Problems of Thinking The Event
I would like to offer some comments and questions in connection with our ongoing debate over Badiou and his relations with other thinkers. These are brief and not intended as a conclusion but to see whether my understanding of the issues holds water and to carry on the debate.
[1] My interest in Deleuze and Kant – in their encounter – is not without relevance to this. Badiou himself makes it clear that a principal question is whether there simply is difference, which must be supplemented by the event, or whether difference is productive as the element of a vital and germinal ‘life’. If there is any notion of excess – such as the Kantian Idea or the event – does this need to be implicated and explicated within the differential engineering that goes on within the open whole of this univocal ‘life’? It does if difference is vitally productive but doesn’t if the excessive and new must interrupt or break with difference. This is not to deny the role of the Idea or the event in Deleuze’s differential ontology but it opens up the dichotomy between ‘the logic of sense, of an immaterial becoming as sense event, as the EFFECT of bodily-material processes-causes’ and ‘the logic of becoming as PRODUCTION of Beings’ [Zizek, ‘Organs Without Bodies,’ p. 21]. This is the problem of understanding the ‘place’ of the folding of intensive and extensive or of the circuit of virtual-actual within an open whole. With difference as productive the Idea or the event would have to be reconciled with the continuity of ‘life’ so as to be productive in its interaction with it. Does a radical break, the new, require the event or is the plane of immanence upon which the dice can be thrown equal to this over- or super-human becoming? Does the voice of the new get lost in the ‘clamour of being’? This connects to Kant’s concern that sensibility, incentives and illusions that distract us from the ‘voice of reason’ in morality. There is certainly a problem with trying to maintain both the continuous and flowing, and the new and evental. It is the capacity for a thinker or artist to become a solitary wonderer, ‘a boarding house lodger’, that is in question.
[2] One point that is made in criticism of Deleuze is that his work holds onto the primacy of the human in ‘becoming-animal’ and so on. It neglects the animal reality in pursuing the super- or over-human (cf. KAP ‘Germinal Life’, ch. 3 and conclusion). This may represent the problems of a thinking of the event in terms such as biological ones, conceiving a germinal life that cannot attain the distance from anthropology that an ontology of mathematics can. Hallwood puts it thus: ‘Mathematics is then the most “truthful” component of science because, thanks to its strictly axiomatic foundation, it is most firmly abstracted from any natural or objective mediation, the most removed from our habitual ways of thinking, and by the same token the most obviously indifferent to the identity of whoever comes to share in its articulation.’ [Introduction to ‘Think Again’, p.3].
[3] Deleuze is from the first concerned with immanence and an immanence that exceeds human categories and preconceptions, perhaps best summed up as good sense and common sense. Upon the plane of immanence movements must be complex and rich so as to connect us with virtual, unknown and unpredictable events. This must be an open whole not containing and establishing essences but keeping bodies attuned to ‘becomings’, ‘becomings-other’. Of course this means that an understanding of the event, the new, has to be transversal and cosmic since otherwise ‘becoming’ would be local and preserve the continuity of the one situation. Badiou does not accept that this conception can be maintained within immanence. He believes that the virtual and actual are two sides of being that disrupt immanence and so Deleuze’s thought is haunted by transcendence [Todd May ‘Think Again’, p. 70]. Thus the sets of two concepts that form a series throughout Deleuze’s work do not form a line of the flight. This is always in-between the two terms and preserves immanence in full force by producing, as the difference between them, a circuit of the two terms. The movement ‘in the middle’ cannot be attached to an essence. It prevents one side from becoming transcendent. It is, in ‘Difference and Repetition’, the difference between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ repetitions. The ‘good’ doesn’t transcend the ‘bad’ but is always coexistent with it. Todd May asks whether the virtual and actual can be kept distinct without the One becoming Two and reintroducing transcendence [ibid, p. 71]. Can the open whole maintain its motion in-between and so never on one side or the other. For Deleuze, univocity is never a quality. The whole is a productive movement traversing all sets, opening one set onto the other, transforming one set into another [Deleuze, ‘Negotiations,’ p. 55]. Can this whole range over all sets – immanent and equal to the new - or does it take a disruptive break to achieve a thinking of the event?
[4] Of course Deleuze’s Bergsonian is a key factor in this. Badiou seems to separate time from the virtual-actual circuit. Deleuze sees in time the conception of the open whole of such richness and productivity that it denies the void. Todd May makes a good case that Badiou forgets Bergson’s duration and thus the spatio-temporal dynamisms that overcome a conception of objects as being ‘part’ actual and ‘part’ virtual [ibid, p. 76]. Through temporal unfolding the virtual-actual relationship overcomes any static dualism between two sides of ontology. Instead, the spatio-temporal dynamism is always an open and implicated in the folding of past into present and so into the future. Perhaps this temporal thinking is the key challenge to Badiou. James Williams conceives of the stages of thinking immanence. The one is formulated within immanence as a process to which connection is made in thought [‘Gilles Deleuze’s Different and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide’]. The One is ongoing; it is a movement of temporal unfolding. From this I believe we can lay against Badiou the charge that he concentrates on the question of the One and then asks whether it is immanent or transcendent. Instead, Deleuze conceives of the movements and the conditions for the production of experience. Univocity is always a process, a ‘life’, and never to be conceived in spatial terms or outside of its activity. I would be interested in what people think about this.
[5] Badiou writes of Deleuze’s ‘latent certainties’: movement as superior to immobility, life superior to the concept, time to space, affirmation to negation, difference to identity, and so on [‘Theoretical Writings,’ p. 98]. This is a challenge that Deleuze has to face since territory is constituted by its implication in deterritorialized movements. It must be re-territorialized through a connection with an Outside that does not destroy or kill but brings it into participation with super- or over-human forces. Whether these are ‘latent certainties’ is, I think, doubtful. This seems to suggest that the transcendental deduction of the production of experience never engages fully with the justification of its ‘certainties.’ A term like essence being inferior to becoming, tendency and haecceity is something deduced within a thinking through of immanence. The critique of common sense and good sense in ‘Difference and Repetition’ is not lacking in depth. Whilst these terms are, for Badiou, unequal to a thinking of the event we should not neglect the Kantian rigor of Deleuze’s deductions in which they are formulated.
[6] Perhaps the crux of the matter is Badiou’s belief that the All or One is not the only source of ‘the principle of the pure multiple’s excess-over-itself.’[ibid, p. 77] He argues that an excess of power haunts every multiple, nothing can give shape to it except an ‘aleatory decision’ which is only given through its effects. He sees in the ‘One-Life’ that Deleuze takes from Bergson an intuition of monotony, a uniformly deployed surface of actualisations. This means that productive forms of thought don't select the unknown [p. 78]. In this way the capacity to think the new, the event, is denied. It rejects the possibility of the dice-throw where chance is embraced and the unknown and unpredictable is produced. I think this brings us again back to time and temporal thinking. The potential of time to unfold and to produce and proliferate the new is shown in a number of different encounters, that with Cinema we have already mentioned. Also, the three-fold synthesis of time in ‘Difference and Repetition’ replaces a spatial thinking with an understanding of the becoming of time that exceeds the present and the past. The third synthesis of time is ‘a less simple and much more secret, much more tortuous, more nebulous circle, an eternally excentric circle, the decentred circle of difference which is re-formed uniquely in the third time of the series. … The form of time is there only for the revelation of the formless in the eternal return. The extreme formality is there only for an excessive formlessness (Hölderlin’s ‘Unförmliche’). In this manner, the ground has been superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come to return.’ [p. 91] This is also formulated by the break down of the sensory-motor image in the ‘Cinema’ books. I leave this issue affirmatively open to further discussion.
[7] An interesting point in David’s Hamman piece, at paragraph 3, is the notion that divine creation does not equate to divine manifestation. This is set against Spinoza who of course must accommodate the consistent and inconsistent within one Being or infinite substance. This connects to the Badiou-Deleuze question. There is a great distance between humankind and ‘God’ in Spinoza but this must be accommodated within univocity. It is a distance to be affirmed in order to bring about the wholly new. Difference must be possible within univocity. The latter is broad, groundless and rich enough to express difference and by the same token to itself be formed by it. Difference and unity cannot be separated. It is when difference and the new are found to be the principles and driving forces of an open and ongoing whole that Deleuze has a strong case. Differential production must keep everything formed, determined and consistent in its finite situation and yet infinitely open to a virtual. This process, this becoming, this territory and deterritorialization, is the meaning of its wholeness. This is difference’s burden and also its joyful affirmation.
Bibliography:
Ansell Pearson, Keith (1999) ‘Germinal Life,’ London: Routledge.
Badiou, Alain (2004) ‘Theoretical Writings’, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, London and New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles (1995) ‘Negotiations,’ trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press.
- (1994) ‘Difference and Repetition’, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athlone.
- (1989) ‘Cinema 2’, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: Athlone.
Hallward, Peter (2004) ‘Think Again,’ London and New York: Continuum.
Zizek, Slavoj (2004) ‘Organs without Bodies,’ London: Routledge.
Williams, James (2003) ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide,’ Edinburgh: at the University Press.
[1] My interest in Deleuze and Kant – in their encounter – is not without relevance to this. Badiou himself makes it clear that a principal question is whether there simply is difference, which must be supplemented by the event, or whether difference is productive as the element of a vital and germinal ‘life’. If there is any notion of excess – such as the Kantian Idea or the event – does this need to be implicated and explicated within the differential engineering that goes on within the open whole of this univocal ‘life’? It does if difference is vitally productive but doesn’t if the excessive and new must interrupt or break with difference. This is not to deny the role of the Idea or the event in Deleuze’s differential ontology but it opens up the dichotomy between ‘the logic of sense, of an immaterial becoming as sense event, as the EFFECT of bodily-material processes-causes’ and ‘the logic of becoming as PRODUCTION of Beings’ [Zizek, ‘Organs Without Bodies,’ p. 21]. This is the problem of understanding the ‘place’ of the folding of intensive and extensive or of the circuit of virtual-actual within an open whole. With difference as productive the Idea or the event would have to be reconciled with the continuity of ‘life’ so as to be productive in its interaction with it. Does a radical break, the new, require the event or is the plane of immanence upon which the dice can be thrown equal to this over- or super-human becoming? Does the voice of the new get lost in the ‘clamour of being’? This connects to Kant’s concern that sensibility, incentives and illusions that distract us from the ‘voice of reason’ in morality. There is certainly a problem with trying to maintain both the continuous and flowing, and the new and evental. It is the capacity for a thinker or artist to become a solitary wonderer, ‘a boarding house lodger’, that is in question.
[2] One point that is made in criticism of Deleuze is that his work holds onto the primacy of the human in ‘becoming-animal’ and so on. It neglects the animal reality in pursuing the super- or over-human (cf. KAP ‘Germinal Life’, ch. 3 and conclusion). This may represent the problems of a thinking of the event in terms such as biological ones, conceiving a germinal life that cannot attain the distance from anthropology that an ontology of mathematics can. Hallwood puts it thus: ‘Mathematics is then the most “truthful” component of science because, thanks to its strictly axiomatic foundation, it is most firmly abstracted from any natural or objective mediation, the most removed from our habitual ways of thinking, and by the same token the most obviously indifferent to the identity of whoever comes to share in its articulation.’ [Introduction to ‘Think Again’, p.3].
[3] Deleuze is from the first concerned with immanence and an immanence that exceeds human categories and preconceptions, perhaps best summed up as good sense and common sense. Upon the plane of immanence movements must be complex and rich so as to connect us with virtual, unknown and unpredictable events. This must be an open whole not containing and establishing essences but keeping bodies attuned to ‘becomings’, ‘becomings-other’. Of course this means that an understanding of the event, the new, has to be transversal and cosmic since otherwise ‘becoming’ would be local and preserve the continuity of the one situation. Badiou does not accept that this conception can be maintained within immanence. He believes that the virtual and actual are two sides of being that disrupt immanence and so Deleuze’s thought is haunted by transcendence [Todd May ‘Think Again’, p. 70]. Thus the sets of two concepts that form a series throughout Deleuze’s work do not form a line of the flight. This is always in-between the two terms and preserves immanence in full force by producing, as the difference between them, a circuit of the two terms. The movement ‘in the middle’ cannot be attached to an essence. It prevents one side from becoming transcendent. It is, in ‘Difference and Repetition’, the difference between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ repetitions. The ‘good’ doesn’t transcend the ‘bad’ but is always coexistent with it. Todd May asks whether the virtual and actual can be kept distinct without the One becoming Two and reintroducing transcendence [ibid, p. 71]. Can the open whole maintain its motion in-between and so never on one side or the other. For Deleuze, univocity is never a quality. The whole is a productive movement traversing all sets, opening one set onto the other, transforming one set into another [Deleuze, ‘Negotiations,’ p. 55]. Can this whole range over all sets – immanent and equal to the new - or does it take a disruptive break to achieve a thinking of the event?
[4] Of course Deleuze’s Bergsonian is a key factor in this. Badiou seems to separate time from the virtual-actual circuit. Deleuze sees in time the conception of the open whole of such richness and productivity that it denies the void. Todd May makes a good case that Badiou forgets Bergson’s duration and thus the spatio-temporal dynamisms that overcome a conception of objects as being ‘part’ actual and ‘part’ virtual [ibid, p. 76]. Through temporal unfolding the virtual-actual relationship overcomes any static dualism between two sides of ontology. Instead, the spatio-temporal dynamism is always an open and implicated in the folding of past into present and so into the future. Perhaps this temporal thinking is the key challenge to Badiou. James Williams conceives of the stages of thinking immanence. The one is formulated within immanence as a process to which connection is made in thought [‘Gilles Deleuze’s Different and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide’]. The One is ongoing; it is a movement of temporal unfolding. From this I believe we can lay against Badiou the charge that he concentrates on the question of the One and then asks whether it is immanent or transcendent. Instead, Deleuze conceives of the movements and the conditions for the production of experience. Univocity is always a process, a ‘life’, and never to be conceived in spatial terms or outside of its activity. I would be interested in what people think about this.
[5] Badiou writes of Deleuze’s ‘latent certainties’: movement as superior to immobility, life superior to the concept, time to space, affirmation to negation, difference to identity, and so on [‘Theoretical Writings,’ p. 98]. This is a challenge that Deleuze has to face since territory is constituted by its implication in deterritorialized movements. It must be re-territorialized through a connection with an Outside that does not destroy or kill but brings it into participation with super- or over-human forces. Whether these are ‘latent certainties’ is, I think, doubtful. This seems to suggest that the transcendental deduction of the production of experience never engages fully with the justification of its ‘certainties.’ A term like essence being inferior to becoming, tendency and haecceity is something deduced within a thinking through of immanence. The critique of common sense and good sense in ‘Difference and Repetition’ is not lacking in depth. Whilst these terms are, for Badiou, unequal to a thinking of the event we should not neglect the Kantian rigor of Deleuze’s deductions in which they are formulated.
[6] Perhaps the crux of the matter is Badiou’s belief that the All or One is not the only source of ‘the principle of the pure multiple’s excess-over-itself.’[ibid, p. 77] He argues that an excess of power haunts every multiple, nothing can give shape to it except an ‘aleatory decision’ which is only given through its effects. He sees in the ‘One-Life’ that Deleuze takes from Bergson an intuition of monotony, a uniformly deployed surface of actualisations. This means that productive forms of thought don't select the unknown [p. 78]. In this way the capacity to think the new, the event, is denied. It rejects the possibility of the dice-throw where chance is embraced and the unknown and unpredictable is produced. I think this brings us again back to time and temporal thinking. The potential of time to unfold and to produce and proliferate the new is shown in a number of different encounters, that with Cinema we have already mentioned. Also, the three-fold synthesis of time in ‘Difference and Repetition’ replaces a spatial thinking with an understanding of the becoming of time that exceeds the present and the past. The third synthesis of time is ‘a less simple and much more secret, much more tortuous, more nebulous circle, an eternally excentric circle, the decentred circle of difference which is re-formed uniquely in the third time of the series. … The form of time is there only for the revelation of the formless in the eternal return. The extreme formality is there only for an excessive formlessness (Hölderlin’s ‘Unförmliche’). In this manner, the ground has been superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come to return.’ [p. 91] This is also formulated by the break down of the sensory-motor image in the ‘Cinema’ books. I leave this issue affirmatively open to further discussion.
[7] An interesting point in David’s Hamman piece, at paragraph 3, is the notion that divine creation does not equate to divine manifestation. This is set against Spinoza who of course must accommodate the consistent and inconsistent within one Being or infinite substance. This connects to the Badiou-Deleuze question. There is a great distance between humankind and ‘God’ in Spinoza but this must be accommodated within univocity. It is a distance to be affirmed in order to bring about the wholly new. Difference must be possible within univocity. The latter is broad, groundless and rich enough to express difference and by the same token to itself be formed by it. Difference and unity cannot be separated. It is when difference and the new are found to be the principles and driving forces of an open and ongoing whole that Deleuze has a strong case. Differential production must keep everything formed, determined and consistent in its finite situation and yet infinitely open to a virtual. This process, this becoming, this territory and deterritorialization, is the meaning of its wholeness. This is difference’s burden and also its joyful affirmation.
Bibliography:
Ansell Pearson, Keith (1999) ‘Germinal Life,’ London: Routledge.
Badiou, Alain (2004) ‘Theoretical Writings’, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, London and New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles (1995) ‘Negotiations,’ trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press.
- (1994) ‘Difference and Repetition’, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athlone.
- (1989) ‘Cinema 2’, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: Athlone.
Hallward, Peter (2004) ‘Think Again,’ London and New York: Continuum.
Zizek, Slavoj (2004) ‘Organs without Bodies,’ London: Routledge.
Williams, James (2003) ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide,’ Edinburgh: at the University Press.
posted by edward willatt at 11:48 am
1 Comments:
Addendum: I came accross a passage that may add something to the argument. It is located in the Fifteenth Series of 'The Logic of Sense' (Continuum, 2004, p. 119). Deleuze takes a quotation from Georges Simondon in connection with the typological surface of contact upon which organisms are situated. Key to this is the membrane, which carries potentials and places internal and external spaces into contact. Simondon talks about life living at the limit of itself, at the level of the membrane. This means that the internal space is 'actively present' to the external world. So far this is perhaps prey to objection that interior-exterior is overcome only spatially and that this sets up a duality that cannot be bridged. The fact that activity is 'in-between' the two series cannot overcome the separation of the levels of this production of sense or actuality. It links overcoming interior-exterior to a productive depth that cannot be made immanent to what it produces. Is this is a residual spatial thinking? However, Simondon sums up Deleuze's position much better than this:
'At the level of the polorized membrane, internal past and external future face one another...' ('L'Individu et sa genese physico-chemical' (Paris PUF, 1964, PP. 260-264). This means that the pure form of time is that dynamism keeping internal and external open. The present is 'in-between' the two directions of time, formed out of their conjunction. Instead of being a spatial thinking we find a temporal synthesis, the threefold synthesis of 'Difference and Repetition' that is here re-instantiated. Time undoes hierarchies and dualisms whilst preserving the production from a differentiated depth. Does it have the power to preserve immanence accross boundaries? If boundaries can only be produced out of the actualisations of the pure form of time onto which the actual is open, they seem to avoid getting caught in a spatial dead end.
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