A young Deleuze pretending to read for the camera
I.
From Christ to the Bourgeoisie [a] was another very early text by Deleuze, first published in 1946, when he was twenty-one. It's central argument and conclusion is: "The relationship that connects Christianity and the Bourgeisie is not contingent." [275] Which is true, I suppose, though hardly an original insight.
Deleuze opens the essay by discussing the decline of spirit in our modern world, which critics and opponents of modernity and materialism often decry: "What they mean is that today, many people no longer believe in internal life, it doesn't pay." [266]
Deleuze continues:
"To be sure, there are different reasons why the internal is disdained today. My first thoughts go to the revolutionary consciousness in an industrial and technological world. The greater the power of this technological world, the more it seems to empty people of all internal life like a chicken and reduce them to total exteriority." [266]
My first thought is that this seems rather unfair on chickens, which remain sacred birds within some cultures. One wonders how Deleuze might know anything about their internal life, or lack thereof? For whilst I'm sure this young French philosopher enjoyed many a dish of coq-au-vin, had he ever tried to form a relationship with a living bird?
I'm doubtful: for despite what he might believe, they are intelligent and sensitive creatures, who display some degree of self-awareness (i.e., have a fairly complex inner life) [b].
Personally, I'm with Lawrence on this point: I like to imagine that even a common brown hen is a goddess in her own rights and blossoms into splendid being, just as we do, within the fourth dimension and that we might form a vital (non-anthropocentric) relationship with her [c].
But I digress ... And, to be fair, there's an ambiguity in what Deleuze writes here; he could be saying that chickens too are emptied of internal life (i.e. have their being negated) within techno-industrial society thanks to factory farming (Heidegger controversially suggests that there is a metaphysical equivalence between mechanised food production and the Nazi extermination camps).
Anyway, let's move on ... And let's do so by immediately pointing out that Deleuze isn't necessarily complaining about this loss of soul - because, like Sartre, he hates moist interiority and regards the issue as a far more complex one than it is often characterised. For one thing, Deleuze suggests the possibility of a spiritual life outside of (and without reference to) any interiority and he believes in a revolution that takes place as a form of action and as an event in the world, rather than in us:
"The revolution is not supposed to take place inside us, it is external - and if we do it in ourselves, it is only a way to avoid doing it outside." [267]
Again, like Sartre whom he quotes, Deleuze suggests that ultimately everything is outside - including the self (l'existence précède l'essence, and all that jazz):
"'Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.'" [268]
Interestingly, Deleuze finds this existentialism in the Gospel: Christ, he says, shows us a new possibility of life that is not lived posthumously in some kind of heaven, but in the external world. Only this, paradoxically, "is not a social, historical, localized world: it is our own internal life" [268].
Unfortunately, it's not this aspect of the Gospel that has triumphed and ultimately Christianity has been more bad news than good and brought about the disastrous "dissociation of Nature and Spirit" [268]. Deleuze continues:
"Some might say that the union did not exist at the time of the Greeks either. No matter. The identity of Nature and Spirit exists as nostalgia in the modern consciousness; whether it is defined in reference to Greece, to a state preceding original sin, or, if you prefer psychoanalysis, to a state prior to the trauma of birth, it matters little. Once upon a time there was a union between Nature and Spirit and this union formed an external world. Nature was mind and mind, nature; the subject was not involved except as an error coefficient." [268-69]
Christianity subjectified both nature and spirit and ended up with a torn consciousness unable to grasp in itself "the relationship of natural life to spiritual life" [269]. Jesus as mediator came to fix this via the Gospel which is "the exteriority of an interiority" [269].
To be honest, I'm not sure I understand this. But let's see how Deleuze now relates this material to the bourgeois opposition between private life and the state ...
II.
At first glance, says Deleuze, this latter opposition seems "very different from the Christian opposition between Nature and Spirit" [269]. But - surprise, surprise - it isn't:
"The bourgeois has been able to internalize internal life as mediation of nature and spirit. By becoming private life, Nature was spiritualized in the form of family [...] and Spirit was naturalized in the form of homeland [...] What is important is that the bourgeoisie is defined first by the internal life and the primacy of the subject. [...] There is bourgeoisie as soon as there is submission of the exterior to an internal order [...]" [269]
Deleuze expands:
"The bourgeoisie is essentially internalized internal life, in other words the mediation of private life and state. Yet it fears the two extremes equally. [...] Its domain is the golden mean. It hates the excess of an overly individualistic private life of a romantic nature [...] Yet it is no less fearful of the state [...] The domain of the bourgeoisie is the domain of the apparently calm humanism of human rights. The bourgeois Person is substantialized mediation; it is defined formally by equality [...] and materially by internal life. If formal equality is materially refuted, there is no contradiction in the eyes of the bourgeois nor is there a reason for revolution. The bourgeois remains coherent." [270]
Ultimately, they have no interest in the question of to be or not to be; they wish to have (to own, to possess); property rights are their concern - not ontological unfolding. But money - as an abstract flow - is problematic; it is not substantialized, "on the contrary, it is fluctuating [...] Whence the threat and danger" [271]. Anticipating his work with Félix Guattari written twenty-five years later, Deleuze notes: "Money negates its own essence [...]" [271] and capitalism inexorably moves towards its own external limit [d].
So, in sum: the fraudulent and secretive bourgeoisie internalise interior life in the form of property, money, and possession: "everything that Christ abhorred and that he came to fight, to substitute being for it" [273] - coming, in effect, not to save the world, but to save man from the world (in all its manifest evil).
Having said that, I rather like the world in all its demirugal and external beauty and resent the idea of salvation, however you present it ...
Notes
[a] Gilles Deleuze, 'From Christ to the Bourgeoisie', Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020). All page numbers given in the above post refer to this work.
[b] See Lori Marino, 'Thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken', Animal Cognition 20, (Jan 2017), pp. 127-147. Click here to read online.
[c] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 307-317. Lawrence discusses forming a relationship with his Rhode Island Red on pp. 313-316.
[d] In Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari describe money as that which has been substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and which has created "an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius". See Anti-Oeipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 33.
Part 1 of this series on Deleuze's youthful writings - Description of Women - can be read by clicking here.
