward, Out of This World

Reviews Peter Hallward, Out of This World : Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (Verso, 2006), at Philosophical Reviews (03.08.2007) :

I have insisted enough, I think, on the fact that we live in an intensive rather than (or at least in addition to) an "actual" world, so I will conclude only by saying that Hallward has missed the "toolbox" element of Deleuze's work. (I'm referring here to the well-known conversation between Foucault and Deleuze, "Intellectuals and Power," available in English in D. F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [Cornell, 1977]; see 208 for the "toolbox" remark.) In his conclusion, Hallward verges on the polemical, warning us against the futility of reading Deleuze politically. But his reading is theoretical, all-too-theoretical. To examine Deleuzean politics is not so much to read the singular logic of being that allegedly subtends the many analyses of the structures of territorial assemblages, the detailed theory of capitalism and the state, the many pragmatic cautions about experimentation with social interaction found throughout A Thousand Plateaus, but to see how these can be and have been used to find points of transformation and intervention in a system. When Deleuze and Guattari write, "we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body" (A Thousand Plateaus 314F / 257E), we have to consider their philosophical writings in this respect. In other words, we have to see how they've been put to use (and there is certainly no "progressive" guarantee here, as Hallward himself notes [163]). So in this regard at least, it's to the positive attempts at "applying" Deleuze and Deleuze & Guattari that we must turn in order to evaluate the potentials for compositional affects offered by these thinkers, rather than to the critical work of Hallward, as noteworthy and thought-provoking as that might be in many other aspects.