27.5.13

Allan James Thomas - Fascism, Irrationalism and Creative Evolution or Deleuze, Running Away @ Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française, Volume 15, Issue 2, Fall 2005


Allan James Thomas - Fascism, Irrationalism and Creative Evolution or Deleuze, Running Away @ Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française, Volume 15, Issue 2, Fall 2005
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"...Rationalism is an attitude of readiness to listen to
critical arguments and to learn from experience. It is fundamentally an attitude of admitting that " I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer the truth."
KarlPopper

"...philosophers have very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone says, Let's discuss this."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 



On the basis of these two quotations, one would imagine that any conversation between Gilles Deleuze and Karl Popper would be destined to be a short one. The differences in approach they represent are certainly reflected in their comments on each other's ideas: to the best of my knowledge there are none. Indeed, even in secondary sources one would rarely expect to find their names referred to in the same book, let alone on the same page. To put it more precisely, their respective understandings and practices of philosophy appear so incompatible as to preclude any "common territory" between them. What they write about, how they write about it, and even who reads them seem to place them, and their ideas, in distinctly different philosophical milieus. There is, however, at least one point on which Deleuze and Popper could be said to agree unequivocally: they both 'detest' and 'abhor' Hegel, and both posit a relation between Hegelian philosophy and totalising or even totalitarian political formations. (...)