by Daniel Smith
2.
An early version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the International Association of Philosophy and Literature at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, in June 2002. The ideas developed here originated in discussions with Andrew Haas and Andrew Montin at the University of New South Wales, and benefitted from the critical comments of Paul Patton and John Protevi.
3.
See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego (New York: Noonday, 1957), as well as Deleuze's comments in LS 98–9, 343–4. Deleuze will retain Sartre's notion of an impersonal transcendental field, stripping it of any determination as a constituting consciousness.
4.
See WP 46:
Kant discovered the modern way of saving transcendence: this is no longer the transcendence of Something, or of a One higher than everything (contemplation), but that of a Subject to which the field of immanence is only attributed by belonging to a self that necessarily represents such a subject to itself (reflection).
5.
See ECC 137: “The poisoned gift of Platonism was to have reintroduced transcendence into philosophy, to have given transcendence a plausible philosophical meaning.” Deleuze is here referring primarily to ontological transcendence.
6.
See also Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 4: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 4:
“Christian God” also stands for the “transcendent” in general in its various meanings—for “ideals” and “norms,” “principles” and “rules,” “ends” and “values,” which are set “above” Being, in order to give Being as a whole a purpose, an order, and—as it is succinctly expressed—“meaning.”
7.
In this, Derrida is certainly more faithful to Heidegger, and is attempting, in an explicit manner, to carry forward a trajectory already present in Heidegger's work: the immanent question of being and its transcendental horizon (time), which is posed in Being and Time, comes to be progressively displaced by the transcendent themes of Ereignis (the “event”) and the es gibt (the “gift” [Gabe] of time and being). The trajectory is continued in the Derridean themes of revelation and promise. See Derrida's comments in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 122–4.
8.
See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), where Derrida characterizes history as “the very movement of transcendence, of the excess over the totality, without which no totality would appear” (117).
9.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 6–7. See also 10: one must “borrow the syntactic and lexical resources of the language of metaphysics … at the very moment one deconstructs this language.”
10.
Derrida, Positions, 6.
11.
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 168: “Différance, the disappearance of any originary presence, is at once the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of truth.”
12.
Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67.
13.
Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 243.
14.
See Arnaud Villani, La Guêpe et l'orchidée: Essai sur Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Belin, 1999), 130.
15.
Significantly, Derrida says the first question he would have asked Deleuze would have concerned the term immanence—a term “on which he always insisted.” See “I'm Going to Have to Wander All Alone,” in Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. and trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 189–96.
16.
Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme,” in Margins of Philosophy, 67.
17.
For Deleuze's interpretation of Platonism, see in particular “Plato and the Simulacrum” in LS 253–66, although the concept of the simulacrum developed there assumes less and less importance in Deleuze's work.
18.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). Deleuze never discusses Levinas's work directly, except as an instance of Jewish philosophy (in WP 233 n5). See, however, Alain Badiou's critiques in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001).
19.
For their respective discussions of the divine names tradition, see Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone, 1990), Chapter 3 (EPS 53–68), and Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
20.
For Thomas Aquinas's formulations of analogy, see Summa Theologica, 1.13.5. The great modern proponent of the way of affirmation was Charles Williams; see his book The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (New York: Faber & Faber, 1943).
21.
See Reiner Schürmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), especially 172–92. While recognizing Eckhart's affinities with immanence (see 176, 252 n56) and with an immanent causality (177), Schürmann attempts to provide a qualified analogical interpretation of his teachings (179).
22.
Derrida characterizes the nature of deconstruction itself in terms derived from the tradition of negative theology. See Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” in Derrida and Difference, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 5: “What is deconstruction? ‘Nothing of course!’ And what is deconstruction not? ‘Everything, of course!’”
23.
Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, 74.
24.
Ibid., 77, 79.
25.
Derrida, On the Name, 69.
26.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 298–9 (A295–6/B352).
27.
See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 257 (A236–7/B294–5):
We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion.
28.
Derrida himself draws the analogy between Kantian Ideas and his own concepts at numerous points throughout his work. For instance, the structure or logic of the gift, Derrida tells us, has “a form analogous to Kant's transcendental dialectic, as relation between thinking and knowing. We are going to give ourselves over to engage in the effort of thinking or rethinking a sort of transcendental illusion of the gift” (Jacques Derrida, Given Time, Vol. 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 29–30, emphasis added). Similarly, Derrida notes that
I have on several occasions spoken of “unconditional” affirmation or of “unconditional” “appeal.” … Now, the very least that can be said of “unconditionality” (a word that I use not by accident to recall the character of the categorical imperative in its Kantian form) is that it is independent of every determinate context, even of the determination of a context in general. It announces itself as such only in the opening of context. (Jacques Derrida, Limited ABC, ed. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 152–3)
To be sure, Derrida's thought cannot be accommodated within these Kantian formulations:
Why have I always hesitated to characterize it [deconstruction] in Kantian terms, for example, or more generally in ethical or political terms, when that would have been so easy and would have enabled me to avoid so many critiques, themselves all too facile? Because such characterizations seem to me essentially associated with philosophemes that themselves call for deconstructive questions. (Limited ABC, 153)
For an analysis of Derrida's relation to Kant, see Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), Chapter 1, “Autoimmunity of Time: Derrida and Kant,” 13–49.
29.
Derrida, Aporias, 16. See also The Gift of Death, 84, where Derrida is still hesitating between the two terms: “The concept of responsibility [would be] paralyzed by what can be called an aporia or an antinomy.”
30.
Derrida, Aporias, 15.
31.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Essay II, §8, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 506, as quoted in NP 213–14.
32.
Derrida, “Post-Scriptum,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, 290.
33.
For a summary of Deleuze's theory of desire, see his seminar of 26 Mar 1973, “Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire–Pleasure–Jouissance),” in Contretemps: An Online Journal of Philosophy 2 (May 2001), 92–108.
34.
Derrida, Given Time, 29.
35.
For the idea that the deconstruction of the law “operates on the basis of the infinite ‘Idea of justice,’” see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Acts of Religion, esp. 250–58. See also Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 17: the Idea of justice implies “non-gathering, dissociation, heterogeneity, non-identity with itself, endless inadequation, infinite transcendence.” On the Idea of justice being “independent of all determinable contexts,” see Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 215–16.
36.
Jacques Derrida, Resistances to Psychoanalysis, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 36. Thanks to Andrew Montin for this reference.
37.
Derrida, On the Name, 37.
38.
See, for example, Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 24.
Essay 17: Alain Badiou
Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Deleuze and Badiou Revisited
1.
F 42 (Deleuze was speaking of Virilio's relation to Foucault). A shorter version of this article was presented at the conference “Ethics and Politics: The Work of Alain Badiou,” which was held at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Cardiff on 25–6 May 2002, organized by Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Neil Badmington, and was published in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004). My understanding of Badiou's work is strongly indebted to Peter Hallward's book Subject to Truth: The Work of Alain Badiou (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), which presents a superb overview and critical analysis of Badiou's philosophy. I would like to thank Prof. Hallward for providing me with an early copy of his manuscript, and for the insights and clarifications he provided on both Badiou and Deleuze during numerous e-mail correspondences. This essay was written before the 2006 publication of Badiou's Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009).
2.
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2005).
3.
Gilles Deleuze, “A Philosophical Concept,” in Who Comes After the Subject, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 95.
4.
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 4.
5.
Badiou, Deleuze, 1.
6.
See Badiou, Being and Event, 483: “the latent paradigm in Deleuze is ‘natural’ … Mine is mathematical.” Similarly, in his review article of Deleuze's book on Leibniz, Badiou writes: “There have never been but two schemas or paradigms of the Multiple: the mathematical and the organicist … This is the cross of metaphysics, and the greatness of Deleuze … is to choose without hesitation for the animal” (Alain Badiou, “Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’,” in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, eds., Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55. This same theme is continued in Badiou's article “Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology,” in Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, ed. and trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 63–72.
7.
See, for instance, the articles on Badiou's book by Éric Alliez, Arnaud Villani, and José Gil, collected in Futur Antérieur 43 (April 1998).
8.
Badiou, “Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology,” in Briefings on Existence, 71.
9.
See Badiou, Briefings on Existence, 54:
A “crisis” in mathematics is a moment when mathematics is constrained to think its own thought as the immanent multiplicity of its own unity. It is at this point, I believe, and at this point alone, that mathematics, that is to say, ontology, functions as a condition of philosophy.
For Badiou, philosophy itself is “meta-ontological,” since it is the task of philosophy to establish the thesis that mathematics is the discourse of Being-as-such (Badiou, Being and Event, 13).
10.
See DR 323 n22: Given the irreducibility of “problems” in his thought, Deleuze writes that “the use of the word ‘problematic’ as a substantive seems to us an indispensable neologism.”
11.
Alain Badiou, “One, Multiple, Multiplicities,” in Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 71.
12.
See TP 374: “Only royal science has at its disposal a metric power that can define a conceptual apparatus or an autonomy of science (including the autonomy of experimental science).” And TP 486: “Major science has a perpetual need for the inspiration of the minor; but the minor would be nothing if it did not confront and conform to the highest scientific requirements.”
13.
Badiou, Being and Event, 184.
14.
Badiou, “One, Multiple, Multiplicities,” in Theoretical Writings, 72.
15.
Badiou, Deleuze, 46: “I uphold that the forms of the multiple are, just like Ideas, always actual and that the virtual does not exist.” Deleuze agrees with this characterization of sets: “Everything is actual in a numerical multiplicity; everything is not ‘realized,’ but everything there is actual. There are no relationships other than those between actuals” (B 43).
16.
AO 371–2. For Badiou's appeal to Lautréamont, see “Mathematics and Philosophy,” in Theoretical Writings, 11–12; and Briefings on Existence, 71.
17.
TP 363. See Deleuze's well-known comments on his relation to the history of philosophy in N 5–6. The best general works on the history of mathematics are Carl B. Boyer, History of Mathematics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) and Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
18.
Proclus, Commentary of the First Book of Euclid's Elements, trans. Glenn R. Murrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 63–7, as cited in DR 163; TP 554 n21; and LS 54. See also Deleuze's comments in TI 174: theorems and problems are “two mathematical instances which constantly refer to each other, the one enveloping the second, the second sliding into the first, but both very different in sp
ite of their union.” On the two types of deduction, TI 185.
19.
For instance, determining a triangle the sum of whose angles is 180 degrees is theorematic, since the angles of every triangle will total 180 degrees. Constructing an equilateral triangle on a given finite straight line, by contrast, is problematic, since we could also construct a non-equilateral triangle or a non-triangular figure on the line (moreover, the construction of an equilateral triangle must first pass through the construction of two circles). Classical geometers struggled for centuries with the three great “problems” of antiquity—trisecting an angle, constructing a cube having double the volume of a given cube, and constructing a square equal to a circle—though it would turn out that none of these problems is solvable using only a straightedge and compass. See E. T. Bell's comments in Men of Mathematics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1937), 31–2.