I quote you directly, to keep it clear:

“In a certain sense, Hallward takes Deleuze’s own methodology and turns it against him. [...] A creation of new concepts means that we see the world in a new way, one that wasn’t available to us before. This is what Deleuze looks for in the history of philosophy, and this is why (and how) he is concerned, not with what a given text “really” means, but rather with what can be done with it, how it can be used, what other problems and other texts it can be brought into conjunction with. Deleuze writes about philosophers whose ideas he can use, or transform, in order to work through the problems he is interested in.
[...]
Hallward brilliantly systematizes Deleuze, extracts a consistency (as Deleuze says a reading of a thinker aways should) from Deleuze’s words and ideas, and shows us what new concepts Deleuze created. But whereas Deleuze takes up this approach in order to make past philosophers useful, and to shed light on Deleuze’s own problems, Hallward does it in order to render Deleuze useless, to deny that Deleuze is at all relevant to discussions of materiality, of subjectivity, of affectivity, and of political change, to dismiss Deleuze’s importance for any of the problems Hallward himself is interested in.
[...]
Hallward works by means of omission and selection, reducing Deleuze to just one aspect of his thought, and acting as if the rest didn’t exist at all. Again, I stress that this is Deleuze’s own method of proceeding; the question is not one of representing Deleuze “accurately,” but of the ends to which Hallward’s selective transformation of Deleuze is put. Hallward seeks to present Deleuze as entirely a philosopher of the virtual, one who seeks merely to escape and to destroy the actual.”

Ok, a lengthy citation, but of your own text, so it should be clear without intensive reading, to you at least, what I’m talking about. The point is, that you say: 1. Hallward uses Deleuze’s method of reading philosophers to Deleuze;2. Deleuze’s method is to, regardless of what the read philosophers might have originally thought, draw from their texts some concepts that were interesting for him and reproduce them as philosophers of these concepts; 3. but Hallward uses this method in order to say why Deleuze isn’t interesting at all.

What we’re talking about here are the methods of interpreting, representing and reading other people’s texts. The method in use here we can call “inspired interpretation”, by which I mean that the interpreter doesn’t aim to give us a “correct reading” of the author he reads, nor is he telling us anything about the author, but rather drawing inspiration from the author’s work, writing then about what he has understood by using this author.

I agree that this is a valid method. One can make an one-sided and “incorrect” interpretation of someone, in condition that one doesn’t claim it to be a fidel reading of the author’s thoughts and that he doesn’t claim the ideas he presents to be those of the author he reads, but rather his own inspired version of this thought, as if the author was his mental guide and he had found new thought with his aid. So that Deleuze doesn’t claim to repeat the philosophy of Kant or Nietzsche, but to create a philosophical thinking in their names. It is of huge importance that the reading must always be a positive one. It is not “inspired” if one draws an infidel picture of someone’s thought in order to show that it leads nowhere.

Therefore I think you’re wrong in saying that Hallwards method is brilliant or that it is same as Deleuze’s – taken that your representation of Hallward’s book is correct. If one is going to criticize someone, then a correct interpretation, as objective and fidel to the criticized author as possible, is needed. When a one-sided, inaccurate version of someone else’s thought is used to criticize the original thinker, it is called a caricature, or a straw man. One should always at least have some reservations, for an academic manner for no other reason (and your text gives a picture that Hallward hasn’t taken even those reservations that Deleuze himself has most stressed).

It isn’t the same strategy that Deleuze used. Deleuze used what he found useful, took concepts he found useful to express his thought. That is, at best (as it is with Deleuze), brilliant, because it can create wonderful new thought. But it is not at all the same if one misrepresents someone else’s thought to unjustly “refute” it. It doesn’t serve as a inspired reading, because it doesn’t create anything, it isn’t inspired. It doesn’t serve as a critique either, because it doesn’t hit the claimed target and the target and it is useless to criticize enemies that don’t exist but as projections of one’s own imagination. There’s nothing brilliant about fighting a straw man. And it is not a good academic manner either.

I repeat that I haven’t read this book. I only say, that using a negative version of the method Deleuze uses means changing the method all together and is not brilliant at all.

Here’s a link in case anyone is interested:

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg/conf2008.html

In the land of Oz at the moment, there is an ongoing debate over the teaching of History in school. The Prime Minister has announced his desire for a narrative structure in History, disparaging all these “postmodern” and critical points of view which he claims has paralysed any coherent notion as to what constitutes being an Australian for future generations.
This argument has been echoed by some academics and a national newspaper has even laid the cause for the demise of Australian literature as a postgraduate field of study, squarely at the feet of these “postmodernists.” In Australia there is only one university that teaches Australian literature at a postgraduate level.

The neo-conservative position in Australia doesn’t sound too far removed from what you describe of Hallward’s take on Deleuze or Spivak’s critique of Deleuze in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Remembering Benjamin’s definition for fascism, the proposed citizenship examination for this country – to cite one example – tests Australian values to such an extent, that many Australians would fail it (who was the first prime minister of Australia?).

It seems to me, in itself, the ongoing academic debate – that isn’t all academic but also political – concerning the future teaching of Deleuze and Derrida (to pull two names out of the “postmodern” hat) exemplifies your contention with Hallward on the notions of the political and the aesthetic. As you rightly point out, the difference is irreducible and we get no further in thinking the differentiation if we merely “shelve” writers into one box or the other – as Hallward (and Spivak) seems to want to do with Deleuze.

The play on the difference between the aestheticisation of politics (the Australian government spent more on advertising last year than it did on the environment) and the politicisation of aesthetics (the Attorney-General’s office banning books that “incite terrorism”), is a crucial focus of Deleuze’s work – creating a memory (a becoming) for a people (that do not yet exist) in the critical experience of the cogito.

Thanks for revitalising my attention to this aspect of Deleuze’s work in a time in the Land of Oz when these ideas are under attack.