Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  So we conclude with three “images”—difference-in-itself as a pure relation, intensity as the sufficient reason of sensibility, and the being of problems that provoke thought—which in fact can never be given in experience, but rather constitute the conditions of the real. And this, indeed, is the upshot of the scenario we have tried to present here under the rubric of Logic and Existence. The problem we began with was: How can thought think existence? How can thought get out of its concepts and logical principles and think the real? Our screenplay presented scenes from the three great trajectories in the history of modern philosophy that attempted to resolve this problem, drawing their inspiration from one of the three principles of classical logic: identity (culminating in Leibniz, the pre-Kantian), non-contradiction (culminating in Hegel, the post-Kantian), and the excluded middle (culminating in the existentialists). But when thought uses the principles of logic, in its attempt to penetrate existence, it remains in its own element (identity); it is thought imposing its own principles on existence. Our concluding images—which point to a sequel—show how Deleuze's contribution was to have inverted the procedure, so to speak. For Deleuze, thought must think something that is contrary to the principles of thought, it must think difference, it must think that which is absolutely different from thought but which none the less gives itself to thought, and wrests thought from its natural stupor. This is no longer thought attempting to think existence, but existence forcing itself on thought, forcing itself to be thought, albeit in the form of an intelligible problem or Idea. There is thus an intelligibility to Being, there are Ideas in sensibility itself, but they always present themselves under a problematic form, as a difference that forces itself to be thought. In this sense, one could say that Deleuze remains a rationalist, but it is a modified rationalism, a rejuvenated rationalism, a rationalism unbound—in short, perhaps, an empiricism.

  Fin.

  PART II

  Deleuze's Philosophical System

  ESSAY 6

  Aesthetics

  Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality

  A

  esthetics since Kant has been haunted by a seemingly intractable dualism. On the one hand, aesthetics designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as a reflection on real experience. The first is the objective element of sensation, which is conditioned by the a priori forms of space and time (the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason); the second is the subjective element of sensation, which is expressed in the feeling of pleasure and pain (the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Critique of Judgment). Deleuze argues that these two aspects of the theory of sensation (aesthetics) can be reunited only at the price of a radical recasting of the transcendental project as formulated by Kant, pushing it in the direction of what Schelling once called a “superior empiricism”; it is only when the conditions of experience in general become the genetic conditions of real experience that they can be reunited with the structures of works of art. In this case, the principles of sensation would at the same time constitute the principles of composition of the work of art, and conversely it would be the structure of the work of art that reveals these conditions.1 In what follows, I would like to examine the means by which Deleuze attempts to overcome this duality in aesthetics, following this single thread through the network of his thought, even if in tracing this line we sacrifice a certain amount of detail in favor of a certain perspicuity. The first part analyzes Deleuze's theory of sensation; the second, his attempt to connect this theory with the structures of the work of art.

  THE THEORY OF SENSATION: “THE BEING OF THE SENSIBLE”

  1. Beyond Recognition and Common Sense. Deleuze frequently begins his discussions of aesthetics by referring to a passage in the Republic where Plato distinguishes between two types of sensations: those that leave the mind tranquil and inactive, and those that force it to think. The first are objects of recognition (“this is a finger”), for which sensation is a more or less adequate judge.

  In these cases [writes Plato], a man is not compelled to ask of thought the question, “What is a finger?” for the sight never intimates to the mind that a finger is other than a finger … There is nothing here which invites or excites intelligence.2

  Deleuze defines recognition, in Kantian terms, as the harmonious exercise of our faculties on an object that is supposedly identical for each of these faculties: it is the same object that can be seen, remembered, imagined, conceived, and so on. To be sure, each faculty (sensibility, imagination, memory, understanding, reason) has its own particular given, and its own way of acting upon the given. We recognize an object, however, when one faculty locates its given as identical to that of another, or more precisely, when all the faculties together relate their given and relate themselves to a form of identity in the object. Recognition consequently finds its correlate in the ideal of common sense, which is defined by Kant, not as a special “sense” or a particular empirical faculty, but by the supposed identity of the subject that functions as the foundation of our faculties, as the principle that unites them in this harmonious accord. These are two poles of what Deleuze terms the “dogmatic” image of thought and which constitutes one of the main objects of his critique: the subjective identity of the self and its faculties (common sense), and the objective identity of the thing to which these faculties refer (recognition). Thus in Kant, the “object in general” or “object = x” is the objective correlate of the “I think” or the subjective unity of consciousness.3

  But there also exists a second kind of sensation in the world, continues Plato, sensations that force us to think, that give rise to thought. These are what Deleuze will term “signs,” for reasons we shall see below; they are no longer objects of recognition but objects of a fundamental encounter. More precisely, they are no longer even recognizable as objects, but rather refer to sensible qualities or relations that are caught up in an unlimited becoming, a perpetual movement of contraries. A finger is never anything but a finger, but a large finger can at the same time be said to be small in relation to a third, just as what is hard is never hard without also being soft, and so on. Recognition measures and limits these paradoxical qualities by relating them to an object, but in themselves, these “simultaneously opposed sensations,” says Plato, perplex the soul and set it in motion; they force it to think because they demand “further inquiry.” Rather than a voluntary and harmonious accord, the faculties here enter into an involuntary discord that lies at the base of Plato's model of education; sensibility compels the intelligence to distinguish the large and the small from the sensible appearances that confuse them, which in turn compels the memory to begin to remember the intelligible Forms.4

  It is sensations of this second type, Deleuze argues, that constitute the basis for any possible aesthetic. Phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, Straus, and Maldiney had already gone a long way toward freeing aesthetics from the presupposition of recognition. They argued that sensation, or rather “sense experience” [le sentir], must be analyzed not only in so far as it relates sensible qualities to an identifiable object (the figurative moment), but in so far as each quality constitutes a field that stands on its own, even though it ceaselessly interferes with other qualifies (the “pathic” moment).5 But they still remained tied to a form of common sense, setting up “natural perception” as a norm, and locating its conditions in a sensible form or Gestalt that organizes the perceptive field as a function of an “intentional consciousness” or “lived body” situated within the horizon of the world. If Proust and Signs occupies a critical place in Deleuze's œuvre, it is because À la recherche du temps perdu, in Deleuze's reading, presents itself as a vast experiment with sensations of this second type, but one freed from the presuppositions of both recognition and common sense. In Proust, these signs no longer simply indicate contrary sensible qualities, as in Plato, but instead testify to a much more complicated netwo
rk of implicated orders of signs: the frivolous signs of society life, the deceptive signs of love, the sensuous signs of the material world, and the essential signs of art, which will come to transform the others. Proust's narrator will discover that, when he thought he was wasting his time, he had in fact already embarked on an intellectual apprenticeship to these signs, a search for their meaning, a revelation of their truth. In each of these orders, the search inevitably passes through two essential moments: an “objectivist temptation” that seeks for the meaning of the sign in the object emitting it (his lover, the madeleine), and a “subjective compensation” that seeks their meaning in a subjective association of ideas. But in each case, the hero discovers that the truth of signs “transcends the states of subjectivity no less than the properties of the object”; it is only in the work of art that their nature will be revealed and their truth made manifest.6

  This distinction between the recognized object and the encountered sign, Deleuze argues, corresponds to a more general distinction between two images of thought. The “dogmatic” or rationalist image can be summarized in several interrelated postulates.

  1. Thought as thought formally contains the truth (innateness of ideas, a priori nature of concepts); thinking is the voluntary and natural exercise of a faculty, and the thinker possesses a natural love for the truth, a philia (hence the image of the thinker as a philo-sophos, a friend or lover of wisdom).

  2. We fall into error, we are diverted from the truth, by external forces that are foreign to thought and distract the mind from its vocation (the body, passions).

  3. Therefore, all we need in order to think truthfully is a “method” that will ward off error and bring us back to the truthful nature of thought.7

  It is against this more or less Greek image that Deleuze counterposes the empirical power of signs and the possibility of a thought “without image.”

  1. Thinking is never the product of a voluntary disposition, but rather the result of forces that act upon thought involuntarily from the outside; we search for truth, we begin to think, only when compelled to do so, when we undergo a violence that impels us to such a search, that wrests us from our natural stupor. What calls for thought, says Heidegger, is the perpetual fact that “we are not yet thinking.”8

  2. The negative of thought is not error—nor even superstition (Lucretius, Spinoza), illusion (Kant), or alienation (Hegel, Marx)—but more profound enemies that prevent the genesis of thought: convention, opinion, clichés, stupidity [bêtise].9

  3. Finally, what leads us to truth is not “method” but “constraint” and “chance”. No method can determine in advance what compels us to think; it is rather the fortuitousness of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what it forces us to think.

  Who is it that in fact searches for the truth? It is not the friend, says Proust, exercising a natural desire for truth in dialogue with others, but rather the jealous lover, under the pressure of his beloved's lies, and the anguish they inflict.10 The jealous lover is forced to confront a problem, whose coordinates are discovered, not through Socrates’ “What is …?” question, but by posing the types of minor questions that Plato rejected: What happened?, When?, Where?, How?, With whom? It is the problem that imposes the “claws of necessity” on the search for truth: not a “categorical imperative,” as Kant would say, but a “problematic imperative,” the imperative imposed by a problem. On this score, Deleuze once said that he considered himself to be a “pure metaphysician,” and that he had little interest in the Heideggerian and Derridean themes of “overcoming” metaphysics. If the old metaphysics is a bad one, he says, then we simply need to construct a new metaphysics; in this sense, he says he considered himself one of the most naive philosophers of his generation (N 88). But this is perhaps a slightly feigned move on Deleuze's part. For if one asked of Deleuze the nature of his metaphysics, or the nature of ultimate reality, or the nature of Being itself, his response would be: Being is a problem. Being always presents itself to us under a problematic form, as a series of problematizations. Whence the two dense chapters at the heart of Difference and Repetition: Chapter 4 (“The Ideal Synthesis of Difference”) analyzes the ideal and intelligible nature of the problems that constitute Being itself; Chapter 5 (“The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible”) analyzes the way these problems are given us—under the sensible form of an intensity that does violence to thought. If Deleuze has always considered himself an empiricist, then, it is because, “on the path which leads to that which is to be thought, everything begins with sensibility.”11

  What, then, is a sign? In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze assigns two primary characteristics to the sign. The first is that the sign riots the soul, renders it perplexed, as if the encountered sign were the bearer of a problem. The second is that the sign is something that can only be felt or sensed [ce qui ne peut être que senti]; as Francis Bacon says, it acts directly on the nervous system, rather than passing through the detour of the brain.12 It is this second characteristic that reveals most clearly the difference between the encountered sign and the recognized object: the latter can not only be felt, but can also be remembered, imagined, conceived, and so on, and thus assumes the accord of the faculties that Kant calls common sense. By taking the encountered sign as the primary element of sensation, Deleuze is pointing, objectively, to a science of the sensible freed from the model of recognition and, subjectively, to a use of the faculties freed from the ideal of common sense. Now Kant himself had already hinted at this latter possibility in the Critique of Judgment where, for the first and only time, he considered a faculty freed from the form of common sense: namely, the faculty of the imagination. Up to that point, Kant had been content to create as many common senses as there were natural interests of reasonable thought (knowledge, morality, reflection), common senses which differed according to the conditions of what was to be recognized (object of knowledge, moral value, aesthetic effect …). In the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, the faculties are made to enter into a harmonious accord in the speculative interest, in which the understanding legislates over and determines the function of the other faculties (“logical common sense”); in the Critique of Practical Reason, the faculties enter into a different accord under the legislation of reason in the practical interest (“moral common sense”); and even in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” of the Critique of Judgment, the reflective imagination is still said to be under the “aesthetic common sense.”13

  But the third Critique opened up the possibility of a new domain, a “disjunctive” theory of the faculties. In the “Analytic of the Sublime,” the faculty of the imagination is forced to confront its own limit, its own maximum; faced with an immense object (the desert, a mountain, a pyramid) or a powerful object (a storm at sea, an erupting volcano), the imagination strives to comprehend these sensations in their totality, but is unable to do so. It reaches the limits of its power, and finds itself reduced to impotency. This failure gives rise to a pain, a cleavage in the subject between what can be imagined and what can be thought, between the imagination and reason. But what is it that pushes the imagination to this limit, what forces it to attempt to unite the immensity of the sensible world into a whole? Kant answers that it is nothing other than the faculty of reason itself; absolute immensity and power are Ideas of reason, Ideas that can be thought but cannot be known or imagined, and which are therefore accessible only to the faculty of reason. The sublime thus presents us with a dissension, a “discordant accord,” between the demands of reason and the power of the imagination. But this painful admission also gives rise to a pleasure: in confronting its own limit, the imagination at the same time goes beyond this limit, albeit in a negative way, by representing to itself the inaccessibility of this rational Idea. It presents to itself the fact that the unpresentable exists, and that it exists in sensible nature.14 From the empirical point of view, this limit is inaccessible and unimaginable; but from the transcendental point of view, it is that which can onl
y be imagined, that which is accessible only to the imagination in its transcendental exercise.

  The lesson of the “Analytic of the Sublime” is that it discovers this discordant accord as the condition of possibility for the harmonious accords of the faculties that Kant evoked in the first two critiques, an accord that is not derived from preexistent external “facts” (the “fact” of knowledge, the “fact” of morality), but is engendered internally in the subject. It is this possibility of a disjunctive use of the faculties, glimpsed fleetingly by Kant with regard to the imagination, that Deleuze will extend to the entire critical project. Rather than having all the faculties harmoniously united in an act of recognition, each faculty is made to confront its own differential limit and is pushed to its involuntary and “transcendental” exercise, an exercise in which something is communicated violently from one faculty to another, but does not form a common sense. Such is the use of the faculties put forward by Proust: a sensibility that apprehends and receives signs; an intelligence, memory, and imagination that interpret them and explicate their meaning, each according to a certain type of sign; and a pure thought which discovers their essence as the sufficient reason of the sign and its meaning. What Deleuze calls a sign is therefore neither a recognizable object nor even a particular quality of an object, but constitutes the limit of the faculty of sensibility (and each faculty in its turn must confront its own limit). As Deleuze puts it, the sign is not a sensible being, nor even a purely qualitative being (aisthēton), but the being of the sensible (aisthēteon). From the empirical point of view, the sign, in and of itself, is unsensible, not in a contingent way, as if it were too small or too distant to be grasped by our senses, but in an essential way: namely, from the point of view of recognition and common sense, in which sensibility can only grasp what can also be grasped by the other faculties. But from the transcendental point of view, the sign is what can only be felt or sensed, that which is accessible only to the faculty of sensibility in its transcendental exercise. The sign, in short, points to a pure aesthetic lying at the limit of sensibility: an immanent Idea or differential field beyond the norms of common sense and recognition. What, then, is this Idea of sensibility? What are these forces of the “outside” that none the less give rise to thought?