Abstract
“Introduction: Philosophy of the Earth”
On the face of it, Arun Saldanha’s Space after Deleuze is an introductory text – one that accomplishes the amazing feat of working through nearly every instance of spatial thinking in the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. But the book is also critical project in its own right, with Deleuzian spatial concepts serving as launch points for journeys through contemporary environmental, economic, social, and political crises that mark our current geographical conjuncture. Deploying endless situated, material examples, Saldanha offers the reader a practicum in spatial theorizing. Small wonder that Karl Marx should loom so large throughout the pages of this book. And yet, unlike the long-winded works of that grouchy, bearded grandfather of communist philosophy, Space after Deleuze invents a radical, 21st century Deleuze by way of short, almost aphoristic sections, composed with a lightness that never diminishes or undercuts the urgent seriousness of the subject. Much like the author, the book is energetic, wide-ranging, rigorous, and unapologetic – and it is important that a geographer has written it.
This is either the first or the last book on Deleuze and space.
If it is the last, it is because no geographer has gone so far in exhaustively cataloging the many instances of spatiality and spatial thinking that appear throughout Deleuze’s philosophical oeuvre. Indeed, here Saldanha becomes the Linnaeus of Deleuzian spaces. He makes an impressive effort to cover spatial concepts in the breadth of Deleuze’s work and this is by far the most wide-ranging treatment in the scholarship. Like Mark Bonta and John Protevi in Deleuze and Geophilosophy, 1 he gives most of his attention to A Thousand Plateaus – as many now know, it is there that Deleuze and Guattari consider spatial concepts most expansively and creatively. Strong as Bonta and Protevi’s project remains, it is heavily influenced by De Landa’s complexity interpretation from the late 1990s and early 2000s, a treatment that has begun to show its age in the past decade. Saldanha is deeply familiar with the diverse trajectories in Deleuzian theoretical and thematic interpretation, juggles them expertly, and writes with the benefit of an extra fifteen years of particularly robust critical and historical scholarship by Deleuzians. 2005–2015 was arguably something of a Golden Age in English-speaking Deleuze scholarship, an era in which enthusiasts at last abandoned silly approaches painting the philosopher as a weird, wacky chaotician and, instead, started reading him like a serious thinker. The trace of that event runs pulses throughout Space After Deleuze. Saldanha’s text is close to exhaustive with respect to Deleuze’s major spatial concepts; it situates definitions within the neighborhoods of the theoretical elements that give concepts their shapes; and it draws heavily upon the new connections, contextualizations, and intellectual histories that have developed within the recent scholarship. Consequently, this is the book to which geographers who are new to Deleuze and Guattari should turn, perhaps dipping in here and there, when initiating the process of grappling with the dynamic philosophies of these complicated thinkers. But this is also a very useful text for more seasoned academics seeking to learn how Deleuzian scholarship is currently being voiced or how approaches to his spatial thought have grown. Saldanha arguably leaves very little left to be said regarding space and Deleuze. But there is always more to be said. . .
If this is the first book on Deleuze and space, it is because no other Deleuzian has gone so far in attempting to systematize Deleuze and Guattari’s thought as spatial philosophy. From the outset, Saldanha argues that “Deleuze does not have an extensive philosophy of space.” 2 I am always skeptical about rationalizations-by-lacuna 3 and remain inclined to disagree on this point with respect to both Deleuze’s general project of spatial philosophy and the specific role of extension in his thought. However, what Saldanha offers is undeniably and solidly within the spirit of Deleuzian philosophy – it is a recovery of a fragmented spatiality in Deleuze that is simultaneously an encounter with Saldanha himself (implicit, for example, in his work’s abiding concerns with antiracism, geo-communism, and the Anthropocene). The structure of the book’s table of contents outlines this story in advance. Moving from planetary phenomena, to the global, and finally on to the local, Saldanha grabs Deleuzoguattarian spatial thought from a range of texts and contexts, reassembling them according to a scalar structure that will no doubt feel intuitive to many geographers – if not this one. Scale, Saldanha insists, is an ontological reality and, with the help of his curation, Deleuze’s range of spaces seem remarkably well-suited to that structure. Does this make Deleuze and Guattari particularly geographically-keen geophilosophers? Are they merely picking up a bit of geographical thinking as a residue of their forays into anthropology, geology, physics, biology, etc.? Saldanha doesn’t say, but I imagine he might answer that, when they are speaking spatially, Deleuze and Guattari are thinking reality. As Saldanha explains: “space is real”. 4
Geographers will no doubt find something critically and theoretically (or perhaps just “reflexively”) compelling about sorting spatializations into familiar geographic categories such as “scale”. Deleuze tends to construct his spatial concepts within specific contexts and only very rarely discusses them in scalar terms. But then, as the philosopher knew all too well, some theoretical violence inevitably results from any critical practice of extraction and sorting. Better to ask, what are the implications of taking conceptual bits of philosophy and arranging them according to the (here, prior or transcendent) epistemological, regional (in the philosophical sense) categories of a specific science? After reshaping something perhaps real to fit the epistemological confines of a science at a particular historical moment, can we still insist upon its reality? Whether scale is ontologically real is not an issue for geography because the discipline as a science approaches the concept as an axiom (that is, it views scale as epistemologically given prior to any encounter with the real). Within a given science – even complexity theory – scale offers a specific “cut” on the real, an epistemological lens used to separate out otherwise combined phenomena. If we force existing philosophy to pass through the localized axioms of a specific science, subjecting it to morality of applicability, do we risk turning concepts into functives?
Following the spirit of Marx’s famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, Saldanha’s answer might invoke the urgency that he rightly feels characterizes the current moment. Structuring Deleuze and Guattari by way of a scalar epistemology in turn helps refract their spatial thinking through several contemporary crises. Two of these, global capitalism and the Anthropocene, are so pervasive throughout Space After Deleuze that they, too, structure the entire volume, or at least its politics. These are problems to which Deleuze and Guattari seem to offer important explicit and implicit responses. They are also realities that perhaps insist upon certain scalings as much as they structure the types of counterforces we might mobilize against them. Saldanha’s great accomplishment here is doubtless his unapologetic enthusiasm for discovering within Deleuze a shout from the recent past against a crisis that was barely on its horizon. That’s a risky move in a text that must also introduce readers to this philosophy, but as Saldanha puts it: “if Guattari be allowed to use Deleuzian concepts and call himself a renegade communist, so can I, with whatever errors, annoyances, and incompletenesses this gesture might entail” (p. 6). Indeed, perhaps this is the answer heralds an Earth to come.