Jeff Bell interview at 3am Magazine

The (wide-ranging and very interesting) interview is here. An excerpt: 

3:AM: One of the fascinating things that happens in your discussions of David Hume and Deleuze is that you show how a conventional reading of Hume is not the most probable if we take Hume at face value. Ernest Gellner said something about this in his Legitimation of Belief where he points out that if all there is is this buzzing confusion of impressions then cultivating our passions and feelings so we become connoisseurs of them would be the rational thing to do. Creating something anew out of them seems to be what Deleuze also considered an obvious move. This seems to be a separate issue to the question of how to bundle the impressions up so that the idea of a self makes sense. Is this something you’d sympathise with, the idea that Hume and other philosophers Deleuze and yourself examine have been packaged to suit interests external to their own positions and that what you’re doing is getting back to the revolutionary potential in them?

JB: That’s a fair assessment of what I attempted to do in my Hume book. I was certainly challenging many of the contemporary readings of Hume and offering an alternative reading that sits well with Hume both philosophically and historically.

And I would agree that I’m also trying to think through thought itself, and in particular philosophical thought, as a challenging of common sense such that it becomes revolutionary and transformative. At the same time, however, I am approaching the positions of Hume and Deleuze as being both inspired by the problem of how to transform a multiplicity into a determinate, identifiable system or belief. For Hume this is the problem of belief in necessary connection as well as the problem of the self; and for Deleuze this is the problem of individuation. The result of approaching Hume and Deleuze in this way is that in the end we probably end up with a Deleuze-Hume hybrid rather than “faithful” (whatever that means) readings of Deleuze and Hume. This hybrid reading, I’d like to think, can clarify a number of issues and perhaps raise new problems that have not been seen before.