Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  1. The question–problem complex. First, Deleuze pursues his inverted Platonism by carrying out his critique at the level of what he calls the “question–problem complex” (DR 66). In archaic myth, there is always a task to be performed, a riddle to be solved; the oracle is questioned, but the oracle's response is itself a problem. In Plato, this question–problem complex reappears in a new form: the appeal to the Idea as a criterion of selection appears in the dialogues as the response to a particular form of question. “The idea, the discovery of the Idea, is not separable from a certain type of question. The Idea is first of all an ‘objectity’ [objectité] that corresponds, as such, to a way of posing questions.”52 In Plato, this questioning appears primarily in the form, What is …? [ti estin?].53 Plato wanted to oppose this major form of the question to all other forms—such as Who? Which one? How many? How? Where? When? In which case? From what point of view?—which are criticized as being minor and vulgar questions of opinion that express confused ways of thinking.

  When Socrates, for instance, asks “What is beauty?”, his interlocutors almost always seem to answer by citing “the one that is beautiful.” Socrates triumphs; one cannot reply to the question “What is beauty?” by citing examples of the beautiful, by noting who is beautiful (“a young virgin”), just as one cannot answer the question “What is justice?” by pointing to where or when there is justice, and one cannot reach the essence of the dyad by explaining how “two” is obtained, and so on. To the question “What is beauty?” one must not point to beautiful things, which are only beautiful accidentally and according to becoming, but to Beauty itself, which is nothing but beautiful, that which is beautiful in its being and essence. Socrates ridicules those who are content to give examples rather than attain essences. The question “What is …?” thus presupposes a particular way of thinking that points one in the direction of essence; it is for Socrates the question of essence, the only question capable of discovering the Idea.54

  One of Deleuze's most constant themes is that the critique of philosophers must take place at this level of questions or problems.

  A philosophic theory [he wrote in his first book] is a developed question, and nothing other. By itself, in itself, it consists not in resolving a problem, but in developing to its limit the necessary implications of a formulated question. It shows us what things are, what they would have to be, supposing that the question is a good and rigorous one. To place in question means to subordinate, to submit things to the question in such a way that, in this constrained and forced submission, they reveal an essence, a nature. To criticize the question means to show under what conditions it is possible and well-posed, that is, how things would not be what they are if the question were not posed in that way. Which is to say that these two operations are one and the same; or if you prefer, there is no critique of solutions, but only a critique of problems. (ES 119)

  Thus the reversal of Platonism necessarily implies a critique of the question “What is …?”; for while it is certainly a blunder to cite an example of something beautiful when asked “What is beauty?”, it is less certain that the question “What is …?” is a legitimate and well-formulated question, even and above all for discovering essence.

  Already in Plato himself, the Socratic method only animates the early “aporetic” dialogues, precisely because the question “What is …?” prejudges the Idea as a simple and abstract essence, which is then obliged to comprehend the non-essential, and to comprehend it in its essence, which leads these dialogues into inextricable aporias. This is perhaps because the primary purpose of these early elenchic dialogues is preparative—their aim is to silence empirical responses in order to open up the region of the Idea in general, while leaving it to others to determine it as an Idea or as a problem. When Socratic irony is no longer taken à la lettre, when the dialectic is no longer confused with its propaedeutic, it becomes something serious and positive, and assumes other forms of questioning: Which one? in the Statesman and the Phaedrus, as we have seen; How many? in the Philebus; Where? and When? in the Sophist; In what sense? in the Parmenides. The “minor” questions of the sophists, Deleuze argues, were the result of a worked-out method, a whole sophistic art that was opposed to the Platonic dialectic and implied an empirical and pluralistic conception of essence, no longer as a foundation, but as an event or a multiplicity. “No doubt, if one insists, the word ‘essence’ might be preserved, but only on condition of saying that the essence is precisely accident, the event … The events and singularities of the Idea do not allow any positing of an essence as ‘what the thing is’” (DR 191). Even in the Platonic texts, such a conception of the Idea was prefigured by the sophist Hippias, “he who refuses essences and yet is not content with examples” (NP 76). The fact is that the question “What is …?” poses the problem of essence in a blind and confused manner. Nietzsche wanted to replace the question “What is …?” with “Who is …?”; rather than posing the question, “What is truth?” he asks, “Who is in search of truth? What do those who ask ‘What is truth?’ really want? What type of will is being expressed in them?”55 Similarly, when we ask “What is beauty?” we are asking, “From what viewpoint do things appear beautiful?”—and with something that does not appear beautiful to us, from what viewpoint would it become so? Where and When? (NP 75–9). If the sophists must be reproached, it is not for having utilized inferior forms of questioning, but for their inability to have determined the conditions within which they take on their transcendental meaning and their ideal sense, beyond empirical examples (DI 95).

  Deleuze suggests that if one considers the history of philosophy, one will, in fact, search in vain for a philosopher who was satisfied with the question “What is …?” Aristotle's questions “ti to on?” and “tis a ousia?” do not signify “What is being?” or “What is substance?” but rather “Which [things] are beings?” [“Qui, l’étant?”] (DR 244n). Kant asked, “What is an object?” but only within the framework of a more profound question, “How is this possible?” When Leibniz was content to ask, “What is …?” he only obtained definitions that he himself considered nominal; when he attained real definitions, it was because of questions like “How?”, “From what point of view?”, “In which case?” Even Heidegger, when he formulated the question of Being, insisted that we can only gain access to Being by asking, not “What is Being?”, but rather “Who is it?” (Dasein).56 If Hegel took the question “What is?” seriously, it was because of his theological prejudices, since “the answer to ‘What is X?’ is always God as the locus of the combinatory of abstract possibilities” (DR 188). Deleuze's pluralist art does not necessarily deny essence, but it makes it depend in all cases upon the spatio-temporal and material coordinates of a problematic Idea that is purely immanent to experience, and that can only be determined by questions such as Who?, How?, Where and When?, How many?, From what viewpoint?, and so on. These “minor” questions are those of the accident, the inessential, of multiplicity, of difference—in short, of the event (problematics as opposed to theorematics).57

  2. Repetition. Second, in an inverted Platonism, the notion of repetition can be said to assume an autonomous power along with that of difference (hence the title of Deleuze's magnum opus). Platonism relies on what Deleuze calls a “naked” model of repetition (representation): the copy repeats the identity of the ideal model as the first term in a hierarchical series (just as, in archaic religion, ritual is said to repeat myth). Naked repetition thus presupposes a mechanical or brute repetition of the Same: it is founded on an ultimate or originary instance or first time (A), which is then repeated a second, third, and fourth time (A1, A2, A3, and so on.). In cases of psychic repetition, this originary term is subject to disguises and displacements, which are secondary yet necessary. In Freud, for instance, our adult loves “repeat” our childhood love for the mother, but our original maternal love is repressed and disguised in these subsequent loves by various mechanisms of condensation (metonymy) and displacement (met
aphor). I repeat because I repress (amnesia), and the task of therapy, through transference, is to recover this hidden origin (not to eliminate repetition, but to verify the authentic repetitions). In Plato, the form of time is introduced into thought under the category of reminiscence (anamnesis). The ultimate term or model is the Idea, but since Plato is unable to assign an empirical moment in the past when the Idea was present, he invokes an originary moment: the Idea has been seen, but in another life, in a mythical present (e.g., the circulation of souls in the Phaedrus). If to learn is to recollect, it is because the real movement of learning implies a distinction in the soul between a “before” and an “after”; there is a first time, in which we forget what we knew, and a second time, in which we recover what we have forgotten.58 In either case, bare repetition refers back to a former present, whether empirical or mythical, which has a prior identity and provides the “thing” to be repeated. It is this originary identity, now lost or forgotten, that conditions the entire process of repetition, and in this sense remains independent of it.

  But the question Deleuze poses is the following: are the disguises and variations, the masks and costumes, something added secondarily “over and above” the original term, or are they, on the contrary, “the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts”? (DR 17). In this case, we would no longer have a “naked” repetition of the Same but a “clothed” repetition of the Different. It is in Proust's work that Deleuze finds a model for this clothed repetition, which he analyzes in detail in Proust and Signs. In Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, the hero's various loves (for Gilberte, Mme. de Guermantes, Albertine) indeed form a series in which each successive love adds its minor differences and contrasting relations to the preceding loves. (Indeed, each particular love itself assumes a serial form—beginning, course, termination—in which the hero first explicates the hidden world enveloped in his lover, and then retraces his steps in forgetting her.) But in Proust, the series of loves does not refer back to the hero's mother; the childhood love for his mother is already a repetition of other adult loves (Proust's hero replays with his mother Swann's passion for Odette), and the mother's love in turn refers to repetitions he has not himself experienced. In other words, there is no first term in what is repeated that can be isolated from the series. My parents are not the ultimate terms of my individual subjectivity, but rather the middle terms of a much larger inter-subjectivity. At the limit, the series of all our loves transcends our experience, and links up with repetitions that are not our own, thereby acceding to a transubjective reality. The personal series of our loves thus refers both to a more vast transpersonal series and to more restricted series constituted by each love in particular.59

  What, then, is being repeated throughout these series? What is the “content” that is being affected or modified within these series? In clothed repetition, what is repeated is not a prior identity or originary sameness, but rather a virtual object or event (an “object = x”) which, in Lacan's terminology, is always displaced in relation to itself and has no fixed identity. The repeated object is a difference that differentiates itself in being repeated.60 There is indeed, one might say, an “essence” that governs the series of our loves, but this essence, Deleuze insists, “is always difference,” and this difference differs from itself every time it is repeated.61 It is a virtuality that is differenciated every time it is actualized. The variations, in other words, do not come from without, but express differential mechanisms which belong to the essence and origin of what is repeated. There is not an originary “thing” (model) which could eventually be uncovered behind the disguises, displacements, and illusions of repetition (copies); rather, disguise and displacement are the essence of repetition itself, which is in itself an original and positive principle.

  Repetition is constituted only with and through the disguises which affect the terms and relations of the real series, but it is so because it depends upon the virtual object as an immanent instance which operated above all by displacement … What is displaced and disguised in the series cannot and must not be identified, but exists and acts as the differenciator of difference. (DR 105, 300)

  The clothed repetition of an inverted Platonism must thus be distinguished from the naked repetitions (re-presentation) of Platonism itself.

  Re-petition opposes re-presentation: the prefix changes meaning, since in the latter case difference is said only in relation to the identical, while in the former it is the univocal which is said of the different … When the identity of things dissolves, being escapes to attain univocity [Being = difference], and begins to revolve around the different. (DR 67)

  Temporally, the differential object = x refers neither to an empirical moment nor to a mythical moment, but belongs essentially to the past, and as such is unrememberable in itself; what is repeated can never be represented in the present, but it always disguised in the roles and masks it produces. Clothed repetition, in other words, does not refer to something underneath the masks, but rather is formed from one mask to the other, in a movement of perpetual differentiation.

  3. Ungrounding. Third, these two immanent principles of difference and repetition can be said to come together in the notion of an “ungrounding,” a sans-fond. Plato saw chaos as a contradictory state that must be subject to an order or a law from the outside; the Demiurge subjugates a rebellious matter, imposing on it the effect of the Same. He thus reduced the Sophist to contradiction, to that supposed state of chaos, the lowest power and last degree of participation. In reality, however, the Sophist is not the being (or non-being) of contradiction, nor the being of the negative; rather, the Sophist is the one who raises everything to the level of simulacra—that is, to the level of difference—and who maintains and affirms them in that state. Far from being a new foundation, the simulacrum allows no installation of a foundation-ground; rather, it swallows up all foundations; it assures a universal collapse, an “un-founding” [effondement], but as a positive event, a “gay science.” The Platonic project of opposing the cosmos to chaos finds itself replaced by the immanent identity of chaos and cosmos, the “chaosmos.” There is no longer a thread to lead us out of Plato's cave, to inaugurate our ascent toward the transcendent Idea, but only, as Nietzsche saw, a deeper cave behind every cave, an abyss beneath every foundation.

  By “ungrounding” [Deleuze writes], we should understand the freedom of the non-mediated ground, the discovery of a ground behind every other ground, the relation between the groundless and the ungrounded, the immediate reflection of the formless and the superior form which constitutes the eternal return. (DR 67)

  Deleuze thus links the immanent identity of cosmos and chaos with Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return—the third form of repetition, beyond both naked and clothed repetition. The eternal return “is not an external order imposed upon the chaos of the world; on the contrary, the eternal return is the internal identity of the world and of chaos, the Chaosmos” (DR 299). If Plato reduced the simulacrum to the lowest power and last degree of participation, the eternal return raises the simulacrum to the highest power, the “nth” power. The “nth” power does not pass through varying degrees of participation (second, third …), but rather is immediately affirmed of chaos itself in order to constitute the highest power. Difference itself is a plastic and nomadic principle that operates beyond or beneath forms themselves; it is a principle that is “contemporaneous with the process of individuation, no less capable of dissolving and destroying individuals than of constituting them” (DR 38). The eternal return is the form of repetition that affirms difference itself, and raises it to the highest power.

  Repetition in the eternal return appears as the peculiar power of difference, and the displacement and disguise of that which repeats only reproduce the divergence and the decentering of the difference in a single movement of diaphora or transport. The eternal return affirms difference, it affirms dissemblance and disparateness, chance, multiplicity, and becoming. (
DR 300)

  4. Selection. Finally, the project of selection takes on a new form as well. The Platonic dialectic is dominated by the idea of establishing a criterion of selection between the thing itself and its simulacra.

  The question [Deleuze writes] is whether such a reaction [against Platonism] abandons the project of a selection among rivals, or on the contrary, as Spinoza and Nietzsche believed, draws up completely different methods of selection. Such methods would no longer concerns claims as acts of transcendence, but the manner in which an existing being is filled with immanence … Selection no longer concerns the claim, but power. (ECC, 137)

  This is what distinguishes the moral vision of the world (Plato, Kant) from an ethical vision of the world (Spinoza, Nietzsche). If morality consists in judging actions or beings by relating them to transcendent values, ethics evaluates what we do or think according to the immanent mode of existence it implies. What would these immanent methods entail? The selective difference can no longer be an external difference (between true and false claimants), but must depend on an internal difference (between active and reactive / passive power). The selection, in short, must be based on the purely immanent criterion of a thing's power or capacities: that is, by the manner in which it actively deploys its power by going to the limit of what it can do, or on the contrary, by the manner in which it is cut off from its capacity to act. An immanent ethical difference (good / bad) is in this way substituted for the transcendent moral opposition (Good / Evil). The “bad” is an exhausted and degenerating mode of existence that judges life from the perspective of its sickness, that devaluates life in the name of “higher” values (the True, the Good, the Beautiful). The “good” is an overflowing, ascending, and exceptional form of existence, a type of being that is able to transform itself depending on the forces it encounters, always increasing its power to live, always opening new possibilities of life.62 This ethical difference is internal to the existing being, and requires no appeal to transcendent criteria. “Only the philosophies of pure immanence escape Platonism,” writes Deleuze, “from the Stoics to Spinoza or Nietzsche.”63