Object-ions: Cutting the Cord

Between Levi Bryant's fascinating posts on what he call's "The Ontic Principle", and Graham Harman's new blog "Object-Oriented Philosophy", I've found myself mulling over some objections. Now, I'm not yet familiar enough with either Harman or Latour, so perhaps these objections have already been anticipated, and if anyone can point me toward the relevant literature I'd appreciate it. But it strikes me that 'object-oriented philosophy' is missing something crucial. I touched upon this a bit in my last post, but there I was more concerned with sketching my own concepts, whereas here I'm a bit more critical.

First of all, while I have some sympathy for the urge to simply forget about correlationsim and pounce on the things themselves, I worry that this may be hasty and somewhat reckless. We can raise here a whole set of problems. Firstly, can we simply forget about Kant, who so famously demonstrated our consignment to the phenomenal world of access, and exlcusion from the in-itself? Secondly, who is to say that 'object' is an appropriate way of speaking about the in-itself? Are not objects the specific way things show up for us? If we subtract ourselves from the equation, what reason do we have to believe that objects will remain as objects?

Again, I'm not familiar enough with Harman to know how he would respond, but I am a bit confused by Levi's willingness to embrace objects as the form of the in-itself. This confusion stems from the high regard I have for his fantastic book on Deleuze, which, among other things, critiques any approach to the given that takes it as it is, rather than accounting for the genesis of that given. It seems to me that, from this position, we should arrive not at an object oriented philosophy any more than a subject oriented philosophy, but rather, at a genesis oriented philosophy, aiming to account for the givenness of the in-itself as objectal and accessible or inaccessible.

Now, Levi does lean in this direction with his explicit formulations, but I don't think he's yet made it altogther clear where he stands. For example, his ontic principle claims that "there is no difference that does not make a difference". He explicates this in conversation with Harman by saying that the object is the difference it produces in relation with objects, and moreover, that this differenciation is inexhaustible, the very inexhaustable being of the object in-itself. The object is nothing more than its potential to produce difference, its virtual power to differenciate. Harman, however, responds by claiming that there would still be something of the object even if it produced no difference, even if it was entirely without relation.

It is still unclear whether Levi thinks there is no object apart from its relations, that it is retroactively produced by its differenciation, or whether there is some substantial being of difference behind it; he has said of the virtual that it is nothing but relations amongst actualities, so the latter option seems unlikely. The option I assume he'd vie for, given his definition of the object as act-uality, is that the object is the difference produced in the wake of an event (in Deleuze's sense), and that this event is the only 'substantial' thing there (although substantial is the wrong term).

This ambiguity is clear in the very formulation of the ontic principle: there is no difference that does not make a difference. This is a negative existential statement, making a definite claim about what does not exist. So, what does exist would have to meet the following criteria: if it is a difference, it would have to make a difference. How do we read this? On the one hand, it could mean that a difference always produces another difference, and difference itself minimally occurs between two differences (this is not to be read as external or empirical difference, but the between of a mutual production, as the space between two connected singularities). On the other hand, it could mean that a difference, as a difference, produces itself as a difference. To be clear, this would mean that something different, by virtue of being different, produces the very difference that defines it as a being. In other words, the object-difference produces itself not only as a specific difference in relations with other objects, but, qua difference, as an existing object.

Both readings seem close to Levi's explication, but both have problems. With the first, we have the problem of an ulterior condition: if an object-difference, i.e. an existing being, by virtue of existing, produces other differences, which, again, by virtue of existing, produce other differences, we seem to be dangerously close to lapsing into the kind of transitive causality that Levi's Spinozism should avoid. If we are to avoid it, we must refer to an ulterior condition or immanent causality by which a difference produces itself as difference. Yet this would mean that, in producing itself, the ulterior condition is one of identity, in which the difference makes a non-difference, produces what already is - itself qua object-difference. Now I think these problems can be countered by reference to Deleuze's model of repetition and identity qua product, but this leads us to the second problem.

The second reading seems to refer to such an ulterior condition in which a difference is its own immanent cause, producing itself as an identity, as an identifiable object(-difference). Yet here we have the problem of treating a difference as object - the object-difference must preexist itself in some fashion, it must produce itself, which means it must exist before it exists. On the one hand, the difference must already be there to produce itself as object-difference. On the other hand, the object-difference must retroactively posit itself as its own cause, there at its own birth, so to speak. This temporal paradox will lead us back to a kind of transitive causation, unless we can provide a non-chronological account of production, an immanent production that occurs in being. Here, again, I think Deleuze can help answer these problems with his account of static genesis, and Levi surely knows this if anyone does.

Yet there is a third reading of the ontic principle that could undermine the apparent consistency of the Deleuzian approach, and I believe it is a reading that would fit Harman's own variant of object-orientation. If there does not exist a difference that does not make a difference, that nonetheless means that there could exist a non-difference that does not make a difference. Levi's ontic principle says nothing about the non-existence of non-differences (and here I suspend the strict identification of non-difference and identity). If Levi is attempting to provide a robust, and parsimonius, theory of object-differences, he nonetheless opens the gateway for a different kind of ontic being, an indifferent-object, and object that does not have any impact on other objects, about which we can say that 'it makes no difference whether or not it exists'. For Harman, I think, objects possess a kind of subterranean indifferent-objectality, a being to which other beings are indifferent, regardless of what kind of difference they may or may not make as object-differences.

If an indifferent-object does exist, we apparently have no way of knowing it - or, to generalize this statement for non-subject objects, objects are generally indifferent to the existence of indifferent-objects, which have no impact upon them. So we can really say nothing about indifferent-objects, except that we cannot say whether or not they exist. As far as I know, from the little I've gleaned thus far, Harman does want to claim not only that indifferent-objects exist, but that they are substantial and qualitatively unique. Levi, on the other hand, despite the ambiguity of his formulation, seems quite antithetical to the idea of indifferent-objects. I don't yet know how Harman justifies these claims, if they do accurately capture his position; but I also don't really know how Levi justifies his opposition, and I'm unclear as to how Deleuze's metaphysics leads to the conclusion of the non-existence of indifferent-objects. At best, it seems to me that both Levi and Deleuze would have to leave the question open and unanswerable, perhaps a poorly-stated problem. If so, maybe the ontic principle is itself poorly stated.

In any case, I have a theory regarding all this. Let's take it step by step. In my (potentially straw-man) description of Harman, we have a twofold structure of the object: there is the object-difference, as the difference produced between an object and other objects; and there is the indifferent-object, its subterranean, non-relational inner-being, the in-itself of the object. While this inner-being is indifferent from the perspective of other objects, it is nonetheless a substantial and fully existing sub-stratum.

In an explicitly structuralist variation of Levi's position, the object is nothing but the first level, the object-difference, and in-itself is the pure void of its place of inscription. The object does not exist apart from its differential relations with other objects, but we can nonetheless subtract the totality of these differences, and leave ourselves with a void place. This is also a somewhat Hegelian position, in that 'there is nothing behind the veil but what we put there'.

My position would be this, and it is still kind of sketchy, so bear with me: the in-itself of the object-difference, as that level of indifferent-objectality about whose existence we can only speculate, unable to decide one way or another, is precisely the negative mark left on the thing by its own genesis. It is the 'navel' of the thing (and we can take this in Freud's sense of the 'navel' of a dream-work). If I may refer to my last post, this indifference is precisely that of something that had to necessarily be so that the object-difference could contingently come-into-being, but that in no way necessitated that contingent outcome. And moreover, this mark is that of the lost contingency foreclosed by the necessary anterior condition. The indifferent-object is nothing less than the ancestral inexistence, that which could not have been so that what is could have been. The ancestral meets all the criteria of the indifferent-object: it does not make a difference, does not relate to or affect anything; and we can not decide on whether it it exists or non-exists, it is excluded from this very dyad. (Are my Laurellian leanings showing here?)

To conclude, I think any object-oriented philosophy must take into account the genesis of objects, which in turn refers to the paradoxical status of something that neither exists nor does not exist, but rather, is foreclosed by the ontic realm of actual objects.

Out Of It

Today, it is commonplace to question identity, to insist upon its problematic and unstable character. And yet, who today has the courage to submit this question to its own test? Who will question the identity of this question, which is to say, in the persistence of its iteration, who will question its consistent direction at one same object? This is not the trivial point that identities are only temporary crystallizations in a constant flux of difference, and hence that the identical object is only ephemeral and apparent. It is not that, in aiming at identity itself, self-identity, the identity of identity with itself, we can only ever find particular things that are perhaps identical with themselves, but that are nonetheless not identical to identity itself. Identity in such cases is only an apparent effect of differential relations. (This is most certainly not what Deleuze is claiming in Difference and Repetition.)

No, the claim is that, in aiming at the identity of things with themselves, we only ever find identity itself with itself. Identity is that which is the same, and hence not sameness, the relation of sameness between two things, but is that which is the same, directly is the same as... Identity is the same as itself, it is this comparison given in a comparable figure itself. Identity is 'the same' as itself, it is 'the same' the being of the same, in its ipseity, its identity with itself, together with itself. Identity is the same as itself, it is the same thing as its self, it is that which directly is its own ipseity or being-with-itself.

Some-thing is the same as some-other. This is the formula.

First: Some-thing is. It is not given, but is like the gift in which one gives what one never had. One does not promise to give, nor does one owe the gift as a debt. Rather, it is a gift that repays a debt that could not be repaid, it is the return delivered to an infinite debt, not by erasing the debt, but in erasing ownership itself, such that nothing can be 'had' to be given, and nothing can be 'had' in accepting a given.

'Some-thing is': something is there, is given, that could not have been given, that was not there for giving. The given is not taken for granted, as merely given, but that by which the given is given, the giving of givenness, is also not given nor is it owed to us. The given is given in the given of the some-thing without a givenness, some-thing given as not to be given and not given.

Second: the same as... We have adressed this element above in brief. This element, as itself, does not pertain to the comparison of two things more or less the same, nor to the sameness of something with itself or with another or with itself as another or another as itself. It is here, between, that the same as... is no longer bound between subject and direct object, between terms related in sameness. When it is the same as it is, it is as it is, which is to say, it is not the same as anything, nor is anything the same as it is. It is, the same as..., not the same, it is not-itself, it is not- the-same-as -itself, and the same as not-itself is.

Third: ...as some-other. The same, as it is itself, is as some-other, which is to say, is as-not, not-itself and some-other. Not other itself, but itself other. It is not itself the same as itself, but is itself the same as itself is some-other. Have we yet thrown you off the scent, or must you still persist in chasing this voice through the thorns?

The formula is, then, that identity as the same, as, the same as, some-other, means that there is no-other that is not itself, and thus that to say "the same" seems meaningless. How can we say something is the same, without say it is the same as (some-other thing)? It amounts to the claim that identity, without itself in ipseity, is the very condition of being-not-itself. And with itself in ipseity, being can only be-with if it is beside, and along with, another one or some-other, and hence, is either with another that is not it and hence not the same as it, or it is with itself alone, and without some-other to be the same as it is.

Identity can only ever claim that which, with itself, is not-itself, or is as not-itself. This is the secret being must keep and keep quiet, that in-itself being is not-itself, as not-itself, and then, maybe, in-itself only as outside, as an outside folded upon itself, facing itself and staring back at itself, which is to say, already beyond itself and toward the limitless reaches outside itself, on the outside in-itself.

Like Father Like Son

Some notes following Giorgio Agamben's lecture, "The Power and the Glory".

Economy properly becomes a concern when the activity or actuality of a praxis, which is to say, an effectivity or efficacy, cannot be reconciled with the being to which it 'belongs'. We should be precise: it is not only the fact of an actuality or action, a 'having happened', an effect, but the facticity of efficacy or the ability to be effective, the power or potential to produce a desired or intended effect. Perhaps it is too much to say 'intended'. It is the facticity of efficacy in the effect, of the potential manifest in an actual effect to produce itself as the right one, the desired one, the appropriate, if not intended effect. In other words, we can say that the propriety of an effect does not belong to being to which it is ascribed, to its 'proper' cause, the cause of which it is a property. It rather holds within itself its own propriety as an immanent power.

Economy is already a form of leading or guiding, which is to say, arche. This is also beginning, in the sense of that which comes before us and goes before us, that which must precede us, in time as well as in space, standing before us to lead the way. We only ever follow after a beginning, we do not begin of ourselves but are preceded. Economy is the form in which the arche of the oikos - the pater - relates to his action of leading, in which the leader relates to the action of leading, through the son and the family, and then the possessions and property of the family, as that which follows from him. In the pater the abstract order of leading must relate to the specific instances of following, or rather, the being which leads must relate to its action of leading as itself manifest. The father intends not to keep the son within his propriety and rule, but to lead him to his own propriety, to the self-directed appropriation that he manifests.

In this sense, the son, as the enacting of leading in following, or of being in an actuality, cannot simply be reduced to the ground of the father's arche. The son must become groundless, self-sufficient, independent of his own beginning, he must exceed the boundary of paternal order and go beyond... The leadership of the father is ultimately aimed at leading the son beyond being led, beyond the being that leads, that stands before and is 'in beginning', 'in the beginning', 'at first'.

This of course is intended to reproduce the structure again, with the son assuming the position of the father, the self-grounded effect returning to the place of a cause, the act assuming the being to which it once belonged. This is not our problem. Our problem is within the structure of economy, not in the concrete reproduction of this structure. The problem is thus: the father, as the beginning from which the son comes, which comes before the son, must lead the son to become without beginning, an-arche, groundless and improper, or again, self-grounded and appropriate to itself and not another, beginning only from itself. Yet the father, not within the chain of concrete reproductions, but the very structural function of the father as beginning, leader, archon, must itself be without beginning, not lead by another or preceded by another, and thereby following after.

In the concrete occasion we may say that either the father has become without leadership after maturing, through being his father's son, or - and this is not necessarily incompatible with the former point - by creating the illusion, in the prerogative of the son, that there is nothing before him, that he is lead by no one, by blocking the way and all sight of what lies ahead. This would be a symbolic fiction, an effective illusion, with a certain pedagogical function. Yet this is not what concerns us at the moment. When such concern does arise, however, it would do us well to revisit, in this light, Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of familialism in Anti-Oedipus, which has for too long been cast as a polemical condemnation of psychoanalytic theory, rather than the precise engagement of a structure within that theory that it really is.

What is it, then, to say that the father qua beginning, archon, is without beginning, an-arche? In the structural sense, it amounts to saying that the beginning is without beginning, or without itself, outside of itself and lacking itself, missing itself in itself. This is not the same as saying that the beginning 'comes from nowhere', ex nihilo, but rather that the beginning does not have itself, does not possess itself, is improper to itself. To return to the terms with which we began, the principle of propriety by which an effect, as manifest, has the power to produce itself as proper or desired, that is to say, in its actuality to become what it was to-be; this principle is also present in the beginning, the being or ground of an effect, or it is reflected into this being once economy structures its relation to its actuality. Yet it is present there in an inverted form by which the beginning becomes improper to itself, in actuality becoming what it was not to-be.

This raises a question as relevant from the structural perspective as it is from the concrete perspective: what was before the father, before the beginning, if this beginning cannot have itself as itself, as its own beginning? What was the beginning before it became the beginning? Who was the father before he became a father, and what has now become of him, if he has apparently vanished?

Saving Spinoza

We all know the cliché according to which Spinoza remains a pre-critical philosopher insofar as, in his assertion of the identity of God and nature, he naively asserts a kind of reductionist materialism. Spinoza's nature is a 'closed mechanism', a blind chain of necessity, and freedom, far from some mystical exemption from this chain, is no more than the assumption of this necessity, et cetera. Thus Žižek claims that for Spinoza, ethics (deontology) is simply reduced to ontology, to this blind necessity free of any obscurantist language of teleological aims, a 'Good' which should be imposed on the way things simply 'are'. Such 'oughts' are no more than fictions that falsely impute to God a will or aim, when God in truth is ignorant of any aim and refers to the blind mechanism of natural causality.

So Spinoza ultimately leads us to a naive scienticism in which we need only learn the way things 'really work', devoid of any ideological mystifications. This 'post-ideological' reign of a pure science, in which we should simply administer the means of a satisfactory life free of any overriding prescriptions or projects, is the paradigm of submission to capitalism; Spinozism thus becomes the perfect capitalist ideology. There is no place for the Cartesian subject, subtracted from the closure of this natural necessity, lacking a proper place and lost, necessitating some perhaps 'fictional' narrative of a moral telos in order to act. Indeed, in this model there is properly no 'subject', but only the free play of natural impulses which, upon assuming their modest place within the natural causal order, can live free of such delusions and the harm they cause.

This reading of Spinoza is exemplified in his discussion of Adam's fall: God does not arbitrarily prohibit Adam from eating from the Tree of Knowledge in a simple exercise of authority, with death as the punishment; God is simply warning Adam of the 'scientific fact' that this fruit would be poisonous to him, that eating it would simply 'cause' him to die... Yet as A. Kiarina Kordela puts it in her remarkable book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, it matters not whether this is an arbitrary prohibition or a mere natural fact, because either way, the notion that Adam should prefer life to death would already entail an aim, that he should live, which imposes on the mere 'facts' a fictional telos. [7-8] The point, then, is that any bare scientific analysis of facts, if it is to have any relevance for us, must already be warped by some fictional (ethical) aim imposed upon them; in short, Adam would've already had to have chosen to live.

Kordela's point, in reading Spinoza 'against himself', is that there is no neutral ontology which can simply see God/nature free of any imputed aims; that we are subjects insofar as we necessitate such a fictional imposition. This is the basic Lacanian point, that any chain of knowledge is incoherent, irrelevant without the stabilizing power of the Master-Signifier, the quilting point which fastens this knowledge to some determinate course of action. This quilting point is a fiction, but a necessary one, without which the world and a 'neutral' ontological analysis thereof would have no consistency for us. Yet can we account for this necessity within Spinoza's thought, or must we resort to 'turning him against himself' so as to draw out the inconsistency of his explicit statements? While I like to think I do not succumb to what she identifies as the 'Neo-Spinozist' tendency to take his words at face value, effacing confrontation with the deadlock intrinsic in his work, I nonetheless think his explicit doctrine is more nuanced than she gives it credit for. To be fair, I have only just begun reading this truly fantastic work, and do not know exactly where she will take her reading; yet, at this early stage, I already find it quite useful in explicating my own reading of Spinoza (to what degree this reading conforms to her's I cannot yet say).

I would contend that, far from the naive position that we can be done with the illusion of ethical aims and modestly resort to a neutral scientific analysis of nature, which must be supplemented with the 'critical' assertion of the necessity of these illusions for us, we can take Spinoza a bit further. The point would then be that, if we were to attempt a truly neutral, 'aimless' dwelling within nature, we would find ourselves unable to act, to do anything. Yet far from a mark of our imperfection, our inability to recognize and fully identify with our proper place in the perfect causal order, and the resulting necessity of supplementing this imperfection with a fiction, what if we radically assert that there is nothing to recognize, that there is no 'natural necessity' to which we would conform if freed from fictive aims?

In other words, insofar as God/nature is the complete chain of causes, a 'closed mechanism', that is, insofar as God is not the constitutive exception to the totality of the world but identified directly with the totality without exception, this totality in its 'infinite perfection' is thereby incomplete, inconsistent. Without the exceptional external view which could explicate 'the next link', that is, the 'natural aim' or 'God's will', there is no way to determine the necessary course of things, inclusive of 'what I should do free of any fictive moral aims'. In other words, the only conclusion of a purely neutral knowledge of nature is that necessity coincides with impossibility, with the impossibility of determining necessity without 'taking a chance', acting without any guarantee... We can thus see how Spinoza is the paradigmatic feminine philosopher in the Lacanian sense: God/nature is 'non-All', that is, there is nothing exempted from it, there is no exempted point of God's will (or, for that matter, a 'free subject' in the vulgar sense), but for that very reason this totality cannot attain closure, it remains incomplete and 'open'. Perfection paradoxically coincides with incompleteness just as the completeness of a fictional aim which gives meaning to arbitrary natural necessity is image of imperfection.

So the 'imperfection' of man is not simply his inability to recognize his place within the perfect order of God/nature; rather, this imperfection is transposed into God/nature itself, such that the shift from imperfection to perfection is no more than a change of perspective on one and the same thing. Whereas we, even in accepting that our aims are ultimately fictional, 'relative', may still continue to posit the divine chain of natural causes as simply epistemologically inaccessible to us, though complete in-itself, Spinoza radically asserts, with his 'third kind of knowledge' (intuition), that we can in fact directly know this perfection; my hermeneutical claim is that this 'intuition' involves no more than transposing this inaccessibility of a complete knowledge of perfection into the very incompleteness of perfection itself. We are thus this incompleteness of the Divine as 'for-itself'. (Furthermore, I would propose against Kordela that Deleuze's reading of Spinoza is not filtered through some vulgar Bergsonian vitalism; rather, if we take his understanding of intuition in Bergson as determined by the Spinozan concept as I read it, we can see that, rather than a 'Bergsonized Spinoza', Deleuze already 'Spinozizes Bergson'; I think his reading of élan vital as not some vulgar Universal Life, but rather a principle of self-difference, is evidence in this direction.)

So, to be precise, if we take Spinoza's God/nature along the same lines as the Lacanian assertion that 'God is unconscious', this does not mean that without the fictions constitutive of consciousness we would find a 'true' necessity, a 'proper place' within nature; rather, God/nature is ultimately no more than the impossibility of discovering such a necessity, the limit internal to every aim that prevents it from coinciding with itself, the very incompleteness of perfection as such. Indeed, Kordela hints at such a reading when she insists that Spinoza's assertion that God has no will, that nature is ultimately 'aimless', is to be read in the same way as Lacan's 'the big Other does not exist':

Lacan...maintains that the Other is inconsistent, that "there is no Other of the Other," that the Other in itself has no will or aim... [H]e adopts the Spinozian conception of history as aimless, and supplements it, according to the Spinozian conception of truth, with a willful and intentional gaze (and, hence, aim), which, however, is "a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other". [17]

And precisely as subjects, who depend on fictional impositions of aims in order to make sense of the world, we are no more than this gaze already inscribed in God: not God's will, but God's opaqueness to itself, the fact that even God does not know his own will, that precisely as perfect, God cannot explain why necessity itself is necessary. Think, for example, of God's speech at the end of the Book of Job, in which he enumerates his own creations as if he himself is amazed at them, as if they are inexplicable even to their creator.

Thus, if freedom is affirmed necessity, it is precisely the assumption of the 'miraculous', inexplicable character of this necessity, the fact that not even God can explain why this was necessary. Spinoza never really elaborates a theory of the subject because the subject is no more than this splitting internal to the divine perfection of nature, this incompleteness/openness that is perfection, necessity. To return to the example of Adam, it is not simply that Adam, in order to make a decision regarding the fruit, must choose some aim (to live or to die), out of ignorance of what God really wants from him; the point is that God himself does not know what he wants of Adam, and hence must leave the decision up to Adam's ignorant, impulsive hubris. The gaze desperately seeking meaning from God is already inscribed in God himself, and is, far from a mark of imperfection, is precisely his perfection as such.

Of course this is only the preamble to such a reading of Spinoza, and I am here setting myself a task I probably won't even begin until my thesis is finished. And I still have a long ways to go in Kordela's book, among others. In any case, I highly recommend $urplus, which presents in my opinion the most original and exciting reading of Spinoza since Deleuze. Whether or not it supports my position, that Spinoza is already a 'critical' philosopher in the strict sense, has yet to be seen, but I am resolute that this is in fact the case. What this means is that, far from reducing deontology to ontology, fictive 'oughts' to the scientific 'is', any more than maintaining the gap between them, Spinoza more radically transposes the gap into the 'is' itself, so that Ethics is the name of the impossible coincidence of God/nature, of the One, with itself. The ethical subject then must assume this gap as his very being, he must identify with this gap/incompleteness that defines the perfection of God/nature.

Contrary to Žižek, Spinoza does not reduce deontology to ontology, but rather raises ontology to deontology. Thus we at the same time denounce fictive 'oughts', ideological aims imposed on the world, and a pure necessary order of 'is' accessible to science: the is, the Being of God/nature, is said only of the must, the vertiginous decision of the subject absent of any justification through aims (the Lacanian act): it is this tautological assertion of an act without any grounding in symbolic coordinates that would 'make sense of it' which selects what must be, which remakes 'what is' by dissolving the symbolic framework that previously defined it, retaining only that which can endure a new evaluation (ultimately, no more than the New itself in History, in the guise of the failed attempts to break out of the given symbolic order which were rendered meaningless by that very order; the act is thus one of Benjaminian Redemption). The is, the Lacanian Real, is ultimately nothing but this immanent limit of symbolization, this necessary inconsistency of every symbolic order, and hence the potential for the New to escape its confines.

Amor Fati and the Eternal Return

This is my final paper for the course on Heidegger, Bergson, and Deleuze I took last spring. The focus of the paper is Deleuze's articulation of the Eternal Return in Nietzsche. It's a little rough, but overall I'm quite happy with it. Since writing it, I have been reading a lot of Zizek, Badiou, Hegel, Lacan, et cetera, a regimen which has significantly altered my reading of Deleuze. Yet, returning to the paper, I was surprised at how much it prefigured this shift. More on that later.

~

Yet to Come
Amor Fati and the Eternal Return in Nietzsche and Deleuze


He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
- William Blake, “Eternity”

~

Amor fati: love of fate, fatal love –

We are faced with a volitional intuition and a transmutation. 'To my inclination for death,' said Bousquet, 'which was a failure of the will, I will substitute a longing for death which would be the apotheosis of the will.' From this inclination to this longing there is, in a certain respect, no change except a change of the will, a sort of leaping in place (saut sur place) of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous conformity...It is in this sense that the Amor fati is one with the struggle of free men.¹

Who is this man who wants to die? Who wills death, longs for death? Who is capable of affirming his death? He who has becom strong enough to affirm even that most terrible burden, to discover in that most terrible realization a joy more profound than any mere enjoyment or pleasure, a joy that cannot be bound to oneself, but that flies from the self and from every captivity, that mercilessly destroys anything that would try to capture it. He who can kiss that joy as it flies, who can love death for discovering in death the joyous escape from that which dies.

Bousquet distinguished two moments. First, a resignation: I cannot will death, I cannot affirm it; that burden is too heavy, too big for me, I would collapse beneath that weight, and so I can only wait for death to take me. I have an inclination for death, I bend toward it, I submit to it and accept its inevitability. On my knees, hunched over, I yield to its merciless judgment, I await its cruelty in pathetic surrender. I have only my little pleasures which allow me to endure this wretched life, those little joys I was able to capture and bind, and I can forgive myself of them because they will not return once my time has come.

When Blake says this man “does the winged life destroy”, we must read it in the fullest sense: he destroys, diminishes, disgraces that purest joy in capturing it, he possess it on the condition that it will soon be gone, and this is already its death; this little joy is only a corpse, an idol, a fool's joy, for it can no longer take flight and attain its highest power, it is already paralyzed, doomed. Yet we can also repeat this quite differently: it is no longer he who destroys the winged life, but the winged life does destroy him.

He who cannot affirm the highest power of joy, who can affirm his joy “once, only once”, will suffer the wrath of his prisoner when, as a phoenix, it rises out of the ashes of its miserable double in a furious incandescence, casting its captor to the flames. These men content to wait for death, to endure life, to take pleasure in the littlest of joys, will receive the most pitiful fate: “they will have, and be aware of, only an ephemeral life!”²

In the second moment, resignation is overcome, the resignation has transformed into exaltation, apotheosis. The man content to wait for death, unable to affirm it, to will it, to carry this burden, is forsaken in favor of a new strength, a new capability: a longing, a passion for death expresses a will transformed, no longer a failed will, a “nothingness of the will” as Nietzsche says. It is now the most profound expression of a “will to nothingness”, no longer stifled by those petty pleasures that distract one from the immensity of its cruel fulfillment.

The man who wants to die, who wills that everything of himself that cannot affirm and cannot be affirmed, everything petty, weak, cowardly, that all of this should die with him – and this is the highest power of joy, this is the winged life attained. When everything base, everything that weighs heavy on one's back, has been annihilated, only lightness and joy remain. He has become capable of casting off everything of himself that has failed and of retaining only that highest power of affirmation. Even negation remains only as a power of affirmation: to will death, but to will the death of that which, incapable of affirming even itself, is resigned to die – to affirm this resignation as such. This is the exaltation of the will: the will to nothingness undergoes a transmutation, becoming a will to affirmation; the abyss swallows everything heavy, so that only an arrow swift and sturdy, sent with the whole force of one's being, can escape its gravity; and so that even the abyss itself is swallowed up by the line of flight the arrow draws.

The man who wants to die succeeds in surpassing the man who cannot affirm his death, who waits patiently for the abyss to open and take him. The man who wants to die becomes capable of shouldering this terrible burden, but only so that he can liberate in himself that which is utterly weightless, the winged life. “What makes one heroic?— Going out to meet at the same time one's highest suffering and one's highest hope.”³ This weight may lead him all the more quickly into the abyss, but it is precisely everything of himself that is a burden for him that is so annihilated, so that the quickness, exuberance, affirmation and joy are set free.

Does this not imply a third moment, a moment when, after death is affirmed and all that cannot affirm death is annihilated, a will to affirmation flies free into its winged life? We have seen the last man, the man resigned to die, and his nothingness of the will; we have seen the man who wants to die, who, in realizing the completion of the will to nothingness, surpassed the last man and his ephemeral life by liberating from his very being a life that would escape that which dies. Are we not then waiting for this winged life to appear, this life that finally overcomes every burden, every death? Are we not awaiting the Overman?

~

Amor fati –

Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of all my life henceforth! I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things:—then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation! And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer!⁴

How does Nietzsche realize this love? How could anyone accomplish such a task? The problem is at once an ethical problem, the problem of how to live, how to make beauty of this life and in this life, to have done with negation and accusation, to make life into pure affirmation. It is through the power of affirmation that beauty and strength and importance is discovered in even the smallest of things, even in cruelty, in pain, in illness, in limitation. To make of one's life an affirmation would mean that the value of everything must be evaluated; of every person, every act, every relationship, every moment. Everything is evaluated so that beauty and worth can be discovered in every thing, so that every thing can be remade on this basis. The will to affirmation would realize and rescue the beauty in everything, in spite of the values imposed on the world that obscure, denigrate, or deny that beauty. Affirmation is the only way in which ethics, as the examination and reinvention of one's very mode of living, one's ethos, can be rescued from the accusation, judgment, and denial of morality.

The problem is also, at the same time, an ontological problem, the problem of “what is necessary in things”. It is not only a matter of “what is”, “what exists”, but rather, of what must exist, of what, in things, necessarily exists. An ontological affirmation cannot affirm everything that is without succumbing to a paralyzing inadequacy. However, it must affirm that which, in every thing, necessarily exists, that which must be made to exist. We seek not a total ontology that would affirm as existing everything, even the most base, most vile, most deserving of inexistence, but a selective ontology that engenders in existence that which must exist, and expels all the rest. Whereas the former would 'let be', the latter will 'make be'. A selective ontology would not simply describe reality, but would engender it as such, as that which must necessarily be; it would select in existence that which purely exists in and for affirmation, and thereby would create a pure ontology. Thus we can see that when ontology becomes pure, it merges with or implicates ethics, it is an ethics, ontological ethics. There is no longer any trace of the classical distinction between what is and what ought to be, a boundary dividing ontology from ethics; there is only what must be, as the traversing of the gap, an arrow crossing the void, a love of fate.

Yet here we must proceed with the utmost caution. For what is the source of this imperative? Doesn't it imply an authority that would reintroduce morality? In what sense can we speak of a pure being, a necessary being, and doesn't this reintroduce a value higher than what is, which opposes existence, which existence merely resembles, against which existence is judged? These concerns will plague us until we consider Nietzsche's solution to the two-fold problem of Amor fati. The will must undergo a test, a torturous crucible, if it is to affirm and love its fate, to make fate itself the object of the will, a will taken to the very limit of its power, to the n^th power. The last man, despite his resignation to death, does not know of this love, for his will is reduced to its minimum of power, and so he cannot will his fate. It is only the man who wants to die that can pass the test, that has a will strong enough to affirm death and all the miseries of fate. In becoming capable of this affirmation, becoming-equal to the task, he aspires to overcome himself, his mortality, all of his weaknesses and limitations He prepares the way for the Overman: “At the stage of the 'during,' or the becoming-equal, the 'overman' becomes an ideal we seek to imitate.”⁵ Nietzsche's test will eliminate these weaknesses and liberate a winged life from that which dies; the Overman will no longer be an ideal for man, but will have already overcome him. With the force of an arrow escaping the gravity of the abyss, it affirms the must that flashes between ontology and ethics as a bolt of lightning. Nietzsche's test is the eternal return.

~

Eternal Return –

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? —⁶

Nietzsche's test is first presented here as a hypothetical, a mere thought: could you affirm the eternal recurrence of the same events, of every moment of your life, from the most wonderful to the most terrible? Could you affirm it all again to the n^th power? Could you will your life, all of your life, without the intrusion of anything new? Yet Nietzsche also says this thought will change you if it does not crush you. What is this change? If one is able to affirm this life once and only once, content with the little pleasures, then one will always confront the intrusion of the new into one's life as miraculous, the mark of a higher power than one's own. One cannot change things or oneself; one can only dwell in those little routines and habits that make one comfortable. The new must come from without, with a strength and a violence greater than one's own. This man would be crushed by the thought of the eternal return, as his only consolation for his miserable life is that it will be over soon enough, and the new will intrude at his death when he is spirited off into the afterlife.

Yet the man who can affirm this terrible weight has discovered the greatest secret. He is able to affirm the eternal recurrence of the same events because he can liberate the new from every past event of his life, drawing out of those same things something different by making difference a power of his acting. It is no longer a divine guarantee, but a immanent imperative. This man lives such that he can affirm all of his past, and the new within everything past, in his every act. It is by making the new, the different, in one's act that one frees from those same events the power of the new, as if the whole of his past is the same, but at the same time, everything has changed. It is as if those same events now mean something completely different, because we now see them as having been necessary for the new to emerge in that very act. One can now affirm all of one's past indefinitely, in every new act that subsequently reacts back on and reveals the new in the same series of events. One can affirm the eternal return of the same events, because this has become the condition for producing the new.

Hence we can draw from this hypothesis an ethical imperative. “The eternal return says: whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.”⁷ Only will that in which you can eternally discover the new, that which can serve as the condition for something different. This imperative gives rise to a genuine change in one's actions; not a simple modification of habits, but a reorientation of every action towards change itself; to will all of one's life, such that the action of this will changes everything. The same events can be affirmed eternally only if they are said of an internal difference, an eternal differing from themselves; they are affirmed only as opening onto the new. They are the 'same events', but they can be affirmed as such only on the condition that in this affirmative act, every one of them is changed; the 'same' is said only of difference when we can affirm our power to eternally make the difference. One is impelled to think of one's actions in such a way that they can be affirmed eternally as the conditions for something new to emerge, as having been necessary for the new. The thought of the eternal return must discover in every past event the potential for something new, and in fact, the necessity of something new.

Yet insofar as this is only a thought, only hypothetical, it has no real imperative power without the support of an authority. How might we think this test as not hypothetically but really imperative? And if this thought is an ethical imperative, what is the reason for this emphasis on the new and different? What is the ethical value of these, and can they really serve as the highest values, such that our imperative need consider none other? The problem is we have yet to discover the relationship between ethics and ontology, and so we must consider the eternal return not only as an ethical test, but an ontological principle. Nietzsche himself takes up the concept of eternal return from the ancients, but not without making it serve as the condition for something new, a new concept.

The ancient concept was an ontological or cosmological principle that conceived reality in terms of the 'cyclical hypothesis': given an infinite amount of time, every possible finite event will be realized, and after which time every event will be realized again to infinity. In this way, the same events will return identically for all eternity. This hypothesis, in Nietzsche's own time, became a scientific claim, the claim of either a mechanistic universe or a final thermodynamic equilibrium: “The two conceptions agree on one hypothesis, that of a final or terminal state, a terminal state of becoming.”⁸ In this way, all change in the universe will terminate in a final equilibrium identical to the beginning state of the universe, after which everything will happen again in the same way, thus subordinating all change to an ultimate identity.

Nietzsche rejects the cyclical hypothesis in both its ancient and scientific formulations. “Nietzsche says that if the universe had an equilibrium position, if becoming had an end or final state, it would already have been attained. But the present moment, as the passing moment, proves that it is not attained and therefore that an equilibrium of forces is not possible.”⁹ He defends this claim by denying the necessity of positing a beginning point from which all change is born, as there is an absurdity in this notion: if there was an equilibrium position before change began, it would have had no reason or power to change, it would have remained as it was. Because there was no beginning to becoming, but rather an “infinity of past time”, a final equilibrium would have already been attained if it were at all possible. And if it had ever attained this state, it would again have no reason or power to leave it.¹⁰ Thus the eternal return as ontological principle cannot base itself on the idea that there is an ultimate series of events bound between a beginning and an end which are identical, and which will repeat identically whenever the end is reached, a “mechanical process [that] passes through the same set of differences again.”¹¹

How then does the eternal return become an ontological principle? “According to Nietzsche the eternal return is in no sense a thought of the identical but rather a thought of synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different which calls for a new principle outside science. This principle is that of the reproduction of diversity as such, of the repetition of difference...”¹² We must then think this principle of synthesis, this synthesis of difference as such. What returns of the same events is precisely their capacity to be synthesized differently; they must necessarily return, but they only return eternally when, in every act, a new synthesis is carried out, a new combination of those same events is produced, such that everything that returns does so only insofar as it is now made different. The new combination succeeds in discovering in the same events something new, some new possible combination. The same events only return as the condition for something new that subsequently discovers in them a new sense; it is this new sense, created in new combinations, that returns, and the 'same' is said only of this new sense that flees from any necessary identity.

This internal difference, internal to every 'same event', of which the same is said, is what Nietzsche calls will to power. “If...the will to power is a good principle, if it reconciles empiricism with principles, if it constitutes a superior empiricism, this is because it is an essentially plastic principle that is no wider than what it conditions, that changes itself with the conditioned and determines itself in each case along with what it determines.”¹³ The same events only return by virtue of this internal principle that makes them serve as the condition of the new, and that determines those events as new at the same time that it determines the new itself. The same events are synthesized as different in the determination of a new combination, and this determination is the destiny of those events. In this way, the affirmation and love of fate must discover in what occurs the destiny of the new. “Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions.”¹⁴

Destiny is affirmed as the destiny of past presents to enter into new combinations, to produce the new that simultaneously determines them anew, giving them a new sense. This plastic, internal principle of difference is thus the ontological principle of the eternal return. Everything returns, but only insofar as it enters into new combinations: “In the eternal return, identities do not return; combinations return, which differ in their atomistic nature. [It] actually unmasks these illusions by making this moment distinct from all others...The present moment assembles a unique combination, distinct from adjacent ones...When we become aware of different combinations, we become aware of novelty, which, rather than emerging from us, erupts from the random play of combinations within time itself.”¹⁵ Everything exists only as a combination, in which the things combined no longer exist except as pure differences, pure elements of an absolutely different combination. They are no longer identical to what they had been, but differ from themselves in being implicated in a novel combination that determines them anew. The affirmation of fate, of destiny, is thus the affirmation of the necessity of chance; what is necessary in things is their ability to enter into a 'random play of combinations', chance encounters that give rise to a new sense in them. Chance, affirmed as necessary, is the internal principle of that which returns in the eternal return, it is will to power. “Chance is the bringing of forces into relation, the will to power is the determining principle of this relation. The will to power is a necessary addition to force but can only be added to forces brought into relation by chance.”¹⁶

If everything exists only in combinations of differences, as combinations of differences, then nothing can be identical to itself, there can be no inner essence or model of things. Here we can think of Plato, who distinguished between the ultimate Forms or Ideas which were identical in themselves, and the things we encounter in the world which are only approximations or copies of those models. Yet there is a third category, the simulacrum: that which resembles or appears to be the copy of some model but does not depend on that model, which only imitates that model as a mask or disguise, hiding a different internal principle. In Plato, simulacra do participate in some other model despite imitating another; for example, the sophist resembles the philosopher, whose Idea is truth, but actually participates in the Idea of prestige or wealth. Yet before the simulacrum is determined as the copy of another model, it is known only as possessing an internal principle different than what was thought. The internal principle of the simulacrum qua simulacrum is difference, only difference.

The ontological principle of the eternal return is precisely that there can be no model, no essence, no identity, of that which returns, and that everything exists only in combinations whose internal principle is difference. The 'same' things exist as such only in returning, in being repeated with a different sense, determined anew in a novel combination that arises out of chance. The 'same' things are said to exist only as an affirmation of chance, of the chance that they might take on a different sense, and this affirmation is the internal principle of that which returns. In this way, things only return as simulacra: “[T]aken in its strict sense, eternal return means that each thing exists only in returning, copy of an infinity of copies which allows neither original nor origin to subsist...it qualifies as simulacrum that which it causes to be (and to return). When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacrum is the true character or form – the 'being' – of that which is.”¹⁷ It is in this sense that the eternal return is a selective ontology: it selects, in what exists, that which is capable of differing from itself, of entering into new combinations and attaining a new sense. Only that which can affirm the chance of differing, and has this affirmation as an internal principle, will return. Affirming chance as necessary and as the only necessity is Amor fati.

What returns in the eternal return is every thing, but only the extreme form of every thing; every thing returns only insofar as it is capable of being transformed, insofar as it goes to its limits rather than resting within them. Those forms or senses of things in which they have stable identities, immutable essences, natures already determined, are abolished in the instant of chance, of determination as such, in which everything is determined anew. “Only the extreme forms return – those which, large or small, are deployed within the limit and extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing one into another.”¹⁸ The values of all things are not already determined, but in every moment must be determined anew; in this way, eternal return becomes the ethical test of evaluation, in which everything is evaluated in terms of what it can do, what it can become, in the new combination that thereby determines itself by affirming the chance of this becoming-other. This is the point at which the ontological principle becomes an ethical imperative; not simply a hypothetical imperative, a selective thought, but a real and realized imperative, a selective being. “It is no longer a question of the simple thought of the eternal return eliminating from willing everything that falls outside this thought but rather, of the eternal return making something come into being which cannot do so without changing nature. It is no longer a question of selective thought but of selective being; for the eternal return is being and being is selection.”¹⁹

Whatever you will, will it such that you also will its eternal return. This means that every act of the will must select in everything that determines it a different sense, a different way of being. The being selected in the eternal return is always a different way of being, a being said of becoming, an identity said of the absolutely different. The value of everything will give way to an evaluation that selects in everything new values, new powers. This is what extreme form means: that which only exists in its capacity to become other than what it is, by entering into a novel combination. The extreme form abolishes everything weak, limiting, stable, already-determined. “Eternal return alone effects the true selection, because it eliminates the average forms and uncovers 'the superior form of everything that is'...the superior form is...the eternal formlessness of the eternal return itself, throughout its metamorphoses and transformations. Eternal return 'makes' the difference because it creates the superior form.”²⁰ Masked by every formed identity is a formlessness, a chance to become different, and this is what is selected and affirmed. The superior form is what must exist, what must be made to exist, and this is where ethics and ontology coincide – thought and being become indistinguishable in the will, the affirmation of the will to power.

The superior form of everything is realized when form itself becomes a mask for an internal principle of formlessness, when identity becomes a mask for difference. The 'same events' return only when they are capable of differing from what they were. This is the ethical imperative: in everything that has value, discover the power of an evaluation that gives sense to values, and that can endow everything with a new sense, a new value. “In what do you believe?— In this: that the weights of all things must be determined anew.”²¹ This revaluation of all values becomes the task of an ontological ethics that would select the superior forms, that would make exist that which must exist of necessity, and affirm this necessity in a love of fate. But necessity is only the necessity of difference, and fate is only that of what is yet-to-come: not a result whose identity is determined beforehand, but the affirmation in everything that occurs of what is only as yet-to-come, and this affirmation is determination as such. “The extreme formality is there only for an excessive formlessness...In this manner, the ground is superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come to return.”²² The eternal return affirms in what exists that which exists only as yet-to-come: internal difference, the potential to differ, to become.

In the act that affirms the eternal return and selects the superior form that must exist, the actor affirms all of the past as the necessary condition for action. Yet insofar as all of the past is implicated in this new combination arising from the chance of the act, it is implicated only in its capacity to differ from what it was prior, in its capacity as the condition of something new. The past is affirmed, but only that which, in the past, is eternally yet-to-come. Every sense of things past that would demand identity, stability, limitation, fidelity to the essence, all of these are eliminated. In the same way, the actor's own identity, his self, is abolished, he is dissolved in the act as the pure power to differ from what he was, he becomes unrecognizable. All of the weaknesses, limitations, and failings that characterize him are abolished, and he becomes otherwise.

The last man, resigned to die, unable to will his fate as the advent of the new, remains fixated on the necessity imposed upon him by his conditions, and repeats these conditions incessantly out of his inability to affirm and to act out of necessity. He can only repeat and retain his weaknesses, limitations, and failings. Because he cannot become otherwise, cannot make something new from his conditions, he cannot pass the test of the eternal return. The man who wants to die, on the other hand, becomes capable of affirming his fate, he actively abolishes his weaknesses in discovering in his condition something yet-to-come, the Overman. Yet while he may pass the test, he will be annihilated as such in the process. Everything in him that constituted his identity, his self – weaknesses, limitations, failings – is eliminated, and so this identity, this self, falls into the abyss. In the third moment, the eternal return liberates from this man the pure will to affirmation, the affirmation of the yet-to-come, and the Overman is born as a child. “The 'small man' and 'last man' repeat since they lack the ability to take action (the repetition of the before). The great heroic and active man, or the 'one who wants to perish,' repeats in order to become-equal to the action (the repetition of the during). And yet both of these must perish in the third moment. This agrees with Nietzsche's sentiment that man is something to be overcome: 'he is a bridge and not an end.'”²³

In the eternal return it is not the past that conditions us, nor ourselves as capable of acting and exceeding these conditions, that returns; they are both led to death, swallowed by the abyss, dissolved in the act. Yet man dies, he is overcome, only in liberating, in his conditions and in himself, that which is yet-to-come. It is not the life of man itself that must die, but man as that which limits his life, which cannot affirm all of chance and find a joy and a love in necessity. Man must be overcome, and what overcomes him is the secret and obscure coherence of the act – the coherence or consistency of every possible outcome, everything in the act that is yet-to-come, affirmed as such. Man will only be overcome when all of chance is affirmed in the act, with a love of fate, whatever fate that may be. When ethics and ontology coincide, there is no longer a distinction between man and his condition, as both are dissolved in the act that retains of them only the power to differ, to become, to make the difference. The act must become the pure affirmation of all of chance, of every possible outcome, and must wager everything on that single throw of the dice. When man and his conditions are transformed in the act, overcome by the act, the will realizes the superior form of everything that is, and it is this form that will return eternally in the secret coherence of the yet-to-come, the winged life of the Overman in eternity's sunrise. The abyss of death is swept up in its line of flight, in a new life that escapes the spirit of gravity.

~

Eternal Return –

In the horizon of the infinite.— We have left the land and have embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any 'land'!²⁴

References:

Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science.

Gilles Deleuze:

D&R – Difference and Repetition. New York: Continuum, 2004.

LoS – The Logic of Sense. New York: Continuum, 2004.

N&P – Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

DTST – Keith Faulkner. Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006.

Notes:

1LoS p 170
2D&R p 67
3The Gay Science §268
4The Gay Science §276
5DTST p 123
6The Gay Science §341
7D&R p 8
8N&P p 46
9Ibid. p 47
10Ibid. p 47-9
11Ibid. p 49
12Ibid. p 46
13Ibid. p 50
14D&R p 105
15DTST p 14
16N&P p 53
17D&R p 80
18Ibid. p 51
19N&P p 71
20D&R p 66
21The Gay Science §269
22D&R 114
23DTST p 124
24The Gay Science §124

Materialism of the Problem

If Deleuze is a materialist, it is because he brings materiality to its limit: the familiar materiality of bodies and their physical relations of force, matter as substantial and formed, at its limit, passes over into the bodiless, insubstantial realm of an unformed and non-formal matter-function. We have the physico-empirical plane of material bodies, of visibilities or sensibilities, which relate in the passage of forces from body to body in causal chains. A cue strikes the cue ball, which strikes another ball, et cetera, constituting a series of passages of force. The complication here is that the passage of force becomes autonomous, inscribed on a different plane than that of the bodies which act and react.

It is this autonomy of passage which Deleuze and Guattari name rhythm. Rhythm must be understood in terms of an alternation, a passage from one thing to the other; they say that rhythm is what happens between milieus, it is a transcoding, a "coordination of heterogeneous space-times." (ATP 313) Coding refers to what Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, calls 'habit': a regular pattern, a series of relations that endures coherently, that repeats. A milieu or habitus is ultimately no more than a consistent set of habits/codings which endures. Rhythm, however, is not simply a habit, a regular pattern or 'meter', but refers to that which interrupts habits/codes, undermines them, and forces them to reorient.

Rhythm, as alternation, involves a passage from one coded milieu into another; yet this does not simply mean that two foreign milieus relate to each other, that one relates to the other as different from itself, composed of different codes. Rather, they together relate to the outside, to an alterity irreducible to some determinate other. It is this outside upon which the passage is inscribed, in which rhythms reverberate. Rhythms are basically the relation between disparate codes, series, or patterns, such that two different codes relate to the Disparate, to their divergence as such. It is across this disparity that a novel conjunction of the coded elements occurs, that a 'transcoding' is born.

Rhythm is that reorientation of codes or patterns that results when two milieus encounter, between each other, that paradoxical element which undermines their consistent conjunction; ultimately, this element is nothing but a pure distance - not the distance between them, but the distance of each from its threshold, the point after which coding breaks down and the consistency of the milieu is compromised, resulting in a change in nature. Every coding envelops this distance, this threshold of decoding, which is not simply the distance of one set of habits from another, but more like the distance of each coding from itself, its inability to extend itself infinitely, to perfectly coincide with itself. At this point, the being of the thing (milieu) becomes indistinguishable from its problematic status - the consistency of the milieu depends upon the problem of its relation to the limit beyond which it will decompose.

Rhythm as alternation is ultimately the incessant oscillation between the consistent encodings of a milieu, including the transcoding that preserves this consistency when foreign milieus must relate across their difference, and the decoding or loss of consistency which characterizes a passage to the limit. This is the passage which becomes autonomous, drawing a plane apart from that of the milieus and their codes. Passage to the limit is the way an arrangement composes itself as such: beyond the incidental conglomeration of the milieu, an arrangement organizes itself on the basis of a limit it must posit as such by extending its power that far, by occupying the whole distance between its borders, and thereby realizing the threshold beyond which its influence ceases. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the territory is a place of passage, or even the place of passage, the taking-place of passage. The territory is constituted precisely when the threshold of a milieu (or the vertiginous conjunction of several thresholds, converging on the paradoxical element of an encounter) becomes the vector of deterritorialization, thus retroactively positing the consistency drawn between milieus as their 'territorialization', as the becoming-expressive of the habitual functions, and the emergence of partial surfaces, membranes, which give body to limits.

This incorporeal transformation of milieu into territory occurs only when the threshold qua problematic point is treated not as some external threat to the consistency of the milieu, but rather as intrinsic and constitutive of that consistency, a 'positive principle of non-consistency'. If the milieu is defined by a warding off of problems - a denial of the consistency of the milieu itself as problematic and unstable, endlessly caught in a coming-to-itself (positing of its constitutive limit) coterminous with a leaving-itself or becoming-other (passage to the limit/confrontation with the threshold of consistency) - the territory is born of a simple 'change of emphasis': the problem is posited as constitutive/productive, the entire habitual field is reoriented in relation to this problematic status.

Insofar as the entirety of the encoding is mobilized in a passage to the limit, the passage itself, in the mode of a fleeing or escape, a passage across the threshold indistinguishable from the threshold itself posited as such, is endlessly displaced within the field, potentially appearing anywhere, amongst any conjunction of elements/functions. The problematization of the field thus involves a displacement of the paradoxical element (line of flight, aleatory point) within the field such that the elements and functions are subject to a continuous variation or redistribution. A materialism of the problem, therefore, should acknowledge the ontological status of the problem as the line of flight, the drawing of limits which territorializes or individuates the pure multiplicity of milieus by virtue of an incorporeal surface, a body without organs, tearing asunder coded elements and functions which are then arranged in relation to the problematic points (thresholds) which, by chance, present themselves in the passage to the limit.

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The point here is that the vulgar, physical materialism in which all that exists is empirical (perceptible) phenomena enchained by causal determination does not go far enough. In this view, reality appears to us as incomplete, plagued by misunderstandings, errors, illusions, et cetera, only insofar as we possess finite, imperfect epistemological relations to it. So reality is an ontologically complete and consistent 'mechanism', everything can be explained immanently within the material world without reference to any divine or supernatural beyond; unfortunately, this view nonetheless presupposes a perfect, untainted intellect, unbound by finite epistemological limitations, which has total access to the complete chain of causes.

Even if we have no conceivable way of occupying such a position, or we deny that there is any (divine) observer occupying it, this vulgar materialism still presupposes that such a position exists in principle. In this sense, the incompletenesses of reality as we experience it, the problems which intervene and disturb the consistency of our world(s), are only epistemological, symptoms of our finitude and embeddedness, which can be progressively overcome through scientific rigor, increasingly approximating the 'ideal', untainted prerogative. Existence is posited as complete, consistent, only insofar as we rely on a constitutive exception by reference to which we can explain apparent inconsistencies (problems) as illusions resulting from a false identification with the exceptional point.

Deleuze's point, if we may put it in these terms, is precisely that this incompleteness is not epistemological, that there is no exceptional point of clarity from which all problems will be recognized as illusory. He is far more radical, asserting that materiality must be extended to the problems themselves, that the inconsistencies we confront must be included in materiality. This means that for Deleuze, the ontological itself is incomplete, inconsistent, problematic. There is no exceptional point unencumbered by the limitations of finitude. In this way, we do not reduce all problems to the central problem of the inadequacy of our knowledge; rather, problems attain a primary ontological status. This status is precisely that of the threshold posited in the passage to the limit constitutive of the consistency of any arrangement; it is the force of deterritorialization which retroactively territorializes the milieu from which it departs; it is the incorporeal transformation of the ordinary into the singular, of delimited coagulations of flows into the unlimited becoming of virtualities.