Postcolonial Haecceities

Arnaud Bouaniche has recently drawn attention to the curious way in which Gilles Deleuze opens his 'Spinoza: Practical Philosophy' (1988) with a dialogue excerpted from Bernard Malamud's novel 'The Fixer' (1966), a dialogue which Bouaniche (2006: 131) describes as "a perfect 'mise en abyme' of the change in perspective" that, in his opinion, occurred in Deleuze's work after May 1968, and which points to the position that Spinoza occupied in Deleuze's thought. What Bouaniche emphasises, and what is of particular interest for us as we try to understand the nature of the relations between Deleuze and his 'mediators', is that when one character in the dialogue is ordered by another, a judge, to explain what brought him to read Spinoza and what meaning he took from his encounter, the character in question: emphasises 'not the speculative content or the theoretical propositions in Spinoza's thought, but the PRACTICAL EFFECTS that they have had' not only on him as the reader and an individual ('After that I wasn't the same man'), but also on their author ('[Spinoza] was out to make a free man of himself'), having decided, in the words of the judge, to approach the problem 'through the man rather than the work.' (Bouaniche 2006: 131; emphasis added) For those of us who wish to gain a better understanding of the popularity that Deleuze has attained among postcolonial writers, what is interesting about this story is that it gives a first hint of the direction we must take in order to approach the question correctly.