In his ‘Letter to a harsh critic’, Deleuze explains how he sees retrospectively what he had written as a philosopher not only in regard to the history of philosophy, but also to the process he went through to liberate himself from the disciplinary constrictions that such history traditionally imposes to any philosopher, ie, the process that leaded him to write philosophy in his own name. For Deleuze, this process is intimately related to the intensive reading of the authors he admired and respected, ie, those “who challenged the rationalist tradition in history” especially Spinoza and Nietzsche. But all these ideas that Deleuze exposes and explains in his response to Cressole were not new nor a secret: five years earlier, in 1968, he referred to them in a couple of interviews following the same critical argument. In both interviews, Deleuze describes how this intensive reading means much more a philosophical love than a philosophical buggery ―where Nietzsche and Spinoza, among others, have a very special place in Deleuze’s heart―. So, if we follow the ideas he exposes with this regard in those interviews, we can see how such ideas would be deployed five years later ―even in a more affective fashion―, in his response to Cressole.

For instance, in his interview with Jean Noel Vuarnet, Deleuze affirms that this intensive reading needs to be considered as an assumption that implies new ways of thinking and writing, and that in Nietzsche this implication “presupposes a radically new conception of thought and language because sense and value, signification and evaluation ―terms that Nietzsche introduces to modern philosophy as rigorous notions, ‘the sense of what one says, and the evaluation of the one saying it’, as Deleuze indicates―, bring into play mechanisms of the unconscious” (Desert Islands, 135-136). From Deleuze’s point of view, it is with respect to these mechanisms that the philosopher always get the truth he deserves according to the sense of what he says and to the values to which he gives voice: for Deleuze, it is with respect these mechanisms that the “impersonal individuations or even pre-individual singularities” of the world should be uncovered critically by the philosopher in order to make them speak that what has not been said yet of them. Though, for Deleuze it cannot be but through the intensive reading of the work of an admired author that is possible to reach the singularities that compose and give consistency to his thought:

“First you have to know how to admire; you have to rediscover the problems he poses, his particular machinery. It is through admiration that you will come to genuine critique… You have to work your way back to those problems which an author of genius has posed, all the way back to that which he does not say in what he says, in order to extract something that still belongs to him, though you also turn it against him. You have to be inspired, visited by the geniuses you denounce… In every modernity and every novelty, you find conformity and creativity; an insipid conformity, but also “a little new music”; something in conformity with the time, but also something untimely —separating the one from the other is the task of those who know how to love, the real destroyers and creators of our day. Good destruction requires love… You have to be able to love the insignificant, to love what goes beyond persons and individuals; you have to open yourself to encounters and find a language in the singularities that exceed individuals, a language in the individuations that exceed persons” (DI, 139-140).

We can see how Deleuze is already suggesting in what sense admiration can lead to an intensive reading through which the philosopher is ‘visited’ by the ‘genius’ of the author that is conceptually treated, and that permits him to grasp the problems raised critically by such an author, ie, to elevate himself to those problems so to denounce and enrich them in a way to make them speak the singularities that compose the untimely thought of such an author. In this specific regard, Deleuze considers that the intensive reading leaded by admiration is also way to love and creation.