Natascia Tosel

In the Coils of the Snake: The Betrayal of Postcritique This article discusses postcritique as developed in particular by Rita Felski, Bruno Latour and Davina Cooper. While postcritique has recently become subject of debate also in Italy, the aim of this essay is to show the relation between critique and postcritique, which I propose considering as a "betrayal". Critique requires a suspicious attitude always prepared to discover and denounce a betrayal. On the contrary, postcritique acts like a traitor that is not ashamed of its misconduct, but that takes pleasure in following its immoral passions. Indeed, a postcritical attitude offers at least four 'instruments of pleasure' that this article outlines. It deals with a cartography of surface, an ontology of relation, a pragmatics of mediation and a politics of affection. These instruments allow postcritics to complete a metamorphosis of moles (zoopolitical figures suited to the depths) into snakes (animals of surface). In this way, postcritique could be considered as a new attitude able to make its concepts slither to the surface of singular networks and everyday practices. Allorché qualcuno domanda a che cosa serva la filosofia, dob-biamo rispondere in modo aggressivo, poiché la domanda vuole essere ironica e mordace. La filosofia non serve né allo Stato né alla Chiesa, che hanno altre preoccupazioni. Non serve ad alcuna potenza costituita. La filosofia serve a turbare. Una filosofia che non turba e non contraria nessuno non è una filosofia" (Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche e la filosofia)

The Law between Difference and Repetition. Gabriel Tarde Encounters Gilles Deleuze This paper proposes a new genealogy of law, which is opposed to the Modern theory of sovereignty. The principal founders of this new perspective are Gabriel Tarde and Gilles Deleuze, as they consider the law as a flow of beliefs and desires that is able to propagate through a process of imitation. This does not mean that the law is a kind of model that is simply copied by the social actors, because the imitative propagation is an operation not only of repetition, but also of differentiation. In this way, a law always coincides with an action of invention of new social relationships, which have the opportunity to expand and to create new communities and new institutions. The micro-social origin of the law allows political philosophy to abandon modern contractualism and to rethink society as a positive encounter of flows and singularities, which interact according to a principle of sympathy. Therefore, Tarde and Deleuze, building on an ontology of difference, show an original way of thinking law as a practice of social integration and inclusion.

Deleuze has left to with two texts, 'Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle' and L'immanence: une vie.., which constitute his heritage. These two essays seem to stand far apart from each other, because while the first talks about the risk that individuals today will be reduced to a number by the machines that control our societies, the second is concerned with proposing the concept of an immanent and impersonal life. The aim of this article, however, is to connect these two texts, in order to show, firstly, that contemporary society has indeed become a system of control, governed by machines and statistical methods. The concept of 'gouvernamentalité algorithmique', proposed by Antoinette Rouvroy, will be used to examine how today the individual is forced into anonymity. On the other hand, however, the second aim of this article is to rethink the Deleuzian notion of the impersonal, which is always associated with a life. In fact, impersonality stands in opposition to the Cartesian subject, which possesses its own unity and identity, yet in no way does it correspond to any anonymity imposed by forms of power. An impersonal life is, instead, a virtual multiplicity: today this seems to be the only strategy of resistance possible, against the regime of quantitative, digital truth that has been developed by our societies.

Deleuze and Guattari, in What is philosophy? (1991), expose their Image of Thought; they consider that it is possible to think through three disciplines: Philosophy, Science and Art. In all this structure there is no trace of Politics: why is it absent? We cannot try here to make a "Marxist" distinction between theory and practice, thinking that Philosophy, Art and Science are part of the thought and therefore of the theory, while Politics is placed on a different level, which would be that of action and practice. Thinking in Deleuze and Guattari is act, it means to face the chaos, it means to experiment; their constructivism removes all doubt on the fact that Thought and Action can be given on two totally distinct plans. Politics is therefore, according to Deleuze and Guattari, within the Thought, and since it cannot be located either in science or in art, in my opinion it is entirely ascribable to Philosophy. However, Philosophy and Politics cannot completely identify themselves. In fact they do not identify themselves even in Deleuze and Guattari: Philosophy is creation of concepts; Politics is within Philosophy because it is also creation of concepts, but the difference between the two disciplines lies in the type of concepts that they create. The concept says the event - this is its nature and remains unchanged whether we speak of philosophical concept or political concept; the difference lies rather in the type of event being announced. In fact, Philosophy says the event that is in becoming, it says the "actual", to use a term dear to Foucault, and the becoming and the actual are distinguished from past and present, but also from future. In fact in What is philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari write that only when a utopian element is present, then Philosophy becomes political and carries to the maximum degree the critic of its age. So the becoming is doubled: there is an actual becoming, which is the specific object of the philosophical concept, and then there is a becoming that looks to the future, which is the basis for the political concept. Politics can connect Philosophy with its time, and can produce a critique of the present only because Politics looks beyond this present and has in mind a better future and "a new people and a new earth "- as Deleuze and Guattari say - and this is its Utopia. So it is worth asking if to make political philosophy today may mean creating new concepts, which contain this utopian element, that is, concepts that privilege the dimension of the future, in addition to that - specifically philosophical - of the becoming.

"What does it matter who is speaking?" asks Foucault in What is an author?. In that text Foucault proclaims the death of the author, as well as only a few years before he had shown another death, that of the subject. In both cases, it is properly a matter of disappearance: the subject and the author establish the representation, but they disappear from the scene, because they are no more represented, as it happens to Philip IV in Velázquez's picture Las Meninas, to which Foucault devotes the first chapter of The Order of Things: an Archeology of the Human Sciences. Unexpectedly we can find that these questions concern closely the work of the ethnographer. The ethnographer in fact uses two fundamentals practices: first of all the observation (even that "participant" theorized by Malinowski) of ethnographic field, and then its reconstruction in writing. In both cases, he has to deal with the disappearances established by Foucault: the ethnographer in fact builds his field of work, giving rise to a sort of representation; but at the same time he is not part of it. The ethnographer thus plays the same role of Philip IV in the above mentioned picture of Velázquez: all represented see the king exactly in front of them, but at the same time he is invisible to outside eyes. The ethnographer usually tries to become invisible reporting objectively the information, never saying "I" and mostly using the so-called "ethnographic present". But Foucault, talking about the death of the subject and the author, doesn't means that the ethnographer has to ignore his impressions and opinions; Foucault speaks here rather of the loss of proper name and identity. What counts is not the ethnographer's life, it counts only what he is now, in the moment in which he is already immersed in his work, it counts his "actuality", to use a term dear to Foucault. And of course also his feelings and his emotions are part of his actual present: he has not to become an impersonal "robot", even when he puts in writing his experience. Indeed, in this case it might be more profitable if he reported everything, including his impressions, and if he spoke in the first person, but he should leave anonymous the text (and Foucault gives a concrete example in this sense: the texts written by the members of the GIP, which he directed, remained anonymous). Achieving this type of invisibility implies a change in the relationships with the others: an "actual ethnographer" gives the word to the representatives, instead of representing them, so they can finally speak. It is exactly here that the ethnographer puts entirely into play his ethical and political task.

Deleuze, nella sue opere, ha dedicato molto spazio ad autori, che possono essere accomunati per la loro "strategia letteraria". Quest'ultima si pone come una pratica che è, al contempo, critica e clinica. Nel lessico deleuziano, la critica assume i contorni di una pars destruens, che però non coincide con una negazione; la clinica, invece, prende la forma di una diagnosi. Tale concetto di clinica, del resto, è profondamente influenzato dal testo di Geoges Canguilhem Il normale e il patologico, in cui la clinica viene intesa non come una cura, bensì come la creazione di una nuova salute e di una nuova possibilità di vita. Prendendo l'esempio del maoschismo, verrà dimostrato come questa pratica letteraria, insieme critica e clinica, funzioni, in Deleuze, come una sovversione della legge, che, però, non deve essere intesa come una trasgressione, bensì come una perversione.

Gilles Deleuze, dans Logique du sens, définit l’humorisme comme un art des surfaces, une opération destinée à montrer les effets du devenir plutôt que chercher les causes profondes du présent; il est une mise en série des simulacres au lieu d’une représentation des modèles et des copies. L’humorisme peut être lu alors comme le précurseur sobre, qui met en relation des potentiels et les fait réagir. Ainsi résulte l’évènement visible, l’éclair qui illumine la surface. L’humorisme comme précurseur sobre conduit à une explosion ou chute qui, Deleuze le rappelle dans Francis Bacon, a toujours un rôle actif: il peut être une clinique plutôt qu’une simple critique destructrice. Donc, il faut se demander si l’humorisme, rapporté par Deleuze surtout à la littérature et à la philosophie (les Stoïciens, Sacher-Masoch, Carroll), est présent comme précurseur sobre même dans l’art.

Ce travail voudrait répondre par l’affirmative à cette question, utilisant comme exemple principal l’œuvre d’une artiste allemande, Cosima von Bonin, à laquelle a été dédiée l’exposition du Mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) l’année dernière. Son exposition s’appelait “Hippies use side door” et elle incluait beaucoup d’œuvres différentes de l’artiste mais en lien entre elles. En particulier, on peut lire comme une série, la répétition du même sujet: des animaux en peluche qui servent de simulacres et qui sont pris sur un moment d’improductivité (plusieurs se reposent après le travail, certains vomissent après une fête, d’autres dorment tranquilles sur des missiles). Ces animaux rendent visible ce qui en réalité est toujours devant nos yeux, mais que nous ne sommes pas habitués à regarder, c’est-à-dire les paradoxes du capitalisme: le système qui a comme loi la production, produit des moments d’improductivité.

Von Bonin réussit cependant à éviter une rechute dans une critique au système peu originale, il ne s’agit pas ici de construire un anti-art. L’œuvre de l’artiste allemande, en utilisant l’instrument de l’humorisme, dépasse donc la dimension critique pour arriver à celle clinique: en effet, il n’y a aucun jugement sur l’improductivité des personnages et aucune condamnation de la fatigue du travail imposée par le capitalisme, il y a seulement une mise en série du repos. Ce dernier est éclairé par l’humorisme, car il nous indique une ligne de fuite imprévue et créatrice: le repos.

Donc, dans Deleuze autant que dans Von Bonin, il ne s’agit pas de chercher une logique de la négation, mais plutôt de découvrir une esthétique de l’attente. On peut donner un exemple de cette esthétique à travers une comparaison entre le masochiste deleuzien et l’œuvre que Von Bonin a appelé “Idler, Lezzer, Tosspiece.” La perversion masochiste, qui est caractérisée par l’humorisme, est selon Deleuze une expérience d’attente et de suspension: le masochiste attend un plaisir qui est toujours en retard et il s’attend à la douleur comme condition de plaisir possible. Par ailleurs, le petit homme blanc, qui est représenté par Von Bonin, est assis sur une chaise en hauteur dans une position d’attente, qui est confirmée par l’élément humoristique présent dans la scène: une araignée a fait sa toile sur le nez de l’homme. Dans les deux cas, il s’agit d’une méconnaissance de la réalité (le masochiste construit un plaisir-fantasme; l’homme blanc ignore les couleurs qui gravitent autour de lui), qui n’est pas une négation du réel, mais plutôt une perversion de la loi. Cette loi est celle du monde capitaliste, qui nous impose le principe de la frénésie et de la vitesse dans le travail autant que dans le temps libre. Au contraire, Deleuze et Von Bonin montrent, à travers l’humorisme, une clinique fondée sur la suspension dans l’action, c’est-à-dire, une esthétique de l’attente.