Ansell Pearson K. - Living The Eternal Return As The Event. Nietzsche With Deleuze 1997 ART ING 34
Ansell Pearson K. - Living The Eternal Return As The Event. Nietzsche With Deleuze 1997 ART ING 34
Ansell Pearson K. - Living The Eternal Return As The Event. Nietzsche With Deleuze 1997 ART ING 34
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*
Living theEternal Return as theEvent: NietzschewithDeleuze
Keith Ansell
one
Pearson
one
(Lawrence
1995:
125).
Subjectivity
is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual.
There
is a profound
link between
signs, events,
the power of
Nietzsche's
and dissimulation
and dissemination
'of
or a thoughtthatis in some
thought)?As towhetherit is a philosophicalthought
sense
philosophy
in spite of,
for us. It is
wider
context of Nietzsche's
become
But in thinking
thepromiseof life(thepromisewhich can only reside infuturity).
and stagings of
of Man and
of living
Superman', where le surhomme is taken to denote not the disappearance
human beings and as requiring much more than a simple change of concept, and
where the eternal return is construed as the 'Superfold' (Surpli) that offers an
'unlimited
finity').In thetextsof thelate 1960sat leastDeleuze takesseriously
64
as a 'great cultivating
presentation of the eternal return
thought', that is, as
a thought of culture and a paideia of thought. It thus plays a crucial role in his
or praxis of philosophy as an attempt to think 'beyond' the
conception of the art
'human condition', where such a 'beyond' denotes the acquisition and cultivation of a
Nietzsche's
and
(times of the eternal return of the same without becoming or the invention of the
event). As the author of a crucial postwar text on difference and repetition Deleuze
noted himself that such a thinking emerges at a fairly precise moment in history when
and stereotypical repetitions appear to have overtaken life
themost mechanical
Such a thought is
altogether and subjected it to a law of homogeneity and sameness.
to
be
both
critical
and
clinical.
In
this
I
focus my
shall
therefore,
essay
designed,
to repeat (the compulsion of the overhuman and
attention on the 'superior' compulsion
locates inNietzsche's
of the differential future) thatDeleuze
eternal return, superior,
that is, in relation to the entropic model
death-drive.
of the repetition-compulsion
which
informs
Freud's
new practical
the 'becoming-active
of forces'
of theeternalreturnin relationto
(1962: 77-81; 1983:68-71). This workingthrough
Kant is takenup again in theopeningpages of DifferenceandRepetitionwhere
Deleuze
could
open
- claim with an
authority that is always open to contestation,
legitimately claim
- that
the eternal return is the ethical
to themovement
of a superior justice
to conceive
it as such is in terms of an
thought par excellence, and that the only way
encounter with the event. I want to stage an exploration of the nature of this strange
encounter in this essay.
Encounters
Transcendental
subjected
to the banalities
of consciousness
with
and on theotherhanddescending
itsfixationon theephemeraland thesuperficial,
into an undifferentiated
'return'.
andmarkedby itsattempt,inspiredchieflyI
Deleuze's thinkingis distinguished
would arguebyBergson,3to thinktheintenselifethatisbothgerminaland
nonorganic:
...not all Life
which
more
nonhuman
Becomings
of human beings
that overspill
the anthropomorphic
or The Logic
of Sense,
are devoted
to
Deleuze's
contribution
is of Bergsonian
resides
inspiration.4
in theway
in
restrictive economy of an existentialist or personalist ethics (an ethics of the T and the
in order to open up the human to the ?ver-human.
This 'beyond' of
self, Je and Moi)
the human denotes for Deleuze
nothing transcendent but is implicated fully in the
superior durations
that characterize
Deleuze's
avowed
aim is
think we
arecapableofbecoming,offering
thepossibilityof livingdangerously,
therefore, a projection of the interior, so that the process involves not a 'One' but a
redoubling of the 'Other', not a reproduction of the same but a repetition of difference,
not the radiant emanation of a possessive T but the immanent production of a non
self: 'It is never the other who is a double in the doubling process, it is a self that lives
encounter
of meeting
(Deleuze compares the process to the invagination of tissue in embryology and to the
act of doubling in sewing that involves twisting, folding, stopping, repeating, and so
on). The 'outside' denotes a field of immanence inwhich, strictly speaking, there is
is
neither an internal self nor an external one (T and 'not-I'). The 'absolute Outside'
devoid of selves 'because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in
and
aim of this new art of living is not to identify with the line, though madness
always exist as a risk, since thiswould be to destroy all thinking and life.
in
Rather, the task is to both 'cross the line' and make it endurable and workable;
The 'outside'
short, this is the line of life cracked by death and conceived as germinal
The
suicide
is the line of life that links up random and arbitrary events in a creative mixture of
and necessity. A new thought of the outside, and a new way of living on the
outside, involves drawing new figures and mapping new diagrams, in short, a general
chance
andvital topology
of thought
thatfoldstheoutside intotheinside.The
intensive
passion
of the outside
entropic containment
been understood
withKant's founding
projectof philosophicmodernity.InTheLogic ofSense
Deleuze
seeks to develop
a new
conception
by
constitutes
67
polarities: Thus,
theskin,M
the
(ibid.: 126; 103). Deleuze does notpretendthatdetermining
transcendental field
is an easy task.
In The Logic
of Sense
he accepts
is
that Sartre's
unityof apperceptionare
objectionstoendowingthisfieldwith theT or thesynthetic
toSartre's
decisive (a pointhe repeatsin the 1993piece on 'Immanence',
referring
Before examining inmore detail the character
essay The Transcendence
of the Ego).
encounter with Kant, it is important to note that the attempt tomap the
of Deleuze's
would
claim
that unless
the conditions
Deleuze
to accept
thus refuses
that
differences)
the transcendental
or a supremely
individuated Being
and a personalized
claims
experience
notes Deleuze,
what
is given
in experience.
'a
is eprphenomenology,
68
at
goes,
perhaps
philosopher'
actualizes
can be viewed
and incarnates
in its body
which
formsof folding(envelopment,
etc.),and thatof thesingularities
development,
to persist and subsist over and above their particular incarnations and
actualizations within an individuated body and self. There is, therefore, a 'continuum
continue
fromtheindividualsthatenvelop it invariabledegrees
thatisdistinct
of singularities'
of determination.
The world,
says Deleuze,
becoming
actualization
for Deleuze
is
by imprisoning
them within
supreme)
or a
'Immanence is supposed to be
gets treated as a field of consciousness:
to a thinking subject' (Deleuze and Guattari
immanent to a pure consciousness,
1991:
the employment of transcendent Ideas he
47-8; 1994: 46). So, while Kant denounces
Husserl,
69
discovers
contends,
The
character of Deleuze's
transcendentalism
peculiar
can be perhaps
further clarified
Thought'
and Repetition.
our conception of thought that the empirical and the transcendental get distributed
related. He is concerned to show how within Kant and phenomenology
the
is never made
transcendental
truly transcendental.
What
does
thismean?
itsucha problemthatphilosophyfailstogetrighttheinstallation
of the
and
And why
is
Deleuze's
the
argument is that although it is Kant who discovers
powers of the transcendental he never escapes, in spite of his immense
labours, to free transcendental structures of thought from the empirical acts of a
We only have towitness in this regard, says Deleuze,
consciousness.
psychological
transcendental?
prodigious
themoves
of the Critique
of Pure
of thefacultiesgroundedin thesupposedly
themodel itself(harmony
universal
essential
seeks
imprisoned
by it (Deleuze
1968:
to undermine
transcendental model
of recognition.
that
which exceeds itsfacultiesand thenorms itimposeson theiroperation(the
The
transcendent exercise must not be traced from the
transcendent application:
it apprehends
thatwhich cannot be grasped from
empirical exercise precisely because
the point of view of common sense' (ibid.: 186; 143). Ultimately,
thismeans
that the
transcendental must be answerable
the empiricism
of common
and good
70
not
the empiricism of the unknown, the demonic, the anarchic, etc. There is
this something is not to
in
theworld thatforces us to think. For Deleuze
something
become an object of recognition but rather assume the form of a 'fundamental
- as in
encounter* (rencontre) (ibid.: 182; 139). It has to be an encounter with demons
encounter with the demon who offers him the fateful and fatal task of
Nietzsche's
on the
undergoing the thought-experiment of eternal return, of taking up and passing
1974:
The
the
over-human
section
of
over-human
task
and
(Nietzsche
335).
gift
altogether:
and thereduction
of
exceeds establishedphilosophicalmodes of recognition
in the world
becomings
to perceptual
Deleuze
move
informs Deleuze's
to
thought beyond
overhuman. The abyss of this Dionysian
unbound energy, is not, Deleuze
insists, an impersonal or abstract Universal beyond
break with
individuation. For him this is precisely what defines Nietzsche's
to be conceived
them:
individuation
itself(Deleuze 1968:332; 1994:258). This is to thinklifenotas the
expression
of a determined
world
potentialities
that of the species,
in a process
of
its psychic
represents the psychic determination of the species, the latter expresses
The formation of the T is inseparable from a form of identity, while
organization).
the self is always constituted by a continuity of family resemblances.
'Individuation',
Deleuze
writes,
'ismobile,
Deleuze
always considered
it superficial
as making
a naive
There
Deleuze
argues, processes
of
etc.). The
The cracked line is,more often that not, deadly, moving fast
(ibid.: 134-5; 98-9).
and violent, transporting us into 'breathless regions'. The task, however, is never to
simply surrender to the lethal character of the line, but to always seek to extract some
so as to pass
something on thatwill
surplus value from its productivity and fecundity,
'You write with a view to an unborn people that doesn't
continue to exist germinally:
to thismode of thinking
Deleuze's commitment
beyondan activeor phallic subject is
such thatit leadshim tomaking a rigorousand strictseparationof themovementof
is 'on
'desire', which is always transversal, from the experience of 'pleasure'.' Pleasure
the side of strata and organization',
serving only to interrupt the purely immanent
1997a: 189-90). He insists that desire does not have
process of desire (Deleuze
austere reading, to
pleasure as its 'norm' because pleasure always wants, on Deleuze's
for the person to find himself or herself again in a process that overwhelms
them and which ensures that the act of repetition is always undergone again and again
means
back
into what
alleviating,
is already known
of truth'
This, he notes, is 'Proofbypleasure ("bypotency")as criterion
(Nietzsche
or the yet-to
the unexperienced,
1979b: 51). The result is to exclude from experience
as well as the strange, the uncanny, and the new and the
be experienced,
immeasurable.9
principle,
to a transcendental
a matter of
making
repetition a novelty,
that
The
chance
encounters
that a
action
in theworld
piece byKlossowski:
the vehement oscillations which upset the individual as long as he seeks only
his own center and does not see the circle of which he himself is a part; for if
to an individuality
these oscillations upset him, it is because each corresponds
1990: 178).
of the event through which the vital powers and unbound energies thatmake possible
sense can be emancipated
'creative evolution' inBergson's
from the containment of a
closed
system.
This will
now be explored
phenomenon
to
hereditary crack). This kind of transmission reproduces the return of the same. What
is novel about Deleuze's
reading of Zola is the attempt to implicate the somatic
transmission in a different crack; where one kind of crack transmits something well
the crack
is forDeleuze
are not simply acquired but have to be invented and are forced to
undergo
The crack 'follows' only itself, like a runaway train destined for
transmutation.
derailment. On the tracks of this germinal train of life there is neither beginning nor
for novel
constituting
overcoming,
offers not a simple redemption but allows for the germinality of the most destructive
inclinations and tendencies.
'He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the
frame of life to break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive
221).
But
if one
- as in
Freud's
death-drive
(a principle
of
this destruction
addressing
and repetition'.
experimentable to thinktheplay of 'difference
young woman
Clotilde
family in
family, encompassing
flourescence of the
126). This is 'thewhole monstrous
this genealogy
is presented in the terms of a
131). Moreover,
erratic, and unpredictable, monstrous descent, a descent subject to, to
and reterritorialization.
2^ola is
terms, perpetual deterritorialization
futures (ibid.:
tree' (ibid.:
highly complex,
employ Delezue's
complicated
entanglement
of sickness
Pascal
asks, for
as monstrous),
science of heredity
is, says Pascal, a world 'beyond good and evil'. The chapter concludes by asking
whether it is necessary to bum the tree of genealogy or whether this can only be a
matter of the future as itsmatter.
This
moving
Haeckel
Weismann's
Obscure,
difference,
evolving
is certainly free of any endogenous
powers
itself.
fix desire
the claim:
to a morbid
when he declares
crack.
links the heredity of the crack up with the death-instinct is crucial
The way Deleuze
since itwants to implicate death in the dimension of 'difference and repetition'. This
and monstrous
role Nietzsche's
eternal return
accounts, therefore, for themomentous
plays
inDeleuze's
of descent
and heredity(originandgenealogy)todeterritorialization.
InFreud thedesireof the
75
organism
maintains
that Freud's
of
a founding
that already presupposes
of
the
return
eternal
amounts
to something of
thought-experiment
a 'Copernican revolution'.
Identity now operates as a secondary power and speaks
true subject of the
only of differences qua differences (it speaks of repetition). The
under the dominion
in general
identity, Nietzsche's
contends,
themobile
theOne
of desire).
Rather, what
convulses
a world where
'In
disjunctions:
if there is an
the
it is because
repetition of eternal return implies the death of thatwhich is one 'once and for all*.
if itenjoys an essential relation with the future it is because
the future is the
Likewise,
of themultiple, the different, and the fortuitous, 'for
explication and complication
themselvesand "forall time'" (Deleuze 1968: 152; 1994: 115). The eternalreturn
thus selects against the One, against thatwhich will not select. A great deal of
commitment to a conception of univocal Being which
confusion surrounds Deleuze's
is regarded as implying a commitment to the 'one'. The erroneous nature of this
can be readilydemonstrated
characterization
by appealingtowhat is at stake in the
the
affirmation
eternal
of originary
differenceand the
the
of
return,
namely
repetition
play of simulacra.14
articulates
of theeternalreturnis theaffirmation
of all chance ina single
Being. The affirmation
and Being as the unique event, 'one Being and only for all forms and all
1969: 211; 1990: 180). On Deleuze's
times' but always as 'extra-Being' (Deleuze
the eternal return provides nothing less than a 'new image of thought*, of the
model
birth of thought and the thought of birth. It is the 'phantasm' that constitutes the site of
moment
and thethought
of a
theeternalreturn,
endlesslymimickingthebirthof a thought
birth, beginning
*anew desexualization,
sublimation,
Deleuze
and symbolization,
caught
in the
utilizes Zola's
'difference' between
transformational
heredity,inordertorenderimpossibleany stabledualityof thethe
Moreover:
...if it is true that the instincts are formed and find their object only at the edge
of the crack, the crack conversely pursues its course, spreads out itsweb,
in each body in relation to the instincts
changes direction, and is actualized
which open a way for it, sometimes mending it a little, sometimes widening
two orders are tightly joined together, like a
up to the final shattering...The
a larger ring, but they are never confused,
within
(ibid.)
ring
- 'the
death instinct'
The crack is simply the emptiness, the great void, it is death
it,
(ibid.: 378; 326). For all the the 'noise' theymake, the swarming
(I'Instinct de Mori)
instincts cannot hide the fact that they belong to thismore profound silence from
When deathhappensthestillnessin
which theyburstforthand towhich theyreturn.
the room is such that one can hear a 'Fly buzz'; it is 'like the Stillness in theAir
'not
instinct
is
The
death
1969:
of
Storm'
theHeaves
Between
merely
(Dickinson
31).
one instinct among others, but the crack itself around which all of the instincts
the final
ibid.).15 On thismodel of life entropy is not allowed
congregate* (Deleuze,
word or the last say; rather, its 'transcendental illusion' must always be exposed.
Deleuze wants to argue that the death-instinct constitutes the complicated
'grand
concerns revolutionary
heredity' of the crack (it's not tragic but epical, since it
But the death-instinct is retrieved from any global entropic
movement).
determination or telos: 'Is itpossible, since it [the death-instinct or drive] absorbs
every instinct, that it could also enact the transmutation of the instincts, turning death
create instincts
Would itnot thereby
whichwould be evolutiverather
againstitself?
than alcoholic,
erotic, or financial...'
(1969:
385;
1990: 332).
For Deleuze
in the self and the T: AH of this is traversed by circulations, echoes, and events
which produce more sense, more freedom, and more strength than man has ever
In Freud the 'daemonic power' of
dreamed of, or God ever conceived'
(ibid.: 91; 73).
to repeat that characterizes
the *beyond' of the pleasure principle (the compulsion
is too readily domesticated by being reduced to an
and the death-drive)
masochism
Oedipal
determination
experiences
possesses
endeavours
which
feel
to remove the death-instinct from the tragic model Freud traps it in order
it up to the pagan space of the epos. The crack comes from the future as a
sign of the future. In the 'exaggeration' of life as composed by the great writer or
to us that
artist, inspiration comes not from the logos but the epos, which discloses
we can never go far enough in the direction of 'decomposition',
'since it is necessary to
go as far as the crack leads' (ibid.: 385; 332). Art is, therefore, implicated in
to open
degeneration.
Degeneration
incorporated the crack as that which allows for repetition and difference). Zola's
'putrid literature is a literature of the future: 'Zola's optimistic literature is not
anything other than his putrid literature.
77
on this
model is nota
(Deleuze 1969: 385; 1990: 332). The death-instinct
manifestation
In learning towill
a 'volitional
wills terminally\
(ibid.: 176; 149). One does notwill exactlywhatoccurs,but rather
willing
something
'in thatwhich
occurs'
the
make
life', and the highest affirmation of the arrival of the future in its difference.
We
have yet, however, to think trulymadly deeply about the nature of the event.
the crucial question pertaining to the actualization of the event concerns
For
Deleuze
the
crack while
not incarnating
oneself
crazy',
'a little
fool), to live, love, and die 'a little alcoholic',
appear as a philosophical
'a little suicidal'?
It is to addressing these difficult questions
that I now turn.
working
through.
means
of the
174-5; 1990: 149). This, saysDeleuze, is ethical lifebeyondtheressentiment
event is the
On
78
the
to
'live on', enjoying its own past and future, haunting each present, making the present
return as a question of the present, and free of the limits placed upon it by any given
state of affairs. The event both happens to an individual and lives on beyond the
The concept of the event is not to be confused with any actualized state of affairs, but
rather refers to the 'shadowy or secret part' that can always be subtracted from or
as an 'infinitemovement' which gives life consistency. This
added to an actualization
is the 'virtual'; not a chaotic virtual but one that has acquired consistency. And while
transcendent to the state of affairs towhich it relates, itmust be
the event may appear
to be an entirely immanent movement
conceived
('L'evenement est immateriel,
incorporel, invivable: la pure "reserve"').
Ironically, it is the state of affairs in which
that is transcendent, as well as 'transdescendent'.
the event becomes actualized
The
time that is implicated in the becoming of the event is not that of the determination
isolable points or themeasure of discrete instants, but that of the 'meanwhile' (un
of
entre-temps), the duree of the interval or 'dead time'. The event names not the passing
of time but the vectorial passage of time: 'When time passes and takes the instant
to restore the event' (Deleuze
and Guattari 1991:
away, there is always a meanwhile
that
150; 1994: 158). The germinal life enjoyed by the event refers to a becoming
takes the battlefield and thewound as components and variations that live in excess
the subject's own body, including its rapport with other bodies and the physico
of
mathematical
and over-lived
disembodiment
or even as one of the lived state, but it also appears as a pure event whose variations
are coextensive with life...' (ibid.: 153; 161). Such a concept of death - death as event
is only possible to the extent that one has gained, and won, a conception of germinal
life. Death is ungraspable not simply because
it does not correspond to the order of
because
which
for an affirmation:
79
is nourished'
(Deleuze
'Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what
happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become an offspring of one's
own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one's
carnal birth...'(Deleuze
1969: 175-6; 1990:
149-50). The play of different kinds of
heredity can now be configured in terms of a play between actions and events. In
becoming what one is' the task is to become the offspring of one's events, not one's
of theevent.This is the
actions,since theaction isproducedonlyby theoffspring
eventful
God
who
the indefinite time of the event, a floating line which travels via speeds, continually
dividing, always too-late and always too-early, never quite on time (the excess of time
or time of excess).
Inhuman time. Chronos
signifies the time of measure,
always the
forms and
right time, a time which corporeally situates persons and things, developing
Human
and
time
Guattari
1980:
1988:
(Deleuze
320;
262).
determining subjects.
inwhich only the present exists in time and gathers
is the time of presence,
together both past and future into a unity. The 'unlimited Aion', by contrast, names a
past and a future that inhere in time and which divide every present into an infinite
Events are of the order of Aion: not living presents but infinitives,
becoming.
that in dividing itself infinitely in two directions at once - past
heralding a becoming
and future must always elude the gathering of the present.
Chronos
safetyof theshore?Why notjust takegallonsof alcohol and have donewith all this
ofFitzgerald
futilephilosophizingonmattersof lifeand death? Does not thetruth
ofArtaud speak from
speak fromthedepthsof alcoholic excess anddoes not thetruth
and theabysmalpit andpendulumof schizophrenia?
thedepthsof self-mutilation
However,
madness
over
to a future germinal
life by making
transfigures
then even when we die. Counter-actualization
to a
is nothing, itbelongs
and pretends to have the value of what could
have happened.
the true
But, to be themime of what effectively occurs...like
actor and dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only chance of not
It is to give the crack the
being confused with its inevitable actualization.
chance of flying over its own incorporeal surface area, without stopping at the
buffoon when
itoperates
alone
80
to go farther than
we would
For Deleuze
consuming passions of bodily life. Attention must be drawn to the confusion of lines,
'the central point of obscurity
of flight and death, of paranoia and schizophrenia,
which raises endlessly the problem of the relations of thought to schizophrenia and
1969: 243-4; 1990: 209). All life involves a process of
(Deleuze
depression...'
demolition,
monstrous,
themore
being superficial out of profundity, which involves having the courage, Nietzsche
says, to stop at the surface, at the fold. The depths are always to be navigated in terms
life' it 'is a
of a geography of thought and existence, for in the 'entire biopsychic
question
of dimensions,
projections,
way
should
return to the question of eternal return as a theory of pure events. The problem of
one of knowing how an individual is able to
a 'logic of sense' is, says, Deleuze,
'transcend' its form and its syntactical link with a world so as 'to attain to the universal
To
its qualities
and actions
'we raise
each event to the power of the eternal return in order that the individual, bom of that
which comes to pass, affirm her distance with respect to every other event. As the
she follows and joins it,passing through all the other
a
implied by the other events, and extracts from it unique Event which is
once again herself, or rather the universal freedom' (ibid.). This is themoment of
or immutability sought by the person but the
'eternity', not the eternity of immortality
and a ghost of time, never
eternity of the event that lives on, like a spectropoiesis
individual
individuals
ceasing
to divide
Conclusion:
Deleuze
Beyond
Weismann
One
81
Nietzsche
another
could be more
'Nietzschean'?
too much to life. This is an
it has been remarked, conceded
extraordinary
It communciates what is truly other and alien
remark, and a profound complaint.
and what perturbs many who encounter him. Deleuze
is a philosopher
about Deleuze
Deleuze,
to life,including
who ends up givingeverything
death,also suicide,druguse and
abuse,
alcoholics,
which
alcoholism,
that
modernity,
in
rendition
of thegerm-plasm)that
theentropyof theriverofDNA (thecontemporary
is immune
in effect, examples
beyond
entropic containment.
reconfigures
example,
maintains
immanence
is a logic of nuances,
of co-implication
82
and co-evolution
between
is no doubt
transformation.
But
the characters
are modified,
The best way to think of the ethics of return as an ethics of the event (an ethics
is in terms of the central paradoxical
formulations Nietzsche
'beyond' the subject)
surrounds his doctrine on
not have
to the eternal return), and (b) one wants only to love everything that has
happened to one, wanting nothing to be different (an event thatmakes all the
insists, than catching sight of
difference). There can be no greater danger, Nietzsche
peculiar
oneself with the task of becoming what one is (necessity, a piece of fate). There only
event of becoming.
Perhaps it is in the thought of the event thatwe can
persists the
discover and invent themeaning of Nietzsche's
cryptic formulation that in order to
understand anything at all of his 'Zarathustra' one must have one foot beyond life
not, I would
suggest, one foot in the grave but one foot in the event.
Nietzsche
requiring the subtle sense and sensibility 'for signs of ascent and descent' in which one
- both.
This dual task requires the complex art
knows both for one is and becomes
of seeing with more than one pair of eyes, it requires an enhanced perspectivism:
One
a lifethatenjoys
beatitudeof thelivingbeyond'. This is a lifebeyondephemerality,
the eternity of the event and its eternal return. Living the event means
living those
'superior durations' beyond the human condition, it 'is' a life of immanence20:
We
time,
This
essay
I am working
on that bears
the working
title
84
The denouement
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A.
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A Critical
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(1997), The Plague of Fantasies,
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(1962), Therese Raquin, Middlesex,
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(1989), Doctor Pascal,
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(1996), La Bete Humaine,
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(ed.), Deleuze:
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88
A Critical
Reader,
Oxford,
Basil
Nietzsche's
of a cultivating thought that aims to ensure that all other modes of thought
a new, non-Darwinian
selective principle that is to be
perish, and the weight of
of strength and barbarism (see Nietzsche
the
1968: 544ff).
in
service
placed
the weight
will
I fear that in this essay it is only possible to give an 'impression' of what itmight
to think the eternal return as the event, since my deployment of Deleuze's
concepts
is highly condensed (the event itself, but also 'individuation', 'intensities', 'singularities',
mean
In The Logic
of Sense Deleuze
deploys
serves to denote neither an attribute nor a quality of subject but rather the incorporeal
predicate of a subject of the proposition (so instead of saying 'the tree is green' one would
say 'the tree greens'). In his book on Leibniz (The Fold, 1988/1993) he attempts to unfold
the 'meaning' of the event once again in terms of Leibniz's chief principles, namely, the
147). This
is relevant to comprehending
(Bergson
attack on
Bergson
1960: chapter
of Pure Reason
A169/B211;
and, in
89
In Creative
Evolution
(1907)
inDeleuze's
Bergson
Logic
of Sense.
construes
Here
his
associated
anticipates many of the moves
approach
in biology, notably in complexity theory.
with
contemporary
developments
insight when
he notes
it is Badiou
who
comes
this
closest to making
'an immanent activity over a
a creation,a noveltycertainly,
but thinkable
withintheinteriority
backgroundof totality,
of the continuous.
see
Deleuze
Un elan vita?
1997:
101ff.,esp.
(1994:
113-116.
60).
For Badiou's
writes:
consciousness,
point:
The model
implies no devaluation
of Thought
relative
toExtension,
but merely
the double
mistake
every proposition
90
ismaking
Life (Routledge
1999).
8
distances himself
It is at this point thatDeleuze
In an essay
from Foucault.
last
in 1994 on 'Desire and Pleasure' Deleuze
tells of the time he and Foucault
published
met, with Foucault
'desire', and with Deleuze
saying he could not 'bear' the word
1997a: 189).
replying that he found theword 'pleasure' almost intolerable (Deleuze
we
in virtue of the pleasure
(auto-satisfaction)
we
from
though
contemplate
experience
things quite apart
- the
ourselves...We must always first contemplate something else
water, or Diana, or the
- in order to be filled with an
of
ourselves'
woods
(1968: 102; 1994: 74-5).
image
of the 'self:
in contemplating,
and even
10
Deleuze
the philosophical writings of Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308)
acknowledges
as the source for the word 'haecceity', where it names 'individuating difference' (Duns
Scotus 1987:4 & 166). The word can also be found deployed inLeibniz's
'Discourse on
Metaphysics'
of 1686, where
it names
individual
substances
in
concerns
the so-called
11
'...the Freudian
as a return to
of the death-instinct, understood
conception
inanimate matter, remains inseparable from the positing of an ultimate term, themodel
of a material and brute repetition, and the conflictual dualism between life and death'
91
contendsthat
Freud'smodel ofdeath
(Deleuze 1968: 137; 1994: 103^). Deleuze further
It concerns a
suffers from being individualist,
subjective,
soiipsistic and monadic.
'difference', that of the ego or self (the One), which only deserves to perish. He will go
on to insist that the unconscious
is not governed by either degradation or contradiction,
12 GillianRose
arguesthatdeath,likerepetition,
enjoys twomeanings inFreud: on
active desire fordeath, throughtheriskingof life (one's own and thatof others), is
equally
implicated
in regression
of the instincts
tendencies
step')
(Rose
recognizes
of the Beyond
the Pleasure
stake
it
to
unconscious
war. On
so-called
impulses'
is said to know
'nothing negativc.no
negation'
(Freud
1987:85). In thisdenialofdeathdeepwithinourunconsciousthereresides,speculates
houses
Freud, the 'secret' and illusion of heroism. On the other hand, the unconscious
towards strangers
the desires of the ultimate paranoid monad that is full of death-wishes
In our unconscious
and outsiders.
impulses we thus 'daily and hourly get rid of anyone
who
take him!",
unconscious,
says Freud, murders over trifles and can be compared to theAthenian code
of Draco which knows only death as the punishment for some perceived crime (in this
It is such an 'insight'
case, the crime of being strange, a stranger, to the 'unconscious').
which
leads Freud
92
conception of death. War, Freud tells us, strips away from us the 'later accretions of
so laying bare before each and every one of us our real primeval self.
civilisation',
it 'compels us to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death; it stamps
Moreover,
strange to itself hence his affirmation in this essay of thewar between nations as a war
of strangers. This, Freud notes with due cruel irony, amounts to a positive regression
(war brings about an 'involution', ibid.: 74), one which at least has 'truth'on its side. The
illusion thatwe can live life without us all being, at some point in time,mass murderers
life intolerable, Freud challenges.
is what makes
13
In a recent reading of the death-drive, as it figures in Freud and Lacan, Zizek
takes the drastic step of divorcing it from the unconscious
altogether, marking it as the
site of the symbolic order. On this reading the drive is not to be defined in terms of a
simple opposition between life and death since its space is occupied by, on the one hand,
split within life itself between ordinary or normal life and 'horrifying
life', and, on the other hand, thatwithin death between the ordinary dead and
and Guattari
to
Like Deleuze
in Anti-Oedipus,
the 'undead' machine.
Zizek wishes
the monstrous
"undead"
but
separate the Freudian death-drive from any Heideggerian
'being-towards-death',
maintains that, although the drive itself is 'immortal, eternal, "undead" (the annihilation
limit of man qua
towards which the death drive tends is not death as the unsurpassable
For
finite being'), death belongs, along with mortality, to the domain of consciousness.
there is no death-anxiety
since such anxiety belongs
the
unconscious
only to
remarks on the death-drive
consciousness
(Zizek 1997: 89; see also Zizek's Lacanian
- in
it is not a biological
fact but 'defines la condition humaine..'
1989: 4-5; and
Zizek
on its complex
14
power
The
simulacrum', Deleuze
(puissance
positive)
which
writes,
denies
1990:262).
(1969:
303;
15
InDeleuze's
well-known distinction between the two
reading of Zola Weismann's
plasms, soma and germ (a distinction that fully informs Freud's positing of the duality of
life and death-drives inBeyond thePleasure Principle), operates as a distinction between
a love or a body which dies and a movement which creatively 'evolves'
through germinal
intensity. This is a movement from the organized body of the organism to the 'body
involves the releasement of singularities and intensities from
without organs' which
La Bete Humaine
(published
93
of the twenty
novels
functions as the
up the Rougon-Macquart
cycle), where themachine
instincts or temperaments no longer occupy the essential
The
instinct:
the train, but the train itself is the epic
They swarm about and within
thatmake
pure death
position.
representation of the death-instinct' (ibid.). In the novel the train is undoubtedly depicted
in terms of the demonic power of a death-drive: '...the trainwas passing, in all its stormy
violence, as if itmight sweep away everything that lay in its path...It was like some huge
a giant creature laid out on the ground...past
it went, mechanical,
triumphant,
to the rest
rigour, determinedly oblivious
hurtling towards the futurewith mathematical
body,
of human
and
through which
of a
of one's muscles
the self is no longer themaster of its own body but the obedient servant
and the 'rabid beast within', one is forced into paying back an ancient
'...paying for the others, for the fathers and grandfathers who had drunk, for the
was the corrupt
the pirce of
issue...paying
generations of drunkards, of whose blood he
a gradual poisoning, of a relapse into primitive savagery thatwas dragging him back into
the forest...' (ibid.).
debt:
Zola's
novel, with its stress on a hereditary regression and
instincts, anticipates both Freud's conception of death (1915) and his positing
is indeed remarkable. On Deleuze's
of the death-drive (1920) by several decades
reading,
investment of the erotic instincts in destructive ones -Zola's
however, the complicated
novel was read in the precise terms of this complication on its publication
expresses not
The
extent to which
atavistic
but ratherthesilent
caughtup in an involution
simplythenoise of primal instincts
of a repetition that drives us ever on forward and upward. This is why for him
the key actor or agent in the novel is the train itself (a field of action, a body without
organs distributing intensities and producing transformations). The train is a creation of
echoes
modern
civilization
but it is also
lives on
in humanity
derails
(the dissolutions
Serres is incisive
waste,
discloses
on Deleuze's
to the regular, and from the remarkable to the ordinary, so orienting 'the arrow of time
from past to future, according to this determination'
(1969: 94; 1990: 76).
94
16
Does
thewound
thewound
in the foreword to Twilight of the Idols: 'Amaxim whose origin Iwithold from
learned curiosity has long been my motto: increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus' ('the
spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding').
Nietzsche
17
In facing the event of death with a great refusal Very Little, Almost Nothing
account of, and testimony to, the profound limitedness
provides a powerful and eloquent
of the human condition.
18
toDeleuze, Nietzsche's
According
perspectivism operates as an art of inclusive
a
not
in
which
is
is not
divergence
disjunctions,
principle of exclusion and disjunction
a means of separation;
'is now a means
of communication'
rather, incompossibility
1990: 174).
Deleuze
stresses that in the case of inclusive
1969: 203;
(Deleuze
a conjunction;
it is not a question of making
the disjunction
rather, it
disjunctions
that continues to bear on divergence:
remains a disjunction
'But this divergence
is
affirmed in such a way that the either...or itself becomes a pure affirmation. Instead of
a certain number of predicates being excluded from a thing in virtue of the identity of its
concept, each "thing" opens itself up to die infinity of predicates through which it passes,
as it loses its center, that is, its identity as concept or as self. The communication
of
events replaces the exclusion of predicates' (ibid.). The 'schizo' experience or becoming,
for example, 'is and remains in disjunction', not reducing two contraries to an identity of
the same, but affirming their 'distance as thatwhich relates the two as different' (Deleuze
and Guattari
a
on Deleuze's
1984: 76-7).
Perspectivism,
reading, is not
truth would vary according
to the subject in question;
rather,
the conditions within which 'the truth of a variation appears to the
1972: 96;
relativism,
in which
perspectives
denote
should consult
'Yet nevertheless,
against the cosmos, tuned in to the cosmos, haunting as much as inhabiting it' (1996:
should also note the extent to which Bergson's
198). We
thinking of the matter of a
'creative evolution' is governed by the play between the solidified life of the organism
95
forces.
20
In short piece entitled 'Immanence: A Life...', written in 1993, Deleuze
argues
out as a 'life' that involves neither
that the transcendental field needs to be mapped
whose very activity
subject nor object but rather 'an absolute immediate consciousness
no longerrefers
back toa beingbut ceaselesslyposits itselfina life*(Deleuze 1997b:4).
is the immanence of the late Fichte (the text Deleuze
of Fichte's
says, Deleuze,
referred to isDie Anweisung
zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre
of 1806,
a la vie bienheureuse).
It is the impersonal but singular
appearing in French as Initiation
This,
iifeof theindividuating
haecceity(theTjeatitude'in thetitleofFichte'swork). This is
a germinal life since it is not positing life in a 'simple moment' confronting a 'universal
'in all themoments'
death' but rather a life that is 'everywhere', contained
that a 'living
is a Being
of blessedness
This
and outsideof
consciousness,
is bound
between
This
world
that is available
It
is lecture
VUJ thatis themost philosophicallyseriousandwhich iswould be thedecisive
Fichte
was'; rather, there is 'constant progress to greater perfection in a straight line which goes
on to infinity'. This
is because
'All death in nature is birth...in dying does
the
is not death which kills, but rather a more living
augmentation of life visibly appear...It
transformation, a world
of repetition
and difference
(the 'joyof thecircle'as theonlygoal), compareNietzsche 1968: 1067 (in
German,
Nietzsche
1987, volume
308ff).
Clement
Rosset
has argued
that beatitude
96
constitutes
thought -1 would willingly say the only theme' (Rosset 1993: 26).
informs the entire endeavour of 'gay science'
expression of a beat-philosophy
(Nietzsche 1974: sections 276-7), with its commitment, in the eternal engagement with/to
life (especially its gloom and doom), to the 'artof cheerfulness' (Heiterkeit). Itwould be
theme of Nietzsche's
Nietzsche's
of beatitude,
instructive to determine the difference between types and expressions
or Stoic. Clearly Nietzsche's
whether Spinozist, Fichtean, Nietzschean,
challenge resides
in the attempt to think theodicy without God, a challenge most evident in his reading of
1968: sections 411,419,
Leibniz (see Nietzsche
1019) (this is a move which, according
-more
toRosset, makes Nietzsche more Leibnizian
cheerful - than Leibniz),
97