Terence Blake’s ‘DELEUZE ON DIALOGUE: DISCUSSION vs CONVERSATION’

 

by Corry Shores

 

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Terence Blake

 

DELEUZE ON DIALOGUE: DISCUSSION vs CONVERSATION

 

In this post Blake discusses the distinction Deleuze draws between discussion and conversation, and he offers the following modified translation from an interview in Two Regimes of Madness:

Deleuze distinguishes “conversation” from “discussion”, and gives a creative role to conversation:

Discussion amounts to wasting a lot of time on indeterminate problems. Conversation is something else entirely. Conversation is quite necessary. But the slightest conversation is a highly schizophrenic exercise happening between two individuals with common resources and a taste for ellipse and verbal shortcuts. Conversation is composed of immobility interspersed with long silences; it can give you ideas. But discussion has no place in philosophical work (TRM, 384, translation modified by me).

(Terence Blake. Note, in my own English edition, which is not the revised edition, this seems to correspond to what is on p.380, and p.355 of my French edition)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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