What Kind of Panpsyhcist is Deleuze?

Student No. 07975043

What Is the Thought That Makes Difference?

Thought is one of the central and most important concepts of Difference and

Repetition. Yet Deleuze makes reference to thought in such a variety of

polysemous contexts that the question presents itself to us of what role

thought plays in Deleuze's philosophy. At least two important strands of

thought run through Difference and Repetition. The first seeks to expose an

image of thought which has a unitary identity, a harmonious will and a common

sense in all those who possess it. Exemplary of this image of thought are the

Cartesian cogito and the Kantian transcendental subject. What Deleuze wishes

to bring to our attention however, is the form of such common sense – a form

that though it professes scepticism or transcendental rigour retains an identity.

In the place of any identity of thought Deleuze pursues a thought of difference,

a thought that “'makes' difference” (Deleuze, 1994: 29). This thought of

difference is the second strand in Difference and Repetition and its relation to

the first is a question of genetic conditions. Deleuze's transcendental

empiricism, in contrast to Kant's transcendental idealism, is a process without

end which attaches to every phenomena, even the given of thought. The

thought of difference for Deleuze then is twofold. It is philosophical thought for

which difference is an object; though by object we mean aim or patient of

study, since it is a concept which indexes the constant necessity of change.

Difference as the constant necessity of change is the metaphysical motor at

the heart of Deleuze's project and it is constant change that is the other

thought of difference – thought which is itself the process of differenciation.

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Deleuze signals the importance of thought for the whole of Difference and

Repetition when he says that “thought is that moment in which determination

makes itself one, by virtue of maintaining a unilateral and precise relation to

the indeterminate. Thought 'makes' difference” (Deleuze, 1994: 29). Yet, so

early in the work, this dense quote provides little to help us understand in what

context thought operates. Concepts at the heart of Deleuze's project appear

here that we must explicate before their significance appears more clearly to

us. Immediately however, two possibilities present themselves as ways in

which we might understand “thought”. The first is that we understand thought

not as limited to any being, human or otherwise. Thought is instead a power, in

a broader metaphysical sense, intimately connected with difference and the

process of differenciation. Contrary to this though, an image of thought

presents itself which is limited to the cognitive capacities of the human, or

finite rational, consciousness. In the manner of Kant's transcendental subject

thought is granted some privileged access to difference. Here it is the cognitive

exercise of our faculties which provide the a priori foundations from which to

begin, and which subsequently determine, our philosophical investigation.

Deleuze's transcendental empiricism shares with Kant's transcendental

idealism a concern to reveal the conditions for the possibility of some given.

Deleuze's is, however, an attempt to radicalise and invert Kantianism,

subjecting not only the structure of experience to this operation but the

structure of every thing. The extent to which Deleuze is successful in his

radicalisation of Kant depends upon the extent to which he is justified in

making every thing a structure of experience. In other words, what is the

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thought that makes difference?

Deleuze is explicit in his endorsement of panpsychism: “Every body, every

thing, thinks and is a thought to the extent that, reduced to its intensive

reasons, it expresses an Idea the actualisation of which it determines”

(Deleuze, 1994: 254). The difficulty of unpacking Deleuze's panpsychist

thought is in part due to the non-linear presentation of Difference and

Repetition and its refusal to settle on a singular definition of thought. There are

good reasons for this, not least the critique of representation and identity which

are rehearsed throughout the work. Difference, repetition and thought are

successively subjected to the same process of enquiring after their conditions;

these concepts are critiqued and undermined as stable identities. This method

seems hardly to be made explicit at all in Difference and Repetition, but it is

demonstrated again and again. The transcendental of Deleuze's transcendental

empiricism is an unending questioning after the conditions for the possibility of

every conditioned identity. That this process of questioning which Deleuze

adopts as his philosophical method is the same as that which he works through

in his idealist metaphysics puts our question of panpsychism into context. The

eternal posing of problems in the virtual relations of Ideas produce

differentiations in those relations. The way in which these problems are also

worked out in differenciations in the actual mirrors that transcendental process

which Deleuze has adopted. The question “what are the conditions for the

possibility of this conditioned identity” is posed by the philosopher, but the

form of a question or problem to which a particular identity is the temporary

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solution is also the form of Deleuze's virtual/actual process metaphysics. The

thought which asks the question in philosophical enterprise is the same

thought which operates in the actualisation of every conditioned identity.

Whether Deleuze is warranted in this expansive use of thought is the question

at which this project is aimed.

The Image of Thought

What thought Deleuze is not referring to in either philosophical questioning or

metaphysical actualisation is made clear in his critique of representational and

identitarian philosophy. The image of thought Deleuze calls the “ur-Doxa”

(1994: 134) because in identifying a common unitary identity for thinking

philosophers such as Descartes and Kant appeal to a common sense for which

they can give no conditions. Despite their sceptical or transcendental

intentions what philosophies adopting the image of thought critique are only

elements of thought and not the form of thought itself. By appeal to what is

supposed to be self-evident – the “I think” for example – the image of thought

introduces an identity which cannot be regarded as a fact. According to

Deleuze, the faculty which serves to make identity primary is recognition.

Recognition is a power to proclaim identity by reference to similitude, and

serves as the provider of a correspondence theory of truth by connecting

thought and thing in a relationship of resemblance. For Kant the transcendental

conditions of experience are the categories. Yet no conditions are ever given for

the categories themselves. Where the structure of experience in our perception

of particulars is subjected to a transcendental aesthetic, the procedure by

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which such conditions are recognized exempts itself from further critique.

Experience therefore, the unity of the transcendental subject itself, remains an

identity. This is the basis for Deleuze's attack on representation and his

adventure into the conditions of difference in itself. Deleuze attacks Aristotle as

guilty of taking empirical or generic difference for metaphysical difference. But

such difference, according to Deleuze, is merely specific difference – the

difference between this or that thing. The real foundation for specific difference

is recognition. We can say that these things differ on condition of first

identifying what these things are. Just as Aristotle makes identity according to

categories the basis of generic difference, so Kant makes the transcendental

categories the basis for phenomenal difference. But Kant's categories are

themselves identities the conditions of which undergo no further critical

process as to the conditions of their possibility. They are fixed identities, brute

facts of consciousness which are distinguished by the specific difference

between them. Deleuze's work against a common sense shows that he cannot

be satisfied by the Kantian faculties. “[It is] not qualitative opposition within the

sensible, but an element which is in itself difference, and creates at once both

the quality in the sensible and the transcendent exercise within sensibility”

(Deleuze, 1994: 144). The phenomenological operation of recognition by which

Kant identifies the conditions of thought can give no account of the conditions

of these conditions; in the categories and the faculties of experience we reach

fixed identities. Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, however, is concerned to

show the conditions of even those categories and faculties which cannot think

their own conditions. The identity of any image of thought is the result of a

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process which precedes that thought's power to order or recognize. This is why

Deleuze seeks difference in itself in place of mere qualitative opposition.

The procedure by which Deleuze submits every identity to enquiry after its

conditions undermines any stable identity of a thinking subject and it is from

here that he expands thought beyond any finite rational being. If it is thought,

in the finite rational sense, which makes difference and difference is the prime

metaphysical motor then we accept that every question of being makes sense

only in a correlative epistemology privileging human access. This is precisely

the opposite of Deleuze's intention. Deleuze's principle of univocity, that “Being

is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of

which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself” (1994: 36), makes explicit

the universal metaphysical significance of difference in itself. The thought

which makes difference therefore cannot be the thought of any unified identity.

In some sense the thought which makes difference must be operative in

differenciation, the processes of actualisation which condition every

conditioned phenomena. This is what is meant when Deleuze says that every

thing “thinks and is a thought to the extent that, reduced to its intensive

reasons, it expresses an Idea the actualisation of which it determines” (1994:

254). However, to what extent Deleuze is justified in this depends on the

method of transcendental empiricism and the structure of virtual/actual

relations discovered through this method. Deleuze's attempt to invert

Kantianism by his more radical transcendental procedure is not enough by

itself to guard against the accusation that the structure of thought in

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philosophical questioning is illegitimately extended into metaphysical process.

If it is thought that does metaphysical work through differenciation then we

must enquire into the nature of this process and the place of thought in it.

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Biology, Panpsychism and Time

In Larval Subjects, Autonomous Systems and E. Coli Chemotaxis John Protevi

argues that Deleuze's thought is a “biological panpsychism” (2007: 29) and

that “cognition is fundamentally biological, that it is founded in organic life”

(2007: 29). Protevi's argument is based on a reading of Deleuze's larval

subjectivity that is exclusively biological. Larval subjectivity is a moment in

Deleuze's philosophy of time that describes the syntheses of past, present and

future. The syntheses of time occur in the differentiation of the virtual and

determine a time of differenciation. That this moment is a “subject” signals

again the parallels operative in Deleuze's work between first person thinking

and metaphysical process. Furthermore, the examples from biology that

demonstrate Deleuze's syntheses – in habit, memory and creativity or

evolution – raise the question of the biological function of time and thought in

contrast to a univocal temporality. It is from the synthesis of time through

subjectivity that Deleuze begins his critique of representational theories of time

and launch his own differential philosophy of time.

Deleuze begins the discussion of his philosophy of time with a reference to

Hume, but also an allusion to Leibniz and a sign of the panpsychism which

Deleuze will come to develop. “Repetition changes nothing in the object

repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it”

(Deleuze, 1994: 70). This is Hume's problem according to Deleuze. It is a

problem which in Hume led to sceptical empiricism and turned Kant towards

transcendental idealism, but which Deleuze will radicalise through his

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transcendental empiricism. The discontinuity of phenomena is not a problem

which must be overcome by anchoring succession in either habit or

transcendental categories, but is a moment in the differenciation of the actual

through temporal synthesis. Leibniz's mens momentenea brings together

matter, time and memory such that "every body is a momentary mind and

consequently without consciousness, sense, memory" (Leibniz quoted in

Beeley, 2004: 61). The temporal structure of differenciation for Deleuze is

intimately connected to sense and memory and it is through his approach to

these questions that he will attempt to escape the problematic inherited from

Hume and Kant of discontinuity and succession. The conditions for successive

appearance are for Deleuze, just as they are for Kant, temporal. However, the

succession of phenomena which Hume and Kant anchor in the rational subject

Deleuze makes a process of larval subjectivity. The larval subject is a not

comparable to any identity of consciousness or cogito - Deleuze's arguments

against common sense make this clear. Instead, the larval subject might be

compared with Whitehead's “subject-superject” because for both Whitehead

and Deleuze the subject is not a being with any a priori structure, it is the

process and the product of an actualisation. The first moment in that process

for Deleuze is a contraction of elements of the past in expectation of the future.

There can be no absolute inertia in Deleuze; no thing ever stays what it is,

because for a thing to be what it is it must be created. No creation is eternal

and each new moment is instead a repetition, a new creation in which the

same returns through temporal difference. Thus when Deleuze says that

repetition “changes nothing in the object repeated” (1994: 70) this is both

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Hume's problem and Deleuze's processual solution. No object can be repeated

itself, instead the Idea which is its conditioning ground may be contracted and

repeated again, but always differently.

The possibility of a return of the same, which is the possibility of any

appearance of stable identity, is based on a contraction of elements of the past

– a memory of what was in expectation of what can be again. This contraction

is the basis of habit, which is repetition and expectation of the same. Deleuze

seeks here to show what Hume could not: the conditions of habit. In Hume

habit is the faculty which grounds expectation of succession but no explanation

is given for the ability of habit to operate serially, that is successively. Habit for

Deleuze is dependent on temporal synthesis, not vice versa. Equally critical is

that we understand habit not as a faculty of the empirical subject as in Hume,

but as a habit of the material itself. This is what is meant when Deleuze says

that repetition “does change something in the mind which contemplates it”

(1994: 70). It is not, as it is in Kant and Hume, that a finite intellect synthesises

successive phenomena, but rather that the larval subject operates as the

universal mind in which Ideas undergo differentiation, a process which in turn

differenciates temporally.

The second synthesis of time is the contraction not only of elements of the

past, but of the whole of the past in the present. This synthesis makes possible

a past wider than the perished moment; it makes possible a return of that

which is not present and is a deeper memory for being. The third and final

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synthesis introduces novelty and individuation. The eternal return of difference

is the repetition not of what has been but repetition of difference, the bringing

into the present of a future which is always different. Together the three

syntheses of time form a crucial moment in Deleuze's process philosophy. In

the current context however we are interested primarily in the first synthesis

and Deleuze's pyscho-biological examples of the passive synthesis of habit.

Deleuze is explicitly organicist, biological and psychical in his examples of the

first synthesis. The contraction of past elements provides the ground for a

habitual repetition most easily seen in living bodies. The systole and diastole of

the heart provides the clearest example with the caveat that this living habit –

while it is exemplified in a material, biological system – is possible only on

condition of the contraction of a past that cannot be actual or material – since

it is past – and therefore the physio-biological phenomena is conditioned by a

spiritual process. “A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles,

nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract

a habit” (Deleuze, 1994: 74). This spiritual process of contraction can be

related to the organisation and function of biological unities in the Aristotlean

sense. Protevi links this spiritual element, the psukhē of living organisation, to

contemporary autopoetic theory, which includes Evan Thompson and which

Protevi calls the “mind in life school” (2011: 31). Protevi's approach explicates

Deleuze's philosophy of difference in reference to an organic philosophy in

which the dynamic genesis of living things is a material and cognitive or sense-

making process. Insofar as this biological focus explicates the evolution of

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living entities in this way it accurately describes Deleuze's work. However, the

problem with an approach that limits itself to the field of biological-

panpsychism is that it limits the work of temporal synthesis and differenciation

to the biological realm and forgoes any description of a broader empirical

realm. First, such work cannot really be called panpsychist because psyche is

not a universal process, but is confined to a limited realm of biological

organisation. This then raises questions of the origin of biological organisation

if the potential to contract habit in temporal synthesis is not universally

distributed. Consequently, claims for the univocity of Being become

problematic. If what Being is said of differs and that difference is made by

thought, then thought limited to a particular realm gives us the peculiar

situation in which the non-biological is not, or in some sense lacks true Being.

Indeed, such a limited biological thought, although realist about living

organisation, echoes Kant's critical strictures by limiting activity to the living

subject. Such biological-panpsychism therefore risks the very serious

accusations that it is either straightforwardly anti-realist, or at the very least

handicapped in its ability to speak about a world beyond living thought. If

Deleuze's repeated references to biological genesis, whether of eggs or eyes,

are understood in a way which limits true Being to the biological, it is left with

no recourse when it comes to thinking the origin of life from non-life. Just as for

Kant, such an origin is unthinkable. What the non-living is, in fact, remains

extraordinarily problematic. Given the focus of biological genesis in Difference

and Repetition and the intimate relation between living habit and temporal

synthesis we may rightly ask if these problems affect Deleuze.

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Vitalism

Rather than panpsychist, a more proper term for the power particular to living

things might be vitalism. Ray Brassier attacks Deleuze as a vitalist with the

understanding that: “by 'vitalism' we mean the claim that physical and

chemical principles cannot explain biological functions and processes”

(Brassier, 2007: 168). Brassier's basis for the claim that Deleuze is a vitalist is

twofold. The first is the preponderance of biological examples in Difference and

Repetition. The second criticises as illegitimate Deleuze's universalising of

thought based the first person experience of intensive difference. In regards to

the first, while references to biology abound in Difference and Repetition the

problems associated with either biological-panpsychism or vitalism, however

serious, cannot be attributed to Deleuze merely on the basis of his scientific

background. That Deleuze was less familiar with the physical sciences than he

was with the biological sciences says very little about the philosophical merit of

his work. Brassier's second argument however, holds more weight. Indeed,

Brassier's criticism follows the same lines as that subjective element of

Deleuze's thought that we have been mapping. The thought that we have

called panpsychist Brassier criticises as vitalist, accusing Deleuze of remaining

within an idealist framework which is incapable of thinking a world outside

experience. Far from radicalising Kant's transcendental work, Deleuze is left

“equivocating between transcendental and absolute idealism” (Brassier, 2007:

190).

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The space of thought in which vitalism finds itself can be made clear by an

another definition, this time proposed by Canguilhem. Canguilhem's definition

of vitalism is given in the context of a discussion about how we situate

ourselves with regard to nature – as alien to it or part of it.

A scientist who feels filial, sympathetic sentiments toward nature will not

regard natural phenomena as strange and alien; rather, he will find in

them life, soul and meaning. Such a man is basically a vitalist.

(Canguilhem, 1994: 288)

The problem which Brassier attributes to Deleuze, Canguilhem highlights here.

Whatever our feelings towards nature, and much of Deleuze's work rests on the

aesthetic intuition of signs of intensive difference, there is no guarantee that

nature either reciprocates, or indeed feels at all. We may extend filial and

sympathetic feelings, but if we attribute the same feelings to nature it may

simply be that what we find is our own way of looking. Much of Brassier's

criticism rests on the sufficiency of Deleuze's work to the variety of inorganic,

material and seemingly senseless processes of nature found in contemporary

physical science – death and entropy are Brassier's preferred examples. To

deny that natural phenomena such as these can be strange and alien may be

to to project into nature, rather then find in it, our own image of life, soul and

meaning. This criticism, when put to Deleuze, condemns transcendental

empiricism for mistaking the form of our feelings of intensive difference for the

the form of all actualisation. This form of all actualisation, which is Deleuze's

larval subject, Brassier argues can only be understood as biological, memorial

and psychically individuating. The syntheses of time are vital powers of living

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beings, not universal principles. Furthermore, the moment of the eternal return

in which novelty and individuation occur “is as yet the prerogative of homo

sapiens” (Brassier, 2007: 201). “Ultimately, it is the thinker – the philosopher-

artist – who is the 'universal individual'” (Brassier, 2007: 185).

The Soul of Matter

Kant calls the theory of living matter hylozoism and argues, on account of his

own commitment to the inertial (and therefore lifeless) identity of matter, that

“we certainly have no a priori insight into whether such matter is possible. But

this means our explanation can only move in a circle” (Kant, Ak.I 394, 1987:

276). The form of our experience for Kant recognises phenomena only so long

as they conform to the categories of experience. Since the categories

determine matter as extended only and lacking inherent power, the intuition of

life or thought within matter is a non-object to us. Certainly the form of certain

living things suggests a force of purposive organisation, but this aesthetic

intuition cannot properly speaking be an object of our understanding. To say

the matter lives or has a vital inherent force is to fabulate from within the

imagination, and such a story has purchase only insofar as we recognise

phenomena that match our imagination. We say nothing true about the world,

and much more about our feverish imaginations. Yet Kant's comment that the

thought of living matter moves “in a circle” is illuminating of the difference

between he and Deleuze. Thought not grounded in an a priori is unthinkable for

Kant, whereas for Deleuze the ungroundedness of every phenomena is the

inevitable result of thinking difference in itself. With the image of thought

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undermined by Deleuze's ceaseless questioning after the conditions of every

conditioned entity, the identity of every thing – including matter – becomes a

contingent moment in an ongoing process of differenciation. The expansion of

transcendental critique to even the thinker of the transcendental abandons any

apodictic certainty to a chaotic becoming where natural production trumps the

necessary identity of any thing. The question remains however, of in what

sense Deleuze is entitled to proclaim the universal significance of the thought

of difference and whether such thought can be considered as realism.

In seeking to paint Deleuze as a vitalist incapable of realism about the non-

living Brassier damns him for relegating matter to a dream of mind (2007:

201). While Brassier, like Kant, finds such a suggestion incomprehensible,

Deleuze has a positive role for the dream of matter. The first passive synthesis

of time is a:

bare repetition [which] must be understood as the external envelope of

the clothed: that is, the repetition of successive instants must be

understood as the most relaxed of the coexistent levels, matter as a

dream or as mind's most relaxed past. (Deleuze, 1994: 84)

The differenciation of matter is the enveloping of differentiated Ideas.

Difference is clothed in its actualisation and matter is the most relaxed of the

contractions of succession. Just as Leibniz's matter is a “momentary mind […]

without consciousness, sense, [or] memory" (quoted in Beeley, 2004: 61)

Deleuze's matter is produced in mind, but mind that has not yet contracted the

complexity of a past or the possibility of novelty. It is not “only the sleep of

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reason which gives rise to monsters: it is also the vigil, the insomnia of

thought” (Deleuze, 1994: 29). Thought dreams in the sense that it is sleepless,

always repeating, incapable of ever being the same. In what sense is matter

also a dream of mind?

If Deleuze has achieved nothing else in his critique of the image of thought, we

must at least grant that the ungrounding process of transcendental empiricism

has banished any possibility of a stable, individuated subject of experience.

What then gives rise to this impression that “I think”? This identity or

recognition, if we are to interrogate its conditions seriously, must itself be

conditioned and therefore the product of some sub-representational process.

This is the meaning of difference in itself. Phenomenal appearance, at least as

it is encountered in our subjective experience, cannot be grounded in any a

priori. It must therefore always be the product of a process which is never the

same, but always different. This process is exemplified in the syntheses of

time: the succession of appearances and their constant change are given to us

in an experience of intensive difference. We cannot experience difference in

itself; in agreement with Kant, on this at least, experience is of phenomena not

process. Where Deleuze departs from Kant is in granting to aesthetic

experience relevance to the presentation of the phenomenal. Kant's aesthetic

Ideas retain an “as if” status. Deleuze, on the other hand, is a realist about

Ideas. An Idea is not an object or an identity, but a differential relation the

expression of which conditions an actualisation. It is because actual

appearances cannot be taken as given that they must be products of a

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conditioning process. Ideas express relations which are conditioned and

actualised in thought.

A process of first person experience conditioned by forces which are not

available to that experience except mediately is neither dogmatically anti-

Kantian, nor opposed to contemporary science. But Deleuze's claim is much

broader than this. The experience conditioned by forces not immediately

available to that experience is not only a first person process. If first person

thought is a process conditioned by Ideas in the virtual, and if we are realists

about the origin of life and consciousness from the non-living unconscious, then

the generative process of differenciation is a universal process. That temporal

synthesis is a necessary moment of differenciation is a result of the necessity

of all identity being conditioned, which is to say that all identity is a product of

difference repeated. Yet unlike Kant, whose transcendental aesthetic fixes the

form of time only in the common sense identity of the transcendental subject,

the subject of Deleuze's temporal synthesis is universal not finite. The larval

subject is not a finite or particular subject, it is the universal form of an ongoing

process of difference: “the subjective, or duration, is the virtual“ (Deleuze,

1988: 42 emphasis in the original). Time takes a form the subject of which

Deleuze maps through syntheses of past, present and future. Each synthesis

contracts the potential to express again Ideas for which there is no original.

Insofar as differenciation expresses Ideas it is a process of thought. Thought “is

that moment in which determination makes itself one, by virtue of maintaining

a unilateral and precise relation to the indeterminate. Thought 'makes'

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difference” (Deleuze, 1994: 29). Ideas determine actualisations which are made

one, which is to say they appear as particular. The unilateral relation is the

process whereby differentiation of the virtual works itself out through

actualisation. If the process of our first person experience is a momentary

product of this actualisation, and if we are realists about the common origin of

all natural phenomena – whether psychic or material – then we risk

incoherence if we deny to material phenomena the same active process in its

production as that which we grant first person experience. Every body, every

thing, is a conditioned product and the thought of difference operates in its

actualisation. No distinction can be made between biological, chemical or

physical processes. The phenomena even of the basest element is the product

of as momentary mind. Even “[m]etallurgy is the consciousness or thought of

the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness” (Deleuze &

Guittari, 1997: 411).

Conclusion

That the thought which makes difference cannot in any way be a common

sense image of experience is clear in Deleuze's work. While it is true that first

person experience of intensive difference serves as the point of departure for

our thinking of the mind of matter, this experience is neither unified nor

identical. Encounters with difference force us to think in the way that they

present signs to us of the Ideas enveloped in appearance. But relations of

difference are operative as much in chemistry and physics as they are in

biology and psychology. Thought makes difference in the sense that the

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process from differentiation to differenciation is real but not yet actual.

Deleuze's thought is not absolute idealism because thought is only this process

of differenciation. The differentiation of the virtual remains what is not thought.

This unthought is not quite noumenal, because there always remains the

potential that virtual Ideas may be enveloped in actualisation, thereby

becoming the subjects of the mind of time; but the determinate relations of

Ideas are inexhaustible. Behind every thought made actual, the potential of the

virtual works unconsciously. Deleuze's thought is neither rigidly biological, nor

vitalist and and it is not opposed to physical science. While Deleuze is critical

of any method which makes a law from conditioned states of affairs, this simply

means that behind every phenomena – whether psychic or material – is the

product a process of thought, unilaterally related to virtual difference. The only

law possible for Deleuze is “crowned anarchy” (1994: 37), an ungrounded

process of continual productivity. If any thinker is alarmed by Deleuze's

description of the spiritual process of matter they need only remember that the

best current physics is not atomism, but describes instead a process of the

production of matter. That this physical process itself cannot be material,

because the material is its product, is the meaning of Deleuze's panpsychist

thought. That the physical is not opposed to thought, and Ideas are not

excluded from the material, must be accepted by any realist about naturalist

metaphysics.

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What Kind of Panpsyhcist is Deleuze?

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