Scambled Eggs à la Deleuze & Guattari (A Reply to Simon Reynolds)

Deleuze and Guattari excitedly await their breakfast 

of œufs brouillés served on toast 

 

 

I. 

 

Scrambled eggs is a popular and easy to make dish in which the whites and yolks of eggs have been stirred, whisked, or beaten together in a bowl [1] - typically with butter or oil (sometimes water or milk) and various other ingredients and seasonings according to taste - and then heated until everything coagulates into a fluffy delight [2] which can, for example, be served on toast spread with Gentleman's Relish [3].  

 

There are, as one might imagine, many ways to prepare and serve scrambled eggs. 

 

But in his defence of things that extend nightmarishly along a straight line or progress logically from start to finish - there's a lot to be said for the linear - the LA-based English writer and cultural critic Simon Reynolds poses the $64,000 question: 

 

How would you go about making scrambled eggs in a rhizomatic way? [4]     

 

Here, with reference to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I would like to address this question ...

 

 

II.  

I think what's important here is to remember that no matter how rhizomatically wacky Deleuze's thinking in collaboration with Guattari appears to be in Mille Plateaux (1980), he still accepts the principle of sufficient reason in some form or other; i.e., there's still a model of causation at work in his philosophy and even a plate of scrambled eggs prepared in a non-arborescent manner doesn't just randomly assemble itself. 

 

In other words, if something is true, there's something that makes it true; and if something is tasty, there's something that makes it tasty. Even if one abandons conventional recipes and classical cooking techniques, one still relies upon certain key ingredients that make a dish what it is (you can't make scrambled eggs without eggs - no matter what our vegan friends may choose to believe).  

 

For Deleuze and Guattari, the components of an egg - particularly the albumen and yolk - therefore remain crucial; they are the matter to be dramatically scrambled, just as the nucleus, cytoplasm, and numerous proteins constitute the differentiated content that is dynamically assembled in order to develop an egg as an egg in the first place.     

 

In brief: by developing a rhizomatic philosophy of difference and becoming, Deleuze and Guattari may not presuppose the identity of the thing that comes to be, nevertheless they do allow for the emergence of determinate identities and, indeed, finished dishes [5]. 

 

And so, it's perfectly possible to make scrambled eggs à la Deleuze and Guattari - provided you like your eggs served virtually and taken with a pinch of salt.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Some people prefer to crack the eggs directly into a hot pan and stir the whites and yolks as they cook, despite those who whip the eggs in a bowl first insisting that it produces a smooter texture. Personally, I'm as indifferent on this matter as on most other culinary disputes; so long as the result is tasty, then the Little Greek is free to use whichever method she likes (though not microwaving, obviously).  

 

[2] The French tend to value a creamier, silker, almost custard-like consistency to their œufs brouillés, but, as an Englishman, I go for a firmer, fluffier, slightly drier finish (but not to the point at which the scrambled eggs have lost their soft, fine texture and become rubbery).       

[3] This delicious savoury dish, much loved by those with a refined palate, is known as Scotch woodcock.    

 

[4] I'm quoting Reynold's from a comment added to a recent post on Torpedo the Ark to do with the fascism of the potato (7 June 2025): click here. 

      As well as authoring numerous essays and books, Reynold's is also a longtime (and brilliant) blogger and I would encourage readers to visit his blissblog by clicking here. 

 

[5] Deleuze and Guattari also famously develop Artaud's notion of the body without organs in this work, which, funnily enough, they also describe as an egg; albeit more in cosmic terms designating an intensive reality rather than something we might eat on toast.  

 

On Miracles and Absolute Contingency in the Work of Daphne du Maurier and Quentin Meillassoux

I.

The opening tale of Daphne du Maurier's astonishing and disturbing collection of short stories entitled The Breaking Point (1959), is not so much a whodunnit as a who did what and reveals what she describes as "the lovely duplicity of a secret life" [22] and it's potential for tragedy.

But, whilst the latter is a fascinating notion - explored at length by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray - what really caught my interest is the moment of revelation at the very beginning of the story when James Fenton realises that miracles can happen at any moment and dramatically mark the end of one's old life. This liberating thought had never come to him before:

"It was as though something had clicked in his brain [...] time had ceased [...] everything had changed [...] he had stepped out of bondage into a new dimension." [2-3]

What's more, Fenton feels himself strangely empowered, as if he had become a miracle-worker himself; i.e., an instrument of fate capable of altering the lives of strangers with a single gesture, be it a random act of kindness, or one of sadistic cruelty.


II.

In some ways, it's nice to know that miracles, far from being rare or unusual, are actually the natural unfolding of things and events and can not only happen at any time, but are, in fact, happening all of the time. For one thing, it releases us from the grip of absolute necessity or what's known within philosophical circles as the principle of sufficient reason (i.e., the metaphysical insistence that the world is at is with good cause and could only be as it is).  

To think in terms of miracles, the unfolding of fate, and what Quentin Meillassoux terms unreason, is to enter a world of absolute contingency in which there is no reason for anything to be as it is or to remain so; everything - including the laws that govern the world - could be otherwise:

"Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing." [53]

For Meillassoux, this is the only absolute: a kind of hyper-chaos that du Maurier, at the point of breakdown - when reality must be faced - discovered for herself. Thus, when her protagonists suddenly step outside the gate, what they encounter is:

"a rather menacing power - something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses [...] a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas." [64]

Further, whilst conventional time ceases, they observe something akin to it - an uncanny form of time that is:

"inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity [...] even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.” [64]

Notes

Daphne du Maurier, 'The Alibi', in The Breaking Point, (Virago Press, 2009).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Infinity, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2009).

For a semi-related post to this one on miracles understood from a Deleuzean perspective in terms of the fold, click here.