Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom

“This is a highly innovative and provocative engagement with Deleuze’s thought that opens up new possibilities of thinking not only about the idea of freedom but also life in a political community.”

—Andreja Zevnik, University of Manchester, UK

“This outstanding collection sheds new light on key Deleuzean concepts and on the concepts of freedom implicit in the work with Guattari. It includes new work by several leading Deleuze scholars that significantly advances the understanding and development of Deleuzean philosophy.”

—Paul Patton, University of New South Wales, Australia

This volume addresses the issue of freedom in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. This is all the more challenging in that Deleuze-Guattari almost never use the term “freedom”, preferring instead the concept of the refrain. The essays collected in the volume show that freedom has been understood in a remarkably narrow sense and that in fact freedom operates as the refrain in every realm of thought and creation. The motivating approach in these essays is Deleuze-Guattari’s emphasis on the irreality of media and capitalistic sign regimes, which they perceive to have taken over even the practices of philosophy, the arts, and science. By offering a clear and engaging treatment of the underexplored issue of freedom, this volume moves the discussion of Deleuze-Guattari’s philosophy forward in ways that will appeal to researchers in continental philosophy and a wide range of other disciplines.

Dorothea Olkowski is Professor and former Chair of Philosophy, Director of Humanities, and Director of Cognitive Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA. She is the author or editor of ten books including Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn (2012), The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible) (2007), and Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (1999).

Eftichis Pirovolakis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. He works on twentieth-century continental philosophy and, more specifically, on the relation between phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. Pirovolakis has published articles in, among other journals, Philosophy Today, Word and Text, and Literature, Interpretation, Theory. He is the author of Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics (2010).

Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom

Freedom’s Refrains

Edited by Dorothea Olkowski
and Eftichis Pirovolakis

With translations by Constantin
Boundas and Andrew Goffey

First published 2019

by Routledge

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Freedom’s Refrains, Deleuze, Guattari, and Philosophy

Introduction

Dorothea Olkowski

The Refrain

If we inquire into the concept of freedom in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and that of Deleuze and Félix Guattari together, we may come up close to empty handed, for as scholars have noted, it is a term that Deleuze and Guattari seldom refer to and, even then, only in a tangential manner.¹ Still, we are strongly inclined to speak of freedom in conjunction with their philosophy, and we want to know more about what motivates the philosophers contributing to this volume to celebrate the philosophy of Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari as a philosophy of freedom. What indications do we have from them that freedom is a concept at stake in their work? It is certainly not a new concept, not newly created by Deleuze or Deleuze-Guattari, nor by any of the philosophers whose work has become associated with theirs. And yet, we cannot let go of the idea that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy amplifies what we have called freedom’s refrains. In saying this, we notice how easily we have bypassed the concept of the refrain in order to focus on the traditional concept of freedom. As it turns out, it is only by reversing course and returning to the refrain that we discover that the refrain has taken over the role, the activity, and the idea usually attributed to the concept of freedom, and that the refrain has taken over so thoroughly that we must revise all of our ideas about so-called freedom: what it is, how it functions, and what it produces.

Writing of the refrain, Deleuze and Guattari initially focus on how the refrain begins with chaos, the physical concept of random disorder that is also the basis of their conception of virtual chaos—the flows of desire, the body without organs—followed by the beginnings of order in that chaos, a calm and stabilizing force emerging at the heart of chaos.

A child hums to summon the strength for the schoolwork she has to hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work…. For sublime deeds like the foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or better yet walks in a circle as in a children’s dance combining rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the differentiated parts of an organism.²

This song and dance—characterized by Deleuze and Guattari as drawn from earthly or terrestrial forces and not as those of a subject—must be engaged in precisely the right way, since any mistake in the speed, rhythm, or harmony would be catastrophic; it would interrupt the order entered into by the creator, unmake the creation, and return both to the chaos. Why is this? What freedom can there possibly be in all of this ordering and organizing? It appears that, in the refrain, the periodic repetition through rhythmic association with earthly forces operates like an open thermodynamic system, and so creates strength and marshals forces, but it does so by producing difference.

In the ritual humming, in the ritual song or dance, the circle opens, that is, it creates its own opening out of its newly generated internal forces, and as it opens, it joins other greater forces, sometimes even cosmic forces, improvising as it goes along. “One ventures from home on the thread of a tune”, along “lines of drift”, lines with “different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities”.³ This entire process is the refrain. It consists of three elements: the chaos, the earthly or terrestrial forces, and cosmic forces. Chaos gives way to an earthly territorial assemblage: a bird song marking territory, a lover humming, a people marking their region by distributing themselves in space and venturing along lines of drift, or the goddess, Eurynome, who arose from yawning Chaos, danced with the wind, and set the Cosmos in motion.⁴ Each of these, each refrain, is what we have been used to calling freedom, but that concept has been wordlessly abandoned so as to give way to something new.

In every refrain, milieus, blocks of space-time, are created by rhythm, the periodic repetition that holds back the intrusion of chaos and moves between milieus, communicating between them, coding and transcoding as one milieu passes into another.⁵ The effect is not to produce a regular meter, but polyphony, melodies in counterpoint, each playing with different codes. The codes stand in a relation of disjunction—[n]either this [n]or that—with the territories, decoding as they form. Territorialization organizes interior zones of shelter, as well as the exterior zones harboring the interior, and beyond that limits or membranes, intermediary zones, energy reserves, and annexes. Thus the refrain is dimensional, and as rhythm, it is expressive. Something is expressed, a mark or signature that makes a territory, and the sign of a rhythm is the expressed. So, for example, we no longer say that there is an instinct to aggressively territorialize but rather a territorialization that creates certain sorts of functions. Thinking of this politically, it is not instinct that drives members of a group, each to their own place, each making a claim against others, as Thomas Hobbes presupposed, but rather it is territorialization that creates differentiated functions in which individuals and groups participate.⁶

Regardless of its function, each refrain begins artfully. The artist makes a mark. The composer sets out a line. The dancers clear out a space. The leader orates. All of this is primary expression, an appropriation of property by means of expression, a possession, a having that derives from art and defines its producers, yet remains the mark of a domain and not of a subject, and so it is no longer possible to even utilize the concept of freedom, which is always attributed to a subject. The artist’s mark, the composer’s line, the dancers’ clearing, and the leader’s oration do not characterize them as beings; rather, they form a domain that can be understood as a style. In so doing they set free matters of expression; better said, they improvise something until it becomes their territory. We might say “it owns it”, meaning that it is the expression that territorializes, orders, and organizes motifs by means of the “self-movement of expressive qualities” as well as their relations with one another, so-called rhythmic characters able to be augmented or diminished and gaining independence from their origins.⁷ Territorial motifs are not effects of impulses, which are immediate reactions, elementary or raw in character, such as primal violence.⁸ Instead, expressive qualities produce the territorial counterpoints that form “melodic landscapes” in the exterior milieu, and different species will enter different landscapes with different rhythmic characters.⁹

Motifs and counterpoints express the relation of the territory to interior impulses that could give way to an action and to exterior circumstances. No longer merely a mark or a signature, this is now a style. Territories open the way to mannerisms. Opponents preen and flex their muscles, expanding and contracting in relation to one another, claiming their place. Dancers’ and lovers’ gestures open their rhythm to one another and connect their polyphonic melodies. Every mannerism is an art that reorganizes functions and regroups forces, territorializing so as to transform old functions, creating specializations and intensifying centers where interior earthly forces and exterior forces of chaos come together in newly organized rites and religions.¹⁰ Yet, by decoding, by situating itself disjunctively between codes and territory, by situating itself on the margins of codes, territorialization makes differentiation possible, and specific differences arise, whether with respect to individuals, species, or social organizations.¹¹

At this passage, when the refrain creates territory, the first assemblage organizes already as an intra-assemblage of heterogeneous activities held together. First, they exist as a fuzzy set, meaning that an element is a member only in an uncertain fashion, but then, they reach consistency. Territorialized activities (sexuality, aggressiveness, gregariousness) can also build new assemblages around and between themselves. “This is the case for the refrain, so much so that we perhaps call all cases of this kind refrains”.¹²

We have seen that the territorial assemblage is produced by means of the formation of motifs and counterpoints and the formation of a style. However, at a certain point, the earth and all assemblages may be left behind as localization enters a cosmic plane. Territorialized forces of the earth are liberated as refrains of confrontation or departure, at once ceasing to be terrestrial and becoming forces of a deterritorialized Cosmos: for example, water, wind, and fog in place of singing birds; “[t]he Cosmos as an immense deterritorialized refrain”.¹³ Clearly, this is no model of linear arborescence. It suggests instead a molecular consistency that forms on the basis of coordination between centers articulated from within, moving from fuzzy uncertain aggregates to creative consolidation beginning “in-between”, “intermezzo”, and elaborating a rich and consistent material.¹⁴

No longer can the creative refrain be taken up on the model of behavior. It is entirely a question of assemblage. Let us not then refer to such things as innate tendencies or drives, nor shall we even say that learning opens onto free creations. Innateness decoded and learning territorialized give way to the “natal”, not an act or a behavior but the valorization of an object or situation that “stretches” from intra-assemblages to displaced exteriorized centers, to interassemblages, to the Cosmos itself.¹⁵ Deterritorialization of the territorial assemblage is the release of a machine, the cutting edge that draws variations and mutations from out of the assemblage and whose effects define consistency or enter matters of expression. Neither symbolic nor imaginary, such effects have the real value of passage or relay.¹⁶

So, the territorial assemblage of bird species opens to interassemblages of courtship in the direction of the partner. Or, the territorial assemblage that includes the artist opens to an interassemblage of other artistic styles. Or, the orator opens to the interassemblage of an alien rhetoric. Exceeding the assemblages is also possible, but producing an opening to the Cosmos carries the risk of falling into a black hole, the inability to express anything, from which the emergence of innovative processes may be permanently inhibited.¹⁷

Deleuze takes the modern age to be the age of the cosmic, an age that leaves behind the forces of chaos, motifs, and earthly things, in favor of the forces of the Cosmos. The latter are material forces but molecularized, therefore now actually immaterial, nonvisible to the artist and not thinkable in themselves to the philosopher. The modern artist renders nonvisual forces visible; the composer takes up the synthesizer that makes the sound process audible; the philosopher abandons a priori synthetic judgment but makes thought into pragmatics, a force of the Cosmos that travels.¹⁸ Use of the concept “freedom”, habitual but empty, has become increasingly problematic.

The fuzzy aggregate, the deterritorialized material, becomes consistent so that its disparate elements are discernible without reterritorializing it. This is a difficult task, a failed task when people’s organizations, parties, unions, or philosophies become machines for reproduction of ideas, ideologies, positions, and powers, rather than turning from the established powers that have occupied the earth to the earth as a point in a galaxy that is but one among others.¹⁹

The refrain is a crystal of space-time that acts upon its surrounds and extracts from those surrounds vibrations, decompositions, projections, or transformations. It is these we refer to when we speak of freedom, but it is the refrain that is the a priori form of time fabricating different times.²⁰ In the cinema books, the crystal-image is an image that breaks up the sensory-motor links between perception, action, and thought, creating a pattern that proliferates and vibrates, a fuzzy set. It is the place where virtual and actual become indistinguishable, but the Cosmos sings.²¹ And freedom, that is, the refrain? Free of subjects, it becomes the ongoing movement of the refrain that deterritorializes but maintains consistency, as it releases itself into the Cosmos. It is not the project of building a system. The refrain is the opening of whatever assemblage has aggregated onto a cosmic force. It is the end of systems and the beginning of the refrain.

Infinite Speeds, the Machine

So it is that we offer this volume as a foray into the cosmic refrain that is freedom’s cosmic transformation beginning with the machine itself, the question of “Deleuze and the Freedom of the Machines” set forth by Jean-Clet Martin, who argues that “transcendental empiricism” is a paradoxical formula. It signifies that there is an experience, an experimentation with forms that are not yet articulated by the “lived” or the “everyday”, that do not take refuge in opinion, in the illusions of a cheap intellectualism, in ready-made answers. Experience could lead to a precarious region, outside of what we have already experienced, and outside of a redundant recognition.

Through experimentation, one could approach an extraordinary plane at the edge of finitude. It would be an uncommon plane: a transcendental plane, a tormented plane; those are its conditions. On this plane, Deleuze isolates “singularities” in order to experiment with other values: molecular singularities, the pre-individuals, those that are free in comparison with the claims of individuals and their supposed rights. Thus, we will no longer speak of freedom founded on the unity of the moral subject or the categorical imperative as on a foundation that would stand on its own, since in the regime of multiplicities everything will collapse in order to restore chance to multiple freedoms. This is a freedom free to circulate among all, unlike the “free exchange”, or the free enterprise called liberalism. It is a freedom open to the nomad game of a new form of political association.

This argument for a molecular and pre-individual plane of political association takes us to the essay of Michael Ardoline, “Infinite Speeds and Practical Reason: A Kinematics of the Concept in What Is Philosophy?”, which examines the conditions under which such planes might be possible. Ardoline begins with the claim that the use of the phrase “infinite speeds” in Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? is an unsettling choice of words to the reader with a background in contemporary physics. While Special Relativity denies the possibility of speeds faster than the speed of light, there is a history of complex problems involving the use of unbounded velocities, specifically the problem of indeterminacy in classical mechanics.

In order to understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean by infinite speeds, we must understand the consequences of infinite speeds in these physical frameworks. This is not to claim that Deleuze and Guattari are promoting a physical theory, but to use the understanding of these frameworks in order to make sense of the phrase “infinite speeds”. To carry this out, it might be necessary to adumbrate our understanding of physical space with space as a form of transcendental aesthetic. This would not be an ontological claim but a methodological one. It allows for the understanding of two parallel series. The first series is that of an intervention of indeterminacy within the deterministic framework of classical mechanics allowed by those very same deterministic laws themselves; the second intervention, that of practical reason (in the Kantian sense), produces indeterminacy in a determinate subject.

This leads Ardoline to an examination of the role of the concept as a condition for freedom in the subject, which comes from the way in which concepts connect with each other on a plane of immanence. The concept cannot be understood ahead of time without its connection to a plane of immanence and further concepts. Moreover, the mere existence of a concept leaves an indelible mark of indeterminism by altering the deterministic development of the universe. What matters here is not the maximization of freedom by maximizing concepts. What is required is that we experiment with a concept and refine the degrees of freedom it makes possible in order to witness the manner in which concepts intervene in the world.

Language

The second part of our volume examines the effects of language with respect to cosmic forces. In her essay “Try Madness: Creation and the Crystalline Brain”, Dorothea Olkowski states that Deleuze’s image of the crystalline brain raises an important question: is madness a prerequisite for creative genius, the deterritorialization of a milieu in order to create something new? Is it the case that the creation of new concepts or the creation of works of art that are original and exemplary benefits from madness?

Citing her experience with family members who suffered from schizophrenia, Olkowski traces the connection between the logic of schizophrenic organization and the logic that Alice encountered in Wonderland. She argues that, for Deleuze, the conflict of the faculties, their disjunction, their lack of harmony, is the necessary prerequisite for works of genius, which he prefers to call the work of the idiot, the aesthetic figure. As such, she examines the relationship between the organization of Wonderland and the schizophrenic creativity and creations of Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, and David Lynch in the context of Deleuze’s concept of the crystalline brain. Distinguishing between the doxa of ordinary perception and the acute state of the creative brain implies the existence of an ethics of creation. This, for Olkowski, is what Deleuze demands from philosophy, from cinema, and from art. Whether one can slip in and out of this state like Alice, or must remain embedded in it, like Artaud, is the question this essay opens to examination.

In his essay “Sense and Literality: Why There Are No Metaphors in Deleuze’s Philosophy”, Daniel W. Smith asks why Deleuze claims that his philosophical concepts must be understood “literally”. From an initial viewpoint, numerous aspects of his philosophy seem metaphorical, whether his concepts themselves—“rhizome, nomads”, “deterritorialization”—or his related claims—“we are made up of lines, the unconscious is a factory”.

Moreover, Smith notes that other philosophers have emphasized the metaphorical nature of language and concepts, including Nietzsche (truth is “a mobile army of metaphors”) and Derrida, whose essay “The White Mythology” emphasized the role of the rhetorical figure of “catachresis” in the creation of concepts (and considered the concept of the concept itself to be metaphorical or catachrestic). The notion of metaphor presumes the distinction between the literal and the figurative, and the movement from a literal sense to a figurative appropriation—though even this understanding of metaphor is hardly straightforward. Thus John Donne’s phrase “no man is an island” can be considered to be a metaphorical statement, although it is also literally true—no man is an island.

Deleuze’s claim that his own concepts are “literal” is thus a complicated one, and in the end, Smith states that the problem is not well-posed in terms of the literal-versus-metaphorical distinction. As Deleuze writes, “there are no literal words, neither are there metaphors”. “There are only inexact words to designate something exactly”. In addition, with regard to concepts, “there is no question of difficulty or understanding: concepts are exactly like sounds, colors, or images, they are intensities that suit you or not, that work or don’t work [qui vous conviennent ou non, qui passent or ne passent pas]…. There’s nothing to understand, nothing to interpret” (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 4, translation modified). It is in this manner that the Deleuzian concept is also the refrain. We see this in Smith’s conclusion that, for Deleuze, we should approach concepts in philosophy in the same way that we approach sounds in music, images in films, or colors in paintings—as intensities. Yet, there is an “inexactitude” that goes beyond the literal and the metaphorical, and is defined purely intensively. And to approach this inexactitude, Smith ends by addressing the theory of sense developed by Deleuze in his 1969 Logic of Sense.

In “Who Are Deleuze’s Conceptual Personae?”, Gregg Lambert examines in greater depth a concept introduced earlier, a concept that appears in Deleuze’s later philosophical reflections with Guattari concerning the special nature of “philosophical enunciation”. Clearly functioning in place of the name and apparent views of a particular philosopher, in some respects, “conceptual personae” originate and function very much like clichés in language, that is, they circulate and are reproduced through the powers of repetition and abstraction functioning as refrains. Consequently, like clichés, in order to achieve a maximal degree of repetition and consensus, by means of the conceptual personae, entire philosophies are pared down, and a few simple features or sentences are extracted from the work in order to convey an abstract image of thought.

What interests Lambert is the nature of those philosophers and their conceptual personae who produced such an extreme range of positive and negative evaluations concerning the fundamental expression of their philosophies. The changing nature of the conceptual personages can be made dramatically evident in special cases (e.g., Plato and Platonism, Descartes and Cartesianism, Spinoza and Spinozism, Kant and Kantianism, Hegel and Hegelianism). In addition, Lambert suggests that we might add several contemporary personages associated with the philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, and others.

Politics

Although the concept of freedom is most often associated with politics, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, politics is one of the most difficult areas of life to investigate with respect to freedom as the refrain. Catarina Pombo Nabais’s essay “Kafka and Melville: The Same Struggle for a People to Come?” takes up this challenge utilizing the concept of expression. Nabais begins with Essays Critical and Clinical, where Deleuze writes: “Kafka (for Central Europe) and Melville (for America), present literature as the collective enunciation, the communal expression of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their expression only in and through the writer”.²²

She follows this up by asking if we believe Deleuze when he suggests that a harmony exists between Kafka and Melville. In other words, is there the same mode of collective enunciation of a minor people in both Melville and Kafka? This is a question of great importance in the current era, when minoritarian voices are frequently silenced. For Nabais, in Deleuze’s understanding of Kafka, the collective dimension of the literary experiment is the work of a minority within a major language as the construction of lines of flight, lines of deterritorialization for singular or minority becomings.

However, Deleuze’s reading of Melville’s universe seems a little different. Melville is not presented by Deleuze as being confronted with small nations asphyxiated by empires. On the contrary, America is presented as a great nation, and Deleuze accentuates its nature as a place of universal immigration. Moreover, according to Deleuze, the political programs of the founding fathers transformed America into a “wall of free stones”, a nation without cement or without an accomplished configuration. The diabolic forces from the outside that knock on the door of American communities of celibate people are not there any longer, as they were in Kafka. Nevertheless, she asks, can one see in these two authors a similar political dimension of the confabulatory function? Is it possible to assign the same prophetic role to the celibate characters of Kafka and to those created by Melville?

Sotiria-Ismini Gounari also raises crucial contemporary issues related to her native country of Greece in terms of nomadic refrains. In her essay “Affective Politics and ‘Crisis’: The Examples of the HIV-Positive Women’s Public Denouncement and of the Refugees’ Confinement”, Gounari discusses two important State undertakings, which occurred during the early years of the refugee crisis in Greece. During the first outburst of “crisis” in Greece, a period characterized by the emergence of the economic recession and its harsh realities, there emanated certain policies that were aimed at managing collective emotions. Then, after the appearance and decline of a movement of resistance, two sources of danger for public health were constructed, to which the diffuse social guilt could now be directed. Gounari argues that these projects served as an opportunity for the consolidation of the State apparatus through the rigidification of gender and race power relations, and that this happened through the circulation of reactionary feelings among the population. Gounari then traces the marks of nomadic resistances to this reinforcing domination, which, she argues, had attained fascistic resonances.

Extending the argument of his previous book Nomad Citizenship, which examined groups of nomad citizens that self-organize and operate autonomously from the capital and the State, Eugene W. Holland extends the concept of nomad citizenship to individuals and groups operating within already-existing institutions. This extension is necessary, Holland claims, because becoming worthy of events such as “the Anthropocene” will require not just social-movement war-machines but also intervention in and by States and other established institutions.

Holland’s point of departure for this argument is Althusser’s extended analysis of the ideological function of State apparatuses. Holland expands this analysis beyond State apparatuses to institutions in general. However, for Holland, re-engineering Althusser’s concept of Ideological State Apparatuses for the mechanosphere entails jettisoning his notion of ideology and rewriting his conceptions of both subjectivity and the mode of production. The result is an account of explicitly political improvisation, another version of the refrain, operating within the context, yet against the grain, of institutional constraints.

The final essay in this part, by Mohamed Moulfi, takes up the difficult question of revolution. In “Geophilosophy and Revolution in Gilles Deleuze”, Moulfi indicates that his interest in the problem of geophilosophy—as articulated around the questions of territorialization and deterritorialization, of geo-history, of rhizomes, etc.—is oriented by the vision of Deleuze and Guattari, according to which philosophy deploys along the orders of transcendence and immanence. The first order is determined by its Greek origins. If the origin is not determinative, philosophy cannot help but hold a constitutive relation with non-philosophy. This shows the necessity of thinking of the other order in which the geophilosophies are situated, as the meeting up of philosophy with various cultures. Moulfi asks if this indicates that the becoming of philosophy is only the effect of an immanent axiomatic, from which arises a Bestimmung, as the destination of philosophy, Greek at birth, and as the determination of a historical and cultural variation of its cultural expression.

With this question, we may come close to the thought of revolution of Deleuze and Guattari, which, like their philosophy, is a resistance to the present and an opening onto the refrain as the unexpected, the new, the remarkable, and the interesting, characteristics at the heart of the problematic of becoming and of transformation. Hence the necessity of trying to respond to the question of the historical relationship of the receivers of the “secret” destination, and of understanding philosophy in its historicity and in the history of the general destination called the West.

Art

It was noted earlier that each refrain begins as art as the artist makes a mark, the composer sets out a line, dancers clear out a space, and leaders orate. Deleuze goes on to theorize the three grand modes of the relation between art and chaos (classical, romantic, and cosmic-modern).

In “Dismantling the Land(scape), Dismantling the Face”, Philippe Mengue asks if it must be the case that Deleuze’s almost exclusive focus on modern artistic expression signifies his depreciation of and contempt for the art of the past. One advantage of thinking through the couple “face/landscape”, as it operates in A Thousand Plateaus, is to be able to open contemporary art onto a different apperception of itself. But not only this, for it also allows, beyond thought, the sense (truly Deleuzian and deterritorializing) of desire. In order for Western space to be divided in every sense according to the logic of identity and resemblance, it needs specific types of organization, among them the processes of facialization. How do they function?

Thanks to the abstract machine of faciality (which would be trans-subjective and trans-objective), the abstract machine of overcoding, which is the face, is on the head, which is found to be facified and ceases to be part of the body, with its polyvocal and multidimensional codes. But not everything is integrable. The semiotic components escape from or do not enter into the game of faciality, like a facial tic, like freckles or a lock of hair. The characteristics of faciality take away from the organization of the face as they spin along the horizon. This brings forth the question “what use is the art of portrait painting when one has the means of a technique like photography?” Why continue to paint faces, as Francis Bacon does? It is that painting now has but one meaning, that is, to perform a “de-facification”. To what end? To remove the face as a machine of power, to trace lines of flight.

Pascale Criton takes us into the heart of the refrain in her essay “Intensive Difference and Subjectivations”. Intensive difference, Criton points out, is not external, nor rational nor probabilistic: it proceeds by reciprocal attractions and captures. Clarifying Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the refrain, Criton takes up the consistency operations at work in disparate series of environments and their actualization in unexpected individuations. In particular, she addresses the virtual/actual double aspect of differenciation at work in the “material–strengths” couple, a concept employed by Deleuze to describe musical spaces and times without identity.

Direct “material–strengths” relations—active in the thought-music corpus—cover all fields of thought and open new connections. The production of a heterogeneous transversality, significant in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s writings beginning with A Thousand Plateaus and subsequent works, is determined in the field of processual and subjectivating creativity. Singular space-times and autonomous sign practices redistribute the sensation-free enunciations: they produce a difference able to confront the irreality of media and capitalistic signs regimes.

Deleuze and the Chaosmic

Nietzsche and Spinoza are perhaps among the most celebrated influences on Deleuze. In his essay “Pluralism = Monism: What Deleuze Learns From Nietzsche and Spinoza”, Alan D. Schrift provides a substantial account of this influence in relation to the question of the chaos taken as flows of desire and desiring production. Schrift examines Deleuze’s readings and appropriations of Spinoza and Nietzsche, suggesting that the rhizomatic connections that result in a Spinoza–Nietzsche assemblage anticipate and lead to what Deleuze and Guattari call their “magic formula … PLURALISM = MONISM”. Schrift explores this formula in terms of their discussion of desiring production in Anti-Oedipus, and concludes with suggestions as to the political possibilities this formula opens. After establishing similarities and differences between Husserl’s geostatism and Deleuze and Guattari’s geodynamism, Beaulieu discusses certain advantages of the latter, which suggests rethinking the relationship between the earth and the universe, and which gives consistency to the idea of a “deterritorialized earth”, which is “not only a point in a galaxy, but one galaxy among others”.

In his essay “The Earth Does Not Move”, Husserl attempts to ground an experience of the earth that he considers more fundamental, as it is subject neither to movement nor to rest. Doing so, Husserl neutralizes modern science’s experimental method in favor of an immobile “ground” (Boden). Deleuze and Guattari, on their side, present a “geophilosophy” where the earth is affected by chaosmic forces free with regard to the hylomorphic model, which implies a perfectly organized whole with a nervous system that links all parts.

Engagement with Deleuze and Guattari brings us to an interassemblage with other philosophers whose work is either connected to or subtly distinguishable from theirs. In his essay “Deleuze and Guattari’s Geodynamism and Husserl’s Geostatism: Two Cosmological Perspectives”, Alain Beaulieu addresses the crucial issue of chaos, the chaosmic forces out of which refrains are organized, by comparing it with a similar attempt by Edmund Husserl.

The final essay of our volume, Corry Shores’s “Affirmations of the False and Bifurcations of the True: Deleuze’s Dialetheic and Stoic Fatalism”, addresses Deleuze’s treatments of Nietzsche’s amor fati and of Stoic fatalism in a manner that allows us to reflect on their connection to the emergence of the concept of the refrain. Shores reveals a temporal structure that couples logically incompatible elements, namely chance and destiny in the first case, and will and fate in the second. In Deleuze’s accounts, it is a particular sort of affirmational activity that allows our immediate, present temporality—during which chance and willful action reign—to intersect with an eternal sort of temporality that houses our fate and destiny and that thus lies outside our immediate grasp.

To understand this combination of incompatible temporalities in Deleuze’s philosophy, Shores introduces paraconsistent reasoning, which allows for the affirmation of both the truth and falsity of some proposition, or, construed in another way, it allows us to dually affirm both a proposition and its paraconsistent negation. Shores goes on to consider these temporal structures as involving “dialetheias” (true contradictions). He then goes on to explore a dialetheic interpretation of Deleuze’s notions of the powers of the false from his writings on Nietzsche, and of prohairesis (“volition”), Aiôn and Chronos from his writings on the Stoics.

The essays in this volume are intent on moving the discussion of Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari’s philosophy forward. At the end of their chapter on the “refrain”, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari urge us to take up a first type of refrain, that of the territory or the assemblage, and then to transform it from within. That would be to deterritorialize it and to produce a cosmic refrain. Why? Because, they tell us, we are captured by the power of the mass media, the great organizations of various sorts of workers, the governing and educational institutions, including philosophies. This capture, this “worksite of inauthentic elements”, threatens to destroy the earth and milieus. What we do not need, they insist, is another system. So, they urge, begin with the first refrain but transform it so that the earth becomes cosmic and the people of the earth become cosmic people. It is our wish to add our voices to this urgent call by means of the essays we have gathered together in this volume.²³

Finally, as editors of the volume, both Eftichis and I would like to express our gratitude and thanks to our dear friend and colleague Constantin Boundas for initiating this editorial project with unique enthusiasm, and for organizing in the first place the international conference on “Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom” at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in April 2015, a major intellectual event in his native Athens, Greece. We are deeply indebted to him for his generosity and for tirelessly providing invaluable help on many levels from the first to the very final stages of this project. Thank you so much Costa.

Notes

1.See Daniel Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p.349; and Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 41–2.

2.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 311.

3.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 311–12.

4.Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 1.a, b, c, d; 1.1. In this archaic cosmology, paternity was non-existent, fatherhood being attributed to various accidents.

5.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 313.

6.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 316.

7.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 317 and 318.

8.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 317.

9.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 319 and 320.

10.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 322.

11.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 322.

12.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 325, emphasis added.

13.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 327.

14.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 328 and 329.

15.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 332 and 333. This process appears to replace the structure of virtual/real, which Deleuze embraced in earlier work.

16.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 333.

17.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 333 and 334.

18.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 342 and 343.

19.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 345.

20.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 348–9.

21.Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 190–1.

22.Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

23.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 349.

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema II: The Time-Image. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths: 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1980.

Patton, Paul. Deleuze and the Political. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Smith, Daniel W. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Translator’s Prologue

Constantin Boundas

Most of the essays gathered in this volume have had an earlier life and a form suited for their oral delivery at the international conference “Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom”. The conference was held at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, Greece, in April 2015. Dorothea Olkowski, the distinguished Deleuze scholar and one of the earliest readers and commentators of Deleuze in North America, and Eftichis Pirovolakis, whose work on Ricoeur and Derrida has led him to Deleuze, with their excellent knowledge of the Deleuzo-Guattarian texts, their fine editorial skills, and unparalleled tact and wisdom, supervised the transition of the oral to the written, enhanced the present collection with the commission and addition of new important chapters, and gave the points of view displayed here a thematic unity that the reader will appreciate: refrains of freedom. The result is one volume in a trilogy: the other two, Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy (Bloomsbury) and Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari (Rowman and Littlefield), both published in 2018, brought the refrains of freedom to bear on the lines of escape of the individual and social life and on the smooth and the striated space of the master builders and the urban planners respectively.

Warm congratulations are due to the editors of the present volume because the collection they made available deals with the problem of freedom, which, besides being dear to my own heart, is, as far as the work of Deleuze and Guattari goes, far from being settled: the assertion that Deleuze has nothing to say about freedom because of his philosophical affinity with Spinoza can still be heard today. Of course, the assertion betrays that the one who makes it has the wrong concept of freedom in mind and a very poor understanding of Spinoza. Deleuze wrote somewhere that he felt like a metaphysician, nothing but a metaphysician, and he pointed to the question of univocity as being at the heart of his work. I would have chosen to add to his list the issue of freedom. His entire philosophy and his joint work with Guattari are about freedom and freedom’s ritornellos. The chapters of the present volume make it abundantly clear provided that we place them in their right philosophical frame.

Not unlike Heidegger, Deleuze is not engaging the question of freedom as if it were, first and foremost, the predicate of the actions and the characters of humans. Freedom is essentially the attribute of difference.

Deleuze’s fondness for the infinitive or the verbal adjective is well-known: “to differ”, “to different/ciate”, and “to repeat” express the impersonality and the mobility of becoming better than “difference” and “repetition”. Not unlike the Being that beings, to differ different/ciates.

The refrain is something that we repeat. The repetition that Deleuze chooses to make the founding principle of his ontology or of his pragmatism (let’s not get distracted over that) is what makes the difference—the one that sustains novelty and creation. Refrains are repetitive moments that create difference, not between two instances in the realm of becoming, but difference in itself and for itself.

What is repeated is the immense reservoir of virtual singularities (the past), new combinations of which are actualized in the present thanks to the eternal return of the empty (future) form of time. The past is the repeated, and the future is what permits the repetition to take place, by making the actual present a past present and simultaneously by reshuffling the elements and the relations of elements that proliferate inside the virtual reservoir. The refrain is freedom, because freedom is not the ability of the soul to choose one out of the many possible alternatives, but the escape from the compulsions of habit and memory. Freedom is not the negation and the annulment of these compulsions but, rather, the creation and the affirmation of the new, in other words, the actualization of the virtual.

The ethical responsibility sustaining, indeed making possible this freedom “for us”, is called counter-actualization, that is, tracing back the present state of things to the virtual event that conditions it and tapping its not-yet-actualized dynamisms, for the sake of a time to come. Becoming worthy of the event, as we trace the lines of escape of and from the present (lines, nevertheless, that pre-exist our tracing efforts), belongs to this moment of turning freedom in itself and for itself into freedom for us in the refrain.

I salute here those who contributed to this volume: they did it with the call of difference and freedom resonating in their ears and guiding their writing.

Part I

Infinite Speeds and the Machine

1 Deleuze and the Freedom of the Machines

Jean-Clet Martin

Translated by Constantin Boundas

There has been talk of play, for a long time now, whether talk of the divine play of Nietzsche or talk of the dice throw of Mallarmé. But when there is talk of play, chance, without a doubt, is never simply chance. We cannot assign finality or interiority to chance. Chance is not a thing; it is a milieu that holds necessary forms and connected lines. But to run through these lines, an encounter is necessary, like the incidence of the rays of the sun inside the water. The rays of the sun necessarily obey the laws of diffraction, and the same happens with their propagation inside the water. What is remarkable is their break, which elicits in Descartes’s case, for example, the image of a bent stick. It is the crossing of the two that generates patches of shade and elements of chance. Inside such a refraction, objects get deformed, creating singular combinations but also figures that we can still control. Perhaps given this break, we have a plane of recomposition that brings about some sort of redistribution. The redistribution presupposes out of sync and often incompatible ‘attributes’ for new formulas, a lot of ‘modes’ and singularities that, as Spinoza maintains, exist thanks to the infinite ‘ideas’ by means of which Nature assembles itself, even when a deformed lens affects it, half way between necessity and freedom.

Each one of us finds our unique formula swirling inside the grand ‘all’. These discoveries do not happen without effectuating combinations slowed down by organisms that filter them, although their concept does not close in on itself nor is it firmly attached to an end. Life, Deleuze used to say, does not die; only organisms do.¹ Whatever the constituted order or the resulting organism may be, vital movement cannot be abolished nor can death annihilate the virtual idea on which the lens and the formula of my unique figure are fixed. My existence is irrevocable. I am; I have been! Nothing can suppress the idea, that is, the broken symmetry ordained by the great universal machine that no negation can ever stop. Life discovers an open road to follow and to extend its flow, folding the elements upon one another and breaking down the infinite relations that Nature has totally in its disposal. Life, in this Spinozist way of seeing things, sings the refrain of a machinic freedom—a machinism proper to the Deleuzian century entirely absorbed in the vital desire that resonates infinitely in everyone as a strongly affirmative power to exist. Freedom in Deleuze is also desire, but it has nothing to do with the ethics of action. The latter would always have an end, while machinic desire is connected with an industrious play that goes on to infinity.

This strange freedom of the triumphal formula that forms a life, this singular equation that constitutes the deformed essence of everyone, is not really opposed to the determinism of physics whose paradoxical game it also plays. The parts of a machine, the parts of a well-oiled mechanism, need a space of play to enter a universal machinism. The dentate wheels, those made best by the distance they travel, are able to link up only because of the interstices of the outside that slide inside the apparatus and bring about the separation. This chaotic outside, this jamming, enters the space of a machine where the intervals count more than the rest. A world of relations…. In every crossroad of an integrated existence, contingency releases the possibles and liberates the future as it profits from already accumulated determinisms. We have the feeling that, in the water, the stick bends, a curve is made of sand, but life does not break. Life goes on, and a certain logic presides over this deviation. We will speak of ‘determination’, not in the case of something determined, not even in the case of the determinant. Between the two, determination (just as much as motivation) is already in the process of being made, creating bifurcations the way that liberations would do.² However, truth to tell, freedom is rarely conceived at this level of radicality. We never grasp it as something that liberates a passage or a way. Free is the movement that plays in a state of ‘indifference’with respect to goals and ends. We are far from the one who ‘wants’—far from the freedom of the will as a force of character. As a matter of fact, freedom opens up a game, a space of play where things evolve in a freewheeling manner. We need a ‘neutral point’ to engage what Deleuze calls the difficulty of thinking, the inability to put the decision in gear, to refer it to a certain rule or a regime, a longwinded and zig zag line. We are consequently on a new, very special mechanism, a mechanism that is at the center of Anti-Oedipus, as much as Jarry’s bicycle, the strange pataphysics that Deleuze displays in his Essays Critical and Clinical. It is here that the freedom of the schizo is given in many different ways by the contradictory movements of a machine whose wheels bifurcate. In this context, the free play, the floating between two pieces or two plateaus, the open space that permits their mobility—the interval—will be inseparable from an empiricism, and from an effort capable of lacerating the most solid forms and of augmenting the most closed organisms.

Every experience occurs on the verge of madness and its insane course, with an emptiness responsible for the change of speed, the change of plateaus, and discs in the wheel of a bicycle. We may then say that the experience of the bent stick in the water is a real change. It is the result of a certain danger, a certain peril, a certain difficulty of thinking, of thinking about its course. Free is the one whose course, even at great personal risk, is unfettered, in ‘free fall’, as we would say of a paratrooper who has not opened his or her parachute or like a cinematic movement that creates the feeling of flight. It resembles the case of someone pedaling unencumbered whose force suddenly would be passed on to a machine and made to follow directions that are not coordinated, as is the case in Man Ray’s mechanism called Danger or Impossibility.³ At the moment of the reorientation of the determination, we could expect that an experience occurs. How could we fail to hear in the word ‘experience’ the danger, the perishing, and the peril that the etymology of the word reveals? If we are more attentive, this word would even suggest something that derives from ‘pire’ (worse), or from the broken peak, or the reef. Experience suggests, as in Beckett’s A cap au pire (Worstward Ho), empirer (to worsen) or even empiricism.

It would take long to establish the set of words related to experiri. Experience and empiricism include many more phantoms. The peirates, the pirate, is not very far from the word ‘experience’, as we learn from Lean-Luc Nancy, who enters this very Deleuzian century and takes freedom outside the Kantian circle, which is contaminated by strange derailments and syncopes.⁴ The pirate, the one who leaves the rails, is the one who goes beyond, who transcends all limits and deterritorializes him- or herself so as to deploy a Deleuzo-Guattarian concept. The pirate leaves behind the worse (pire) and enters a determination whose end is unknown. There is no point in turning into an enfant terrible and forcing the concept of ‘experience’ in a delirium with no consideration for genealogy; there is no point in shaking a bent stick inside the water for the sake of strange reflections…. However, we can say, at least, that we have a ritornello here, ready to be hummed in the midst of words that break up, that recall memories and return the way the bicycle wheel turns…. The point of this machination of experience was to raise the question of the difficulties and the horrific trials confronting freedom in its effort to find its outside, its other, the crack and the rhythm of perishing, peril, pire (worse), empirer (worsen), or the empiricism that Deleuze tried to raise to its ‘superior’ form.⁵

Ever since Kant, freedom has nothing empirical about it; it is not limited by any peril, any trial, or any steep climb. It does not have to fear the worst, at least, if we take the concept of liberty in its most ethical sense. For Kant, freedom was certainly an abstract, immaculate Idea that did not have to put its hands in the dirty grease, or on a chain that goes off the track. We cannot really activate it in its attachment to reality. It is an Idea that cannot be presented on the phenomenal and tormented plane that is ours. In the already pacified experience where everything links with everything else, Kant tells us, there is no autonomy. But it looks as if Kant knows nothing of the autonomy of machines, nothing of the automata that life has taken over and made to transmit endlessly aberrant and discontinuous movements. This transmission has neither origin, nor end, and Kant is certainly right to think that in this stubborn experience nothing ever begins by itself. However, is this not the domain of automatism, of free passage, and of another freedom, despite the fact that this spiritual automatism does not appeal to Kant? For him, everything that happens in this world is already determined by a prior cause and is consequently unintentional. It follows that freedom is not thinkable. How can we imagine freedom if we place it inside an involuntary and unintentional system of links in a chain, with no escape from the track of its sprocket wheel and the derailleur gear that gives them direction?

From the point of view of causes, determinism reigns supreme. Kant admits only ‘effects’, but effects determine nothing; they are necessary consequences and determined results. This is why freedom cannot be reduced to an effect. It must be conceived, Kant insists, as unconditional. This is the great lesson of the third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason that Nancy presents in L’Experience de la liberté and Le Discours de la syncope. It is an antinomy whose crack and incorporeal effects Deleuze will often stress and rethink: another logic of sense. As a matter of fact, Deleuze has a very different idea of an effect, of incorporeal effects. It is very far from the Kantian freedom that works with an ethereal form of causality, a causality that would be ‘by itself’, a cause of itself, a first cause and a radical beginning. The experience of freedom, according to Kant, is a challenge that only a Subject is able to have, on the basis of a moral autonomy that owes nothing to the derailleur.⁶ On the other hand, Deleuze’s machinism is desire’s own automatism, alien to duty and to the feeling that, in the natural course of a life, would be imposed as a negative limit and as a conviction of what I cannot want or, alternatively, of what I ought to want to universalize as an instance of responsibility. We could say that freedom, as duty, denies the automated course of things, and as such, it is totally independent of happiness or of a personal satisfaction, or even of an ethics that is always in de droles de paris, machineries and machinations. For Kant, desire, in its voluntary form, is not happiness, and Deleuze would agree with him on this point, although he understands better than Kant the intrigues, the automatisms, and the infinite share that shape true desire.

It seems to me that Descartes, another foe of Deleuze, developed, better than Kant, a more rhizomatic view of freedom. There is something of the ‘century of Descartes’ inside the ‘century of Deleuze’, thanks to the machinic side of the latter, and the ‘animal-machine’ or the strange Body with Machine (although Deleuze finally retained the image of the Boy with Machine).⁷ We find in Descartes a very interesting concept, the ‘freedom of indifference’, which is not very rational. On the contrary, it is “the lowest degree of freedom”, which “reveals a weakness in knowledge rather than a perfection in the will”.⁸ It is clear then that the freedom Descartes envisages here is a very singular experience. It links up with the speeds of the machine, with the jolts of the animal machine. It is an experience that decreases our power to think. We learn, thanks to it, that in the final analysis our thought is finite, limited, bent as much as the stick plunged into water is bent or like the segments of a curve. It always presumes that there is an unthought that overflows thought and exceeds our faculty to assess a very complicated situation. Freedom decides without us ever knowing whether or not this was worth the trouble. Deleuze would say, undoubtedly and justifiably, that freedom is a silly inspiration and a “difficulty for thought”.⁹

In the case of Descartes, we are in the world of machines, with pulleys and belts, and with a pineal gland like a mechanized theater.¹⁰ Inside such a world, freedom—long before Deleuze—participates in a certain danger. It leads to the failure of reason, which is overcome by the passions, or by the infinity of a choice that is impossible to equilibrate. Reason gets off the rails in the labyrinth of being or in the “immense forest” that Descartres evokes, and loses itself in unknown roads.¹¹ The will, leaning toward one road rather than another, does not know the ‘reason’ that made it choose. The subject, being an insane speed, loses its substance in front of the urgency to choose and to accept a decision wrought by the automatism of the body.

How can we decide? Blindly? Following the straight line? It is easy to understand why the idiot and the blind are in a better position to teach us about freedom and to turn into conceptual personages. Deleuze evokes the idiot and refers to Descartes as someone who comes back with ‘his eyes red’ in What Is Philosophy? But why does the Cartesian philosopher return from the forest or from the sea with red eyes? This is a strange question, but one that we can understand very well if we raise the question of freedom in a different context, a context where it does not yet have a moral authority. This is exactly what Deleuze and Guattari state, as if it were a kind of ritornello—the ritornello of freedom: “We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. Even Descartes had his dream. To think is always to follow the witch’s flight”.¹²

Acknowledging that balancing choices is an infinite process and that the understanding is limited, Descartes convinces us to let our eyes redden and to associate with sorcerers. Are these mere metaphors? Bloodshot eyes are wide open eyes, wounded by the sun and the salt and misled by the experience of the bent stick in the water. These are eyes forced to see but to see on the plane of immanence, in other words, on a plane where reason does not shed its light and a superior principle does not guide us from above. Here vision is the vision of the corsair and the pirate mentioned earlier, because the Cartesian life is a will o’ the wisp, brief and uncertain. According to Descartes, we have the power to do everything and the ability to spend ourselves without reserve. But our time is limited. The will, very different from Kant’s will, is a sudden explosion, infinite yet instantaneous, like a shooting star gleaming and already switched off. Things move so fast that the understanding has no time to guide and educate us except by default, and by following some kind of provisional morality. In Descartes, there are two broken plateaus: the understanding and the will. Life cannot teach us the infinity of what the will wants. We find ourselves in a situation of immanence that demands that we open our eyes and keep them wide open because what we can do and desire is not at all obvious. We can never see by ourselves on such a chaotic plane. Evidence is not freedom’s intuition. Whatever happens to us on that plane does not provide us with the key for the assessment of the effects. We are done with judgment, with the judgment of God.¹³ Descartes’s century is a century that Deleuze retraces between Spinoza and Leibniz, necessarily retaining something of the baroque madness of a theatrical evil genius that comes to threaten the divine clarity. Inside this movement of machines that become more and more alive, Deleuze throws the dice and broaches his entry in the neo-baroque that marks our own century.¹⁴

This is, I think, what the word ‘freedom’ means for Deleuze. God is dead, and only a witch’s flight can be opposed to the last judgment, a vital line that is not knowledge. The eye becomes red because it understands nothing, and because no final point is ever visible. The understanding has, therefore, broken down; it is stranded. It no longer leads us. Only desire urges us toward a certain determination, but this determination has no end, no intelligible goal: it is a line of escape that would require, I think, as Nancy understands it, a new subject. For only the event exists, the eventum tantum of the Logic of Sense.¹⁵ We know very well that desire has no finality—if it did, it would not be desire. Deleuze and Guattari show this best in their Anti-Oedipus. The thesis of this book is that desire does not reach an end; it is open-ended, it moves freely, and it does not let itself be interrupted as the case is with pleasure. Even less does it allow itself to be guided by the understanding, by a calculus. That is exactly what Sacher-Masoch proposes, namely an experience of an erratic freedom, a freedom that errs and has no finality, and that, for this reason, cannot obtain jouissance.¹⁶ Freedom, consequently, is suspended, hovering, always waiting and hoping (dans l’expectative) in the process of weaving a ritornello that would be repeated without any finality to stop it. The ritornello is a tune that goes through our head, a mania of sorts, a mannerism of freedom. We are indeed called to a freedom, the repetition of which becomes the law. But to what extent is this thought Cartesian? Which thought, which ‘cogito’ can we anticipate?

We cannot say that in Kant’s case we enjoy more freedom than in the case of Sacher-Masoch. In Kant, freedom and jouissance have nothing in common. However, unlike Kant, for whom freedom is an imperative of the subject, the one who commands and restricts the will in a moral and rigid position, Descartes places us in the situation of Buridan’s ass, allowing itself to starve because of his hesitation between hay and water. There is always a fault and a crack in the order of speeds and the forms of association. When I do not know, when the act is neither certitude nor moral injunction but only obstinacy and determination, freedom for the ‘cracked I’ is becoming-donkey or becoming-idiot. This is the case with the one who lets himself be straddled like a donkey in Venus in Furs or in the strange and unpleasant contracts of masochism. What is preferable has neither authority nor circulation here. In a similar perspective, Cartesian morality remains always provisional, adjourned, deferred until later for its verification. And this provisional morality, this unlimited procrastination, is expressed in words, in chansons de geste, or in maxims that can be repeated—cogito ergo sum, cogito ergo sum. We are confronted by a suspended subject in the mode of free errancy. Deleuze often brings up the idea of a formula. These are Stoic witticisms, dicta, or rather formulas of the kind ‘I’d prefer not to’. There is undoubtedly obstinacy in Bartleby. Whenever doubt is juxtaposed to the thesis of an evident world, we find in Melville a denial, something that bends the way the stick bends in the water, a certain freedom of indifference. The Deleuzian cogito may be found in the repetition of the formula ‘I’d prefer not to’.

As in Melville, there is a Deleuzian obstinacy, an obstinate determination by means of which we reach another Descartes, a Descartes confronting freedom the way we confront someone who is stubborn. This is precisely what he calls indifference. Indifference does not imply that there is no difference. It implies that I ought to make the difference, and that the difference is not already granted, that something is not resolved a priori, not given or determined, but rather that something is taken up inside a crazy determination. Freedom is irresolute. It leaves me indifferent as if I were dead, a dead man who knows not how to reply, like the dead man that Deleuze presents in his final text in the figure of the assassin. This is yet another personage, another subject that we may designate, with Nancy speaking of Descartes, as “chaogito”.¹⁷ Indeed, we could follow a line from Melville to Dickens, to his novel Our Common Friend, with its detestable character who becomes almost lovable, having lost his airs, his pretentions, having now acquired the face of someone who cannot reply, engulfed within a pure and simple indifference. He does not know. There is no longer knowledge. He has reached the last extremity, the very end; he is before death. A form of freedom is then born, an absence of justification and finality, and this enters the course of a life that is machinic and anyone’s. This life is anyone’s because it is no longer determined. It is anyone’s because of its ongoing determination and because of a determinability that replays the possibilities of an unpredictable life.¹⁸ ‘Whatsoever’ means: neither better nor worse—a life among others, singular like everyone else’s, plugged into the automatism of its repetitions. The dead man no longer expects anything. He is free from every obstacle within an undetermined region. And as a result, we are before a life as good as any other, and this includes even the life of the criminal. How can we then speak of such indifference faced with the last moment of the dying man in Dickens? How can we speak of this chaogito?

The idiot is not enough to talk about indifference. There is another character in the work of Deleuze who hums freedom and sings its singular experience. It is the exhausted one that Deleuze evokes with reference to the Quad.¹⁹ Funny times, funny characters, placed in a pallid light. The indifference of freedom is not the fatigue of someone going from one door to another in order to try and determine which one is the best. The exhausted one does not choose one; he or she chooses them all, exhausting the possible and remaining indifferent in the face of one choice rather than another. There are no better choices. We must endure them all: ‘beyond good and evil’. There is no understanding that could orient the preference of one over another. They are all worthy of whatever happens to us; they are all desirable. There is no principle of the best, not even of the preferable. There is a life, say mine. It has gone through certain doors, certain thresholds—sometimes the worst ones. Empiricism, in this case, opts for the form of the worst. My task is to sing the ritornello, to salute the opening, to thread the edges, the frames, to practice multiplicity. A “multiplicity is defined not by the elements that compose it in extension, not by the characteristics that compose it in comprehension”.²⁰ It is from their broken linkage, from their irrational connections, that a certain movement can be extracted, the determination of a movement-image, a possibility to ‘believe in the world’, to caption the world in a non-negotiable time, in a time against which I can do nothing, against which I can only remain indifferent.²¹ It is no longer Greek nor any other tradition. It begins again, being at last liberated from the weight of all references.

‘I would prefer not to’ constitutes a chaogito, according to which the ‘I’ loses its preferences because value belongs to an entire life without any judgment of this or that part as meritorious or excellent, infamous or hateful. We are in front of a sacred determination. Nothing rejected, no spoiled possibilities. We must take it all, an ‘all’ that is open, even at the end, especially at the end, when death dispossesses us [nous depossede], integrating us with other machines, whether writing or celibate, extremities without number exhausting us like the lames of a fan are exhausted. It is always a life that is the object of my desire and of my freedom, despite the number of its folds. The value of a life depends on whether or not it exhausts its possibles, whether or not it is able to survey all events, even if it suffers and comes back with red eyes. This exhaustion is the ritornello that turns leaves and hours in the image of the stagemaker bird of A Thousand Plateaus.²² This bird frees itself from the place of origin, from its territory, the way we liberate ourselves from history and from the weight of years for the sake of a Deleuzian century. The ritornello/chaogito returns necessity to freedom, event to desire. As if they were pages, it will connect one by one all the nerves—happy or not—that its experience has traversed. It exhausts its rhizome, runs through the broken sticks of the fan of the entire life of the one who would ‘rather not’. It is like drawing up the‘time-image’ of a life that is composed of only one line in order to bring together the most terrible differences. The refrain of freedom is not sung only at the beginning or at the end. The entire line of determinations repeats each one of its instants as if to attach not only to the actual present, but to all splutterings, every single derailment of the machine. We could say that in such machinism life gets established in the same way that a single electric network traces its path inside an essentially compromised brain crammed with synaptic cracks. It is, at any rate, possible that every life is ‘a life’, for a network of neurons is never the same for me and for you, even if we are not the best and we are far from being exemplary. Neither universal, nor particular, but rather singular (“each one” to use Nancy’s expression). Every life produces its own signature inside the ‘megamachine of the universe’, its own image and diagram that do not resemble any other. There is a chance—and it is here that our freedom is finally affirmed—a draw that is worth an eternity or rather an ‘ethernity’, a slow rise of ether, of the emptiness between the two or three crenelated plateaus of a bike that Deleuze humorously evokes in his text on Jarry. It is in this entre-temps, in this change of speeds, that we may experience the determination, which is simultaneously desire and decision. It is a decision to go to the very end, despite all the chaining that has failed. It is a freewheeling refrain, helping us to learn how to love at last whatever befalls us between two determinisms, between the two enchainments that open up the time of waiting and the exhaustion of the possibles.²³

In such a case, a certain intoxication can occur between the two. The chaogito is the subject that comes from the extremities jumping from the one chain to the other, each one existing in itself, but with an emptiness responsible for a coupling, a common relationship, perhaps the way things are between two of Spinoza’s attributes. They are different, but they follow the same rhythm that runs from one space to another, with one deferred moment, and with a small forward movement in their passage. Each one of these chains exists outside of itself, outside of the time proper to each one, like Nancy who lives with the heart of another. We will call upon Nancy’s intoxication in order to link them together. Intoxication is an experience of crossing over, and every crossing is a free passage. It makes us drunk, placed as it is at the edge of a possibility, a sketch, a fable: it has the sense of the in-between, of a world that is not closed, a world that the intoxication opens upon another, through inexhaustible mutations.

This passing through worlds expresses possession. One is possessed by a junction, a clinamen, a bifurcation, torn by a transformation between two determinisms. One falls into a gray area, the intoxication that carries us elsewhere, outside of the ontology of a proper substance. Where then? In the chaogito extracted from its limit, the gray spirit that dissolves the closed number, the unique number that I am.

There is no question of atoms in this molecular machinism, on this molecular plane. Intoxication successfully splits the atoms. The first term is already divided in the middle, split into two unequal parts, which are themselves split again, partes extra partes, each one at the edge of a division that situates us as ex nihilo. It is an extremity, a failure that the most alcoholic can borrow. Literature gives us access to such failures, to such faults. For example, Malcolm Lowry’s failure, his fall in a ravine that I have shared with Deleuze and Nancy from the very beginning. The drink of Malcolm Lowry … and his cigarette, made of ashes that fall into the glass and dissolve—ashes that link genres into lines that meet as would ashes disseminated in worlds and announcing the possibility of a world, a “faith in the world”, a world that, in its closure and beautiful unity, no longer exists. From Deleuze perhaps Nancy receives a world made of worlds distancing themselves from one another, having arrived from some other point, and opening upon universes that they do not share but that, nevertheless, rediscover themselves in the Deleuzian desire to get drunk on pure water, in the vapor of intoxication, and in the ‘between’, and the ‘with’, starting with the ‘milieu’ that intoxication liberates.

Nancy opens up, therefore, behind Deleuze’s back, a possible world, a drunk chaogito, which Socrates called “the demon”. Socrates is possessed by a demon who soars above determinations, above the chains of demonstrations. This is a very sober intoxication that marks all the strange characters of philosophy, with Socrates being the first one to be outside himself, talking a lot, knowing himself to be a stranger to himself: “Everyone is farthest from himself”; Nietzsche’s formula would be appropriate here where the ego eliminates itself.²⁴ Here is an intoxicated Socrates, even before drinking the hemlock, one who follows his demon into another world, as if he were changing regime and plateau. Immanence was yet again intoxicated when Heraclitus, the first to lose himself, going toward all that is different, speaks another language—the language of the possessed. “It’s not only in the same river that Heraclitus is unable to swim twice, it’s not even the same body. He is never himself without being also soaked with oddities and dripping moisture. He is possessed by a body inside his body, with another blood pumping, intruding and intrusive”.²⁵ It is this machinism, this spiritual automaton of intoxication, that names the freedom played between two chains and between two orders of concepts. And from Deleuze to Nancy, we are able to glide from one page to another, from one corpus to another, separated by their margins, strange yet also close to one another. Always, coming from such a great distance, the books get connected, seized by a demon who leaps over their pages, circulates on their borders, without ever uniting them—a chaogito that emerges at the point of the absolute where every exteriority and every interiority get to be dissolved and the excess, produced.²⁶

Under the influence of intoxication, encounters are liberated, conceptual personae create couples and machines, as they follow a heterogeneous rhythm and a foreign language that gives rise to the curious jargon of philosophy, between idiots, the exhausted, the fatigued, those fallen asleep, criminals, saints, and demons—all of those who inhabit the texts and interest them in living on by themselves and in being extended along lines more interesting and less personal than the lines of biography. There is something there that differs from the Deleuzian affirmation. The drunken machine is launched in an insane negation and deterioration, but the negation of the limit also turns into joy. It is the joy, the ecstasy, and the jouissance of a reader avid for strangers and for characters who do not resemble their author. How, for instance, could Faust have remained imprisoned inside the pages of Goethe and go nowhere else, the opera, the theater, etc.? Was it possible not to be a character free to take off, to be detached, to meet other lives, to enter the process of automatic reading? Within these free experiences, we may certainly speak excessively; we may be in a lyrical state, as if absent from ourselves. We talk at the speed of a machine; the body slides into machines, conjugating the strangest of determinisms. These are grafts that come out of everything, let themselves turn around and walk straight. “The absolute is this desire, this vertigo of infinite desire. It is the whirling, exhilaration and amazement of desire stretched toward the nearest end, toward the excess of proximity, which in its excess escapes what is closest, what is infinitely close, and thus always infinitesimally distant”.²⁷

Notes

1.Gilles Deleuze, Seminar on Cinema, 02/02/1982, 1 9A.

2.The idea of determination is discussed in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 220.

3.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: L’ Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. 465; engl. trans. by Robert Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: The Viking Press, 1977).

4.Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Expérience de la liberté (Paris: Galilée, 1988), p. 112.

5.This is the standard expression of Difference and Repetition, which evokes for this difficulty the idea of transcendental empiricism. I raised it in my Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). See also Anne Sauvagnargues, L’empirisme Transcendantal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010).

6.This position of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) is contested in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

7.See the work of Richard Lindner in Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, p. 6.

8.René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Arthur Wollaston (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1960), Part III, 2.

9.Discourse on Method, Part III, 2.

10.For this reading of the pineal gland, see my book Le mal et autres passions obscures (Paris: Kime, 2015).

11.Discourse on Method, Part III, 2.

12.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 41.

13.Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 158.

14.This is the important lesson of Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972).

15.Deleuze,The Logic of Sense, p. 151.

16.This is more or less the thesis of Gilles Deleuze in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967); engl. trans. by J. McNeil, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty (New York: G. Braziller, 1971). This thesis is also taken up in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.

17.Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego Sum (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 197), p. 119.

18.Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: Une Vie”, in Philosophie 47 (September 1995): pp. 4–7.

19.Gilles Deleuze, “L’Epuise”, in Samuel Beckett, Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision suivi de L’Épuisé par Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1992).

20.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 245.

21.We can find this fabulation in Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), but also approached in a different way in Nancy’s ‘Mundus est fabula’, in Ego Sum.

22.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 331.

23.For the description of Jarry’s bicycle, see An Unrecognized Precursor to Heidegger: Alfred Jarry”, in Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical.

24.Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 335.

25.Jean-Luc Nancy, Ivresse (Paris: Payot-rivages, 2013), p. 32.

26.Nancy, Ivresse, p. 40.

27.Nancy, Ivresse, p. 40.

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. Présentation de Sacher-Masoch. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967. Engl. trans. by J. McNeil.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Deleuze, Gilles. “L’Épuisé”. In Samuel Beckett. Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision suivi de L’Épuisé par Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1992.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Immanence: Une Vie” in Philosophie 47 (September 1995): 4–7.

Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles. Seminar on Cinema, 02/02/1982 1 9A.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: L’ Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972. Engl. trans. Robert Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: The Viking Press, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Descartes, René. Discourse on Method. Trans. Arthur Wollaston. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1960.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965.

Martin, Jean-Clet. Variations. The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Trans. Constantin V. Boundas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

Martin, Jean-Clet. Le Mal et les autres passions obscures. Paris: Kime, 2015.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Ego Sum. Aubier-Flammarion, 1979.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. L’Expérience de la liberté. Paris: Galilée, 1988.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Ivresse. Paris: Payot-rivages, 2013.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Intoxication. Trans. Philip Armstrong. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Nietzsche, Gay Science. Trans. Josephine Nauckhoff. Ed. Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Sauvagnargues, Anne. L’empirisme Transcendantal. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010.

2 Infinite Speeds and Practical Reason

A Kinematics of the Concept in What Is Philosophy?

Michael J. Ardoline

The use of the phrase “infinite speeds” in Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? is an unsettling choice of words to the reader with a background in contemporary physics. The phrase can seem to be a jarring red flag of scientific illiteracy in two thinkers who, as far as continental philosophy goes, have a great respect for the sciences. While Special Relativity denies the possibility of speeds faster than the speed of light, there is a history of complex problems involving the use of unbounded velocities, specifically one of the problems of indeterminacy¹ in classical mechanics (sometimes known as “the problem of Space Invaders”). In order to understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean by infinite speeds, which is integral to understanding their account of the construction and use of concepts, we must understand what a movement at infinite speeds looks like, and we must undertake a description of the motion of an object moving with an infinite velocity. This should be approached rigorously and as mathematically as possible, rather than seen as a loose analogy.

For instance, if, hypothetically, they had called the concept parabolic, then in order to understand the concept, it would be necessary to know what a parabola looks like, that it has a minimum or a maximum, and so on. This is not to claim that Deleuze and Guattari are promoting a physical theory or commenting on a physical theory, but that we can use the understanding of these frameworks in order to make sense of the phrase “infinite speed”. The rigor of the mathematical description of physical movement, kinematics, can be lent to making sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the concept. This allows for an investigation of the intervention of indeterminacy within the deterministic framework of classical mechanics allowed by the supposedly deterministic laws of Newtonian physics themselves. This analysis will produce an understanding of the concept as inherently risky, non-representational, and dependent on other concepts. In this, investigation of the kinematics of the concept recalls one of Kant’s great motivating problems: how can a subject act freely if the universe is governed by deterministic laws? Rather than insisting on a sharp distinction between the scientific (the empirical) and the subjective (the transcendental) as Kant does, Deleuze and Guattari propose an understanding of the concept that makes qualitative use of the same mathematics as classical physics. This allows for the transcendental and the empirical to be understood as immanent. The concept can then be understood in its relation to practical reason (in the Kantian sense), which is the seat of freedom in an otherwise determinate entity, the subject.

Space Invaders

Infinite speeds in classical physics are the site of indeterministic events within an apparently deterministic order. Classical physics is not the only domain that could provide conceptual resources to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s account of practical reason, but it is perhaps the easiest tool through which to grasp the meaning of the phrase “infinite speeds” in relation to concept formation and the process by which concepts become efficacious. Modern physics prevents infinite speeds from being a possible state of affairs, as the equations of Special and General Relativity stop working at speeds above that of light in a vacuum, the constant C. They have no solutions for speeds above C. Therefore, we must use classical dynamics, the physics of Newton, as our example.

As our goal is not to adequately describe the physical world, this use of Newtonian mechanics, which is an incomplete (though completely rigorous and, in a limited domain, accurate) model, should not trouble us in understanding the figure of infinite speed. I maintain that the term “infinite speed” must indeed be a figure as Deleuze and Guattari surely knew of the limit of the speed of light and make reference to it in What Is Philosophy? Furthermore, thought, as in the actual operations of the brain, has been calculated to take place at speeds of only a few hundred kilometers per hour, many orders of magnitude smaller than the speed of light, let alone infinity, so this cannot be the proper understanding of the phrase either. One could argue that, with the prima facie contradictions given our best current models of physical reality, a physical example will be useless. However, the way in which infinite speeds in Newtonian mechanics highlight strange behavior through indeterminism, determinism, and causality makes it an ideal model to provide a description through which to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the phrase, whether or not it accurately describes the physical world.

Newtonian physics is generally considered to be a completely deterministic account of the physical world, giving rise to such figures as Laplace’s demon, who knows all future states based on knowing the initial conditions of the universe and the correct physical laws. However, this is not entirely the case if we delve into all possible solutions for the equations of classical mechanics. Let us take a simple situation in Newtonian mechanics: point masses in a frictionless vacuum. These objects’ acceleration is described by Newton’s equation of universal gravity: F = G(Mm/r²). Essentially, the gravitational force (F) exerted on a body is equivalent to the mass of that body (M) times the mass of the body attracting it (m), divided by the distance between them squared (r), all times the gravitational constant (G, which is an empirically measured constant and mostly serves to make the units work out nicely).

Given complex interactions described by this equation, it is possible for a finite number of particles, through purely gravitational interactions, to accelerate a particle to an infinite speed. This is due to the unbounded potential offered by 1/r², meaning that since there is no limit on what number can be substituted for r, it can grow infinitely large or infinitely small, and since F depends on r, so can the gravitational force, making acceleration to an infinite speed possible.

We can see from these circumstances that a particle at infinite speed would reach a spatial infinity and stop moving in time. This is a difficult mathematical result to interpret physically as it appears to show that a particle reaching an infinite speed would literally leave the universe. The universe and all its particles would continue on their paths, but this unlucky particle would remain in stasis, being thrown beyond the forces of becoming in the universe. In other words, it would leave the causal order, neither affecting nor being affected by anything else. Furthermore, Newton’s equations are time reversible, meaning that the equations describing the situation do not pick out a causal order. If you recorded a video of a ball in flight and played the recording of the arc of the ball backwards and forwards (without showing the throwing or landing of the ball), we could not discern which was the actual path of the ball and which was the time-reversed version. We can reverse the time order of any set of events using Newton’s kinematics and get an equally physically possible account. Taking this into account, we get a much more interesting result if we run this in reverse: a particle at spatial infinity or “outside the universe” could, from an infinite speed, slow down and enter the causal order. Because the equations give us an indeterminate result for the particle starting at infinite speeds, its path cannot be known until it slows down. Hence the colloquial name “the problem of Space Invaders”. In other words, we see here two possible options for an object moving at infinite speed; either it accelerates to an infinite speed and flies out of the universe to a spatial infinity, or it starts at infinite velocity then accelerates negatively and enters the universe, returning from a spatial infinity. This is a strange occurrence to find in Newtonian mechanics as it is usually referred to as a deterministic theory. In other words, if one knows the equations governing motion and all initial conditions, one could know with certainty all future states. However, if particles are flying into and out of the system or universe, then there is no way to ensure determinism.² It must be noted that this indeterminism is not necessarily a rare occurrence, the instantiation of a miracle within the causal order, but rather a constant potentiality always looming over an otherwise deterministic system. Indeterministic events are equally potential, if not probable, within this model. In fact, “unlikely” or “improbable” are not applicable phrases when applied to these sorts of events; we cannot even ask the probability of these Space Invader events. They are a consequence of the equations, which do not depend on the current state of affairs of the universe, and therefore do not allow us to even calculate a measure of “potential Space Invader events” or other ways of judging their likelihood. Given these equations, it is possible at any moment, at any position in the universe, that a “Space Invader” may take place.

One could claim this is an unphysical result of the equations, but as the equations were meant to describe reality, there is no grounds other than the lack of empirical evidence to deny this occurrence. This is not to argue that this could actually take place in our universe. “Space Invaders” are a problem with Newtonian mechanics that, were it still the foundation of physics, would need to be solved, and not merely discounted or ignored. However, the finding that Newtonian mechanics is a special case of General Relativity has removed the urgency from this problem as General Relativity sets a speed limit of C for anything with mass. This is not to say that General Relativity lacks any indeterminist results or potentially unphysical or non-interpretable solutions, but just that they will not have to do with infinite speeds. Be that as it may, thanks to the mathematical description of movement at infinite speeds provided by this problem case, we can now rigorously understand how a concept moves if it moves at infinite speeds.

The Movement of the Concept

Concept formation is central to Deleuze’s philosophical projects in general, especially in the works with Guattari. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari assert that “the concept is defined by the inseparability of a finite number of heterogeneous components traversed by a point of absolute survey at infinite speed”.³ In line with the previous example, creating a concept is analogous to accelerating a particle to or from infinite speed. This is due to the construction of the concept and its use as ranging over potentially analyzable parts. Every concept can be broken into component parts with no atomic facts or terminal propositions underlying it because “there are no simple concepts”.⁴ In other words, while concepts contain finite components (other concepts), these components can always be analyzed into further component parts, without ever finding a set of elemental concepts. Concepts that would themselves have no analyzable component concepts are impossible on Deleuze and Guattari’s account. However, despite the indefinitely analyzable nature of the concept, when it is employed, its parts are ranged over at “infinite speed”. Therefore, when the employment of a concept takes place, especially a novel concept, an indeterminate situation is produced. Were this not the case, movement across or ranging over the pieces of the concept would take place piecemeal, crossing each bit of the concept one by one. However, if there is no atomic bit, then this movement would have to be infinite because we would find ourselves at a Zeno’s paradox of the concept. If the movement over the concept were deterministic, we could never actually employ a concept because, in moving from one part of the concept to another, there would be an indefinitely analyzable void between the parts. We would always have to move across one-half of the concept before covering the whole, and across one-quarter before covering one-half, and so on. Worse yet, if the movement were bit by bit, then each employment of a concept would be an analysis of that concept as its use would be equivalent to its breaking down into its component parts. Clearly, neither of these can be the case as we do not find ourselves lost or in infinite loops the moment we employ a concept. Furthermore, neither of these could be Deleuze and Guattari’s intention as they stress the concept is employed all at once. Therefore, the employment of the novel concept must be an indeterminate moment in the movement of thought.

The important question then is “what are the practical consequences of the employment of a concept?” As far as I can tell, there are four: its use is risky,⁵ it has non-representational aspects, it absolutely requires the interaction of other concepts, and it is the condition for a sort of freedom.⁶ Let us examine the movement of the concept using the description from the case of Space Invaders by making a methodological connection between the Cartesian plane of geometry and the plane of immanence in order to describe each of these aspects.

First, the indeterminate nature of the concept points to the necessary risk in its employment. In the same way that a particle moving at an infinite speed bursts into the universe in an unpredictable fashion, a concept’s full expression cannot be known ahead of time. There is no concept-in-itself apart from its expression on a plane of immanence. Rather, the concept must be employed in order that we see how it works. A particle must enter into the universe in order for its path to be traceable. In other words, the model fails to represent the movement of the infinitely fast particle. This dependence on the plane for the expression of the concept explains why the fallacy of equivocation is possible in general: the same word is used for two concepts—perhaps the concepts have the same silhouette—but they are understandable only in relation to the plane they exist on; there is no concept in itself. And so when one equivocates, they slide from one plane to another based on a similarity, not an identity, in concepts.

The inherent risk at the heart of the employment of the concept makes the concept itself insufficient to be understood as a representational mode of thought alone. As one employs a concept, one ranges over an analyzable series of statements. A concept can always be broken down in analysis, possibly infinitely. However, in the skillful or adequate use of a concept, one moves over this set of propositions, or whatever makes up the concept, at an infinite speed, and therefore enters a zone of indeterminacy. In this zone, the determinate nature of the causal order is suspended, which produces a risk. In the employment of a concept, in thought or action, the dice are rolled. What this means practically is that a concept is the condition both for the possibility of new thought and action but also for the inadequacy of describing the world.

Here an example may be useful. Some faiths posit the concept of predestination in which their deity or deities have already chosen an elect to share in paradise and damned the rest. Now, when one analyzes this concept, it appears completely contradictory to the concept of freedom. Instead, and this is especially the case for Calvinism in the early United States, the employment of the concept of predestination actually leads one to search for proof of their status as elect. This leads the individual to attempt great feats, believing that if they succeed, then this is a sign of their status as one of the elect. They then take actions we could assume they otherwise would not have taken without this possibility of being the elect factored in. In an odd series of circumstances, the concept of predestination describes a world without freedom, and yet it augments the ability of those who employ it to act.

This is a strange situation indeed, but what we can draw from it is that the indeterminate nature of the concept makes a representational understanding of it insufficient. Put simply: what the concept describes is not what it makes possible. Furthermore, it is impossible to say what outcomes a concept can have ahead of time. We must always ask after a concept what it can do, what it can allow one to understand. What can we do with a concept? What can a concept allow us to do? We must attend, as Olkowski puts it, “not only to the extent to which concepts are efficacious but, more crucially, to the manner in which they intervene in the world”.⁷ And we can only glimpse the coarsest grain answer without employing the concept itself, without rolling the dice.

To call this indeterminacy free will would be excessive. First, while indeterminate, it is not undetermined: a dice roll still has odds and a number of definite outcomes based on its number of sides. Rather, it is closer to what we would call degrees of freedom in a physical system, e.g., a simple pendulum has one degree of freedom (its angle). Mathematically, we can describe a physical system by a graph of all possible states of the system with each degree of freedom accounted for by a dimension of the graph. Many everyday, spatially extended three-dimensional objects have phase spaces with dimensions much higher than three, depending on how many of its parts can move independently of each other (e.g., a phase space of a human arm will generally contain seven dimensions, ignoring fingers: pitch, roll, and yaw of the shoulder, pitch of the elbow, and pitch, yaw, and roll of the wrist). It is this account of degrees of freedom that is invoked in What Is Philosophy? In fact, Deleuze and Guattari go as far as to say that “every concept therefore has a phase space”.⁸ In other words, the concept provides not an increase in free will, but additional powers or potentialities for thought or action. It is important to note that a phase space is used for continuous functions, not discrete (which would be a state space), here reinforcing the claim that concepts do not have atomic units as a continuous space can always be subdivided into smaller and smaller quanta. In our connection between the plane of immanence and the Cartesian plane of Newtonian mechanics, the particle entering the causal order produces the possibility for states that could not have existed without that particle; new possibilities are produced.

This addition of powers is not done by the concept in isolation. Rather, the role of the concept as a condition for freedom in the subject comes from the way in which concepts connect with each other on a plane of immanence. The concept cannot be understood ahead of time without its connection to a plane of immanence and further concepts; a particle that enters the universe at infinite speeds affects the causal order only as it slows to a finite speed and therefore interacts with the causal order again. The particle does not remain a bearer of indeterminacy; it joins the causal order operating as any other particle. However, its mere existence has left its indelible mark of indeterminism by altering the deterministic development of the universe because not everything that will appear in the universe is within it at its start. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, concepts “are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of the dice. They resonate nonetheless, and the philosophy that creates them always introduces a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not fragmented”.⁹ In other words, the power of a concept comes when it is joined with others on a plane in a movement of making consistent with each other. It is not a jigsaw puzzle because the pieces are not cut to fit. Rather, in being placed on a plane together, concepts limit or augment each other so as to work together as a Whole. Were this not the case, connecting concepts could only lead to inconsistent thought, throwing us wildly from one plane of immanence to another.

With all of this, we must be careful not to simply equate more concepts with greater freedom, and, furthermore, greater freedom is not always a greater good. First, this is because concepts constrain each other in their becoming consistent, so a new concept may actually limit possibilities of thought. Second, working to produce concepts that maximize the ways of acting, in other words, maximizing degrees of freedom, would be little more than adding sides to dice. This is perhaps what makes it possible for an ethicist to rationalize their decisions more ably than the non-ethicist due to their greater collection of ethically related concepts. An ethicist with no commitments to a specific consistent theory will probably never judge themselves to be acting unethically. They simply have more ways of judging an action ‘ethical’ than those who constrain themselves to a single, coherent theory.

All of this is not to say that the concept or conceptual creation, development, or clarification is the only way to change one’s actions or habits, increase degrees of freedom, etc. Of course, percepts, affects, social structures, and so on all interact and affect this process as well. However, the development of concepts is the primarily philosophical form of this process, and it may be the route we as conscious beings have the most control over.

Conclusion

There is a unique feature to the concept that is not captured by this example: the concept, when used repeatedly, becomes determined. Deleuze and Guattari speak of the bloodless concepts of science or of clichés, both of which lack the power of indeterminacy of the living, novel concept. It should be noted that in lacking indeterminacy, these concepts also lack risk. No physicist is going to suddenly find herself befuddled upon the employment of “position” in a scientific description, at least not without anomalous or unexpected empirical data, or a Kuhnian paradigm shift, in which case the risk is not from the use of the concept itself.

Determining the concept does not only lead to clichés; we must oppose the bloodless, overly determined concept that stands only as placeholder to the still living but refined concept, which has much of its risk mitigated. A refined concept is one in which the risk is minimized: it becomes more likely that an action is carried out well, or that one reasons logically from premise to conclusion, but this risk is never zero as long as one is using a living concept. In order to achieve its desired ends and to answer its corresponding problems well, a concept must be labored over, forged and reforged like folded steel. Deleuze and Guattari specifically mention the creation of a concept as the roll of the dice, but given both this investigation into infinite speeds, and that the concept ranges over variations and complex organizations, it would seem strange if the whole of chance of a concept were exhausted in its creation or its first employment. Rather, we expect a gradient from novelty to cliché that depends on both the exploration of the concept in use and the changing circumstances to which it responds (be it the double movement with the plane of immanence, or the concrete situations with which the concept engages). In other words, as we experiment with the concept, we refine the degrees of freedom it makes possible, adding here or subtracting there.

Finally, this account of freedom is not opposed to necessity; rather a certain form of indeterminate necessity is absolutely required for freedom to take place. Before a path can be followed, it must be traced out potentially (a concept has a phase space). That there is more than one path is the source of freedom, but that these paths are already traced out is the undergirding necessity. Now this is obviously not a full account of the relation of practical reason to action, freedom, or even the human. To complete this account of Deleuze and Guattari’s work would require including the effects of other mainstays of their philosophy such as memory, ideas, habit, and time, to name a few. However, the importance of the freedom and necessity of the refined concept is apparent even when Deleuze and Guattari set out the condition for the possibility of them writing the text What Is Philosophy?, which they attribute to “times when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and in which all the parts of the machine come together to send into the future a feature that cuts across all ages”.¹⁰

Notes

1.Newtonian dynamics is generally taken to be a deterministic account in which perfect predictions of future states of a system are possible given proper information about the system and the mathematical regularities by which it changes. Indeterminacy becomes a problem because it makes precise prediction impossible.

2.John Earman, “Determinism: What We have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know”, in Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’ Rourke and David Shier (eds), Freedom and Determinism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), p. 24.

3.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 21.

4.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 15.

5.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 76 (see also pp. 49–50).

6.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 23.

7.Dorothea Olkowski, The Universal (in the Realm of the Sensible) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 25.

8.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 25.

9.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p.35.

10.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 1–2.

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Earman, John. “Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know”. In Freedom and Determinism. Eds. Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’ Rourke and David Shier. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004, pp. 21–46.

Olkowski, Dorothea. The Universal (in the Realm of the Sensible). New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Part II

Philosophy and Language

3 Try Madness

Creation and the Crystalline Brain

Dorothea Olkowski

Idiots

Wherever we look for creative forces, there are idiots, idiots stripped of all knowledge and left with nothing. Take, for example, the work of an exemplary idiot, a private thinker who disengaged from all authoritative concepts, all scholastic Christianity, and evolved into the conceptual persona we refer to as the “cogito”. Relieved of reason and indubitable truth, the idiot “wants the lost, the incomprehensible, and the absurd to be restored to him”.¹ Such personae are the powers of concepts. Equally, if not more, compelling as idiots are the aesthetic figures, the powers of affects and percepts, landscapes, faces, visions, and becomings, who are half philosophers, but also much more than philosophers insofar as they are becoming other caught in the matter of expression, while continuing to be what they are.²

Certain exemplary works of art, according to Gilles Deleuze, preserve a bloc of sensations—compounded percepts wrested from perception and perceiving subjects and affects wrested from affections and affected subjectivities.³ Drugs, it is quite certain, are of no use to aesthetic figures for creating the kind of artworks that preserve blocs of sensations, as the sensations expressed by these means are too ephemeral and so are unable to be preserved. However, actual madness or mental disorder may succeed insofar as exemplary aesthetic creation is an act that requires life to be freed from where it is imprisoned, and so, it may require combat, combat in the face of good sense and common sense, doxa, and logical systems. The question we are asking here is precisely this: what situation frees life creatively from such constraints, and in what does combat against these constraints consist? Can an artist situate herself so as to become an aesthetic figure, that kind of idiot who is becoming other in the midst of expression?

Agon and Catastrophe

It may seem foolish to say that Deleuze finds the concepts expressing the madness of the aesthetic figure in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. After all, he has called Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason a book of the enemy, but let us notice that he has also called it “an unrestrained work of old age, which his successors still have not caught up with”.⁴ Moreover, have we ever asked what this means, what is a book of the enemy? The philosophical “friend” of the ancient Greeks was a seeker of wisdom, inventing concepts. What does “friend” signify with respect to the power of concepts? The friend is precisely not a lover, but rather a rival in the creation of concepts, a rival invoking competitive distrust and agon, the Greek concept for struggle, contest, and conflict.⁵ The rival reveals the power of violence and calls up the power of the dark precursor, “enabling communication between difference as such, making the different communicate with difference: the dark precursor is not a friend”.⁶ This is not as Deleuze has noted philo-sophia, the kindly friend of wisdom, but mis-sophia, the enemy of wisdom, that is to say, the one who embraces disharmony, the enemy, the rival.

What is the power of violence that the rival presents to Deleuze? Surely it is related to freeing life where it has been imprisoned even or especially at the cost of madness. Deleuze calls our attention to Kant’s argument, in the Critique of Judgment, that there can be a free play of our cognitive and sensible faculties. When the faculty of Understanding (determining empirical knowledge) and the faculty of Reason (determining practical, ethical interests) free life from where it has been imprisoned, they are set free from their usual tasks of supplying concepts for sensible experience or judgments of moral law to decide what actions are good.⁷ Freed from the power of Understanding and Reason and indifferent to the existence of objects as well as to their materiality, Imagination is also freed. No longer imprisoned by sensation, Imagination reflects on the form of an object and encounters a profound aesthetic sensation independent of any interest in the existence of objects as much as any interest in their material aspects.⁸

This freedom is what Kant refers to as taste. In principle, it is available to everyone, but there is a caveat, which is that formal aesthetic freedom, this show of taste, is in some instances deeply disturbed by a significant shock. The shock takes place in the manner of an encounter with Nature’s formless, wild, irregular chaos, its disorder and desolation, its size beyond measure and power beyond comprehension. This dynamical power crushes and deranges Imagination’s attempts to make tasteful forms, and it destabilizes the recipient until Reason intervenes by creating the Idea of the sublime.

For Deleuze, the sublime is not an event in Nature; it is a break with sensible knowing, a radical break with norms, a discontinuous transition, and a restabilization beyond the sensible. Ultimately it is in agreement with Reason’s Idea, an Idea that can be thought but offers no knowledge; this is the Idea of an idiot.⁹ Only by means of this catastrophic transformation may the aesthetic figure emerge. First, there is the free play of Understanding and Reason, then Imagination’s freedom from matter and existence, then the encounter with the violence of Nature, then the catastrophic shock of submission, and, finally, the Idea. The mind feels elevated and abandons itself to Imagination’s freedom from limits, which comes only thanks to the arrival of an Idea of Reason, which is not the Idea of unity but the Idea of exclusive disjunction brought on by the dark precursor. The mind vibrates between attraction and repulsion; it is dis-harmonious through their contrast. The two poles of vibration form a disjunctive synthesis, a disharmony of the faculties. Imagination and Reason generate the subjective purposiveness of our mental powers, but they do it by means of conflict.¹⁰ The conflict of the faculties, their disjunction, their lack of harmony, Deleuze maintains, is the necessary prerequisite for works of genius, which he prefers to call the work of the idiot or the work of the aesthetic figure.

Who Are They?

Who then are these aesthetic figures, and how do they exist? Although Deleuze, along with Guattari, offers many figures for our consideration, we might wish to concentrate on those most profound idiots of aesthetic invention, those who tell us something about madness and the relationship between madness and creation. This begins quite innocently by way of Deleuze’s accounts of Alice, who ventures crazily into Wonderland in a dream. What sort of behavior is this when a little girl wildly and without hesitation throws herself down into a deep hole in chase of some strangely dressed creature? What sort of hallucination, what visions impel her? Even as she falls, so far down that she nearly sleeps, she begins to lose touch with logical principles of good sense and common sense, principles that weaken more and more until her dreams end.

Throughout her journey, Alice carelessly drinks and eats various things and undergoes such rapid becomings—she grows and shrinks and grows again—that she begins to question her identity. “ ‘Was I the same as when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?’ ”¹¹ The past is not carrying into the present, which means that good sense is failing her, and soon she will also lose common sense, which “subsumes under itself the various faculties of the soul, or the differentiated organs of the body, and brings them to bear upon a unity which is capable of saying ‘I’ ”.¹² Soon then, she will lose the capacity to say “I” and to know “I”.

Thus the question “Who are you?”, when posed by the hookah smoking Caterpillar, is appropriate, but it shocks Alice into the recognition that she is no longer entirely sure of her identity and further unbalances her.¹³ It is frightening because the past-Alice’s “I” is no longer carrying into the future as it did among her school friends, and logical relations have become unreliable. When presented with a riddle that has no answer, Alice is indignant but further unhinged. The metaphor “killing time” is said to be an actual murder—although of a clock—that results in a permanent 6 o’clock. The Duchess tells story after story, each of which has a moral that has nothing to do with her story, and witnesses to a trial are threatened with execution if they cannot remember events that they never saw. In every case, the link—the signifying, the temporal, or the causal link between one event and another—is broken. All reliable associations of ideas—as David Hume named them—are coming apart, but here, unlike for Hume, “everything happens at the boundary between things and proposition”.¹⁴

Deleuze maintains that as the story progresses, it moves from the depths of the earth—the realm of animals, where a boy can become a pig—to the surface kingdom of cards with no thickness.¹⁵ He associates this with the Stoic’s conception of “incorporeal events at the surface”, expressing the exteriority of events in relation to the mixture of bodies on which they depend. Events exist as the ideational effect of bodies, Ideas that may be sonorous, optical, or linguistic.¹⁶ Events as pure Ideas are not restrained by bodily limits. Thus, they may manifest reversals between future and past, active and passive, cause and effect, more and less, too much and not enough, and even infinite divisibility is of course not problematic.¹⁷

The story of Alice relies largely on surface linguistic effects, including logic, and so Deleuze asks if “the fantastic work [of Lewis Carroll] presents simply the traps and difficulties into which we fall when we do not observe the rules and laws formulated by the logical work”.¹⁸ What is this logical work? On the one hand, it is the work of the Kantian Understanding when it utilizes the table of categories, derived by Kant from the table of logical judgments, and especially, in this case, the pure logical judgments of the category of relations: association, conjunction, and disjunction. Events that had been associated (AB, AB) are coming apart, conjoined events (if A then B) are disjoined, and disjunction may be only exclusive (either A or B but not both) but not inclusive (both A and B). As Deleuze points out, these logical relations are surface effects, that is, they are events expressed or expressible in propositions.¹⁹ But also, they are the work of linguistics and the philosophy of language.

When an “I” (utilizing common sense and good sense as defined previously) speaks, what it speaks is sense.²⁰ In speaking, an “I” denotes; it relates a proposition to an external state of affairs. In order to represent an object, it associates a subject and a predicate saying “it is this or that”, a proposition that may be logically determined as either true or false.²¹ But the “I” that denotes the world requires, prior to denoting, an “I”, a self that manifests. The “I” that speaks “manifests”, and manifestations are causal expressions of its internal desires or external beliefs (I want that or tomorrow comes) where the desire or belief is the cause. Manifestation makes denotation possible insofar as it verifies (or not) the relation of an “I” to anything that may be denoted by the “I”.²² This is why it is manifestation that makes denotation possible. Furthermore, when a proposition is expressed, its elements are considered to be signifying; they are able to refer to other propositions, thus to be either a premise or a conclusion, namely an assertion. In mathematical logic, an assertion is a statement that is either true or wrong, or as Deleuze puts it for linguistics, either true, since it has a signification, or absurd; a proposition that has no signification may not be false.²³

In a language system as a whole (langue) apart from speech (parole), signified concepts are primary in relation to designated objects and to manifested selves. The constancy of the signified concept makes possible both denotation and manifestation, otherwise what is designated or desired would be impossibly slippery.²⁴ However, in Wonderland, assertions introduce paradoxes that signification does not resolve. To make an assertion, its premises must be true; they must denote a true state of affairs. But this requires an additional assertion that implication holds between the true states of affairs in the premises and the conclusion. And that assertion of implication itself must be verified, and the assertion verifying it must also be verified—ad infinitum. This is essentially the collapse of signification, and when signification collapses, personal identity is lost and denotations are neither true nor false.²⁵

Clearly, this is what is happening for Alice when “killing time” signifies an actual murder and when, in her conversation with Mouse, there is confusion regarding the “dry tail” or the “dry tale”. Given this situation, Deleuze proposes the need for a fourth element, a fourth dimension, which he refers to as sense. Denotation, manifestation, and signification need something unconditioned upon which to situate their genesis. Sense, defined as the expressed of a proposition, is that unconditioned element.

The philosopher Gottlob Frege has provided the clearest account of sense in relation to propositions. A sign or name represents a proper name, which must have a definite object as its reference. Although a definite sense corresponds to the sign, there are signs that have sense and no reference. The reference of a sign is an object able to be perceived by the senses of which we may form an internal image or an idea arising from memories of sense impressions. But sense does not ensure that there is a reference, and the same sense is not always connected with the same idea.²⁶

In Wonderland, Alice often encounters this problem, when, for example, she and the Mouse use the word “dry” but with differing senses. After nearly drowning in her own tears, Alice wants to dry off because she is wet, cold, and shivering, but the Mouse suggests that it will tell a dry tale. The reference of dry would be an object that we designate, but the idea is wholly subjective (to dry off or to tell a dry tale).²⁷ “In between lies the sense, which is indeed no longer subjective like the idea, but is yet not the object itself”.²⁸ “A proper name (word, sign, sign combination, expression) expresses its sense, stands for or designates its reference. By means of a sign we express its sense and designate its reference”.²⁹

Or, in terms made familiar by Edmund Husserl, “there are many noemata or senses for the same denotatum: evening star and morning star are two noemata, that is, two ways in which the same denotatum may be presented in expressions”.³⁰ Where then does this leave us? Sense is attributed to things or states of affairs but does not exist outside of the proposition that expresses it; it inheres in that proposition. It is situated, as Frege implied, with one side turned toward things and the other side turned toward propositions, but merges with neither. It remains the boundary; it is what Deleuze names the event, the flat surface that belongs to language and only to language.³¹

When signification collapses, when, as for Kant, God, world, and self become unstable significations, mere transcendental Ideas that proscribe acting as if they exist, neither causality nor true and false propositions are asserted, so anything becomes a possibility. But in Wonderland nothing truly happens. The Mad Hatter’s tea party is eternal, and even as the terrifying Queen orders multiple beheadings, not a single one occurs. If something does seem to happen, it is a simple matter to undo it; the Cheshire cat appears and disappears, the pig could just as well turn back into a baby, Alice shrinks and grows and shrinks again. Everything is time reversible. Lacking a stable signifier, all is Idea and nothing but Idea. Surely these are the conditions of madness. But Wonderland does not leave us there. It returns us to the surface where sense operates in the midst of the traps of logical work invoking paradoxes. The ability to return indicates that Alice is not truly mad; it is not the mark of mental instability, not yet.

The Depths

When I was growing up, my family would infrequently visit my grandmother, who lived alone in a run-down house in the country. On these visits, she would almost always start talking about someone named “Scap”, who we thought was the devil but which actually refers to an old German word for “creature”. She said that she had to chase Scap away with her broom to get him to leave her alone. He was there a lot. At the time I did not find this at all remarkable. We lived with the mysteries and over-determination of Polish Catholicism, and given the regularity of incense infused candle-lit processions and Latin incantations, her pronouncements seemed normal to me. Only later did I learn that this was schizophrenia.

My grandmother did not belong to a world where her irascibility was taken for art, and—except for my mother’s sister who lived with us briefly and taught us many mischievous tricks—no one else in the family developed schizophrenia, but we lived in its shadow as our household operated according to its artful principles, the only ones my mother knew. Deleuze articulated these principles in his account of Wonderland, but they were already quite familiar to me. Like Alice, we children learned to be extremely cautious, and our world, like Wonderland, was a strange one whose procedures and processes broke with the rules of association or connection, causal expectations, and signification, the logical rules of language and thought, as well as the principles of action. In spite of our caution, under these circumstances experimentation with changes of state were inevitable. Schizophrenia is a state beyond the structure of paradoxes that trap its inhabitants; for schizophrenia entails not only mental states but also physical states that greatly exceed the difficulties brought on by not following the rules and laws of logical work.

From a purely medical point of view, “schizophrenia is a chronic and severe disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels and acts”.³² Its diagnosis focuses on psychotic behaviors, such as the loss of touch with reality, hallucinations (especially hearing voices), delusional false beliefs and illogic (believing that one is being harmed or controlled by others), disorganized thinking, garbled language, blocked thought, meaningless words, and agitated or repeated bodily movements. These dysfunctions tend to manifest in flat affect, loss of pleasure, difficulties in carrying out actions, and difficulties speaking, as well as poor focus, memory, and comprehension.³³ Bodily or physical aspects of schizophrenia are not primary in these accounts, but for my aunt and grandmother, and for the screen and language artist Antonin Artaud, they were indeed primary, indicating that the medical and mental health professions have overlooked a crucial aspect of the schizophrenic condition. One has only to look at images of Artaud throughout his life to see the physical ravages of his “mental disorder” over time.

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze sums up the difference between Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud, who suffered from schizophrenia, and who surely at times lived something like aphasia (the inability to understand or speak) and apraxia (the inability to perform purposive acts). He states that for Artaud, Carroll is a pervert who holds onto surface language and logical structures, thereby escaping the depths of schizophrenic suffering, the effects of the body on itself, both death and life. Unlike Alice, whose bodily pathologies are extreme but eventually overcome, the schizophrenic body suffers all the time; it suffers the effects of its brain damage until it disappears into voices whose sound belongs to no one and disappears into images that move or throb, that take on color or are impossible.³⁴

Carroll, Charles Dodgson, was a mathematician and logician, although one who dared to explore the effects of dispensing with logic and perception for the sake of action. Yet, “The effect of this is that Carroll’s logic games are puerile, hypocritical, and too well bred”.³⁵ In the end, Deleuze makes the judgment that “We would not give a page of Artaud for all of Carroll. Artaud is alone in having been an absolute depth in literature, and in having discovered a vital body and the prodigious language of this body”.³⁶ In other words, in spite of her initial experimentation with eating and drinking things that alter her body, in the end, Alice mostly wondered about Wonderland; Artaud did not.

To understand this situation, let us think first about Artaud, the conceptual personae whose schizophrenic mind reviles and suspends grammar and syntax, semantics, and mechanics, so that what it means to write effective sentences is interrupted and permanently deferred.³⁷ Artaud writes that he despises writers who have points of reference; for them, words have meanings and modes of being; writers classify emotions, then quibble over their “hilarious classifications”; they believe in terms and ideologies; they recommend books (the worst pigs of all).³⁸

Artaud’s fury is directed partly against linguistic constants—its etiology and phonetics as well as its grammar and syntax—and partly against intellectuals, grammarians, and logicians who insist upon ready-made language and surface logics with hidden and immutable structures. The experience of the schizophrenic is of “nature as a process of production”, an unorganized flow of affective memories that is not always and immediately subject to a social force or form of expression that orders it.³⁹ Artaud’s expression is an explicit denial of the logic and the socius that seek to determine him. He writes that systematic thought cannot “go where my emotions and the images that rise within me drive it”.⁴⁰ For Artaud, what is first and foremost is the problematic of bodies and language. Artaud experiences contradiction between his inner and affective facility, the actions and passions of the flesh, and his exterior, a difficulty so severe, so painful, that it is killing him. It is killing him because nothing “touches” Artaud except immediately; “nothing interests me except what addresses itself directly to my flesh”.⁴¹

Between Alice and Artaud lies a gulf in which language changes nature and enters another dimension. This gulf lies in the difference between language “emitted at the surface” and that “carved in to the depth of bodies”, which is exemplified in the oral duality of to eat and to speak.⁴² We have seen earlier that “sense” is an effect of corporeal things as much as non-sense, but it is situated at the surface, expressed by propositions, and attributable to things. But for Artaud there is no surface, no border between objects and propositions, because the body is fully and completely a body in depth directly in contact with things.⁴³ What Artaud means is that for him (unlike Carroll) everything is physical, and every physical thing penetrates the physical body, which has no boundary.

For Artaud’s body, denotation is empty, manifestation is indifferent, and signification is always false. Even words are purely physical, decomposable into elements that directly affect and bruise the body, so that the effects of words are indistinguishable from the actions and passions of the body.⁴⁴ The sonorous qualities of these passion-words invade the body; all words decompose into bodily fragments: obnoxious noise, poisonous food, and excrement, Artaud’s theater of terror.⁴⁵ Unable to produce meaning, the schizophrenic acts, creating another kind of word that is the body, a word that cannot decompose and so penetrate and harm the body. This language without articulation is purely intensive language: Artaud’s theater of cruelty, the shouts and growls and guttural expressions of his body.⁴⁶

Cinema and the Brain

Perhaps unexpectedly, all of this comes to the fore in Deleuze’s work on cinema. Cinema is defined as the power of putting images in motion. It puts images in motion in the brain, tracing neuronal circuits, putting cinema in the place once occupied by psychoanalysis, in place of the human, and in place of perception. We know this because there is a lot of “bad cinema … a mix of violence and sexuality in what is represented—a mix of gratuitous cruelty and organized ineptitude”.⁴⁷ Bad cinema travels the circuits of the lower brain—the brain stem, the medulla, the cerebellum, the thalamus and hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and amygdala. It is localized in the limbic system devoted to generating feeling. It convinces us that we are human, that our opinions, our doxa, are correct. Bad cinema is plentiful in and out of the theater. It is not unlike certain other practices: dinner at Mr. Rorty’s, but also computer science, sociology, marketing, design, advertising—practices that claim to create Ideas but are really only producing doxa, opinion.⁴⁸

But along with the philosophy that is the creation of concepts through mis-sophia, the disharmony of the faculties, the “real cinema” achieves a violence and sexuality that is molecular; it is not localized in any part of the brain.⁴⁹ First, we see that all cinema is inserted into a system of relays in the brain. Given the relation between perception, sensation, and memory, Deleuze argues that these circuits can be larger and larger, uniting actual images with recollection, dream, or world images. These circuits can also contract the image so that it shrinks away from experience and the world. Cinema finds the smallest possible circuit, which lies in proximity to a double, a virtual object that reflects a real unmediated sensation, forming a single image with two sides, actual and virtual, sensation and image.⁵⁰

In this, Deleuze follows the structure developed by Henri Bergson, for whom, under normal perceptual circumstances, “memory [images], laden with the whole of the past, respond … to the appeal of the present state” by contracting.⁵¹ Contracting to meet the actual present, memory turns toward that present so as to offer an image most useful to a present perception. This, for Bergson, is how the sensory-motor body, turned toward action, limits the life of the mind, the life of the spirit, which he identifies with duration.⁵² This refracting, the breaking up of pure duration into space, reduces our psychical states to a more profoundly impersonal form to make them enter the actual world and to act.⁵³

Like Bergson, but to an even lesser degree, Deleuze does not seek to produce action; therefore, he asks what would happen if perception is not gratified, if it cannot seize memory for the sake of action, if the body is pure sensibility and not perceptual at all, so that cinema is the brain, and the brain is always right on the very edge of paramnesia, where actual and virtual really are inseparable, right at the edge of madness, if not at times tipping over into it. This relationship is called reversibility: one image, two sides. The image arises when the pure optical sign (opsign), the actual optical image, crystallizes on the smallest internal circuits of the brain that is the screen. Deleuze refers to such an opsign as the crystal-image.

Why crystals? “Almost all solid materials, from ice to gold, consist of ordered crystals”.⁵⁴ Crystal formation breaks spatial symmetry and underlies the so-called phase transition from liquid to solid. Inside a crystal, atoms are ordered in regular patterns, and depending on the chemical composition, they have different symmetries and form regular patterns but only in the lowest energy states. Typically, there will be one atom surrounded by three, four, or six atoms in repeating patterns, although in the 1980s physicists began discovering seemingly impossible five-, eight- and twelve-fold symmetries—something supposedly counter to the laws of nature.⁵⁵ Mosaics are the outstanding example of crystal patterns in art. In the 1970s, the British mathematician Sir Roger Penrose created aperiodic (regular but not repeating) mosaics using only two different tiles.⁵⁶ Crystallographer Alan Mackay discovered that atoms form the same aperiodic patterns as the mosaics. These crystals are distinct because they are regular but do not repeat. Crystals thus break the laws of physics, which dictate that molecular phenomena are symmetrical and reversible, but crystals are not. Most interesting is that in 2016, it was experimentally proven that in addition to spatial crystals, in non-equilibrium systems discrete time crystals evolve and are not symmetrical with respect to time.⁵⁷

Of course, Deleuze would not have had access to any of this new data; nevertheless, in his thinking, the opsign, the crystal-image, is not merely a manifestation of film. It is the name of that which crystallizes, solidifies, and so acts to break apart the sensory-motor links between perception, action, and thought. Under the opsign, a character in film or a brain in a living being is forcefully subject to vision—but solidifies and does not act—resisting the fact that perception exists for the sake of action. This crack up, this breaking apart of perception, action, and thought, this “cracked I”, is the prerequisite for the “crystal image” in cinema, in which a virtual mirror image—a mise en abyme—creates a pattern that proliferates and vibrates, disrupting mere repetition with a bloc of sensation, the reflection of a sensibility that forcefully overtakes that character’s actuality.

Henri Bergson had already utilized the term “crystallization” to refer to the construction of a general idea, which he says is usually made to coincide with the action it gives rise to, the word that expresses it, or the unlimited memory-images it inhabits. “But the truth is that the general idea escapes us as soon as we try to fix it at either of the two extremities. It consists in the double current which is always ready to crystallize into uttered words or to evaporate into memories”.⁵⁸

But Deleuze is not Bergson. He carefully reformulates this concept in his own terms. For Deleuze, the body can be the unthought that forces us to think what has previously been concealed from thought. The body is stubbornly non-thinking. The body is the site of attitudes and postures, of behaviors but never of actions.⁵⁹ The body is or at least can be a mechanism unable to perform purposive actions and so suffers from apraxia, and it may be unable to understand or speak and so suffers from aphasia. In cinema, the body suffers the effects of brain damage until it disappears into voices whose sound belongs to no one. It disappears as well into images that move or throb, that take on color or are impossible—Artaud’s indications of ecstasy or death.⁶⁰ Thus, every non-thinking body is a work of art and every human being merely one of its crystallized constructs, not necessarily its greatest either conceptually or aesthetically.

Perhaps this is what is meant by the idea of the “last man” who rejects the moment when memory-images crystallize into a perception for the sake of uttering a word that is part of an action. For Deleuze, the real moment of crystallization arrives when the myriad memory-images contract at the point where they meet a thought-image as their other side, where virtual and actual become confused and indistinguishable. With this, our bodily affective sensation conveys the possibility of not acting. “The affective dimension of the sensation—its pleasure or pain in relation to the internal state of the subject—informs the subject, animal or human alike, that the stimulus should be sought, avoided, ignored”.⁶¹ When the stimulus is ignored, something completely original takes place. Conceptual personae, aesthetic figures—idiots—emerge.

Let us not forget that Bergson did account for this possibility as well as its perceptual option. Placing ourselves in the midst of our sensory images we discover that some are perceptions that arrive from the “outside”. We call this matter. But some arise in our own bodies. These are affections, a special kind of sensitivity, some of which affect our nervous system. External objects disturb afferent nerves, which pass this disturbance on to centers of molecular movements. Alterations in external objects or images alter these molecular movements and their effects, giving rise to perceptions.⁶² In complex organisms, sensory nerve fibers transmit stimulation to a central region, which passes it on to motor elements, but “the sensitive elements [affections] retain the relative immobility”.⁶³ The relatively immobile sensory nerve fibers provide a “zone of indetermination”, an interval, a break in the perception-action link, which operates as an invitation to act, but also to wait to act or not to act, to do nothing at all.⁶⁴

Contemporary neuro-science has enhanced Bergson’s insight by exploring the role of neurons in this behavior. Affective sensation is aroused in the neuro-physiology of the body, when an afferent neuron detects physical or chemical changes occurring at its endings and transmits this information to nervous centers. Sensation is the emergence of such information into our awareness.⁶⁵ The affective sensation conveys the possibility of not acting because “the affective dimension of the sensation—its pleasure or pain in relation to the internal state of the subject—informs the subject, animal or human alike, that the stimulus should be sought, avoided, or ignored”.⁶⁶

This is the manner in which sensible affection—the memory-image—makes possible the creation of something new. Affections are situated between excitations coming from outside the body and the movements about to be undertaken. Affections are the sensation that arises from the body’s influence on itself, but they also make thought possible. Reformulating the Kantian faculties, Deleuze stipulates that Reason, the faculty of Ideas, lays out the plane of immanence wherein concepts are connected, Imagination as temporal creates conceptual personae, and Understanding as cognitive creates concepts.⁶⁷

Kant argued that Understanding, the faculty of concepts, must be applied to empirical intuitions and that this gives us knowledge. But if one is creating concepts without applying them to perceptions for the sake of action because the zone of indetermination—the moment of not acting—arising from the body’s own sensations halts the process, then this becomes the means by which thought abandons doxa and takes up residence on the plane of immanence. This, for Deleuze, is reflection. There is, he maintains, too much action and not enough reflection. “Philosophy must extract from opinions a ‘knowledge’ that transforms them”, not as Kant suggests, through the application of concepts of the Understanding to empirical intuitions, and not as even the Greeks did it, by introducing a dialectic that “reduces philosophy to interminable discussion”, but rather, through the abandonment of at least some empirical intuitions.⁶⁸

Cinema and Life

For an artist who is a creative genius, the process is clear. Like Artaud, who insists that “What I lack is words that correspond to each minute of my state of mind”, there is a break with logical structures tout court because, as was noted previously, Artaud experiences a bodily killing and painful contradiction between his inner and affective life, the actions and passions of his flesh, and the exterior.⁶⁹ He has no stable signifiers with which to express this, and so with lightning speed, he hurls into language the signs that resonate with his bodily affects: “o dedi, a dada orzoura, o dou zoura., a dada skizi, o kaya, o kaya pontoura, o ponoura, a pena, poni”.⁷⁰ These are signs that crystallize, forming regular patterns but without repetition. In the cinema, what the break with stable signifiers creates is similarly “an unstable set of floating memories, images of a past in general which move at dizzying speed, as if time were achieving a profound freedom”.⁷¹

Given the speed of these images, characters are powerless to move and powerless to act. This is how, for example, the films of David Lynch break with reality to such an extent that there is no subjectivity left at all because there is no action, only events taking place in a haze of dreams, apparitions, hallucinations, visions, madness, and nightmares. Every character is prey to blocs of visual and sound sensations that dissolve any possibility of recognition. Lynch has said that the ear is an opening and a ticket to another world, so that Jeffrey Beaumont, at the beginning of the film Blue Velvet, finds a severed ear in a field, and at the end of the film, the camera zooms out of Jeffrey’s own ear as he awakes, having drifted off to sleep in the sun. Perhaps it is all a dream; possibly the idealized small town, the film’s setting, may be the hallucination, and the dark nightmarish events that take place at night may be the unrecognizable reality, a past in general that contrasts with the stark white of the picket fence and saturated red of the roses in front of it, emblematic of the town, but only on the surface.

Beaumont hides in Dorothy Vallens’s closet, frozen and unable to move as he watches her undress, but nothing in his past indicates that he would do this. Perhaps it is his dream, perhaps not. We cannot really tell. Likewise, the film Mulholland Drive may be entirely the dream of one of its characters, Betty, a failed actress who lives in the least glamorous part of Hollywood and has succumbed to drug addiction. Again destiny, the pure power of time, overflows all possibility of reaction and defeats, immobilizes, and petrifies figures in their own affectivity, crystallizing and so condemning them to a horrendous fate even as it destroys all conventions.

As in the cinema, so too in life where the “cracked I” is the refrain between memory and actuality, otherwise said, between the virtual and the actual. Thought, as Deleuze conceives of it, must not depend on what he refers to as “man’s relations with the world—with which the brain is in agreement because it is drawn from these relations”.⁷² This is at its best an urdoxa, an original opinion; it is not yet thinking. For there to be thinking, the brain must think and not man; man is absent from the brain and is merely one of its ideas, a “cerebral crystallization”.⁷³

The crystalline brain, the opsign, this ethics of creation seem to me to be what Deleuze demands from philosophy, from cinema, from visual and verbal art. Whether one can slip in and out of this state like Alice or remain embedded in it, like Artaud, or manifest it throughout one’s works, without being mad in one’s life as well as in one’s creation, is an open question, perhaps one that few of us can answer. Nevertheless, what Deleuze’s aesthetic figures evoke is nothing other than the hysteria of the senses. Each one begins with categories of the Understanding, their representational and narrative organization, then clears them away in what is, for Deleuze, the sublime work of the aesthetic figure: isolation, deformation, dissipation, but, ultimately, the eternal preservation of blocs of sensation in works of art.⁷⁴

Notes

1.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 62; originally published as Qu’est que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1991).

2.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp.67 and 177.

3.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p.16.

4.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p.2.

5.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp.4 and 5.

6.Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 145; originally published as Différence et Répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). Thus the dismissal or overturning of the Platonic friendship in philosophy, a friendship calling for harmony and unity; see Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp.2–6 and 8–11.

7.Gilles Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics”, trans. Daniel W. Smith, in Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 5.3 (December 2000): 57–70, 60.

8.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1914), sect. 38, p. 137. See Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis”, p. 61.

9.Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis”, p. 63.

10.Kant, Critique of Judgment, sect. 27, pp. 120–1.

11.An earlier and sustained version of Alice can be found in my essay “After Alice: Alice and the Dry Tail”, in Deleuze Studies, Deleuze and Gender, eds. Claire Colebrook and Jamie Weinstein, 2.3 (2008): 107–22. Lewis Carroll, The Philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, intro. and notes by Peter Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), p. 25.

12.Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

13.Carroll, The Philosopher’s Alice, p. 47.

14.Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 8; originally published as Logique du sens (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969).

15.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 8.

16.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 7.

17.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.8.

18.Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp.22–34.

19.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.12.

20.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.28.

21.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp.12 and 13.

22.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp.13 and14.

23. http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Assert.html. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp.14 and 15.

24.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp.15 and 16.

25.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp.17 and 18.

26.Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference”, in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), p. 59.

27.Frege, “On Sense and Reference”, p. 60.

28.Frege, “On Sense and Reference”, p. 60.

29.Frege, “On Sense and Reference”, p. 61.

30.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.20.

31.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 22.

32.“What is Schizophrenia?”, National Institute of Mental Health. www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/schizophrenia-booklet/index.shtml. Accessed 12/2016.

33.“What is Schizophrenia?”.

34.Gilles Deleuze, Cinema Two, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 190–1; originally published as Cinéma 2, L’Image-temps (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985).

35.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.93/84.

36.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 113–14 and 103–4.

37.An earlier version of Artaud’s account and use of language can be found in my essay “Eluding Derrida, Artaud and the Imperceptibility of Life for Thought”, in Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 5.2 (August 2000): 191–200.

38.Antonin Artaud, “The Nerve Meter” (1925), in Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 85.

39.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), p. 2.

40.Antonin Artaud, “Fragments of a Diary from Hell” (1925), in Selected Writings, p. 92.

41.Artaud, Selected Writings, p. 93; these passages are from the essay cited earlier.

42.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp.85 and 86.

43.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp.86 and 87.

44.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.87.

45.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp.88 and 90. This is the action of the fragmented body.

46.Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.90. This is the action of the body without organs.

47.Gilles Deleuze, “Preface to the French Edition”, in Cinema One, The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiv; originally published as Cinéma 1, L’Image-Movement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983).

48.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p.10.

49.Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain Is the Screen, An Interview with Gilles Deleuze”, in The Brain is the Screen, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 365–73 and 367.

50.Deleuze, Cinema Two, p. 189.

51.Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 168.

52.Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 179.

53.Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 185.

54.“Crystals”, Kungle.Vetenskaps Akademien, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1. www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2011/popular-chemistryprize2011.pdf. Accessed 12/2016.

55.“Crystals”, Kungle.Vetenskaps Akademien, pp. 5 and 7.

56.“Crystals.” Kungle.Vetenskaps Akademien, pp. 5 and 7.

57.“Physicists Create World’s First Time Crystal”, MIT Technology Review. Accessed 12/2016. See also. http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08684: J. Zhang, P. W. Hess, A. Kyprianidis, P. Becker, A. Lee, J. Smith, G. Pagano, I. D. Potirniche, A. C. Potter, A. Vishwanath, N. Y. Yao, C. Monroe, “Observation of a Discrete Time Crystal” (27 September 2016), www.technologyreview.com/s/602541/physicists-create-worlds-first-time-crystal/.

58.Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 210.

59.Deleuze, Cinema II, p. 189. originally published as Cinéma II: l’Image-temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985).

60.Deleuze, Cinema II, pp. 190–1.

61.Michel Cabanac, “What Is Sensation?”, in Biological Perspectives on Motivated Activities, ed. R. Wong (Northwood, NJ: Ablex Press, 1992), p. 8. Pleasure and displeasure are thus linked to the well being of the organism.

62.Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 17–30.

63.Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 55.

64.Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 30. Thus arises the “law” that “perception is the master of space in the exact measure in which action is the master of time” (p. 31).

65.Cabanac, “What Is Sensation?” pp. 4 and 5.

66.Cabanac, “What Is Sensation?” p. 8. Once again, pleasure is well being.

67.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p.77.

68.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p.79.

69.Artaud, “Artaud le Mômo”, in Selected Writings, p. 523.

70.Artaud, “Artaud le Mômo”, in Selected Writings, p. 523.

71.Deleuze, Cinema II, p. 55.

72.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p.209.

73.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p.210.

74.Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis”, pp. 63–4 and 42–3.

Bibliography

Antonin, Artaud. Selected Writings. Trans. Helen Weaver. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

Cabanac, Michel. “What is Sensation?” In Biological Perspectives on Motivated Activities. Ed. R. Wong. Northwood, NJ: Ablex Press, 1992.

“Crystals”. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Kungle.Vetenskaps Akademien 1. www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2011/popular-chemistryprize2011.pdf. Accessed 12/2016.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema One, The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Originally published as Cinéma 1, L’Image-Movement. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema Two, The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Originally published as Cinéma 2, L’Image-temps. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Originally published as Logique du sens. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969.

Deleuze, Gilles. “The Brain is the Screen, An interview with Gilles Deleuze”. In The Brain is the Screen, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed. Gregory Flaxman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 365–73.

Deleuze, Gilles. “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics”. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. In Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 5.3 (December 2000): 57–70.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Originally published as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1991.

Frege, Gottlob. “On Sense and Reference”. In Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Eds. Peter Geach and Max Black. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. 2nd ed. Revised. London: Macmillan, 1914.

Olkowski, Dorothea. “Eluding Derrida, Artaud and the Imperceptibility of Life for Thought”. In Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 5.2 (August 2000): 191–200.

“Physicists Create World’s First Time Crystal”. MIT Technology Review. www.technologyreview.com/s/602541/physicists-create-worlds-first-time-crystal/. Accessed 12/2016.

“What is Schizophrenia?”. National Institute of Mental Health. www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/schizophrenia-booklet/index.shtml. Accessed 12/2016.

Zhang, J., P. W. Hess, A. Kyprianidis, P. Becker, A. Lee, J. Smith, G. Pagano, I. D. Potirniche, A. C. Potter, A. Vishwanath, N. Y. Yao, C. Monroe. “Observation of a Discrete Time Crystal”. http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08684. Accessed 27/09/2016.

4 Sense and Literality

Why There Are No Metaphors in Deleuze’s Philosophy

Daniel W. Smith

Introduction

Why does Deleuze claim that his philosophical concepts must be understood “literally”? From an initial viewpoint, numerous aspects of his philosophy seem metaphorical, whether his concepts themselves (rhizome, nomads, deterritorialization) or his related claims (we are made up of lines, the unconscious is a factory). Moreover, other philosophers have emphasized the metaphorical nature of language and concepts, including Nietzsche (truth is “a mobile army of metaphors”)¹ and Derrida, whose essay “The White Mythology” emphasized the role of the rhetorical figure of “catachresis” in the creation of concepts (and considered the concept of the concept itself to be metaphorical or catachrestic).² The notion of metaphor presumes the distinction between the literal and the figurative, and the movement from a literal sense to a figurative appropriation—though even this understanding of metaphor is hardly straightforward. As Ted Cohen pointed out long ago, John Donne’s phrase “no man is an island” can be considered to be a metaphorical statement, though it is also literally true—no man is an island.³

Deleuze’s claim that his own concepts are “literal” is thus a complicated one, and in the end the problem itself is not well-posed in terms of the literal-versus-metaphorical distinction. “There are no literal words, neither are there metaphors”, Deleuze writes. “There are only inexact words to designate something exactly”.⁴ With regard to concepts, he adds, “there is no question of difficulty or understanding: concepts are exactly like sounds, colors, or images, they are intensities that suit you or not, that work or don’t work [qui vous conviennent ou non, qui passent or ne passent pas]…. There’s nothing to understand, nothing to interpret”.⁵ For Deleuze, we should approach concepts in philosophy in the same way that we approach sounds in music, images in films, or colors in paintings—that is, as intensities. But what then is the nature of the “inexactitude” that goes beyond the literal and the metaphorical, and which is defined purely intensively? To answer this question, or at least establish an approach to the question, we need to consider the theory of sense developed by Deleuze in his 1969 text Logic of Sense.⁶

Three Dimensions of Language

In the second half of Logic of Sense, Deleuze traces out what he calls the dynamic genesis of language, drawing in part on texts from developmental psychology. “What renders language possible is that which separates sounds from bodies and organizes them into propositions, freeing them for the expressive function”.⁷ If a speaker suddenly lapsed into violent babbling and began to utter incomprehensible noises, one might suspect that they had collapsed into psychosis. The dynamic genesis of language follows the opposite movement: it “concerns the procedure that liberates sounds and makes them independent of bodies”.⁸ In tracing out this genesis, Deleuze distinguishes between three dimensions of language—or rather, three “stages” of the dynamic genesis, although each stage coexists reciprocally with the others: the primary order of language, which is found in the depths of the body; the secondary organization of language, which is the surface of sense (and non-sense); and finally, the tertiary arrangement of language, which is found in the propositions of languages, with their various functions of designation, manifestation, signification, and expression.

Three Dimensions of Language

Tertiary Arrangement

Height

Foundation

Propositions: designation, manifestation, signification, expression

Secondary Organization

Surface

Ground

Sense

Primary Order

Depth

Groundless

Intensities

1. The Primary Order of Language (noise, intensities). The dynamic genesis begins with the noises (or intensities) of the body, which constitutes what Deleuze calls the primary order of language. His starting point is the nursing infant, and the clamorous, noisy depth of its body: cries and ringings, gurglings and burpings, crackings and poppings, teeth-gnashings, jaw-grindings. This is the dimension of noise, a first type of non-sense, and a first type of sonorous system. At this level, “everything is passion and action, everything is communication of bodies in depth, attack and defense”.⁹ Daniel N. Stern describes the world of the infant (what Deleuze would call its “body without organs”) as a kind of human “weatherscape”, made up entirely of sequences of risings and fallings of various intensities—the jolting of a bright light or a sharp noise, the calming of a voice, or the explosive breakout of a storm of hunger, with its knot of agony and cries, and then the passing of the storm when the baby is fed, and the subsequent sense of pleasure and satisfaction. It is a situation where the infant experiences no distinction between itself and the world, but only “intensities-in-motion”.¹⁰

2. The Tertiary Arrangement of Language (designation, manifestation, signification, and expression). The second stage of the dynamic genesis then appears, which is in fact the end point of the genesis—the tertiary arrangement of language. In the midst of this world of intensities, there is a particular noise, a voice from on high, namely the voices of parents or other adults. This transference from depth to height entails an entire reorientation of the psychic and corporeal life of the infant. Even before the infant can understand the voice, it grasps language as something that pre-exists itself, as something already there: the familial voice that conveys tradition, or that affects the child as already being the bearer of a name. As opposed to the primary order of language (pure noise as the dimension of the body), the voice participates in what Deleuze calls the tertiary arrangement of language (langue, a fully formed language), which is made up of sentences or propositions. We will only make some summary remarks of Deleuze’s characterization of this tertiary arrangement, since his primary interest, as we shall see, concerns the secondary organization of sense.

In the important “Third Series” of the Logic of Sense, Deleuze analyzes in some detail the three primary dimensions of propositions in general, which he terms designation, manifestation, and signification. Designation, or denotation, is the relation of a proposition to an external state of affairs (“snow is white”, “that man is Socrates”). This is the relation of reference, which determines the truth value of the proposition (true or false). Manifestation marks the relation of the proposition to the beliefs and desires of the person who is speaking (“I desire to be loved”, “I believe the world will end tomorrow”). Its logical value is not the true and the false, but veracity and illusion. Signification, finally, is the relation of the proposition to other propositions, or to universal or general concepts. This is the domain of logic, with its relations of inference and demonstration between propositions (“implies”, “therefore”). Its logical value is no longer truth, as shown by the hypothetical mode of implications (if … then), but rather the condition of truth, the set of conditions under which the proposition would be true. The condition of truth is not opposed to the false but to the absurd, that which is without signification and thus neither true nor false.¹¹

Propositions, in other words, can be related to the world and to objects within the world (designation); to subjects and their feelings, desires, and beliefs (manifestation); or to other propositions (signification). In Kantian language, each of these dimensions of the proposition is founded on a certain principle or concept: the World and its states of affairs are the principle of reference or denotation; the Self or Soul is the principles of manifestation; and God, as the combinatory of abstract predicates, is the principle of demonstration or the form of possibility (the Ens summum). These are precisely the three transcendent Ideas that Kant identified as the terminal points of metaphysics in the “Transcendental Dialectic” of the Critique of Pure Reason: the Self, the World, and God. Deleuze seems to be following Nietzsche—and many others—in suggesting that traditional metaphysical concepts are derived from language and its grammar, and from the most general structure of propositions or judgments.

Is it possible to find a common “ground” of these relations within the proposition? In fact and in principle, each of these three dimensions is reciprocally determined by the others, and none of them can be considered to be foundational. As the locus of truth, denotation or reference would initially seem to be the primary relation. However, in the domain of speech, it is obviously manifestation that is primary (the “I”), since neither denotation nor signification is possible without it. Yet insofar as a person always speaks a specific language (langue), significations are primary, and they exist before manifesting a subject or denoting a state of affairs. But in logic, inferences are empty unless the premises from which they are derived are true, which grounds them in the relation of denotation. And even if the premises are true, Lewis Carroll’s celebrated text, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”, shows the fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of every theory of symbolic implication, which prevents it from exercising the role of a final foundation.¹² In short, from denotation to manifestation to signification and back again, we are carried along in the circle of the proposition, “a complex structure in which each of the three relations of the proposition in general is in turn primary”, a structure that can collapse if it loses this complementarity.¹³ It is this propositional structure as a whole that forms the tertiary arrangement of language.¹⁴

For this reason, philosophers have often identified a fourth dimension to the proposition—something in the proposition that cannot be identified with the state of affairs it denotes, nor the beliefs and desires it manifests, nor the concepts or inferences it signifies. This fourth dimension of the proposition is sense, which Deleuze, following Husserl, will call the dimension of expression: sense is what is “expressed” by a proposition.¹⁵ To a certain degree, Deleuze is here indebted to the genius of thinkers like Frege and Russell, who discovered that the domain of sense was the condition of truth, or denotation. The true–false distinction finds its ground in the sense–non-sense distinction: in order for a proposition to be true, it must have a sense. The proposition, “My gruba is the color of an ockbar”, is neither true nor false, since “gruba” and “ockbar” are non-sensical words. A proposition without sense is neither true nor false; it is merely non-sensical. “We position ourselves immediately within sense whenever we denote”.¹⁶ But as a superior condition, sense is not only the condition of denotation; it is the form of possibility for the proposition itself, in all its dimensions. “Sense is always presupposed as soon as I begin to speak; I would not be able to begin without this presupposition”.¹⁷ It is sense, then, that constitutes the ground of the structure of the proposition, and it is the object of Deleuze’s analyses in Logic of Sense.¹⁸

But the concept of sense will function in two registers in Logic of Sense, and these two registers correspond to two aspects of the notion of surface. In the first register, sense is a result of the tertiary arrangement of language. It is the effect of an already-constituted proposition: sense is what is expressed by the proposition, its “meaning” or “semantic content”. This is the domain referred to when one says that the propositions “The tree is green” (English), “L’arbre est vert” (French) and “Der Baum ist grün” (German) all have the same meaning, even though this meaning is “expressed” through different words in different languages.¹⁹ In Frege’s well-known example, “Venus is the morning star” and “Venus is the evening star” are both true propositions that refer to the same object (the planet Venus), but they each express a different sense, a different Sinn (morning star, evening star).²⁰ Deleuze suggests that, in the history of philosophy, sense was first discovered by the Stoics (in a reaction against Platonism), a second time in the fourteenth century in Ockham’s school, by Gregory of Rimini and Nicholas d’Autrecourt (in reaction against the problem of universals), and a third time by the philosopher and logician Meinong (in reaction against Hegelian logic and its lineage).²¹

Much of the early part of Logic of Sense is devoted to an analysis of this first aspect of sense, not from the point of view of post-Fregean analytic philosophy, but rather in the context of the Stoic distinction between corporeal states of affairs and incorporeal events. As is often the case in his work, Deleuze rejuvenates a contemporary problem by reconsidering it from the viewpoint of the history of philosophy. For Deleuze, the paradigmatic example of an incorporeal event is a battle, which has moreover been the subject of well-known literary descriptions in Stendahl, Hugo, Tolstoy, and especially Stephen Crane.²² We can attribute “Battle of Waterloo”, for instance, to a particular state of affairs, but what we find in that state of affairs are bodies mixing with one another: spears stabbing flesh, bullets flying through the air, cannons firing, bodies being ripped apart. Strictly speaking, the battle itself exists nowhere except in the expression of my proposition, which attributes “Battle of Waterloo” to this mixture of bodies. More precisely, we could say that the battle itself merely “insists” or “subsists” in the proposition. Hence one of the fundamental theses of Logic of Sense: sense is to propositions what attributes like “Battle of Waterloo” are to states of affairs. They are pure events that subsist or insist in both propositions and states of affairs. This is also the first meaning that Deleuze gives to the term “surface”: sense is what lies at the surface between states of affairs and propositions. Sense is both that which is expressed by propositions and that which is attributed to things (the static genesis). Logic of Sense provides detailed analyses of the structures (sterility, impassivity, neutrality) and paradoxes (indefinite proliferation, sterility, neutrality, absurdity) that characterize this first aspect of sense. We will not pursue these analyses here, which have been the object of a number of excellent studies.²³

We might note, however, that what came to be known as the “philosophy of language” tended to focus almost exclusively on this tertiary arrangement of language. It was preoccupied, for instance, with the concept of truth, which is defined in terms of a proposition’s conformity with reality (reference) and logical principles (inference). But a deeper constraint was the focus on propositions themselves—that is, on the propositions of fully formed and already developed languages—without posing the question of their genesis. Bertrand Russell seems to have set the agenda for much subsequent philosophy when he declared in 1900: “That all sound philosophy should begin with an analysis of propositions, is a truth too evident, perhaps, to demand a proof”.²⁴ Such an exclusive focus on propositions inevitably tended to confine the focus of the philosophy of language to the four primary dimensions of propositions: designation (the theory of reference, denotation, rigid designation), manifestation (the so-called propositional attitudes), signification (the principles of logic, inference, and demonstration), and expression (theories of meaning, and the meaning of meaning). To be sure, this is a vast simplification of the extraordinary work that took place in the philosophy of language in the twentieth century, but it allows us to highlight the fact that Deleuze’s concerns took him in a different direction. In biology, one does not discover the nature of the organism by simply examining a fully formed individual, since the individual itself is the result or effect of a complex genetic process, starting with the genetic code and passing through a series of developmental processes. The same is true of language: we are led astray if we analyze language in its full-blown adult state, without adopting a genetic point of view on it.

3. The Secondary Organization of Language (sense and non-sense). This brings us to the third aspect of the dynamic genesis, the third element of language, which lies “between” the primary order of language (the body, pure noise, intensities) and the tertiary arrangement of language (the proposition). This is what Deleuze calls the secondary organization of language, which is the domain of sense in its second register. Sense here is no longer a sterile effect of propositions (meaning or sematic content) but lies at the genesis of propositions. It is this second register of sense that is Deleuze’s primary interest in Logic of Sense. “At the heart of the logic of sense, one always returns to this problem, this immaculate conception, being the passage from sterility to genesis”.²⁵

Here again, Deleuze uses Frege and Russell to provide an initial approach to the problem. Although Frege and Russell define sense as the condition of the true, it is granted an extension larger than truth in order to account for the possibility of error: a false or erroneous proposition nonetheless remains a proposition endowed with sense. A proposition that does not have a sense can be neither true nor false; it is simply non-sensical. But in this manner, although the sense–nonsense relation is prior to the truth–falsity relation, sense only grounds the truth of a proposition by remaining indifferent to what it grounds. As a result, the values of truth and falsity are allowed to continue in the same state as before, “as if they were independent of the condition assigned to them”.²⁶ Truth still remains a matter of reference or denotation. This is why the determination of sense as expression is inadequate and is only the first aspect of the concept of sense.²⁷ “What would be the purpose of rising from the domain of truth to the domain of sense”, Deleuze asks, “if it were only to find between sense and nonsense a relation analogous to that of the true and the false?”²⁸ We cannot simply presume, in a Kantian manner, the existence of “truth” as a fact and then seek its condition in sense. The problem must be reformulated from the standpoint of genesis: “Truth and falsity do not concern a simple designation, rendered possible by a sense which remains indifferent to it. The relation between a proposition and what it designates must be established within sense itself: the nature of ideal sense is to point beyond itself towards the object designated”.²⁹ In other words, Deleuze’s aim is to provide a genetic account of truth, rather than seeking the conditions of truth as a mere “fact”. Truth must be seen to be a matter of production within sense (method of genesis) rather than adequation to states of affairs (method of conditioning).³⁰

This then is what Deleuze considers to be “the most general problem of the logic of sense”: how do we move from understanding sense as a neutral and sterile surface effect of propositions (expression) to grasping it as a fruitful principle of production? This second aspect of sense concerns sense as the element of the genesis of propositions, and no longer simply is the effect of propositions. “Sense was first discovered in the form of an impassible neutrality by an empirical logic of propositions, which had broken away from Aristotelianism; and then, for a second time, sense was discovered in the form of a genetic productivity by transcendental philosophy, which had broken away from metaphysics”.³¹ How then does sense function, in this second discovery, as an element of the genesis of propositions, rather than simply as the “expressed” meaning or effect of an already given proposition? And what is its relation to the literality-metaphor problematic (insofar as metaphor is taken to be a transfer of sense from a literal or proper sense to a figurative sense)?

The Synthetic Surface Structure of Sense

In order to comprehend the structure of the secondary organization (the sense–nonsense relation), consider again the life of an infant. All of us were born into what Deleuze calls the primary order of language: noise, which includes the primary sounds and affects of the body, with all its intensive variations. But in the midst of this, the infant hears a Voice on High, that is, the voices of those speaking an already constituted language. How does the infant move from the primary order of the body to the tertiary arrangement of language? Answer: through the secondary organization of sense. For the infant, the Voice on High already has all the dimensions of the “tertiary arrangement” of language: it manifests the emotional variations of the speaker (the voice that loves and reassures, attacks and scolds, withdraws and keeps silent, complains about being wounded); it denotes certain states of affairs, such as the “good” object (the breast) or introjected objects (like food); and it signifies something, namely all the classes and concepts that structure this domain of pre-existence. Yet the child itself does not know what the voice is denoting, manifesting, or signifying. For the child, the voice “has the dimensions of language without having its condition”, in other words, for the infant, the voice does not yet have a sense.³² Whereas the noise of the depths is an infra-sense, an under-sense, an Untersinn, the Voice on High is a pre-sense. It still awaits the “event” (sense) that functions as the genetic element of language itself. But of course this is not simply an experience of infants. The passage from noise to voice is relived when the sounds reaching sleeping people are organized into the voice ready to wake them. More obviously, we experience it when we encounter someone speaking a foreign language. The Greeks called foreigners “barbarians”, because when foreigners spoke, the Greeks heard only the babbling non-signifying intensities of a non-Greek language (bar bar bar). They heard the voice, but they had no access to its sense. One could see that the voice had sense, that it “made sense”, but Greeks lacked access to the dimension of sense in the foreign language. In a similar way, Americans tend to caricature the vowel-y sound of French, just as the French tend to mock Americans for speaking as if they have a hot potato in their mouths, since most American vowel sounds are diphthongs.

For an infant (or foreigner) to gain access to the tertiary arrangement of language (the voice), it must pass through the secondary organization of language, which is the construction of the surface dimension of sense. This entails a long period of apprenticeship on the child’s part. Out of the continuous flow of the Voice on High, the child will begin to extract intensive elements of different orders, freeing them up in order to give them functions that are not yet linguistic. One might see this as an early formulation of Deleuze’s theory of flows: the voice is a flow from which non-signifying elements are extracted and combined. The first words of the infant are not formed linguistic units, but merely formative elements: phonemes, morphemes, semantemes. The fundamental thesis of the logic of sense is that “sense always results from the combination of elements which are not themselves signifying”.³³

Deleuze analyzes this surface organization of sense in terms of three moments, which are defined by three types of series or syntheses: connective, conjunctive, and disjunctive syntheses. (1) In the first moment (connection), the child extracts pure phonemes from the current of the Voice on High, and connects them together in “a concatenation of successive entities” such as ma ma, da da, or bay bee, which can then enter into more complex relations, or even an alignment of clusters.³⁴ (2) In the second moment (conjunction), there is the construction of the first esoteric words out of these phonemes, which is brought about not by a simple addition of preceding phonemes, but rather through the integration of the phonemes into convergent and continuous series, as in Lewis Carroll’s contraction of your royal highness into y’reince.³⁵ Such a contraction aims at the extraction of the global sense of an entire proposition in order to name it with a single syllable—what Carroll calls an “unpronounceable monosyllable”.³⁶ (3) In the third moment (disjunction), the child starts making these esoteric words enter into relation with other divergent and independent series. If Logic of Sense presents itself in part as a reading of Lewis Carroll’s work, it is because Carroll was one of the great explorers of this surface dimension of sense. Although his famous portmanteau words seem to establish conjunctive syntheses between two heterogeneous series (snark = snake + shark; slithy = slimy + lithe; mimsy = flimsy + miserable), Deleuze argues that their deeper function is to create ramifications in the surface of sense. Carroll himself explains the functioning of the word “frumious” (fuming + furious) in disjunctive terms: “If your thoughts incline ever so little towards ‘fuming’, you will say ‘fuming-furious’; if they turn, even by a hair’s breadth, toward ‘furious’, you will say ‘furious-fuming’; but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say ‘frumious’ ”.³⁷ Ultimately, the real definition of the portmanteau word, Deleuze argues, must be found in its ramifying function (or disjunctive synthesis) throughout the surface of sense.³⁸

These three syntheses constitute the production of the surface of sense out of the voice.³⁹ The structure of this surface corresponds to the components of the “Idea” that Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition: a multiplicity in which differential relations between determinable elements (e.g., phonemes) constitute singularities (e.g., esoteric words), in the “neighborhood” of which the sonorities and significations of language will be constituted.⁴⁰ A phoneme, for instance, is the smallest linguistic unit capable of differentiating two words with different meanings: for instance, bat and cat. Although the phoneme is incarnated in letters, syllables, and sounds, it is not reducible to them. In itself, the phoneme is inseparable from the differential relation that unites it to other phonemes: b/c. Phonemes do not exist independent of the differential relations into which they enter and through which they reciprocally determine each other. In turn, esoteric words of different kinds guarantee the separation, coordination, and ramifications of the various series that constitute the surface organization of sense and non-sense (the Idea). What distinguishes the secondary organization of sense (surface) from the primary order of noise (depth) is that “the depth is not organized in series”.⁴¹ Thus, while the static genesis concerns the actualization of sense in a state of affairs (what is expressed in a proposition is attributed to a state of affairs), the dynamic genesis concerns the production of sense out of the depths of the body. “What matters here is the preliminary, founding or poetic organization—that is, this play of surfaces in which only an a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual field is employed, this exercise of nonsense and sense, and this deployment of series which precede the elaborate products of the status genesis”.⁴²

The surface of sense points to a domain that is difficult to access. On the one hand, it implies a dimension of speech that adults have long ago “forgotten”, even though each of us occupies the domain of sense continuously. If you are capable of understanding the propositions of an interlocutor, it is because you inhabit and sustain the structure of sense that underlies them. This is the function of the surface organization of sense: it separates sounds from the body and begins to turn them into the elements of speech. The creation of sense (out of non-signifying elements) is what allows the sounds coming out of one’s mouth to participate fully in a shared linguistic world. But the converse is also true. If a child comes to a language it cannot yet grasp as a language, but only as a familial hum of voices, perhaps conversely it can grasp what adults no longer grasp in their own language, namely the differential relations between the formative elements of language. From the flow of the voice, children extract elements of different orders, but they give them a function that is still pre-linguistic. For the child, there is “an apprenticeship of formative elements before there is any understanding of formed linguistic units” that would be able to denote things, manifest persons, or signify concepts.⁴³ What Deleuze says about language is equally true for living organisms: an embryo passes through experiences—foldings, migrations, and so on—that would destroy an adult. “Embryology already displays the truth that there are systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them”.⁴⁴ The implication, as we have seen, is far-reaching: we are led astray when we focus on fully formed individuals in biology or fully formed propositions in linguistics.

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the concept of sense in Deleuze’s work, and indeed in our own lives. If you are capable of understanding the propositions of an interlocutor, it is because of the element of sense that underlies them. Sense is this surface, this boundary, this frontier that exists between the noises of one’s body (the primary order) and the sentences of language (the tertiary arrangement). Sense is what allows the noises coming out of one’s mouth to participate fully in the linguistic world we share. Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty showed, the same is true not only for the noises coming out of one’s mouth, but for the whole of one’s body, which is “expressive” through and through, having a sense in every one of its gestures (bodily intentionality).⁴⁵ In other words, the same syntheses of sense are at work in the body of the infant. Indeed, how can they not be, since the dynamic genesis is what extracts the surface of sense from bodily states?⁴⁶ As the body gets caught up in the system of language, Deleuze writes, “there is a co-system of sexuality that mimics sense, nonsense, and their surface organization”.⁴⁷ Long before the infant experiences its body (or its mother’s body) as an organism, it experiences its body as a geography of intensities and gradients. Freud, for instance, identified “erogenous zones” of pregenital sexuality in the infant, each of which is a dynamic formation of a surface space around a singularity constituted by an orifice surrounded by a mucous membrane (oral, anal, urethral zones), and development of the infant concerns the more general problem of organizing these surfaces and bringing about their coordination and integration. For Deleuze, the important idea is that there are orientations in the biopsychic life of the infant that have variable or shifting dimensions—an entire geography and geometry of living dimensions. The dynamic genesis is nothing other than the formation of surfaces (or zones) and their coordination, both in the body and in speech.

The Fragility of Sense: Two Types of Non-Sense (the Psychotic Procedure)

At the same time, we are also aware of the fundamental fragility of this surface domain of sense, and the fact that it can break down at any moment into non-sense. In fact, for Deleuze this domain of non-sense is even more revealing than the domain of sense—the sense–non-sense relation is far more important to philosophy than the truth–falsity relation, which depends on it. In fact, Deleuze distinguishes between two types of non-sense, the non-sense of as-yet inarticulate words (surface) and the non-sense of the body (depth). The second is more profound than the first: “What is essential is the threat that depth begins to be on all the other dimensions”.⁴⁸

The first type of non-sense, as we have seen, is the non-sense of Lewis Carroll, who takes the formative elements of language and establishes new syntheses between them. Carroll’s famous poem Jabberwocky—itself a portmanteau word, combining “jabber” (a voluble, animated, or chattering discussion) with “wocer” (offspring or fruit), that coincides with its function—begins with a famous first line: “Twas brillig, and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe”. To which Alice responds, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!”⁴⁹ The poem seemed to make sense to Alice, but she nonetheless had no idea what it was about. It seems to make “sense” because Carroll combines the formative elements of language in a way that produces in Alice a feeling of sense, even though the combination of elements lies outside the tertiary structure of language. “Slithey” is a combination of “slimy” and “lithe”, and thus seems to have a sense, even though it is a non-sensical combination of elements.

But there is a second kind of non-sense, which is exemplified in the schizophrenic writings of Antonin Artaud. Artaud did not admire Lewis Carroll, and he used a rather technical term to describe Carroll’s writing: pigshit (la cochonnerie).⁵⁰ Artaud speaks of the “caca of being and of its language”.⁵¹ The reason: Carroll remained at the surface, playing his little combinatorial game, combining “shark” and “snake” into “snark” and making a poem out of it. But that kind of non-sense is nothing—absolutely nothing—compared with the non-sense of the body, with its pure intensities and noises, which Artaud expressed in his “scream-breaths”, his cris-souffles—and which was tied, moreover, to a schizophrenic pathology, to an extraordinary lived experience. Artaud followed the reverse path of the infant, though “regression” is hardly an adequate concept for this process. The infant starts in the primary order of the body, and attains the tertiary arrangement of language by passing through—or rather constructing—the secondary organization of sense. And yet, as Artaud knew, “nothing is more fragile than the surface”.⁵²

Artaud’s pathos moved in the opposite direction. The tertiary arrangement of language (the proposition) is “grounded” in the “secondary organization” of sense (which is what Carroll plays with). And yet, following what Deleuze sometimes calls the “bend” or “twist” in sufficient reason, the dimension of sense itself threatens to collapse into the un-grounded “primary order” of noise. In the primary order of schizophrenia, “there is no longer anything to prevent propositions from falling back onto bodies and from mingling their sonorous elements with the body’s olfactory, gustatory, or digestive effects. Not only is there no longer any sense, but there is no longer any grammar or syntax either—nor, at the limit, are there any articulated syllabic, literal, or phonetic elements”.⁵³ There are only Artaud’s cris-souffles, which are “the asyntactical limit toward which all language tends”: “Ratara ratara ratara Atara tatara rana Otara otara katara”.⁵⁴ The schizophrenic treats words as if they were things; “things and proposition no longer have any frontier between them”.⁵⁵ The schizophrenic body is no longer anything but depth; it no longer has a surface organization. The surface has collapsed.⁵⁶

Indeed, Deleuze will argue that “psychosis is inseparable from a variable linguistic procedure (procédé). The procedure is the very process of the psychosis”.⁵⁷ One of his most important essays on this score is his essay entitled “Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure”.⁵⁸ Wolfson was a schizophrenic, but also a student of languages, and he developed a specific procedure to deal with his English-speaking mother: whenever she began to speak, he would immediately “translate” her speech into a multi-lingual non-sense.

Given a word from the maternal language, he looks for a foreign word with a similar meaning that has common sounds or phonemes (preferably in French, German, Russian, or Hebrew, the four principal languages studied by the author). For example, Where? will be translated as Wo? Hier? où? ici?, or better yet, as Woher. Tree will produce Tere, which phonetically becomes Dere, and leads to the Russian Derevo. Thus, an ordinary maternal sentence will be analyzed in terms of its phonetic elements and movements so that it can be converted into a sentence, in one or more foreign languages, which is similar in sound and meaning…. The sentence Don’t trip over the wire becomes Tu’nicht tréb über èth hé Zwirn.⁵⁹

For Wolfson, his mother’s voice had to be stripped of its sense, without delay, “decomposed into its phonetic elements and recomposed into inarticulate blocks”.⁶⁰ It was never a question of recovering sense but of destroying the word and conjuring up an affect, transforming the painful passion of the body into a triumphant action, but “always in this depth beneath the fissured surface”.⁶¹ A similar case was that of Jean-Pierre Brisset, whose procedure was to focus on words and phrases whose sounds were identical but whose meanings were completely different: prisoners were first drenched dans l’eau sale (in dirty water), they were dans la sale eau pris (taken away in dirty water), thus becoming salauds pris (saloperies) (captured bastards/shit), who were then sold in la salle aux prix/pris (the price room/the prisoner’s room).⁶² In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the case of a young patient of Bruno Bettleheim named Joey, who would not only decompose words (“Connecticut” became “connect-I-cut”), but who could live, eat, defecate, and sleep “only if he is plugged into machines provided with motors, wires, lights, carburators, propellers, and steering wheels: an electrical feeding machine, a car-machine that enables him to breathe, an anal machine that lights up”.⁶³ Deleuze has developed a set of interrelated concepts to analyze such cases: if the enunciable refers to a procedure (procédé), the visible refers to a process (processus), and taken together a procedure and a process constitute a proceeding (procedure). A proceeding is a combination of a visible process and an enunciative procedure.⁶⁴

Deleuze compares these psychotic procedures with the well-known compositional procedure of the writer Raymond Roussel, to whom Michel Foucault devoted an important book.⁶⁵ In his novel Impressions of Africa, Roussel famously converted an initial sentence (les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard = the white man’s letters on the hoards of the old plunderer) into another sentence with similar sounds and phonemes, but with a completely different meaning (les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard = the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table). Roussel amplified the procedure, creating a novel that “surreptitiously tries to say two things with the same words”.⁶⁶ Unlike Wolfson or Brisset, Roussel was able to create a work of art from his procedure, filling up the interval between the original sentence and its conversion “with marvelously proliferating stories”.⁶⁷

Is not perhaps the greatness—and the great pathos—of Artaud that he was able to speak and write out of the depths of the primary order of the body? Nietzsche was unable to do so, and lapsed into silence. We can nonetheless get a glimpse into the nature of Nietzsche’s delirium in the letters and postcards he wrote in the ten days following his initial collapse in 1889, in which his language takes on a purely intensive use. It directly expresses the “primary order” of Nietzsche’s body and its intensive states, each of which receives a proper name—some designating his “attractive” allies, or manic rises in intensity (Prado, Lesseps, Chambige, “honest criminals”, Dionysus), others designating his “repulsive” enemies, or depressive falls in intensity (Caiaphus, William, Bismark, the “antisemites”, the Crucified)—a chaos of pure oscillations that is ultimately invested, as Nietzsche says, by “all the names of history”.⁶⁸ And yet, was it not precisely this experience that Nietzsche was confronting throughout all his writings? At the end of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche included a telling lament about his writing: “Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by the hand—by our hand. We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer—only weary and mellow things!”⁶⁹ Nietzsche’s illness was not a part of the process, but rather an arrest or stopping of the process.⁷⁰

But is Nietzsche’s or Artaud’s experience any different from our own? In a sense, yes, absolutely yes, since both shared a profound pathology most of us will never experience. In Logic of Sense, Deleuze muses about people like himself, writing on Artaud’s schizophrenia, Nietzsche’s collapse, Hölderlin’s madness, Woolf’s suicide, Fitzgerald’s breakdown, and so on—all the while standing on the shore, dipping toes in the water, but unable to dive in and plunge beneath the surface.⁷¹ But in another sense, no, the experience is not so different, for a simple stammer or a stumbling over a word (a “Freudian slip”) is itself an intrusion of the dimension of noise, and is enough to indicate the fundamental fragility of the surface of sense, which covers the groundlessness that constantly threatens to bubble up and subsume everything, making us fall into “the undifferentiated abyss of a groundlessness which only permits the pulsation of a monstrous body”.⁷²

The Intensive: Beyond the Literal and the Metaphorical

We seem to be far away from our theme of literality and metaphor, but we have never been so close. Let us return to Deleuze’s statement that we cited at the start: “There are no literal words, neither are there metaphors…. There are only inexact words to designate something exactly”.⁷³ No less a thinker than Kant had made a similar observation in the Critique of Pure Reason: “Despite the great wealth of our languages, the thinker often finds himself at a loss for the expression which exactly fits his concept, and for want of which he is unable to be really intelligible to others or even to himself”.⁷⁴ This is why Deleuze can define philosophy, famously, as the creation of concepts: philosophy is the creation of inexact words to designate something exactly, “literally”. From this viewpoint, the analyses of concepts proposed in What Is Philosophy? are a transposition of the analysis of language provided in Logic of Sense. The path followed by the infant is to construct the secondary surface of sense in order to pass from the primary noise of the body to the tertiary arrangement of language. In creating concepts, the philosopher pursues a similar path, closer to Artaud’s, and attempts to follow (or create) a line of flight within language itself that will extract its formative or genetic elements (the components of the concept) in order to create something new.

Strictly speaking, however, while it is easy to comprehend Deleuze’s rejection of the suggestion that his concepts are “mere” metaphors, it would likewise be inexact to say that Deleuze’s concepts must therefore be taken “literally”. The reason is that the literal-metaphorical distinction itself operates entirely within the realm of sense: it involves the movement from a “proper” meaning or sense of a word or phrase to a figurative or metaphorical meaning. At this level of analysis, it is easy to see how the phrase “the unconscious is a factory” can be understood in a metaphorical manner as a transfer of meaning from a literal to a figurative sense. A factory is literally a milieu of production; to say that the unconscious is a factory is to transfer the literal sense of “production” (in a factory) in a figurative manner to a new milieu (in the unconscious). There is a transfer of meaning that operates there entirely within the first realm of sense (or expression).

But this is only the first aspect of sense: sense (or meaning) as an effect of propositions; meaning is what is “expressed” by a proposition. The second aspect, as we have seen, concerns sense as an element in the genesis of propositions from its formative elements (the three syntheses), and it is this aspect that concerns us here. From this viewpoint, sense is the “ground” of language, but this ground itself rests on the “groundlessness” of the primary order of noise. (As geology and plate tectonics teach us, no ground is ever entirely secure.) This is why Artaud ultimately plays a more important role in Logic of Sense than does Carroll. Artaud’s intensive “scream-breaths”, uttered from the depth of his pathology (the primary order), are worth far more than Carroll’s extensive word-plays, which remain at the surface (the secondary surface). The genesis of language must be found at the relation between the intensive depth (noise) and the extensive surface (sense).

Thus, just as the sense–non-sense complementarity conditions the true-–false dichotomy (a proposition can be true or false only if it has a sense), one could say that the intensity-becoming complementarity conditions the literal-metaphorical distinction. In several texts, Deleuze speaks of literary procedures, like those of Roussel, that go beyond sense and point to a purely intensive use of language. This can take place “when sense is actively neutralized … when there remains only enough of sense to direct the lines of escape … in order to liberate a living and expressive material that speaks for itself and has no need of being put into a form”.⁷⁵ Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, for instance, speaks of a

language, torn from sense… [that] no longer finds its value in anything but an accenting of the word, an inflection…. Children are well skilled in the exercise of repeating a word, the sense of which is only vaguely felt, in order to make it vibrate around itself. Kafka tells how, as a child, he repeated one of his father’s expressions in order to make it take flight on a line of non-sense: “end of the month, end of the month”…. [The phrase] no longer forms anything but a sequence of intensive states, a ladder or circuit for intensities that one can make race around in one direction [sens] or another, from high to low, or from low to high…. There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution to states that is part of the range of the word.⁷⁶

Like Artaud’s scream-breaths, the word here becomes linked with its own intensive conditions in the primary order. Such an intensive use of language marks what Deleuze calls a “line of flight” or a “line of escape”: “a language of sense is traversed by a line of escape in order to liberate a living and expressive material that speaks for itself and has no need of being put into a form”.⁷⁷ What Deleuze calls a “minor” use of language is nothing other than an intensive use of language.

When Deleuze and Guattari published What Is Philosophy? in 1991, they similarly defined the components of philosophical concepts as “intensive ordinates”.⁷⁸ The components of a concept are not spatiotemporal coordinates (extensions), but intensive ordinates that lie outside any coordinates (pure events). Intensive ordinates are “pure and simple” singularities that are brought together in the concept through the establishment of “zones of indiscernibility” between them.⁷⁹ The Cartesian concept of the cogito, for instance, has as its intensive ordinates the concept of doubting, thinking, and being. To create a concept is “to make the sequences vibrate, to open the word onto unexpected internal intensities”.⁸⁰ Like the literary procedures of Roussel and Kafka, the creation of concepts is an asignifying and intensive utilization of language.

It is in this manner that we must understand Deleuze’s claims such as “the unconscious is a factory”. As long as we remain at the tertiary arrangement of language or the secondary organization of sense, we cannot help but see the relationship between the two words as a kind of transfer of sense, a relationship of resemblance, or imitation, or mimesis, or even an imaginary identification. But once we reach the intensive level, the relationship between the two words becomes, precisely, a relationship of becoming. A zone of indiscernibility is established between the two words “unconscious” and “factory”, such that we can say that the unconscious literally is a factory, or more precisely, becomes a factory. This is what happens in Wuthering Heights, when Emily Brontë has Catherine say, “I am Heathcliff”, or in Moby Dick, when Herman Melville says that Captain Ahab “becomes” Moby Dick. Catherine does not “really” become Heathcliff any more than Ahab “really” becomes a whale. In a becoming, one term does not simply resemble the other; rather, each term encounters the other, and the becoming is something that passes between the two, outside the two. In literature, this “in between” is a pure affect or percept, such that both Ahab and Moby Dick lose their status as subjects in favor of “an infinitely proliferating patchwork” of affects that escape their form, like the “the furrows that twist from Ahab’s brow to that of the Whale”.⁸¹

One could say that, in philosophy, these inbetweens, or these becomings, produce concepts. When Deleuze says that “the unconscious is a factory”, it marks the becoming of the concept of the unconscious, or rather (which amounts to the same thing) the creation of a new concept. Deleuze defines concepts as multiplicities, but a multiplicity is defined by the limits and borders where it enters into relations with other multiplicities and changes nature, transforms itself, and follows a “line of flight” (even while remaining itself). When Deleuze says that “the unconscious is a factory”, he makes the concept of the unconscious enter into a becoming. The phrase creates an objective zone of indistinction or indiscernibility that always exists between any two multiplicities—in this case, the two concepts or terms—and that precedes their taking on a sense.⁸² Indeed, it is only by entering into this becoming that the term “the unconscious” can be said to have taken on a new sense, a new “literal” sense (this unconscious is a factory, and not a theater). Or, put differently, the concept of the unconscious can be said to have changed, to have altered one of its intensive ordinates. The intensive primary order is the condition that makes possible “the perpetual, invisible, and silent displacement of linguistic sense”.⁸³

For Deleuze, this is the very movement of thought itself, the creation of the new within thought. Our ordinary use of language is extensive—or, in the language of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, it is reterritorializing. Language is a deterritorialization of noise that becomes reterritorialized in sense; and it is sense that allows the noises of the body to become linguistic elements. This is what Deleuze means when he speaks of a “minor” use of language (in philosophy or elsewhere), or cites Proust’s phrase that writers create a kind of foreign language within their own language. It is a process that involves taking any linguistic variable—phonological, semantic, syntactical, or grammatical—and placing it in variation, pushing language to the point where it “stops being representative in order to move toward its extremities or its limits”,⁸⁴ in order to create new possibilities within thought itself. Style and philosophy in this way come together: “This is what style is, or rather the absence of style—asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says … but by what causes it to move, to flow, to explode…. For [philosophy] is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal … a pure process that fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds—[philosophy] as ‘experimentation’ ”.⁸⁵ A philosophical concept is not a metaphor but a metamorphosis.

Notes

1.See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” [1873], in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), p. 46.

2.Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 209–71.

3.Ted Cohen, “Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts”, in Journal of Philosophy 72.19 (1975): 669–84. The line is from Donne’s Meditation XVII: “No man is an island / Entire of itself / Every man is a piece of the continent / A part of the main”.

4.Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 3.

5.Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 4, translation modified. Kafka wrote, in one of his diaries, “Metaphors are one of the things that make me despair of literature”.

6.Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 181. We should note that Deleuze himself expressed reservations about this part of Logic of Sense: “I attach little importance to the text on structuralism [“How Do We Recognize Structuralism?”], and very little importance to the whole part of Logic of Sense that was still under the influence of psychoanalysis (the empty case, and a far too structuralist conception of series)”; letter to Arnaud Villani, December 1981, reprinted in Les Styles De Deleuze: Esthétique et philosophie, ed. Adnen Jdey (Paris: Les Impressions nouvelles, 2011), “Cinq Lettres de Gilles Deleuze”, p. 286.

7.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 181.

8.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 186.

9.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 192.

10.Daniel N. Stern, Diary of a Baby (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 14: “A sudden increase in interest; a rising, then a falling wave of hunger pain; an ebbing of pleasure”. See also Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

11.See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, chapter three, “Of the Proposition”, pp. 12–22.

12.Lewis Carroll, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, illus. John Tenniel (New York: Modern Library, 1936), pp. 1125–1130.

13.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, pp. 17, 184 and 119–20.

14.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 119. For Deleuze’s more detailed account of the relations within the proposition, see Logic of Sense, pp. 13–19 and 119.

15.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 104.

16.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 17.

17.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 28.

18.Deleuze’s theory of sense seems to have been inspired, in part, by Bergson’s analysis of memory. See Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 57: “Bergson analyzes language in the same way as memory. The way in which we understand what is said to us is identical to the way in which we find a recollection. Far from recomposing sense on the basis of sounds that are heard and associated images, we place ourselves at once in the element of sense, then in a region of this element”. (Deleuze is referring to a text in Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul [New York: Zone Books, 1988], p. 116: “The hearer places himself at once in the midst of the corresponding ideas …”.) Summarizing these links, Deleuze writes elsewhere: “What the past is to time, sense is to language and idea is to thought” (Gilles Deleuze, The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], p. 99). In other words, sense is “the interiority of language” (Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 185), just as intensity is the interiority of sensibility.

19.While some philosophers reserve the term “proposition” for the meanings (semantic content) of sentences, Deleuze utilizes the term in a more general manner as the equivalent to a sentence.

20.Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference” (1892), trans. M. Black, in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds. Peter Geach and Max Black, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).

21.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 19. Deleuze refers to the work of Hubert Elie, Le Complexe Significabile (Paris: Vrin, 1936), which compares the doctrines of Gregory of Rimini and Nicolas d’Autrecourt with Meinong’s theories (and Russell’s critiques), showing how a similar polemic was repeated in the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries.

22.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, pp. 100–1.

23.See in particular Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s “Logic of Sense” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s “Logic of Sense”: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

24.Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Leibniz [1900] (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 8. Curiously, in the very next sentence, Russell admits that this self-evident claim was perhaps not self-evident to Leibniz (“That Leibniz’s philosophy began with such an analysis is less evident”).

25.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 97.

26.Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 153.

27.See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 153: “Two dimensions may be distinguished in the proposition: expression, in which a proposition says or expresses some idea; and designation, in which it indicates or designates the objects to which what is said or expressed applies. One of these would then be the dimension of sense, the other the dimension of truth and falsity. However, in this manner sense would only found the truth of a proposition while remaining indifferent to what it founds. Truth and falsity would be matters of designation. As Russell says, ‘The question of truth and falsehood has to do with what words and sentence indicate, not with what they express’ ”. The latter quote is from Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 201.

28.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 68.

29.Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 154.

30.See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 154: “The relation between a proposition and what it designates must be established within sense itself: the nature of ideal sense is to point beyond itself towards the object designated. Designation, insofar as it is achieved in the case of a true proposition, would never be grounded unless it were understood as the limit of the genetic series or the ideal connections which constitute sense. If sense points beyond itself toward the object, the latter can no longer be posited in reality exterior to sense, but only at the limit of its process…. Sense is the genesis or production of the true, and truth is only the empirical result of sense”.

31.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 105. The discovery of the first aspect of sense (as an effect of propositions) was due to the Stoics, and was continued in Meinong, Frege, and Russell; the discovery of the second aspect of sense (as an element of the genesis of proposition) was due in part, Deleuze suggests, to Husserl.

32.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 194.

33.Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?”, in Desert Island and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 175.

34.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 231.

35.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 43.

36.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 234.

37.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 46.

38.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 47.

39.We might note that Chomsky uses the phrase “surface structure” in an analogous way to Deleuze, although Chomsky’s “deep structure” refers to what Deleuze calls the “tertiary arrangement of language”. See Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter three, “Deep and Surface Structure”, p. 79: “Using some recent terminology, we can distinguish the ‘deep structure’ of a sentence from its ‘surface structure’. The former is the underlying abstract structure that determines its semantic interpretation; the latter, the superficial organization of units which determines the phonetic interpretation and which relates to the physical form of the actual utterance, to its perceived or intended form. In these terms, we can formulate a second fundamental conclusion of Cartesian linguistics, namely, that deep and surface structures need not be identical. The underlying organization of a sentence relevant to semantic interpretation is not necessarily revealed by the actual arrangement and phrasing of its given components”.

40.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 50.

41.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 224.

42.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 246.

43.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 230.

44.Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 118.

45.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior [1942], trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). Deleuze, however, does not refer to Merleau-Ponty in Logic of Sense, and, indeed, in Anti-Oedipus, p. 23, Deleuze and Guattari criticize Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body image as “the final avatar of the soul, a vague conjoining of the requirements of spiritualism and positivism”.

46.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 187.

47.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 243.

48.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 244.

49.Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, pp. 153–5.

50.Antonin Artaud, “All Writing is Pigshit”, in Artaud Anthology, trans. Jack Hirschman (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1965), pp. 38–40.

51.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 193.

52.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 82.

53.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 91.

54.Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 5. See also Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 83.

55.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, pp. 86–7.

56.See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, pp. 88–9: “Triumph may now be reached only through the creation of breath-words (mots-souffles) and howl-words (mots-cris), in which all literal, syllabic, and phonetic values have been replaced by values which are explosively tonic and not written. To these values a glorious body corresponds being a new dimension of the schizophrenic body, an organism without parts which operated entirely by Insufflation, respiration, evaporation, and fluid transmission (the superior body without organs of Antonin Artaud)…. What defines this second language and this method of action, practically, is its consonantal, guttural, and aspirated overloads, its apostrophes and internal accents, its breaths and its scansions, and its modulation which replaces all syllabic or even literal values…. The word becomes an action of the body without organs”.

57.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, “Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure”, p. 9. Michel Foucault comments on Deleuze’s essay in his 1970 piece “Sept propos sur le septieme ange” [“Seven Remarks on the Seventh Angel”], reprinted in Dits et écrits 1954–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 13–24.

58.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, pp. 7–20.

59.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, pp. 7–8.

60.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 194. See also p. 88 of the same work: “The word no longer expresses an attribute of the state of affairs; its fragments merge with unbearable sonorous qualities, invade the body where they form a mixture and a new state of affairs, as if they themselves were a noisy, poisonous food and canned excrement. The parts of the body, its organs, are determined in virtue of decomposed elements which affect and assail them. In this passion, a pure language-affect is substituted for the effect of language: ‘All writing is PIG SHIT’ (that is to say, every fixed or written word is decomposed into noisy, alimentary, and excremental bits)”.

61.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 88.

62.For an analysis of Brisset’s procedure, see Foucault, “Sept propos sur le septième ange”, pp. 13–25.

63.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), p. 37.

64.For the procédé-processus-procedure distinction, see Gilles Deleuze, seminar of 22 October 1985 (on Foucault).

65.Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas, intro. John Ashbery (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1986), esp. chapter 2, “The Cushions of the Billiard Table”, pp. 13–28.

66.Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, p. 16.

67.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 10.

68.For a penetrating study of Nietzsche’s collapse, frequently cited by Deleuze, see Pierre Klossowski, “The Euphoria at Turin”, in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 208–53.

69.Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), §296, pp. 236–7 and 426–7, the last fragment of the book, at the end of the section “What Is Noble?”

70.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 3.

71.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, pp. 157–8.

72.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 120.

73.Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 3.

74.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 309, A312/B368–69.

75.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 21.

76.Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 22.

77.Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 21.

78.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 20.

79.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 20 and 25.

80.Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 22.

81.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 77.

82.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 173. Deleuze’s monographs in the history of philosophy all inhabit such a zone of indiscernibility, which accounts for the sense that they are fully “Deleuzian” despite the variety of figures he considers.

83.Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 123.

84.Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 23.

85.Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 133 and 370–1. For this use of the term “experimentation”, see John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 13: “The word experimental is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown”.

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Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

Bowden, Sean. The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s “Logic of Sense”. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass. In The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. Illus. John Tenniel. New York: Modern Library, 1936.

Carroll, Lewis. “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles”. In The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. Illus. John Tenniel. New York: Modern Library, 1936, pp. 1125–1130.

Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Cohen, Ted. “Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts”. In Journal of Philosophy 72.19 (1975): 669–84.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition [1968]. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles. “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” In Desert Island and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Trans. Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Cinq Lettres de Gilles Deleuze”. In Les Styles De Deleuze: Esthétique et philosophie. Ed. Adnen Jdey. Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2011.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: The Viking Press, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.

Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”. In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Elie, Hubert. Le Complexe Significabile. Paris: Vrin, 1936.

Foucault, Michel. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Trans. Charles Ruas. Intro. John Ashbery. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1986.

Foucault, Michel. “Sept propos sur le septieme ange” [“Seven Remarks on the Seventh Angel”. 1970]. In Dits et écrits 1954–1988. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

Frege, Gottlob. “On Sense and Reference” [1892]. In Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Trans. M. Black. Eds. Peter Geach and Max Black. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1929.

Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior [1942]. Trans. Alden L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” [1873]. In The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Viking Press, 1954.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Russell, Bertrand. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962.

Russell, Bertrand. The Philosophy of Leibniz [1900]. London: Routledge, 1997.

Stern, Daniel N. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View From Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Stern, Daniel N. Diary of a Baby. New York: Basic Books, 1990.

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s “Logic of Sense”: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

5 Who Are Deleuze’s Conceptual Personae?

Gregg Lambert

The question of this chapter’s title should recall the small essay written by Martin Heidegger in 1954, after the war, “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?”¹ This essay should remain in the background of my discussion of the philosopher and his or her “conceptual personae”. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduce this unique figure in the third chapter of What Is Philosophy?, arguing that philosophy seeks to lay out a plan(e) of immanence in order to populate this plane with its own concepts as well as those it borrows from previous (and even “antipathetic”) philosophers.² In each case, a conceptual persona must be invented to bring this plan to life, in short, to “personalize philosophy”—first of all, by connecting the plane of concepts to the image of a life that will be evaluated according to the coordinates that it lays out and the intensities that it expresses. (Otherwise, who would care what a philosopher has to say?) As Deleuze and Guattari write, “the conceptual persona is needed to create concepts on the plane, just as the plane needs to be laid out. But these two operations do not merge in the persona, which itself appears as a distinct operator”.³ In other words, if thinking is determined or often represented as and by an image that is distinctive from images of perception, memory, intuition, or imagination, then the conceptual personage refers to a special agency of enunciation, which is not to be identified with the subject of the individual philosopher.

But why does the philosopher need to invent a conceptual persona in order to speak? First, in order to think, or rather, to speak while thinking, the philosopher requires the intermediary of a conceptual persona, which functions differently from a mask, from a character in a story or a novel, or even from the “I” of the linguistic act, or the subject of enunciation. Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari write, “in philosophical enunciations we do not do something by saying it but produce movement by thinking it through the intermediary of a conceptual persona”.⁴ Here we must distinguish between enunciation and mere speaking, for in the previous passage “enunciation” amounts to a “movement in thinking” that refers to the agency of collective enunciation. For example, even after the individual philosopher falls silent and succumbs to a natural death—is there any other kind of death for a philosopher?—it is only his or her conceptual persona that can be heard to go on speaking or, rather, enunciating a movement of thought that once belonged to the living philosopher. It is in this manner that philosophers themselves become conceptual personae when their proper names begin to function more like common nouns such as “Plato”, “Aristotle”, “Hegel”, and “Deleuze”.

At this point, we might ask whether this represents the same movement of thinking, or whether something has changed, especially since, even after the philosopher can no longer be said to be the one responsible for the agent of enunciation (the philosopher can no longer invent his or her own intermediary who says “I”), it is also true that there will be other agents who emerge to speak “in the place of the philosopher”, which is to say, other conceptual personae that will emerge as either the philosopher’s sympathetic or antipathetic agents. It is not just the single or solitary philosopher who invents a conceptual persona, but rather a group of readers and commentators who follow, so that in the history of philosophy it is possible to say that there are several personae for a single philosophy, given that “each persona has several features that give rise to other personae”, and thus, in this manner, the conceptual personae proliferate to represent a particular philosophy or philosopher.⁵ This means that what is peculiar to philosophy is the philosopher’s need, in order to be able to communicate a movement of thought, to create a unique form of individuation, which does not refer to the personality or the psychology of the philosopher, but rather to something like an onto-genetic principle, or what Gilbert Simondon refers to as an “outbreak of individuation”, which often occurs through a special form of “empathic identification” (Einfuhlung) with the conceptual persona of a particular philosopher—for instance, Hegel for the Hegelians, Kant for the neo-Kantians, Marx for the Marxists, or Deleuze for the Deleuzians, Derrida for the Derrideans, Badiou for the Badiouians, and then Zizek for just about everyone else.⁶

While I cannot pursue the sociological question concerning the nature of this form of individuation (including the question of whether philosophy necessarily remains bound to an Oedipal form of individuation and, thus, a masculine image of thought), one could point to the multiple forms of collective enunciation (and thus different “molar individuals”) that populate the field of contemporary philosophy today, including the kind of philosophy that one most often finds on blogs and Twitter. Nevertheless, what I am calling philosophical enunciation refers to a certain kind of movement: to think is to create a movement toward a plane of immanence (even if this movement simultaneously turns away), to affirm before negating, to construct, to lay out concepts, to partition, to divide up, to create, but this movement occurs only through the intermediary of a conceptual persona, and this operation is identified with the production of movement in thinking that simultaneously differentiates/is differentiated from other thoughts, other planes constructed by other philosophies.

In order to demonstrate this, one only has to be reminded of Deleuze’s statement concerning how certain philosophers have fundamentally changed what it means “to think”, and by doing so, how they not only reoriented a previous tradition of philosophical inquiry, or the “history of philosophy”, but also managed to establish the conditions of philosophical enunciation for every philosopher who came afterward, who had to contend with their image of thought out of necessity, or run the risk of losing all reference to the name of philosophy itself in its most contemporary usage. For example, the name of Descartes no longer exclusively refers to the individual and does not function as a proper name, to the same degree that the term “Cartesianism” does not refer only to Descartes’s own writings, but also to the tradition of philosophy that depends on his method as well as the antithetical philosophies that establish their image of thought on an essentially pejorative and negative usage of the same term. The theory of the proper name can be referred to Saul Kripke’s causal understanding of the “initial baptism” of the name as a referent (or “rigid designator”), but must also be expanded to include “subsequent baptisms”.⁷ In the case of the name of Descartes, for example, we witness the birth of a distinctive, and yet historically changing, conceptual personage that appears to represent the philosophy of Descartes owing to multiple baptisms, in which the name functions both as a line of filiation and in a polemical sense of “anti-Cartesianism”. Of course, everything I have just described can be applied to many other philosophers, both historical and contemporary—though not to all!—and what is most remarkable is the causal nature of certain philosophers who have produced such an extreme range of positive and negative evaluations. The volatile nature of specific conceptual personages becomes more dramatically evident in these special cases: Plato and Platonism, Descartes and Cartesianism, Spinoza and Spinozism, Kant and neo-Kantianism, Hegel and Hegelianism, Nietzsche and Nietszcheanism (and to this list we might also add several contemporary examples, including the philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, and Derrida).

However, for each case, or for each conceptual persona listed by a “rigid designator”, the aforementioned history must also be accompanied by another series of conceptual personae beginning with the prefix “anti-”. This especially concerns the antipathy that has developed at certain moments around these philosophies as in the case of an “anti-Hegelianism” that unites certain contemporary philosophies around a vague and indeterminate feeling for something else, for another kind of movement of thinking that determines the future of philosophy. It is for this reason that perhaps there is an entire drama of attraction, repulsion, sympathy, empathy, and antipathy unfolded around certain conceptual personae of great philosophers, which constitutes their becoming and cannot be separated from this generalized struggle or agonism over the plane that this philosophy first produces as a movement in thought that constantly causes it to be distinguished from other planes expressed by art or science. As Deleuze and Guattari describe this becoming, “conceptual personae carry out the movements that describe the author’s plane of immanence, and they play a part in the very creation of the author’s concepts”.⁸ Even when they are completely “antipathetic”, these conceptual personae belong to the plane that the philosopher in question lays out and to the concepts that he or she creates, also including the dangers specific to this plane. Besides, perhaps it is the philosopher who is also made responsible for all the bad perceptions, bad feelings, and even negative movements that emerge from this plane, for they themselves first inspired these affective possibilities by proposing concepts whose repulsive character remains a constitutive property of that philosophy. For example, this is certainly true in the case of the philosophy of Nietzsche, and it may also be the case for Heidegger, but for different reasons and according to another mixture.

It is also in this larger collective and social sense of empathy and antipathy (i.e., attraction and repulsion, bad feelings, negative perceptions, even failed becoming and abortive becomings) that the creation of a generic form of individuation becomes the condition of a generic multiplicity, or “collective assemblage of enunciation”. Consequently, what one commonly refers to under the name of “Deleuze” can also be defined in terms of the opposition to other movements, other schools, and other conceptual personae—in the sense that empathy breeds and is only sharpened by the forces of antipathy, and even disgust. From the early Greek to the contemporary moment, the history of philosophy is defined by these empathetic and antipathetic movements that become attached to a philosopher’s name, and by a certain image or persona that stands for that thought, in the sense of constituting what is distinctive in this thought in contrast to all the others, and thus constitutes an original, even primitive, form of dramaturgy that originally belongs to philosophy. Although some might argue that it belongs more to religion, and to certain cultic forms of society bound up with the authority of a master, one must remember that philosophy also began as a cult and, in some ways, continues to assume this anachronistic social form up to the modern day. And yet, it is here, I believe, that one also discovers the social and collective resonance of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a special kind of empathy (Einfühlung), which allows philosophies to become collective and social movements of thought that come to be identified by souls thinking in a certain sense of moving together, forming a movement that occurs as much within a territory on the earth as on a plane constructed by particular concepts and populated by conceptual personae. Beginning with the Greeks, and particularly since the dispersion of philosophies throughout Asia-Minor in the Roman and early Christian periods, philosophies have gradually come to be identified as “schools” (as movements, as collective societies, even as cults) and at the same time to begin to be differentiated by their conceptual personae: the Stoic, the Cynic, the Epicurean, the Neo-Platonist, even the Christian and the Jew. In Lucian’s Philosophies for Sale, for example, these conceptual personae that stand for these different schools are often lampooned and parodied in a manner that was essential to understand the aspect of “conversion” (metanoia) of all values and the guarantee of the best life that each school promised.⁹

So we must remark that the notion of the conceptual persona is not new to philosophy, or unique to Deleuze’s or Nietzsche’s philosophy, but in a certain sense represents the original social and collective dramaturgy of philosophy that in some sense Deleuze and Guattari sought to restore and reanimate—and precisely as a primitive and cultic form of individuation that can resist capitalist society, which is based on an axiomatic of identity. In the history of philosophy, it is perhaps Hegel who understood the nature of conceptual persona best and essentially modernized the original Greek sense of dramaturgy, which he recast in the form of the modern epic—thus spirit is shown dialectically to pass through all of its previous conceptual personae (Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, Scholastic, etc.) until a stage of bad consciousness in which spirit strips away the dross appearance of all of its persona and appears for-itself, as Subject, as self-representing Reason. At this point, all the conceptual personae pass into history just as the figure passes through all its previous embodiments and genres and becomes identified with the mind itself, positing its thought in a universal form of writing—in the scientific form of the phenomenology. On the other hand, it will be important to see how Nietzsche restores the original Greek and Christian dramaturgy with his conceptual personae, since spirit will be assigned again purely as an expression of the body and its passions. For Nietzsche, therefore, the reader herself appears as a new conceptual persona who must be produced or willed alongside the creation of the author’s conceptual personae for a philosophy of the future. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “it is possible that the conceptual persona only rarely or allusively appears for himself. Nevertheless, he is there, and however nameless and subterranean he must always be reconstituted by the reader”.¹⁰

Today, it is the reader who leads us to the modern function of commentary as the favored genre for the invention of new conceptual personae, and who has become the cause of both fame and ignominy for any modern philosopher, living or dead, and especially for those who have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to have been reconstituted by the prefix “anti-”. Therefore, one never begins to read a philosopher without confronting the shadowy presence of a conceptual persona who appears to obscure or block the primary work and, in some ways, to prefigure or even to pre-interpret it. Every philosopher is the lone figure at the back of the group, a figure preceded by a crowd of commentators; therefore, in reading a particular philosopher, one must always parry and struggle with the existence of the conceptual persona in approaching the philosophy and subtracting its too simple and clichéd image of thought with a more complicated and nuanced understanding. Perhaps, the best commentaries are those that manage to replace this conceptual persona with one of their own making, which is why I have previously argued that the function of commentators must be understood to be actually to write in the place of the primary philosopher, with all the ambivalence this act of substitution implies. This even explains why some of the best commentaries in the history of philosophy, like Deleuze’s own, might at first appear to contradict and go against a common understanding or perception of the primary philosophy. In point of fact, these commentaries must first “defamiliarize”, using the Brechtian term, or even “destroy”, employing Nietzsche’s favorite word, an image of thought that has traditionally represented this philosophy, since they will later on explain how this image does not actually belong to the philosophy itself, but has been added later by a subsequent community of readers, by a philosophical tradition, or by “history itself”, and must, subsequently, be subtracted or destroyed so that another image and a new conceptual persona could be erected in its place. Of course, there are also just as many examples of commentators who will function as “false friends”, secret rivals, including the unholy series of sorcerers, “confidence men”, and even tricksters in the history of philosophical commentary and secondary literatures. Therefore, in studying the creation of new conceptual personae, we must first acknowledge how so-called misinterpretations become extremely productive, even “viral”, over the course of time, and have sometimes even managed to determine the image of thought for centuries that follow, as in the case of Bayles’s conceptual persona of “Spinozism”, which led in part to the Jacobi controversy.

At this point, we could provide many other examples from the history of philosophy, but I am more interested in the fate of future personae. For example, among the many contemporaries to choose from, both Deleuze and Derrida could be singled out as haunted by the problem of their own conceptual personae. Nevertheless, the existence of a dominant misinterpretation cannot simply be rationalized by referring to any species of error, as if the fate of interpretation amounted to a problem of simple math, but rather must be explained in reference to the faculty of desire, which is why stupidity is not caused by error but addresses the capacity of freedom that is ascribed to the power of Reason itself. As Deleuze first argued, the faculty of desire and the innate capacity of freedom determine the act of thinking that gives stupidity a moral dimension at its origin. It is also for this reason that the power of dissemblance that the conceptual persona produces in the place of all subsequent readings of a philosopher’s work cannot be reduced to logical or hermeneutic error, since we know from experience that no amount of “correct interpretation” can ever restore this image (and, God knows, many have tried, particularly in the case of Derrida). Instead, it is only by means of the invention of another conceptual persona (for example, another “Derrida”, a second “Deleuze”) who enters to do battle with the first, to overturn its image and steal the power of dissimulation itself (i.e., “the powers of the false”), that is, to restore the effect of a pure simulacrum, that a personage can henceforth be judged as merely an extrinsic and external relation and no longer the expression of an internal genesis of thought with the identity of the thinker. For example, the entire problematic around the “overturning of Platonism” refers precisely to this kind of battle and the need to invent a new conceptual personage, since in many ways the fate of a particular philosophy will be bound up with the good or bad nature of its conceptual personae.

It is because the entire history of philosophy can be described as a field of battle between different conceptual personae, which are often designated by the same proper name or common noun, that the entire problem of representation in philosophy can be better understood by referring again to the original sense of “dramaturgy”. In attempting to grasp the original social meaning, in my own commentaries I have always been more interested in what happens to Deleuze’s philosophy when it is read, translated, reproduced, and adapted to other ends, but also when it is refuted, negated, opposed, and often violently dismissed. In other words, I have always been more interested in all these events and misadventures, and perhaps this is why my work has been regarded more as literary criticism than philosophy, due to my intense curiosity and interest in the history of the reception of the philosopher’s work, rather than in the total meaning of the philosophical system of concepts. As a literary critic, I understand that such a meaning is merely a “figure in the carpet” whose secret desire is bound up with the commentator’s fantasy of closing the book eternally, once and for all, as if to make the primary work redundant to the text of the commentary and no longer necessary, thereby internalizing its external repetition in its own image of thought. Although the commentator often pretends to address the principal philosopher’s work “for the benefit of the readers” (“cc:” carbon copy, that is, two or more recipients of the original text), most commentaries speak “in place of the philosopher”, in the sense that they situate the subject of enunciation within the margins—and sometimes within the text—of the primary philosopher’s writings in order to enunciate something that remains unsaid—to clarify and explain, to gloss or expand upon, correct or redact; to rebuke or erase, or to substitute the primary philosopher’s language with their own. This gives to the art of philosophical commentary a very peculiar and often ambiguous subject of enunciation, as if there were the presence of a shadowy precursor and the signification of double-entendre of stupidity (or blindness) and insight that underwrote every discursive situation belonging to this genre, since every commentary must first introduce a certain degree of stupidity into the work of the primary philosopher in order to be able to perform afterwards the arduous task of removing it like a splinter in the eye.

Perhaps it is for this reason that philosophers must always lay out their concepts on a plane of immanence like throws of the dice that will be taken up (or not) both by their sympathetic listeners and by their greatest competitors. Deleuze writes in Nietzsche and Philosophy:

The authentic image of the philosopher does not survive the one who can embody it for a time, for his epoch. It must be taken up again, reanimated, it must find a new field of activity in the following epoch. If philosophy’s critical task is not actively taken up in every epoch philosophy dies and with it die the images of the philosopher and the free man. Stupidity and baseness are always those of our own time, of our contemporaries, our stupidity and baseness.¹¹

Therefore, in judging the representation of contemporary philosophy, today we can speak of only our own stupidity and our own baseness. It seems we have no other choice, and to bathe only our own image of thought as “the best” is to fall prey to the same species of subjective illusions that Deleuze first sought to chase out into the open both in Nietzsche and Philosophy and, five years later, in the third chapter of Difference and Repetition.

Finally, if the image of stupidity expresses a relation to an antagonistic desire that is the origin of a fundamental dissimulation of the sense that first belonged to the philosopher’s own enunciation, then the democratizing role of modern commentary has often been to replace the authority of the philosophical enunciation with an image of thinking that expresses a common sense understanding, one that can also function socially to represent that philosophy in a nominative or accusative sense—for example, in the statements that one often hears, “that’s Spinozist” or “Cartesian”, “that’s Hegelian” or “Marxist”, “Deleuzian” or “Derridean”! Although these statements also function to socialize philosophy by bringing thought under the jurisdiction of dominant systems of judgment and value—and philosophy “becomes” in this manner as well!—unfortunately, this also implies that the act of thinking itself is reduced to an image that does not think. Is this not, ultimately, a form of stupidity? Moreover, why would commentators desire such a thing in the first place, since it would appear to contradict and negate the meaning of their own activity, and risks turning it into a farce? Consequently, if I addressed the problem of stupidity previously as a “moral image of thought”, following Deleuze’s earlier argument, then perhaps its most appropriate genre is comedy or farce, and the creation of the conceptual persona in philosophy will be found to have an essential relation to the stereotype of the social personage in the comic form, the cliché in the linguistic form, and the dogmatic image in the moral form of thinking. These are the three forces or social forms of repetition and common sense that belong to the field of philosophy and define its semi-tragic battles and agonistic contests, as well as its comic figures and its public spectacles. Even today, when we hear someone speaking of “Deleuzism”, whether in a positive or negative sense, perhaps we are only witnessing a living drama by which even contemporary philosophy still reactivates the original social situation of the Greek polis.

Notes

1.Martin Heidegger and Bernd Magnus, “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in The Review of Metaphysics 20.3 (1967): 411–31.

2.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 35–60.

3.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 64.

4.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 64.

5.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 75.

6.Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual”, in Incorporations (Zone: 6), ed. Jonathan Crary (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 297–319.

7.Gareth Evans, “The Causal Theory of Names”, in The Philosophy of Language, ed. A. Martinich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 635–56. See also Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 3–4.

8.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 63.

9.Lucian, The Downward Journey or The Tyrant. Zeus Catechized. Zeus Rants. The Dream or The Cock. Prometheus. Icaromenippus or The Sky-man. Timon or The Misanthrope. Charon or The Inspectors. Philosophies for Sale, trans. A. M. Harmon, Loeb Classical Library 54 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 449–512.

10.Lucian, The Downward Journey, pp. 449–512.

11.Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 107.

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Evans, Gareth. “The Causal Theory of Names”. In The Philosophy of Language. Ed. A. Martinich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 635–56.

Heidegger, Martin and Bernd Magnus. “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” In The Review of Metaphysics 20.3 (1967): 411–31.

Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Lucian. The Downward Journey or The Tyrant. Zeus Catechized. Zeus Rants. The Dream or The Cock. Prometheus. Icaromenippus or The Sky-man. Timon or The Misanthrope. Charon or The Inspectors. Philosophies for Sale. Trans. A. M. Harmon. Loeb Classical Library 54. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Simondon, Gilbert. “The Genesis of the Individual”. In Incorporations (Zone: 6). Ed. Jonathan Crary. New York: Zone Books, 1992, pp. 297–319.

Part III

Beyond Politics

6 Kafka and Melville

The Same Struggle for a People to Come?¹

Catarina Pombo Nabais

Minor Literatures and Minor Peoples

“What Kafka would say about ‘small nations’ is what Melville had already said about the great American nation: it must become a patchwork of all small nations. What Kafka would say about minor literatures is what Melville had already said about the American literature of his time: because there are so few authors in America, and because its people are so indifferent, the writer is not in a position to succeed as a recognized master. Even in his failure, the writer remains all the more the bearer of a collective enunciation, which no longer forms part of literary history and preserves the rights of a people to come, or of a human becoming”.² In the introductory text of Essays Critical and Clinical, Gilles Deleuze already diagnosed the existence of a harmony between Kafka and Melville: “Kafka (for Central Europe) and Melville (for America) present literature as the collective enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their expression only in and through the writer”.³ But should we believe what Deleuze states? In Kafka and Melville, is there the same movement for the preservation of people’s rights, the same regime of collective enunciation of a minor people?

In 1975, in Deleuze’s understanding of Kafka, the collective dimension of the literary experience—what Deleuze calls the “collective assemblage of enunciation”⁴—was the work of a minority within a major language as the construction of lines of flight, lines of deterritorialization for singular or minor becomings. However, a few years later, in 1989, Deleuze’s reading of Melville’s universe seems a little different. Melville is not presented by Deleuze as being confronted with small nations asphyxiated by empires. On the contrary, America is a great nation, and Deleuze accentuates its nature as a place of universal immigration. Moreover, according to Deleuze, the political programs of the founding fathers have transformed America into a “wall of loose, uncemented stones”,⁵ a nation without cement or without an accomplished configuration. The diabolic forces from the outside that knock on the door of American communities of celibate people are not there any longer, as they were in Kafka.

Fiction or Fabulation?

Nevertheless, can we see in Deleuze’s approach to both Kafka and Melville a similar understanding of the fabulative function? Although the concept of “fabulation” is not present in Kafka—Towards a Minor Literature, is it possible to assign the same prophetic role to Kafka’s celibate characters and to those created by Melville?⁶ Are they similarly described as legending in flagrante delicto (“en flagrant délit de légender”) a missing people? To answer these questions, we would need a parallel reading of both Kafka and Melville. It would be necessary to make the contrast between, on the one hand, Kafka’s characters (either the K. function in the news, or the celibate whom we find everywhere in the novels) in their lines of flight, their deterritorializations, their becomings-animal, and, on the other hand, Melville’s originals, all schizophrenics, all catatonics, all hypochondriacs of the America of immigrants in their becoming-mineral, in their becoming-stone. This is an impossible task, at least for the scope of this chapter. It would require another complete line of research. We will rather try another strategy. We prefer to take some paradigmatic cases and turn them into objects of experimentation. This experimentation needs to be at the same time critical and clinical. It concerns the meaning of the relation, for Deleuze, between the becoming process of some characters and the work of fabulation that constitutes them as literature.

This is the case with Kafka’s only character that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, has failed his fate of becoming-animal. We think of Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis and of his similarity to Bartleby. Should we not see in Bartleby’s catatonia and anorexia the same failed becoming as in Gregor Samsa’s process—the way it was diagnosed by Deleuze and Guattari both in Kafka and in A Thousand Plateaus?⁷ And, in this case, are we then not confronted with a paradox?

Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis is the culmination of a false becoming, of a re-Oedipalized becoming. Gregor dies because he does not break with the maternal figure in his incest with his sister. On the contrary, Bartleby does not die because of a failed becoming but due to a becoming that succeeds, that reaches its own perfection: the becoming-mineral, the becoming-stone, stone among stones in a free stone wall. In fact, Bartleby’s becoming is always regarded by Deleuze not as a sick culmination but as the creation of a new health, one that implies the invention of a people. Bartleby’s delirium is precisely presented as the extreme case of the creation of health, and Melville’s work (as long as it invents a celibate people, a people of original beings) is the accomplishment of literature’s ultimate goal: “The ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life”.⁸ In this sense, Bartleby is “the doctor of a sick America, the Medicine-man”,⁹ who turns his own becoming-mineral, from his total exhaustion, from his limit silence, into the experience of a new health. This new health, because it depends on this process of invention of a missing people, is the effect of literature: “Health as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people who are missing”.¹⁰ This is the last performative dimension of the formula: to invent a health as writing, as designing of a missing people.

Now, how can we understand the striking similarity between Gregor Samsa’s and Bartleby’s becoming? And what may the most extreme opposition of their effects on life mean, the absolute contrast between Gregor’s unstoppable disease (Gregor transformed into a necrotic insect) and the invention of a new health in Bartleby (in his delirium of a community of men without references or preferences)? Even if leading to opposite fates, are these two becomings similar processes?

Becoming and Deterritorialization

It is true that Gregor’s becoming is formulated, from the beginning, as the effect of an Oedipus returning, of the incest with his sister, while Bartleby is the man of transversal relationships, of the community of brothers. So, for Deleuze, Bartleby does not belong to the fight against psychoanalysis.¹¹ On the contrary, Deleuze presents The Metamorphosis as the practical rebuttal of an analytical transfer. The case of Gregor is the epitome of a re-Oedipalization. Gregor’s process of becoming-animal suffers a break by his sister’s crisis of jealousy toward the portrait of the Lady with the furs that Gregor insists to keep. At the moment she starts emptying Gregor’s bedroom,

he sticks to the portrait, as if to a last territorialized image. In fact, that’s what the sister cannot tolerate. She accepted Gregor; like him, she wanted the schizo incest, the incest of strong connections, the incest with the sister in opposition to the Oedipal incest, incest that gives evidence of a nonhuman sexuality as in a becoming-animal. But, jealous of the portrait, she begins to hate Gregor and condemns him. From that point on, Gregor’s deterritorialization through the becoming-animal fails; he re-Oedipalizes himself through the apple that is thrown at him and has nothing to do but die, the apple buried in his back.¹²

The diagnosis of Deleuze and Guattari leaves no doubts: Gregor’s becoming-animal was a failed process; he was a victim of the Oedipus returning. But is the incest with his sister just fake? Is Gregor not engaged in a political becoming too, as much as Bartleby is? Is he not also engaged in bureaucratic, territorial, historical fights? Unlike Bartleby, Gregor is a family man, a man of the ethos. However, as much as Bartleby, Gregor is a bureaucratic man too. In his becoming, he will lose all his possessions; he will become a stranger in his own house, an ungrateful host whom one needs to annihilate and make disappear. What will be destroyed by Gregor’s becoming-dispossessed is the trio of the polis as an organized system of work, the oikos as a way to submit oneself to the polis, and the ethos as the place where this submission takes place. As a bureaucratic man, Gregor was part of the logic of the polis according to which oikonomia is the maintenance of the ethos: “Gregor had earned so much money that he was able to meet the expenses of the whole household and did so”.¹³

Deleuze and Guattari recognize this historical and global background of Gregor’s relationship with his family: “One discovers behind the familial triangle (father-mother-child) other infinitely more active triangles from which the family itself borrows its own power, its own drive to propagate submission, to lower the head and make heads lower. Because it’s that that the libido of the child really invests itself in from the start: by means of the family photo, a whole map of the world”.¹⁴ It is in this sense that Gregor’s becoming-animal has the meaning of a radical insubordination, which constitutes the condition of a line of flight. The escape or line of flight appears at the precise moment when the comic expansion of the Oedipus reveals the oppressor triangles: “To the inhumanness of the ‘diabolical powers’, there is the answer of a becoming-animal: to become a beetle… ‘head over heels and away’, rather than lowering one’s head and remaining a bureaucrat, inspector, judge or judged. All children build or feel these sorts of escapes, these acts of becoming-animal”.¹⁵ It is this becoming-animal that happens with Gregor. And this becoming is much bigger than a fight against the father, much bigger than an Oedipal delirium. This becoming occurs “not to flee his father but rather to find an escape where his father didn’t know to find one, in order to flee the director, the business, and the bureaucrats, to reach that region where the voice no longer does anything but hum: ‘Did you hear him? It was an animal’s voice, said the chief clerk’ ”.¹⁶

For Deleuze, in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, there are thus two effects of the Oedipus’s political development. On the one hand, and by a derivation a contrario, one unveils in the family triangle a submission to other triangles that are in the family triangle itself. On the other hand, and by a derivation a fortiori, one discovers a becoming-animal as tracing its own way out, its lines of flight from the double-chain submission, in a world-historical movement.¹⁷

The Metamorphosis, therefore, shows both the submission of the family’s original triangle to the diabolical powers (bureaucratic, capitalist, fascist) and, correlatively, the escape of one of its members by a becoming-animal. The historic-global dimension is constituted in three stages. “First, the director who comes to menace and to demand; then the father who has resumed his work at the bank and who sleeps in his uniform, demonstrating the external power that he is still in submission to as if even at home he was ‘only at the beck and call of his superior’ ”.¹⁸ Finally, we have the rental of part of the house and a complete service offered by the family to the three bureaucrats-lodgers who “penetrate the family itself, taking up its roles, sitting ‘where formerly Gregor and his father and mother had taken their meals’ ”.¹⁹ On the other hand, simultaneously, the escape from that situation is Gregor’s becoming-animal. This becoming is the trace of the possibility of a line of flight from the family triangle, but mostly it is an escape from the bureaucratic and commercial triangle. The effect that this deterritorialization has for the rest of the family is most terrifying. As much as Bartleby’s, Gregor’s becoming shakes everything that surrounds him. Thus, there are two parallel events: Gregor’s becoming to death and his family deterritorialization.

The Concept of Becoming Between Politics and Ethics

As a result of his becoming-animal, Gregor had to die by necrosis. But what about Bartleby’s fate? Is Bartleby’s dying in jail, perishing by catatonia, by anorexia, and by becoming-mineral very different from that of Gregor? Back to our question: despite all these similarities between Gregor’s becoming-animal and Bartleby’s becoming-mineral, may we grasp a change in Deleuze’s thought? And in which theoretical field does this change take part? These questions refer back to a fundamental problem, the one that focuses on the possible existence of a Deleuzian politics. And here we need to discuss with Jacques Rancière.

In his commentary on Deleuze’s Bartleby, Rancière shows that no politics can result from the indifference of the preference or from the celibate characters’ becomings. According to Rancière, the big picture of a new political experience that can be found in Deleuze’s text on Bartleby is the wall of free stones. It is “one of the last of the great, strong images that Deleuze has left us”.²⁰ Yet, this image blocks the political and liberating function of literature, because the utopia and the hope that Deleuze had toward Bartleby as the Confidence Man of the American world finally appear to be weakened by this image of the wall. It is an image that confronts Deleuze with the possibility of Flaubert’s quietism or with an indifferentism. The question thus becomes: how can Bartleby, the indifferent, constitute a fraternal community?²¹ Rancière can do nothing but denounce what he considers to be the displacement of the political toward a metaphysics of the multitude and a dramaturgy of the feast. “Under the mask of Bartleby, Deleuze opens to us the open road of comrades, the great drunknness of joyous multitudes freed from the law of the Father, the path of a certain ‘Deleuzism’ that is perhaps only the ‘festival of donkeys’ of Deleuze’s thinking. But this road leads us to contradiction: the wall of loose stone, the wall of non-passage. We do not go on, from the multitudinous incantation of Being, toward any political justice. Literature opens no passage to a Deleuzian politics. There is no Dionysian politics”.²²

The question cannot wait: in the concepts of “fabulation”, of “missing people”, of “becoming”, of “converging incompossible worlds”, are we dealing with a Dionysian politics? Or, more radically, is there a politics whatsoever? Is the difference between Gregor’s and Bartleby’s becomings the key that may allow us to suspect a decisive displacement in Deleuze’s thought on the relation between literature and life? And this relation between literature and life, is it an event that belongs to the sphere of politics? Between the book on Kafka (1975) and text on Melville (1989), is there any significant difference in Deleuze’s concept of life? Also, is this concept of life still the case of the polis?

Apparently, Gregor and Bartleby provide a fabulative configuration similar to the writer’s becoming during the act of writing: Gregor by a becoming-animal, by a line of flight from the familial, economic, and bureaucratic territories; Bartleby by a becoming-mineral, by a becoming-a-any-singular, a being without qualities, an Original, in relation to a first inhumane nature. Why then does Deleuze take Gregor’s death as a failed becoming, and Bartleby’s death as the invention of a new health? Why does Deleuze see no effect of fabulation, no invention of a missing people in Gregor’s becoming-animal, while he proclaims, in Bartleby’s becoming-mineral, the happy consequence of the invention of a new community to come?

Perhaps, it is necessary to transform the way by which Deleuze uses Bartleby’s formula: as an imperative not political but, rather, ethical. This means revealing Bartleby’s fabulation in its whole as the assertion not of new forms of power but of new forms of possibility and even of unpower. The formula is ethical because, being both a performative and a cognitive disjunctive synthesis, it simultaneously raises the lack of a preference in the plane of action and the presence of an incompossibility of divergent series in the plane of a presentation of the world. In its performative condition, the formula can be read as the abyss of the categorical imperative, not only in its Kantian but also in its Nietzschean version. The formula does not aim for the universal in the exemplarity, nor does it pose the will’s infinity into the affirmation of the eternal return.

This ethics, both non-Kantian and non-Nietzschean, does not exempt a cosmology. As a voyance the formula refuses Kantian humanity as a cosmopolitical fact. Against Nietzsche, the formula does not see the individuality in the consequence of the cosmic repetition. The formula gives access to a vision of a world. It opens to a clairvoyance of a chaosmos. Nevertheless, this chaosmos, because it is crossed by a plane of consistency of divergent series, can give nothing but imperatives that are non-politics, non-cosmopolitics, and non-preference.

As with all imperatives, Bartleby’s formula does contain a vision of a people and of a world. It has in itself an infinite fabulative power. But the world and the people given by the formula do not belong to the daily experience that could mimetically be transposed into literary expressions. It is a world and a people only accessible to the clairvoyance of a fabulative character. Bartleby’s visions and auditions alone can make it real, either on the pragmatic plane as annihilation of any preference and of any choice by the person who enunciates the formula, or on the metaphysical plane as the production of an incompossible world’s resonances. So, in our point of view, when Deleuze says that Bartleby’s formula “poses the impossible” (“pose de l’impossible”), it is precisely to express this double reality, both pragmatic and metaphysical. The formula poses both an impossible people and an incompossible world. From the book on Kafka to the text on Melville, we can see a Deleuzian displacement from politics to ethics, from a theory of power/unpower to a theory of possible/impossible. Thus, the big question about the relation between literature and life has been moved.

Notes

1.In this chapter I address similar issues as in Catarina Pombo Nabais, Gilles Deleuze: Philosophie et Litérature (Paris: Harmattan, 2013), pp. 400–9.

2.Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 89–90.

3.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 4.

4.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 4.

5.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 86.

6.Cf. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, pp. 85–90.

7.Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, pp. 13–15, 22, 30, 36–40, 46, 51, 59, 67–8. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum Press, 1987), pp. 34, 214 and 243.

8.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 4.

9.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 90.

10.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 4.

11.The text on Bartleby inaugurates a new style of the criticism of psychoanalysis within Deleuze’s work. This text is the first step of a “spiritualization” of this criticism. Kafka and Bene belong to the first moment of the overthrow of psychoanalysis, but they remain too committed to political and representative premises. The character of Bartleby is opposed to psychoanalysis in a new way: he introduces the concepts of soul and spiritualization. The great reversal is carried out by the annihilation of any will, of any preference, but also and especially by the annihilation of any reason or rationality. Bartleby is the Excluded from reason, and he is without preference; he is a soul that survives only in the confidence in a community to come. The theme of the overthrow of reason’s faculties and of all preference beyond the faculties will be thought of, with Beckett, as the topic of spiritualization. Beckett will bring about the radicalization of this novelty. But already in “Bartleby or the Formula”, Deleuze works on the themes of image, silence, and spirit.

12.Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 15.

13.Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), p. 98.

14.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 11.

15.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 12.

16.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 13.

17.“To become-animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs” (Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 13).

18.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 14.

19.Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 14.

20.Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words. The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 161.

21.Cf. Rancière, The Flesh of Words, pp. 160–2.

22.Rancière, The Flesh of Words, p. 164.

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum Press, 1987.

Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir. London: Everyman’s Library, 1993.

Rancière, Jacques. The Flesh of Words. The Politics of Writing. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

7 Affective Politics and “Crisis”

The Examples of the HIV-Positive Women’s Public Denouncement and of the Refugees’ Confinement

Sotiria-Ismini Gounari

Introduction

The affective political aspect of the so-called crisis in Greece, namely of the period from 2008 onwards that was characterized by deep economic recession, austerity measures, and an abrupt fall of the population’s living standard, could be an object of long-term research on its own. This research could not but be interrelated with the affective turn in social sciences. Through this intellectual path, the work of various thinkers during the past two decades has led us to consider how the changes in the technological, symbolic, material, and political conditions of our times transmute our preconscious ability for action. In this context, affect is a continuous plane of bodily reactions. Emotions can only be extracted from it as one conscious part.¹ Consequently, the affect of “crisis” is a very broad subject that could not be covered completely in a chapter like this. What will concern us here is that part of affect that was expressed in two examples of political management, characteristic of a conservative flow that followed the consolidation of the “crisis” regime.

During the first outburst of “crisis” in Greece, a period characterized by the emergence of the economic recession and its harsh realities, there emanated certain policies that aimed at managing collective emotions. A characteristic example was the famous statement made by the then vice president of the government, attributing responsibility and therefore guilt to the whole population for having collectively “eaten” [sic] the money missing from the public repositories.² Then, after the appearance and decline of a movement of resistance, based upon indignation and expressed in the occupation of central squares and demonstrations, new endeavors to regulate collective feelings were made. April 2012, a month before the elections that would replace the transitional appointed government with an elected one, and two months after violent clashes around the parliament, was a time that marked a turning point in the extent of irrationality of political discourse. Collective feelings were now attributed by means of separating from the ample population’s spectrum those that did not represent an indeterminate responsibility for the “crisis” misfortune, but a specific menace: illness. Two sources of danger for public health were constructed, to which the diffuse social guilt could now be directed: HIV-positive women and refugees.

In analyzing these two examples, I will attempt to consider their nomadic aspect, or otherwise the aspect of resistance against governmental management, through the exercise of a sort of minor politics. First, I will make an overview of the theoretical tools that will serve the present analysis, and I will then turn to the examples, attempting to examine them through these lenses.

Affect

A thing … is never separable from its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior.³

In his second monograph on Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze defines a body not as a subject, a form, or an essence but as an abstract element characterized by its modes. By “modes” he refers to the relations of movement and rest of the particles making up that body, as well as the affects of which it is capable. Affect, in this context, is the trace of change in a body’s condition when it is subject to other bodies’ influence. It indicates the condition of changing, through which the body switches to greater or lesser perfection under an external or internal influence. This change can be either an increase or a diminution of the body’s power to act.⁴ Hence, any body is defined by its affective capacity, meaning its capacity to connect and to interact with its external environment, to influence and to be influenced. What a body designates is by no means restricted to an organic entity; it may as well refer to any assemblage, such as an idea, a multitude, a crowd, a city, or a social group.⁵

Although definitive of our desires and actions, affects take place on the unconscious level of social and individual interaction, in contrast to feelings, which are conscious bodily and mental reactions. They are additionally distinguished from feelings in that they stress in-betweeness and multiplicity, whereas feelings concern distinguishable, individual actors who are their bearers. Following from this, if affect refers to interaction, if people cannot but be always defined in relation to their environment, the notion of affect resists the consideration of the subject as a self-sustained element, as it is considered in the view of political liberalism.

In addition to perplexing the distinction between self and other, interior and exterior, affect also perplexes the separation of discourse as the immaterial field of power’s exercise and body as the material field where power is experienced. According to Spinoza, whatever is an act of the soul is necessarily an act of the body, and affect is exactly the point where these two levels meet. Therefore, affect and the emotions that constitute its traces are both immaterial and material in the sense that they implicate both thinking, as one of their sources, and body, explicit bodily expressions, indistinguishable from their mental counterparts—for example, anxiety as indistinguishable from a stomach ache and the opposite, fear as indistinguishable from a shrinkage of the body and so on.

By setting the ground for the affective theoretical turn in the contemporary era, affect is capital’s object of capture par excellence. Bodies’ affective ability is scrutinized and managed as it is transformed into the principal means of production.⁶ Guattari reinforces this view when he says that Integrated World Capitalism is no longer based on political economy but, crucially, lies in the field of subjective economy, one that is in turn based on affect,⁷ namely the people’s power to act and interact.

Nomadism Against the State

Nomadism, as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari, offers us a view of affect, positing it in a theoretical model with explicitly political dimensions. First, let us see how nomadism is conceived. Nomadism is a war machine that opposes the State apparatus. It opposes, in this way, the work of internalization, adherence to a territory, the possession and striation of space, and the sedentary force of gravity. Nomadism, contrary to the State, is based on perpetual movement and transposition from one territory to another, on decoding the relation to the ground, or, in other words, on deterritorialization. Through its hostility to striation and stabilization, it creates smooth space. Striation designates something analogous to the enclosure of space—be it material or immaterial—while smooth space permits the circulation of flows.⁸

The opposition of these two concepts corresponds, as the two thinkers famously note, to the difference between chess and the Japanese game of Go. Chess proceeds through coded roles and movements—each pawn being capable of specific, unchanging moves—and functions through semantics. On the other hand, Go, corresponding to nomadism, operates through undistinguished, non-coded pawns that have the same shape but are capable of any movement as long as they have assumed a suitable position.⁹ The State apparatus is linked to philosophy and is mutually reinforced by the transcendental conceptions of Truth and Right, which it emits for its part, to strengthen dominant modes of thinking, namely common sense. It favors stabilization and reinforces the concept of identity. On the contrary, nomadism favors minor, dynamic, and immanent external ways of thinking, penetrated by flows and emitting forces and intensities. It assumes thought is pathos and becoming.¹⁰ It indicates the process of constant movement, mutation, and transformation.

Nomadism and the State apparatus correspond to different passions. The former corresponds to affects, which are always relational, external to themselves, and assume a free action model. In this context, affect is the active discharge of emotion and has a weapon-like, projectile function. On the contrary, the State apparatus corresponds to feelings, namely retarded, resistant emotions, which are introverted and find their limit in the resistance of matter. In this context, feelings have a tool function and presuppose a work model. They confront the resistance of matter, whereas affects are related to “speed and to compositions of speed among elements”.¹¹ On the one hand, there is the coding and introceptive function of State feelings, confining a mutliplicity to itself, and on the other, there is the externalizing, decoding function of nomadic affects permitting and propelling a body to interact with its environment. In the light of nomadism, what we commonsensically understand as individual action is proved an illusion since we are always an in-between: “a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding-outwards of affects”.¹²

As a process of perpetual mutation, nomadism is closely linked to the concept of becoming developed by the two thinkers. Becoming is the process bringing multiplicities in contiguity, effecting a new multiplicity, in other words, a new field of differences and singularities.¹³ In contrast to the transcendental notion of Being, which in turn corresponds to the State mode of functioning and thinking, becoming is the process corresponding to nomadism, as it refers to constant change and is irreducible to sameness and the stability of the identical. Becoming is itself a multiplicity that constantly transforms itself to other multiplicities,¹⁴ so becoming and nomadism are both processes of perpetual mutation. Nomadism is effectuated and always combined with processes of becoming, as they both share the power of deterritorializing dominant identities and dominant ways of thinking and being in the world.

Micropolitics

Before attempting to make use of the aforementioned notions to offer a political analysis of specific spatiotemporal events and their contexts, the concept of micropolitics also needs to be considered. In their conceptualization of micropolitics, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two levels of social life: the molar and the molecular. The first one is the level of representation, where all identities, roles, and expectations of sociality are segmented and projected, and the second is the level of affective and desiring flows, where intimate and unnatural connections, conjunctions, and disjunctions occur. This distinction replaces the traditional distinction between the individual and the collective that we have already seen being questioned when reflecting upon affect. The molar and the molecular are distinct without being opposed to each other, and the micropolitical is exactly the realm where these two levels intersect and interact.¹⁵

The molar is the level of social interaction perceivable through usual cognitive means, where social and political activity takes place and where the great social organizations are formed, rigidly distinguishing and separating identities and activities, functions and roles. Everyone has a particular place in great molar distinctions, which can be binary (such as man or woman, child or adult), linear (as school, army, work), or concentric (as the core of individuality, city, country, the world). It is through these segments that power mechanisms in our modern societies mutually reinforce each other, all resonating in a single point, the unified center of the State. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari: “the State apparatus … is the assemblage that effectuates the abstract machine of molar overcoding”.¹⁶ On the contrary, the molecular level is where minuscule operations within and between people and between people and their natural and artificial environments take place, escaping these segments. These operations are flow movements and cannot be perceived through usual means of cognition. This is where affective interactions take place, operating below the threshold of perception and regardless of the will of the supposedly conscious social actors. Deleuze and Guattari refer to aggregates of the perception or feeling type that correspond to the molar rigid segmentarity, and to the unconscious micropercepts and affects corresponding to molecular, supple segmentarity.¹⁷

The social realm is emanating from the affective level and, therefore, contrary to common sense beliefs, it is not guided by individual or collective actors that are in control of the situation, but by affects flowing underneath, besides, parallel to the supposedly rational political field of actions and decisions. Suggesting that the political field is determined by affective flows created on the unconscious level first of all implies a disestablishment of the notion of the sovereign subject and its intentionality and free will, and a subsequent conceptualization of collective entities, or rather assemblages and multiplicities, as the agents of the political realm.¹⁸ Moreover and importantly, it means linking intimate emotions and affects with the active exercise of politics. This view prevents and opposes the transcendental conception of politics that places each and every different political aim beyond the personal, individual, or micro affects and desires. In fact “there is no rupture between the personal and the political”¹⁹ since the political and the social molar segments determine the supposed-to-be-personal psychic life in a fundamental way, and the political life is in its turn importantly dependent upon psychic phenomena.

In this way, we are propelled to think about politics beyond its classical conception. Although it does have its own importance, the level of molar politics, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the most superficial realm of social activity. The current form of molar politics and of State governmentality attains a reactive nature in its work, as it aims at stabilizing and fixing the social field of free differences and becomings. What is crucial is the molecular level, which is taken over by either liberating or repressive lines and trends, without us being totally aware of the way in which this is done. This is not to say that the molar realm is not definitive of social life. Molecular movements are never separable from the status of the great social formations, the molar level, to which they return, reshuffling its rigid segments.

But it is when individuals and groups deviate from the majoritarian, dominant norms and molecular desire is escaping molar segments that the forms constituting the sociopolitical field may be subverted. It is a revolutionary becoming of people, societies, and individuals that is at stake, rather than a revolutionary capture of the State as posited in traditional Marxist-inspired politics.²⁰ I will now turn to the example of Greece during the “crisis” era, to consider some ways in which the State apparatus was consolidated by rigidifying molar segmentarity, through the production of reactionary affects and finally the counter movements to this consolidation.

“Crisis” as Decoding and Recoding: The Example of Greece

Defining the era of capitalist recession as crisis, strictly speaking, reconfirms the normality status attributed to the situation that preceded it, namely robust capitalism, and its mode of production of goods and subjectivities. It postulates the provisional and exceptional character of the described situation, which will inevitably be surpassed. Hence, the term will only be used for its comprehensibility, in an attempt to overcome its obviousness.

The Greek recession era covered by the notion of “crisis”, in all its severity, constituted a deep mutation of social relations within the country’s boundaries, as well as in their relation to its exterior. Let us only refer to masses of people losing their jobs, both in the public and the private economic sector. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, one could suggest that flows of people were deterritorialized from the work regime. Educated middle class youth leaving the country and people of every class losing their houses and entering the streets are only examples of these decoded flows that started to circulate under the effect of austerity measures. Given the important role played by the work model regarding the State apparatus mode of organization, we can deduce the deep consequences of such movements.

If we consider the proposition of Gabriel Tarde—a sociologist whose ideas influenced the conception of the molecular level in Deleuze and Guattari—that every flow is a flow of belief and desire, should we not relate these unprecedented deterritorialized flows with a simultaneous mutation in social beliefs? The “indignant” movement, a movement of occupation of central squares that lasted several months, was a characteristic trace of this kind of change. People gathered on the basis of their shared situation, and besides the multiplicity and irreconcilability in political stances and views expressed, what was apparent was a mistrust of the traditional political form of parliamentary democracy as effected by its deputies, namely the political parties. People occupied central squares for several months, while discussions were held in assemblies that experimented with anti-hierarchical ways of decision making. This movement, along with the violent riots that accompanied it and culminated some months later, in February 2012, at the moment of the voting on the second package of austerity measures, expressed a refusal to conform to the dominant forms of governance and the deep and devastating effects they seemed to bring about. Anger and indignation were the apparent emotional expressions of this struggle. One would not be wrong to claim that there were lines of flight escaping the people’s belief and trust in the State. Failing to secure what it was supposed to, the welfare State could not be and was not considered to be the powerful source of meaning it had been until then. Desire was necessarily being disassembled from the codes that used to organize it on the molar level during the regular function of the axiomatic of capital. The State, as a mode of realization of the latter, was becoming destabilized by the flows that were leaking from the segmentarities in which it resonated until then. By this we mean all social segments, namely separations of all kinds, of which gender, race, class, and age are only some examples. Deterritorializing flows derived from both the unintended event of life depreciation and the intended and conscious event of the aforementioned struggles.

However, processes of deterritorialization are never pure; they are always followed by relative or more severe reterritorializations.²¹ The State apparatus is an internalizing mechanism not sparing in modes of overcoding, of segmenting and reterritorializing, of conjugating and obstructing lines of flight. These modes, in the case examined here, would be effectuated in many ways as, we would like to suggest, by undertakings of depreciation of people from minorities.

The HIV-Positive Women’s Public Pillorying

We will now attempt to examine two examples of political management that in our view constituted a turning point in “crisis” affectivity and its depressing, fascistic resonance. These two examples will then be considered and assessed in relevance to the political theoretical tools presented earlier.

29 April 2012

A young woman’s photograph fills the television screen. The reporter’s voice announces that this woman of Russian origin is HIV-positive and at the same time works as a prostitute. The news comes in the form of a warning to the audience against a danger that appears to threaten the clients of sexual services and, as a consequence, Greek society as a whole. On the following days, photographs of women like her—of Greek origin this time—proliferate in the news broadcasts, followed by the same rhetoric. The journalists invite possible clients of sexual services to get tested, while special call centers for further information, as well as examination centers, are being set up. All this is done in order to control the citizens’ health, which is threatened by the wave of HIV-positive women revealed by the police. These women are arrested and imprisoned, while, during their transportation to the court and prison, the policemen appear covered with gloves and masks, creating the image of sanitary menace, which is in full contradiction with the scientific facts concerning the conditions under which the virus can be transmitted. The issue is on the news, and these women continue to be reviled as a public threat. Their legal accusations concern the “intentional heavy damage” to which they allegedly exposed their clients. Only one year later was it revealed that there was never any evidence establishing that these women were sex workers.²²

Organizations for the de-stigmatization of HIV-positive people affirm that it would take long before the damage made in their effort has been retrieved. The stigma attributed to HIV-positive people, traditionally linked to male homosexuality, enhanced pervasive Greek homophobia. Four years after these incidents, one of these women committed suicide while imprisoned, and pictures of some of them can still be found on the internet. The fact that only women were targeted is of course related to and symptomatic of the patriarchal assumptions about sex-working in the context of the traditional Greek society.

The Refugees’ Confinement

1 April 2012

In their declaration on the news broadcast, Minister of Health Andreas Loverdos and Minister of Citizen Protection Michalis Chrisochoidis denote that the living conditions of the immigrants living in the country constitute a danger to public health, as the latter are bearers of transmissible diseases that plague their counties of origin. “Hygienic bomb ready to blow up” is the characteristic expression they use to describe the condition. Obligatory health tests for immigrants is the measure they propose. The declarations conclude with the announcement of the creation of detention centers preordained for refugees without legal papers.

4 August 2012

In the center of Athens, which is now empty due to the vacation period, a police mission ironically named “Xenios Dias”, the ancient Greek god of hospitality, begins, aiming at the removal of refugees without legal papers of residency from the city center. The mission is enormous, as it involves the abduction of more than ten thousand refugees, one-tenth of whom are considered illegal and are transferred to the detention centers announced by the ministers of the transitional government. In the following year, the mission is continued with a large number of people being subjected to police controls, on the basis of their skin color and their country of origin. One year later, reports of the Human Rights Watch, an international nongovernmental organization, observed a severe abuse of the rights of the prosecuted, with bodily violence and racist behavior constituting eminent elements of the mission.

As a consequence of these conditions, a large part of the refugees populations are imprisoned under dreadful conditions without having committed any crime, while another big part of them, who are supposed to be living in freedom, describe their living as commensurate with the condition of being confined, since the fear of police controls and of being assaulted and deported forces a lot of them to hide and to avoid moving around at inappropriate times.

One year after the launching of the detention centers and the prolongation of the confinement period to eighteen months, 700 refugees went on hunger strike, and some of them even attempted suicide.

Sad Affects and Minorities

What if we considered the ample population to which these undertakings were directed and to which these discourses were addressed as a body in the Deleuzian sense? How was this body affected through these enterprises? And how was this affect linked to the specific spatiotemporal coordinates in which it was incited? We will try to answer these questions by tracing affect in the obvious level of social interaction and perception, namely by analyzing social emotions. Bearing in mind the distinction between affect and feelings developed by the two thinkers, we have to take into account that affect, circulating on the molecular level of social interaction, is what overflows its conceivable correlate, the molar realm. We always perceive and infer it by the traces we detect on the latter.

The main emotions to which the state tried to direct the population’s affective condition can be summed up as follows: fear of infection with diseases for the ample population and fear of punishment for the “bearers of the threat”, shame and guilt for the supposed bearers as a result of the accusations attributed to them, and mutual hate on both sides. These emotional influences are classified, by Spinoza, as negative affects, namely affects that decrease or repress the body’s power to act.²³ According to him, sad affects are the very result of every such decrease in power. What is more, these influences seem to correspond exactly to the Deleuzo-Guattarian State-feeling model.

According to Guattari, a main task of every micropolitical analysis would be to acknowledge the processes of culpabilization and to point to the practices of the social attribution of guilt.²⁴ In fact, guilt seems to perfectly fit the kind of resisting emotions that correspond to the work model and the State apparatus. Guilt is confining the self to contemplating a past action that needs to be redeemed, thus forcing consciousness to put effort on elaborating the past behaviors and motives behind them. Judging future actions in the light of the alleged past mistake, the culpable is bound to watch out, not to repeat it, or even to examine the self for the existence of a possibly spiteful nature. The mistake could also be the result of a problematic mentality [sic] as implied in the journalistic discourses concerning the HIV-positive women. In their case, the attributed accusations of intentional heavy damage implied the actual will of the women to transmit the virus they carried. The issue was further developed in journalistic reports and discussions, where much stress was put on the question of whether or not the women actually knew that they carried the virus and on their intention to transmit it. The doctor of the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the main institution bearing scientific responsibility for the whole undertaking, commenting on the first woman who was arrested, made the following statement: “She told us she was diagnosed with the virus in Russia”. It is of no importance whether these discourses seemed to make sense or if they could easily be subverted—as they would be, as the exculpation of the accused was to show some years later. The active intention of these women to cause damage was crucial in the complete functionality of this media and public event in attribution of guilt.²⁵

“Hygienic bombs in the center of Athens” and “Terror for thousands of families” were some common titles in the press during that period, referring both to the refugees and the HIV-positive.²⁶ Along with these, the image of the policemen arresting the HIV-positive women covered with masks and gloves constituted verbal and non-verbal messages that were predestined to actually terrorize. Fear and terror have been well described as prominent feelings around which our societies and their claims for security are organized. It is the claim for security that necessitates fear. Fear as guilt is a feeling that concurs with the internalizing function of the State model. According to Deleuze and Guattari, fear is what makes us adhere to our molar segmentarities, what makes us reterritorialize and flee from the lines of flight that tend to carry us away. “The more rigid the segmentarity, the more reassuring it is for us”.²⁷ Fear of contamination distributed among the population was transformed into a fear that invited people to cling to molarities and to dominant systems of overcoding. “Make sure that you are not going to be contaminated, love your family, keep away from foreigners and their way of living” could be the essence of the terrifying messages.

Considering that affect constitutes a flow that penetrates individuals, rendering them points on its route, we could not make the distinction between the channeling of affect into sad feelings, namely the diffusion of a sense of danger, fear, and guilt, on the one hand, and a certain rational resistance against this, on the other. Affect is what blurs the distinction between the outside and the inside; as it does not derive from either one, it appears at the limit between two multiplicities, at the limit between the self and the others.²⁸ In other words, since selves are open interacting systems receiving and emitting flows and particles, there is no chance of preventing outward incentives from having an initial effect on us. It is only after incentives have touched us and affected us to one degree or another that we can react to these influences.²⁹

In addition, affect functions performatively, namely it comes into existence and acquires its substance the moment it is uttered, without being in a causal relation with the incentive attributed to it. This means that the truth claims of the governmental discourses, and their complete indifference to medical knowledge, were of secondary importance. Brian Massumi, in his description of anti-threat policies applied in the US during the past twenty years, shows how the construction of threatening factors lacks a factual base, in the vast majority of cases, while at the same time being absolutely real to the extent that it actually results in the circulation of the sense of danger. The sense of danger makes menace real and not the other way around, according to the doctrine “there could have been” (a real threat).³⁰ Similarly, in our case, guilt was not related to any real possibility of the population being contaminated by illnesses, but was attributed to the “bearers of the threat” perfomatively, that is, through their punishment, confinement, and public pillorying.

At a crucial moment in political life, when social discontent had become more than apparent, the minority groups of women, refugees, the HIV-positive, and indirectly gay men were recognized as bearers of danger, as appalling identities. A non-sovereign social group, a minority in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to it, is in all cases projected as menacing the general population. A minority, according to them, is by no means conceived of numerically, but is related to the abstention from a sovereignty status characterizing the majority. A majority, in turn, is the model that sets the normality standard and presupposes domination.³¹ The well-known historical affective investment of the minority political categories of women and refugees as mean and malicious was reinforced, giving a revitalizing boost to pre-existing sexism and racism. By contrast, the privilege of the majoritarian white male subject, namely the one that, in dominant modes of thinking, constitutes the point of reference for the assessment of these minorities, was confirmed.

Thus, the repressive segments of the great molar realm were recomposed, reproducing dominant modes of subjectivation, namely dominant modes of making sense of one’s self, and creating repressive affects.³² Linking minorities to sad affects meant striating the body of the population, by distinguishing its allegedly healthy and ill parts and capturing its affect in rigid molar segmentarities. Activating affect through suppressive paths meant diminishing the population’s capacity to act and react, to affect and be affected. Social affect as a nomadic potential—having opened radical paths of questioning the traditional political forms—would now be captured in the internalizing feelings of fear and guilt, organized around the denigration of minorities and the deterioration of their status. Resonating in molar segmentation, the State model could mutually be reinforced by the intensification and proliferation of binary hierarchized distinctions between the threatened and the threatening, the healthy and the ill, men and women, natives and foreigners, the minority and the majority.

Marginal Political Resistances, Nomadic Becomings

However, as nomadism in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari is a lurking force that opposes the State’s mechanisms and cannot fully be captured, there is also no reterritorialization or conjugation of deterritorialized and decoded flows without those flows forging ahead.³³ The performative and unintentional function of affect that has been noted does not mean that reactionary affective flows circulate without meeting obstacles or opposing affective flows running in parallel with or underneath them. There is always a part of affect that is not capturable, escaping and undermining the molar, State-feeling aggregates. There are always nomadic trends incarnated in processes of becoming, thoughts, beliefs, and affects on the molecular level, bearing the potential of stirring up the level of representation, which in our case had been taken over by reactionary discourse on the part of journalists and statepersons.

As we have already shown, whereas on the molar level of representation everything is defined in terms of subjects and forms, on the level of molecular flows, all that exists are bodies as abstract elements. On this level or plane, we are solely distinguished by the relations of speed and slowness, movement and rest of the particles that constitute us and by the degrees of power corresponding to these relations. A becoming occurs when different multiplicities are correlated, effecting different degrees of power, namely different affects. It is the process through which the affects of an assemblage connect with those of another, creating a new one, whose “meaning … is no longer that of words … matter is no longer that of forms … affectability is no longer that of subjects”.³⁴ Moreover, according to Deleuze and Guattari, becomings have an essentially liberating potential: all becomings are minoritarian,³⁵ molecular, deterritorializing, and nomadic. Consequently, becoming occurs when affects of a minority and a majority group, in the sense they have been considered, are exchanged and merged, creating a new flow, which decodes their molar binary distinction.

“Anything at all can do the job, but it always turns out to be a political affair. Becoming-minoritarian is a political affair and necessitates a labor of power (puissance), an active micropolitics”.³⁶ Whereas radical deviation from the norm is a process possibly occurring incidentally, a micropolitics deviating from and opposing the movements of political actors of the molar realm is what reinforces it. Given this, we will consider the resistance to the Greek governmental undertakings as possible minoritarian becomings. In other words, we will consider them as an attempt of parts of the population to conserve their capacity to act and react, to deterritorialize from the suppressing codes to which they were socially channeled and to turn them into radical, nomadic trends.

In the example of the HIV-positive women, a solidarity movement was constituted immediately: a number of nongovernmental organizations concerned with AIDS, feminist groups, and collectives as well as traditional leftist, autonomous, and antiauthoritarian political groups declared their opposition to the whole enterprise. Most were groups marginal to the mainstream political scene, so their resistance never reached the mainstream media. They emphasized the multiple power relations that were being reinforced or the severe violation of human rights, offering different kinds of analysis, depending on their modes of enunciation and their familiar discourses. Many of them focused on the experience of being a sex-worker in a deeply patriarchal society and on the sexist assumptions of the governmental undertaking and of the journalistic discourse. A collaborative demonstration was held in the center of Athens on the 6th of June 2012 to demand that the confined women be immediately released, while the “Solidarity Initiative for the HIV-Positive Persecuted Women” continued covering the issue by supporting the persecuted women legally and morally.

The denouncement of the HIV-positive women gave rise to feminist discourses and to the recognition that women as a minority group were struck unevenly by the “crisis”. This feminist counter-current took over a big part of marginal political groups. In fact, it constituted an instant, even imperceptible, becoming-woman of the marginal politics. For the part of traditional leftist groups, it meant a displacement from a traditional, stock analysis of power relations in exclusively economic terms, and at the same time it embodied an oppositional trend to the patriarchal nuances of mainstream public discourse. Conversely, the victimizing elements that appeared in some solidarity discourses concerning the experience of sex-working were an indication that the molar realm had taken over molecular movements and effected what Deleuze and Guattari term marginal reterritorializations. In the case of the refugees’ scapegoating and confinement, resistances occurred in a more fragmented way. Posters expressing opposition to the racist statements concerning the alleged illnesses of the refugees, texts condemning the confinement, and groups opposing the detention center treaty and theoretically associating it with the concentration camps appeared in a sparse way.

How could the resistances uttered in the marginal political scene in the aforementioned cases be assessed? Could the affects created in the exercise of this kind of micropolitics create new assemblages including both those showing solidarity and those being humiliated and confined, and if so, to what extent? At first, it should be noted that any resistance, however minuscule, to the so obviously irrational, sexist, and racist governmental undertakings could not but be seen as opening a passage against the obstruction of lines of flight taking place in all directions. In the same manner that Deleuze and Guattari refer to becoming as an amelioration of a problem, as opening a way previously blocked, we cannot but see these marginal voices as openings and as breaths of fresh air, circulating in the depressing, death-smelling atmosphere of the fascist-like recreation of molar segments.³⁷ Then again, it should be repeated that molecular affective flows can only be inferred by their traces on the conceivable level of social interaction, such as emotions. Becoming sensitive to the feelings of shame, guilt and impotence imposed on the HIV-positive and the refugees, the people participating in solidarity movements were able to let similar affects emanating from their part enter a new assemblage. Shame and guilt deriving from direct humiliation were assembled with shame for the subtle debasement signaled by the recession and its “exceptional” character and with the generalized sense of impotence, circulating upon the social field, thus creating a new assemblage, a line of resistance. Sad affects propagated by the governmental discourses were conquered and inflected to the extent that they were transformed to actively discharged emotions, or otherwise nomadic affects, which in their turn could be inferred from and traced in social emotions such as the anger expressed in the struggles against the general resonance of power rigidification. Considering the preceding discussion, it could be suggested that the solidarity movements did actually create instant minoritarian becomings. These formed lines of flight escaping the State and capitalistic reterritorializations, however minuscule these lines of flight might have been. However, incommensurable counter-currents and impasses were also apparent. Considering that, at the time of the incidents examined, the far-right party of Golden Dawn had entered the parliament for the first time, it was obvious that the diffusion of racism in society had rendered fear inescapable, that a rigid, active desire for repression was being formed, and that microfascisms were penetrating everyday life.

Conclusion

Attempting to draw a comprehensive picture of the incidents we examined here in all their complexity and contradictory tendencies returns us to the concept of micropolitics. At the intersection of the molar and the molecular level of affective social interaction, we can reflect on the molecular flows of resistant marginal politics and their capability of reshuffling the violent rigidification of molar segments affecting the population’s body. Their traces are admittedly not favorable to this conclusion. Despite the nomadic, molecular counter-currents of resistance, the depressing affect circulating in the social field became an irrefutable reality, overshadowing minoritarian becomings. The molecular level was captured by movements of the molar. In the preceding examples, we tried to indicate this by tracing affect, the capacity to interact, in the obvious social emotions of fear and guilt. We found that affective capacity, captured in these emotions, was coded and organized anew around rigid molar segmentation. Social interaction was once again coded around the common sense perceptions of hierarchized distinctions of gender and race. Power relations were confirmed and intensified, and the dependence of minorities in reference to the majority was rehabilitated.

Through the invigoration of rigid molar segmentarity and power relations, the State apparatus was simultaneously reinforcing and being reinforced by them, serving as their resonating center. The capacity of the State apparatus to internalize and appropriate, to recode and reterritorialize, either in the material space of the detention center or in the immaterial space of social rejection, was enhanced. Captured by the State’s gravitational and internalizing power, nomadic affects and becomings were obstructed, and individualization and consent to majoritarian recodings were presented as inevitable options in a strategy of overcoming what is commonsensically conceived as “crisis”.

Notes

1.Patricia Clough, “Introduction”, in The Affective Turn, eds. Patricia Clough and Jean Halley (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 2.

2.Minister Pagalos’s statement “We ate them all together” on the 21st of September 2010 became something like a motto of the politicians’ insensibility to their mismanagement and responsibility for the recession.

3.Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 125.

4.Deleuze, Spinoza, p. 49.

5.Deleuze, Spinoza, p. 127.

6.Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, “Value and Affect”, in boundary 2 26.2 (Summer 1999): 77–88.

7.Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 197.

8.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 380–7.

9.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 352–3.

10.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 380.

11.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 400.

12.Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2006), p. 135.

13.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 249.

14.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 249.

15.Guattari and Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, p. 179.

16.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 227.

17.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 213.

18.The English word “assemblage” does not successfully convey the meaning of the original notion of agencement used by the two thinkers in French. Agencement bears etymological implications of agency from the beginning.

19.Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, p. 150.

20.Paul Patton, “Deleuze’s Political Philosophy”, in The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, eds. Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 202.

21.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 303.

22.Ruins, directed by Zoe Mavroudi (Greece: Unite the Union, Union Solidarity International, 2013). http://ruins-documentary.com. Accessed 23/12/2016.

23.Benedictus de Spinoza, “Ethics”, in The Collected Writings of Spinoza, vol. 1 of 2 vols, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

24.Guattari and Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, p. 190.

25.Many articles considering the HIV-positive women and the progression of the issue the following years can be found on the following webpage: https://left.gr/orothetikes. Accessed 23/12/2016.

26.Anonymous, “Τρόμος για χιλιάδες οικογένειες–Στις 17 οι ιερόδουλες με AIDS” [“Terror for thousands of families–Up to 17 the prostitutes having AIDS”], Iefimerida.gr, 3 May 2012. www.iefimerida.gr/. Accessed 23/12/ 2016.

27.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 227.

28.Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame”, in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 76.

29.Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”, in Cultural Critique 31, Part II (Autumn 1995): 83–109, 90.

30.Brian Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat”, in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, pp. 54–5.

31.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 291.

32.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 209.

33.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 472.

34.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 258.

35.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 291.

36.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 292.

37.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 258.

Bibliography

Anonymous. “Τρόμος για χιλιάδες οικογένειες-Στις 17 οι ιερόδουλες με AIDS” [“Terror for thousands of families-Up to 17 the prostitutes having AIDS”]. Iefimerida.gr, 3 May 2012. www.iefimerida.gr/. Accessed 23/12/2016.

Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2006.

Clough, Patricia. “Introduction”. In The Affective Turn. Eds. Patricia Clough and Jean Halley. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 1–33.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Guattari, Félix and Suely Rolnik. Molecular Revolution in Brazil. Trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007.

Left.gr. “Orothetikes”. 2012. https://left.gr/orothetikes. Accessed 23/12/2016.

Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect”. In Cultural Critique 31, Part II (Autumn 1995): 83–109.

Massumi, Brian. “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat”. In The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 52–70.

Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt. “Value and Affect”. In boundary 2 26.2 (Summer 1999): 77–88.

Patton, Paul. “Deleuze’s Political Philosophy”. In The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze. Eds. Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 198–219.

Probyn, Elspeth. “Writing Shame”. In The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 71–90.

Ruins, directed by Zoe Mavroudi, Greece: Unite the Union, Union Solidarity International, 2013. http://ruins-documentary.com. Accessed 23/12/2016.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. “Ethics”. In The Collected Writings of Spinoza. Vol. 1 of 2 vols. Ed. and trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

8 Political Improvisation and “the Long March Through the Institutions”

Eugene W. Holland

The notion of a “long march through the institutions” was proposed by activist Rudi Dutschke in order to broaden both the locus and the aims of the 1960s student movement. The crisis that provoked the student movement to begin with was the Vietnam War, but as the aims broadened to target corporate capitalism and mass consumer culture, Dutschke argued that achieving anything more than ending an especially egregious imperialist war would require moving beyond a university-based, counter-cultural student movement and infiltrating society’s institutions so as to transform them from within. Although ending the war in Vietnam was a remarkable achievement in its time, it eliminated a symptom rather than providing a cure—having merely changed their stripes (with the passage from Fordism to neoliberalism), corporate capitalism and mass consumerism lurched toward their next major crisis: what we now call climate change. And although there is a growing number of social movements tackling climate change (ranging from EarthFirst! to Transitions), it is abundantly clear that swift and widespread transformation of existing institutions is required to adequately address the rapidly evolving crisis.

As I confirm in my book Nomad Citizenship, Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy is particularly well-suited to theorizing social movements that self-organize and operate autonomously from capital and the State.¹ Yet throughout their careers, both Deleuze and Guattari were deeply engaged in questions about institutions (Deleuze more theoretically, Guattari more practically, perhaps). And if the first volume of their collaboration seemed better-suited to militant social-movement activism, the second was categorical: the “struggle around axioms” was also of paramount importance.² So here, I want to extend the concept of nomad citizenship to individuals and groups operating within already-existing institutions. I take as my point of departure Althusser’s analysis of the ideological function of the institutions he called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), expanding it beyond State apparatuses to institutions in general, but also changing its basic parameters.³

Deleuze and Guattari’s fundamental agreements with Althusser are numerous: the attempt to salvage Marxism from Hegelianism by drawing instead on Spinoza; the “problematic” status of the economic as a virtual structure expressed and masked by actual solutions; the importance of the division of labor as social multiplicity (relative to class struggle); and the “becoming-necessary” of a mode of production as a result of machinic processes rather than a point of departure. Yet despite these fundamental areas of agreement, Deleuze and Guattari vehemently rejected the notion of ideology—even the new and improved version Althusser proposed, drawing on Lacan, in the famous essay on Ideological State Apparatuses. They rejected standard notions of ideology for overemphasizing cognition and ignoring the primacy of desire: ideology would be better construed as an instance of “believing is seeing”; people see what they want to see, what they desire. But Althusser’s Lacanian version of ideology centers precisely on desire: desire as desire of the Other. Althusser ingeniously redefines ideology as the constitution of the Subject through interpellation by what Zizek (following Lacan) calls the “big Other”—a composite and ultimately fictitious figure based on such real-life authorities as fathers, teachers, preachers, leaders, the police, and the boss. Crucial for Althusser is that all these figure-heads operate within various Ideological State Apparatuses, and these apparatuses all align to reproduce the capitalist mode of production, which is the core function of the modern State. While recognizing the preponderance of (usually State-run) school-systems in fulfilling this function, Althusser dramatizes the structure of ideology by staging a scene, as we all know, where the Subject emerges through interpellation by turning around when a police officer shouts “Hey you!”

Deleuze and Guattari would agree that a kind of chain of equivalence does indeed link the various figure-heads ranging from father to boss as Oedipal authorities, since the father’s authority within the Oedipus complex is itself derived from various forms of despotic authority within social institutions such as the church and the State to begin with. But what Althusser actually describes is not the ideological constitution of the Subject, but only of the citizen. This is most dramatically evident in the scene of interpellation with the policeman; but insofar as the function of ideology in all institutions is to reproduce (or challenge the reproduction of) the capitalist State, according to Althusser, what he indentifies as subjectivity is actually no more than citizenship. For subjectivity is in fact far more polymorphous than this: the subject qua child, sibling, student, worker, hobbyist, parent, and lifestyle-consumer don’t all align on the citizen-subject, which exists alongside them rather than subsuming them. The State is not, in other words, the “big Other” from which other instances of institutional authority derive, nor does it found or guarantee their coherence or alignment: just as much as the mode of production, the State only tends toward consistency or is always only becoming-necessary, as a result of machinic processes that are themselves disparate, heterogeneous, and multiple. (This is to say, in a very different idiom, that subjectivity is always radically “intersectional”.)

Yet schizoanalysis does not deny that the nuclear family contributes to the constitution of subjectivity. What schizoanalysis does deny is that the nuclear family is the only or even the most important factor in the formation of subjectivity: rather, the family operates along with other institutions; indeed, it serves to relay determinations from these other institutions to emergent subjectivity in its earliest stages of formation. And schizoanalysis also denies, perhaps even more importantly, the Oedipal precept that the relation to the father or the name-of-the-father is ultimately the most important axis of intersubjectivity within the nuclear family. For placing the Oedipal father at the core of the nuclear family privileges relations of obedience/disobedience to the Law in the constitution of subjectivity—precisely the relationship that is central to the Subject’s interpellation by the police and the other big Others in all of Althusser’s ISAs: State citizen-subjects either consent to or refuse to contribute to the reproduction of the mode of production at the behest of the State. (Notice that the relationship to the big Other and the binary alternative “obey/disobey” situates the father-relation predominantly in the Symbolic and Imaginary registers.) What is more, focusing on the father obscures relations with the mother, which Deleuze and Guattari consider far more important and more fundamental.

Originary maternal relations comprise not the binary alternative between obeying and disobeying, but an exceedingly complex admixture of pleasure and nourishment, of desire and need. They are part–object relations situated in the body, rather than whole–object relations defined by meaning and the Law. They are Real relations that subsist even while getting over-written in the Imaginary and Symbolic registers, and even when the placenta and then the breast get displaced by other, more worldly sources of nourishment and gratification, as the Subject moves beyond the breast and the nuclear family through other institutions such as school cafeterias, grocery stores, and restaurants, nightclubs, shopping malls, and online dating sites—each and every one of which contributes in some degree to the polymorphous or intersectional constitution of subjectivity.

Importantly, such institutions do so not by means of authoritative interpellation alone, but also by a process of “solicitation” or attraction that promises some measure and form of nourishment and/or gratification, however attenuated, sublimated, varied, or perverse. Grocery stores and restaurants, for example, both respond to the basic need for nourishment, but in differing admixtures of the satisfaction of real need, the gratification of interpersonal desire, and the sheer enjoyment of eating—distributed differently, of course, over the various subject-positions involved, ranging from the interpellation of the waiter by the boss, whom he obeys, to the satisfactions of working as a team (or a pack) with other members of the wait-staff, to the consummate enjoyment of the customers enjoying their meal—while also satisfying, at some level or remove, a real need for nourishment. So the originally “maternal” relations are not “pre-Oedipal” in any strict chronological sense: they remain in effect, as Real and as necessary, throughout life; in this sense, they are as much “post-Oedipal” as they are “pre-Oedipal”. But in a more important sense, they are an-Oedipal or anti-Oedipal: as part–object relations, they defy all logics of identity and unification, denying the (Imaginary) authority of the big Other, the (Imaginary) coherence of the Symbolic order—and any (equally Imaginary) alignment of institutions on the sole State function of reproducing the mode of production. In reality, then, the institutions Althusser calls “Ideological State Apparatuses” are neither ideological nor State-centric: what they constitute is not a State citizen-subject—or not only a State citizen-subject—but a polymorphous, intersectional, schizophrenic subject maintaining continuous, though continually changing, contact with the part–object Real, while also remaining subject to social inscription in the universe of meaning by myriad social groups and institutions.

Deleuze and Guattari’s views of both subjectivity and institutions thus differ substantially from Althusser’s. Althusser’s subject of ideology, the State citizen-subject, obeys or disobeys a paternal Other representing and enforcing the social-reproduction of the State, which is the principal function of social institutions construed as Ideological State Apparatuses. Deleuze, by contrast, draws on Bergson (in an early essay entitled “Instincts and Institutions”⁴) to consider institutions as “organized systems of means … of possible satisfaction” of Real instinctual needs or tendencies.⁵ Unlike the Law, which is a “limitation of actions”, institutions provide “positive model(s) for action”.⁶ But in humans, these models are well-nigh infinitely variable, to the extent that the instinctual tendencies practically disappear from view beneath the institutional variation:

This is the paradox of society: we are always talking about institutions, but we are in fact confronted by procedures of satisfaction—and the tendencies satisfied by such procedures neither trigger nor determine the procedures. Tendencies are satisfied by means that do not depend on them…. We come to the following conclusion: humans have no instincts, they build institutions. The Human is the animal decimating its species. Therefore, instinct would translate the urgent needs of the animal, and the institution the demands of humanity: the urgency of hunger becomes in humanity the demand for bread.⁷

Bergson thus provides Deleuze and Guattari a positive view of institutions as plural and open-ended means of satisfying Real needs, whatever their role in enforcing (or contesting) the reproduction of a mode of production may be. Bergson will, however, go on to critique a too-narrowly needs-based understanding of human institutions and society. For institutions focused on providing means of satisfying the needs of its members or the society of which they are a part necessarily exclude others from enjoyment of those means. They thereby function as parts of what Bergson calls a closed society, organized around us-vs.-them structures that prevent humanity in his view from achieving and sharing its full potential.

Deleuze offers two important modifications of Bergson’s position, one bearing on his definition of the problem, the other on his specification of a solution. Bergson’s proposed solution, it turns out, is even more narrowly subject-centered than Althusser’s definition of ideology: the “ant-hill” morality of social obedience characteristic of closed societies can be overcome only by following the exemplary morality of “exceptional men”—Bergson mentions “the saints of Christianity … the sages of Greece, the prophets of Israel, the Arahants of Buddhism, and others”—who differ not in degree but in kind from ordinary men.⁸ Now there is much to recommend this second morality, whose basis in imitation, contagion, and inspiration aligns it with nomad social relations and with the sociology of Gabriel Tarde favored by Deleuze and Guattari. In particular: “The generality of the one [ant-hill morality] consists in the universal acceptance of a law, that of the other in a common imitation of a model”⁹—and we know that Deleuze prefers institutions to laws because the former provide positive models of action for satisfying human tendencies or needs. Yet even locating Bergson’s superior morality in institutions themselves rather than exceptional individuals is ultimately unsatisfactory.

Deleuze and Guattari return to the problems with this solution in A Thousand Plateaus, where they recast the “exceptional individual” (taking Bergson’s very term as their point of departure) as “the Anomalous” who functions “neither [as] an individual nor a species” but rather as the vocal cords of a collective assemblage of enunciation—in much the same way as a dark precursor gathers and focuses an invisible field of differential electrical charges onto the point of discharge in a visible bolt of lightning that completely transforms the field.¹⁰ Crucially, the Anomalous serves not as a spokesperson for the institution as it is actually constituted, but rather as an impetus for change: rather than occupy the institution’s stable center, it roams its borderlines and bifurcation points, registering and amplifying becomings that can transform the institution from within by connecting up with what lies without. The Anomalous as a kind of nomad authority-figure thus incarnates the virtual openness of institutions even when they actually appear to be closed.

Bergson attributes the closure of society and its insitutions, as I have said, to structures that restrict enjoyment of the means of satisfaction provided by institutions to the members of a given closed society and thereby exclude others. To this explanation of the problem of closed societies, valid for the broad sweep of human history with which Bergson is concerned, Deleuze and Guattari add an explanation specific to the psychodynamics of capitalist society, based on its repression of death.¹¹ As I have said, a given institution first appears in order to provide organized means of satisfaction of certain tendencies or needs, and in principle, it would disappear as soon as those needs were satisfied or when different and preferable means of satisfaction were found. And in fact, capital’s “constant revolutionizing of production” means that new and improved means of satisfaction are ever more rapidly being found or invented; yet capitalists refuse to let already-instituted and obsolete means of satisfaction die because, and for as long as, they are still yielding profits. Private appropriation of surplus artificially prolongs the life of institutions far beyond their period of true social value. This is one of the principal contradictions of capitalism highlighted by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (and by Marx in Volume 3 of Capital).

But that is not all: to this restrictive effect of the repression of death on capital’s investment in institutions there corresponds an equally retrograde and even more desperate investment in existing institutions on the part of labor. For those who work in a given institution, providing its specific means of satisfaction for others is their only means of securing other means of satisfaction for themselves, through the medium of the wage. Given the conditions of artificial scarcity and competition continually generated by primitive accumulation under capitalism, workers simply cannot afford to let their institutions die, even when new and improved means of satisfaction are possible, inasmuch as doing so would curtail or eliminate access to all means of satisfaction for themselves.

Especially under capitalism, then, institutions are imbued with what we might call a perverse instinct of self-preservation that exacerbates their closure. Although in a sense all human groups are self-organizing, social movements can be distinguished from institutions in that the former simply die out when the tendencies they were organized to satisfy no longer exist or the means the movement provided to satisfy them no longer suffice. Conversely, if the tendencies persist and the means provided continue to satisfy them, movements can become institutions—and they typically do so by fixing a certain organizational form and means-ends rationality in an explicit and more or less permanent structure (by means of a charter, for instance), and as often as not, by assigning specific individuals to more or less permanent positions of authority—regardless of the situation and of their cognitive and expressive capacity or incapacity in relation to it. Relative to a nomadic group or social movement, an institution runs the twin risks of (1) subordinating the pursuit of the aims for which it was founded to the preservation of the institution itself, and (2) sacrificing its flexibility in responding to novel events and changing circumstances to the maintenance of the established power structure and the power-status of its current appointees. The unusual organizational charter of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra offers an instructive middle-ground between nomadic self-organization and standard institutional organization: rather than appoint their conductor, artistic director, business manager, and so on, on a permanent basis, Orpheus selects whoever seems best suited to each position according to what piece they are preparing to perform, so that institutional authority in effect becomes nomadic, repeatedly and temporarily devolving to different members of the group in line with their differing expressive capacities in relation to the group’s changing repertoire.¹² The contrast with Orpheus is instructive precisely because institutions, as a rule, tend to lose such open-ended flexibility and responsiveness, and end up forfeiting their Real reasons for existing (viz. providing means of satisfaction) in order to perpetuate their existence for its own sake—tending thereby to become closed institutions.

This is where the nomadic authority or leadership of the Anomalous proves so valuable. If, as Bourdieu has argued, institutional authority is maintained largely through a habitus that limits humans’ improvisational capacities by tying perceptions and dispositions to the repertoire of standard operating practices that reproduce the power structure of the institution, the Anomalous on the contrary expands improvisational capacities by registering transformative becomings and engaging or inspiring others to do likewise. As Romand Coles has recently argued—and also demonstrated, through his experiments in community organizing at and around Northern Arizona University—improvisational skills can be developed through concerted training, thereby expanding the repertoire of institutional behaviors and generating “game-transformative” rather than merely reproductive practices.¹³

We could then say that nomadic authority, if such a thing is conceivable, rests with those Anomalous individuals and groups within an institution who register productive becomings and are thereby able to continually adjust its Real aims (besides or beneath self-preservation) to changing circumstances. What transforms mere institutional citizens into nomad citizens is their refusal to take the chartered norms of its standard operating practices as their reference, and their insistence on connecting even their institutional activities creatively with world-historical circumstances and events, instead. This very different and crucially broader horizon of reference involves making moves in institutional language-games that go beyond mere disobedience (as per Althusser) by experimenting with moves that change the rules of the language-games themselves, and thereby actually break institutional bad habits and create new ones, as Roberto Unger recommends in his program to “realize democracy”.¹⁴ One major impediment to the realization of democracy is precisely the transcendent structure of organization for the sake of self-preservation adopted by most institutions, which serves to fix its aims and practices, consolidate the Royal authority of those in power, and reduce flexibility and experimentation to almost zero, making the practices perversely serve the organization rather than the other way around. Nomad citizens, by contrast, strive to keep institutional organization and norms subordinate to aims and practices, and can do so by diminishing the ordinary moves by which closed institutions get reproduced in favor of extraordinary moves by which to transform them in light of ever-changing circumstances. Whether those circumstances are understood to center on neoliberal capitalism, patriarchy, racism, or some combination of those or others, there are always many reasons for and ways of enacting nomad citizenship—even in the institutions to which we are subjected every day, in the very heart of the beast. In this light, climate change—like the Vietnam War a lifetime ago—could serve as one designation for the circumstances that would induce nomad citizens’ sense of collective responsibility to address a world-historical crisis, and—hopefully—make us worthy of the event.

Notes

1.Eugene W. Holland, Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

2.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 471.

3.Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 127–86.

4.Glles Deleuze, “Instinct and Institutions”, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2004), pp. 19–21.

5.Deleuze, “Instincts and Institutions”, p. 19.

6.Deleuze, “Instincts and Institutions”, p. 19.

7.Deleuze, “Instincts and Institutions”, pp. 20–1.

8.Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1954), p. 34.

9.Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, p. 34.

10.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 243–4.

11.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); for more on the repression of death under capitalism, see my “Infinite Subjective Representation and the Perversion of Death”, in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.2 (2000): 85–91.

12.Harvey Seifter and Peter Economy, Leadership Ensemble: Lessons in Collaborative Management from the World’s Only Conductorless Orchestra (New York: Henry Holt, 2001); see also my Nomad Citizenship, especially pp. 65–6.

13.Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 7–12 and passim.

14.Roberto Unger, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (London: Verso, 2000).

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Penguin Books, 1971, pp. 127–86.

Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1954.

Coles, Romand. Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Instinct and Institutions”. In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2004, pp. 19–21.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Holland, Eugene W. “Infinite Subjective Representation and the Perversion of Death”. In Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.2 (2000): 85–91.

Holland, Eugene W. Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Seifter, Harvey and Peter Economy. Leadership Ensemble: Lessons in Collaborative Management from the World’s Only Conductorless Orchestra. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

Unger, Roberto. Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative. London: Verso, 2000.

9 Geophilosophy and Revolution in Gilles Deleuze

Mohamed Moulfi

Translated by Constantin Boundas

My purpose is to examine the theme of geophilosophy in relation to that of the revolution.¹ The couple “philosophy/revolution” is recurrent among philosophers. Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Georges Labica in his Karl Marx: The Theses on Feuerbach have drawn attention to it.² Even if the evocation is not so obvious in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the concept of geophilosophy appears to establish some correlation with the revolution. Then, it seems necessary to consider the arguments and theoretical resources they use to think about their homology and their common characteristics, beyond the intrinsic differences in their nature and function. It is in the chapter entitled “Geophilosophy” in What Is Philosophy? that such a relation is precisely and deeply sketched. By elaborating the pivotal concept of “becoming”, we will explain each aspect of the geophilosophy and the metaphorical effects associated with revolution.

Geophilosophy

Indeed, philosophy is Greek, as Jacques Derrida paradigmatically claimed in his discussion of the arguments resulting from Emmanuel Lévinas’s encounter with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, those two so-called Greeks: “The entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source”.³ So, philosophy has a certain beginning,⁴ an origin, but can we contend that the revolution has an origin too? As far as philosophy is concerned, J.-F. Courtine maintains that “Greece is the origin of philosophy, that is to say the landmark that reveals … its most secret ‘destination’ ”.⁵ The origin implies an orientation. Philosophers do have different views, and Deleuze and Guattari are among the first ones who do not believe “in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date…. [They] believe only in totalities that are peripheral”.⁶ This is a key divergence point. They explicitly specify that “even the first concept, the one with which a philosophy ‘begins’, has several components, because it is not obvious that philosophy must have a beginning, and if it does determine one, it must combine it with a point of view…. Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin with the same concept, they do not have the same concept of the beginning”.⁷ Do they come close to Friedrich Nietzsche, who believes that “Everything first-rate must be causa sui…. The last, thinnest, emptiest, is put first, as cause in itself, as ens realissimum”?⁸

However, beyond their proximity to Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari seem closer to Marx, the thinker of transition and revolution, conceived of as “a presentation of the infinite in the here and now, which includes nothing rational or even reasonable”.⁹ Is it there that the contingent process takes place? The question, therefore, is located at the moment of the encounter between the here and the now. Is not this Verbindung the moment of conjunction and association? At this level lies one aspect of the novelty of the approach of Deleuze and Guattari, also conceptualized by Althusser via Machiavelli.¹⁰ Is not this thinking about the origin of the myth and its mystical scope the preoccupation of most thinkers of that generation? Foucault also writes that “history also teaches us how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin”.¹¹

Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari do not speak about the destination of philosophy, its Bestimmung. For them, its invention crosses several continents; the confluences are plural because, as they explain, philosophy does not necessarily move from Greece to Europe through Christianity. It is rather “the contingent recommencement of a same contingent process, in different conditions”.¹² Following Jean-Pierre Faye in La raison narrative, they admit that a century was needed for the name philosopher, probably invented by Heraclitus of Ephesus, to find its correlate in the word “philosophy”, probably invented by Plato: “Asia, Italy, Africa, are odyssean phases of the route linking the philosophos to philosophy”.¹³ Such were the course and the peregrinations of philosophy.

We should retain the historical as much as the geographical landmarks in the path of philosophy. The effect of such a particular course is crystallized in three Greek traits: immanence, opinion, and friendship. With respect to friendship, first, let us say that it is the sign of the sense of hospitality and collaboration: since philosophy is Greek, philosophers themselves are strangers. Throughout the history of philosophy, as Hölderlin believed, the point was precisely to underline the inescapable history of Greek philosophy: “The ‘Autochthon’ for the Greeks is our ‘stranger’, that which we have to acquire, whereas our Autochthon is what, to the contrary, the Greeks had to acquire as their stranger”.¹⁴ Paradoxically, according to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy speaks to an internal necessity because it originates in the junction between the Greek milieu and the plane of immanence. It is the aleatory encounter of the friend and thought because, evidently, even the principle of reason, they maintain, is contingent to such an extent that universal history is nothing but contingency. I will not dwell further on this point, just as I will not insist on the expression of the free opinion of the friend or the rival.

So, what is the real contribution of the Greeks? Beside the fact that they invented an absolute plane of immanence, their originality rests on the intelligence of the relation between the relative and the absolute, so that “thinking consists in stretching out a plane of immanence that absorbs the earth”.¹⁵ What can we say except that “the transcendent produces an ‘absolutization of immanence’ through projection. But philosophy appeals to a completely different immanence of the absolute”?¹⁶

That is the first consequence of this theory. It is now possible to consider the first aspect of geophilosophy to be the exclusion of any attempt to integrate philosophy into other configurations of knowledge. This is why the assumption that, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Christianity made impresa the envelope of concetto is without consistency and even figurative or concealed. Deleuze and Guattari again ask the dreaded question and find explanations as different as they are contradictory. So the question “Is there a Christian philosophy?” implies that Christianity creates its own concept. This is how they explain the overthrow of the Greek logos through the Judeo-Christian discourse: “Transcendence enters as soon as movement of the infinite is stopped. It takes advantage of the interruption to reemerge, revive, and spring forth again”.¹⁷ Another aspect of geophilosophy can still be identified when philosophy sets in motion and gives rise to conceptual creation since it is useless “if it does not undertake to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage”.¹⁸ The new scene is the continued philosophical trinity: trace, invent, and create, whose effectuation, according to Deleuze and Guattari, occupies a pre-philosophical plane that it must trace (immanence). It must not only create and make live pre-philosophical characters (insistence) but it must also create philosophical concepts (consistency).¹⁹ This is the case with Chinese, Arabic, Jewish, Hindu, and other philosophies, which differ from the other autological conceptions of philosophy when they think the great movements of the unfolding that punctuate them. In fact, they think, with Plato, that the universals of contemplation measure the respective value of relative opinions when raising them to the status of knowledge. While Aristotle orients the dialectical research of problems toward the universals of communications (the topics), for Kant it is the selection or the sharing of opposed views through universals of reflection. As for Hegel, he uses the contradiction of rival opinions to get supra-scientific proposals that are able to move, to contemplate, to reflect, and to communicate within themselves and in the absolute.

However, Deleuze and Guattari refute the idea of an origin that assumes an internal unfolding that makes the history of philosophy that of a civilization.²⁰ This is their disapproval of the historicism of Hegel and Heidegger, who conceive of Greek philosophy as the origin and starting point of a narrative internal to the West. However, once again, Nietzsche ironically remarks: “Is there anything worse … than to find oneself facing a German when one was expecting a Greek?”²¹ Taking their distance from historicism, they each adopt a different conception of history and of the history of philosophy. For them, geology or geography replaces genealogy, to which the rhizome is opposed as an anti-genealogy, which itself is a short memory or an anti-memory.

That is how “the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots”.²² For them, Gregory Bateson, from whom they borrow the word “plateau”, uses this term to point out “something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end”.²³ In brief, let us insist on the question of the adequacy between the plane of immanence and the requirements of the current period, of the specific situation. With regard to philosophy, this relation introduces a difference between its history and the time of philosophy as “a stratigraphic time where ‘before’ and ‘after’ indicate only an order of superimpositions”.²⁴ In this way, there unfolds the infinite becoming of philosophy, which should not be confused with its history.

As for geography, it lowers the need to focus on contingency. Geography traces and tracks the becomings that are not history, and it obliges “in every case the Greeks … to become philosophers in the first place, just as philosophers had to become Greek”.²⁵ Therefore, according to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy is becoming and not history. It does not originate there even if its creations become historical. Thus, the singular and strange theorem articulating history as a condition of the existence of becoming is that “the event itself needs becoming as an unhistorical element”.²⁶ As anti-Hegelians, they claim that “becoming is always double, and it is this double becoming that constitutes the people to come and the new earth. The philosopher must become nonphilosopher so that nonphilosophy becomes the earth and people of philosophy”.²⁷ It is a startling gesture, to become myself after having been another, to live, in the final analysis, as a Nietzschean: “Become what you are!” The massive and decisive conclusion Deleuze and Guattari reach corroborates the idea that the concern of philosophy and of the philosopher is to become a stranger to oneself, and to one’s own language and nation.²⁸ They maintain that absolute deterritorialization is never without reterritorialization. As for philosophy, it reterritorializes on the concept, which is a territory. In other words, to exist, philosophy must reterritorialize itself on a triple temporality, in the past of the Greeks, in the present of the democratic State, and in the future of “the new people and the new earth”. In order not to reproduce the Eastern figures, the Greeks established a plane of immanence, but not the concept, that which is not yet. Inversely, the moderns have the concept, but not the plane. Hence the necessity of searching for the territory, for the space in which to place it. The concepts need a plane of immanence for heuristic effect. It is in the quest for territory that philosophy finds a direction. These compulsory tasks, if any, make philosophy a philosophical becoming. This may be the geophilosophy.

Revolution

Beyond the crisis of Marxism and, therefore, the cooling of revolutionary alternatives in the context of the real socialist countries, 1968 is perceived by Deleuze and other intellectuals of his generation as the call for a critical revival or, at least, an advantageous revival of critical thinking. Paradoxically, it is the link Deleuze and Guattari maintained to Marx’s analysis that best conveys the essential inflections of their theoretical practice. As far as the philosophical field is concerned, the use of Marx corresponds to the need to rethink the political effects of the withdrawal of Marxism but also to think about the conditions of its efficiency. Despite the serious difficulties with updating the experience of socialism in an increasingly hostile historical context, with the distortion of Marx’s thought and its antidote, Marxist criticism becomes more and more pertinent. The reference to Marx and to revolution “also continues to designate its emptiness and also its lack, by defining the scene, and expressing the requirement to somehow or other maintain an actuality, and encouraging a recovery that would be philosophical without ceasing to be theoretical”.²⁹

Given the necessity of rethinking the revolution, why not rethink Marxism? Deleuze and Guattari provided a direction: “As an analytical tool, is the concept of war machine neutral? … The concept involves the invention of practices that do not reproduce the State organization at their level”.³⁰ To not reproduce the State is to think and perform its transformation. Philosophical becoming is the same as revolutionary becoming. Let us clarify the meaning of the proximity of philosophy to revolution. For Aristotle, there are two types of becoming or dynamis, one understood as movement, the other as an act and an accomplished state.³¹ This reminder implies that what is becoming is the possible and not the negative of the dialectic. It is a paradoxical figure, as articulated by Vladimir Jankélévitch: “Becoming makes possible the impossible coexistence by releasing the symbiosis of the incompossibles: it is a modus vivendi with the tragic…. The necessary impossible”.³²

Thus, if one were to record some issues related to the nagging question that has always haunted and will never stop haunting philosophy, “where must we start?”, it would be judicious to refer to Machiavelli, who, in the guise of a philosopher, replies that we must begin in the beginning, definitely not with nothingness, but with emptiness, the condition of possibility for “the new becoming, the beginning”,³³ for the revolution. The necessary impossible-possible originates, in an unlikely manner, in an illusive emptiness. The emptiness is the absolute beginning, the inaugural. But if the impossible is already the first beginning, it is no longer impossible; it is the necessary possible, the new. In the eyes of Althusser, Machiavelli is the theorist of novelty precisely because he is the theorist of beginnings, of the beginning.³⁴

Althusser remarks that modern philosophy borrows its contents from an existing situation, an already accomplished fact and not one in the process of being accomplished. This fundamentally separates modern philosophy from Machiavelli’s work. Althusser also observes that, whereas the natural law theorists try to think about the origin, Machiavelli faces the question of the beginning. Rousseau, on the other hand, tries to think in the origin. Does this mean that Deleuze and Guattari share the same opinion? Does this argument correspond to theirs in relation to the destiny of philosophy and the becoming of the revolution?

Let us explain. The revolution sets things in motion but leaves them unfinished. It is an act, the result of the possible, but it is also the process of being and of continuing. It is becoming-revolutionary, no longer obeying an inner necessity, but obeying the immanence of the situation, the realities encountered. Strangely, it escapes itself in the same way that May 1968 was “a demonstration, an irruption, of a becoming in its pure state”.³⁵ Deleuze reaches the following conclusion:

It’s fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It’s nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.³⁶

There is another aspect of the revolution, the one that produced their analysis of capitalism. Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, the two components of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, attempt to examine contemporary capitalism in dimensions proper to a new historical sequence calling for a strategic break with the 1960s. Why? Because in their eyes, “capitalism, in a way, has haunted all types of societies, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, the panic fear they have of a flux that would evade their codes”.³⁷ This approach highlights the ontological foundations of revolution, “ontology of flux and becoming”, as Jacques Vincent contends.³⁸ Deleuze and Guattari clearly seem to be refuting a certain doctrinaire Marxism, quickly stated, one characterized by simplifications and reductionisms that they wish to exceed such as “the folding back of the real on its concept, of the revolution over the ‘revolution’, that is to say, of the politics over the ‘political philosophy’ ”.³⁹ Isabelle Garo writes: “The revolution is one of these motives, always resurgent, but never returning to anything else except the ensemble of variations on a theme. A refrain”,⁴⁰ which could take place in social transformations, in artistic creation, and in philosophy—a theory that is constructed and a practice that is looking for itself. This remains necessary for the dialectic of the revolution.

Let us follow Deleuze and Guattari and evoke the Aternal (Internel),⁴¹ a term borrowed from the poet and essayist Charles Peguy. Neither eternal nor historical, the Aternal might be the future, this “infinite Now, the Nun that Plato already distinguished from every present: the Intensive or Untimely, not an instant but a becoming”.⁴² Is this form, in which the revolution unfolds, the only one that interests them? But what is the form of a revolution? Would its form be its realization and its effectuation? Relying on Foucault, they carry on insisting on the difference between the present and the actual because “the actual is not what we are but, rather, what we become, what we are in the process of becoming—that is to say, the Other, our becoming-other”.⁴³ The actual is experimentation, and experimentation “is always that which is in the process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is”.⁴⁴ A wink here to Machiavelli, one might think.

However, could we consider creation to be the form of experimentation? In a quite different register, Hannah Arendt seems to believe that creation in human affairs corresponds, to a certain extent, to the idea of the miracle free from any religious connotation: “Whenever something new happens, this takes place in a way unexpected, incalculable and ultimately causally inexplicable, in the way in which a miracle occurs in the context of calculable events”.⁴⁵ The event is the unexpected, the unforeseen that cannot be fully explained, unless you try to understand it, as Arendt says, or to elucidate it, as Cornelius Castoriadis would have said. It is perhaps because of the causally inexplicable that Deleuze and Guattari posit that “experimentation is not historical. It is philosophical”.⁴⁶ If this is the case, if to think is to experiment, this means that philosophy extracts itself from our present to assume the duty of diagnosing our actual becomings: “A becoming-revolutionary that, according to Kant himself, is not the same thing as the past, present, or future of revolutions. A becoming-democratic that is not the same as what States of law are, or even a becoming-Greek that is not the same as what the Greeks were”.⁴⁷ The lesson is fundamental and has serious consequences whose meaning is revealed in their denunciation of the unfortunate propensity of the Western mind “to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value”.⁴⁸

In conclusion, we will focus on certain problematic issues. If the Western mind forgets the form and, after considering this triple dimension of space as territorialization-deterritorialization-reterritorialization, attributes the sense of becoming to the order of immanence, we will ask questions about becoming on the basis of the future perfect, thereby introducing another dimension of space and time, a dimension distinct from the crossroads of the planes of transcendence and immanence and also from the comings and goings between past, present, and future. As we know, the future perfect nourishes itself with a present and/or an undying past that expresses, in another language, the principle of advance/delay where an already played out becoming takes place and another one or the same one is still to be played, although differently and elsewhere. That is the case with the extra-European “foreign” territories, and with those experiences for which the West continued to produce the effects of its historical, political, social, and other conquests. This means that the revolution could not take place, for the route of its arrival (à venir) was already traced. Yet, nothing stochastic can take place, given this unexpected reversal, where the plane of immanence is transformed—due to the future perfect—into the plane of transcendence. The resulting reversal could be the perfect point at which to correlate philosophy and revolution. Revolution is like philosophy: it is the resistance to the present, and the openness to the unpredictable, “the new, the remarkable, the interesting”. It is precisely here that the revolution could take place, as the space or, rather, the non-space of the undecidable that is “the germ and locus par excellence of revolutionary decisions”.⁴⁹ The correlation in question allows us to expose the terms of the problematic of becoming for Deleuze and Guattari, in the light of the related issue of the “translatability” between similar situations. Hence the necessity of the historical relation of the recipients of the “secret” destination, if one wishes to understand the decisive efficacy of philosophy in its historicity and the historicity of the general destination named the West. However, will it be enough for philosophy to be born for it to allow the building up of Europe? The West? The Cosmos? The Cosmopolitics? Then, symmetrically, is it enough for the West to use philosophy to be promised to this becoming-world? The question deserves to be raised and to be thrown back upon the question of those callings that influence each other, ultimately, in order to make the world a becoming-world.

Notes

1.See the remarkable work of Manola Antonioli, Géophilosophie de Deleuze et Guattari (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), and the essay by Stephan Günzel, “Geophilosophie”, in Information Philosophie 2 (2005): 38–43.

2.Georges Labica, Karl Marx. The Theses on Feuerbach (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987; repr. Paris: Syllepse, 2014).

3.Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 81.

4.On this issue and Hegel’s important position, see Gilbert Gérard, Le concept hégélien de l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Vrin, 2008), p. 152ff.

5.Jean-François Courtine, Heidegger et la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1990), p. 17ff.

6.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), p. 42.

7.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 15.

8.Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 17–18.

9.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 100.

10.See Louis Althusser, Machiavel et nous, pref. by Étienne Balibar, presented by François Matheron (Paris: Tallandier, 2009). See also Mohamed Moulfi, “Lectures machiavéliennes d’Althusser”, in The Radical Machiavelli. Politics, Philosophy and Language, eds. F. Del Luchese, F. Frosini and V. Morfino (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015).

11.Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 79.

12.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 98.

13.Jean-Pierre Faye, La Raison narrative (Paris: Édition Balland, 1990), pp. 15–18.

14.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 101.

15.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 88.

16.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 92.

17.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 47.

18.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 83.

19.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 76–7.

20.On the relation between interiority and exteriority, Deleuze says: “Exteriority is still a form, as in The Archaeology of Knowledge—even two forms which are exterior to one another, since knowledge is made from the two environments of light and language, seeing and speaking. But the outside concerns force… [F]orces necessarily refer to an irreducible outside which no longer even has any form”; see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 86.

21.Quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 108–9.

22.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 21.

23.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 22.

24.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 58.

25.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 96.

26.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 96.

27.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 109.

28.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 109. Nevertheless, they do suggest the existence of a national philosophy: “The history of philosophy therefore is marked by national characteristics or rather by nationalitarianisms [nationalitaires], which are like philosophical ‘opinions’ ” (p. 104). Can we then specify the geophilosophical figure as an opinion, emerging from the cultural trait in order to be able to talk of a Chinese geophilosophy, an Arab geophilosophy, etc.?

29.Jacques Vincent, Deleuze, Pas à pas (Paris: Ellipses, 2014), p. 15.

30.Vincent, Deleuze, Pas à pas, p. 177.

31.See A. Jaulin, “Le rôle de la matière dans la théorie aristotélicienne du devenir”, in Revue de Morale et de Métaphysique 1 (Janvier–Mars 2003): 23–32, 28. It refers to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book Θ, 1048a. Jaulin thinks that “the movement (or the becoming) is not the hazardous and risky passage of an opposite, from any one to any other, but rather the ordered and progressive installation in the possible that matter proposes of a realization (or form) determined by a certain function (or an end)” (see p. 31).

32.Vladimir Jankelevitch, La mort (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), p. 107.

33.Moulfi, “Lectures machiavéliennes d’Althusser”, p. 133.

34.See Hannah Arendt, La crise de la culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), p. 45. In Augustinian terms, she speaks of the “beginning of a beginning” (p. 21). As for Plato, he contends that “the Beginning that sits enshrined as a goddess among mortals is the Saviour of all”; see Plato, Laws, trans. R. G. Bury, vol. 9 of the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 775e4–5.

35.Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming”, in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 169–76, p. 171.

36.Deleuze, “Control and Becoming”, p. 171.

37.Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 164. See Vincent’s comment in Deleuze, Pas à pas, p. 178.

38.Vincent, Deleuze, Pas à pas, p. 3.

39.Vincent, Deleuze, Pas à pas, p. 3.

40.Deleuze Isabelle Garo, “Marx et la révolution: ce que ‘rester marxiste’ veut dire”. http://semimarx.free.fr/IMG/pdf/Garo_DeleuzeMarx-2.pdf, p. 12. See also Isabelle Garo, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser and Marx, La politique dans la philosophie (Paris: Démopolis, 2011).

41.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 111–12.

42.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 112.

43.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 112.

44.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 111.

45.Hannah Arendt, Qu’est-ce que la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1995), pp. 51–2 (my translation). The link between Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis was already suggested by Nicos Iliopoulos in “Cornelius Castoriadis et la création politique (1)”. www.implications-philosophiques.org/. Accessed 10/2011.

46.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? p. 111.

47.Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 112–13.

48.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 22.

49.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 473.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. Machiavel et nous. Ed. François Matheron. Paris: Tallandier, 2009.

Antonioli, Manola. Géophilosophie de Deleuze et Guattari. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003.

Arendt, Hannah, Qu’est-ce que la politique? Paris: Seuil, 1995.

Arendt, Hannah. La crise de la culture. Paris: Gallimard, 2007.

Courtine, Jean-François. Heidegger et la phénoménologie. Paris: Vrin, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Control and Becoming”. In Negotiations: 1972–1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 169–76.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: The Viking Press, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. “Mai 68 n’a pas eu lieu”. In Chimères 64 (2007/2): 23–4.

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Faye, Jean-Pierre. La Raison narrative. Paris: Édition Balland, 1990.

Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Garo, Isabelle. “Deleuze, Marx et la révolution: ce que ‘rester marxiste’ veut dire”. http://semimarx.free.fr/IMG/pdf/Garo_DeleuzeMarx-2.pdf

Garo, Isabelle. Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser and Marx, La politique dans la philosophie. Paris: Démopolis, 2011.

Gérard, Gilbert. Le concept hégélien de l’histoire de la philosophie. Paris: Vrin, 2008.

Günzel, Stephan. “Geophilosophie”. In Information Philosophie 2 (2005): 38–43.

Iliopoulos, Nicos. “Cornelius Castoriadis et la création politique (1)”. www.implications-philosophiques.org/. Accessed 10/2011.

Jankelevitch, Vladimir. La mort. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.

Jaulin, Annick. “Le rôle de la matière dans la théorie aristotélicienne du devenir”. In Revue de Morale et de Métaphysique 1 (Janvier–Mars 2003).

Labica, Georges. Karl Marx. Les Thèses sur Feuerbach. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987; repr. Paris: Syllepse, 2014.

Moulfi, Mohamed. “Lectures machiavéliennes d’Althusser”. In The Radical Machiavelli. Politics, Philosophy and Language. Eds. F. Del Luchese, F. Frosini, V. Morfino. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2015.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Plato. Laws. Trans. R. G. Bury. Vol. 9 of the Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926.

Vincent, Jacques. Deleuze, Pas à pas. Paris: Ellipses, 2014.

Part IV

Art and Creation

10 Dismantling the Land(scape), Dismantling the Face

Philippe Mengue

Translated by Constantin Boundas

We know—but what kind of knowledge is this?—that contemporary art, and especially painting, has been emancipated from its Platonic tutelage and its suggestion that it should essentially be imitation (mimesis tis physeos). Art does not have to be figurative, representative, or narrative; it has no such injunction to obey, because it has become entirely autonomous, without any references, acosmic, and purely autotelic. Having turned free from all constraints, including the mimetic code, it accedes to itself, in all the purity and the plenitude of its essence. We also know, with the same kind of knowledge, that Gilles Deleuze, in his struggle to overturn Platonism, refused to submit art and literature to the authority of the model/copy relationship that allegedly implies the concept of mimesis (translated in the Roman languages as imitation or representation). At least, this is the way we tell our story—the story of modernity. We do know every stentorian and triumphant (sometimes arrogant) formula on this subject.

The reasons for visiting the couple ‘face/landscape’ and the way it functions in Deleuze’s philosophy—which has never been anything but a long and profound meditation on what thinking is and also on the place (the model or the contaminating power) that art occupies in philosophical thought—are not so that we may be able to refute this saga, but rather to shake it up in order to make it possible for contemporary art to have a different apperception of itself and a new sense (this time, really Deleuzian) that is not under the dictatorship of contemporary artistic doxa and the alleged liberation of art from the world, nature, and every type of alterity. To the extent that it is world-less and refers only to itself, what purpose does painting faces and landscapes serve? Obviously, none.

The Portrait and the Problematics of Contemporary Art

Yet, Francis Bacon paints portraits, the portrait of Georges Dyer talking, for example, or of Dyer on his bicycle, the portraits of Van Gogh and Lucien Freud, or the portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne. He draws studies for his self-portrait, he repeats Velasquez’s portraits of Pope Innocent X, etc. There are so many that one could claim that Bacon’s painting belongs to the genre of portraiture, which he magnificently renewed. However, by doing so, would all references to Bacon as a brilliant portraitist, perhaps the greatest of all times, not render his painting as much as the thought of the author of Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation out of play, out of date, outside the range of modernity, or, as people would like to say, outside hyper-modernity or postmodernity? Would Deleuze’s own philosophy of art not be all too classical and subject to out of date requisites?

Perhaps, the liberation of art, its access to its own essence, is only partial in Bacon’s painting, and its subjection to the constraints of the mimetic code may be all too obvious. No matter how deformed, would Bacon’s portraits not still depend on resemblance, and, therefore, on the authority of the logic of the identical? There is indeed a problem here. Either Bacon, read by Deleuze, is not a really modern and contemporary artist because he is very much compliant with mimesis, or we must question the view that holds the typically modern emancipation from the mimetic code to be the condition of art’s access to itself.

Deleuze has always presented himself as a thinker of modernity, but, at the same time, he never trusted these categories. He was suspicious, be it through his silence, of the idea of an ultra-modernity or postmodernity, and he distrusted avant gardes. His entire philosophy teaches us to relativize these concepts to the extent that they are subject to a historicist representation of history and of art history, to a progressivist vision, with its excesses and overbids for the abolition of traditions and its break from everything sacred, every alterity—all that which constitutes the credo of contemporary art.

This silence of Deleuze is astonishing and gives rise to a liberating suspicion, positive and fertile, one that moves not against his own thought but against those who want to make this thought serve something with respect to which he was expecting some caution. It is time to ask whether Deleuze himself was maintaining a secret distance from certain progressivist movements of the avant garde arts and from several tendencies of the so-called contemporary art. It is time to ask whether he was not expressing this hesitation because of his solidarity with the spirit of research, invention, and creation that his philosophy, along with Bergson’s, was intended to extol. Fearing a certain populism, he would have prevented himself from denouncing the dead ends of contemporary art, irrespective of its occasional failures, its mediocrity, and even its stupidity. Does the Deleuzian principle of research, praising the new and the remarkable that replaces the true, not ask us to lower the eyes and to support the facts in a very pragmatic fashion? Do not openness, invention, and the elan have the upper hand over results and effects?

It is a sign of his pragmatic prudence—a veritable warning that Deleuze has not delivered us his entire thought. He focused almost exclusively on the creators of modernity. The texts of the time of Difference and Repetition in the 1960s have been regarded as philosophical manifestos that discern the principles of the new art, and as a brilliant defense of contemporary art. Moreover, the masterpieces of the old art, Hellenic, medieval, classical, or romantic, are, with the exception of a few brief references, absent from his discourse. With respect to his relation to works of the past, we have only scraps, traces, and allusions: courtly love and Princess de Cléves in literature, Rembrandt and Velasquez in painting, etc. Either he sketches out a quick summary of the history of art, as he does in the seventh chapter of Francis Bacon, or he makes a very general sketch, a kind of fresco of this history, as he does in A Thousand Plateaus, where he pronounces the history of art to be non-Hegelian and theorizes the three grand modes of the relation between art and chaos (classical, romantic, and cosmic-modern). Would this absence signify his depreciation or even contempt for the art of the past and the superiority of contemporary and Chinese art, a superiority reminiscent of the one he attributes to Anglo-Saxon literature as opposed to French literature?¹

This cannot be true. These famous declarations of Deleuze are very ambiguous and should not be taken literally. Bacon is not superior to Velasquez or Giotto, nor is Beckett superior to Chretien de Troyes. The inward looking (esostrephic) French literature is nothing but literature à la française, seen according to its most exaggerated tendency, where interiority and intellectualism have priority over the forces of adventure and openness (as in the wit of the salons or the parisianism of Saint Germain des Près).²

Indeed, to begin with, this approach would depend on gross binary oppositions (ancient versus modern, subjection to model/copy versus invention and creation, dominance of codes versus liberation), oppositions that would lead Deleuzism to a simplistic ideology of progress and modernism that cannot be his own. On the other hand, the pertinence of his theory of art cannot hold for the modern and contemporary periods alone. It must be applicable to the works of the past; otherwise it must reject as non-artistic and mediocre the greatest achievements of human art and lose its universality. Velasquez is art as much as Bacon is, despite the fact that the latter has a more powerful actuality. Moreover, Velasquez is “a little better”,³ as Bacon himself states.

Certainly, from a politico-pragmatic point of view, we understand that it is wiser to support and privilege contemporary art in view of the conservatisms and the archaisms threatening its flight than to express once again our reverence for the sacred works of the past. We can see this choice as a legitimate one. But such an expedient, such a practical necessity, is not enough to explain Deleuze’s prudent abstention and the lacuna he chose to leave a propos of the art of the past. Indeed, showing that art has no history (understood as history of progress) and that its universal defining goals—the capturing of forces and the tracing of lines of escape—belong to all artworks insofar as they are true artworks (and not a mere stunt or a modern, postmodern, or contemporary mannerism) constitutes a venture that carries a certain risk. Would it not be easy to show that the more modern or successful works, the most deterritorializing with respect to the habitual soil of our usual perception and its clichés, in other words, the most liberating and disclosing artworks, are first and foremost works that belong to the past, to the patrimony, to the tradition, and that, by comparison, very few contemporary works would make the mark? But then how not to locate the origin of this conclusion in a typically conservative discourse, feeding the populist critique of contemporary art?

Here is a simple hypothesis. The latter has the merit not of a reassuring objectivity but of making us face the necessity to look once more, in the light of Deleuzian concepts, at those ancient genres, the portrait, the painting of the human figure, which for Hegel have the status of being the object par excellence of painting (an essentially romantic view of art): the face and, along with it, the painting of the landscape. Face, landscape—what is their relationship? That in the center of our reflection we find the question of the figure and, therefore, of the figurative and of imitation would not surprise anyone. But our discussion, with the help of Deleuze, of the relationship ‘face/landscape’, whereby the emphasis is placed on the landscape, could lead us to read in a new way the Deleuzian conception of art and to give a revived sense to contemporary art and its relationship with the arts of the past. The program is ambitious and cannot be dealt with exhaustively here. However, it will be sufficient for my chapter to generate interest in its theoretical positions that find here the beginning of a beginning. Having drawn so far, in a cursory manner, the directions and the context of this study, I now propose to follow a few lineaments of Deleuze’s thought associated with the face and the landscape.

Faciality: Year Zero

In the seventh plateau of A Thousand Plateaus (“Year Zero. Faciality”), we find a declaration so revolting, obtuse, and anti-Christian that it is ridiculous: “The face is Christ. The face is the typical European”.⁴ Yes, Christ is first and foremost face. From his crucified body, we essentially retain his face, deposited in his shroud, the first real icon. But it is especially in the context of art, after the triumph and the glory of Byzantine icons and mosaics, that we can understand this affirmation. But why add that he is of the European type? Is it by assimilation that we make Christ an average European? We are not certain about the sense of this formula. Would we want to say that the Europeans alone have a face and not the Chinese or the Africans? Such a thing would be very strange! But a little further on, our doubts are dissipated. We are about to lose our patience.⁵ Christ, a man? Certainly! But just anyone? … Really! We may not have faith, but such an affirmation goes beyond the limits of good sense. It prompts us to say that its meanness equals its stupidity and blindness wholly closed upon themselves. Even Nietzsche has the integrity to recognize that Christ is the best model of humanity that we can find. He was not molded in resentment like our two authors.

Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari go on to develop logically a serious theoretical thesis on the subject of the face and its status in the West; they are not engaged in an extravagance, nor are they led astray in the crude polemics of a leftist and narrowly laicist struggle claiming that the face of Christ, ever since his birth, is a power machine (year zero is the point of the beginning of the Western calendar) and does not result from a republican gimmick à la francaise in a fight against the clergy. Christ’s person is not without significance. It is because Christ is considered to be a ‘person’ that there is a problem, and along with Christ, the Europeans (all of them, white or non-white, although from a majoritarian point of view, white, the European in general). Indeed, Europe is an invention and a construction on the body and the head of a face, and this face is a personna in the Latin sense, a mask serving the theater actors of the Antiquity to help the sound of their voice to carry further. We would happily agree with Hegel that Christ, Christianity, and the Church Fathers, having invented subjectivity and deepened the development of self-consciousness and the affirmation of a totally new form of freedom, through the cultivation of the Stoic interiority and the installation of an inviolable center of deliberation and absolute choice in the face of God (Foucault, Care of Self), are the authors of this construction. Faciality: year zero.

The face is something fabricated, constructed, but, moreover, this construction, Deleuze and Guattari maintain in opposition to Hegel, is of the order of the carceral; it does not call forth the elevation of man’s humanity, but rather its imprisonment. It is not a rise toward more consciousness and freedom but rather, a consolidation of our own prison. We, the ‘good Europeans’ as Nietzsche used to call us, are stuck inside the mask of the human person, or inside the straitjacket of a fixed being, identical to itself and responsible, capable of keeping its word, a word indexed to a face (an identity photo). Of course, the creation of a being capable of keeping his promises and his engagements is not the work of one day. It is an entire ‘Genealogy of Morals’ viewed from an angle different from Nietzsche’s, the angle of Deleuze and Guattari. The seventh plateau contemplates the possible construction and deconstruction of the human person, the factual reality of which is the materially visible face. What is this mask, so solidly planted into the head of the Europeans that it cannot be detached from it? It is a simple opposition/complementarity: white wall/black hole (or the opposite when it comes to colors). The question is this: why single out these two characteristics as the only ones constitutive of the face? I will try to follow the justifications that Deleuze and Guattari offer in order to get rid of the weight of the apparent necessity, of the natural character that the face assumes, along with everything else that it makes possible in terms of subjection.

White Wall/Black Holes

The 1980 text of A Thousand Plateaus was preceded by the 1979 publication of Félix Guattari’s “Signifying Faciality, Diagrammatic Faciality”. We have, therefore, a text that belongs to Guattari and was published in the Machinic Unconscious. We also have a text that appears prior to the last one, “On la Visagéité”.⁶ The concept of faciality will be retained until the last important book, Schizoanalytic Cartographies of 1989.⁷ All these are very political essays that today look dated because, in accordance with Guattari’s vision, the questions raised in them reflect a conception of power and society essentially motivated by the idea of repression. The problem then is that they implicitly presuppose a rigid dualism where there is power, on the one hand, and nomad freedom, on the other. We are left with the Foucault of the 1976 Discipline and Punish, without recourse to the denunciation, in the Volonté de Savoir, of the problematics based on a repressive system. What surprises the most in this problematic is the universality, the force of repression, and the generalized submission to the signifiers of the dominant powers. How can they be so powerful and lead to such a general submission inside a philosophy grounded on the force of the life of desire and on freedom, and on the ultimate reality of nomad intensities? The concept of faciality is an attempt to account for this paradoxical reversal. Faciality is a component of the social order. It is a fundamental agent of the regimentation of society that fabricates fixed identities, and constitutes subjects and persons. Guattari (and Deleuze) proposes to enter the mechanism of repressive power, the interior functioning of the dominant controls, and particularly the question of how dominant significations are being made, along with semiologies that permit the consolidation of the capitalist domination (Guattari writes “capitalistic”). Their political objective (micropolitics) is to divest us of our identities, which are constituted under the aegis of normalizing semiologies, with a view to bringing about collective assemblages of denunciation or what the Anti-Oedipus calls subject-groups, now having the ability to emit and circulate new statements, to seize the power to speak and not only to keep their word. Such assemblages will be capable of bypassing the subjugating institutions, opening spaces of desire and proliferating the lines of escape. The objective is that we may be able to constitute collective assemblages, bearers of other modalities of semiotization that would succeed in functioning like groups resisting conditionings and normalizations.

The study of faciality intervenes in the field of scrutiny of particular semiotic components or of sign regimes. Our life is certainly made of signs. But we should not think that all signs are signifying. The general theory of signs (semiotics) should no longer be subservient to linguistics. One of the very important contributions of Deleuze and Guattari is this liberation of philosophy and the human sciences from the imperialism of Saussurian linguistics and the corollary notion of the signifier.

Moreover, we must abandon the supremacy of language and focus instead on the study of regimes—not only regimes that do not signify but also regimes that do not belong to language.⁸ A non-linguistic semiotics, associated with the pragmatics of significations (that do not belong to language), creates the frame within which the question of faciality can be dealt with. We must show that the face intervenes in the ways we organize social space, determining what is licit and what is not, as it operates normalizations. It functions as a power of territorialzation and of conformity to the dominant reality.

The modes of semiotization have two opposite poles depending on whether they are in the service of vectors of territorialization or whether they serve vectors of reterritorialization. Facialization has the reterritorialization of significations as its function. For this procedure, an abstract machine is required, and it is precisely the face that fulfills this function. The face territorializes the significations upon itself, absorbs, neutralizes, and regulates them. Other semiotic components are assembled on the face, and are neutralized and crashed by it. With its name and surname, the face holds the totality of the person together. Due to the face, other special semiotics (artistic, somatic, musical, and literary) are subjugated, submitted to the signs of capitalist normalcy. Primitive semiotics, polyvocal, heterogeneous, multidimensional, as well as the fluid and transversal traits of rhizomes are excluded, to the benefit of the semiotics of language, which is based on the signifier and its differential binary oppositions (marked or unmarked), and has as its surface of inscription a homogeneous and neutral expanse.

For the Western space to be quadrille in every sense, according to the logic of identity and resemblance, we need special assemblages. The procedures of facialization belong here. They operate thanks to an abstract machine, an abstract machine of faciality, trans-subjective and trans-objective. The face operates on the basis of the duality ‘white wall/black hole’ (or inversely depending on the colors), which controls all the contents and traits of expression and crashes any rebellious traits that may come from different semiotics. Why ‘white wall’? For the significance. Why black holes? For the subjectification.⁹ These are the two conditions that give rise to the facification of the head and of the body. We need the installation of a white wall, of a homogeneous surface, in order to linguistically inscribe the signs, the signifiers. We need a screen upon which differences are going to be distributed and opposed in a binary way in order to be able to integrate every semiotic trait, to subject it to the signifier, and to give it a linguistic signification. We also need the installation of a central hole (or rather two) where subjectivity will live on as consciousness and passion, enabling choices to be made at every point of the signifying network, and statements or linguistic expressions (impossible without this choice and this assemblage of effectuation) to be formed. Without these conditions, “no message would be discernible, and no choice could be implemented”.¹⁰ The face, then, is what articulates (assembles) significance and subjectification, the two regimes of sign that, differently from one other, have their own logic. But to make a person, they must be coordinated with a face and a name that speaks and keeps its word.

Dismantling the Face

The face, the abstract overcoding machine, is placed on the head, which, as a result, is facialized and no longer a part of the body with its polyvocal and multidimensional code.¹¹ The face brings about an absolute deterrritorialization because it takes the head away from the organism in order to connect it with other strata, whose regime of signs are significance and subjectification.¹² However, not everything can be integrated: either semiotic components succeed in abstracting themselves, or they do not enter the play of the face—the tic, for example. Traits of faciality are abstracted from the fixed organization of the face flying out to the horizon: “Faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face—freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse”.¹³

But what is the use of art and the painting of portraits when we are in possession of technical means such as the photograph? Why paint faces, like Bacon? Painting has only one function, to dismantle the face (dévisagéification) in order to prevent the face from being a machine of the Western power, to “break … through the wall of the signifier and get … out of the black hole of subjectivity”, to trace the lines of flight.¹⁴ “Bacon thus pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face”.¹⁵ The head is a part of the body, its highest point. It has no face because the face is an organization that conceals the head.¹⁶ But “dismantling the face is no mean affair”.¹⁷

Indeed, nothing less than Art is required. How concretely to liberate the traits of facialty the way we liberate birds instead of bringing the flows down to significance and subjectification—this is precisely what Bacon’s painting teaches us, according to and thanks to Deleuze’s commentary. This is the sense of the book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation: to teach how to dismantle the face. For this, the painter needs a counter-machine of ‘dismantling the face’ (I will explain later why I create this term as a correlate of ‘dismantling the land’). The diagram is the operator of dismantling the face. Each one of us has his or her own. So does Bacon. The diagram belongs to scrambling and produces a scrambled zone.¹⁸ This is not in order to make everything indiscernible and to scramble the painting, which would be sloppy, but in order to open up the figurative to an alterity that has been snatched from it.¹⁹ The diagram, according to Bacon, “unlocks areas of sensation”.²⁰

Let us read the passage where Deleuze’s aesthetics gets condensed in a clear and vigorous formulation (as he alone knows how to do):

The essential point about the diagram is that it is made in order for something to emerge from it, and if nothing emerges from it, it fails. And what emerges from the diagram, the Figure, emerges both gradually and all at once…. But this passage, whether abrupt or gradual, is the great moment in the act of painting.²¹

The merit of the Figure is to save the contour and to prevent the diagram from invading and submerging the whole canvas, as is the case with action painting or with abstract expressionism, where even when the sensation is reached, it is left in a state of irremediable confusion.²² Not all figurative data have to disappear. Above all, a new figuration, that of the Figure, should emerge from the diagram and make the sensation clear and precise.²³ In short, the diagram, as Bacon himself states, acts as a “whip of white paint” on the shoulder “of the figure being sick in the basin”.²⁴ It is an explosion without contour, and yet inside a contour that makes it escape suddenly and open up: for example, a mouth will be elongated, stretched from one side of the head to the other.²⁵

First conclusion: although no art is figurative, nevertheless, art is not abstract either, and figuration has not been banished.²⁶ The fight between the figurative and the abstract is false. But resemblance, mimesis, has changed their internal relations. Even the art that we call figurative, where resemblance is eminently present, is never reducible to an imitation of its model (its motif, nature for the landscape, face for the portrait), because the artwork snatches the Figure from its perceived model and creates its own reference. It is the model that depends on the artwork and resembles it and not the opposite. This is the way it is in the painting that we call figurative. This is the famous inversion that Deleuze placed at the base of his anti-Platonism, ever since the Logic of Sense (“Plato and the Simulacrum”). The work is extracted or abstracted from the model and makes the model appear as it had never been seen before and as something that, once realized, we cannot fail to see.

Along these lines, I would like to extend the movement that Deleuze spearheaded and to propose the idea not only that the ‘dismantling of the face’ is being pursued beyond the face, in the landscape, but that the landscape is already in the face in virtue of its power to dismantle it. To undo the face is to introduce a landscape into it or, rather, to draw the face toward the landscape that it includes. This will lead us to the idea that, in every painting of a landscape, whether ancient or modern, even before Cézanne, before the Impressionists and Turner, and even in the most classical of paintings, there is a landscape that is being dismantled insofar as the landscape is, above all, that which really escapes.²⁷ We will call this active flight ‘dismantling the landscape’ to the extent that it is always present in the landscape, in the same way as the dismantling of the face is in the face.²⁸

Bacon, Lévinas, Cézanne

This escape and the presence of smooth space are at the center of Bacon’s modern painting (and, in the last analysis, of all painting): Bacon is violently undoing the face, defacing it and scratching it with his nails. This is evident in the quotation that follows. ‘Suddenly’ implies the violence of the disfiguration; it is a blow like a punch or like a sudden and violent spurt of a very powerful corrosive against a face offered peacefully, and proscribing the violence of homicide (against the incomplete, transcendentalist, and, therefore, pacifying phenomenology of Emmanuel Lévinas).

I allow myself at this point a word on the face, as Lévinas understands it. I risk saying that Lévinas has sensed under the name of the Infinite the power of the forces of escape, of lines of deterritorialization that traverse every being and every face, every landscape, the earth itself—forces and lines that escape the jurisdiction of the Same or, perhaps, the jurisdiction of being. But Lévinas wanted, in that which escapes the Same and the totality of knowledge, to retrieve the action and the presence/absence of an Infinite cut off from the entire earth, every territory and every contour (and as a result, veritably transcendent). In a sense, he made a mistake, or, rather, he chose a road (because in this domain there is neither right nor wrong) similar to the one that Deleuze attributes to the mistake of abstract art.²⁹ Lévinas believed that it was fine to take absolute deterritorialization out of the plane of immanence of thought to the transcendent; he believed in a gesture that, despite the ethical beauty of Totality and Infinity, disfigures the plane and plunges it to a black or white hole. The force of the Deleuzian escape toward the indefinite cannot accommodate such an exit to exteriority or to an absolute, transcendent alterity, because in this case the line of escape no longer escapes; it references itself to and is instantiated by a point that gives it its (ethical) sense. It acquires a term, even if and especially if the term is unattainable. The fact is that this term, starting from its transcendent center, focuses and orients every other vector, every line, and homogenizes them. The line of escape finds itself re-integrated into the sovereignty of the Other as the only absolute point of convergence to which I am called upon to respond from the very beginning. Within the frame of this submission (that of ontology to the ethical relation posited as the fundamental relation), the line of escape, far from nomadizing, losing itself, and reaching the imperceptible and the asignifying, sinks in the black hole of self-consciousness within which the Other, in a position of transcendence, resonates. Subjectivity is never more self-identical, selfsame, and triumphant than when submitted and subjugated to the Other (the law, the wholly Other, etc.) and when it feels responsible. The face of the Other, Lévinas states, is denuded, exposed, threatened; it invites us to violence, and, at the same time, it prohibits us to kill. No doubt. But this relationship cannot be the first one. The face calls me to my responsibility, and it is the face that gives sense to every linguistic expression, to the whole of language, in the relationship between a dispossessed Self and a prescriptive You. We do not stop being persons when we are figureless or unfigurable.

By means of the responsibility and privilege attributed to discourse and consciousness, the face constitutes a power machine. Despite but also thanks to its escapade to the Infinite, it derives from the faciality of A Thousand Plateaus. As we saw, we reached the Infinite, we kept the Subject (even if and especially if the Other reigns unconditionally over the Self), but we lost, perhaps, the essential: the earth (Terre) of the deterritorialization.

Dismantling the Land and Dismantling the Landscape

Bacon dismantles the face, suddenly throwing on it, by clearing away (with brush, sponge, or rag) a desert space, a zone of indetermination, which makes the face flee by disfiguring and dismantling it (dévisageant) in the first and primitive sense of this word according to its etymology:

It is as if a Sahara, a zone of the Sahara were suddenly inserted into the head; it is as if a piece of rhinoceros skin, viewed under a microscope, were stretched over it, it is as if the two halves of the head were split open by an ocean.³⁰

What is then introduced to the face is the equivalent of a landscape, a Sahara, an ocean. Becoming-animal (the rhinoceros) is a step before becoming-mineral and aquatic or becoming-imperceptible. A landscape is always at work in a painted face. During the Renaissance, the artists used to place it behind the portrait (the landscape was not a mere decorum, an environment, or a milieu, but it existed by itself, as Lhotte shows).³¹ The face was not surrounded by the land; it was taken by and included in it. It was drawn up by the background and by the back of this background. This is already how the Renaissance artists made the face escape, and not only in this way. The broken nose of a Duke with the demeanor of a condottiere—see the portraits of the Duke and the Duchess of Urbino facing each other, painted for profit by Piero de la Francesca—evokes curiously broken up rocks. The subtle meandering of the hairdo of the Duchess carries us inevitably to the volutes of an immense seashell that would be reigning over the entire land—a seashell drawn in its immense smallness elegantly behind and to the lowest point. In both portraits, in the sweetness of the distance, we sense the grand familiarity of the inviting face of the earth and the smallness of man and its activities.

This is why violence does not always have to be visible. There is in every face a landscape and in every landscape the line of escape and of deterritorialization that runs in the horizon and throws itself to the imperceptible, making use of contours, mounts (no longer the mounts of Urbino but those of Sainte Victoire), pines, houses, and farms, as the case is with Cézanne, for whom the dismantling of landscape is at the heart of his work. Cézanne, of course, achieves this not through violent wipings off but through color, and this is because Cézanne with his landscape painting invented a specific way, struggling this time not against figuration but against the clichés that figuration carries with it. He obtained essentially through color his diagram or his way of dismantling the landscape, the coloring sensation associated with the frame that the lines of the earth offer as they leave the motif in order to give it structure (a geometry of a geological type), as Deleuze states.³² That is how he was laboring “in order for colors to arise, for the earth to rise toward the sun”.³³

“… these beings of flight …”

If there is someone who knows how to apply the art of dismantling the face to all faces, that would be Proust. Those we love, says Proust in The Captive, are “beings of flight” to whom wings have been attached. They are given to a becoming-bird, and they fly away. They are always seized in a landscape that encompasses them or that they encompass for the sake of which they have wings. As in Plato’s Symposium, love is love of beauty, and both love and beauty get attached to what escapes and has wings alone. This is because wings constitute signs of the divine, as Nietzsche wanted it (the gods are winged like the souls in the Symposium), the sign of a beauty that transcends beauty.

To such beings, such fugitive beings, their own nature and our anxiety fasten wings. And even when they are with us the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to take flight, the proof of this beauty, surpassing beauty itself, that wings add.³⁴

Beauty, in its juvenile presence, fascinates the narrator in the beginning, not in the presence of one person but, rather, in the presence of a group, or better of a group of young girls, each one of them, initially, being indistinct from any other. Where does then their surprising beauty come from? From their becoming-animal, their becoming-bird. The narrator sees, at the far end of the esplanade,

five or six young girls as different in appearance and manner … as would have been a flock of gulls arriving from God knows where and performing with measured tread upon the sands … a parade the purpose of which seems as obscure to the human bathers whom they do not appear to see as it is clearly determined in their own birdish eyes.³⁵

What is then first is not the face but rather the group, the band. And not even a human group but an inhuman assembly of animals or birds. A world without man and without face, a primordial world, like the sea without man that the narrator seeks to retrieve; “I was contemplating the immemorial ocean”.³⁶ Such is the background out of which, little by little, faces are going to emerge, the face of Albertine, of Andrée. And with this surgical operation of extraction, which starts with the beach, the sea barrier, the landscape, the inhuman world, what has the narrator obtained? One more instance of landscape that comes with a face. And it is the landscape that he drags along with himself, as if they were of the same substance, like something that undoes him and makes him fly to the indefinite. “What did I know of Albertine? One or two glimpses of a profile against the sea”.³⁷ The budding young girls are those “who only that morning had been to me merely figures in a picture with the sea for background”.³⁸ But the sea is not a simple background; it exists in their eyes and in their face. The Proustian Figure is involved in or it involves a landscape; it is dragged in a fleeing landscape. The traits of being a landscapity (paysagéité) are in the face and drag the traits of faciality in their becoming-indefinite.

The figure of the girl …, reminded me of a cake on the top of which a place has been kept for a morsel of blue sky. Her eyes, even when fixed on an object, gave the impression of mobility, as on days of high wind the air, though invisible, lets us perceive the speed with which it is coursing between us and the sky. For a moment her eyes met mine, like those travelling skies on stormy days. ³⁹

Another friend of the small band is taken up in a becoming-vegetable:

She had taken off her hat for comfort, and let her hair, like a strange and fascinating plant, lay over her brow, displaying all the delicate tracery of its foliation…. Her hair was golden and not her hair only; for if her cheeks were pink and her eyes blue, it was like the still roseate morning sky which sparkles everywhere with dazzling points of gold.⁴⁰

The budding young girls recall the esplanade and the sea. This is true also for the face of Albertine, which amalgamates “the beach and the breaking waves”: Albertine and Balbec, Mademoiselle de Stermaria and Bretagne.⁴¹ In Proust, the traits of faciality are forever going away; they fly like birds; they are swept along in the traits of a landscape being.⁴² “Freckles dashing towards the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself”.⁴³ Before being faces, these young girls are landscapes. “They … were for me the mountainous blue undulations of the sea, the outline of a procession against the sea. It was the sea that I hoped to find. The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else”.⁴⁴

One of the most charming pages of Proust’s erotics has it that the beloved face always envelops a possible world, ‘landscapes and places’ unknown and inaccessible landscapes. This enveloped landscape, enveloped by the face, or the landscape that envelops the face, is an irreducibly unknown world. We feel that this indisputable inaccessibility depends on the fact that we are seen, seen from the vantage point of a landscape from which we are excluded (hence our jealousy). If she had seen me, what could I have meant to her? From what universe did she select me?⁴⁵ The other sees us from a universe, a land, or a landscape to which we constitutively have no possible access. Deleuze offers the reason: “How can we gain access to a landscape that is no longer the one we see, but on the contrary the one in which we are seen?”⁴⁶

What is it, then, that the sea we can discern on the faces of the young girls brings along with it? What is it that runs through and transcends the young girls who breathe desire all around themselves? We are not supposed to raise this question, which is without object because desire is without an object. It is not because it lacks one, but because it is the presence of the flight itself, the presence of the line of escape in its becoming-imperceptible. It is not that desire and love are given to the impossible or to the Absent Object, but because desire itself is one with the escape to the indefinite, and is as a result taken in the pursuit of the inaccessible, the face-less, the asignifying, and the imperceptible. We need the “risk of an impossibility” for love to exist: he needed this risk.⁴⁷ There is no reason, therefore, to wonder as to what the line of escape desires, since it is desire itself to the extent that it is impossible.

It is time now to conclude.

The landscape has nothing to do with a milieu, an environment, a decorum, or even with a mere comparison. It is a part of, and in osmosis with, the face in the entity ‘face-landscape’.⁴⁸ The landscape is an inseparable correlate of the face The landscape is a world in the process of deterritorialization; it is what escapes and makes things escape in the horizon; it emphasizes the absolute deterritorialization that is at work in the face.⁴⁹

The figure of discourse proper to the Proustian Figure is the metaphor, provided that it refers to becoming and to metamorphosis. (The term ‘Figure’ that I here propose is meant to bring together Bacon and Proust.) And the entire sense and genius of Elstir’s painting reside in the metamorphosis. Elstir paints the flight into the landscape, and does this by means of the play of colors that give the impression that material and forms slide onto each other. The jubilation in vision is to see the contours being suppressed, and to see the mixture, indeed the fusion, of land and sea.⁵⁰

The landscape, in painting, is not then explicitly taken out of the land (dépaysé); its being landscape has not been dismantled (dépaysagé), or delandscapified (dépaysagéifié).⁵¹ It was as a painter and as an artist (without yet knowing himself as such) that the narrator watched flee the beings that he contemplated and desired. Art comes first, because it is already inside Nature, and Nature imitates it. This is the sense of the real mimesis, which is not at all a copy or a calque of a pre-existing model. It is not without model and referent, but it creates its own model; it is creative.

But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lies in a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew.⁵²

We see, therefore, how the faces, in the work of Proust, are constantly defaced by the landscape that runs through them and carries them to the indefinite of the horizon. As a consequence, it is the landscapes in the face that make it escape toward inaccessible, faraway places, and it is the landscapes again, enveloped in the other face, that they escape as they leave. But these landscapes put the face to flight only because they themselves are on the way to being dismantled and deterritorialized.

Notes

1.Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), Chapter 2.

2.Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, Chapter 2.

3.David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962–1979 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 17.

4.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 176.

5.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.178.

6.See Félix Guattari, Lignes de Fuite, ed. Liane Mozère (Paris: Edition de l’Aube, 2011).

7.See, for example, “La Machine visagéitaire de KeichiTahara”, in Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 315ff.

8.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.111.

9.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp.167–8.

10.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.179.

11.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp.169–70 and 208.

12.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.172.

13.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.171.

14.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp.182 and 188.

15.Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 19; originally published as Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, vol. 2 (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1981).

16.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 19.

17.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.188.

18.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 127.

19.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 128.

20.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 83.

21.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 128.

22.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 89.

23.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 89.

24.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, pp. 161–2 n. 19. See also the paintings Figure at a Washbasin (1976) and Triptych (May-June 1973).

25.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 81.

26.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 48.

27.The reader can consult the analysis of Lorrain’s painting in my Espaces lisses et lignes de fuite (Paris: Kimé, 2015). I argued there that the striated space of the perspectivist painting is necessarily integrated inside a smooth and nomadic space. Inside this space, the eye can wander, and the “line of escape” can produce an escape different from the one of the point of concentration and structuration of the visual perspectivist lines.

28.Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 47.

29.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, pp. 84–5.

30.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 82.

31.See on this subject André Lhotte’s magnificent Traité de Paysage (Paris: Grasset, 1970).

32.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 91.

33.Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 91.

34.Marcel Proust, La Recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3 of 5 vols (Paris: Édition Gallimard, Pléiade, 1968), p. 88.

35.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, pp. 845–6.

36.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, p. 963.

37.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, p. 917.

38.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, p. 924.

39.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, p. 915.

40.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, pp. 947–87.

41.Quoted in Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 129.

42.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.171.

43.Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 171.

44.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, p. 891.

45.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, p. 794. Quoted in Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p.8.

46.Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 8.

47.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, p. 890.

48.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.172.

49.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.172.

50.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, p. 836.

51.On the issue of dévisagéification, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp.206–7.

52.Proust, La Recherche, vol. 1, p. 893.

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs. The Complete Text. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Originally published as Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation. Vol. 2 Peintures. Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1981.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.

Guattari, Félix. The Machinic Unconscious. Trans. Taylor Adkins. New York: Semiotext(e), 2010.

Guattari, Félix. Lignes de Fuite. Ed. Liane Mozère. Paris: Edition de l’ Aube, 2011.

Guattari, Félix. Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Trans. Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Lhotte, André. Traité de Paysage. Paris: Grasset, 1970.

Mengue, Philippe. Espaces lisses et lignes de fuite. Paris: Editions Kimé, 2015.

Proust, Marcel. La Recherche du temps perdu. Vols 1–5. Paris: Édition Gallimard, Pléiade, 1968.

11 Intensive Difference and Subjectivations

Pascale Criton

Translated by Andrew Goffey

Consistency and Disparation

Difference is at the heart of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thought: far from being a given state, it is an emergent and productive operation. As opposed to a quantitative or qualitative difference between existing objects, intensive difference is the result of a creative process. What are the factors of this process, which is the central subject of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s thesis? It’s a theater of circumstances, a crapshoot, the scattered objects of which demand a solution to a problem that insists on, and is marked by, repetition. That these scattered objects have something to do with each other is not a given: a priori they do not communicate. The differentiating idea will gain consistency, make these disparate elements or series resonate together, and affirm itself through a kind of self-repetition that runs through varied environments and brings together dispersed objects. Nor does Deleuze say that these objects are distinct—they are both virtual and actual, distinct and obscure. On the one hand, they are immersed in the consistency of their previous environments, and on the other, engaged in becomings, couplings that actualise themselves. ‘Different-ciation’ (t/c) expresses the two aspects involved in actualizing the virtual by local integrations. It is the spatial and temporal emergence of signs, the specification and creation of a ‘material’: a style, a color in a painting, a sonic space-time for a musician. As we will see, differentiation feeds the ‘machinic’ processes of refrains (ritornellos), collective and subjective individuations, and enunciations.

Deleuze’s seminars, which I first started attending in 1974,¹ allowed me to take part in the development of what he meant by ‘building a plane of consistency’. Deleuze paid a particular attention to ways of ‘contracting relations’ and creating a floating state: gathering independent lines, constituting a restless nebula agitated with local contractions, minute tensions then extracted, displaced. Far from it being a fixed frame, various levels of attention marked the process of the flow of thought. From my point of view, this was not unlike familiar movements in music composition. As Deleuze emphasized, it is in this phase of coexistence that differential traits, couplings, and reciprocal captures accompanying a process of deterritorialization are experienced. It is a time of bringing into relation, a balancing between tact and sketch, allowing the idea to fabricate itself through a succession of strata, reprises, droppings out, delay effects: ‘What do we need to make it stand up?’ The idea is in between, a zig zag between selection and reconnection, and the emerging problem is the concern of an orientation in thinking, the movement of a ‘drama’ formed by the concepts and states of things themselves, beneath representation, beneath logos. There are prior operations for achieving the establishment of a ‘theater of properties and events’. There are prior conditions for situating a consistency and enabling active processuality. “A fuzzy aggregate, a synthesis of disparate elements, is defined only by a degree of consistency that makes it possible to distinguish the disparate elements constituting that aggregate (discernability)”.²

An Intensive Matrix

Most of the encounters with literature, music, and film brought about by Deleuze are sub-representational, in a ‘distinct and obscure’ area where an individuating operation releases ‘materials-forces’ (emergent materials), affects, and percepts. Deleuze is interested in the composition of relations, the distribution of elements and articulations that presides over the emergence of forms, their organization, and their variation. What determines and gives rise to events is not an exogenous structural point of view, but a reciprocal and fluid structuration that is in perpetual transformation. The emphasis is on what determines temporal events (act, operation), on what consists in the movement of forces in relation, not from an external point of view that would give them a stable organization, but from a thinking of potential relationships, resulting from dynamic couplings.

During a lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1967, Deleuze outlined the principle of the reciprocity of sub-representational dynamisms determining intensive individuating experience according to a complementary double movement of organization and qualification (qualities and surfaces, species and parts). If the intensive model of the egg, given as point of reference, is a pure spatium yet to acquire extension, prior to the organism’s extension or the organization of organs, differential forces will be integrated by “taking diverging paths, splitting into dualisms and following lines of differentiation without which everything would remain in the dispersion of an unrealized cause”.³ Every individuating system—whether physical, psychological, aesthetic, or political—acquires specifications and particular modes of extension. An intensive field of individuation is constructed from disparate, heterogeneous series. The communication between series under the action of a differentiating (idea) consists of phenomena of coupling between series, of internal resonance in the system and forced movement as a magnitude beyond the basic series themselves: “Dynamism thus comprises its own power of determining space and time, since it immediately incarnates differential relations, the singularities and the progressivities immanent in the Idea”.⁴

We find here the three characteristic times of the ‘intensive systems’ in which differentiation is actualization through the double movement of specification and organization: “they must be surveyed in every domain”,⁵ Deleuze reminds us. The analysis of individuations brings out what is attempted in each case, the purpose and means of capture, showing the specific features of each area. What is at stake? The qualification of species and the organization of surfaces, individuation (event, object, state of things) in a spatial and temporal field, according to the two complementary aspects of quality and extension. In the field of art, writing or painting are operations of differentiation, ‘actualizing an Idea’. Note the emergent nature of this intensive matrix whose axes, vectors, gradients, and thresholds are experienced on non-communicating edges, without a priori structure: disparate synthesis concerns the extraction of new expressive materials.

Differentiation is also the ‘machinic’ nucleus that we find in the refrain. What is the refrain? A synthesis of disparates. A composite, transversal, ‘trans-categorical’ operation, linking territories, affects, and codes, based on an intensive process articulated in three steps: (1) create a ‘middle’ (intensive field); (2) produce expressive materials (territory); and (3) cause an excess movement (deterritorialization). These three steps are constitutive of every intensive system, whether aesthetic, psychological, linguistic, physical, thermodynamic, or embryological and of the specific individuations they produce in each domain.

The Emergent Musical Agency

Deleuze’s interest in energy and spatio-temporal determinations in a certain way stimulates the productive encounter with the musical field that unfolded in the course of the 1970s, with Félix Guattari. Remarkably, the issue of music appears, in connection with the notion of consistency in A Thousand Plateaus, as a privileged heterogeneous site that holds together disparate elements and allows for an overlapping of categories.⁶ One clearly sees a dialectical field specific to music appearing between, on the one hand, a plane of consistency—or a plane of the composition of powers with no prior allocation, which could also be called a plane of inconsistency—and on the other, a plane of organization (or development) present in the writing of music. The latter plane is not ‘audible’ for itself, and like Proust or Balzac “describes their work’s plane of organisation or development, as though in a metalanguage”,⁷ musicians like Stockhausen or Xenakis describe the sound forms of their works in an ‘off-time’.⁸

The idea of an intensive spatium, prior to effectuations, makes sense for music, concerning on one hand the distribution of functions within an open space-time, and on the other the game of differences, their emergence in a thought and/or system of expression. We are thinking here of the musical concepts that were freed from a transcendent, regulatory model in the 1950s–1970s, radically renewing representations and spatio-temporal patterns. The issue of differences and their individuation is at the heart of the concerns of musicians such as Varèse, who was, moreover, interested in the differential idea as a support for his idea of ‘organized sound’.⁹ We find the open game of differences in Luigi Nono’s idea of an ‘acoustic variation’ or in Xenakis’s ‘diagrams’ to name but a few. More broadly whether it be serialist, repetitive, ultrachromatique, concrete, or electronic music, no less than free jazz, progressive rock tendencies, pop, or improvisation, the concern is for the dynamics of experimenting with extensive–expressive conjunctions that break with consonance or the regulatory unity of form or measure.

Two years before the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze was invited by Boulez to participate in a conference at IRCAM on Musical Time,¹⁰ where he proposed to think differences in terms of forces (materials-forces) rather than form (material-form), a method, he underlined, that “concerns music but could just as well be used for a thousand other things”.¹¹ It was a matter of mapping variables in order to distinguish individuated time profiles in the different works presented: György Ligeti, Concerto de chambre; Claude Debussy, Dialogue du vent et de la mer; Olivier Messiaen, Mode de valeurs et d’intensités; Elliott Carter, A Mirror on Which to Dwell; and Pierre Boulez, Éclat, so that the time profiles analyzed stand out on a plane of consistency potentially occupied by “a multiplicity of heterochronous, qualitative, non-coincident, non-communicating durations”.¹² The affair of material is to contract relationships to allow a consistency capable of lightning flashes, breaks, shift changes, irrational cuts (which can gain from sobriety, being reduced to the essential). These qualities proper to music, such as variable flow lines and temporal forms, their diagrammatic directness, are often evoked in A Thousand Plateaus in its elaboration of a heterogeneous and transversal field.

Diagrams and Resonances

Which spatial and temporal multiplicities does music put in place for the freeing up of its individuations? The way musical components are assembled and ‘stand up’ by producing transversal coordinates, polyphonic devices, transpositions, and modular scales produces rapid extensions with no prior identity. Recall how the refrain is characterized in a particular relationship with deterritorialization and becomings, setting indissociably expressive intensities—cries, postures—and territory marks. If expression is first and territory second, functionalities and the production of expressive materials take shape with signs and collective protocols that are organized in time. So, it is with this double temporal and spatial, intensive and technical aspect that the assemblage of the musical field and its devices makes sense and broadens out to the assemblage of spatial and temporal coordinates required for any event or object of representation. We see in A Thousand Plateaus how the certain aspects of the ‘musical model’ become autonomous, move, are extracted and related to a priori exogenous fields. The model of ‘smooth space’ and ‘striated space’, for example, will be valid as a diagram of space-time that is applicable to technical, social, and political models; the production of a diagonal will, for instance, be relevant to holding Foucault’s enunciative functions together.¹³

Machinic Subjectivations

Beyond A Thousand Plateaus, we will recall how much Guattari—himself an amateur musician—insists in his own writings on the heterogeneous consistency of music, its semiotic field, its abstract and non-corporeal dimension, transverse to categories. Music, as a semiotic material escaping discursivity, produces regimes of signs through transitive logics, the composition of speeds, and its own modes of enunciation. The issue of subjectivity is actively projected in Chaosmosis, Guattari’s final book, in which the ethico-aesthetic dimension of the refrain is transversalized as a force able to redistribute existential desire, a non-mediated subjective capacity. Note in Chaosmosis just how much the ‘machinic’ subjectivation defined by Guattari refers to polyvocal functions, ‘non-corporal’ exchanges, and how he borrows many expressions of musical nature: subjectivity is ‘polyphonic’, existential grasping is ‘rhythm’, the process is ‘ritournellisant’.¹⁴ Guattari turns to the resources of an aesthetic paradigm, the reciprocities and resonances of which he conjugates with therapeutic approaches to social practices, from the unconscious to politics, from ethics to the artistic.¹⁵ Proponents of a paradigm of ‘ethics and aesthetics’ invite us to produce a difference able to oppose the unreality of a homogenized mass-media subjectivity. And no doubt, in this new paradigmatic context, art is credited with a special part, valorized for its practices of ‘rupture and suture’ able to bring out sense in a world submitted to the empty signs of a universalizing subjectivity. Faced with capitalistic subjugation, Guattari calls on an ethical, aesthetic, political community whose mutant function is to experiment with a subjective and processual creativity.¹⁶

Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the coming semiotic context (already present in the 1980s and 1990s) pushes them to consider an intense heterogenesis within a growing complexity of spatial and temporal modes and their associated modalities of control; “the modern exercise of power implies processes of normalisation, modulation, modeling and information that bear on language, perception, desire and movement”.¹⁷ Beyond the musical model and its capacity to produce individual and collective subjectivation, the differentiation or individuating processuality concerns the possibilities of deviation from the regulatory control of signs—whether moral, political, economic, or aesthetic—and brings out opportunities to form free enunciations and autonomous signs practices.

Such are the stakes of ‘machinic’ filiation engaged with technical and political flows of material reality, but also subjective representations not subordinated to the dominant molarity, incessantly injecting a relationship to desire of another kind—an infinite humor—the strength of constant creative subjectivity. It is on this ethical, transverse, and cross-category axis of heterogenesis, which no more belongs to one domain than to another, but concerns instead a processual vector passing through disparate and non-communicating milieus, that the stakes of an individuating or deterritorializing differentiation arises—not only in the arts, but in every domain of individuation.

Notes

1.Pascale Criton, “L’invitation”, in Deleuze épars. Approches et portraits, eds. A. Bernold and R. Pinhas (Paris: Hermann, 2005), pp. 55–8.

2.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 344; originally published as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (Paris: Minuit, 1980).

3.Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 32; originally published as Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986).

4.Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 218; originally published as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).

5.Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 214.

6.Pascale Criton, “L’hétérogénèse sonore”, in Gilles Deleuze. La pensée-musique, ed. P. Criton and J. M. Chouvel (Paris: CDMC, 2015), pp. 51–60.

7.Deleuze et Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 266.

8.Iannis Xenakis, Kéleütha (Paris: L’Arche, 1994), pp. 67–74.

9.Edgar Varèse, Ecrits (Paris: Bourgois, 1983), pp. 153–4.

10.Conference organized by Pierre Boulez at IRCAM, 23 February 1978, as part of the series Le Temps musical [The Musical Time] with Roland Barthes, Pierre Boulez, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, Video Ircam-Centre Pompidou, 1978.

11.Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 156; originally published as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit, 2003).

12.Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 157.

13.Deleuze, Foucault, p. 45.

14.Following the standard translation of ‘ritournelle’ as ‘refrain’, the word ‘ritournellisant’ would be translated as ‘refraining’ or ‘refrainifying’. We leave the original French expression here to avoid choosing between these two possibilities.

15.Pascale Criton, “Nothing Is Established Forever”, trans. Shane Lillis and revision Andrew Goffey, in The Guattari Effect, eds. Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey (London: Continuum Press, 2011), pp. 235–50.

16.Félix Guattari, Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée, 1992), pp. 126–8; English translation: Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

17.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 458.

Bibliography

Criton, Pascale. “L’invitation”. In Deleuze épars. Approches et portraits. Eds. A. Bernold and R. Pinhas. Paris: Hermann, 2005, pp. 55–8.

Criton, Pascale. “Nothing Is Established Forever”. Trans. Shane Lillis and revision Andrew Goffey. In The Guattari Effect. Eds. Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey. London: Continuum Press, 2011, pp. 235–50.

Criton, Pascale. “L’hétérogénèse sonore”. In Gilles Deleuze. La pensée-musique. Eds. P. Criton and J. M. Chouvel. Paris: CDMC, 2015, pp. 51–60.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; originally published as Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. London: Bloomsbury, 2006; originally published as Foucault. Paris: Minuit, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2007; originally published as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995. Paris: Minuit, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; originally published as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2. Paris: Minuit, 1980.

Guattari, Félix. Chaosmose. Paris: Galilée, 1992. English translation: Chaosmosis. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Varèse, Edgar. Ecrits. Paris: Bourgois, 1983.

Xenakis, Iannis. Kéleütha. Paris: L’Arche, 1994.

Part V

Deleuze and Others

12 Pluralism = Monism

What Deleuze Learns From Nietzsche and Spinoza

Alan D. Schrift

Gilles Deleuze has a complex and conflicted relation to the history of philosophy.¹ On the one hand, he was trained by, and has great respect for, some of the Sorbonne’s pre-eminent historians of philosophy: he learned his Stoics and his medieval philosophy from Maurice de Gandillac, and it was to Gandillac that he submitted Difference and Repetition in 1968 as his primary thesis for the Doctorat d’État. He worked closely as well with the great historian of modern philosophy Martial Guéroult, and it was another great historian of modern philosophy, Ferdinand Alquié, who supervised his secondary thesis, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression.² Yet while producing a series of studies in the history of philosophy, with books on Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche, Deleuze also confessed that he “belongs to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy”, adding that within philosophy “the history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role”.³ To escape from this repression while at the same time operating within its borders, Deleuze focused on “authors who challenged the rationalist tradition”, and in so doing, he finds what he calls a “secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche, constituted by their critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power”.⁴ In what follows, I want to explore the “secret link” Deleuze uncovers between Spinoza and Nietzsche, focusing specifically on how they both guide Deleuze to what he and Guattari call, in A Thousand Plateaus, their “magic formula … PLURALISM = MONISM”.

In 1970, two years after Deleuze had published Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, he published a second, introductory text on Spinoza. This little text, titled simply Spinoza,⁵ was expanded and republished in a second edition in 1981 with the subtitle “Practical Philosophy”.⁶ The first edition, following the model of texts published in the Presses Universitaires de France series “Philosophes”,⁷ was quite short in terms of Deleuze’s prose, including, in addition to twenty brief selections from Spinoza’s works, only three chapters written by Deleuze: a recounting of Spinoza’s life, a chapter on his philosophy, and a more lengthy explication, comprising roughly two-thirds of Deleuze’s prose, of what he considered to be the main concepts in Spinoza’s philosophy. One of the striking things about this text, and certainly something that would have come as a shock to someone coming to this text, as they might have surprised anyone familiar with the series in which it appeared who came looking simply for an introduction to Spinoza’s philosophy, is the role Nietzsche plays within it, a role that Deleuze highlights further in the second edition. In addition to Nietzsche’s name being the very first word of the text, Deleuze’s second chapter, whose title was changed in the second edition from “Philosophy” to “On the Difference between the Ethics and a Morality”, situates Spinoza’s importance vis-à-vis three “scandalous” main themes that each bears a “major resemblance” with Nietzsche.⁸ Let us look at these themes in turn.

The first theme, the denunciation of consciousness, points to Spinoza the materialist, who devalues consciousness in favor of thought. Here Deleuze emphasizes Spinoza’s rejection of the primacy of the mind as his fundamental challenge to Descartes. This is the import of Spinoza’s parallelism, which places the mind on an equal footing with the body. And while Spinoza’s paralellism is a metaphysical position, it has an essentially moral consequence in challenging the view, promoted by the dogmatic image of thought and its fear of being led into error, that the mind/spirit is in conflict with the body/flesh, and that the role of consciousness is fundamentally a moral role: to facilitate the control of the passions/the body and thereby avoid falling into error. Spinoza’s parallelism also has the consequence of devaluing consciousness in favor of thought, because if there is a strict parallelism between thought and extension—that is, if everything that happens in the body has its parallel analog in the mind—then we can only conclude that much of what is happening under the attribute of thought is unconscious insofar as much of what is happening in our body is unknown to us. This leads Deleuze to formulate what he calls the triple illusion that constitutes consciousness, a trio of illusions that match exactly Nietzsche’s account of “The Four Great Errors” in Twilight of the Idols:

The illusion of final causes, or what Nietzsche called “the error of mistaking the consequence for the cause”—the illusion of taking effects for causes, an illusion that is manifested when consciousness construes as the final cause or purpose behind consciousness’s own actions what is in reality the effect of a body on our body. For example, we believe we freely choose to smoke a cigarette when we are in fact motivated by a physiological addiction to nicotine that produces the craving to smoke: our conscious choice to light up a cigarette is not the cause of our lighting the cigarette; rather, our conscious choice to light up is in fact the unconscious effect of one body—the physical craving for nicotine—causing our body to react.

The illusion of free decrees, which Nietzsche names “the error of free will”—the illusion of consciousness taking itself as a first cause that exercises control over the body.

The theological illusion, or what Nietzsche calls “the error of false [or] imaginary causes”—the illusion that manifests itself when consciousness finds that it is incapable of attributing to itself the causal power to do something, and concludes by attributing this causal power instead to God.

From these illusions, Deleuze concludes that, for Spinoza, consciousness is not the cause of anything; it is rather the effect of the affections that produce in us appetites. In other words, some external thing causes us to desire it, to strive for it, to regard it as “good”, and consciousness is simply the awareness of this desire, this striving, this conatus. Rather than being the cause of our attractions or repulsions, consciousness is only the awareness of the passage from being attracted by an object to desiring that object, or from being repulsed by an object to hating it.⁹

The second theme, the denunciation of transcendent moral values, points to Spinoza the immoralist, who rejects transcendent values, and in particular “evil”, in favor of “good and bad”. In contrast to the fictitious moral ideas of good and evil, Spinoza claims we should consider good and bad naturalistically as concepts with an objective meaning: good is what agrees with our nature (and thereby increases our power to act), and bad is what disagrees with our nature (and thus diminishes our power to act). This, for Deleuze, is the import of Spinoza’s interpretation of the Genesis story about Adam and the apple: when God told Adam not to eat the apple, he was not issuing a moral law for which Adam would be punished should he disobey, as Adam himself came to understand what had happened when he interpreted his exile from Eden as divine punishment for violating a prohibition. Instead, according to Spinoza, God was simply providing Adam with some useful information, telling Adam that eating the apple would be bad for him insofar as it would diminish his capacity to act.¹⁰ For Spinoza, there is no such thing as evil, but there are many things that are bad insofar as they will lead to the decomposition of the body and to diminishing what it can do. This is why, for Deleuze, ethics “is a typology of immanent modes of existence, replaces Morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values”.¹¹ What is objectively bad is thus linked to affects of sadness, while what is objectively good is productive of joyful affects. And Spinoza’s theory of the affects turns us away from seeking a transcendental moral standard for judging what is good or evil, and returns us to the immanent question of what we are capable of doing: which is to say, has our power to act in the world been increased or decreased?

Spinoza’s proximity here to Nietzsche is clear. Nietzsche is well-known for being the philosopher who sought to go “beyond good and evil”, but it is equally important to remember, as Nietzsche noted explicitly at the close of the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, that to go “beyond good and evil” “does not mean [to go] ‘Beyond Good and Bad’ ”. The difference between “Good and Evil” and “Good and Bad” is the ostensible topic of the Genealogy’s First Essay, and reflecting on this difference is the very first topic Deleuze addresses in Nietzsche and Philosophy. For Nietzsche, the distinction between “good and bad” remains in some sense grounded in the natural, while the “good and evil” distinction is grounded in the divine: where the originators of judgments of “good and bad” had sufficient confidence in their own natural instincts to establish these ethical categories on their own, the originators of judgments of “good and evil” lacked this confidence—in Nietzsche’s language, they lacked the strength—and they sought a transcendent justification for their judgments in the will of God. Anticipating precisely Deleuze’s distinction between ethics and morality, Nietzsche distinguishes between the natural and the divine by distinguishing between the immanent, ethical difference between noble and base that grounds evaluative judgments on one’s “way of being or style of life”,¹² and the transcendent, moral opposition between good and evil that grounds evaluative judgment on an absolute and otherworldly ideal. When Deleuze returns to this point later in the text, he distinguishes “good and bad” from “good and evil” precisely in terms of the distinction between the ethical and the moral: “This is how good and evil are born: ethical determination, that of good and bad, gives way to moral judgment. The good of ethics becomes the evil of morality, the bad has become the good of morality”.¹³ How this plays out in Nietzsche is in terms of his unique version of ethical naturalism: a healthy ethical individual will make evaluations in terms of those values that match one’s nature, while the decadent individual is the one whose values reflect the nature of others, or of a time in which one does not oneself belong. Nietzsche’s noble creates values as a positive affirmation of self, while his slave’s values are created in response to what is determined to be other than his nature.

Like Spinoza, Nietzsche wants to link ethics with the immanent question of what we are capable of doing, as we see clearly at the beginning of the second section of The Anti-Christian:

What is good?—Everything that heightens in the human the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself.

What is bad?—All that stems from weakness.

What is happiness?—The feeling of power on the increase, that resistance has been overcome.¹⁴

And as with Spinoza, whenever Nietzsche talks about values, his appeal is to the values immanent within life, as we see, for example, in Nietzsche’s famous analysis, in the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, of the psychology of bad conscience, not as the voice of God in man, but as the instinct of cruelty that turns back on itself after it can no longer discharge itself externally. When Nietzsche argues that it is the immanent necessities of social existence required by human beings’ entry into community that result in the “internalization of man” that stands at the origin of the “soul” and the entire inner world, his thinking, like Spinoza’s, challenges the assumption that one must ground one’s politics or ethics in something transcendent, be it the Platonic Good, the Christian God, or the Kantian autonomous moral self.

The third theme, the denunciation of “sad passions”, according to Deleuze, points to Spinoza the atheist. Where Nietzsche seeks out as his enemy the ascetic ideal, Spinoza denounces the moralist trinity of

The slave, or the man with sad passions.

The tyrant, or the man who exploits these sad passions.

The priest, or the man who is saddened by the human condition and by human passions in general.

What unites these three is precisely what Nietzsche associates with those who put their faith in the ascetic ideal, namely their hatred of life. In contrast to this moralist trinity, Spinoza’s affirmation of joy is a philosophy of life-affirmation. The Ethics is thus not a morality but an ethology that, with regard to humans and animals, considers only their capacity for being affected. With respect to humans, we must consider two sorts of affections:

Actions which are explained by the nature of the affected individual and spring from the individual’s own essence as manifested in the power (puissance) of acting.

Passions which are explained by something else originating outside the individual and manifested in the power (puissance) of being acted upon.

And with respect to passions, a further distinction must be made between

What acts upon us in a way that diminishes our power to act: the sad passions.

What acts upon us in a way that increases our power to act: the joyful passions.

For Deleuze’s Spinoza, what ultimately mattered was not the metaphysics or epistemology, but the politics, specifically, the intervention into the political so as to increase the amount of joy and decrease the sadness. When Deleuze reads Spinoza, in the end, he flattens the Spinozist system to a single plane of immanence. This is what the chapter “Spinoza and Us”, which Deleuze added to the second edition as its final chapter, asks us to construct: a plane with two dimensions, a longitude that allows us to situate bodies in terms of relations of motion and rest, and a latitude that chronicles the affects that occupy these bodies at each moment. In the end, nothing else in Spinoza matters. All the nuts and bolts of Spinoza’s metaphysical system are inessential. The essential is to refrain from leaving the plane of immanence to a theological plane or plane of organization that takes us away from bodies and what they can do. Like Spinoza, Deleuze is also primarily a practical thinker, a thinker of practices, an ethologist. And his practical goal, also like Spinoza’s, is to increase the joyful passions—those that increase our power to act—and decrease the sad passions that diminish our power to act. There is no need to leave the plane of immanence, because nothing else really matters.

For Deleuze, Spinoza’s Ethics, as an ethics, asks but a single question: “how does one arrive at a maximum of joyful passions?” According to Deleuze, Spinoza’s psychology is a brutally reductionist one: all that matters, in the end, are sadness and joy, and our ethical command is to maximize joy and minimize sadness. All the other affects are simply the fine tuning of this binary, directed toward allowing us to increase our power to act. The result of this ethical theory is a call to interact with others who will compose with us new individuals whose power of acting will have been increased, as will the power to act of the individuals who now comprise this collective individual, and to avoid interacting with individuals who will decompose us and diminish our power to act.

And in the end, for Deleuze, what Nietzsche means by “will to power” is exactly the same thing: not the desire to have some thing—power—but the having of this power in order to act upon the world.¹⁵ This is why Nietzsche can speak, in Beyond Good and Evil, of psychology as “the path to the fundamental problems” when it is understood, as he understands it, “as morphology and doctrine of the development of the will to power”.¹⁶ For Nietzsche, as for Spinoza, life is the incessant process of acting on and being acted upon, which for Spinoza is expressed in terms of actions and passions (or more technically, active affects and passive affects), while for Nietzsche these are expressed in terms of the forces of strength and the forces of weakness. And what Deleuze does with this Nietzschean distinction is almost as well-known as Nietzsche’s distinction itself, as he reframes the forces of strength that Nietzsche associates with the noble and the forces of weakness that he associates with the slave in terms of the forces of action and reaction: where the noble actively differentiates oneself from one’s rivals, the slave reactively opposes all that is other than oneself. Not surprisingly, then, Deleuze opens the chapter in Nietzsche and Philosophy on the active and the reactive by invoking Spinoza: “Spinoza suggested a new direction for the sciences and philosophy. He said that we do not even know what a body can do, we talk about consciousness and spirit, and chatter on about it all, but we do not know what a body is capable of, what forces belong to it or what they are preparing for. Nietzsche knew that the hour had come”.¹⁷ This is the hour when history would have to be interrogated in terms of a history of nihilism, a history of the triumph of reactive forces, a history of the becoming-reactive of active forces. Deleuze’s Nietzsche book, we must remember, is not titled Nietzsche’s Philosophy but Nietzsche and Philosophy, and what Nietzsche offers to philosophy is an understanding of a body as any relationship of forces, with forces understood as either dominant/active or dominated/reactive.¹⁸ And what Deleuze offers to us in his book is the Spinoza–Nietzsche assemblage, Spin-Nietzsche if you will, who understands reactive force as force that separates active force from what it can do and thereby denies active force, thus marking the triumph of the base, while understanding active force as force that goes to the limit of what it can do.

What draws Deleuze to both Nietzsche and Spinoza is that he finds in them the strongest expression of the power of affirmation. The will to power itself is the principle of multiple affirmation, the differential element that simultaneously determines the relation of forces (in terms of their quantity) and the respective qualities of related forces in terms of their being active or reactive. True to his own affirmative spirit, Deleuze forms an alliance with Nietzsche and Spinoza in opposition to Hegel, confronting Hegel’s “labor of the dialectic” with Nietzsche’s “games of the will to power”, and contrasting Hegel’s discovery of the “negation of the negation” with Nietzsche’s alternative discovery of the “affirmation of affirmation”.¹⁹ In place of Hegelian negation, then, Deleuze situates Nietzschean critique, a critique that confronts the reign of the base in which the triumphant reactive forces both deny active forces and turn against themselves. The goal of critique is not to negate but to transmute these reactive forces: only through transvaluation, through the becoming-active of reactive forces, will critique succeed and will force, now active, take its place as force that affirms its difference and makes its difference an object of enjoyment and affirmation.²⁰

My point in recalling this Spinoza–Nietzsche assemblage is that, while his contemporaries cannot avoid thinking through Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, Deleuze pays these four little attention as he reads Spinoza through a Nietzschean lens and Nietzsche through a Spinozist lens. And what results from these two readings is precisely Deleuze and Guattari’s “magic formula … PLURALISM = MONISM”.²¹ For Spinoza, of course, this is understood in terms of the infinite plurality of modes through which the monistic substance that is “deus sive nature” manifests itself, and the plurality of relations of motion and rest and active and passive affects through which bodies manifest themselves. And for Nietzsche, this is understood as the plurality of differential relations of active and reactive forces through which the monism of will to power manifests itself. Following their leads, Deleuze and Guattari collapse the distinction between monism and pluralism as their analyses plot their analysands along a variety of multiplicitous continuums. What is important to note is that like Nietzsche and Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari are not afraid to formulate their continuums within a binary, dualistic framework. In fact, their willingness to adopt and remain within a binary format marks one of the most obvious points at which Deleuze and Guattari differentiate themselves from the Hegelian tradition. In contrast to the resolution of dualistic opposition in a higher synthesis via the Hegelian Aufhebung, even a brief survey of some of their basic analytic categories—paranoia and schizophrenia, molar and molecular, arborescent and rhizomatic, state apparatus and nomad war machine, smooth and striated—shows Deleuze and Guattari to be content to work within the framework of a certain kind of binarism, one that seeks not to dissolve but to multiply dualistic concepts. In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, they confront the issue of utilizing dualistic concepts in non-oppositional ways and admit to using dualisms but only in order to challenge other dualisms. When binary concepts are employed, they write, “mental correctives are necessary” to undo those dualisms that one does not “wish to construct but through which [one must] pass” as one moves beyond dualisms to the realization of a pluralist monism.²² One can use dualistic concepts—indeed their use may be necessary; but one must take care to avoid privileging and reifying these dualisms as absolute while remembering that these dualisms mark differences rather than oppositions and remembering as well that their use is always strategic and provisional.

Avoiding the privileging or reification of these dualistic opposites is made easier for Deleuze insofar as he is perhaps the most significant “philosopher of becoming” since Nietzsche. Deleuze notes that the central feature that distinguishes becoming from other transformative processes with which it can be confused is the absence of fixed terms: “What is real”, Deleuze writes, “is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes…. Becoming produces nothing other than itself…. [A] becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself…. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own”.²³ What Deleuze finds in becoming that is missing in other accounts of transformation is the focus on process itself. Where other accounts of transformation focus our attention on the beginning and end point of a process in a way that obscures the passage between them, the language of becoming draws our attention to what happens between these ever‑receding endpoints. Becomings take place between the binary, dualistic poles; they are the in‑betweens that pass only and always along a middle without origin or destination.²⁴

This understanding of becoming as a process that can acknowledge differences without falling victim to conceiving these differences as marking dualistically opposed subjects allows Deleuze and Guattari to reformulate traditional binary disjunctions between given alternatives in terms of a pluralist–monist continuum that facilitates the construction of alliances. As they note in the conclusion of their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, “the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction ‘and … and … and…’ ”.²⁵ It is this rhizomatic conjunction that makes possible the construction of the multiple, which is their privileged form of the construction of the new. It is important, they note, to treat the multiple “as a substantive”, an assemblage “that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections”.²⁶ This is, in the final analysis, what Deleuze was doing in his Nietzsche and Spinoza books, producing rhizomatic connections between his two predecessors in recognizing that monism equals pluralism.

It is also a central component of what Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, calls the “new image of thought”. This new image is put forward in contrast to the “dogmatic image of thought” that has dominated philosophy and that Deleuze summarizes in “three essential theses”:

Thinkers, qua thinkers, want and love truth.

We are diverted from the truth by forces foreign to it, in particular, the body, passions, and sensuous interest.

The way to ward off this diversion into error is through a method.²⁷

That Nietzsche would be Deleuze’s guide out of the dogmatic image of thought is not surprising, given that the questioning of the “will to truth” is perhaps his most consistent motif in his mature post-Zarathustra writings.²⁸ According to Deleuze, for Nietzsche, meaning and value precede truth, which means that we get the truths we deserve insofar as they are a function of the values we affirm and bring with us at the outset of our search for these truths.²⁹ For that reason, Nietzschean genealogy is less interested in our “truths” than in the values that give rise to those truths that have meaning for us. The “new image of thought” will therefore be guided not by truth but by meaning and value. And the question of value takes us out of the realm of metaphysics and puts us into the realm of ethics. Where the dogmatic image of thought seeks above all to avoid error in its search for truth, the new image of thought, following Nietzsche, suggests that some errors might be necessary, that untruth might itself be “a condition of life”.³⁰ What is to be avoided in this new image of thought is thus not error but stupidity, bêtise, base thinking.³¹ And this thinking is stupid and base not because it misses the truth but because it limits what one is capable of doing. For Deleuze’s Nietzsche, this stupidity manifests itself in the reactive forces that prevent active forces from doing what they are capable of, while for Deleuze’s Spinoza, this stupidity shows itself in the sad passions that limit what the body is able to do.

Staying with Nietzsche for the moment, a mind dominated by reactive forces, whether it thinks the truth or thinks falsely, always thinks basely, and thus the thinking that is governed by reactive forces expresses itself as stupidity, regardless of whether its stupidities are true or false. Nietzsche ushers in the new image of thought by looking for thought to be guided not by method but by culture. Because, according to Nietzsche, “thinking needs to be learned just as dancing needs to be learned”,³² and because our schools no longer know what it means to learn how to think, Nietzsche must enter the culture wars. His attack on the will to truth and the dogmatic image of thought that is its guardian leads him to a new image of thought, which works through meaning and value by way of interpretation and evaluation. This new image of thought, driven by the becoming-active of forces, will transvalue negation into affirmation, sadness into joy, and will finally begin to experiment with answers to Spinoza’s question about what a body can do. Nietzsche’s positive goal was to create a culture not unlike the society imagined by Spinoza, in which the role of the state was to facilitate individuals doing what they are capable of. Like Spinoza, Nietzsche says that we do not yet know what the body can do, but he goes beyond Spinoza in critiquing our slavish, base morality and culture for not wanting to know what the body is capable of doing and for instead creating social rules—that is to say, morality—to instill in us an image of thought that encourages us to fear allowing ourselves, and others, the right to do what we are capable of.

Throughout Deleuze’s works, as is also the case in the works of Spinoza and Nietzsche, one sees the desire to remain within the plane of immanence and the refusal to make any move to a transcendent or theological plane that takes us away from bodies and what they can do. On several occasions, as I have already noted, he addresses this point by marking a distinction between ethics and morality. In a 1986 interview, Deleuze put the distinction this way:

Morality presents us with a set of constraining rules of a special sort, ones that judge actions and intentions by considering them in relation to transcendent values (this is good, that’s evil…); ethics is a set of optional rules that assess what we do, what we say, in relation to the ways of existing involved.³³

By way of conclusion, let me suggest that there are significant political implications to be drawn from how Deleuze advances the new image of thought and moves from Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s rejection of the good–evil binary to the “magic formula … PLURALISM = MONISM”. A politics that thinks in terms of good vs. evil—as we see all too clearly throughout the contemporary world—can neither avoid demonizing the other—the other will be either my friend or my enemy—nor allow for any sort of compromise insofar as compromise becomes equated with defeat: if my enemy gains, I must lose. A politics that thinks in terms of a pluralist continuum of good and bad—which in fact would be a micropolitics of “better or worse”—would make choices in terms of local considerations along a monistic plane of immanence, whether understood in terms of Spinoza’s increasing the body’s capacity to act, Nietzsche’s enhancement of life, or Deleuze’s advancing the ways of existing. Deleuze often recalled Spinoza’s remark that we do not yet know what a body can do,³⁴ and this applies to the body politic as well as to a human body. We have yet to truly explore what a body politic can do when it refuses to leave the plane of immanence, when it commits itself to negotiating its de- and reterritorializations, its lines of flight and experimentations, while steadfastly refusing to appeal to the transcendent. Such a politics might sometimes be dangerous, to be sure. But unlike the various forms of contemporary politics that think only in terms of the transcendent values of good vs. evil, only in terms of friend vs. enemy, such a politics might find ways to avoid being stupid.

Notes

1.This chapter draws upon and expands several points I first raised in “Thinking about Ethics: Deleuze’s Not-So-Secret Link with Spinoza and Nietzsche”, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, vol. 30, eds. Leonard Lawlor and Peg Birmingham, published in Philosophy Today (2009 Supplement): 207–13.

2.Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968); trans. into English as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990).

3.Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 5.

4.Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 6.

5.Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970).

6.Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988); originally published as Spinoza, philosophie pratique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981).

7.Deleuze published the text on Nietzsche in this series in 1965.

8.One of the few changes to this chapter in the second edition is the addition of the sentence following Deleuze’s first listing of the “triple denunciation”: “These are the three major resemblances with Nietzsche” (Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, p. 17). A second addition is the quote from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality that appears on p. 22.

9.In Section 354 of The Joyful Science, Nietzsche makes essentially the same claim about consciousness, arguing that it is essentially a “mirror effect” that, while largely superfluous for most of our actions (including thinking, feeling, willing, and remembering), arises in response to “the pressure of the need for communication”. Here, as elsewhere in this chapter, I follow the Stanford University Press translations of Nietzsche’s book titles.

10.See Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chapter 4, paragraphs 26–7, and Letter XIX to Blyenburgh.

11.Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, p. 23.

12.Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 1.

13.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 122.

14.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christian, trans. Carol Diethe and Adrian Del Caro, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner / Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christian / Ecce Homo / Dionysus Dithyrambs / Nietzsche Contra Wagner, trans. Carol Diethe, Adrian Del Caro, Duncan Large and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming), Section 2.

15.Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 57: “There isn’t a desire for power; it is power itself that is desire. Not a desire-lack, but desire as a plenitude, exercise, and functioning, even in the most subaltern of workers. Being an assemblage, desire is precisely one with the gears and the components of the machine, one with the power of the machine”.

16.Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), Section 23.

17.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.39.

18.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 40.

19.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 197.

20.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 61.

21.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 20.

22.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 20–1.

23.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 238–9.

24.Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 293.

25.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 2.

26.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 8.

27.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 103.

28.See, for example, the opening section of Beyond Good and Evil.

29.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 104.

30.Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Section 4.

31.Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 105.

32.Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), “What the Germans Lack”, Section 7.

33.Deleuze, Negotiations, p.100 (translation modified).

34.Spinoza, Ethics, Book III, Postulate 2, Proposition 2; cited and discussed by Deleuze in, among other places, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 39 (at the start of the chapter “Active and Reactive”), and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, chapter 14: “What Can a Body Do?”

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Originally published as Spinoza et le problème de l’expression. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Originally published as Spinoza, philosophie pratique. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981.

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Athlone Press, 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, 1972–1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil/On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. Adrian Del Caro. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Case of Wagner/Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christian/Ecce Homo/Dionysus Dithyrambs/Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Trans. Carol Diethe, Adrian Del Caro, Duncan Large and others. Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Joyful Science. Trans. Adrian Del Caro. Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming.

Schrift, Alan D. “Thinking about Ethics: Deleuze’s not-so-Secret Link with Spinoza and Nietzsche”. Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Vol. 30. Eds. Leonard Lawlor and Peg Birmingham. In Philosophy Today (2009 Supplement): 207–13.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. Ethics. In The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1. Ed. and trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 2. Ed. and trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

13 Deleuze and Guattari’s Geodynamism and Husserl’s Geostatism

Two Cosmological Perspectives

Alain Beaulieu

The conference theme “Refrains of Freedom”,¹ to which this chapter was initially presented, may have a cosmological resonance. No doubt, it is a perspective I adopt in the present analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s and Edmund Husserl’s cosmologies, and, more precisely, of their respective conceptions of the earth: a geostatic earth for Husserl and a geodynamic one for Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Husserl’s essay “The Earth Does Not Move”² (also known as the Umsturz Fragment, written in 1934) as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal A Thousand Plateaus and What Is Philosophy? serve as the foundation of my analysis.³

This chapter is a response to the relative silence in the secondary literature with respect to Deleuze and cosmology. It elaborates Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Husserl’s conception of the earth, written perhaps cursorily at the beginning of the chapter “Geophilosophy” in What Is Philosophy?, and delineates the political implications of this critique.

Husserl’s Earth

In the 1934 essay “The Earth Does Not Move”, Husserl presents a geostatic conception according to which the earth’s immobility is more significant than its state of movement or rest. Let us outline the context of this brief meditation by recalling several ideas presented in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,⁴ written between 1934 and 1937, and so concurrently with “The Earth Does Not Move”. In Crisis, Husserl intends to revive the Greek teleological and purely spiritual experience of theoria so as to neutralize modern science and its empirical method and to propose a phenomenological alternative to it. It is Galileo whom Husserl considers to be the main representative of modern science.

Galileo pioneered the use of observation tools, and applied the empirical method with the more or less declared intention to become, to borrow Descartes’s expression, “like masters and possessors of nature”.⁵ This path taken by modern science is, according to Husserl, the source of a profound crisis, which has become symptomatic of the sciences and their attempt, considered to be “delirious”, to objectivize the Cosmos.

The cause of the crisis of Western science is to be found in the misleading rationalism that objectivizes the nature of the world. The remedy, following Husserl, who becomes for a moment a “doctor of civilization” (Arzt der Kultur),⁶ lies in reconnecting phenomenology with the teleological experience of science as theoria. The task of phenomenology as a rigorous science is not finite and does not consist in providing definitive, exact, and certain answers, but is, rather, infinite in that the constitution of phenomena must remain a process destined never to be fully accomplished.

Husserl’s rhetoric of crisis as well as the sense of emergency associated with it can certainly be criticized, as can his idea of an increasing danger and a cultural devastation linked to his diagnosis of the crumbling away of reason at that time of crisis. After all, modern science has not been entirely and integrally harmful to humanity.

Husserl’s critique of rationality, however, is not intended to endorse a naive irrationalism. It is, rather, an attempt to reconnect with an experience of rationality that Husserl considers to be more fundamental, namely the Greek teleological logos that Galileo and his successors either misunderstood or pushed to the realm of useless abstraction. From Galileo to Einstein, modern science has missed the telos of science that enables reaching the Lebenswelt, a life-world that cannot be “known” by the intellect or experienced by the senses: it can only be intuited. Insofar as scientists disregard this pre-predicative level of experience, they will remain, for Husserl, prisoners of a faulty conception of evidence.

Husserl’s critique of modern science reveals a certain cosmological affectivity. It is worth noting that his critique does not directly launch an attack on medicine, biology, or chemistry, even if Claude Bernard, Dmitri Mendeleev, and Charles Darwin introduced the empirical method into their respective sciences. It is, rather, astronomy and, more specifically, Galileo in Crisis and Copernicus in “The Earth Does Not Move” that constitute the targets of Husserl’s critique. Husserl’s choice of astronomy perhaps emphasizes the opposition between the modern vision of the world and his own cosmic vision. After all, phenomenology considers the “world” (Cosmos) and its Konstitution to be among its main concerns.

In “The Earth Does Not Move”, Husserl argues that all cosmologies of the past, whether geocentric or heliocentric (perhaps even those that combine both approaches, as in the case of Tycho Brahe), share a common denominator: they conceptualize the earth as a celestial body, thereby overlooking a more fundamental aspect of it, the earth as the originary archè (Ur-Archè). There is certainly a semantic, or minimally a phonetic, polysemy at work here in that the “archè” in question may conjure up images of Noah’s Ark as the biblical metaphor of our space vessel; of the archè of the ancient Greeks as “fundamental principle”; and of the adjective “archaic” as a synonym of “primordial” or “ancestral”. Husserl’s earth as the originary ark encompasses all of these meanings. The Ur-Archè acts as a space vessel that carries the Greek fundamental and teleological principles embedded in Western science. Husserl summarizes these meanings by regarding the earth as a phenomenological entity, not as a celestial body but, rather, as our originary and living “ground” (Boden).

The claim that the earth does not move is undoubtedly provocative. Actually, the earth as a celestial body moves, and moves very fast. The earth rotates on its axis at 465 m/s and revolves around the sun at 107.000 km/h. It is, nonetheless, true that these movements are not perceived by us. From the point of view of our perception, it is, in fact, as if the earth did not move. Our everyday experience also indicates that the earth may not be at rest. The sunrise and the sunset give the impression of the earth’s movement. However, if we were to ask our perceptions “What moves?”, the answer “The sun revolves around the earth” would not be less absurd than the answer “The earth revolves around the sun”.

It follows that if we rely on our perceptions alone, the earth does not move as the absence of acceleration and deceleration gives such an impression. At the same time, it is not absurd to consider that the earth moves for we experience the movement of the sun in the sky. For Husserl, then, the earth is neither in movement nor at rest. The earth is rather our immobile ground. Both movement and non-movement are relative to the immobile ground that makes it all possible.

Husserl transposes that relativity of movement and rest to the perception on the earth as the originary ark in which the state of movement and rest is teleologically possible. The primordial phenomenological experience of the earth as the originary ark corresponds essentially to the fixed and stable ground associated with the Greco-European telos, which we carry with us wherever we go. Our experience of movement and rest is thus relative to that originary ground, which is also according to Husserl our primordial and unmoving home. In other words, the Ptolemean and Copernican systems are relative to the earth as the originary and immobile ark, which is their common and universal ground.

Deleuze and Guattari’s Earth

Cosmologies of the past, from Plato’s Timaeus⁷ to young Kant,⁸ are dominated by the speculative attempt to determine all the parameters of the heavens, to discover their laws of organization, finality, and perfection. Husserl and Deleuze engage in a different quest as they ask philosophers to “return to the earth” after having been lost in the speculations of transcendent cosmologies.

However, Deleuze’s peculiar conception of the earth does not exclude a “non-earthly” cosmology. As opposed to what the case is in Husserl, the supra-lunar cosmology continues to play a determining role in Deleuze. He is, in fact, one of the few contemporary philosophers who adhere to that cosmological tradition, to which the secondary literature on Deleuze has paid relatively little attention. Deleuze suggests a reformation of the old, transcendent, and speculative cosmologies in favor of an immanent cosmology. Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically quote works of such astrophysicists as Roland Omnès and Jean-Pierre Luminet. Deleuze and Guattari’s readers are familiar with such scientific notions as space-time, supernovas, the Big Bang, speed of light, Einstein’s theories, and Hubble’s constant, which periodically appear in their works.

Cosmological sensibility, without a doubt, permeates Deleuze’s work. For instance, in Difference and Repetition, he considers Whitehead’s Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology⁹ to be “one of the greatest books of modern philosophy”.¹⁰ Another example of Deleuze’s cosmological sensibility lies in his use of the neologism “chaosmology”, borrowed from James Joyce. Besides, the concept of an “outside which is farther away than any external world”,¹¹ borrowed from Antonin Artaud and Maurice Blanchot, acquires a cosmological resonance. The “incapacity to think” (impouvoir de la pensée)¹² is precisely linked to a sensibility to “outside forces”. These forces affect the geodynamic earth, and their place and origin can possibly be situated beyond it. We should also recall the concluding section of Deleuze’s work on Bergson and his discussion of “cosmic memory” and the “mystic soul [which] actively plays the whole of the universe”, as well as the notion of “cosmic art” presented as one of the main features of modern art in A Thousand Plateaus.¹³

One of the principal philosophical challenges presented by Deleuze consists less in asking “What is outside of the world we live in?” than in asking “How to live in this world?” Paul Valéry’s oft-quoted passage by Deleuze “The deepest is the skin”¹⁴ may summarize Deleuze’s perspective on cosmology: profound mysteries and the strangeness of the universe are down here, in the immanent world. Deleuze’s earth belongs to the category of “Erewhon”¹⁵ created by Samuel Butler: the earth is a “now here”, deprived of transcendence, but also a “nowhere” that exceeds representation. Therefore, the primary task of philosophy consists in creating concepts by experiencing, paradoxically, the non-familiarity of the earth. To achieve this, philosophy must become “geophilosophy”.

It is certainly justifiable to regard Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy as a critical response to historicism. It is equally legitimate to claim that their geophilosophy takes a critical distance from what we may term “cosmo-philosophy”. For the ancient Greeks, cosmology is closely linked to philosophy. Accordingly, we cannot claim to have achieved the highest degree of wisdom without being philosophically and spiritually aware of an intimate relationship between the harmony in ourselves and the harmony of the universe. The speculative aspect of Plato’s cosmological questioning is at the service of a superior ethical goal, for it ideally leads to an experience of the harmony between the movement of the celestial bodies and the movement of our soul, as Plato demonstrates in a remarkably poetic fashion.¹⁶ The movement of the soul must be aligned with the harmony of the celestial orbits. To put it more simply, following Pierre Hadot,¹⁷ from the point of view of ancient cosmologies, the observation of heavens is a spiritual exercise meant to improve the self. Consequently, one of the main tasks for philosophers consists in integrating that cosmological aspect into their endeavor to attain a certain wisdom. In this sense, philosophy is indeed a cosmo-philosophy.

Deleuze’s geophilosophy, to the contrary, is suspicious of cosmo-philosophy. The role attributed to geophilosophy does not involve contemplation of the harmonious links between the micro- and the macro-Cosmos. Geophilosophy is interested in experiencing with the deterritorializing forces of the earth, which render the immanent environment a place simultaneously surprising, strange, creative, and non-familiar. Geophilosophy suggests and implies a de-Oedipalization of the ancient cosmo-philosophies. It also breaks with the intimacy and transcendence associated with the ancient cosmo-philosophies in favor of the conquest of an immanent earth.

Territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization become paradigmatic of this conquest. From the point of view of geophilosophy, philosophy is not concerned with the relation between the human soul and the “world soul” but, rather, with the relation between territory and the earth, where thinking takes place. This complex interconnectedness between thought and the earth implies the movement of de- and reterritorialization, with the lines of flight as the vectors of these transformations; each territory provides a temporary equilibrium or an ephemeral order, which temporarily protects from chaos, and is sent back to the realm of mere opinion. Territorial movements occur on the earth, and so the need to refer to transcendent or supra-terrestrial territories such as Plato’s Sky of Ideas or Augustine’s City of God is not essential any longer.

The ancient cosmo-philosophies leave the earth behind and overlook, therefore, the relation between thought and the earth. On the other hand, geophilosophy is an immanent philosophy and is terrestrial by nature. It is not a cosmo-philosophy in the sense that it is not interested in speculating on the supra-terrestrial but, primarily, in experiencing with the earth.

Geodynamism and Geostatism

Both Husserl and Deleuze dispense with the traditional quest for the supra-terrestrial, and favor instead experiencing with the earth. There are, however, significant divergences between the two thinkers. At the beginning of the chapter “Geophilosophy” in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari present, without clarification, their explicit critique of Husserl’s earth as the originary ark by opposing their geodynamism to Husserl’s geostatism. What follows is a brief discussion of the discord between Husserl and Deleuze so as to give substance to the critique of Husserl’s geostatism.

Husserl’s epochè is incompatible with Deleuze’s experience of the earth. Husserl suspends or “brackets” the natural world by proposing a radical critique of the natural attitude, which is meant to bring back into question the validity of the heliocentric model. It leaves room for a symbolic earth that is aligned with the spiritual roots of the scientific and teleological tradition of Western culture. By doing so, phenomenology opposes the advancement of modern science, including the discoveries of astronomy and astrophysics. The earth for Deleuze, on the other hand, is physical and animated by non-sensible forces. Deleuze does not reject scientific discoveries. To the contrary, he often refers to the works of astrophysicists and cosmologists to illustrate certain aspects of his philosophy. Science is for Deleuze a form of thought as valuable as the two other forms, philosophy and art.

Husserl presents a romantic vision of the earth, which becomes a new mythical figure. He presents a phenomenological version of Mother Earth responsible for nourishing and protecting, from which we do not wish to move away. It is as though a phenomenological umbilical cord kept us (us who belong to the spiritual Europe) attached to the earth as the originary ark. This seems to be rather Oedipal for Deleuze, who does not hesitate to detach from the earth of the “mother” type for good by proposing a “new earth”, leaving the earth to deterritorialize itself under the effect of cosmic forces, thereby creating a “cosmic earth”. What is more, the earth for Deleuze is not an isolated point, lost in the immensity of the galaxy. He thinks of it, rather, as offering such richness and diversity in terms of encounters, deterritorializing processes, assemblages, and networks of virtualities that he and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, consider it to be “one galaxy among others”.¹⁸

Another difference between Husserl and Deleuze concerns cosmology as such. Husserl’s cosmology is a “pseudo-cosmology”. There is certainly a cosmological dimension inherent in phenomenology, but its attachment to the “originary earth” neutralizes all questioning related to the existence of other worlds. It is impossible, in Husserl’s optics, to create a new world and new ways of perceiving. It is equally impossible for Husserl to consider that other worlds could modify our perspectives and suggest other ways of perceiving. For the Western world, the grounded system of perception extends to what is perceived. Contrary to Husserl, Deleuze presents a cosmology much greater in that it is concerned not only with the earth but also with the possibility of a deterritorialization of perceptions¹⁹ through which the possibility of other worlds is recognized.²⁰ Husserl’s “pseudo-cosmology” is apparently incapable of acknowledging that Western thought may have an impure origin, and this is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy recalls: that philosophy would not have appeared in Greece without the foreigners who contributed to the reorganization and refashioning of the earth by co-creating the rational form of thought. For Deleuze and Guattari, Greece is not an absolute origin but a contingent milieu where an encounter between foreigners and natives took place.

Politics

For both Husserl and Deleuze, the true inhabitants of the earth are missing. This idea is integrated into Husserl’s rhetoric of the crisis of sciences and leads him to represent himself as a kind of savior, as the spiritual leader of a community of phenomenologists who will stand as “functionaries of humanity”.²¹ Deleuze considers the situation differently by recalling that the depopulation of the earth had already been prophetically announced by an untimely community. Deleuze unites a series of artists who explicitly refer to the idea of a “missing people”, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Klee, Carmelo Bene, and Franz Kafka, as well as several post-War directors.²² In comparison with Husserl, Deleuze is more original in attributing a cosmological dimension to the “new people” associated with the “new earth”. If the “new people” are not able to triumph in supplanting the “existing people” who are unaware of the deterritorializing processes, then this earth will continue to depopulate, to crumble, and will ultimately disappear. Husserl does not endorse such hope in the new but prefers to return to an existing tradition. For Deleuze, though, merely to return to a teleological origin of the tradition bears an anti-creative and nihilistic attitude in that it destroys life. Simply relying on tradition in order to grasp what the earth is constitutes, for Deleuze, part of the earth’s problem. Both Husserl and Deleuze make of the earth a political affair, but the normative and universalizing point of view of Husserl is hardly compatible with Deleuze’s creative politics of the deterritorialization of the earth.

Conclusion

The earth has conventionally been taken for granted as either the center of the universe for the Greeks or an unquestionable creation for religious believers, or as a celestial object for the scientists. Husserl and Deleuze initiate a new philosophical questioning by asking “What is the earth?” They suggest that the quid of the earth is not as evident as we tend to think. They abandon the quest regarding the organization of the whole universe, and focus instead, philosophically and with a certain degree of modesty, on this earth, which is a static spiritual ground for Husserl and a dynamic arrangement in the process of self-differentiation for Deleuze.

Friedrich Nietzsche may be considered to be an initiator of this quest for the earth. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra,²³ he explicitly abandons all supra-terrestrial preoccupations with the origin and destiny of the universe. Instead, he invites us to remain truthful to the earth. However, Nietzsche’s call to “remain earthly” is understood differently by Deleuze and Husserl (even though it is not certain that Husserl had read Thus Spoke Zarathustra thoroughly). Husserl may be seen as a logocentric thinker who attempts to recover the spiritual unity of the earth, while for Deleuze this unity leaves room for a deterritorializing earth that has the capacity to deterritorialize itself. Husserl wishes to give a definitive representation of the earth as the originary ark. Ultimately, for Husserl, the way humans have perceived and will perceive, wherever they are in the whole universe, is limited to the Greco-European ways of logical and teleological perception. For Deleuze, the cosmological challenge does not consist in developing a more intimate and familiar relation to the earth, but concerns, rather, the creative potential of the ever-new earth that has an infinite capacity to generate unheard-of environments for the new people to live in and think in. There is no one grounded earth but infinite deterritorializing earths. Ultimately, for Deleuze, the sky and the earth coexist in the same pragmasphere, and the Cosmos is not a super-earth but a vast plane of immanence composed of multiple earths, which are in the midst of experiencing with the deterritorializing forces.

Notes

1.Conference on “Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom”, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece, 24–26 April 2015.

2.Edmund Husserl, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move” [1934], trans. Fred Kersten, in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Including Texts by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, eds. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), pp. 117–31.

3.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [1980], trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? [1991], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

4.Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology [1934–1937], trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

5.René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Understanding One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, trans. Ian Mclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Part 6.

6.Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6 (München: Musarion Verlag, 1922), pp. 65–75.

7.Plato, Timaeus, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008).

8.Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, trans. Ian Johnston (Arlington: Richer Resources Publications, 2009).

9.Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology [1927] (New York: Macmillan, 1960).

10.Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 284–5.

11.Gilles Deleuze, Foucault [1986], trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988), p. 86.

12.Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image [1985], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989), pp. 216–18.

13.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Chap. 11, “Of the Refrain”.

14.Paul Valéry, L’Idée fixe (Paris: Gallimard, 1934), p. 116. The full French quote is: “Ce qu’il y a de plus profond en l’homme, c’est la peau”.

15.Samuel Butler, Erewhon [1937] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2011).

16.Plato, Timaeus, 47d.

17.Pierre Hadot, “La terre vue d’en haut et le voyage cosmique: le point de vue du poète, du philosophe et de l’historien”, in Frontières et conquête spatiale. La philosophie à l’épreuve, eds. Jean Schneider and Monique Léger-Orine (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), pp. 31–9.

18.Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 345.

19.It might be worth noting that in French there is a conceptual and etymological connection between “territoire” and “terre” (our planet) that is lost in the English translation, where these notions are rendered by “earth” and “territory” respectively. What the English reader might miss is the celestial and cosmic aspect of the territory. Thus, processes of “de-” and “reterritorialization” do not have only a geographical dimension but also a cosmological connotation, without the cosmo-philosophical aspect outlined earlier.

20.See, for instance, Deleuze’s conception of the Other as expression of possible worlds in The Logic of Sense [1969], trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 301–20.

21.Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, §7.

22.Alain Beaulieu, “Gilles Deleuze’s Politics: From Marxism to the Missing People”, in Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York and London: Continuum Press, 2009), pp. 204–17.

23.Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1883], trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Bibliography

Beaulieu, Alain. “Gilles Deleuze’s Politics: From Marxism to the Missing People”. In Gilles Deleuze. The Intensive Reduction. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York and London: Continuum Press, 2009, pp. 204–17.

Butler, Samuel. Erewhon [1937]. New York: Penguin Classics, 2011.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault [1986]. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. The Time-Image [1985]. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense [1969]. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition [1968]. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus [1980]. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? [1991]. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Descartes, René. A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Understanding One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Trans. Ian Mclean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Hadot, Pierre. “La terre vue d’en haut et le voyage cosmique: le point de vue du poète, du philosophe et de l’historien”. In Frontières et conquête spatiale. La philosophie à l’épreuve. Eds. Jean Schneider and Monique Léger-Orine. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987, pp. 31–9.

Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology [1934–1937]. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

Husserl, Edmund. “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does Not Move” [1934]. Trans. Fred Kersten. In Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Including Texts by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Eds. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002, pp. 117–31.

Kant, Immanuel. Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. Trans. Ian Johnston. Arlington: Richer Resources Publications, 2009.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 6. München: Musarion Verlag, 1922.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1883]. Trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Plato. Timaeus. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin Classics, 2008.

Valéry, Paul. L’Idée fixe [1932]. Paris: Gallimard, 1931.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology [1927]. New York: Macmillan, 1960.

14 Affirmations of the False and Bifurcations of the True

Deleuze’s Dialetheic and Stoic Fatalism¹

Corry Shores

Introduction: Must Negation Be Dark? Deleuze and Paraconsistency

As John Sellars observes, it is not in matters of ontology but rather in ethics that Deleuze comes closest to the spirit of the Stoics, as “[b]oth Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus would have welcomed Deleuze’s statement that ‘Stoic ethics … consists of willing the event as such’ ”.² As we will see, for Deleuze this Stoic ethical notion is understood in terms of a bifurcational structure of time and a logical structure called “affirmative synthetic disjunction”. We will examine these two structures’ interrelation to better characterize both of them, by drawing from some useful notions in non-classical logic and by working through some Leibnizian and Nietzschean ideas that Deleuze binds into this Stoic context. Our driving concern here is whether or not a non-classical sort of negation can characterize these temporal and logical structures.

In Dark Deleuze, Andrew Culp also studies negational elements in Deleuze’s philosophy, but he does so with a focus on their political implications. Because his treatment of certain notions can help us clarify the logical issues at hand, let us just initially take a quick look at parts of his book. Culp rejects the predominant “joyous” sort of interpretation of Deleuze’s texts in favor of a “dark” reading, which is more suited for successfully enacting a communist revolution to ultimately set the world on a better course. Culp’s dark Deleuzism, then, aims to “rehabilitate the destructive force of negativity by cultivating a ‘hatred for this world’ ”,³ so that we can bring about “the end of this world, the final defeat of the state, and full communism”.⁴

To derive this more effective revolutionary philosophy from Deleuze’s writings, Culp identifies certain philosophical themes that lend themselves either to a “joyous” or to a “dark” reading, advocating of course for the darker one. On the one hand, Culp recognizes that the dark readings can follow Deleuze’s thinking down roads that Deleuze himself was very careful not to pursue.⁵ On the other hand, Culp bases the dark interpretations on concepts and formulations in Deleuze’s philosophy that do have an apparent negational nature. He writes that dark Deleuzism draws from “the perfused negativity of [Deleuze’s] concepts and affects. On the level of concept, it recognizes that negativity impregnates Deleuze’s many prefixes of difference, becoming, movement, and transformation, such as de-, a-, in-, and non-”.⁶

The particular dark Deleuzian reading that is directly relevant here is Culp’s study of difference as understood in terms “disjunctive synthesis”. Culp says that its joyous interpretation would render it an inclusive disjunctive synthesis, which, presumably, has a structure that is something like this or that, or (hopefully) even both, while Culp’s dark reading understands it as an exclusive disjunctive synthesis, which takes the form “this, not that” and which enables us to “become contrary”.⁷ Yet, he seems to acknowledge that this is not Deleuze’s understanding of the concept; and as we see from the cited passages, Deleuze himself explicitly calls it affirmative synthetic disjunction and says that it should not involve “the negative, limitative, or exclusive use of disjunction”.⁸ Regardless, given the non-classical logic we will implement, our choice will not be limited to these two sorts of options anyway; for, we will instead consider a non-exclusionary notion of negation and of contradiction—or as our sources call it, of “nonexclusive restricted otherthanness”⁹—in order to better characterize the logical properties of affirmative synthetic disjunction. And what we will find is that this sort of negation can indeed be affirmational with respect to what it negates.

Part of Culp’s defense for taking Deleuze’s ideas down roads of development that Deleuze explicitly avoids pursuing is that this is a proper way to read Deleuze, given that it uses Deleuze’s very own manner of interpretation, namely his so-called buggery of other authors.¹⁰ Deleuze claims that when interpreting other philosophers, like Bergson, Spinoza, etc., he tried to produce an “offspring” that the author would have to recognize as their own but nonetheless regard as a monstrous version of themselves.¹¹ So, because Culp’s dark reading is a monstrous interpretation, it may then qualify as such a properly Deleuzian buggery of Deleuze.

Yet, upon closer examination of Deleuze’s readings of other philosophers, we might obtain the impression that he uncovers something that really can be said to be a fundamental part of their philosophy, and it would be monstrous for the original author only to the extent that it was not obvious to them that it lies deep within their own thinking. For example, before reading Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy and reading his course lectures on Spinoza, it may never have crossed our mind that at the basis of Spinoza’s philosophy is a new development and implementation of the concept of intensity. In fact, to all appearances at least, it seemed not to have been obvious even to Spinoza himself.¹² But after reading Deleuze’s commentaries, it can be hard afterward not to notice intensity’s role in Spinoza’s philosophy.

I mention this, because Deleuze is explicitly critical of negation and contradiction, and yet we will implement certain theories of negation to characterize aspects of Deleuze’s logic. Nonetheless, this is not meant to be a monstrous contortion of Deleuze’s thinking. Rather, it is an exploration of the possibility that Deleuze was using a sort of non-classical logic without being aware of its formal features.¹³

And despite the fact that two of Deleuze’s book titles do contain the words “Logic of …” (The Logic of Sense and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation), he does not seem to consider himself as a logician; for, he says, “I feel I am a pure metaphysician”.¹⁴ But as Graham Priest observes, one cannot do metaphysics without also thereby doing logic, in the sense of making use of certain logical principles rather than others.¹⁵ One illustration Priest offers is metaphysical accounts of change, with motion serving as a particular case. Bertrand Russell’s metaphysics is constrained by his classical logic, which prohibits contradiction. Thus, when explaining motion, Russell draws the counterintuitive conclusion that at no moment does a moving object actually move, because doing so would require that the object both be in a location and not be in a location, all in the same instant. So, his theory portrays motion as being composed solely of resting states, which is not entirely satisfactory.¹⁶ Hegel’s logic, however, allows for contradictions, which enables him to define motion as in fact being the situation where an object both is and is not in some particular location, in the moment that it is moving past that point. In other words, Hegel’s non-classical logic allows him to portray motion as involving a change of place at every instant.¹⁷ So, although Deleuze understands himself to be a pure metaphysician, that still means he thereby is at least tacitly involving himself in logic. For, he is selecting certain logical principles and rejecting others, in accordance with the metaphysical concepts he is crafting.

It is no surprise, then, that even Deleuze’s Logic of Sense can be read as making the fundamental metaphysical claim, as Sean Bowden observes, that “events are ontologically prior to substances”,¹⁸ even though the title seems to indicate that it would instead be primarily about logic and sense rather than metaphysics. In other words, to arrive upon Deleuze’s logical thinking, it will require that we seek out the logical principles, properties, operations, structures, etc. that are at work in his philosophy and to ask ourselves how best to articulate them. The approach we undertake here is to look to known non-classical logics, in this case particularly many-valued paraconsistent logics, to determine how adequately they can provide an account that is useful for grasping the logical import of one of Deleuze’s concepts.

And not only, as we noted, is Deleuze at least tacitly involving himself in matters of logic; we could even follow David Lapoujade, who goes as far as to say that logic is Deleuze’s most fundamental philosophical project:

Deleuze is interested foremost in logic…. Deleuze is above all a logician and all his books are “Logics”. His first book on Hume could have been called “Logic of Human Nature”, just as his book on Proust could have been called “Logic of Signs”…. Likewise, the books on cinema could have been called “Logic of Images”, just as there are a Logic of Sense and a Logic of Sensation. When Deleuze and Guattari say that philosophy consists in the creation of concepts, to what else are they referring but to the production of logics, given that a concept is never created alone but always in conjunction with other concepts? To create a concept entails creating the logic that links it with other concepts.¹⁹

I agree with Lapoujade that Deleuze’s philosophy at its basis is an enterprise in logic, even if Deleuze was not aware of it. But where I will veer slightly in a different direction is that, unlike Lapoujade, I will not here explore a characterization of Deleuze’s logic as being “irrational”,²⁰ but rather we will think of it more in terms of being a non-classical logic, namely one that can handle inconsistency. And as Priest argues, it is actually irrational to believe simply in consistency, and it is instead more rational to accept inconsistencies.²¹ Nonetheless, after having taken into consideration the findings of this or of any further studies on Deleuze’s logic, we might in the end want rather to conclude that Deleuze is implementing neither classical logic nor any other known non-classical logic but is instead using some “irrational” alternative to all of them.²² Yet still, as part of our progress to that conclusion, we should determine why none of the “rational” non-classical logics are adequate for helping us understand Deleuze’s logic. This is why we will explore the potential of many-valued paraconsistent logics to help us model the logical properties of affirmative synthetic disjunction, in terms of how it operates in Deleuze’s philosophy of time.

Incompossible Leibnizes

In the twenty-fourth section of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, on “The Communication of Events”, he elaborates on affirmative synthetic disjunction in the context of Leibniz’s notion of incompossible worlds, which we will sketch out now in brief.

We begin with Leibniz’s notion of individual substance, which in one sense is something whose notion has a unique and complete set of predicates, meaning that no other substance has the same ones²³ and also that they completely determine the individual substance, such that it cannot be confused with any others.²⁴ Yet, these predicates include temporal determinations; that is to say, not all of the predicates are true at the same time, but rather certain ones might be true for particular times and not for others.²⁵ As a possible example, consider how you yourself have a predicate determining when you were born. This also means that your parents have predicates determining that they meet some time before your birth.

Given that the predicates can be assigned more or less arbitrarily, Leibniz says that there are many possible biblical Adams, with each having its own unique set of predicates.²⁶ Deleuze observes that one sort of possible Adam would have the alternate predicate of not being a sinner.²⁷ And oftentimes the predicates are relational (like your parents meeting), so the complete concept of an individual substance can inform us about all the other individual substances implicated with it in the same world, such that from one you can deduce all the others, as if each is a mirror to the entire world or a different point of perspective surveying an entire town.²⁸

An individual substance is possible so long as any of its predicates do not contradict any others that it has.²⁹ Think, for instance, of the classic example of a contradictory object, the round square.³⁰ But since God is interested in creating a world, that means there will be very many individual substances that God will create and place together into one shared Cosmos;³¹ and, in order for every one of these individual substances to be able to coexist together, all their predicates must be accommodated to one another.³² Substances whose predicates do not “get in one another’s way”³³ are compossible, and substances whose predicates instead preclude the possibility of the other (like your parents meeting only after you are born) are called incompossible.³⁴ So God calculates not just every possible complete predicate-assignment for all individual substances,³⁵ God also calculates all the combinations of every different individual substance.³⁶ Yet in addition to these variables, God calculates for these possible worlds different sets of laws, which in large part determine the conditions for a world’s compossibility.³⁷ For instance, in our world, your parents cannot have the predicate that they meet after the event of your birth; for, that would go against the laws governing the nature of causality and of time that have been assigned to our world. And to use Deleuze’s example, Adam the non-sinner cannot be in our world, because everything else that is to transpire in our world depends on his having committed his sinful act.³⁸ So while Adam with the predicate “non-sinner” is possible given that his notion involves no contradiction with his other predicates, he is not possible in combination with the other individual substances in our world. In other words, our world is exclusively disjunct from these other possible worlds whose substances are incompossible with ours.³⁹

Deleuze illustrates incompossibility by using a situation Georges Canguilhem describes in his On the Normal and the Pathological. Canguilhem discusses a study of two variations of a butterfly species, one black and vigorous and the other gray and calm. Now, even though “in captivity the blacks eliminate the greys”,⁴⁰ there was once a time when the gray ones were more prevalent in certain regions of the world. The reason, Canguilhem says, is that the calmness and lighter tone of the gray butterflies allowed them to better escape the attention of birds by hiding on tree bark, while the vigorous activity and darkness of the black ones made them more prone to detection and capture. So because in our world there are certain natural laws and particular varieties of creatures with relational predicates—like birds eating butterflies—that means (1) certain predicates can be found to be incompatible within one creature even if there is no logical contradiction between them. For example, grayness and vigor paired up in one butterfly combine incompatible survival strategies. And (2) certain predicates held in different species can be incompossible with one another even if they too are not strongly contradictory, like grayness and blackness, as the conditions of some situation may allow just those creatures with a particular tone to thrive. For Deleuze, one affirmative element in this example is that “to turn gray is no less positive than to turn black”.⁴¹ In other words, although a thriving population of gray butterflies would not be found in the same situation as a thriving population of black ones, both traits are positive, and neither is—logically speaking—an exclusive negation of the other. So since it is the actual laws and conditions of the world itself that determine the exclusions, Deleuze calls them “alogical” incompatibilities.⁴²

Now, before creating the actual world, God calculated all possible worlds made of compossible individual substances, and, using free will,⁴³ God chose the “best of all possible worlds”,⁴⁴ which would be the one with “the greatest amount of essence”⁴⁵ and the “greatest possible variety, but with all the order there could be” and thus with “as much perfection as could be”.⁴⁶

Another important idea in Leibniz’s thinking is a notion of the divergence between incompossible worlds. Suppose there are two worlds, one being ours. All the individual substances in our world have counterparts in the other world, and these corresponding individual substances share the same temporally determined predicates, up until the time of Adam’s sinning in our world. But in the other world he never sins. This situation can be understood as the worlds being convergent up until the moment when Adam sins in our world, after which they diverge in different directions of development; for, Adam the sinner in our world is incompossible with the innocent paradise remaining in the other world, just as innocent Adam is incompossible with the fallen beings of our world. As Leibniz writes:

If, in the life of any person, and even in the whole universe anything went differently from what it has, nothing could prevent us from saying that it was another person or another possible universe which God had chosen. It would then be indeed another individual.⁴⁷

Leibniz illustrates this divergence of incompossible worlds by having us consider two time intervals, A–B, during which he is in Paris, and B–C, following immediately after, when he goes to Germany. Yet, he then wonders, what would happen were he not to make the journey to Germany and instead remain in Paris during interval B–C? That could only happen were the worlds to diverge, with there now being two separate worlds and two distinct Leibnizes, one being in Paris in the first world and the other being in Germany in the second world (figure 14.1).⁴⁸

John Nolt, when explaining modal tense logic by means of Leibnizian possible worlds semantics, gives the following similar scenario.

I wake up on a Saturday; several salient possibilities lie before me. I could work on this book, or weed my garden, or take the kids to the park…. Yet my choices affect the world. If I spend the day gardening, the world that results is a different world than if I had chosen otherwise. Leibnizian metaphysics, then, can be seen as a widening of our vision of possibility from the part to the whole, from mere possible situations to entire possible worlds.⁴⁹

Nolt diagrams this divergence of possible worlds with a tree-like figure, where the branches represent points when a decision causes worlds to disjoin (figure 14.2).

Deleuze finds such a structure in Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”, which describes a book where instead of the story advancing linearly, a new chapter might give a different version of the previous one, taking the chain of events down an alternate and incompossible road that was not pursued in the previous chapter.⁵¹

Now, suppose that Adam’s consequential decision was not necessitated by God’s selection of predicates. This would mean that prior to his choice, he is missing the predicate “sinner” and is also missing “not sinner”. Leibniz calls such an underdetermined Adam a “vague Adam”, because Adam’s notion here encompasses more than one individual,⁵² and Leibniz says there would thus be “several disjunctively possible Adams”.⁵³

Nevertheless, Leibniz’s God does not leave anything up to chance; for, “God does nothing disorderly”.⁵⁴ Thus for Leibniz there can be no vague Adams, and you yourself are not vague either. For, when God selected our world, God already knew all the predicates for each individual substance and thus all the choices Adam and you make.⁵⁵ Here the actual world can follow only one path with no real chances for divergence at any point.

Figure 14.1 Were Leibniz to stay in Paris instead of going to Germany, he would be another Leibniz in another world.

Figure 14.2 A diagram of temporalized world divergence, based on John Nolt’s “A Picture of Time” diagram.⁵⁰

When explaining affirmative synthetic disjunction, Deleuze suggests that we remove God from this Leibnizian picture, such that given all the ways our world can diverge at any moment, none of them have been decided in advance.⁵⁶ This means that incompossibility no longer serves “to exclude events from one another” by means of “a negative use of divergence of disjunction”.⁵⁷ In Deleuze’s account, normally exclusive disjunction serves to deny one member while affirming the other.⁵⁸ And under these “negative rules of exclusion”, to affirm both members would mean that “their difference is denied”, which can involve synthesizing them in such a way that they become identical.⁵⁹

For example, under Leibniz’s assumptions, the affirmation of two worlds is equivalent to identifying them as one and the same. Suppose we think we have two worlds, and we affirm both of them as being true or actual worlds. It cannot be that one diverges from the other, because God excluded all variants except one. But if they are entirely convergent, then there is no difference between their laws and substances, and thus under Leibniz’s law of identity they would be identically the same after all.⁶⁰ Our world, for Leibniz, never admits of any incompossible divergences or incomplete determinations.

Finally, recall God’s criteria for selecting the best of all possible worlds: it is the one with the most essence and variety. Suppose we subtract God but keep these criteria in place. Would not a world in which divergences somehow enter in a real way, like Adam being both a sinner and not a sinner, have additional essence and variety on account of the extra predicate that is otherwise excluded? With this in mind, let us now consider a logical theory of negation that allows for such inconsistencies to hold non-exclusively in one same world.

Augmentation as Negation: Routley and Routley’s Non-Exclusive Otherthanness

We turn now to Routley and Routley’s article “Negation and Contradiction”, along with related texts by Priest, which will enable us to distinguish different types of negation. With these concepts in hand, we will attempt to determine which sort of negation Deleuze is averse to and which, if any, could be useful for understanding the logical properties of affirmative synthetic disjunction.

Routley and Routley note that throughout the history of logic there have been competing models of negation, each rising and falling from prominence during different periods. Their method for distinguishing types of negation involves examining the role it is thought to play in contradictory formulations of the sort “something and its own negation”, which we will here write as A ∧ ¬A. That role is determined by seeing what a philosopher claims can be inferred from A ∧ ¬A, which thereby indicates which model of negation the philosopher uses. Whatever is said to be inferable from a formulation is called its “logical content”, and the different theories understand a contradiction-forming negation as having one or another effect on logical content.⁶¹

The first model of negation says that from A ∧ ¬A we can infer nothing: not A, not ¬A, and not anything else at all. It is thus called the cancelation model, because the negation of A is understood as canceling (destroying, erasing, deleting, neutralizing) the content of A. This model of negation was used in the connexive type of logics in ancient and medieval times.⁶² We might think of ¬A’s content as being an antithesis of that of A, such that their combination pushes both contents out of the world; or, we might think of their contents simply becoming eliminated in some other destructive sense (figure 14.3).

The second logical theory of negation says that from A ∧ ¬A we can infer any other arbitrary formula we want, no matter how unrelated or absurd, and in fact we can infer everything else whatsoever. This is the explosion model of negation, because from one contradictory formula there bursts forth inferentially every other formula, including all other contradictions (B ∧ ¬B, C ∧ ¬C, and so on), thereby creating a thoroughly inconsistent and trivial world.⁶³ This sort of negation is used in classical and intuitionistic logics.⁶⁴ Routley and Routley provide as one sort of classical definition of negation that ¬A holds in a world if and only if A does not hold in that world.⁶⁵ This view on negation can also be called a complementation model,⁶⁶ because the logical content of ¬A may be understood as being everything whatsoever that is not A. To illustrate, Routley and Routley have us consider the topside of a record album, which we consider here as A. Its classical negation, then, would be everything else in the world that is not that one side.⁶⁷ If we picture the contents of A and of ¬A as taking up some “territory” in the domain (understood as a geometrical space of a diagram, or alternately, as a set of things, or as a sum of propositions), then the entire domain is covered by A ∧ ¬A (figure 14.4).⁶⁸

Figure 14.3 Negation as cancelation destroys both contents.

This classical model of negation has unfortunately been considered by many as the only legitimate one in the recent century or so.⁷⁰ One of its greatest disadvantages and counterintuitive features is that, as I noted earlier, by having A and ¬A in the same world, we thereby have rendered the world inconsistent not just in this limited way but in fact entirely and thoroughly so. This means that in classical logic, contradictions should be avoided at all costs. So if we on the one hand begin by thinking that we should have A in our world, and then on the other hand we come to find reason to think that ¬A should be in our world, then under classical assumptions one of the two needs to be excluded from the world in order for it to not explode into total inconsistency and triviality. Routley and Routley call this eliminative choosing the “consistencizing” of the world.⁷¹

Figure 14.4 Negation as explosion (including classical negation) is exclusive and exhaustive. It yields an unrestricted otherthanness, and its contradictory pairing yields a thoroughly inconsistent and trivial world.⁶⁹

One shortcoming of classical negation is that it fails to give us the “natural” sort of negation that we implement in daily life and in our use of natural language.⁷² Moreover, for certain logical reasons—and in our case, for metaphysical ones too—we need a sort of negation that allows “for non-trivial inconsistent worlds” and also “for nonnull incomplete worlds”;⁷³ thus, “[t]he classical rule has to be rejected”.⁷⁴

This brings us to the third model of negation, called the constraint or intermediate model, which includes relevant and paraconsistent negations.⁷⁵ Now, since our concern here will be with inconsistent worlds, it is paraconsistent negation in particular that we will study. Under paraconsistent reasoning, from A ∧ ¬A you can derive more than just nothing but less than everything. For instance, from A ∧ ¬A we might want to say that we can derive A on the one hand and ¬A on the other hand but nothing more, just as from B ∧ C we can derive B and C.

Now, one important feature for any sort of negation would be that it yields something with “otherthanness”, as Routley and Routley call it, to whatever is being negated.⁷⁶ Yet as we have seen, we need to be very careful about what qualifies for our negational otherthanness. It should not be mutually destructive, like in the cancelation theory, and it should not be unrestricted, like in classical negation.⁷⁷ Rather it should yield something over and beyond what is being negated in a way that is also not necessarily exclusionary to it. For this sort of negation, Routley and Routley provide the following diagram, and notice the overlapping of A and ¬A and also the fact that the two of them do not exhaust the entire domain (figure 14.5).

Thus this third kind of negation yields “nonexclusive restricted otherthanness”;⁷⁹ in other words, “A and ¬A are suitably independent though nonetheless related; A and ¬A may both fail together and differently both may hold together; A and ¬A neither cancel nor implode one another”.⁸⁰

In their record album illustration for this model, the negation of the topside is simply the bottom side and not everything else in the world.⁸¹Yet, in this case, the world is not made inconsistent simply by adding this non-exclusive negation of the topside; for surely there is nothing remarkable about a world having record albums with two sides. Rather, this sort of otherthanness can in other cases involve more profound sorts of logical incompatibilities, as when combining worlds that together make one inconsistent world:

Figure 14.5 Routley and Routley’s diagram for negation as non-exclusive restricted otherthanness. It can yield an inconsistent otherthan without eliminating either.⁷⁸

In the classical case when ¬A is added to a world, quite a bit may have to be taken out of the world, e.g. A (and what implies it) if it is there, in order to consistencize the world; whereas in the relevant case ¬A can simply be added without any consistencizing subtractions. More generally, worlds can be simply combined and statements added to worlds without the need to delete anything, because what is being added are further conditions, not the taking away of conditions already given.⁸²

In the following, I will use certain terminology that I define now for convenience. A logic in which one cannot derive any arbitrary formula whatsoever from a contradiction is called a paraconsistent logic.⁸³ A “dialetheia is a true contradiction, a pair, α and ¬α, which are both true (or equivalently, supposing a normal notion of conjunction, a truth of the form α ∧ ¬α)”.⁸⁴ If in fact Deleuze’s notion of affirmative synthetic disjunction involves a structure with equivalent logical properties, that might involve him in a certain metaphysical stance called dialetheism:

Dialetheism is a metaphysical view: that some contradictions are true. That is, where ¬ is negation, there are sentences, propositions (or whatever one takes truth-bearers to be), A, such that A and ¬A are both true. Given that A is false iff (if and only if) its negation is true, this is to say that there are some As which are both true and false.⁸⁵

Here in these properties of paraconsistent negation, we might already detect hints of a distinction between negation and denial, which is a matter we turn to now in order to determine the sorts of negations involved in Deleuze’s philosophy.

The Negation Deleuze Denies, and the Negation Deleuze Affirms

As I noted, Deleuze does not want us to use the concept of negation to understand affirmative synthetic disjunction, which affirms difference. And also, in Difference and Repetition, he explicitly rejects the use of negation for understanding difference.⁸⁶ But before we can begin our analysis, we need to see how denial and negation are not coupled in paraconsistent reasoning like they are in classical reasoning.

Denial, as Priest and other non-classical logicians hold,⁸⁷ is a speech act, and its opposite is assertion, which can also be understood as affirmation:⁸⁸

One must distinguish between the illocutory acts of assertion and denial. The former indicates the acceptance of something; the latter its rejection…. We all find ourselves confused sometimes, endorsing contradictory views that are not acceptable to us. We find ourselves asserting p and ¬p. But we do not deny p.⁸⁹

Thus,

when a dialetheist asserts “The liar sentence is true; the liar sentence is not true”, the second utterance is not meant to convey to the hearer the fact that the dialetheist rejects the first sentence: after all, they do accept it. The second sentence conveys the fact that they accept its negation too…. Many people have inconsistent views (about religion, politics, or whatever). Sometimes they come to discover this fact by saying inconsistent things, perhaps under some probing questioning. Thus, for some α they may utter both α and ¬α. The second utterance is not an indication that the speaker rejects α. They do accept α. They just accept ¬α as well, at least until they revise their views.⁹⁰

So just as we saw with paraconsistent negation, to affirm or assert the negation ¬A is not to deny A; for, they can both coexist in the same inconsistent world, system of beliefs, etc. This is not the case for classical negations like Boolean negation; for, as Edwin Mares writes: “[o]ne feature of Boolean negation is that it is a form of denial negation. If ‘¬A’ is true, it precludes ‘A’ from being true”.⁹¹ So, if Deleuze understands negation as involving the denial of what it negates, then one reason for this could be that he gives the term “negation” its classical definition, which would not be unexpected given that classical logic was the predominant sort throughout his career.

While there are many passages in Difference and Repetition where Deleuze discusses affirmation, negation, or denial, there is a notable place where he discusses all of them together. He writes that Nietzsche “never ceases to contrast two conceptions of the affirmation-negation relation…. Affirmation is indeed produced, but in order to say yes to all that is negative and negating, to all that can be denied”.⁹² Here we see that affirmation is contrasted on the one hand with negation and on the other hand with denial. In other words, this passage suggests that negation and denial here are both understood in terms of their contrast to affirmation. This is something that would hold under classical assumptions about negation but not under paraconsistent ones. From this passage alone, however, we cannot know with certainty exactly what Deleuze’s own theory of negation is; nonetheless, it does at least suggest that Deleuze uses the term “negation” with its classical sense, such that a negation is tantamount to the denial of what is being negated, which is not something that holds for paraconsistent reasoning.

Thus, when Deleuze criticizes negation and contradiction, it could very well be that he has as his target the second type of negation, which includes classical negation, and that furthermore his criticisms might not be applicable to the third sort of negation, which includes the paraconsistent kind.⁹³ We have not yet established any of this definitively; and, even if we feel compelled to wager it nonetheless, it need not here be a point of contention. For, we are not trying to model the logical properties of difference itself but rather those of affirmative synthetic disjunction, which may not be the same.

Yet our question still remains: can paraconsistent negation and dialetheism be useful for understanding affirmative synthetic disjunction? To obtain an answer, we will examine one way Deleuze implements it in his philosophy of time, specifically with regard to a bifurcating temporal structure that he articulates by co-contextualizing Leibniz, the Stoics, and Nietzsche on the issue of fate.

The Stoic Affirmation of Negational Fates

The important idea we will arrive at in this section is a Stoic moral notion involving our fatalistically disjoining the course of time, like changing the trajectory of an arrow while it is already moving in another particular direction. Yet, to give such an account, we need to implement other notions from the Stoics’ richly intricate philosophical system, which we will review now only in brief.⁹⁴

Reasoning Stoically

As Deleuze reminds us, in the Stoics’ philosophical system there are three main divisions: logic, physics, and ethics, which, according to Émile Bréhier, “are indissolubly linked together since it is one and the same reason (logos) which in dialectic binds consequential propositions to antecedents, which in nature establishes a causal nexus and which in conduct provides the basis for perfect harmony between actions”.⁹⁵ Let us look then at how these three domains are bound up. We begin with their logic,⁹⁶ because all three branches are concerned ultimately with reason.⁹⁷ Yet, we will limit ourselves to just three issues in Stoic logic relevant to our discussion: conditionals, correspondence theory of truth, and sayables.

One of the Stoics’ greatest contributions to logic involves their theory of conditionals, which are propositions of the form if … then …; for, the Stoics were the first to develop a sentential logic for treating the two parts of the conditional (the antecedent and the consequent) as being propositions rather than terms.⁹⁸ Now, while the Stoics do specify a certain sort of conditional as being a “causal proposition”,⁹⁹ nonetheless, it is, according to Cicero, the conditional form in general that the Stoic Chrysippus used when explaining fate, divination, and causality.¹⁰⁰ And as Victor Goldschmidt notes, this implies a sort of temporality simply in that logical form, because the antecedent of the conditional is understood in terms of antecedent causality; thus it comes prior to the consequent both logically and temporally in the causal series.¹⁰¹

The next logical notion is that for the Stoics, a proposition is true only if it holds for what is happening right now in the present. Suppose we say, “It is day”. Then “if it really is day, the judgment before us is true, but if not, it is false”.¹⁰²

And the final logical issue is the Stoic notion of the “sayable”. In this logical context, it is what is being said of or affirmed of something, and it is expressible either as a bare predicate or as a complete proposition.¹⁰³ As we will later see, the sayable is not what is directly signified by a sentence. Rather, it is something like the “sense” of a proposition, which can be said to be true or false.¹⁰⁴ When dealing with the problem of discussing ineffabilities, Priest describes a similar sort of entity:

Logicians normally take semantic values [like true and false] to be assigned to sentences. Sentences are not the kind of thing that can be ineffable; so we now have to think of our semantic bearers, not as sentences, but as propositions or states of affairs—something about which it makes sense to say that they are or are not the content of some sentence.¹⁰⁵

Corporeality

The second main division of Stoic philosophy is their physics, which will involve matters of cosmology, theology, and metaphysics as well. The Stoics, notably for their time, located all reality in the present corporeal world.¹⁰⁶ Yet, even bodies need to exist at times and places, which are not themselves bodies. This is one reason why the Stoics created another category of entities, the incorporeals, which have thinghood but not reality or being.¹⁰⁷ In addition to time and place, the other incorporeals are void and the sayable.¹⁰⁸ Rather than existing or “belonging”, incorporeals are said to “subsist”.¹⁰⁹

Also notable for their time,¹¹⁰ the Stoics reject final causality and favor an active, energetic sort of efficient causality as being the primary sort; for, as Sextus Empiricus observes, “a Cause would seem to be, according to them, ‘That by whose energizing the effect comes about’; as, for example, the sun or the sun’s heat is the cause of the wax being melted or of the melting of the wax”.¹¹¹ Yet, as Goldschmidt explains, this does not mean that there is no final end to the Cosmos that it is moving toward progressively. The end result is certain and in fact was built into the first causal act as being the necessary final outcome of the Cosmos.¹¹² Namely the world will end in fire, and out of that conflagration, every time, God will create the world anew.¹¹³ And the events between conflagrations are ordered fatefully and providentially by the divine wisdom and benevolence of God, who sets that course in motion with the first causal, world-creative act, and the sequence of events that follow are ordered rationally by a chain of linked causes.¹¹⁴ Thus Providence, which is God’s will, and Fate, which is the series of causes, are one and the same, because things unfold causally and yet in accordance with God’s wise and good intentions.¹¹⁵

Moreover, even between conflagrations, the world remains composed at its very basis by this rational, designing fire that is nothing other than God, Godself.¹¹⁶ Physically speaking, fire is a tensile element, meaning that its pressures or tensions can alter without it coming undone, and God creates the world by condensing parts of fire down into elements with lesser and lesser tensility.¹¹⁷ First is air, which is still quite tensile, and then earth and water, which are so lacking in tensility that they cannot by themselves remain self-cohesive.¹¹⁸ Fire and air mix to form breath or pneuma,¹¹⁹ and pneuma is the tensile mixture that binds water and earth together such that composed entities can sustain as mixtures of these four elements.¹²⁰

Pneuma pervades the entire Cosmos, thereby endowing every part of the physical world with God’s divine intellect.¹²¹ And pneuma also serves as the whole world’s binding principle, being something like a dynamic “glue” that holds the world together;¹²² and by means of its inward and outward springing movements,¹²³ pneuma enables the universe to be “interactive with itself”.¹²⁴ In inanimate objects, the pneuma is called hexis or tenor, which means that the object it binds together can move but only by external force. In plants the pneuma is called physis; such beings can move on their own but only by growing outward from one place. The pneuma in animals is called psyche or soul.¹²⁵ But note that for the Stoics, the soul, as pneuma, is corporeal, and there is corporeal interactivity between soul and body: “when the soul feels shame … the body turns red”.¹²⁶ Creatures with soul can move about on their own accord, because their soul is capable of impression and motion by impulse.¹²⁷ And among rational creatures like humans, there is a component of our soul, located in our heart,¹²⁸ called the “leading” or “commanding” part, which rationally coordinates in our body its impressions, reasoning, “assents”, and impulses.¹²⁹

Incorporeality

Before we can elaborate on those notions, we need to understand how the world presents its sensible and understandable rational nature. Bodies are defined by their capacity to act and be acted upon in their intermixings, as incorporeals cannot interact with or have any direct causal influence on the corporeal world.¹³⁰ And the tensions of the pneuma within a thing determine its physical properties, like the density of stone and the whiteness of silver.¹³¹ Yet often the mixtures are such that even though the distinct yet intermixing objects become thoroughly interspersed throughout one another, they still maintain themselves somehow and can be separated again, like how “fire as a whole passes through iron as a whole while each of them preserves its own substance”.¹³² Think, for example, of when a hot iron touches wood shavings, and thereby the fire leaves the iron to then mix with the wood.¹³³

Now, while at any moment the iron has a certain temperature on account of the conditions of the mixture, we would not really attribute hotness to the iron.¹³⁴ Rather, what is attributed to the iron is a certain temporalized activity where the interactions and intermixings of bodies bring about pneumatic changes and thus property changes over time. So instead of “hot” being attributed to iron, we rather think that its interactive intermixings are an activity that involves its getting hotter. Linguistically, the Stoics, according to Bréhier, consider such attributive predicates as being expressible by verbs rather than adjectives,¹³⁵ as in “the tree greens”.¹³⁶ As Deleuze writes:

The attribute is not a being and does not qualify a being; it is an extra-being. “Green” designates a quality, a mixture of things, a mixture of tree and air where chlorophyll coexists with all the parts of the leaf. “To green”, on the contrary, is not a quality in the thing, but an attribute which is said of the thing.¹³⁷

So using the Stoics’ fire and iron example, we would not say, “the iron is hot” but rather something to the effect of “the iron is heating up”.

Stoic Time

At this point we need to address a matter regarding Stoic sources in relation to our present task. So far you may have observed that these Stoic notions are a little vague and complicated at times. In fact, nearly all of the original Stoic textual sources have been lost, and much of what remains is fragmentary in nature and can possibly be unreliable in certain cases when the Stoics are being paraphrased for the sake of criticizing their views.¹³⁸ Yet, despite the fragmentary, incomplete, and inconsistent nature of the available sources, one still obtains the impression that the Stoics produced an innovative and coherent system. Thus, the project of explicating their system in a more complete manner involves suggesting ways to fill in the gaps and to untangle the inconsistencies and ambiguities. We need to mention this, because as John Sellars has shown, it is misleading when Deleuze speaks of the Stoic philosophy of time as involving the two varieties of temporality, Aiôn and Chronos.¹³⁹ It is more accurate to say that this is Goldschmidt’s interpretative invention that he proposes to explain certain conceptual ambiguities in their accounts of time. But for now we can put that objection aside, because our interest here is in Deleuze’s implementations of Goldschmidt’s innovations, which are quite useful in understanding the conceptual ambiguities in the texts.

One especially confusing matter arises from the Stoics’ claim that the present interactive intermixing of corporeals immediately and directly causes incorporeal event-predicates (sayables), which themselves have no causal power on corporeality.¹⁴⁰ So, what is still missing from this picture is an account for how present factors can be causally linked to effects in the future, because it would seem from what has been said that all causation has its effect strictly in the present. Anthony Long and David Sedley diagnose and resolve this problem in the following way:

Nor are we told the metaphysical nature of a causal chain. For example how, if causes are bodies but effects are incorporeal, can there ever be a chain of cause and effect? We will have to take it that it is not a simple chain A-B-C, where B is the effect of A and the cause of C, but that the cause of C is the body of which the effect B has come to be predicable, acting as cause because of the corresponding quality which it now possesses. For example, if I strike a match, which in truth sets my house on fire, I am the cause to the match of the predicate “burning”, and the burning match, a body, is then the cause to the house of the same predicate.¹⁴¹

Let us use instead the Stoics’ similar fire and iron example but expand it in accordance with Long and Sedley’s model. Suppose now that we have three bodily mixtures, each expressing its own predicate: fire + iron causing “heating”, hot iron + hammer causing “flattening”, and flattened iron + grindstone causing “sharpening” (figure 14.6).

Using Long and Sedley’s wording, we would say that the cause of the current sharpening is the bodily mixture of flat iron with grindstone, where the prior predicate “flattening” has “come to be predicable” of the current flat iron. But how does that extension of the causality beyond the present corporeal cause take place, such that the predicates come to be distributed across time? They must somehow extend past the given corporeal present. As this will be important for the bifurcational structure Deleuze uncovers, let us take a closer look at the Stoic theory of time.

As I noted, the designation of an Aiôn and a Chronos time is Goldschmidt’s terminological innovation to help us understand a conceptual ambiguity in the Stoic account of time. But in the end, what will prove most remarkable in Goldschmidt’s theory is not their distinction but rather the way these metaphysically incompatible components of time mutually contaminate one another.

Goldschmidt focuses on certain passages about time attributed to Chrysippus, where just one word for time is used, Chronos. However, time in general—along with the more specific temporal notions of past, present (now), and future—seems to be assigned inconsistent properties: time is limited and unlimited, present and not present, real and irreal (existing and subsisting), and infinitely divisible and expandable and not infinitely divisible and expandable.¹⁴²

Goldschmidt splits apart these property pairings into separate sets and assigns them to two sorts of time, borrowing a term from Marcus Aurelius to designate one of them.¹⁴³ Chronos time is the durational present that is always limited but whose finite boundaries can expand or contract to any other finite size.¹⁴⁴ It is the time of corporeal interactive mixings. And Aiôn time is the eternal stretch of time going on limitlessly into the past and future. It is the time of incorporeal event-predicates (figure 14.7, corresponding to the two horizontal levels in figure 14.6, earlier).¹⁴⁵

Figure 14.6 How can future events result from present ones if all causes have only present effects?

Yet, despite their metaphysical distinction, the two sorts of time are co-contaminated and also co-dependent for some of their own temporal properties. The chronosian present obtains its temporal quality of being durational by always having some past and future within it, filling it out extensively; also, it can absorb more of that aiônian past and future outside its bounds by expanding outward into it.¹⁴⁷ The aiônian eternity obtains the temporal quality of being an actual occurrence by “accompanying” the activities of the chronosian present and borrowing from their reality.¹⁴⁸ For example, a month is both an incorporeal measure of time and the actual corporeal movement of the moon around the earth. In other words, the moon’s corporeal motion can continue on for the month it takes to circle the earth only on account of there being an incorporeal temporal extent that its motion can last for. And, the incorporeal measure of a month (being twenty-seven or so days in length) can obtain such a particular temporal quantity only by means of the moon’s actual corporeal movement, whose physical speed determines the motion’s duration.¹⁴⁹ Put another way, Aiôn time needs Chronos time in order for its measures to manifest temporally and to not just have a space-like status, and Chronos time needs Aiôn time in order for it to have an expansive temporal extent to its duration.

What interests us here especially regarding their contamination is the way that the corporeal present expands by borrowing from incorporeal temporality. Bodily interactions cause an incorporeal event, which in a sense expands the present’s bounds further forward, thereby appropriating the future into the present. Recall that at the beginning of the world, God knows with benevolent wisdom how the events of the world should proceed until their final end, the conflagration. And, that ultimate end point in the unfolding of the Cosmos is built into the initial mixture situation God creates, because it causes at that first moment an event-predicate whose end is that last moment of the world.

Figure 14.7 Aiôn and Chronos time in Deleuze’s reading of Goldschmidt, here based loosely on Sellars’s diagrams.¹⁴⁶ (They have been stacked vertically to indicate the co-contamination that Goldschmidt is trying to explain with this distinction.)

And recall that there is a long, internal chain of fated causes leading to that final state. Now, although the causal chain is found in Aiôn time, it immediately brings the future into the corporeal present. And, since all the incorporeal events are fatally linked, the present corporeal activity is unified with all of its future ones. So the first chronosian corporeal cause determines in that present the incorporeal aiônian future end and thereby the line of causes that will unfold, while at the same time this aiônian sequence of fated events broadens the present out into one long stretch of corporeal activity such that every moment expresses the same all-encompassing event-predicate (it is the sayable expressed by every activity throughout cosmic history),¹⁵⁰ which could perhaps be something like “unfolding” or “becoming”.¹⁵¹

Now let us see the way this works with our example. The heating event-predicate is expressed from the first corporeal moment until the point when the fire begins to form a new mixture with the air, and at that time, the mixture changes and it expresses flattening, and after that sharpening. But all of these activities share a common end, as they lead to the construction of a blade. For terminological convenience, let us just call this common predicate for the crafting activity “forging” (figure 14.8).

Insofar as a present moment of a corporeal mixture expresses an event-predicate, its activity spans a duration corresponding to the end of that event-predicate, at which point it terminates and gives way to the next event-predicate.¹⁵² But the reason we do not have isolated presents and temporally confined causes is that, on account of God’s Providence, every present activity always expresses an even deeper event-predicate whose end spans beyond the present in question and envelops it developmentally within an even longer activity that it is a causal part of. Under this conception, an incorporeal event does not actually cause future events. Rather, it is what establishes the direction of expansion for any corporeal present, but it does so in accordance with the immediate, efficient causality built into any limited present. God established this dynamic by having the first moment of time express an event-predicate whose end is the last moment in time, thereby projecting every other moment of that development in that fated direction.¹⁵³ So the important idea here is that the present corporeal cause enters into a chain of fated events in the aiônian eternity, corresponding to which is the ongoing corporeal procession of development in the chronosian present, whose progress has been set to unfold in that direction.¹⁵⁴

Figure 14.8 The duration of a present activity corresponds to the end of the incorporeal predicate that is expressed throughout that activity. Ends are nested deeper and deeper into Fate, corresponding thus with longer and longer present activities.

To Cooperate With Destiny by Affirming Creative Falsity

With all this in mind, let us return now to the issue of how we are informed about the world and thereby react to it appropriately. This raises questions regarding moral choice, and so we have arrived finally at the third branch of the Stoic system, their ethics. Suppose we observe someone named Cato, who is walking, and thus this corporeal mixture in the world causes there to be the incorporeal event-predicate “walking”.¹⁵⁵ The visual data of this activity are conveyed to our eyes by means of the disturbances in the air between us.¹⁵⁶ There is something like a set of “tentacles” branching out of the soul’s leading part to all the sensory organs such that it can be receptive to the external pneumatic motions.¹⁵⁷ This produces “sensory impressions” in the leading part of our soul, but they are fragmentary in nature.¹⁵⁸ So, the leading part rationally organizes the sensory impressions by means of the conditional form (if … then …) to create a “rational impression”, which is organized in accordance with the incorporeal sayable (the event-predicate) that is being expressed in the external event and that is also being expressed in our corporeal conceptions.¹⁵⁹ Now, because our impressions are normally veridical,¹⁶⁰ and since we assent to whatever we regard as true,¹⁶¹ this sensory and conceptual process results in the leading part of our soul sending an impulse to parts of our body so that it may react accordingly.¹⁶² For example, we might call out to greet Cato.

Yet, given this mechanistic sequence of events and the order of fated causes that God preordained for all of time, there would seem to be no room for moral choice.¹⁶³ Whatever impressions we are given are determined by fate, and since we assent to them, our pneumatic impulses cause our bodies to react reflexively, which then alters the corporeal mixture around us in such a way that its activities are drawing the world toward the next fated event.

But in fact, as Cicero says, Chrysippus rejects this picture and finds a way to “escape necessity while retaining fate”,¹⁶⁴ such that we are able, as Goldschmidt puts it, to cooperate with the causality of Destiny:¹⁶⁵ we should not simply submit to these fated forces and ends like a dog tied to a cart and dragged around in whatever direction the cart happens to be going, despite the dog’s wishes. Rather, we should live in accordance with the forces and directions of fate like the tied dog trusting every move the cart makes and running willingly and cooperatively with it.¹⁶⁶

Nonetheless, it is still not obvious how cooperating with Destiny can involve free moral choice that corresponds to the series of fated causes rather than defying its linear order. One danger of a fatalistic view is what Cicero refers to as the “Lazy Argument”: nothing we do can change our fate, so we might as well do nothing at all or follow whatever arbitrary whim we please;¹⁶⁷ and since we do only whatever we are caused to do, there is “no justice in either praise or blame, either honours or punishments”.¹⁶⁸

The way Chrysippus keeps fate while eliminating causal necessity involves a nuanced distinction between types of causality. We fatalistically suppose that each event has some antecedent cause that sufficiently explains the effected situation.¹⁶⁹ A cause for Chrysippus is a “that because of which”;¹⁷⁰ it is “the rationale of the world … in accordance with which past events have happened, present events are happening, and future events will happen”.¹⁷¹ Now, under a strict deterministic fatalism, as with Diodorus’s “master” argument, for every present cause there is only one possible outcome, which will occur by necessity.¹⁷²

Yet, Chrysippus does not think that every antecedent cause has only one possible outcome. That is to say, not all causes on their own necessitate one particular result (even though every result has some sufficient causal explanation).¹⁷³ Specifically this happens by means of the intervention of the leading part of the soul. When we have an impression, the leading part will initially form a rational impression to which we automatically assent, and it thus mechanically conveys a reflexive impulse to the rest of the body. So, “[w]hen some terrifying sound … or anything else of that kind occurs, even a (Stoic) wise man’s mind must be slightly moved and contracted and frightened … by certain rapid and involuntary movements”.¹⁷⁴ That sets activities and events along one course of development. And this initial mechanistic reaction is not necessarily something bad; for, we should accept what befalls us, as God had the good of humanity in mind when selecting the fated sequence of causes.¹⁷⁵ So we are right to assent at the beginning of our given impressions, because they cannot be otherwise and because God chooses us to have them all for the sake of the greater good, even if we personally do not like them.¹⁷⁶ As Marcus Aurelius says, you should “embrace and delight in whatever befalls you” no matter how disturbing or unpleasant.¹⁷⁷

Nonetheless, “reason supervenes as the craftsman of impulse”,¹⁷⁸ because our rational faculties can, in addition to their automated activities, voluntarily fabricate an alternative rational impression in accordance with our moral wisdom, which we also assent to on account of its own truth. This additional assent thereby produces a competing impulse that will hopefully override the reflexive one.¹⁷⁹ Epictetus describes how this works in a section of his Discourses entitled “How Must We Struggle Against Impressions?”:

Today, when I saw a handsome boy or a beautiful woman, I did not say to myself, O that I could sleep with her! And How happy is her husband! (for he who says this, says too, How happy is the adulterer!): nor do I go on to picture what follows next, the woman with me, and undressing, and lying down beside me…. But if the woman should even happen to be willing, and give me the nod, and send for me, and lay hold of me, and press herself against me … I still hold off and gain the victory.¹⁸⁰

Epictetus then explains that the way we can achieve this victory over our automatic impulses is by developing an additional rational impression that we set against the given one in order to “over power it, and not be swept away by it”:

In the first place, do not allow yourself to be carried away by its intensity: but say, “Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are, and what you represent. Let me test you”. Then, afterwards, do not allow it to draw you on by picturing what may come next, for if you do, it will lead you wherever it pleases. But rather, you should introduce some fair and noble impression to replace it, and banish this base and sordid one.¹⁸¹

Here is where Deleuze specifically locates bifurcation and affirmative synthetic disjunction, namely in Epictetus’s notion of prohairesis, which is the willful and rational selection among possible reactions. We determine these options in the first place by learning which things are within our sphere of control, and this is something we can do only after acknowledging the things in our lives that we cannot change.¹⁸²

In Stoic ethics, the moral value of an action lies in the good of the selection we make.¹⁸³ And the rationality of our commanding faculty is disposed toward making beneficent, virtuous actions that accord with nature.¹⁸⁴ So we should select those rational impressions that will provide a morally justifiable rationale for the action, and we should follow the better impulses they create. We do this by again implementing the conditional form to assess the ends that our actions should aim for.¹⁸⁵ Epictetus calls this the “right use of impressions”.¹⁸⁶

So by means of this selection and creation of parallel incorporeal ends, we produce a paraconsistent combination of event-predicates, like Epictetus fatalistically affirming that the woman is what is attracting him while also affirming an alternate predicate for the situation, as if his philosophical life or his home life is what is attracting him. In the same stroke, we also place into the corporeal world new diverging developmental tendencies on account of the additional pneumatic disturbances that our alternate impulses and actions introduce into the world. As Deleuze writes, “the [Stoic] sage wishes to ‘give a body’ to the incorporeal effect, since the effect inherits the cause”.¹⁸⁷ And this, as we see, involves co-contamination of Aiôn and Chronos time (figure 14.9).

We thus have a dialetheic form: Epictetus is both attracted to the other person and not attracted to them, although this negation is not exclusive. In order to insert this alternate path, we need to affirm an event-predicate that at one point is not yet true but that then comes to be true by means of this affirmation; for, the very affirmation and assent to it thereby produces corporeal and incorporeal bifurcations. It is an affirmation of a paraconsistent negation, but that also means that logically it involves an affirmation of a falsity; for, in a dialetheia, both the formula and its negation are thought to be both true and false. In our example, the counter-impression whose event-predicate we affirm does not yet have its full impulsional actualization the very instant we first affirm it, and in that sense it has a falsity to it. Thus, this dialetheic affirmation of the false has what Deleuze calls the powers of the false, because by means of affirming such paraconsistent negations, one can participate in “the creation of the New”.¹⁸⁹

Yet, we still have not explained how this sort of causality both rejects necessity and keeps fate. What we may have noticed in these matters of moral choice is that the outcome depended not just on one factor, namely the necessarily given impression, but as well it depended on whether or not there was an additional factor, the alternate impression.¹⁹⁰ Chrysippus’s theory of antecedent causality thus involves what Cicero calls “co-fated” causes: situations in the world that were determinately caused may not themselves be causally sufficient to bring about certain other particular outcomes, and instead, additional causal factors must accompany them to ensure that determination.¹⁹¹ So, many causal outcomes are decided by the contingent combinations of causal factors. For instance, consider Epictetus’s example again (figure 14.10).

Figure 14.9 Stoic moral choice introduces divergence into the course of time on both the aiônian and chronosian levels.¹⁸⁸

There is the given impression, which was caused by necessity. Call this cause “A”. And our rational faculty’s decision not to intervene we will call cause “B”. In Epictetus’s example, the effect would be that we impel our bodies toward this attractive person, and let us call this outcome “Ψ”. Here A and B are co-fatal causes, because neither one alone was enough to determine Ψ, although their combination was sufficient. But suppose we instead make a different selection. In this case, our rational faculties intervene. Call this alternate cause “C”. Its result, “Ω”, is that we impel our bodies away from the attractive person. So regardless of whether it is Ψ or Ω that in fact results, in both cases there is a sufficient rationale, namely that Ψ is caused by A and B, and Ω is caused by A and C. This means that for Chrysippus, everything is still fated, because for every event there is an antecedent causality that sufficiently accounts for the outcome. Furthermore, whenever the mechanistic causality is sidetracked, as in Epictetus’s example, it is done so on account of a rational deliberation, which also provides rationale for the alternate outcome. Nonetheless, all this implies that time’s course is not strictly unilinear but is rather bifurcational.¹⁹³ But that need not be a problem under the Stoics’ assumptions of God’s Providence and Fate, because it can still be that all roads are ultimately good ones and also that they all lead to the same end, conflagration, each in its own way.

Figure 14.10 Stoic co-fatality can be understood as involving bifurcational antecedent causality.¹⁹²

Conclusion: Joyful Negation

We have seen that there is a sort of paraconsistent negation that may help us understand how incompatible developments can be dually affirmed in Deleuze’s affirmative synthetic disjunction and bifurcational theory of time. Yet, we still need to assess the limitations of this proposal. Deleuze says that this affirmative synthetic disjunction is an “affirmation of all chance in a single moment, the unique cast for all throws”.¹⁹⁴ These are also basic concepts built into his interpretation of Nietzsche’s amor fati, which similarly does not mean succumbing to an attitude of passive resignation to the events transpiring around us. Rather, according to Deleuze, we must actively affirm things in such a way that their outcomes will need to be decided by chance, and when those outcomes do come to pass, we must affirm them not as events that should have been otherwise but rather as results that must be so. This affirmation of the necessity of the outcome is the affirmation of Destiny. The Nietzschean metaphor here is throwing dice to the heavens, where the gods decide the outcome by throwing them back to the earth.¹⁹⁵ In the Stoic context, we would say that when by prohairesis we introduce new paths of fate and of worldly activity, we do not thereby get to decide the outcomes. For, consider how whatever does in fact transpire results in part from a complex combination of many other co-fatal, voluntary decisions that everyone else makes simultaneously with your choice. Many times, no matter how strongly you will the world toward some morally and rationally selected end, the tide will go the other way. The best we can do, however, is to add co-fatalities to the world that can generate better outcomes and assent to them as much as possible so that these alternative options for development become available for actualization through our bodily actions. To exercise prohairesis, then, is still to affirm chance, as the outcomes will not be determined by us or anyone else alone.

With this in mind, we are presented with two additional logical situations that are bound up with this affirmative synthetic disjunction but that the dialetheic structure might fail to explain. Before we even know that we will have the chance to add alternate options into the world (or metaphorically, before we even craft the dice), it would seem that we are not yet affirming one or another future course. So here we have an “analetheic” rather than a dialetheic structure, as there would be propositions about the future that are neither true nor false.¹⁹⁶ And after the outcome has at last been decided, we would seem to have an exclusionary, classical situation where one outcome holds and the other does not.¹⁹⁷ But notice that neither one of these other two related situations is an instance of affirmative synthetic disjunction, which takes place at that moment when additional options and directions of development are first affirmed in combination with the one already given, such that the final outcome may be decided by fateful chance. So we must remain aware of these and other possible limitations for applying the dialetheic structure and paraconsistent reasoning when understanding Deleuze’s logic.

We now see that we have enough reason not to understand all negational concepts in Deleuze’s thinking in the exclusionary or destructive way Culp has in mind. Yet, whether or not a paraconsistent sort of negation has as much revolutionary power as the classical, exclusive one is a question for another occasion. But although we leave this matter aside, let us end with the following relevant passage from Difference and Repetition:

There are two ways to appeal to “necessary destructions”: that of the poet, who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterizes eternal return; and that of the politician, who is above all concerned to deny that which “differs”, so as to conserve or prolong an established historical order, or to establish a historical order which already calls forth in the world the forms of its representation.¹⁹⁸

Abbreviations

Aet. Plac.

Aetius, De placita philosophorum (Opinions of the Philosophers)

Alex. In Ar. Top.

Alexander of Aphrodisias, In Aristotelis Topicorum (On Aristotle’s Topics)

Alex. Mantissa

Alexander of Aphrodisias, De anima libri mantissa (On Soul II)

Alex. Mixt.

Alexander of Aphrodisias, De mixtione (On Mixture)

Calc. In Tim.

Calcidius, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus (On Plato’s Timaeus)

Cic. Div.

Cicero, De divinatione (On Divination)

Cic. Fat.

Cicero, De fato (On Fate)

Cic. Off.

Cicero, De officiis (On Duties)

Clem. Paid.

Clement of Alexandria, Paidagogos (Teacher)

Clem. Stom.

Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis (Miscellanies)

Cleom. Mot. circul.

Cleomedes, De motu circulari corporum caelestium (On the Circular Motions of the Celestial Bodies)

Diog. Laert. Vit. phil.

Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers)

Epict. Diss.

Epictetus, Dissertationes (Discourses)

Epict. Ench.

Epictetus, Enchiridion (Manual)

Euseb. Praep. evang.

Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica (Evangelical Preparation)

Gal. Foet.

Galen, De foetus formation (On the Formation of the Fetus)

Gal. Intr.

Galen, Introductio sive medicus (Medical Introduction)

Gal. Meth. med.

Galen, De methodo medendi (On Medical Method)

Gal. Musc. mot.

Galen, De musculorum motu (On Muscular Movement)

Gal. Plac.

Galen, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis (On Hippocrates’ and Plato’s Doctrines)

Gal. Plen.

Galen, De plenitudine (On Bodily Mass)

Gell. Noc. Att.

Gellius, Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights)

Hippol. Haer.

Hippolytus, Refutatio omnium haeresium (Refutation of All Heresies)

L&S

Anthony Long and David Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers

Marc. Aur. Med.

Marcus Aurelius, Ta eis heauton (Meditations)

Nem. Nat. hom.

Nemesius, De natura hominis (On Human Nature)

Orig. Princ.

Origen, De principiis (On Principles)

Philo. Leg. alleg.

Philo of Alexandria, Legum allegoriarum (Allegories of the Laws)

Philo. Quaes. Gen.

Philo of Alexandria, Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim (Questions and Answers on Genesis)

Plut. Comm. not.

Plutarch, De communibus notitiis adversus Stoicos (On Common Conceptions)

Plut. St. rep.

Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis (On Stoic Self-Contradictions)

Sen. Ep.

Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales (Letters)

Sext. Emp. Adv. math.

Sextus Empiricus. Adversus mathematicos (Against the Professors)

Sext. Emp. Pyr.

Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoneae hypotyposes (Outlines of Pyrrhonism)

Stob. Ecl.

Stobaeus, Eclogae (Anthology)

Notes

1.I would like to thank Dorothea Olkowski, Eftichis Pirovolakis, Graham Priest, Julie Van der Wielen, and Terence Blake for their helpful comments on this chapter or for their other assistance with the research.

2.John Sellars, “Aiôn and Chronos: Deleuze and the Stoic Theory of Time”, in Collapse, vol. 3, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), p. 205, quoting Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969; English title: Logic of Sense), pp. 168/163. Unless otherwise indicated, citations with a slash give the listed original language edition first and the English edition second, which in all cases are the sources of the quotations.

3.Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 1–2.

4.Culp, Dark Deleuze, p. 20.

5.See, for example, Culp’s discussion of Deleuze’s claim from the second Cinema book that “We need reasons to believe in this world”. Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985; English title: Cinema 2: The Time-Image), pp. 223/166. Culp writes: “Although his suggestion is not wrong, it is incomplete. In his haste, Deleuze forgets to pose the problem with the ambivalence found in all his other accounts of power–how affects are ruled by tyrants, molecular revolutions made fascist, and nomad war machines enrolled to fight for the state. Without it, he becomes Nietzsche’s braying ass, which says yes only because it is incapable of saying no (NP, 178–86). We must then make up for Deleuze’s error and seek the dark underside of belief”; see Culp, Dark Deleuze, p. 8, my emphasis, with Culp citing the Columbia University Press English translation edition (1983) of Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1962; English title: Nietzsche and Philosophy). Culp’s claim seems to be that in such cases, Deleuze normally would at least open movements down the dark road, but here, as an exception, he refrained. Nonetheless, this still involves an admission that Deleuze refrains here, and Culp’s judgment is that Deleuze has erred by making this exception and that we instead should take this line of thinking down the darker path Deleuze chose not to take. As we can see, there is an ambivalence in Culp’s treatment of Deleuze: on the one hand, he seems to want to say that the dark reading is consistent with what Deleuze writes, while, on the other hand, he shows how the dark reading at times requires detours from Deleuze’s texts. My suggestion here instead is that Deleuze is using a non-classical sort of reasoning that would explain what might seem to be a conceptual ambivalence in his texts; namely I am proposing that the negational elements in Deleuze’s philosophy can have a logically affirmative character and thus do not need to be given an exclusionary sense.

6.Culp, Dark Deleuze, p. 2, my emphasis on “negativity”.

7.Culp, Dark Deleuze, p. 32.

8.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 204/199, my emphasis; Culp, Dark Deleuze, p. 32. Culp speaks of exclusive disjunctive synthesis as “our own” version of the concept, so I assume he is acknowledging this is not a Deleuzian notion; for, as his cited Deleuze passages show, it cannot suffice as one.

9.Richard Routley and Val Routley, “Negation and Contradiction”, in Revista Colombiana de Matematicas 19 (1985): 201.

10.Culp, Dark Deleuze, p. 1.

11.Gilles Deleuze, “Lettre à un critique sévère”, in Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit, 1990; English title: “Letter to a Harsh Critic”), pp. 14–15/6.

12.See Simon Duffy, The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), especially, for instance, pp. 113–17.

13.Some may note the extraordinary breadth of Deleuze’s knowledge and doubt that he could have been unaware of paraconsistent logic. But given the marginalization that non-classical logics endured in the twentieth century–even once being referred to as “deviant” logics (see Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 213, and Susan Haack, Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic: Beyond the Formalism [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996], p. 4)–it seems plausible that Deleuze never had by chance an “encounter” with them, as he instead did with many other areas, such as painting, physics, mathematics, and so on. (See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “C comme culture” and “N comme neurologie”, in L’abécédaire, ed. Pierre-André Boutang [Paris: Montparnasse, 2004; English title: From A to Z], DVD.) And considering the sheer scope of sources in Deleuze footnotes, the mere fact that he never mentions paraconsistent logics even when discussing logical paradoxes also suggests he may never have had the opportunity to study them. Nonetheless, the fact that he also never criticizes them or otherwise mentions them means we can at least consider the possibility that they are consistent with his philosophy, if not even particularly helpful for understanding it. Furthermore, non-classical logicians have uncovered paraconsistent reasoning in philosophers going back to Heraclitus, even though they too were not explicitly aware of paraconsistent logics. See, for instance, Graham Priest and Richard Routley, “First Historical Introduction: A Preliminary History of Paraconsistent and Dialethic Approaches”, and “An Outline of the History of (Logical) Dialectic”, in Graham Priest, Richard Routley, and Jean Norman (eds), Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the Inconsistent (Munich: Philosophia, 1989); and Graham Priest, Doubt Truth to Be a Liar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 119–21.

14.Gilles Deleuze and Arnaud Villani, “Réponses à une série de questions”, in La guêpe et l’orchidée: Essai sur Gilles Deleuze, ed. Arnaud Villani (Paris: Belin, 1999; English title: “Responses to a Series of Questions”), pp. 130/42.

15.Graham Priest, “Logic: A Short Introduction. Lecture 2: Why is Logic Important?” online recorded lecture, 20 February 2017, Romanae Disputationes. Concorso nazionale di Filosofia, 10.01. http://romanaedisputationes.com/rd-world. More precisely, Priest says that logic “constrains” metaphysics.

16.See, for instance, Graham Priest, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent, expand, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 175, and Barry Dainton, Time and Space (Durham: Acumen, 2010), pp. 290–1.

17.Graham Priest, “Logic: A Short Introduction. Lecture 2”, In Contradiction, pp. 159–81 (chapters 11 and 12, “The Metaphysics of Change” parts 1 and 2); Routley and Routley, “Negation”, pp. 220–1.

18.Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s “Logic of Sense” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 82. “The Logic of Sense is concerned above all to establish the claim that events have ontological priority over substances”; see Bowden, Priority, p. 17.

19.David Lapoujade, Deleuze, les mouvements aberrants (Paris: Minuit, 2014; English title: Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze), pp. 11–13/26–7, emphasis in the original. Some other works on Deleuze that deal either explicitly or indirectly with ideas in non-classical logic are Cécile Voisset-Veysseyre, “Toward a Post-Identity Philosophy: Along a Flight Line with Gilles Deleuze?”, in Tahir (August 2011); Daniel Smith, “Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the ‘Conditions of the Real’ ”, in Chiasmi International 13 (2011); and Dorothea Olkowski, “Using Our Intuition: Creating the Future Phenomenological Plane of Thought”, in Feminist Phenomenology Futures, Eds. Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).

20.Lapoujade, Deleuze, pp. 13/27.

21.Priest, Doubt Truth, pp. 125–9 (section 7.4, “The Rationality of Inconsistency”). Here Priest argues that it is more rational to accept a paraconsistent logic when dealing with the liar paradox, because its ability to handle contradiction makes it more adequate to the given data of the problem; it gives a simpler sufficient solution; it has greater explanatory power with regard to the underlying phenomena; and it provides a more complete account.

22.I am not entirely sure what would qualify as an irrational logic, especially like the sort Deleuze may be using, but maybe one possibility would be a logic where the “rules” randomly change. Perhaps also we might seek a logic that somehow decides truth values by chance, although maybe not in any formalizable way.

23.Then, they would be identical anyway, according to Leibniz’s law of identity. Gottfried Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique, in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, series 6, vol. 4, ed. Academy of Sciences of Berlin (Berlin: Akademie, 1999; English title: Discourse on Metaphysics), pp. 1541/60.

24.Leibniz, Discours, pp. 1540/59–60. On these and related matters concerning Leibniz’s notion of individual substance, see Roger Woolhouse, “On the Nature of an Individual Substance”, in Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive Essays, ed. Michael Hooker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Note that in the following I have selected the passages in Leibniz that more or less suit the sort of interpretation Deleuze gives to Leibniz’s incompossibility. The task of giving a completely accurate and consistent account of Leibniz’s theories of possible worlds and of compossibility is far more complex than this, and there are a variety of theories on how to do so. On these matters, see especially Gregory Brown and Yual Chiek, “Introduction”, in Leibniz on Compossibility and Possible Worlds, Eds. Gregory Brown and Yual Chiek (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016), pp. 7–14. Similarly, the later section on the Stoics is meant to present their ideas in a way that corresponds to Deleuze’s interpretation and is not meant to stand on its own as a reliable representation of their philosophy. For accurate studies of the Stoics in comparison to Deleuze’s interpretations, see, for instance, John Sellars, “An Ethics of the Event: Deleuze’s Stoicism”, in Angelaki 11.3 (2006); “Six Theses on Deleuze’s Stoicism”, online recorded lecture, Autumn, 2006, A/V: Journal of Practical and Creative Philosophy 4. www.actualvirtualjournal.com/2014/11/six-theses-on-deleuzes-stoicism.html; and “Aiôn”.

25.Gottfried Leibniz, “Primae veritates”, in Opuscules et fragments inédits, ed. Louis Couturat (Paris: Alcan, 1903; English title: “First Truths”), pp. 520/268; Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz, Landgraf Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels und Antoine Arnauld (1686–1690), in Die Philosophischen Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Carl Gerhardt (Hildesheim: Olms, 1978; English title: “Correspondence between Leibniz and Arnauld”, with translations from George Montgomery or from Richard Francks and Roger Woolhouse), pp. 19–20, 49 and 126 / Montgomery, pp. 78–9, 121–2 and 233; Leibniz, Discours, pp. 1546–7/ 63–4.

26.Leibniz, Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz, Landgraf Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels und Antoine Arnauld, p. 54 / Montgomery, p. 128.

27.Gilles Deleuze, Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988; English title: The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque), pp. 79/59.

28.Gottfried Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée, in Die Philosophischen Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Carl Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1885; English title: Theodicy), pp. 107/128; Monadologie, in Die Philosophischen Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Carl Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1885; English title: Monadology), pp. 616/275; Discours, pp. 1541/60; Briefwechsel … Arnauld, pp. 19, 27, 40–1, 57 and 126 / Montgomery, pp. 79, 89–90, 109–10, 133 and 233.

29.Leibniz, Briefwechsel … Arnauld, p. 55 / Montgomery, p. 131.

30.Priest and Routley, “First Historical Introduction”, pp. 24–5.

31.Leibniz, Théodicée, pp. 107/128.

32.Leibniz, Monadologie, pp. 615–16/275; Leibniz, Briefwechsel … Arnauld, p. 58 / Montgomery, p. 134.

33.Gottfried Leibniz, De contingentia, in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, series 6, vol. 4, ed. Academy of Sciences of Berlin (Berlin: Akademie, 1999; English title: “On Contingency”), pp. 1651/29.

34.See Gottfried Leibniz, “De veritatibus primis”, in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, series 6, vol. 4, ed. Academy of Sciences of Berlin (Berlin: Akademie, 1999; English title: “On First Truths”), pp. 1442–3/29–30; Brown and Chiek, “Introduction”, pp. 4–5.

35.Leibniz, Théodicée, pp. 107/ 128; Briefwechsel … Arnauld, pp. 20 and 50 / Montgomery, pp. 80 and 123.

36.Leibniz, Monadologie, pp. 615–16/275; “Primae veritates”, pp. 520/268–9; Briefwechsel … Arnauld, pp. 18–19 and 48 / Montgomery, pp. 78 and 120.

37.Leibniz, Briefwechsel … Arnauld, p. 40 / Montgomery, p. 108.

38.Deleuze, Le pli, pp. 79/59.

39.Gottfried Leibniz, Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz und Bourguet (1709–1716), in Die Philosophischen Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Carl Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1978; English title: “Letters to Louis Bourguet”), pp. 572–3/661.

40.Georges Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 2013; English title: On the Normal and the Pathological), pp. 119/81.

41.“le grisonner n’est pas moins positif que le noircir” (Deleuze, Logique, pp. 200/195, emphasis in the original). In the subsection titled “Incorporeality” (pp. 194–5), we see why the adjectives were converted to verbs in this passage.

42.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 200–01/196. While the real world incompatibility of the predicates is “alogical”, I still think that their affirmative synthetic disjunction is another matter that can be understood using non-classical logic.

43.Leibniz, Briefwechsel … Arnauld, pp. 48 and 55–6 / Montgomery, pp. 120 and 131.

44.Gottfried Leibniz, Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz und Coste (1706–1712), in Die Philosophischen Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Carl Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1978; English title: “Letter to Coste, on Human Freedom”), pp. 400/193; Théodicée, pp. 252/267–8; Monadologie, pp. 615–16/275.

45.Gottfried Leibniz, De arcanis sublimium vel de summa rerum, in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, series 6, vol. 3, ed. Academy of Sciences of Berlin (Berlin: Akademie, 1980; English title: “On the Secrets of the Sublime, or on the Supreme Being”), pp. 472/21–3.

46.Leibniz, Monadologie, pp. 616/275, my emphasis. Deleuze defines compossibility along similar lines: “the condition of a maximum of continuity for a maximum of difference”; see Deleuze, Logique, pp. 339/332.

47.Leibniz, Briefwechsel … Arnauld, p. 53 / Montgomery, pp. 127–8, my emphasis.

48.Leibniz, Briefwechsel … Arnauld, pp. 42–3, 53 and 56 / Montgomery, pp. 111–12, 128 and 132.

49.John Nolt, Logics (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1997), p. 310.

50.Nolt, Logics, p. 366. Nolt’s diagram has more branches, and its caption reads “The thick line represents the actual world. The thinner lines represent temporal portions of merely possible worlds that share the actual world’s past. Specific times are represented by points on any of the lines”.

51.Jorge Borges, “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”, in Ficciones (Madrid: Alianza, 1971; English title: “The Garden of Forking Paths”), pp. 109–15/24–8; Gilles Deleuze, “Course 1980–04–22”, online transcript and translation of a course lecture given on 22 April 1980, Web Deleuze. www.webdeleuze.com; Le pli, pp. 83–4/62.

52.Leibniz, Briefwechsel … Arnauld, pp. 18–19, 54 / Montgomery, pp. 78 and 128–9.

53.As “plusieurs Adams disjunctivement possibles”. Leibniz, Briefwechsel … Arnauld, p. 54 / Francks and Woolhouse, p. 110, emphasis mine.

54.Leibniz, Discours, pp. 1537/58.

55.Leibniz, Discours, pp. 1546–7 / 64; Briefwechsel … Arnauld, p. 52 / Montgomery, pp. 125–6.

56.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 201/197.

57.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 201/197.

58.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 201/197.

59.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 201–2/197.

60.Nolt, Logics, p. 385.

61.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 205.

62.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 205; Priest, Doubt Truth, pp. 31–2.

63.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, pp. 206 and 212; Priest, Doubt Truth, p. 31.

64.Priest, Doubt Truth, p. 31.

65.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 206, definition modified in accordance with Edwin Mares, Relevant Logic: A Philosophical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 92.

66.Priest, Doubt Truth, p. 31.

67.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 217.

68.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, pp. 214–15.

69.Based on Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 207.

70.Graham Priest, “Paraconsistency and Dialetheism”, in Handbook of the History of Logic, Eds. Dov Gabbay and John Woods, vol. 8 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007), p. 135.

71.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 208.

72.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 220.

73.That is, “for worlds where A and ¬A (strictly A ∧ ¬A) hold but B does not”, and “for worlds where C holds but neither D nor ¬D do”; see Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 209, notation modified.

74.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, pp. 209 and 212.

75.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 209; Priest, Doubt Truth, p. 31.

76.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, pp. 217 and 220.

77.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 212.

78.Based on Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 216.

79.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 201.

80.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 209, notation modified.

81.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 217.

82.Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 208, notation modified and original italics removed with my own inserted, to highlight the passage’s relevance in our Leibnizian context.

83.Koji Tanaka et al., “Paraconsistency: Introduction”, in Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications, Eds. Koji Tanaka et al. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), p. 2. Not all relevance logics are paraconsistent, and not all paraconsistent logics are relevant, although there is generally an overlap of these types of logics. Routley and Routley, “Negation”, p. 204.

84.Priest, “Paraconsistency”, p. 131.

85.Graham Priest, One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of Its Parts, Including the Singular Object Which is Nothingness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. xviii.

86.See, for instance, Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968; English title: Difference and Repetition), pp. 2 and 74/xviii and 63.

87.Mares, Relevant Logic, p. 93.

88.Priest himself does not use the term “affirmation”, because he does not give it any special meaning; however, he says that were he ever to have used it, he would have meant it the same as “assert”. His clarification was given to me by email, 26 January 2015. Also, Mares, who likewise says that denial is a speech act, considers rejection to be “the propositional attitude that is expressed by denial”; see Mares, Relevant Logic, p. 93. As such, it seems appropriate that affirmation be considered the propositional attitude that is expressed by assertion.

89.Graham Priest and Edgar Aroutiounian, “An Interview with Noted Logician, Graham Priest”, in Florida Student Philosophy Blog, online text interview, 23 February 2011. https://unfspb.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/part-ii-of-the-interview-with-graham-priest, notation modified.

90.Priest, “Paraconsistency”, p. 194, emphasis in the original.

91.Mares, Relevant Logic, p. 93, emphasis in the original, but notation modified.

92.Deleuze, Différence, pp. 75/64, emphasis in the original. Additional text where affirmation and negation are contrasted can be found in Deleuze, Nietzsche, pp. 60–5 and 76–7/50–3 and 62–3.

93.His criticism probably also applies to the first kind of negation, which yields even more exclusion.

94.Otherwise see the excellent presentations of Stoic philosophy in relation to Deleuze’s in Bowden, Priority; James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s “Logic of Sense”: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), ch.6; and also in Sellars, “Aiôn”, “Ethics”, and “Six Theses”.

95.Émile Bréhier, Histoire de la Philosophie, vol. 1, Book 2 (Paris: Alcan, 1927), p. 299 / Anthony Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (New York: Scribner, 1974), p. 120. See Deleuze, Logique, pp. 167/162; and Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.39–40 (Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Dual language edition), vol. 2, trans. R. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), pp. 148–50/149–51).

96.As Anneli Luhtala observes, the Stoics, with one known exception (Posidonius), advocated starting a philosophical education with the study of logic; see Anneli Luhtala, On the Origin of Syntactical Description in Stoic Logic (Münster: Nodus, 2000), p. 58. So like the Stoics, we here begin our “course with Logic, go on to Physics, and finish with Ethics”. Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.40 (Lives, pp. 150/151).

97.Luhtala, Origin, pp. 58–9; Long, Philosophy, p. 120.

98.David Sanford, If P, then Q: Conditionals and the Foundations of Reasoning (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 14–15. Sanford quotes a passage by Aristotle where the constituents of the conditional are given as sentences, but he remarks that Aristotle nonetheless developed a logic of terms, while the Stoics instead created a logic of sentences or propositions.

99.Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.74–75 (Lives, pp. 182/183).

100.Cic. Fat. 6.11–19.45 (De oratore, Book 3 (Dual language edition), trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), pp. 204–42/205–43).

101.Victor Goldschmidt, Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps (Paris: Vrin, 1953), pp. 82–3.

102.Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.65–66 (Lives, pp. 174/175).

103.Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.63–64 (Lives, pp. 172/173); Clem. Stom. 8.9.26.3–4 (Clemens Alexandrinus, vol. 3, ed. Otto Stählin (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1909; English title: The So-Called Eighth Stromateus), pp. 96–7/117); Émile Bréhier, La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme (Paris: Vrin, 1962), pp. 14–20; Andreas Graeser, “The Stoic Theory of Meaning”, in The Stoics, ed. John Rist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p. 94.

104.Bréhier, La théorie, pp. 14–15; Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 8.11–12. Anthony Long and David Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 2: Greek and Latin Texts with Notes and Bibliography, and vol. 1: Translations of the Principle Sources with Philosophical Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 197/195–6. Henceforth abbreviated L&S, with vol. 1 listed last when given with a slash.

105.Graham Priest, “Speaking of the Ineffable, East and West”, in European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 11.2 (2015): 15, italics at the end and bracketed insertion are mine.

106.Bréhier, La théorie, p. 1.

107.Bréhier, La théorie, p. 2; Sen. Ep. 58.13–15 (L&S, pp. 166/162); Alex. In Ar. Top. 301,19–25 (L&S, pp. 167/162).

108.Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 10.218 (L&S, pp. 167/162).

109.Gal. Meth. med. 10.155,1–8 (L&S, pp. 168/163); Stob. Ecl. 1.106, 5–23 (Stobaeus, Anthologium, vol. 1, eds. Curt Wachsmuth and Otto Hense (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884), pp. 106/L&S, pp. 301–2/304).

110.Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 91–5.

111.Sext. Emp. Pyr. 3.14 (Sextus Empiricus in Three Volumes, vol. 1 (Dual language edition), trans. R. Bury (London and New York: Heinemann/Putman, 1933), pp. 334/335).

112.Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 95–6.

113.Euseb. Praep. evang. 15.14.1–2, 15.18.2 (L&S, pp. 270 and 274–5/273 and 276); Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.141 (Lives, pp. 244/245); Aet. Plac. 1.7.33 (L&S, pp. 271–2/274–5).

114.Stob. Ecl. 1.25, 3–27,4 (L&S, pp. 326–7/326–7); Plut. Comm. not. 1075E (L&S, pp. 327–8/327).

115.Calc. In Tim. 144 (L&S, pp. 332/331).

116.Euseb. Praep. evang. 15.14.1 (L&S, pp. 274/273); Aet. Plac. 1.7.33 (L&S, pp. 271–2/274–5).

117.Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.142 (Lives, pp. 246/247).

118.Plut. Comm. not. 1085C-D (L&S, pp. 280–1/282); Gal. Plen. 7.525, 9–14 (L&S, pp. 280/282). See Samuel Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973), p. 4.

119.Gal. Plac. 5.3.8 (L&S, pp. 281 / 282); Alex. Mixt. 224, 14–27 (L&S, pp. 281/282).

120.Alex. Mixt. 218, 2–6 (L&S, pp. 290/291).

121.Cicero, De natura deorum 1.39–41, 2.18–22, 2.87–90 (Cicero in Twenty-Eight Volumes, vol. 19, trans. H. Rackham (London and Cambridge, MA: Heinemann/Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 40–2, 140–4 and 206–10 / 41–3, 141–5 and 207–11); Aet. Plac. 1.7.33 (L&S, pp. 271–2/274–5).

122.Philo. Quaes. Gen. 2.4 (Paralipomena Armena, ed. John Baptist Aucher (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1826), pp. 77 / L&S and 285); Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.138–40 (Lives, pp. 242–4/243–5); Gal. Musc. mot. 4.402, 12–403,10 (L&S, pp. 282/283); Alex. Mixt. 223, 25–36 (L&S, pp. 283/283); Clem. Stom. 5.47.6–48.3 (Clemens Alexandrinus, vol. 2, ed. Otto Stählin (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1906; English title: The Miscellanies, Books II-VIII), pp. 358/249. See Sambursky, Physics, p. 5.

123.Alex. Mixt. 224, 23–6 (L&S, pp. 281/282); Nem. Nat. hom. 70, 6–71, 4 (L&S, pp. 282/283); Philo. Quaes. Gen. 2.4 (Paralipomena Armena, pp. 73/L&S and 285).

124.Alex. Mixt. 216, 14–17 (L&S, pp. 288/290). See Deleuze, Logique, pp. 13/7.

125.Gal. Intr. 14.726, 7–11 (L&S, pp. 284/284). See Sambursky, Physics, pp. 7–8.

126.Nem. Nat. hom. 78, 7–79, 2 (L&S, pp. 269/272).

127.Philo. Leg. alleg. 2.22–23 (L&S, pp. 284–5/284); Cic. Off. 1.132 (L&S, pp. 315/316); Gal. Intr. 14.726, 7–11 (L&S, pp. 284/284); Orig. Princ. 3.1.2–3 (L&S, pp. 310/313).

128.Gal. Foet. 4.698, 2–9 (L&S, pp. 312/314); Calc. In Tim. 220 (L&S, pp. 313–14/315).

129.Aet. Plac. 4.21.1–4 (L&S, pp. 314/315–16); Stob. Ecl. 1.368, 12–20 (L&S, pp. 315–16/316); Luhtala, Origin, pp. 67–8.

130.Euseb. Praep. evang. 15.14.1 (L&S, pp. 270/273); Cicero, Academica 1.39–40 (Vol. 19, pp. 448/449); Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 8.263 (L&S, pp. 269/272); Nem. Nat. hom. 78, 7–79, 2 (L&S, pp. 269/272).

131.Plut. St. rep. 1053F-1054B (L&S, pp. 283/284). See Sambursky, Physics, pp. 7–8.

132.Alex. Mixt. 218,1–2 (L&S, pp. 290/291).

133.A related example is given in Clem. Stom. 8.9.29.1 (Vol. 3, pp. 98/121). But here the discussion is about the “suitability” of the wood to burn when mixing with fire.

134.Under Stoic metaphysics where only bodies are real, we would not say that the iron is participating in some idea for hotness or that it falls under some incorporeal class that groups hot things. Nor would we say that it is one body enclosed in another body, because the hotness, although corporeal, is something physically inherent to the iron rather than being a body into which the iron is contained. See Bréhier, La théorie, pp. 20–1.

135.Bréhier, La théorie, p. 19.

136.“On ne doit pas dire, pensaient-ils ‘L’arbre est vert’ mais ‘L’arbre verdoie’ ”; see Bréhier, La théorie, p. 20, using the English translation for certain terminology from Deleuze’s Logique, pp. 33/24. For a more detailed linguistic discussion of the relation between verbs and incorporeal predicates, see Luhtala, Origin, pp. 84 and 88–100.

137.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 33/25.

138.Luhtala, Origin, pp. 62–3; Bréhier, La théorie, p. 2.

139.Sellars, “Aiôn”.

140.Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 8.263, 9.211 (L&S, pp. 269 and 333/272 and 333); Clem. Stom. 8.9.26.3–4 (Vol. 3, pp. 96–7 and 99/117); Stob. Ecl. 1.138, 14–139, 4 (L&S, pp. 332–3/333); Cic. Acad. 1.39–40 (Vol. 19, pp. 448/449); Nem. Nat. hom. 78, 7–79, 2, 81, 6–10 (L&S, pp. 269–70/272). See Deleuze, Logique, pp. 13–14/7–8.

141.Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1, p. 343, emphasis mine.

142.On the one hand, there is a durationless cut dividing an eternal time that goes on forever in both directions, while, on the other hand, the act of dividing any durational present always yields a smaller duration; and every expansion of a durational present always yields another finitely limited duration too; see Stob. Ecl. 1.105, 8–16, 1.106, 5–23 (L&S, pp. 301–3/304–5).

143.Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 38–40. See Marc. Aur. Med. 4.3,7, 5.24, 12.7, 12.32 (Ad se ipsum libri XII, ed. Joachim Dalfen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1979; English title: Meditations), pp. 25, 43, 117, 121/48, 66, 146 and 151). Also see Sellars’s critique of Goldschmidt’s implementation of this term in “Aiôn”, pp. 193–6.

144.Stob. Ecl. 1.105, 8–16, 1.106, 5–23 (L&S, pp. 301–3/304–5). See Chrysippus’s notion of interminable corporeal division: Stob. Ecl. 1.142, 2–6 (L&S, pp. 296/297); Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.150 (Lives, pp. 254/255); Plut. Comm. not. 1078E-1079C (L&S, pp. 396–7/298).

145.Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.141 (Lives, pp. 244/245); Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 30–43. As with corporeals and incorporeals, only the present exists; the past and future subsist. Plut. Comm. not. 1081C-1082A (L&S, pp. 302–3/304–5); Stob. Ecl. 1.106, 5–23 (L&S, pp. 301–2/304).

146.Sellars, “Aiôn”, p. 183. See Deleuze, Logique, pp. 190–7/186–92. For the now as durationless limit, see Plut. Comm. not. 1081C-1082A (L&S, pp. 302–3/304–5), and Sellars, “Aiôn”, p. 188.

147.Plut. Comm. not. 1081C-1082A (L&S, pp. 302–3/304–5); Stob. Ecl. 1.105, 8–16 (L&S, pp. 303/305).

148.“Par là, l’étendue temporelle qui ‘accompagne’ l’acte, prend toute la réalité dont elle est capable, sans cependant cesser d’être un incorporel”; see Goldschmidt, Le système, p. 41.

149.Cleom. Mot. circul. 202, 11–23 (Κυκλικὴ θεωρία μετεώρων, ed. Hermann Ziegler [Leipzig: Teubner, 1891; English title: Cleomedes’ Lectures on Astronomy: A Translation of The Heavens], pp. 202/49–150); Stob. Ecl. 1.106, 5–23 (L&S, pp. 301–2/304); Stob. Ecl. 1.219, 24–1.220, 2 (Vol. 1, pp. 219–20/Jacques Brunschwig, Papers in Hellenistic Philosophy, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 142–3, especially n. 128); Plut. Comm. not. 1084C-D (L&S, pp. 304–5/306); Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 30–1 and 40–1.

150.Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 79–83 and 91–9.

151.See Cic. Div. 1.127 (De senectute, de amicitia, de divinatione [dual language edition], trans. William Falconer [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923], pp. 362/363).

152.In our example, the activity that expresses heating all throughout its duration also expresses forging, binding it into a longer duration; but it also expresses waring, and we can go up and up through the temporal scales to the whole of human history and finally to the whole of cosmic history by considering the broader activities and ends that each is fatally and causally bound up with.

153.Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 81–8.

154.See Williams, Time, p. 150.

155.Sen. Ep. 117.13 (L&S, pp. 198/196).

156.Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.157–58 (Lives, pp. 260/261).

157.Aet. Plac. 4.21.1–4 (L&S, pp. 314/315–16).

158.Aet. Plac. 4.11.1–4 (L&S, pp. 240–41/238); Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.49–52 (Lives, pp. 158–60/159–61 / L&S, pp. 236–37); Cic. Acad. 1.40 (Vol. 19, pp. 448/449). See Bréhier, La théorie, p. 16.

159.Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.49–52 (Lives, pp. 158–60/159–61); Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 8.409–10 (L&S, pp. 167–8/163); Bréhier, La théorie, p. 17; Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 81–3. Note that the sayable is never actually signified by a sentence. A significant utterance is a body that signifies its corresponding concept, which in turn expresses but does not signify the incorporeal sayable that organizes this corporeal rational impression as well as the external corporeal activity. In other words, the veridical correspondence between the external world and our propositional thoughts about it is built upon our thoughts and their respective external activities sharing the same incorporeal sayable, whose rational order is that of the external world and of thinking. Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 8.11–12 (L&S, pp. 197/195–6); Bréhier, La théorie, pp. 14–18.

160.Aet. Plac. 4.12.1–5 (L&S, pp. 239/237); Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.45–46 (Lives, pp. 154/155); Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 7.247–52 (L&S, pp. 245–6/243).

161.Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 7.242–43 (L&S, pp. 241/238); Cic. Acad. 2.37–39 (Vol. 19, pp. 514–16/ 515–17).

162.Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 7.402–8 (L&S, pp. 247–8/244); Stob. Ecl. 2.88, 2–6 (L&S, pp. 200/197); Orig. Princ. 3.1.2–3 (L&S, pp. 310/313); Cic. Off. 1.132 (L&S, pp. 315/316); Philo. Leg. alleg. 1.30 (L&S, pp. 317/317); Stob. Ecl. 2.86, 17–87, 6 (L&S, pp. 318/317).

163.See Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 85–9 and 100–1.

164.Cic. Fat. 41 (De oratore, pp. 236 / L&S and 387). Deleuze adds to this the notion of affirmation: “the Stoics went to astonishing lengths in order to escape necessity and to affirm the ‘fated’ without affirming the necessary”; see Deleuze, Logique, pp. 47/40.

165.Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 89, 99–100, 109 and 231.

166.Hippol. Haer. 1.21 (L&S, pp. 382/386).

167.Cic. Fat. 28–30 (De oratore, pp. 224/L&S and 339).

168.Cic. Fat. 40 (De oratore, pp. 236/237).

169.Cic. Fat. 40–41 (De oratore, pp. 236/237); Aet. Plac. 1.28.4 (L&S, pp. 337/336); Gell. Noc. Att. 7.2.3 (L&S, pp. 337/336).

170.Stob. Ecl. 1.138, 23–139, 4 (L&S, pp. 333/333).

171.Stob. Ecl. 1.79, 1–12 (L&S, pp. 337/337). And from Cicero: “By ‘fate’, I mean what the Greeks call heimarmenē–an ordering and sequence of causes, since it is the connexion of cause to cause which out of itself produces anything. It is everlasting truth, flowing from all eternity. Consequently nothing has happened which was not going to be, and likewise nothing is going to be of which nature does not contain causes working to bring that very thing about. This makes it intelligible that fate should be, not the ‘fate’ of superstition, but that of physics, an everlasting cause of things–why past things happened, why present things are now happening, and why future things will be”; see Cic. Div. 1.125–26 (L&S, pp. 337/337).

172.See Epict. Diss. 2.19.1–5 (Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, ed. Heinrich Schenkl [Leipzig: Teubner, 1916; English title: The Discourses of Epictetus], pp. 189–91/122–3), and Cic. Fat. 11–21 (De oratore, pp. 204–16/205–17). The master argument is articulated in a convoluted way, but it is essentially the following. Everything that has happened in the past and that has just happened right now cannot be otherwise; thus it is necessary. We then project this reasoning into the context of the future. The next moment will present us with a similar situation, where whatever happens after now will in that future context be necessary. Thus what happens from now to the next moment cannot happen in any other way, because, when the next thing does occur, it will have happened by necessity.

173.Cic. Fat. 43–45 (De oratore, pp. 240–2/241–3).

174.Gell. Noc. Att. 19.1.17 (L&S, pp. 417/419, the parentheses are brackets in Long and Sedley).

175.Clem. Paid. 1.8.63.1–2 (L&S, pp. 369/ 371–2).

176.Goldschmidt, Le système, p. 88.

177.Marc. Aur. Med. 5.8,12 (Ad se ipsum, pp. 37/61, typography modified). “Love and desire that alone which happens to you, and is destined by providence for you”. Marc. Aur. Med. 7.57 (Ad se ipsum, pp. 67/91); see also Marc. Aur. Med. 2.3, 4.34, 4.44, 4.49, 5.27, 6.1, 6.41, 6.38, 7.18, 7.45, 8.17, 8.36, 8.50, 10.5, and 11.34.

178.Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.86 (Lives, pp. 194/L&S and 346).

179.Gell. Noc. Att. 19.1.17–18 (L&S, pp. 417/419).

180.Epict. Diss. 2.18.15–18 (Dissertationes, pp. 186/120–1).

181.Epict. Diss. 2.18.24–25 (Dissertationes, pp. 187–8/121), emphasis mine. In this way, the force of the given impression “slides over [our minds] fairly smoothly and without obstruction”. Gell. Noc. Att. 6.2 (Noctes Atticae, vol. 1, ed. Jakob Gronovius [London: Valpy, 1824], pp. 413/L&S and 384/388, bracketed insertion mine [note that in Long and Sedley and in Stoicorum veterum fragmenta 2.1000, this is listed as 7.2]). Here we do seem to have an exclusion when the better impulses succeed. Or maybe they continue but not to an effectual degree. Regardless, my claim is that before the exclusion would happen, there would need first to be a paraconsistent combination.

182.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 172 / 166; Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 100–1 (see especially p. 101 n. 1); Epict. Diss. 1.12.8–9, 1.17.18–26, 1.22.9–11, 2.1.4–12, 2.10.1–13, 2.15, 2.23.1–20, Epict. Ench. 1 (Dissertationes, pp. 51, 65, 78–9, 113–15, 145–7, 167–70, 212–16, 5*–6* / 33, 42–3, 51, 75–6, 95–6, 109–11, 137–9 and 287). For prohairesis applied to the handsome man or beautiful woman situation, see Epict. Diss. 3.3.14–15 (Dissertationes, pp. 244–5/158).

183.Sen. Ep. 92.11–13 (L&S, pp. 402/405). The Stoics think we should live our lives in accordance with nature. Stob. Ecl. 2 (L&S, pp. 389–90/394); Diog. Laert. Vit. phil. 7.86–87 (Lives, pp. 194/195).

184.Stob. Ecl. 2.76, 9–15 (L&S, pp. 354/357); Sext. Emp. Adv. math. 11.22–26 (L&S, pp. 367–8/371).

185.Alex. Mantissa 164, 3–9 (L&S, pp. 395/401).

186.Epict. Diss. 1.1.7–17, 2.19.32 (Dissertationes, pp. 8–9 and 195/5–6 and 125); Goldschmidt, Le système, p. 110; Deleuze, Logique, pp. 169–71/164–5 (translated there as “usage of representations”).

187.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 172/166, bracketed insertion mine.

188.Deleuze writes: “To the extent that divergence is affirmed and disjunction becomes a positive synthesis, it seems that all events, even contraries, are compatible…. Incompatibility does not exist between two events, but between an event and the world or the individual which actualizes another event as divergent. At this point, there is something which does not allow itself to be reduced to a logical contradiction between predicates and which is nevertheless an incompatibility”; see Deleuze, Logique, pp. 208/203.

189.Deleuze, Cinéma 2, pp. 191–2/142.

190.Cic. Fat. 41–44 (De oratore, pp. 236–40/237–41).

191.Cic. Fat. 30 (De oratore, pp. 224–6/225–7; see L&S, vol. 1, pp. 339–40); Euseb. Praep. evang. 6.8.25–9 (L&S, pp. 385–6/389); Goldschmidt, Le système, p. 90; Deleuze, Logique, pp. 15, 18, 200/14, 11 and 196.

192.See Cic. Fat. 36–45 (De oratore, pp. 232–42/233–43). There is an important distinction between “perfect and principal causes”, which necessitate one particular outcome and not others, and “auxiliary and proximate causes”, which on their own are not sufficient to necessitate some certain effect. The impulses that we receive are given to us by perfect and principal causality, and our reaction will still be caused by these impressions that we have received; however, our response results from auxiliary and proximate causality. See Goldschmidt, Le système, pp. 107–10.

193.See Williams, Time, p. 151.

194.Deleuze, Logique, pp. 211/205.

195.Deleuze, Nietzsche, pp. 29–31/21–6. See the similar concepts of chance and tables in Deleuze, Logique, pp. 81–2/75–6. For the connection between Deleuze’s Stoic ethics and Nietzsche’s amor fati, see Sellars, “Ethics”, pp. 165–7.

196.See J. C. Beall and David Ripley, “Analetheism and Dialetheism”, in Analysis 64.1 (2004), and Graham Priest, An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic: From If to Is, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 132–3.

197.We might consider, for example, First Degree Entailment or four-valued logics whose semantics correspond to it. In these logics, there are four possible truth-value situations for formulas: (1) just true, (2) just false, (3) both true and false, and (4) neither true nor false. Such logics with these four truth-value possibilities would encompass the analetheic situations where neither a formula nor its negation is true or false, the dialetheic situations where they are both affirmed as true (and as false), and the classical situations where something is either simply true or simply false while the negation takes the other value. (To get these logics with four truth-value situations to be just analetheic, just dialetheic, or just classical would involve placing on them an exclusion constraint, or an exhaustion constraint, or both of these constraints, respectively. See Priest, Introduction, pp. 146–9). The reason I here focused on paraconsistency is its particular relevance to affirmative synthetic disjunction. Regardless, there are yet more options that need to be assessed for understanding Deleuze’s logic, like fuzzy logics and intuitionistic logics, which are more explicitly tied to Deleuze’s writings. For an examination of the intuitionistic elements of Deleuze’s logical thinking, see Olkowski, “Intuition”.

198.Deleuze, Différence, pp. 75/64.

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Priest, Graham. Doubt Truth to Be a Liar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Priest, Graham. “Paraconsistency and Dialetheism”. In Handbook of the History of Logic. Vol. 8: The Many Valued and Nonmonotonic Turn in Logic. Eds. Dov Gabbay and John Woods. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007, pp. 129–204.

Priest, Graham. An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic: From If to Is. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Priest, Graham. One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of Its Parts, Including the Singular Object Which is Nothingness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Priest, Graham and Edgar Aroutiounian. “An Interview with Noted Logician, Graham Priest”. Online text interview, 23 February 2011. Florida Student Philosophy Blog. https://unfspb.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/part-ii-of-the-interview-with-graham-priest

Priest, Graham and Richard Routley. “First Historical Introduction: A Preliminary History of Paraconsistent and Dialethic Approaches”. In Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the Inconsistent. Eds. Graham Priest, Richard Routley, and Jean Norman. Munich: Philosophia, 1989, pp. 3–75.

Priest, Graham and Richard Routley. “An Outline of the History of (Logical) Dialectic”. In Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the Inconsistent. Eds. Graham Priest, Richard Routley, and Jean Norman. Munich: Philosophia, 1989, pp. 76–98.

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Notes on Contributors

Michael J. Ardoline is currently a Masters student at Kingston University and Paris 8 through the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy. He holds a Masters in philosophy from West Chester University and a Bachelor of Science in physics from Lebanon Valley College. His current research focuses on situating Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism historically, as well as squaring it with recent philosophy of science and mathematics. His other research interests include Kant, Nietzsche, twentieth-century French philosophy, twentieth-century analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, and contemporary metaphysics.

Alain Beaulieu is Associate Professor of philosophy at Laurentian University, Canada. He has a Doctorate of third cycle in philosophy from Université de Paris 8 with a thesis on Gilles Deleuze et la phénoménologie (Sils Maria/Vrin, 2nd ed., 2006). He has published Cuerpo y acontecimiento. La estética de Gilles Deleuze (Letra Viva, 2012), Gilles Deleuze et ses contemporains (Harmattan, 2011), and has co-edited the following works: Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics (Lexington, 2014), Abécédaire de Martin Heidegger (Sils Maria/Vrin, 2008), Michel Foucault and Power Today (Lexington, 2006), Gilles Deleuze. Héritage philosophique (PUF, 2005), as well as Michel Foucault et le contrôle social (PU Laval, 2nd ed., 2008).

Constantin Boundas (translator) is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Trent University, Ontario, Canada. For the last forty years, he has been a reader, translator, and commentator of Gilles Deleuze. His recent publications include two edited volumes, Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari (co-edited with Vana Tentokali, Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), and one long essay on the philosophico-theological work of Christos Yannaras, titled “Αληθεύειν και Κοινωνείν”. Boundas has also just completed a Greek translation of Deleuze’s Difference et Repetition (Athens: Ekkremes, forthcoming).

Pascale Criton is a composer and has a PhD in musicology. Her works explore sound variability, multi-sensoral receptions, and the spatialization of listening. As the artistic director of Art & Fact, she initiates concerts combining music, architecture, and building materials inviting the public to experience new sound representations (Ecouter Autrement, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2015). She is currently Associate Researcher at the Lutherie Acoustique Musique laboratory (Pierre and Marie Curie University, CNRS), where she conducts research on sound transmission through touch. She recently edited Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Libération du son, Ecrits 1916–1979 (Symétrie, Prix des muses, 2014, awarded by Singer-Polignac Foundation). Her encounter with Gilles Deleuze in 1974 around music determined her interest in philosophy. Criton has co-edited, with J.-M. Chouvel, Gilles Deleuze, la pensée-musique (CDMC, Symétrie, 2015), and has published numerous articles including: “L’invitation”, in Deleuze épars, approches et portraits (Hermann, 2005); “Bords à bords, vers une pensée-musique”, in Le Portique (2007); “La ritournelle et le galop”, in Gilles Deleuze, une vie philosophique (Synthélabo, 1998); and “Nothing Is Established Forever”, in The Guattari Effect (Continuum, 2011). Criton has also edited Chaosmose, penser avec Félix Guattari, Chimères, n° 77 (2012), and Chaosmose, temps pluriels, Chimères, n° 79 (2013).

Andrew Goffey (translator) is Associate Professor in critical theory and cultural studies at the University of Nottinham, UK. He has a broad expertise in contemporary French philosophy and specific expertise in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers, and related appropriations of pragmatism. He writes in the space between philosophy, science, and culture, and is the coauthor of Evil Media with Matthew Fuller (MIT Press, 2012).

Sotiria-Ismini Gounari is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy, and Psychology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Her dissertation concerns the concept of affect in Spinoza and Deleuze and its use in considering the political aspects of contemporary art. She holds a first degree in architecture (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), and one in political science and sociology (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens).

Eugene W. Holland is Professor Emeritus of comparative studies at Ohio State University, and has published extensively on Deleuze and Guattari, including monographs on Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Nomad Citizenship (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and readers’ guides to both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Routledge, 1999, and Bloomsbury, 2013).

Gregg Lambert received a PhD. in comparative literature and critical theory from University of California at Irvine under the direction of Jacques Derrida and Gabriele Schwab. In 1996, he joined the Department of English at Syracuse University and was appointed as Chair in 2005, before leaving the department in 2008 to become Founding Director of The SU Humanities Center. Since 2008, he has also served as Principal Investigator and Director of the Central New York Humanities Corridor, a regional collaborative research network. Author of eleven books and critical editions, and of well more than fifty articles, Lambert is internationally renowned for his scholarly writings on critical theory and film, the contemporary university, baroque and neo-baroque cultural history, and especially for his work on Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. He has lectured internationally and was recently invited as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, Ewha University, Seoul National University. In 2010, he was appointed as the BK21 Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea.

Jean-Clet Martin (Collège International de Philosophie) is the author of Deleuze (Editions de L’éclat, 2012), and of Variations-la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze (Payot, 1993), translated into English by Constantin Boundas as Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Philippe Mengue was an instructor in the area of Provence and also at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, after successfully completing his Agrégation and a Doctorat d’État. Having a profound knowledge of the writings of Sade and Deleuze, Mengue has published several works on contemporary French thought: Gilles Deleuze ou le Système du multiple (Editions Kimé, 1994), L’Ordre sadien (Kimé, 1996), Deleuze et la question de la démocratie (L’Harmatan, 2003), La Philosophie au piège de l’histoire (La Différence, 2004), Peuples et identités (La Différence, 2008), Utopies et devenirs deleuziens (L’Harmattan, 2009), Proust-Joyce, Deleuze-Lacan, Lectures croisées (L’Harmattan, 2010), Guerre ou paix en philosophie? (Germina, 2011), Comprendre Deleuze (Max milo, 2012), Pour une politique deleuzienne de l’idiot (Germina, 2013), and Marcher, Courir, Nager, Le corps en fuite (Kimé, 2015, English translation in preparation). His last published work is Espaces lisses et Lignes de fuite (Kimé, 2015), and his Désolations, roman philosophique is forthcoming.

Mohamed Moulfi is Professor of philosophy at the University of Oran, Algeria. He is a member of the Internationale Hegel-Gesellschaft e.V (2007), and an advisor editor of Décalages, An Althusser Studies Journal (2013). Moulfi is the author of Engels: philosophie et sciences (L’Harmattan, 2004), and of other essays or articles in Dictionnaire critique du marxisme (ed. G. Bensussan and G. Labica, PUF, 1985 and 1999); in Dictionnaire du darwinisme et de l’évolutionnisme (ed. P. Tort, PUF, 1997); “Derrida: Le sens du monde”, in Sur les traces de Derrida (Actes Sud-Alger Barzakh, 2009); “Philosophie et falsafa”, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, n° 4 (2009); “De l’Etat à l’Etat politique. Notes inchoatives sur l’instauration démocratique”, in Studia Politica, n° 3 (2011); “Notes sur l’Ausgang”, in Georges Labica: Philosophie en colère (CNRPH, 2012); “Propos sur la question de l’interculturalité”, in Revue Laros, n° 8 (April 2011); “Althusser, lecteur de Machiavel”, in Décalages, An Althusser Studies Journal (2013); “Hegel et la négativité. Philosophie et histoire”, in Hegel and modernity, Hegel-Jahrbuch (2014); and “Robespierre. Une politique de la philosophie de Georges Labica”, in Contretemps, n° 20 (2014).

Catarina Pombo Nabais graduated in philosophy from the Faculty of Arts of the Universidade Clássica de Lisboa (1998) and obtained the Diplôme d’Études Approfondies in philosophy from the Université d’Amiens, France (1999). She completed her PhD in philosophy at Université de Paris 8, under the guidance of the philosopher Jacques Rancière (2007). Nabais obtained the highest degree for a PhD thesis in France in 2013. Her research and publication interests are contemporary continental philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of art.

Dorothea Olkowski (contributor and co-editor) is Professor and Chair of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Director of the Cognitive Studies Program, and former Director of Women’s Studies. Specializing in phenomenology, contemporary continental philosophy, and feminist theory, she has been a Fellow at the University of Western Ontario, Rotman Institute of Philosophy and Science, the Australian National University in Canberra, and UC Berkeley. She is the author/editor of ten books including Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn (Indiana University Press, 2012), The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible) (Edinburgh and Columbia University Press, 2007), and Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (University of California Press, 1999). Author of more than 100 articles including essays, book reviews, encyclopedia articles, translations of her work, and collaborations with artists, she is currently working on the intersection of Deleuze’s philosophy of creation with the doxa of phenomenology.

Eftichis Pirovolakis (co-editor) is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. He is the author of Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics (SUNY Press, 2010), which also includes his translation into English of Derrida’s essay “La parole: Donner, nommer, appeler”. Pirovolakis has published articles in, among other journals, Philosophy Today, Word and Text, and Literature, Interpretation, Theory. He works on twentieth-century continental philosophy and, more specifically, on the relation between deconstruction, hermeneutics, and phenomenology.

Alan D. Schrift is F. Wendell Miller Professor of philosophy at Grinnell College (USA). In addition to more than eighty published articles or book chapters on Nietzsche and French and German twentieth-century philosophy, he is the author of Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (2006), Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (1995), and Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (1990). He has also edited sixteen books, including the eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy (2010), Modernity and the Problem of Evil (2005), Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics (2000), The Logic of the Gift (1997), and The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur (1990). He continues as General Editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Stanford University Press translation of Nietzsche’s Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Colli and Montinari, and is currently completing an edition of selected writings of Jean Wahl.

Corry Shores is Assistant Professor of philosophy at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. His PhD is from University of Leuven, Belgium. His publications and research are in the areas of French philosophy, aesthetics, Spinoza, philosophy of art, and transhumanism.

Daniel W. Smith is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. He is the translator of Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and of Essays Critical and Clinical (with Michael A. Greco), and the editor, with Henry Somers-Hall, of the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (2012). His book Essays on Deleuze was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2012.

Index

absolute survey 19

actual xii, xviii, xxiii, 11, 17, 18, 35–7, 121, 183, 185, 197, 211

aesthetic figures 51, 53, 61, 64

affect(s) 18, 22–3, 27, 39, 46, 51, 56, 60

affection(s) 27, 61, 62, 181, 183

affective 38

affirmative synthetic disjunction 178–9, 185–6, 189–91, 204–5, 218

agency 68, 104, 148

Aiôn xix, 195–8, 202, 203, 207, 209, 212, 214, 215, 223

Alice in Wonderland 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40

Althusser, Louis xvi, xvii, 106–10, 112–13, 115, 115, 120, 123, 124, 125

anomalous 23, 110, 112

antinomy 6

arrangement 174; tertiary 45, 46, 48–9, 51, 53, 55, 58, 60

Artaud, Antonin xiv, 33–9, 41–3, 55, 57–9, 64, 65, 171

assemblage ix, x, xi, xii, xviii, xix, xx, 71, 81, 90, 93, 100, 102, 104, 110, 134–6, 150, 161, 163, 166, 173

Aurelius, Marcus 178, 201, 296, 222

authority 7, 9, 75, 107, 109, 110–12, 129, 130

automatism 6, 7, 9

autonomy 5, 6, 104, 105

becoming xi, xvi, xvii, xxiii, 18, 22, 27, 56, 59, 60, 71, 82–6, 92, 94, 95, 100, 102, 118–22, 142, 162, 186

Bergson, Henri xv, 35–8, 41–2, 62, 65, 70, 109–10, 113–14, 171, 179

Bergsonism 66

Bestimmung xvii, 116

bifurcation(s) vii, xix, 4, 11, 110, 202, 204; of the True 178–223

bifurcational 196

bloc of sensations 51, 63

Bréhier, Émile 194, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218

Canguilhem, Georges 182, 210, 219

Carroll, Lewis 30, 33, 34, 47, 52, 54, 55, 59, 62, 64, 65

Cartesianism xv, 70; anti-Cartesianism 70

causal 18, 21–2, 30, 70, 76, 116, 121, 157, 192–5, 198, 200, 215

causality 6, 17, 33, 182, 196, 202–4, 217

chaogito 9, 10, 11–13

chaos viii, ix, x, xi, xvii, xviii, xix, 28, 57, 86, 131, 172; virtual viii

chaosmology 171

chaosmosis 150, 152, 225

Chronos xix, 195–9, 202, 203, 207, 223

Chrysippus 192, 196, 200, 202, 203

Cicero 192, 200, 203, 206, 213, 214, 216, 219

cinema xii, xiv, 13, 14, 35–9, 101, 207

citizen(s) xvi, 96, 112

citizenship 106, 107, 113, 114

Classical physics 17

climate change 106, 113

cogito 8, 9, 27, 59

Coles, Romand 112–14

compossibility 182, 209, 218

concept(s) i, v, viii, ix, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xxii, 5, 6, 12, 16, 19–24, 27, 28, 31, 35, 37, 38, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 68, 82, 85, 86, 91. 92, 102, 106, 115, 119, 120, 122, 125, 129, 130, 132, 134, 147, 149, 156, 157, 162, 171, 179, 180, 181, 182, 186, 190, 204, 205, 206, 208, 215, 218, 225

conceptual 7, 17, 117; ambiguities 195, 196; ambivalence 207

conceptual personae v, xv, 27, 37–8, 68–75, 77

consistency x, xi, xii, xviii, xix, 107, 117, 121, 146–50, 162

cosmic ii, ix, xi–xiii, 53, 86, 129, 131, 169, 171, 173, 176, 198, 215

cosmological vi, xviii, 168–9, 171–6

cosmology xx, 86, 168, 171, 173, 175, 177, 193; cosmologies 168, 170, 171–2

creative xi, xii, xiv, 27, 38, 143, 146, 151, 172, 175, 193, 199, 205, 208, 223

creativity xiv, 150

crisis vi, xvi, 83, 89–105, 106, 113, 119, 168, 169, 174, 175

crystal-image xii, 36

crystalline brain v, xiii, xiv, 27–43, 39

danger xvi, 5, 7, 71, 90, 95, 96, 99, 165, 169, 200

death 3, 9, 10, 24, 33, 37, 65, 66, 68, 69, 85, 86, 102, 111, 113, 114, 155

desire(s) viii, vii, xix, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 46–7, 73, 74, 75, 90, 93, 94, 95, 102, 107, 108, 134, 142, 143, 150, 157, 160, 164, 166, 216

determinism 4, 6, 11–13, 18, 24

deterritorializing xvii, 92, 95, 232, 151, 172–5, 174–5

deterritorialization ix, xiii–xiv, xvi, 44, 61, 81–5, 91, 95, 118, 121, 138–9, 142, 147–9, 172–3

diagrams 149, 184, 197

dialetheism 189, 191, 211, 218, 222

difference(s) ix, x, xxiii, 9, 11, 28, 92, 93, 135, 161–2, 179, 185, 210; intensive vi, xviii, 146–52

Difference and Repetition 13, 14, 40, 52, 63, 65, 66, 75, 130, 151, 152, 155, 171, 175, 176, 190, 191, 205, 212, 219, 224

disjunction ix, xiv, 30, 52, 92, 163, 189, 217; affirmative synthetic 178–9, 181, 185, 186, 191, 202, 204, 205, 218

disjunctive synthesis 29, 52, 86, 179, 207

disparation 146

dramaturgy 71, 72, 74, 85

earth xi–xii, xix–xx, 30, 71, 106, 117–18, 138–40, 170–7, 193, 197, 204; earthly ix, x

Einfuhlung 69, 71

empiricism 4, 10; transcendental xii, 13, 224

encounter(s) i, 3, 13, 28–9, 31, 51, 60, 116, 120, 147–8, 173, 174, 208, 227

enunciation xv, xviii, 68–71, 74, 75, 81, 101, 110, 146, 150, 151

Epictetus 178, 201–6, 216, 220

Erewhon 171, 176

ethics xiv, 4, 6, 39, 103, 105, 150, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 178, 192, 199, 209, 212, 218, 223

event(s) 30, 48, 59, 62, 65, 147, 180, 181, 208, 218

experience xii, xiv, 4–8, 10, 11, 13, 28, 34, 38, 46, 51, 53, 54, 545, 57, 74, 81, 83, 85, 96, 90, 101, 119, 147, 148, 169, 170, 171, 173, 225

extra-European 122

fabulation 14, 82, 86

faciality xviii, 132, 133–6, 139, 141

fatalism vii, xix, 178, 200

figure xiv, 3, 9, 17, 27–9, 37, 39, 40, 44, 65, 68, 72, 73, 74, 76, 82, 104, 107, 110, 118, 119, 123, 132, 137, 141, 142, 173, 184

figureless 139

force viii–xvii, xix, 4–5, 18, 34, 123, 134, 150, 178, 194, 217

forces xiii, xviii, 27, 37, 71, 76, 81, 97, 131, 138, 147, 149, 155, 160–1, 163–4, 171–4, 175, 200

freedom i, iii, v, viii–xxiii, 5–13, 15, 17, 20–4, 28–9, 39, 73, 97, 133–4, 168, 175, 210, 220–1

Frege, Gottlob 31

gender xvi, 40, 82, 95, 103

genius xiv, 29, 47, 142; creative xiii, 38; evil 8

geodynamism vi, 168–75, 169, 172

geography 54, 118

geophilosophy vi, vii, xix, 115–26, 123, 168, 171–3

geostatism vi, xviii, 168–77

Goldschmidt, Victor 192, 193, 195, 196, 200, 213, 215, 216, 217, 220

gravity 17, 91

Greece xvi, xx, xxii, 89, 94, 104, 110, 115, 116, 173, 174

Hegel xv, 48, 69, 72, 75, 106, 116–18, 122, 132–3, 161–2, 180, 208, 220, 221, 227

Hegelian xv, 131; anti-Hegelian 118

Heidegger, Martin 76, 115, 224

HIV-positive women vi, 89–105

Husserl, Edmund vi, xviii, xix, 32, 47, 63, 115, 161, 170, 172–5, 177

Idea 5, 28–30, 32, 35, 38, 40–3, 47, 52, 148, 172

ideology 107, 110, 113, 131

idiot xiv, 7, 9, 10, 13, 27–9, 37, 226

immanence xiii, xvii, 7–8, 20, 22–3, 38, 69, 71, 75, 116, 117–18, 120, 121–2, 138, 159–60, 165, 175

immanent xvii, 17, 91, 148, 157, 158, 159, 171, 172

improvisation vi, xvii, 106, 112, 149; political 106–14

incompossibility 86, 182, 185

indeterminism xiii, 17–18, 22

indifference 4, 6, 9, 10, 85

individuation xviii, 69, 71, 146, 148, 149, 151

infinite speed v, vii–iii, 1, 4, 7, 13, 16–23

instinct xi, 109, 111, 113, 114, 158, 159

institutions vi, xvi, xvii, xx, 106–14, 134

intensities xiv, xv, 44–6, 49, 51, 54, 55, 59, 60, 68, 91, 118, 134, 149

interassemblage xi, xviii

intoxication 11, 12, 13, 15

Kripke, Saul 70, 76

language v, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 12, 13, 25, 30–5, 39, 40, 41, 44–9, 51, 53–64, 74, 78, 81, 112, 118, 122, 123, 125, 129, 135, 139, 148, 150, 158, 162, 188, 207, 212, 213

Leibniz, Gottfried 209, 210, 220, 221

liberty 5

literature 12, 34, 59, 60, 61, 65, 73, 81–3, 85–8, 129, 131, 147, 171

logic 180; non-classical 208–9, 222

Lucian 76, 77; Philosophies for Sale 72

machinic 3, 4, 6, 9, 107, 134, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151

madness xiii, 27, 4, 8, 27–9, 31–2, 38, 57, 151, 152

Marxism 106, 119, 120, 176, 226

microfascisms 102

micropolitics 92, 101, 102, 134

milieu(s) ix, x, xiii, xx, 3, 12, 58, 116, 139, 142, 151, 174

minoritarian xvi, 100, 102; becoming 101, 103

minority xvi, 81, 99, 100, 101

mis-sophia 28, 35

molar 69, 92–103, 151, 162

molecular xi, xiii, 12, 35–7, 92–4, 97, 100–3, 105, 162, 207

monism vi, xix, 165–7

music xv, xviii, 44, 135, 146–8, 225

negation xix, xxiii, 3, 13, 161, 164, 178, 179, 180, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 202, 204, 207, 208, 211, 212, 218, 222

Newton, Isaac 16–19, 22, 24

Nietzsche vi, xiv, xix, 3, 12, 14–15, 44, 47, 57, 61, 65–6, 68, 70–6, 116–18, 123, 125, 133, 140, 155–67, 174–7, 191, 204, 207, 212, 218, 220, 224, 228

Nietzschean 86, 178

Nietzsche and Philosophy 220

nomad xii, xiv, xvi, 44, 106, 110, 113–14, 134, 162, 207, 225

nomadic 90, 92, 100–4, 111–12, 144

nomadism 91

nonphilosophy 118

paraconsistency 178, 211, 212, 218, 222, 223

passions 7, 14, 15, 34, 38, 72, 91, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167

pluralism = monism vi, xix, 155–67, 161, 163

people vi, ix, xii, xv, xvi, xx, 51, 57, 81–8, 86, 97, 90, 91, 93–8, 100, 102, 107, 118, 120, 130, 174, 175, 190

perception(s) xii, xvii, 27, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 68, 71, 93, 97, 103, 112, 129, 132, 150, 173, 175

percepts 47, 51, 117, 171

phase space 21–3

phenomenological 168, 170, 173, 175, 177, 209

phenomenology 72, 209, 222, 28, 165, 167, 168, 169, 173, 177

Pirate 5, 7, 64

plane of immanence 7, 20, 22–3, 38, 69, 71, 75, 116–18, 121–2, 138, 159–60, 164–5, 175

pluralism vi, xiv, 155–67

politics vi, xv, 79, 85–7, 90, 120, 159, 164, 165, 174, 176, 190; affective vi, xvi, 89–105

practical reason v, viii, 15–19, 21, 23, 28

Priest, Graham 180, 181, 186, 190, 192, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 218, 222

process(es) xi, xviii, xx, 4, 7, 8, 13, 17, 23, 32, 34, 38, 49, 55, 56, 57, 61, 63, 64, 82, 83, 91, 92, 95, 98, 100, 101, 107, 108, 116, 120, 121, 142, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 160, 162, 169, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 198, 200

prohairesis 202, 204, 205, 217

race xvi, 59, 95

refrain i, iii, v, viii–xxiii

refugees vi, xvi, 89–105

resonance(s) xvi, 71, 87, 95, 102, 147, 149, 150, 168, 171

reterritorialization 100, 165, 172

reterritorialize(d)(s) 61, 118

reterritorializing 60

revolution vi, xvii, 103, 104, 105, 115–26, 119, 120, 121, 122, 178, 205

Routley, Val; Richard (now Val Plumwood and Richard Sylvan) 187, 188, 210, 211, 212, 222

schizoanalysis xxii, 108

schizophrenia xiv, 14, 15, 32–3, 41, 43, 57, 60, 61, 87, 103, 123, 124, 143, 151, 162

self-preservation 111–12

societies 72, 93, 94, 98; closed 110

space invaders 16–18, 20

space-time ix, xii, xviii, 146, 149–50, 171

Spinoza vi, xv, xix, xvii, 3, 8, 11, 70, 90, 97, 103–7, 155, 156–64, 165, 166, 179, 208

state xvi, 91–5, 98, 100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113, 118, 119, 131, 162, 164, 207

state of affairs 46–8, 51, 53, 64, 192

state space 22

Stoic vii, xix, 9, 30, 48, 63, 72, 133, 155, 178, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 201, 204, 206, 207, 209, 212, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 220; ethics 202, 203, 218; logic 222

stoicism 209, 223

subjectivations vi, xviii, 146–52

sublime viii, 28, 40, 210, 221

Tarde, Gabriel 94, 110

territorialization xiii, xiv, xvii, 121, 135

territorialize(d)(s) x, xi, xii

territory(ies) ix, x, 10, 71, 86, 91, 122, 148, 176, 187

time xii, xviii, 8, 10, 20–2, 24, 32, 33, 36, 39, 42, 48, 50, 62, 72, 73, 75, 81, 82, 89, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 106, 114, 118, 122, 130, 140, 142, 147, 148, 149, 151, 155, 158, 169, 170, 176, 178, 181, 183, 185, 191, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 218, 219, image xxi, 11, 14, 41, 43, 66, 223; killing 30, 31

transcendence xvii, 117, 122, 139, 171

Unger, Roberto 112, 113, 114

universe xiii, xvi, xix, 11, 12, 16–20, 22, 81, 109, 142, 171, 174, 175, 183, 193

untimely 121, 174

virtual viii, xii, xxiii, 3, 35–7, 39, 107, 110, 146

West xvii, 117, 121–2, 133

Western 135–6, 169–70, 173, 213

will xix, 7–8, 86–7, 93, 98, 158, 163; free 21–22, 157, 183

willing 178