The lecture ‘La differance’ was delivered to the Societe Francaise de philosophie in 1968. In a summary provided on that occasion, Derrida records how the nonword or nonconcept differance assembles ‘the juncture of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what we conveniently call our “epoch.”’ He names in this regard five thinkers and certain fundamental ideas associated with them: ‘the difference of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure's principle of semiological difference, differing as the possibility of facilitation, impression and delayed effect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and the ontic-ontological difference in Heidegger.’ The emphasis in the summary is on difference, but the notion of trace could have served to unite the theme of the lecture almost as well. The trace provides the focus for Derrida's discussion of Saussure, Freud, and Heidegger at least as much as the notion of difference does. And although it could be said that no discussion of Nietzsche and the trace is offered, it could equally well be observed that, in the short paragraph devoted to Levinas, it is the trace and not difference which is specified: ‘A past that has never been present: with this formula Emmanuel Levinas designates (in ways that are, to be sure, not those of psychoanalysis) the trace and the enigma of absolute alterity, that is, the Other. At least within these limits, and from this point of view, the thought of differance implies the whole critique of classical ontology undertaken by Levinas’ (M [Marges - de la philosophie (1972)] 22/21; SP [Speech and Phenomena] 152).

The first text I propose to investigate is Freud's essay on the uncanny. A relatively exhaustive and satisfactory reading of this seminal (or perhaps ‘disseminai’) paper cannot be attempted here. Such a reading would have to explore a wide range of problems, beginning with that of situating the essay, both within the development of Freud's thought in general, and in particular with regard to the particular perspectives opened by Freud's move ‘Beyond the Pleasure-Principle,’ a text written at the same time as the Uncanny and related to it in various fundamental respects. Jacques Derrida has already indicated certain of the main lines which such an investigation would have to take, placing particular emphasis upon the significance of the Todestrieb (Deathdrive) and the Wiederholungszwang (Repetition-Compulsion) for Freud's approach to art and literature. This line of inquiry has been pursued by Helene Cixous in a recent article, ‘La fiction et ses fantomes,’ which represents one of the first attempts to read Freud's text not simply in terms of its conceptual content but also with regard to its rhetorical and stylistic movement. Whether or not one accepts the major premise of Helene Cixous’ reading: that Freud's text is to be regarded as itself an example of the uncanny: ‘moins comme un discours que comme un etrange roman theorique’3 the alert reader will hardly remain insensitive to the peculiar merging of subject-matter and discourse in Freud's essay. Yet this merging does not simply fulfill the exigencies of theoretical discourse, the adaequatio intellectus et rei, since here the ‘adequacy’ of discourse and object tends as much to dislocate the discourse as to locate the object.

1. Sign and Idea

We have defined the idea or concept as an element of philosophy and the sign as that which forces thought to think. Yet these two defini¬tions do not proceed in the same way: one concerns nature, the other concerns function. So nothing prevents one from functioning as the other. Thus, here is our hypothesis with respect to the first difficulty: what forces us to think, what poses a problem, what confronts our faculties with their limit is sometimes the encounter of a concept. This does not in principle concern a necessary identity in kind but an occasional identity in function.

This is a hypothesis replete with consequences. From a general point of view, it implies that in the beginning of philosophy was phi¬losophy itself, that what impels us to create concepts is the encounter with a philosophical work. The fact that the history of philosophy constitutes a moment of creation has no other meaning: it is not just the instrument of creation but also its detonation. Once again, it is Deleuze's philosophy that would constitute the best realisation of his conception of philosophy: it began with commentaries, with studies of the history of philosophy, because these are systems of the past that would have required the creation of concepts. Deleuze admits this when he refers to Bergson or to Hume: ‘There's something extraordinary in the way they tell us: thinking means something else than what you believe.’

Introduction

In April 1928, during an intimate dinner, John Maynard Keynes explained to Virginia Woolf that: ‘There are two royal stocks in England […] from which all intellect descends’ (D3 181). Recording the dinner in her diary, Woolf presented these thoughts as a mark of Keynes's ‘remarkable mind’, which was, ‘working always, on Russia, Bolshevists, glands, genealogies’ (D3 181). Keynes was director of the Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, and the eugenic nature of his comment is characteristic both of his beliefs and of its time. Its sympathetic reception by Woolf is also not unusual, for she was open to eugenic ideas, sometimes adopting them for her own literary purposes. Woolf and Keynes accepted their intellectual superiority, embracing a shared membership of the society they were discussing, but a shadow hung over their eugenic profiles because neither had children. Since ‘breeding’ strong, healthy children was a key tenet of every branch of the eugenics community, society's acceptance of eugenic principles would compel Woolf to find some other way to validate her reproductive choices and bequeath her talent. She achieved this by repurposing eugenics; turning it into a theory of literary legacy that used reproductive models to explain how canons are created.

In recent years the topic of eugenics has gained attention among Woolf scholars, with Donald Childs arguing that:

1. The Problem of Method

The Deleuzian definition of philosophy consists of three terms: an element, the concept; an activity, creation; and a conjunction that ties them together. Each of these terms raises a question: what is a concept? What is creation, or how do we create concepts? When is creation the creation of concepts and not something else? The first question, nevertheless, reveals itself to be relatively narrow because philosophy involves three elements: we must add the plane of imma¬nence and the conceptual persona to the concept. This is why it drifted into a theory of elements that exceeds the theory of the concept. Yet how is the concept created? The Deleuzian definition of philosophy presupposes not only an object, a what, but also an activity, a how. How is creation to be understood? How does philosophy proceed in order to create concepts? But now that we know the elements of philosophy, we can dedicate ourselves to the heart of our problem: must we understand this creation as a break with the past that would atomise the history of philosophy and prevent us from assigning an identity to the discipline? If, on the contrary, this involves a creation that does not imply a break with the tradition, how would it make the production of original concepts possible? Thus, we need to inter¬rogate the Deleuzian conception of philosophy from a methodologi¬cal point of view. But in the same way that the theory of the concept does not exhaust the question of what, we will see that the theory of method does not exhaust the question of how. This question also takes on a historiographical aspect (how does the philosopher relate to the history of philosophy?) and a discursive aspect (how does the philosopher make use of the language of the philosophical tradi¬tion?).

1. The Problem of the History of Philosophy

Method relates to creation from what we will call a formal point of view. We are familiar with its rules, we know how it proceeds, but we ignore its materials, the substance of that which is cut-out and intercut. Certainly, it is always about concepts. But which con¬cepts? Where do they come from? The concept of the concept and the concept of method itself have sufficiently revealed this: they are constructed on the basis of an enormous ensemble of prime matter that we call tradition for the sake of convenience. It is in the history of philosophy that method finds its materials. Already in our first chapter it was envisioned as the superposition of planes. But at that point it was a question of the constituted history of philosophy. Now we need to interrogate the constitutive history of philosophy. It no longer concerns belonging to a lineage or the consolidation of an alli¬ance, the retrospective invention of precursors and enemies, but the practice, the mechanisms through which a philosophy is elaborated, including the history of philosophy that it implies. Which history of philosophy therefore supposes the creation of concepts? How could the relation to history engender a creation?

Within the framework of the history of philosophy, Deleuze will also take some distance with respect to the concept of method: ‘As a teacher, I would love to be able to give a course as Bob Dylan organises a song, as an astonishing producer rather than an author. […] The opposite of a plagiarist, but also the opposite of a master or a model. A very lengthy preparation, yet no method, no rules, no recipes.’