La problématisation de l’excès chez Deleuze. De l’ontologie critique à la clinique politique

• Published in: La Deleuziana no. 12; pp. 87 - 106
• Main Author: Jean Matthys
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: ACT 01.01.2020

This paper argues that a Deleuzian take on the notion of excess should not be used as an abstract ontological discourse aiming to provide metaphysical guarantees to political processes. On the contrary, one should consider the profound transformation which affects the goals and means of philosophical practice under the project of schizo-analysis, understood as an immanent and cautious cartography of lines of desire, so as to contribute to their becoming-consistent and ability to last and endure, despite the irreducibly problematic, excessive and ambivalent nature of desire. This argument is supported by a critical reading of the practical horizon of Deleuze’s philosophy in the 1960s and how his differential ontology is supposed to support and guarantee emancipatory forms of de/subjectivization. The subsequent clinical and “careful” shift of Deleuze’s practical and political thought in the 1970s is then interpretated as the effect of both a new reading of Spinoza and the collaboration with Guattari, converging towards the necessity to create new forms of institutions in order to cope with the fundamentally precarious nature of politics.