by Daniel Smith
With these Nietzschean reflections in hand, I want to turn to my second text of an immanent ethics, which comes from Leibniz's New Essays Concerning Human Understanding.23 Although the names of Nietzsche and Leibniz are not usually linked together by philosophers, the relation between the two thinkers is not an accidental one. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche praised Leibniz's critique of consciousness and his differential conception of the unconscious, the profundity of which he says, “has not been exhausted to this day.”24 In the New Essays, Leibniz asks: What would it mean to act “freely,” given this theory of the drives? Leibniz asks us to consider a simple example. Suppose I am hesitating between staying at home and writing this paper, or going out to a tavern to have a drink with some friends. How do I go about making a decision between these two? The error, he suggests, would be to objectify these two options, as if “staying in” or “going out” were objects that could be weighed in a balance, and as if deliberation were an act of judgment in which the “I”—my self, my ego, my intellect—attempts to assess the direction toward which the balance is leaning, “all things being equal.” But in fact these two options are not isolatable “objects” but rather two drives, or as Leibniz calls them, “motives” or “inclinations” of the soul. The strength of Leibniz's analysis in the New Essays is to show that drives or motives are not simple things, but rather complex “orientations” or “tendencies,” each of which integrates within itself a host of “minute inclinations.” My inclination to go to the tavern, for instance, includes not only the minute perception of the effect of the alcohol, or the taste and temperature of the drink, but also the clinking of glasses in the bar, the smoke in the air, the conversation with friends, the temporary lifting of one's solitude, and so on. The same is true of the inclination to stay at home and work, which includes the minute perceptions of the rustling of paper, the noise of my fingers tapping at the computer, the quality of the silence of the room when I stop tapping, the comfort (or frustration) that I find in my work. Both inclinations are formed within an unconscious complex of auditive, gustative, olfactory, and visual perceptions, an entire perceptio-inclinatory ensemble. Just as we have unconscious perceptions, we likewise are constituted by “insensible inclinations” or “disquietudes” of which we are not aware, but which pull us simultaneously in a multitude of directions.25 Not only are all of us constituted by a multitude of unconscious drives; each drive is itself multiple, an infinite complex of minute perceptions and inclinations. It is these drives and motives that constitute the very tissue of the soul, constantly folding it in all directions. This is what Locke termed the “uneasiness” of the soul, its state of constant disquiet and disequilibrium, and Leibniz, its dark background, the fuscum subnigrum.
What, then, is the act of deliberation? At the moment when I am torn between staying home and going out for a drink, the tissue of my soul is in a state of disequilibrium—oscillating between two complex perceptive poles (the tavern and the study), each of which is itself swarming with an infinity of minute perceptions and inclinations. Here, the movement of the soul, as Leibniz says, more properly resembles a pendulum or “spring” rather than a balance—and often a rather wildly swinging pendulum at that.26 The question of decision is: On which side will I “fold” my soul? With which minute inclinations and perceptions will I make a “decisive” fold? Arriving at a decision is a matter of “integrating” (to use a mathematical term) the minute perceptions and inclinations in a “distinguished” perception or a “remarkable” inclination.
The error of the usual schema of judgment is that, in objectifying my two options—staying home or going out—as if they were weights in a balance, it presumes that they remain the same in front of me, and that the deliberating self likewise remains the same, simply assessing the two options in terms of some sort of decision procedure (my interest, a calculus of probabilities, an assessment of potential consequences, and so on). But this falsifies the nature of deliberation: if neither the options nor the self ever change, how could I ever arrive at a decision? The truth of the matter is that, during the entire time the deliberation is going on, the self is constantly changing, and consequently is modifying the two feelings that are agitating it. What Leibniz (as well as Bergson, significantly) calls a “free” act will be an act that effectuates the amplitude of my soul at a certain moment, the moment the act is undertaken. It is an act that integrates the small perceptions and small inclinations into a remarkable inclination, which then becomes an inclination of the soul. But this integration requires time; there is a psychic integration and a psychic time of integration. Thus, at 10:15 p.m. I have a vague urge to go to the tavern. Why do I not go? Because at that moment, it remains in the state of a minute inclination, a small perception, a swarm. The motivation is there, but if I still remain at home working, I do not know the amplitude of my soul. Indeed, most of the time my actions do not correspond to the amplitude of my soul.
There is no reason [says Deleuze] to subject all the actions we undertake to the criterion: Is it free or not? Freedom is only for certain acts. There are all sorts of acts that do not have to be confronted with the problems of freedom. They are done solely, one could say, to calm our disquietude: all our habitual and machinal acts. We will speak of freedom only when we pose the question of an act capable or not of filling the amplitude of the soul at a given moment. (24 Nov 1987)
At 10:30 p.m., I finally say to myself, I'm going out for a drink. Is that because the drive to go out has won out over the drive to stay home working? Even that simplifies the operation, since what came into play may have been other motives that remain largely unknown to us, such as (these are examples given by Nietzsche in Daybreak): “the way we habitually expend our energy”; “or our indolence, which prefers to do what is easiest”; “or an excitation of our imagination brought about at the decisive moment by some immediate, very trivial event”; or “quite incalculable physical influences”; or “some emotion or other [that] happens quite by chance to leap forth.”27 As Bergson puts it, in terms very similar to Leibniz's,
all the time that the deliberation is going on, the self is changing and is consequently modifying the [often unknown] feelings that agitate it. A dynamic series of states is thus formed which permeate and strengthen one another, and which will lead by a natural evolution to a free act … In reality there are not two tendencies, or even two directions, but a self which lives and develops by means of its very hesitations, until the free action drops from it like an over-ripe fruit.28
In Leibniz's terminology, to say that we are “free” means that we are “inclined without being necessitated.” A free act is simply an act that expresses the whole of the soul at a given moment of duration—that is, an act that fills the amplitude of the soul at a given moment.
Parenthetically, one might contrast this theory of decision with the one proposed by Derrida in his well-known essay “Force of Law.” Both Derrida and Deleuze insist that decision presupposes an Idea, almost in the Kantian sense. For Derrida, however, these Ideas—for instance, the Idea of justice, which would guide our juridical decisions—are, as he says, “infinitely transcendent,” and hence the very condition of possibility of their effectuation is their impossibility. For Deleuze, such Ideas are purely immanent; the Idea is nothing other than the problematic multiplicity of these drives and minute inclinations, which constitutes the condition of any decision. In this sense, one might say that Deleuze “replaces the power of judgment with the force of decision” (ECC 49).
THE THEORY OF DESIRE
With these two analyses now in hand—Nietzsche's theory of the drives, as a way of approaching the nature of modes of existence; and Leibniz's theory of “freedom,” in relation to his theory of minute inclinations—we can now turn to the question of desire, and the problem of how desire can desire its own repression. (What Deleuze means by the term “desire” is, of course, different from its usual usage: it refers to the state of our unconscious drives and inclinations.) There a
re a number of consequences that follow from these analyses.
First, there is a school of economics that sees human as rational agents who always act in such a way as to maximize their own interests (what is sometimes called “rational choice theory”). Deleuze's distinction between desire and interest seeks to put that claim in its proper context. Someone may have an interest, say, in becoming an academic, so he or she applies to the university, writes a thesis, attends conferences, and goes on the job market in hopes of securing an academic position. One may indeed have an interest in all that, which can be pursued in a highly rational manner. But that interest exists as a possibility only within the context of a particular social formation: if one can pursue that interest in a concerted way, it is first of all because one's desire—one's drives and impulses—is itself invested in the social formation that makes that interest possible. One's drives have been constructed and assembled in a way that allows one to have this particular interest. This is why Deleuze can say that desire as such is always positive. Normally, we tend to think of desire in terms of lack: if we desire something, it is because we lack it. But Deleuze reconfigures the concept of desire: what we desire, what we invest our desire in, is a social formation, and in this sense desire is always positive. Lack appears only at the level of interest, because the social formation (the infrastructure) in which we have already invested our desire has in turn produced that lack. The result of this analysis is that we can see why the proper object of a purely immanent ethics is not one's conscious will or one's conscious decisions, but neither is it my pre-conscious interests (class interest, in the Marxist sense). The true object of an immanent ethics is desire (the drives), and thus it entails, as both Spinoza and Nietzsche showed, an entire theory of affectivity at the basis of any theory of ethics.
The second consequence follows from the first. The primacy of the question of desire over both interest and will is the reason Deleuze says that the fundamental problem of political philosophy is one that was formulated most clearly by Spinoza: “Why do people fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” (AO 29). Why do we invest in a social system that constantly represses us, thwarts our interests, and introduces lack into our lives? Theoretically, the answer is straightforward: it is because our desires—that is, our drives and affects—are not our own. They are, if I can put it this way, part of the capitalist infrastructure; they are not simply our own individual mental or psychic realities (“There is no particular form of existence that can be labeled ‘psychic reality’” [AO 30]). Nothing makes this more obvious that the effects of advertising and marketing, which are aimed at the direct manipulation of the drives and affects. I almost automatically reach for one brand of toothpaste rather than another, since I have a fervent interest in having fresh breath and cavity-free teeth—but this is because my desire is already invested in the social formation that creates that interest, and that creates the sense of lack I feel if my breath is not fresh or my teeth are not white.
Third, the difference between interest and desire could be said to parallel the difference between the rational and the irrational. Once interests have been defined within the confines of a society, what is “rational” is the way people pursue those interests and attempt to realize them—the interest for a job, or for cavity-free teeth. But beneath that, one finds desire—investments of desire that are not to be confused with investments of interest, and on which interests depend for their determination and very distribution: “an enormous flow, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that constitute the delirium of this society” (DI 263). As Deleuze will say,
Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—it is in no way sheltered from the irrational, but traversed by it and only defined by a certain kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift. Everything about capitalism is rational, except capital … A stock market is a perfectly rational mechanism, you can understand it, learn how it works; capitalists know how to use it; and yet it is completely delirious, it is demented … It is just like theology: everything about it is quite rational—if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation, which are themselves irrational elements. (DI 262–3, translation modified)
Fourth, how does Deleuze conceptualize this movement of desire? Interestingly, Anti-Oedipus can be read as an explicit attempt to rework the fundamental theses of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. Kant presents the second critique as a theory of desire, and he defines desire, somewhat surprisingly, in causal terms: desire is “a faculty which by means of its representations is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those representations.” In its lower form, the products of desire are fantasies and superstitions; but in its higher form (the will), the products of desire are acts of freedom under the moral law—actions which are, however, irreducible to mechanistic causality. Deleuze takes up Kant's model of desire, but modifies it in two fundamental ways. First, if desire is productive or causal, then its product is itself real (and not illusory or noumenal); the entire socio-political field, Deleuze argues, must be seen as the historically determined product of desire. Second, to maintain this claim, Deleuze formulates an entirely new theory of “Ideas.” In Kant, the postulates of practical reason are found in the transcendent Ideas of God, World, and the Soul, which are themselves derived from the types of judgment of relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive). In response, Deleuze, in the first chapters of Anti-Oedipus, formulates a purely immanent theory of Ideas, in which desire is constituted by a set of constituting passive syntheses (connective, disjunctive, conjunctive).
Deleuze's theory of desire, however, is also developed partly in relation to Lacan, but by taking Lacan's thought in a direction that most Lacanians would never go, and indeed they would insist that one cannot go there. Anti-Oedipus, as its subtitle (“Capitalism and Schizophrenia”) indicates, takes psychosis as its model for the unconscious. Lacan himself had said that the unconscious appears in its purest form in psychosis, but that in effect the unconscious remains inaccessible in psychotics, precisely because psychotics refuse symbolization. Thus, the dimension of the Real, in Lacan, can only appear as a kind of negative moment in Lacan, as a kind of “gap” or “rupture” in the field of immanence, thereby reintroducing an element of transcendence. Deleuze, in this respect, effectively inverts Lacan, and presents Anti-Oedipus in its entirety as a theory of the Real that is described in all its positivity—that is, as a sub-representative field defined by differential partial objects or intensities that enter into indirect syntheses; pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible (transverse connections, polyvocal conjunctions, included disjunctions); signs of desire that compose a signifying chain, but which are themselves non-signifying, and so on (AO 309). It is an analysis of delirium, showing that the delirium that threatens the heart of the self (schizophrenia) is one and the same thing as the delirium that exists at the heart of our society, and which appears most clearly in capitalism—a monetary mass that “exists” nowhere, is controlled by no one, and is literally delirious in its operations.
Finally, this is a way of suggesting that the concept of freedom—which plays such a decisive role in Kant's philosophy—also assumes a prominent place in Deleuze's own philosophy of desire, albeit in a new form: namely, as the question of the conditions for the production of the new. But as Deleuze frequently says, following thinkers like Salomon Maimon, what needed to happen in post-Kantian philosophy was a substitution of a viewpoint of internal genesis for the Kantian viewpoint of external condition. This is what one finds in Deleuze's post-Kantian (Nietzschean) reading of Leibniz: the idea that the “I think” of consciousness bathes in an unconscious, an unconscious of drives, motives, and inclinations, which contain the differentials of what appears in consciousness, and which would therefore perform the genesis of the conditioned as a function of the condition. In this sense, Deleuze's ethical philosophy might at first sight appear to be
the opposite of Kant's ethical theory, with the latter's appeal to the transcendence of the Moral Law. Yet Kant himself insisted on a principle of immanence throughout his philosophy, even if he betrayed it in his books on practical philosophy. This is perhaps why, in Deleuze, the content of an immanent ethics is taken from Nietzsche and Spinoza, but its immanent form winds up being taken primarily from Kant. In this sense, one could say that Deleuze's work, with regard to practical and political philosophy, in the end is at once an inversion as well as a completion of Kant's critical philosophy.
