Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  EXEUNT SIMULACRA

  Deleuze summarizes these contrasts between the copy and the simulacrum—between Platonism and inverted Platonism—by inviting us to consider two formulas: “Only that which resembles differs” and “Only differences can resemble each other.” The first is an exact definition of the world as an icon; it bids us to think of difference only in terms of similarity, or a previous identity, which become the conditions of difference (Plato). The second defines the world of simulacra; it posits the world itself as a phantasm or simulacrum, inviting us to think of similarity and even identity as the result of a fundamental disparity, products or effects of a primary difference, or a primary system of differences (Nietzsche).

  What we have to ask [writes Deleuze] is whether these two formulas are simply two ways of speaking that do not change much; or if they are applied to completely different systems; or if, being applied to the same systems (at the limit, to the system of the World), they signify two incompatible interpretations of unequal value, one of which is capable of changing everything.64

  In the end, Deleuze's analysis of the simulacrum entails more than a reading of latonism; it also constitutes one of the fundamental problems of contemporary thought.

  Modern thought [Deleuze writes in the preface to Difference and Repetition] was born out of the failure of representation, as the loss of identities, and the discovery of all the forces that were acting under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra … All identities are only simulated, produced like an “optical effect” by a more profound play [jeu] which is that of difference and repetition. We would like to think difference in itself, and the relation of the different with the different, independent of the forms of representation that lead it back to the Same.65

  Deleuze's entire philosophical project can be seen as an explication of this declaration of intent.

  An assessment of Deleuze's theory of Ideas (which passes through a reappraisal of Kant as well as Plato) lies beyond the scope of this paper. It was initially through his reading of Plato that Deleuze was able to pose the problem that lies at the genesis of his theory of Ideas (the problem of simulacra), and to indicate the role that the overturning of Platonism plays in his thought. However, there is a coda to this story. After the publication of Difference and Repetition (1968), the concept of the simulacrum more or less disappears from Deleuze's work in favor of the concept of the agencement or “assemblage.” “It seems to me that I have completely abandoned the notion of the simulacrum,” Deleuze noted in 1993.66 There seem to be two reasons for this evolution. On the one hand, the notion that things simulate a transcendent Idea has a meaning only in the context of Platonism. In Deleuze's own ontology, things no longer “simulate” anything, but rather “actualize” immanent Ideas that are themselves real, though virtual. Deleuze thus uses the notion of the simulacrum to pose the Nietzschean problem of “anti-Platonism” within Plato himself, but then drops the notion as he forges his own ontological terminology. Within Deleuze's own work, the concept of the simulacrum is ultimately replaced by the concept of the assemblage [agencement], and the process of simulation is more properly characterized as the process of actualization (or even more precisely, the complex process of “differen t/c iation”). On the other hand, Deleuze does not ascribe to Greek thought the importance that one finds in Nietzsche (for whom post-Greek thought was little more than the history of a long error)67 or Heidegger (who tended to fetishize Greek and German language and thought). Nietzsche said that a truth never reveals itself immediately, at its birth, but only in its maturation. Similarly, Deleuze's philosophical heroes, so to speak, tend to be found, not at the origins of philosophical thought (Socrates, Plato), but in its maturation in the seventeenth century (Spinoza, Leibniz). After Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, Plato's work does not receive another sustained discussion in Deleuze's writings until What is Philosophy? In this sense, Deleuze's sketch of Nietzsche's anti-Platonism serves as a propaedeutic endeavor whose primary role is to outline the motivations of Deleuze's own philosophical project. Finally, one could say that, as the concept of the simulacrum disappeared from Deleuze's writings, it was taken up by other writers (such as Baudrillard) and taken in a different direction, with different coordinates and in response to different problematics. Concepts, in this sense, have their own autonomy and history that go beyond the diversity of their adherents.

  ESSAY 2

  Univocity

  The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze's Ontology of Immanence

  “I

  f God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Deleuze likes to invert this Dostoyevskian formula from The Brothers Karamazov because, he says, the opposite is in fact the case: it is with God that everything is permissible. This is obviously true morally, since the worst atrocities have always managed to find a divine justification, and belief in God has never been a guarantor of morality. But it is also true aesthetically and philosophically. Medieval art, for example, is filled with images of God, and it would be tempting to see this merely as an inevitable constraint of the era, imposed from without by the Church. Deleuze suggests a different hypothesis. In the hands of great painters like El Greco, Tintoretto, and Giotto, this constraint became the condition of a radical emancipation; in painting the divine, one could take literally the idea that God must not be represented, an idea that resulted in an extraordinary liberation of line, color, form, and movement. With God, painting found a freedom it would not have had otherwise—a properly pictorial atheism.1

  The same was true in philosophy. Until the revolution of the eighteenth century, philosophers were constantly speaking of God, to the point where philosophy seemed completely compromised by theology and the demands of the Church. But in the hands of great philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, this constraint became the condition of an equally extraordinary liberation. With God, philosophical concepts were freed from the traditional task that had been imposed on them—the representation of things—and were allowed to assume fantastic dimensions. With the concept of God, everything was permissible. Or almost everything, for thinkers (like Spinoza) who went too far with the concept, or went too fast, often did so at their own peril. Deleuze thus harbors neither the antagonism of the “secular” who find the concept of God outmoded, nor the angst or mourning of those for whom the loss of God was crisis-provoking, nor the faith of those who would like to retrieve the concept in a new form. He remains fascinated with theological concepts, and regards medieval theologians in particular as a magnificent breed of thinkers who were able to invent, in the name of God, remarkable systems of logic and physics. Indeed, at several points in his writings, he picks up on certain “heretical” paths of theological thought closed off by orthodoxy and seemingly abandoned, and sets them to work philosophically in a different context.

  Deleuze's appropriation of the medieval concept of univocity is the most obvious and important example of this unorthodox use of the Christian theological tradition. The doctrine of the “univocity of Being” is an ontological theory developed in the thirteenth century by Duns Scotus, following Henry of Ghent, in his magnum opus entitled Opus Oxoniense, which Deleuze calls “the greatest book of pure ontology.”2 In the Middle Ages, univocity was a heterodox position, constantly at the borders of heresy, and had limited currency outside the Scotistic school.3 (The English word “dunce” is derived from the term of approbation used to describe the followers of Duns Scotus.) Moreover, the concept has a rather curious status in Deleuze's own work. The term is not even mentioned before 1968, when univocity suddenly becomes an important theme in almost all of Deleuze's writings. It first appears in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, where it forms the “keystone” of Deleuze's interpretation of Spinoza (even more so than the title concept of “expression”).4 It then assumes an even more prominent role in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, where Deleuze not only identifies an entire tradition of univocity in the history of philosophy, running
from Duns Scotus (against Thomism) through Spinoza (against Cartesianism) to Nietzsche (against Hegelianism), but also presents his own ontology as a univocal ontology, thereby identifying himself as the most recent inheritor of that tradition. And then, equally abruptly, and without explanation, the concept disappears, almost without a trace; it is scarcely mentioned in any of Deleuze's subsequent works.

  What is the role of univocity in Deleuze's thought? And why does the concept have such a short-lived but intense trajectory in Deleuze's writings, like a flashing meteor? Despite Deleuze's provocative claim, there is no “tradition” of univocity in the history of philosophy, apart from the one he himself creates; there is hardly a secondary literature on the concept outside of Scotistic studies. Deleuze was more accurate when he remarked, in a seminar, that univocity is “the strangest thought, the most difficult to think, if it has ever been thought.”5 In what follows, I will attempt to follow the life of this “strange” concept as it appears, matures, and then passes away, as it were, within the flow of Deleuze's thought, creating unexpected “traversals” between otherwise disconnected thinkers and problems. Were one to “dramatize” the movement of this concept, it could perhaps be staged in four separate acts.

  THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

  Act I would take us back to the medieval articulations of the concept. For Duns Scotus, as for many Scholastic philosophers, the object of theology was God, while the object of philosophy, or rather of the metaphysics crowning it, was Being as Being. In developing his theory of univocity, Duns Scotus was injecting himself into a lively thirteenth-century debate concerning the nature of Being; Being is said of beings, but in what sense? The Scholastics used three precise terms to designate the various ways of resolving the problem: equivocity, univocity, and analogy. To say that Being is equivocal means that the term “Being” is said of beings in several senses, and that these senses have no common measure; “God is” does not have the same sense as “man is,” for instance, because God does not have the same type of being as man. By contrast, to say that Being is univocal, as Duns Scotus affirmed, means that Being has only one sense, and is said in one and the same sense of everything of which it is said, whether it be God or human, animal or plant. Since these positions seemed to lead to scandalous conclusions (equivocity denied order in the cosmos, univocity implied pantheism), a third alternative was developed between these two extremes: Being is neither equivocal nor univocal but analogical. This became the position of Christian orthodoxy, as formulated by Thomas Aquinas; there is indeed a common measure to the forms of Being, but this measure is analogical, and not univocal.

  Why did Deleuze revisit this seemingly obscure Scholastic debate? The answer seems clear: the three books Deleuze published in 1968 to 1969 (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense) mark, among other things, the culmination of Deleuze's confrontation with Heidegger. This confrontation had been present in Deleuze's work from the start, even if Heidegger's name receives only passing mention in the texts.6 As always, Deleuze brings a contemporary problematic to bear on his work in the history of philosophy. Heidegger (who wrote his own thesis on Duns Scotus) famously inaugurated the modern renaissance of ontology by posing the question of the “ontological difference”: What is the difference between Being and beings? Or more precisely, How is Being distributed among beings? During the Middle Ages, this ontological problem had been intertwined with a similar, though not identical, set of theological questions: What is the difference between God and his creatures? Or put logically, in terms of the “divine names” tradition: In what sense can we predicate of God the same terms (e.g., goodness) that we use of his creatures? The concept of univocity was situated at the nexus of this complex set of philosophical and theological questions.

  According to Deleuze, however, although Heidegger revived the question of ontology and gave “renewed splendor to the univocity of Being,” he did not effect the necessary conversion according to which “univocal Being belongs only to difference” (that is, the term “Being” has one and only one sense, which is “difference”).7 Heidegger, in other words, was unable—or perhaps unwilling—to push the problematic of ontological difference to its necessary conclusion. This is the project that Deleuze takes up as his own in Difference and Repetition. In this sense, univocity must be seen as one of the concepts Deleuze uses in order to state and resolve Heidegger's ontological problematic in his own manner. For Deleuze, the only pure and fully realized ontology must be a univocal ontology, and only a univocal ontology is capable of thinking difference-in-itself, or of providing difference with its own concept. As Foucault put it, in his well-known essay on Deleuze, the univocity of Being is “the principal condition which permits difference to escape the domination of identity.”8 But this link between univocity and difference might seem obscure. If Being is univocal, what constitutes the difference between beings? Why does a philosophy of difference require a univocal ontology?

  THE THREE FIGURES OF UNIVOCITY IN SPINOZA

  In the second act, Deleuze begins to respond to these questions by turning, not to Duns Scotus, who plays the role of a precursor, but rather to Spinoza, who, according to Deleuze, gave the concept of univocity its fullest expression. “Univocity,” Deleuze claims, “is the keystone of Spinoza's entire philosophy”—even though the word does not appear even once in Spinoza's texts.9 Deleuze, however, often employs this “topological” method in his historical monographs; when he interprets Bergson in terms of the concept of “difference” (as formulated by Heidegger), or Leibniz in terms of a theory of “singularities” (borrowed from Albert Lautman), or Spinoza in terms of “univocity” (imported from Duns Scotus), he is using a “foreign” concept, not explicitly formulated by the thinkers at hand, to bring out aspects of their thought that might otherwise remain obscure.

  Deleuze's affinity with Spinoza here is not incidental. Heidegger himself wrote notoriously little on Spinoza—a surprising omission, it would seem, since the Ethics is a work of pure ontology that poses the problem of ontological difference in terms of the difference between infinite substance (Being) and finite modes (beings). Deleuze's work on Spinoza, from this viewpoint, can be read as his means of working through the problematic of ontological difference in a new manner, just as Difference and Repetition could be read as a response to Being and Time (for Deleuze, Being is difference, and time is repetition). Where Heidegger returns to the Greeks (the origin), Deleuze turns to Spinoza (the middle). According to Deleuze, univocity assumes three figures in Spinoza's philosophy: the univocity of the attributes, the univocity of cause, and the univocity of modality. These are the three important scenes of the second act that show how Spinoza overturned the entire medieval theological tradition, at the price of his condemnation.

  1. The Univocity of the Attributes. In the Middle Ages, as Heidegger says, ontology became an onto-theo-logy; the question of the Being of beings tended to be forgotten in favor of the thought of God as the supreme (ontic) being. The Christian concept of God was the inheritor of the Platonic “Good” and the Neo-Platonic “One,” which were “above” or “beyond” Being (hyperousios, epikeina tes ousias): that is, transcendent to Being. Christian theology thus oscillated between a double requirement: immanence (the ontological requirement that the first principle be a being) and transcendence (the more powerful requirement that the transcendence of God be maintained, as the One beyond Being). The “divine names” tradition, in turn, was concerned with the manner in which the traditional divine attributes (e.g., goodness, love, wisdom, power, etc.) could be predicated of God: negatively or positively? As conditional affirmations, or negations marking the ablation of some privation? The Christian tradition identified two extreme (and heterodox) responses to this question: pure transcendence would imply the equivocity of terms, pure immanence their univocity. Between these two poles, orthodoxy developed a via media approach to the problem, centered in large part on the strategies of negation, eminence, and analogy. The
se five ways—equivocity, negation, eminence, analogy, univocity—entered into historically varying combinations in Christian thought, though two general approaches assumed the status of orthodoxy: a way of negation and a way of affirmation.

  The way of negation, which came to be called “negative theology” (following Pseudo-Dionysus), admits that affirmations are able to designate God as cause, subject to rules of immanence, but insists that God as substance or essence can only be defined negatively, according to rules of transcendence. Meister Eckhart, for instance, prefers to say “God is not” rather than “God is,” because “x is” is a statement that is said of beings, whereas God is eminently superior to Being, beyond Being.10 This allows God to appear in his “supra-substantial” or “supra-essential” eminence, as far from all negation as from all affirmation. Negative theology can therefore be defined by its dynamics; one goes beyond affirmations (God is good) via negations (God is not good in the human sense of the term), and beyond both affirmations and negations to attain God's eminence (God is good with an “incomparable” or “ineffable” Goodness). By contrast, a theology with more positive ambitions, like that of Thomas Aquinas, relies on analogy to found new affirmative rules. Positive qualities can indeed belong to God substantially, but only in so far as they are treated “analogically,” either in terms of an ordered relationship between two proportions—for instance, the divine goodness is to God as human goodness is to man (analogy of proportionality)—or by reference to a focal meaning or “prime analogate”—for instance, “Goodness,” which God possesses eminently and creatures only derivatively (analogy of proportion). The way of affirmation must likewise be defined by a specific dynamic: it maintains the strength of the negative and the eminent, but comprehends them within analogy.11