JM104: What is Philosophy?

When it was published in 1990, Deleuze and Guattari’s final work, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, was a source of bafflement for many readers. Primed for another madcap foray into the radical iconoclasm of the duo’s previous bestsellers, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, many were disappointed to find, in its pages, an uncharacteristically sober meditation on the Western philosophical tradition. To make matters worse, this meditation hinged on a neat classification of philosophy as a discipline distinct from art and science: philosophy envisioned as an autonomous endeavour—detached, self-referential, and, as Oscar Wilde once said of art, ultimately “quite useless.” It did not help to know that Deleuze largely wrote the book on his own, including Guattari’s name more as a token of friendship than as a seal of actual co-authorship.

To this day, the book is too often misunderstood, sometimes willfully so. In this course, independent scholar and Weird Studies co-host J.F. Martel will show how What Is Philosophy? is not just a groundbreaking work; it is the key that unlocks Deleuze’s project as a whole. Indeed, it is a guide to a philosophy of the future—one which, having abandoned all pretense of ultimate truth and decided to operate on its own terms, can finally acknowledge its grounding in the creative imagination.

In Deleuze, philosophy becomes the art of creating concepts—nothing more and nothing less. But what is a concept? What can a concept do? Answering these questions, Martel will present Deleuze as a thinker irreducible to the movements and trends with which he is traditionally associated: a deeply innovative philosopher who deserves every comparison to the artist, the magician, and the mystic that his commentators have dared in less cautious moments.

In the end, this is a course on philosophy tout court: an attempt not just to read Deleuze’s words on the subject, but to descry the spirit in which they were written. The goal is to express a new vision of conceptual thought, a “weird” one that follows philosophy’s tangled roots into the rich soil that has given us poetry, prophecy, and sorcery.