Page 115 - Amechanon_vol1_2016-18

Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846

It’s important here to make a brief distinction between traveling and making tourism, to
avoid any mistakes about what we are calling travel. Deleuze, in a well-known interview,

professed a surprising distaste for travel. He testified that he did not enjoy the hassle,
bureaucracy, and fatigue that a trip generates, especially intellectual trips in which he was

forced to speak too much. He characterizes the trip, first, as a «false break»: people who
travel a lot talk about it with pride and often say they are «in search of a father», which is

an illusory quest. Second, Deleuze argues that the intention often proffered of traveling
for pleasure is not valid. Third, he states that it is possible to «journey without leaving the

place». He illustrates this point with the example of nomads, who are nomadic precisely

because they love the soil where they are, yet need to leave it – thus, differentiating
themselves from immigrants. Finally, he refers to Proust’s impulse to travel prompted by
dreams – to «find out if that color that we dreamt of is really there». He then moderates

his remarks and confesses that there are trips that are «true breaks» – and that what

153
matters is the intensity of the trip and not the physical distance traveled .

What Deleuze seems to consider problematic is not exactly traveling, but a specific type of
trip – one that is experienced by most tourists, involved more with the movement through

space than experiencing uniqueness and unpredictability. Michel Onfray explains this
difference by contrasting the archetypes of the traveler and the tourist:

«To travel assumes less the missionary, nationalist, Euro-centric, and narrow spirit
than ethnological will, cosmopolitan, centered, and open. The tourist compares;
the traveler separates. The first remains outside a civilization, touches lightly a
culture, and is content to […] grasp its epiphenomena from afar as an engaged

spectator, militantly attached to his own roots; the second seeks to enter an
unknown world without prior intentions, as a disengaged spectator, trying not to
laugh or cry, judge or condemn, acquit or launch anathemas, but to grasp the

interior, which is to understand […] The comparative always designates the tourist,
154
the anatomist indicates the traveler» .

In this sense, what we are trying to put in relation with the body – and moreover, with the

school – is this intensive, nomadic way of travel. Thus, it becomes necessary to explore

153 Boutang, P.A., Deleuze, G. & Parnet, C., L'abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: Avec Claire Parnet, Los
Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012.

154 Onfray, M., Théorie du voyage. Poétique de la géographie, Paris: Le livre de Poche, 2007, pp. 58,
59.

115