by Daniel Smith
30.
See Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes, ed. David Webb (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000), 67; and Michel Serres, Atlas (Paris: Julliard, 1994), 100.
31.
See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1905]; and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2002), as well as 27 Mar 1984.
32.
For Deleuze's elucidation of these themes, see 17 Apr 1984 and 4 May 1984. See also TRM 238: “Philosophy creates concepts, which are neither generalities nor even truths; they are rather of the order of the Singular, the Important, the New.”
33.
One of the themes of Deleuze's two-volume Cinema is that the cinema, in its much shorter history, none the less recapitulated this philosophical revolution in the movement–time relation. For a useful summary of this revolution in the concept of time, albeit from a slightly different perspective than Deleuze's, see John Dewey, “Time and Individuality” (1940), in The Essential Dewey, Vol. 1., Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, ed. Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 217–26.
34.
See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), 15:
As for my own opinion, I have said more than once that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time is – that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order of things that exist at the same time, considered as existing together, without entering into their particular manners of existing. And when many things are seen together, one consciously perceives this order of things among themselves.
35.
Deleuze insists that it is important not to confuse the synthesis of time with time itself. Martin Heidegger, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), reintroduced an originary time because he wrongly consider the synthesis of time to be an originary time. See Deleuze's critique in 17 Apr 1984.
36.
For the active syntheses of the transcendental ego found in Kant, Deleuze substitutes a theory of passive synthesis, derived in part from Husserl. Joe Hughes provides an insightful analysis of the concept of passive synthesis in Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), esp. 8–19. See also Keith Faulkner, Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).
37.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 13.
38.
Bellour nicely summarizes the tension inherent in Deleuze's analytic when he asks: “How can the concept be both what suspends, arrests, consists, and what flees, opens all lines of flight?” See Raymond Bellour, “Thinking, Recounting: The Cinema of Gilles Deleuze,” trans. Melissa McMahon, in Discourse, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Fall 1998), 56–75 (71).
39.
Paul Patton makes the comparison between Deleuzian concepts and hypertext documents in his review of What is Philosophy? in the Times Literary Supplement, 23 Jun 1995, 10–12.
40.
See Villani, La Guêpe et l'orchidée, 130:
I feel myself to be Bergsonian, when Bergson says that modern science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs. It is this metaphysics that interests me … It is in this manner, it seems to me, that philosophy can be considered as a science: determining the conditions of a problem.
Following Deleuze, Michel Foucault would later take up this concept of “problematization” in interpreting the course of his own work. See Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 381–90.
41.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 319, A328/B384: “The absolute whole of appearances [the World] is only an Idea, since it remains a problem to which there is no solution.”
42.
B 17–18. See Bergson's classic article “The Possible and the Real,” in Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1946), 91–106.
43.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Mordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 193. No doubt this was one reason Deleuze was not sympathetic to Wittgenstein: the dissolution of false problems has as its necessary correlate the construction of true problems.
44.
Kierkegaard argued that the interesting is one of the fundamental categories of philosophy. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1985), 109: “The category I would like to examine a little more closely is that of the interesting ….”
45.
See N 130: “Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless. He didn't say they were wrong—that wouldn't have been so bad.”
46.
N 25. For the idea of a “philosophy of circumstances,” see Michel Serres, The Five Senses, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), esp. 282–88.
47.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258.
48.
Similarly, one could say that our culture has yet to develop a secularized relation to science; see Serres, The Five Senses, 334–5.
49.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Essay III, §24, 153.
50.
On the concept of information, in this sense, see Gilbert Simondon, L'Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2005).
51.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 486.
52.
See TI 134, 145, as well as 8 Nov 1983 and 12 Jun 1984.
53.
Spinoza, Letter 32, to Oldenburg, 20 Nov 1665, in Spinoza: The Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 849.
54.
James made a similar point in his analysis of what he called “the stream of thought.” See William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), 224–5:
The first fact for us … is that thinking of some sort goes on … If we could say in English ‘it thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it blows,’ we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on.
55.
Spinoza, The Emendation of the Intellect, §85, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 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.” Leibniz, for his own reasons, appealed to the same image. See “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, 2nd edn., ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), 495: “The soul is a most exact spiritual automaton.”
56.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §17, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 214.
57.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 34 (= Notebook 38[1] = KSA 11:38[1]). See also DR 118:
It is not even clear that thought, in so far as it constitutes the dynamism peculiar to philosophical systems, may be related to a substantial, completed, and well-constituted sub
ject, such as the Cartesian Cogito: thought is, rather, one of those terrible movements which can be sustained only under the conditions of a larval subject.
58.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), §§25–7, 35.
59.
William James, Pragmatism [1907] (New York: Dover, 1995), 24.
60.
Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 64.
61.
DR xxi. Deleuze and Guattari similarly suggest that Anti-Oedipus was written out of ignorance: “We would like to speak in the name of an absolute incompetence” (AO 380; cf. 232, 238, 334).
62.
On the time (or temporal synthesis) proper to painting, see 31 Mar 1981.
Essay 9: Ethics
The Place of Ethics in Deleuze's Philosophy: Three Questions of Immanence
1.
See Monique Canto-Sperber, “Pour la philosophie morale,” in Le Débat 72 (Nov–Dec 1992), 40–51.
2.
See the introduction to Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985), 3–32, where Foucault explains the reformulation of the project.
3.
See N 135: “Everything tended toward the great Spinoza-Nietzsche identity”
4.
See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 4: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), section 12, “Nietzsche's ‘Moral’ Interpretation of Metaphysics,” 76–7: “By ‘morality,’ Nietzsche usually understands a system of evaluations in which a transcendent world is posited as an idealized standard of measure.”
5.
NP 1. For the distinction between “morality” and “ethics,” see N 100, 113–14. “Règles facultatives” is a term Deleuze adopts from the sociolinguist William Labov to designate “functions of internal variation and no longer constants”; see F 147 n18.
6.
On the notion of “dramatization,” see NP 75–9.
7.
At best, the Spinozistic and Nietzschean critiques were accepted as negative moments, exemplary instances of what must be fought against and rejected in the ethico-moral domain. See, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), who, for his part, summarized the contemporary ethical options in the chapter entitled, “Aristotle or Nietzsche?”: “The defensibility of the Nietzschean position turns in the end on the answer to the question: was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle?” (117).
8.
NP 89–90. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), §7, Remark, 165: the consciousness of the moral law is “not an empirical fact, but the sole fact of pure reason, which, by it, proclaims itself as originally lawgiving.”
9.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968). Preface, §6, 456; Essay 3, §24, 589.
10.
The discussion that follows is a summary of Deleuze's analysis of the Moral Law in Chapter 7 of Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, entitled “Humor, Irony, and the Law” (M 81–90).
11.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 72–3.
12.
M 86–90. “Perversion” plays an important role in Deleuze's writings as a specific type of mode of existence that retains a positivity of its own.
13.
For Deleuze's analysis of the slave and the priest as modes of existence, see NP, Chapter 4, “From Ressentiment to the Bad Conscience,” 111–45. Deleuze provides a useful summary of his interpretation in PI 17–41.
14.
Deleuze's analysis of this tradition is found in his two-volume Cinema, where he draws a parallel between the philosophy of Pascal and Kierkegaard and the films of Bresson and Dreyer. See MI 114–16 and TI 176–9.
15.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), §83, 51–2.
16.
DR 86–7. The concept of “passive synthesis” is taken from Husserl; see Joe Hughes, Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (London: Continuum, 2008), 10–19.
17.
See EPS for Deleuze's three formulations of “the ethical question” in Spinoza:
.
1. Of what affections are we capable? What is the extent of our power? (226)
.
2. What must we do to be affected by a maximum of joyful passions? (273)
.
3. How can we come to produce active affections? (246)
18.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §532, 289; see also §489, 270.
19.
On the distinction between “arborescent” and “rhizomatic” models of thought, see TP 3–25. For Spinoza's critique of the Aristotelian tradition, see SPP 44–8, and EPS 277–8.
20.
See Spinoza, Ethics, Book 3, prop. 3, scholium, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, 2nd edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 495: “No one has yet determined what a body can do.” This phrase is repeated like a leitmotif in several of Deleuze's books.
21.
See the final volumes of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality: Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985), and Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1986). The fourth volume of the series, Les Aveux de la chair (The Confessions of the Flesh), was written but never published.
22.
This is particularly true of a certain Hegelianism of the right that still dominates political philosophy, and weds the destiny of thought to the State (Alexandre Kojève and Eric Weil in France, Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom in America). See TP 556 n42.
23.
Modern thought thus found itself subordinated to an image of thought derived from the legislative and juridical organization of the State, leading to the prevalence, in political philosophy, of such categories as the republic of free spirits, the tribunal of reason, the rights of man, the consensual contract, inquiries into the understanding (method, recognition, question and response, judgment), and so on. On these themes, see TP 374–80.
24.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 316, A323/B379: “We have to seek for an unconditioned, first, of the categorical synthesis in a subject; secondly, of the hypothetical synthesis of the members of a series; thirdly, of the disjunctive synthesis of the parts in a system.”
25.
AO analyses “primitive” societies, the State, and capitalism (139–271); TP adds to this an analysis of the nomadic war machine (351–423), and in an essential chapter entitled “Apparatus of Capture” (424–73), it attempts to lay out in specific terms the complex relations between these various typologies. For analyses of the typology of social formations developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, see Eugene Holland, Deleuze and Guattari's “Anti-Oedipus”: An Introduction to Schizoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), and Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari's “Anti-Oedipus”: A Reader's Guide (London: Continuum, 2008).
26.
D 125; TP 277. John Protevi has explored the political implications of Deleuze's theory of the affects, most notably in Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic (London and New York: Athlone, 2001), and Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
27.
On “infantile leftism,” see Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Michel Foucault,” in Foucault: A Critical Rea
der, ed. David Couzens Hoy (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 51. On “neo-conservatism,” see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
28.
Deleuze analyzes these distinctions in detail in EPS, notably in Chapter 16, “The Ethical Vision of the World,” 255–72. See also SPP, entry on “Power,” 97–104.
29.
See WP 74:
There is not the slightest reason for thinking that modes of existence need transcendent values by which they could be compared selected, and judged relative to one another. There are only immanent criteria. A possibility of life is evaluated through itself in the movements its lays out and the intensities it creates on a plane of immanence: what is not laid out or created is rejected. A mode of existence is good or bad, noble or vulgar, complete or empty, independently of Good or Evil or any transcendent value: there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life.
30.
For instance, in a famous text, which in some respects parallels Nietzsche's analyses in the Genealogy of Morals, Spinoza showed how the notion of the Law arose among the Hebrews from a misunderstanding of affective relations. When God forbade Adam to eat the fruit of the Garden of Eden, he did so because he knew it would affect Adam's body like a poison, decomposing its constitutive relation. But Adam, unable to perceive these affective relations, mistook the prohibition for a commandment, the effect of decomposition as a punishment, and the word of God as a Law. See Spinoza, Letter 19, to Blijenbergh, in Collected Works, 357–61. On the question, Can there be inherently evil modes of existence?, see SPP 30–43.