Against Oblivion and Simple Empiricism

Abstract

So each year you bring the object to C and you nail it to her door, at the beginning of winter, because she dreads the season where all things turn inwards. Each year you do the same. But it is never the same. Neither the season, nor the gift, nor the trees, nor the early winter wind turning from lowlands to hills, nor the wood cracking on the door, nor the newly polished handle, shining against the tarnish built up over time; an ever rougher grain under your hand, until now, as once again you fail to open the door, but this time because your damp hand slips; you still turn away and everything still passes. Will you open it before oblivion strikes one of you from the earth? In 1995, a few months before his death by suicide, in the final stages of a very long illness, Gilles Deleuze revisited his impressions, sources, ideas and new metaphysics for the problem of empirical oblivion. (1) The resulting essay Immanence: a life... draws upon many of his earlier books and traces new relations between their concepts. It is therefore a work of reminiscence and new beginnings. There is never one without the other for Deleuze. His argument is of rare philosophical courage, intensity, depth, gentleness and troubling difficulty. It is comparable to moments in Montaigne, Pascal, Hume and Barthes, where a philosopher condenses years of investigation and reflection into a very personal, yet universally resonant pattern of observations, deductions and problems. Montaigne prepares for Deleuze's fearless account, indeed shares its Stoic roots, where anguish and the consequent cruel baseness we humans draw from our terror of death are overcome not through certainty, either in annihilation or ethereal survival, but in the tempered tracing of a new line of thought on life and death, free of the commonplace disguised as knowledge and of the government of living and dead souls disguised as faith. (2) The essay is then a two-fold resistance to oblivion. It counters the process of effacement in death and disintegration, but it also strikes against evasive and illusory resolutions of natural loss and our anguish. What then is empirical oblivion? It one side only of a larger problem Deleuze reconstructed and shaped, by trying to create positive concepts adequate to its overcoming. A problem for Deleuze is never resolved. (3) Instead, it interacts with different times in different ways such that each must find the best way to balance its positive and negative effects by transforming it. (4) For example, the problem of how to raise a child is different depending on the cultures, epochs, families, clans, tribes, societies and places where it is considered. The right 'solution' at one time can well be a mistake earlier or later. This does not mean that each epoch has its own problem independent of all others; on the contrary, they are related and earlier solutions bequeath new components to later ones, while later ones can reveal the limits and errors of earlier ones. How could they have sent the children away? Why do they spoil them with such luxuries? Overcoming does not mean eliminating; it means selecting within the problem in order to move beyond its most incapacitating effects, while freeing its most creative ones. Even mathematical problems, say as inherited from Euler or Fermat, are only partially solved according to this view. This is because the real problem is not in the conjecture or theorem demanding a proof, but rather in a much wider interaction of a mathematical system with the question of why a particular mathematical problem is particularly hard to resolve in that system. (5) Solutions extend or even change systems such that, although the particular problem is solved in terms of a proof, the initial difficulty remains, though altered through the new additions. In Immanence: a life ... the problem of empiricism is then transformed into the problem of what Deleuze calls 'higher empiricism', (6) a name he used from the 1960s, but that can be tracked back to his earliest work on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity, published in 1953. …