razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: events

Reading ‘The Logic of sense’: Series 2

(A slightly delayed note on the second Series due to preparations for the Volcanic Lines conference we held last week on Kant and Deleuze, a report of which is over here).

One of the most fascinating lines here in this Series is the following: “For this reason the stoics can oppose destiny and necessity” (LOS:6). A footnote follows which refers to Cicero’s De Fato. A comparison with the Epicureans immediately follows this.

What is crucial, at this point, is the way in which it is the causal relation, the cause-effect couple, which prompts these claims about the conceptualisation of necessity within the Stoics and Epicureans. The reference to Cicero is a peculiarity. I am currently reading Kant’s Logic at the same time as Deleuze’s LOS and a comment Kant makes there about Cicero offers a curious complication to Deleuze’s account. Kant claims that “Cicero was in speculative philosophy a disciple of Plato, in morality a Stoic” (Logic: Introduction, S4; 35). The complication in reading Deleuze seems to be that he is advanced as an example of the Stoic account of necessity, yet precisely in line with Kant’s characterization of him as a ’Stoic in morality’. It is not a logical account of necessity that Deleuze is focussing on, though in later sections he will refer to a notion of ’modality’, but rather the moral dimension of necessity which is tangled into the concept of ’destiny’. We might want to ask whether Deleuze too, like Cicero, might be classed as a Platonic in speculation and a Stoic in morality. There seem at least some who might want to assert just such a claim, at least in part – Badiou, for example, seems to claim a level of Platonism can be found within Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual / actual distinction.

What happens in this 2nd Series of LOS, however, is a kind of philosophical-historical conceptual topography. Deleuze brings to the foreground the concept of the ’event’ which is plainly of central importance to the whole project of LOS. In the first Series he had indicated the role of the ’depth’ of ’mad becoming’ that was incapable of being contained within a model of knowledge. The motor force of the problematic relation to identity is found in what Deleuze names there as the ’paradox of infinite identity’ which is caused by a di-directionality of couples such as cause-effect (LOS:2). The name, that which “is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir“, is that which is lost in Alice’s adventures in the realm of becoming. The name is lost within the event and yet the event is communicated through language.
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July 14, 2007
Reading ‘The Logic of Sense’: Preface and Chapter 1

This is the first in a series of posts, initiated by the suggestions of Evan Duq in his blog ‘Working on concepts‘. I’m in the throes of some intensive writing practice over the summer as I try to get the first draft of my new book into shape and currently am working on a paper for the ‘Strange Encounters: Kant and Deleuze’ conference we’re organising at Greenwich…so throwing LOS into the mix should be good.

I’m using the Athlone 1990 edition and all references are to that unless otherwise stated. Whilst this is a re-reading (in my case) of LOS I am going to approach it to a large extent as though it were a fresh reading…inevitably this will be slightly distorted by the existing annotations in the text but what I want to note is that these are reading notes rather than sustained critical commentary. Certain comments are inevitably going to be extremely tenuous and at times plain wrong…the freedom to be wrong, however, is part of the nature of the internet and why students quoting texts and online commentaries should remember caveat emptor!

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LOS begins with a rather short and sweet preface that takes on a quite traditional role of introducing the text rather than philosophically positioning the reader in regard to the text. The first thing of note is the reference to ‘modern reader’ and a set of elements to be found within Lewis Carroll that would ‘please’ such a modern reader. The elements seem to refer to structuralist type aspects of form, as well as aspects of a psychoanalytic interest (children’s books “or, rather, books for little girls” and an explicit mention of “a profound psychoanalytic content“). Who, then, is the ‘modern reader’? Someone embedded within a psychoanalytic practice of reading? Someone embedded, moreoever, in a specifically structuralist psychoanalytic reading, ie; a Lacanian? Is the suggestion – perhaps – that Deleuze is presenting a text which should be of profound interest to the Lacanian reader and as such a common ground of discussion or theoretical concept creation? It seems likely, at least at the moment, that this is the case. If so this suggests a certain ‘audience’ for LOS – viz, the Lacanian reader, but an audience that needs to attend to something usually forgotten. “Over and above the immediate pleasure” Deleuze says (and I would want to check the French edition here to see whether jouissance is the specific term at work in this sentence) “there is something else” in the work of Carroll, that being the play of sense and nonsense. This “connection between language” (one form of sense) “and the unconscious” is readily present, Deleuze says, but he then indicates again the ‘something else’ he wants to bring to attention, “what else is this marriage connected with” (xiii). (more…)

June 24, 2007
Principles and Facts – notes

There’s an interesting online psych project over here at Project Implicit…an interesting thing mentioned on Thought Capital’s blog post about the use of ’empirical data’ in ’evidenced-based meta-analyses’. I presume these EBMA’s are some sort of peculiar category of philosophical activity, perhaps connected to the idea of ’experimental philosophy’ which, whilst fascinating, seems to sometimes miss the point. Can evidence ever establish particular principles of thought? If not, then is it for a philosophy a question of giving up principles or of giving up evidence? Is there a dichotomy here that cannot (in principle or in fact) be resolved?

This difficulty, of what we might call the distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris is critical to any attempt to understand transcendental philosophy. There is an argument being made (James Williams, Dan Smith etc) that it is in fact principles that are crucial for Deleuze, that the quid juris has in some sense a priority derivable from an affinity of Deleuze’s method with that expressed by Leibniz ’Principle of Sufficient Reason’. Everything has to have a reason for existing, a ratio existendi, rather than simply a reason for being, ratio essendi. In fact, Smith argue, Leibniz in fact added other epistemological and metaphysical conditions in the PSR with the notions of ratio cognoscendi (a reason for how we can know the thing, the principle of indiscernibles) and a ratio fiendi (reason for becoming out of that which already is or law of continuity preventing arbitrary MacGuffin like inventions during the course of an account). The PSR aims to fulfill all that we would ask for in either of the quid moves, such that a question of fact or principle is capable of being responded to by understanding the sufficient reason for a thing.

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June 10, 2007
Transcendental philosophy and naturalism

I’ve just got an email through confirming my place for this conference in a couple of weeks, which looks very interesting. This project is being run by Essex University and looks like it may produce some useful clarification of the transcendental / naturalism debate, thoguh I’ve been too busy this year to pay it as much attention as I would have liked. Take a look at the speaker list and subject titles though if Kant, transcendental arguments or the naturalism debate are in your horizon and email them if you want to attend. Details on the website linked.

September 15, 2006