Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  26.

  Spinoza, Ethics, IV, def. 3 and 4. See also I, 33, scholia: “A thing is called contingent only because of a defect in our knowledge.”

  27.

  Spinoza, Ethics, I, appendix; II, 35, scholia; V, preface. See also III, 2, scholia (“Men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined”) and I, 32 (“The will cannot be called a free cause”).

  28.

  The formation of adequate idea through the “common notions” is one of the primary foci of Deleuze's analysis of Spinoza. See EPS 255–88, and the summary provided in SPP 54–8.

  29.

  Spinoza, Letter 58, to G. H. Schuller, in Spinoza: Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 908–9.

  30.

  See Deleuze's essay on Klossowski in LS, where he contrasts the “order of God” with the “order of the Anti-Christ” (LS 292, 294).

  31.

  See DR 40–1. Whitehead, in Process and Reality, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), proposes a similar modification of Spinoza: “Spinoza bases his philosophy upon the monistic substance, of which the actual occasions are inferior modes. The philosophy of organism inverts this point of view” (81). Similarly, if Deleuze is Leibnizian, it is only by eliminating the idea of a God who chooses the “best” of all possible worlds, with its pre-established harmony; in Deleuze, incompossibilities and dissonances belong to one and the same world, the only world, our world.

  32.

  See Deleuze's interview with Arnaud Villani in the latter's La Guêpe et l'orchidée: Essai sur Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Belin, 1999), 130: “I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician … Bergson says that modern science hasn't found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me.”

  33.

  See Deleuze, “Letter Preface,” in Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, trans. Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 8: “I believe in philosophy as system. For me, the system must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, it must be a heterogenesis—something which, it seems to me, has never been attempted.”

  34.

  See Aristotle, Categories, 4, 1b25 (list of the categories) and Physics, Book 1, Chapter 2, 185a21 (“‘Is’ is used in several senses”) in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 8, 220.

  35.

  Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 102; cf. 117.

  36.

  This diagram of Porphyry's tree is adapted from E. M. Curley, Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 29.

  37.

  See Aristotle, Metaphysics, III, 3, 998b22–7, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 723:

  It is not possible that either unity or being should be a single genus of things; for the differentiae of any genus must each of them both have being and be one, but it is not possible for the genus taken apart from its species (any more than for the species of the genus) to be predicated of its proper differentiae; so that if unity or being is a genus, no differentia will either have being or be one.

  38.

  See Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 2, 1003a33–4, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 732 (translation modified): “Being is said in several senses, but always with reference to a single term (pros hen).”

  39.

  On the relation between “common sense” and “good sense,” see DR 269 and LS 75–9.

  40.

  For Deleuze's summary of his criticisms of Aristotle, see DR 269–70.

  41.

  The interpretation of Spinoza's “degree of power” in terms of the concept of intensity is another Deleuzian innovation. In Difference and Repetition, however, the concept of intensity is no longer linked to that of substance, as in Spinoza, but takes on an autonomous status, defined formally (following Kant) as a difference that divides into itself, an individuating difference, in relation to a limit where intensity = 0.

  42.

  See Eric Alliez, La Signature du monde (Paris: Cerf, 1993), Chapter 3, “Onto-éthologiques,” 67–104.

  43.

  DR 145. One could conserve the notion of a “category” in a univocal ontology, as do Peirce and Whitehead (see DR 284–5), on the condition of defining categories in a new manner, as differential concepts or Ideas. In an interview in Arnaud Villani, La Guêpe et l'orchidée (Paris: Belin, 1999), Deleuze comments:

  The conclusion to A Thousand Plateaus is, in my mind, a table of categories (but incomplete, insufficient). Not in the manner of Kant [or Aristotle], but in the manner of Whitehead [or Peirce]. Category thus takes in a new meaning, a very special one. I would like to work on this point. (130)

  François Dosse, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) cites a 1981 letter in which Deleuze suggests to Guattari that the evolving theory of categories be a focus of their project: “Pierce and Whitehead make modern tables of categories: how has this idea of categories evolved?” (4). The analytic of concepts developed in What is Philosophy? can be read as the direct result of Deleuze's rethinking of the problem of the categories.

  44.

  See Deleuze, “Lettre-préface,” in Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, trans. Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), vii: “It seems to me that I have completely abandoned the notion of the simulacrum.”

  45.

  D57:

  The whole of grammar, the whole of the syllogism, is a way of maintaining the subordination of conjunctions to the verb to be, of making them gravitate around the verb to be. One must go further: one must make the encounter with relations penetrate and corrupt everything, undermine being, make it topple over. Substitute AND [ET] for IS [EST]. A and B. The And is not even a specific relation or conjunction, it is that which makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set of their terms, and outside everything which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole.

  See also TP 25.

  46.

  See, for instance, TI 180: “The whole undergoes a mutation, because it has ceased to be the One-Being, in order to become the constitutive ‘and’ of things, the constitutive between-two [entre-deux].”

  Essay 3: Leibniz

  Deleuze on Leibniz: Difference, Continuity, and the Calculus

  1.

  See Deleuze's remark in his Letter-Preface to Jean-Clet Martin's Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, trans. Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), vii: “I feel that I am a very classical philosopher. I believe in philosophy as a system.”

  2.

  See EPS 11:

  What I needed was both (1) the expressive character of particular individuals, and (2) an immanence of being. Leibniz, in a way, goes still further than Spinoza on the first point. But on the second, Spinoza stands alone. One finds it only in him. This is why I consider myself a Spinozist, rather than a Leibnizian, although I owe a lot to Leibniz.

  3.

  Deleuze also devoted two series of sessions of his seminar at the University of Vincennes-St. Denis to Leibniz, first in 1980, and then again in 1987, when he was at work on The Fold. My discussion here follows closely the deduction presented in the 1980 seminars.

  4.

  For a discussion of Deleuze's relation to Maimon and the post-Kantian tradition, see Graham Jones, Difference and Determination: Prolegomena Concerning Deleuze's Early Metaphysic, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Monash University, 2002.

  5.

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed. Jonathan Bennett and Peter Remnant (Cambridge: Cambridge University P
ress, 1981), 361.

  6.

  See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd edn., ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), 307: “It is certain that every true predication has some basis in the nature of things, and when a proposition is not an identity, that is to say, when the predicate is not expressly contained in the subject, it must be included in it virtually” (Discourse on Metaphysics 8).

  7.

  FLB 41. See Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, 310: “Everything that happens to some person is already contained virtually in his nature or concept, just as the properties of the circle are contained in its definition” (Discourse on Metaphysics 13).

  8.

  See Louis Couturat, “On Leibniz's Metaphysics,” in Harry G. Frankfurt, ed., Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1972), 22: “The principle of identity states: every identity (analytic) proposition is true. The principle of reason affirms, on the contrary: every true proposition is an identity (analytic).”

  9.

  See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 2, II, 994b, 22–5, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 714: “How can we apprehend things that are infinite in this way … if we do not make a stop?”

  10.

  See Benson Mates, The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 157: “To discover the reason for the truth of the essential proposition ‘A is B’ is to analyze the concept A far enough to reveal the concept B as contained in it.” Deleuze, however, would disagree with Mates's statement that Leibniz “appears to use the terms ‘reason’ and ‘cause’ interchangeably” (158), despite the ambiguities of several Leibnizian texts.

  11.

  DR 12. On the relation of difference and repetition in the classical theory of the concept, see DR 288: difference is always inscribed within the identity of the concept in general, and repetition is defined as a difference without a concept, that is, in terms of the numerically distinct exemplars or individuals that are subsumed under the generality of the concept (x1, x2, x3, … xn), and which block further conceptual specification.

  12.

  DR 56. See also 222: “Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given as diverse.”

  13.

  However, Deleuze will argue, against Leibniz himself, that the analysis of essences must itself be infinite, since it is inseparable from the infinity of God. See FLB 42.

  14.

  For an analysis of Deleuze's relation to the history of the calculus, see Essay 15.

  15.

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Justification of the Infinitesimal Calculus by That of Ordinary Algebra,” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 545–6.

  16.

  Deleuze analyzes this theory in an important chapter, entitled “Perception in the Folds,” in FLB 85–99.

  17.

  Alberto Gualandi, Deleuze (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998), 49. Gualandi's book is one of the best short introductions to Deleuze's work, emphasizing Deleuze's philosophy of nature.

  18.

  Kant had already objected that Maimon, by returning to Leibniz, thereby reintroduced the duality between a finite understanding (consciousness) and an infinite understanding (the divine), which the entire Kantian critique had attempted to eliminate. See Immanuel Kant, letter to Marcus Herz, 26 May 1789, in Arnulf Zweig, ed., Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, 1759–99 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 150–6. Against Kant, however, Deleuze argues that

  the infinite here is only the presence of an unconscious in the finite understanding, a unthought in finite thought, a non-self in the finite self (whose presence Kant himself was forced to discover when he hollowed out the difference between a determining ego and a determinable ego). For Maimon as for Leibniz, the reciprocal determination of differentials does not refer to a divine understanding, but to minute perceptions as the representatives of the world in the finite self. (FLB, 118–19)

  See also DR 192–3.

  19.

  See DR 106–8 (as well as the whole of AO), which contain Deleuze's most explicit advocation of a differential unconscious (Leibniz, Fechner) over a conflictual unconscious (Freud).

  20.

  See Leibniz's analysis of simple curves in “Tentamen Anagogicum: An Anagogical Essay in the Investigation of Causes,” in Loemker, ed., Philosophical Papers and Letters, 477–85.

  21.

  See LS 174:

  Instead of a certain number of predicates being excluded by a thing by virtue of the identity of its concept, each ‘thing’ is open to the infinity of predicates through which it passes, and at the same time it loses its center, that is to say, its identity as a concept and as a self.

  22.

  An early version of this paper appeared under the title “Difference, Continuity, and the Calculus,” in Stephen Daniel, ed., Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 127–47.

  Essay 4: Hegel

  Deleuze, Hegel, and the Post-Kantian Tradition

  1.

  Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 12: “In 1945, all that was modern sprang from Hegel … In 1968, all that was modern was hostile to Hegel.” Kojève's course on Hegel was given at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939, and was regularly attended by figures such as Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Koyré, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Eric Weil, among others. The text of the course was compiled by Raymond Queneau and published in 1947. An English translation appeared in 1969: Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic, 1969).

  2.

  Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 235, as cited in Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, 12.

  3.

  In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze links his concept of dialectics to the notion of the problematic: “Whenever the dialectic ‘forgets’ its intimate relation with Ideas in the form of problems … it loses its true power” (DR 164); “Problems are always dialectical: the dialectic has no other sense” (DR 179).

  4.

  Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, trans. Lauretta C. Clough (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

  5.

  François Châtelet, Chronique des idées perdues (Paris: Stock, 1977), 46. Michel Tournier provides a similar tribute in The Wind Spirit: An Autobiography, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Ness, 1988), 127–8: as a student, Deleuze “possessed extraordinary powers of translation and rearrangement: all the tired philosophy of the curriculum passed through him and emerged unrecognizable but rejuvenated, with an air of freshness, undigestedness, and raw newness, utterly startling and discomfiting our weakness and laziness.” See also 134–5 and 157.

  6.

  Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

  7.

  See Michèle Le Dœuff, “Long Hair, Short Ideas,” in The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 105–6. Deleuze himseIf makes a similar point in Difference and Repetition: “There is something amorous—but also something fatal—about all education”(DR 23).

  8.

  See TP 526 n32: “Jean Wahl's works contain profound reflections on this sense of ‘and,’ on the way it challenges the primacy of the verb ‘to be.’”

  9.

  See D vii: “I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist.”

  10.

  See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979), section on “Sense Certainty.” See also Deleuze's comment in NP 4: “Hegel wanted to ridicule pluralism, identifying it with a naive consciousness which would be happy to say ‘this, that, here, now’—like a child stuttering out its most humble needs.”

  11.

  William James had already spoken of impressions of relations; see his Principles of Psychology [1890] (New York: Dover, 1950), Vol. I, 245: “We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue, a feeling of cold.”

  12.

  See N 122–4. The French term “Intercesseurs” in the title is translated as “Mediators.”

  13.

  Deleuze analyzes this notion in his cinema books, but it seems equally applicable to his own work. See MI 73: free indirect discourse “testifies to a system which is always heterogeneous, far from equilibrium.”