Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  43.

  LS 265. On these points, see Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, 162–99.

  44.

  Plato, Republic, VII, 523b ff.

  45.

  For an analysis of Warhol's work in this context, see Paul Patton, “Anti-Platonism and Art,” in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Routledge, 1994), 141–56.

  46.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §289, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 414.

  47.

  What disengages the false from the model of truth (as the universal and the necessary—what is true “at all times and in all places”) is ultimately the form of time (see 12 Jun 1984). The phrase “power of the false” seems to be Deleuze's coinage, not Nietzsche's.

  48.

  See NP 103:

  The activity of life is like a power of falsehood: duping, dissimulating, dazzling, and seducing. But, in order to be brought into effect, this power of the false must be selected, redoubled or repeated, and thus elevated to a higher power … It is art that invents the lies that elevate the false to this higher affirmative power, that turns the will to deceive into something that is affirmed in the power of the false. Appearance, for the artist, no longer signifies the negation of the real in this world, but this kind of selection, this correction, this redoubling, this affirmation. Then truth perhaps takes on a new signification. Truth is appearance. Truth signifies the effectuation of power, raising it to the highest power. In Nietzsche, “we the artists” = “we the seekers after knowledge or truth.” (translation modified)

  See also Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Reason in Philosophy,” 6:

  For “appearance” in this case [the artist] means reality once more, only by way of selection, reinforcement, and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible—he is Dionysian. (484)

  49.

  See DR 319 n30. In the Theaetetus, for example, Socrates speaks of “two patterns eternally set before humanity, the one blessed and divine, the other godless and wretched” (176e). Similarly, the Timaeus (27d–28d) sets before the demiurge two possible models for the creation of the world, and before humanity two possible models for science (“Which of the patterns had the artificer in view when he created the world—the pattern of that which is unchangeable, or of that which is created?”). In TP 361–74, Deleuze analyses various “minor” sciences (Archimedean geometry, the physics of the atomists, the differential calculus, etc.) that were based on such a model of becoming, and replaced the hylomorphic model (the static relation of form–matter), which searches for laws by extracting constants, with a hydraulic model (the dynamic relation of material–forces), which placed the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation.

  50.

  Plato, Parmenides, 130d.

  51.

  See DR 127: “Insinuated throughout the Platonic cosmos, difference resists it yoke … It is as though there were a strange double which dogs Socrates’ footsteps and haunts even Plato's style, inserting itself into the repetitions and variations of that style.” On the effect that this “double” has on Plato's style, see DR 319 n29: “Plato's arguments are marked by stylistic reprisals and repetitions which testify to a meticulous attention to detail, as though there were an effort to ‘correct’ a theme in order to defend it against a neighboring, but dissimilar, theme that is ‘insinuating’ itself into the first.”

  52.

  See Deleuze's article “The Method of Dramatization,” in DI 94–116, esp. 94–5. See also DR 64: “Being (what Plato calls the Idea) ‘corresponds’ to the essence of the problem or the question as such. It is as though there were an ‘opening,’ a ‘gap,’ an ontological ‘fold’ which relates being and the question to one another.”

  53.

  For an analysis of the role of the “What is …?” question in Plato, see Richard Robinson, Plato's Earlier Dialectic, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), esp. Chapter 5, “Socratic Definition,” 49–60.

  54.

  Contemporary “antifoundationalism” implies, at the very least, the rejection of this Platonic form of questioning, of this search for a foundational essence.

  I cannot characterize my standpoint better [wrote Wittgenstein] than to say it is opposed to that which Socrates represents in the Platonic dialogues. For if asked what knowledge is (Theatatus 146a) I would list examples of knowledge, and add the words “and the like” … whereas when Socrates asks the question “What is knowledge?” he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, manuscript 302, ¶14, as quoted in Garth Hallett, A Commentary to Wittgenstein's “Philosophical Investigations” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 33–4.

  In general, however, Deleuze was hesitant about Wittgenstein's work, which he thought had had a pernicious effect on Anglo-American philosophy; see ABC W.

  55.

  Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §556, 301: “The question ‘What is that?’ is an imposition of meaning from some other viewpoint. ‘Essence,’ the ‘essential nature,’ is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity. At the bottom of it there always lies ‘What is that for me’ (for us, for all that lives, etc.).”

  56.

  See Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 119–20. On all these points, see DI 94–5, 105–7; DR 188; NP 75–8.

  57.

  On the relation between such “minor” questions and problematics, see Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 368:

  It should be borne in mind that sometimes it is a matter of finding a truth or falsity of a given proposition, which is the same as answering the “whether” question, i.e., whether it is or isn't so; while sometimes the question to be answered is (other things being equal) more difficult—when it is asked, for instance “By whom and how,” in which case something more has to be added. It is only questions like this, which leave part of the proposition blank, that the mathematicians call “problems.”

  58.

  See DR 16–19 (on Freud), and DR 87–8, 141–2 (on Plato).

  59.

  On the theme of series in Proust, see PS 67–83. One of the essential critiques that Deleuze and Guattari level against psychoanalysis is that it reduces the unconscious to the familial coordinates of the primal scene or the Oedipal triangle (“daddy–mommy–me”). See, for instance, AO 97, 91:

  The father, mother, and the self are directly coupled to the elements of the political and historical situation: the soldier, the cop, the occupier, the collaborator, the radical, the resister, the boss, the boss's wife … The family is by nature eccentric, decentered … There is always an uncle from America; a brother who went bad; an aunt who took off with a military man … The father and mother exist only as fragments … inductors or stimuli of varying, vague import that trigger processes of an entirely different nature.

  60.

  Jacques Lacan develops this theme most famously in his “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972), 55: “What is hidden is never but what is missing from its place, as the call slip puts it when speaking of a volume lost in the library. And even if the book be on an adjacent shelf or in the next slot, it would be hidden there, however visibly it may appear.” See also LS 40–1, which cites a parallel text of Lewis Carroll's.

  61.

  PS 75. Chapter 6 of this book (“Series and Group,” 67–83) explores the mechanisms of difference and repetition exemplified in Proust's serial conception of love: difference as the law or essence of the series; the repetition of the terms as variation and
displacement. In the conclusion of Part I (“The Image of Thought,” 94–102), Deleuze analyzes the “anti-Greek” image of thought found in Proust, implicitly aligning it with Nietzsche's theme of an inverted Platonism.

  62.

  See DR 54:

  Nietzsche reproaches all those selection procedures based upon the opposition or conflict with working to the advantage of the average forms and operating to the benefit of the “large number.” Eternal return alone effects the true selection, because it eliminates the average forms and uncovers “the superior form of everything that is.”

  63.

  ECC 127. For a discussion of the criteria of selection in an immanent ethics, see Essay 4 in this volume.

  64.

  DR 117; see also LS 261–2. The two formulas are derived from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1962), 77. Arthur Danto makes a similar point in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 171:

  The paradigm of a philosophical difference is between two worlds, one of which is sheer illusion, as the Indians believed this one is, and the other of which is real in the way we believe this very world is. Descartes’ problem of distinguishing waking experience from dream experience is a limited variation of the same question … A world of sheer determinism might be imagined indistinguishable from one in which everything happens by accident. A world in which God exists could never be told apart from one in which God didn't … Carnap would have said that such a choice is meaningless precisely because no observation(s) could be summoned to effect a discrimination … Whatever the case, it is plain that philosophical differences are external to the worlds they discriminate.

  65.

  DR ix (translation modified). See also DR 301: “The history of the long error is the history of representation, the history of icons.”

  66.

  See Gilles Deleuze, “Lettre-préface,” in Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, trans. Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 8.

  67.

  See LS 129: “Nietzsche takes little interest in what happened after Plato, maintaining that it was necessarily the continuation of a long decadence.”

  Essay 2: Univocity

  The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze's Ontology of Immanence

  1.

  See FB 11 and 25 Nov 1980.

  2.

  DR 39 (35–42 contains Deleuze's “song” of univocity). See also LS 177–80.

  3.

  Deleuze's interpretation of Duns Scotus relies primarily on Étienne Gilson's definitive Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses positions fondamentales (Paris: J. Vrin, 1952). In English, see Gilson's historical discussions in History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London: Sheed & Ward, 1955), 454–71, and Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952), 84–95.

  4.

  Deleuze almost certainly developed the notion of univocity while researching his “secondary” thesis on Spinoza for the Doctorat d’État. François Dosse, however, notes that Deleuze had largely completed his thesis on Spinoza in the late 1950s, before the publication of Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1962, even though the thesis was not published until 1968. See his Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 118, 143.

  5.

  4 Jan 1974. This seminar includes Deleuze's discussion of the Scholastic approaches to the concept of Being.

  6.

  Deleuze's 1956 essay, “Bergson's Conception of Difference,” trans. Melissa McMahon, in John Mullarky, ed., The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) is a reading of Bergson through the prism of Heidegger's problematic of ontological difference. See Constantin V. Boundas's analyses in “Deleuze-Bergsonian Ontology of the Virtual,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (London: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 81–106, which makes the comparison. Miguel de Beistegui's Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004) is a superb analysis of the Heidegger–Deleuze relation.

  7.

  DR 66. In the preface to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze cites “Heidegger's ever more pronounced orientation toward a philosophy of ontological Difference” (DR ix) as one of the factors that led him to write the book. The only direct confrontation, however, is the long footnote in Chapter 1 (DR 64–6), which concerns the notion of difference in Heidegger's thought. The note was apparently inserted at the insistence of Deleuze's thesis advisors, who no doubt recognized the subterranean battle lines being drawn in the book.

  8.

  Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 172.

  9.

  SPP 63. To my knowledge, Deleuze is the only commentator to have drawn this link between Duns Scotus and Spinoza on the question of univocity.

  10.

  See Reiner Schürmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 172–92. While recognizing Eckhart's affinities with immanence (see 176, 252 n56) and with an immanent causality (177), Schürmann none the less attempts to provide a qualified analogical interpretation of his teachings (179).

  11.

  For Thomas Aquinas's formulations of analogy, see Summa Theologica 1.13.5. The way of affirmation found its greatest literary expression in Dante's Divine Comedy, and perhaps its most important modern proponent in Charles Williams. See, most notably, Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (London: Faber & Faber, 1943).

  12.

  See Spinoza, Short Treatise, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 65–90, as well as Deleuze's commentary in SPP 104–5 and EPS 49–51, 55–61, 70–7.

  13.

  See Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), particularly Chapter 2.

  14.

  See Harry Austryn Wolfson, From Philo to Spinoza: Two Studies in Religious Philosophy (New York: Behrman House, 1977).

  15.

  On the distinction between these three types of causality, see 22 Mar 1983.

  16.

  In his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Alain Badiou rightly notes the influence of Heidegger on Deleuze, but wrongly presents Deleuze's “univocal ontology” as if it were a Neo-Platonic “philosophy of the One.” For instance, when Badiou writes that, in Deleuze, “the paradoxical or super-eminent One engenders, in an immanent manner, a procession of beings, whose univocal sense it distributes” (26), he is giving a description of an emanative ontology, not a univocal one. In general, like many medievals, Badiou combines transitive, emanative, and immanent elements in his treatment of univocity, thereby seeming to confirm Deleuze's adage, cited above, that univocity is “the strangest thought, the most difficult to think.”

  17.

  Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

  18.

  See in particular Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). John D. Caputo has analyzed Derrida's theological appropriations in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

  19.

  TRM 261.The term “crowned anarchy” is taken from what Deleuze considers to be Antonin Artaud's “masterpiece” (AO 211), his novelized biography of the third-century Roman emperor, Heliogabalus, or The Crowned Anarchist, trans. Alexis Lykiard (Clerkenwell: Solar, 2004).

  20.

  Our analysis follows closely Deleuze's presentation of the univocity of modality in SPP, especially 93–4 (en
try on the “Necessary”) and 69–71 (entry on “Freedom”).

  21.

  Spinoza, Ethics, I, 17, scholia (“Neither intellect nor will pertain to God's nature”) and I, 32, corollary 1 (“God does not produce any effect by freedom of the will”).

  22.

  For the first argument, see Spinoza, Ethics, I, 33, scholia 2: “If God had decreed, concerning Nature and its order, something other than what he did decree, that is, had willed and conceived something else concerning Nature, he would necessarily have had an intellect other than he now has, and a will other than he now has.” For the second argument, see Ethics, I, appendix: “If God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something he lacks.”

  23.

  On the contrast that Spinoza establishes between abstractions and common notions, see SPP 44–8, 54–8.

  24.

  SPP 70. Spinoza none the less distinguishes between the “idea of God” and his “infinite understanding” or infinite intellect; see SPP 80.

  25.

  Deleuze discusses these illusions in SPP 20, 60. For the illusion of final causes, see Ethics, I, appendix (‘all final causes are nothing but human fictions”); for the illusion of free will, see Ethics, V, preface (“the forces of the body cannot in any way be determined by those of the mind”), as well as III, 2, scholia (“no one has yet determined what a body can do”); for the theological illusion, see Ethics, I, appendix (“they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God”).