system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is Deleuze a post-structuralist, if so, how does his concept of difference differ from the structuralist concept of difference?
gpt
Oh boy this is a hard one, because Deleuze's relationship to structuralism is not stable through the course of his works, and even where - as with 'early Deleuze' - his takeaways from structuralism are unambiguously positive, they are always filtered through a Deleuzian vocabulary that makes his structuralism incredibly idiosyncratic. So, for instance, there's an early essay of Deleuze's, "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?", where he lays out six 'criteria' by which we can 'recognize structuralism'. What's fascinating about it is that if you read it along with his major works published soon after (*Difference and Repetition* and the *Logic of Sense*), that essay contains, in embryo, almost the entirety of what would become those works. In other words, if those 'criteria' are 'how we recognize structuralism', then we cannot help but 'recognize' Deleuze's early solo works as not only meeting those criteria, but elaborating and expanding upon them, in new and creative ways.

What's tough about it is that even while Deleuze self-identifies some of his major concepts as structuralist in this period, it's kinda hard to recognize them *as* structuralist from any 'orthodox structuralist' perspective. So for example, when Deleuze identifies one of his most important concepts from that period ('the virtual') as being nothing other than structure itself ("the reality of the virtual is structure" *DR*209), and then when he further goes on to identify the virtual with what he calls 'the problematic' and the 'Idea' (which have their own provenance in Plato, Kant, and Maimon), this chain of identifications is almost entirely original to Deleuze, even as it can be said to 'translate' the notion of 'structure' in a way more or less consistent with structuralism proper. So one might cautiously say that Deleuze is transcribing sturcturalist ideas into a 'non-strucutralist' vocabulary. Does this make him a 'post-structuralist'? Or is he rather elaborating and expanding the richness of structuralist concepts? Hard to say.

In his later works, Deleuze becomes positively hostile to, at the very least, the nomenclature of structure. In fact, a great deal of his conceptual vocabulary in the later period is defined by being engineered *explicitly* to be counterposed against any notion of structure: in *Anti-Oedipus*, 'Oedipus' is pretty much another name for structure ("Oedipus-as-structure" *AO*107), which means the book may as well be called 'Anti-Structuralism'. Elsewhere, 'machines', 'the rhizome', 'schizoanalysis' and 'the event' are all deliberately theorized as being alternative ways of thinking about things than in terms of structure (to quote the Deleuze scholar Daniel Smith, who himself is quoting Deleuze's biographer, Francois Dosse: "‘Machine’ is a veritable catchphrase that was meant to dethrone another catchphrase of the time: the notion of ‘structure.'" In contrast to the idea of "structure," which seems to suggest something fixed or static, activity seems to be built into the very notion of a 'machine'". Smith, "What Is the Body Without Organs?").

Bringing the question of 'difference' into it makes the problem yet more complicated. One way to think about what early Deleuze is doing with structuralism is as 'purifying' the notion of structure so as to expel any trace of either 'identity' or 'the negative' associated with the concept ("the difference between differences relate difference to itself without any other intermediary"). This in contrast to 'the structuralists' proper who are a little ambiguous about this. It's possible that, in Deleuze's later work (where the 'virtual' and 'the Idea' also recede in importance, if not disappear entirely), 'structure' itself become a constraint on thinking about difference that had to be sloughed off. Especially if one takes Deleuze at his word when he (and Guattari) simply identity Oedipus with structure (in which case *Anti-Oedipus* more or less details point by point why structure is no good). And even then, in a 'late' work like *A Thousand Plateaus -* written after *AO* \- perhaps the most important conceptual distinction that runs through the entire book (one of the few distinctions that remains stable throughout that sprawling, disjointed work - that between 'content' and 'expression') is drawn from noneother than the structural linguist, Louis Hjelmslev.

So is Deleuze post-structuralist? Er, it's complicated.