Gilles Deleuze An Introduction by Todd May in 2015
1. How might one live?
I.
- Our lives’ narratives, when we tell them to ourselves or to others, are steeped in the discarding of certain futures and the embrace of others, in the construction of a world that is to each of us uniquely our own because each of us has chosen it. But is that how we live? Is that how our lives, so often conforming, so often predictable, so often disappointing, come to be what they are?
- How many of us open the door to the possibility that, however it is we are living, we might live other-wise?
II.
- How should one live? How might one live? These are questions that philosophers ask; they report their results to us, and we, if we choose, may read and assess them for their insights.
III.
- In ancient philosophy, the question was: How should one live?
IV.
- It is simpler just to brush our teeth, crawl into our clothing, and burn our days than to ask what we might become.
- They have recognized that there is an intimate bond between the ways in which we think about ourselves and our world and the ways in which we construct our lives and they have sought to address that thinking in order to reach us in our living.
- Foucault’s works take some of the constraints that seem natural and inevitable to us in order to show that they are, contrary to appearances, historical and contingent.
- Derrida shares with Foucaulta concern aboutthe constraints our world has placed upon us. Like Foucault, he believes that those constraints arise primarily in the categories by means of which we conceptualize ourselves and our world. Unlike Foucault, however, Derrida finds these constraints to lie in the structure of language.
V.
- Deleuze’s works are steeped in ontology. Each work posits a new group of fundamental entities or reworks entities from previous works into a new context.
VI.
- Deleuze approaches the question of how one might live as a complex one. It is not simply a question of how we human beings might go about creating our lives, of what we might decide to make ourselves into.
- The question might also be interpreted as asking for a speculation of what life might be about, how it is that living happens. How might one live? might mean something like, “What might living consist in?”
- Another way of interpreting the question is concerned less with the word living than with the word one. So far we have taken the word one to mean person. We need not. If living is a matter of the unfolding of a vital difference, then the one that lives can be either less or more or other than a person. It can be a mouth, a gesture, a style, a relationship. It can be a group or an epoch. To embed the concept of living in people is to commit the error of humanism, the error of believing that the proper perspective for understanding the world is centered on the viewpoint of the human subject.
- “This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.”15
2. Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche: The Holy Trinity
I.
- Spinoza offers us immanence, difference made flesh.
- Bergson offers us the temporality of duration, without which immanence cannot be born.
- And the spirit of Nietzsche, of the active and the creative affirmation of difference without recoupment into some form of identity, pervades the entire project.
- Immanence, duration, affirmation: Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche. These are the parameters of an ontology of difference.
II.
III.
IV.
- The question ofhow one might live, when Deleuze asks it, offers itself to two interpretations. One interpretation, the practical one, concerns the possibilities for living in which one might engage.
- The second interpretation of the question of how one might live is ontological. It is a question of how living might go, what it might be to be alive. Deleuze’s Spinoza has created concepts that import the vibrancy of life not only into organic beings but into the entirety of the universe.
V.
- If Spinoza is Deleuze’s Christ of philosophers, then Bergson is the Father. Spinoza announces the Good News: immanence. But the Good News requires temporality in order to give it philosophical birth. The concept ofimmanence, if it is not to regress into a mindless sameness, must have recourse to another concept, that of expression.
VI.
- Husserl’s existential conception of time serves as a corrective to the linear conception, but it is a corrective that relies on the lived time of a human consciousness. Bergson, in contrast, does not believe that memory is only psychological. It is ontological. There is psychological memory, to be sure. But psychological memory points to something larger than itself, to a wider ontological condition that contains it.
VII.
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The immanence of duration to the present has an important consequence: the present always has a greater potential for transfor-mation than it appears to
have. Why is this? The present “presents” itself to us as the realm of identities and differences in degrees.
- But if difference is immanent to the present, then each moment is suffused by a realm of difference that lies coiled within it, offering the possibility of disrupting any given identity. There is always more than presents itself, a surplus beyond what is directly experienced. That surplus is not another fixed identity, a “something else,” but the virtuality of difference with no identity and all measure of potential.
VIII.
- The coiling of difference within seemingly fixed identities is the consequence of the immanence of duration to the present.
IX.
- The future will reveal itself to be the eternal return; and in the return will be found the affirmation of difference that is Deleuze’s Nietzschean spirit.
- Substance does not stand behind or outside its modes; if the modes change and evolve, that is because substance itself is folding, unfolding, and refolding. Substance is not a constant identity that stands behind the modes. Substance is becoming. Duration is not identity. It is difference, difference that may actualize itself intospecific identities, but that remains difference even within those identities.
X. Active and reactive forces
- “Every force which goes to the limit of its power is . . . active.”56 An active force goes to the limit of what it can do. It does whatever is in its power to the extent of its ability. Active forces are creative, because they seek to exercise themselves, to make whatever can be made of themselves.
- Reactive forces “proceed in an entirely different way – they decompose; they separate active force from what it can do; they take away a part or almost all of its power.”57 If active forces go to the limit of their power, create through their self-expression, reactive forces operate by cutting active forces off from their own power.
XI. Eternal return
- All of this is a matter of the eternal return. The eternal return is the return of difference. It is the recurrence of pure difference that Bergson shows is the nature of duration. Good players affirm the eternal return. They affirm the return of difference without identity, of differences whose actualization into identities is nota matter of the continuation of rigid forms but instead an experimentation in a world of inexhaustible creative resources.
XII.
- There is one world, one substance, a single being. It is not governed or judged by a world or Being outside it. There is no transcendence. “The idea of another world, of a supersensible world in all its forms (God, essence, the good, truth), the idea of values superior to life, is not one example among many but the constitutive element of all fiction.”62 Being is not something other than the world we live in. It is that world.
3. Thought, science, and language
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VIII.
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4. The politics of difference
I.
- Here is a way of seeing the world: it is composed not of identities that form and reform themselves, but of swarms of difference that actualize themselves into specific forms of identity.