This link has been bookmarked by 29 people . It was first bookmarked on 25 May 2008, by Tomislav Medak.
-
21 Feb 13
-
In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility.
-
Deleuze inverts this priority: identity persists, but is now a something produced by a prior relation between differentials (dx rather than not-x). Difference is no longer an empirical relation but becomes a transcendental principle that constitutes the sufficient reason of empirical diversity
-
Ultimately, then, Difference and Repetition will show that the individuation of entities is produced by the actualization, integration, or resolution (the terms are synonymous for Deleuze) of a differentiated virtual field of Ideas or “multiplicities” that are themselves changed, via “counter-effectuation,” in each individuating event.
-
-
20 Mar 12
-
Normally, difference is conceived of as an empirical relation between two terms each of which have a prior identity of their own (“x is different from y”). In Deleuze, this primacy is inverted: identity persists, but it is now a secondary principle produced by a prior relation between differentials (dx rather than not-x)
-
the different is related to the different through difference itself, without any mediation by an identity
-
-
30 Jan 12
-
01 Dec 11
-
if the temperature differences reach a certain threshold (if they attain a certain “intensity” in Deleuze's terms), the system will undergo a “phase transition,” losing symmetry and changing its dynamics, entering into a periodic pattern of motion
-
deas define the being of a thing, but one cannot attain an Idea through the Socratic question “What is … ?” (which posits Ideas as transcendent and eternal), but rather through “minor” questions such as “Which one?” “Where?” “When?” “How?” “How many?” “In which case?” “From which viewpoint?”—all of which allow one to define the differential Ideas immanent in the intensive processes they structure.
-
the condition of truth (denotation) lies in the domain of sense. In order for a proposition to be true (or false) it must have a sense; a nonsensical proposition can be neither true nor false.
-
three types of relation within propositions:
-
the relation of a proposition to an external state of affairs
-
Manifestation, which marks the relation of the proposition to the beliefs and desires of the person who is speaking
-
the relation of the proposition to other propositions
-
Propositions, in other words, can be related either to the objects to which they refer, or to the subjects who utter them, or to other propositions. But each of these relations, in turn, can be taken to be primary.
-
Sense, then, would be a fourth dimension of propositions, for which Deleuze reserves the term expression.
-
what we find in the state of affairs are bodies mixing with one another—spears stabbing flesh, bullets flying through the air, cannons firing, bodies being ripped apart—and the battle itself is the effect or the result of this intermingling of bodies.
-
But it cannot be confused with the proposition which expressed it any more than with the state of affairs or the quality which the proposition denotes. It is exactly the boundary between propositions and things”
-
As the latter term indicates, one of the foci of their investigations is the tendency of some systems to head toward congealment or stratification. More precisely put, any concrete system is composed of intensive processes tending toward the (virtual) plane of consistency and/or toward (actual) stratification
-
-
17 Nov 11
-
philosophy aims not at stating the conditions of knowledge qua representation, but at finding and fostering the conditions of creative production.
-
The positive name for that genetic condition is the virtual, which Deleuze adopts from the following Bergsonian argument. The notion of the possible, Bergson holds in Creative Evolution, is derived from a false problem that confuses the “more” with the “less” and ignores differences in kind; there is not less but more in the idea of the possible than in the real, just as there is more in the idea of nonbeing than in that of being, or more in the idea of disorder than in that of order.
-
In social terms, puissance is immanent power, power to act rather than power to dominate another; we could say that puissance is praxis (in which equals clash or act together) rather than poiesis (in which others are matter to be formed by the command of a superior, a sense of transcendent power that matches what pouvoir indicates for Deleuze).
-
In Deleuze's ontology, the different is related to the different through difference itself, without any mediation by an identity. Although he was indebted to metaphysical thinkers such as Spinoza, Leibniz, and Bergson, Deleuze appropriated their respective systems of thought only by pushing them to their “differential” limit, purging them of the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics that subordinate difference to identity (God, World, Self).
-
Deleuze and Guattari's refusal to recognize that their work contains metaphors is due to their struggle against the “imperialism” of the signifying regime, a major theme in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: not every relation between different intellectual fields can be grasped by the most common notions of “metaphor,” reliant as they are on the notion of a transfer of sense from primary to secondary signification.
-
-
10 Apr 11
-
activity of thought took place primarily in writing
-
philosophical concepts struck him with the same force as literary characters, having their own autonomy and style
-
In an era in which peers like Foucault and Derrida, students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, concentrated on “the three H's” (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger), Deleuze's decision to write on empiricism and Hume was already a provocation, early evidence of the heterodox tendencies of his thought.
-
-
17 Sep 10
-
Logic
-
Life and Works
-
-
29 Jul 10
-
Deleuze still wants to work back from experience, but since the condition cannot resemble the conditioned, and since the empirical is personal and individuated, the transcendental must be impersonal and pre-individual. The virtual is the condition for real experience, but it has no identity; identities of the subject and the object are products of processes that resolve, integrate, or actualize (the three terms are synonymous for Deleuze) a differential field. The Deleuzean virtual is thus not the condition of possibility of any rational experience, but the condition of genesis of real experience.
-
In univocity, as Deleuze reads Spinoza, the single sense of Being frees a charge of difference throughout all that is. In univocal ontology being is said in a single sense of all of which it is said, but it is said of difference itself. What is that difference? Difference is difference in degrees of “power”; in interpreting this term we must distinguish the two French words puissance and pouvoir. In social terms, puissance is immanent power, power to act rather than power to dominate another; we could say that puissance is praxis (in which equals clash or act together) rather than poiesis (in which others are matter to be formed by the command of a superior, a sense of transcendent power that matches what pouvoir indicates for Deleuze). In the most general terms Deleuze develops throughout his career, puissance is the ability to affect and to be affected, to form assemblages or consistencies, that is, to form emergent unities that nonetheless respect the heterogeneity of their components. (Here we see the empiricist theme of the “externality of relations”: in an assemblage or consistency, the “becoming” or relation of the terms attains its own independent ontological status. In Deleuze's favorite example, the wasp and orchid create a “becoming” or symbiotic emergent unit.)
-
Deleuze's target in Difference and Repetition is the subordination of difference to identity. Normally, difference is conceived of as an empirical relation between two terms each of which have a prior identity of their own (“x is different from y”). In Deleuze, this primacy is inverted: identity persists, but it is now a secondary principle produced by a prior relation between differentials (dx rather than not-x). Difference is no longer an empirical relation but becomes a transcendental principle that constitutes the sufficient reason of empirical diversity as such (for example, it is the electric potential difference in a cloud that constitutes the sufficient reason of the phenomenon of lightning). In Deleuze's ontology, the different is related to the different through difference itself, without any mediation by an identity. Although he was indebted to metaphysical thinkers such as Spinoza, Leibniz, and Bergson, Deleuze appropriated their respective systems of thought only by pushing them to their “differential” limit, purging them of the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics that subordinate difference to identity (God, World, Self).
-
In this restricted and singular sense, then, we might say Deleuze is “post-structuralist,” and in so doing, we can replace the title Difference and Repetition with Structure and Genesis (a play on Jean Hyppolite's work on Hegel, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit). If we follow this line of thought, structures are differential, and genesis is repetition, that is, different incarnations of the same structure. The key is to identify the genetic conditions for living repetition, that which introduces difference into what tends toward dead repetition (repeated elements that are different only within a horizon of identity). What produces dead repetition is what Deleuze will call the four shackles of representation: identity in the concept, opposition in predication, analogy in judgment, and resemblance in perception. Rather than being such identity-preserving shackles, differential structures (what Deleuze will call Ideas) are conditions of genesis, conditions for the creative transformation of things.
-
Extensive differences, such as length, area or volume, are intrinsically divisible. A volume of matter divided into two equal halves produces two volumes, each having half the extent of the original one. Intensive differences, by contrast, refer to properties such as temperature or pressure that cannot be so divided. If a volume of water whose temperature is 90º is divided in half, the result is two volumes at the original temperature, not two volumes at 45º. However, the important property of intensity is not that it is indivisible, but that it is a property that cannot be divided without involving a change in kind. The temperature of a volume of water, for instance, can be “divided” by heating the container from below, causing a temperature difference between the top and the bottom. In so doing, however, we change the system qualitatively; moreover, if the temperature differences reach a certain threshold (if they attain a certain “intensity” in Deleuze's terms), the system will undergo a “phase transition,” losing symmetry and changing its dynamics, entering into a periodic pattern of motion—convection—which displays extensive properties of size: X centimeters of length and breadth. Drawing on these kinds of analyses, Deleuze will assign a transcendental status to the intensive: intensity, he argues, constitutes the genetic condition of extensive space. Intensive processes are themselves in turn structured by Ideas or multiplicities.
-
-
29 Mar 10
-
25 Feb 10
-
a radicalized reading of Kant, whose genius, as Deleuze explains in Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963), was to have conceived of a purely immanent critique of reason—a critique that did not seek “errors” of reason produced by external causes, but rather “illusions” that arise from within reason itself by the illegitimate (transcendent) uses of the syntheses of consciousness. Deleuze characterized his own work as a philosophy of immanence, arguing that Kant himself had failed to realize fully the ambitions of his critique, for at least two reasons.
-
Taking all this into account, Deleuze summarized his differential, immanent and genetic position by the at first glance odd phrase of “transcendental empiricism.” This is cashed out in terms of two characteristics: (1) the abstract (e.g., “subject,” “object,” “State,” the “whole,” and so on) does not explain, but must itself be explained; and (2) the aim of philosophy is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the singular conditions under which something new is produced. In other words—and this is a pragmatic perspective from which Deleuze never deviated—philosophy aims not at stating the conditions of knowledge qua representation, but at finding and fostering the conditions of creative production.
-
These forces affirm themselves, and thereby differentiate themselves first, and only secondarily consider that from which they have differentiated themselves.
-
We then say that the possible has been “realized” in the real. By contrast, Deleuze will reject the notion of the possible in favor of that of the virtual. Rather than awaiting realization, the virtual is fully real; what happens in genesis is that the virtual is actualized.
-
Difference is no longer an empirical relation but becomes a transcendental principle that constitutes the sufficient reason of empirical diversity as such (for example, it is the electric potential difference in a cloud that constitutes the sufficient reason of the phenomenon of lightning).
-
structures are differential, and genesis is repetition, that is, different incarnations of the same structure.
-
What produces dead repetition is what Deleuze will call the four shackles of representation: identity in the concept, opposition in predication, analogy in judgment, and resemblance in perception. Rather than being such identity-preserving shackles, differential structures (what Deleuze will call Ideas) are conditions of genesis, conditions for the creative transformation of things.
-
In isolating the conditions of genesis, Deleuze sets up a tripartite ontological scheme, positing three interdependent registers: the virtual, intensive, and actual. Overlooking many important nuances, we can say that Deleuze's basic notion is that in all realms of being intensive morphogenetic processes follow differential virtual multiplicities to produce localized and individuated actual substances with extensive properties. Simply put, the actualization of the virtual proceeds by way of intensive processes.
-
However, the important property of intensity is not that it is indivisible, but that it is a property that cannot be divided without involving a change in kind.
-
The temperature of a volume of water, for instance, can be “divided” by heating the container from below, causing a temperature difference between the top and the bottom. In so doing, however, we change the system qualitatively; moreover, if the temperature differences reach a certain threshold (if they attain a certain “intensity” in Deleuze's terms), the system will undergo a “phase transition,” losing symmetry and changing its dynamics, entering into a periodic pattern of motion—convection—which displays extensive properties of size: X centimeters of length and breadth. Drawing on these kinds of analyses, Deleuze will assign a transcendental status to the intensive: intensity, he argues, constitutes the genetic condition of extensive space. Intensive processes are themselves in turn structured by Ideas or multiplicities.
-
Tying together the themes of difference, multiplicity, virtuality and intensity, at the heart of Difference and Repetition we find a theory of Ideas (dialectics) based neither on an essential model of identity (Plato), nor a regulative model of unity (Kant), nor a dialectical model of contradiction (Hegel), but rather on a problematic and genetic model of difference. Ideas define the being of a thing, but one cannot attain an Idea through the Socratic question “What is … ?” (which posits Ideas as transcendent and eternal), but rather through “minor” questions such as “Which one?” “Where?” “When?” “How?” “How many?” “In which case?” “From which viewpoint?”—all of which allow one to define the differential Ideas immanent in the intensive processes they structure.
-
Deleuze uses the word “perplexion” to signify, not a coefficient of doubt, hesitation, or astonishment, but the multiple and virtual state of Ideas
-
Yet they betrayed this insight, Deleuze argues, because they—like Kant before them—remained content with establishing the condition of truth rather than its genesis.
-
Designation or denotation, which is the relation of a proposition to an external state of affairs (theory of reference, with its criterion of truth or falsity).
-
Manifestation, which marks the relation of the proposition to the beliefs and desires of the person who is speaking (with its values of veracity or illusion).
-
Signification or demonstration, which is the relation of the proposition to other propositions (the domain of logic, with its relations of implication and assertion).
-
I can attribute the proper name “Battle of Waterloo” to a particular state of affairs, but the battle itself is an incorporeal event (or sense) with no other reality than that of the expression of my proposition; what we find in the state of affairs are bodies mixing with one another—spears stabbing flesh, bullets flying through the air, cannons firing, bodies being ripped apart—and the battle itself is the effect or the result of this intermingling of bodies. Sense thus has a complex status. On the one hand, it does not exist outside the proposition that expresses it, but it cannot be confused with the proposition, since it has a distinct “objectity” of its own (it does not exist, but rather “subsists” or “insists”). On the other hand, it is attributed to states of affairs or things, but it cannot be confused or identified with state of affairs, nor with a quality or relation of these states. “Sense is both the expressible or the expressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state of affairs. It turns one side toward things, and another side toward propositions. But it cannot be confused with the proposition which expressed it any more than with the state of affairs or the quality which the proposition denotes. It is exactly the boundary between propositions and things”
-
Sense is never a principle or an origin; rather, it is an effect, it is produced, and it is produced out of elements that do not, in themselves, have a sense. Sense, in other words, has a determinate relation with nonsense.
-
In other words, the philosophy of difference now set out to show how the unified objects of the world, the unified subjects who know and hence control them, the unified bodies of knowledge that codify this knowledge, and the unified institution of philosophy that polices the whole affair, are products of historical, political forces in combat with other forces.
-
Deleuze and Guattari will call desiring-production a “universal primary process” underlying the seemingly separate natural, social and psychological realms.
-
The schizophrenic is a sick person in need of help, but schizophrenia is an avenue into the unconscious, the unconscious not of an individual, but the “transcendental unconscious,” an unconscious that is social, historical, and natural all at once.
-
productive connections between immanently arrayed material systems without reference to an external governing source
-
To over-simplify, Deleuze and Guattari take up the insights of dynamical systems theory, which explores the various thresholds at which material systems self-organize (that is, reduce their degrees of freedom, as in our previous example of convection currents). Deleuze and Guattari then extend the notion of self-organizing material systems—those with no need of transcendent organizing agents such as gods, leaders, capital, or subjects—to the social, linguistic, political-economic, and psychological realms.
-
Coding is the process of ordering matter as it is drawn into a body; by contrast, stratification is the process of creating hierarchal bodies, while territorialization is the ordering of those bodies in “assemblages,” that is to say, an emergent unity joining together heterogeneous bodies in a “consistency.”
-
Thought, in all its modes, struggles with chaos against opinion.
-
-
28 Jan 10
-
02 Jul 09
-
01 Jul 09
-
16 Mar 09
-
23 Feb 09
-
25 Oct 08
-
26 Jun 08
-
29 May 08
-
25 May 08
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.