Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
Your next book is by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Mille Plateaux.
Yes, my interest in Deleuze started when I read his Proust et les Signes in high school in Paris in 1977. He was still relatively unknown outside France. Since then I have pillaged his extraordinary conceptual coinage – I use ‘Thousand Planes’ (my translation of Mille Plateaux) in my Introduction to Middle Eastern Law as a holding concept for 4,000 years of Middle Eastern and Islamic law. It is impossible to circumvent Deleuze as the major philosopher of the century. Foucault predicted as much in a famous quote that goes something like: the 21st century will be Deleuzian or nothing. Deleuze, who died in1995, has indeed moved from being a maverick thinker to becoming a major world political and philosophical reference.
Can you describe the basis of Deleuzian maverick political thought?
The elaborate dimension of his philosophy is in Mille Plateaux, written with Guattari, his old companion who died in 1992. There are several planes, he says, layers of what he calls ‘rhizome’ – many roads, some that go nowhere. This is a modern and lively version of Heidegger’s Holzwege [Off the Beaten Track]. Deleuze provides always a brilliant, meaningful exposition of classics in a current context: Kafka, Proust, Spinoza, Nietzsche, the cinema. The order he brings in and operates in each field I find always extremely enriching, to understand them and go beyond.
In what way?
Take my field of research, Islamic law. Islamic law is not one monolithic thing over 1,500 years or, if you take it as Middle Eastern law, over 4,000 years. It’s not just the Qur’an and some haphazard aphorisms called hadith. There are so many different layers of interaction. The metaphor in the world at large of 1,000 planes all held together is very useful in law, especially in a Mid-Eastern legal world that is looking for meaning and order, amidst the immense violence it casts on itself and on the rest of the planet.
But then Deleuze also gives a formidable understanding of Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, producing art as the key to defeating the passage of time and death: art as the reproduction of memory – around Venice, the famed madeleines, Combray – in a masterpiece of fiction that talks about our inner world at large. In art Deleuze’s Proust defeats death and time, otherwise forever lost. Art is the antidote to politics.
The essence of the thousand planes is like a thousand people all describing an event and each point of view holds its own truth. He fits philosophical thought into 1,000 planes as a key to understanding the modern world. It’s the antithesis of Fossaert who has a coherent, complex but linear concept of society. Deleuze has no linearity. His central counter-concept is lignes de fuite, escape lines. This, like his machine de guerre, is a powerful key to understanding modern politics, and its immense state-driven violence.
Your next book is Pour Le Liban by Kamal Joumblatt.
This is by the Lebanese socialist leader who was assassinated in 1977 by those in power in Syria. It is not his best book. The book is posthumous, and the editor has done a poor job. But it still holds profound reflections on the deadlocks which Joumblatt fought against all his life, and which we continue to fight against 30 years later: authoritarian Arab states, the distortion and damnation of oil money, the sectarian straitjacket, the structural injustice constituted by the Israeli state, and the brutal rule of Asad’s Syria.
As a lawyer, Chibli Mallat is best known for legal actions on behalf of the victims of Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein, and for winning the case of Victims of Sabra and Shatila v Ariel Sharon et al under the law of universal jurisdiction in Belgium in February 2003, before a change in Belgian law removed the jurisdiction of the court. Now senior law adviser for the University of Utah Global Justice Project: Iraq in Baghdad, Mallat says: 'It takes at least a generation to establish democracy and the rulers in the Middle East are all ruthless dinosaurs. But we’d better start now!'
