Guest Lecture by Carl Raschke on Deleuze, June 28th 2017

On the 28th of June Carl Raschke, who is a professor for religious studies at the University of Denver and one of the major experts in the field of postmodern philosophy in the USA, gave a guest lecture as part of the last session of the seminar “Gilles Deleuze – Die Falte”. Raschke provided an essential introduction to Deleuze stressing his new vision of philosophy as an image of thought. Thought is no longer understood as an abstract worldview, but rather as an open-ended experience with the way language makes us see the world. Unlike Derrida, Deleuze’s work is neither limited to a philosophical language and terminology nor does it primarily aim for a re-reading of the philosophical tradition. Deleuze’s project can be described as an inversion of Platonism proceeding Nietzsche and leading to a notion of transcendental empiricism. In this way, the object of philosophy, after Deleuze, is neither logic nor rationality, but it is the pre-logical that is encountered in the body, the tone or the gesture.

Raschke pointed out the importance of the notions of “difference” and “intensity” for Deleuze’s oeuvre. First the notion of difference – not seen as negation, but as affirmation – is not only an important key to Deleuze’s philosophy, rather it is a key to thinking itself which, after Deleuze, is understood as intrinsically philosophic. Moreover Deleuze’s new image of thought is starting to think of philosophical concepts not as abstract models, but as intensities and even as persons. Beyond that, Raschke also gave a short overview on major books of Deleuze reaching from the Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense and The Fold to Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.