Essays on Deleuze
Page 66
7.
The analysis of images of thought is one of the central objects of Deleuze's philosophy: see in general PS 94–102, NP 103–10, and DR 127–67. More specific analysis of these “noological” themes can be found in LS 127–33 (height, depth, and surface as coordinates of thought) and TP 3–25 (the tree and the rhizome as images of thought), 374–80 (the State-form versus “nomad” thought), and 474–500 (the smooth and the striated).
8.
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 28. Heidegger, however, still retains the theme of a desire or philia, substituting metaphors of the “gift” for those of violence, and adhering to the subjective presupposition of a pre-ontological understanding of Being. If Artaud plays an important role in Deleuze's thinking, it is because his case presents, in its clearest form, the fact that what thought is forced to think is its own impotence, its own incapacity to take on form on its own; Artaud's problem was not to orient his thought, but simply to manage to think something. Hence the determining importance of images of thought: can being mad belong to thought in principle, or is it simply a contingent feature of the brain that should be considered as a simple fact? See DR 146–7 (commentary on Artaud) and 321 n11 (criticisms of Heidegger).
9.
Deleuze has analyzed each of these figures of negativity: on stupidity, see NP 105 (“stupidity is a structure of thought as such … it is not error or a tissue of errors … there are imbecile thoughts, imbecile discourses that are made up entirely of truths”); on convention, see PS 95 (“truths remain arbitrary and abstract so long as they are based on the goodwill of thinking. Only the conventional is explicit … Minds communicate to each other only the conventional”); on opinion, see WP 144–50 (“opinion is a thought closely molded on the form of recognition”); on clichés, particularly as they pose a problem for the artist, see MI 208–9 and FB 71–80.
10.
According to Proust, jealousy is not a disease of love but its truth, its finality, and all love is “a dispute over evidence,” “a delirium of signs” (PS 132, 138).
11.
DR 144. See also EPS 149:
One is always struck by the diverse inspirations of empiricists and rationalists. One group is surprised by what fails to surprise the others. If we listen to the rationalists, truth and freedom are, above all, rights; they wonder how we can lose our rights, fall into error or lose our freedom … From an empiricist viewpoint, everything is inverted: what is surprising is that men sometimes manage to understand truth, sometimes manage to understand one other, sometimes manage to free themselves from what fetters them.
12.
Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with David Sylvester (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), 18.
13.
Kant presents this theory of common sense in the Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), §18–22 (81–9), §40 (150–4).
14.
See Kant, Critique of Judgment, §29, General Remark (127). Kant's “Analytic of the Sublime” lies at the centre of Jean-François Lyotard's conception of “postmodern” art, which he defines as that which presents the unpresentable. See his essay “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?,” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 71–82. There is a profound difference between Deleuze and Lyotard, despite numerous lines of convergence between their respective theories of art: Deleuze's theory is derived from an analysis of sensibility (intensity), whereas Lyotard's is derived from the faculty of the imagination (the sublime). Lyotard sometimes speaks of the “imagination or sensibility” in the same sentence (e.g., 80, 81), but without ever taking the further step of extracting the limit-element of sensibility, which is precisely not that of the imagination. The difference would seem to bear on the nature of the Ideas appealed to in each instance: transcendent in the case of the imagination, immanent in the case of sensibility. For Lyotard's analysis of the sublime, see his important commentaries in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
15.
Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy [1790], trans. Nick Midgley, Henry Somers-Hall, Alistair Welchman, and Merten Reglitz (London: Continuum, 2010). For commentary, see above all Martial Guéroult, La Philosophie transcendental de Salomon Maimon (Paris: Alcan, 1929), esp. 55ff and 76ff; Sylvain Zac, Salomon Maïmon: Critique de Kant (Paris: Cerf, 1988), esp. Chapter 6; and Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy From Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 295–303.
16.
Note on the differential relation. The nature of the differential relation can be made clear by comparing three types of relation distinguished in mathematics. A first type is established between elements that are themselves independent or autonomous, such as 3 + 2 or 2/3. The elements are real, and these relations themselves must be said to be real. A second type, e.g., x2 + y2 – R2 = 0 (the algebraic equation for the circle), is established between terms whose value is unspecified, but which nevertheless must in each case have a determined value. Such relations can be called imaginary. But the third type of relation is established between elements that themselves have no determined value, but that nevertheless are determined reciprocally in the relation: thus ydy+ xdx = 0 (the universal of the circumference or the corresponding function), or dy/dx = –x/y (the expression of a curve and its trigonometric tangent). These are differential relations. The elements of these relations are undetermined, being neither real nor imaginary: dy is completely undetermined in relation to y, dx is completely undetermined in relation to x. Yet they are perfectly determinable in the differential relation; the terms themselves do not exist apart from the differential relation into which they enter and by which they are reciprocally determined. This differential relation, in turn, determines a singular point, and it is the set of these points that determines the topological space of a given multiplicity or manifold (a triangle, for example, has three singular points, while curves and figures are derived from more complex distributions). See Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” in DI 170–92, FLB 88, and DR 172–5.
17.
For Deleuze's interpretation of Leibniz's theory of perception, see FLB, Chapter 7, “Perception in the Folds,” 85–99, from which the above examples are taken. For Leibniz's primary texts, see Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), esp. Discourse on Metaphysics, §33 (324–5); Monadology, §20–25 (645); and Principles of Nature and Grace, §13 (640), as well as New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Chapter 1.
18.
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1946), 225. Deleuze analyses this example in “Bergson's Conception of Difference,” in DI 32–52, and draws out its consequences in LS 136:
To have a color is not more general than to be green, because it is only this color, and this green which is this nuance, and is related in the individual subject. This rose is not red without having the redness of this rose.
Deleuze is closer to Goethe than Newton. Goethe's theory of color has similarly been retrieved in certain contemporary scientific theories. Redness is no longer perceived as a band-width of light but as a singularity within a chaotic universe, whose boundaries are not always easy to describe; see James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking 1987), 164–6.
19.
Likewise, one could speak of a white society or a white language, which contains in its virtuality all the phonemes and relations destined to be actualized in the diverse languages and in the remarkable parts of a same language; see DR 203–7. For a fuller analysis of musical form along these lines, see Jean-Fra
nçois Lyotard, “Several Silences,” in Driftworks, ed. Roger McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), 99–110.
20.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 203–4, A169/B21:
Every sensation has a degree, that is, an intensive magnitude which can always be diminished [to the point where the intensity = 0] … Every color, as for instance red, has a degree which, however small it may be, is never the smallest; and so with heat, the moment of gravity, etc.
21.
Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 2nd edn. (Berlin: Dümmler, 1885), 428:
Space and time itself, the sensible conditions of the unity of consciousness, insofar as they represent quanta continua, are constituted as continua by the reality of intensive magnitude as the condition of thought. Intensive magnitude consequently appears immediately as the prior condition of the extensive … Such as the necessity that led to the finitely small, positing something that became a unity not in relation to One but in relation to Zero.
See Jules Vuillemin's commentaries in L'Héritage kantien et la révolution copernicienne: Fichte, Cohen, Heidegger (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), 132–207.
22.
See DR 20:
By “sign” we mean what happens within such a [differential] system, what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates. The sign is indeed an effect, but an effect with two aspects: in one of these it expresses, qua sign, the productive dissymmetry; in the other it tends to cancel it.
23.
Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, admitted that this schematizing power of the imagination was “blind” (112, A78/B103), “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul,” an activity “nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover” (183, A141/B180–1). It is for this reason that Heidegger took the imagination as the focal point of his reading of Kant, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), although Deleuze breaks with Heidegger's reading.
24.
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), Essay II, §1, 493–4:
What we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it … as does the thousandfold process involved in physical nourishment … so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone, 1988), 35–6: we never perceive objects per se, but rather objects minus those aspects that do not interest us as a function of our needs.
25.
DR 237. In the chapter on “The Perception-Image” in The Movement-Image, Deleuze argues that, if the cinema goes beyond normal perception, it is in the sense that it reaches this genetic element of all possible perception: “In the “kino-eye,” Vertov was aiming to attain or regain the system of universal variation in itself,” to “reach ‘another’ perception, which is also the genetic element of all perception” (MI 80–6).
26.
DR 213. Martial Guéroult discusses the role this notion played in post-Kantian philosophy in L’Évolution et la structure de la Doctrine de la Science chez Fichte (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930), Vol. 1, 14–15: “Clear and distinct understanding was posited as the fruit of a continuous development whose point of departure was the confused understanding, the sole form under which the totality of the universe could be given originally in the finite mind.”
27.
Paul Klee, “Schopferische Konfession,” in Das Bildnerische Denken, ed. Jürg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1964), 76, as quoted in FB 48 and TP 342. See also Maldiney's commentary in Parole regard espace, 143–6. Lyotard's similar formula—“not to represent, but to present the unpresentable”—is discussed in “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 89–107.
28.
See PS 18: “Time seeks out bodies in order to become visible, seizing bodies wherever it encounters them so as to cast its magic lantern,” modifying this feature of someone we knew long ago, elongating, blurring, or crushing that one. Deleuze distinguishes four structures of time in Proust: lost time is both “passing time” and “wasted time”; time regained is both a “time recovered” at the heart of time lost, and an “original time” that is affirmed in art.
29.
For these examples, see TP 343 and FB 48.
30.
Quoted in Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove, 1988), 5, 36.
31.
Bacon, The Brutality of Fact, 23.
32.
Ibid., 18.
33.
See Gilbert Simondon, L'Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964); Deleuze was strongly influenced by Simondon's text.
34.
Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber, 1966), 53: “Had I wished to present man ‘as he is,’ then I should have had to use such a bewildering confusion of lines that pure elementary representation would have been out of the question. The result would have been vagueness beyond recognition.”
35.
The primary texts on these sensible syntheses in art are: FB 60–1, WP 167–8, and PS 148–60.
36.
In Newton, for example, the “optical” grey is obtained through a combination of black and white, whereas in Goethe the “haptic” grey is obtained through a combination of green and red. See Goethe, Color Theory, ed. Rupprecht Matthaei (New York: Van Nostrand, 1971). On Cézanne's relation to the Impressionists with regard to color, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne's Doubt,” in The Essential Writings, ed. Alden L. Fischer (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 236.
37.
MI 118. On these relations of color, see Deleuze's discussion in FB, Chapter 15, “Bacon's Trajectory,” 109–15.
38.
On the role of resonance in involuntary memory, see PS, Chapter 6, “The Secondary Role of Memory,” 52–66 (Joyce's “epiphanies,” Deleuze argues, can be analyzed in the same manner). On coupling in Bacon, see FB, Chapter 9, “Couples and Triptychs,” 55–61.
39.
On “forced movement” in Bacon, see FB, Chapter 10, “What is a Triptych?,” 62–70. The question concerning the conditions under which disjunction can be a form of synthesis (and not an analytic procedure that excludes the predicates of a thing by virtue of the identity of its concept) is one of the decisive questions posed by a philosophy of difference, though it lies beyond the scope of this paper. For Deleuze's discussions of the problem, see “La synthèse disjonctive” (with Guattari), in L'Arc 43 (1970), 54–62 and LS 172–6, 294–7.
40.
In WP 168, Deleuze suggests that, of all the arts, it is perhaps sculpture that presents these three syntheses in an almost pure state: first, there are the sensations of stone, marble, or metal, which vibrate according to strong and weak beats; second, there are the protuberances and cavities in the material, which establish powerful combats that interlock and resonate with each other; and finally, there is the set-up of the sculpture, with large empty spaces between groups, or even within a single group, in which one no longer knows if it is the light or air that sculpts or is sculpted.
41.
On the relation of the sensation to the material, see WP, Chapter 7, esp. 191–7.
42.
See AO 42: the work of art “is a whole of its constituent parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of its particular parts but it does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.” On Deleuze's use of the concept of transversality, originally formulated by Guattari, see PS 168 (and 188 n5).
Essay 7: Dialectics
Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas
1.
This paper was originally presented as a lecture entitled “Idea and Immanence in Deleuze” at the Collegium Phenomenologicum in Città di Castello, Italy, on 31 July 2003, directed by Leonard Lawlor, and benefited from the critical comments of the Collegium members.
2.
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 309, A312/B368: “Despite the great wealth of our languages, the thinker often finds himself at a loss for the expression which exactly fits his concept, and for want of which he is unable to be really intelligible to others or even to himself.” One finds a similar passage in the preface to the Critique of Practical Reason, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Preface, 5:11, 145.
3.
The themes of difference and affirmation—as well as the confrontation with Hegel—largely disappear from Deleuze's writings after the publication of Difference and Repetition in 1968.
4.
See François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 119.
5.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 319, A328/B384: An Idea is “a problem to which there is no solution.”