Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  If there is any salvation within this pure and empty form of time—time rendered ordinary—it takes place, in Kant, through the activity of synthesis, which is a process brought to bear, not on time itself, but on the modes of time, in order to render both being and knowledge possible.35 Under the aspect of succession, what appears in time is a multiplicity of parts, which must be synthesized by the subject in an apprehension that fixes them in an ever-variable present. Under the aspect of simultaneity, moreover, I must not only apprehend parts in order for knowledge to be possible, but I must also reproduce the past parts: that is, I must remember the preceding parts in time and synthesize or “contract” them with the present parts. Under the aspect of permanence, finally, I can synthesize the apprehended present and the previous reproduced presents with the permanence of something that endures in time, which is related to a concept in an act of recognition (“so it's a table”). Readers of Difference and Repetition—notably in the third chapter on repetition—will recognize the ways in which Deleuze modifies the Kantian analysis of synthesis in the direction of a concept of passive syntheses.36 The first synthesis (present) is reformulated into the passive organic and corporeal syntheses (habit) that make any receptivity, in Kant's sense, possible. The second synthesis (past), following Bergson, posits the need for a concept of the “pure” past, without which the passing of time would be impossible. And the third synthesis (future), rather than appealing to recognition, instead is the condition for the production of the new. “The more we study the nature of time,” Bergson would later write, “the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.”37 The production of the new—including the activities of creation found in philosophy, science, and art—is the direct consequence of this liberation of time. Though the term rarely appears in the text, What is Philosophy? is a book on time, or more precisely, a study of the determinations of thought that take place within the pure form of time. What Hume called the association of ideas (resemblance, contiguity, causality) links together our ideas in time with a minimum of constant rules, thereby forming a realm of opinion that protects us from chaos. But philosophy, science, and art do more than this, and Deleuze describes their respective activities using his own (created) vocabulary. From the infinite variability of time, philosophers extract variations that converge as the components of a consistent concept; scientists extract variables that enter into determinable relations in a function; and artists extract varieties that enter into the composition of a being of sensation (WP 202).

  A NEW ANALYTIC OF CONCEPTS

  The new analytic of concepts presented in What is Philosophy? is an attempt to insert the form of time into philosophical concepts, assigning them a synthetic structure that is differential and temporal. While concepts have no identity, they must have a consistency, but this consistency must have as its necessary complement the internal variability of the concept.38 Deleuze analyzes these two temporal aspects of concepts under the rubrics of exo-consistency and endo-consistency. For Deleuze, no concept is ever simple; not only does it link up with other concepts (exo-consistency), but each concept also has its own internal components (endo-consistency), which in turn can themselves be considered as concepts. Descartes's concept of the cogito, for instance, can be said to have three components: namely, thinking, doubting, and being: “I (who doubt) think, and therefore I am (a thinking being).” A concept is therefore always a multiplicity: it is composed of a finite number of distinct, heterogeneous, and none the less inseparable components or variations; the concept itself is the point of coincidence, condensation, or accumulation of these component elements, which it renders consistent in itself; and this internal consistency in turn is defined by the zones of neighborhood [voisinage] or indiscernibility that it creates between these components. But like a hypertext, the concept of the cogito is an open-ended multiplicity that contains the potential for bridges that provide links or crossroads to other Cartesian concepts.39 The idea of infinity is the bridge leading from the concept of cogito to the concept of God, a new concept that has three components forming the “proofs” for the existence of God. In turn, the third proof (ontological) assures the closure of the concept but also throws out a new bridge or branches off to a concept of extended being, in so far as the concept of God guarantees the objective truth value of our other clear and distinct ideas.

  This exo-consistency of concepts extends to the history of philosophy as well. When Kant later criticized the Cartesian cogito, he did so in the name of a new problematic field: Descartes could not say under what form the “I think” is capable of determining the “I am,” and this determinable form, Kant argued, is precisely the form of time. In this way, Kant introduced a new component into the Cartesian cogito. Yet to say that Kant “criticized” Descartes is simply to say that Kant constructed a problem that could not be occupied or completed by the Cartesian cogito. Descartes created the concept of the cogito, but he expelled time from it as a form of anteriority, making it a simple mode of succession sustained by a continuous divine creation. If Kant introduced time as a new component of the cogito, he did so on the condition of creating a new concept of time: time now becomes a form of interiority with its own internal components (succession, but also simultaneity and permanence). Similarly, to ask if there are precursors to the cogito—for instance, in Augustine—is to ask:

  Are there concepts signed by previous philosophers that have similar or almost identical components, but from which one component is lacking, or to which others have been added, so that a cogito does not crystallize, since the components do not yet coincide in a self? (WP 26)

  Concepts, in short, possess an internal history, a potential for transmutation into other concepts, which constitutes what Deleuze likes to call the “plane of immanence” of philosophy.

  Creating concepts is constructing some area in the plane, adding a new area to existing ones, exploring a new area, filling in what's missing. Concepts are composites, amalgams of lines, curves. If new concepts have to be brought in all the time, it's just because the plane of immanence has to be constructed area by area, constructed locally, going from one point to the next. (N 147)

  It is precisely through this kind of analysis that one can account for the various kinds of conceptual becomings that one finds in Deleuze's own work, and the transformations he himself introduced into concepts drawn from the history of philosophy. “The history of philosophy,” Deleuze writes, “means that we evaluate not only the historical novelty of the concepts created by the philosopher, but also the power of their becoming when they pass into one another” (WP 32).

  A complete study of Deleuze's analytic of concepts would have to examine the way the form of time permeates the other aspects of Deleuze's analyses. Concepts, for instance, are never created willy-nilly, but always as the function of a problem, and the analytic of concepts developed in What is Philosophy? finds its necessary correlate in the dialectic of problems formulated in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze considered himself to be a “pure metaphysician,” but his fundamental metaphysical position is that Being is a problem; Being always presents itself under a problematic form, as a series of problematizations that are themselves temporal.40 One might say that Plato invents the concept of the Idea in response to the problem of rivalry in the Greek cities (Socrates contra the Sophists), Descartes creates the cogito in response to the problem of absolute subjective certainty, and Leibniz formulates a whole series of hallucinatory concepts—expression, perspective, compossibility, harmony—in response to the problem of sufficient reason: everything has a reason, everything has to have a reason. Philosophy is the creation of concepts, but the creation of concepts has as its condition the construction of a problem or problems, which are themselves temporal. To “problematize” a concept thus does not only mean that one places it in question; it means that one seeks to determine the nature of the problem to which it serves as a solution. While it i
s relatively easy to define the true and the false in relation to solutions whose problems are already stated, it is much more difficult to distinguish between well-posed and badly-posed problems, which is why philosophy has often taken the form of a critique of false problems (B 16–17). Kant criticized the concepts of the Soul, the World, and God for being derived from “problems without solution.”41 Bergson similarly argued that questions such as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” or “Why is there disorder rather than order?” or “Why is there this rather than that (when that was equally possible)?” are false problems derived from a confusion of the more with the less.42 Wittgenstein even attempted to show that, through an analysis of language use, most philosophical problems could in fact be dissolved “like a lump of sugar in water.”43 Yet even more difficult than the critique of false or badly-formulated problems, as both Kierkegaard and Whitehead insisted, is the assessment of whether or not a problem is important or interesting.44 Henri Poincaré said that, in mathematics, constructing a proof for an unimportant problem was worse than discovering a flaw in one's proof for a remarkable problem; the former will remain eternally trivial, while the latter can be corrected and may have already gained important terrain.45 The truth of a solution, in other words, is less important than the truth or interest of the problem being dealt with (a problem always has the solution it “deserves”). The same is true in philosophy: one can read pages and pages that are not false, but are without interest or importance. It is true that the problem that animates a philosopher is not always clearly stated; to engage in the history of philosophy is to recover these problems, and thereby to discover what is innovative in the concepts being created. Mediocre histories of philosophy link up concepts as if they go without saying—as if they had not been created—without determining the problems to which they correspond. Similarly, mediocre philosophers are those who create no concepts and instead make use of ready-made notions; they remain in the realm of opinion, ignorant of the problems at issue. Problems in turn are expressed in the form of questions, and Deleuze's early writings are critical of the “What is …?” form of questioning, as a means of attaining essences, in favor of questions such as Who?, Which one?, How many?, How?, Where?, When?, In which case?, From what point of view? “For a long time, concepts had been used to determine what something is (its essence). We, on the contrary, are interested in the circumstances of a thing: in which cases, where and when, how, and so on? For us, a concept should express an event, and no longer an essence.”46 If one has neither a concept nor a problem, one is not doing philosophy; one must become an apprentice not only to the creation of concepts but also to the constitution of problems and questions.

  Moreover, both problems and questions, in turn, presuppose pre-philosophical images of thought: that is, images of what it means to think that pre-exist any particular “method” of resolving a problem or creating a concept. Borrowing a term coined by Bakhtin, Deleuze suggests that every explicit method in philosophy envelops an implicit “chronotope” of thought: that is, a noetic landscape of space-time with its own geography, inhabited by what Deleuze would come to call a conceptual persona, a “somewhat mysterious” (WP 61) notion that appears in Deleuze's writings for the first time in What is Philosophy?47 The temporal aspect of thought (the before and after) is the order of reasons that a thinker creates between concepts; the spatial aspect is its distribution of aims, means, and obstacles. But the conceptual character of philosophers—as opposed to their psycho-social or historical character—is an internal condition for the production of their concepts; it concerns “that which belongs by right to thought and only to thought,” even if it remains inseparable from empirical, psychological, and social determinations (WP 69). To give a simple example: one could say that Plato, Descartes, and Kant all shared the same aim—the truth—but they inhabited the problem of truth through different conceptual characters. If Plato wanted to find the truth, for instance, if he wanted to find the intelligible essence behind appearances (the Idea), it is because he did not want to be deceived by the false claimants to truth that he found in the Athenian democracy (sophists, rhetoricians, orators, artists). This is the lived problem confronted by his thought: “I do not want to be deceived.” But when Descartes sought the truth in the Meditations, he did so in relation to the different problem of subjective certitude: the senses deceive me, the scholastics deceive me, perhaps God is a malicious demon that deceives me, and in the end it is I who deceive myself and allow myself to be deceived. This is not the same way of posing the problem of truth; it is animated by a different conceptual character (“I do not want to deceive myself”), and it produces a different concept of truth. What is important to Descartes is that deception and error are themselves modes of thought, and thus the first certitude Descartes finds—the first truth—is the “I think”: even when I am being deceived or am in error, I am still thinking. When Kant in turns says, “I want the truth,” he again means something very different: “I do not want to deceive.” This entails yet another manner of living the relation to truth. If Plato was marked by the Athenian democracy, Kant was a creature of the Reformation, and had discovered moral rigor. Kant thus subordinated knowledge (speculative reason) to morality (practical reason). Morality no longer depends on one's knowledge, as in the virtue of the sage or wise man; rather, knowledge is itself subject to a higher finality, the finality of a moral reason. “I do not want to deceive” indeed engenders Kant's search for the truth—the operation of knowledge—but it does so by strictly subordinating knowledge to a practical finality. If Kant does not want to deceive, it is because only beings that do not deceive are free, or can even claim to be free. In Kant, intelligible nature is no longer found in an essence, as in Plato, but in a community of moral beings, the kingdom of ends. In short, the concepts created by Plato, Descartes, and Kant fill a noetic space-time following a temporal order of reasons and a spatial order of aims, means and obstacles, but each of them refer to a prior image of thought inhabited by very different conceptual personae, which can be summarized in the cries, “I do not want to be deceived,” “I do not want to deceive myself,” and “I do not want to deceive.” The differing methods of the three philosophers—dialectic, analytic, transcendental—are derived from these images, which preexist any explicit methodology.

  THE POWER OF THE FALSE

  Deleuze's analytic of concepts, in other words, introduces time not only into concepts, but also into the construction of problems and questions, as well as the transformation of images of thought and the conceptual characters that inhabit them. Indeed, one of the most significant implications of Deleuze's analyses is that the form of time places the concept of truth in crisis. Philosophers tend to speak of the true with a reverence once reserved for the divine, as if its value were unquestioned.48 Yet truth is itself a concept, with its own becoming. Nietzsche seems to have been correct when he said that he was the first see that the concept of truth poses a philosophical problem:

  Let us thus define our own task—the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question … Suppose we want the truth: Why not rather untruth? Or uncertainty? Or ignorance? … Though it scarcely seems credible, it finally almost seems to us as if the problem had never even been put so far—as if we were the first to see it, fix our eyes on it, and risk it. For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater.49

  Deleuze's thesis is that the concept of truth enters into crisis when it confronts the form of time; the form of the true gives way to the power of the false. Speaking in general terms, the true is not the same thing as the real; it is rather the distinction between the real and the imaginary (or between essence and appearance). The false is not the imaginary; it is rather the confusion of the imaginary with the real (or of the apparent with the essential). What we call error is the act that consists of making this confusion; the false is effectuated in error, which confuses the imaginary and the real (DR 148). How, then, do we distingui
sh the false from the true? Only the true has a form (eidos); the false has no form, and error consists in giving the false the form of the true. Since Aristotle, the form of the true has had a precise sense: the universal and the necessary. The true is that which is universal and necessary, always and everywhere, in all times and in all places. This is not a universality of fact but a universality of right. In fact, it may be that people rarely think, and rarely think the true. But to say that only the true has a form is to insist that, in principle, if you think a triangle, you cannot deny that its three angles are necessarily equal to two right angles. Universality and necessity qualify the judgments that are made of the form of the true; since the false has no form, judgments made about it are by right deprived of all universality and necessity. Who, then, is the truthful person? In classical philosophy, what corresponds to the real in an idea is its power to represent, while what corresponds to the imaginary is the capacity of an idea (or image) to produce a modification of my body or soul. The former attains to essences, while the latter leaves one mired in appearances, and the anguish of the passions. The truthful person is thus someone who would allow their body and soul to be modified only by the form of the true. The activity through which this takes place can be called the in-formation of the soul by the true, which takes as its model the Eternal (the universal and the necessary).50

  If time puts the concept of truth in crisis, it does so not at the level of its content (“truth changes with time”), but rather at the level of its form; the form of time takes the place of the (universal) form of the true. The false is thereby given a power of its own; if the false does not have a form, it none the less has a power. When does the false take on a power? When it is freed from the model of truth: that is, when the false is no longer presented as being true. What can disengage the concept of the false from the model of truth? The answer is: time. Just as Deleuze attempts to formulate a concept of difference-in-itself, freed from its subordination to the concept of identity, so he attempts to formulate a concept of the false-in-itself, freed from its subordination to the concept of truth (and error). But this in no way implies the banal conclusion that “everything is false,” which would now be presented as a truth: as Nietzsche said, in one of his most profound phrases, in abolishing the true world we have also abolished the false world of appearances.51 There is no longer either truth or appearance, and the false is no longer presented as being true; instead, the false assumes a power of its own. What, then, is the “power” of the false? If the form of the true is derived from the power of judgment, the power of the false is a power of metamorphosis: that is, a power of creation. Creative of what? At this point, there is no reason not to re-employ the word “truth.” The power of the false is creative of truth—but this is, precisely, a new concept of truth: truth is no longer a timeless universal to be discovered, but a singularity to be created (in time). “Philosophy creates concepts, which are neither generalities nor even truths; they are rather of the order of the Singular, the Important, the New” (TRM 238).