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Charles J. Stivale, "Unfolding the Deleuze Seminars, 1970–1987: Summaries and Commentary" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
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- [00:02]
Charles Stavall
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Nathan Smith
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Charles Stavall
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Charles Stavall
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Nathan Smith
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Charles Stavall
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See homedepot.com pricema for details. Welcome to the New Books Network hello, I'm Nathan Smith, host for the New Books Network. I have the pleasure today to speak again with Charles Stavall, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Wayne State University, Detroit, about his book Unfolding The Deleuze Seminars, 1970-1987 Summaries and Commentary, which was recently published by Edinburgh University Press earlier this year to Steal Some Good Words from the Inside Flap, a rich resource of Deleuze's research that is unavailable in his published writing. The texts in this volume, summaries of the 216 seminars taught by Gilles d', els, provide a unique insight into the latter half of his teaching career at Paris 8St. Denis Vincent between 1970 and 1987. They also offer a guide to his pursuit of creative the development of philosophical works through teaching. Deleuze understood his seminars as a laboratory for developing his ongoing research with students. From Anti oedipus, published in 72, to the Leibniz and the Broke, published in 87, he examined a wide range of philosophical perspectives in pursuit of successive thematic topics. These summaries and commentaries serve as incitement for more research, allowing readers familiar with Deleuze's work to find new angles of approach and providing greater access to those coming to his work for the first time. And with that, Charles, welcome back.
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Charles Stavall
Thank you very much.
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Nathan Smith
So this is this book rhymes a little bit with our last interview to a certain extent, but takes a little bit of a broader approach. So can you just for the listeners, and I'll link in the in the description of this episode, our previous discussion on, on on painting, as well as your discussions you've had with Cooper and Taylor on the Machinic Unconscious happy hour, just on the larger, you know, archival project. But could you kind of lay out some of the players involved, you know, for those who are just now joining us, why are the Deleuze seminars being published now? How has the translation been going? Just kind of like what work has been happening, I guess, since his death regarding these lectures?
- [04:15]
Charles Stavall
Okay. Well, as some listeners might know, Deleuze had a sort of a caveat on all his works posthumously, which was that certainly in terms of the seminars, that no transcripts would be published in print, but he did give the green light to an eventual online presence. And that would that had to do predominantly with his friendship with a musician named Richard Pinhas, who attended Deliza seminars from early from at least in the mid-70s onward. And Hilda was retired in 1987. And so Pinos had his had a website early on. Early on in this case means the mid-90s for anybody who's a historian of the the Internet, when websites were not the usual thing that everybody had. And so he had a musician site, and then he just decided to add a bifurcation, which is another link Deleuze. And gradually, what he began to do, by dint of having recorded a lot of the lectures, he was able to start putting up a whole lot of transcripts and then recruited translators, thanks to Tim Murphy, who that's how I got involved in doing some translations for webdeluts back in the late 90s. And meanwhile, another group of people this is now into the aughts another group of people at Paris 8 got involved in putting up their own website called the Voice of Deleuze Online. And the reason that they were able to do so and also another reason why Pinhas was able to expand his site is that there was a young Japanese student named Hidenobu Suzuki who attended Deleuze's lectures from fall 1979 to Deleuze's retirement in 87. And he didn't get every single session, but he got a heck of a lot of them. And so that's how we have access to Deleuze's Seminars because at some point in the early. I believe in the early aughts, these digital recordings, these were digitized by the Bibliotheque Nationale in France, French National Library. So they're available through the Gallica program at the BNF at the Bibliotheque, but they're also available through YouTube links, various YouTube links. And so you can access transcripts of these at the Paris 8 site. The voice of Gilles Deleuze online. That's where those are the two main players, plus Suzuki, who did the hard work. And then in the aughts, as some readers of the Liz might know, even though he passed away in 1995, in the early aughts, two volumes came out of his occasional pieces, various texts that hadn't been appeared in any other volumes. And so one of those was called Desert Islands, another text, and the second one, two years later, was Two Regimes of Madness. They've both been translated and are available in English. And coming back, coming to the next decade, into the teens, 20 teens, that's where Dan Smith gets involved, because in the. One of the things that he noticed about the. The site, the Paris 8 site, was they didn't have the Foucault lectures there. So Dan was. And he wanted to teach them. He wanted to have access to them for students who didn't speak, read French. So he started getting funding, developing, grant, getting operations to get some kind of funding just to get the Foucault lectures transcribed and then eventually translated. So. And these transcriptions were posted on the Paris 8 site initially. And then gradually, as the teens unfolded, Dan, I guess he got good at writing grants. He started acquiring. He got a small NEH grant to continue the project and then got a large NEH grant in 2018 to develop the site, to develop a full site with all of these transcriptions and translations. And that's pretty much where I came into the picture, because around the end of 2018, he contacted me and said, hey, you know, I've gotten this money, but some of the people who I started working on this with have gone on to do other things. And. And you're retiring, so would you like to get involved then? So I said, oh, okay, sure. Something to do while I'm retired. So that's what's happened since the end of about 2018. I started working with Dan and we. We gradually got. We got another NEH grant in 2021 that went to 2024. We've been applying since from various adventures of grant review have prevented us from having fundings, but we just continue to be hopeful despite all odds. But in any case, we really developed what I think is a pretty magnificent site. And it was in this process that I got the idea of developing the short summaries that appear, that came to appear in my book. I put it that. I rephrase it that way because initially I had no idea, I had no intention of writing a book on this. I was writing these summaries because one of the features of each of the pages that we have is that each, Each seminar has. Each session of the seminars has a short description, description, description field that needed to be filled in. And so rather than do less, I did more. And then gradually I realized that I had over 200 of these and that this might be useful in another medium, and so began to rework them. And it was sort of at the same time that to some extent it felt like the rug was being pulled out from underneath us, when seemingly out of nowhere, the stricture, the caveat concerning no print publication of these seminars suddenly went away. And what I mean is that Edition de Minuit, which is the publisher of most of Deleuze's books from Anti Oedipus onward, actually Logic of Sense onward, started bringing these out, edited by David Lad, with the rationale that they have been brought out already in other languages. So they have been translated into Spanish, they have been translated fewer, but nonetheless translated into Italian. And both in Italian and in Spanish books have come out with the complete seminars. And so the family, I guess, deemed it necessary or advisable to come up with definitive versions of these seminars. And so whereas our philosophy for putting transcripts and translations on our site was sort of paranoid in the sense that we didn't want to leave a. We almost didn't want to leave a single, er, ah. Out. We didn't quite go that far. We didn't, you know, do those. Has a habit of going. And we didn't put every in, but nonetheless, we tried to be as faithful to the transcriptions and in. In our. And then. And then the translations would reflect that to the extent possible. Whereas in the. The minu e books that have come out so far, 2023 was on painting, 2024 was on Spinoza, 2025, they had, because it was Deleuze, Saturnary Minui published two books on lines of life and on the state apparatus and the war machine. And I'm putting these titles in English, but they were all published in French. And so at first we were sort of shocked, taken aback, wondering what this meant, but quickly, suddenly, but quickly realized that particularly when Minue. Excuse me, when University of Minnesota Press came knocking at Dan's door, Dan deferred to me as a possible translator. And so I've been translating these texts for Minnesota and On Painting came out last year on Spinoza's coming out later this fall and the other two on Lines of Life and on the State Apparatus and the War Machine should be out in successive years 2027 and 2028. So that's the general framework of where things stand with the background for understanding why this all came about. And other philosophers have their own apparatuses of this sort. Foucault certainly does and Derrida I suppose, does too, and other ones. So it's not unusual, but we've been fortunate to be able to have institutional support because it's, it is housed, if you can call a website housed somewhere. It's, it's at, at Purdue University. And Purdue has been very supportive.
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Nathan Smith
Yeah yeah. No, and I, we talked about this a little bit in the, the previous talk we had which, which for listeners. Dan was also there. It was a, you know, the three of us talking and I grew up, you know, just north of Purdue a little bit and I, I got many of my first tastes of Deleuze, presumably from like the, you know, the importance that you know, kind of Dan put on it especially in the Anglophone philosophy. Where does the Lewis fit discourse. So it, yeah, I, that's been like the, one of the, the strangest things was just oh that pretty oh that this is all coming out just, just south of me. And, and it's a, and it's an incredible resource. Like I, I, I've been following the list seminars website for quite some time and seen it get various glow ups and the transition from you know, just kind of a, almost more of a. I don't want to say facts but like almost like an email setup of the, the translations where it's like here's the title, here's the date, here's the, you know, the, the who cc'd to getting its own letterhead and you know, taking on a little bit more of a, a coherent image. And it's just been very enjoyable to watch and yeah, it's, yeah, I think it stands as a nice, I guess I don't know if microcosm of the general move of like, I don't know if you want to call it like guerrilla transcription of these things where cassette culture intersects with the Internet translations proliferate in varying levels of atten. As you, as you said like the paranoid aspect of how many ums do I need versus trying to produce something that reads a little bit more like a text. You know, like, there's obviously back and forth. And even in the. The French, the minui versions, they. He. They keep, you know, like, I have a. There's a meeting coming up, and before we get going, you should do this, you know, so you still get a little bit of the. The. The sense, but it's not quite the level of pause.
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Charles Stavall
Right, right. Yeah. They made it. They made the decision to edit out some. Not only to edit out a lot of the flotsam and jetsam of just people. This. People being in a crowded classroom.
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Nathan Smith
Yeah.
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Charles Stavall
But also to edit actually out some redundancies. So. And if needed. Needed. Needs be at certain points to reorder what Deleuze actually said. Just so. Because sometimes he'll say something and then he'll go on to another point and they say, oh, yeah, I've wanted to mention that. And then he'll go back to it. So, you know, a number of those. And whereas, you know, we kept it straight and linear in that regard, this is a lot more edited. And that is reflected on the translation process itself, because I've worked with Drew Burke at Univocal, who has the imprint for University of Minnesota Press, and worked with Drew Burke to really make these translations, say, much more approachable than we necessarily did on the Luz site. Not that they're any way eligible, but nonetheless, there are ways of rendering that make it a lot more accessible. And so we really made that effort.
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Nathan Smith
Yeah, yeah. No, and I guess that's probably a good thing to. It's a flag with. With this, you know, in relation to other, you know, 80s French, post structuralist, post modern, whatever you want to call them, philosophers and thinkers. Yeah. These read the most like. Oh, yeah, this. Which I think is actually kind of enjoyable. They read the most like, this is an actual class happening, as opposed to, you know, Foucault, which almost read like a book, you know, like, I mean, it. There's obviously, there's direct address, but you don't get as much interjections written into the lectures. And it seems a little bit more as a typed lecture delivered. And Derrida's kind of the same way versus Deleuze as you've kind of described, I think. And you can see it even in the COVID of the book. It's a crowded room, and it sometimes seems a little bit more like, all right, here's my stack of papers. I have an outline. But It's a little bit looser on that. On that in that regard, which is. I don't know, I find it really enjoyable to kind of like, watch him go. Like you actually have students interjecting and suggesting connections and him going, yes, but. And, you know, nuancing it a little bit and working, I guess, in a little bit more of a workshop almost fashion.
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Charles Stavall
Yeah.
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Nathan Smith
So, yeah, no, I mean, it's. It's really fascinating, you know, especially now that these are coming forth and especially with, you know, as you've. I. I know you've said, I believe it was in a discussion on the Machine Unconscious Happy Hour about. I think it was the cinema and maybe the Leibnitz. I think you were talking about those texts because many of these lectures then, know, speaking of distilling into little summaries and on painting, these things become some of Deleuze's late works post, you know, Anti Oedipus, including Anti Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus, but where he will spend an entire seminar on painting and go down rabbit holes that don't quite make it into the book. But those are also points at which the book feels almost so distilled from the lecture that it is opaque. So these lectures are wonderful. Like, oh, yeah, he made one reference to, you know, the color gray. That's not a good example. But like, that's actually a huge part of Lecture 4 of On Painting or something. And you can really dive into these lectures to, you know, as they interface with some of these later works. Right. So these are fantastic. Like a nice little intermediary.
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Charles Stavall
I did a reading group back in two, I'll say around 2005 or 2006, with a couple people at Wayne State trying to read Leibniz and the Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque. And I'm kind of. I was after the fact. I was kicking myself because I realized that there was a resource out there that I had on my fingertips that it never dawned on me to tap into, which was the 1980 Leibniz lectures, five lectures that Delisa did in 1980. But now that we have all 20 of the Leibniz and the Baroque lectures from 86, 87, frankly, I can't see how anyone can read chapters one, two and three of the fold, Leibniz and the Broke without reference to the first three lectures of the seminar, particularly the third lecture, because the third lecture has the almost not unique but nonetheless rare status of having been filmed, filmed in color, and that that seminar is available on YouTube with subtitles. And so it's, it's, it's quite, quite interesting to observe and. But in terms of doing the transcript and translation, it gave a number of different sources, not only Suzuki, who is actually in on screen most of the time, just to Deleuze's. Right. So Delu. So you got Suzuki's recording, but you've also got the recording coming from the Italian filmmakers. So it, it's. But anyhow, that, that book is just a, A study in Deleuze's. What do you call his sobriety of style, narrowing things down to the quintessence of what he wants to express, but at the cost of certain, certain things just being. The links between paragraphs are of. Escape me at certain points, and references just seem to be too thin. So, I mean, my example that I've said elsewhere is Mahler may. The presence of Mallarme in the sessions. In the Leibniz and the Baroque sessions In February of 1987, there's about half a class is devoted to Mallarme, the French poet Mallarme, and then the importance of Mallarme for the whole concept of the fold. And boy, don't you know, there's like one paragraph in the entire book of the. The fold, Leibniz and the Baroque that references Malarmace explicitly. But Deleuze is. But Deleuze has this phrase in French, it's pli cellon pli, which is translated as fold after fold, which comes directly from one of Mallarme's poems. And so he's referencing Mallarme implicitly by. With his, you know, sort of coming back to this itty bitty mantra. But if you don't know Malarme, I'm somewhat intimately. It's not like you would necessarily know this poem that he wrote to his friends in Belgium. It's not one of the. It's not one of the biggies. Yeah, you know, it's just like they would go right by. So, of course, our reading group, we did the best we could given the limitations we had. But man, it would have been such a treat to be able to go into the deep end of the pool and just get an understanding of what Deleuze is really saying.
- [26:16]
Nathan Smith
What does it mean to write today? If writing is a technology that restructures thought, as philosopher Walter Ong put it, then which written forms of thought and reflection will survive, AI or conversely, will be enabled by it? What new literacies are required? How will new technologies rework the relationship between writing and the marketplace? The new issue of the interdisciplinary journal Social Research explores how the way we write and the meaning of writing are rapidly changing. It asks how artificial intelligence transforms norms and expectations that for centuries associated writing with voice, originality and agency. In nine groundbreaking articles, the Summer 2026 issue of the journal tackles these and other questions that pertain to the issue's title. Writing in the 21st century. Social research is the flagship journal of the New School for Social Research in New York City. You can find the journal on Project muse or@www.socres.org. that's www.socres.org. yeah, and I think that was one thing that we talked about in our last discussion on the. On painting thing, the seminar and me going into it going, oh, yeah, this, you know, it more or less, you know, becomes the Francis Bacon book. You know, like, those ideas, they're, you know, co. Extensive to some extent. And then you read the actual. You read the seminar and it's like, well, Francis Bacon is a player here, but this is not a seminar on Francis Bacon. So you get like a different, you know, and then like reading that in conjunction with the actual. What the text actually becomes. And obviously it, you know, it's been reframed. He's been re. Centered in a way Bacon has that is as the only thing that's being talked about. And it kind of like inverts in some sense and re. You know, it's like a kaleidoscope, you know, like you're refracting a lot of the work he did in the lecture, but centering it around Bacon in an interesting way. And so, like, it's not always, you know, like the broke one. It sounds a. And obviously, you know, million things going on here, but a little bit like a process of condensation. But some of them also kind of stand apart as these are these. These products or these two, you know, intellectual endeavors, they rhyme and they share a lot, but they're not always having the same thing. And sometimes it's a little bit like there's still some distance, I guess, at least from what I've seen from Theon Painting, which is the. The one that we've spoken about earlier. It's a fascinating, like, way these things just kind of get tracked along and their connections to what, you know, if you just look at his bibliography, they seem to be, oh, yeah, he wrote a book on cinema and like finding the, like, even though that is an overstuffed text and another very distilled text, it spread out, I think, was that. That one wasn't two years of seminars, was it?
- [29:23]
Charles Stavall
Yeah. Each of work. Each. Each were two years of seminars.
- [29:27]
Nathan Smith
Yeah.
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Charles Stavall
And it's four. Four years.
- [29:29]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. Oh yeah, right, exactly. And he did that for so long and like that is such a wealth of information.
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Charles Stavall
92 sessions. Yep, yep. Yeah. But one of the, one of the interesting things about what you just. We've been describing here, I've just done this, I'm reading it, trying to write up a book proposal and I've just, you know, to see if I even have a book proposal, I have to actually write chapters to see if I have any. There, there. Yeah. And so I just finished a draft of the opening chapter and it has to deal with basically it's Deleuze's becoming his, his. The, the, the focus is on the so called 8 here 8 year hole in his life between 53 and 60. 54 and 62. But in any case, one of the things I discovered while I was looking really closely at a whole bunch of texts that I've sort of waved at as I've gone to things I was more interested in. Well now I did sort of dive into them and I realized that he did a lot of this. He became a master of reworking. I don't think he, he told Parne somewhere in the Abe Sedeh that when I die, don't go looking in my desk drawer because there's nothing there. I don't have all these things waiting to be published. And the irony with that is that early on he did in that he was busy in that so called eight year hole, amassing texts. But at the same time he also had a propensity for, well, propensity when approached to bring things out that would then get reworked in another form. And the two most prominent ones of these are he published in a small political journal in Paris in the late 50s, early 60s. He published what could be considered to be an excerpt from Nietzschean philosophy and then two years later an excerpt of what could be considered to be an excerpt from the Sagar Masoch book Coldness and Cruelty. And yet when you look closely at those texts, which I have, you realize that the 1959 Nietzsche text that he published in this journal. Well, okay, it's the first four sections of chapter one. And then there's all just a whole bunch of stuff that's scattered into pick and choosing from a number of different spots of what would eventually be Nietzschean philosophy. And the Sagar Mazok is text that he brought out in 1961, he did something slightly similar, although not as clearly formed as the earlier piece in relationship to the book. And so the Saramazok presentation that Zazi calls it the Coldness and Cruelty text, the presentation to what's the main act for Deleuze in that volume, which is Sagar Mazok's Venus and Furs, that text is a little, it's. Well, the what the, the. It's sparse, let's put it that way. What appears eventually as Venus of Coldness and Cruelty, it's there you can see the protean form. But really he's got a lot of work to do. But that's fine because apparently he had in mind he's going to write. If he's, he's working on something, he's going to write it and if it doesn't come out right away, that's no problem. And so there he was in 1959, he had some version of Nietzsche and philosophy which didn't come out until 62. There he was in 61 with some version of the Sagar Mazak introduction. Well, that didn't come out until 6066, I think, or 67. And he was more than happy to wait half a decade or a full decade because according to what his biographer Francois Doss said in his Intersecting Lives biography, apparently Deleuze wrote the complementary dissertation on Spinoza which came out as Expression in Philosophy. Spinoza, that didn't come out in France until 1968. Apparently he had written that or a strong version of that back in 1959 when he was taking courses at the Sorbonne. Not as a student, but he was teaching at the Sorbonne. But he was able to sit in on courses by professors that he respected and they were courses being taught on Spinoza and he's working on it. And why not? The guy who directed that complementary dissertation was teaching the course and so why not crank it out now and I'll use it when I need it. And well, you know, it's just, just a crazy thing that this guy was so prolific in that, that so called hole. And he's the one who brought up this, this expression of the so called hoe, the eight year old, because he was really, really busy during those years establishing himself as a teacher and, and within the profession.
- [35:19]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, and yeah, I think that in it, it strikes me that that in to read this as a film, we would call that a Chekhov's gun or Chekhov's desk drawer of like this has been flagged for. You don't look there but like, okay, that's a loose end that's going to come back at some point, you know. That's interesting. Yeah, I didn't know that he. I mean, like, I. I've seen a couple of scholars, you know, do like, not genealogies, but like unpacking some of the. The. How these things trace, like there was one. On the concept of expression and the changing relationships between what he takes from Bergson through a number of these early essays and drafts before to the, you know, Bergsonism, the actual text. And it is fascinating that like, he. Yeah, that's interesting to note that he, like, he's like, I have this idea and taught on his mind. He would write it out. But he doesn't always have the. I guess you could say, you know, to riff on, you know, some of the thousand plateaus stuff. And Marx, Marxism in general, of all of the parts were there or the organs, but they didn't have a body yet to which, you know, to congeal and to like, you know, come to. To expression, I suppose, of like, you had individual things, but you didn't have the assemblage, the. The. The putting together whatever holds these bits. That's interesting.
- [36:47]
Charles Stavall
If I had to. If I had to point to a single essay that. And of. Of this kind, it. It would be this essay that it's in different. It's in desert islands and other texts called the Concept of Difference in Bergson. And if you look at that, it's published in 1956 for Bergsoni, a journal called Bergsonian Studies. If you look at that text, you've got the embryonic version of Difference in Repetition. And it's just amazing. And he doesn't give short shrift at all to Bergson. He really does a solid job of representing Bergson's thought and his works in there. But. I recently read Joe Hughes's Guide to Difference in Repetition, which I highly recommend. It's so readable and approachable and intelligently explained that. But. So I was sort of familiar with a lot of the vocabulary and then reading this, and I recognized the Bergson side, but boy, oh boy, do I recognize the terms that will be brought forth in difference in repetition. And the amazing thing is that he was 56. 55. 56, because there's a little bit of lead time there for publication. He was very much into Bergson because he had another job. He had another text to produce, which was about half the size, half the length of the Concepts of Difference essay. But it was. It was. It was called Bergson Bergson 1849-1941. And it's also in different dead desert island islands. Yeah, it's, it's a much. It would presumably be a more biographical and more man, man and work type of thing. It's not. He really goes out at Bergson tooth and nail, just really going at, going at his key terms right from the get go, first paragraph, and then sees them through. And I think this was a kind of an unexpected approach because it was published in a huge volume edited by Maurice Merleau Ponty called Famous Philosophers Les Philosophes. And it was, you know, it's seen, I mean, until recently, until I've been doing this deep dive, I had never heard of it and other, other than see it in Deleuze's bibliography as, oh, that's republic. But I've not, I've since acquired that volume and it's pretty astounding and, and yet what Deleuze produced for it I think astounded the people who, who read it because he did such a succinct job of really being, I think really being faithful to Bergson's thought. But, but where he ends up in the 1849-1941 essay is with difference. And that's where he starts with the other one of the conference. That's a concept of difference in Bergson. So those two go together really neatly and crazily enough. In 1957 he publishes for another publishing house, I think it was Buf Preston University de France. He published one of these sort of scholarly manuals that's basically just excerpts, selected excerpts from Bergson's work. Thematically organized. But if you take that thematically organized little scholarly book from 57 and juxtapose it to those two texts in 56, you don't have to have Bergson's complete work sitting in front of you. You've got the selection of excerpts that correspond thematically to what he was talking about in those essays in the previous year. And it's just this amazing little cusp of scholarship that he produced in this so called hole that. For Burke. Burke and, and it's still a decade ahead of Bergsonism, you know, so he said, okay, I did that. I'll put it aside for now. It might come in useful down the road. What am I going to go on to now? I got this niche thing and oh yeah, why don't I write a dissertation on Spinoza? And it's not even 1960 yet.
- [41:36]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had a. I mean it's not quite, I guess it's coming out of the hole, but a similar Type of experience. I was doing like a re. Translation of. I think it's in Desert Islands. The what is, what is structuralism?
- [41:53]
Charles Stavall
Essay retranslation of my translation.
- [41:56]
Nathan Smith
Is that your translation?
- [41:57]
Charles Stavall
I curse you, man. I curse you.
- [41:59]
Nathan Smith
Oh, no, no, I. Wait, was that your translation in desert?
- [42:04]
Charles Stavall
Melissa McMahon and I did that translation.
- [42:07]
Nathan Smith
My goodness. No, it's not, it's not retranslating. It's. I, I've been doing like an editorial apparatus that like, involves highlighting and like, I, it's part of, it's in my dissertation and it has, it's more of like a typographic, you know, trying to find a way to see where the, the concepts in the text, like, rhyme. Because in that one he's juggling, you know, it's about structuralism. So he's talking about Levy, Strauss, he's talking about Altusser, Lacan, and he's going through all these different things and he's pulling out the, you know, he's like, you know, with structuralism, the important thing is always the, you know, the third that, you know, helps mediate but opens up things and like, it's a typographic way of like, trying to, yeah, I guess, dive into what are the actual, like, terms that he's using to, you know, I guess pull it into his theoretical apparatus that then goes into the, the connection I was going to draw was into Logic of Sense because a lot of the early chapters of that pretty much are like, laying out some of the first half of Logic of Sense before, you know, like, there's obviously the psychoanalytic stuff, but especially the, let's get some nuts and bolts on the table about, you know, what is expression, what is content, what, you know, the height, the, the depths, etc. But yeah, no, so I, I, the retranslation wasn't. This one isn't good. It's more of. I wanted to, I, I was getting more. Something that had passed over me, I guess, when I first was reading some of his texts was the degree to which he, he was structural and maybe this. He also still does this a little bit in the seminars as well, of the specificity of like. And I, I don't know, part of me imagines him going in there with his outline and like, the outline might have, okay, we have content expression. And he will pick one word more or less from a thinker to be. Oh, that's the. Their word for expression. And he will try to pull. And he'll use that as a way to pull people into dialogue, I suppose. So I was like, more just trying to, like, trace which. Which, you know, the translation followed. It was more of. Just for me, like, working through it, trying to be like, does he use the same word? Like, is it Liu versus, You know, because he'll do things like its place versus position, or I can't remember off the top of my head. It's been a while since I was diving into that explicitly. But he'll use two words that could be synonyms, but he will consistently use one of them to kind of set up a binary. Play with it a little bit, see how it unfolds.
- [45:01]
Charles Stavall
Yeah. And the funny thing about how does one recognize structuralism is that it. It appeared in a collection of. Of actually, it's 8. 8 volume.
- [45:18]
Nathan Smith
Yeah.
- [45:20]
Charles Stavall
It's history of Philosophy, edited by Francois Chatelet.
- [45:24]
Nathan Smith
I think Wall did the. I think it's from the. Like, one of the last ones. And I think Wall did the. That. That particular one. Yeah, yeah.
- [45:31]
Charles Stavall
And he. But the thing was that he. If you look at the first paragraph of that essay, he says he's talking about something real succinct at the beginning. And then he says, this is 1967.
- [45:47]
Nathan Smith
Yeah.
- [45:49]
Charles Stavall
Which might strike people as odd seeing it published in a 1972 book. And if you think about, okay, well, what does that mean? What does 1972 mean? Well, 1972 is the year that Anti Oedipus came out.
- [46:01]
Nathan Smith
That's true.
- [46:01]
Charles Stavall
And he was so far away from that 1967 text by the time the book finally appeared in print that people who try to sort of juxtapose, say, the Deleuzian Deleuze of 1972, Anti Oedipus to that essay that appeared in 1972 are going to have a hard time, because you're absolutely right. And juxtaposing it more to logic of sense, because logic of sense was at that point, be. Information in his writing practice. And he. He has an. He has a letter in the. In the volume of letters edited by La Pujad, Letters and other texts that. To. To Chatelet, where he's talking to Chatelet about publishing with him and making the contributions. Okay. He says, yeah, the Hume text, it's a go. But I can't give you something on Spinoza because I got this other commitment. And the problem with that letter is that it has no date. And La Pujad, I think, erroneously, La Pujad attributes the date he puts down at the little footnote. He says, possibly fall 1968, and I would say possibly fall 1967, just because of the issues that he's raising with Chatelet that is publishing the Hume preparing something for how she says, I can't do the Spinoza. Well, no, he can't do the Spinoza because a. He's got the Spinoza book coming out the next year as his complementary dissertation, but he also can't do the Spinoza because he's preparing a small little volume called Text Choisy Chosen Text, another one of those little scholarly manuals that'll come out in 1970. So Spinoza is pretty much taken, he says, but I can do something on structuralism if it would fit into your framework. And it turns out that structuralism and the vocabulary that he's using within that structural essay, particularly the whole idea of the empty square, the empty space. Space. I mean, that straight. I want to say it's straight out of logic of sense, but in fact, logic of sense is straight out of this essay that he was already working on or preparing and turning into, I think, to Chatelet, because he had other stuff. He had other fish to fry. And the other aspect of why I don't think it's 1968 is he says, well, I'm going to be traveling to Paris on December 11th, 12th and 13th, and so I'll catch up with you there. Well, Deleuze, in 1968, in December, was just about a month away from having his operation that took out a. And so he was really, really sick. He had to be on medical leave from the University of Lyon that whole year and the following year to recuperate. And so he wasn't really traveling around in that way. And also he makes a reference to one of the members of his committee, and he tells Chatelet in the same letter, well, my dissertation is a big pot of soup, but all the papers have been filled out and Shul is reading it. Well, to be writing that in December of 68 or fall of 68 is kind of unlikely, since the dissertation defense was supposed to be happening in fall of 68 and had to be postponed in January of 69. So it's so much more likely that it was a year earlier or maybe the spring of 68, but the winter of 68. But in any case, these are sort of the little things that pop up. And in that essay, the structuralism essay, the reason you didn't know I translated is because when you look at desert islands, you have to go all the way to the back of the book, way in the back, sort of in the sub basement of the book where they have the list of translators, their stuff than those that were footnoted. We're not even footnoted.
- [50:47]
Nathan Smith
We're like the, at least in the, in my edition, like after the title, there's a footnote. Oh no. That just leads to. Yeah, the Histrado. Yeah. The Chatelet. Huh?
- [51:01]
Charles Stavall
Yeah. We're way in the back. We're in, we're in the, out by where they, they pick up the garbage. You know, it's. I'm out there on the back. Yeah. So, I mean, that's been, that's been my experience as a translator. It's just been, you know, hey, you. At least I'm getting respect from Minnesota. I'm very happy with, with working for Minnesota.
- [51:21]
Nathan Smith
I didn't, I didn't mean to throw any shade here. There's nothing.
- [51:24]
Charles Stavall
But. Yeah, I just wanted to point out to you, buddy, that.
- [51:29]
Nathan Smith
Oh yeah, no, in my, like, I, I, I'm like re looking at my document now and like, I found a good example, like, example of what I was trying to say and part of it and it has to do with. Yeah, like more of my typographic stuff. But like, you get this sentence here. It is neither a matter of place in a real spatial expanse, sites in a man in imaginary extension. And it's trying to correlate and track. And like I said, this wasn't like a, I'm translating it for publication. It was more of a, you know, how he sets up rhetorically. Place with expanse, sites with extension. Places are then further pinned to things and real beings and then sites are further pinned to roles and events of like, how he's like trying to, he takes these different words and continuously like riffs on like, you know, it's the way he, you know, we'll talk about like, there's, you know. And that's, I think it's the second or third chapter about the, the Stoics and the, you know, they, they made the right, the, the cleavage between, what was it, beings and events and incorporeal transformations or something to that event extent where it's the, the idea of the, the lower bodily and then the upper realm and then between them comes the, the, you know, the, the film of sense, I suppose. And trying to like, see how he like, structures that and how consistent he is and the words he uses to signal that throughout, I guess. Yeah, well, hey, I, you know, I will definitely, if I ever finish up my. It's more of like a rhyming dictionary of like, it's putting visually in the English translation the, the evolving sets of like what is occupying the space of the bodies and states of affairs versus, you know, events or expressions, you know, and like trying to track the 2 to 3 levels and when does it shift from 2 to 3 and stuff like that. But yeah, all right. We have gotten so far away from your book, unfortunately. But also it's been great. Like, I mean, this is, this is exactly, I think what makes diving into these lectures at first intimidating on top of like the other published works. However, that is exactly, in some sense what your text is really great about, providing a key to, I guess this, the, the. The web of mad references and publication dates that we just got ourselves ensnared in or snarled in. So you provide a nice entryway into that. So how, I guess to like tie it back in with this, the text and the little summaries that you've. You put in and the keywords. How do you see your book kind of, you know, I guess maybe a little shading more toward the earlier discussion of like the le. The lectures writ large and the various institutional validation structures that they went through. How do you see it interfacing with those? Like what? I guess take me through how a reader approaching the book will take in, you know, the examples and then also how does that open up back onto the larger, like the actual lectures in a certain sense. So good, so good. So good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up
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Charles Stavall
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Nathan Smith
Shop new arrivals first and more.
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Charles Stavall
Put buy online and pick up at
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Nathan Smith
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Charles Stavall
Great brands, great prices.
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Nathan Smith
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- [56:06]
Charles Stavall
June 30th turns at aka Ms. CollegePC. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration platform blog. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make Anything online make sense?
- [56:29]
Nathan Smith
There's no place like Chrome.
- [56:31]
Charles Stavall
Check responses set up, required compatibility and availability various 18 plus. Well, that's an interesting question in the sense that it's. It's precisely the kind of question that one finds in the format for posing a book to oppress who, who. What will the readership be? And my take on that is, is, you know, typically massive waffle, because it always depends on the background of that particular reader. Right, right. Someone who's. I would just say that most generally anyone who has an interest in one of the particular topics that are covered within this book. And just to lay that out, we're starting with lectures not recorded. So transcripts. Yeah, transcripts of Anti Oedipus. Not that many, but nonetheless there are a few from 72, 73, 70, 71, 72, 72, 73, 73, 74. There's a blank year there. We have nothing for 7,475. And then for our organizational purposes on our website, we put the next five years 75 to 79 under the rubric of 1000 plateaus. But again these are, except for 75, 76 which were. We have videos of them. So we have transcripts taken from the film for Rai 3 television in Italy. For the other ones for 76 through 79 we only have a handful of texts and it's not until 79. So we're talking antioedipus, a thousand plateaus. And then 79 was when Suzuki started is recording. And that takes you through focusing mostly on plateaus 12, 13 and 14 of a thousand plateaus. And then subject wise in terms of say, following the thousand plateaus, you have a brief little five session mini seminar on Leibniz followed by two wrap up sessions at the end of spring 1980. And then subject wise, painting Spinoza 8081 is, excuse me, 8081 is Spinoza. And painting 82 through 86 through 85 takes you through the four seminars of the two cinema books. 76, 576 is Foucault, excuse me, my decade off. 85, 85, 86 is Foucault and 86, 87 is the fold, Leibniz and the Baroque. So anyone coming from any of these different perspectives, and as we mentioned earlier for Leibniz, well, heck, you ought to. You owe it to yourself to check out these seminars because without them it's tough going in that little book. Going backwards here, Foucault, consider that. Let's just, let's just take out the last two sessions there are 26 sessions of the Foucault seminar. Let's just take out the last two because they're mostly Q and A, various sorts. So we got 24 sessions. Tank two, that's 48, two hours. That's 48 hours of text. And I'm being skimpy here because in the Foucault seminar we had some three hour sessions and so at least 48 hours of discussion of the three main parts of that book and which really
- [60:42]
Nathan Smith
like expand 20 pages.
- [60:45]
Charles Stavall
Yeah, exactly. You got very thin book. Again, slim down massively. And so he has a great expansion on much of what he says in that book. Going backwards further, you got Cinema One book, the, the movement image, Cinema Two, the time image and across 92 sessions. Yeah, whatever you might be interested in, you might pair this up with visiting our website, you know, my book and really you can always look in the index of my book to see where, where terms come up. But if you're interested in, in just the whole concept of space, you could just put the word, plug the word space into our search engine and boy will you get some hits. But there's all kinds of different space that comes up in the back in the index of my book. So whatever the theme you might be or the topic or the author you might be wanting to work on, there you go. You can find them both the combination of my book and delve into it just to see, well, okay, this is where this is spoken about or this person spoken about and then go there the site or, or you can, and you can download the lectures as PDFs and then backwards a little bit further. That takes you to Spinoza and to painting and again the Spinoza book. Most the most recent Spinoza book that's it's going to come out in 81 is Spinoza practical Philosophy. And Fano's Practical Philosophy is an expansion of his 1970 book the text Choisy book the Chosen Selected Text. But he adds a few extra chapters in the Practical philosophy book and a number of those, particularly for example, the chapter on Blyenberg and Spinoza's correspondence with Blyenberg that's dealt with in considerable detail and quite humorously in the Spinoza Seminar. And you know, we've already spoken about, about the painting. You got these two different projects going on simultaneously. On the one hand, Liz wants to lead the, the students to the discussion of color, but to get to color, you've got to have a painting to color, as it were. And so he really starts from the beginning of that Seminar from the founding moment of bringing a painting into creation. And that process of moving from those founding moments in the first sessions all the way to the last two sessions, sessions seven and eight, where he's really coming to color at that point and discussing all the different aspects of color. It's really a remarkable study of, you know, painting in. In a really broad and sweeping sense. And. And you're right to say that, you know, and the. The Bacon book, the Logic of Sensation is not the seminar. And yet, yeah, a lot of the key terms, key concepts that are developed in the seminar do appear in the. The Bacon book. So it's. And that's. And then the last thing I'll just say here is that if you happen to be A Thousand Plateaus freak. Yeah, there's probably a lot of better places to go now because we just had a couple books have just come out in the last few months, more introductions or overviews or critical articles. A Thousand Plateaus. And Henry Summers hall is. He's got to bear responsibility for these because he's behind them. But in any case, the 7980 seminar
- [65:02]
Nathan Smith
on
- [65:04]
Charles Stavall
the sections of 1000 plateaus are still really very interesting. And he fleshes out a lot of the detail that you find in A Thousand Plateaus, a lot of the same sources and so forth. But it's interesting. One of the things I'm going to be developing, I hope, at some point in the next year or so is trying to link up the last few chapters of A Thousand Plateaus and the seminar to the idea that Deleuze already wrote his book on Marx, you know, because there's this. All this discussion of, ah, heck, you know, that was his last work that never got off the ground. And if you look back at A Thousand Plateaus and you look at the way he brings Marx forward, a particular kind of Marx. You see that Again, we're talking about a guy. We've already said this earlier. He has these protean projects in the works. And if he had been able to get the Marx book out before he died, we'd all be looking back at where they had come from in these earlier. Earlier, that's true. Sessions, but we don't have that book. Well, let's just look at those earlier sessions and just pretend we have the book and we're writing it as we look at these sessions and what he was working on with Marx. So I want to kind of work that forward through. Through what is philosophy, you know, through the. The geophylosophy section of what Is philosophy just to try to tie those. Those little strands together. I'm not sure I'm. I'm really capable of doing that as well as some people that I know, but I'm going to give it a stab. Sort of the last. It'll be the last part of this book project if I. I make it there.
- [67:05]
Nathan Smith
That's fantastic. Yeah. No, and that's actually part of what sent me back to the. What is structuralism text or like I spent so much time with it was the scant amount of references to Altuser and the like his. The. The interactions with him sending that text all to Sarah and he see there seems to be in that text a lot of, you know, respect and interest and like a special. Like Altusser often comes up as like the pinnacle of like, oh, this is, you know, people were talking about, you know, this and Altucera raised it, I guess like a level of abstraction to the dis. The level of history and discourse itself. It's been a while. I'm kind of pulling on it. And that is something that is utterly scrubbed from logic of sense. And like you start to get a couple more, you know, and part of it has to do, I think was it Machery and some of the. Yeah, Machery and the. Those who were in. Collected in the reading capital. Balabar, Balibar and. Because that was like a hot thing in 1965, which with this essay coming, you know what. What was it? 67 or 69? I can't remember. Seven. Yeah. And yeah, there was apparently a. A back and forth and then. Yeah, 69 would be logic of. No, that's 60.
- [68:34]
Charles Stavall
Logic of sense, huh?
- [68:35]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, yeah, it's all coming in like very close. And then to. To hear. Yeah, there was a kind of a. A gutting of the. Of the Marxist side of it from logic of sense and then to see parts of it come back out in especially the chapter. So like I'm. I'm really interested in that project, the chapter 3 of Anti Oedipus which then gets picked up in those later the war machine and the state apparatus, especially plateaus and anti. Thousand Plateaus. Yeah, it's like you. You do get something of a book on Marx and how it's been refracted through structuralism. Were very structuralisms. But yeah, you're right, it's kind of. It's oddly muted while still simultaneously being there.
- [69:21]
Charles Stavall
Oh yeah, definitely, definitely. But in relationship, in relation to the seminar, it's. It's a lot less muted, believe me. And I mean I say this Because I already have a complete draft of the state apparatus in the War Machine translation. And this is what I do in my translation process is I do the footnotes first, do the text translations after I have the footnotes in place so I don't have to interrupt myself as I'm going through the text translation with the thorny process of footnotes. If I have them all in place, then I've already seen sort of the, the sort of in Backstage, as it were. It's like there's a play called Voices off where everything takes place behind stage. You don't see the stage until second act. And so this is sort of feels like starting a translation by looking at the apparatus behind it. And so by getting through that, when I did the first draft, I was able to see just how much Marx, how important Marx was and what texts by Marx figure into the, Liz's thinking and, and in the, and to the, into the seminars. So, yeah, so his, his presence is, you know, quite important. Now you, you, you triggered something when you mentioned Althusser. And so I immediately went to the back of my book and there is no mention of Althusser on the index. And I realized, okay, fatal error. But it was a decision that had to be made in the book, in the ongoing, in the book, the unfolding the Deleuze seminars. At the end of pretty much every summary, I have additional key names. But what that means is the additional key names were names that couldn't, that I didn't include in the summary. Yes, proper for various reasons, but nonetheless that figure within some way within that particular session. But when it came to doing the index, there are about, I'm going to say roughly three to 400 names in these additional key names. Some of them are in the index because they, they're actually within some of the summaries.
- [72:07]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, right.
- [72:08]
Charles Stavall
But those ones that sort of fell out that weren't, weren't in any of the summaries, then they get no reference. So I didn't, in other words, I didn't reference any of the additional key names. So if you go to this book and you go look in the index, say, oh, there's no Altuser mentioned in here. Yeah, well, I'm looking at page 85 of the additional key names for the February 8, 1980 session. So Althusser makes some kind of appearance, but within the session you see deriving several, I'm reading from the text, deriving several examples from works by Bali Barr and from Marx. Deleuze questions the need henceforth for the State apparatus given the new formation, operating through the axiomatic. And that's just one sentence. But you see the. You know, see the presence. And so Balibar is mentioned there. Well, okay, so he's just probably a running buddy of his. Is going to be Altuser for some. For some way.
- [73:12]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, no, and I was. I actually had that same page open where I was going to say I never checked the index. I'm like, well that's weird because you like Altouser is in here. I remember reading his name. Yeah, it's. It's just to give the. The listener a little sense of this. So like, you know, this is on page I'm starting on 83 here. It's at the very bottom. You get something like session 8, February 5, 1980. As approx. As close as it can get. There's a. You know, then you get like the. The precede or the like summary itself which is about. There's two lines on the first page, all of 84 and let's say the first third of 85. And that goes through like the actual seminar.
- [73:54]
Charles Stavall
The.
- [73:54]
Nathan Smith
Like the real meat. And yeah, you see Balabar mentioned there on 84. And then the additional key names are. The other are what you're talking about here. So you get Altucer Conte. Yeah, Contest. Yeah, sorry. Kant, Pinas. So Adam Smith, Verdi and Wagner.
- [74:22]
Charles Stavall
You know, like. And these are.
- [74:23]
Nathan Smith
Which is. It's one thing I enjoyed in reading this is reading the coherence of the seminar description that you've provided and then going, wait, we talked about Verdi here. Like me as a, you know, music. Music studies scholar. Like, what the hell? Yeah. I'm like, wait, where the. The really want to Chuck.
- [74:47]
Charles Stavall
If you really want to chuckle, Nathan, look at the bottom of 86.
- [74:51]
Nathan Smith
Oh God.
- [74:52]
Charles Stavall
Because now this is the next session and at the bottom of 86, the last key name on this page of the Marx Brothers.
- [75:01]
Nathan Smith
I man, see, that's the wrong kind of Marx Brother though. You see what I mean?
- [75:06]
Charles Stavall
Yeah, well, I was going to say.
- [75:08]
Nathan Smith
And I also.
- [75:09]
Charles Stavall
They'll make their way into my. My chapter somehow.
- [75:12]
Nathan Smith
That's. You have to. There's a. There's a great. I think it's called the Fireside Theater.
- [75:17]
Charles Stavall
Oh yes, I know. Fire Sign Theater.
- [75:20]
Nathan Smith
Yes, fine theater. And I have this record and I finally listened to it and on the COVID it has Marx and Lennon and it's Groucho Marx and John Lennon. Yes, very funny. You know, kind of a, you know, collage style humor. But yeah, there's ample stuff to. To pull out there. Yeah. I mean, this book is fun just reading in and of itself, but it, it is interesting how like, and just, you know, for the, to signal for hopefully many future readers of it, you get to the end of like, incredibly nice summaries that lay out the main, you know, I guess kind of like positions the, the main, the signposts of what is being discussed. And then you get this little, this little thing going like also, I cut out so much. But if you, you know, and you, you're able to kind of go, oh, I am interested in how Wagner and Verity intersected with a totalitarian state apparatus in the American state. I can now, you know, then you jump and you can go into either the Purdue, Purdue Duluth seminars thing or hopefully should these be. Are these the, now that I'm thinking about it, yeah, these are the ones that are in the, the most recent MINUI or the, the state apparatus ones, right? Yes. Is that the agencies.
- [76:44]
Charles Stavall
Yeah, the ones that, yes, these are the, these are the state apparatus ones. Huh?
- [76:48]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. My French is not that good, so I've been slogging through that very slowly. The, to go through some of the French to, you know, bulk up on being able to read a second language. But yeah, I mean these are absolutely like indispensable little clear outlines. But then also you provide those, those threads out and yeah, I guess the text search function on the, the Duluth seminar definitely is. I don't know for me, that's where I went next.
- [77:21]
Charles Stavall
Yeah.
- [77:23]
Nathan Smith
I think a part of what the, the impulse for that question of like, how do you imagine. Yeah. What's your ideal reader? Is me going, I'm like, I probably like I, someone who already knew webdelos and has used the search function and gone through some of the summaries for those that don't have transcripts. I was like, this feels, you know, hand in glove. So I wasn't sure if you had a, you know, thought out some other possible options of how to navigate them.
- [77:51]
Charles Stavall
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean every. Humans are an inventive species. So I, I, I, I far be it for me to try to limit anybody, you know.
- [78:02]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, of course.
- [78:03]
Charles Stavall
Yeah.
- [78:06]
Nathan Smith
Oh, I mean, I've had you for quite some time and we've, we've gone in out of the book, around the book, into the desk drawer and back. There was one other thing that I wanted to ask and I, maybe this will get us back to a little bit of the looking forward and where things are going with this process of navigating the, I guess the moratorium on appearing in print after death. So this isn't the first time that you've written something like a precis for Deliz's French works without actually being able to publish a translation. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, the ab work you did.
- [78:48]
Charles Stavall
The.
- [78:48]
Nathan Smith
What is it, eight hours long? The. The filmed with Parnier, I believe. Yeah. Like, do you. Did you see that in some sense, preparing you for something like this? I don't know what. How did those two processes.
- [79:00]
Charles Stavall
I didn't know something like this would exist.
- [79:03]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, that's true. I would really have to be.
- [79:06]
Charles Stavall
I'd have to have some foresight. No, the. Obviously there. Okay, so we're talking about a different medium now. The medium we were dealing with at that point were VHS cassettes. And the collection of VHS cassettes came out from Edition Montparnasse in. I think it was 96 or 97. And of course, so they came in these big three. Bulk. Bulky, bulky box of three VHS cassettes. And my thought process before I even put them in the cassette recorder was, you know, I want to. I want to watch these, but I don't want to watch these like I'm. I'm. I'm watching the Godfather or something, you know, I don't want to watch these as a. Just a spectator. I really want to be involved. So that's where I got the idea, right from the get go, to transcribe them for no other purpose at that point than to have the actual transcription. And so watch these and then write the transcriptions of each of these. And so that. That was just like its own project itself. And what came out of that was my understanding. First. I had a, you know, a really good insight into what Deleuze was saying in these seminars, and a lot of little blank spots where I couldn't quite figure out what he was saying. But gradually I got those filled in. But at that point I realized that there was no way to. I could certainly translate these, but there was nothing I could do with the translation because of permission issues. And they were issues that I wasn't even in the least bit interested in going after. So what I did in about 98 or 99 or thereabouts was I decided to. Well, I don't need to. I can translate it, of course, but then I can just summarize the translation. So if I have a summary of the translation in the third person, which is my. My trans. My. My summary of this, of this eight hours, that it's my property and Nobody else's. And so that's what I did. And, and then I made it available through word of mouth. I made it available to a whole bunch of friends. Anybody who wanted a copy, they just had to send me an email. And I mailed them a paper copy. I never, never mailed this out. I never emailed this out. I mailed it to them wherever they were on the planet. And so I did that for a couple years. And around 2000 or 2001, I got a email from Silver L', autranger who was the editor of Semiotext at the time, one of the founders of Semiotext. And he wrote me and said, oh, I hear you got a translation of the Abi Seder and I really be interested in publishing it. And I wrote him back, said, no, I don't have a translation of the Abba Seder. I have a summary of the Abba Seder. And that's what the people around him at Columbia were telling him. And he wasn't paying attention, so he thought I had a translation. So then he said to me, well, you know, it wouldn't take much for me to get one of my students to do a translation of that. So I thought to myself, okay, well, I'm about to be. I'm being too picky here. I'm about to be scooped by somebody else. So I said, well, I happen to have a translation.
- [82:56]
Nathan Smith
It's just.
- [82:57]
Charles Stavall
I haven't made that available to anybody. It's just, oh, well, okay, then let's. Let's get on. Let's get this project on the road. And I stored them back. I said, what about the permissions? And he said, well, I can get those. That's no problem. I'll just talk to Claire Parnet. Yeah, well, fast forward. No, Claire Parnay was having none of it. And. But I already had a contract with these guys.
- [83:19]
Nathan Smith
Yeah.
- [83:20]
Charles Stavall
And so basically, for the next decade, throughout the aughts, I just sat on it, except kept mailing people, kept mailing copies to people, snail mail. And then around 2009 or so, I heard from. I can't remember his last name, but first name, I think is Hetty. One of the people who worked for Lotan Jake. They had the permission to do the DVD in zone one format. And I said, well, you know, you already got the contract for the translation. It's, you know, I already mailed it to you guys. And he goes, oh, really? He said, could you. Because you could you mail it to me again? So I. So at that point I was able to send a digital copy to him because they owned it. And so the translation that I did back in about 98 or 99 became the translation, more or less, of the DVD subtitles that was published by Semiotex and MIT Press, I think, in 2012. So going back to the beginning, your question was, no, I wasn't preparing for working with Dan Smith back in 98 because I didn't know Dan would come up with this. But on the other hand, it's sort of the way I operate is that I don't really. I didn't really want to just leave it as. Oh, yeah, that's a cool thing to watch every now and then. I think I'll watch D tonight, you know, just as I'm, you know, after I have dinner. No, I really went at it very, very seriously and. And it came, you know, it became really important. Important part of my. My work because I was able to talk about it knowledgeably and also give talks with clips.
- [85:11]
Nathan Smith
Yeah.
- [85:11]
Charles Stavall
That I. And I knew where to go for these clips because, you know, I'd just gotten so inside the whole eight hours and where stuff was. I could go there pretty quickly. So it was very, very, you know, it was very, very helpful thing.
- [85:26]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. No, and this, like, I. That impulse of. I don't know, I. It. It's an interesting thing to, like, hear you talk through it of, like, wanting to dig in of as someone who studied jazz guitar. And that was like something I did before becoming more academically, you know, oriented. Like, that's a lot of what transcription is. It's like, yeah, you can listen to, you know, a Miles Davis solo, whatever, but, like, taking the time to try to reproduce it second by second, you know, start with the overview.
- [86:00]
Charles Stavall
Get a.
- [86:00]
Nathan Smith
You know, get your bearings, but less as a. I will produce a product that will then be marketable, you know, and then as like a practice of engagement, which then as you're saying, like, subsequently, it's like, well, I mean, this could be useful for other people. And then you get into, like, issues of. Of property and various types of things like that. But, like, just the process of attuning towards something I find incredibly fascinating. And that's part of why I started, I guess, retranslating your translation. I'm sorry again, Buzz.
- [86:37]
Charles Stavall
Sounds like you. It sounds more like you're transposing. Yeah. Than translating. And that's, you know, you. In any case, you have to apologize. You're free to do whatever you want and all free to curse you all I want. So, yeah, that's Right.
- [86:50]
Nathan Smith
We have it on record here. No but like that, but like it stemmed from a similar impulse of like I read the English translation. I'm, I'm, you know as we've been talking with doing, doing some of the Blanche some of his works and the, which we've talked about in the axiomatics text and the half of it that's that Deloitte sight sometimes trying to get into it. It's like no, I'm going to sit down. He's talking about a lot of thinkers here. They're all right there. I'm going to try to read it in French and see if I can like change it and you know like, you know, you kind of what you're saying like dive in like dig, dig, dig into it. Not just passively read a, a sentence. But yeah, I mean that this, I guess part of what made me think of the same thing there of like this seems to have arisen from a similar like practice of engagement that, that you, that you made weren't that was in evidence when you did the EPSA there of like oh, you know, I'll start making these summaries because you're dealing with this. You know, they're in English or they're in French. They've been transcribed. Oh how would I render that in English? If someone such as myself who has barely or like, you know a passable French in a reading capacity wants to find out what the hell was going on with Wagner and the nation state in that one anti, you know, thousand plateau thing. I could then dive back into the French or. And now we're seeing like entire seminars being through Minnesota brought out in English as well. The, the process of engagement that seems to like, you know, I've really, it's been fun to both listen to you as well as Taylor. We've mentioned him a couple of times or on from the Machinic Unconscious Happy hour and his work with Laurel and Simone Dawn. The like the practice of translation in this kind of international, I don't know like search for more stuff especially with some of these, you know, kind of diff like really difficult and often quite condensed thinkers has been such an interesting approach that I felt really I like again rhyme if not duplicate, you know, has a, has an affinity with just the practice of being a jazz musician and learning a solo. It's like well, I'm actually getting that it's not, I'm never going to play this necessarily but this is helping me really focus my attention. But I don't know. I, I, that's one thing I've really enjoyed about hearing you talk about your work and your translations in general, and this text is a lovely testament to that.
- [89:48]
Charles Stavall
Thank you.
- [89:49]
Nathan Smith
I. Hey, I've had you for so long. I've talked about jazz transcription. I've, I've insulted you in your translations. I, I think we've checked all the boxes. Is there anything that you want to flag? I.
- [90:02]
Charles Stavall
We should.
- [90:03]
Nathan Smith
You've mentioned that the, the. Those two seminars are also. Or the sections of them are already under contract with Minnesota, I believe. Right. For the. Including Spinoza for the next Spinoza.
- [90:19]
Charles Stavall
I'm waiting on the proofs any day now. And, and then they. That should be out sometime late in the. I think late in the fall. But Minnesota gives, gives kind of a lead time on their publication. I mean there's, Even though you can't get a hold of the book until it's released, nonetheless, they, they love to pre release. Not pre release but pre, pre. Pre get your, your pre publication advertising and so you can get your order in. But, but any case. Yeah, I'm not. For the subsequent years, you know, obviously they, they put out their plan for that particular book within the year. So I won't know about that until next year for, for On Lines of Onlines of Life.
- [91:06]
Nathan Smith
Right, right. Right. Yeah. No, you've been, you've been. We've been talking about how these came out and you were like I just started going. But. Right. How they, how these are going to like intersect with these various marketing, institutional, et cetera. Copyright schedules is obviously going to inflect this.
- [91:28]
Charles Stavall
Yeah. Any case, these are these, these texts are all available in English translation on our website. So translations are not at all what are going to be in the published books coming out from Minnesota, but they certainly resemble them. And particularly the Onlines of Life, we're only talking about the two sessions that are. I mean the book will probably be lucky to be more than 110, 115 pages, but it's got a third seminar added to it as an appendix because the topics that are discussed in the seminar proper are related to. I'm looking it up here. Related to the previous. Yeah. Here in his seven. Yeah. A 1977 session. And so there we are. Yeah. There. It's February 15th, 1977. And the title I've given it for our purposes is Cartography. Three Lines and Two Planes. And it discusses the. It's kind of some. It's a, it's a beginning. This, this February 15th date is usually where they're about to Either. I believe they're about to go on their spring break. So. Though it seems to be summarizing a lot here. And it's not a complete session either, you can tell that it gets cut off at the end. But nonetheless, he's kind of summarizing the whole concept of segmentarity and multiplicity and breaks it down into a number of different categories and particularly talks about lines and lines of life. And so it's very pertinent for the publication of it with these two particular sessions from 1980 is particularly pertinent. And it doesn't help. Excuse me. It doesn't hurt that the mean ue probably wanted to give the. Give the potential buyers a little bit more than just these two from 1980. And so it's a way of sort of bringing one of these odd sessions that probably couldn't find any other home, bringing it into this relationship. The same thing is true for the State Apparatus and the War Machine, because it too, I believe, if I'm not misspeaking, has an appendix. I'm going to come here.
- [94:38]
Nathan Smith
From 79.
- [94:39]
Charles Stavall
Yes, from 79. It's the soul Session. It's the Soul Session that exists for the previous academic year, 1978. 79. So I gave the title of that movement. Movement, Matter, Metalization and Music. Yeah. And again, it's just a fragment of a session, but it's sort of animated by Richard Pinos and his questions to Deleuze.
- [95:09]
Nathan Smith
So, yeah, I believe this was the one you. You would reference to me of, like. There's the word. Is this where he explains what a synthesizer is? Kind of like, he.
- [95:18]
Charles Stavall
Oh, no, that. No, that the synthesizer explanation comes at the very last session of the Leibniz and the Baroque Seminar.
- [95:27]
Nathan Smith
Right. Yes.
- [95:28]
Charles Stavall
It's a very end there. He gets all into explaining the synthesizer and he takes over the class, unfortunately, because this is. This is. Well, I say it unfortunately not because. Not necessarily because of him, but because this is the last time Deleuze is going to be speaking. And. And for some reason, Pinos decided that. And this was filmed too, to make it even more egregious.
- [95:57]
Nathan Smith
Yeah.
- [95:58]
Charles Stavall
That he decided that this is where he was really going to show off. And he had the cameras on him. And to lose his purpose in that final session was to bring students together to discuss the concept of harmony and to listen to musicologists who had knowledge of Baroque music and could provide feedback on the way he was dealing with the Baroque in relationship to the music of the period and also the concept of harmony. And alas, Richard decided that this was his moment to shine. And the loose kind of had, you know, since you've got a lot of moments there where you've got Deleuze's body expressions, you know, you know, you can read what he's, what he's thinking, even though he doesn't say it. It's pretty obvious. He's just sort of throws up his hand and goes, okay, what can I do?
- [96:57]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, yeah, yeah, man, that's, I, I, I, I'm taking a note of that right now. That sounds. Pulling it up on the website, but yeah, well, thank, thanks for the, thanks for the reminder on that. That's, you know, all these things are obviously jostling around and, you know, somewhere in here I'm supposed to write dissertation and, you know, get a job if there were any. So it's good to have these, you know, I remember that. I remember doing. Sure, yeah. It's good to have these rebubble up. So, so thank you, but. All right. Is there anything else about the, well,
- [97:36]
Charles Stavall
in the, in the, in the, in the comments that you sent me beforehand, you had the, you almost have a question here. What, what's your favorite chapter? And, and I'm going to say to you, that's like asking a parent, what's your favorite child?
- [97:52]
Nathan Smith
That's what I was like. You don't have to do it if you don't want to.
- [97:55]
Charles Stavall
Yeah.
- [97:56]
Nathan Smith
And.
- [97:56]
Charles Stavall
Well, you can't, you can't single them out. I mean, I have, I have a relationship. It's so bizarre because I've thought about that question most of all since you sent me this list and I said I have a weird relationship with every single session and every single seminar because I've been working on. Well, working. I mean, the first translation I did was back in 1999, 2000, of the five sessions of the 1980 Leibniz, as well as a couple sessions from Leibniz and the Baroque. So that one that goes back now over 25 years. And then since I've been working with Dan since 19, since 2018, there's been. I re. Listened to every single transcript, every single recording to make sure that we have the transcripts properly spelled out and as close to as faithfully as we can. So it's just really hard to just specify, you know, one. I guess I would always go back to the first one. I did the, the five. The five Leibniz, mainly because I, I had no clue what I was doing. I had no clue what. And, and I have to say that I wasn't basing that on recordings, I had no access to the recordings at that point. I was basing them on the transcripts that were provided on web Deleuze. And I have to, there are translations on web to lose, but I just have to give a shout out again, don't want to diss. So I'll just give a shout out to our site because we've listened to everything and I can pretty much guarantee that what's on the recording is what's on is what's on our transcript and then in our translation. I can't say the same for what's on the different seminars on web Deleuze, because a lot of variation occurs just to leave it like that between what happens in the delu sessions and then what gets put on got put on the site. So a lot of the peculiar, unfortunate editing occurred at certain points. So. But in any case, yeah, so I can't. But I, I, I come back to those five because I didn't know what I was doing, but I learned from them. And so it was very, it was very, very helpful. And as I moved forward, I really became clear how I could do a better job. And so those are learning. It's like the first child, you know, you make your mistakes and you move on.
- [100:50]
Nathan Smith
Yep. Hey, as a first child, I resent that, but, but, but I will accept.
- [100:54]
Charles Stavall
Hey, it's not on you.
- [100:57]
Nathan Smith
That's fair. Again, Charles, thank you. This is something that you've been sitting with. So it is, it's telling that you, like, bring us back to some of your first attempts at these, because this has clearly been in almost 30 year process that you've been, you know, working with this material. And I just, it's an honor to be able to talk to you and I'm so glad that you're willing to just talk so openly and refresh my memory, go on these little tangents of this one thing that happened at one point in the translation from text to video to, you know, what have you, because this is a wealth of knowledge that it's an honor for me to be able to hear you talk through it. And I'm glad that we're adding yet another layer of rabbit hole chasing hopefully for people who are trying to get into this stuff. So thank you so much.
- [101:49]
Charles Stavall
Okay. It's my pleasure.
- [101:50]
Nathan Smith
Yeah.
- [101:51]
Charles Stavall
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with
- [101:56]
Nathan Smith
the mission of public education.
- [101:58]
Charles Stavall
If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ewbooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.