1. Introduction

The rationale for the title of my talk is simple: in light of Alan Schrift’s presentation on the “university Deleuze”, the experimental purpose for the creation of Paris 8-Vincennes provides a different emphasis in Deleuze’s career from 1970 onward. Not only did Deleuze use this teaching mission as the laboratory for at least 10 books as Alan has noted, Deleuze gained immensely from contact with students as well as colleagues for various aspects of his own thinking and writing. I will develop a chronological study, first, to consider the importance of Vincennes itself as an educational and cultural experiment; then, to discuss the rather complex, indeed intense two years prior to Deleuze’s arrival at Vincennes in fall 1970, linking his teaching focused on the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia to the context in which he was teaching as expérimenteur; then, to consider Deleuze’s teaching in the 1980s, up to 1987 at his retirement, following the shift in fall 1980 from the Vincennes campus to the different one in the north of Paris, St. Denis, with Vincennes physically being levelled by the end of summer 1980; finally, regarding Deleuze’s retirement, I briefly consider some aspects of the “beyond” in retirement, that is, how certain projects that followed his retirement linked back evidently to the seminars.

2. The ‘invention’ of a university

The importance of Vincennes as an educational and cultural experiment is linked to the changes occurring in the French university generally in the 1960s and, more specifically, to the events of May ’68.¹ Let us recall that while the events of May ‘68 were barely resolved, the de Gaulle government named Edgar Faure Minister of Education effectively in May, officially in July 1968, and he had to find solutions for the massive growth of the university-age population expected in the French system.² Faure’s primary effort was to construct a “loi d’orientation”, a sweeping educational reform that he and his aides developed, proposed, submitted for debate and passed between July and 12 November 1968, a mere four months (see Berger et al, 2015, p. 22).

As Guy Berger describes the Vincennes initiative within this context, that is, the development of an experimental university center, “from this perspective [of the reforms], Vincennes university no longer seems to be the scrawny ‘baby’ born from May ’68 but was more like the ‘foot holding the door open’, a door which soon would slam shut” (Berger et al., 2015, pp. 22-23). That is, as an institution, and the ONLY one, literally open to all comers, providing access to anyone seeking knowledge, whatever their background, Vincennes takes on a particular aura both within the university system AND within the political debates writ large concerning the possibilities for openness and democracy in education. This institutional profile constituted a risky prospect given the imposition of a new conservative regime in France following de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969, resulting in the forced departure of Edgar Faure from his ministerial role in November 1969. Yet, as Berger notes, while Vincennes might well have disappeared as quickly as it appeared, that it remained and functioned in its first manifestation until 1980 is a tribute to the Vincennois, the rapidly assembled faculty departments and researchers who seriously addressed the experimental task at hand in the classroom and the different research facilities.

The details of this “invention” of a university are fascinating:

July 1968: Raymond Las Vergnas, the recently elected dean of the Sorbonne Lettres, is asked by Faure to develop the Vincennes university project, officially announced 9 September (Dormoy-Rajramanan, 2012, 89-115);

August 1968: Las Vergnas holds a preparatory meeting with an initial group of distinguished scholars, and university and bureaucratic officials (the latter being graduates of the Ecole Normale d’Administration), including the scholars Vladimir Jankélévitch, Hélène Cixous, known as the “noyau d’instituants”, or constituant core (Dormoy-Rajramanan, 2012, pp. 88-116). Following this meeting, a slightly expanded group meet at Edgar Faure’s apartment where, according to Berger, Las Vergnas “borrows the MLK ‘I have a dream’ statement” to describe “a university that might have teachers without necessarily having the required degrees (titres)” (Berger et al., 2015, p. 37). This desire seems to allow the possibility of younger instructors and thereby continue the energy from May ’68.

September-October: The organizational work of the expanded committee, known as the “noyau cooptant”, or recruitment core, (see Dormoy-Rajramanan, 2012, p. 116)³ is divided essentially between Cixous for hiring the professorial staff, fellow literary scholar Pierre Dommergues as well as English professor Bernard Cassen for the construction details, while Michel Debauvais oversaw curricular and administrative organization (see Berger et al., 2015, p. 28; and Dormoy Rajramanan, 2012, pp. 92-94). The hiring process was guided, in fact, by a larger and deliberately short-lived “commission d’orientation” or “de cooptants” (orientation or recruitment committee, Berger et al., 2015, pp. 43-44) consisting of 25 male scholars from a range of disciplines (including Barthes, Canguilhem, Derrida, Jankélévitch, Le Roy Ladurie, and Vernant). The sole task of this group of uber-sages (or super-wise men) was to propose a more specific list of “sages” (presumably wise women as well as men), thereby effectively naming likely department heads that could then undertake the actual hiring.

Why such a contorted process, you may wonder? Because this structure’s main purpose was to avoid creating a hiring process dependent on the generally quite conservative “mandarins” at the Sorbonne. Hence, these “sages” nominated by an initial group of “sages” would be “administratively legitimate and acceptable to the union officials” (Berger et al., 2015, p. 44). And Berger describes nicely the profile of the ideal chair candidate: “One must locate a competent leader (maître d’oeuvre), well-known, somewhat leaning toward the May ’68 ideology, but qualified to be hired at the necessary Professor rank” (Berger et al., 2015, p. 48).⁴

I admit that the description of the successive steps of this process constitutes a rabbit hole of sorts into which my entire talk could get swallowed. The point of raising Vincennes’s origins in the Deleuzian context, however, is to clarify François Dosse’s too brief account of the creation of Vincennes in the Deleuze-Guattari biography, and Foucault’s role in this process. I should note that Dosse seems to realize how brief his account was since this year he published a book on this very topic, Vincennes’s creation.⁵ While I avail myself of this text when pertinent, I am sticking to the biography for purposes of economy here.

Dosse states that, besides his work for the philosophy department which I will discuss in a moment, “Foucault was also involved in getting the entire experimental university up and running” (Dosse, 2024, p. 346). According to Christelle Dormoy-Rajramanan, Foucault’s prestige did indeed play “an essential role in the intellectual legitimation of the Vincennes project and of the Center’s public image”; he was involved in organizational issues as early as August and subsequently participated in organizing other units, notably the psychoanalysis program.⁶ While Dormoy-Rajramanan outlines Foucault’s considerable organizational industry, Berger recounts that Foucault was recruited initially as a member of the ‘uber-sages’, that is, the short-lived advisory group for chair nominations. Given that a condition for inclusion in this group was to be ineligible for nomination as chair, Berger maintains that Foucault “was obliged to withdraw from [the ‘uber-sage’ group] in order to be nominated at Vincennes [for the chair position]” (Berger et al., 2015, p. 44). Hence, Foucault’s name tends not to appear on the official ‘uber-sage list.

Moreover, as “the most spectacular nomination, Michel Foucault as head of the philosophy department” according to Dosse, Foucault “immediately asked Deleuze to join, but ill health prevented him from coming to Vincennes for two years” (Dosse, 2024, p. 345). While accurate as regards Deleuze, this depiction needs to be nuanced from two perspectives: first, the list of departments in which recruitment of department chairs and then faculty members occurred is at least nineteen, so that “the most spectacular” being Foucault would presume an extreme philosophy-centric world view, whereas each discipline had its stars coming to this innovative institution.⁷

Second, given his glowing reputation on the intellectual scene, Foucault’s nomination was supported by Georges Canguilhem on the recruitment core committee (Berger et al., 2015, p. 65), by his contacts with Cixous and her colleague, Pierre Dommergues, but was promoted along with a number of other contemporary stars by a ‘junior member’ of the core committee, Jacques Derrida.⁸ Indeed, Foucault quickly undertook the hiring process and succeeded in bringing on board, among others, François Châtelet (soon to succeed Foucault as chair), René Scherer, Michel Serres and Jean-François Lyotard. Moreover, Foucault was forced to face political realities, namely that the majority of hires needed to balance different leftist tendencies: on one hand, Maoist leanings represented by Judith Miller, Jacques-Alain Miller, François Regnault, Alain Badiou; on the other hand, Trotskyists (Henri Weber, Daniel Bensaïd) and Communists and Althusserians (Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière) (Berger et al., 2015, p. 50). And in this process, given his relative isolation regarding different leftist groups and even some resentment for having been absent for the May ’68 event (see Dormoy-Rajramanan, 2012, p. 121),⁹ Foucault had to rely entirely on some key advisors, particularly on Alain Badiou. Christelle Dormoy-Rajramanan draws from Badiou’s comments in a film on Vincennes by Yoland Robeville and Jean Condé to recount an anecdote of “particularly unorthodox recruitment” methods. Since this hiring process was necessarily rapid, Foucault eagerly turned to Badiou for recommendations. The basis on which Foucault accepted Badiou’s suggestions, solicited during a departmental cocktail party, gives new dimensions the word “flimsy,” at least on Badiou’s account. For example, Jean Borreil was found interesting by Foucault because of what he perceived as “Borreil”’s name being Catalan. As for Henri Weber who Badiou also recommended, Foucault found him immediately hirable once Badiou assured Foucault somewhat vaguely in response to Foucault’s otherwise irrelevant query that Weber “avait de l’allure”, that is, possessed “style” or “elegance” (Dormoy-Rajramanan, 2012, p. 141).¹⁰

Nonetheless, Vincennes seems to have been an undertaking doomed from the start, and not simply because Faure was out as minister in November 1969, during Foucault’s only full year running the philosophy department. With this experimental initiative’s major patron henceforth in no position to offer support, throughout the 1970s Vincennes was a beleaguered institution, an anti-Sorbonne disdained by the more established schools and an increasingly impoverished site given the budgetary restrictions imposed on the campus. To provide an exclamation point to this disdain, the philosophy program was stripped in December 1969 of its accreditation to credential students with the national “license” in philosophy (that is, the post-BA level step to prepare higher degrees elsewhere) by Edgar Faure’s successor, Olivier Guichard (Berger et al., 2015, pp. 65-95). A fun fact about this is that in 1975, the new name for the philosophy department became the “Polytechnic Institute of Philosophy” (Berger et al., 2015, p. 95), as means to provide students with diplomas bearing greater stature (Dosse, 2024, p. 167). Moreover, this site, out east of Paris in the woods in Vincennes, became a politically marginalized locus associated with the radical left, with unruly and unmanageable classrooms, and eventually with drug trade and a counter-culture so unacceptable to the right-wing establishment that the only solution, apparently, was simply to close the once state-of-the-art location and shift operations to a smaller site on the northern edge of Paris, and then to raze the entire campus.¹¹

3. Deleuze at Vincennes

While there is much more to be said about Vincennes’s general organization, curriculum and development, I turn now toward Deleuze, and here we shift gears entirely since with Deleuze in 1968, we encounter a rather paradoxical situation. To all outward appearances, Deleuze’s work up to 1969 was full of extraordinary achievements: after preparing for completion of the doctoral degree with Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza and Difference and Repetition published in 1968, Deleuze mentions in his correspondence that he had undertaken another major work: originally begun as a “book of articles”, mostly unpublished, for Jean Piel at the Éditions de Minuit, Deleuze’s “article” on Lewis Carroll rapidly expanded all on its own into a book “on the logic of sense in general” (Lapoujade, 2020, p. 33). However, as Dosse recounts, despite these achievements, Deleuze’s health problems (recurrent tuberculosis) prevented him from joining Foucault at Vincennes and resulted in postponement of the doctoral defence until January 1969. Deleuze then underwent surgery and spent the next eighteen months recuperating, or at least not resuming his teaching position at the University of Lyon where he had taught since 1964 (Dosse, 2024, p. 178).

Deleuze’s correspondence shows that while he rested frequently at the family country home at St. Léonard-de-Noblat in the Limousin, he also travelled often from there to Paris and also back to Lyon. Furthermore, that “article” on Lewis Carroll appeared as a full-fledged book, Logique du sens in 1969, obviously completed and edited before the operation and in the down time afterwards. However, Deleuze experienced something altogether unexpected in this same period, job insecurity, since he had no intention of returning to his academic appointment in Lyon. As Deleuze recounted to François Châtelet (probably in March 1969): “I have to find [a university position] at all costs, in Vincennes or Nanterre … next year. I’d rather have another tuberculosis cavity than start over at Lyon” (Lapoujade, 2020, p. 29). And early in 1970, he recounted to Klossowski that while he has recovered quite well, he also described a disastrous, even humiliating job interview at the Sorbonne and adds: “God forbid that Vincennes disappears so it can accept me” (Lapoujade, 2020, p. 59). This fear of Vincennes’s disappearance in early 1970 is quite literal since Deleuze could take nothing for granted given what he seems to have perceived as Paris 8’s beleaguered status.

Of course, his rest was not only occupied by these displacements and concerns: starting in spring 1969, he also undertook a collaboration with Félix Guattari, first by letters, then direct working meetings, and finally a combination of both (but mostly by correspondence), the fruits of which are evident not only in the university seminars and joint publications, but also in Guattari’s notes gathered in The Anti-Oedipus Papers.¹² As is evident from these notes for the collaborative correspondence (which begin in 1970), their work together advanced quite rapidly, so much so that Deleuze proposed to Klossowski in early 1970 an essay for a special issue of the journal L’Arc (in fact, devoted to Klossowski) from an upcoming book, says Deleuze, to “be called ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia” on the topic of “the three syntheses’ … about which you renewed our understanding” (Lapoujade, 2020, p. 59).¹³ However, the concepts and terminology under development in their correspondence also provided the basis for not just one “book” but two, the successive volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

As for the seminars that Deleuze offered in his new position at Vincennes starting in fall 1970, Dosse provides no documentation at all, only that their titles were “Logic and Desire” and “Spinoza’s Logic”. The archives for Paris 8 reveal that the 1970-71 program scheduled Deleuze to teach these seminars simultaneously, within the Tuesday morning three-hour block,¹⁴ the only time that Deleuze would split his three-hour seminar in this fashion. However, besides the essay on the disjunctive synthesis for the 1970 issue of L’Arc,other documents are available to indicate some of the substance for the “Logic and Desire” seminar. In an essay for an issue of L’Arc devoted to Deleuze, France Berçu provides precise dates for certain sessions in 1970-71 in which Deleuze addressed specific aspects of material in Anti-Oedipus (see Berçu, 1980, 23-30). Furthermore, in the following year, that is, corresponding to the 1971-72 sessions to which Deleuze attributes the title “Logique des flux” [Logic of flows], Deleuze refers back on four occasions to details of the previous year’s seminar.¹⁵

The dates indicated in Berçu’s essay – located between November 1970 and February 1971 -- suggest that Deleuze developed aspects of Anti-Oedipus, predominantly from chapters I and II, and as Dosse remarks, “During the years 1970, 1971, and 1972, [Deleuze’s] themes were part of what became Anti-Oedipus: codes, flows, coding and decoding, the double bind, the libido and work, psychoanalysis and its myths, the body without organs and its intensities, the axiomatic, capitalism, Marx and Freud, and schizophrenia” (Dosse, 2024, p. 347). As for the seminar on “Spinoza’s Logic”, while no precise details are available, Deleuze had just published a small manual, Spinoza. Textes choisis, with Presses universitaires de France.¹⁶ This volume not only contains an “index” of key concepts in The Ethics, but also a detailed study of Spinoza’s threefold denunciation of conscience, values and sad passions, which might justifiably be understood as the “logic” of Spinoza’s thought.

Besides Deleuze’s commitment to his focused philosophy teaching, Vincennes’s very nature as a pluridisciplinary institution helps explain interesting crossover collaborations. Deleuze spoke very warmly and affirmatively about the relationship between the philosophy program and mathematics,¹⁷ and in his final seminar, on Leibniz and the Baroque, he invited a math professor to speak on the topic of ‘singularities,’ someone that Deleuze identified simply as “Maarek”. Fortunately, the Paris 8 Octaviana archives show that this was Marcel Maarek, someone who taught in Tunisia prior to being expelled for political reasons, and who joined Vincennes at its start, teaching logic in the philosophy and mathematics departments. What may be a little-known detail (yet another fun fact) is that Deleuze himself served quietly but effectively as the director, on paper at least, for the Cinema department (see Berger et al., 2015, p. 318). Apparently, due to funding issues, the Cinema department did not have any senior faculty, without which the program could not grant advanced degrees requiring the signature or oversight of a senior member. Hence, as Deleuze’s own program in philosophy had been stripped of the ability to grant degrees recognized by other French educational institutions, he could at least guarantee that another program, Cinema in this case, could function on this level thanks to his presence as figurehead signatory.¹⁸

To conclude this segment, let me provide a quick overview of Deleuze’s courses up to 1979: the transcripts made available through Richard Pinhas’s WebDeleuze consist of 9 sessions from 1971-72, the year devoted to “logic of flows”; 5 sessions from 1972-73, and 3 from 1973-74, with none from 1974-75. These courses continue development of what will become A Thousand Plateaus, and besides a range of interviews that Deleuze and Guattari give in different journals and newspapers in this period, Deleuze and Guattari’s publications also include a chapter from what will become Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature (1974) and two preliminary segments from A Thousand Plateaus published in the Éditions de Minuit house journal, Minuit, “14 May 1914. One or several wolves” (1973) and “28 november 1947. How to make yourself a body without organs” (1974). Also, Dosse says that in “the mid-1970s”, Deleuze, François Châtelet, Jean-François Lyotard and Christian Descamps “undertake a course together” (Dosse, 2024, 168), although it is unclear whether the course was ever offered or just discussed.

Part of the 1975-76 academic year exists on film, sessions located in the RAI-3 videos available on YouTube produced during the seminar that year by one of Deleuze’s students, Marielle Burkhalter, as part of her masters project, “Filming Philosophy as it Happens,” then broadcast on the RAI-3 cinema program “Fuori Orario”. Following these sessions, between 1976 to 1979, the predominant theme (provided by Deleuze himself) was “War and the State”, for which we possess a grand total of 5 transcripts (3 from 1976-77, 1 from 1977-78 and 1 from 1978-79), but also 4 sessions from a seminar on Kant that Deleuze taught in spring 1978. Meanwhile, the Paris 8 Octaviana archives reveal that Deleuze also taught a seminar on Spinoza that same winter-spring semester, 1978, and the one 1977-78 session available may correspond to this mini-seminar. Of course, in the final year at Vincennes, 1979-80, the first for which we have recordings besides completing his long sequence of seminars on A Thousand Plateaus, specifically on the Apparatus of Capture & the War Machine (13 sessions), Deleuze added 5 sessions on Leibniz and 2 sessions on reflections about Anti-Oedipus and other issues.

It’s the RAI-3 sessions that best portray an array of traits that characterize Deleuze’s pedagogical approach: first, to engage intensely in his teaching in ways that he has described in a number of interviews, for example, “a course [conceived as] a kind of Sprechgesang, closer to music than to theatre” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1997, p. 139) and also as “something requiring an enormous amount of preparation to reach these moments of inspiration without which the course means nothing” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1997, “P as in Professor”). Second, these videos show an instructor out of space, crammed into the tight room, yet seeming to gain inspiration from these very conditions. And third, one sees his ability to engage with all manner of students’ interventions, not merely about the primary material, but also protests of different sorts, allowing full-length debates in two sessions in particular, and one precisely about the classroom’s lack of space.¹⁹

Charles Soulié has described Deleuze’s teaching as “charismatic pedagogy”, not without some irony, I believe (see Soulié, 2017, pp. 42-63), but I want to close this segment by considering how Deleuze’s experimental, or experiential teaching might be conceived as steps of a seminar mode d’emploi. Deleuze described the seminar in “P as in Professor” as “something that was not destined to be understood in its totality”; rather, “a course is a kind of matter in movement (matière en mouvement), in which each person, each group, or each student at the limit takes from it what suits him/her”. This first step for using the seminar – taking from it what the student found suitable, that is, could grasp -- was fundamental in the weekly flow from one aspect of the development to the next.

Deleuze examined the dynamics of this process during the Foucault seminar, in what he called a “delicious activity of self-criticism”, specifically about what he deemed not to have worked sufficiently well in the previous session:

“This is the charm of courses”, he says: something one thinks was well presented just “doesn’t work, it undoes itself. Whoever offers a course doesn’t have quite the same point of view as someone listening, to the extent that, while I’m doing a course, which is a strong moment for me, for many of you, on the contrary, it could very well be a weak moment”, and vice versa. (DS Foucault 15, 11 March 1986)²⁰

In this moment, Deleuze placed the blame on himself for having attempted to systematise something that Foucault perhaps preferred not to have systematised, but Deleuze also recognised the importance for students to take in what he presented in their own time, at their own pace, according to their own abilities.

This experience is also something he recognised clearly in linking the comprehension process to the seminar’s temporal aspect:

I’m here teaching the course, you’re there listening . . . I’ve arrived focalised, and my entire act of consciousness consists in focalising this kind of time period, a two-hour present, . . . [which] is why the two hours for me ultimately go so fast, whereas for you, they don’t move fast enough at all except when this works sufficiently for you to come into my present. At that point, you are living the same time as I do. (DS Cinema III 16, 17 April 1984)

Hence, along with the first step for users, Deleuze described the present of the seminar as “an echo chamber, a feedback loop, in which an idea reappeared after going, as it were, through various filters” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 139).

This process suggests a second step for users that Deleuze repeatedly emphasised, what Charles Soulié calls Deleuze’s “theory of dual comprehension” (Soulié, 2017, p. 52): as Deleuze describes it, “Philosophy needs not only a philosophical understanding, through concepts, but a non-philosophical understanding, rooted in percepts and affects’ which, rather than being ‘inadequate or provisional, is one of philosophy’s two sides, one of its two wings” (1995, pp. 139-40). This perspective functions as the flip side of the previous step: just as the listener can grasp what he or she hears only in relation to a particular propensity for comprehension in the moment, such comprehension need not, and for Deleuze, must not be limited by unnecessarily specific parameters; that is, it needs to be open to as many sources as possible for facilitating and extending the comprehension process.

In this regard, a third step for users corresponds to the impact of this process on the listener. One aspect of this step recalls Deleuze’s emphasis on the importance of “encounters”, certainly in a Spinozist sense of bodies that are suitable and cause joyful passions (DS Spinoza 15, 31 March 1981), but also on the important conceptual process of simply understanding:

When you encounter something as a conceptual fact in philosophy, with two concepts joining together, and even if you still don’t have a clue why that’s the case, that’s a good thing. You can tell yourself . . . you’re onto something; you’ll then have to go find an explanation, but it’s the very fact that one concept created the encounter with another. Rather than being an association of ideas, these kinds of associating through concepts in philosophy are very distinctive. (DS Cinema I 9, 02 Feb 1982)

These encounters with and through concepts and ideas, as Soulié concludes, “force you to think, and this forcing encompasses so many shocks creating, in the end, a concrete and active relation with thought, no longer scholarly, docile or derivative” (Soulié, 2017, p. 54; see also Charbonier, 2009, pp. 32-40).

However, a second aspect of this third step lies in Deleuze’s firm belief that “a course entails as much emotion as intelligence, and if there is no emotion, then there is nothing in the course, it has no interest” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2012, “P as in Professor”). Hence his willingness to sacrifice time for intensity, noting at one point, “I’m going fast, really fast as you notice, very fast, but I am speaking toward your feeling (sentiment), not your intellect (intelligence)” (DS Cinema IV 26, 12 June 84). As Soulié describes this process, “one must already experience and feel, that is, open oneself – or not – to the intensity that is proposed/imposed by the instructor, and then eventually create variations, embroidery, associations” (Soulié, 2017, p. 53).

Of course, this process corresponds to Deleuze’s oft repeated direction that students open themselves to feeling the linkages between philosophical concepts, that is, grasping these linkages in an entirely personal way that might not necessarily occur at the level of understanding. As Claude Jaeglé describes this, “There’s no point in contributing to philosophical discourse if this does not arise from the intensity drawing you forward, from the vehemence that inspires you” (Jaeglé, 2005, p. 17). Indeed, Deleuze frequently introduced concepts or arguments with the phrase “il faut que vous sentiez…” (“you must sense/feel” this or that point) and employed the imperative, “Sentez que…” (Sense that…) or the complimentary, supportive phrase “Vous sentez que…” (You get/sense/feel that…). It was through such constant encouragement and hopeful prompts that Deleuze helped students to infer the intensity and urgency of his own feelings about philosophy, as well as his confidence in their ability to grasp hold and follow him onward.

4. 1980 Vincennes undone, the 1980s seminars

The demise of Vincennes was already signaled by a hostile conservative politician Alice Saunier-Seité as early as 1976, but in 1978, she ascended to the ministry of universities, and the transfer of Vincennes to upgraded and renovated facilities at St. Denis was pronounced immediately in 1978, along with the destruction of the old campus, barely a decade old (Berger et al, 2015, p. 197). Protests and various efforts to counter this exercise of political will throughout the 1970s were ultimately ineffective, and even into the final semester, the increased surveillance of students on the pretext of a burgeoning drug trade created an increasingly tense atmosphere.²¹ Session 10 of Deleuze’s final seminar on the Apparatus of Capture & the War Machine (4 March 1980), is entirely devoted to discussion between Deleuze and students about current events on the campus, and I cannot recommend this session highly enough as evidence of the way that Deleuze carefully served as a mediator to assist students with effective steps to respond to the issues in question. But another aspect of this session is the issue of “normalization” which will be imposed on all departments in the new location at St. Denis. This process means that the individual requirements developed democratically within the Vincennes departments would henceforth be aligned with those imposed by the State, hence the disappearance of the distinctive political and educational characteristics at the very heart of the Vincennes experiment.

I am deliberately avoiding saying more on this shift to St. Denis in order to turn to the eight 1980s seminars in which Deleuze continues his approach to pedagogy, but mainly to reflect on some of the limits in the classroom for Deleuze the expérimenteur. I am referring specifically to the tension that always existed in his seminars regarding his stated desire to be able to engage directly with the students – hence, his refusal to teach in a large amphitheater which Deleuze considered as an alienating space. The tensions arose when, in fact, Deleuze evidently found certain students’ interventions to be counterproductive, that is, to throw him off his task of pursuing a carefully prepared line of reflection. The complete audio corpus of the seminars suggests that much like the continuum between overlapping smooth and striated spaces, the temporal and pedagogical continuum into which Deleuze slid in each session was fragile, with frequent disturbances of the focus required for him to create impulsions of inspiration.

As it happens, two sessions may be deemed exemplary in that they were published as CDs, an edited version of Spinoza session 13 (17 March 1981) as “Spinoza: immortalité et éternité” (Immortality and Eternity) in 2001, and an edited version of Leibniz and the Baroque session 10 (24 February 1987) as “Leibniz: âme et damnation” (Soul and Damnation) in 2003.²² These sessions are quite distinct in that in one, Spinoza, the session is seemingly derailed by students’ questions, while the other, Leibniz, is kept steadily on track by minimal overt student interventions. These polar differences raise the implicit question of whether Deleuze was more inspired by remaining open to questioning with the risk of dispersion of different, individual presents, or by the more subtle, implicit engagement of students quietly following his every word and possibly focalizing extensively within his present, while deferring questions until later.

That Deleuze was fully aware of this discrepancy becomes evident at certain moments in these seminars, most notably at the start of the second Cinema seminar 2 November 1982. Here he announces something of a do-over, that is, a repetition of the same content as in the previous year, but with a greater emphasis on Peirce’s semiotics in contrast to the previous year’s emphasis on Bergson. He also ponders how to maximize the course’s implied goal of a collaboration between listeners and the speaker, that is, how to “obtain reactions – not objections, which are always painful and intolerable” – in other words, their assistance which might result in “correct[ing] me, to extend things longer” (DS Cinema II 1, 2 Nov 1982). Unfortunately, his more tendentious organizational remarks in this session consist in proposing to divide the seminar into two distinct sections via a vague process of unsupervised self-selection by potential participants, and this approach led to an extensive exchange with the dissatisfied students. However, Deleuze maintained his insistence that: “Your task consists in speaking either on the basis of your thoughts or of your feelings (sentiments), but not your opinions (avis). That means saying: yes, in [the topic] you raised there, I get the impression that there’s something that doesn’t work, that’s unbalanced; or else, you tell me: what you’re saying has awakened this in me, something I hadn’t thought of”. Obviously, the “feeling” versus “opinion” distinction here remains quite imprecise.

Early in Cinema seminar IV (session 7, 18 December 1984), Deleuze pretends to reach an epiphany of sorts, proposing a method that he had, in fact, employed in the 1970s, the prepared interventions by invited lecturers and seminar participants, among whom were Félix Guattari, Éric Alliez and, as I mentioned earlier, mathematician Marcel Maarek. Presentations by these guests of such stature and their exchanges with Deleuze went well, but when Deleuze invited speakers from among the seminar participants, sometimes the smooth flow or space became definitely striated with unforeseen remarks.

The most notable example of such difficulties came in session 22 in the same Cinema IV seminar (14 May 1985), during Dominique Vaillant’s interview/intervention on different aspects of sound and soundtracks in films. Conflict arose due to an unanticipated and lengthy intervention by a frequent interlocutor, Richard Pinhas, who was followed by another invited intervener, Pascale Criton, who objected to Pinhas’s perspectives. Facing precisely the kind of interchange of objections and opinions that he detested, Deleuze shifted between alternate postures, on one hand defending Pinhas, but on the other hand seeking common ground, finally responding to another student’s objections with a peculiar rationale: “She [Vaillant] wasn’t speaking in her own name; she had accepted to answer some questions that I asked her, fine. I wanted to have my technical session”.

Pinhas intervened spontaneously on other occasions, and the most obvious and unfortunate case is in the final session of Deleuze’s career, 2 June 1987, a discussion with several musicologists on questions of harmony in Leibniz’s era in relation to the theme of harmony in Leibniz’s works. Pinhas not only attempts to raise objections to remarks by invited speaker Pascale Criton, but then ultimately hijacks the session with his own intervention on electronics synthesizers (appropriately named “harmoniseurs”). It should be no surprise that he did so not only for the audio recordings being made, but especially for the RAI-3 film crew, and anyone can view these exchanges and Deleuze’s resigned posture after attempting to rein Pinhas in.

However, I would be remiss if I did not mention what I have called “the Comtesse phenomenon” (Stivale, 2023, p. 243). Georges Comtesse who was a long-term and active seminar participant, with the earliest comment by him on record being from 1971 (Anti-Oedipus I 1, 17 Nov 1971). He became a privileged interlocutor, and not only in terms of the number of his interventions (of greater and lesser length, in over sixty sessions). In the best circumstances, the substance of many of Comtesse’s questions and interventions allowed Deleuze to fold them into the “matter in movement” as Deleuze then developed quite precise and even longer responses. And however ambivalent Deleuze’s reactions to Comtesse might seem on certain occasions, it was clear that Comtesse truly hoped to contribute to the seminars by engaging with Deleuze. However, whatever his intentions, Comtesse stands alone among all participants in his ability to provoke Deleuze to extreme reactions, usually less by the substance of the statements than by Comtesse’s manner in stating them.

Two sessions, both from the Cinema IV seminar and still untranslated, highlight how these interventions disrupted the pedagogical process. In the first case, following a long intervention by Comtesse, Deleuze agreed with the substance of Comtesse’s remarks, but objected to Comtesse’s formal edicts:

You have a tendency to present what you’re reading as, in its very nature, reducing everything else to zero. Try to understand that when you are speaking, you say some very interesting things, but these things aren’t supposed to annul every other discourse.” Deleuze then became only more aggravated by Comtesse’s attempted justification, first, due to his failing (in Deleuze’s judgement) to provide the actual texts on which his assertions were based, then by his seeming to base his perspectives on another scholar’s works: “[Your statements] may well come from Derrida, but I am certain that Derrida is much more nuanced than you are. But I insist on this: don’t come here to tell us ‘Here’s the truth!’ You may be able to say this in Derrida’s course, I don’t know, but not here, not here. (DS Cinema IV 7, 18 Dec 1984)

Three months later, another point of contention arose between them due to Comtesse’s repeated tendency to object at great length that “there are other aspects” to be considered and that these aspects “are more profound” than the ones already presented. Again, Comtesse’s attempted justifications raised Deleuze’s ire:

I tell you, no, that’s your favorite argument, it’s this Stalinist argument that disgusts me. Bah, no, stop! Listen, because suddenly we’re getting behind.” In other words, not only did Comtesse’s arguments disgust him, but he was wasting the seminar’s time. Comtesse then added insult to injury by concluding his argument about a particular film with the arrogant demand, “Try to grasp that!” (Essayez d’entendre ça!). Here, Deleuze summed up matters in no uncertain terms: “Who do you take yourself for? You dare to finish something by saying ‘try to grasp that!’, try to understand the imponderable depth of what I just said! No, that’s just wrong! I can’t take it any more! Break time! Five minutes break! (DS Cinema IV 16, 19 March 1985)

Besides the occasional disturbing intervention by Comtesse, at least from Deleuze’s perspective, there are numerous other types of exchanges with students that created difficulties for the flow of Deleuze’s presentations. And yet, this type of exchange is precisely what he sought in maintaining his teaching in the close confines of a smaller classroom rather than the more common amphitheater. If Deleuze could do little about the striated space of his seminar room (in some ways, by his own choice) as well as the educational regime under which he worked, he attempted to parry these constraints through the philosophical becomings of the “matter in movement” which constituted each seminar, that is, how “all degrees of puissance (or power of action) become complicated within each other, this copresence of all the[se] degrees … belong[ing] to eternity” (DS Cinema III 15, 27 March 1984).

Yet, he was also fully aware that, just as one can never reach an entirely smooth space, such movement toward eternity could only be achieved momentarily, always in moments of extreme fragility, of this “matter in movement”. As Deleuze suggested about listeners’ reactions within the “musical conception of a course”, a delayed effect is always possible, even preferable given the variability of each present: “At one moment, you don't understand a movement, and then three minutes later, it becomes clear, or ten minutes later: something happened in the meantime. So, with these delayed effects in a course, suddenly a guy listening can certainly understand nothing at one point, and ten minutes later, it becomes clear, there's a kind of retroactive effect” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2012, “P as in Professor”).

5. Conclusions

Changes in administrative requirements at St. Denis are quite evident during the final seminar on Leibniz and the Baroque, with Deleuze seemingly forced to split the course rather artificially between a “first cycle” (or undergraduate) segment, titled “Leibniz as Baroque Philosopher”, and a “second cycle” or graduate portion, titled “Principles and Freedom”. So, while Deleuze’s decision to retire may have come as a surprise to many seminar participants, he had certainly expressed his intentions and his weariness to different friends.²³ Within the seminar, this weariness crept into remarks shortly before Winter break in 1987, notably, his comment about (and to) a Japanese student, possibly Hidenobu Suzuki, who “left this country without vacations and where they kill off the elderly in order to attend a class with an old man who asks for nothing other than vacations!” (DS Leibniz & Baroque 9, 3 March 1987).

This acerbic exchange betrays the deeper sentiments that he stated in his later interview with Parnet, “I left at a time that was terrifying, and I could no longer understand how professors could continue teaching courses. That is, they'd become managers”; in his view, the university had ceased to be a true research site, with the result that his time and energy were “eaten up by these management hassles, the vast number of meetings at the university,” hence the inability for professors to prepare their courses (“P as in Professor”). He described this difficulty in another interview (in September 1988): “I was ready to stop when I saw it was taking more and more preparation to get a more taxing inspiration” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 139). Hence, given his belief in the necessity of such teaching preparation and its linkage to the seminar’s recherche, its seeking, its quest, continuing to teach in these circumstances had become increasingly futile. As he stated in his announcement to the Leibniz seminar students, “the fact that I’m going to stop is quite perfect. … I feel that the moment has come; I’m not managing it anymore. … It’s not that this is the most divine activity in the world, not at all, but it’s such a special activity” (DS Leibniz & Baroque 18, 19 May 1987).

How special that activity was became evident in the ultimate session on 2 June 1987: in Deleuze’s closing statement, he emphasised how important this ultimate session was for him in terms of research:

I find that this year, we have accomplished again a rich year, and I am saying, without undue flattery on your part, that this has been greatly thanks to you. … So, I really like that [today’s session] has left us, as required, with some confused impressions. But I believe that, in any case for me, it gives me some new departure points for work that I would not have had without this session. So, there we are, thank you very much. (DS Leibniz & Baroque)

Some of these departure points certainly benefited the Leibniz book which appeared the following year, a book he described as “both a summing up (récapitulation) and a quest (poursuite)” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 155 [translation modified]), and no doubt, an extended comparison of The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque with the Leibniz sessions (both 1980 and 1986-87) would provide additional insights about the concise written work in light of more extended examples included throughout the sessions. However, Deleuze’s quest in pursuing several projects implicitly in progress within the seminars becomes evident in his successive endeavours, and here is where I will close, simply by indicating three directions among a number that Deleuze pursued:

Deleuze’s continued to reflect on the concept of “control” undertaken during the Foucault seminar, and subsequently developed in the “Postscript on Control Societies”.²⁴ What seems crucial to me is the need to discern what forms of resistance might emerge, which is where the “postscript” essay ends, Deleuze stopping precisely where readers might reasonably hope for some direction.²⁵ This concluding point explains why one of the most important segments in Gilles Deleuze, From A to Z is devoted precisely to “R as in Resistance”, but which, in its turn, informs the all-important, ‘sacred project’ of What Is Philosophy?

Then, in the late 1980s, Deleuze accepted the challenge of another enterprise that was dear to his heart, what he considered to be an archival assemblage through the filmed interview that became Gilles Deleuze, From A to Z. This eight-hour series of interviews were conducted with Claire Parnet and filmed by Pierre-André Boutang in 1988-89, with the vague intention to broadcast them at some point, but only after Deleuze's death.²⁶ The intersections between the seminars and this lengthy interview are numerous, and one can fruitfully trace the key topics from the interview by focusing on the main seminars clusters presented in the 1980s: the aggregate of seminars on A Thousand Plateaus; Spinoza and Painting; the first three Cinema seminars; the fourth seminar, on Cinema and Thought; Foucault; and Leibniz and the Baroque.

Finally, Deleuze’s inquiry toward the very heart of “what is philosophy?” can be located at numerous points throughout the seminars, explicitly and implicitly, and in my view, three segments from the Gilles Deleuze, From A to Z interview fall directly under the project of What Is Philosophy?: “A as in Animal”, in terms of its confluence of themes, not just material from the “Memories of a Sorcerer” sections in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 240-244), but as regards ‘writing “for” animals’, as in the “Geophilosophy” chapter of What Is Philosophy?; second, “U as in ‘One’ [Un]”, a brief segment in which Deleuze rejects universals as opinion and ready-made ideas and explains the ways in which both philosophy and science deal solely with singularities and multiplicities; finally, “R as in Resistance” which is something of a crossroads for many aspects of Deleuze’s thought, notably the expression from Primo Levi of “la honte d’être un homme” (the shame of being human), announcing the powerful pages in the “Geophilosophy” chapter about shame as “one of philosophy’s most powerful motifs” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1995, p. 108).²⁷

Perhaps one way to conceptualize the seminars in terms of resistance to control and of what Deleuze and Guattari call the mission of summoning a people (1996, p. 110) is by seeing Deleuze’s teaching as an enormous, ongoing recruitment campaign for enlisting other summoners, to offer pathways to nascent philosophers and artists in each seminar for finding ways to continue to find “new departures” and thereby take up the work that Deleuze and Guattari elaborated together.

References

Beckman, F. (2018). Introduction: Control of What? In: F. Beckman (ed.). Control Culture. Foucault and Deleuze After Discipline (pp. 6-7). Edinburgh University Press.

Berçu, F. (1972). Sed Perseverare Diabolicum. L’Arc, n° 49, pp. 23-30.

Berger, G., Courtois, M. & Perrigault, C. (2015). Folies et raisons d’une université Paris 8. Editions PETRA.

Boutang, P. A. (2004). Everything about Gilles Deleuze and Nothing About Gilles Deleuze. In: G. Deleuze. From A to Z. MIT Press; Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents.

Charbonnier, S. (2009). Deleuze pédagogue. L’Harmattan.

Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, trans. Maratin Joughin. Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1997). Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael Greco. Minnesota University Press.

Deleuze, G. (2001). Spinoza: Immortalité Et Éternité [Album]. Gallimard.

Deleuze, G. (2003). Leibniz: âme et damnation [Album]. Gallimard.

Deleuze, G. (2006). Cinéma [Album]. Gallimard.

Deleuze, G. (2020). Letters and other texts, trans. Ames Hodges. MIT Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1970). La synthèse disjonctive. L’Arc, n° 43, pp. 54-62.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. Minnesota University Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1996). What is philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. & Parnet, C. (2012). Gilles Deleuze : from A to Z, trans. Charles J. Stivale. MIT Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1976). Rhizome. Introduction. Minuit.

Dormoy-Rajramanan, C. (2021). Mai-juin 1968: acmé d’un contexte de crise universitaire. In: C. Soulié (ed.). Un Mythe à Détruire? (pp. 61-84). Presses universitaires de Vincennes.

Dosse, F. (2010). Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: intersecting lives, trans. Deborah Glassman. Columbia University Press.

Dosse, F. (2024). Vincennes: heurs et malheurs de l’université de tous les possibles. Payot.

Guattari, F. (1984). Molecular Revolution, trans. Rosemary Sheed. Penguin.

Guattari, F. (2006). The Anti-Oedipus papers, trans. Kélina Gotman. MIT Press.

Guattari, F. (2015). Psychoanalysis and transversality. MIT Press.

Jaeglé, C. (2005). Portrait oratoire de Gilles Deleuze aux yeux jaunes. PUF.

Lapoujade, D. (ed.) (2020). Deleuze, Letters and Other Texts, trans. Ames Hodges. MIT Press/Semiotext(e).

Levi, P. (1989). The drowned and the saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Sphere Books.

Octaviana Bibliothèque Numérique. https://octaviana.fr/items/browse?collection=633 (accessed 8 June 2024).

Smith, D & Stivale, C. The Deleuze Seminars. https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/ (accessed 11 November 2024).

Soulié, C. (1998). Le destin d'une institution d'avant-garde: histoire du département de philosophie de Paris VIII. Histoire de l’éducation, n. 83-84, pp. 77

Soulié, C. (2017). La pédagogie charismatique de Gilles Deleuze à Vincennes. Actes de recherche en science sociale 2017/1 (issue 216-217) 42-63.

Soulié, C. (ed.) (2012). Un Mythe à Détruire?. Presses universitaires de Vincennes.

Stivale, C. J. (2023). Gilles Deleuze, A Man Out of Time. In R. Luzecky & D. W. Smith (eds.). Deleuze and Time (pp. 234-257). Edinburgh University Press.

Notes

Author notes