New Left Review 69, May-June 2011

Peter Osborne

GUATTAREUZE?

Philosophy invites and repels biography in equal measure. On the one hand, it is identified with its most famous names in a way that would seem anachronistic in other disciplines; on the other, the lives of philosophers most often seem beside the point when it comes to understanding the individuality of their thought. If social histories of philosophy tend towards over-generalizing abstractions, personalizing ones are in danger of failing to illuminate the work at all. Hence the somewhat perverse character of the fascination with the lives of philosophers: the banality of the everyday acquires an added poignancy when the narrated life so consistently disappoints the search for the secret of the thought. This applies as much to ‘engaged’ philosophers (Heidegger, for example—a subject of intense biographical scrutiny, for obvious political reasons) as it does to less engaged ones (Kant, whose life’s charm resides, famously, in its metronomic uneventfulness). It is hard, though, to dispel the intuition that there is some important connection between the life and the thought. [1] François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, Columbia University Press:New York 2010, £26, hardback 651 pp, 978 0 231 14560 2

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