Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze [Paperback]

This is a collection of challenging and insightful essays bringing the still as yet relatively overlooked philosophical work of Deleuze & Guattari to bear on questions raised by contemporary biology, especially as it intersects so-called complexity theory. Besides a focus on population rather than individual (one of the meanings of their notorious call for "pop" philosophy), D/G also propose a "machinic" biology, one not centered on the organism as a whole in its putative connection to a similarly static environment, but one that follows multiple flows of energy and matter through the "rhizome" or interactive field that traverses what used to be seen as the whole organism, now inscribed as a mere node in that heterogenous field. Following these leads, Ansell Pearson's concern with "life" also includes questions of art, literature, and politics, endeavors which, to speak Aristotelian for a moment, were always considered the artificial from which the natural could be safely distinguished.

As itself a heterogenous "assemblage" of the type it investigates, Germinal Life sparkles with new connections and fresh insights. Few have read as widely and as well as KAP, and it shows. The author demonstrates, in addition to an easy familiarity with Deleuze and Deleuze/Guattari, a firm grasp of the classic work of Darwin and Bergson, as well as wide reading in the voluminous recent University Press literature documenting the contemporary life sciences and so-called complexity theory. For a reader with some familiarity with the basic themes of its components, plugging into the machine of Germinal Life will be a productive experience indeed.

Keith Ansell-Pearson's "Germinal Life" situates itself at the nexus of three sets of concerns: Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of "difference," Bergson's philosophy of "life," and contemporary neo-evolutionary theories. Between these three themes, Ansell-Pearson weaves an intruiging web of interrelated questions and problems. Deleuze is partly responsible for the revival of interest in Bergson's writings, which had fallen into semi-obscurity in the early part of the twentieth-century. (Lévi-Strauss once commented that Bergson reduced everything to a state of mush in order to bring out its inherent ineffability.) But what is the nature of Deleuze's own "Bergsonism"? How and why does he appropriate the three primary concepts of Bergson's thought, intuition, memory, and élan vital? Most difficultly, how and in what sense can Bergson's "vitalism" be taken seriously given the developments in modern biology? Ansell-Pearson brings a wide range of resources to bear on these complex issues, all of which lie at the intersection of philosophy and biology. The book investigates the relation of Deleuze's thought to Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche, and along the way provides helpful discussions of figures in the history of biology (Weismann, Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire), contemporary writers in the field (Gould, Dawkins, Goodwin, Margulis), as well as a number of lesser-known known figures that Deleuze himself championed (Simondon, Uexküll).

The thread that guides Ansell-Pearson throughout his research is the idea of a contemporary "bio-philosophy" or philosophy of life. This idea has far-reaching relevance. Kant is often said to have inaugurated modern philosophy with his "Copernican revolution": the conditions of the objects of knowledge must be the _same_ as the subjective conditions of knowledge itself. Against the ancient conception of wisdom, which defined the wise man by his submission to and accord with Nature, Kant set up an entirely new image of thought: humans are now the legislators of Nature. The subject, in other words, became constitutive. Ansell-Pearson's work is situated within a broader contemporary reaction against this Kantian heritage. His aim, he states, is to examine the possibility and implications of "thinking _beyond_ the human condition" (p. 2). "Germinal Life" thus continues the project of Ansell-Pearson's earlier book, "Viroid life." The latter analyzed Nietzsche's attempt to think the "transhuman" condition; the former pursues the same theme in the context of the "life sciences" (the subhuman and the superhuman). Both books, however, are framed by a fundamental ethical question: Does a biophilosophy entail a simple "disavowal" of the finitude and historicity of the human condition (p. 214)? Or on the contrary, as Ansell-Pearson argues, is it possible that a radically _ethical_ philosophy "must necessarily think trans- or overhumanly" (p. 3)? This question is all the more urgent given current developments in informational and genetic technologies, which have already transformed our concept of the "human." In this sense, Ansell-Pearson's has opened a line of philosophical inquiry that will no doubt be of increasing importance in the future. It points to the possibility, and indeed the need, for something that largely disappeared from philosophy after Schelling, namely, a renewed philosophy of Nature.

Highly recommended.

Germinal Life is the sequel to Keith Ansell Pearson's well-received book on Nietzsche and biophilosophy, Viroid Life, which appeared in 1997. It is also the middle-entry in what is unfolding as a series of three books examining the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Bergson, the third of which will focus on the ontological concept of the 'virtual' commonly found in both Bergson and Deleuze. Like any middle-child, one might expect such a volume as this to be somewhat troublesome, possessing neither the seniority of the first in the series (and the respect that goes with that) nor the relative youth and indulgence enjoyed by the latest arrival. To switch the analogy to one with literature, the novelty of the first book in any trilogy is seldom surpassed by what follows it, while the kudos of being the final entry where everything is brought to a climax is likewise unparalleled. This usually leaves the second book an intermediary role in the most anodyne sense, that of pushing the plot forward (normally by complication) and deepening the characterisation. What is uniquely philosophical about a trilogy of philosophy books may well thwart such a structural characterisation as this (especially if it is a trilogy in name only), but there is, nonetheless, evidence for this homology in Ansell Pearson's latest work: it builds on the main them of Viroid Life, namely contemporary biophilosophy and its significance for the 'transhuman condition', by intensifying its interpretation of Deleuze's vitalist metaphysics (through reading Bergson in particular), while also anticipating future research into the various political implications of such a philosophy. In other words, the characterisation of Deleuze's philosophy (already a central component in Viroid Life) is deepened and the philosophical problematic of what going beyond 'the human condition' truly entails is complicated. However, where Viroid Life played with themes that are fairly intoxicating (techno-theory, nihilism, viruses), used theorists who have always had a wide appeal (Nietzsche, Lyotard, Baudrillard), and did all this in a politically engaged manner, Germinal Life is temperate and measured in its progress: it provides more of the arguments necessary to support the points introduced so spectacularly in the earlier book. This is not to say that Germinal Life is dull by comparison, but rather that it is eminently philosophical (in this sense, all genuine philosophy would have to be called dull). Indeed, what is true of Ansell Pearson's work in general is also the hallmark of Deleuze's own oeuvre: beneath the apparently 'flashy' surface (as Foucault once put it) there is a well thought-out metaphysics at work (for Ansell Pearson, the end of philosophy, which is to say, the end of metaphysics, is far from being upon us). It is only that the balance has shifted in this latest work: names like Baudrillard are still there (no less than Bergson and Deleuze were present in Viroid Life), only more as a background to the hard task of philosophising. Consequently, while Germinal Life may have less appeal amongst non-philosophers in cultural studies and sociology, it cannot fail to impress philosophers interested in biology, the history of Twentieth-century French thought, and the fundamentals of Deleuze's philosophy of immanence. This type of serious, philosophical engagement with Deleuze is all the more necessary now that the reception of his work in the English-speaking world is entering its second phase and moving away from basic introductions and commentaries to the appraisal of its actual value for contemporary debates. What Germinal Life admirably demonstrates is that, firstly, Deleuze's vitalist philosophy belongs to a tradition of non-mechanistic, non-teleological, and non-reductionist thought about evolution running from Bergson to Gilbert Simonden through Jacob Von Uexküll and Raymond Ruyer: but Ansell Pearson also argues for the tenability of this oft-derided approach by examining in great detail the latest research in favour of the creativity of evolution, evidence that shows us the non-hierarchical, relatively chaotic, and molecular phenomenon which is life, far removed from the unilinear, organicist, and perfectionist model normally drawn. These ideas are articulated through three chapters (bordered by an introduction and conclusion), on the theoretical relationship between Bergson and Deleuze (Chapter One), Deleuze and Darwin(ism) (Chapter Two), and creative evolution and Deleuze's 'creative ethology' (Chapter Three). Clearly, the presence of Bergson looms large in these pages, and Ansell Pearson is as scholarly and expert as ever in his exposition of his thought and its influence on Deleuze. But this book is not only about the history of thought. As the title would suggest, its primary text is Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (1968), which is both the most biological and ontological of his works: as such, it is the text that constitutes - if any one book can - the bedrock of the Deleuzian philosophy. The method of transcendental empiricism was announced in Difference and Repetition and its delineation of this method brings together most of Deleuze's central ideas, be they ontological (the univocity of being, difference as the groundless ground of repetition, etc.) empirical (Deleuze's biophilosophy itself) or metaphilosophical (the shock of the new, the image of thought, and so on). Other texts from the Deleuzian corpus are invoked by Ansell Pearson when necessary, of course, especially the Logic of Sense (1969) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) (the latter is particularly important for the third chapter). Overall, however, this focus on one text and one theme (biophilosophy) gives Germinal Life a continuous organisation: where Viroid Life was composed of a loosely integrated set of articles that, quite fittingly, dispersed its argument through the space of its chapters, Germinal Life, no less appropriately, fosters a continuity of argument over time, a germ-line of thought rather than a zig-zag line-of-escape (to recycle some of the most popular Deleuzian jargon). I recommend it wholeheartly to all those seriously interested in Deleuze, Bergson and the Philosophy of biology.