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?

The Multiplicity of Names

for Deleuze, overturning Platonism means "to make the simulacra rise and to affirm their rights (Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 262); i.e., if simulacra or beings are depreciated in Plato, as Deleuze supposes, "it is necessary to affirm the rights of simulacra as so many equivocal cases of univocity that joyously attest to the univocal power of Being" (26)

• disjunctive synthesis: "beings are merely disjointed, divergent simulacra that lack any internal relation between themselves or with any transcendent Idea whatsoever" (26-7)
• world is a work, not a state -- concept shared with Plato
• "glorification of simulacra as a positive dimension of the univocity of Being" (27)

problem of the names of Being: what is the appropriate name for that which is univocal? how can one test this sense?

• ends up in the trap of always assigning two names for Being, since "Being needs to be said in a single sense both from the viewpoint of the unity of its power and from the viewpoint of the multiplicity of the divergent simulacra that this power actualizes in itself" (28) (same problem Plato and Heidegger have)

"In short: In order to say that there is a single sense, two names are necessary." (28)

Method

An Antidialectic

sedendary nomos: assigning different types of beings a place or time in the ordered development of absolute Being; thinking == methodically running through this distribution; categories -- names that delimit a particular territory of Being -- are part of this, and destroy the univocity of Being (since Being can only be said in a single sense, not through categories)

for Deleuze, "the univocity of Being and the equivocity of beings (the latter being nothing other than the immanent production of the former) must be thought "together" without the mediation of genera or species, types or emblems: in short without categories, without generalities." (32)

• can be no mediation, no dialectic
• one then has to distribute "in a stable way the affirmative and univocal integrity of Being, on the one hand, and that which in which, within itself, Being occurs -- namely, the separation or equivocal disjunction of beings -- on the other" (33)
• active aspect of things separated from their passive aspects
• results in the duality that runs through Deleuze's work

The Trajectory of the Intuition

"Deleuze's method is the transposition in writing of a singular form of intuition." (35)

Descartes favored intuition as a complete clarity, ungrounded; "but if beings (or ideas) are only moving inflections of univocal Being, how can they be isolated in this way -- in the name of their clarity -- from the obscure and all-encompassing "ground" that bears them? Clarity is only a brilliance, that is, a transient intensity, and tis intensity, being that of a modality of the one, bears in itself the indistinctness of sense. Clarity is thus a punctual concentration of the confused." (35)

Deleuzian intuition as not a mental atom "but an athletic trajectory of thought and an open multiplicity" -- a "complex construction that Deleuze frequently names a 'perpetual reconcatenation'" (36)

"On the one hand, Deleuzian intuition has to apprehend the separation of beins as disjunctive synthesis, divergence and equivocity, and so avoid succumbing to the sirens of the categories or to the tranquil classification of beings under generalities that rescind the univocity of Being. But it must also equally think separated beings as simulacra that are purely modal or formal, and thus, ultimately, unseparated in their being, for they are merely local intensities of the One. The result of this is that intuition (as a double movement and, in the final analysis, as writing, as style) must simultaneously descend from a singular being toward its active dissolution in the One -- thereby presenting it in its being qua simulacrum -- and reascend from the One toward the singular benig, in following the immanent productive lines of power, and thereby presenting the being in question as a simulacrum of Being." (36)

pgs. 36-8: critical recapitulation of arguments from Logic of Sense through a reading of structuralism; sense as prior to any structure and nonsense as the ontological essence of sense

double movement:

• "descending, or analytic, statements: 'there are different senses'; 'they are produced by combinatory machines'; 'these machines are open at the singular point of the empty square'; 'sense is produced by nonsense'" (39)
• "ascending, or productive statements: 'Being is univocal'; 'it cannot make sense by itself, because there is no sense of sense'; 'it is therefore nonsense'; 'this nonsense is the donation of (ontological) sense'; 'there are different senses qua machinic simulacra of the univocity of Being (of nonsense qua the name of sense as what occurs multiply in beings)'" (39)