by Daniel Smith
20.
This reading can be found in Deleuze's seminars of 28 Mar and 4 Apr 1978, which are are available online at webdeleuze.com in an English translation by Melissa McMahon.
21.
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 144 (A120): “There must exist in us an active faculty for the synthesis of the manifold. To this faculty I give the title, imagination.”
22.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 105 (A68/B93): “The only use which the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of them.”
23.
Immanuel Kant [1952], Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 1978), 5§26,105. Deleuze considered the Critique of Judgment to be “one of the most important books in all of philosophy” (31 Mar 1981).
24.
Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 140.
25.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 5.
26.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, §26, 98.
27.
See Henri Maldiney, “L'Esthetique des rhythmes,” in Regard parole espace (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1973), 147–72: 149–51.
28.
Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames & Hudson: 1991), 160. See Deleuze's commentary on this text in the seminar of 31 Mar 2981.
29.
Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 43. See TP 312 as well as 28 Mar 1978.
30.
In Kant, sensibility is a mere receptive faculty; it simply presents a diversity of a manifold in space and time. The task of the imagination (through synthesis), the understanding (through concepts), and reason (through Ideas) is to unify this diversity (the form of recognition and common sense).
31.
Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 180. Genosko presents an analysis of Guattari's “diagrammatism” on 178–85.
32.
Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935–1966), Vol. 4, 531 (as cited in Genosko, Félix Guattari, 179).
33.
TP 531 n41. Deleuze and Guattari note that they “borrow his [Peirce's] terms, even while changing their connotations,” such that they are able to assign to the diagram “a distinct role, irreducible to either the icon or the symbol.” For their use of the term diagram, see TP 141–4.
34.
WP 203: “The struggle with chaos that Cézanne and Klee have shown in action in painting, at the heart of painting, is found in another way in science and in philosophy.”
35.
Deleuze none the less occasionally makes use of this term; see, for instance, TP 497: “The figurative as such is not inherent to any ‘will to art.’”
36.
Maldiney, Regard parole espace, 195.
Essay 14: The New
The Conditions of the New
1.
An early version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the British Society for Phenomenology at St. Hilda's College, Oxford University, in April 2005, on the theme of “The Problem of the New,” organized by Robin Durie.
2.
See, for instance, the following: “The aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)” (D vii); Bergson “transformed philosophy by posing the question of the ‘new’ instead of that of eternity (how are the production and appearance of something new possible)” (MI 3); “The new—in other words, difference—calls forth forces in thought that are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognita” (DR 136). None the less, it is true that the new is merely an operative concept in Deleuze's philosophy, which he himself tends to thematize under the rubric of difference.
3.
On these issues, Deleuze did not hesitate to identify himself as a metaphysician, in the traditional sense. “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” (Arnaud Villani, La Guêpe et l'orchidée: Essai sur Gilles Deleuze [Paris: Belin, 1999], 130.)
4.
See Mario Bunge, Causality and Modern Science, 3rd rev. edn. (New York: Dover Books , 1979), 17–19 (“The Spectrum of Categories of Determination”).
5.
See the discussion in Mario Bunge, Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2001), esp. 49, 222.
6.
Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 1.
7.
Martial Gueroult, L’Évolution et la structure de la Doctrine de la Science chez Fichte, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres), I, 126.
8.
In a Deleuzian context, it might be preferable to speak about the conditions of the real, rather than real experience, since the latter seems to imply a link to a (transcendental) subjectivity. But we can perhaps retain the phrase if we instead link it to the notion of pure experience in the Jamesian sense—that is, an experience without a subject or an object.
9.
DR 38. See also DR 54: “The search for a ground forms the essential step of a ‘critique’ which should inspire in us new ways of thinking … [But] as long as the ground remains larger than the grounded, this critique serves only to justify traditional ways of thinking.”
10.
See LS 19: in order to assure a real genesis, the genesis requires an element of its own, “distinct from the form of the conditioned,” something unconditioned, an “ideational material or ‘stratum.’”
11.
Leibniz and Spinoza will both claim, for example, that Descartes's clear and distinct ideas only find their sufficient reason in adequate ideas. On the relation of the foundation to the ground, see DR 79: “The foundation concerns the soil: it shows how something is established upon this soil, how it occupies and possesses it; whereas the ground … measures the possessor and the soil against one another according to a title of ownership.”
12.
On the role of the sans-fond in artistic creation, see Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation,” translator's preface to Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), vii–xxxiii.
13.
Ian Stewart, Does God Place Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, 2nd edn. (London: Blackwell, 1989), 32–3.
14.
Bunge Causality and Modern Science, 74–5, citing Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1996), 122. As Bunge notes, however, “the advances of science elicit the invention of fresh mathematical tools” (75), and there is thus no reason to privilege differential equations per se.
15.
See 22 Apr 1980: “It is because it [the calculus] is a well-founded fiction in relation to mathematical truth that it is consequently a basic and real means of exploration of the reality of existence.” Deleuze makes a similar point in 29 Apr 1980:
Everyone agrees on the irreducibility of differential signs to any mathematical reality, that is to say, to geometrical, arithmetical, and algebraic reality. The difference arises when some people think, as a consequence, that differential calculus is only a convention—a rather suspect one—and others, on the contrary, think that its artificial character in relation to mathematical reality allows it to be adequate to certain aspects of physical reality.
16.
; See DR 42–50, where Deleuze analyzes and compares the projects of Hegel and Leibniz on this score: “differential calculus no less than the dialectic is a matter of ‘power’ and of the power of the limit” (43).
17.
Strictly speaking, the list of concepts that follows, as Deleuze points out, is not a list of categories, nor could it be (without changing the concept of a category): they are “complexes of space and time … irreducible to the universality of the concept and to the particularity of the now here” (DR 285).
18.
But this forces Leibniz into a new problem: What is the relation between the two judgments of attribution “A is larger than B” (in the concept A) and “B is smaller than A” (in the concept B)? Leibniz reduces relations to attributions, but then he divides the relation into two relations. If we have “A R1 B” and “B R2 A” (where R1 and R2 are the relations), then what is the relation between R1 and R2? Leibniz's genius was to create another new concept to account for this second relation: the “pre-established harmony”: in God's understanding there is a correspondence and a harmony between everything that is contained in the concept A and everything that is contained in the concept B. In other words, there is a single and unique world that is expressed in the concepts of real beings.
19.
14 Dec 1982. See also ECC 86–7, and David Lapoujade, “From Transcendental Empiricism to Worker Nomadism: William James,” trans. Alberto Toscano, in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 9 (2000), 190–9, who analyzes James's “radical empiricism” in a similar light.
20.
See TP 232–309, the plateau entitled “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ….” The concept of becoming appears earlier, in NP, for example, but it does not yet have the components that Deleuze will eventually assign to it in this text, and which will be further developed in later concepts such as the interstice, affect and percept, and so on.
21.
See D 30: Mrs. Dalloway was “laid out like a mist between the people she knew best.”
22.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Justification of the Infinitesimal Calculus by That of Ordinary Algebra,” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1956), 545–6. For a fuller analysis of Leibniz's text, see Essay 11.
23.
By contrast, in The Fold, Deleuze begins his deduction of concepts with the differential concept of inflection.
24.
Miguel de Beistegui, in his Truth and Genesis: Philosophy and Differential Ontology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), has analyzed in detail the shift from substance to multiplicity brought about by Deleuze's differential ontology.
25.
Alfred North Whitehead makes a similar point in Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), 173: “We can never get away from the questions: —How much, —In what proportions?—and In what pattern of arrangement with other things? …. Arsenic deals out either health or death, according to its proportions amid a pattern of circumstances.”
26.
The analysis that follows derived from Deleuze's seminar of 10 Mar 1981, which forms part of a series of fourteen seminars that Deleuze gave on Spinoza between December 1980 and March 1981. In certain respects, the contents of these seminars differ significantly from the interpretation of Spinoza given in EPS.
27.
Like most seventeenth-century thinkers, Leibniz also proposed a concept of the actual infinite that was opposed to the indefinite:
I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author. Thus I believe that there is no part of matter which is not, I do not say divisible, but actually divided; and consequently the least particle ought to be considered as a world full of an infinity of different creatures. (Letter to Foucher, 16 Mar 1693, in Die Philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin: George Olms, 1965), I, 416)
28.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 319, A327/B384.
29.
Steven Strogatz, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 181.
30.
Ian Stewart, Does God Place Dice?: The Mathematics of Chaos (London: Blackwell, 1989), 73–4.
31.
See B 98: “It is not the real that resembles the possible; it is the possible that resembles the real.” The concept of possibility is subject to the same critique that Deleuze offers of Kant's conception of conditions of possibility: “the error of all determinations of the transcendental as consciousness is to conceive of the transcendental in the image and resemblance of what it is supposed to found” (LS 105).
32.
For this reason, Deleuze's work has been seen to anticipate certain developments in complexity theory and chaos theory. Manuel De Landa in particular has emphasized this link in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London and New York: Continuum, 2002). For a general presentation of the mathematics of chaos theory, see Ian Stewart, Does God Place Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos.
33.
See B 97: “The characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such a way that it is actualized by being differenciated, and is forced to differenciate itself, to create its lines of differenciation in order to be actualized.”
34.
On this topic, see Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1096–7: “After the dawn of rigorous mathematics with Cauchy, most mathematicians followed his dictates and rejected divergent series as unsound,” but with the advent of non-Euclidean geometry and the new algebras, “mathematicians slowly began to appreciate that … Cauchy's definition of convergence could no longer be regarded as a higher necessity informed by some superhuman power.”
Essay 15: The Open
The Idea of the Open: Bergson's Three Theses on Movement
1.
This paper was originally presented as a talk in Stavanger, Norway, on 7 November 2008, at a conference entitled “Deleuze 2008: Deleuze in the Open,” which was organized by Arne Fredlund.
2.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
3.
See 3 May 1987:
The two parts of a mixture are never equal. One of the two parts is always more or less given, the other is always more or less to be made. It is for this reason that I have remained very Bergsonian. He said very beautiful things on that. He said that in a mixture, you never have two elements, but one element which plays the role of impurity and that one you have, it's given to you, and then you have a pure element that you don't have that must be made. That's not bad.
4.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 330: “Ancient science thinks it knows its object sufficiently when it has noted some of its privileged moments, whereas modern science considers the object at any moment whatever.”
5.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 331.
6.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 330.
7.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 331: “Galileo thought there was no essential moment, no privileged instant.”
8.
For the Greeks, a figure is defined by its form: that is, by its privileged points (a circle has one privileged point, its center; a finite line has two privileged points, its ends or extrema; a triangle has three privileged points, a square has four, a cube has eight, and so on).
9.
MI 4. Bergson develops these points in the fourth chapter of Creative Evolution.
10.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 336, as cited in MI 4.
11.
Bergson, Cre
ative Evolution, 37: “The essence of mechanical explanation is to regard the future and the past as calculable functions of the present, and thus to claim that the whole is given [tout est donné].” See also 39, 45, 345.
12.
Whitehead—whom Deleuze considered to be the last great American philosopher—would take up this question in his own manner; what he called a concrescence is the production of something new in the world (creativity).
13.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 32: “Such a science would be a mechanics of transformation, of which our mechanics of translation would become a particular case.”
14.
For Bergson's famous example of mixing sugar in a glass of water, see Creative Evolution, 9–10.
15.
This section is a recapitulation of themes that are developed in more detail in Essay 12.
Essay 16: Jacques Derrida
Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought
1.
Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 220–39: 239. Edith Wyschogrod, in Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), distinguishes between philosophers of difference (Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot) and philosophers of the plenum (Deleuze and Guattari, Genet) (191, 223, 229), but this distinction seems less germane than Agamben's.