“The history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it’s philosophy’s own version of the Oedipus complex: ‘You can’t seriously consider saying what you yourself think until you’ve read this and that, and that on this, and this on that.’ Many members of my generation never broke free of this; others did, by inventing their own particular methods and new rules, a new approach. I myself “did” history of philosophy for a long time, read books on this or that author. But I compensated in various ways: by concentrating, in the first place, on authors who challenged the rationalist tradition in this history (and I see a secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, constituted by their critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power… and so on). What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics. My book on Kant’s different; I like it, I did it as a book about an enemy that tries to show how his system works, its various cogs–the tribunal of Reason, the legitimate exercise of the faculties (our subjection to these made all the more hypocritical by our being characterized as legislators). But I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed. I think my book on Bergson’s a good example.

It was Nietzsche, who I read only later, who extricated me from all this. Because you just can’t deal with him in the same sort of way. He gets up to all sorts of things behind your back. He gives you a perverse taste–certainly something neither Marx nor Freud ever gave anyone-for saying simple things in your own way, in affects, intensities, experiences, experiments. It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them. A name as the direct awareness of such intensive multiplicity is the opposite of the depersonalization effected by the history of philosophy; it’s depersonalization through love rather than subjection. What one says comes from the depths of one’s ignorance, the depths of one’s own underdevelopment. One becomes a set of liberated singularities, words, names, fingernails, things, animals, little events: quite the reverse of a vedette.”

Gilles Deleuze
Negotiations