Deleuze Says Research Articles

The Image in Thought

Whether classic or modern, the great philosophers are often inventive stylists. It takes
 only a slight direction of attention to recognize suddenly that Plato or Wittgenstein are poets
 of philosophy, no less than Emerson, Nietzsche, Cavell, Deleuze and indeed many others. How
 is it possible to separate their art of thinking from the writerly composition of concepts in a
 space and time whose weaving of voice, rhythm, polyphony, and counterpoint seem so close
 to musical creation? In fact, one cannot. Thinking and the expressive line are inextricably
 intertwined in the great philosophical stylists.
 
 Deleuze himself beautifully voiced this perspective in a lecture entitled, “What is the
 Creative Act?,” presented at la FEMIS in 1991, which opens with the question, “What does it
 mean to have an idea in cinema?” Deleuze notes an experience all too familiar to every creative
 mind—having an idea is an event worth celebrating because its occurrence is rare and
 unpredictable. To think, one must prepare a terrain and a context where an idea can germinate
 and unfold because, as Deleuze says, “No one has an idea in general. An idea─like the one
 who has the idea—is already dedicated to a particular field.... Ideas have to be treated like
 potentials already engaged in one mode of expression or another and inseparable from the
 mode of expression, such that I cannot say that I have an idea in general. Depending on the
 techniques I am familiar with, I can have an idea in a certain domain, an idea in cinema or an
 idea in philosophy.”i

The Delirium of Rationalism: Why Deleuze Invokes Spinoza and Leibniz

Why does Deleuze rely so heavily on Spinoza and Leibniz? At first glance, his critique of representation and the traditional ‘image of thought’ seems to oppose him to rationalism. However, Deleuze says that when the ‘cry of rationalism’ is pursued until the end, rationalism becomes ‘delirious’. In such a state, it undermines the model of representation. This delirium is found in Spinoza and Leibniz's critique of generality and their conflation of essence and existence, through which they ruin the traditional mediation of difference by identity and generality. However, for this rationalism to completely break with representationalism it must undergo some Deleuzian corrections.

The Ultimate Meaning of Counter-Actualisation: On the Ethics of the Univocity of Being in Deleuze'sLogic of Sense

As is well known, Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition that ‘the task of contemporary philosophy has been defined: to reverse Platonism’. This task is then continued in Logic of Sense, through its discussion of Stoic logic. Deleuze says there that ‘the Stoics are the first to reverse Platonism’. And, at the same time, in the big Spinoza book, we see Deleuze present Spinoza's ‘anti-Cartesian reaction’. This anti-Cartesian reaction is equivalent to the reversal of Platonism. We can say then that the task of the reversal of Platonism unifies the three books Deleuze published at the end of the Sixties. The thesis of this essay will consist in arguing that ethics we find in Logic of Sense – which we can call ‘the ethics of the univocity of being’ – completes, in a constructive way, Deleuze's early project of the reversal of Platonism. The ethics centres on the idea of counter-actualisation. We shall argue that there are four senses of counter-actualisation. Here is a summary of the four senses of counter-actualisation: (1) beatitude against resentment (against presentist modes of measurement); (2) caring for the sense against neglecting the sense (denouncing any one determinate answer); (3) the embodiment of plural hopings and rememberings against the embodiment of one hope and one memory (against the character); and (4) ‘just enough’ against ‘too much’ (against suicide). Yet, as we shall see, there is a fifth meaning of counter-actualisation, the ultimate meaning. The ultimate sense of counter-actualisation is universal freedom. This is where my essay will end.

The plenitude of the Roman camp: a diagrammatic inquiry

The most common mistake of contemporary ‘experimental’ architecture is to turn the space of the diagram or graph literally into the space of the drawing, and, therefore, of the building.2(Alejandro Zaera-Polo)The diagram […] does not act as a code, but as a modulator.3(Gilles Deleuze)Often thought of in somewhat static, explanatory terms, the typical architectural diagram is used as a form of shorthand to succinctly communicate condensed information about a project and/or its conditions. In this way, the diagram functions as kind of coding device. Contrary to this typical coding function, Georges Teyssot describes the potential of a diagram that functions not as a code (mould) but rather as a modulator: ‘while molding leads to a permanent state of things, modulation introduces the factor of time’.4 Modulating is simply, as Deleuze says, ‘molding in a variable and continuous manner’.5 Critical to the modulating function is a degree of indeterminacy, which allows a diagram to be both responsive and flexible.

Des Romantiques aux écocritiques. Le Romantisme comme militantisme pour écrire la terre en danger

Romantic poets were precursors leading people toward awareness and toward a questioning about humans' presence to the world. They used vision as a "fighting weapon" as Deleuze says. They found in nature the inspiration of a poetic, and also philosophical and political revolution that was to make the world progress in the centuries to come. Ecocritics work in their wake to "try to understand the human relations with the nonhuman world through texts," as Scott Slovic defines the concept. Travelling becomes both an opening to the world and to the writer's own inner world and it appears as the sign of engagement. The close link between Romantic poets, environmental writers and ecocritics perhaps dwells on their common use of the eyes as both an instrument of perception and of engagement.

The Discovery of Baduk in Gilles Deleuze

질 들뢰즈의 바둑의 발견은 두 개의 특성을 지닌다. 하나는 고대 그리스의 폴리스가 국가철학을 형성하기 이전의 노모스 사회를 구성하였던 지식의 발견이고, 또 다른 하나는 동아시아의 전통적 지식이 지니는 노마드적 특성을 발견한 것이다. 그러나 서구 유럽의 전통이 하나가 아닌 것처럼 동아시아의 전통도 또한 하나가 아니다. 따라서 들뢰즈의 바둑의 발견에서 드러나는 동아시아의 전통적 지식은 일본의 히야마 하사오가 『동양적 근대의 창출』에서 이야기하고 있는 일본 근대문학의 아버지라고 일컬어지고 있는 나쓰메 소세키의 문학과 중국 근대문학의 아버지라고 일컬어지고 있는 루쉰의 문학에 나타난 공통적 특성, 즉 서구적 근대화와 더불어 “탈각해야 할 동양”과 “회귀해야 할 동양” 중에서 “회귀해야 할 동양”의 전통적 지식을 의미한다. 히야마 하사오가 이야기하는 “탈각해야 할 동양”은 유가적 지식을 의미하고, “회귀해야 할 동양”은 도가적 지식을 의미한다. 질 들뢰즈의 바둑의 발견은 또한 장기와 체스의 놀이가 국가철학에 토대를 둔 것과 달리 바둑의 놀이가 노마돌로지의 지식에 토대를 두고 있다는 것의 발견이다. 따라서 히야마 하사오가 이야기하는 “회귀해야 할 동양”의 도가적 지식과 들뢰즈의 바둑의 발견이 상호 일치하는 것은 장기와 체스의 국가철학에 바탕을 플라톤주의와 유가철학이 상호 일치하고 있다는 점에서 지구촌 시대의 지구지역적 가치로 바둑의 체계가 아주 적절하다는 점을 보여준다. 체스와 장기의 체계가 왕국과 왕국, 혹은 국가와 국가의 대립구도로 이루어진 것과는 달리 바둑의 체계는 집과 사회와 국가의 영토화와 탈영토화의 과정이라는 시간성으로 이루어져 있다. 또한 체스와 장기의 말들은 외부에 의해서 “상대적 권력을 부여받은 . . . 언표행위의 주체”인데 반하여 바둑알들은 “주체화되어 있지 않은 기계적 배치물의 요소들로서 . . . 상황적 특성만을 갖고 있을 뿐이다.” 바둑판 위에서 바둑알들이 노마드적 비주체로 존재하는 “상황적 특성”이 바로 들뢰즈가 바둑의 발견에서 말하는 “존재의 기술”이다. 미쉘 푸코가 『성의 역사』에서 문명의 사회로부터 탈영토화를 한 노모스 사회의 특성이었던 “존재의 기술”은 인간들의 삶을 구성하는 탈영토화와 재영토화의 과정에서 만드는 “행동규칙”과 “스스로를 변화시키고 그들의 특이한 존재 속에서 스스로를 변형시키는 미학적 가치”인 동시에 “어떤 양식의 기준에 부합하는 하나의 작품으로 만들고자 하는 신중하고도 자발적인 실천”이다. 바둑을 구성하는 초반부와 중반부와 종반부는 바로 노마드적 “존재의 기술”, 즉 생산적 욕망의 관계들을 구성하는 “행동규칙”과 무리나 집단 속에서 변화를 생산하는 “미학적 가치”, 그리고 삶을 하나의 작품으로 만들고자 하는 “자발적인 실천”과 동일하며, 이러한 “존재의 기술”은 들뢰즈가 『철학이란 무엇인가?』에서 이야기하는 예술적 지식과 철학적 지식, 그리고 과학적 지식의 결합과 일치한다.The discovery of Baduk in Gilles Deleuze is not only the discovery of the knowledge in the old Greek nomos society, but also the one in the East Asian traditional thought. But it is not the traditional thought of the state philosophy, but the one of the nomadology. Since the polis and the state had been formed in the world, they were based on the logic of state philosophy and erased the knowledge of nomadology in which the old and modern Platonism have been consisted in the West and the Confucianism are derived in the East. The discovery of Baduk in Gilles Deleuze is that the Chess is the game based on the logic of State Philosophy in the West and the East, but the Baduk is the only one game based on the nomadology known and thought in the landscape of the world. The point is that since the 17th century, the western european discovery of modern political-industrial imperialist landscapes has spread across the world according to the logic of the west, white and mail centered state philosophy, until today it ravages all kind of nomadic life forms. Deleuze says that the state philosophy is based on the logic of the chess in which the chess pieces have “an internal coded nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive”, but the nomadology is based on the logic of the baduk in which the baduk pieces have “only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function” from which their movements “are elements of a non-subjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties.” In contrast with Chess pieces, Baduk pieces have the “arts of existence.” Baduk pieces can destroy an entire constellation synchronically, and make the various houses, societies, and states in which they show the “arts of existence” are structured with “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an ouevre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.” The “rules of conduct”, “aesthetic values” and “voluntary actions” discovered in the “arts of existence” of Baduk is the convergence between the knowledges of art, philosophy and science in the trans-modern global and local world.

Affect and the Political

(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Lauren Berlant on Affect and the Political. Mr. Aryal focused his questions on the affective aspects of the political.) Y. A.: Your book Cruel Optimism maps out an affective history of the present. What is the model of the present, which you think, with which people are relating to themselves with the present in the contemporary [American] society today? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] L. B: In Cruel Optimism I claim that the historical present makes itself available to its occupants first as a serious affective disturbance in the reproduction of life. By "the reproduction of life" point to many scenes of engagement: from familial and intimate, to labor and economic, to participation in media and pleasure consumption. Since job and credit availability have become so very unstable in the last four years, there has been a tightening up in the diversity of the material experience of the present-more people are in sync observing and living the historical present as an economic crisis time. Economic crisis threatens the robustness of intimate consumer pleasure domains too, although the instability of intimacy and other modes of mediated cultural belonging doesn't only come from the economic root. The global financial crisis also threatens the faith in and the primacy of the nation form, in its symbolic and political infrastructure. The historical present became modern in the US and Europe with the coming to hegemony of the national frame: so a disturbance in what kind of resource for belonging the nation is is a disturbance in what constitutes the historical present in a serious way. So I guess what I am saying to you is that the model of the historical present at present is a disturbance in the historical present's traditional forms. Y. A.: In the last part of your conversation, you are sketching the economic crisis. So, certainly you are trying to suggest reproduction of capital has shaped the "reproduction of life." I agree! It just reminds me what Deleuze says in the Anti-Oedipus that the formation of political reproduction at present is taking place through the reproduction of capital (all it matters is reproduction of money) whereas it would take place through biological reproduction (kinship, bigotry etc. Rulers or kings would decide whom their sons or daughters could marry and whom not in order to influence a specific political reproduction. The same regulation was also maintained in the familial relations among population) in the archaic societies, so that familial/intimate relations are increasingly viewed as "private matters." This is what another but similar way of understanding " a disturbance in the historical present's traditional forms" in terms of political reproduction. In what ways do these "private matters [familial relations .i.e. biological as well intimate relations i.e. biosociality] " participate in the reproduction of the political at the historical present? And how is it connected to the reproduction of capital? L. B: It would be difficult to answer this question in general, I can't do it. Political reproduction (in administrative, policy, juridical, and symbolic ways) saturates (but never homogenizes) the reproduction of life, in the everyday, in people's relation to work and pleasure, in people's practices and imaginaries for belonging, and in debates and concepts of what a life is--and of course the question of the flourishing of people in families is always an extremely invested site for multiple performances of political antagonism, usually allegorical but not always. At the same time, everyday life theory has long argued that people's relation to the materiality of work-to that part of capitalism that constructs sleep and eating patterns, leisure and speed--constructs relationality in desperate and subtle ways, along with affecting what the shape of a life is in its daily and longer temporal arcs, not to mention people's senses of causality and efficacy. …

An Inquiry in to the Ethical Nature of a Deleuzian Creative Educational Practice

In introducing the work of Deleuze and Guattari Massumi says, “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” Therefore, in taking the Deleuzian view that concepts have no subjects or objects other than themselves and that the creation of concepts are acts, this article is conceived as a nomadic inquiry into the possible ethical, affective, and political aspects of the events with which these acts are associated. The article is informed by the author’s own collaborative and performative research practices, and the inquiry is sited within the context of his teaching and learning practices in postgraduate education and professional development in higher education in the United Kingdom at the present time. In short, the article explores the ethical implications and sensitivities of the use of creative practices of conceptualization within educational settings of this kind.

Deleuze

(Justin S. Litaker interviewed Daniel W. Smith. Mr. Litaker focused his questions on continuous variation of concepts in Deleuze). JSL: How did you come to be interested in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and what sustains your interest? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] DWS: I first became interested in Deleuze when I was in graduate school. I was reading Nietzsche when the English translation of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy came out. So I read the book and was amazed at the way Deleuze had systematized Nietzsche's thought. At the time, there weren't many translations of Deleuze's works available, so I went to the library at the University of Chicago and discovered Difference and Repetition on the shelves. I thought it must contain the secret of Deleuze's work, which was only hinted at in Nietzsche and Philosophy. So right at the start, Nietzsche and Philosophy instilled in me a kind of conviction that Deleuze was worth reading, and that there was much more in his work that I needed to find out about. I had also been reading Vincent Descombes' book Modern French Philosophy, and he had isolated Derrida and Deleuze as the focal points of contemporary French philosophy. So I knew that Deleuze was more than a historian of philosophy, and that he had a project of his own, which was, at the very least, oriented around the concept of difference. There and then, I decided that I needed to learn French in order to read Difference and Repetition. You asked what has sustained my interest in Deleuze through the years. For one, I've never tired of reading Deleuze. Even now, I don't think I have a complete sense of what Deleuze is up to. I think this is partly because of his manner of writing, which has been described as free indirect discourse. Deleuze has written numerous monographs in the history of philosophy-on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Leibniz, Bergson, and so on-but in each book he is also reading and using these thinkers toward his own philosophical ends, so that in Nietzsche and Philosophy, for instance, there is a becoming-Nietzsche of Deleuze as well as a becoming-Deleuze of Nietzsche. Readers are thus caught up in what Deleuze would call a becoming, or a zone of indiscernibility. Reading Deleuze is more like following a trajectory or a continuous movement that you never have done with, rather than arriving at a set of doctrines or positions that would lie at the heart of Deleuze's thought. JSL: Has this process of becoming or continuous movement affected your own reading of Deleuze? DWS: Absolutely. Right now I'm trying to write a book on Deleuze. At one point, Deleuze says that he still believes in philosophy as a system, and I initially thought, well great, I'll try to elucidate Deleuze's system of philosophy. I thought I'd approach Deleuze's system using Kant as a model, since Kant has a very architectonic idea of what philosophy is. So I borrowed five rubrics from Kant's system: aesthetics (the theory of space and time, the theory of art, the theory of sensibility), analytics (the theory of concepts in the Transcendental Deduction), Dialectics (the theory of the idea), ethics, and politics. I figured I would start from Kant, then show how Deleuze modifies Kant, and in the process of doing that I would be able to produce some version of what Deleuze's system is. That, at least, was my initial idea for the book. But of course it has all turned out to be much more complicated than that. Although Deleuze says he is interested in philosophy as a system, he also says he thinks of his own system as being heterogenetic, that is, it is itself a genesis of the heterogeneous, the production of the new, the production of difference. What this means is that Deleuze's own system modifies itself over the course of its development. Deleuze gives an example of this in his preface to the Italian translation of his book Logic of Sense, where he takes as one of his examples his own concept of intensity. …

An Approach to Difference and Repetition

Truer words were never spoken than when Deleuze said of Difference and Repetition his 1973 Letter to a Harsh Critic, still full of academic elements, it's heavy going. (1) I'll say! (Part of that academicism comes from Deleuze having submitted Difference and Repetition to his jury as primary thesis for doctorat d'Etat; secondary thesis was big Spinoza book). context of these remarks is useful: Deleuze has just been noting that the history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of Oedipus complex. (2) Deleuze continues that he tried to subvert this repressive force by various means: (3) (1) by writing on authors such as Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche who contested rationalist tradition by critique of negativity, cultivation of joy, hatred of interiority, externality of forces and relations, denunciation of power [pouvoir]; (2) by enculage / immaculate conception: making author say something their own words that would be monstrous. These are famous lines, and last is certainly fun an epater les bourgeois sort of way. But what is really important my view comes next, when Deleuze explains what it means to finally write in your own name, as he claims he first did Difference and Repetition: Individuals find a real name for themselves ... only through harshest exercises by opening themselves up to multiplicities everywhere w/in them, to intensities running through them. [This is] a depersonalization through love rather than through subjection. (4) So that's our challenge introducing Difference and Repetition: can we help our students avoid subjecting themselves to it as a monument history of philosophy, as is case with an Oedipal relation to history of philosophy which you give yourself up to be a mere repetiteur: an old occupational title French academic system? Rather, can we help them turn their reading of it into a harsh exercise depersonalization, that is, an opening up of themselves to multiplicities and intensities within them, indeed, within all of us, student and teacher alike? Can our encounter with it be a depersonalization through love? Can we learn from it, rather than gain knowledge from it? Luckily, Difference and Repetition contains a discussion of learning; it thematizes challenge it poses to us. discussion of learning occurs at a key point Difference and Repetition, at turning point of book, end of middle chapter, The Image of Thought. Let's look at architecture of book, which after Preface, has a pleasing and significant asymmetry: Introduction: Repetition and Difference Chapter One: Difference Itself Chapter Two: Repetition for Itself Chapter Three: Image of Thought Chapter Four: Ideal Synthesis of Difference Chapter Five: Asymmetrical Synthesis of Sensibility Conclusion: Difference and Repetition At first glance we see that title/subject of book, difference and repetition, structures book. conclusion repeats, with a difference, Introduction, while chapter 4 repeats chapter 1 and chapter five repeats chapter two. Chapter three is center of book, pivot on which it turns. In a useful article, Tim Murphy will claim it is caesura, pure and empty form of time, which breaks naked repetition and opens way to a novel future, repetition with a difference. (5) We should note that an interview from 1988, Deleuze says that noology or study of image of thought is prolegomena to philosophy. (6) So, roughly speaking, we can say that first part of book (introduction and chapters one and two) is Deleuze's voyage of depersonalization through history of philosophy (repeating it with a difference, his enculage of philosophers he writes on). …

Deleuze’s Concept of the Virtual and the Critique of the Possible

In this paper, I would simply like to sketch out what I take to be the component elements of Deleuze's concept of the virtual. (1) My thesis is this: Deleuze's philosophy can accurately be described as a transcendental philosophy--a transcendental empiricism, as he himself puts it--although Deleuze defines the transcendental field in a completely different manner than does Kant, who invented the term. Kant's genius, according to Deleuze, was to have conceived of a purely immanent critique of reason, a critique that did not seek, within reason, errors produced by external causes, but rather illusions that arise internally and inevitably from within reason itself by the illegitimate (that is, transcendent) uses of the syntheses. (2) Insofar as Deleuze conceives of philosophy as the construction of a plane of immanence, he aligns himself squarely with Kant's critical philosophy. (3) But he also criticizes Kant for having failed to fulfill the immanent ambitions of his critique, for reasons that we shall see in a moment. The difference does not lie simply in the fact that Deleuze purges the transcendental of any reference to consciousness or to a transcendental subject. The more important difference lies precisely in the distinction he makes between the possible and the virtual. For Deleuze, the transcendental does not serve to define the of possible experience for a subject; on the contrary, is a virtual field that serves as the genetic or productive condition of real experience, and that exists prior to the constitution of the subject. In what follows, I would like to draw out this difference between the possible and the virtual (as two conceptions of the transcendental) from the point of view of the history of philosophy: first, by examining two figures who seem to have influenced Deleuze most in this regard--Henri Bergson and Salomon Maimon; second, by examining the reading of Kant that Deleuze provides in Difference and Repetition; and finally, by briefly examining, as examples, Deleuze's analysis of three virtual structures, namely those of language, society, and the body. 1. Bergson's Problematization of the Possible. I turn first to Bergson. Deleuze derives the concept of the virtual directly from Bergson, and in a number of early articles (1956) he argues that Bergson forged the concept of the virtual by problematizing the notion of the possible. More precisely, the virtual is by nature problematizing; expresses a problematic. What does he mean by this? The activity of thought is frequently conceived of as the search for solutions to problems, a prejudice whose roots, Deleuze suggests, are both social and pedagogical. In the classroom, is the school teacher who poses ready-made problems, the pupil's task being to discover the correct solution, and what the notions of and serve to qualify are precisely these responses or solutions. Yet everyone recognizes that problems are never given ready-made but must themselves be constructed or constituted--hence the scandal when a or badly-formulated problem is set in an examination. This is not to imply that solutions are unimportant; on the contrary, is the solution that counts, but, as Deleuze says at several points through his work, a problem always has the solution merits in terms of the way in which is and the means and terms we have at our disposal for stating it, i.e., in terms of the conditions under which is determined as a problem. To problematize a concept thus does not only mean that one places in question; means that one seeks to determine the nature of the problem to which serves as a solution. This is why the process of problematization is so complex. While is relatively easy to define the true and the false in relation to solutions whose problems are already stated, writes Deleuze, it is much more difficult to say what the true and false consist of when they are applied directly to problems themselves. …

The Opening of the West

The Opening of the West Steffen Stelzer (bio) For the opening of the West (fatḥ al-maghrib) is unrivalled by any other opening, since its allotted time is the night (al-layl), and [the night] precedes the daytime (al-nahār) in the glorious scripture in every passage. —Ibn ‘Arabi, Risālāt al-Intiṣār Dear Friend, I don’t know at which time of the day or the night you were born. Would you allow me to choose a time? If I could say you were born at midnight, if you would let me imagine that you were born at that time, I would have a good pretext for beginning to write to you in the way I’d like. I could then say: These lines are to celebrate your birthday. Or one of your birthdays, after many birthdays, at a certain age, at a certain time. And I could say, as Deleuze said and you read: this time, midnight, is a good time to speak and to ask about philosophy, a time to speak, as he puts it, “concretely.” That is, to ask “in a moment of quiet restlessness, at midnight, when there is no longer anything to ask” (1994, 1). [End Page 215] Let’s imagine such a nightly conversation about philosophy, how it might turn to Europe, and how one would then speak and hear of old age and of youth, of travels by land and by sea, of oceans and shores, of directions and headings. Perhaps, one could invite some guests from the northern and western shores of the Mediterranean and some from the southern and the eastern shores, that is, some of those who seem to be always around, in the air, when there is talk of Europe and of philosophy, but somehow are never quite there. Perhaps, there could be a guest like the old Oriental sage mentioned by Deleuze as a foil against the Greek type of the philosopher-friend, the old Oriental sage who is older than the old philosopher and doesn’t speak a word. Which makes me, of course, curious about how he “maybe, thinks in figures,” as Deleuze says (1994, 3). Or, maybe, we could have some of those guests Derrida regretted not having in a “more apparently Christian and hardly Judaeo-Christian” round that met to speak of religion: a woman, a Muslim. “Mute witnesses,” he called them (1996, 13). Conversations that pursue clearly or even vaguely determined goals, questions that need answers, have, of course, to take place under well-defined conditions. The nightly conversation Deleuze spoke of, that is, the philosophical conversation, is not of this kind. Moments of quiet restlessness, questions asked when there is no longer anything to ask, do not follow straight lines from start to goal or even roundabout ways to an end. They may be said to waver or flicker. Nevertheless, this does not imply a complete lack of traits, and it is telling to which extent these traits are shared by both, questions about thinking and questions about Europe. Although not pursuing a determinable trajectory, this “quiet restlessness” is, therefore, not still. It travels. And as long as it travels there are recognizable times, specific spaces, particular elements, particular means. Being a nightly conversation, the room, or should one say, the space in which it takes place, is usually badly lit or outright dark. This explains the need for orientation, when traveling by land, or for navigation, when traveling by sea or air. The former is addressed by Kant when he speaks of “the right of reason’s need . . . for orienting itself in thinking, solely through reason’s own need, in that immeasurable space of the supersensible, which for us is filled with dark night” (1996, 10). The latter echoes in Derrida’s remark about proposing [End Page 216] the title of his talk in a colloquium on “European Cultural Identity” when he says that “while on board a plane [I was thinking at first] of the language of air or sea navigation” (1992, 13). Furthermore, as much rationality and, therefore, objectivity, may be claimed for both endeavors, for orienting oneself in thinking and for navigating the sea...

The Trouble with the Virtual

The Trouble with the Virtual Wojciech Kalaga (bio) In the world of technology, telepresence, synthetic environments, etc., the immediate—and troublesome—association of the virtual is with the concept of virtual reality. Yet even a cursory look at the virtual reality praxis shows us that it consists in simulation or fabrication of images through the stimulation of human perceptual apparatus (and the parallel or subsequent immersion of the subject of sensory perception). Even an inexperienced ontologist intuitively knows that there is more to virtuality than stimulation or simulation. The purpose of this paper is exactly to explore the nature of virtuality and its relation to the actual. What will be needed in this exploration is, first, the overcoming of the dichotomy between existence and nonexistence (the dichotomy already undermined by the long tradition of studies in various kinds of the so-called non-existent objects), and secondly, a mutatis mutandis acceptance for the humanities of what Bruno Latour proposes for science and calls relative existence: “existing somewhat,” “having a little reality” (156). A profound account of virtuality has been given by Gille Deleuze in Difference and Repetition and in Bergsonism. Deleuze begins his analysis of virtuality with the concept of Idea (-as-structure) or problem which tends towards actualization/solution. What, however, precedes the Idea-as-structure is the relation as the possibility and basis of any structure at all. It is from the concept of relation that I want to develop the concept of the virtual. This is not a theory contradictory or incompatible with Deleuze’s—on the contrary, this paper fully recognizes the validity of what Deleuze says in his analyses. My aim is rather to explore the infrastructure of virtuality: just like nano-analysis will give us a more adequate insight into the structure of the matter, so the analysis of constituents more basic than idea will give us a more comprehensive ontology of the virtual. Such an approach aims also against limiting the idea of virtuality to the kind of cybernetic concept [End Page 96] proposed by Levy, 1 who I think overemphasizes the importance of the problem-solution vector of Deleuze’s theory. Relations Still, to begin with ideas construed as problematic structures would mean to neglect a more basic “stuff” of virtuality, and—as I intend to show—also an important channel of interaction between the actual and the virtual. This basic stuff of virtuality, its “wiring” which is primary to ideas, is made up of relations. For the sake of this discussion, it is not necessary to distinguish and separately analyze various known types of relations (such as spatial, causal, quantitative, qualitative, etc.). Suffice it to say in general that relation is a primeval intervention of logos into chaos. 2 Irrespective of the types of objects related—whether material, abstract, intentional, virtual, etc.—there is one feature common to all kinds of relations, namely that they are in a primary sense logical. By saying logical I do not refer to the science of calculus, or to any kind of logic proper, but to the inherent reference of any relation to logos, the potential presence of a mind—not any particular, individual mind, but mind in general (what Peirce would call a potential mind or Quasi-Mind). In this sense, relations in their existence are relative to the mind, while material objects are not. In other words, while material objects (in their physical, purely material rather than cultural constitution) exist independently of any reference to a mind—i.e., independently of any statement or thought about them—relations that occur among those objects are relative to the mind. 3 It is to be [End Page 97] emphasized that relative to the mind does not refer to any particular, individual, or actually existing mind. Being relative refers to mind construed as a general condition for existence or cultural identity, what Rescher calls generic dependence: The “being” of unactualized possibility does not inhere in its relation to this or that specific mind, but to its conceivability by mind-in-general, in terms of the linguistic resources that are a common capability of intelligence as we know it. This independence of any specific mind establishes the...

The Uses of Anachronism

Even the history of philosophy is completely without interest if it does not undertake to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage, even if this comes at the price of turning it against itself.1 History of Philosophy: Recounting Imaginary Books Gilles Deleuze observes a distinction between writing history of philosophy and philosophy. We are interested here in how this distinction is set up. How does Deleuze conceive of the relation between history of philosophy and doing philosophy? What is the use of historiography and how can it be brought to bear on the present? In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes this: There is a great difference between writing history of philosophy and writing philosophy. In the one case we study the arrows or the tools of a great thinker, the trophies and the prey, the continents discovered. In the other case we trim our own arrows, or gather those which seem to us the finest in order to try and send them in other directions, even if the distance covered is not astronomical but relatively small. We try to speak in our own name only to learn that a proper name designates no more than the outcome of a body of work-in other words the concepts discovered, on condition that we were able to express and imbue them with life using all the possibilities of language.2 This metaphor of the arrow is instructive. Deleuze says that After I had studied Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Proust, all of whom fired me with enthusiasm, Difference and Repetition was the first book in which I tried to `do philosophy.' Deleuze distinguishes here between his earlier texts on the history of philosophy and his first text which does philosophy-on the one hand, the selection of some arrows and tools, the tensioning of a bow, and, on the other, their deployment in a new direction. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze wants to be an untimely philosopher-he desires a philosophy that is not a philosophy of history, nor a philosophy of the universal, but untimely. That is to say-and these words are Nietzsche'sacting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come. Deleuze anticipates a time when it will no longer be possible to write philosophy books as they have been traditionally produced. The search for new means of philosophical expression was begun by Nietzsche, and Deleuze hints here that his own work on cinema, theatre, and the visual arts is animated by this need for new modes of philosophical expression. At any rate it is in this context that Deleuze raises the question of the history of philosophy. He says that the history of philosophy should play a role roughly analogous to collage in painting. This means that elements, or more precisely concepts, are lifted from the textual context in which they were created and juxtaposed with concepts from other places in ways that make familiar concepts strange and imbue them with new powers. A commentary reproduces a concept but it is reproduced in a new context-or rather, on a different plane-and for Deleuze commentary must be conscious of the mutations that occur when historical concepts are reproduced in the present. In fact it is the field of possible mutations which constitute commentary's possibilities. The history of philosophy is the reproduction of philosophy itself. In the history of philosophy a commentary should act as a veritable double and bear the maximum modification appropriate to a double.3 Even more provocatively, Deleuze suggests that it should be possible to recount a real book of past philosophy as if it were an imaginary and feigned book. And here, by way of explanation, he mentions a story by Borges. The story is Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.4 As a guide to what Deleuze might mean here it is quite illuminating. Borges had an extraordinary talent for the invention of imaginary texts. …

The Spinoza-intoxicated man: Deleuze on expression

That Deleuze’s thought is heavily indebted to Spinoza is a claim that is both obvious and obscure. On the one hand, Deleuze says quite plainly that he is “a Spinozist,” and that Spinoza is for him “the ‘prince’ of philosophers.”1 On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that the thinker of difference and pre-individual singularities could have anything in common with Spinoza, thinker of the one absolutely infinite substance and monist par excellence. One might, under the circumstances, be tempted to divide Deleuze’s books into two groups: those in which he speaks in his own name, such as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense; and those which deal with the history of philosophy, such as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. But to make such a division would be a mistake. Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, far from being peripheral to his own thought, is in fact central to it. Indeed, I want to argue here that Deleuze’s ontology of difference cannot be adequately understood outside the context of Expressionism in Philosophy. I intend to show that Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense are in large part attempts to articulate an expressionistic ontology, and that they must be read in light of what Deleuze says about expression in his work on Spinoza. Accordingly, what follows is divided into three parts. The first gives an overview of Deleuze’s ontology, and shows that it invokes a tripartite distinction among Being, the virtual, and the actual. Part Two traces this tripartite scheme back to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, and fleshes out Deleuze’s claim that it is a necessary part of an expressionistic ontology. And in Part Three, I explain how Deleuze both preserves and modifies the Spinozist scheme in his own work. In doing so, I try to show that Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense are attempts “to make substance turn around the modes – in other words, to realize univocity in the form of repetition.”2

"Frankenstein" with Kant: A Theory of Monstrosity, or the Monstrosity of Theory

The sort of interrogation I am proposing is neither philosophical nor literary but something in between these two. On one hand, it is a testing out of shifting boundary between philosophy, personified by Kant's Critique ofJudgment, and literature, represented by Shelley's Frankenstein; on other, it investigates what rebounds from these two texts: what comes back, or returns. If as Deleuze says, have Critique of Judgment as foundation of Romanticism, perhaps Frankenstein is already encased in and anticipated by Kantian theory.' Correlatively, perhaps these texts, each inverse of other, predict and possibly even determine shape of theory in late twentieth century. If we are heirs of Frankenstein and third Critique-as much read by them as readers of them-what have we inherited, to whom are we indebted, and what are our debts? My thesis is that Victor Frankenstein's Monster is third Critique's heir, and that we are its inheritor. First I argue that, in a philosophic register, Kant's depiction or construction of sublime simultaneously portrays and defends itself against monstrosity; second that, in a literary register, Frankenstein makes explicit and dramatizes what Kant's analytic contains but cannot say, demonstrating that shape of sublime, which fulfills metaphysician's desire, is precisely that of monstrosity; and third, that Shelley's Frankenstein and Kant's Critique ofJudgment together predict form of contemporary theory-the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself in terrifying form of monstrosity, as Derrida said when he brought Deconstruction (sometimes described as the French plague) to Baltimore in 1966. Through investigating ways in which these two texts mutually inhabit and enact each other, I suggest that Kant's theory of sublime is not only a form of monstrous but also a figure for theory as such-perhaps even paradigmatic form of it, and that theory in turn is itself monstrous or Frankensteinian. The romantic vision of future