ドゥルーズ 講義録「基礎づけるとは何か」英訳版、訳者による導入
What?
What is grounding? is a translation of extensive notes to Qu’est-ce que fonder?, a seminar Deleuze gave in 1956-1957. It sees Deleuze engaging with a series of philosophers ranging from Plato to Heidegger in order to investigate the meaning, importance, and sheer possibility of ground for both philosophical thought and reality at large.
The notes to this seminar have a strange history. They were originally taken by one Pierre Lefebvre. Given that only a handful of sentences in the notes are incomplete, plus the fact that the style of phrasing is clearly Deleuze’s own, Lefebvre must have used either a tape recorder or shorthand to retain almost everything. In any case, the notes remained a buried treasure for over five decades, until a French transcript surfaced online several years ago. Among other places, it can now be found on a website hosted by Richard Pinhas, a famous electronic rock musician and former student of Deleuze. His website also hosts a Spanish translation of the first few pages, a project prematurely abandoned for unknown reasons. The story in the pages to follow has thus passed, at the very least, from Deleuze to a tape recorder or sheets filled with shorthand, then probably to a typewritten transcript, then to HTML, and now to this book.
When?
Deleuze taught What is grounding? very early in his career. The only texts predating it are his repudiated ‘Sartrean’ articles from the forties, the essay Instincts and Institutions, and his 1953 book on Hume, Empiricism and subjectivity *1. The seminar is contemporaneous with two essays Deleuze published on Bergson, one in Les philosophes célèbres, a volume edited by Merleau-Ponty, the other in Les etudes bergsoniennes *2. It predates Deleuze’s second book Nietzsche and philosophy by five years, and Difference and repetition by little over a decade.
Deleuze gave this seminar at the lycée Louis le Grand, where he taught philosophy before becoming assistant professor at the Sorbonne later in 1957. At the time, Deleuze’s lectures were already ‘must-see events’, and the transcript of the seminar shows why this must have been the case *3. For What is grounding? is no mere tour through the history of philosophy. It is a tale spun by an extremely talented philosopher who, already in his early thirties, interprets the great problems and thinkers from the history of philosophy in a way completely his own. As a consequence, the reader is not confronted with a mere reflection on what has been said in the past, but rather with a mobilization of resources, or better yet with a transformation of thinkers and concepts into the building blocks for what will become Deleuze’s own philosophy.
notes
1. Instincts and Institutions was originally the introduction of a schoolbook with sixty-six texts on institutions, edited by Deleuze and belonging to a series supervised by Canguilhem. It has been republished in Desert Islands and other texts – 1953-1974.
2. Both republished in Desert Islands.
3. See Dosse, Intersecting Lives, p. 96.
以下は「基礎づけるとは何か」と直接関係ないが、参考。
"From 1949 to 1956, I lived with a few friends in a furnished hotel on the Ile St. Louis. It was a sordid place, but we could see teh Seine. GIlles Deleuze eventually joined us and stayed a few years until he got married." Michel Tourier.
WebdeleuzeにもThe Deleuze Seminarsにも本文の冒頭に「Cours du 30/11/1955」（1955年11月30日の講義）と記されていて、Webdeleuzeでは、この講義はこの日付で案内されている。The Deleuze Seminarsでは、導入ページの冒頭に以下の文が置かれている。
OCTOBER 1, 1956 TO MAY 1, 1957
Qu’est-ce que fonder? was the title of a "cours hypokhâgne" that Deleuze gave at the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris during the 1956-1957 academic year. The hypokhâgne is the first year course, followed by khâgne, of the two-year academic cycle in France (Classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles) whose aim is to prepare high school students for the entrance competition of the École normale supérieure in Paris. The text is based on the notes of one of the students in the course, Pierre Lefebvre.
