Deleuze habitually condemns “discussion” as narcissistic and sterile, an empty social ritual to be avoided at all costs:

It is already hard enough to understand what someone is saying. Discussion is just an exercise in narcissism where everyone takes turns showing off. Very quickly, you no longer have any idea what is being discussed (TWO REGIMES OF MADNESS, 384).

Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, “Let’s discuss this.” (WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY, 28)

One should be wary of taking such statements at face value, as enouncing some sort of general law about an abstraction called “discussion”, about which one can say something in isolation from any context or concrete arrangement. Nor should one understand this maxim of Deleuze as propounding a general rule: always avoid discusions, never discuss.

What Deleuze is getting at is the existence of incommensurability, which is very often denied or repressed. Many…