Category: deleuze

Following the reading of Alain Badiou’s ‘Clamour of being’ that we undertook as the first task of the Volcanic Lines – deleuzian research group at Greenwich University, I recently re-read Alberto Toscano’s interesting review of Badiou ‘Clamour’ and his ‘Manifesto’.  This piece dates back to 2000 when it appeared in the Warwick University journal ‘Pli’.  It concludes with a set of four tasks, which Toscano frames in terms of the responses Deleuzians might need to make to Badiou, tasks that still seem to me very resonant and which perhaps might frame the key moments of an attempt to think through Deleuze.  Part of the resonance, no doubt, results from the fact that the first two of these tasks are ones that I intuitively agree with and which I think I took up, somewhat unconsciously, within my doctoral thesis.  They have continued to maintain their presence as the main focus of my reserach.  The fascinating point, for me at least, comes in the third point however.

Recently I have turned to begin thinking the ‘political’ in relation to Deleuze and this was, at least in part, the subject of a presentation I gave to the conference on Deleuze we held at Greenwich last July.  There I began to try and think a concept of the ‘human bomb’ that derived from a kind of struggle to use a Deleuzian method to articulate contemporary political actions.  The paper provoked a quite hostile response from some attending, which was gratifying to a degree, but did become blocked in some ways through an underlying difficulty, that of thinking an action, in some sense, ‘beyond justification’, that is, an action that appears both ‘beyond justification’ in ‘good sense’ (unjustified) and the tension with an action that is ‘beyond justification’ in the ‘common sense’ (unthinkable).  There seemed to be something missing, some ground or preliminary set of arguments that would be needed before such a task could take place and my intuition now, resonant with Toscano’s tasks, is that this preliminary work needs to take place in the realm of the ontology, that is, specifically, in terms of the ‘link between univocity and ethology’.  Crudely speaking – or rather, speaking in another register – this feels at the moment like it would be something like articulating a position akin to the ‘compatabilists’ in the debate on free will, or the possibility of a naturalistic philosophy of mind (these being very rough indications of possible comparisons).

Toscano’s four tasks for Deleuzians are:

• “One, to grasp Deleuzian affirmation as a resistance to the present,transforming Badiou’s ascetic image of the purified automaton into a constructivist one. This point depends on a close encounter with Deleuze’s ethics of the event through the concept of counter-actualisation.
• Two, the extraction from Deleuze work of a new theory of illusion, cast in a deeply Nietzschean mode, that does not depend on the re-instatement of a separation between truth(s) and simulacra. The necessary prelude to this is an exhaustive account of Deleuze theory of the problem.
• Three, the elucidation of the essential link between univocity and ethology, or, why Deleuze is a political ontology.
• And four, a careful inquiry into the tensions which potentially mine the consistency of the relationship between immanence and virtuality.”

(Pli 9 (2000), 220-38)

At the moment I’m trying to think through a kind of peculiar imperative, that of the conversation. Imagine a scene: a pub, restaurant or party, one in which the focus is a kind of average everyday, ‘passing the time’ conversation. The subjects roam across TV programs, a little current affairs, perhaps venturing into some personal experience. Maybe the topics don’t even reach this far and consist of a banter about women, men, sex, people that are hated or disliked. At some point in this situation someone begins to express an opinion that is unusual and they continue to express it even when it comes up against confusion and disagreement. Each time someone objects, another reason is given. The game becomes one of giving and taking reasons, except it is at this point that something arises that is no longer smooth. Aggression, anger or a general heightened emotional state begin to be displayed – the scene is decsending into an argument and not a reasonable, debating society type of argument nor an emotionally over-loaded inter-personal conflict but rather a confrontation and disruption.

(more…)

John Rajchman, in his introduction to Pure Immanence, emphasises that it was in terms of the problem of subjectivity that Deleuze posed the need for a new kind of empiricism. The first published work of Deleuze makes such a claim quite reasonable, since it is entitled Empiricism and subjectivity and constitutes Deleuze’s only prolonged public encounter with Hume.  Rajchman makes an interesting attempt to reconstruct a central part of Deleuze’s argument …

The Deleuzian argument (as suggested by Rajchman’s intro)

1) The being of sensation is what can only be sensed (aistheteon)

2) More material and less divisible than sense data, it requires a non-categorical synthesis (example of artworks  – Deleuze came to think that art-works just are sensations connected in materials in such a way as to free aesthesis from the assumptions of the sort of ‘common sense’ that for Kant is supposed by the ‘I think’ or the ‘I judge’) (p.9)

3) The asymetrical synthesis of the sensible is what gives the Merleau-Pontyian ‘flesh’.

4) This synthesis thus requires an exercise of thought

5) However, unlike the syntheses of the self or consciousness the asymmetrical synthesis requires ‘sort of dissolution of the ego’.

6) sensation is sythesised according to a peculiar logic: “ a logic of multiplicity that is neither dialectical nor transcendental – it is a logic of an AND prior and irreducible to the IS of predications” (p.10 – 11)

This sensation is prior to all subjects.

Transcendental empiricism may then be said to be the experimental relation we have to that element in sensation that precedes the self as well as any ‘we’, through which is attained, in the materiality of living, the powers of ‘a life’ (p.11)

Deleuze takes from Hume the idea of habit – the habit of saying I in particular. Against Locke, Hume put forward the idea that the self is not given, is not a fact, the identity of which then needs explanation. (p.12)

Hume thus opens up the question of other ways of composing sensations than those of the habits of the self and the ‘human nature’ that they suppose (p.12).