Gilles Deleuze An Introduction

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Gilles Deleuze
An Introduction
This book offers a readable and compelling introduction to the work
of one of the twentieth centurys most important and elusive thinkers.
Other books have tried to explain Deleuze in general terms. Todd May
organizes his book around a central question at the heart of Deleuzes
philosophy: how might one live? The author then goes on to explain how
Deleuze offers a view of the cosmos as a living thing that provides ways
of conducting our lives that we may not have dreamed of. Through this
approach the full range of Deleuzes philosophy is covered.
Offering a lucid account of a highly technical philosophy, Todd Mays
introduction will be widely read among those in philosophy, political
science, cultural studies, and French studies.
Todd May is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and
Religion at Clemson University in South Carolina.
Gilles Deleuze
An Introduction
TODD MAY
Clemson University
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Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo
Cambridge University Press
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First published in print format
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Todd May 2005
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without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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For Constantin Boundas
in gratitude for his patience and generosity
Contents
Acknowledgments page ix
1 How Might One Live? 1
2 Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche: The Holy Trinity 26
3 Thought, Science, and Language 72
4 The Politics of Difference 114
5 Lives 154
Further Reading 173
References 177
Index 181
vii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Gary Gutting, who paved the way for this book.
Terence Moore, Stephanie Achard, and Sally Nicholls, at Cambridge
University Press, have been a pleasure to work with. Three anonymous
reviewers for the Press made important suggestions; I hope I have not
betrayed their efforts in my revisions. Some of the pages on science
in the third chapter are revisions of an article, Deleuze, Difference,
and Science, which appeared in a volume edited by Gary Gutting,
Continental Philosophy and Science, published by Basil Blackwell in 2004.
I appreciate their permission to modify and reprint those pages.
ix
Gilles Deleuze
An Introduction
1
How Might One Live?
I
How might one live?
Its anoddquestion, insome sense; a questionwe dont ask ourselves
very often. We get up in the morning, we brush our teeth, we crawl
into our clothing, and burn our days as though it were impossible to
live any other way, as though this particular life were the only one to
be lived. As though the universe were so constructed that it required
our lives to unfold in this way and in no other.
Of course that isnt what we tell ourselves. Our stories are always
lled with choices, with crossroads and tangents and directions of our
own making. 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 ask ourselves, not once and for all time but fre-
quently and at different times, how might one live? How many of us
embrace that question, not only in our stories but in our actions,
our projects, our commitments? How many of us open the door to
the possibility that, however it is we are living, we might live other-
wise?
1
2 Gilles Deleuze
II
Perhaps it is not uptoeachof us toask this question. Perhaps, instead, it
falls to philosophy, as a special study, to address it. What is the meaning
of life? What are its purposes? 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 themfor their insights.
Philosophers rarely ask these questions. They rarely ask them in
their work, and seem rarely to do so outside of it.
Part of the reason for this is historical. The twentieth century saw
the division of Western philosophy into two distinct traditions. Britain
and the United States embraced analytic philosophy, which treated
these questions as though they fell outside the purview of philosophy.
For some of those working in this tradition, the role of philosophy was
to clarify the limits and range of scientic claims; for others, it was
to understand the nature and functioning of language. The idea that
philosophy might grapple withquestions of our living was seenas a sort
of conceptual confusion. Philosophy is toreect onour knowledge and
our language; it is to tell us how they work, or how they ought to work.
To widen the tasks of philosophy to include a reection on what we
ought to become or might become is to introduce external, perhaps
even incoherent, concerns into a discipline that seeks to achieve rigor
and precision above all.
The historical situation for British and American philosophy has
changedover the past thirty years. Since the publicationof JohnRawls
A Theory of Justice, it has become more nearly acceptable, in keeping
with earlier periods in philosophy, to write and to think about the
larger questions concerning our lives. The weight has lifted, but it
has not been removed. Nearly a century of analytic work has instilled
philosophical habits that are difcult to break. Those who are writ-
ing about normative matters still risk ridicule by those doing hard
philosophy; they are still haunted by the fear of analytic failure. Too
often, rather than harnessing the rigor of analytic philosophy to the
task of asking these larger, more diffuse questions, instead the ques-
tions themselves are sacriced or amputated in order to preserve the
rigor of the method.
The other tradition in twentieth-century philosophy has come to be
called the Continental tradition, since it focuses particularly on works
How Might One Live? 3
writteninFrance, Germany, andtoa lesser extent Italy. Inthis tradition,
the question of how one might live has never been lost, even though
at times it has been eclipsed by other concerns. The major thinkers in
this tradition, from Martin Heidegger through Jean-Paul Sartre and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Foucault and J urgen Habermas, are
never far from questions about the nature and possibilities of our liv-
ing. And yet, here in the United States, where Continentally oriented
philosophers are often studying the works of these thinkers, there is
a tendency toward specialization that blunts the power of the larger
questions. Perhaps because in so many other disciplines, the academy
values the small nuance, the concrete accomplishment, the incremen-
tal result, many Continentally orientedphilosophers are wont to spend
less time engaged with the larger questions that animate a thinkers
work. Insteadthey become engagedinthe interpretationof some small
corner of thought, an assessment of the accuracy of Xs rendering of
Ys interpretation of some marginal aspect of Zs work. (I am as guilty
of this as are any of my philosophical colleagues, and so any ngers
pointed here are directed also at me.)
In this book, I would like to hold out against that tendency and
offer an interpretation of Gilles Deleuze that, even when weaving to-
gether details of his thought, remains mindful of and oriented toward
the one question that is never far from his texts: how might one live?
Although his thought is among the most esoteric, and even obscure,
of recent thinkers, it is, rightly seen, nothing other than an engage-
ment with that question. In a world that holds banality to be a virtue
and originality a disease, Deleuze never stops asking the question of
what other possibilities life holds open to us, or, more specically, of
how we might think about things in ways that would open up new
regions for living. We do not even know of what a body is capable, says
Spinoza.
1
III
The question of how might one live is not always the question that has
been asked in philosophy by those who are concerned with how our
lives might go. It is a question that has emerged over the course of the
1
Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, p. 226.
4 Gilles Deleuze
twentieth century, in the wake created by thinkers such as Friedrich
Nietzsche and Sartre.
In ancient philosophy, the question was: How should one live? As the
philosopher Bernard Williams has written, it is Socrates question. It
is not a trivial question, Socrates said: what we are talking about is
how one should live.
2
The question of how one should live involves a
particular way of approaching life. It views life as having a shape: a life
a humanlife is a whole that might be approachedby way of askinghow
it should unfold. What is the course a human life should take? What
are the best pursuits for a human being and how should those pursuits
be arranged? What is the proper role for humanbeings inthe universe?
Over the course of the modern period, the question How should
one live? has been gradually replaced by another one. By the late eigh-
teenth century, philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jeremy
Bentham are addressing a different question. No longer is the con-
cern with how one should live, with the shape ones life should take.
Now the question is How should one act?
On the surface, it may seemthat the question of how one should act
is the same as that of howone should live. One lives through ones acts,
does one not? And if so, then the shape of ones life will be nothing
more than the sumof ones acts. These are not two different questions,
they are instead two different forms of the same question.
Appearances here are deceiving. There are two signicant differ-
ences behind the question asked by the ancients and that asked by
the moderns that inect the answers to these questions in different
directions. First, for the ancients, the question of how one should live
is asked within a context that assumes the existence of a cosmological
order to which a good life must conform. A human life does not exist
divorced from the cosmological whole within which it is embedded. It
has a role to play that ought to converge with or at least complement
the movement of the rest of the universe. For Plato, that role consists in
seeking the Good; for Aristotle it is a matter of living out a specically
human teleology. Neither doubts, nor do others, such as the Stoics or
the Epicureans, doubt, that the universe has an order to it, a stability
and a general form that ought to be mirrored or conformed to by the
lives of human beings.
2
Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 1.
Modernphilosophy writes withina context that jettisons the guiding
assumption of a cosmological order. This does not mean that there
is no God or that God has no efcacy in shaping the universe. The
traces of Gods work remain salient everywhere. It is the role of the
human being that has changed. No longer does a human life nd
its signicance in a larger order of which it is a part. Rather, a life is
judged on its own merits. It answers to God or to the moral law, not
to any order in which it might be embedded. Men and women stand
alone before their acts and before the judge to whom those acts are
submitted. There is no larger whole (or at least no whole larger than
ones society) that requires ones participation.
This change has been known as the rise of individualism or alterna-
tively the rise of the subject in modern philosophy.
The second change is inseparable fromthe rst. We might call it the
emergence of a democratic philosophy. Where there is order there is
often hierarchy, and there is hierarchy in ancient order. Not only does
each creature have a place in the cosmological order; it also has a status.
That status involves dominance over creatures that lie below it and
submissiontothose above. Slaves are tosubmit totheir masters, women
to their husbands. Inthis order, humans, particularly free males, have a
privilegedstatus inthe cosmological order. Nevertheless, they toomust
submit to the larger whole of the cosmos itself and to those elements
in the cosmos that lie above them. (One might take Platos Good to
be such an element.)
The modernperiod, incutting adrift fromthe ancient moorings ina
cosmological order, also frees itself fromthe hierarchies of dominance
and submission inherent in that order. It casts aside the assumption of
a cosmological higher and lower. Individualism is not simply a matter
of divorcing oneself from the inherence in a cosmological role; it is
also a divorce fromthe status conferred upon one inhabiting that role.
With this divorce, we can glimpse the opening toward democracy and
equal citizenship toward which we are still striving today.
By withdrawing allegiance to a cosmological order and by leveling
out the status of human beings, the modern period becomes less con-
cerned with the overall shape of ones life. It does not matter what the
whole of a life looks like; it matters whether one is acting in the right
way, whether one is fullling ones obligations. I no longer have to
seek my rightful place in the order of things. Instead I must ask what
6 Gilles Deleuze
my proper actions are, those that, as a member of society and as an
individual before God, I am required to perform.
My actions, then, are distinct from my life as a whole. In fact, in
the modern period the concern with ones life as a whole is dimin-
ished. Some philosophers have taken this languishing of concern with
a whole life as a philosophical loss. The question How should one act? di-
vorces ones deeds fromoneself ina way that is alienating. Our morality
fails to be integrated into our lives; it exists out there, apart from the
rest of our existence. If a person is forced to ask about how to act
without at the same time seeing the answer to that question as being
related to ones particular life, then ones relation to morality becomes
ssured. We need to return, these philosophers suggest, to the an-
cient question, to allow it to renew its hold on us so that once again
we may be addressed by philosophy in the space in which we live.
Other philosophers defend the emergence of the modern ques-
tion as an advance upon the ancient one. Narrowing the focus of the
question fromlives to action corresponds to a widening of the realmof
freedomto choose the life one would like to create. Philosophy should
not legislate over the course of ones life; it should not determine the
shape it should take, or even whether a life should have a coherent
shape. If the rise of individualism and the decline of inequality are to
have a meaning for our lives, it is that we can now determine (within
the limits prescribed by the answer to the question of how one should
act) the course and direction of our lives. Each of us must answer to
the obligations laid out before him or her; beyond that, philosophy
has no business legislating who we ought to be or ought to become.
That is our private concern.
In the Continental tradition in philosophy, the modern question
gave rise to a third question, one with which we continue to grapple
today. Its roots are foundscatteredthroughout the nineteenthcentury,
but nowhere are they given as much nourishment as in the thought
of Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the central event of the late nineteenth
century is the death of God. However this death might have occurred
(Nietzsche offers different accounts at different points inhis work), the
implication is profound for human life. Those before Nietzsche who
have askedthe questionof howone shouldact, almost toa philosopher,
have found the answer anchored in a transcendent being, in God. It is
a Godoutside this worldthat assures us of our obligations withinit. The
death of God, then, is not merely the demise of a certain theological
existence; it is thevanishingof thetranscendenceinwhichour morality
is grounded. WithNietzsche, not only is there nocosmological order in
whichto anchor the meaning of our lives, there is also no transcendent
set of standards by which to guide our actions. We lack the means we
have relied upon to answer the question of how we should act.
We might try to discover other resources that offer guidance in
addressing the question of how we should act, resources that are
grounded in our own world rather than in a transcendent one. Some
philosophers, mostly in the analytic tradition, have taken this route.
Nietzsche does not. He is uninterested inthe questionof howwe ought
to act; for him, the question is merely a remnant of the period before
the death of God. It is an archaism, a bit of nostalgia.
The death of God offers us a new question, one that jettisons the
concern with both cosmic roles and individual obligations: How might
one live?
In Nietzsches hands, this new question becomes a challenge, a
gauntlet thrown at the feet of those whose lives are too narrow. What
the long history of asking the questions of how should one live and
how should one act has bequeathed us are sad small creatures that can
no longer set worthy tasks before us. We have become a species of the
petty gesture and the whining complaint. We castigate ourselves with
a transcendent (God, the Good) that we can never achieve and whose
only function is to reinforce that very castigation. We dene ourselves
not by what we might create but by what we might hold back from
creating; we are our self-denial. In the meantime, what we might be
capable of goes not only unanswered but unasked. Those who have the
temerity to ask are quickly silenced or removed to the social margins.
It is the death of God and the consequent vanishing of transcen-
dence that reopens the question for us, allowing us to enlarge our lives
beyond the limits our history had set for us. Once again we can ask
what we might make of ourselves in this world, the world we inhabit.
We can stop denying our larger dreams and projects in the name of
a transcendence that judges us, and free ourselves instead for what is
most noble in our nature.
Much of Continental thought over the course of the twentieth
century can be seen as a response to Nietzsches announcement of
the death of God. If God is dead, if we are no longer judged by a
8 Gilles Deleuze
transcendence that both diminishes and sustains us, then how might
we or how ought we to make our way in the world? How should we
think of ourselves? How should we articulate who we are and what we
can become?
Jean-Paul Sartre takes up these questions, inaugurating, at least in
its contemporary form, the existentialism that forms the immediate
legacy of the death of God: if God does not exist, we nd no values or
commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright
realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justication before
us. We are alone, with no excuses.
3
There is no God. There is no tran-
scendent judge for our acts. We are more alone than the individualism
of the modern question could have imagined. We face a future that
will be created by decisions that each of us will make with no standard
to guide us.
That Sartre, at moments, withdraws fromthe implications of his own
thought is undeniable. In the same pages he announces the vertigo
of human freedom, the groundlessness of human choice, he seeks to
reintroduce the question of how one ought to act and even to give
it a traditional modern answer. But it is too late; the cat is out of the
bag. There is no longer a question of how one should live, or how one
should act. There is only a question of how one might live.
IV
It is a difcult question, and a frightening one. There is much in us
that rebels against confronting it, taking it into our lives and creating
ourselves in light of the freedom it offers. It is simpler just to brush
our teeth, crawl into our clothing, and burn our days than to ask what
we might become. And, as Sartre himself begins to realize in his later
years, there is also much outside of our own reticence that militates
against our asking the question. The structure of society, the weight of
history, the legacy of our language all conspire to keep the question
from us, and to keep us from it. Our conformity is not solely a result
of individual cowardice; it is built into the world we inhabit.
Several recent French philosophers have forged their philosophical
views in the shadow cast by conformity. They have sought to free us
3
Sartre, Existentialism, p. 23.
fromthe grip of the structures and forces that produce and reproduce
conformity. These philosophers have exposed these structures in our
thinking and offered paths to escape them. 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. In doing so they have nourished the question of how one
might live, clearing a space for its asking and for the living that would
accompany it.
Deleuze is among these philosophers, but he is by nomeans the only
one. Two others, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, have taken
different approaches to the challenge and offered different routes
into the question of how one might live. In order to see the peculiar-
ity of Deleuzes own philosophical path, it might be contrasted with
Foucaults and Derridas.
Foucaults works take some of the constraints that seemnatural and
inevitable to us in order to showthat they are, contrary to appearances,
historical and contingent. There are aspects of our world that seem to
be immune from change. We must conform to the limits they place
before us and order our world with those limits in mind. This is more
deeply true, and more deeply constraining, when those limits are not
merely placed upon us from the outside like barriers but are instead
woven into the very fabric of human existence. To attempt to surpass
such limits, to seek to live otherwise, would be futile. Far from being a
sign of liberation, the project of living otherwise would be a symptom
of abnormality. For Foucault, historical study reveals to us that many
of these internal limits arise not from the constitution of our being
but fromthe politics of our relationships. They are neither natural nor
inescapable. There is an optimism that consists, he writes, in saying
that things couldnt be better. My optimism would consist in saying
that so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, more arbitrary
than self-evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical
circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constraints.
4
It might seemtobeinscribedintheorder of things, for instance, that
there is a normal course for sexuality totake, andthat other courses are
deviations from that norm. Homosexuality, bisexuality, promiscuity,
4
Foucoult, Practicing Criticism, p. 156.
10 Gilles Deleuze
even female sexual initiative have been in various periods including
our own accounted as unnatural, as symptoms of a deviance that
requires at least intervention and perhaps punishment. To treat ho-
mosexuality as a project of pleasure rather than as an expression of
abnormality would be to ignore the violation of normal human sexu-
ality that it constitutes. Moreover, to treat a homosexual as something
other than a homosexual, to see him or her as dened by something
other than sexual orientation, is to miss the central element of his or her
being. If homosexuality is abnormal, it is an abnormality that swallows
up the rest of ones existence; every gesture, every emotionis reducible
to the core fact of the homosexuality. That is why it seems so important
to intervene. What is at stake is not simply a deviant form of activity; it
is a deviant form of life.
But is sexuality naturally or inevitably divided into the normal and
the abnormal? Isnt this division rather a historical one, one that serves
certaininterests and denies others? Foucault argues that it is. Many his-
torians have shown that the concept of homosexuality, for instance, is
a recent one, and one that arises not so much from scientic discovery
as from psychological categorization. What Foucault adds is the recog-
nition that the central place that sexuality itself occupies in Western
culture is a historically determined one. Its importance derives less
from a process of neutral intellectual inquiry than from changes in
such far-ung practices as the Catholic confessional and population
studies, changes whichpromote the viewof desire as constitutive of hu-
manbeings and of sexuality as the central mode of desire. The result of
these changes is to promote both a sexual conformity and, through it,
a general social conformity that converge with the economic require-
ments of capitalism, the political requirements of liberal democracy,
and the epistemological requirements of the human sciences such as
psychology.
What is true of sexuality is true also for other constraints that the
human sciences present to us. All my analyses are against the idea of
universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness
of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and
how many changes can still be made.
5
Far from being determined
by immobile anthropological constraints, we are instead molded by
5
Foucoult, Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault, p. 11.
historical and political forces that can be modied, changed, perhaps
even overthrown. The problem the philosophical problem is that we
fail to recognize the historical character of these constraints, and so
fail to recognize the freedombefore us. We are unable to ask ourselves,
in any but the most constricted fashion, how one might live.
If Foucaults approach to the question of how one might live is
historical, Jacques Derridas might be called more nearly linguistic.
Derrida shares withFoucault a concernabout the 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 andour world. Unlike Foucault, however, Derrida nds these
constraints to lie in the structure of language. Our oppression is not
merely in our historical legacy, but in our very words. Each time we
speak, we rely on constraints that haunt our language and that deny
us access to addressing the question of how one might live. Because
of this, the means to counter those constraints will involve not simply
the recognition and overcoming of our historical inheritance; they will
involve a nuanced and fragile approach to language itself.
Derrida points out that the project of philosophy consists largely
in attempting to build foundations for thought. These foundations
work by privileging certain philosophical themes and concepts at the
expense of others. Presence is privileged at the expense of absence,
identity at the expense of difference, masculinity at the expense of
femininity, the literal at the expense of the metaphorical, principles
at the expense of sensitivity. In each case of privileging, however, mat-
ters turn out to be more complicated than they might seem. It is not
merely that it is unjust to privilege one term at the expense of its
complement (although there is an injustice there). More deeply, the
problem is that the privileged term is, in part, constituted by the com-
plement. In philosophical systems that are centered on the concept of
presence, that presence cannot be conceived except on the basis of
the absence it excludes. Absence does not appear as an other, outside
of presence, against which it is understood. It is internal to presence.
If we were to put the matter paradoxically, we might say that pure pres-
ence can be understood only on the basis of an absence that inhabits
it and is partially constitutive of it.
This does not mean that the complements melt into each other, be-
coming a third category that incorporates the features of each. Rather,
12 Gilles Deleuze
they operate in a dynamic relation of distinctness and mutual envelop-
ment where the line between them can be neither clearly drawn nor
completely erased.
This dynamic, or, as Derrida sometimes calls it, this economy of
complementary terms each bleeding into the other without one
being able to x the borders of their meanings has at least two impli-
cations. First, it undercuts the project of philosophical foundational-
ism, the project of building a nal and unsurpassable foundation for
thought. If one cannot x the meaning of the philosophical terms one
uses, if those terms are constantly inltrated by the terms they are try-
ing to exclude, then the foundations themselves will be porous, and in
the end unable to hold. It is as though the structure itself will seep into
the foundation. This is because, as Derrida recognizes, the project of
philosophy is a linguistic one; philosophy is a practice whose medium
is words. And, he argues, because of the economy of complementary
terms, those words will never be able to be xed in a way that is solid
enough to provide the type of foundation philosophy seeks.
This does not mean that the exclusions of absence, of the fem-
inine, of difference, of metaphor are overcome. Nor does it mean
that the privilegings of presence, of the masculine, of identity, of the
literal are just. There is still an injustice, a marginalization that must
be addressed. Philosophy, as well as everyday thought, still operates by
means of these privilegings. They continue to dictate our approach to
ourselves and the world. Overcoming this injustice, however, is not a
matter of simply inverting the privilege these terms have enjoyed or
of trying instead to render them equally privileged. Both approaches
would repeat the deeper problem Derrida nds in traditional philoso-
phy. They are attempts to x the terms once and for all rather than to
recognize their uidity. Instead, we must allow the uidity of terms to
remain in play, to negotiate our language in ways that do not suppress
but instead allow expression to the economy inherent in it.
If it is languages character to operate by an economy of comple-
mentary terms, and if the attempt to deny that economy by xing
the meanings of terms is both futile and unjust, then the approach
to language that must be taken is to think and to speak and to write
differently. This is primarily a philosophical project, but, like a lot of
philosophy, its effects will ripple out into the wider culture.
What bearing does Derridas approach to philosophy and its lan-
guage have upon the question of how one might live? By shaking the
foundations of the categories throughwhichwe conceive ourselves and
our world, Derrida opens upnewways of thinking about ourselves, ways
that no longer conform to the categories we have inherited. In fact,
they do not conform to the idea of categories. When, for instance, we
no longer privilege the masculine over the feminine, when we see that
these categories bleed into each other, then we are no longer worried
about the essence of the masculine or the feminine. We become free
to borrow from realms that once seemed barred from us. Moreover,
we are no longer bound to make those borrowings conform to a pre-
given model of what our lives and our world should look like, since
the categories within which we would conceive our lives and our world
are themselves uid.
Just as Foucault seeks to reawaken the question of how one might
live by showing that what appear to be necessary constraints on our
existence are in fact historically contingent, Derrida seeks to reawaken
the question by showing that what appear to be strict categories of
experience are in fact uid and interwoven. Beneath these projects
there is a deeper bond. Both reject a certain traditional philosophical
project that falls under the rubric of ontology.
The term ontology has several different meanings in philosophy. In
the analytic tradition, it means the study of what there is, either in
general or in some specic area. What are the ultimate constituents
of the universe? Is everything that exists ultimately physical matter or
do such things as numbers or ideas or sets also exist? Or, at a more
specic level, what are the constituents of psychology: the mind, be-
havior, bodies in interaction? Can we reduce psychological accounts
of human existence to purely physical ones? These are among the
questions pondered by ontology in analytic thought. In Continental
thought, ontology has come to mean the study of being (or Being).
This approach takes its cue from the work of Martin Heidegger, who
argues that over the course of Western philosophy, stretching as far
back as Plato, the question of Being has been forgotten and needs
to be recovered. What is being? What is the meaning of being? What
is it for something to be ? These are the driving questions of ontology
among Continental thinkers.
14 Gilles Deleuze
There can be a convergence between analytic and Continental ap-
proaches to ontology. Both ask about the nature of what there is. But
their inections on this asking are different. Analytic philosophers
are interested in the beings of which the universe is constituted. They
seek to account for the nature and existence of those beings and their
relationships to one another. Continental philosophers often see a
question of being that cannot be addressed in terms of constituent
beings. Following Heidegger, they see in the attempt to reduce the
question of being to that of beings a symptom of an age that is too
ready to accept the terms in which science conceives the world.
For their part Derrida and Foucault both reject ontology in the rst,
analytic, sense.
Foucault rejects any ontology of human being, any account of the
ultimate nature of human being. When he says that all of his analyses
are against the idea of necessities in human existence, he is refusing to
engage in an ontology of the human. What appear to be ontological
matters are in reality historical matters parading in ontological garb.
We are taught that there are certain norms, tendencies, and orien-
tations that human beings, by virtue of being human, possess. There
are specic sexual, psychological, cognitive, and emotional lives that
are characteristically human. To fail to live in accordance with these
characteristically human lives is to fail to be fully human. It is to be
abnormal. The lesson of Foucaults histories is that what is consid-
ered characteristically human, and therefore normal, is the product
of a politically charged history. Abnormality need not be seen as a
violation of the norms of human existence. It can as well be a refusal
to conform to the ontological requirements of a given historical
moment.
Derridas rejection of ontology occurs not at the level of specic
human ontologies but at the level of the terms used to x any on-
tology. What vitiates the ontological project in his eyes concerns the
language in which an ontology would be articulated. Any ontology is
an attempt to give an exhaustive account of what there is, to discover
some essential nature at the bottom of things. But if linguistic terms
are permeable in the way Derrida thinks, then the very terms in which
that nature is articulated will be haunted by terms they are trying to
exclude. There is no path to an account of an essential nature that
would not be permeated by the nonessential as an inextricable aspect.
The project of constructing an ontology that separates what is from
what is not is doomed by the economy of the terms it uses.
Whether Foucault or Derrida reject ontology in the second, Con-
tinental, sense is a more difcult question. Foucault is largely unin-
terested in the question of being. Derrida, by contrast, sees himself
as following through on many of Heideggers concerns.
6
What they
wouldcertainly reject, however, wouldbe any approachto the question
of being by means of an account that says, ultimately, what there is.
For both Foucault and Derrida any approach to the question of being
that goes by means of an account of an unchanging, pure nature or
essence is misguided, for either historical or linguistic reasons. Mis-
guided, and worse than misguided: harmful. To address the question
of being by means of an account of what there is would seem to con-
strain human behavior to a narrow conformity. It would fail to keep
alive the question of how one might live.
And that is the point at which they diverge from Deleuze, who ap-
proaches the question of how one might live not by abandoning on-
tology, but by embracing it.
V
Deleuzes works are steeped in ontology. Each work posits a new group
of fundamental entities or reworks entities from previous works into
a new context. To read Deleuze is to be introduced into a world of
proliferating beings and new forms of life. These beings and forms of
life are not a part of our everyday experience. Nevertheless they inhere
in the fabric of our existence.
While Foucault and Derrida seek to unravel the pretensions of on-
tology as a study of what there is, Deleuze revels in ontological creation
and analysis. While Foucault and Derrida nd ontology to be a threat
to asking how one might live, Deleuze nds ontology to be the very
route one must take inorder to ask about it adequately. While Foucault
and Derrida offer alternatives to the traditional philosophical project
of ontology, Deleuze drives that project to its limit, a limit at which he
6
Deconstructionis inmany ways a continuationof Heideggers Destruktion of traditional
philosophy, anddifferance may be readas anapproachtoHeideggers ontic-ontological
difference.
16 Gilles Deleuze
nds the question of how one might live to be raised afresh and ready
to offer surprising answers.
By embracing ontology as the study of what there is Deleuze does
not only go against the anti-ontological trend of much of twentieth-
century philosophy. His work also cuts against the grain of those who
have approached the question of how one might live. For Deleuzes
predecessors and contemporaries, breathing life into that question re-
quires abandoning what had been considered ontologically necessary,
eliminating the search for entities that constrain us to asking ques-
tions less radical than that of how one might live. For Nietzsche the
question of how one might live is opened up by the death of God,
that is, the loss of any constraining ontological transcendence. For
Sartre existentialism involves a recognition that nothing makes us be
what we are, that we are free to create ourselves without an essential
ontological nature that dictates the inescapable course of our lives.
For Foucault the identities offered to us by our history must be rec-
ognized as contingent rather than necessary, as passing phenomena
rather than ontological requirements. Only then will we be able to ask
the question of how one might live without already constricting the
answer to the conformity that forms the ether of our world. Finally, for
Derrida the rigid ontologies of traditional philosophy veil the uidity
of their terms, a uidity that undercuts the very project of saying what
there is and what there is not. That uidity must be unveiled if we are
to reopen the question of how one might live.
It would seem that if one hopes to address the question of how one
might live in a way that does not reinforce a tired conformity, then
ontology at least inasmuch as it is the study of what there is is the
problem rather than the solution.
Is this the inescapable fate of ontology? Must it disappear from the
eld of philosophical reection if our task is to ask the question of
how one might live without falling back either into concerns about
how one should act or how one ought to live or into an unquestioning
conformism?
Deleuze denies this in his work. He denies it by creating an ontol-
ogy, or rather a series of ontologies, that challenge two assumptions
underlying the rejection of an ontological approach to the question.
The rst assumption is that ontology involves discovery rather than
creation. What other thinkers who have been grasped by the question
of how one might live have assumed is that ontology is an attempt to
discover the nature of the universes fundamental entities. Why must
one see ontology as a matter of discovery, however, as opposed to
creation? It is true that philosophers who engage in ontology almost
universally see themselves as attempting to glean the essential char-
acter of what there is. They assume that the study of what there is
consists of accounting in the most adequate fashion for the nature
of what exists. And it is precisely this assumption that has worried
those who ask the question of how one might live. Such accounting
seems always to be a reduction of possibilities, a narrowing of perspec-
tive that ends up impoverishing the universe. A universe composed
solely of physical entities in more or less predictable relationships with
one another, a humanity characterized by narrow norms of behavior,
a realm of entities rigidly demarcated from one another: these are
worlds that constrict rather than widen the question of how one might
live.
Is this howontology must be done? Are we excludedfromapproach-
ing ontology another way? Suppose we were to see the study of what
there is as a creation rather than a discovery, or, better, as a project
where the distinction between creation and discovery is no longer rel-
evant. Suppose that ontology were not a project of seeking to grasp
what there is in the most accurate way. Suppose instead ontology were
to construct frameworks that, while not simply matters of ction, were
not simply matters of explanation either. Is it not possible to invert
the traditional relationship, so that the question of how one might live
is no longer based upon the question of what there is but vice versa?
In other words, could one not create an ontology whose purpose is
to open the question of how one might live to new vistas? Nietzsche,
Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida have shown the constrictions that arise
when the question of how one might live must answer to ontology.
Deleuze suggests that it is possible to move in the opposite direction,
to create an ontology that answers to the question of how one might
live rather than dictating its limits.
Such an ontology would not only invert the traditional relationship
between creation and discovery. It would also invert the traditional
relationship between identity and difference. This is the second as-
sumption about ontology that Deleuze challenges. It is intertwined
with the rst one.
18 Gilles Deleuze
If ontology is a project solely of discovery, its point is to articulate
the nature or essence of what is. It is to offer us the identity of what
is. An identity requires conceptual stability. In order for something
to have an identity, it must have characteristics that can be identied
over time. Those characteristics do not need to be stable. The stability
needs to be possessed only by the concepts that identify them. Certain
kinds of instabilities might be identied, and might be part of the
identity of what is. If Freudis correct inhis viewof humandevelopment,
tensions betweenones present relationships andones earlier parental
relationships are of the nature of human being. No particular way of
resolving these tensions is essential to humanunfolding; the identity of
human beings, however, is caught in the web of those tensions and the
instabilities that emerge from them. And the character of the tensions
themselves can be identied. That character can be captured in words
that possess conceptual stability, words like Oedipus complex and transfer.
Without conceptual stability there can be no discovery of the kind
ontology has always sought. Unless we can articulate what there is in
words that actually identify it, our discoveries slip through our con-
ceptual grasp. We are left with chaos, with a realm that dees our
understanding, that resists our attempt to say what there is and to say
what it is like. There is no identity here, because what there is cannot
be identied in a way that allows us to engage in ontology.
In their different ways, Nietzsche and Sartre and Foucault and
Derrida argue that there are no ontological identities to be discov-
ered, because what looks like a stable identity is not. Particular identi-
ties have become sedimented in our philosophical views not because
they reect the ways things really are but because our history or our
fears or our language has placed them there. Ontology, far from be-
ing an engagement with what is, denies the shifting character of reality
or the porous quality of our language. Since it is a project of discov-
ery, ontology requires identity; because it does so it is a philosophical
failure.
According to Deleuze, the failure of ontology to discover identi-
able entities does not spell the end of ontology, the death of philoso-
phy as some writers wouldhave it. This failure is, infact, the beginning
of ontology. We can engage in ontology, the only kind of ontology
worthdoing ontology that responds tothe questionof howone might
live when we cease to see it as a project of identity. We begin ontology
when we abandon the search for conceptual stability and begin to
see what there is in terms of difference rather than identity: differ-
ence is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing.
7
To see being as difference is at once to refuse to philosophize in
terms of identities and to jettison the project of ontology as discovery.
It is not, however, to resort to ction. The abandonment of discovery
is not an announcement that philosophy has given the eld over to
novel writing. We need not posit two stable concepts discovery and
creation andconclude that since philosophy is not solely the rst then
it is nothing more than the second. Just as ction writers are con-
strainedby the characters they create, by the situations those characters
nd themselves in, and by the ow of the narrative itself, philosophy
is constrained, but in different ways.
What is philosophy? It is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricat-
ing concepts.
8
Aconcept is not a ction, but neither is it a discovery. A
concept is a way of addressing the difference that lies beneaththe iden-
tities we experience. It is a way of articulating the hidden virtual reality
out of which the actually experienced reality emerges. In Deleuzes
hands, philosophy does not seek to offer a coherent framework from
within which we can see ourselves and our world whole. It does not put
everything in its place. It does not tell us who we are or what we ought
to do. Philosophy does not settle things. It disturbs them. Philosophy
disturbs by moving beneath the stable world of identities to a world of
difference that at once produces those identities and shows themto be
little more than the froth of what there is. And it does this by creating
concepts. Concepts reach beneath the identities our world presents to
us in order to touch upon the world of difference that both constitutes
and disrupts those identities.
A concept does not stand alone. It links up with other concepts,
coexists with them on a plane of immanence that allows different
concepts to resonate together in a multitude of ways. It is the plane
that secures conceptual linkages withever increasing connections, and
it is concepts that secure the populating of the plane on an always
renewed and variable curve.
9
Together, concepts and the plane of
7
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 57.
8
Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 2.
9
20 Gilles Deleuze
immanence give voice to the difference that is behind everything and
behind which there is nothing.
How is this possible? How can a concept capture something that
is not an identity but instead lies beneath it and within it? Although
we have yet only begun to approach the difference Deleuze speaks of,
we can already recognize that it cannot be given an identity. Differ-
ence is not identied. What is the relationship between a concept or
a philosophical perspective consisting in concepts on a plane and the
difference it articulates? In traditional ontology, concepts identify what
there is. What can a concept do with that which cannot be identied?
Concepts do not identify difference, they palpate it. When doctors
seek to understand a lesion they cannot see, they palpate the body.
They create a zone of touch where the sense of the lesion can emerge
without its being directly experienced. They use their ngers to cre-
ate an understanding where direct identication is impossible. This
sense or understanding is not an emotional one. It is not an effect.
(For Deleuze, art is the realm of effects; philosophy is the realm of
concepts.) We might say that palpation gives voice to the lesion. It
allows the lesion to speak: not in its own words, for it has none, but in
a voice that will at least not be confused with something it is not.
Palpation is not a traditional philosophical activity. It does not seek
to comprehend, if by comprehension we mean bringing within our
intellectual control. Traditional ontology would like to match its con-
cepts to what there is, to map what there is by means of concepts that
are adequate to it. Adequacy requires truth, conceptual stability, and
in the end identity. But if it is difference rather than identity we seek,
and the interesting and remarkable rather than the true, then it is
palpation rather than comprehension we require.
If a doctor palpates something that cannot be directly perceived,
philosophy palpates something that cannot be directly compre-
hended. It palpates something that eludes our theoretical grasp, some-
thing that as we will see in a moment eludes our knowledge.
Concepts palpate difference, and by doing so they give voice to it.
It is a strange voice, eerie and perturbing. It is not the voice of the pop
singer or the news anchor. Nor is it the voice of the legislator or the
professor. The voice of difference arises from a place that is at once
distant and intimate, that is both of us and not of us. And the creation
of concepts, which in Deleuzes view is the only signicant endeavor
in which philosophy can engage, seeks to palpate and give voice to
this difference that disrupts all projects of identication. Philosophy is
ontology; it speaks of what there is. But what there is cannot be identi-
ed. Or better, what can be identied is only a single manifestation, a
single actualization, of what there is. What there is is difference: a dif-
ference that is not simply the distinction between two identities (which
would subordinate difference to identity) or the negation of one of
them (which would think of difference only negatively). What there
is is a difference in itself, a pure difference that forms the soil for all
identities, all distinctions, and all negations. The task of philosophy is
to create concepts for difference.
Deleuze often uses the word thought to refer to philosophy that
takes its task seriously.
10
He distinguishes thought from knowledge.
Knowledge is the recognition and understanding of identities. When
we know something we have a cognitive grasp of its identity. Most
philosophers have taken the project of philosophy to be that of knowl-
edge. Philosophers in the analytic tradition have surely done so. In
modeling their work on that of the sciences or mathematics, they have
sought to gain knowledge in areas not traditionally associated with
those elds, for instance in the nature of knowledge or of language.
(However, as Deleuze argues, there are surprises that both mathemat-
ics and science hold in store for those who see them as exemplary
elds of knowledge. It will be seen in Chapter 3 of this book that there
is more of what Deleuze calls thought going on in them than is often
realized.) Thought, by contrast, does not identify and so does not give
us knowledge. It moves beyond what is known to the difference be-
neath, behind, and within it. And, since difference outruns thought,
thought can only palpate a difference that lies beyond its grasp. There
is always more to think. There is always more philosophy to be done.
Does this mean that philosophy, when it is done properly as thought
rather than as knowledge, offers us ctions? Does knowledge concern
itself with discovery, and thought (in Deleuzes sense) with creation?
Have we not returned to the distinction we were just trying to erase
between what can be found and what is made up?
We do so only if we must believe that difference is a ction. But
we are not forced to believe that. Difference is no more a creation
10
See, for example, his pages onthinking inMichel Foucault inhis Foucault, pp. 11619.
22 Gilles Deleuze
than it is a discovery. Concepts of difference are not like ctional
characters. They do not ask us to suspend belief. But neither do they
ask us to believe. Assent or denial are not the responses concepts seek.
Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth.
Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that
determine success or failure.
11
The destiny of philosophical concepts
and philosophical positions lie not with the truth or falsity of their
claims but with the vistas for thinking and living they open up for us.
If knowledge seeks to answer the question, What can we know that we
did not know before? philosophy is motivated by a different query:
How can we see what we did not see before?
How? is not simply a what, since what we see and how we see it are,
in philosophy, inseparable. Philosophical concepts and the philosoph-
ical views upon which they are built offer us not merely something to
be seen difference but also a way of seeing it. That way of doing
philosophy is not interested in whether what is seen really exists: Is
there difference, really? Nor does it, like ction, assume that there is
no such thing as difference, really, but that if we make it up we can
create new and interesting worlds. Philosophy is not inspired by truth,
but it is not inspired by ction either. Instead, philosophy creates a way
of seeing this world in which we live that disturbs the verities we are
presented with, that opens up new ways of seeing and of conceiving
this world that, rather than true or false, are interesting, remarkable,
or important. Thinking, Deleuze writes of Nietzsche, would then
mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life.
12
Deleuze remarks in one of his books that Every time someone puts
an objection to me, I want to say: OK, OK, lets go on to something
else.
13
This is not because he does not want to be faced with any
shortcomings his work might have; it is because philosophy, as he does
it, is not about argument. It is not about seeking the truth beneath di-
vergent opinions. Philosophy is about ontology, and ontology is about
concepts of difference, and concepts of difference are not seeking to
articulate a truth; they are creating a perspective onwhat there is. What
motivates this perspective is the question of how one might live.
11
12
Deleuze Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 101.
13
Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 1.
Foucault and Derrida teach us that if we think of our lives solely
in terms of what appears to us, and if we think of what appears to
us as exhausting our possibilities, we are already hedged in, already
committed to conformism. Their response is to say that we ought to
stopthinking interms of ontology, at least inthe analytic sense, because
ontology teaches us that what appears to us is natural and inevitable.
Things cannot be otherwise. Deleuze agrees with their diagnosis, but
not with their cure. If the question is how might one live, the way to
approach it is with another ontology, one that offers possibilities as yet
undreamed of, one whose soil is far richer than those plants to which
it has yet given rise.
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. We might not want to think of the question that way at all. There
are several ways to interpret what is being asked with the question of
how might one live. That it is a question addressing the creation of
human lives is only one of those interpretations. Deleuze is interested
in at least two others.
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?
What is being asked for here is not so much an accounting of our
future possibilities as a perspective on what it is to be alive. To be
sure, our future possibilities are not divorced from what our living
consists in. What worries the thinkers we have discussed is precisely
that a narrow view of what living consists in needlessly constrains our
conception of future possibilities. The two are related. But they are
not the same question. In approaching ontology, Deleuze directs his
attention far more to the question of what living might consist in than
to the question of our future possibilities. It is our future possibilities
that everywhere concern him. But he addresses them by offering an
ontology adequate to them. He tells us what our living consists in
in order that each of us might better ask ourselves about our future
possibilities.
24 Gilles Deleuze
To ask what living consists in, as an ontological matter, is not the
same thing as asking about it as a biological one. The answer will not
be given in terms of carbon; it will be given in terms of difference. For
Deleuze, living consists indifference andits actualization. Difference is
not a thing, it is a process. It unfolds or better, it is an unfolding (and
a folding, and a refolding). It is alive. Not with cells or with respiration,
but with vitality. To ask what living consists in is to ask about this vitality
at the heart of things.
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 thana person. It canbe 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. Deleuze tries to pry us away
from humanism by focusing on a difference that need not be human
difference and a one that need not be a person. I can be the one who
lives, but so can my hand or my relationship with my wife or the way
my body navigates through a crowded room.
There is no reason to privilege the life of the subject above other
lives. Nor is there any reason to reject it. It is one perspective on dif-
ference, one way of getting a conceptual hold of it. There are others,
neither more nor less adequate. Or, rather their adequacy depends on
how they contribute to living. The mistake all along was to believe that
there was only one, and that it was the human one.
The question of how one might live, then, is not simply a question
of how a human being might go about creating his or her future. It is
that, too. But it is not merely that. As a questionof ontology, it concerns
the creation of concepts of difference that allow us to consider living
at different levels. Among these levels we may nd a variety of under-
standings of ourselves, and this variety of understandings may open
up a variety of futures to be lived. This multiplicity and diffusion of
concepts and perspectives is not a difculty for Deleuzes philosophy.
It is the point.
The philosopher John Rajchman may have put it best: In a modern
world of stupefying banality, routine, clich e, mechanical reproduction
or automatism, the problem is to extract a singular image, a vital,
multiple way of thinking and saying, not a substitute theology.
14
In
Chapter 5 we will return to this. But it can already be glimpsed
that Deleuzes ontology does not give us a prescription for living. In
approaching the question of how one might live, Deleuze does not
offer us a simple formula: Live thus. If his ontology is concerned with
difference, then the future must be concerned with experimentation.
We can discover our possibilities my possibilities, but also the possi-
bilities of my hand, my relationships, the groups in which I participate,
the style of an artistic movement by probing difference, seeing what
new foldings, unfoldings, and refoldings it is capable of. This is how
it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the
opportunities it offers, nd an advantageous place on it, nd potential
movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of ight, experience
them, produce ow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums
of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all
times.
15
We need not conform. Indeed, if our lives are to be interesting ones,
capable of newfeelings, newpleasures, newthoughts and experiences,
we must not conform. Deleuze offers us a radically different way to
approach living, and an attractive one, as long as we are willing to ask
anew what it is to be us and what it is to be living. As long as we are
willing to accept that ontology does not offer answers but rather ways
to approach the question of living. As long as we turn to his work not
to settle old questions or old scores but instead to become unsettled.
In short, as long as we are willing to do philosophy.
14
Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, p. 125.
15
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 161.
2
Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche
The Holy Trinity
I
Deleuze and Guattari write, Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers, and
the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance
themselves or draw near this mystery.
1
If Spinoza is the Christ among
Deleuzes philosophers, then Bergson is the Father, and Nietzsche
the Holy Ghost. Spinoza offers us immanence, difference made esh.
Bergson offers us the temporality of duration, without which imma-
nence cannot be born. And the spirit of Nietzsche, of the active and
the creative afrmation of difference without recoupment into some
form of identity, pervades the entire project.
Deleuze writes of other thinkers. There are books on Hume,
Kant, Proust, Sacher-Masoch, Kafka, Foucault, and Leibniz. There
are appeals to Lucretius, Scotus, and Heidegger, allusions to Melville,
Henry Miller, Michel Tournier, Pierre Klossowski, Joyce, and scientic
references to Monod and Prigogine. But in the end, there are three
who stand above the others. It is they who provide the motivation and
the framework for the ontologies Deleuze constructs over the course
of his many writings. Immanence, duration, afrmation: Spinoza,
Bergson, Nietzsche. These are the parameters of an ontology of
difference.
1
26
Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche 27
II
Immanence is the rst requirement of an ontology of difference.
Philosophy cannot admit transcendence without lapsing into inade-
quate concepts, concepts of identity, concepts that ultimately lead us
to conformism. We must draw up a list of . . . illusions and take their
measure, just as Nietzsche, following Spinoza, listed the four great
errors. But the list is innite. First of all there is the illusion of transcen-
dence, which, perhaps, comes before all the others.
2
Transcendence freezes living, makes it coagulate and lose its ow;
it seeks to capture the vital difference that outruns all thought and
submit it to the judgment of a single perspective, a perspective that
stands outside difference and gathers it into manageable categories.
Transcendence substitutes knowledge for thought.
That which transcends stands outside or above. It is beyond. The
God of the Judeo-Christiantraditionis the primary example. God tran-
scends. He transcends the world, but also transcends human experi-
ence. He is beyond anything we can conceive of him. (This transcen-
dence, it seems, does not preclude Godfromgiving special messages to
his self-elected representatives about what he wants, but that is another
matter a matter of politics.) In the history of philosophy, a history
dominated by the motif of transcendence, it is the transcendence of
God that forms the longest legacy. But it is not the only one.
Before there is God there are the Platonic Forms. The Forms stand
outside human experience; they transcend the world, not only the
experienced world but the world itself. (Difference, it turns out, tran-
scends the experienced world but does not transcend the world itself. It
is transcendent to our knowledge, but not to that which gives knowl-
edge.) The role of the philosopher is to seek to understand the Forms.
The philosopher seeks cognitive participation in them, wanting to
grasp intellectually their nature and, ultimately, to mold the world in
their likeness. The latter task belongs to the philosopher king: to apply
the lessons of transcendence to this world. Philosophers are required
as rulers for a just society because there is a transcendence to be un-
derstood and learned from. That is the lesson of the allegory of the
cave in Platos Republic.
2
28 Gilles Deleuze
Before the philosophers role becomes that of understanding the
transcending God and our relationship to that God, then, it is to un-
derstand the transcending Forms and our participation in them. And
after God there is human subjectivity.
Human subjectivity does not immediately replace God. Descartes
ambivalence between the power of the cogito and the power of God
reects the difcult birthof the humansubject. Descartes doubts every-
thing that can be doubted, leaving intact only the human subject that
doubts. But the subject is not yet capable of constructing a world; that
moment awaits the arrival of Berkeley and then Kant. For Descartes,
the human subject requires assistance, an assistance that can be pro-
vided only by God. So the seeds of God are built into the subjectivity to
which doubt has reduced Descartes, but Gods being also transcends
that subjectivity. Epistemologically, the human subject is rst: it is the
seat of knowledge. Ontologically, however, the subject follows in Gods
wake, since God both grants and guarantees the experience of the
subject.
This is a dual transcendence, of subjectivity from the world and
of God from both the subject and the world. The rst transcendence
gives birth to the mind-body problem: if the mind transcends the body,
then what is their relationship? The second transcendence carries on
the ancient and medieval tradition of the transcendence of God.
In time, the rst transcendence displaces the second one. The hu-
man subject transcends the material world, constituting it and giving
it form. From Kant to Sartre, philosophy is in thrall to a human sub-
jectivity that abandons God not by overthrowing transcendence but
by gradually usurping Gods place in it. The primacy of the human
subject is not a turn to immanence, not an immersion in the world,
but transcendence carried on by other means.
A philosophy of transcendence, whether of Forms or of God or
of the human subject, requires two commitments and is haunted by
a single question. The rst commitment is to the existence of two
ontological substances, twotypes of being. If Godtranscends the world,
it cannot be made of the same substance as the world. The worlds
substance is nite, changeable, even at its best intellectually limited.
Godis innite, unchanging, andomniscient. If it were otherwise, there
would be no sense to the idea of Gods transcendence. God might be
elsewhere in space and time, but he would not be beyond.
So it is with human subjectivity. There is a material world and a
mental one. The material world is physical, spatially limited, inert.
The mental world is less limited (although more limited than God),
active, and constituting of the material world. This does not mean
that the mental world actually creates the material world. Constitution
does not imply creation. It is not as though there were only mental
substance and then, by some miracle, physical substance was created
from it. What is created is not the material but the world. The what
it is of the material world, its character, is constituted by the mental
world, wovenfromthe material worlds inert threads into a meaningful
complex. It is only a mind that can make a world. Without it there is
simply silence.
Transcendence requires the existence of at least two ontological
substances. That is its rst commitment. It also requires that one of
those substances be superior to the other. Superior in power, and
superior in value as well. The Forms, God, and the human subject
are all superior to the worlds they transcend. The Forms constitute
the true nature of the degraded copies that are found in the world.
Deleuze writes of Platos thought that The foundation [the Forms]
is that which possesses something in a primary way; it relinquishes
it to be participated in, giving it to the suitor, who possesses only
secondarily and insofar as he has been able to pass the test of the
foundation.
3
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and all good. There would be no
problem of evil were God not superior to the world he creates and
sustains.
The human subject creates a world from the inert material it is
presented with. If God said, Let there be light, and there was light,
then without the human subject it would not be light. It would just
be there, without name or form, performing no function except to
sustain a mute world of animality.
In each case the Forms, God, the human subject the constitut-
ing power is valued more highly than that which it constitutes. The
superior power is not a foreign occupying force, colonizing the world
it transcends. It is not an invader, unwanted, corrupting an original
purity. If anything it is the opposite. The transcending power brings
3
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 255.
30 Gilles Deleuze
the transcended world into full ower, liberating it from the prison
of its incapacity, its impotence. Transcendence does not corrupt; it
completes. It offers signicance to a substance that would otherwise
be nothing more than a wound in space and time. That is why it is a
moral duty to seek the Forms or to follow God, why it is that human
subjectivity is the highest form of (nite) being.
All of this follows from the commitment to transcendence. It does
not follow as a matter of pure logic. It is not contradictory to say that
the transcending substance is of the same type as the transcended
substance, or that it is not superior. Rather, it follows as a matter of the
role of transcendence in the history of philosophy.
The rst commitment is simply understood. If there were two sub-
stances of the same type then they would either interact and become
one substance or they would not interact and would instead form two
separate universes. But for philosophy there has only been one uni-
verse to be explained: our universe. So if there are two substances, one
transcending the other, they must be different in character. However,
although different in character, the two substances must interact. If
they did not interact, once again there would be two different uni-
verses. The two universes would be universes of different substances
rather than the same substance. But they would nevertheless be two
universes.
In order for there to be transcendence, then, in a universe that
we recognize as our own, there must be two different interacting sub-
stances.
Regarding the second commitment, it is hardly a logical require-
ment that the interaction between the two substances privilege one of
them, either in power or in value. One can imagine a transcendence
where both substances were equal. However, the point of transcen-
dence has always been to reach beyond this world. Why reach beyond
it if what is to be grasped is not superior in power or value to what is
already here? Nietzsche understood this as the ascetic undercurrent
of much of human history, especially religious history. The idea at
issue in this struggle is the value which the ascetic priests ascribe to our
life: they juxtapose this life (along with what belongs to it, nature,
world, the whole sphere of becoming and the ephemeral) to a com-
pletely different form of existence, which it opposes and excludes,
unless it somehow turns itself against itself, denies itself.
4
What tran-
scends must be superior to what exists before us, or else there would
be no point in our seeking it.
This is as true of human subjectivity as it is of God or the Forms.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, subjectivity is bound to the spirit,
which resists the temptations of the esh. And even when it pries itself
apart from its moorings in religion, the human subject as active and
constituting takes on the powers formerly associated with God.
With these last considerations we can begin to glimpse the role of
transcendence. It is to allow the universe to be explained in such a
way as to privilege one substance at the expense of another, to pre-
serve the superiority of certain characteristics and to denigrate others.
What is to be recognized as superior is not of this world: the in-
nite, the nonphysical, the unlimited, and the unity of a self-identity.
But what is of more moment for Deleuzes thought is what is to be
denigrated: the physical, the chaotic, that which resists identity. Only
that which submits to participation in the identity of the Forms, or that
which follows the narrow dictates of God, or that which conforms to
the conceptual categories of human thought is to be admitted into the
arena of the acceptable. Physicality, chaos, difference that cannot be
subsumed into categories of identity: all these must deny themselves
if they would seek to be recognized in the privileged company of the
superior substance.
The commitments of transcendence, to two substances and to a
privileging of one of them, lead us to the questions all philosophies of
transcendence must face. How does the interaction between the two
substances occur? If there are two substances of different types, what
is the means of communication between the two?
It is a question without an obvious answer. Those who have held
the mind to be distinct from the human body have been challenged
to discover the means of their interaction. Descartes answer was that
they interacted in the pineal gland.
5
But this is not an answer. It is only
geography. It tells us where the interaction takes place. What we need
to know, however, is how it happens.
4
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 96.
5
See further, Descartes, The Passions of the Soul.
32 Gilles Deleuze
III
How does the participation by physical substances in the forms occur?
How does God relate to his creatures? How do mental thoughts create
movements in the body?
Deleuze does not worry about these questions. He does not like
to argue. He does not like to harp on weaknesses in a philosophers
work. He would rather change the subject. Every time someone puts an
objection to me I want to say: OK, OK, lets go on to something else. When
he discusses Plato, he is not concerned that there may be a difculty in
accounting for the participation in the Forms. Instead, he is fascinated
by something else: that it is Plato himself who offers a way to undercut
transcendence. Platos concern is to distinguish the real copies of a
given form from the pretenders, the simulacra. He wants to discover
those copies that are worthy of participation, those that possess an
actual resemblance totheir proper Form, andsomust distinguishthem
from those copies that merely pretend to resemble but in actuality are
different from it. He must distinguish the real participants from the
false pretenders. It is with the concept of the simulacrum that Plato
himself begins to point the way out of Platonic transcendence. Plato
discovers, in the ash of an instant, that the simulacrum is not simply
a false copy, but that it places in question the very notations of copy
and model. . . . Was it not Plato himself who pointed out the direction
for the reversal of Platonism?
6
Deleuze is also not concerned about the conceptual difculties of
the relationship between God and his creatures or the mind and the
body. Spinoza is. His major arguments at the outset of the rst part of
the Ethics aim at refuting the claim that there can be more than one
substance, in order to be able to conclude in proposition 14: There can
be, or be conceived, no other substance but God.
7
His major arguments in
the beginning of the second part of Ethics aimat refuting the ontologi-
cal distinction between mind and body, in order to be able to conclude
in proposition 7: The order and connection of ideas is the same as the or-
der and connection of things, with its scholium, thinking substance and
extended substance are one and the same substance, comprehended
6
7
Spinoza, The Ethics and Selected Letters, p. 39.
now under this attribute, now under that.
8
What concerns Deleuze
is not what Spinoza criticizes but the model of immanence he con-
structs in its stead. It is not that Spinoza has detailed the difculties
of transcendence that fascinates Deleuze. Rather, it is that Spinoza
has successfully changed the subject, gone on to something else. He
has done so by employing a concept that allows thinking to abandon
transcendence: the concept of expression.
In Spinozas time the concepts of substance, attributes, and modes
are the standard fare of philosophy. Attributes are the characteristics
or essences of substance, modes their concrete appearance in reality.
An attribute of mental substance is that it thinks; a mode is a spe-
cic thought. An attribute of physical substance is that it is extended.
My body is one of its modes. Gods attributes are omniscience, om-
nipotence, etc.: it has no modes. The relationship between substance
and mode, particularly the divine substance of God, is one of either
creation or emanation.
In creation, God exercises his omnipotence in order to put some-
thing in place that did not exist before. The Genesis story of the cre-
ation of the physical universe is usually interpreted in this way. There
was nothing but God, until God brought the universe into being. The
usual way of thinking about the relationship between what exists and
God is along the lines of creation. Emanation is like creation in that
there remains a distinction between the creator and the created. The
difference is that what is created comes from the substance of the cre-
ator, emanates fromit. If I were an artist who was able not only to mold
the material before me but also to will the very material to appear, I
would be engaging in creation. If my art were instead torn from my
esh, I would be engaged in emanation.
Deleuze points out that emanation, unlike creation, has an afn-
ity with expression: they produce while remaining in themselves.
9
Both
emanation and expression see substance as being of a single type,
since what appears in the creation is of the same stuff as the cre-
ator. But the similarity ends there. In emanation, what is created is
distinct from the creator. Moreover, the creator remains privileged
in regard to its creation. Emanation thus serves as the principle
8
Spinoza, The Ethics and Selected Letters, pp. 667.
9
34 Gilles Deleuze
of a universe rendered hierarchical . . . each term is as it were the
image of the superior term that precedes it, and is dened by the
degree of distance that separates it from the rst cause or the rst
principle.
10
Emanation, like creation, preserves the two commitments of a phi-
losophy of transcendence: the existence of two substances and the
superiority of one of those substances: the themes of creation or
emanation cannot do without a minimal transcendence, which bars
expressionism from proceeding all the way to the immanence it im-
plies.
11
The difference between expressionism in the quoted pas-
sage and expressionism as Deleuze intends it lies in the turn toward
immanence.
That both creation and emanation retain a commitment to tran-
scendence is no accident. There is a religious necessity pushing on-
tology into the arms of transcendence. Without transcendence, what
do we make of God? In what sense is God superior to the creatures of
this world, if not by being beyond them? God cannot compel us, cannot
command our devotion, unless he transcends the boundaries of our
world. Just as for Plato the Forms take their aura of superiority in being
beyond the world of shadows that we inhabit, for the Judeo-Christian
tradition God nds his luster in transcending the parameters of our
universe. Spinoza is a heretic, but his heresy lies not in pantheism but
in the denial of transcendence and in the construction of an ontol-
ogy of immanence. It was for this that the Christ of philosophers was
crucied.
What is an ontology of immanence? Its rst requirement is the uni-
vocity of being: expressive immanence cannot be sustained unless it
is accompanied by a thoroughgoing conception of univocity, a thor-
oughgoing afrmation of univocal Being.
12
The substance of being
is one and indivisible. There are no distinctions to be made into dif-
ferent substances, different layers of substance, different types of sub-
stance, or different levels of substance. All hierarchy and division is
banished from ontology. The term being (or Being) is said in one
and the same sense of everything of which it is said. Without univocity,
10
11
12
transcendence will inevitably return to haunt the construction of any
ontology.
Emanation is an example of the haunting of ontology by transcen-
dence. One starts with a single substance, God. He is univocal. There
are no distinctions among its substance. One can imagine that it could
emanate itself and yet remain univocal. That would be expression-
ism. In the medieval tradition in which the concept of emanation
arises, however, that is not what happens. In order to preserve the
transcendence of God, emanation introduces the twofold distinction
into substance: God is different from what is emanated, and higher.
No matter how close the created comes to the creator, there must re-
main an ontological gap between them, a distance that allows for the
superiority of the creator because of its transcendence.
It is only through the denial of that ontological gap, through the
rigorous commitment to the univocity of being, that an ontology of
immanence can be created. The signicance of Spinozism seems to
me to be this: it asserts immanence as a principle and frees expression
from any subordination to emanative or exemplary causality. . . . And
such a result can be obtained only within a perspective of univocity.
13
The univocity of being threatens the Judeo-Christian conception
of God by maintaining the equality of all being. For Deleuze, this is
good news. If there is no longer a transcending God whose dictates
we must follow or whose substance we must seek in our own lives to
resemble, if there is no longer a transcending Other that can lay claim
upon our faith or our behavior, then the door is open to an ontology of
difference. Whatever our relation to the Spinozist God might be, it will
not be articulated in terms of following or subordinating or resembling.
These concepts imply an identity to which our actions, thoughts, and
beliefs must return rather than a difference that can give them play,
draw them farther aeld of themselves.
But the univocity of being leads to its own philosophical puzzle. If
all being is one, if there are no distinctions between levels or types or
layers of being, thenhoware we tounderstandthe distinctions between
substance, attribute, and mode? If being is univocal, then what marks
the difference between an attribute and the substance of which it is an
attribute, the mode and the attribute it modies?
13
36 Gilles Deleuze
This puzzle threatens to undo the opening onto difference that the
denial of transcendence was meant to offer us. If all being is univo-
cal, if there are no distinctions to be drawn among types of being, if
we deny not merely the hierarchy of substances but the internal dis-
tinctions among types of substance, then we seem to be left with a
self-subsistent identity, one that does not give us difference but denies
the very possibility of difference. Does the univocity of being lead us
here?
What is required in order to solve this puzzle is a concept that
allows for differences between and among attributes and modes with-
out retreating to an ontology of transcendence. What is required is
the concept of expression. Substance expresses itself in attributes, of
which thought and extension are the only two accessible to human
consciousness. Attributes, in turn, express themselves in the modes
that are expressions or modications of those attributes.
Deleuze writes,
Attributes are for Spinoza dynamic and active forms. And here at once we
have what seems essential: attributes are no longer attributed, but they are in
some sense attributive. . . . As long as we conceive the attribute as something
attributed, we thereby conceive a substance of the same species or genus; such
a substance . . . is dependent on the goodwill of a transcendent God. . . On the
other hand, as soon as we posit the attribute as attributive we conceive it as
attributing its essence to something that remains identical for all attributes,
that is, to necessarily existing substance.
14
Attributes are dynamic and active forms that attribute their
essences to substance. They are active expressions of substance. If
substance (or, as Spinoza has it, God, or substance) is expressive,
it expresses itself in attributes, which are then not things that emanate
from substance, but are instead substance expressing itself. What do
[attributes] attribute, what do they express? Each attribute attributes
an innite essence, that is, an unlimited quality.
15
Thought is an un-
limited quality. Extension is an unlimited quality. For Spinoza, there
are an innite number of unlimited qualities, but humans can know
only these two. Eachunlimitedquality is anessence of substance, which
14
15
is expressed through each attribute. Attributes attribute, or express,
an essence. Substance expresses itself through its attributes.
This is not a static picture of substance standing behind a set of
attributes that it has brought into existence. That would be a picture
of attributes as created by or emanating from substance. That is the
picture most of us would likely have in mind, since it is the one that
has dominated the philosophical and religious tradition. For Deleuze,
there are two differences between this picture of the relation of sub-
stance and attributes and Spinozas. First, substance is woven into the
attributes that express it. They are not separate from it. Being is univo-
cal. Second, substance is not like a thing that gives birthtoother things.
It is more like a process of expression. Substance has a temporal char-
acter. It is bound up with time. To understand this temporal character
of substance will require the introductionof Bergsons thought. But we
must already remove ourselves from the temptation to see substance
as an object or a thing if we are to grasp the Spinoza that Deleuze puts
before us.
Attributes, in their turn, express themselves in modes. Deleuze of-
ten speaks of modes as particular things, and in this he is not wrong.
However, this way of speaking may obscure the temporal character of
those things. If we think of modes as modications or even modula-
tions of attributes, we are probably closer to the rhythm of Spinozas
thought. A modulation is not a product separate from its producer. It
is a specic inection of the producer. Every time a piece of music is
played, it is a modulation of the composers score.
If modes are modulations of attributes, then they are no more di-
vorced from substance than those attributes are. Being remains uni-
vocal, although it is expressed rst in attributes and then in modes.
The difference between attributes and modes is that modes are con-
ceivable only through the attributes they express, while attributes do
not require any specic mode in order to be conceived. Attributes are
thus forms common to God, whose essence they constitute, and to modes or
creatures which imply them essentially. . . . modes are only comprehended
under these forms, while God, on the other hand, is convertible with
them.
16
A man is an expression of thought and extension, and so an
expression of those attributes and of substance. God, however, does
16
38 Gilles Deleuze
not require man. Neither do the attributes of thought or extension.
They could have expressed themselves in other ways, and often do.
Here is an analogy of expression. It is a bit simple, but may begin
to capture the point. Japanese origami is the folding of paper into dif-
ferent recognizable gures: swans, turtles, people, trees. In origami,
there is no cutting of the paper. No outside elements are introduced
into it. Everything happens as an expression of that particular piece
of paper. It is only the paper that is folded and unfolded into new ar-
rangements, those arrangements being the modes of the paper, which
is the origamis substance. The extension of the paper would be its
attribute. If we can imagine the papers being able to fold and unfold
itself, we come closer to the concept of expression. Further, we must
see each gure as part of a process, not a nished product, if we are
to grasp the temporal character of substance.
Deleuze invokes the medieval concepts of explication, involvement,
and complication in order to capture the concept of expression. To
explicate is to evolve, to involve is to implicate. . . . Expression is on the
one handanexplication, anunfolding of what expresses itself, the One
manifesting itself in the Many . . . Its multiple expression, on the other
hand involves Unity. The One remains involved in what expresses it,
imprinted in what unfolds it, immanent in whatever manifests it.
17
Folding, unfolding, refolding. Like Japanese origami. It is a con-
cept that Deleuze relies on twenty years later when he writes his book
on Leibniz. But already, in the book on Spinoza, there is a complicity
between Spinoza and Leibniz regarding the concept of expression.
To the extent that one may speak of the Anticartesianism of Leibniz
and Spinoza, such Anticartesianism is grounded in the idea of expres-
sion.
18
Folding, unfolding, refolding. Substance folds, unfolds, and refolds
itself in its attributes and its modes, to which it remains immanent. It is
always substance that, in folding and unfolding itself, remains within
those folds. Being is univocal: there is no distinction between layers,
levels, or types of being. There is no transcendence, only immanence.
The concept of complication completes the picture. It retains
the unity of the one that unfolds itself. Damascius develops the
17
18
description of this aspect of Being in which the Multiple is collected,
concentrated, comprised in the One, but in which the One also explicates
itself in the Many to great lengths. . . . All things are present to God,
who complicates them. God is present to all things, which explicate
and implicate him.
19
The One expresses itself in the Many, but does
not become lost or dispersed in the Many. It is within them; they are
within it. We may read Deleuze as saying nothing else in Difference and
Repetition when he speaks in his own voice (not through Spinoza or any
of the other gures that are the object of his earlier works): Being is
said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but
that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself.
20
Spinozas is the rst fully developed thought of immanence. Three
concepts are entwined to develop this thought: the univocity of being,
immanence, and expression. This is what makes Spinoza the Christ of
philosophers. No longer are we asked to submit ourselves to a tran-
scendent being or Being who holds sway over what we are to become.
No longer is resemblance or copying or obeying the proper mode of
living for a human being. No longer is there a beyond whose superi-
ority stands as a judgment against our world. There is only one being;
it exists within all of the forms within which it manifests itself; those
forms evolve and involve it while it, in turn, complicates them. This is
the Good News he brings us.
IV
The question of how 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 one who
might engage in those ways of living is not always a human; it is not any
natural kind, as though the universe came with a set of instructions
telling us how to divide it into specic kinds, as though there were not
a multitude of ways of dividing, of individuating, the substance of the
universe. The reasonwhy Deleuze resists individuating into specically
19
20
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 36. Although Deleuze distances himself slightly
from Spinoza here: Spinozas substance appears independent of the modes, while
the modes are dependent on substance, but as though on something other than
themselves. Substance must be said of the modes and only of the modes. p. 40.
40 Gilles Deleuze
human beings (or anything else) as a natural category, why he resists
what has come to be called humanism, is beginning to emerge.
There is only one substance, and it can modify itself in many ways.
Those ways are not copies or replicas or models of some original;
they are foldings, unfoldings, refoldings of substance. Those foldings
and unfoldings may become different from what they are. Darwin has
taught us that they likely will. We do not even know of what a body
is capable.
But there is a deeper issue. Deciding which things are the folds is
a matter for judgment; the universe does not teach us this. There is
only the ongoing process of substance. Whether it should be divided
into humans or energy or libido or material relations is a question
with no single answer because there is no single way to resolve it. To
think in terms of univocity, immanence, and expression is to reject the
division of being into natural kinds and to open up the horizon of a
thought that embraces both its temporal uidity and its resistance to
rigid classication.
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. Deleuzes Spinoza has created concepts that import the
vibrancy of life not only into organic beings but into the entirety of
the universe. By abandoning transcendence in favor of immanence
and by turning immanence into an expressive substance, Spinoza an-
imates the universe. To be is to express oneself, to express something else,
or to be expressed.
21
There is life everywhere, because everywhere there
are foldings, unfoldings, and refoldings of the only substance there
is. Indeed, substance is nothing other than those foldings, unfoldings,
and refoldings. How might one live? How might it be that living goes?
It might be that living invests the universe. It might be that the at-
tempt to restrict the idea of living to functioning organic matter is
too restrictive. Perhaps, instead of jettisoning ontology for something
more empirical or more deconstructive, we might begin to construct
and arrange concepts in a way that nds life everywhere.
But if life is everywhere, it is because expression is the way of the
universe, because the substance of the universe is not so much a
thing as a process. How does this process work? How does expression
21
occur? According to what principles does immanence fold, unfold,
and refold? Can ontology create concepts that can offer a glimpse of
the character of beings expression?
These, ultimately, are questions about time. They are questions
about the nature of time. They ask after the temporal character of
expression. It is here that the son discovers the father.
V
If Spinoza is Deleuzes 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 of immanence, if it is not to regress into a mindless sameness,
must have recourse to another concept, that of expression. We have
seen this. But expression is a temporal concept. Expression happens
temporally; for Deleuze, expression is so inseparable fromtemporality
that we might think of expression and temporality as the same thing,
seen from two different angles. What Spinoza creates with his concept
of expressionandwhat Bergsoncreates withhis concept of temporality
are a seamless weave in Deleuzes philosophical perspective.
If this is so, then temporality as Bergson conceives it must be as for-
eign to our usual conception of time as Spinozas concept of substance
is to our usual conception of God. It is.
We are familiar with the standard view of time. It is a line, innitely
divisible and innitely extended.
Time is divisible into epochs, years, months, days, hours, and sec-
onds. Those seconds are divisible, and what those seconds are divisible
into are themselves divisible. The division can proceed without end,
instants within instants. The Now that we think of as the present in-
stant is simply anideal point. It cannever be reached, because however
thinly we slice the instant of the Now, we can always slice it thinner. In
reality, there is no Now; that is simply a way of speaking.
Time is also innitely extended. However far into the past we delve,
we can always conceive an instant before that. There may have been
nothing else before the stuff that was the source of the Big Bang; but
there was time. There was the instant before the Big Bang, and the
instant before the stuff that exploded came into existence, and the
instant before that. The seconds, days, and epochs unfolded, even if
42 Gilles Deleuze
there was nothing to unfold in them, nothing else but silence. And
what goes for the past goes likewise for the future. However far into
the future we project, we can always conceive an instant after that: the
silence at the other end of time. Or better, since time has no end, the
silence at the other end of what happens in time.
Bergson calls this conception of time a spatialized conception.
It has the character of extension: a line that extends from one point
innitely remote to another point innitely distant. The instants that
occupy it, while ideal points, are each discrete fromone another. They
are like objects in space; however close they come to each other, they
never overlap. There cannot be two objects, or two instants, in the
same space and time. Time is also spatialized because it is conceived
as a container. Things happen in time. Time is exterior to those things
that happen; it marks them, each with its own moment, but is not
absorbed by them. In fact, before anything happened (if there is such
a before), there was time. After everything is done happening, there
will still be time.
We might say that time is in this way transcendent to what happens.
This conception of time is not the only one. There are others.
Among less technologically developed peoples, there is frequently a
circular view of time; history repeats itself like the seasons or the years.
For those engaged in modern life, however, the linear view is the most
common conception of time. It is useful for us. It helps arrange our
daily lives according to the variety of tasks that face us: I will spend
an hour writing today and each day at the same time until this book
is done, then I will move on to meet my other responsibilities. It co-
ordinates action among people involved in disparate activities: at ten
oclock each of us will drop our specialized task and meet together
in the conference room. It gives narrative form to lives that are often
seen as individual rather than communal projects: rst I was a medical
student, then a resident . . .
Over the course of the twentiethcentury this conceptionof time has
been challenged. First by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, then by
Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, the linear, spatialized concep-
tion of time has been replaced by a more existential view of time. Time
is not a container that exists outside the unfolding of a human life.
Rather, it is something that is livedrst andonly afterwards givenlinear
form. The latter is built upon the former, not the other way around.
In lived time there is not an equal weight according to each instant,
as there is in the linear conception. The past, present, and future have
distinct roles to play, of which the future is the dominant dimension.
Human beings are characterized by our projects, by the direction in
which we are headed, the plans that lie ahead of us. We look forward.
It is the future, then, that carries the other dimensions of time along
with it, like a comet carries its tail. This does not mean that the past has
no bearing on how the future is lived. It does. The future is often seen
by means of the orientation the past has given us. Our experiences do
not simply drop away when they are over; rather, they accrete in us,
they sediment into a thickness that orients us in some ways and not in
others. Certain futures become open to us based on our past; others
do not. Certain personal styles become ours; others do not. The past is
swept up into the future, coloring and directing it. The future is where
the past is taken up, where it has its effects.
There are those for whom the past carries more weight than the
future can bear, those who cannot move beyond their past. For them
the future is simply a continued confrontation with their past. This
is the sign of psychological illness, a lived time that does not stop
orienting itself toward the future but deforms that future in order to
make it a repetition of the past. Failed projects are still engaged in,
old wounds continue to bleed. Psychological illness is not, however, a
privilegingof the past. It is anorientationthat, as for those without such
illnesses, moves toward the future. The difference between illness and
normality is that for the former that future is weighted with unrealized
and often unrealizable projects that stem from past experience and
that continue to press the urgency of their goals.
The present is where the future and past meet, the place of their
mingling. The linear conception of time offers a certain privilege to
the present. It is the only point of time that actually exists at a certain
moment, even if its duration is too small to conceive. The present is
the model for the proper unit of time. It is the (ideal) instant that is
attached to those instants that are no longer and those that are not
yet in order to form the line that is time. For the existential view of
lived time, the present would be empty if it were not for the pull of
the future and the weight of the past that give it its character. The
present does not dene the character of future and past. It is dened
by them.
44 Gilles Deleuze
Neither the linear nor the existential conceptions of time are capa-
ble of giving birth to the ontological immanence Spinoza has offered
us. The linear conception cannot capture the process of expression. In
expression, the expressing substance remains within its expressions.
It is not disconnected from them. It is not as though at one moment
there is one thing and at another there is something else. The folds
of substance are not something other than substance; they are sub-
stance itself, in the process of its folding (unfolding, refolding). The
linear conception of time is blind to this, because it ignores the inter-
nal connection of the instants that compose it. It is more nearly akin
to creationist or emanationist models, in which something emerges
from something else. In spatializing time, in putting its instants beside
one another rather than inside them, the linear conception of time is
incapable of conceiving expression, and therefore loses all purchase
on Spinozas concept of immanence.
The existential conception of time does not do this. For Husserl,
Heidegger, and Sartre, the dimensions of time, while distinct, do not
exist at a remove from one another. The past is woven into the future;
the future carries the past with it; the present is the moment where
they are both realized. No dimension of time exists in the way that it
does without incorporating the others. One can imagine expression
nding a home in the existential conception of time. What begins in
the past expresses itself in the future by means of the present; the
future becomes an expression of the past, an expression that does not
merely repeat it, but that unfolds it, or folds it, or refolds it.
The difculty with the existential conception of time does not lie
with the concept of expression. It lies elsewhere. The existential ap-
proach emphasizes the human character of time. It is subjectively ori-
ented. What gives the future its privilege as a dimension of time is that
we humans are characterized by our projects, by the goals and aspira-
tions we place before ourselves. It is we who are dened by our futures.
To dene time in this way is to place it in service of human beings.
The existential conception of time denies the multiplicity of the
one in the question of how one might live. It freezes the one into a
humanistic model. This should not be surprising. Existentialism is a
humanistic philosophy.
22
It is not soby mistakebut by design. Deleuzes
22
It is for this reason that Heideggers later philosophy comes to reject the existential
elements of the earlier works.
philosophy is not humanistic. It does not seek to create an ontology
centered on human perceptions or the human orientation toward the
world. This does not mean that humans do not gure in his ontology.
Nor does it mean that we, as humans, do not gure in his approach
to temporality. What it means is that we cannot occupy pride of place
in that approach. We must conceive temporality in a way that both
captures the human living of time and does not subordinate all of
temporality to it. It is only to the extent that movement is grasped
as belonging to things as much as to consciousness that it ceases to
be confused with psychological duration, whose point of application
it will displace, thereby necessitating that things participate directly in
duration itself.
23
It is Henri Bergson who provides the approach Deleuze requires.
For Bergson, the human dimension of time opens out onto a wider
horizon, one that neither denies nor privileges the human dimension.
Further, this conception of time extends the concept of immanence;
it offers a way to understand how expression occurs. If expression is
temporal above all rather than spatial, then temporality itself must be
conceived temporally rather than spatially. The concept of duration
(dur ee) allows us to do that.
VI
Begin with psychological memory. I recall something that happened
to me. My lover breaks up with me one night in a college town far from
mine in the early autumn of my rst year away from home. My grand-
mother and step-grandmother, after years of hatred, pose together
for a picture at my mothers third wedding. I am dog-sledding in the
Arctic. The ice is smooth and padded with a thin layer of snow. There
are no sounds but those of the dogs kicking up a mist of akes as they
run. And I think to myself, for the rst time in many years, life is good.
These are memories. They are recollections of things that have
happened. They are not happening now but have happened in the
past. Here is how the linear conception of time sees the past in which
these things took place. It does not exist. It is no longer. Or better, it
exists not in reality but only as a memory in the present, if indeed it is
remembered. There is no past. There is only a series of presents that
23
Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 48.
46 Gilles Deleuze
become past, each yielding to another present. But how does each
present move into past? What is the connection between that which is
and that which no longer is? The present is a something that exists;
the past is a nothing. How is it that this something becomes a nothing?
How does the present pass?
The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two
elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass,
and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all
presents pass. . . . The past does not follow the present, but on the contrary, is
presupposed by it as the pure condition without which it would not pass.
24
The present passes. With this recognition, we are already beyond the
kenof the linear conceptionof time. For the linear conception, there is
only Now, and Now is only an ideal point. It can have no real thickness
because it is innitely divisible; each instant can be divided into other
instants. However small one carves the instants of time, one can always
imagine them more nely carved. And what does it mean to carve
these instants? It means that what is sliced off is separated from what
is left, that the innitely vanishing instant of time is separated from
the past by the pasts being no longer, not really there any more.
There is only an ideal point surrounded by the nothing of the past
and the nothing of the future. The present does not pass. It cannot
pass, because there is a gulf between the ideal point that is Now and
the rest that is no longer. Husserl recognizes this point. He writes
that in order for there to be a present that is lived, it must contain a
retention of the immediate past and a protention of the immediate
future, or else it would disappear into the nothing of its ideal point.
25
The living present has a thickness that extends backward into the
immediate past and forward into the immediate future.
The present passes. In order for this to happen, there must be a
past for the present to pass into. The past must exist as surely as does
the present. It does not exist in the same way as the present. Bergson
conceives it as existing ina very different way; it is a virtuality, incontrast
to the actuality of the present. (The difference between a virtuality and
an actuality will be discussed shortly.) But it must exist. Otherwise, the
24
25
Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.
present could not pass. It would just disappear. And even that would
be difcult to conceive, since what would disappear is innitely small.
Instead, we say that the present passes into the past, which exists and
which is the pure condition of the presents ability to pass.
We are still in the realm of psychology. Husserls existential concep-
tion 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 psycholog-
ical. It is ontological. There is psychological memory, to be sure. But
psychological memory points to something larger thanitself, to a wider
ontological condition that contains it. For psychological memory, the
past takes place in the present, in retention and in memory. That
present, the living present, has a thickness that the linear conception
of time cannot recognize. But it is a present nonetheless.
Ontological memory is concerned with the past itself, not simply
with its existence in the present. Strictly speaking, the psychological
is the present. Only the present is psychological; but the past is pure
ontology; pure recollection has only ontological signicance.
26
Husserls concept of retention(as well as his concept of recollection,
the act of remembering) is psychological. It belongs to the living
present of the existential conception of time. Bergsons concept of
the past is not psychological; it is the ontological source from which
psychological memory springs.
The past is not merely a psychological residue in the present. If it
were, there would be many pasts, as many as there are people, or per-
haps as many as there are psychological states of people. For Bergson
there is one past, a single past inwhichall psychological memory partic-
ipates. To understandthis past is to understandhowexpressionoccurs,
and to begin to understand the concept of difference that Nietzsche
asks us to afrm.
The past does not exist in the same way as the present does. The
present exists in actuality. We experience it directly. As the existential-
ists would say, we have phenomenological access to it. The past (not
the psychological past of individuals but the ontological past) exists
virtually. The virtual past is there; it is not nothing. It is not the past of
26
48 Gilles Deleuze
the linear conception of time. It is not an instant, or a thing. But it is
there, in a different way from the way the present is there.
Think of genetic information. Our genes store information about
us. They contribute that information in the process of our growth. But
the information itself is not in the genes in any actual way. One cannot
look at someones genes under a microscope and nd it lying there
on the slide, available to vision. As the genes unfold, the information
becomes apparent in the actual world; the person becomes what the
information formatted that person to become. But the information
itself, even though it exists, does not exist in actuality. It exists virtually
in the structure of the genes.
27
We may think of virtuality that way, as something that exists but not
in actuality. As Deleuze says, the virtual actualizes itself (the genetic
information unfolds as a person), but it is not actual.
Deleuze often cautions against a mistake that can be made in think-
ing about the virtual. The distinctionbetweenthe virtual andthe actual
is not the same as the distinction between the possible and the real.
There are two differences. First, the possible does not exist, while the
virtual does. It is real. The virtual is real in so far as it is virtual.
28
The
possible is what might become or might have become real, but as yet
has not. The virtual is already real. It does not need to have anything
added to it in order to become real.
The second difference is that the possible is a mirror of the real,
while the virtual does not mirror the actual. The possible is structured
like the real, missing only its characteristic of really existing. The pos-
sibility of my nishing the writing of this chapter today is exactly like
my nishing it today, except that it will not happen in reality. The pos-
sible is an image of the real, constructed just like it minus the reals
character of factual existence. Or, seen from the other direction, the
real is the image of the possible, with the addition that it is a real
image.
The absence of reality does not mean that the possible is inferior to
the real. It may be that the possible is superior, and that the real fails to
reach the standards it sets. The possibility of my nishing writing this
27
There is more to say about genes and virtuality, since the situation is more complex
than this paragraph indicates. The next chapter discusses genes in more detail.
28
chapter today is not inferior to my really not nishing it. But whether
superior, inferior, or neither, the possible and the real mirror each
other.
The virtual is not an image of the actual, or of anything else. It is not
like an image. It is not the actual minus the characteristic of actuality.
The past is not like the present. It is structured differently. Think of the
relation of substance to attributes and modes. Attributes and modes
unfold (fold, refold) substance, but not as copies for which substance
provides the original model. Although substance actualizes itself in
attributes and modes, its way of being as virtual is not simply a mirror
image of its way of being as actual modes.
Deleuze uses the distinction between the terms virtual/actual and
possible/real in order to distance himself from Platonic ways of think-
ing. For Plato, Forms are the original, existing things the copies. Ex-
isting things are truer realizations of forms the more they participate
in them, that is, the closer they come to resembling those Forms. The
ideas of model and copy and of resemblance carry transcendence in
their train. The model is the superior transcendent, the copy the in-
ferior existent. The copy takes its value only by resemblance to the
model. This is a denigration of existing things, the second characteris-
tic of transcendence. Deleuze rejects the denigration of existence, and
with it both the distinctions between model and copy on the one hand
and possible and real on the other. Both distinctions, by relying on the
concept of resemblance, compare what is in existence to something
outside by means of which the existence is judged.
The virtual is neither a ghost of the actual nor a transcendent that
hovers above it. It is part of the real, just as actuality is. No more and
no less. But it is not real in the same way as the actual. How does this
distinction help us to understand the ontological past and its relation
to the present? To say that the present actualizes the past is true, but
not very informative. What is the past like? What is the present like?
How do the two relate?
Bergson uses the image of an inverted cone to describe the past.
The summit of the cone intersects with the plane that is the present. If
I represent by a cone SAB, the totality of the recollections accumulated
in my memory, the base AB, situated in the past, remains motionless,
while the summit S, which indicates at all times my present, moves
forward unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches the moving plane
50 Gilles Deleuze
P of my actual representation of the universe.
29
The imagery here is
of psychological memory: my memory, my actual representation. For
Deleuze, however, Bergson is already on the ground of the ontological
past. It is not merely my past that exists like a cone in relation to
my present; it is the past. My past is a particular perspective on the
ontological past in which it participates.
Why the image of a cone? A cone is three-dimensional. Its base
extends away from its summit in a widening sweep. What do these
aspects of a cone have to do with the ontological past? There are
different layers of the past, and these layers exist as different degrees
of contraction or expansion.
The past AB coexists with the present S, but by including in itself all the
sections AB, AB, etc., that measure the degrees of a purely ideal proximity
or distance in relation to S. Each of these sections is virtual, belonging to
the being in itself of the past. Each of these sections or each of these levels
includes not particular elements of the past, but always the totality of the past.
It includes this totality at a more or less expanded or contracted level.
30
What is contraction and expansion (or relaxation, as Deleuze some-
times puts it)? It cannot be a matter of being further past, further from
the present. The more remote past is not more expanded than the re-
cent past, even though the greatest degree of contraction does occur
with the present. The totality of the past exists at each section or
level. There is only one time, the time that includes both the present
and the past, always together, always at the same time. It is this that
Bergson is after in constructing the concept of duration.
For Bergson, a greater contraction means a closer relation to a
persons behavioral involvement with the world. We tend to scatter
ourselves over AB in the measure that we detach ourselves from our
sensory and motor state to live in the life of dreams; we tend to con-
centrate ourselves in S in the measure that we attach ourselves more
rmly to the present reality, responding by motor reactions to sensory
stimulation.
31
Deleuze offers an example of contraction in discussing
sensory perception: What, in fact, is a sensation? It is the operation of
29
Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 152.
30
Deleuze, Bergonism, p. 60.
31
Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 1623.
contracting trillions of vibrations onto a receptive surface.
32
A more
contracted past is one in which the elements of the entire past are
brought closer to a particular persons engagement with the world.
But it is always the whole of the past that is contracted, not simply
the more recent past. Marcel Proust begins to capture this idea in a
passage from Remembrance of Things Past:
. . . the differences which exist between every one of our real impressions
differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much
resemblance to the reality derive probably from the following cause: the
slightest word that we have said, the most insignicant action that we have
performed at any one epoch of our life was surrounded by, and colored by the
reection of, things which logically had no connection with it and which later
have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of it
for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which here
the pink reection of the evening upon the ower-covered wall of a country
restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury;
there the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of
music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs the simplest act or
gesture remains immured as within a thousand vessels, each one of themlled
with things of a color, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one
fromanother, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of
our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams
and our thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us
the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.
33
And there is more. It is not just the entirety of my past that exists
withinme; it is the entirety of the past itself. My ownpast, my sensations,
desires, memories, joys, do not arise outside the historical context in
which I live. They arise within a legacy that is planted in me by history,
a legacy that I might perhaps change but cannot escape. To live is to
navigate the world immersed in a historically given context that is not
of ones own making. Thus my own past is a participant in, and at the
same time a perspective on, the past itself. That past exists within me,
and appears at each moment I am engaged with the world.
32
33
Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The Past Recaptured, p. 132. Compare this passage
with one from Deleuze in his book on Proust: Perhaps that is what time is: the
ultimate existence of parts, of different sizes and shapes, which cannot be adapted,
which do not develop at the same rhythm, and which the stream of style does not
sweep along at the same speed. Proust and Signs, p. 101.
52 Gilles Deleuze
It is in this engagement that the actualization of the virtual occurs.
A person, through action or memory or perception, brings the past to
bear uponthe present moment. Anactionmay bring previous learning
to bear in the discovery of a solution to a puzzle; a memory may recall,
within the present context, a past moment that one is reminded of;
a perception sees what is in front of one within the horizon of the
past that one has lived through and the legacy of ones history. In all
these cases, the past and present are mingled: the past unfolding, the
present creating and inventing.
Always, three things must be borne in mind. There is no present that
does not actualize the past. It is all of the past that is actualized at every mo-
ment. The past that is actualized exists. The actualization of the past by a
person is the psychological moment. The virtual past that is actualized
is the ontological moment. In this way a psychological unconscious,
distinct fromthe ontological unconscious, is dened. The latter corre-
sponds toa recollectionthat is pure, virtual, impassive, inactive, initself.
The former represents the movement of recollection in the course of
actualizing itself.
34
But the psychological moment and the ontological moment, while
distinct, are inseparable. Actualization is not only psychological; it is
also ontological. And the virtual is coiled in every human psyche. The
past is not a monolith, a block. It is lived in actualization, just as actu-
alization emerges from the eld of the virtual.
The temporal character of Spinozas substance is beginning tocome
into view. Substance is duration, the virtual that is always there in all of
its modes. Actualization is the modalizing of the virtual, the folding,
unfolding, and refolding of the virtual into modes. This actualization,
this modalization, is not a making of one thing into another. It is not
a creationor anemanation. It is a process inwhichsubstance expresses
itself in the course of its folding, unfolding, and refolding.
Is Spinozas substance the same as Bergsons ontological past, the
same as duration? If the issue is one of historical accuracy, of delity to
precise philosophical positions, the answer is, no. Deleuze himself re-
sists making the comparison, and for good reasons. Each philosopher
has created his own concepts to solve his own problems. The problem
of God for Spinoza is not the same problemas that of time for Bergson.
Moreover, it is not an issue of historical accuracy. It is a question of
34
constructing concepts, using what Spinoza and Bergson have given us
in order to create an ontology that can address the question of how
one might live. Deleuze sees that Spinozas immanence and Bergsons
duration can be brought together in constructing a philosophy that
allows us to see living more vitally than we had before. That is what
Deleuze seeks.
35
If the past, if duration, is always there virtually, and if it actualizes
itself in the present, then what is the past? What is its nature and
character? It is not simply what has happened. That would be the past
seen through the lens of the linear conception of time; the past as what
has gone before, the past as what is no longer. Proust gives us an indi-
cation of the nature of the past in the passage above. The impressions
of our past are surrounded and colored by . . . things which logically
hadnoconnectionwithit. Our gestures andacts are immured inves-
sels in which the surrounding elements are absolutely different one
from another. What characterizes duration is not logical connection;
nor is it relation among similar elements, nor is it identication or
imitation or resemblance. It is difference that characterizes duration:
Duration is that which differs with itself.
36
The past, duration, is characterized by a certain kind of difference,
a kind of difference that cannot be subsumed under the categories of
identity. Here is a difference that would be subsumed under categories
of identity. An ironing board and a shoe are different. They are differ-
ent because there is such a thing as an ironing board (an identity) and
a shoe (another identity), and those identities are not identical with
each other. They are different. Here difference means something like
not identical.
For some philosophers, for example G. W. F. Hegel, difference ap-
pears in the form of opposition. This is difference as seen through the
dialectic. A perception that appears immediately to me, without being
brought intolinguistic categories, is opposedtolinguistically mediated
perception (Its a chair or Its red). The immediate and mediated
35
In Dialogues, he writes, The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power
in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the repressers role: how can you
think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-sos book
about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in
thought but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this
specialism which they despise. p. 13.
36
Deleuze, La conception de la diff erence chez Bergson, p. 88 (my translation).
54 Gilles Deleuze
are opposites. Hegel sometimes says that each is the negation of the
other. In the course of the dialectic, these oppositions will need to be
mediated into a higher unity that will eliminate their opposition. The
immediate character of perception and its linguistic mediation will
need to be reconciled, their opposition overcome.
37
This is a more
sophisticated form of difference, but one that is still subsumed under
categories of identity. The identity of the immediate is opposed to the
identity of the mediated, although in the end they will both be sub-
sumed. But they will be subsumed into a higher identity that captures
them both. Difference here is still in thrall to identity.
The difference that Proust discusses is not a difference between
identities. The gestures and acts he refers to do not retain their char-
acter as identical to themselves when they become part of the past.
They dissolve and reformin different ways. There is no gesture, no act,
that can retain its particular character, that can, so to speak, be what
it is. A particular gesture loses its specic character when it changes
surroundings or comes in contact with other parts of the past. The past
then is not composed of elements that are identical to themselves, and
thus the past itself has no particular identity. One way to put that point
would be to say that it differs with itself.
Deleuze does not believe that all difference is like this. There are
differences between identities: the ironing board is different from the
shoe. There are oppositions and negations of the kind Hegel dis-
cusses. Those differences do exist; but they dont exist in duration.
They exist in the present. They are spatial rather than temporal differ-
ences. Deleuze sometimes uses the term multiplicity for difference.
He writes that there are
two types of multiplicity. One is represented by space . . . It is a multiplicity of
exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative differen-
tiation, of difference in degree; it is a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and
actual. The other type of multiplicity appears in pure duration: It is an inter-
nal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of
qualitative discrimination, or of difference in kind; it is a virtual and continuous
multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers.
38
37
This overcoming is a long and complex story in Hegels thought, and the reconcilia-
tion a subtle one. Deleuze does not want to deny this, but rather to critique the terms
in which that story is told.
38
The problem is that People have seen only differences in degree
where there are differences in kind.
39
Duration is a virtual multiplicity, a realm of difference where dif-
ferences are not between previously constituted identities but where
difference differs with itself. This virtual multiplicity, this realm of
temporal difference is as real as the realm of spatial identities and dif-
ferences that everyday experience presents us with. It is fromthe realm
of duration that the present arises, as its virtuality actualizes into spe-
cic spatial features. Thus, the Bergsonian revolution is clear: We do
not move fromthe present tothe past, fromperceptiontorecollection,
but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception.
40
What is more, duration does not only give rise to the present; it
is also of the present. Spinozas lesson must not be lost. Immanence
requires that the virtuality of duration not only actualize itself in the
present, but that it is of the very present that it actualizes. The present
the realmof space, identities, and differences between those identities
(differences in degree) does not emanate or separate itself from the
past of duration.
VII
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. In the
spatial present, things appear to have more or less xed identities. An
ironing board is nothing more than an ironing board, a shoe noth-
ing more than a shoe. 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 xed identity, a something
else, but the virtuality of difference with no identity and all measure
of potential.
39
40
56 Gilles Deleuze
This is easier to conceive if we think temporally than if we think
spatially, which is why Bergson is so important for Deleuze. Thinking
spatially, we ask ourselves: Howcananironing board be anything more
than an ironing board? The idea that there is anything more around it
or inside it seems absurd. It would be like positing a mystical horizon
or aura around or within physical objects that somehow lets them be
more than they are.
41
But if we think temporally the idea of a virtual
difference makes more sense. The present is more than simply an
ideal Now, cut off from past and future. Rather, it is a realm of spatial
presence, of relatively xed identities and of differences in degree,
suffused by a past that both contributes to those identities and helps
to undercut them, to unsettle them in ways that allow for expressions
other than the ones that appear at a given moment in experience.
Here we discover the wisdom of Spinozas use of the concept of
substance. If Deleuze is right in saying that Spinoza sometimes leans
too heavily toward the idea that substance is independent of its modes,
we must recognize on the other hand that substance is not simply
reducible to its modes. There is always more to the modes than the
modes themselves; there is the substance that is immanent to them.
And there is always more to the present than the present reveals to
us. There is the realm of virtual difference that is immanent to it. The
world both is and is not as it seems. If we think spatially, the world is as
it seems, exhausted by its identities and distinguished by differences
of degree. If we think temporally with Bergson, the world is always
more than it seems, always fraught with differences that can actualize
themselves in novel and unfamiliar ways.
Ontology is beginning to reveal itself as more than an inventory for
what philosophers have said exists. It has more to offer than a pallid
reinforcement of what presents itself to us as natural or inevitable. On-
tology is not merely a sop for conformism. This is because, for Deleuze,
ontology is not a study of what is, if by that we mean a study of the iden-
tities of things. It is a study of what is and of what unsettles it. It is a
study that creates concepts that may open out onto new lands, onto
terrains that have yet to be traveled. Nomadism, the wandering among
41
Actually, it is not quite so absurd as that, even from the standpoint of science. I have
tried to capture this point in Deleuzes treatment of science in my Deleuze, Science,
and Difference.
those lands, plays a signicant role in Deleuzes later thought. Its seeds
lie here. Foucault and Derrida are right to say that most ontologies
lead to conformism, to a blind conrmation of what we are told is
already there. But this is not because it is the fate of ontology to do
so. It is because ontology has been dominated, throughout the course
of its long history, by transcendence and spatiality. In reading Spinoza
and Bergson together, Deleuze appropriates and creates concepts that
challenge this domination. It is not transcendence and spatiality that
are the proper terms for ontological thinking; it is immanence and
temporality. Immanence and temporality remove ontology, and phi-
losophy generally, from the sad, withered task of ratifying a status quo,
which has no need of philosophy in the rst place, to the creation of
concepts that see the status quo as only one ontological arrangement
among many.
We do not even know of what a body is capable.
VIII
The coiling of difference within seemingly xed identities is the con-
sequence of the immanence of duration to the present. The past does
not trail the present, but is intimate with it. We do not move from
present to past but from past to present.
But what about the future? What is the role of the future in the
temporally oriented ontology that Deleuze is constructing? We have
seen the intimate relationship of past to present, present to past. Is
there no future here? And if there is, how are we to conceive it?
This question cannot be answered without recourse to the third
member of the Trinity: the Holy Ghost, Nietzsche.
IX
The Nietzschean spirit haunts much of twentieth-century philosophy,
particularly, but not solely, in the Continental tradition. Nietzsche is
at once angel and demon. He is the philosopher far ahead of his time,
pointing the way towardphilosophys future; he is the threat of nihilism
and relativism that any true philosophy must avoid. He is the standard
bearer for much of postWorld War II French philosophy; he is the
evidence that that philosophy is bankrupt. There is no philosophy that
58 Gilles Deleuze
does not operate in his shadow, whether to cloak itself in his darkness
or to escape it into the light.
Deleuze is no exception. He can be read as a straightforward dis-
ciple of Nietzsche. His concepts can be interpreted as extensions of
Nietzsches, from immanence to difference to nomadism. Deleuzes
anti-conformism sometimes seems, even to Deleuze, to be of a piece
with Nietzsches. Marx and Freud, Deleuze writes, perhaps, do rep-
resent the dawn of our culture, but Nietzsche is something entirely
different: the dawn of counterculture.
42
To reduce Deleuzes thought to Nietzsches would be too quick.
Nietzsche can be interpreted in many ways. Taken in a certain way, he
becomes a niche in which Deleuzes thought can be inserted. Taken
in another way, the two seem more distant. If Nietzsche has resources
that open new vistas for Deleuze, it is equally true that Deleuzes use of
Nietzschean concepts can make Nietzsche seem fresh reading. What
is most interesting about Nietzsches inuence on Deleuze is not the
question of whether Deleuzes thought should be seen as distinct from
Nietzsches, or whether Deleuzes concepts are simply reinscriptions,
but the way the spirit of Nietzsche suffuses his work. Nietzsche is
Deleuzes Holy Ghost. The two are brothers in spirit, even where they
are not philosophers of the same concepts. They are fellow travelers,
fellow nomads, even where Deleuzes own interpretation or appro-
priation of a Nietzschean concept inverts the interpretation we have
come to associate with it.
As is the case with the eternal return.
The eternal return has always been one of the most puzzling of
Nietzschean concepts. Philosophers nd it to be among the most ob-
scure to understand. This is not because its meaning is difcult, or so
it has seemed, but because its role in Nietzsches overall philosophy
is elusive. As far as its meaning goes, the eternal return is taken to be
the cycling back of the same things over the course of time. In Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustras animals taunt him with this. Behold,
we knowwhat youteach: that all things recur eternally, andwe ourselves
too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of times, and
all things with us. . . . I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with
this eagle, with this serpent not to a newlife or a better life or a similar
42
Deleuze, Nomad Thought, p. 142.
life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life . . .
43
It is a wound
to Zarathustra to know that everything, even the smallest and pettiest
of human foibles, will recur eternally. Nothing, not even the most
resentful or most petty of people, will drop out of the cycle of return.
For Deleuze, the eternal return is not as it might seem. It is not
the eternal return of the same: According to Nietzsche the eternal
return is in no sense a thought of the identical but rather a thought of
synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different . . . It is not the same
or the one which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself
the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs.
44
The eternal return is not the recurrence of the same; it is the recur-
rence of difference, of difference itself. The future will reveal itself to
be the eternal return; and in the return will be found the afrmation
of difference that is Deleuzes Nietzschean spirit.
Deleuzes denition of the eternal return is obscure. Return is the
being of that which becomes. Return is the being of becoming itself, the
being which is afrmed in becoming.
45
In traditional philosophy, being is contrasted with becoming. Be-
ing is that which endures, that which underlies, that which remains
constant. Being is the source and the foundation, xed and unchang-
ing. God is being; Nature is being; for those philosophers who resist
a Spinozist view, substance is being. On the other hand, becoming is
ephemeral, changing, inconstant, and therefore less substantial than
being. Being is real, becoming is a passing illusion.
What if things were the opposite of what they seem? What if there
were no enduring being, only becoming? What if the only thing that
is real is becoming, the changing and uid character of that which
is? Nietzsche believes this to be the case. If the world had a goal, it
must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended nal
state, this also must have been reached. If it were capable of pausing
and becoming xed, of being, if in the whole course of its becom-
ing it possessed even for a moment this capability of being, then all
becoming would long since have come to an end. . .
46
43
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 3323.
44
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 46.
45
46
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 546.
60 Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze concurs. For there is no being beyond becoming, noth-
ing beyond multiplicity; neither multiplicity nor becoming are appear-
ances or illusions. . . . Multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, es-
sential transformation and constant symptom of unity. Multiplicity is
the afrmation of unity; becoming is the afrmation of being.
47
We are already prepared for this thought. The way has been paved
by Spinoza and Bergson. 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. Du-
ration is not identity. It is difference, difference that may actualize
itself into specic identities, but that remains difference even within
those identities. There is no being here, at least not in the traditional
sense. Or, to put the point another way, if there is being, if there is
a constant, it is becoming itself: the folding and unfolding of sub-
stance, the actualization of duration. If we have a taste for paradox,
which Deleuze does, we might say that the only being is the being of
becoming.
And that being is multiplicity, difference. It is not a multiplicity
that is a Many as opposed to a One. The One duration, substance
is multiplicity itself. Multiplicity, difference, is not transcendent; it is
immanent. Multiplicity is the afrmation of unity.
And return is the being of becoming. There is only becoming, and
that becoming is the eternal return. What returns then? What is it that
recurs eternally, always coming back to face us, never left behind? If
the past actualizes itself in the present, if we move frompast to present
rather than from present to past, and if the past that actualizes itself
in the present is difference, then what recurs eternally is difference itself.
What faces us always is difference, difference in kind, difference that
has yet to be congealed into identities.
Deleuzes reasoning here is rigorous, if difcult. With Spinoza, he
says that all being is immanent, that there is no transcendence. There
is no constant identity outside our world no God, no laws of history,
no goal that dictates its character. This does not mean that nothing
exists outside our experience. What is not outside our world may still
be outside our experience. (Science has long taught us this.) But,
47
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 234.
whether it is within or outside our experience, there is no being that
is not of our world.
With Bergson, Deleuze shows that substance is temporal in char-
acter, that it is a folding and unfolding in time in which that which
folds, unfolds, and refolds is a past that is never gone. Moreover,
that past is difference itself. There are no stable identities, only
levels of contracted differences that may actualize themselves in the
present.
What is the future, then? What is it that lies before us? Unactual-
ized difference. We have already learned that if the past did not exist,
the present itself could not pass. Now we are told that The passing
moment could never pass if it were not already past and yet to come
at the same time as being present.
48
Duration is a unity, but it is
not merely a unity of past and present, as it might have seemed with
Bergson. It is a unity of past, present, and future. As a unity, each di-
mension is woven into the others. The future, the present, the past are
involved, each in the others.
The future has the character of the past. Just as the past is differ-
ence in kind, pure multiplicity, so is the future. It comes to meet us
without any pregiven identities, any persevering constants. This does
not mean that the future is empty; it means that the future is the
return of virtual difference that characterizes the past as Bergson con-
ceives it. What returns are not the identities that are actualized in the
present. What returns is the virtuality that lies behind and within those
identities.
It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being
insofar as it is afrmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some
one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is
afrmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the return does
not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of
returning for that which differs.
49
The future is not empty; indeed, it is full to overowing.
To say that the future has the character of past, then, is not to re-
call the tired clich e that history repeats itself. If that were the lesson
48
49
62 Gilles Deleuze
of the eternal return, it would have nothing to teach us. Everything
returns, yes; everything recurs. But what recurs does not do so in
the form of actualized identities but in the form of the virtual dif-
ference that constitutes those identities. The sun, the earth, the
eagle and the serpent return. Even the smallest and meanest of
emotions returns. But they do not return as the sun, the earth, the
eagle, the serpent, the smallest and meanest of emotions. They return
as the virtuality that constitutes them. The eternal return is the be-
ing of becoming, and the being of becoming is virtual difference,
multiplicity.
The past is duration; the present is actualization; the future is eter-
nal return. But within all these, constitutive of them, is difference.
Difference in kind constitutes duration. Actualized difference consti-
tutes the present. The return of difference constitutes the future.
50
To afrm the eternal return, to embrace it, is the hardest task for
Zarathustra. For to afrm it is not to say yes to the things of this world,
to will them to return just as they are, each in its place. Rather, it is to
afrm difference itself. It is to live by embracing a future that is not
characterized by the continuity of the present, nor by the repetition of
its actualizations, but by a difference that can never be brought fully
into ones grasp. The future is outside ones control, conceptually and
behaviorally. There is too much there: nothing that has to be there, so
many things that can be.
Deleuze discusses the dice throw in the third part of Nietzsches
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He says, The game has two moments which
are those of a dicethrow the dice that is thrown and the dice that
falls back. . . . The dice which are thrown once are the afrmation of
chance, the combination which they form on falling is the afrmation
of necessity.
51
What does this mean?
We face the future, which is the eternal return, the return of differ-
ence. There is nothing specic that has to be there in the future, but
so much that can be. The future is virtual difference that has not yet
actualized itself into a particular present. Anything might happen,
not simply in the pedestrian sense that we cannot predict the future,
50
Constantin Boundas details this idea, particularly with regard to the future, in
Deleuze-Bergson: An Ontology of the Virtual.
51
but also and more deeply in the sense that the future itself is pure
multiplicity. That is the throw of the dice. It is chance.
52
Then the future actualizes itself in a present, as the past does. The
return crystallizes into identities. Pure temporality becomes also spa-
tiality. We are faced with a particular situation that has emerged from
the multiplicity that has returned.
That is the combination, the dice that falls back. It is necessity. It
is necessity not because things had to happen that way. Things might
not have happened that way. There is no transcendence guiding the
present, giving form to a particular future that has to happen this way
and not others. The idea that this particular future and no other is
going to become the present is just the kind of thinking Deleuze re-
jects. It has three faults. First, it implies that the future is constituted by
particular identities, instead of being a virtual multiplicity of the kind
Bergson conceives. Second, it implies that that future exists as a possi-
bility before it becomes a reality, whereas Deleuze contrasts possibility
with virtuality. Third, it implies guidance, which seems to require tran-
scendence rather than immanence. In immanence, there is folding,
unfolding, refolding. But there is no guiding force, no invisible hand.
The termnecessity indicates that howthe future is actualizedis largely
out of the control of any particular person or group of people. Never-
theless, it appears; it is inscribed in reality. It must be lived. To be sure,
people can affect the future; we are not passive recipients of our lives.
But we do not determine their shape. We are involved in a temporality
that outstrips us, and that may constitute a present that we had not
dreamed of but cannot escape.
I study medicine and become a doctor in order to develop a cure
for cancer. Someone else discovers it before I do. Perhaps I was even
on the wrong path, not because I was sloppy but because all the clues
led me there. I will not discover the cure for cancer. That is how things
unfolded. It might not have turned out that way. The person who
discovered the cure might have been hit by a car, or been on the
wrong path just as I was, or have misread some laboratory results. But
none of these things happened, and the multiplicity of the future has
now coalesced into a particular present.
52
If the analogy were to be more rigorous, we would have to imagine the dice without
any particular numbers yet etched onto their faces.
64 Gilles Deleuze
In 1987 the Palestinians start an uprising against the occupation of
their land by Israel; in 1990 the Berlin Wall comes down; in 1991 the
United States declares war on Iraq. These events change the nature
of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. They become part of the ne-
cessity of being Palestinian. Does the Berlin Wall have to come down
at that time? Does the United States have to declare war then, or at
all? Are these events etched in the Laws of History? No. Before they
happen, they do not need to happen; nothing makes them happen.
But their occurrence makes them a necessity, a reality that could not
be controlled but cannot now be avoided.
The dice are thrown. This is the eternal return. The dice are always
thrown, at every moment, at every instant. The future is always with
us, here and now, just as the past is. A pair of dice, loaded with the
multiplicity that is duration, is thrown. The dice fall back. They show a
combination. There you have it. Those are the numbers. That is your
throw. You may get another, but it will not erase the combination that
faces you. That combination will always have happened, and will always
be part of your score. The past is always a part of every present.
How can one be a good player at this game? What distinguishes
the good from the bad players? The bad player counts on several
throws of the dice, on a great number of throws. In this way he makes
use of causality and probability to produce a combination that he
sees as desirable. He posits this combination itself as an end to be
obtained, hidden behind causality.
53
Bad players deny chance. They
seek a particular combination, and hope that the throw of the dice will
offer it tothem. Sevens, not snake eyes. There is anidentity, a particular
identity or identities, they are awaiting. They will be disappointed if
that identity does not turn up. They are working within the realm
of possibility, not virtuality. They are calculating a set of probabilities
based on possible combinations. Maybe if they just throw the dice
again. . .
But, in this way, all that will ever be obtained are more or less
probable relative numbers. That the universe has no purpose, that is
has no end to hope for any more than it has causes to be known this
is the certainty necessary to play well.
54
Good players do not count
53
54
on a particular future, do not ask to throw the dice one more time.
Good players afrm both chance and necessity. They play not for a
particular combination, but withthe knowledge that the combinations
are innite, and are not up to them.
We should not think that good players are passive. Whatever
happens; it doesnt matter. Just roll the dice. This is not the stance of
good players. Good players play, and play with abandon. But they do
not expect anything of the universe. The universe owes them nothing.
It is headed nowhere in particular and they have no role to play in it.
The universe gives what it gives. Good players do not know what it will
give, but they give themselves over to the game, in each throw. They
do not measure the combination that falls back against other combi-
nations, against the combination that they wished had fallen back, the
one that should have fallen back. They throw and play to their limit.
Without resentment or guilt about throwing the dice or the combina-
tion that falls back.
To afrm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release,
to set free what lives. To afrm is to unburden: not to load life with the weight of
higher values, but to create new values which are those of life, which make life
light and active. There is creation, properly speaking, only insofar as we can
make use of excess in order to invent new forms of life rather than separating
life from what it can do.
55
To afrmis to experiment, without any assurances about the results
of ones experimenting. It is to explore the virtual, rather than to cling
to the actual. It is to ask with ones life the question of how one might
live.
X
Nietzsche distinguishes between active and reactive forces. He is some-
times understood to distinguish between active and reactive people.
But this is a mistake. It is not that some people are active, others reac-
tive. People are conuences of forces, some active, some reactive. In a
givenperson, or a givengroup, or a givensociety, or evena givenspecies
or historical period, it is uncertain which forces will predominate, the
55
66 Gilles Deleuze
active or the reactive. Recall that when Deleuze asks how one might
live, the one is not necessarily a person. How might a group live? How
might a force live? How might an epoch live?
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. What gets created is not only up to the active
force. It also concerns the context in which that force expresses itself
and its own ability to reach its limit. The universe does not necessarily
cooperate with active forces, which means that their creativity may be
channeled in unexpected directions, or even undermined altogether.
All creativity is an experiment. One throws the dice, but does not know
what will fall back.
Active forces may also be destructive. But this is not because they
seek to destroy. In creating, there may be obstacles in the way of active
forces, impediments to their going to the limit of what they can do.
These may be destroyed by the active force, not out of hatred or malice
but out of the joy of going to the limit that active forces are engaged
in. What threaten active forces are not other active forces, which can
at best only compete with or destroy an active force. What threaten
active forces are reactive forces.
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. Reactive forces do not
overcome active forces; they undermine them. They do not create;
they stie the creativity of active forces.
Think of churches and homosexuality. Homosexuality, like hetero-
sexuality, is a force. It seeks to express itself. As active force, homosexu-
ality may seek to go to its limit: to nd new forms of sexual expression,
to express itself with many others (or on the contrary to express itself
more deeply with a single other), to ride the crest of its own power. If a
particular homosexual force is active, it does not ask itself what other
56
57
homosexual forces are doing; it does not wonder what is proper for
homosexuality; it feels no guilt or remorse or doubt. There is no point
to all that.
Nearly all churches, nearly all religions, seek to separate homosex-
ual force from what it can do. Deny it, reject it, threaten it, pity it. The
theological relation to homosexuality does not work by going to the
limit of what it can do; there is nothing it is seeking to do or to express.
It proceeds in an entirely different way. It works by inhibition. Make
the homosexual force an outcast. Introduce guilt and punishment.
Announce the threat that homosexuality poses for everything around
it. It is a relationship that is parasitical upon homosexuality. Without
it, there would be no raison d etre for an entire aspect of theological
doctrine.
There are many things for which Nietzsche criticized institutional
religion. Perhaps none is so trenchant or so profound as the recogni-
tion that institutional religion is primarily reactive. It does not operate
by allowing forces to go to the limit but by separating them from what
they can do, by mobilizing reactive forces against active ones, seeking
to render those active forces powerless, guilty, feeble, and nally re-
active. The history of institutional religions is a history of populations
that dene themselves by what they are not, that take their solace not
in what they can do but in their not being something else. You are evil,
therefore I am good.
58
Weakness parades as virtue, and active forces are
numbered among the enemy. The sick represent the greatest danger
for the healthy; it is not the strongest but the weakest who spell disaster
for the strong. Do we appreciate this?
59
People, communities, living beings, epochs these are combina-
tions of active and reactive forces. (Nietzsche thinks that in our his-
torical period it is the reactive forces that dominate.) We are com-
posed of forces that seek to go the limit of what they can do, and
forces that seek to separate those forces from what they can do.
Active forces afrm their difference. They do not see themselves
through the eyes of others, but instead go to the limit of their own
difference. They do not compare; they create. Reactive forces are
what they are only through their negation of active forces. Their
58
59
Deleuze, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 100.
68 Gilles Deleuze
identity comes not from afrming their difference, from expressing
their particular wills, but from negating the differences of the active
forces.
Good players of dice afrm active forces. They are not afraid of
them. They knowthat the dice may fail togototheir limit, andthat even
if they succeed, their effects are as yet unknown. This does not bother
them. They afrm both chance and necessity, the difference that is
both past and future and the actualization of difference. Good players
do not seek to restrict or undermine the creativity of active forces. They
leave that for the bad players, the players for whom outcomes must be
known in advance and everything arranged to bring those outcomes
under control. For the good players themselves, they are aware that
they do not even know of what a body is capable; but they are willing
to nd out.
XI
All of this is a matter of the eternal return. The eternal return is the re-
turn of difference. It is the recurrence of pure difference that Bergson
shows is the nature of duration. Good players afrmthe eternal return.
They afrm the return of difference without identity, of differences
whose actualizationintoidentities is not a matter of the continuationof
rigid forms but instead an experimentation in a world of inexhaustible
creative resources. To afrm the eternal return is to recognize a world
of virtual difference that lies beyond the particularities of our present,
to set free the active forces of creativity, to refuse to separate those
forces from what they can do. It is to recognize that the future does
not offer us guarantees of what will be there, and moreover that to
seek guarantees is to restrict our capacities, to imprison our bodies, to
stie our creative possibilities, to betray what may be the best in us for
fear that it may instead be the worst.
The eternal return teaches us that all creativity is an experiment. To
afrm our creativity is to open ourselves to the experimentation that
the future offers us rather than clinging to the illusory identity that the
present places before us. If we are capable of creativity, it is because we
are not threatened by the prospect of blazing a path to its limit across
a territory that offers no assurances, except that we cannot exhaust
its resources. Many, perhaps most in Deleuzes and Nietzsches eyes,
cannot rise to this task. But they do not write for them, but for the few
(the few people, the few forces, the few epochs) who can.
Deleuze writes of Nietzsches concept of the will to power, in con-
trast to earlier conceptions of the will: Against this fettering of the will
Nietzsche announces that willing liberates; against the suffering of the
will Nietzsche announces that the will is joyful. Against the image of a
will which dreams of having established values attributed to it Nietzsche
announces that towill is to create newvalues.
60
Liberation, joy, creation.
That is what the afrmation of difference, the embrace of the eternal
return, amounts to. Not sadness, resentment, pangs of conscience, or
self-denial, but their opposite. Nietzsches practical teaching is that
difference is happy; that multiplicity, becoming and chance are ade-
quate objects of joy by themselves and that only joy returns.
61
And
Deleuze asks, as did Nietzsche before him, are we capable of this? Or,
to put the question another way, have we the strength to ask how one
might live?
XII
Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche: Christ, the Father, the Holy Ghost. They
create the three concepts that form the tripod on which Deleuzes
own philosophy stands: immanence, duration, and the afrmation of
difference.
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
ction.
62
Being is not something other than the world we live in. It is
that world.
This does not mean that there is only what is present to us. There
is more than meets the eye. Being folds itself, unfolds itself, refolds
itself into the specic forms that constitute the world of our experi-
ence. Being, or substance, inheres in what presents itself to us, but is
60
61
62
70 Gilles Deleuze
always more than any presentation. To understand this we must think
temporally rather than spatially. Spatial thinking can give us only the
phenomenology of our world, the structure of appearances. Temporal
thinking can penetrate that world to show us what those appearances
might be made of, and how they might become different.
Temporal thinking reveals a thickness of duration, a past that is
not simply the absence of a present moment but instead a particular
kind of subsistence in the present. Past and present imply one another.
Without the present there would be nothing to pass. Without the con-
tinued existence of the past the present would not pass. There is only
one time.
The present is actuality. The past is virtuality. The past is a realm of
virtual differences that exist in the present in actualized form. Actual-
izationdoes not impoverishthe virtuality of difference, the multiplicity
of duration. Actualization does not freeze being. Rather, it gives it spe-
cic forms, specic modes, that express being without exhausting it.
The present always holds more than it seems. It is pregnant with its
past, which is also its future.
The past, duration, virtual multiplicity, does not simply trail the
present. It comes tomeet it. The past recurs. It is the eternal recurrence
of difference. Duration, whichinheres inthe present, is alsothe future.
The present is never simply the forms it presents to us. It is always
more than appears. It does not lose the multiplicity that constitutes it.
As a result, the present is not a matter of stable forms but of modes
of difference; the present has actualized itself in one way and may
actualize itself in others. We do not even know what a body is capable
of. The future, then, is not simply a continuation of the stable forms of
the present, since the present is not merely a set of stable forms. The
future is unactualized difference, both coming to meet us and already
with us.
We can allow ourselves to draw near this difference, to afrm it, to
embrace the chance that it is andthe necessity that its actualizations will
present us with. We can ask what a body is capable of, how one might
live. We can ask it not only as human beings, but as groups in action, as
products of a historical epoch or environment, as forces that interact
with other forces in relations of solidarity, domination, mutual excess.
If we ask, if we permit the question to resonate, then we are open to
the creativity of what constitutes us. We allow what is in us or what we
are or what we are a part of to seek its limit, to express itself. We do not
compare ourselves to what seems to be there now or what has gone
before; we experiment with what can be. If, alternatively, we refuse
the question, if we refuse to ask how one might live, then we will seek
comfort in established values, transcendent beings, judges of all sorts
who will take our power from us and hand it back to us in the form
of quiescence. We will not seek to discover what we are capable of but
instead seek to separate ourselves from what we might be capable of.
In the mainstream of philosophy, the project of ontology has always
been to engage in this separation of ourselves from what we might
be capable of. Only at the margins have there been gures that have
offered a different vision. Spinoza, Bergson, and Nietzsche are among
them, presenting us with concepts from which we might build a new
ontology, one that does not reinforce a tired conformism but points
the way toward a more open, vibrant conception of the world and of
living in it.
For Deleuze, to conceive living is to conceive both what is and what
might be. It is to offer an account of what it is for something to be
living and an opening onto ways to live. In an ontology worthy of the
name, the two are entwined. The world is more than we may realize.
It is rich with difference. And in this more, in this difference, in the
worlds ontological constitution, lie responses to the question of how
one might live. Or better, since the responses have not yet been for-
mulated, since they are not lying there ready-made and awaiting our
embrace, we might say that it is in asking, not only with our words but
with our lives, the question of how one might live that responses are
formed.
3
Thought, Science, and Language
I
How we think about our world and how we live in it are entwined. Our
ontology and our practical engagements are woven together. This is
true not only for philosophers. It is true for everyone. A world that
consists of particular things with strict borders that interact with other
particular things (with their strict borders) according to particular nat-
ural laws will call us to certain kinds of living. For instance, if particular
things are what they are and nothing else, then we will not waste our
time imagining what else they might be or might become. We will con-
formourselves to the possibilities presented to us by their actuality. We
will have to discover the natural laws that relate these particular things
to one another so that we do not attempt futilely to break them. We
will conform ourselves to these laws just as we conform ourselves to
the identities of the things these laws govern.
If we abandon this way of thinking of our world, then alternative
ways of living may appear to us. If things dont have strict borders of
identity and if the relations among them are not reducible to natural
laws, then we can no longer be sure of what a body is capable. Perhaps
there is more going on in our world than is presented to us. We dont
know. The only way to nd out is to experiment.
Immanence, duration, afrmation of difference. These are con-
cepts through which the world becomes strange to us again, through
which the borders between things become porous and their identities
72
Thought, Science, and Language 73
uid. To think this way requires a new ontology. But it requires more
than that. It requires that we see our old way of thinking for what it is,
that we understand its shape and its design. Deleuze calls this old way
of thinking the dogmatic image of thought.
Once we understand the dogmatic image of thought, we will be
better able to grasp the new type of thought that Deleuze offers us,
a new type of thought, with new concepts that open up new ways
of living. This new type of thought will conceive the world differ-
ently from the dogmatic image. We should not be misled by its nov-
elty, however. There are those working in the sciences who conceive
the world in ways that are not foreign to the way Deleuze conceives
it. Science may not verify Deleuzes ontology; philosophy is not the
same thing, after all, as science. Philosophy creates concepts. It is
concerned not with the truth but with the remarkable, the interest-
ing, and the important. But there are concepts and discoveries in
science that may help to illustrate the ontology Deleuze constructs.
A new type of science and a new type of philosophy converge on a
new conception of the world and the universe in which we live: a
world and a universe that may be more alive than we have been led to
think.
Our thought and our science are constructed in language. That
does not mean that they are simply devices of language, or that there
is nothing outside language that has a bearing on us. We are not alone
with our language. The perspective Deleuze constructs should have
already made that clear. The world contains more than our words can
reveal to us, not less. But if our language is not all there is, if the world
is not simply woven from our words, then neither is our language
distant from us. To understand our conceptions of the world, we must
understand the workings of the language in which those conceptions
are rendered. A reection on thought and science, in order to be
complete, requires as well a reection on language.
Thought, science, and language. If immanence, duration, and the
afrmation of difference are the concepts that we need to conceive
the world anew, then thought, science, and language are the mediums
of that new conception. We must abandon the dogmatic image of
thought for a new type of thought; we must see that thought more
clearly, in ways that science will assist us with; and we must reconsider
the language in which all that new type of thought appears.
74 Gilles Deleuze
II
What is the dogmatic image of thought? It is not the possession of a
few philosophers, ensconced in their ofces, alone with their ideas.
Nor is it a treatise to be found in a dusty library, an arcane or secret
program that has been passed down the generations in some sort of
intellectual conspiracy. The dogmatic image of thought is ours. It is
our template for conceiving the world.
Perhaps the most central element of this template is representation.
This is how it works. The world is out there, stable and serene. In order
to be conceived, it awaits our thought. Our thought represents it. That
is what thought does. It mirrors what is there, in its stability and its
serenity, in our ideas. Thought is nothing more than a representation
of the world: a re-presentation in our mind of what is presented to us once,
already, out there.
This is a simple story, and a compelling one. In ancient thought,
there were problems to overcome in making the story plausible. For
instance, how can something as big as a cow t into my mind? Now we
think of such problems as silly. This is not because we have overcome
representation as the way we think about our thought. Rather, it is
because we have been able to rene the template to accommodate
potential problems like this. It is not that a cow actually appears in
our thought. Rather, our eyes process the image: they pass that image
through the optic nerves to the brain, which stores the image and
relates it to other images of the same kind, those that fall into the
category of cow.
That is not the only way to tell the story, but the other ways are
like it, and they share something it is easy to overlook. At each point
there is stability. The image of the cow, the passing and storing of it,
the category into which it falls: all these retain the integrity of strict
borders, clearly marked boundaries. Representation, Deleuze says,
fails to capture the afrmed world of difference. Representation has
only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in conse-
quence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves
nothing.
1
1
Representationmediates everything, but mobilizes andmoves noth-
ing. We await a thought that mobilizes and moves. Deleuze will try to
offer that to us. For now we must understand how the dogmatic image
of thought mediates without moving. It does so through the stability
of presentation and representation.
At each point, what is there is what there is, and there is nothing
else. The cow is a cow and nothing else. Its image is the image of that
cow and nothing else. The category is that of cow and nothing else.
And at every point, what is passed along is what is there and nothing
else. That is how representation works. If it did not work that way, it
would not be a re-presentation. It would not present again in thought
and language what is already there in the world.
Representation is in alliance with truth, or at least a certain concep-
tionof truth. There have beenseveral conceptions of truththroughout
the history of philosophy. The most important, the one that has dug its
roots the deepest into the soil of our thought, is the correspondence
view of truth. On this view, a statement is true if it corresponds to the
state of affairs about which it is making its claim. The statement The
cow is in the meadow is true if and only if the cow being referred
to is indeed in the meadow being referred to. This seems obviously
right. After all, how could the statement The cow is in the meadow
be true if said cow was not in said meadow (and let us not even begin
to consider the possibility that there is no cow there, or that the cow
in the meadow is not really a cow but an inanimate model of a cow)?
What is obviously right, though, may be so only within the parame-
ters of a certain image of thought: the dogmatic image. Without this
image, the correspondence theory of truth does not have a foothold.
What this viewof truthrequires are all the integrities of representation:
integrities of cows and images and nerve passages and categories of
language. There can be no correspondence of two elements (the lan-
guage of the statement and the world of the cow) without each of these
having a stability that allows one to reect the other.
Let us consider, though, the possibility that what is out there in the
meadow is not simply a cow, but more than a cow. Let us consider
the possibility that cows are more than cows. And, on the other side
of the coin, perhaps thought and language are more than a set of
stable categories with appropriate functions for navigating through
76 Gilles Deleuze
them (pronouns, conjunctions, and so on). Perhaps language bleeds
internally, so that no category is as stable as it appears, or, better, that
the idea of a category does not capture what is going on in language.
It may be that there is a chaos internal to both the world and language
that undermines the stability of the dogmatic image of thought.
In that case, there would be no representation and no truth, at least
no truth as correspondence. Or, more accurately, there might be rep-
resentation and truth, but there would be more, much more, to which
a commitment to representation and truth would blind us. Conceiv-
ing that more would require something other than the dogmatic
image of thought. It would require another image, another thought.
Or, better, it would require a thought that no longer involves images:
a thought of difference.
Deleuze says that the dogmatic image of thought, thought as rep-
resentation, operates with what he calls common sense and good sense :
judgement has precisely two essential functions, and only two: distribution,
which it ensures by the partition of concepts; and hierarchization, which it
ensures by the measuring of subjects. To the former corresponds the faculty of
judgement known as common sense; to the latter the faculty known as good
sense (or rst sense). Both constitute just measure or justice as a value of
judgement. In this sense, every philosophy of categories takes judgement for
its model.
2
Deleuze does not choose the terms common sense and good sense arbi-
trarily. They have resonance for us. Common sense: that is what every-
one who can navigate their way through life with a minimumof success
possesses. To have common sense is to be able to recognize what is ob-
vious. (We will return to the idea of recognition in a bit.) Good sense:
that is what everyone with good intuitions has. To have good sense is
to know ones way around what is there. These are not the meanings
Deleuze gives to the terms; but he is aware of the connotations they
possess.
Deleuze nds common sense and good sense in all philosophies
of categories, all philosophies of representation. He nds it in Plato
and in Aristotle, in Kant and in Hegel. But common sense and good
sense are not only to be discovered among philosophers. They are our
2
heritage and our thought. The dogmatic image of thought, which is
our thought, judges by means of common sense and good sense.
In the technical meaning Deleuze ascribes to it, common sense as-
sures the harmony of different mental faculties in judgment of the
object. That cow Im seeing, and thinking, and saying: its all the
same cow. Whats out there is the thing in my mind, and its the same
thing in the different activities (perceptual, cognitive, linguistic) in my
mind. Common sense coordinates. It assures me that there is a match
between what is inside me and what is outside me, and among the var-
ious faculties inside me by means of which I approach what is outside
me. Common sense [is] dened subjectively by the supposed identity
of a Self which provided the unity and ground of all the faculties, and
objectively by the identity of whatever object served as a focus for all
the faculties.
3
That is the distribution Deleuze speaks of: different
activities, but the same object and the same subject (me) confronting
the object.
But coordination by itself is empty. There has to be some content to
be coordinated. There has to be a cowor a meadowthat is coordinated
between inside and outside and among the faculties of the inside. And
the I or the me that coordinates themhas to be a particular I or me, not
some general or universal one. That is the role that good sense plays.
Common sense must therefore point beyond itself towards another,
dynamic instance, capable of determining the indeterminate object as
this or that, and of individualising the self situated in this ensemble of
objects. This other instance is good sense.
4
Good sense gives each object its measure; it provides the categories
that common sense coordinates. Common sense assures that those
categories do not leak, that they are properly matched, one with an-
other. Good sense and common sense converge in providing stability
to thought. Good sense does differentiate among objects; it nds that
one object is not like another. But it does not do so by engaging the
difference that Nietzsche afrms. It does so by means of creating stable
categories for each. In this way, difference is subordinated to identity.
Things are different because they fall into different categories. They
are different precisely in not being identical or the same. It is on the
3
4
78 Gilles Deleuze
basis of the identity of the categories that difference is recognized.
The stability of the categories is thereby retained. The integrities of
the dogmatic image of thought are assured.
Commonsense reinforces that stability. There are different faculties
inside me, and what is outside me is different from me. But there is co-
ordination among these differences, which in the end yields identity.
Not an identity that emerges out of differences, but an identity that
is their very operation. Nothing escapes the categories or their co-
ordination. Nothing leaks out. There is nothing left over. Everything
ts.
The coordination of common sense and good sense offers us a
model of judgment as recognition. To judge is to recognize. Why is this?
To judge is to take the material of our experience and to t it into
categories that we already possess. It is to apply a category that will
assure the coordination of experience among the different faculties
(perception, cognition, language, and so on). When we make a judg-
ment, it is always through a recognition of what is there, a tting of
what is there into representational categories that we already possess.
This does not mean that judgment is always of one type. Judgement,
in Deleuzes view (borrowing from Aristotle), can be of four different
types: identity, analogy, opposition, or resemblance.
Identity: x equals y; x is the same thing as y.
Analogy: x shares a quality with y.
Opposition: x is opposed to y or x is not y.
Resemblance: x is like y.
To performany of these judgments requires that we already have an
x or a y available to us. And it requires not only that they are available to
us, but also that the x and the y be the very categories through which
judgment happens. They are the basis for judgment. This, in turn,
requires that there be a stability of judging that allows x to remain x in
all circumstances, and y to remain y. Common sense and good sense
provide that stability. Identity, analogy, opposition, and resemblance
are the operations of a judgment structured by common sense and
good sense. They are the elements of the representational or dogmatic
image of thought. And they are the means by which we conceive our
world, the means by which we recognize it.
What is that? (A question of recognition.) It looks like a cow. (Resem-
blance, supported by the categories of good sense.) I remember what
cows look like. (Common sense.) It surely isnt a steer; they have horns. (Op-
position.) It has hooves like a steer, though. (Analogy.) But its a cow. In
fact, its the same cow I saw in that meadow yesterday. (Identity.)
The dogmatic image of thought: the ether of our conception of
the world. But what is wrong with it? Is there a problem here? We
think about the world in the categories our language presents to us,
representing it inthe stability it presents tous andcarrying that stability
throughout the process from perception to conception. What could
be wrong with that?
There is a problem. Philosophy is left without means to realise
its project of breaking with doxa.
5
Doxa is opinion. It is what every-
body knows, or what everybody should know. It is common sense and
good sense, both in the more everyday meaning of those terms and
in the more technical sense Deleuze constructs. The dogmatic image
of thought may allow philosophy to challenge a particular doxa. But
it still operates within the structure of doxa. It never leaves the arena
of common opinion; it is always within a realm that is already familiar
to us.
There is a deep conformism of thought here.
It is surprising, although less remarked upon than it should be, that
ethical theories in philosophy so often reinforce common moral opin-
ion, no matter how far their theoretical journeys stray from mundane
experience. Kant, for instance, takes ethics on a journey to universal
reason. He revisits the nature of our freedom, plumbs the depths of
our subjectivity, asks after the role of God. And yet, many of the ethical
recommendations that emerge from this journey are uncontroversial,
even pedestrian. The moral impermissibility of lying, the sanctions
against suicide and cheating ones neighbor, while based in a thought
that has gone to far places, do not invite us to strange adventures of
our own.
6
5
6
Deleuze thinks that Kant is capable of stranger adventures than his ethical recom-
mendations would lead one to believe. In his slim volume on Kant, he uses the
Third Critique to open up a realm of chaos that one would not normally asso-
ciate with Kantian thought. See Deleuze, Kants Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the
Faculties.
80 Gilles Deleuze
This is doxa, Deleuze would say, pure doxa. What, he asks, is a
thought whichharms noone, neither thinkers nor anyone else? Recog-
nition is a sign of the celebration of monstrous nuptials, in which
thought rediscovers the State, rediscovers the Church and rediscov-
ers all the current values that it subtly presented in the pure form of
an eternally blessed unspecied eternal object.
7
The problem is not
with Kant, nor specically with any other philosopher. The problem is
with the structure of the thought that underlies their philosophies, the
dogmatic image of thought itself. If we are to loosen the chains that
have bound our thought, and the thought of most of the history of
philosophy, then we must learn to think differently, to abandon repre-
sentational thought for something else. We must embark in unfamiliar
crafts to uncharted territory.
It has been done before. Spinoza did it, as did Nietzsche and
Bergson. As Deleuze notes:
here and there isolated and passionate cries are raised. How could they not
be isolated when they deny what everybody knows . . .? And passionate, since
they deny that which, it is said, nobody can deny? Such protest does not take
place in the name of aristocratic prejudices; it is not a question of saying what
few think and knowing what it means to think. On the contrary, it is a question
of someone if only one with the necessary modesty not managing to know
what everybody knows.
8
For Foucault and for Derrida, not managing to know what every-
body knows requires the abandonment of ontology. It is ontology that
gives us the categories of recognition, the content of our represen-
tational thought. And it is only by abandoning ontology, either by
recounting the contingent history of its most unassailable concepts or
by showing the reliance of those concepts on what they are meant to
deny, that we can manage to forget what everybody knows. To embark
on strange adventures, to leave behind the question of howone should
live or what one must do, to embrace instead the question of how one
might live, to do these things requires that we cast adrift not merely
from this or that ontology but from ontology altogether. We cannot
surmount the dogmatic image of thought unless we are prepared to
jettison the ontology that supports it.
7
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 1356.
8
Deleuze does not agree. Ontology itself has strange adventures in
store for us, if only we can think differently about how it might be
conceived. If we stop searching for the true, stop asking the world to
allow us to recognize it, stop knowing what everybody knows, then we
can set off on a new thought, a thought that is both ontological and
foreign, an experiment in ontology, rather than an exercise in dog-
matism. Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired
by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or
Important that determine its success or failure. Now, this cannot hap-
pen before being constructed.
9
III
Suppose we consider the possibility that there is more to our world
than we can perceive, and more than we can conceive. Suppose the
world overows the categories of representation that the dogmatic im-
age of thought imposes upon it. This is not to say that our particular
categories are lacking something that other, better categories would
give us. Our imagination must go further than that. We need to con-
sider the possibility that the world (or, since the concept of the world is
too narrow, things or being or what there is) outruns any categories we
might seek to use to capture it. We will see in the next section, when we
discuss science, that we have some reason to think that this possibility
is in fact true.
10
But for now let us just consider the possibility.
One way to think about this would be to say that being is difference,
that beneaththe identities that the dogmatic image of thought offers to
us is a realmof pure difference, irreducible to any identity: difference
is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing.
11
What might this mean? We need to be careful here. Deleuze may
seemto be moving back into representational thought. It could look as
though he were merely substituting one concept for another. Its not
identity that captures what things are; its difference that does it. To
read him that way would be to keep his thought circulating within the
9
10
Although we must always bear in mind that it is not truth Deleuze seeks. Science,
then, may illustrate his thought, but science cannot provide either conrmation or
disconrmation.
11
82 Gilles Deleuze
dogmatic image. For Deleuze, to say that being is difference is not at all
like saying that being is identity (or identities), and not simply because
he is saying that it is really something else. The term difference is
not another concept designed to capture the nature of being or the
essence of what there is. It is a term he uses to refer to that which
eludes such capture.
Inorder to followDeleuzes thought here we must ask what the term
difference seeks to palpate, not what it seeks to represent. And even
then we are in dangerous waters, because if we give an answer to that
what in representational terms, we are back in the dogmatic image.
The term difference palpates what it cannot conceive; it gestures at
what it cannot grasp. We experience the actualities difference presents
us with, but must think the difference that yields them. We might say
that difference is the overowing character of things themselves, their
inability to be wrestled into categories of representation. If we say this,
however, we must again be careful. There is no strategy of resistance
among things. Being is not bothered when it is represented. Rather,
being is always more and therefore other than what representation
posits for it. The world (or what there is) is in its very character a
transgression of the categories of any representational thought; it is
an offense to both good sense and common sense. These latter merely
capture the surface of things. In doing so, they both betray what we
might say there is and reinforce the deathly conformity of doxa.
Behind the identities the dogmatic image of thought presents to
us, difference is what there is. This difference may be virtual, but it is
not transcendent. It is there, coiled in the heart of things. It is of their
very nature. When Deleuze says that difference is behind everything,
we should not take himto mean that it is beyond everything. It is behind
things, but still within them. Being is said in a single and same sense
of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it
is said of difference itself.
12
This, of course, is the lesson of Spinozas
immanence.
One way to approach the thought of difference would be, as
Deleuze does, to think of being as a problem, and to seek a prob-
lematizing thought that can follow its contours. We often think badly
about problems; either that or we think about bad or uninteresting
12
problems. When we think about problems, we tend to think about
them in terms of solutions. Problems, it seems to us, seek solutions.
Not only do they seek solutions, each problemseeks a unique solution,
or at least a small set of them. It is as though a problem were merely
a particular lack or fault that a solution will ll or rectify. That is how
we were taught to think of problems at school. And that is why schools
have so many tests. Tests propose problems in order to see whether
you know the solution. It is the solution that matters, not the prob-
lem. We are led to believe that problems are given ready-made, and
that they disappear in the responses or the solution. . . . We are led to
believe that the activity of thinking . . . begins only with the search for
solutions.
13
Here are some examples of this way of thinking about problems:
1. How much is two plus two?
2. What is the fastest route from here to the grocery store?
3. What was the crucial mistake that Napoleon made in Russia that
cost him the war there?
4. Who were the most popular jazz performers of the past decade?
These are problems that seek solutions, problems whose character
is dened by the fact that there are particular solutions they seek. Here
are a couple of problems that might look like the rst four, but are
not, or at least do not need to be:
1. How did the dodo bird come to appear on the planet?
2. Is Nietzsches philosophy relevant to us today?
We can, of course, approach these problems in the way we approach
the rst four. We might answer the rst question by reference to
genetic mutations the dodo bird instantiated and why, at that time,
those genetic mutations were adaptive. But we donot needtoapproach
things this way. Instead of seeing these as problems that seek a partic-
ular solution, we might see them as opening up elds of discussion,
in which there are many possible solutions, each of which captures
something, but not everything, put before us by the problem.
Take the case of the dodo bird. Instead of accounting for its emer-
gence in terms of particular mutations and environmental niches, we
13
84 Gilles Deleuze
might look more holistically at the environment. We might say that the
environment itself is a problem, one that lends itself to many solutions.
The dodo bird was a solution to that problem, although perhaps not
the only one. Another solution might have been a change of vegeta-
tion, or another kind of animal that mutated fromanother species but
fed on similar products. Or we might look at the matter differently,
from the point of view of populations. The relation of the species of
bird from which the dodo bird comes to the environmental niche that
species occupied was a problem. The population of that species t
into that niche in a certain way. There were perhaps other types of t.
Through the accident of a genetic mutation, the dodo bird offered
another solution to the problem of how that population t into that
niche. It was a solution that occurred alongside the solution that the
original species formed or instead of it, depending on environmental
conditions.
If we look at things this way, we are no longer looking at problems in
terms of solutions. Problems become an open eld in which a variety
of solutions may take place. It is the problems rather than the solutions
that are primary. Thinking of being as difference is an example of a
problematizing rather than a representational thought. Being (what
Plato calls the Idea) corresponds to the essence of the problemor the
question as such. It is as though there were an opening, a gap, an
ontological fold which relates being and the question to one another.
In this relation, being is difference itself.
14
Taking being as difference is a problematizing rather than a dog-
matic approach to ontology. Contrast this approach to the dogmatic
approach. For dogmatism, there are stable entities that can be repre-
sented through stable categories. There is, as we saw, stability at every
stage. This does not mean that there has to be only one answer to every
problem or only one way for identities or thoughts to combine. But in
each case, the answers or combinations are constructed out of discrete
elements, which in turn form other discrete things or ideas when they
combine. The elements are limited to what everybody knows, and
thus their combinations will not stretch much beyond what everybody
knows, if they stretch at all.
14
For Deleuze, this is a case of the solution dening the problem. To
see why, recall the relation of the virtual to the actual. The virtual is
not the same as the actual; it has a different character. Solutions are
actual; problems are virtual. The dodo bird is an actual solution to the
problem of a particular environment. Solutions present themselves
as stable identities whereas problems (at least the worthwhile ones)
present themselves as open elds or gaps or ontological folds.
Problems are inexhaustible, while solutions are a particular form of
exhaustion.
15
For the dogmatic image of thought, being is dened in terms of
actuality rather than virtuality. It is a matter of stable identities rather
than difference. To think ontologically in terms of stable identities is to
read solutions back into problems, to approach problems in terms of
solutions. For Deleuze, being is not a matter of the stable identities that
representational thought gives us. Identities come later, as particular
solutions to the problems that being places before us, the problem
that being is. To confuse those identities with being is to confuse the
actual with the virtual. It is to confuse solutions and problems. The
dogmatic image of thought gives primacy to identities, to the actual
and solutions. It sees difference in terms of these.
If these are the terms of ontology, no wonder Foucault and
Derrida abandon the project of ontology. The other course, the one
Deleuze takes, is to set ontology on another path, the path of being as
difference.
It is what Deleuze thinks any good philosophy must do. In his rst
book, on the philosopher David Hume, he writes, that
a philosophical theory is an elaborately developed question, and nothing else;
by itself and in itself, it is not the resolution to a problem, but the elaboration,
to the very end, of the necessary implications of a formulated question. . . . In
15
This does not mean that solutions do not carry particular problems within them.
The virtual remains within the actual. A problem does not exist, apart from its
solutions. Far from disappearing in this overlay, however, it insists and persists in
these solutions. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 163. But inasmuch as we call
something a solution, we are seeing it in terms of its actuality rather than its virtuality.
The dodo bird may be more than merely a dodo bird, but it is also a dodo bird,
and as such is a particular solution. As such, it is a way of addressing a particular
problem.
86 Gilles Deleuze
philosophy, the question and the critique of the question are one; or, if you
wish, there is no critique of solutions, there are only critiques of problems.
16
This is why the issue of truth does not matter to Deleuze, why it is the
remarkable, the interesting, and the important that matter. And this
is why, in Deleuzes hands, ontology is not a matter of telling us what
there is but of taking us on strange adventures, bringing us far aeld of
ourselves. Finally, this is why philosophy is a project of not managing
to know what everybody knows.
Teachers already know that errors or falsehoods are rarely found in home-
work (except in those exercises where a xed result must be produced, or
propositions must be translated one by one). Rather, what is more frequently
found and worse are nonsensical sentences, remarks without interest or
importance, banalities mistaken for profundities . . . badly posed or distorted
problems all heavy with dangers, yet the fate of us all. . . . Philosophy must
draw the conclusions which follow from this.
17
IV
It is not only philosophy that can think difference. Science can do
it too. There are scientists whose work offers a context for thinking
of being as difference, for thinking the world as a problematic eld
or set of problematic elds in which actual biological or chemical
entities are particular solutions. As discussed earlier, thinking of being
as difference might be not only a divergent form of thought from the
dogmatic image, but also a more adequate approach to what there is
andto howthings are thanthe dogmatic image offers. It is possible that
the world does in fact overow the categories we use to try to capture
it, and that it may overow any categories whose goal is its capture.
Several areas in science, particularly in biology and in chemistry,
offer examples of this. The approach in these areas of science is no
longer as a project of seeking laws governing stable identities, which
was the way we all learned in high school that science was supposed
to be approached, the way Newton approached the inertia governing
moving andstable bodies or Galileothe study of falling bodies. Instead,
16
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 106.
17
science is seen as a matter of understanding systems of differences in
dynamic relation.
Biologists have largely moved away from seeing life as a matter of
living beings and toward a view of biological and ecological systems.
The living being is not necessarily the primary unit of biological study;
instead, life or the environment is. One of the thinkers who most
inuenced Deleuzes Difference and Repetition, Gilbert Simondon, has
put it this way:
the individual is to be understood as having a relative reality, occupying only a
certain phase of the whole being in question a phase that therefore carries
the implication of a preceding preindividual state, and that, even after individ-
uation, does not exist in isolation, since individuation does not exhaust in the
single act of its appearance all the potentials embedded in the preindividual
state.
18
The preindividual state, the state of biological being, is not exhausted
by the actuality of any given individual. There is always more than
meets the eye.
Simondons idea of a preindividual state recognizes the signicance
of the virtual as a eld of difference, or, as Deleuze sometimes calls
it, a eld of intensities. The expression difference of intensity is a
tautology, Deleuze says. Intensity is the form of difference in so far
as this is the reason of the sensible.
19
We might think of intensities
in contrast to extensities. Extensities exist in the actual realm, inten-
sities in the virtual realm. Intensities are relations of difference that
give rise to the extensive world, the actual world, but are not directly
accessible to perception in the actual world. Intensity is difference,
but this difference tends to deny or cancel itself out in extensity and
underneath quality.
20
What does Deleuze see Simondon as proposing? The biological
individual is an actualization of a virtual intensive state, one that does
not exhaust the potential of the virtual but that brings it into a specic
18
Simondon, The Genesis of the Individual, p. 300. This text is the introduction to
Simondons Lindividu et sa gen`ese physico-biologique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1964.
19
20
88 Gilles Deleuze
actualization. Deleuze describes Simondons contribution:
Individuation emerges like the act of solving a problem, or what amounts
to the same thing like the actualization of a potential and the establishing
of communication between disparates. . . . Individuation is the act by which
intensity determines differential relations to become actualised, along the
lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates.
21
The individuation of a biological creature is an actualization of vir-
tual difference, a solving of a problem. We have seen that this does
not eliminate the problem; the ontological eld remains. A biological
individual is a solution within the problem.
There are examples of this. Think of a gene not as a set of discrete
bits of information but instead as part of a virtual eld of intensities
that actualizes into specic concrete beings. The gene is not a closed
system of pregiven information that issues out directly into individual
characteristics. Instead, the genetic code is inconstant interactionwith
a eld of variables that in their intensive interaction generate a spe-
cic living being. The environmentalist Barry Commoner has argued
that the failure to recognize this point is what leads to the dangers
of genetic engineering, since genetic engineering as it is practiced as-
sumes that the introduction of a gene into a foreign body will result
in the passing on of that genes information without alteration or re-
mainder. That assumption has been shown to be empirically false, with
fatal results, and, if practiced widely, would be potentially disastrous.
22
We must conceive of genetic passage, then, not as the perpetuation
of individuals by means of a closed genetic code, but rather as the
unfolding of a genetic virtuality that has among its products the indi-
viduation of organisms, the creation of biological individuals. Or, as
Simondon puts the point, the being contains not only that which is
identical to itself, with the result that being qua being previous to
any individuation can be grasped as something more than a unity
and more than an identity, adding that This method presupposes a
postulate of an ontological nature.
23
It is the last phrase that suggests something no longer biological, but
philosophical. What is required is a new ontology, no longer in thrall
21
22
Barry Commoner, Unraveling the DNA Myth, pp. 3947.
23
Simondon, The Genesis of the Individual, p. 312.
to the dogmatic image of thought. A new way of conceiving being, not
in terms of identities but in terms of difference or, as he sometimes
puts it, multiplicities.
When and under what conditions should we speak of a multiplicity? There
are three conditions . . . (1) the elements of the multiplicity must have neither
sensible form nor conceptual signication. . . . They are not even actually ex-
istent, but inseparable from a potential or a virtuality. In this sense they imply
no prior identity. . . . (2) These elements must in effect be determined, but
reciprocally, by reciprocal relations which allow no independence whatsoever
to subsist. . . . (3) Amultiple ideal connection, a differential relation must be ac-
tualized in diverse spatio-temporal relationships, at the same time as its elements
are actually incarnated in a variety of terms and forms.
24
Simondons preindividual state is an example of a multiplicity. Its
elements are not conceivable in terms of identity; they are not repre-
sentable. They are, as Barry Commoner points out, reciprocally deter-
mined. And they issue out into particular individuals.
Another example is that of an egg. Deleuze writes that,
Individuating difference must be understood rst within its eld of
individuation not as belated, but as in some sense in the egg. Since the
work of Child and Weiss, we recognize axes or planes of symmetry within an
egg. Here, too, however, the positive element lies less in the elements of the
givensymmetry thaninthose whichare missing. Anintensity forming a wave of
variation throughout the protoplasm distributes its difference along the axes
and from one pole to another. . . . the individual in the egg is a genuine de-
scent, going fromthe highest to the lowest and afrming the differences which
comprise it and in which it falls.
25
The egg is a eld of differential intensities, a preindividual eld from
within which an individual arises. We should not think of the egg
as a biological being in germ. It is different in kind from the indi-
vidual that emerges from it (the virtual is different in kind from the
actual); becauseof this, thereis somethingthat overows thebiological
individual.
The philosopher Keith Ansell Pearson remarks that Deleuzes use
of Simondon implies that it is the process itself that is to be regarded
as primary. This means that ontogenesis is no longer treated as dealing
24
25
90 Gilles Deleuze
with the genesis of the individual but rather designates the becoming
of being.
26
Bergson and Spinoza are the touchstones here. Bergsons
concept of duration offers the framework for understanding the pro-
cess of the unfolding of difference as the actualization of the virtual.
Spinozas concept of the univocity of being reveals this process as an
immanent unfolding, an expression, rather than a transcendent cre-
ation or emanation.
In his turn, Deleuze takes Simondons framework and generalizes
it to the unfolding of the world itself, going beyond the biological to
the ontological. He writes:
The world is an egg. . . . We think that difference in intensity, as this is impli-
cated in the egg, expresses rst the differential relations or virtual matter to be
organized. This intensive eld of individuation determines the relations that
it expresses to be incarnated in spatio-temporal dynamisms (dramatisation),
in species which correspond to these relations (specic differenciation), and
in organic parts which correspond to the distinctive points in these relations
(organic differenciation).
27
V
It is not only Simondon who views biology in terms of ontological dif-
ference. When Deleuze starts his collaboration with Felix Guattari, he
refers to the work of the biochemist Jacques Monod. Anti-Oedipus, pub-
lished in 1972, two years after Monods seminal Chance and Necessity,
28
adopts Monods treatment of biological enzymes as having cognitive
properties, allowing for the combination of disparate elements into
new life forms. Monod articulates that idea in a way that converges
with Simondons earlier work on biological individuation.
Chance and Necessity is famous chiey for its conclusion that human
beings are the product of biological chance rather than any form of
evolutionary necessity. But it is not exclusively Monods conclusion
that interests Deleuze and Guattari. It is also the chemical analysis on
which he bases his conclusion. Monod analyzes particular enzymes,
and especially a class of enzymes known as allosteric enzymes, which
26
Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze, p. 90.
27
28
Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology.
not only perform the function of binding chemical substrates, but
can also regulate their own activity on the basis of the existence of
other compounds. Monod says that allosteric enzymes have the fur-
ther property of recognizing electively one or several other compounds,
whose . . . association with the protein has a modifying effect that is,
depending on the case, of heightening or inhibiting its activity with re-
spect to the substrate.
29
Monod calls this property a cognitive one. It
means that there is a process of self-ordering at the molecular level
that does not require the intervention of an already constituted highly
ordered system. The allosteric enzyme recognizes and responds to its
environmental conditions.
The emergence of complex biological systems arises from a group
of molecular interactions that require nothing more than the right
opportunity providedby chance mixings inorder to developinto those
systems. Order, structural differentiation, acquisition of functions
all these appear out of a random mixture of molecules individually
devoid of any activity, any intrinsic functional capacity other than that
of recognizing the partners with which they will build the structure.
30
Given this approach to molecular biology, the rise of human be-
ings would be more a matter of chance than necessity. Better, it would
be a combination of chance and necessity. The fortuitous meeting of
certain enzymes under certain conditions facilitate the formation of
specic types of biological compounds that give rise to certain life
forms. Whether those life forms are reproduced depends on the ca-
pacity for those compounds to thrive in a given environment. That
those life forms would eventuate in human life is a random matter.
That is what interests Monod.
A different lesson interests Deleuze and Guattari even more. Al-
losteric and other types of enzymes contain the capacity for all sorts
of combinations at the preindividual level. Moreover, these combina-
tions, because they are the product of chance, might have been and
might become otherwise. The molecular level is a virtual realm of
intensities, a eld of difference that actualizes itself into specic bio-
logical arrangements. As Monod puts the matter, With the globular
protein we already have, at the molecular level, a veritable machine a
29
Monod, Chance and Necessity, p. 63.
30
92 Gilles Deleuze
machine in its functional properties, but not, as we now see, in its fun-
damental structure, where nothing but the play of blind combinations
can be discerned. . . . A totally blind process can by denition lead to
anything; it can even lead to vision itself.
31
At different levels of biological complexity Simondon at the level
of the gene and its environment, Monod at the level of pre-genetic
molecular interaction that leads up to the gene both these biolo-
gists offer a picture of a complex preindividual eld that allows for
the generation of specic individual forms but also is not bound or
reducible to those forms. They posit a eld of difference that outruns
any specic biological forms or individuals while still giving rise to
them. Moreover, since that eld is immanent to the physical realm, it
requires no movement toward transcendence in order to conceive it.
It is a realm of immanent difference, which actualizes itself into par-
ticular differences while remaining an ontological fold or gap. It is a
problem that actualizes itself in different solutions.
VI
One more set of examples, perhaps the most striking set. In the
later collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari, the writings of Ilya
Prigogine become increasingly important. Prigogine, whose book La
nouvelle alliance (co-authored with Isabelle Stengers and partially trans-
lated as Order Out of Chaos) appeared in 1979, argues for a self-ordering
of chemical components into patterns and relationships that cannot
be readoff fromthe previous state of chemical disarray. The articial,
he writes, may be deterministic and reversible. The natural contains
essential elements of randomness and irreversibility. This leads to a
new view of matter in which matter is no longer the passive substance
described in the mechanistic world view but is associated with sponta-
neous activity.
32
31
32
Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Mans New Dialogue with Nature, p. 9. In
this view of matter, the authors show some sympathy for Bergson when they write
that dur ee, Bergsons lived time, refers to the basic dimensions of becoming, the
irreversibility that Einstein was willing to admit only at the phenomenological level.
p. 294. In the original French edition of this book there are several complimentary
references toDeleuze andborrowings fromhis work that donot appear inthe English
Prigogine offers the example of the chemical clock. In conditions
that move away from equilibrium (for example, conditions of intense
heat or other type of energy), a process they describe withthe following
image might occur:
Suppose we have two molecules, red and blue. Because of the chaotic
motion of the molecules, we would expect that at a given moment we would
have more red molecules, say, in the left part of a vessel. Then a bit later more
blue molecules would appear, and so on. The vessel would appear to us as
violet, with occasional irregular ashes or red or blue. However, this is not
what happens witha chemical clock; here the systemis all blue, thenit abruptly
changes its color to red, then again to blue. Because all these changes occur
at regular time intervals, we have a coherent process.
33
This is unexpected. It is not the introduction of some sort of or-
dering mechanism that makes the chemical clock appear. Nothing
is brought in from the outside. It is an inherent capability of the
chemicals themselves for self-organization that gives rise to this phe-
nomenon. It is as though there were virtual potentialities for commu-
nication or coordination contained in the chemicals themselves, or
at least in their groupings, that are actualized under conditions that
move away from equilibrium.
Prigogine discusses another example that points to the self-
organizing of matter: bifurcations. Bifurcations are situations, once
again under conditions far from equilibrium, in which a chemical sys-
tem will choose between two or more possible structures, but which
structure it chooses cannot be predicted in advance. It is only a matter
of probability, not natural law, which structure will result. Therefore,
the resulting structure is not reversible into its initial conditions. One
cannot read backwards from what did happen to what was going to
happen. Something else might have happened.
edition. For example, the following passage cites Nietzsche and Philosophy but could
well stand as a summation of Difference and Repetition: Science, which describes the
transformations of energy under the sign of equivalence, must admit, however, that
only difference can produce effects, which would in turn be differences themselves.
The conversion of energy is nothing other than the destruction of one difference and
the creation of another. La Nouvelle Alliance: M etamorphose de la science, p. 127 (my
translation).
33
Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, pp. 1478.
94 Gilles Deleuze
And there is more. When bifurcation is about to occur, small
changes in the surrounding environmental conditions might have
large effects on the outcome of the bifurcation. This introduces
another element of chance into the understanding of chemistry.
Self-organizing processes in far-from-equilibrium conditions corre-
spond to a delicate interplay between chance and necessity, between
uctuations and deterministic laws. We expect that near a bifurca-
tion, uctuations or random elements would play an important role,
while between bifurcations the deterministic aspects would become
dominant.
34
A delicate interplay between chance and necessity. Monod nds it. Pri-
gogine nds it. It is Nietzsches dice throw; the dice that are thrownand
the dice that fall back. In the realm of science, Monod and Prigogine
are among the better players. They understand that there is no being,
only becoming. Or, as Deleuze puts it, that the only being is the being
of becoming.
The lesson here is not that chemistry is just random. It is that there
is a self-ordering process within the chemical realm that cannot be
reduced to strict laws because of the capacity of chemicals to combine
withandreact to disparate chemical elements or physical conditions in
new and unpredictable ways. In other words, there is a virtual realm of
difference out of which actualizations of diverse elements can appear.
At the level of the virtual, the level of pure difference, there is no
precluding what will combine with what or what will result. Disparate
combinations and unexpected outcomes are the very possibilities of
the virtual.
Prigogine and Stengers conclude that Nonequilibrium brings order
out of chaos.
35
We must be careful to interpret those words in a par-
ticular way. This does not mean that when we move from a situation
of chaos to one of order, chaos is left behind. Such an understanding
would amount to a return to an emanative or creative view of causal-
ity. If matter expresses itself in particular organized or self-organized
forms, it is not because we have left behind chaos or difference. Or-
ganized and self-organized matter brings its chaos along with it, not
as actualized but as virtual. Matter preserves its capacity for disparate
34
Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, p. 176.
35
Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, p. 286.
combinations and novel actualizations at every point. The virtual is im-
manent to matter as both chaotic and organized. Chaos yields order,
but it does not yield to order; difference does not yield to identity.
Recent scientic approaches offer us Spinozas immanence,
Bergsons duration, Nietzsches afrmation of difference. They offer
us a virtual realm of pure difference, a problematic eld in which so-
lutions do not overcome problems but simply actualize them under
specic conditions. These discussions cannot be captured by the dog-
matic image of thought. Matter and life cannot be represented; their
dynamism overows the stable identities with which representation
would seek to shackle them. Whatever we see, whatever we say, there
is more always more.
VII
How can our language say this more? Or, if not say it, at least not
violate it whenit speaks? It seems as thoughit already has. Over all these
many pages, we have addressed a pure difference that resists represen-
tation, a difference that emerges in both philosophy and science and
that can be palpated but not brought under the categories of the dog-
matic image of thought. We have followed Deleuzes construction of
an ontology of this difference.
We have done all this in language. That is how philosophy is done,
after all. It is done in language. How else might it be done?
But there is a problem here that needs to be confronted. Might
it not be that language itself is inescapably representational? Might it
not be that our words can do no more than represent the world that
is presented to us? If that is so, then the very medium of Deleuzes
ontology betrays him as he writes, and betrays us as we read him.
We have proceeded all along as though language were transparent.
We have proceeded as though words effaced themselves and left us
with nothing more or less than the thoughts those words were meant
to express. We have discussed Deleuze as though words do just what
we want them to do. It is not that we have not recognized the limits to
language. After all, a central feature of Deleuzes ontology is that dif-
ference can be palpated but not brought into the categories of repre-
sentation. But what we have done, oddly, is to assume that phrases like
difference can be palpated but not brought into the categories of representation
96 Gilles Deleuze
are themselves transparent. And therein lies the problem. In accept-
ing the working of language uncritically, we have allowed the dogmatic
image of thought to slip back into philosophy: not through what we
have tried to think, but through the medium through which we try to
think it.
Deleuze seeks to overcome the dogmatic image of thought in order
to construct an ontology of difference. Central to the dogmatic im-
age of thought is the commitment to language as a representational
medium. The stable entities of the world appear to our perception,
which in turn carries images of those stable entities to our brain, which
in its own turn represents those images in the stable categories of
language. Language, then, is a medium that represents the world. It
is a transparent medium it reects the world as it is, and without
remainder.
Inrejecting the dogmatic image, Deleuze has offereda viewof being
that overows the categories representation seeks to impose on it.
The world is always more than representation can capture; the world
remains untamed by the dogmatic image of thought.
But what about language itself? If we are to reject the conception of
the worldofferedtous by the dogmatic image of thought, are we alsoto
reject the image of language as seeking to represent that world? The
world, being, overows representational categories. Does language
itself also overow those categories?
If Deleuzes thought is to compel us, it would seem that it must. For
if language fails to overowthose categories, then his own thought will
be caught in the net of the dogmatic image of thought. After all, if the
medium of his thought faithfully reects the ideas he wants to convey,
then we have returned to the stability he seeks to overcome, not at the
level of the world he describes but at the level of the language he uses
to describe it.
It is not enough to say that we avoid this problem by talking about
palpating difference rather thanrepresenting it. Because the problem,
once again, lies with the words palpating difference rather than representing
it. What are we doing when we say these words, or when we say any
words at all?
The challenge Deleuze confronts is to substitute for the representa-
tional viewof language a viewthat allows it to overowthe categories of
representation. He needs to construct, alongside his ontology, a view
of language adequate to that ontology. Just as he nds a difference
in being that resists capture by the stable categories of the dogmatic
image of thought, so he must nd in the language in which he tells
us about this difference something that, equally, resists those stable
categories. He must make the language of his ontology resonate with
the same irrecuperable energy that he has discovered in the ontology
itself. In short, he must offer us what he calls a logic of sense.
(One might be tempted to extend the problem yet another turn,
twisting it once again. If Deleuze offers a view of language that is in
keeping with the ontology he has created, what about the language in
which he offers us this view of language? Should we see the language
of that view of language as itself an accurate representation of how lan-
guage works? And, if we do, dont we fall into the same problem, this
time at the level of the language about the language? Alternatively,
if we concede that language itself overows its representational cate-
gories, then does Deleuzes view of language undercut itself ? After all,
if we cannot represent how language works, then doesnt the language
of his view of language also overow what he wants to say? Is there a
dilemma here? No, there isnt. Deleuze can concede that his view of
language overows its representational categories without undercut-
ting himself. He offers us a view of how language works. That view sees
language as overowing its representational categories. There is more
than representation can capture. If there is, then the language of his
own account of language overows its representational content. The
trembling of language goes all the way up the line, from language to
his account of language, and, if we like, further up to an account of
the account of language. There is no reason Deleuze should reject this
consequence of his thought. Does the language of his viewof language
burst its own bounds? Of course, and why not?)
VIII
We have seen the traditional view of language as representation and
the stabilities that viewrequires. Deleuze offers a slightly more complex
take on the traditional view. For him, it involves three dimensions: de-
notation, manifestation, and signication. Alinguistic claim, a propo-
sition as he calls it, operates in these three dimensions. It turns out
that these three dimensions require a fourth.
98 Gilles Deleuze
Denotation is the relation of the proposition to an external state of
affairs.
36
It is the propositions turning outside of itself and pointing
toward what it is in the world that it is talking about. The correspon-
dence view of truth is a matter of denotation. When I say the cow is
in the meadow, that proposition refers to the cow, over there, in that
particular meadow.
Manifestation concerns the relation of the proposition to the per-
son who speaks and expresses himself.
37
In manifestation, the propo-
sition also points outside of itself, but this time in another direction.
Where denotation points forward toward the world the proposition
speaks of, manifestation points backward toward the propositions
origin, toward the one who utters the proposition.
With denotation and manifestation, we have three intersecting el-
ements in language: a proposition, a speaker, and a state of affairs.
These three elements are mutually implicating. Together they form
the representational world of language. But if we stop at denotation
and manifestation, then we will miss much of what goes on both within
language itself and in the relation of language to speaker and world.
We need a third concept: signication.
Signication has to do with the implication of propositions, with
what follows from a proposition or a group of propositions. It often
does not point outside language, but remains within the intralinguistic
realm. This can happen in several ways. Deleuze illustrates signica-
tion with an example of logical demonstration to show one of them. If
two propositions are true, a third one may follow from it. Here is
the classic example: 1) All men are mortal; 2) Socrates is a man;
3) Therefore, Socrates is mortal. In this example we dont need to
know anything about either denotation or manifestation. It doesnt
matter who Socrates is or who is speaking the three propositions. If
Socrates were a ctional character and if these sentences were gener-
ated by a computer program, the signication would still be the same.
The truth of the rst two propositions yields the truth of the third one.
Logical demonstrations are not the only kind of signication. Here
is another example, still within the intralinguistic realm. There is what
is called material inference, the direct inference of one proposition from
36
37
another. From the proposition the chair is brown I can infer imme-
diately another proposition, the chair is colored. Here there is no
logical demonstration. It is not the combination of two propositions
that yield a third one, but a single proposition that yields another. Like
logical demonstration, though, that yielding is intralinguistic. We do
not infer from the chairs being brown to its being colored by looking
at the chair or by understanding who is talking about the chair. The
inference goes from one linguistic proposition directly to another.
Although much of signication concerns intralinguistic inference,
there can be implications a proposition has that are not intralinguistic.
Deleuze uses the example of a promise. He says that the assertion of
the conclusion is represented by the moment the promise is kept.
38
In what way is the keeping of a promise like a logical or material
inference? In what way is keeping a promise like a conclusion? If I
offer you a promise, the implication of that offer is that I will fulll
that promise. The fullling of a promise is, in that sense, the there-
fore of the promise. I promise to meet you for coffee at four oclock.
Therefore, I am committed to be there when I said I would be. It may
turn out that I would like to be somewhere else. Perhaps at half past
three I hear about a radio program I would like to listen to that starts
at four. My promise has implied that I will meet you rather than listen
to the radio program.
Compare that with a logical inference. I amcommitted to the belief
that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man. From here, it
does not matter what I would like to believe; I am committed to the
belief that Socrates is mortal. I may deny that Socrates is mortal, just
as I may neglect my meeting with you in order to listen to the radio
program. But in both cases I am rejecting something I am committed
to by virtue of the language I have used. In both cases the propositions
have implications: they signify.
Denotation, manifestation, and signication are within the realm
of representation. If they were all there is to language, we would not
escape the dogmatic image of thought. Recall the earlier example
of the cow in the meadow. Denotation would relate the proposition to
the world in a stable way. The words the cow is in the meadow would
represent the cowthat is out there inthe meadow. Manifestationwould
38
100 Gilles Deleuze
point back toward a stable speaker that is uttering the words, a person
who has processed the image of the cow and can express that image in
words. Signication would take us away from the immediate situation
involving the cow, the words, and the speaker, but without losing any
stability. One implication of the words that were spoken is that there
is a mammal in the meadow. There is an inference here, but no loss
of stability. Representation remains intact. The move from one part
of language to another is just as stable as the move from language to
world and language to speaker.
This is a realm in which good sense and common sense reign
supreme. There are stable linguistic identities that are coordinated
among themselves and in relation to both speaker and world.
This leads to the question: Is this all there is to language? For
Deleuze, there is more. Alongside the three dimensions of denota-
tion, manifestation, and signication, there is another. Sense is the
fourth dimension of the proposition. The Stoics discovered it along
with the event: sense, the expressed of the proposition, is an incorporeal,
complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event
which inheres or subsists in the proposition.
39
We must ask what this
sense is.
IX
We have seen the concept of expression before. Spinozas substance
is expressed in attributes and modes. Likewise, sense is expressed in
propositions. But what is this sense?
Sense is what happens at the point at which language and the world
meet. It is the happening, the event that arises whena particular propo-
sitioncomes incontact withthe world. This sounds like denotation, but
it isnt. Consider this. In denotation, a proposition refers to the world it
is discussing. If we appeal to the correspondence theory of truth, a true
proposition corresponds to the world. But what do we mean by refers and
corresponds? We cannot answer this question by turning back to deno-
tation, since that is where the question began. Neither manifestation
nor signication will help us either. The question is not one of who is
39
speaking, nor of the implications of a proposition. It is a question of
the relation between the proposition and the world.
If we cannot answer this question along these three dimensions,
then perhaps there is a fourth one. This is the dimension of sense.
It is exactly the boundary between propositions and things.
40
This
boundary is one that eludes capture by the three dimensions of lan-
guage that constitute its representational structure. That elusiveness
should not lead us to dismiss it, however. It is a virtual dimension of
language whose reality lies neither inwhat words nor the world present
us with but in what happens when they meet.
A man walks into a bank. He pulls out a gun and says, This is a
stickup. His words denote that the bank is being robbed. They man-
ifest his intention. They signify, among other things, that the man
holding the gun is not a security guard. But the words do something
else as well. They intersect with the situation in order to create some-
thing that was not there before, something that cannot be captured in
the traditional view of language, something that overows it.
Deleuze says that sense is the expressed of the proposition and the
attribute of the state of affairs.
41
We may ask what he is doing when
he uses these terms; but we must bear in mind that Deleuze is not
representing here. He is palpating.
In his reading of Spinoza, Deleuze emphasizes that when substance
is expressed in its attributes and modes, it is absorbed into them. This
does not mean that it becomes an attribute or a mode, but that it in-
heres in them. It does not exist outside them. It is not transcendent.
The discussion of science offers us examples of inherence. The con-
stitution of matter allows it, under conditions far from equilibrium, to
exhibit the qualities of a chemical clock or bifurcation. This constitu-
tion is an aspect of matter that inheres in it and that, under certain
conditions, can be expressed. But it cannot be derived from a study of
the identity of matter. It is a differential aspect of matter. So it is with
sense. Sense is expressed in propositions; it inheres in them. But it is
not reducible to the qualities of the proposition that expresses it. It is
different in kind fromthe proposition in which it inheres. It is an event
that happens in the proposition but is not the proposition itself. The
40
41
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 212.
102 Gilles Deleuze
words This is a stickup do more than any analysis of the meaning of
that proposition would be able to tell us.
The other side of sense faces the world; it is the attribute of things
or of states of affairs although sense does not exist outside of the
proposition which expresses it, it is nevertheless the attribute of states
of affairs and not the attribute of the proposition. The event subsists
in language, but happens to things.
42
A man announces This is a
stickup, and something happens to the world.
How does an event happen to things? For Deleuze, it is by means
of verbs, particularly verbs in the innitive form. Green designates a
quality, a mixture of things, a mixture of tree and air where chlorophyll
coexists with all parts of the leaf. To green, on the contrary, is not a
quality in the thing, but an attribute which is said of the thing.
43
To green is not to have something happeninthe world that changes it
from a previous state of affairs into a later one. To green does not insert
itself into the causal order of things. In that sense, it remains within the
proposition. But in another sense, it does happen to things. It happens
to themby way of their becoming something through the proposition.
When to green happens, an aspect of the world is opened up in a new
way, something is attributed to it that is beyond the causal order of
things. Claire Colebrook, commenting on Deleuzes analysis of sense,
puts it this way: Sense is a power of incorporeal transformation: whether
I refer to the cut (actual) body as injured, scarred, or punished
will alter what it is in its incorporeal or virtual being. Sense is an event,
producing new lines of becoming.
44
Isnt Deleuze saying something very simple here? Isnt he saying that
when we use the word green we make the world appear a certain way
for the people who hear us? When I say the leaf is green, arent I
just ascribing a quality to something in the world, manifesting myself
in words that denote the world?
That aspect of greenis what Deleuze is talkingabout whenhe says that
green designates a quality. He does not deny that this occurs. It occurs
in the representational order of things. But he insists that something
else occurs as well, something that eludes that representational order
42
43
44
Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, p. 60.
but is just as real as that order. The verb has two poles: the present,
which indicates its relation to a denotable state of affairs in view of
a physical time characterized by succession; and the innitive, which
indicates its relation to sense or the event in view of the internal time
which it envelops.
45
To green, to be a stickup, is to orient bodies in
certain ways, to create new lines of engagement among things, to cut
a trajectory through the world, a trajectory in which both oneself and
the world are affected. It is not a matter of representation but of an
event that occurs both within and through language, at its point of
intersection with the world.
This may sound like Bergson. It should. Bergson also divided time
into two types, the time of the succession of moments and the internal
time of dur ee or duration. Duration is virtual; it inheres in the time
of succession as well as giving rise to it. The innitive does much the
same thing. To green does not turn part of the world green. Nor does
it point to the already existing greenness of part of the world. It is
neither language imposed upon the world nor language reecting
or representing the way the world already is. It is instead a meeting
point of the language and the world (but from the side of language,
of the proposition), the point at which something happens to both. To
green indicates both the becoming green of part of the world and the
speaking green of language. It is their co-emergence. The event subsists
in language, but it happens to things.
Sense is the concept Deleuze substitutes for correspondence. In
representation, there is supposed to be a match between our words
and the world they represent. The difculty lies in saying what that
match is. As we have seen, the match, the correspondence, cannot be
accounted for in any of the three dimensions of representational lan-
guage. Correspondence is what is supposed to explaindenotation, and
it cannot be explained by means of either manifestation or signica-
tion. Deleuzes suggestion is that what happens between propositions
and things is either not really or at least not only some kind of match or
correspondence. What happens is something that overows any kind
of a correspondence, something that points bothtowardthe worldand
toward propositions without being reducible to any of the identities
of representation or the dogmatic image of the world.
45
104 Gilles Deleuze
Because of this, Deleuze says, sense is paradoxical. We must under-
standthe termparadoxical inat least twoways.
46
First, paradox contrasts
with doxa. Recall that doxa is the common opinion. It is what everyone
knows. Paradox is opposed to doxa, in both aspects of doxa, namely,
good sense and common sense.
47
Where doxa gives us stable entities
out in the world that correspond to distinct but converging faculties,
paradox points to the unstable character of the relationship of lan-
guage and world. What happens between language and world is not
simply a tidy match but rather a complex event, an event that only later
gets honed by the dogmatic image of thought into something smooth.
Second, paradox points in two directions at once. It points both
toward the proposition in which it subsists and toward the world of
which it is an attribute. But this pointing in two directions at once is
not like a double arrow that can point at once to the east and to the
west. The east and the west are both directions in space. They are of
the same kind, the same category. To point to the east is simply the
opposite of pointing to the west.
Language and world are not symmetrical like that. It is only rep-
resentation, which would like to have a concept of correspondence,
that wants to nd the moment of symmetry between the two. Para-
dox points in two directions at once, but the things it points to are
of a divergent nature. One cannot take the arrow of sense, remove
it from a proposition, place it in the world, and then point back to-
ward language. Paradox involves the bringing together of disparate
elements into a convergence that neither reduces one to the other
nor keeps them apart. This asymmetry between language and world
points toward something deeper than sense, something Deleuze calls
nonsense.
X
To grasp what Deleuze is palpating with the concept of nonsense, we
must rst understand something about the structuralist theory of lan-
guage developed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The
46
There are, in fact, other paradoxes. Deleuze discusses them in The Logic of Sense,
especially pp. 2835 and pp. 7481.
47
book developed from Saussures lectures, translated into English as
Course in General Linguistics,
48
is undoubtedly the linguistic text that
has most inuenced twentieth-century French philosophy. The an-
thropological structuralism of Claude L evi-Strauss, the psychoanalysis
of Jacques Lacan, the Marxismof Louis Althusser, andDerridas decon-
struction all owe deep debts to Saussure. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze
does not discuss Saussures linguistics in depth.
49
However, Saussures
linguistics are there in the background, as they are for every French
thinker of Deleuzes generation.
Saussure sees the structure of language, both in its meaning and
in its phonetics, as a matter of differences rather than elements: in
language there are only differences without positive terms.
50
Phonetics
provides the most straightforward example. Suppose I want to pro-
nounce the sound corresponding to the letter b. We can call it the
b-sound. There is no exact sound I have to make. What gives the pho-
netic quality to the b-sound is not the sound itself but its difference
from surrounding similar sounds, for example d-sounds and t-sounds.
It is the contrast between sounds rather than the sounds themselves
that give the phonemes their particular phonetic place in language.
If it were the positive terms the sounds themselves rather thanthe
differences among them that gave sounds their phonetic place, then
we would never be able to understand people with different accents
or different ways of speaking. This is because people with different
accents speak sounds differently. (This is often especially true with
vowels.) In fact, each person speaks sounds slightly differently. So if
there had to be an exact sound corresponding to, say, the b-sound, al-
most nobody would understand it. Instead, a range of different sounds
canfall under the category of the b-sound. What limits that range is the
range of other letters that contrast with it, like t-sounds and d-sounds.
This differential system also applies to the meanings of words. The
meaning of the word tree is neither a specic concept in my head nor
any particular tree out there, but the role of the term in the language,
particularly in contrast to other terms such as bush, shrub, plant, and so
48
The lectures from which this book is drawn were given between 1906 and 1911.
49
In his later collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze often borrows concepts from the
work of structuralist Hjelmslev, a disciple of Saussure.
50
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 120.
106 Gilles Deleuze
on. If there were no words like these in English, the word tree would
have a different role to play. Thus, as Saussure says, the meaning of a
term in a language is dened by its role in that language, and its role
is dened by the differences between it and other terms.
If we now relate language to the world, we have a complex situation
involving two groups (or what Deleuze calls series) of differences. On
the one hand, being is difference. The world arises from the actualiza-
tion of a virtual difference that underlies and inhabits that actualiza-
tion. The science of Monod and Prigogine, as well as the reections
of Bergson and Nietzsche, have taught us this. On the other hand
language is a system of differences. It exists not as a system of posi-
tive elements, each of which has its identity. Rather it is dened by
differences that, like the difference of being, can be palpated but not
brought under representational categories. To speak, then, is to bring
two series of differences into contact: being and language.
For Deleuze, this contact between two series of differences implies
the existence of certain kinds of paradoxical elements that belong
to both and neither series at the same time. The two heteroge-
neous series converge toward a paradoxical element, which is their
differentiator. . . . This element belongs to no series; or rather, it be-
longs to both series at once and never ceases to circulate among
them.
51
This paradoxical element, the element that both is and is
not of language, and is and is not of the world, is nonsense.
The role of nonsense is to traverse the heterogeneous series, to
make them resonate and converge, but also to ramify them and to
introduce into each one of them multiple disjunctions. It is word = x
and thing = x.
52
In order to see what this role is, Deleuze often
appeals to Lewis Carroll. Here is an exchange between Alice and the
Red Knight from Through the Looking Glass:
The name of the song is called Haddocks Eyes.
Oh, thats the name of the song, is it? Alice said, trying to feel interested.
No, you dont understand, the Knight said, looking a little vexed. Thats
what the name of the song is called. The name is really The Aged Aged Man.
Then I ought to have said, Thats what the song is called? Alice corrected
herself.
51
52
No, you oughtnt: thats quite another thing! The song is called Ways And
Means: but thats only what its called, you know!
Well, what is the song, then? said Alice, who by this time was completely
bewildered.
53
Here, of course, the Red Knight sings the song. Because that is what
the song is.
In this exchange, the movement goes from what the name of the
song is called to what the name of the song is, to what the song itself is
called, to what the song is. In this shift, the idea of a name begins to do
double-duty. It is both language and world, in the sense that it is what
does the referring and what is referred to.
54
It is both language and
the object of language. In this case, of course, what does the referring
and what is referred to are both a single piece of language, a name.
And that is where nonsense arises. Nonsense is a paradoxical element
that, in this case, ramies the series from what the name of the song
is called to the name of the song, and so on.
Lewis Carrolls writings proliferate these forms of nonsense. This
proliferation is not, for Deleuze, merely a game that can be played at
the margins of language. It points to something essential about lan-
guage itself. It is nonsense that allows language and the world to come
together. It is only because there can be these paradoxical elements
that both bring language and world together and keep them separate
that there can be linguistic meaning at all. Without this paradox, there
would only be the non-communication of these two series, a silence
between them.
The realmof difference that is the worldandthe realmof difference
that is language are brought together and kept apart by nonsense, a
paradoxical element that traverses them. Deleuze sometimes calls
this paradoxical element, this nonsense, the empty square. More-
over, it is only on the basis of nonsense that sense can arise.
Authors referred to as structuralists by recent practice may have no essential
point in common other than this: sense, regarded not at all as appearance but
53
Carroll, The Annotated Alice, p. 306.
54
There is complication here. For Saussure, the distinction between signier and sig-
nied is a distinction between the language that does the referring and the concept
it refers to. The signied is a concept, not the world itself. Deleuze does not al-
ways follow this usage, since for him the heterogeneous series that resonate through
nonsense can just as easily be world and language as concepts and language.
108 Gilles Deleuze
as surface effect and position effect, and produced by the circulation of the
empty square in the structural series . . . structuralism shows in this manner
that sense is produced by nonsense and its perpetual displacement, and that
it is born of the respective position of elements which are not in themselves
signifying.
55
What, then, is the relation between sense and nonsense? Sense is
the paradoxical element that resides in the proposition but is the at-
tribute of things. Nonsense is the paradoxical element that circulates
among language and things and brings them together. Sense is ex-
actly the boundary between propositions and things. But is that not
what nonsense is? And if so, what is the difference between them?
Sense is produced by nonsense. To grasp this thought, we need to
bear in mind that nonsense is not a something. If it is an element, as
Deleuze sometimes calls it, it is an element that is not a particular thing
but a paradox. What gives the nonsensical character to the passage on
names from Through the Looking Glass is that the names both are and
are not from the series of language. They are both signifying and
signied. It is from the movement of this paradox that sense arises,
not as a thing emerging from another thing, but as an effect of the
movement itself. In short, sense is always an effect. It is not an effect
merely in the causal sense; it is also an effect in the sense of an optical
effect or a sound effect, or, even better, a surface effect, a position
effect, and a language effect.
56
It is because there is nonsense, because something can bring to-
gether the series that is being (or the world) and the series that is lan-
guage and circulate betweenand among them, that there canbe sense.
Sense is an effect of nonsense: it is caused by this bringing together
and it arises on its surface. It is like a sound effect or an optical effect
because it is not produced by nonsense in any traditional causal sense.
It is not like the sound that is produced when a bat hits a ball. Sense is
incorporeal; it is not inserted into the causal order of material things.
Optical effects and sound effects happen when a certain way of being
seen or being heard emerges from an optical or sonic arrangement.
What are called optical illusions are like this. Draw a certain pattern
55
56
on paper and the eyes see something more than is drawn. This doesnt
just have to do with the lines on the paper, nor with the eyes, but with
what happens between them, with what Deleuze might call a certain
nonsense that circulates in their interaction.
So it is with sense. Nonsense circulates between and among the
differences of language and the world. In that circulation, language
and the world offer certain ways of being proposed. A proposition,
which is what has a sense, is a way of their being proposed. It is both an
effect of that circulation and a proposal within language for the world.
XI
I say, The leaf is green. That is a proposition. There is sense to this
proposition. It lies in the to green of the leaf. The to green inheres in
the proposition, but it is attributed to the world. The to green is not
denotation, not manifestation, not signication. It is that which gives
rise to the denotation in The leaf is green; it remains virtually in that
denotation; but it cannot itself be denoted.
How can there be sense? How can a proposition have sense? It can
do so because the series of differences that is the worldandthe series of
differences that is language can be brought together by a paradoxical
element that makes them both converge and diverge. Sense happens
on the basis of this convergence and divergence. And sense, in turn,
stirs our words beyond and within their denotation, their manifes-
tation, and their signication, making something happen to us and to
the world. Just as the world is not inert, is not merely a matter of iden-
tities, so language is not inert, not merely a matter of representation.
Language is always more than language. Or better, language is al-
ways more than representation. It spills over into the world. It is woven
into the world in order to be able to function as representation. This
weaving requires paradoxes, paradoxes of sense and nonsense that es-
cape the grasp of language. It is language which xes the limits (the
moment, for example, at which the excess begins), but it is language
as well which transcends the limits and restores them to the innite
equivalence of an unlimited becoming.
57
57
110 Gilles Deleuze
To afrm language, then, is to afrm becoming. It is to palpate
that in language which is beyond representation. It is to recognize the
paradoxical elements that are its virtual character, and that always exist
in any act of representation. Whatever we see, whatever we say, there
is more, always more.
XII
To learnis to enter into the universal of the relations whichconstitute the Idea,
and into their corresponding singularities. The idea of the sea, for example, as
Leibniz showed, is a system of liaisons or differential relations between partic-
ulars and singularities corresponding to the degrees of variation among these
relations the totality of the system being incarnated in the real movement of
the waves. To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies
with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic
eld.
58
What does learning consist in? Here is a traditional view: learning
is a matter of memorizing something that somebody else knows. It
sounds simplistic, if we put it that way. But who among us has not at-
tended high school and college and has not been subjected to this
view of learning? A teacher, a professor, stands before the class, chalk
or transparencies in hand. There are things you need to learn, items you
need to know. Before the class period is over, these things will be trans-
ferred fromthe teachers lecture notes, the professors transparencies,
to your notebook. From there, these things will be transferred to your
brain. When these transfers are successful, you will be said to have
learned what the teacher, the professor, has to teach you.
It is a meager model of learning. It is also the most common one.
It is a model that operates on some surface assumptions and a slightly
deeper one. Its surface assumptions are, rst, that the teacher knows
what there is to know about a subject and you do not. Second, there is
the assumption that the way that you learn what the teacher knows is
to listen to the teacher and commit to memory what he or she has to
say. Last, on the teachers side, there is the assumption that by talking
or using other media to substitute for talking, the teacher can impart
to the student what needs to be known.
58
The slightly deeper assumption has to do with the dogmatic image
of thought. It is the assumption that what is to be learned comes in
discrete packets of identities. There are particular somethings that need
to be known. These somethings may be related to one another or
they may not. In either case, they are independent enough from one
another to be isolated each to a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter.
These somethings are then represented by the sentences spoken by
the teacher or professor, and then arrive in your ear or on your paper.
If the learning is successful, there will have been no alteration, no
damage, of any of these somethings along the way. Their identities will
retain their integrity. And if you do your job you will be able to repeat
or manipulate these identities when test time comes around.
There is another view of learning that does not start with the as-
sumption that what is to be learned has the character of an iden-
tity or group of identities. It starts instead from the assumption that
what there is to be learned has the character of difference rather than
identity. If what is to be learned does not have the character of identity,
then the learning itself is not a project of transferring identities from
the knower to the one who seeks to know. It is instead a project of
experimentation.
Swimmers do not learn facts about the water and about their bodies
and then apply them to the case at hand. The water and their bodies
are swarms of differences. Inorder tonavigate their bodies throughthe
water they will need to acquire a skill: to conjugate their bodies with
the water in such a way as to stay on its surface. This skill involves no
memorization. It involves an immersion, a nding ones way through
things, coming through ones body to understand what one is capable
of in the water. There is no one way to do this, and different ways may
lead to different kinds of success. There are also failures; water may be
composed of differences, but not every path through those differences
will keep one aoat.
Swimmers apprentice themselves to the water. They get a feel for
the water, for how it moves and what possibilities it offers them.
They get a feel for their bodies in the water. And they conjugate one
against the other. The couplet body/water is a problematic eld, in
the sense of the word problem we saw earlier. Particular ways of swim-
ming are solutions within that problematic eld. They do not solve the
problem of swimming. For there is no single problem of swimming.
112 Gilles Deleuze
There is instead a problematic eld of body/water, of which partic-
ular ways of swimming are solutions. They are experiments in con-
jugation of this problematic eld, much of which takes place below
the level of conscious thought, beneath the identities representation
offers to us: learning always takes place in and through the uncon-
scious, thereby establishing a profoundcomplicity betweennature and
mind.
59
What does learning how to think consist in? Unlike learning how to
swim, it rst requires the abandonment of bad habits. These habits are
the ones instilled in all of us by the dogmatic image of thought and
its representational view of language and the world. We must discover
this image and this view; we must see what roles they play in preventing
us from really thinking.
But that is not all. That is only the negative task, the clearing of
the ground. Alongside this abandonment we must also experiment in
ways of thinking. We must conjugate our thought and our world, our
thought and our language.
There are those who have gone before us, who have swum in this
water before: Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche amongthem. They may help
ease us into the water, teach us some of the strokes, so we dont drown
before we get started. We can apprentice ourselves to them. Sooner or
later, however, we must push off from the shore and conjugate things
for ourselves. That is what Deleuze does in Difference and Repetition and
The Logic of Sense. But we must all do it for ourselves, each of us. We
can apprentice ourselves to Deleuze if we like, as he does with those
who come before him. But he cannot swim for us.
There are two mistakes we might make in considering the prospect
of learning to think. The rst mistake would be to assume that think-
ing, unlike swimming, is a purely conscious activity, that thinking is
a manipulation of thought. That mistake is our inheritance from the
dogmatic image of thought. We feel our way into thinking in much
the same way as we feel our way into swimming. Thinking is at least
as unconscious as it is conscious, and it is no less an experiment. That
is one of the things meant by the suggestion that Deleuze palpates his
subject matter. The second mistake would be to assume that each of us
must face this task alone. In fact we can face it in groups, conjugating
59
ourselves with one another as well as with the world. Thinking does
not need to be a solitary activity, and it surely does not take place in
a world we do not share with others. The next step, then, might be
to consider our place among others in the world, to think about it, or
with it, or in it.
That step would lead us into politics.
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 specic forms of identity. Those swarms are
not outside the world; they are not transcendent creators. They are
of the world, as material as the identities formed from them. And
they continue to exist even within the identities they form, not as
identities but as difference. From their place within identities, these
swarms of difference assure that the future will be open to novelty, to
new identities and new relationships among them.
We have seen this world in the thought of Spinoza, Bergson, and
Nietzsche. Spinoza lays the groundwork for thinking the immanence
of difference. Difference is not transcendent creation; it is immanent
expression. Bergson offers the temporal scaffolding for this expres-
sion. Time is not a linear passage of discrete instantaneous units but
the actualization of the virtual. Nietzsche announces difference and its
eternal return. He points the way toward afrming the play of chance,
the embrace of the dice throw. He does not regret the openness of the
future, does not reach helplessly toward the security of what he thinks
he knows.
We have seen this world in science and in language. It is the chaos
within physics and biology. It is in the way language overspills itself, al-
ways doing more than it can say. And we have begun to think this world
114
The Politics of Difference 115
as well, moving beyond the dogmatic image of thought we have inher-
ited toward a new, more agile, thought that palpates what it cannot
conceive and gestures at what it cannot grasp.
Is this world one of complete arbitrariness? Can we say nothing of
the future on the basis of what is or what has been? Is everything and
anything equally possible at every moment?
It is more accurate to say that we do not know what is possible
at every moment than to say that everything is possible. To say that
everything is possible would be to deny that the world is composed of
difference. It would be more like saying the world is undifferentiated.
If everything were equally possible at every moment, that would be
because everything is always there, vying for expression, all the time.
That is not what Deleuze says. The world is composed of elds of
difference, problematic elds, not elds of undifferentiation. To say
that the world is more than we experience is not to say that the world
is everything, all the time. To say, with Monod, that a totally blind
process can by denition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision
itself, is not to say that vision is possible in every biological being at
every moment.
Although the future is an actualization of difference, this actual-
ization is constrained by the structure of a particular virtuality. (This
was discussed in Chapter 3.) Chemical processes are composed of par-
ticular relationships of difference, not of all the differences of being
at one time. Moreover, Prigogines work shows us that the differences
inhabiting material forms can only display themselves under certain
conditions. A chemical clock cannot occur in conditions that are close
to equilibrium, only in conditions that are far from it. The differential
relationships that determine chemical processes include both chemi-
cal and physical conditions.
The same holds for language. A particular language cannot express
all possible forms of sense. (That is why translation can be so difcult.)
It can only express what the differential relationships in that language,
in their articulation against and across the world, permits.
We might put the point this way: history is not irrelevant. History is
the folding and unfolding of particular swarms of difference in partic-
ular relationships. It is the virtual character of the past as it inhabits
the present. To deny the relevance of history is not simply to deny the
116 Gilles Deleuze
identities on which historical study often relies; it is, equally, to deny
the realm of difference that inhabits our present.
Perhaps, rather than saying that anything can happen, it would be
more accurate to say that anything can happen, given the right conditions.
But, since we do not know of what a body is capable, it would be better
to say, not that anything can happen, but that so much can happen that
we do not know about. The worlds possibilities are beyond us. We are
constrained in opening ourselves to them, not only by the limits of
our imagination and the vastness of our ignorance but and this is
what Deleuze means to cure by the very way we think about those
possibilities.
Does this mean that prediction is futile? No. Chemical processes
can often be predicted in conditions that are near equilibrium. We
can predict the future with some degree of accuracy, the more so if
prediction occurs by means of probabilities rather than scientic laws.
The world is a world of difference, not of undifferentiation. And, if
we are to live like Nietzsches bad player, we might seek to reduce the
world to its predictability, to take probabilities onthe throwof the dice.
We would always be impoverished, but not always mistaken, to do so.
But to think about the worlds possibilities in a fresh way, to take
account of the differences in which we and the world are steeped,
requires a new ontology. And so, against the grain carved by Sartre
and Derrida and Foucault, Deleuze traces a new ontology, a new way
of conceiving of being, the world, or what there is. He takes up the
challenge of the limits of our thought in order to construct a new
thought. Instead of abandoning the questions of being that have been
badly posed by so many of our philosophical ancestors, he chooses to
raise them again, but to pose them differently. Being is not a puzzle
to be solved but a problem to be engaged. It is to be engaged by a
thought that moves as comfortably among problems as it does among
solutions, as uidly among differences as it does among identities.
The task of such thought is not to be undertaken alone. A philoso-
pher in his study understanding the world as difference is not the goal
of Deleuzes ontology. The world as Deleuze conceives it is a living
world, a vital world. This is true even of the worlds inanimate realms.
But it is not only a living world; it is a world to be lived in. The task
is not merely to think the world differently, but to live it differently.
As was said at the outset, Deleuzes guide to living is both a guide to
conceiving the world as living and a guide to raising the question of
how one might live.
And one does not live alone. One lives among others: thinking
among them, acting among them, speaking withandstruggling among
them. For Deleuzes thought to take the next step is for it to start
thinking not only the world but the among others in which thought takes
place. The challenge facing the thought of difference is not only to
think the vital difference that is the unfolding of being but also to
think the political world in which that thought takes place.
Although Deleuzes earlier works gesture in the direction of poli-
tics, it is only when he starts collaborating with F elix Guattari that the
thought of difference turns from a general to a political ontology. In
Deleuzes own intellectual itinerary, it is after the events of May 1968
in France that politics moves toward the forefront of his thought.
1
II
Let us start with traditional liberal political theory. (The term liberal
here is not contrastedwithconservative. It is contrastedwithsovereign,
in the sense of royalty. Both contemporary liberals and conservatives
in the United States nd their roots in liberal political theory.) Liberal
theory is our political inheritance. It is the ether in which debates
about the role of the state, the right to abortion, the obligations to
immigrants, the reform of welfare, and most other debates in what
is called the public realm are discussed. Liberal theory authorizes
the terms and sets the limits of those debates. For most of us, the
framework of liberal theory appears so natural as to be inescapable.
How else might we discuss matters of politics?
The starting point for liberal politics is the individual. Earlier polit-
ical theory starts with the sovereign: the king, the prince, in any case
the head of state. The sovereign is the given of early political theory;
1
In May and June 1968, people from very different quarters of life students, workers,
women took to the streets of Paris, built barricades, deed the police, and almost
forced the resignation of then President Charles DeGaulle. He was restored to power
with the assistance of the French Communist Party, which resented the fact that the
uprising was not being led or controlled by them. In the wake of what came to be
called May 68, French intellectuals began to theorize progressive politics outside
the Marxist tradition.
118 Gilles Deleuze
it is the point around which theorizing revolves. Liberal theory re-
verses the terms of this relation. For liberal theory, it is the individual
to be governed, not the governor, who is the starting point. A proper
understanding of the political begins with individuals and their rela-
tionship to one another, not with an already constituted state and its
royal prerogatives.
The founding question for liberal theory is: Why should an indi-
vidual consent to be governed in the rst place? This is the question
posed by the initiators of the liberal tradition, thinkers like Thomas
Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. It remains the question
for contemporary political theory. John Rawls and Robert Nozick have
not shifted the question. They, and others whose writings trace the
parameters of our political thought, remain bound to the same start-
ing point. There are individual human beings, each with his or her
interests, goals, and particular characteristics. Why and under what
conditions should these individuals come together and allow them-
selves to be governed?
The various answers offered to this question constitute the sub-
stance of the liberal political tradition. That variance is a product of
different assumptions about the needs of individuals, their willingness
to cooperate with one another, their motivation to abide by rules to
which they have agreed, the dangers of consolidating political power,
the likelihood and depth of conicts between the better off and the
worse off, and the range of individual liberty that is the birthright of
individuals.
People inAmerica who call themselves liberals (inthe everyday sense
of the term) make certain assumptions, or argue for certain positions,
onthese matters. People whocall themselves conservatives arrange their
assumptions differently. Liberals, for instance, are wont to weigh heav-
ily the needs of individuals, to count on peoples willingness to cooper-
ate with one another, and to be more willing to limit certain individual
liberties for the collective good. Conservatives are more likely to be
concerned about the dangers of consolidating political power, more
enthusiastic about individual liberties, and less concerned about con-
icts between the better off and the worse off. What both groups agree
on is that these matters are the proper ones to be discussed, and that
their discussion is ultimately addressed to the question of why individ-
uals should allow themselves to be governed.
What does government do, then? What is its role? In some form or
another, it represents individuals and their interests. If a government is
to be a legitimate one, the interests of each individual must be rep-
resented in the public realm occupied by government. I can only be
asked to consent to be governed if the structure of government takes
the realization of my interests as its task and its goal. This does not
mean that a government must attempt to realize all of my interests.
People have different and conicting interests; not all of them can be
realized. However, for a government to be legitimate is for it to recog-
nize those interests and to attempt to arrange the cooperative aspects
of our lives in such a way as to meet the most important of them, and
to allow us to pursue them as best we can.
This is what has come to be known as the social contract. Each
individual, deciding on his or her own, agrees to come together under
a common government, and agrees to obey that government, as long
as the government the individual agrees to obey is one that represents
his or her most important interests.
A government that does not start from the interests of the gov-
erned, that does not represent those interests, has lost its mandate to
govern. This need not be a serious matter. If the problem lies with
the particular participants in the governing body, then they can be
removed by the individuals they govern. In the standard case, they
are voted out of ofce. By contrast, if the problem is deeper, if the
government is not structured in such a way as to represent the inter-
ests of the governed, then those individuals are justied in forming a
new, more representative, governmental structure. The early slogan of
the American Revolution, no taxation without representation, is an
example of this. The colonials complaint was not that the particular
members of Parliament did not have their interests in mind when de-
ciding tax policy; it was that the British government was structured to
prevent any of the colonials from having their interests represented.
To address that problem required a new, more representative, form of
government.
This picture of politics constitutes the framework within which we
discuss political issues. It is the element of our political thought. No
doubt it is anadvance onsovereignpolitical theory. Better to see things
from the side of the governed than from the side of the governor. But
neither is there any doubt that liberal political theory is a form of
120 Gilles Deleuze
the dogmatic image of thought. It is precisely the dogmatic image
translated into political terms.
For the dogmatic image of thought, there are already constituted
identities, each with its qualities, which are to be represented by
thought. For liberal political theory, there are already constituted in-
dividuals, each with his or her interests (although these interests are
usually seen as chosen rather than already attached to the individual),
which are to be represented by government. For the dogmatic im-
age of thought, representation is the relay from the world to thought.
For liberal political theory, representation is the relay from the in-
dividual to government. For the dogmatic image of thought, truth
consists in the correspondence between thought and the identities it
represents. For liberal political theory, legitimacy or justice consists
in the correspondence between government and the individuals it
represents.
Identities and representation: this is the stuff of the dogmatic im-
age of thought. It is mirrored precisely in liberal political theory. No
wonder stability is a constant preoccupation of political discussion.
No wonder the threat to politics is so often called anarchy, by which
is meant chaos, by which is meant instability and disorder. Politics is
a matter of stability, of the stable representation of given individual
interests by means of a government that considers and balances those
interests in the public realm.
There are many questions that have been posed to liberal political
theory, particularly in recent years. Does it make sense to conceive in-
dividuals as choosing their specic interests; doesnt the society one is
brought upinandlives incontribute tothe character of those interests?
In populous societies, how is government to represent individuals
interests; what are the proper regional or geographic parameters for
governments? Howshould we conceive representation; to what degree
is an elected representative obliged to speak in the name of those rep-
resented when their views on a particular issue diverge from his or
hers? Most of these questions share important elements of traditional
liberal theory. They are attempts to modify rather than to eliminate
the framework for liberal thought.
The question for Deleuze, the political question, is whether we
can think otherwise. Is politics necessarily hostage to the dogmatic
image of thought, or can we think about politics differently? Can we
live together differently? Is there more to our political lives than has
been accounted for by the dogmatic image embraced by the liberal
tradition?
III
One way to approach Deleuze and Guattaris politics is to see them as
offering a new political ontology. Deleuze cannot accept the dogmatic
ontology offered by traditional political theory. To begin our political
thought with individual human beings, each of which comes with his
or her own (chosen) interests, is already to give the game away. It is to
concede the stability of the already given that is the foundation of the
dogmatic image of thought.
The problem is not only that individuals interests are intimately
bound up with the society in which they live. It is true, as the commu-
nitarians
2
have pointed out, that liberal political theorys isolation of
individuals fromtheir societies oftenpaints a distorted viewof peoples
interests. Individuals are far more subject to their social surroundings
than liberal theory would have us believe. But the problem Deleuze
sees is deeper. It lies in the very concept of the individual.
Why should we assume that individual humanbeings are the proper
ontological units for political theory? Is it possible to start with some
other unit? Or better, is it possible to start with a concept that is not
prejudiced toward any particular unit of political analysis, whether it
be the individual, the society, the state, the ethnic group, or whatever?
Is it possible to conceive politics on the basis of a more uid ontology,
one that would allow for political change and experimentation on a
variety of levels, rather than privileging one level or another?
In the collaborative work Deleuze and Guattari perform together,
they offer a variety of starting places, a variety of concepts that are
agile enough to insert at different political levels. One of the con-
cepts they rely on the most is that of the machine. Everywhere it [what
Freud called the id] is machines real ones, not gurative ones: ma-
chines driving other machines, machines being driven by other ma-
chines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. . . . we are all
2
For example, Michael Sandel in his book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.
122 Gilles Deleuze
handymen: each with his little machines.
3
The machine is a concept
that can be situated at the level of the individual, the society, the state,
the pre-individual, among groups and between people, and across
these various realms. It is a concept that offers ontological mobility,
and thus can capture what overspills the dogmatic image of political
thought.
Claire Colebrook offers a suggestive contrast. She writes that:
In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari use a terminol-
ogy of machines, assemblages, connections and productions. . . . An organism
is a bounded whole with an identity and an end. A mechanism is a closed ma-
chine with a specic function. A machine, however, is nothing more than its
connections; it is not made by anything, is not for anything, and has no closed
identity.
4
An organism is a self-regulating whole. Each of its parts supports
others, and the whole is the harmony of those parts. We often conceive
biological entities as organisms in this sense, and the wonder we feel
at them comes from the balance of their living elements. If biologists
like Simondonand Monod are right, however, there are no suchthings
as organisms, at least in this sense. It is not that there is no balance
among various organic parts. Often there is. It is that there is always
more to the parts than their balance, a more that can express itself in
other directions, with other balances, or with no balance at all.
This does not meanonly that there canbe a different balanceamong
the same parts. It means, rst, that there can be a different individual.
We saw the argument by Barry Commoner that genetic engineering
can result in very different biological forms from the ones engineers
might predict. Beyond that, there canbe different relations withdiffer-
ent parts of the environment. Adifferent biological entity may interact
with different aspects or elements of the environment. It may eat dif-
ferent things; it may nest in different places; it may dig up different
parts of the earth; it may clear different paths; ultimately, it may be
eaten by different biological entities.
One way to capture this point would be to say that we should think
of biological entities not as self-sustaining organisms but as mobile
3
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 1.
4
machines that may connect to the environment in a variety of ways,
depending on how those machines are actualized.
If machines are not organisms, neither are they mechanisms. Mech-
anisms are machines in their frozen state. They are machines caught
at a particular moment in time, in the seeming solidity of particular
connections. Mechanisms are machines seen from the viewpoint of
the present instant, machines seen spatially in Bergsons sense. Mech-
anisms are the actualization of machines. Our perception may en-
counter mechanisms; but our thought must penetrate those mecha-
nisms in order to discover the machines within them.
Colebrook offers this example. Think of a bicycle, which obviously
has no end or intention. It only works when it is connected with
another machine such as the human body. . . . But we could imag-
ine different connections producing different machines. The cycle
becomes an art object when placed in a gallery; the human body be-
comes an artist when connected with a paintbrush.
5
Here there are
seven machines: the bicycle, the human body, the gallery, the paint-
brush, the bicycle-body, the bicycle-gallery, the body-paintbrush. Let
us take two of these. The bicycle is composed of a series of connec-
tions among its parts (each of which are, in turn, composed of a series
of connections among their molecular parts). It is their connections
that create the machine that is a bicycle. The bicycle-body is another
machine, formedfromanother set of connections: foot-to-pedal, hand-
to-handlebar, rear-end-to-seat.
If we think this way, then the concept of a machine becomes agile.
It applies not only to bicycles, but also to parts of bicycles and to things
of which bicycles are themselves parts. There is no privileged unit of
analysis. We will go on to apply this concept to politics. But even now,
before we dothat, we cansee one of its virtues. Liberal political theorys
reliance on the concept of the individual as the pivot of political anal-
ysis forces it to approach politics mechanistically or organically. The
relation of individuals to society is one of a specic set of connections
or a self-organizing whole. To think machinically is to consider the
relation of individuals to society as only one level of connections that
can be discussed. One can also discuss pre-individual connections and
supra-individual connections.
5
124 Gilles Deleuze
Moreover, these connections can be seen in their uidity. Indi-
viduals, in the liberal tradition, are pre-given. They come with their
(chosen) interests, wearing them like sandwich boards. I am Bob. My
interests are: skateboarding, eating Chinese food, reading cyberpunk
ction. But individuals have changing interests that emerge from
their changing connections to their changing environments. Machinic
thinking recognizes these changes. Machines are not mechanisms;
they evolve, mutate, and reconnect with different machines, which
are themselves in evolution and mutation.
A third point. Machinic connections are productive. They are cre-
ative. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize this point in Anti-Oedipus as a
contrast to psychoanalytic thinking. For psychoanalysis, desire is con-
ceived in terms of lack. I desire what I want but do not have. If we think
of desire machinically, however, it loses its character of lack. Desire is
a creator of connections, not a lack that must be lled. To desire is to
connect with others: sexually, politically, athletically, gastronomically,
vocationally. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the
mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of an anorexic wavers be-
tween several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an
eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing
machine (asthma attacks).
6
Machines do not ll lacks; they connect,
and through connecting create.
Deleuze and Guattaris critique of psychoanalysis has bearing on
liberal political theory. Liberal theory thinks of individuals in terms of
what they lack politically. It is not that the individuals are constituted
by any internal lacks of the kind psychoanalysis claims. There is no
missing mother gure that an individuals desire is forever chasing.
The individual is a whole; the individual has chosen his or her own
interests. Nothing is lacking in that sense. But individuals are unable
to realize their interests on their own. There is a lack, not within them,
but betweentheir interests and the environment inwhichthey pursues
them. The environment does not immediately provide the resources
to realize their interests. If there were no lack inthis sense, there would
be no motivation to consent to be governed.
The answer to the question of why individuals would allow them-
selves to be governed always concerns their inability to fulll their
6
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 1.
interests on their own. That inability could be due to scarcity, to com-
petition from others, or to the complexity of the interests themselves.
But for one reason or another, individuals need others in order to sat-
isfy their desires or realize their interests. The idea of lack is central to
liberal political theory. It motivates the social contract. It is what binds
the fates of individuals to the fates of other individuals.
Machines do not operate out of lack. They do not seek to fulll
needs. Instead they produce connections. Moreover, the connections
they produce are not pre-given; machines are not mechanisms. Ma-
chines are productive in unpredictable and often novel ways.
The concept of a machine as Deleuze and Guattari employ it is like
the concept of difference Deleuze develops before his collaboration
with Guattari. If the individual is the central political concept of the
dogmatic image of thought, then the machine can stand as a central
political concept of the new form of thought Deleuze develops. It im-
ports into politics three characteristics of Deleuzes general ontology.
First, machines retain Deleuzes concept of difference as positive
rather than negative. Recall his critique of traditional concepts of dif-
ference. Difference is subordinated to identity; difference is what is
not identical. This is difference seen as lack: difference is the lack of
identity, the privation of sameness. But difference does not have to
be cast in the role of lack or negativity. The appeal of the concept
of difference to Deleuze is that if one can conceive it positively rather
than negatively, it shows that there is more to the world than meets the
eye. That is how machines function. In their distinction from mecha-
nisms, machines are mobile producers of connections. They are not
reducible to any one set of connections, any particular identity. Even
when they are connected in a particular way they are capable of other
connections and other functions. We can call this the Nietzschean
character of machines.
How are they capable of this mobility? It is because machines are
not reducible to their actual connections. There is a virtuality to ma-
chines that inheres in any set of actual connections and that allows
them to connect in other and often novel ways. Bicycles are means of
transportation, art objects, sources of spare parts, items inanexchange
economy, objects of childhood fantasy all depending on what other
machines they connect to. We can call this the Bergsonian character
of machines.
126 Gilles Deleuze
Finally, the virtual character of machines, their mobility as machines
and the mobility of the concept machine, does not come from their
transcendent character. It is not because machines stand outside their
connections that they are capable of such mobility. There is no such
thing as a machine outside of its connections. It is within their con-
nections, and perhaps sometimes through them, that machines are
capable of producing other connections. The root of a tree can con-
nect through the soil to the foundation of a house, where it produces
a crack that allows moles to burrow through. Deleuze and Guattari
call the schizoanalysis they develop in Anti-Oedipus a materialist psy-
chiatry, in contrast to the transcendent psychiatry of psychoanalysis. A
materialist psychiatry does not see a transcendent gure (for example,
Oedipus) organizing the connections that are made. The connections
arise from within matter; they are not imposed from the outside. We
can call this the Spinozist character of machines.
We dene social formations by machinic processes and not by modes
of production (these on the contrary depend on the processes).
7
In contrast to Freud, there is no organizing element to desiring-
machines that imposes specic modes of connections from outside
or above. In contrast to Marx, economic modes of production do not
dene machinic connections. Rather, it is the other way around: eco-
nomic modes of production are dened by the character of their ma-
chinic connections. The machine is a concept that can be developed to
form a Deleuzian political ontology that avoids the dogmatic image of
thought that structures liberal political theory.
IV
To embrace the concept of the machine is to move froma focus on the
macropolitical to the micropolitical, from the molar to the molecular.
The distinction between these two pairs of terms is one of the most
misunderstood in Deleuzes thought. It is only when the concept of
the machine is grasped that we begin to understand the role they are
meant to play.
The misunderstanding of macropolitical and micropolitical, or mo-
lar and molecular, goes like this. The macropolitical concerns large
7
political entities or institutions or historical forces. Liberals who focus
on the state and Marxists who focus on the economy are macropo-
litical theorists. They overlook the small elements that comprise our
political lives. They are fascinated by the grand scheme of things. In
order to understand how we are constructed and how power works,
however, we must turn from the grand scale to the smaller scale. We
must focus on the little things. We must exchange the telescope for
the microscope. Only then will we see the political power at work.
This is a good schema for grasping the thought of Foucault. He
analyzes power at what he often called its capillaries. It does not have
as much to do with Deleuze and Guattaris concept of micropolitics.
Deleuze and Guattari write, the molecular, or microeconomics,
micropolitics, is dened not by the smallness of its elements but by
the nature of its mass the quantum ow as opposed to the molar
segmented line.
8
It is not smallness but something else that denes
the molecular and micropolitics. The quantum ow as opposed to the
molar segmented line. What is a quantum ow? It is what we encoun-
tered in the discussion of science. A quantum ow is a virtual eld
that actualizes itself. It is a machinic process. Genetic information is a
quantum ow. An egg is a quantum ow. Matter is a quantum ow, a
fact we understand when we subject it to conditions that are far from
equilibrium. In physics, quantum theory tries to understand matter as
often being subject to chance and unpredictability. Einsteins quarrel
with quantum theory concerns precisely this. God does not play dice
with the universe, he said. Oh, but God does, replied the quantum
theorists, and Nietzsche and Deleuze with them. There is more to the
universe than meets the eye, even the eye of the relativist.
Molar segmented lines: given identities with recognizable borders.
Quantum ows: uid identities that arise from a chaotic and often un-
predictable folding, unfolding, and refolding of matter. Micropolitics
is not an issue of the small; it is an issue of quantum ows. It is an issue
of machines.
To think machinically is to recognize that the given identities of our
political thought are more uid and changeable thanwe have beenled
to believe. It is to seek not for the eternal nature of traditional political
entities: the nation, the state, the people, the economy. It is instead
8
128 Gilles Deleuze
to seek for what escapes them. This does not mean that one seeks for
what lies outside of them; it means that one seeks for what escapes
from them and within them. We no longer look for a transcendent or
an outside. What escapes is of the same order as that which it escapes.
There is only immanence. What Deleuze calls a line of ight is not a
leap into another realm; it is a production within the realm of that
from which it takes ight.
Political thought conceived in terms of the state or the economy is
inadequate. It is inadequate because it is macropolitical thinking. But
it is not macropolitical thinking because the state and the economy are
large rather than small. They are large. But the inadequacy lies else-
where. It is that thought oriented around them tends to be rigid. It
lacks the suppleness that allows us to begin to recognize machinic pro-
cesses. Deleuze and Guattari discuss the state and the economy. They
discuss themat length. But only later, only after having established the
primacy of the machinic, which is to say the micropolitical.
Are there no macropolitics? Are there no established identities that
have bearing upon our political lives? There are: everything is polit-
ical, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micro-
politics.
9
We must be careful here, however. There are not two realms,
the molar and the molecular, that intersect or collaborate to form a
political creation. There are not even two separate levels. There is both
a macropolitics and a micropolitics, but the micropolitics comes rst.
It is primary. Take, for example, the concept of social class:
social classes themselves imply masses that do not have the same kind of
movement, distribution, or objectives and do not wage the same kind of strug-
gle. Attempts to distinguish mass from class effectively tend toward this limit:
the notion of mass is a molecular notion operating according to a type of
segmentation irreducible to the molar segmentarity of class. Yet classes are in-
deed fashioned from masses; they crystallize them. And masses are constantly
owing or leaking from classes.
10
Are there classes? Are there states? Are there sexes and modes of
production and ethnic groups and national territories? Yes, there are.
But we must think of these as relative stabilities, as products of ma-
chinic processes that at once construct them through the formation
9
10
of connections and overspill them from within. Macropolitics does ex-
ist, and we must study its processes if we are to understand the world
in which we conduct our lives with others. But we must always keep
in mind that while politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a
micropolitics, it is the micropolitics that is primary.
V
There are many political terms aheadof us: territorializationanddeter-
ritorialization, the state and capitalism, different kinds of lines (molar,
molecular, lines of ight), subject groups and subjugated groups. Be-
fore turning to them, we should pause to take stock. The categories
of the machine and of the macro- and micropolitical must nd their
place in the folds of Deleuzes thought.
The question we are asking is that of how one might live. It has been
divided into two related questions: What might living consist in? How
might we go about living?
To the rst question, we have seen that living might be something
that is not conned to organic matter. The world lives. Being lives. It
lives not by organic processes but by unfolding its virtuality into actual
forms, by realizing from within difference particular identities under
particular conditions. Those identities do not cast themselves adrift
from difference; they are suffused with difference. But identity is not
pure difference; it is actualized difference.
Micropolitics is political thought that responds to difference. Tra-
ditional political thought has ossied. It can only reect upon the
identities it sees as eternal: the state, the nation, the economy, the mil-
itary, and behind them all, the individual. But suppose these identities
come later. Suppose they are not the primary items of politics. Sup-
pose the world is indeed a world of difference. Then the individual,
the state, the economy would be particular actualizations of a differ-
ence that need not be actualized in these particular ways, or that may
be actualized in these ways but in many different ones as well.
Beneaththis critique lies another one. It may be possible toconceive
our political world in terms of these identities. Even though they are
not primary, even though they are built upon a realm of supple differ-
ences, there may be nothing incoherent about using these identities to
understand and modulate our relations with one another. Traditional
130 Gilles Deleuze
liberal thought is not an impossible way of thinking about politics. It
is not entirely wrongheaded or self-contradictory. Macropolitics cap-
tures, however inadequately, some aspects of our political experience.
But if we substitute micropolitics for macropolitics, if we begin to think
machinically, we begin to see more than macropolitics puts before our
vision. Machines produce connections not only to the state and the
economy. Machines produce all kinds of connections, connections
that will only begin to be seen if we turn away fromtraditional political
thought.
Consider the antiglobalization movement. If we look at it through
the lens of traditional political theory, we may see something like this.
Individuals have come together to resist certain effects of global capi-
talism on their lives and on the lives of others. Pollution, exploitation,
destruction of natural resources, corruption of governments are all
effects of global capitalism. By demonstrating, circulating petitions,
raising awareness of the issue, the antiglobalization movement hopes
to mitigate or perhaps end those effects, perhaps by ending capitalism
as it has evolved over the past forty or fty years.
This is not a mistaken view. There is something right in looking at
themovement this way. Thereare, indeed, individuals comingtogether
in the manner the description portrays. The problem is not that the
account is false but that it is inadequate.
The rst layer that this view fails to see is that people are connect-
ing in ways that cut across traditional political categories. For example,
organic farmers and antiglobalization activists are thinking about and
practicingdifferent ways of treatingthe earthanddifferent approaches
to eating. In this context, vegetarianism is a political activity. For an-
other example, activist groups think about internal group dynamics.
They ask howto relate to one another in ways that avoid domination or
a repetition of traditional oppressions (of women, blacks, and so on).
Rather than reproducing the traditional group structure of (usually
white, male) leaders who create the agenda and followers who carry
it out, they seek to allow for various or novel expressions, consensual
decision making, and more active participation.
If we look at the antiglobalization movement strictly from the view-
point of individuals forming organizations in order to intervene in
standard political ways, we miss these other ways of connecting. Ma-
chinic thinking allows us to see them.
Deleuze uses a different example from recent traditional political
thought. It is dated, but its very datedness is testimony to the agility he
wants political thought to achieve.
imagine that between the West and the East a certain segmentarity is introduced,
opposed in a binary machine, arranged in State apparatuses, overcoded by an
abstract machine as a sketchof a WorldOrder. It is thenfromNorth to South that
the destabilization takes place. . . . A Corsican here, elsewhere a Palestinian, a
plane hijacker, a tribal upsurge, a feminist movement, a Green ecologist, a
Russian dissident there will always be someone to rise up to the south.
11
These different connections, which we might call transversal con-
nections since they cut across traditional political identities are
invisible to liberal political theory. Machinic thinking allows us to see
them. Are these transversal connections political? They involve ways of
living together; they involve power. Why would they not be political?
That is the rst layer of politics traditional liberal thinking neglects.
But there is another layer, or group of layers, to which machinic think-
ing will allow us access. For even at the rst layer, we are dealing with
individuals in relation to one another. And we need not approach,
for example, the antiglobalization movement as a matter of individu-
als. We can look at it from other perspectives that will allow us to see
different things.
Here is one of those other perspectives. The antiglobalizationmove-
ment is a movement of the earth. It is a movement of some part of the
earth seeking to renew itself in specic ways and to restore or protect
other parts of the earth. The earth, we might say, consists in ecosys-
tems. Those ecosystems may be in various kinds of balance; they may
be organic in Claire Colebrooks sense of the term. But even when
balanced, there are virtual imbalances inhabiting them. The anti-
globalizationmovement is a particular type of imbalance cutting across
ecosystems that attempts to protect or restore particular types of bal-
ance among themor withinthem. Toanticipate some Deleuzianterms,
the antiglobalization movement is a deterritorialization that will allow
for a new type of reterritorialization.
What does looking at things this way allowus to see? Why should the
earth be a political category? There are at least two insights we might
11
132 Gilles Deleuze
gainfromgiving anaccount that centers onthe earthrather thanupon
individuals. First, it allows us to see that just as the environment is a
political matter, politics as an environmental matter. Environmental-
ism is not simply a movement of individuals in relation to the earth.
It is that, but it is not only that. Since individuals are themselves part
of ecosystems, environmentalism is not only a movement about ecosys-
tems but also a movement within them. Introducing the earth as a
political category allows us to understand this.
Second, the shift from individuals to the earth loosens the grip
traditional political categories have on our thought. Forcing ourselves
to articulate the political by means of different categories reduces the
sense of naturalness that attaches to those categories that have become
ossied. It allows our thought an opportunity to gain or to regain
suppleness. If we are to think politics by means of difference, we will
need that suppleness.
This does not mean that we substitute the category of the earth for
that of individuals in understanding the antiglobalization movement.
It is not an either/or. As Deleuze often says in his later writings, it is
and. . . and. . . and. We are not saying, No, its not about individuals,
its about the earth. We are saying, Yes, it is about individuals, but
no more about them than about the earth. The task is not one of
replacing a single set of categories with another set. It is one of being
able to create and move among various sets of categories, and even to
cross between them. A political thought of difference recognizes that
whatever categories we use, there is always more to say. We need to be
prepared to switch perspectives in order to say more, in order to see
more.
So far, we have been looking at the rst reading of the question of
how we might live: What might living together consist of? Deleuze
and Guattaris machinic political approach allows us to open that ques-
tion from different angles, to see different connections being made at
different levels. Rather than taking it for granted that there are par-
ticular individuals with particular needs or lacks that the engagement
in politics seeks to ll, political living might consist in the creation of
connections among and within various actualized levels of difference:
individuals, the earth, the South. Approaching the question this way
opens up newpaths for approaching the second question: Howmight
we go about living?
In navigating this second question, we do not want to provide an-
swers. We do not want to say, one should live in such and such a way.
There is no general prescription. We have done with all globalizing
concepts.
12
It is not a question of how we should live; it is a question
of how we might live. Seen from Deleuze and Guattaris viewpoint, the
question might become something like this: What connections might
we form? Or, What actualizations can we experiment with? If we ask
the question this way, we need to bear in mind that the we of the
questions is not a given we. It can be a group. It can be an individual.
It can be an ecosystemor a pre-individual part or a cross-section within
an environment or a geographical slice. What makes it a we is not
the stability of an identity. It is the participation in the formation of
connections.
Will this participation be a matter of living together? Will it involve
power? Yes to both questions. Politics is an experiment in machinic
connections; it is not a distribution of goods to those who lack them.
Toask howwe might goabout living is not torepeat the dreary question
of who needs what. It is instead to probe the realm of difference that
we are in order to create new and (one hopes) better arrangements
for living, in the broadest sense of the word living.
VI
There is another image Deleuze and Guattari use to characterize ma-
chinic thinking: rhizomatics. They contrast a rhizome with a tree. A
tree has particular roots that embed themselves in the soil at a particu-
lar place and give rise to branches and then leaves in a particular way. It
is a systemof derivation: rst the roots, then the trunk, then the leaves.
The roots are embedded here and not elsewhere. The branches are
bound to the trunk, the leaves to the branches.
Rhizomes do not work that way. Kudzu is a rhizome. It can shoot
out roots from any point, leaves and stems from any point. It has no
beginning: no roots. It has no middle: no trunk. And it has no end:
no leaves. It is always in the middle, always in process. There is no
particular shape it has to take and no particular territory to which it is
12
134 Gilles Deleuze
bound. It can connect from any part of itself to a tree, to the ground,
to a fence, to other plants, to itself.
The tree is liation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree
imposes the verb to be, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction,
and. . . and. . . and. . . This conjunction carries enough force to shake and
uproot the verb to be. Where are you going? Where are you coming from?
What are youheading for? These are totally useless questions. . . . Betweenthings
does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other
and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that
sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end. . .
13
Traditional political thought is arboreal: its thought is structured
like a tree. First there is the individual, then the state, then the laws
that answer back to the needs of the individual. Machinic thinking is
rhizomatic. It allows for multiple connections from a variety of per-
spectives that are not rooted in a single concept or small group of
concepts. Our political thought must be like kudzu. Only that way
can it see beyond the single tree to which traditional liberal thought
has tethered us. Only that way can living together be an exercise in
creation rather than need reduction.
VII
Do Deleuze and Guattari, then, have nothing to say about the tra-
ditional political categories? Are there no individuals, no economic
categories, no state in their politics? Can there be any intersection
between the political thought they offer us and our other ways of con-
ceiving politics, or do we have to start anew? Is politics, in their view,
something other than what we have always been taught?
Deleuze and Guattari do talk of individuals, and of the state, and
of capitalism. To understand this talk, however, requires a machinic
orientation. Having developed this orientation, we are only now in a
position to begin to think about more traditional political categories.
There are many ways to approach this thought. The one we will
rely on here runs primarily through the last chapter of the Dialogues,
which is co-authored by Deleuze and Claire Parnet and published in
13
1977, between the publication of Deleuze and Guattaris two volumes
of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.
The political thought developed in Dialogues is of a piece with that of
the two major volumes, but its sustained discussion of politics is more
accessible.
Wearecomposedof lines. Whether weareindividuals or groups, we
are made up of lines and these lines are very varied in nature. The rst
kind of line which forms us is segmentary or rigid segmentarity . . .
family-profession; job-holiday; family and then school and then
the army and then the factory and then retirement.
14
Segmen-
tary lines are themselves varied in nature. Certain kinds of lines are
contemporaneous: family-profession. Other kinds are chronological:
school-army-factory. The reason these lines are of a single type is that
they are composed of categories we recognize, categories that might
make up the elements of a traditional political theory. Segmentary
lines are the lines with which traditional theory operates. As we saw
before, Deleuze does not deny their existence. There are segmentary
lines, and they are politically relevant. What Deleuze denies is their
exclusive right to determine our political thought.
One might be uncomfortable with Deleuzes resort to segmentary
lines. Given the discussion of language in Chapter 3, is it appropriate
to see segmentary lines in operation anywhere? If linguistic categories
are always overowing themselves, then how can there be lines of rigid
segmentarity? How can they be rigid? Dont they overow themselves
as well?
They do. Lines of rigid segmentarity are not rigid in the sense that
nothing can get past them. We will see in a moment that these lines are
composed of lines of ight whose nature is to overow. What makes
these lines rigid is not what they contain but what people think they
contain. Lines of rigid segmentarity present themselves as rigid. They
are infused with the dogmatic image of thought. Relax, youre not
at work now, youre on vacation, or, Do you think youre still on
vacation? Get focused; youre at work now.
It is not that these lines are not real. We are composed of lines of
rigid segmentarity, just as there are cows and meadows in the world.
But those lines, like cows and meadows, are more than they may seem.
14
136 Gilles Deleuze
The difculty, for political thought and action, is to grasp that more.
Otherwise, the ction that there are only segmentary lines prevents us
from seeing other ways of living. The idea that there are only segmen-
tary lines becomes a politically self-fullling prophecy.
Deleuze calls lines of rigid segmentarity molar. These other lines he
calls molecular:
we have lines of segmentarity which are much more supple, as it were
molecular. . . . rather than molar lines with segments, they are molecular uxes
with thresholds or quanta. A threshold is crossed, which does not necessarily coincide
with a segment of more visible lines. Many things happen on this second kind of
line becomings, micro-becomings, which dont even have the same rhythm
as our history.
15
This sounds like the distinction between macropolitics and microp-
olitics that we have already seen. It is, but there is more. In moving
from the molar to the molecular, we have passed from macropolitics
to micropolitics. But there is still a third kind of line to be discussed
that will also be a micropolitical one. Before turning to the third kind
of line, we need to understand what a molecular line is.
We have already seen an example of it. The Palestinian, the Corsi-
can, and the Green ecologist that rise up fromthe South are molecular
gures. They cut across the divisions of the old political structure of
East andWest. They are representatives neither of Democracy andCap-
italismnor the Triumph of Socialism. In some sense their politics is not
foreign to us. After all, what Palestinians want involves things like au-
tonomy and a separate state. However, their activity and their demands
do not t neatly into the geopolitical vision of East and West. Which is
why, during the Cold War, they were often ignored or marginalized. (It
is not a coincidence that Palestinians have often called themselves the
Jews of the contemporary world. They have been the Other to those
whose categories and concerns lie elsewhere.)
Molecular lines do not have the same rhythm as our history. Our
history: the one we tell ourselves, the one we are taught to tell our-
selves. Our history is the story of our names, our families, our jobs,
our nation. Molecular lines have a different history, a history that runs
15
within and across the ofcial one. A profession is a rigid segment,
but also what happens beneath it, the connections, the attractions and
repulsions, which do not coincide with the segments, the forms of
madness which are secret but which nevertheless relate to the public
authorities.
16
Earlier we saw that molecular lines, those drawn by the Palestinian
or the Corsican, are still beholden to some traditional categories: the
individual and the state. Beneath these lines, there is another set of
lines: lines of ight. Lines of ight have two roles to play in Deleuze
and Guattaris thought. They determine both molar lines and other
types of molecular lines, and they offer other political adventures
and other political dangers.
From the point of view of micropolitics, a society is dened by
its lines of ight, which are molecular.
17
What is a line of ight, that
molecular line that denes a society? It is the third kind of line, which
is even more strange: as if something carried us away, across our seg-
ments, but also across our thresholds, towards a destination which is
unknown, not foreseeable, not pre-existent.
18
We knowwhat it sounds like, a line of ight. It sounds like anescape,
a movement away from something. A convict on a prison break takes
a line of ight. There is a prison; the convict ees it. That is a line of
ight. Or so it seems.
This idea is not entirely wrong. There is something of the convict
to a line of ight, and something of the prison to be escaped. But
it misses the most important point. A society is dened by its lines
of ight. Lines of ight do not escape from anything, or do not do
only that. They are also constitutive. They dene whole societies. How
might they?
We are already prepared for this thought. Deleuzes ontology is an
ontology of lines of ight. Lines of ight are the pure difference that
lies beneath and within the constituted identities of segmentary lines
and the partially constituted identities of molecular lines. They are not
themselves constituted or imprisoned inspecic identities. But they
provide the material that will be actualized into those identities.
16
17
18
138 Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze does not use the term actualize when he writes with Guat-
tari. Instead he makes the distinction between territorialization and de-
territorialization. A territorialized line is one that has a specic territory.
It has been captured and imprisoned in a particular identity. There
can be advantages to capture, to be sure. Capture is not all bad; it
is a necessary moment of things. Territory needs to be marked out:
statements need to be made, identities need to be constituted, people
have to live somewhere. Or else there would be nothing but chaos,
nothing but pure difference. Territorialization is not the enemy to
be overcome. Or rather, it only becomes the enemy when we become
blind to deterritorialization.
Deterritorialization is the chaos beneath and within the territories.
It is the lines of ight without which there would be neither territory
nor change in territory. Lines of ight are the immanent movement
of deterritorialization that at once allows there to be a territory and
destabilizes the territorial character of any territory.
A Marxist can be quickly recognized when he says that a society contradicts
itself, is dened by its contradictions, and in particular by its class contra-
dictions. We would rather say that, in a society, everything ees and that a
society is dened by its lines of ight which affect masses of all kinds (here
again, mass is a molecular notion). A society . . . is dened rst by its points
of deterritorialization, its uxes of deterritorialization.
19
We need to be clear here. The primacy of lines of ight is not
chronological. It is not that there are rst deterritorialized lines of
ight and then later settled territories. There are always both: the
nomads do not precede the sedentaries; rather, nomadism is a move-
ment, a becoming that affects sedentaries, just as sedentarization is a
stoppage that settles the nomads.
20
The primacy of lines of ight is
material. All material, whether territorial or deterritorialized, is con-
stituted by lines of ight. Being is pure difference. There are always
actualized identities, always territories. But those territories are rooted
in deterritorialization, a deterritorialization that is not inert. It pro-
vides the resources for erasing and redrawing boundaries, for eeing
19
20
a particular territory for another one, and, under certain conditions,
for imploding the territory itself.
It is the primacy of lines of ight that gives the machinic character
to Deleuzes political thought. These lines are creative. They create
territories and they create within territories. They are the element
of segmentary lines and molecular lines. They are not organisms or
mechanisms, but organisms and mechanisms containthem. And other
organisms andmechanisms canbe built fromthem. Seenfromanother
perspective, they are the material of our living together, a material
that forms and reforms itself in our living. It is a material that is at
once the earth, the individual, the group, and the masses that ow
within and across the earth, the individual, and the group. Together
with molecular and segmentary lines, lines of ight are the stuff of
our being and the proper focus of political thought. In any case, the
three lines are immanent, caught up in one another. We have as many
tangled lines as a hand. We are complicated in a different way from a
hand. What we call by different names schizoanalysis, micro-politics,
pragmatics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography has no other
object than the study of these lines, in groups or in individuals.
21
It is in the thicket of these lines, in their entanglement, that we
discover the state and capitalism.
VIII
We have seen the character of the state for traditional liberal thought.
It is the referee between individuals, the mediator of their needs. It
has a monopoly on the major power resources in a society, in order
to prevent one set of interests from dominating another and oppress-
ing it. But in the end that power must answer to the multiplicity of
individual needs. The state is the arbiter of lack.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the state does not mediate, it creates
resonances. The State . . . is a phenomenonof intraconsistency. It makes
points resonate together, points that are not necessarily already town-
poles but very diverse points of order, geographic, ethnic, linguistic,
moral, economic, technological particularities.
22
Tocreate resonance
21
22
140 Gilles Deleuze
is, rst of all, to rely on something that precedes one. The state has
no order of its own; it does not have its own reasons. The state is
parasitic.
What is it parasitic on? Lines. It is parasitic on lines of ight, other
types of molecular lines, and molar lines. But of the three, it is partic-
ularly from the molar lines that it draws its nourishment. Traditional
thinking sees a state that answers or at least ought to answer to the
needs of individuals. Deleuze and Guattari see a state that resonates
molar lines. How does this happen?
Unlike molecular lines andespecially lines of ight, molar lines have
particular orders and identities. These orders and identities are not
the same at all times and places. For one society, there may be an order
that runs from son to warrior to farmer, while in another it may run
from son to school child to graduate to professional. (And of course
both those lines may exist in the same society.) But there is more.
Not only are there orders and identities among the molar lines in a
society, there are also what Deleuze and Guattari call abstract machines.
They often credit Foucault with the analysis of abstract machines of
power. Perhaps his most famous analysis of an abstract machine is that
of discipline.
Discipline is not a creation of the state, although the state will have
much to do with discipline. Discipline is a type of power that arises on
the basis of diverse practices. It brings elements of each together to
form a whole that in turn pervades nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Western societies. This power is characterized by a minute observation
of and intervention into the behavior of bodies, a distinction between
the abnormal and the normal in regard to human desire and behavior,
and a constant surveillance of individuals. For Foucault, the prison is
the place where these characteristics rst come together. They have
migrated from the enclosure of the prison, however, inltrating all
corners of society. It is not that all power is reducible to disciplinary
power; rather, it is that nopart of society is immune toit. Is this the new
law of modern society? Foucault asks of the idea of the normal that is
at the heart of discipline. Let us say rather that, since the eighteenth
century, it has joined other powers the Law, the Word and the Text
imposing new limitations on them.
23
23
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 184.
We might think of discipline as anabstract machine. It does not exist
as a concrete reality one could point to or isolate from the various
forms it takes. Instead, it brings together diverse practices under a
particular regime of power. One might say, with Deleuze and Guattari,
that discipline, like other abstract machines, overcodes the molar lines
of a society.
What is overcoding? It is the taking of diverse elements of power
to pull them together into a particular arrangement that is then ap-
plied across large segments of society. Discipline arose through bor-
rowing a variety of little power mechanisms. There were the precise
time schedules of the monasteries, the practices of recording behav-
ior and symptoms in hospitals, the enclosure of the emerging prison
system, the experiments in military discipline in the Prussian army.
These elements came together into a particular form of power that
was then reapplied to hospitals, prisons, the military, and to schools
and factories as well. In all these institutions there emerged a regi-
men of minute interventions into and recording of bodily movement
in enclosed spaces on the basis of specic, detailed time schedules.
Discipline overcoded these diverse practices.
The state enters at the point of overcoding. It reinforces overcoding
and helps spread it to all corners of society. If an abstract machine is
built from the resonance of a variety of molar lines, the state helps
develop and maintain that abstract machine. There are no sciences of
the State but there are abstract machines which have relationships of
interdependence with the State. That is why, on the line of rigid [that
is, molar] segmentarity, one must distinguish the devices of power which
code diverse segments, the abstract machine which overcodes them and
regulates their relationships and the apparatus of the State which real-
izes this machine.
24
The state does not create the abstract machines;
it realizes them. To create something, at least in this sense, is to bring
it into being. By contrast, to realize something is to pull together into
a whole what already exists in a more dispersed way.
24
Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 130. We have been talking here as though there
were only one type of abstract machine, the type that overcodes molar lines. In A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari posit another type of abstract machine, an
abstract machine of mutation, which operates by decoding and deterritorialization.
p. 223 This second type of abstract machine relies on lines of ight. The struggle
between these two machines is that between overcoded molar identities and the lines
of ight that both constitute and escape those identities.
142 Gilles Deleuze
Societies are complex entities, shot through with various intersect-
ing molar lines, molecular lines, and lines of ight. How could an
abstract machine take hold of various practices in society and main-
tain itself without some larger force that keeps it in place? The state
is that larger force. The State is not a point taking all the others
upon itself, but a resonance chamber for them all.
25
In discipline,
the state provides the resources to ensure that discipline can spread
through and get a grip upon various social sectors. It provides the
funding for large prisons, the organization for the military, the in-
formational base for many hospitals, the structure of school systems.
Without the state, it is hard to imagine how an abstract machine could
take hold of the variety of practices it does. It is hard to imagine how
something like an abstract machine could be installed in the midst
of the complex relations of identity and difference that Deleuze and
Guattari think are the material arrangements of any society. The state,
although parasitic, is a necessary feature of a society that expects
to maintain order through the imposition of uniformity across its
surface.
We are far removed here from the liberal state that mediates the
needs of individuals. The state, in Deleuze and Guattaris eyes, does
not mediate. It does not use its monopoly on the means of force in or-
der to prevent one set of individual interests fromdominating another.
Instead the state is by nature oppressive. It is a force for conformity.
As traditional liberal theory recognizes, the state possesses enormous
resources. But those resources are not in the service of mediation or
liberation; they are in the service of a realization of the power of ab-
stract machines andtheir oppressionandconformity. The state realizes
discipline. It creates the conditions under whichabstract machines can
reinforce the identity of molar lines and subject themto the same sorts
of routines. The state is parasitic, powerful, and oppressive. And it has
a strange relationship to capitalism.
IX
One might think that capitalism is another kind of abstract machine
whose power is realized in the resonance chamber of the state. After
25
all, does not capitalism bring together a variety of practices under the
rubric of the market, which then overcodes those practices so that
everything becomes a commodity? Is not the power of capital that of
borrowing from a variety of economic practices and subjecting them
to the conformity of the marketplace? And is not the role of the state
to ensure capitalisms smooth operation, protecting its expansion and
eliminating or marginalizing those that would stand in its way?
For many Marxists, this is the nature of capitalism and the role of
the state. Capitalism is an abstract machine of exploitation. It steals
from the workers the rightful fruits of their labor. The state serves this
exploitation. It supports mechanisms whose ultimate goal is domina-
tion by a capitalist economic system. The overcoding realized by the
state is in the service of the overcoding created by capitalism. The mar-
ket prevails; it is supported by systems like those of discipline in order
to maximize productivity and minimize resistance.
For Deleuze and Guattari, this story about capitalism and its rela-
tionship with the state lacks nuance. Like Marx himself, their relation-
ship to capitalism is ambivalent. They credit capitalism for removing
many past oppressions, for overthrowing mechanisms of conformity
characteristic of our earlier history. On the other hand, capitalismcre-
ates its own damages. These damages must be understood and over-
thrown. Deleuze and Guattari are not simple Marxists; but they are
hardly apologists for capitalism.
Think of the kinds of oppression capitalism has helped overcome.
We are no longer bound to public authorities, our social surroundings,
or even to our families in the way we once were. Kings do not rule us
in the name of a higher power that presses us into submission. The
church, the synagogue, the mosque are no longer the arbiters of our
moral lives. We are no longer merely cogs in a larger social scheme
that requires our unquestioning obedience. As Deleuze and Guattari
put it, the old codes that have ruled us have been swept away by
capitalism. They have been replaced instead by an axiomatic.
The difference between an axiomatic and the codes it has replaced
is described by Deleuze and Guattari this way:
the axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements and relations
whose nature is not specied, and which are immediately realized in highly
varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other hand, are relative to those
144 Gilles Deleuze
domains and express specic relations betweenqualied elements that cannot
be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence
and in an indirect fashion.
26
Codes are concrete principles and rules that regulate specic peoples
relationships withother specic people. Anaxiomatic is more abstract.
It regulates, but not through specic rules and not by means of specic
relationships.
Consider this historical change. At one time, peasants were tied to
the land and to the lord for whomthey worked. They had a specic set
of obligations to that lord, obligations they had toward no other lord.
They could not pick up and move to the land of another lord, and
not simply because they could not afford to move or to buy land. The
idea of affording to move or buy land hardly existed in the world of
peasantry. One lived bound within a set of obligations to land and lord
that could be regulated or overcoded from a distance by the state, but
only by transcendence rather than immanence: only by imposition of
a force outside the specic relationship rather than part of it.
Contemporary laborers in a capitalist economy are in a very differ-
ent situation. There is no bond of obligation to employer, no sanction
against moving. Laborers can move as they please as long as they can
afford it. They can buy land or equipment, invest capital, start up their
own businesses. There is no regulation of their relationships with spe-
cic others in a society.
This does not mean that they are free. Far fromit. Even if we except
for the moment the overcoding realized by the state, capitalism has its
own ways of regulating behavior and interaction. The most prominent
among these ways has to do with the dominance of exchange value.
Marxs famous distinction between use value and exchange value is a
distinction between what an object can be used for and what it can
be exchanged for. In capitalism, it is exchange value rather than use
value that dominates. An object is worth what it can be exchanged for.
And these objects need not be material things: they can be ideas, or
labor, or self-respect.
Exchange value works as an axiomatic rather than as a code. It reg-
ulates not by setting rules between specic people or between people
26
and things but by setting the manner in which all interactions can be
governed. I can sell my labor to you; you can invest it in a product; you
can sell that product to others; they can employ that product in their
business to the extent that it allows them to create something that will
afford them a favorable exchange with still others. In this chain, it is
irrelevant who I am or who you are. I can be a laborer or a consul-
tant or a doctor or lawyer. My position does not matter. The axiomatic
is a functional regulator of relationships among diverse people and
things. It can work across a variety of domains and does not respect
(or restrict) people to specic ofces or positions.
This is not, in Deleuze and Guattaris view, an entirely bad thing.
Capitalism deterritorializes, clearing the ground for new ways of cre-
ating lives: capitalism and its break are dened not solely by decoded
ows, but by the generalized decoding of ows, the new massive deter-
ritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized ows.
27
By deter-
ritorializing previous territorialities, lines of ight are freed to travel
to new territories, intersect with other lines of ight, engage in new
experiments.
Unfortunately, that is not what happens in capitalism. Although
possessed of a dynamic of deterritorialization, although decoding the
ows with which it operates, capitalism has ways of ensuring that those
decoded ows serve its own purposes. It has mechanisms of capture
that stie the ight of molecular lines.
One of these ways of stiing ight is the regime of discipline Fou-
cault describes. Another, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the
Oedipus complex. Oedipus, like discipline, is an abstract machine that
functions under capitalism to capture lines of ight and prevent them
creating new ways of living. Deleuze and Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus at
the time of the ascendance of psychoanalysis in France. In their view,
the idea of the family drama that Oedipus implies is a mechanism that
focuses on desire. A desire is a line of ight. It is capable of creating
new ways of living. But if its energy can be turned back upon itself if
it can be made to become entangled in itself then its creativity will be
inhibited. It will be put instead in the service of the dominant order,
in this case the axiomatic of capitalism.
27
146 Gilles Deleuze
That is what Oedipus does. It turns desire centripetally back toward
the family instead of allowing it to move centrifugally, experimenting
with new connections.
Oedipus is the entangler of lines of ight. Rather than opening
them to their own experiments, Oedipus says that your desires, your
lines of ight, are really directedtowardyour ownfamily. Whatever you
think you desire, it is really your mother or your father you want. Lines
of ight are captured, blocked fromexploiting the deterritorialization
that the emergence of capitalismaffords. In that way, lines of ight can
be placed in the service of capital rather than freed to pursue other
directions. Familial molar lines replace older political codes as a means
of capture for lines of ight. Capitalism retains its hegemony over the
uncertain adventures that might follow the deterritorialization it has
helped foster.
To many of us, the idea of Oedipus as a mechanism of capture
may seem provincial or dated. The fortunes of psychoanalysis, never
high in the United States or Britain, have fallen over the years. By the
time Deleuze and Guattari publish the second volume of Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, eight years after Anti-Oedipus, Oedipus is no longer
a gure in their thought. Although the abstract machine of discipline
continues to be recognized as a powerful mechanism binding lines
of ight, Oedipus does not.
28
Now the capitalist axiomatic is directly
exploitative. It does not require an intermediary.
The four principal ows that torment the representatives of the world econ-
omy, or the axiomatic, are the ow of matter-energy, the ow of population,
the ow of ood, and the urban ow. The situation seems inextricable be-
cause the axiomatic never ceases to create all of these problems, while at the
same time its axioms, even multiplied, deny it the means of resolving them
(for example, the circulation and distribution that would make it possible to
feed the world).
29
28
Near the end of his life, Deleuze begins to question whether discipline is still effective
as an abstract machine. He suggests that we have moved froma society of discipline to
a society of control, characterized not by the connement and regulation of bodies
but by ultrarapid forms of apparently free-oating control that are taking over from
the old disciplines at work within the time scales of closed systems. Postscript on
Societies of Control, p. 178.
29
There is no Oedipus here. The capitalist axiomatic creates its own
difculties, engages inits ownoppression. By submitting all ows tothe
regime of exchange value, capitalismreterritorializes the lines of ight
it has freed from previous codes. It binds them to an axiomatic that
keeps themwithin the orbit of capitalismwithout requiring an outside
force to intervene. In this situation, Oedipus is no longer required.
Does the state have a role to play here? It does, although its role is
more limited than it was in earlier regimes. What characterizes our
situation is both beyond and on this side of the State.
30
Even with-
out Oedipus, though, there are other abstract machines at work (for
example, discipline) that require the resonance of the state in order
to be maintained. Moreover, to think of a society as reducible to its
economic arrangements is to deny the complexity of its composition.
Not all molar lines are in service of the economy. And molar lines are
themselves composed of lines of ight that are more than the molar
lines they constitute.
Perhaps we are living in a world where states hold less sway over
the societies they are said to govern. Perhaps the development of cap-
italism does not require the support of the state to the degree it did
in the nineteenth century and in most of the twentieth century. This
does not mean that states will wither away. There will always be lines
of ight, pressing against the territorializations of the moment. There
will always be abstract machines seeking to capture, entangle, or con-
strict those lines of ight. And there will always be a need to realize
and maintain those abstract machines by making their elements res-
onate across social arrangements. Whether in the service of capitalism
or not, states are not poised at the edge of disappearance.
The story many Marxists tell about the relation of capitalism to
the state, the story we cited a few pages ago, is not entirely wrong.
The state does overcode society in the service of capitalism. But the
story is not entirely right, either. An account that focuses solely on the
states service to a purely exploitative capitalism misses the complexity
of both state and capitalism. The state is not only in the service of
capitalism; its overcoding touches on aspects of our lives that are not
reducible to economics. And capitalism is not purely exploitative. The
30
148 Gilles Deleuze
axiomatic that binds us to the market also frees us fromthe oppression
of traditional social codes. The question facing us now, the political
question, is how to mobilize the deterritorialization that capitalism
unleashes in the service of new ways of living together.
X
How might we conceive resistance to the capitalisms axiomatic and
the states resonance of overcoding? How might we begin to think
about mobilizing lines of ight in order to create alternative social
arrangements? At the end of Chapter 3, we saw that to think differ-
ently is not a solitary activity. It is difcult, if not impossible, to do
on ones own. And to live differently on ones own is more difcult
still. Deleuze has offered us an ontology that responds to difference.
Deleuze and Guattari have carried that ontology into the realm of pol-
itics. How might we use this ontology and this politics in the project of
living together? How might we release our lines of ight, recover the
machines coiled within the organisms and mechanisms?
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between subject
groups and subjected groups. Each involves an investment of desire. But
both involve very different investments.
Every investment is collective, every fantasy is a group fantasy and in this sense
a position of reality. But the two kinds of investment are radically different,
according as the one bears upon the molar structures that subordinate the
molecules, and the other on the contrary bears upon the molecular multiplic-
ities that subordinate the structuredcrowdphenomena. One is a subjected group
investment . . . which socially and psychically represses the desire of persons;
the other, a subject-group investment in the transverse multiplicities that convey
desire as a molecular phenomenon. . .
31
Subjected groups and subject groups. Subjected groups think and
act in terms of molar lines, machines and organisms. Their world con-
sists solely of actualities, never of virtualities that might be actualized.
It is not difcult to nd subjected groups engaged in politics. Turn on
the television. The talking heads will offer subjected group talk to any-
one willing to listen. There is always an us and a them. The distinction is
31
clearly drawn. There are things we can do to them, or at least ways we can
help ourselves, but we must be realistic. We can debate the options, but
when one of them is chosen, we must fall in behind it. Everyone has
a role to play. Mothers should be mothers; workers should contribute
in the way of their work; children should listen to their parents.
This is the thought of subjected groups: clear distinctions among
molar lines with already understood goals. It is pure Nietzschean reac-
tivity. But recall what Deleuze said about philosophy. It is a question
of someone if only one with the necessary modesty not managing
to know what everybody knows. That is where subject groups begin.
With subject groups, it is not only one. Every investment, Deleuze and
Guattari tell us, is collective. We are never alone, not in our molar
lines and not in our molecular lines. It is a question of some among
us not managing to know what the rest of us know. Subject groups are
ignorant. Like Socrates, their wisdom lies in knowing that they do not
know. And most important, they do not yet know what their collective
bodies are capable of.
To be ignorant is not to be stagnant. It is not to be paralyzed. To be
ignorant in this way is instead to be seeking new possibilities, new for-
mations. It is tobe creating newconnections. It is tomove among the as
yet undecided and the undecidable in order to see what might be cre-
ated. Every struggle is a functionof all these undecidable propositions
andconstructs revolutionary connections inoppositionto the conjugations
of the axiomatic.
32
Machines connect; they do not conjugate within an
axiomatic, but create new connections with other machines. They ac-
tualize new moments of the virtual. Fail to know what everyone else
knows and you have a chance to create something interesting. Never
alone, always in a group. Groups do not have to be stiing. They do
not have to be subjected groups. Find others who are willing to touch
the virtual and you have a subject group.
Deleuze often talks of nomads and minorities. He contrasts no-
mads with sedentaries. We have seen that there are always both no-
mads and sedentaries. Deleuze throws in his lot with the nomads, with
those whose restlessness sends themon strange adventures, even when
those adventures happen in a single place, as they do for writers and
philosophers. Nomads do not know. They seek. They seek not to nd
32
150 Gilles Deleuze
something, because there is not a something to be found. There is
no transcendence to comfort them. They seek not to discover but to
connect. Which is to say they seek to create. They palpate the virtual in
their work in order to discover what may be connected to it. They em-
brace the eternal return, because it will always offer them something
they do not know. They are not afraid to throw the dice, and are not
fearful of the dice that fall back.
Minorities are nomadic adventures. To become minor is to seek to
connect with neglected movements in the social body. These connec-
tions can be political in the traditional sense, but they do not need
to be. They can be artistic, culinary, vocational, linguistic, scientic,
parental, or literary. Deleuze and Guattaris book on Kafka is a book
about a writer seeking to become minor, in part through the use of a
particular variant of German. Prague German is a deterritorizalized
language, appropriate for strange and minor uses. (This can be com-
pared in another context to what blacks in America today are able to
do with the English language.)
33
To become minor is not to embrace a particular identity, and it has
nothing to do with how many are in the group compared with the
number in the majority. Becoming-woman is a becoming minor, even
if there are more women than men. To become minor is to jostle the
reins of the majority identity in order to investigate new possibilities,
newways of becoming that are nolonger boundtothe dominant molar
lines and their abstract machines. It is to investigate the virtual whose
vision is often obscured by the molar lines of the majority. It is to break
with identity, which is always the identity of the majority, in favor of
difference as yet unactualized. As Deleuze and Guattari say of Kafka,
A minor literature doesnt come from a minor language; it is rather
that which a minority constructs within a major language.
34
Ebonics is not a different language. It is English, twisted into un-
recognizable forms in order to express different experiences. It is not
another language but an experiment in language, one that breaks
from the major language of English in order to say new things or cre-
ate new rhythms or utter new sounds. Once Ebonics develops its own
33
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 17.
34
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 16.
codes and rules, it becomes a major language, even if only African-
Americans speak it. As John Rajchman says,
Minor languages like Black English pose this problem one must devise ways
of being at home not in a territory but in this Earth, which, far from rooting
them in a place, an identity, a memory, releases them from such borders and
becomes light or deterritorialized, like a tent put down by nomads. . . . The
problem is no longer that of the people, but of a people, an indenite
people, as yet without qualities, still to be invented. . .
35
Nomadism and minorities are not the activities solely of particular
individuals banding together. They may be that, but they do not have
to be. Nomadism and becoming-minor can happen across groups or
even at a pre-individual level. The behavior of particular chemicals
at far from equilibrium conditions is a becoming-minor, an actualiza-
tion of a neglected aspect of the virtual eld. The emergence of the
antiglobalization movement is a becoming-minor of many different
groups with a variety of particular goals and purposes; their conver-
gence on issues of exploitation, eating, and group decision making
are a becoming-minor of traditional political processes (and, like all
becomings-minor, in perpetual danger of evolving into a new code
proclaiming How Things Should Be).
None of the terms Deleuze and Guattari introduce subject groups,
nomads, minorities offers a specic political agenda. There is no
general prescription. We are done with all globalizing concepts. If
you ask them, What should we do now? they will not offer you an
answer. Or, if they offer one, it will look like this:
This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with
the opportunities it offers, nd an advantageous place on it, nd potential
movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of ight, experience them,
produce ow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities
segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. . . . Connect,
conjugate, continue: a whole diagram, as opposed to still signifying and
subjective programs.
36
Is that an answer to the question of what should be done or merely
a call to arms? It is both. What Deleuze and Guattari point to here
35
Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, pp. 956.
36
152 Gilles Deleuze
are not political programs but ways of conceiving and acting upon our
experience. We understand these terms: deterritorialization, lines of
ight, continuums of intensities. What we need to do now is think and
act by means of them. This does not require an avant-garde to tell us
where our interests lie. It rejects the crutch of an avant-garde. It places
responsibility in our hands, as long as we understand the word our to
refer not to individuals nor to pre-individual objects nor to groups nor
to states nor to organizations nor to transversal alignments but to all
of these, each at its proper level and in its proper context.
And, a nal point, and perhaps the most important one, politics is
an experiment, not a deduction. If we had not known this before, the
history of the twentieth century should have taught it to us. There are
no formulas, no rules, no programs that can be imposed from above.
Tothink otherwise is toinvite abuse andslaughter inthe name of ideals
that often prove to be at once noble and empty, or base and empty,
but in any case empty. Deleuze and Guattari teach us much of what is
wrong withour political world. They offer us ways to conceive ourselves
and our being together that allow us to begin to experiment with
alternatives. But there is no general prescription. There are only analyses
and experiments in a world that offers us no guarantees, because it
is always other and more than we can imagine. We roll the dice; we do
not knowfor sure what will fall back. Everything is played in uncertain
games. . . . The questionof the future of the revolutionis a badquestion
because, in so far as it is asked, there are so many people who do not
become revolutionaries, and this is exactly why it is done, to impede the
question of the revolutionary-becoming of people, at every level, in
every place.
37
Everything is played in uncertain games. Each line has its own dan-
gers. The dangers of molar lines are obvious. They have been detailed
by Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault. But molecular lines have their
dangers as well. It is not sufcient to attain or trace out a molecular
line . . . it is the supple lines themselves which produce or encounter
their own dangers, a threshold crossed too quickly, an intensity be-
come dangerous because it could not be tolerated. . . a supple line
rushes into a black hole from which it will not be able to extricate
37
itself.
38
Molecular lines can paint themselves into a corner. Perhaps
that is what the proponents of identity politics in the United States did
inthe 1980s. Inseeking to articulate particular political identities (gay-
ness, blackness) from which to address their oppressions, they wound
up isolating groups from one another, ghettoizing progressive politics
rather than mobilizing it.
The dangers associated with lines of ight are perhaps the worst of
all. It is not just that lines of ight, the most steeply sloping, risk being
barred, segmentarized, drawn into black holes. They have yet another
special risk: that of turning into lines of abolition, of destruction, of
others and of oneself.
39
Deleuze cites examples of this danger in
literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf among them. Follow
a line of ight and you do not know where it leads. It could lead
anywhere or nowhere at all. It could lead to its own obliteration.
Our task in politics is not to follow the program. It is not to draft the
revolution or to proclaim that it has already happened. It is neither to
appease the individual nor to create the classless society. And it does
not lie in the slogan To the molecular, to the lines of ight. Our
task is to ask and answer afresh, always once more because it is never
concluded, the question of how one might live. It is a question we ask
and answer not solely with our words or our thoughts but with our
individual and collective lives, in an experimentation that is neither
guaranteed nor doomed but always in the process of becoming.
38
39
5
Lives
I
John Coltrane was a jazz saxophonist. He was born in North Carolina
in 1926 and died in New York in 1967. In between, he produced
some of the most inuential music in the history of jazz. Alongside
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and
Thelonious Monk, Coltrane stands as a peer. There is no jazz saxo-
phonist playing today that does not stand in his shadow. The question
for many young saxophonists is whether he left any light for them.
Coltrane did not have the struggle of many jazz musicians to be
recognized. Although he put in his time in bars and juke joints, at a
fairly young age he was able to play with many of the top jazz bands
of the time, including those of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. It
was during the collaborations with Miles and Monk that he began to
develop his own sound.
In some of his live music recorded in the late 1950s, one can hear
its beginnings. Coltranes solos became longer, more searching. It was
as though he were experimenting with different ways of approach-
ing a song, now this way and now that, often during the same solo.
Miles Davis once said that when he asked Coltrane about the length
of his solos, Coltrane said that he didnt know how to stop playing.
(Daviss reply was, reportedly, Take the hornout of your mouth.) The
solos also became more intense, with more notes covered and faster
runs. To listen to Davis and Coltrane play together was to hear a study
154
Lives 155
in contrasts: Daviss spare playing sought the single right note for a
particular musical space, while Coltrane lled the air with what came
to be called his sheets of sound.
In 1960 Coltrane formed his own group. At rst the group played
within the recognized context of the jazz of the time, hard bop. But
during the early 1960s, other inuences began to nd their way
into the music. Coltrane described having a spiritual awakening
in 1957, and his music of the early 1960s showed traces of a more
spiritual nature. While incorporating sources as diverse as slave spir-
ituals and Indian classical music, Coltrane moved away from hard
bop jazz into something still more searching and restless. His solos
became longer still and, for many of his listeners, mesmerizing. He of-
ten substituted for the tenor saxophone the higher pitched soprano,
an instrument played by Sidney Bechet in the 1920s and 1930s, but
rarely used since. Videotapes of concerts in the 1960s show Coltrane
tethered to his horn, eyes tightly shut, playing wave after wave of
notes while his band pushed the music from behind. It was as though
he became a dervish, lost to the sound, immersed in, rather than
creating, it.
It was not exactly like that, however. Evenwhenhe was most involved
in the music, he was still seeking to push it further, to discover what
it could do. His drummer, Elvin Jones, recalled an occasion on which
Coltrane put downhis saxophone andstartedbeating his chest infront
of the microphone, trying to create sounds that lay outside the range
of his horn.
By the mid-1960s Coltrane was experimenting in the free jazz of
the time, playing atonal music that even many of his devoted listeners
found difcult to follow. He brought in new musicians, people playing
on the margins of jazz, in order to experiment with those margins
himself. One of his late albums, Ascension, remains among the most
challenging of jazz compositions. Its sound is cacophonous, dispersed,
intense without respite. Inkeeping withthe albums title, it is as though
Coltrane were seeking to force a spiritual ascension through the sheer
force of the instruments, as though another effort, just one more,
might land them all in another realm.
Near the end of his life, those around Coltrane described his fre-
quent bouts of exhaustion. He would take breaks from playing, but
each one was followed by a more intense musical quest. He died at the
156 Gilles Deleuze
age of forty-one of a liver ailment that was probably exacerbated by
the intensity of his involvement in the music.
How might we understand Coltranes musical itinerary?
Here is one way. Coltrane was seeking something transcendent,
using the music to attain a spiritual state that was beyond the music,
raising his listeners along with him to that state. The advantage of
this way of understanding it is that it seems to conform to some of
Coltranes own, religiously tinged, descriptions of what he was seeking
to accomplish. The disadvantage of this way of understanding it is
that it neglects the music. The music, on this description, is a means
to an end. The fact that it was music and not painting or writing is
irrelevant.
Coltrane was once asked what he would do if he could no longer
play music. He replied that music was all he knew how to do.
There is another, better way to describe what Coltrane was doing.
It starts with the music. Music is a virtual eld of differences that can
be actualized in many different ways. It is a rich virtual eld, one that,
if its history is any indication, is inexhaustible. Unfortunately, most
musicians do not touch the virtual. They do not even seek to. The
recording industry is not an investigator of musics virtuality; it is a
purveyor of its most common and banal identities. And most musi-
cians, seeking to sell albums, are content to conne their musical
journeys to the boundaries of current public taste. Even what count
as transgressions in contemporary music provocative lyrics or stage
props or clothing are little more than titillations rather than musical
developments.
Coltrane refused the connes of any particular musical context.
This was not because he was rebelling against them. Some people de-
scribe the intensity of his music as angry, but most who listen to him
think of it as ecstatic. The one overtly political piece that he did com-
pose, Alabama, created in the wake of the bombing of a Birmingham
church in which four children were killed, is a dirge rather than a
protest. Coltrane was not reactive, in the Nietzschean sense. He did
not resent the music industry (which was more supportive of alterna-
tive music then); nor did he seem to feel burdened by the dominant
structures of the music of his day.
Rather then rebel, Coltrane created. And his particular form of
creation was to see what more there could be in the music he played.
Lives 157
He did not so much compose or arrange or express; he searched. He
threwthe dice. His playingwas anactive force, goingtothe limit of what
it could do. He investigated to see what else the music might contain
that it had not shown before. He played not to display the actual but
to touch the virtual. And since he was a jazz musician, his form of
touching the virtual was largely improvisational. Unlike Schoenberg,
for instance, whocreatedthe twelve-tone scale, Coltranes investigation
into the virtual of music happened while he played rather than while
he composed.
Looked at as an investigation of the virtual rather than as a step
into transcendence, Coltranes itinerary makes more sense. It puts
the music in the center of the account, rather than seeing it as a
means. But we need to say more. As yet, the gure of John Coltrane
is too distinct from the music. We need to recognize that Coltrane
was as much a vehicle for the music as he was its master. This is why
his relation to the music was one of searching rather than expres-
sion. The music played itself through him as much as he played it.
At the moment of improvisation, there is in fact only a single entity:
Coltrane-music. As Deleuze puts the more general point, The life of
the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that re-
leases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external
life, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a Homo
tantum with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of
beatitude.
1
Inimprovisational jazz, we cansee this clearly. Coltrane practicedup
to eight hours a day. He sought out different forms of music, different
types of musical scales, different musicians to talk to. The end of this
practice and this seeking was not to master the music but to be able, at
the moment of playing, to allow the virtual of music to actualize itself
through his saxophone. It was in the music, not beyond it, that the
beatitude lay.
II
On the afternoon of December 8, 1987, an Israeli truck hit a car
carrying Palestinian laborers, killing four of them. This was not the
1
Deleuze, Immanence: A Life, p. 28.
158 Gilles Deleuze
rst time Palestinian workers had been killed by Israelis. To the
contrary, that Israelis were killing Palestinians was not surprising to
anybody. Whether this particular killing was intentional or not was
never discovered. Given what happened afterwards, it did not much
matter.
Demonstrations beganalmost immediately after the killing, starting
in the populous Gaza refugee camp of Jebalya, and spread through-
out the occupied territories. Young Palestinian males, armed with no
more than rocks, confronted Israeli tanks, machine guns, and tear gas.
At rst, it looked like the kind of outburst that is common among op-
pressed populations: an explosion of rage, soon followed by the return
of quiescent despair.
This time, however, the quiescence did not return. Demonstra-
tions continued; they gained in intensity. An underground leadership
emerged, the United National Leadership, issuing leaets calling for
demonstrations and strikes at particular times and places. The more
the Israelis tried to put down the resistance, the more persistent it
became. Soon the movement earned a name: intifada, an Arabic term
that means rising up or casting off.
As media coverage around the world continued to show images of
a technologically advanced army pitted against stone-throwing youths
in their own streets and villages, Israel became desperate to end the
intifada. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin announced a policy of force,
might, and beatings. The application of that policy was shown on tele-
vision, which increased both Palestinian resistance and world outrage
at Israels behavior. Less publicly, Israel tried to divide the Palestinian
community. In a move it was later to regret, Israeli ofcials encour-
aged the rise of the Islamic group Hamas as a counterweight to the
PLO, who it thought was behind the uprising. Although Hamas cre-
atedsome divisionwithinthe movement, for instance calling for strikes
on different days from the United National Leadership, there was no
diminishing of the intifadas energy.
As it unfolded, the intifada took on different aspects. It was not
solely a matter of confronting the military aspect of occupation, but
of developing self-reliance, national pride, and a sense of the future.
Day care centers sprang up that taught Palestinians their history and
cultural legacy, something that had been neglected in the Israeli-
supervised schools. National symbols, such as the banned Palestinian
Lives 159
ag, were displayed on telephone lines and spray-painted on build-
ing walls. Womens agricultural collectives were formed, planting and
harvesting crops. Small backyard gardens sprang up, providing food
that was passed from house to house during the weeklong curfews im-
posed by Israel. Professors held classes in secret in their homes after
the Israeli army closed Palestinian universities.
Perhaps no one was more surprised by the intifada its range, its
intensity, its longevity than the Palestinians themselves. In the United
States, Palestinians are seen as an unruly people drawn toward terror-
ism. This image does not match the history of the Palestinian people.
On the contrary. Palestinians are often embarrassed by their own lack
of political will. In 1948, when nearly three-quarters of a million of
themwere driven off their land by Israeli forces, they went quietly, with
little resistance except for a few irregular armed groups. From 1948
until 1967 they were ruled by Jordan in the West Bank and Egypt in
the Gaza Strip. Aside fromthe formation of the PLOin 1964 there was
little political initiative directed toward achieving a Palestinian state.
During the rst twenty years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip, from 1967 until 1987, Palestinian resistance was
sporadic. There were long periods of calm punctuated by demonstra-
tions or a hijacking or a terrorist attack. There was no broadbased
popular movement.
It was not that there were no complaints. Palestinians in the refugee
camps longed for a return to the land Israel had dispossessed them
of in 1948. And Palestinians whose home was in the West Bank com-
plained as their lands were conscated for Israeli settlements and their
livelihoods transformed into day labor for Israel. There were arbitrary
arrests, house demolitions, daily humiliations, deportation, collective
punishment, and Israeli terrorism against anyone who tried to resist
the occupation. And there was occasional resistance. But until 1987,
the idea of a mass popular resistance movement seemed foreign to the
family- and agriculturally based Palestinian culture.
The intifada was not an entirely spontaneous affair. It did not arise,
fully formed and articulated, from nowhere. There were structures
already in place to take advantage of the killings of the Palestinian
workers. For several years before the intifada, local organizers had
been working in towns and villages to pull together a variety of un-
derground organizations: resistance groups, self-help groups, medical
160 Gilles Deleuze
groups, cultural education groups. But even those involved in the de-
velopment of these groups were surprised by the speed with which
events unfolded after December 8. The energy and will, the sponta-
neous coordination and resistance had little analogy in Palestinian
history.
So what happened? We cannot say that the killings on December
8 were unusual, or especially egregious. They were not. There was
nothing that happened on that day to distinguish it from many oth-
ers. It would be more accurate to say that the killings precipitated a
movement that was ready to happen, that this particular incident was
a spark that touched the dry wood of Palestinian anger. But we must
be careful here. It had been despair as much as anger that had been
the most common Palestinian response to Israeli occupation. Why did
things change so quickly?
We should recall two aspects of Prigogines study of chemical reac-
tions in conditions that are far from equilibrium. First, chemicals can
display behavior for which there seems to be no causal explanation,
for example the chemical clock. Second, small changes in the environ-
ment can have a decisive impact on the nature of a chemical change.
Recall as well the lesson both Deleuze and Prigogine draw from this
study: we should think of the chemical eld not as one of identities in
causal interaction but of differences that can be actualized in a variety
of ways.
It would not be wrong to say of the Palestinians that they were
capable of the intifada under the right conditions. But it would be
misleading to say that the intifada was waiting to happen, and that
December 8 just allowed it to emerge. To put things that way assumes
that every Palestinian or at least a good many of them were waiting,
consciously or unconsciously, for a moment to express their resistance.
It assumes that resistance lay wholely formedineachPalestinianbreast,
anticipating its appointed hour. It was not like that. If it were, there
would have been no surprise among the Palestinian organizers at the
intifadas depth and intensity. The anger, the resentment, the sense of
injustice and desire to resist: these were all more free-oating. They
had not coalesced, at least in the minds of most Palestinians, into a
particular determination. It was the unfolding events of December
1987 and January 1988 that arranged them in a particular way, that
made them what they were to become.
Lives 161
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that it is in speak-
ing that we discover what it is that we want to say.
2
In the intifada, it was
in action that the Palestinians discovered their ability to resist. What
we later call resistance is not a particular identity lying nascent in pre-
vious conditions, but an aspect of the virtual that assumes a particular
identity when it is actualized. It is correct to say of the Palestinians
before December 8 that they were ripe for resistance; it is incorrect to
say that the resistance was already there, waiting to be expressed. The
former is a matter of difference, the latter an example of the dogmatic
image of thought.
John Rajchman writes, To say we each have a life and to say that
we each have an unconscious thus amounts to the same thing. It means
that there is always something outside our identications as subject
or persons, which we play out through complexifying encounters . . .
3
The rst Palestinian intifada had a life. It had an unconscious that
was played out through the complexifying encounters that emerged
during the weeks after December 8, 1987. The Palestinians did not
think of themselves as a resistant people before then. (Largely they
thought of themselves as an enduring people.) They were right. Before
December 1987, Palestinians, as a people, were not resistant. Resistance
was not there, waiting to be unleashed. Something was there, or, better,
somethings were there. There were various elements despair, pride,
anger that were not but could become resistance, depending on the
unfolding of events.
Even to describe it that way, as though there were particular ele-
ments that needed only to be mobilized in order to become resistance,
is misleading. Before I begin to speak, I do not know exactly what I
want to say. There are no shards of thought, lying scattered in my
consciousness, that need only to be pieced together by the adhesive
of my words. Before the formation of a chemical clock, there are no
potentialities for chemical concentration that lie in wait for an energy
source to release them. Before Coltrane begins to play a solo, there
2
I was going to say. . . . You remember various details. But not even all of them
together shew your intention. It is as if a snapshot of a scene had been taken, but only
a fewscattered details of it were to be seen. . . And nowit is as if we knewquite certainly
what the whole picture represented. As if I could read the darkness. Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, p. 163.
3
Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, p. 89.
162 Gilles Deleuze
are no notes, neither in his mind nor in his horn. There is a virtual
that he can draw upon in order to create notes, notes that follow one
another in a coherent pattern that itself did not exist before he started
to play.
To describe the emergence of the intifada as a mobilization of par-
ticular elements assumes that each of those elements has a particular
identity, and that they only need to be arranged in the proper order
for the intifada to happen. But elements change. What was anger be-
comes determination; what was despair becomes hope. There is always
more going on than meets the eye. Everything is always more than its
identity. There is always something outside our identication as subjects and
persons. It was the unfolding relationships among elements that were
more than merely elements that made the rst intifada what it was. It
was the actualization of the virtual, the unfolding of difference, that
created the popular resistance that lasted until 1993.
There is another lesson here too, sadder in this case. Actualization
does not guarantee the persistence of an identity. The eternal return is
the return of difference, not identity. The second Palestinian intifada,
the Al-Aksa intifada that started in September 2000,
4
has not been
like the rst. It has not been a movement of popular resistance but one
engaged in by military elites with more passive popular support. The
second intifada, although larger in scale than pre-1987 opposition,
remains mostly an opposition of the resistance groups rather than of
the Palestinian population itself. There are, perhaps, many reasons
for this: exhaustion from the rst intifada, continuing and further
dispossession by Israel, corruption in Yassir Arafats political regime,
and the existence of military weaponry in the occupied territories that
divides the population into those who have weapons and those who
do not. In any case, the lesson for us is that the virtual remains coiled
within the actual. Difference returns, identity is fragile. No particular
arrangement, no particular state of folding and unfolding, good or
bad, is ever secure. The truth will out, some have said. But nothing will
necessarily out: not truth, not evil, not justice. There are noguarantees,
except that there is more to come.
4
The name Al-Aksa intifada derives from its precipitating event, the deliberately
provocative visit of Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount/Haram El-Sharif, where the
Al-Aksa mosque is located.
Lives 163
III
In the 1950s and 1960s, American cities were subject to the clarion
call of urban renewal. Urban renewal would deal with the decay of the
cities, their dissolution and their blight. Faced with increasing poverty,
crime, and congestion, urban renewal would counter the chaotic na-
ture of the urban environment with planning and organization. There
would be new roads and highways to accommodate trafc into and out
of urban centers. There would be new high-rise housing for the poor
that removedthemfromthe dangers of street-level living. There would
be distinct areas for shopping, for living, for entertainment, for work.
Each area would have its own facilities and resources: a habitat for
each aspect of urban life. Urban chaos would give way to an orderly
city life.
It was all a spectacular failure.
Funds for roads andhighways supplantedmass transit andincreased
automotive congestion in city centers. Low-income high-rise build-
ings further marginalized impoverished citizens and divided African-
Americanandwhite populations, concentrating the ghettorather than
eliminating it. The separation of areas of life raised crime rates rather
than lowering them, diminished urban life, and isolated city residents
fromone another. Acity, it turns out, is not to be modeled on a suburb.
Jane Jacobs had already taught us this in 1961 with her book The
Death and Life of Great American Cities. City planners want things ar-
ranged in neat patterns. Shops go over here, residences over there,
and highways go through everything to add accessibility. But cities are
not like that. Cities are messy affairs. They work not by an orderly seg-
regation but by a more spontaneous integration of disparate factors.
It is not that there is no order in cities. But urban order emerges from
diversity, rather than the other way around.
This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life,
not art, we may liken it to the dance not to a simple-minded precision dance
with everyone kicking up at the same time . . . but to an intricate ballet in which
the individual dancers reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.
The ballet of a good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and
in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.
5
5
Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 50.
164 Gilles Deleuze
Here is what happens if you plan a city according to the doctrine
of urban renewal. The residential areas do not have anyone walking
around in them either during the day or the evening, because there
is nowhere to go. People emerge from their homes in the morning to
go to work and return to them in the late afternoon. If they leave their
houses again, it is by car to go to another part of town. The business
areas become deserted after dark, since there is no reason for anyone
to be there except to work or shop. Relying on highways instead of
mass transit further isolates people. People travel in their vehicular
bubbles from home to work to entertainment and back to home. This
is a recipe for desolate streets, high crime rates, and, consequently,
ight from cities to suburbs.
It is worse in the high-rise ghetto. Concentrating impoverished pop-
ulations inhigh-rises surroundedby access roads only serves toincrease
their isolation from the rest of the city. It reinforces peoples staying
in their apartments. And by keeping people away from one another,
by diminishing community life, it invites crime.
The core of a city lies not in the number of people who live there
but in the quality of its street life. This is the lesson of Jane Jacobs
urbanism. Consider, she asks us, a neighborhood that has residential,
business, and entertainment elements woven together. There are peo-
ple on the street at all hours. In the morning, people shop and go to
work. In the afternoon, they stroll, eat lunch, and shop. In the evening,
they arrive home from work. At night, they go out. In an environment
like that, businesses will thrive, since there are people who have im-
mediate access to them. Restaurants will respond to local palates or
alternatively will develop them. People will feel safer, since there will
be eyes on the street at all hours. Moreover, they will get to know peo-
ple from walks of life other than their own. Instead of a deteriorating
cycle of neighborhood abandonment and rising crime, there will be a
cycle of cross-fertilization and mutual protection.
How this cross-fertilization and mutual protection will occur is not
predictable. It cannot be planned in advance. Will it be my butcher
that warns me that my kids are hanging around with some of the
wrong people, or will it be the dry cleaner? Will the restaurant owners
press the city for better streetlights, or will the residents? What will the
coalition that resists the development of a Wal-Mart superstore look
like: will the local bookstore, threatened with being undersold, be in
Lives 165
league with residents who want to resist the anonymity of a large chain,
or will there be a spontaneous organization of people who meet while
cleaning up the streets on Earth Day? The folding, unfolding, and
refolding of street life cannot be predicted. It cannot be managed by
at. One can only help foster a diversity of elements and watch what
happens fromthere. Cities are not matters of function; they are matters
of connection. They are rhizomes, not trees. Only this is certain: it is the
relationships among the diversity of aspects of urban life that create
a vibrant street life, not their segregation into areas of uniformity.
Diversity nourishes cities; uniformity strangles them.
And, as in the case of the rst Palestinian intifada, the elements
that create urban vitality are not themselves identities. Although there
is an order, there is no organic whole that is supported by particular
elements arranged in a particular way. There are instead local connec-
tions that are formed in a variety of ways that change the elements that
are connecting.
Objects in cities whether they are buildings, streets, parks, districts, land-
marks, or anything else can have radically different effects, depending on
the circumstances and contexts in which they exist. . . . City dwellings either
existing or potential are specic and particularized buildings always involved
in differing specic processes such as unslumming, slumming, generation of di-
versity, self-destruction of diversity.
6
What is created brings out aspects of people and of the neighborhood
that could not have been foreseen, and that were not there in advance.
The dynamic interactionthat characterizes street life is not a symphony
of particular instruments but a chemical process where the elements
themselves change their composition as they come into contact with
other elements.
Cities are not organic and they are not mechanistic. They are ma-
chinic. It is not that no order emerges. An order, an actualization, does
emerge. But its emergence has nothing to do with self-subsistent ele-
ments arranged according to a pre-given pattern or from connections
that are melded once and for all. It emerges from specic contexts of
diversity in ways that both create and are created by the elements of
that diversity.
6
Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 440.
166 Gilles Deleuze
I decide to take up the trumpet because the woman who works at
the local record store and with whom I have been passingly irting
played some Clifford Brown on the store sound system the last several
times I walked in. I do not begin to play because there was a trumpet
player in me waiting for release. It is because our connection created
something that was not there before: a desire to take up a musical
instrument. Whether I will continue to play depends in good part
on what connections I form as I begin. (It may also depend on my
talent for playing; but it may not.) Are there teachers who will deepen
my interest? Are there local folks who might be interested in playing
together? Will there be others around me that reinforce my progress
will, for instance, the woman smile at me a little more often or a little
more slyly when she hears that Ive started playing?
A successful city allows unity to arise from diversity, not from uni-
formity. A city that works is an exploration of the virtual. Good city
planning fosters that exploration; it does not inhibit it. It is possible,
of course, to plan a city in terms of stable identities. It is possible to
create a city that mirrors the terms of the dogmatic image of thought.
We know what people need, we know how to arrange residences and
businesses and places of entertainment in order to meet those needs,
and we know how to get them from one place to another most ef-
ciently. Those are the starting points of the dogmatic image of thought
as it applies to urban planning. Those are the terms in which thinkers
of urban renewal discussed cities, as cities conceived as suburbs, only
more crowded and therefore more difcult. The question is whether
we can begin to think of cities not in terms of needs we already know
but in terms of diversities whose connections we do not yet know.
We must consider cities as actualizations of a virtual difference, as
machinic connections, not as the interaction of particular identities,
as organic or mechanistic wholes. That is the lesson, although not the
vocabulary, of Jane Jacobs work. It is a lesson we have still not learned.
Although the idea of multi-use urban geographies is beginning to
get a hearing (as though the idea were not over forty years old), we
still think of cities in terms of residential, business, and entertainment
areas. We still allow our downtowns to become blighted, our neighbor-
hoods to become ghettoized, and our lives to become isolated from
those around us. We insulate ourselves rather than forming connec-
tions. One can only wonder, given the proliferation of further isolating
Lives 167
technologies (television, the internet), whether street life will further
decline, or whether, alternatively, the impoverishment that this loss
of connection has created will lead to a renewed desire for an urban-
ism that is Deleuzian rather than dogmatic in its inspiration. Will the
future bring us cities or merely less successful suburban enclaves?
IV
Love has its own erotics. It is an erotics that occurs not by represen-
tation, and not by communication, but by experimentation and con-
nection. And it occurs not only between individuals but also between
parts of individuals, between aspects or surfaces of their bodies.
We often talk of love as though it were a matter solely of individuals
and communication. Love happens between two people. It happens
when they understand each other, when they arrive at some deeper
form of communication. Love is the bonding of two souls that com-
prehend each other.
This talk is not entirely wrong, just as talk of individual needs in
political discussion is not entirely wrong. But it misses large swaths of
the event of love. And among the things it misses is loves erotics.
If we think of love solely in terms of communication or understand-
ing, we cannot explain why long-distance relationships are so difcult
to maintain. With the advent of the telephone, now supplemented
by the internet, communication with one who is far away is simpli-
ed. There can always be communication, and perhaps understand-
ing, without the sight, the smell, the sound of the beloved. Why, then,
do people need to experience the bodily presence of those they love?
One might say that what is missing is sexuality. True. But what do
we mean by sexuality here? Is it simply the act of penetration or the
consequence of orgasm? Why is it that when we masturbate we do not
experience the same level of joy as when we make love with someone,
particularly with someone we care about? Sexuality is itself embedded
in a larger realm, a realm we might call erotics. When we enter that
larger realm, we are no longer in the arena of communication or
better, we are no longer simply in that arena. Nor are we simply at the
level of individuals. Instead we are at the level of sub-individual bodily
parts.
168 Gilles Deleuze
A hand caresses the at of a stomach. An eye gazes over strands
of hair lying on a pillow. A thigh meets the soft esh of a buttock.
An ear hears a sigh of contentment or relief or pleasure. These are
not matters of communication; they are matters of erotics. The hand
that caresses the stomach is not telling anything to the stomach, nor
to the individual whose stomach it is. It is connecting to the stomach,
exploring it. And in doing so it is creating sensations that are not,
strictly speaking, either mine or yours or ours. There is no possession
of the sensation, and there is no subject of it. If we want to put it in
terms of individuals, we might say that each of us is the object of the
sensation rather than its subject. But each of us is not the only object.
The hand, the stomach: they are also the objects of sensation.
And who is the subject of the caress? Is it the individual, the person
who caresses? Not necessarily. If I decide to move my hand thus on
your stomach, then I, the individual, am the subject of the caress. But
must a caress be like this? Must caressing be a conscious endeavor
embarked upon by a consciousness? Often, and particularly when love
deepens, it does not. I do not caress your stomach. My hand caresses it.
Automatically, and without decision. There is always something outside our
identication as subjects and persons. There is an unconscious erotics of
bodies that relies neither on the decisions of particular individuals nor
on the mutual projects they have embarked upon. There is not simply
a me and a you. Nor is there an us that is the melding of each. There is
a hand and a stomach and a sensation arising from their connection.
We can see evidence for this in the heat of sexual passion. We say
that people lose themselves. That is a good way to put it. In the erotics
of the sexual moment, there are no longer two individuals. And this
is not because there is a single individual that is the fusion of the
two. There are not fewer beings there, but more. There are arms and
genitals and ears and eyes and soles and hair and ngertips; there is
a series of explorations and connections and experimentations that
arise not as decisions but on both the near and far sides of decisions
and the individuals who make them. They arise when individuals lose
themselves.
It is not only in sexual erotics that there are many subjects. To
hear the sigh of the beloved, say when she is taking a shower, is not
simply for one person to hear the pleasure of another. It is for an ear
to become the object of a sound, for it to be aroused by noise. If this is
Lives 169
communication, thenwhat informationis being communicated? What
is the content? If this is solely about individuals, then where am I in
all this? Am I the vehicle for the sensation, or only its effect? Might
it be more accurate to say that at that moment I arise out of my aural
excitement than that I experience it?
Loves erotics is a matter between individuals, but it is not only that.
It is also a matter between body parts, between surfaces that come
in contact. And the individuals to whom those surfaces belong are
a product of that contact at least as much as its subject. Our bodies
are the actualization of a virtual that loves erotics explores. Erotics
explores the virtual on many levels: the individual, the pre-individual,
the between-individuals, the between-individual-parts.
We are taught what is to be thought of as erotic, what we should be
aroused by. We all know the images: slim, owing bodies for women,
hard muscular bodies for men. Big breasts, big pecs. Long legs, large
quads. But it often does not happen like that. It is often that something
else becomes erotic. The eye is caught by the glint of light froma knee.
The roughness of a patch of skin becomes provocative to a nger. The
bones of an anorexic or the esh of obesity are compelling. A lisp or
a stutter arouses. One part of a body calls out to another, not with
information but with invitation. Or better, a relationship of eroticism
occurs between them that creates both subjects and objects. There is
an event, an event of erotics that arises across and between the surfaces
of bodies. It may be a surprise to us to discover these sensations, these
arousals. But that is because we still do not know of what a body is
capable.
V
Individual lives. Lives of political movements. Lives of cities. Erotic
lives. Other lives as well: those of chemicals, of cells, of time, of envi-
ronments, of languages. And yet still more lives of which we have not
spoken. No one has done a Deleuzian analysis of the life of a weather
system, although it could be done. All of these lives are actualizations
of the virtual, creations of specic identities fromswarms of difference.
We have seen here, in the lives of Coltrane, of the rst Palestinian
intifada, of cities, and of loves erotics, illustrations of living that can
be given a Deleuzian reading. They can be given other readings as
170 Gilles Deleuze
well, more traditional ones. But those other readings neglect aspects
of what they are accounting for that Deleuzes approach captures.
Often they miss the most important thing: the unconscious character
of Coltranes solos or the pre-individual level of erotic sensation.
But it is not simply a matter of accounting for what is there, for what
there is. The question of how one might live is two-fold. It is both a
question of how living might go and of how one might go about living.
The lives we have glanced at in this chapter address the rst question,
but not the second. We have seen that living might be a matter of the
actualization of difference. But we know as well that actualizations do
not have to be compelling or signicant. They might not yield the In-
teresting, the Remarkable, or the Important. Most often they do not.
Most saxophonists seek to repeat the identities that have been handed
down to them. The second Palestinian intifada is a violent and often
uncreative affair, even if the occupation it is struggling against is abom-
inable. Cities are often segregated, blighted; sexuality is often rote.
We should not conclude from this, Deleuze argues, that ontology
should give primacy to identity. It is not that identities come rst,
difference later. Rather it is that difference is often neglected, the
virtual unexplored. The conformity of our lives has less to do with the
necessity of rigid identities than with the refusal to think, to act, to live
in accordance with a difference that is always there, always subsisting
within the world that is presented to us.
What makes the illustrations we have seen here signicant is that
each involves an experimentation that is willing to recognize that it
does not already know what it will nd. Each heads resolutely into the
virtual with no guarantee of success. Many people call Coltranes later
work noise. The jury is still out on the importance of the rst intifada.
The diversity of cities canlead to antagonismas well as vibrancy. Erotics
canbecome obsessive, centripetal, self-destructive. Deleuze cites exam-
ples of the dangers of exploration: Kleist and his suicide pact, Hold-
erlin and his madness, Fitzgerald and his destruction, Virginia Woolf
and her disappearance.
7
To experiment is not necessarily to succeed.
But it is also not to walk away from what is there. A line of ight is
not a ight from reality but a ight within it. It does not create from
nothing but rather experiments with a difference that is immanent to
7
Lives 171
our world. There is always something more, more than we can know,
more than we can perceive. The question before us, and it is a question
of living, is whether we are willing to explore it, or instead are content
to rest upon its surface.
Deleuzes ontology has not answered the question of how one is to
go about living, at least not directly. There are no instructions; there is
no handbook. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum . . .
What he has done instead is to conceive the world in a way that makes
conformity not the monolith that needs to be broken but instead the
detritus of our possibilities. It is not, on Deleuzes view, deviance that
needs to explainitself. Rather it is conformity that shouldmake us raise
an eyebrow. Difference is there, always. It is immanent to our present
and returning to us from our future. We explore and experiment, not
in order to reject this world, but in order better to embrace it.
And so we return to ontology. Foucault and Derrida reject ontology
in part because of the conformismit promotes. They are right to reject
conformism, but they do not need to reject ontology. If difference
is deeper than identity, if actualization proceeds from the virtual, if
multiplicity is immanent to our world, then the only ontology that
needs to be rejected is an ontology of identity. Ontology has been
thought to be an ontology of identity since Plato. But it does not need
to be that way. Ontology can be an ontology of difference. It can be
anontology where what is there is not the same old things but a process
of continual creation, an ontology that does not seek to reduce being
to the knowable but instead seeks to widen thought to palpate the
unknowable. An ontology of difference is attuned to the concerns
of Derrida and Foucault. It accomplishes the same tasks, using the
opposite means. Rather than jettisoning ontology, Deleuze gives it a
new meaning.
What might this have to do with the question of how one might live,
of how one might go about living? If we seek a prescription, then the
answer is: nothing. Deleuze does not answer the ancient question of
how one should live. He abandons the modern question of how one
should act. He is interested in prescribing neither for our lives nor for
our behavior. And yet he is interested in normative questions. He is
interested in how we act and how our lives go.
The question of how living might go is both an invitation and
a provocation. Deleuzes ontology is not for the faint of heart. To
172 Gilles Deleuze
experiment in Deleuzes sense, to take his ontology seriously, is not to
ll the gaps in our knowledge, nor to seek what we might do on the
basis of what we can do. To experiment is to expose those lines of ight
that are both of us and not of our identity. It is to explore the virtual
without knowing what it will yield. It is to palpate difference in ones
thought and in ones living. It is to throw the dice joyously without
calculating the numbers that will fall back. To experiment is to ask
with the bers of ones being the individual bers, the interpersonal
bers, the pre-individual and supra-individual bers the only ques-
tion Deleuze deems worthy of a life: how might a life go, how might
one live?
What Deleuze understands is that the question of how one might
live is not like the questions of ancient and modern philosophy. It
cannot be answered by means of rules or prescriptions or models or
ideals. If one attempts to answer the question of how one might live
that way, then one falls back into one of the two earlier questions,
either the ancient question or the modern one. What is required is not
instruction but invitation, not a directive but an opening. To put it in
terms Deleuze would recognize, what we require are not solutions but
problems. What Deleuze has put before us is an ontology of problems,
an ontology that faces us neither as an explanation of the world nor
as a solution to a philosophical question.
Deleuzes ontology is not a resting place; it is not a zone of comfort;
it is not an answer that allows us to abandon our seeking. It is the
opposite. An ontology of difference is a challenge. To recognize that
there is more than we have been taught, that what is presented to us is
only the beginning of what there is, puts before us the greater task of
our living. We have not nished with living; we are never nished with
living. However we live, there is always more. We do not know of what
a body is capable, nor how it can live. The alternatives of contentment
(I have arrived) and hopelessness (There is nowhere to go) are two sides
of the same misguided thought: that what is presented to us is what
there is.
There is more, always more.
Further Reading
In what follows, I point some directions for readers interested in read-
ing more about Deleuze, his interlocutors, or the issues that have arisen
in the course of this book. I include bibliographical details for texts
that have not been cited in the previous pages. As far as general treat-
ments of Deleuzes thought, Claire Colebrooks Gilles Deleuze and John
Rajchmans The Deleuze Connections are excellent books. The former is
more literary and cinematic in its orientation; the latter is more dif-
cult, and perhaps better approached after some engagement with
Deleuzes writings.
Chapter 1
Regarding the questions of How should one live? and How should one
act? Plato and Aristotle are obvious cases of the former, while Kant is
exemplary of the latter. Platos Republic and Aristotles Nichomachean
Ethics offer overviews of how each thinker approaches the question
of how one should live. There are a number of extant translations of
these works. Kants Critique of Practical Reason (tr. Lewis White Beck,
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956) or his shorter Groundwork of the
Metaphysic of Morals (tr. H. J. Paton, New York: Harper & Row, 1956)
offer as rigorous approaches to the second question as one is likely to
nd. Regarding Nietzsche, the two texts most inuential on Deleuzes
thought are probably Thus Spoke Zarathustra (included in The Portable
Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufman, New York: Viking Press, 1954)
173
174 Further Reading
and On the Genealogy of Morals. Sartres humanism receives its summary
statement in his essay Existentialism in Existentialismand Human Emo-
tions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957); his technical treatment
appears in Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology
(tr. Hazel Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). Foucaults
primary genealogical works, inwhichthe rejectionof ontology appears
most forthrightly, are Discipline and Punish and the rst volume of The
History of Sexuality (tr. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, 1980).
Derrida has had a long and prolic writing career; my own prefer-
ence is for his early works, for instance Speech and Phenomena and Other
Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs (tr. David Allison, Evanston: North-
westernUniversity Press, 1973) and Writing and Difference (tr. AlanBass,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Chapter 2
Spinozas central work is the Ethics, of which there are several transla-
tions. Bergsons Matter andMemory (tr. N. M. Paul andW. S. Palmer, New
York: Zone Books, 1988) is often appealed to by Deleuze, and forms
the basis for the treatment discussedhere. The most important existen-
tial/phenomenological discussion of time is Husserls The Phenomenol-
ogy of Internal Time-Consciousness (ed. Martin Heidegger, tr. James S.
Churchill, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964). Nietzsches
books have already been cited. Among Deleuzes works, Expression-
ism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Bergsonism, and
Nietzsche and Philosophy are the key treatments of Spinoza, Bergson, and
Nietzsche respectively.
Chapter 3
Unfortunately, very little of Gilbert Simondons work has been trans-
lated into English. However, the introduction to Lindividu et sa
gen`ese physico-biologique appears in Crary and Kwinters Incorporations.
Monods Chance and Necessity and Prigogine and Stengers Order Out
of Chaos are difcult texts, but important for understanding Deleuzes
approach to science. Regarding language, Saussures Course in General
Linguistics is probably the single most inuential linguistics text of the
twentiethcentury, at least as far as Europe is concerned. Lewis Carrolls
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass provide Deleuze with
Further Reading 175
numerous examples of nonsense; Martin Gardners The Annotated Al-
ice is an excellent guide through those texts. Deleuzes approach to
science appears in various places in Difference and Repetition (many of
them cited in the above pages) as well as in his later collaboration
with Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, especially Plateau 3. The dogmatic
image of thought is the subject of the third chapter of Difference and
Repetition. The key text for Deleuzes early approach to language is The
Logic of Sense. Later, in his collaboration with Guattari, he develops an
approach that is different from, but not at odds with, the earlier one
discussed in the present book. The fourth of the thousand plateaus
discusses the later approach at length.
Chapter 4
There are a number of statements of liberalism, but perhaps two stand
out above others: John Stuart Mills nineteenth-century work On Lib-
erty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978) and John Rawlss A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). Among communitarian
works, Michael Sandels Liberalism and the Limits of Justice is an excel-
lent example. Marx and Marxism, of course, have a long and complex
history. As far as Marxs writings, the earlier Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts (which can be found, among other places, in Early Writ-
ings, tr. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, New York: Random
House, 1975) and the later Capital: Volume One (tr. Ben Fowkes, New
York: Random House, 1977) are representative works. Foucaults Dis-
cipline and Punish has already been cited. Much of Deleuzes overtly
political writings are done in collaboration with F elix Guattari: Anti-
Oedipus (especially the fourth chapter) and A Thousand Plateaus (espe-
cially Plateaus 9, 12, and 13), as well as Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
which has a discussion in the third chapter of minority and becoming-
minor in literature. My discussion has also relied on the fourth chapter
of Deleuzes Dialogues with Claire Parnet.
Chapter 5
There have been many things written about John Coltrane, but for
an overview of his music and his style, I prefer the video The World
According to John Coltrane (New York: BMG Video, 1991). Among its
virtues is a grainy video of a performance of My Favorite Things that
176 Further Reading
captures Coltranes searching music as well as anything I have seen.
Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains the
touchstone for thinking about the character of cities. The Palestinian
intifada has also been the subject of much study. One book that offers
an early overview of the rst intifada is Don Peretzs Intifada (Boulder:
Westview, 1991). For more recent developments, I have co-edited a
book with Muna Hamzeh, Operation Defensive Shield: Witnesses to Israeli
War Crimes (London: Pluto Press, 2003), that focuses on Israels 2002
invasion of the territories, but also offers a more general treatment of
the issues. Regarding erotics, the early pages of Anti-Oedipus have an
excellent discussion of couplings that are not person to person, but
part to part.
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Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996.
Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice, with notes by Martin Gardner. New York:
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Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Commoner, Barry. Unraveling the DNA Myth, Harpers, February 2002,
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Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New
York: Zone Books, 1988 (rst published 1966).
. La conception de la diff erence chez Bergson, Les etudes bergsoniennes,
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. EmpiricismandSubjectivity, tr. ConstantinBoundas. NewYork: Columbia
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Index
actuality, 46, 47, 489, 50, 52, 53,
54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65,
68, 70, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91,
92, 93, 94, 95, 106, 114, 115,
123, 125, 127, 129, 132, 133,
1378, 148, 149, 151, 156,
157, 162, 165, 166, 169, 170,
171
afrmation, 26, 34, 47, 59, 60, 61,
62, 65, 678, 69, 70, 72, 73,
74, 77, 95, 110, 114
Althusser, Louis, 105
Arafat, Yassir, 162
Aristotle, 4, 76, 78, 173
Armstrong, Louis, 154
axiomatic, 143, 144, 145, 1467,
148, 149
Bechet, Sidney, 155
becoming, 5960, 62, 94, 102, 109,
110, 136, 138, 150, 151, 152,
153, 175
Bentham, Jonathan, 4
Bergson, Henri, 26, 37, 41, 42, 45,
46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56,
57, 60, 61, 63, 68, 69, 71, 80,
90, 92, 95, 103, 106, 112, 114,
123, 125, 174
Berkeley, George, 28
Boundas, Constantin, 62
Brown, Clifford, 166
Carroll, Lewis, 106, 107, 174
Colebrook, Claire, 102, 122, 123,
131, 173
Coltrane, John, 154, 155, 156, 157,
161, 169, 170, 1756
Commoner, Barry, 88, 89, 122
Damascius, 38
Darwin, Charles, 40
Davis, Miles, 154, 155
De Gaulle, Charles, 117
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 23, 57, 80, 85, 105,
116, 171, 174
deterritorialization, 25, 129, 131,
138, 141, 145, 146, 147, 148,
150, 151, 152
difference, 1920, 212, 24, 25, 26,
27, 31, 356, 39, 53, 54, 55, 56,
57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 69,
181
182 Index
difference (cont.)
70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 778, 81, 82,
84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91,
92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 106, 107,
111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 125,
129, 132, 133, 137, 138, 150,
161, 162, 166, 170, 171, 172
dogmatic image of thought, 73, 74,
75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82,
84, 85, 86, 89, 95, 96, 97, 99,
103, 104, 111, 112, 115, 1201,
125, 126, 135, 161, 166, 175
duration, 26, 45, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55,
57, 60, 61, 62, 64, 68, 69, 70,
72, 73, 90, 95, 103
Einstein, Albert, 92, 127
Ellington, Duke, 154
Epicureans, 4
experimentation, 25, 65, 66, 68, 71,
72, 81, 111, 112, 121, 133, 145,
146, 150, 151, 152, 153, 167,
168, 170, 171, 172
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 153, 170
Foucault, Michel, 3, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 26, 57,
80, 85, 116, 127, 140, 145, 152,
171, 174, 175
Freud, Sigmund, 18, 58, 126
Galileo, Galilei, 86
Gardner, Martin, 175
Guattari, F elix, 26, 90, 91, 92, 105,
117, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127,
128, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137,
139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145,
146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 175
Habermas, J urgen, 3
Hamzeh, Muna, 176
Hegel, Georg, 53, 54, 76
Heidegger, Martin, 3, 13, 14, 15, 26,
42, 44, 53
Hjelmslev, Louis, 105
Hobbes, Thomas, 118
Hume, David, 26, 85
Husserl, Edmund, 42, 44, 46, 47,
174
immanence, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34, 35,
38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 53, 55,
56, 57, 58, 60, 63, 69, 72, 73,
82, 92, 95, 114, 128, 138, 139,
144, 170, 171
Jacobs, Jane, 1634, 166,
176
Jefferson, Thomas, 118
Jones, Elvin, 155
Joyce, James, 26
Kafka, Franz, 26, 150
Kant, Immanuel, 4, 26, 28, 53, 76,
79, 80, 173
Klossowski, Pierre, 26
Lacan, Jacques, 105
language, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 21, 73,
756, 79, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99,
100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105,
106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112,
114, 115, 150, 175
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 26, 38,
110
L evi-Strauss, Claude, 105
lines of ight, 25, 128, 129, 135, 137,
138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145,
146, 147, 148, 151, 152, 153,
170, 172
Locke, John, 118
Lucretius, 26
Index 183
machines, 1212, 1234, 125, 126,
127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132,
133, 134, 139, 140, 141, 142,
143, 145, 146, 147, 150, 153,
165, 166
macropolitics, 1267, 128, 129, 130,
136
Marx, Karl, 58, 126, 143, 144, 175
Melville, Herman, 26
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3
micropolitics, 126, 127, 128, 129,
130, 136, 137
Mill, John Stuart, 175
Miller, Henry, 26
molecular, 126, 127, 128, 129, 136,
137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142,
145, 148, 149, 1523
Monk, Thelonious, 154
Monod, Jacques, 26, 901, 92, 94,
106, 115, 122, 174
multiplicity, 54, 55, 60, 61, 62, 63,
64, 70, 89, 148, 171
Napoleon, 83
Newton, Isaac, 86
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 67, 16, 17,
18, 22, 26, 27, 30, 31, 47, 57,
589, 62, 65, 67, 689, 71, 77,
80, 83, 94, 95, 106, 112, 114,
116, 125, 127, 149, 156, 173,
174
nonsense, 104, 106, 107, 108,
109
Nozick, Robert, 118
ontology, 1314, 1518, 19, 20, 21,
22, 234, 25, 26, 27, 289, 32,
345, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 49,
50, 52, 53, 56, 57, 71, 72, 73,
80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 88, 92, 95,
96, 97, 116, 117, 121, 122, 125,
126, 137, 148, 170, 171, 172
and Gilles Deleuze, 1517, 18, 23,
25, 26, 56, 73, 80, 86, 95, 116,
125, 137, 148, 170, 171,
172
overcoding, 131, 141, 143, 144, 147,
148
Palestinians, 131, 136, 137, 15760,
161, 162, 165, 169, 170, 176
Parker, Charlie, 154
Parnet, Claire, 175
Pearson, Keith Ansell, 89
Peretz, Don, 176
philosophy, 2, 34, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13,
16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25,
27, 28, 30, 334, 53, 57, 59, 71,
73, 79, 81, 86, 95, 96, 149, 172
and Gilles Deleuze, 1920, 21, 24,
44, 149
Plato, 4, 5, 13, 27, 29, 32, 34, 49, 53,
76, 84, 171, 173
politics, 9, 11, 27, 113, 11719, 120,
121, 122, 123, 1245, 126, 127,
128, 129, 130, 1312, 133, 134,
135, 136, 137, 139, 148, 150,
152, 153, 167, 169
Prigogine, Ilya, 26, 92, 93, 94, 106,
115, 160, 174
Proust, Marcel, 26, 51, 53, 54
Rabin, Yitzhak, 158
Rajchman, John, 24, 151, 161, 173
Rawls, John, 2, 118, 175
representation, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80,
81, 82, 84, 85, 95, 96, 97, 98,
99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104,
106, 109, 110, 112, 120,
167
rhizomes, 1334, 139, 165
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 26
Sandel, Michael, 121, 175
184 Index
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 4, 8, 16, 17, 18,
28, 42, 44, 116, 174
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1047,
174
Schoenberg, Arnold, 157
science, 14, 21, 60, 73, 81, 86, 87, 93,
95, 101, 114, 127, 175
and Gilles Deleuze, 21, 175
sense, 97, 100, 1012, 103, 104, 107,
108, 109, 115
Sharon, Ariel, 162
Simondon, Gilbert, 87, 88, 89, 90,
92, 122, 174
Scotus, Duns, 26
Socrates, 4, 989, 149
Spinoza, Benedict de, 3, 26, 27, 32,
33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41,
44, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60, 69,
71, 77, 80, 82, 90, 95, 100, 101,
112, 114, 126, 174
Stengers, Isabelle, 92, 94, 174
Stoics, 4
territorialization, 129, 131, 138,
140
Tournier, Michel, 26
virtuality, 19, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52,
53, 54, 55, 56, 61, 62, 63, 64,
65, 68, 70, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89,
90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 101, 102,
103, 106, 109, 110, 114, 115,
125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 148,
149, 150, 151, 156, 157, 161,
162, 166, 169, 170, 171,
172
Williams, Bernard, 4
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 161
Woolf, Virginia, 153, 170

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