My read this week is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives by François Dosse. It is the personal and intellectual biography of two of my favorite philosophers of the 20th century.
I spent a lot of time with both authors' thought a while back, both individually and collectively, and was reminded by this biography of Deleuze's interesting approach to fighting static concepts in the history of philosophy: resurrection.
"[Deleuze] revisited and corrected past controversies by examining those losers whose futures were often more interesting than the quickly institutionalized winners" (Dosse, 160-61). From Tarde (popularly unknown under Durkheim) to Simondon (popularly unknown under Descartes' Cogito) to Hjelmslev (popularly unknown under Saussaure's structuralism), Deleuze found value in collectively resurrecting these philosophers to revive arguments they had each individually lost in history. He produced the rupture he needed by "misappropriating," in the sense that popular judgments (or ambivalence) would have led him to believe he was wasting his time sifting through the "unimportant" annals.
There is something there in this method that sits just beyond my ability to define its significance. I do know, it has something to do with finding incommensurable value in digging where no one else wants to dig-- it's production at the limit, or even beyond the limit, of popular imagination where opportunity lies.
It seems as though this is the exact modus operandi that tech entrepreneurs use to approach business building and innovation, and one that has become mainstream amongst entrepreneurs today. This would fit the archetype of the successful tech entrepreneur as a mad-man (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Peter Thiel, ad nauseam), who goes beyond the limit of everyone's imagination to create a rupture in industry of significant value.
Something that plagues me about making the resemblance seem very close, is that Deleuze was effectively a hipster, innovating on the level of his methodological approach before it became mainstream. Maybe the same can be said of the early tech entrepreneurs as well, but the reality of today's tech entrepreneurship is such that there is a rush to the limit of imagination by everyone involved.
The margins are overcrowded-- what a bizarre concept.