Badiou 2000

Which Deleuze?

Renewed Concept of the One

"Deleuze's fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One. What must the One be, for the multiple to be integrally conceivable therein as the production of simulacra?" (11)

The "Purified Automaton"

concept of desire and "desiring-machines" "precludes any idea of ourselves as being, at any time, the source of what we think or do. Everything always stems from afar -- indeed, everything is always 'already-there', in the infinite and inhuman resource of the One" (11-12)

choice:

• Kierkegaardian choice; not this or that, but to choose or not to choose
• choice becomes "pure" by being "automatic" : "inreality, we are ourselves chosen, far from being, as the philosophy of representation would ahve it, the center, or seat, of a decision" (12)

"This figure of the automaton, which links up easily with that of the 'machinery' that produces sense, represents the veritable subjective ideal, precisely because it demolishes all subjective pretensions. The outside, as agency of active force, takes hold of a body, selects an individual, and submits it to the choice of choosing" (12)

therefore Deleuze's though is not egalitarian or communitarian but profoundly aristocratic; "thought only exists in a hierarchized space" (12); "the condition of thought, for Deleuze, is ascetic" (13), with the result that his philosophy of life is essentially a philosophy of death (13) -- dying as the immanent moment of life, related most personally and most impersonal/exterior to the individual -- which is also thought, "for thinking consists precisely in ascetically attaining that point where the individual is transfixed by the impersonal exteriority that is equally his or her authentic being" (13)

i.e., there's an identity between thinking and dying

"Monotonous" Productions

Deleuze wants to follow the Nietzschean program of "over-turning Platonism," but:

"Immanence requires that you place yourself where thought has already started, as close as possible to a singular case and to the movement of thought. Thinking happens 'behind your back' and you are impelled and constrained by it." (14)

e.g., use of free indirect discourse

from wide variety of thinkers, "Deleuze arrives at conceptual productions that I would unhesitatingly qualify as monotonous, composing a very particular regime of emphasis or almost infinite repetition of a limited repertoire of concepts, as well as a virtuosic variation of names, under which what is thought remains essentially identical" (15)

cinema texts an example of this -- hard to use for film critics, because the film's only function in favor of Deleuze's already-produced philosophy (15-16)

• cinema used to generate concepts, but "what is generated bears no resemblance to the generating power" of cinema, only to preconceived concepts

thus, a new understanding of the principles of Deleuze's philosophy:

1. "This philosophy is organized around a metaphysics of the One.
2. "It proposes an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and asceticism."
3. "It is systematic and abstract." (17)

Univocity of Being and Multiplicity of Names

linguistic turn ("philosophy as either a generalized grammar or a weak logic," 19) being overshadowed by an ontological turn

even Wittgenstein ("the only really great thinker of this turn," 19) in the Tractatus founds his theory of objects on an ontological basis: the limits of the world are the limits of language, therefore thought must exceed language, must achieve its highest power beyond the analytics of language

Deleuze's thought is solely ontological; "his work is concerned with thinking thought (its act, its movement) on the basis of an ontological precomprehension of being as One" (20)

Heidegger's Limit

phenomenology: begins from the premise "that consciousness 'is directed toward the thing and gains significance in the world' (Foucault, p. 108). This is what phenomenology names intentionality" (21)

Deleuze did not believe "the thinking of thought (philosophy's unique objective) could start from such a signifying directedness" (21)

• can't begin exploring thought with consciousness, since thought achieves itself when unconscious
• the intentionality of thought is dependent on an internal relation between consciousness and its object; but if thought is "the deployment of the Being-One," then it is grounded on external modalities, none of which have priority of internalizing the others

if all Being is One, can't break down its univocity by setting up internal-external relationships; the essence of the relation of modalities of being is the nonrelation, "for its only content is the neutral equality of the One" (22)

"it is, doubtlessly, in the exercise of this nonrelation that thought 'relates' most faithfully to the Being that constitutes it. This is what Deleuze calls a "disjunctive synthesis": one has to think the nonrelation according to the One, which founds it by radically separating the terms involved. One has to steadfastly rest within thea ctivity of separation, understood as a power of Being. One has to explain that 'the nonrelation is still a relation, and even a relation of a deeper sort', insofar as it is thought in accordance with the divergent or disjoining movement that, incessantly separating, testifies to the infinite and egalitarian fecundity of the One. But this disjunctive synthesis is the ruin of intentionality." (22)

the limits of Heidegger for Deleuze, then, is he stops halfway, maintaining relations instead of proceeding to the more radical disjunctive synthesis

The Univocity of Being

could be said that all of Deleuze's thought is a riff on this sentence: "There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal" (Difference and Repetition, pg. 35)

• reading of other philosophers is a way of showing the univocity of being

Thesis 1: Being is not numerically one, but is compatible with the existence of multiple forms of Being; "The multiple acceptations of being must be understood as a multiple that is formal, while the One alone is real, and only the real supports the distribution of sense (which is unique)" (25)

Thesis 2: beings are "local degrees of intensity or inflections of power [i.e. the One Being] that are in constant movement and entirely singular" (25)

leads to a kind of Platonism -- the theory of simulacra:

"given that the multiple (of beings, of significations) is arrayed in the universe by way of a numerical difference that is purely formal as regards the form of being to which it refers (thought, extension, time, etc.) and purely modal i nregards its individuation, it follows that, ultiamtely, this multiple can only be of the order of simulacra. And if one classes -- as one should -- every difference without a real status, every multiplicity whose ontological status is that of the One, as a simulacrum, then the world of beings is the theater of the simulacra of Being." (26)

...but Deleuze, with Nietzsche, wants to overturn Platonism?