The Deleuze Connections

In philosophy, we start to see a Russian rather than a Cartesian Idiot, who, in his departure from learning, no longer needs to suppose that he is only discovering what anyone might be brought to see by a natural light; he starts instead to look for something conceptually foreign even in a “natural language”like French -- one example Deleuze gives is Nietzsche’s dream to write in Polish or to make philosophical German “dance.”

With such Idiots, the pragmatic presuppositions of philosophy shift, revealing new relations between “private”and “public.” In Difference and Repetition Deleuze says in effect that the only way to “start without presuppositions” in philosophy is to become some sort of Russian Idiot, giving up the presumptions of common sense, throwing away one’s “hermeneutic compass” and instead trying to turn one’s “idiocy” into the “idiosyncrasies” of a style of thinking “in other ways.”

For what Russian Idiots show is not only that philosophical thought is unlearned, but also that it is free in its creations not when everyone agrees or plays by the rules, but on the contrary, when what the rules and who the players are is not given in advance, but instead emerges along with the new concepts created and the new problems posed. Such Idiots help dramatize, in other words, what is “pragmatically supposed” by a philosophy that no longer even purports to be derived from fixed methods or prior forms, that is instead content to work out its peculiar problems, at first given by intuition, by creating concepts that then become tied up with others in many complicated ways, in a manner suggested by an adage of Leibniz that Deleuze was fond of quoting: one thinks one is at port only to discover that one is in fact still at sea.