Deleuze session (Part I):

September 2007

Having addressed the work of Michel Foucault, Jean François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida in conjunction with the influential philosophies of Friederich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger before the summer break we will now turn to that of Gilles Deleuze. As we are all relatively alert at the beginning of this session may I do something unusual? I have added a summary to the paper which was distributed originally. I will of course give this at the end as is usual. However, I’d also like to present the summary before I read my paper which will be in two halves. The first will last for 20 minutes and the second for about 15. After this you may feel a little jaded as I probably will too. So let’s start off with what I find so interesting about Deleuze.

As Deleuze points out in Difference and Repetition: “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.”i For Deleuze an object of an encounter is fundamentally different from an object of recognition. With the latter our knowledge(s), beliefs and values are reconfirmed. We, and the particular world we inhabit, are reconfirmed as that which we already understood our world and ourselves to be. An object of recognition, a representation is then precisely a re-presentation of something always already in place. Common sense and worldly wisdom and even cynicism underpins such an understanding. We have a view of the world and of ourselves which is shared and may give us a sense of comfort or even complacency as we are able to put things, including ourselves, into their proper place. We know precisely what’s what. Deleuze fundamentally contests this way of thinking. This is because with such a non-encounter our habitual way of being and

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acting in the world is reaffirmed and reinforced, and as a consequence no real thought takes place. Indeed, we might say that for him representation precisely prevents thinking.

With a genuine encounter however the contrary is the case. Our typical ways of being in the world are challenged and our systems of knowledge are disrupted. We are forced to think. The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack in our assumptions. However this is not the end of the story, for the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a potential new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently in a moment of “pure difference”. This is the creative moment of the encounter that obliges us to think otherwise. According to Deleuze, life, when it truly is lived, is a history of these encounters, which will always necessarily occur beyond representation/ re-presentation.

What then, according to Deleuze, happens in an encounter which forces us to think? He states that there is an immediate moment of inspiration or enthusiasm which sets a challenge or poses a question to our accepted assumptions about the world: that which is already in place, the already given. In such a moment we encounter “pure difference”. Deleuze’s writing can itself be positioned as an experiment in thinking differently, “beyond” representation. His project offers us a “new image of thought”, one in which process and becoming, invention and creativity, are privileged over stasis, identity and recognition. End of summary.

My paperIn the last session you will recall we looked at a DVD of Jacques Derrida and in all we devoted three sessions to his work.ii Derrida’s work is

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particularly well known in the Anglo-American world as his landmark books Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference and Speech and Phenomena were translated into English in the 1970s.iii This allowed his “deconstructive” thought to become one of the most significant intellectual movements in literary theory and throughout much of the humanities and social sciences in the last quarter of the 20 th century. However, Derrida’s work is still marginal to, and largely rejected by, mainstream Anglo-American analytic philosophy. This, no doubt, is because his deconstructive reading of philosophical texts attacks philosophy as an entire discipline, from the “outside” through writing’s elision of meaning, and it is consequently anti-philosophical.

Derrida is often dismissed as a charlatan by analytic philosophers because he refuses to engage directly with their arguments. Whereas for him to do this would be to first accept the implicit but binding rules which characterise this epistemological discourse, a discourse which he resolutely refuses. Derrida is engaged in a ground clearing exercise and he believes that the ground to be cleared is the entire Western canonical philosophic tradition.

However, unlike Derrida, Deleuze works subversively within the tradition of Western philosophy and, whilst appearing to accept it, undermines its very foundations. His aim is more ambitious than Derrida’s. He is a committed philosopher who wants to take the entire Western philosophic tradition, read it completely differently, manipulate and move it in a new and more productive direction. iv Well aware of the impact that philosophic thought has on life outside of the academy – witness the effect of Enlightenment thinkers – and the need to engage with current problems posed to philosophy through the events taking place in the world, he regards philosophy not as marginal or dispensable but crucial to both a vital change of thought

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and our future well being. Deleuze’s “monstrous” philosophical ambitions might be summarised in terms of building positive concepts without recourse to transcendent categories or the dialectic, conceiving “pure difference” while ignoring identity, and uncovering the logic of those “untimely” and singular constellations of forces he calls “the event”. Of these I believe that his exploration of “pure difference” is the most significant aspect of his conjoined endeavour.

Unlike Derrida his work has only recently come to prominence in the Anglo-American world. For, despite having published major philosophic works in France, such as Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense and Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy,v in 1968-69 and even earlier in 1962 with his Nietzsche and Philosophyvi – which drastically changed the way in which Derrida, Foucault and their entire peer group read Nietzsche – these works were not translated into English for 20 years or so after their publication in France.vii Frankly, Derrida was always a traveller and self-publicist, particularly in the USA, whereas Deleuze was much more modest and something of a recluse. Consequently it was only in the mid to late 1990s that English readers had the opportunity to look at Deleuze’s work as a whole.

I will be spending two sessions on Deleuze because his work is at least of equal significance to that of Derrida as the latter frankly acknowledged.viii In this session there will not be time for a reading of Deleuze’s work as I aim to simply set out his position with regard to “pure difference”. In the next session I hope to get in at least two brief readings and possibly three.

Deleuze and Derrida knew each other, and each other’s work, well and Derrida frequently said that Deleuze looked after him as if he were his elder brother – often chiding him for not writing enough but involving

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himself in other public activities. Michel Foucault another of Deleuze’s peer group who also got on well with Deleuze personally and admired his work, (in)famously said of it that “one day perhaps, this century will be seen as Deleuzian”, to which Deleuze modestly rejoined: “He may perhaps have meant that I was the most naïve philosopher of our generation … I wasn’t better than the others, but more naïve … not the

i Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p.139.ii

? In the first session on Derrida we concentrated on Heidegger’s influence on Derrida and in the second we looked at his Glas as a practical outcome of his deconstructive theorising in Of Grammatology, one of his major works.

iii Jaques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Spivak (Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1974); Writing and Difference , trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978); Speech and Phenomena, trans. by David Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

iv See also: http://www.eri.mmu.ac.uk/deleuze/on-deleuze-why_study_Deleuze.php

v Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1994); The Logic of Sense , trans. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992).

vi Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

vii Although his two volume work, jointly authored with Félix Guattari Capitalism and Schizophrenia, was translated in 1984 and 1987, and met with the usual contumely from Anglo-American analytic philosophers and Marxists.

viii Despite the major differences in their respective approaches, Derrida in the eulogy that he wrote immediately after Deleuze’s death in 1995, “I’m Going to Have to Wander All Alone”, said that he felt a “nearly total affinity” between his work andthat of Deleuze, even while acknowledging the “very obvious distances in what Iwould call – lacking any better term – the ‘gesture’, the ‘strategy’, the ‘manner’: of writing, of speaking, of reading perhaps”.( Jacques Derrida, “I’m Going to Have to Wander all Alone”, in The Work of Mourning, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p.192.

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most profound but the most innocent, the one who felt the least guilty about ‘doing philosophy’”.ix Nevertheless, unlike Derrida, Deleuze “did” philosophy. Although he was very well aware that he and his peer group had been trapped through their élite academic education within the repressive apparatus of the history of philosophy. He commented:

I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it’s philosophy’s own version of the Oedipus complex: “You can't seriously consider saying what you yourself think until you've read this and that, and that on this, and this on that”. x

He explains here how he freed himself from this repression and “found his own voice” through a kind of depersonalisation, learned from reading Nietzsche: “It was Nietzsche, who I read only later, who extricated me from all this .... He gives you a perverse taste ... for saying simple things in your own way, in affects, intensities, experiences, experiments”. Deleuze then went on to explain that it was in this manner that he began to write in his own name:

It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them. A name as the direct awareness of such intensive multiplicities is the opposite of the depersonalization effected by the history of philosophy; it’s depersonalization through love rather than subjection.xi

ix Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990 , trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp.88-89.

x Ibid, pp.6-7.

xi Ibid.

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In his response to a disenchanted former follower that he simply copied the work of earlier philosophers, Deleuze describes his way of writing the history of philosophy as:

a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.xii

Whereas Derrida would undo the meaning of philosophic texts by showing that the ambiguities of writing would always result in the text not having either the meaning which the author may have intended, or simply ended in a deadlock of meaning, or aporia, Deleuze “naively” refused the “linguistic turn” of post-structuralism and inhabited canonical texts in order to transform the thought in question by taking it further than the originator had ever forseen even as a remote possibility.

Much of his early formative writing is consequently concerned with unique readings of philosophers such as Kant, Lucretius, Leibniz, Spinoza, Bergson and Hume. To Kant he wrote an affectionate study of “an enemy”, while all the rest he saw as conjoined through “a secret link constituted by the critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power”.xiii It was these aspects of their philosophies that he brought out in his “naive” repositionings. Thus, whilst reading them differently, he prided himself on never changing anything they had said but in each reading putting a radically new twist on what their writings had previously been understood to mean.

xii Ibid, p.6.

xiii Gilles Deleuze, ‘I have nothing to admit’, trans. by Janis Forman, Semiotext(e) 2, 3(1977).

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Deleuze and Derrida may seem to be working towards the same ends in deconstructing or perverting the canonical texts of Western philosophy, and Derrida certainly thought this to be the case, but Deleuze, I believe, goes far beyond Derrida by appreciating the value of philosophy and working with it rather than simply trying to deconstruct it. Derrida deformed Western philosophic thought by correctly pointing out that it claimed access to “the truth” while ignoring the very language in which these truth claims were made. He was well aware of his indebtedness to Heidegger in taking this approach as we have seen.xiv Philosophy has no special language which gives direct access to reality, meaning and truth distinguishing it from other writings. Language is always subject to ambiguities, difference and the ultimate deferral of meaning which makes these philosophers’ truth claims highly problematic, to say the least.

Yet, when you’ve destroyed writing as holding any definite meaning what have you got left to work or make any sense with? Both Lyotard and Wittgenstein could have told him that speech and writing can give meaningful discourse when, and only when, the implicit underpinning rules of the group are obeyed. They would have advised him not to look for the meaning in language itself but to look for how it is used in xiv Derrida has acknowledged a profound debt to Heidegger. However, he does not

pursuethe idea of Being as such but uses Heidegger’s thought as a means of examining and radically disturbing Western metaphysics. Timothy Clark notes that “Derrida’s deconstruction of Western thought is the most prominent legatee of Heideggerian destruction/deconstruction. Both thinkers take received modes of philosophizing and thought to their limits, not to affirm a blandly fashionable relativism, but to shake up the deepest assumptions of Western thought, opening it to what other modes of being and thinking, if any, might be conceived beside it. For both, the singular mode of being of the literary is crucial to this venture”. (Timothy Clark, Martin Heidegger (London and new York: Routledge, 2002), p.149.

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any given social situation in order to establish its, possibly transient, meaning. By ignoring this social context and yet trying to advance an alternative philosophy based on language alone, Derrida is inevitably hoist with his own petard of the undecidable meanings of language and writing. Thus, André Pierre Colombat is not alone in arguing that:

Deleuze’s two books on cinema shed a new light on his criticism of linguistic signs. They also exemplify his radical opposition to any form of structuralism based on linguistics or even to the most brilliant and subtle word games played by Derrida’s Deconstruction. The point is not to unveil a Signifier nor a paradoxical founding trace but to evaluate forces, arrangements and an entire battlefield; to map thinking [and thus philosophy] as a vital process.xv

James Williams too contrasts Deleuze and Derrida’s work to the latter’s disadvantage:

Broadly, the contrast between Deleuze and Derrida lies in the former’s preparedness to adopt systematic forms, arguments and concepts from the history of philosophy and then to cast them, still fully functional, in a new and disruptive setting. The latter shies away from this inclusive approach, preferring to undermine historical arguments from the outset and replacing them with a much looser methodological framework. Deleuze offers us principles and methods for a philosophy of difference, whereas Derrida offers us … writing about difference explicitly resistant to the emergence of principles or methods.xvi

xv André Pierre Colombat, ‘Deleuze and Signs’, in Deleuze and Literature, ed. by Ian Buchanan, and John Marks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p.22.xvi

? James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p.26.

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There are three distinct phases in Deleuze’s work: his subversive re-reading and repositioning of traditional philosophers,xvii the personal writings,xviii and the collaborative work with Félix Guattari,xix the left wing activist and radical Lacanian psychoanalyst. However, I will not be distinguishing between the second and third phases here. For, despite the possible added vitality – or as Bogue has put it ‘humour, energy and audacity’xx – which their joint work displays, Deleuze is the professional philosopher and it is primarily Deleuzian philosophy with which we are concerned here. There is an underlying consistency in Deleuze’s work, a major aspect of which is the Nietzschean influence as remarked above. I will select at least two brief readings for the next session one from the first and one from the second phase of his work in order to show this underlying consistency in his thought.xxi

Postmodernist philosophers, Heidegger and Nietzsche.Throughout these sessions I have repeatedly made the point that the philosophers and thinkers grouped together under the term “postmodernists”, or even the more specific sub-group of “post-structuralists”, are a disparate lot and that their often very different thinking can only be seen as an entity if certain underlying influences are taken to be at work in each and every one of them. The key influences which pervade the entire group and make them a group, to my mind, are the philosophies of Heidegger and Nietzsche in so far as they directly or implicitly focus on and critique the rational philosophies of Descartes and Kant and with them the Enlightenment project, capitalism and modernity.

In previous sessions I have consequently attempted to relate the work of Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida to Heidegger and Nietzsche’s underpinning philosophies in order to establish the legitimacy of the term “postmodernist/ post-structuralist philosophy”. Although the

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Heideggerian ontology of “Being” influenced Deleuze, it seems obvious that viewing his work from the perspective of Nietzsche better offers that thin skein of continuity which I have been trying to establish between all of these “postmodernist/ post-structuralist” thinkers. I will argue that the influence of Nietzsche and the very different interpretation which Deleuze placed on his concept of the “eternal return” from that of Heidegger himself, xxii as well as the prevailing Sartrean existentialist thinkers of his time,xxiii is a central feature of Deleuze’s philosophy.xvii Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983); Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Haberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1984); Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by R. Hurley (San Fransisco: City Light Books, 1988); Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque, trans. by Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993).

xviii Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994); The Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Cinema I: The Movement Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1992); Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and R. Galeta (London:Athlone Press, 1989); Proust and Signs, trans. by Richard Howard (London: The Athlone Press, 2000) andEssays Critical and Clinical, trans. by Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

xix Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I, trans. by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984); Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by D. Polan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, II, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London and New York: Verso, 1994).

xx Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p.

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xxi If there is time I may also introduce a reading from Deleuze and Guattari, either from Capitalism and Schizophrenia, or What is Philosophy?.

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“Pure Difference”:Deleuze is often labelled as a, or even the, “philosopher of difference”, an assessment that highlights the critical place of “ pure difference” in his work. “Difference”, as such, is key to his thought and central to his philosophy as he equates difference with life itself.xxiv This does not mean that Deleuze simply tries to be different from all other thinkers in a sort of adolescent attempt to make himself noticed by petulantly opposing other thinkers just for the sake of it.

“Pure difference” is not concerned with something being different from something else. “Pure difference” is simply difference in itself without reference to any other thing or thought. Difference as essence, equated with life, is thus fundamental to Deleuze’s vitalism. It distinguishes him from Derrida as “pure difference” is foundational for Deleuze whereas Derrida was explicitly an anti-foundationalist and “différance”,xxv for him is concerned with deferral, and ultimately undermining any textual coherence or sense of unity of meaning rather than being fundamental to life itself.

Deleuze is concerned to overturn the primacy accorded to identity and representation in Western rationality by theorising difference as it is experienced. What does this mean in effect? Deleuze challenges two critical presuppositions. First the privilege Hegel, in particular, accorded “being” and second the representational model of thought. (If we take a sideways glance at Heidegger’s philosophy here, Deleuze is not critiquing Heideggerian ontological Being as such – which is frequently hidden, anyway – but the beings who are clearly represented or re-presented as “the same” and identifiable.) He considers both to have important and undesirable political, aesthetic and ethical implications that only a disruption of traditional philosophy

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can help to surmount. Deleuze uses his notion of empirical and non-conceptual “difference in itself”, or “pure difference” in the service of such a disruption. However, the distinction between difference from something and “pure difference” is quite difficult to grasp and merits further exploration.

[BREAK FOR 10 MINUTES]xxii For instance, Heidegger claims that Nietzsche’s philosophy teaches the “eternalreturn” of the same as its fundamental doctrine (Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by David Farrell Krell (San Fransisco and London: Harper & Row), vol. 2, p.21.), whereas Deleuze sees the “eternal return” as signifying absolute difference. Moreover, “[f]or Deleuze, contra Heidegger, time, like death, is never ‘mine’: it is no-one’s. The affirmation of ‘eternal recurrence’ effects a mode of psychic individuation which transforms thought into sign of impersonal death …” (Ray Brassier, “The Pure and Empty Form of Death: Deleuze and Heidegger”, Actual Virtual (April 2006), p.3. Nevertheless, “[a]s for the idea of ‘event’ ... Deleuze’s événement feels close at times to Heidegger’s Ereignis—the idea of an event or ‘occurrence’ which is more fundamental than the subject.” (Charles Wolfe, “Review” of John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2000), http://multitudes.samizdat.net/ article202.html.

xxiii Sartrean existential understandings of the “eternal return”:Other interpretations of Nietzsche’s “eternal return” are better known. This difficult and enigmatic idea has proved controversial in philosophical circles where it has generally been interpreted as an existential vision of existence. According to this once predominant existential reading, the thought of eternal return compels us to consider how we ought properly to live. This thought can be expressed in the following way: were we suddenly to recognise that every aspect of our lives, both painful and joyous, was fated to return in the guise of a potentially infinite repetition, how would we need to live to justify the recurrence of even the most terrible and painful events? Here the eternal return appears to play a similar rôle to death in Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, the “being there” whose awareness of not “being there” results in the constant consideration of how we ought to conduct our lives.

Deleuze’s critique of Sartrean humanist existentialism:Conversely, Deleuze’s inhuman or cosmological reading understands Nietzsche’s proposition as the fundamental axiom of a philosophy of forces in which “active force” separates itself from and supplants “reactive force” and ultimately locates itself as the motor principle of becoming. ? It is not simply the acceptance but the joyous affirmation of every aspect of life which leads to self-overcoming and the concept of the over-man. Deleuze’s major contribution to the post-war philosophical revision of Nietzsche was to displace the existential reading and establish this second reading of eternal return as the return and selection of forces.

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Hegel and DeleuzeDifference is usually understood either as “difference from the same” or difference of the same over time. In either case, it refers to a variation between two states. Such a conception assumes that these states are comparable, and that there is at base a sameness against which variation can be observed or deduced. As such, difference becomes merely a relative measure of sameness and, being the product of a comparison, it typically means grouping like with like, and then drawing distinctions between the groups.xxvi Furthermore, over and above such groupings might be posited a universal grouping, such as Being, a conception of presence that alone makes the groups wholly consistent and meaningful. It is because Hegel drew a comprehensive and cohesive world of Being that made him such a significant target for Deleuze’s critique.

xxiv In fact a conference was recently held at Warwick University under the title “Deleuzeand Philosophy: The Difference Engineer”. Reported in Keith Ansell Pearson, Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer (London: Routledge, 1997).

xxv Différance both signals how language works while also being another term for themanoeuvres and movements of Derrida’s “deconstruction” philosophy. As a descriptiveterm – following the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure – Derrida uses it to illustrate how any word always depends for its meaning not on its natural bond with reality, as if it were simply its stand-in or substitute, but on its association with other words along a whole chain of significations, to which it refers but also from which it is different, thus indicating perpetual movements as well as potential slippages of meaning in language. As a neologism, created from the French verb differer meaning both “to differ” and “to defer”, differance, referring to both concepts simultaneously and therefore being deliberately ambiguous, highlights language as essentially indeterminate, by showing us that meaning is always undecidable and thus endlessly deferred. As such, differance not only describes linguistic functions, it also performs them. As an interchangeable term for deconstruction it also, however, fulfils another function. While undermining any sense of unity, it can never just simply be conceived as its opposite; for, to conceive of differance in opposition to another term, such as unity, would be to fix it in a certain binary position and thus curtail what characterizes it: suspension, movement, deferral. Thus, as its very operations illustrate, it is an alternative term for both unity and difference.

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Implicit in Hegel’s view is that difference is subordinated to sameness, and becomes an object of representation in relation to some identity. As such, it is never conceived in terms of “pure difference” or “difference-in-itself”: the uniqueness implicit in the particularity of things and the moments of their conception and perception. Rather, difference is understood in terms of resemblance, identity, opposition and analogy, the kinds of relations used to determine conceptual groupings of things. Yet this tendency to think in terms of sameness detracts from the specificity of concrete experience, instead simplifying phenomena so that they might “fit” within a dominant model of unity.

Deleuze’s “liberation” of difference from such a model has two parts. First, he develops a concept of difference that does not rely on a relationship with sameness and, second, he challenges the philosophy of representation. He argues that we ought not to presume a pre-existing unity, but instead take seriously the nature of the world as it is experienced. For him, every aspect of reality evidences difference, and there is nothing “behind” such difference. Difference is not grounded in anything else. Deleuze is not referring to differences of degree as distinctions amongst items that are considered the same in some sense. Instead, he means the absolute particularity or “singularity”, as he puts it, of each individual thing, moment, perception or conception. Even if things might be conceived as having shared attributes allowing them to be labelled as being of the same kind, Deleuze’s conception of difference sets out to highlight the

xxvi For instance women, blacks, gays and now Muslims are seen as distinct groupsdifferent from the rest but fundamentally part of the human community and therefor part of the diversity but actually fundamental sameness which makes up the overall grouping of “humanity” as a whole.

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individual differences between them.

This is because such individuality or difference is, for Deleuze, the primary philosophical fact, so that, rather than theorising how individuals might be grouped, it is more important to explore the unique development, change or “becoming” of each specific individual. The genealogy of an individual lies not in generality or commonality, but in a process of individuation determined by actual and specific differences, multitudinous influences and chance interactions.

Sameness/ identity:Deleuze’s “pure difference” or “difference-in-itself” releases difference from domination by identity and sameness. Indeed, on this account, identity must always be problematised by the difference inherent in any given individual or individualisation. To realise this is to meet Deleuze’s challenge of developing a new perspective in order to resist transcendence. However, to do so routinely is not easy. Only by destabilising our thinking, disrupting our faculties and freeing our senses from established tendencies might we uncover the difference evident in the lived world, and realise the uniqueness of each moment and thing. It is this attempted destabilisation, which together with Guattari, he later (and perhaps ill-advisedly) termed “schizophrenic” as key to their “schizoanalytic” philosophy that brought down critical coals of fire on their heads.xxvii

Representation:Deleuze’s theory of difference also challenges the traditional theory of

xxvii For example, even authors as sympathetic to postmodernism as Stuart Sim and Borin Van Loon (Introducing Critical Theory (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), p. 117.) say of Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” that we are here “on the wilder shores of postmodernism”.

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representation, by which we tend to consider each individual as re-presenting (“presenting again”) something as just another instance of a category or original. On such a view, difference is something that might be predicated of a philosophic concept, and so logically subordinated to it, whilst the concept can be applied to an infinite number of particular instances.xxviii To think in terms of “difference-in-itself” means to set the concept aside and focus instead on the singular, and the unique circumstances of its production. Awareness of such specific circumstances means that the notion of some “thing in general” can be set aside in favour of one’s experience of this thing, here and now. It is the life-enhancing, life-giving ‘vitalism’ of such a cartographic process which is the key to Deleuze’s philosophy. He does not take language as foundational. As a philosophic vitalist, though one of a different stripe to those who were concerned with a mystical, transcendent life force, as everything is immanent for him, he takes a materialist perspective on life: life seen as “difference”.

xxviii In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari hold that “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts” (p.2). Nevertheless, despite asserting that his work is “philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word” (Deleuze, ‘Entretien 1980’, L’Arc, 49, rev. edn. (1980), 99-102, p. 99), when one turns to the traditional philosophic view of concepts there are substantial differences between established views and Deleuze’s understanding of how such concepts should be understood. The traditional means is to understand concepts as determinate ideal entities serving as points of identification which must conform to the logic of exclusive disjunction. In other words, things either do or do not belong within them. Traditionally understood concepts are concerned with clear-cut categorization and thus the establishment of identity. Deleuze and Guattari regard the philosophic concept quite differently. It is not to be seen in such a cut-and-dried fashion. They see it as determined by context and difference, ‘pure and simple variations ordered according to their neighbourhood’. Their formulation of the concept is therefore:

… incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or effectuated in bodies. But, in fact, it is not mixed up with the state of affairs in which it is effectuated. It does not have spatiotemporal coordinates, only intensive ordinates. It has no energy, only intensities ... The concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing—pure Event, a hecceity [sic] ... It is like the bird as event. (What is Philosophy?, p. 21)

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Friederich Nietzsche:How does this tie in with the philosophy of Nietzsche? If we look at the thought experiment which Nietzsche conducts in Thus Spake Zarathustra and Gay Science which aims to show that joyous affirmation overcomes even the most extreme form of nihilism epitomised in the apparent sameness of the “eternal return”,xxix we see that Deleuze not only takes this thought experiment as the key to xxix Nietzsche’s “eternal return”:

The greatest weight. – What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (The Gay Science, § 341).

Of the vision and the Riddle[Zarathustra started to speak thus “… Lately I walked gloomily through a deathly-grey twilight, gloomily and sternly with compressed lips … my foot with effort forced itself upwards] Upward – despite the spirit that drew it downward, drew it towards the abyss, the Spirit of Gravity, my devil and arch-enemy. Upward – although he sat upon me, half dwarf, half mole; crippled, crippling; pouring lead-drops into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain. “O Zarathustra”, he said mockingly, syllable by syllable, “you stone of wisdom! You have thrown yourself high, but every stone that is thrown must – fall! “O Zarathustra, you stone of wisdom, you projectile, you star-destroyer! You have thrown yourself thus high, but every stone that is thrown – must fall! …Thereupon the dwarf fell silent; and he long continued so. But his silence oppresed me; and to be thus in company is truly more lonely than to be

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his understanding of Nietzsche but as basic to his own philosophy too. He holds that to really think through the “eternal return” we turn away from the repetition of the same, which Heidegger held to be the case, in order to think “pure difference” as such. It is this implicit difference which radically overcomes the apparent sameness in Nietzsche’s readings of the “eternal return”. It accomplishes this through the “becoming-active” of “forces”.xxx The result for Deleuze is an

alone! …But there is something in me that I call courage: it has always destroyed every discouragement in me. This courage at last bade me stop and say: “Dwarf! You! Or I!” For courage is the best destroyer – courage that attacks: for in every attack there is a triumphant shout. …”Stop, dwarf!” I said. “I! Or you! But I am the stronger of us two – you do not know my abysmal thought! That thought – you could not endure!'”Then something occurred which lightened me: for the dwarf jumped from my shoulder, the inquisitive dwarf! And he squatted down upon a stone in front of me. But a gateway stood just where we had halted. “Behold this gateway, dwarf!” I went on: “it has two aspects. Two paths come together here: no one has ever reached their end. This long lane behind us: it goes on for an eternity. And that long lane ahead of us – that is another eternity”. “They are in opposition to one another, these paths; they abut on one another: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is written above it: ‘Moment’.” “But if one were to follow them further and ever further and further: do you think, dwarf, that these paths would be in eternal opposition?” “Everything straight lies”, murmured the dwarf disdainfully. “All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle”.“Spirit of Gravity!” I said angrily, “do not treat this too lightly! Or I shall leave you squatting where you are, Lame-foot – and I have carried you high! ”.“Behold this moment!” I went on. “From this gateway Moment a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity lies behind us. “Must not all things that can run have already run along this lane? Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past? “And if all things have been here before: what do you think of this moment, dwarf? Must not this gateway, too, have been here – before? “And are not all things bound fast together in such a way that this moment draws after it all future things? Therefore – draws itself too? “For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this long lane. “And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal

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overcoming of the self-hood of the human by taking humanity beyond itself to a joyous merging with life in its entirety, through a series of “becomings”: “the subject of the eternal return is not the same but the different, not the similar but the dissimilar, not the one but the many”.xxxi

Thus, Nietzsche’s concept of the “eternal return” is crucial to

things – must we not all have been here before? “ and must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long, terrible lane – must we not return eternally?” Thus I spoke, and I spoke more and more softly: for I was afraid of my own thoughts and reservations. …Where had the dwarf now gone? And the gateway? And the spider? And all the whispering? Had I been dreaming? Had I awoken?

(Thus SpakeZarathustra).

xxx “Forces”: Forces are defined by their interrelations, rather than any inherent core. Determined by their confrontations with other forces, there is no agent behind the will, nor are they the expression of an inner essence. For Nietzsche, the world comprises a chaotic web of natural and biological forces without any particular origin or goal which never come to rest in either a state of equilibrium or at a final resting point. According to him such forces interact ceaselessly and constitute a dynamic world-in-flux rather than a collection of stable entities. Although it is implicit throughout his corpus, Deleuze’s conception of force is clearest in his interpretative readings of Nietzsche. In fact much of what he writes on the subject is taken directly from Nietzsche, although the way in which he uses the notion to theorise the concepts of “difference” and “becoming” is his own. Yet, neither Deleuze nor Nietzsche provide a clear definition of “force”; although Deleuze states negatively what he does not mean by it. According to him “force” is not “aggression” or “pressure”. However, Nietzsche is not so forthcoming. For Deleuze, we can only truly perceive forces by intuiting them; that is, by grasping them without reference to a conceptual understanding of existence. In other words we cannot explicitly define them within a philosophical schema. Clearly, such reliance on intutition makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to say much about force/s per se.

It seems to me though that “force”, in general terms, can be taken to mean any capacity to produce a change, difference, or becoming, whether this capacity and its products are physical, psychological, mystical, artistic, philosophical, theological, conceptual, social, economic, linguistic, legal or whatever. All of reality is an expression and consequence of interactions between forces, with each interaction revealed as an “event”. Every event, body or other phenomenon is, then, the net result of a hierarchical pattern of interactions between forces, colliding in some particular and unpredictable way.

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Deleuze’s radical extension of his philosophy of “difference” which is expressed in terms of immanencexxxii and univocity.xxxiii

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze sets out his philosophy through a succession of arguments from Duns Scotus, through Spinoza, to Nietzsche. Deleuze argues that all of these philosophers

This enigmatic characterisation of forces is developed in Deleuze’s account of their activity. Every force exerts itself upon others. No force can exist apart from its inter-relationships with other forces and, since such associations of struggle are always temporary, forces are always in the process of becoming different or passing out of existence, so that no particular force can ever be repeated. The relationship between the “dominant” and “dominated” forces are seen to be key here.

xxxi Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 126.

xxxii Immanence: “Immanence” and “transcendence” are opposing terms about the relations that hold at the heart of different metaphysics. Are the privileged relations in a philosophy of the form of a relation “to” something, or of a relation “in” something? If it is “to” then it is philosophy of transcendence. If it is “in” then it is immanence. Deleuze is radical about immanence, that is, his philosophy is to be thought strictly in terms of relations “in”.

In the history of philosophy, relations of transcendence can be traced back to theological roots, where a lower realm is related to a higher one with everything on earth being both related to and acquiring values through its relation to God. For example, in Descartes, relations of transcendence hold from body to mind and from created substance to God. Mind is independent of body and yet body is secondary to mind and in its grasp. God is independent of his creation, yet the creation must be referred to God, for example, where he acts a guarantor for the validity of clear and distinct perception.

The objection to relations of transcendence is that they involve founding negations (for example, that the mind is completely separate from the body). Such negations are the grounds for negative valuations, both in the sense of a “lower” realm finding its value or redemption in a “higher” one, and in the sense of the lower realm depending on the higher one for its definition. For example, if the human realm is seen as transcended by God, then the human body and even the Cartesian mind will be devalued in the light of an overarching transcendent soul.

xxxiii Univocity: “One must not be led astray (as Alain Badiou seems to have been) by theprefix ‘uni’ in the term ‘univocity’: a univocal ontology is by definition irreconcilable with a philosophy of the One, which necessarily entails an equivocal concept of Being. In

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affirmed univocal being. It is only with Nietzsche, according to Deleuze, that the joyful idea of univocity as difference is thought adequately, through the “eternal return”, and this is because Nietzsche imagines a world of “pre-personal singularities”. That is, there is not a “who” or “what” that then has various properties; nor is there someone or something that is. In their arguments, the difficulties in developing a philosophy of pure immanence become apparent, as first Scotus then Spinoza are shown still to depend on some forms of transcendence. Only Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return of pure differences allows for a full immanent ontology, because all things, whether identifiable or not, are posited as complete only through their relation to an immanent transcendental field of pure differences, a field which Deleuze – following Bergson – characterises as the “virtual”: “If only what differs returns, then the eternal return operates selectively and this selection is an affirmation of difference, rather than an activity of representation and unification based on the negative, as with Hegel”.xxxiv

The only thing that is repeated or returns is difference; no two moments of life can be the same. By virtue of the flow of time, any repeated event is necessarily different (even if different only to the extent that it has a predecessor). The power of life is difference and his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (trans. by Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)), Alain Badiou rightly notes the influence of Heidegger on Deleuze, but wrongly presents Deleuze’s ‘univocal ontology’ as if it were a neoplatonic ‘philosophy of the One’… Deleuze’s thesis in Difference and Repetition is that only ‘univocity’ can provide us with a truly collective sense of Being (and not merely a distributive sense) by giving us a comprehension of the play of individuating differences within beings (and not mere generalities in a network of resemblances).” (Daniel W Smith, ‘The doctrine of univocity: Deleuze’s ontology of immanence’, in Mary Bryden, ed., Deleuze and Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp.174, 177.

xxxiv Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.126.

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repetition, or the eternal return of difference. Each event of life transforms the whole of life, and does this over and over again. So eternity, all that is and will be, is always different from itself, always open to becoming, never at rest.

Thus, the world is constituted by “difference” and each difference is a power to differ, with no event of difference being the ground or cause of any other. If difference occurred in order to arrive at some proper end – if there were a purpose or proper end to life – then the process of “becoming” would have some teleological end point in time (even if this were only imagined or ideal). But difference is an event that is joyful in itself; it is not the difference of this being or for this end. With each event of difference life is transformed; life becomes other than itself because life is difference. Consequently, the only ‘thing’ that ‘is’ is difference, with each repetition of difference being different. Only difference returns, and it returns eternally. Time is what follows from difference (time is difference); difference cannot be located in time. The eternal return is therefore the ultimate idea of difference according to Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche.

May I again attempt to summarize the above? As Deleuze points out in Difference and Repetition: “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.”xxxv

xxxv Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p.139.

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For Deleuze an object of an encounter is fundamentally different from an object of recognition. With the latter our knowledges, beliefs and values are reconfirmed. We, and the world we inhabit, are reconfirmed as that which we already understood our world and ourselves to be. An object of recognition, a representation is then precisely a re-presentation of something always already in place. Common sense and worldly wisdom and even cynicism underpins such an understanding. We have a view of the world and of ourselves which is shared and may give us a sense of comfort or even complacency as we are able to put things, including ourselves, into their proper place as we know precisely what’s what. Deleuze fundamentally contests this way of thinking. This is because with such a non-encounter our habitual way of being and acting in the world is reaffirmed and reinforced, and as a consequence no real thought takes place. Indeed, we might say that representation precisely stymies thinking.

With a genuine encounter however the contrary is the case. Our typical ways of being in the world are challenged and our systems of knowledge are disrupted. We are forced to think. The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack in our assumptions. However this is not the end of the story, for the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a potential new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently in a moment of “pure difference”. This is the creative moment of the encounter that obliges us to think otherwise. According to Deleuze, life, when it truly is lived, is a history of these encounters, which will always necessarily occur beyond representation/ re-presentation.

What then, according to Deleuze, happens in an encounter which forces us to think? He states that there is an immediate moment of

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inspiration or enthusiasm which sets a challenge or poses a question to our accepted assumptions about the world: that which is already in place, the already given. In such a moment we encounter “pure difference”. Deleuze’s writing can itself be positioned as an experiment in thinking differently, “beyond” representation. His project offers us a “new image of thought”, one in which process and becoming, invention and creativity, are privileged over stasis, identity and recognition.

Personally, I find Deleuze’s way of looking at the world and life extremely stimulating. What do you think?

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