Thinking through thinking

I remember (can’t recall who or where) someone smiling at a ‘Deleuzian’ who nonetheless prepared a genealogical tree of Deleuze’s thought. One thinks, similarly, of the Derridean who, when the logic of his rhetoric is revealed to him, appeals instead to the integrity of his intentions. Or people who are happy to talk about ‘positions of enunciation’, ‘discursive context’, ‘phatic functions’ and so on, while displaying wanton disregard for these in their actual human interactions.

Time and again, thinking operates only within the penumbra of the desk lamp, wilfully blind to its own implications, unable to translate itself into practice or to move from one domain into another - esp. into the domain of the everyday. ‘Deleuze’, or whoever, becomes one more Playstation of the intellect into which a pale narcissus plugs before returning to a life unruffled and intact. (And some of the best writing, some of the best blogs are those in which the author's theoretical or philosophical thought is fully immanent in their everyday observations).

But the point here is not simply to underline the too-familiar contrast between thinking and practice, to repeat the adage that thinking is one thing but life quite another. Firstly, because there is already a thinking embodied in those everyday actions and relations, so that it’s not look, you think this but do that; its look, effectively you think this. Secondly, though, and perhaps obviously, there is a point at which the idea, to think itself further, must pass beyond itself into life; but this passing through itself is also a coming into itself, a completion. The idea which is blind to its implications (and to its implication in the world) is stunted, partial. The actualisation of the idea (in the everyday and in the concrete) is in fact its continuation.