Essays on Deleuze
Page 67
6.
DR 161–2. In the calculus, it is the differential that defines the nature of problems, which is why it must disappear in the solution.
7.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 534, A645–6/B673–4:
These concepts of reason are not derived from nature; on the contrary, we interrogate nature in accordance with these Ideas, and consider our knowledge defective as long as it is not adequate to them. By general admission, pure earth, pure water, pure air, etc., are not to be found. We require, however, the concepts of them (though, insofar as their complete purity is concerned, they have their origin solely in reason) in order properly to determine the share which each of these natural causes has in producing appearances.
8.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 298–9, A295–6/B352.
9.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 299, A296/B352: “Transcendental and transcendent are not interchangeable terms.”
10.
For the components of the Platonic Idea, see Essay 10, in this volume.
11.
DR 168–221. The title in French is “Synthèse idéal de la différence,” “The Ideal Synthesis of Difference.”
12.
See Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 286: “To study Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel without having read Maimon's Versuch [Essay on Transcendental Philosophy] is like studying Kant without having read Hume's Treatise.”
13.
Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Correspondence, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 151.
14.
The analyses that follow are summaries of Deleuze's detailed reading of the Critique of Judgment, which can be found in his article, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant's Aesthetics”, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Angelaki, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Dec 2000), 39–70.
15.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), §59, 223.
16.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, §42, 159, translation modified.
17.
Alain Badiou makes this point in The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 153–4, in the context of developing his own nascent theory of the Idea. See also his “The Idea of Communism,” in The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010), 229–60.
18.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962).
19.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 61; Deleuze uses these two phrases to characterize Leibniz's philosophy as a whole.
20.
See DR 191: “No doubt, if one insists, the word ‘essence’ might be preserved, but only on condition of saying that the essence is precisely the accident, the event.”
21.
Note how Kant inverts the relation between immanence and transcendence in the passage from the first to the second critique:
It is incumbent to the Critique of Practical Reason as such to prevent empirically conditioned reason from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnishes the determining ground of the will [or desire]. If it is proved that there is pure reason, its use alone is immanent; the empirically conditioned use, which lay claim to absolute rule, is on the contrary transcendent and expressed itself in demands and commands that go quite beyond its sphere—precisely the opposite relation from what could be said of pure reason in its speculative use. (Critique of Practical Reason, Introduction, 5:16, 148–9.)
22.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, Introduction, §3, 15–16: “The faculties of the soul are reducible to three, which do not admit of any further derivation from a common ground: the faculty of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, and the faculty of desire.”
23.
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Preface, 5:9n, 143–4.
24.
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:89, 212.
25.
Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, 6:213, 374:
The faculty of desire whose inner determining ground … lies within the subject's reason is called the will. The will is therefore the faculty of desire considered not so much in relation to action, but rather in relation to the ground determining choice to action.
26.
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:89, 212.
27.
See Spinoza, Emendation of the Intellect, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. E. Curley, 2nd edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), §85, 37: “So far as I know they [the ancients] never conceived the soul (as we do here) as acting according to certain laws, like a spiritual automaton”); and Leibniz, “Clarification of the Difficulties Which Mr. Bayle has Found in the New System of the Union of Soul and Body,” in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), 495: “The soul is a most exact spiritual automaton.”
28.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), §129, 129.
Essay 8: Analytics
On the Becoming of Concepts
1.
An early version of this paper was presented at the workshop entitled “Between Deleuze and Simondon,” 18–19 September 2009, Palazzo Pesaro-Papafave, Venice, Italy, which was the fourth workshop sponsored by the European Network in Contemporary French Philosophy. I am indebted to the founders and organizers of the network: Miguel de Beistegui, Arnold I. Davidson, Frédéric Worms, and Mauro Carbone.
2.
WP 2, citing Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), §409, 220: Philosophers “must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and polish them, but must first make and create them, present them and make them convincing.” Whitehead seems to have had a similar conception of philosophy: “Progress in truth … is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts.” Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham, 1996), 131.
3.
Guattari, who did not explicitly assume the mantle of a philosopher, seemed to have seen the activity of thought in a different vein, preferring the production of flows or diagrams over the creation of concepts (TRM 238). For analyses of Guattari's “diagrammaticism,” see Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), and Jannell Watson, Guattari's Diagrammatic Thought (London: Continuum, 2009). The publication of Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006) opened an interesting window into Guattari's working methods. For a review, see Daniel W. Smith, “Inside Out: Guattari's Anti-Oedipus Papers,” in Radical Philosophy 140 (Nov–Dec 2006), 35–9.
4.
EPS 321. Although it was published in 1968, François Dosse notes that Deleuze had largely completed his secondary thesis on Spinoza (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza) in the late 1950s, before the publication of Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1962. See François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 118, 143.
5.
WP 1. For a different approach to Deleuze's analytic of concepts, oriented around the notion of the event, see Daniel W. Smith, “‘Knowledge of Pure Events’: A Note on Deleuze's Analytic of Concepts,” in Ereignis auf Französisch. Zum Erfahrungsbegriff der französischen Gegenwartsphilosophie: Temporalität, Freiheit, Sprache, ed. Marc Rölli (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 363–74.
6.
WP 2. Deleuze considered the Critique of Judgment to be “one of the most important books in all of philosophy” (31 Mar 1981).
7.
See also DI
261: “I've undergone a change. The surface–depth opposition no longer concerns me. What interests me now is the relationships between a full body, a body without organs, and flows that migrate.”
8.
The same is true of Deleuze's other concepts as well. The concept of affect, for example, first arises in Deleuze's work on Spinoza, where it designates the passage from one intensity to another in a finite mode, which is experienced as a joy or a sadness. In A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?, however, the affect is no longer “the passage from one lived state to another,” but has assumed an autonomous status—along with percepts—as a becoming that takes place between two multiplicities. See WP 173: “The affect is not the passage from one lived state to another but man's nonhuman becoming.”
9.
What is important to Deleuze is not only the concept of multiplicity, nor even the types of multiplicities he analyses, but the relations and transformations between these types (WP 152): that is, the transformation from the continuous to the discrete, from the problematic to the axiomatic, the intensive to the extensive, the non-metric to the metric, the non-denumerable to the denumerable, the rhizomatic to the arborescent, the smooth to the striated, the molecular to the molar, and so on. When asked about the concept of “micro-physics” in the 1981 interview with Arnaud Villani, Deleuze responded:
The distinction between macro and micro is very important, but it perhaps belongs more to Félix than to myself. For me, it is rather the distinction between two types of multiplicities. For me, that is the essential point: that one of these two types refers to micro-multiplicities is only a consequence. Even for the problem of thought, and even for the sciences, the notion of multiplicity, as introduced by Riemann, seems much more important than that of microphysics. (Arnaud Villani, La Guêpe et l'orchidée (Paris: Belin, 1999), 130)
10.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, (London: Macmillan, 1929), “The Ideas in General,” 309–14, A312–20/B368–77.
11.
Deleuze first mentioned What is Philosophy? (1991) in the 1981 interview with Arnaud Villani, in response to a question about the books he was hoping to write after completing A Thousand Plateaus: “I have just finished a book on Francis Bacon, and all I have left now are two projects: one on ‘Thought and Cinema,’ and another which would be a large book on ‘What is Philosophy’ (with the problem of the categories).” See Villani, La Guêpe et l'orchidée, 130.
12.
See DR 284–5:
We have continually proposed descriptive notions … None of this, however, amounts to a list of categories. It is pointless to claim that a list of categories can be open in principle: it can be in fact, but not in principle. For categories belong to the world of representation, where they constitute forms of distribution according to which Being is repartitioned among beings following the rules of sedentary proportionality. That is why philosophy has often been tempted to oppose notions of a quite different kind to categories, notions which are really open and which betray an empirical and pluralist sense of Ideas: ‘existential’ as against essential, percepts as against concepts, or indeed the list of empirico-ideal notions that we find in Whitehead, which makes Process and Reality one of the greatest books of modern philosophy.
13.
Deleuze made this remark in his interview with Arnaud Villani. See Villani, La Guêpe et l'orchidée, 130. François Dosse, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, cites a 1981 letter from Deleuze to Guattari which presented the problem of the categories as an integral part of their joint project: “Pierce and Whitehead make modern tables of categories: how has this idea of categories evolved?” (14).
14.
For the distinction between expression and exemplification, see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 2nd edn. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976).
15.
Summarizing all these becomings, Deleuze comments: “There's nothing more unsettling than the continual movement of something that seems fixed” (N 157).
16.
See Deleuze's article, “What is the Creative Act?” (TRM 312–24), which was originally presented as a lecture to the Fémis film school in Paris under the title, “Having an Idea in Cinema.”
17.
TRM 176, translation modified. See Gilles Deleuze, “8 ans après: Entretien 1980” (interview with Catherine Clément), in L'Arc 49 (rev. edn., 1980), special issue on Deleuze, 99.
18.
For an analysis of the concepts Deleuze creates in his Francis Bacon, see Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation,” in FB vii–xxxiii.
19.
For an analysis of the relation between Deleuze's treatment of concepts in What is Philosophy? and the treatments of social assemblages in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, see Craig Lundy, History and Becoming in Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
20.
TI 129. In this essay, I have left to the side Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of science, which none the less seems to have gone through a certain evolution. In 1983, Deleuze noted in a seminar, simply, that “concepts can be of different types, they can be scientific, they can be philosophical” (13 Dec 1983). By May 1984, however, Deleuze was clearly seeking to distinguish science from philosophy, defining the former as a “system of operators”—although Deleuze immediately added that the notion of an opérateur could function as a definition of science only if one was capable of answering the question, “What are the differences between mathematical operators, physical operators, and chemical operators?” (29 May 1984). Deleuze would make use of the term opérateur in the 1985 The Time-Image as well (TI 129). In the same seminar, Deleuze defined art as the creative activity that consists in creating “characters” [personages], as if he had not yet clearly disengaged the notion of “conceptual personae,” which, in What is Philosophy?, serves as a condition for the philosophical creation of concepts. The definition of science in terms of functions, in What is Philosophy? (1991), thus seems to have been a rather late formulation, itself the result of a series of experimentations and becomings.
21.
See Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 54: “I am in full accord with Bergson, though he uses ‘time’ for the fundamental fact which I call the ‘passage of nature.’”
22.
Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (1915), trans. M. D. Hottinger, from the 7th German edition (1929) (New York: Dover, 1932). Wilhelm Worringer would later undertake a similar conceptual analysis of the concept of the Gothic, which Deleuze appeals to frequently. See Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic (1911), ed. Herbert Read (London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927), as well as Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908), trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997).
23.
For a penetrating analysis of Wölfflin's work along these lines, see Arnold I. Davidson, “Styles of Reasoning: From the History of Art to the Epistemology of Science,” in The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 125–141.
24.
Arnold I. Davidson, “Closing Up the Corpses: Diseases of Sexuality and the Emergence of the Psychiatric Style of Reasoning” and “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality,” in The Emergence of Sexuality, 1–65. See also David Halperin's now-classic analysis, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1989).
25.
See, in general, Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 99–114; and “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” in Humanities in Society 5 (1982), 279–95. For Hacking's analysis of specific concepts and their corresponding modes of existence, see: (1) on multiple personality: “The Invent
ion of Split Personalities,” in Human Nature and Natural Knowledge, ed. Alan Donagan, Anthony N. Perovich, Jr., and Michael V. Wedlin (Dordrecht: Springer, 1986), 63–85; (2) on child abuse: “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse,” in Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991), 253–88; and (3) on autism:“What is Tom Saying to Maureen?,” in London Review of Books, Vol. 28, No. 9 (May 2006), 3–7.
26.
See N 156, LS 261–2, and DR 116. These texts are all referring to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1963), 77: “It is not the resemblance, but the differences, which resemble each other.”
27.
For a comprehensive analysis of Deleuze's concept of time, which we are merely summarizing here, see James Williams, Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Williams focuses primarily on Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense rather than the analyses of time presented in the Cinema books (see 159–64), although the later works seem to expand on Deleuze's earlier discussions of time in crucial ways.
28.
Plato, Timaeus, 37d. Aristotle's definition is similarly indexed on movement: “time is the number of motion in respect of before and after” (Physics 219b2).
29.
Deleuze discusses the conceptions of time in Plato and Plotinus; see the series of seminars from 7 February 1984 to 27 March 1984. Descartes's modern solution to the same problem was to conserve something invariant “in” movement: namely, the quantity of movement, mv, the product of mass times velocity.