2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Gilles Deleuze. Throughout the year, we’ll be taking the opportunity to explore the impact of this towering figure in twentieth-century philosophy.
As part of this celebration, we’re publishing a series of blogs from leading Deleuze scholars. Read on to discover how Eugene W. Holland got hooked on Deleuze as a graduate student, and never looked back.
Find out more about our centenary celebrations.
By Eugene W. Holland
I started becoming Deleuzian pretty quickly. I had gone to graduate school at UC San Diego primarily to work with the foremost Marxist literary theorist of his time, Fredric Jameson (Fred, from here on out), and when he assigned Anti-Oedipus in one of his seminars, I was immediately hooked. I rounded up some similarly interested – and baffled – grad students, and we spent some months trying to make sense of that notoriously difficult text. For me, the appeal of Anti-Oedipus was basically four-fold:
(1) As a philosophy and French literature double-major at Yale, I had already studied Derrida and developed a taste for post-structuralist philosophies of difference. But here was one that remained committed to Marxism!
(2) I had long been fascinated by psychoanalysis – but was always also deeply skeptical of its claims to universality. And here was a French theorist applying Fred’s imperative to ‘always historicize’ to Freud himself! (I would only gradually realize how different historicizing genealogically, as Deleuze and Guattari do in Chapter 3 of Anti-Oedipus, is from historicizing dialectically, as Fred was wont to do.)
(3) Before switching to philosophy and literature in college, I had tried out economics for a semester or two. But reading Bataille’s Accursed Share completely blew my mind and, along with my reading of Nietzsche, prepared me to understand the preeminent role of anti-production and debt in Deleuze and Guattari’s construal of libidinal modes of production, against the grain of much orthodox Marxism.
Preferring Nietzsche to Hegel as post-Kantian philosophers was one difference between me and Fred; the other was adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s use of formerly psychological categories – notably paranoia and schizophrenia – to characterize the dynamics of capitalism. No amount of citing Herbert Marcuse’s use of Freudian categories to analyze capitalism would convince Fred otherwise – although it must be said that I didn’t entirely succeed in convincing Marcuse of the value of schizophrenia as a socio-historical category, either.
(4) As a long-time jazz fan, I soon realized how well jazz group improvisation could serve as a positive instance of what Deleuze and Guattari meant by schizophrenia, with its intersecting lines of flight performing de-coding while maintaining enough consistency to make perfect musical sense. Jazz group improvisation is to symphony orchestra performance as soccer is to American football, as immanent consistency is to transcendent command, puissance to pouvoir, power-with to power-over (in the terms I would later use in Nomad Citizenship).
Improvisational jazz would thus (along with bird flocking and fish schooling) become a model for what I saw as the positive potential of immanently coordinated markets, once freed from the quasi-transcendent command of capital. Indeed, driving a wedge between markets and capital would become a main preoccupation of most of my later Deleuze-inspired scholarship, with Nomad Citizenship focusing on the positive (virtual) potential of capital-free markets and Perversions of the Market focusing on what capital actually does to markets. Tracking the evolution of Deleuze and Guattari’s own thought, especially their redefining capital as an apparatus of capture rather than a socius and assigning universality to the market rather than to history, gave that preoccupation a real boost.
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A starting point: Deleuze and Baudelaire
But right from the start, schizoanalysis became central to my dissertation and my first book, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: the Sociopoetics of Modernism. For schizoanalysis’s focus on the dynamics of de-coding and re-coding enabled me to develop a kind of ‘unified field theory’ for closely examining Baudelaire’s writings (poetics), his personal life (psychopoetics), and his historical context (sociopoetics) within a single conceptual apparatus. I was able to connect de-coding with Jakobsonian discourse analysis to show the increasing predominance of metonymy over metaphor (as axes of discourse, not figures of speech) in the evolution of Baudelaire’s poetry.
Lacan’s psycholinguistic adaptation of metaphor and metonymy enabled me to expand on Walter Benjamin’s psychoanalytic insights into the impact of market de-coding on Baudelaire’s poetry and personal life. With the loss of his inheritance at the behest of his stepfather, Baudelaire fell from the position of consummate consumer (dandy) to that of a desperate peddler of poems and essays (prostitute), just as the democratic promise of the 2nd Republic succumbed to the authoritarian capitalism of Emperor Napoloeon III. It was the resonance between Baudelaire’s investments in these two fields, the personal and the political, I argued, that catapulted him from romanticism into modernism and made him (in Benjamin’s apt phrase) ‘the lyric poet in the age of high capital.’
The Deleuze-Guattari community
So I have the late, truly great Fred Jameson to thank for jump-starting my becoming Deleuzian. That initial introduction to Deleuze and Guattari preceded a long series of interactions with intercessors (a better translation than ‘mediators’) in what became the Deleuze-Guattari community. Never having been one for self-promotion, I was extremely fortunate to encounter a number of editors and conference organizers who share credit for furthering my becoming Deleuzian. Costas Boundas organized a series of conferences at Trent University that were among the first in North America devoted to Deleuze and Guattari, edited a number of collections, and would later invite me to a Deleuze conference in Athens. Invitations to two conferences at the University of Warwick acquainted me with many of the Deleuze scholars based in England. Paul Patton invited me to present to the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy in Sydney, cementing connections with the burgeoning Australian Deleuze community forged during a number of other conferences there. Ian Buchanan, who became a mainstay of the Deleuze community as conference organizer and journal and book-series editor, invited me first to a Deleuze Symposium at the University of Western Australia, and then to participate in a series of International Deleuze Studies conferences (starting in Wales, then moving around the world) and to contribute to a number of essay collections. Rosi Braidotti asked me to address the “Idea of Cosmopolitanism” symposium she organized at the University of Utrecht, providing invaluable feedback on my nomad citizenship project. Dan Smith invited me to conferences at Purdue University which helped refine my understanding of A Thousand Plateaus. And Jay Lampert asked me to Duquesne University to try out some new ideas about axiomatics.
In addition to these organizers and editors are the numerous intercessors I would run into over and over again at conferences around the world: Anne Sauvagnargues, Arkady Plotnitsky, Brent Adkins, Brian Massumi, Bruce Baugh, Charley Stivale, Erin Manning, Felicity Coleman, Frida Beckman, Gregory Flaxman, Henry Somers-Hall, James Williams, Janell Watkins, Jeff Bell, John Protevi, Jon Roffe, Ken Surin, Patricia Pisters, Ron Bogue, Todd May, and others who may have escaped recollection. What a pleasure it was (and how surprising in retrospect) to be able to sketch competing outlines of A Thousand Plateaus on a pizza-box with Anne somewhere in the American mid-west, or to run into Brian and Erin at the airport in Beijing, ‘survive’ a (very) minor earthquake with Patricia in Taipei, visit night-markets in Kaifeng with Dan, share dinner and some honky-tonk piano in New Orleans with Ron, or watch a regatta in Stockholm with Frida. Particularly in the more far-flung conference venues, it seemed as if we Deleuzians formed something like a group of what Deleuze and Guattari would call ‘schizophrenics’, scrambling unfamiliar local codes or inventing hybrid ones in situations where our sedimented habits no longer applied – it felt, in other words, a little like jazz improvisation.
To continue becoming Deleuzian
Having started becoming Deleuzian with Anti-Oedipus, to continue becoming Deleuzian meant negotiating the continuing evolution of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. That called for tempering the revolutionary anarchism and trust in capital-free markets inspired by the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia with a serious dose of caution. Gone: linear universal history promoting schizophrenia as freedom, replaced with non-linear history and contingency. Although I remained (and remain) a fan of jazz improvisation, schizophrenia had to go because the capture apparatus of capital had reached such high speeds that scrambling codes could no longer promise escape from the capitalist axiomatic. Psychological forms (schizophrenia, paranoia) would therefore be replaced in the second volume with group formations: nomads, war-machines, minorities. Meanwhile, with modes of production now understood to depend on the contingent consistency of machinic processes, the addition in A Thousand Plateaus of legal and scientific axiomatics to the axiomatic of capital led to a re-evaluation of the role of the State, elevating the importance of ‘struggle on the level of the axioms.’ And for me, the most promising prospect of such struggle would be the constitution of a ‘new axiomatic’ – a prospect that Deleuze and Guattari mention only once (as far as I know), and left up to us to develop. So ‘encore un effort si on veut continuer à devenir Deleuzien!’
About the author
Eugene W. Holland is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. He specializes in interdisciplinary social and critical theory. In addition to publishing articles in journals such as Culture, Theory and Critique, Symposium, South Atlantic Quarterly, Cultural Logic, Strategies, Angelaki, and SubStance on topics in poststructuralist theory and particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze, he is the author of Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism (SUNY Press 2024), Readers Guide to A Thousand Plateaus (Bloomsbury/Continuum 2013), Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (University of Minnesota Press 2011), Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (Routledge 1999), and Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge UP 1993).
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