by Daniel Smith
1. First Sub-Thesis: Movement Implies a Difference of Potential (Difference in Intensity). Consider the following series of real movements. As the sun is setting, I leave my house in town and go for a walk in the country. This is a movement, a translation in space, but it is also an assignable transformation in the affection of the Whole: the whole of the town, the whole of the day, the whole of the country. While I am walking, a flock of birds takes off in flight in a migration—this too is a change in the whole, an expression of a climatic change. Later that evening, at a gathering, I am hungry, so I walk over to a table and eat an hors-d’œuvre: another transformation of the whole. To explain these transformations, Deleuze appeals to a concept derived from physics: a difference of potential (17 Nov 1981). At the gathering, a difference of potential is opened up between my sensation of hunger and the perception of the food, and my movement in space finds its sufficient reason in this difference of potential. A kind of equalization of this potential will take place when I absorb the food, at which point another difference of potential will be opened up in the whole: having satiated my hunger, I turn around a see a friend, and I walk over to him and start up a conversation. To move from one state of the whole to another state of the whole is to move from one difference of potential to another difference in potential—a system that is neither stable nor unstable but “metastable” (LS 103). Movements of translation thus never exist in a pure state, but always express deeper qualitative transformations in the whole; every movement of translation refers to a perturbation, a modification, a change in tension or energy, a passage from one difference to another. These differences of potential are never localizable, since what is localizable are the two terms between which the difference is established. Rather, the differences concern the whole—it is the whole that functions by means of differences that constitute the sufficient reason of every movement of translation. This is the theme that Deleuze develops in more detail in the fifth chapter of Difference and Repetition: “Every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason. Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension potential, difference of intensity” (DR 222).
For this reason, the Whole, or wholes, must not be confused with sets; sets are closed systems, whereas the whole is the open. On this score, one can compare Bergson's examples of real movement (such as sugar melting in water) with the typical example of movement given in seventeenth-century physics: the movement of billiard balls.14 If this example was so popular, it was because the seventeenth century was attempting to create a science of movement and the communication of movement. But when Bergson wants to make his point that translations in space express transformations of the whole, he purposely relies on different examples—that is, he considers examples of real movements, and not abstract movements grasped in artificial and isolated situations. Such is the difference between a set and a whole: a set is a collection of parts in a closed system, and everything that is closed is artificially closed, whereas the whole is duration and change—that is, the open (for Bergson, the whole can never be the set of all sets). It is true that the artificial division of a set or a closed system is not a pure illusion; it is well founded. A system can always be closed and isolated from duration; the organization of matter makes closed systems possible, and the deployment of space makes them necessary. Indeed, phenomena can only be studied scientifically by relating them to closed systems; it is only under these conditions that a system can be quantified, for what makes an equation possible is a system of coordinates (abscissa and ordinates). But this is the reason that science is incapable of grasping a movement of translation as the expression of a more profound transformation (a change in the whole). For no system can ever be entirely closed; as Deleuze writes, “the whole is not a closed set, but rather that by virtue of which any set is never absolutely closed, never completely sheltered, but that which keeps it open somewhere as if by the finest thread that attaches it to the rest of the universe” (MI 10).
Whole and part, in short, are two notions that do not exist on the same plane. Many thinkers have made the claim that the whole is something other than the sum of its parts, but Bergson's uniqueness lies in the justification he gives for this claim: parts are always in space, whereas the whole is time, it is real time. This is another way of saying that the whole is never given, since the whole is the open: it is constantly changing; it is duration; it is time itself. So two formulas that could be said to correspond to Bergson's first thesis now take on a more rigorous status: “immobile sections + abstract time” refers to closed sets whose parts are immobile cuts, and whose successive states are calculated in an abstract time; while “real movement + concrete duration” refers to the opening up of a whole that endures, and whose movements are so many mobile sections traversing the closed systems. For Bergson, the greatness of modern science was that it took time as an independent variable, and yet despite itself science remained grafted on to an ancient metaphysics. With the notion of duration, Bergson attempted to provide the metaphysics that corresponds to modern science, which is a metaphysics of real time rather than a metaphysics of the eternal.
Bergson's third thesis thus allows Deleuze to isolate three levels of real movement:
1. there are discrete objects in space
2. then there are the movements of these objects (translation), which are continuous from one moment to the next
3. but these movements find their sufficient reason as affections or transformations of the Whole, which is the Open (differences of potential).
All three of these levels coexist, and nothing would function if duration itself did not have the power of sometimes subdividing itself into sub-durations and rhythms (the leap of the gazelle, the dash of the lion), while at other times uniting and gathering together these rhythms and sub-durations into one and the same duration (the lion tackles the gazelle). Every movement is itself a mobile cut in the flux of duration, but duration (the whole) is a perpetual movement through which these flows of time are constantly being divided and gathered together (whence “the idea of a co-existence in duration of all degrees of expansion and contraction,” DR 331 n14).
2. Second Sub-Thesis: The Whole is Defined by Relations. The second sub-thesis concerns the status of relations, and it is here that we approach Deleuze's own contribution to thinking the idea of the Open.15 The problem of relations has haunted philosophy since its inception, and it is inextricably linked to the problem of judgment. The simplest form of judgment is the judgment of attribution: the sky is blue, A is B. But it is not difficult to see that every judgment of attribution is a kind of an offense against the principle of identity, A is A. While it is easy to comprehend “A is A” (a thing is identical to itself), how is it possible to say that “A is B”? Philosophy would ultimately explain this by saying that, in a judgment of attribution, A and B are not the same: the judgment attributes a predicate (blue) to a subject (sky), or a property or attribute to a substance. Every metaphysics of substance can be said to find its origin in the judgment of attribution.
But there is a second kind of judgment, more complex, which is the judgment of relation—for instance, A is smaller than B. Judgments of relation are very different from judgments of attribution, and opened up a different path for metaphysics. When we say “Peter is smaller than Paul,” we are no longer attributing a property to a subject. If I say that “being smaller than” is a property of A, I would also have to say, at the same time, that “being taller than” is also a property of A, since there is also a C that is smaller than A (“Peter is smaller than Paul, but taller than Mary”). But Plato had already pointed out that this would entail attributing contradictory properties to the same subject (“being smaller than,” “being taller than”), which would seem to be an offense against the principle of non-contradiction, just as the judgment of attribution seems to be an offence against the principle of identity. One might object b
y saying that the properties being predicated are not simply “smaller than” and “taller than,” but rather “smaller than Paul” and “taller than Mary,” but this does not solve the problem; Paul and Mary are themselves real beings, and while the concept of Peter may contain properties, but it is not possible for the concept of Peter to contain other real beings. So when I say, “Peter is taller than Paul,” this relation is neither a property of Peter nor a property of Paul; rather, it is something between the two. But what is this “between the two”? To what does this “between” belong if it belongs to neither of the two terms? Philosophy has offered at least three responses to this question, which are exemplified in the positions of Plato, Leibniz, and Hume.
For Plato, relations do not depend on their terms because they are Ideas with a capital “I.” For instance, there is an Idea of the Small and an Idea of the Large, and when we say that “A is smaller than B and greater than C,” we are saying that A participates in the Idea of the Small in relation to term B and that it participates in the Idea of the Large in relation to term C. For Plato, relations are irreducible to attributes because they are pure Ideas that go beyond the sensible world. In a sense, Plato anticipates the path that Deleuze will take: once one has discovered the world of relations, one can ask if, in the end, every judgment is not a judgment of relation—that is, if there are not properties at all but only relations.
Leibniz took a quite different approach. He attempted to show that all judgments of relations were reducible to a judgment of attribution, and he was willing to draw the necessary conclusion: every concept that designates a real being (such as Peter, Paul, Adam, or Caesar), he realized, must contain the totality of all other concepts. Why? Because Peter is related to Paul, and more distantly, to Caesar, and even more distantly, to Adam—which amounts to saying that the concept of every being necessarily expresses the totality of the world. This means that, in Leibniz, relations are internal to their terms; and that if the concept of Peter contains all other terms, then all imaginable relations can be reduced to attributions, to properties of the concept.
The greatness of Hume, finally, was to have arrived on the scene and argued that relations are external to their terms. “For me,” Deleuze would later comment, “this proposition was like a clap of thunder in philosophy” (14 Dec 1982). Hume's admonition is, “Accept exteriority.” Rather than invoking Ideas, as Plato does, or undertaking operations as complex as those of Leibniz, Hume asks us to accept the world in which we live, which is a world of exteriorities. The fundamental thesis of empiricism is not that knowledge is derived from experience or that everything finds its origin in the sensible, but rather that relations are external to their terms. Properties may be internal to the terms to which they are attributed, but relations are exteriorities. Empiricism thus found itself faced with the task of creating a new logic—a logic of relations—which broke definitively with the logic of attribution. (This logic would begin with Hume's theory of probabilities, and take on a definitive form in Bertrand Russell.) Prior to Hume, one might say that philosophers would only support interiority; to comprehend something was to interiorize it—to interiorize it in a concept, interiorize it in a subject. Hume inaugurates a completely different theory of thought whose task is no longer to internalize but to reflect on a radical exteriority. Deleuze will ultimately derive two consequences from the principle of the exteriority of relations.
First, it is not possible to think relations without thinking of a becoming. When I say that “Peter resembles Paul,” this resemblance is a relation that is not contained in the concept of either Peter or Paul, which means that the relation cannot change without the concepts changing; the resemblance can be accentuated or lost. Whereas properties are solid, relations are fragile; a relation is not only external to its terms, but it is essentially transitive, in the sense of “transitory.” If it is so difficult to think relations, it is because relations imply or envelop change; relation is the domain of becoming. As Deleuze writes:
I believe that one cannot think relation independent of a becoming that is at least virtual, whatever the relation might be; and that, in my opinion, the theorists of relation, however strong they might have been, have not seen this. But I would like to insist on this point. (14 Dec 1982)
Second, once one starts down this path, one cannot stop. If there are relations between any two terms, and if the terms change when the relations change, then at the limit, perhaps there are no longer even terms but only packets of relations. What one calls a term (or a thing or a substance) is itself only a packet of relations: that is, a multiplicity or a manifold.
Once you discover the world of relations, you can ask if every judgment is not a judgment of relation, that is, when you say “Peter has blue eyes,” you can ask if that is not already a judgment of relation, and that there are not even properties but only relations. (14 Dec 1982)
Such is the mystery of relations: a relation is between two things, it unites them, but it cannot be reduced to either of them. For Deleuze, the greatness of Anglo-American philosophy is that it developed a metaphysics that consisted in seeing this “in-between” in itself and for itself. This where Deleuze's logic of relations links up with and extends Bergson's theses on movement: the whole is the open—that is, duration and change—but the domain of becoming itself implies a logic of pure relations.
PART IV
Deleuze and Contemporary
Philosophy
ESSAY 16
Jacques Derrida
Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought
G
iorgio Agamben, in a recent essay,1 has identified two different trajectories in contemporary French philosophy, both of which pass through Heidegger: a trajectory of transcendence, which includes Levinas and Derrida, and goes back through Husserl to Kant; and a trajectory of immanence, which includes Foucault and Deleuze, and goes back through Nietzsche to Spinoza.2 Deleuze and Levinas are no doubt the most obvious representatives of these two trajectories; Deleuze explicitly describes himself as a philosopher of immanence, while Levinas explicitly claims the mantle of transcendence (the “Other” being the paradigmatic concept of transcendence). But Derrida clearly belongs to the trajectory of transcendence as well, and Agamben's typology can thus provides us with a valuable grid for assessing the relation between Derrida and Deleuze, at least in a preliminary manner. Agamben does not himself develop his insight in detail, and perhaps for good reason. Immanence and transcendence are both highly overdetermined terms in the history of philosophy, and it is not immediately clear what it would mean to be a philosopher of either one. The very term “transcendence” has theological and spiritual overtones that tend to obscure the wider history and varied philosophical uses of the concept. Moreover, one might be tempted to question the use of such a “binary opposition” to characterize philosophers like Derrida and Deleuze, given their shared critique of the use of oppositional strategies in philosophy. But such a dismissal would be both hasty and superficial. Immanence and transcendence are relative terms, not opposites, which means that in each case one must ask: Immanent to what? Or transcendent to what? As such, immanence and transcendence can be helpful terms, not so much in determining the differing “positions” of Derrida and Deleuze, but rather as means of charting out their differing philosophical “trajectories,” at least relative to each other. There are three traditional areas of philosophy, in particular, in which these terms have found a specific use—namely, the fields of subjectivity, ontology, and epistemology. Derrida and Deleuze have written on each of these topics, and although these fields certainly do not exhaust the themes of immanence and transcendence, they none the less provide points of reference from which we can evaluate the work of Derrida and Deleuze using Agamben's typology. In what follows, then, I would like to consider each of these domains in turn, showing how, in each case, Derrida has explicitly aligned himself with a trajectory of transcendence, while Deleuze ha
s consistently followed a trajectory of immanence. At best, this is a propaedeutic study, a kind of “vectorial” analysis that seeks to diagram, in a general manner, the divergent directions Derrida and Deleuze have followed in their philosophical careers, despite (or perhaps even because of) their initial interest in a number of shared problematics.
THE FIELD OF SUBJECTIVITY
The tradition of subjectivity provides us with a first and obvious model of transcendence. For any philosophy that begins with the subject or the mind—that is, much of post-Cartesian philosophy—the concept of immanence refers to the sphere of the subject, while transcendence refers to what lies outside the subject, such as the “external world” or the “Other.” In this tradition, the term “transcendence” refers to that which transcends the field of consciousness immanent to the subject. On this score, one has only to think of the problems posed in Husserl's fifth Cartesian Meditation, the theme of “Being-with-Others” in Sartre, or Levinas's own philosophy of alterity. But one also finds, in the subjectivist tradition, a second, and perhaps more profound, problem of transcendence, which is what Sartre called, in his article of the same name, “The Transcendence of the Ego.” In Kant, the ego or the “I think” accompanies all (or most of) my representations—it is precisely what makes them mine. Against Kant, Sartre pushed for a conception of an impersonal transcendental field that was without an ego, much like William James's notion of a “pure flux of consciousness.”3 In other words, when one says that the field of consciousness is immanent to a transcendental subject, one is already erecting the subject as an element of transcendence that goes beyond the flux of experience.4 Already, then, we find two models of transcendence at work in the subjectivist tradition: the other (or the “world,” in Heidegger) is what transcends the self, but the subject itself is already transcendent in relation to “experience” (passive syntheses). Consequently, one might say that there are two general means by which one can call into question the status of the transcendental subject (the well-known theme of the “death of the subject”): by appealing either to the transcendence of the other or to the immanent flux of experience itself. It would be simplistic to suggest that Derrida simply followed the first path and Deleuze the second, but the “elective affinities” of the two thinkers seems evident. Derrida and Deleuze, however, are both critical of the subjectivist tradition, and the more telling differences between them lie elsewhere.