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......• Deleuze's Platonism: Ideas as Real •
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Recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of
the flesh: when you see in front of you a voluptuous feminine body,
imagine how it will look in a couple of decades - the dried skin,
sagging breasts... (Or, even better, imagine what lurks now already
beneath the skin: raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food
and excrements...) Far from enacting a return to the Real destined to
break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure equals the
escape from the Real, the Real announcing itself in the seductive
appearance of the naked body. That is to say, in the opposition between
the spectral appearance of the sexualized body and the repulsive body in
decay, it is the spectral appearance with is the Real, and the decaying
body which is reality - we take recourse to the decaying body in order
to avoid the deadly fascination of the Real which threatens to draw us
into its vortex of jouissance.
A "raw" Platonism would have claimed here that only the beautiful body
fully materializes the Idea, and that a body in its material decay
simply falls of from its Idea, is no longer its faithful copy. From a
Deleuzian (and, here, Lacanian) view, on the contrary, the specter that
attracts us is the Idea of the body as Real. This body is not the body
in reality, but the virtual body in Deleuze's sense of the term: the
incorporeal/immaterial body of pure intensities.
Deleuze's most radical anti-Hegelian argument concerns pure difference:
Hegel is unable to think pure difference which is outside the horizon of
identity/contradiction; Hegel conceives a radicalized difference as
contradiction which, then, through its dialectical resolution, is again
subsumed under identity. (Here, Deleuze is also opposed to Derrida who,
from his perspective, remains caught within the vicious cycle of
contradiction/identity, merely postponing resolution indefinitely.) And
insofar as Hegel is the philosopher of actuality/actualization, insofar
as, for him, the "truth" of a potentiality is revealed in its
actualization, Hegel's inability to think pure difference equals his
inability to think the virtual in its proper dimension, as a possibility
which already qua possibility possesses its own reality: pure
difference is not actual, it does not concern different actual
properties of a thing or among things, its status is purely virtual, it
is a difference which takes place at its purest precisely when nothing
changes in actuality, when, in actuality, the SAME thing repeats itself.
- Effectively, it may appear that it is only Deleuze who formulates the
truly post-Hegelian program of thinking difference: the Derridean
"opening" which emphasizes the endless difference, the dissemination
that cannot ever be sublated/reappropriated, etc., remains within the
Hegelian framework, merely "opening" it up...
But, here, the Hegelian counter-argument would have been: is then the
"pure" virtual difference not the very name for actual self-identity? Is
it not CONSTITUTIVE of actual identity? More precisely, in the terms of
Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, pure difference is the virtual
support/condition of actual identity: an entity is perceived as
"(self-)identical" when (and only when) its virtual support is reduced
to a pure difference. In Lacanese, pure difference concerns the
supplement of the virtual object (Lacan's objet a); its most
plastic experience is that of a sudden change in (our perception of) an
object which, with regard to its positive qualities, remains the same:
"although nothing changes, the thing all of a sudden seemed totally
different" - as Deleuze would have put it, it is the thing's intensity
which changes. (For Lacan, the theoretical problem/task is here to
distinguish between the Master-Signifier and objet a which both
refer to the abyssal X in the object beyond its positive properties.) As
such, pure difference is closer to antagonism than to the difference
between two positive social groups one of which is to be annihilated.
The universalism that sustains an antagonistic struggle is not exclusive
of anyone, which is why the highest triumph of the antagonistic
struggle is not the destruction of the enemy, but the explosion of the
"universal brotherhood" in which agents of the opposite camp change
sides and join us (recall the proverbial scenes of police or military
units joining the demonstrators). It is in such explosion of
enthusiastic all-encompassing brotherhood from which no one is in
principle excluded, that the difference between "us" and "enemy" as
positive agents is reduced to a PURE formal difference.
This brings us to the topic of difference, repetition, and change (in
the sense of the rise of something really new). Deleuze's thesis
according to which New and repetition are not opposed, i.e., according
to which New arises only from repetition, is to be read against the
background of the difference between the Virtual and the Actual. To put
it directly: changes which concerns only the actual aspect of things are
only changes within the existing frame, not the emergences of something
really New - New only emerges when the virtual support of the Actual
changes, and this change occurs precisely in the guise of a repetition
in which a thing remains the same in its actuality. In other words,
things really change not when a transforms itself into B, but when,
while A remains exactly the same with regard to its actual properties,
it imperceptibly "totally changes"...
The Lacanian Real, in its opposition to the Symbolic, has ultimately
nothing whatsoever to do with the standard empiricist (or
phenomenological, or historicist, or Lebensphilosophie, for that
reason) topic of the wealth of reality that resists formal structures,
that cannot be reduced to its conceptual determinations - language is
grey, reality is green... The Lacanian Real is, on the contrary, even
more "reductionist" that any symbolic structure: we touch it when we
subtract from a symbolic field all the wealth of its differences,
reducing it to a minimum of antagonism. Lacan himself is here not beyond
reproach, since he gets sometimes seduced by the rhizomatic wealth of
language beyond (or, rather, beneath) the formal structure that sustains
it. It is in this sense that, in the last decade of his teaching, he
deployed the notion of lalangue (sometimes simply translated as
"llanguage") which stands for language as the space of illicit pleasures
that defy any normativity: the chaotic multitude of homonymies,
word-plays, "irregular" metaphoric links and resonances... Productive as
this notion is, one should be aware of its limitations. Many
commentators have noted that Lacan's last great literary reading, that
of Joyce to whom his late seminar (XXIII: Le sinthome [1]) is dedicated, is not at the level of his previous great readings (Hamlet, Antigone, Claudel's Coufontaine-trilogy). There is effectively something fake in Lacan's fascination with late Joyce, with Finnegan's Wake as the latest version of the literary Gesamtkunstwerk with its endless wealth of lalangue in which not only the gap between singular languages, but the very gap between linguistic meaning and jouissance seems overcome and the rhizome-like jouis-sense
(enjoyment-in-meaning: enjoy-meant) proliferates in all directions. The
true counterpart to Joyce is, of course, Samuel Becket: after his early
period in which he more or less wrote some variations on Joyce, the
"true" Becket constituted himself through a true ethical act, a CUT, a
rejection of the Joycean wealth of enjoy-meant, and the ascetic turn
towards a "minimal difference," towards a minimalization, "subtraction,"
of the narrative content and of language itself (this line is most
clearly discernible in his masterpiece, the trilogy Molloy - Malone Dies - L'innomable).
So what is the "minimal difference" - the purely parallax gap - that
sustains Becket's mature production? One is tempted to propose the
thesis that it is the very difference between French and English: as is
known, Becket wrote most of his mature works in French (not his mother
tongue), and the, desperate at the low quality of translations,
translated them himself into English, and these translations are not
mere close translations, but effectively a different text.
It is because of this "minimalist" - purely formal and insubstantial -
status of the Real that, for Lacan, repetition precedes repression - or,
as Deleuze put it succinctly: "We do not repeat because we repress, we
repress because we repeat." (DR-105) It is not that, first, we repress
some traumatic content, and then, since we are unable to remember it and
thus to clarify our relationship to it, this content continues to haunt
us, repeating itself in disguised forms. If the Real is a minimal
difference, then repetition (that establishes this difference) is
primordial; the primacy of repression emerges with the "reification" of
the Real into a Thing that resists symbolization - only then, it appears
that the excluded/repressed Real insists and repeats itself. The Real
is primordially nothing but the gap that separates a thing from itself,
the gap of repetition.
The consequence of this is also the inversion in the relationship
between repetition and remembrance. Freud's famous motto "what we do not
remember, we are compelled to repeat" should thus be turned around:
what we are unable to repeat, we are haunted with and are compelled to
memorize. The way to get rid of a past trauma is not to rememorize it,
but to fully REPEAT it in the Kierkegaardian sense.
What is the Deleuzian "pure difference" at its purest, if we may put it
in this tautological way? It is the purely virtual difference of an
entity which repeats itself as totally identical with regard to its
actual properties: "there are significant differences in the virtual
intensities expressed in our actual sensations. These differences do not
correspond to actual recognizable differences. That the shade of pink
has changed in an identifiable way is not all-important. It is that the
change is a sign of a re-arrangement of an infinity of other actual and
virtual relations." [2]
Is such a pure difference not what takes place in the repetition of the
same actual melodic line in Robert Schumann's "Humoresque"? This piece
is to be read against the background of the gradual loss of the voice in
Schumann's songs: it is not a simple piano piece, but a song without
the vocal line, with the vocal line reduced to silence, so that all we
effectively hear is the piano accompaniment. This is how one should read
the famous "inner voice /innere Stimme/" added by Schumann (in
the written score) as a third line between the two piano lines, higher
and lower: as the vocal melodic line which remains a non-vocalized
"inner voice" (which exists only as Augenmusik, music for the
eyes only, in the guise of written notes). This absent melody is to be
reconstructed on the basis of the fact that the first and third levels
(the right and the left hand piano lines) do not relate to each other
directly, i.e. their relationship is not that of an immediate mirroring:
in order to account for their interconnection, one is thus compelled to
(re)construct a third, "virtual" intermediate level (melodic line)
which, for structural reasons, cannot be played. Schumann brings this
procedure of absent melody to an apparently absurd self-reference when,
later in the same fragment of Humoresque, he repeats the same two
effectively played melodic lines, yet this time the score contains no
third absent melodic line, no inner voice - what is absent here is the
absent melody, i.e. absence itself. How are we to play these notes when,
at the level of what is effectively to be played, they exactly repeat
the previous notes? The effectively played notes are deprived only of
what is not there, of their constitutive lack, or, to refer to the
Bible, they lose even that what they never had. The true pianist should
thus have the savoir-faire to play the existing, positive, notes
in such a way that one would be cable to discern the echo of the
accompanying non-played "silent" virtual notes or their absence... This,
then, is pure difference: the nothing-actual, the virtual background,
which accounts for the difference of the two melodic lines.
This logic of virtual difference can also be discerned in another paradox, namely the above mentioned cinema version of Billy Bathgate
is basically a failure, but an interesting one: a failure which
nonetheless evokes in the viewer the specter of the much better novel.
However, when one then goes to read the novel on which the film is
based, one is disappointed - this is NOT the novel the film evoked as
the standard with regard to which it failed. The repetition (of a failed
novel in the failed film) thus gives rise to a third, purely virtual,
element, the better novel. This is an exemplary case of what Deleuze
deploys in the crucial pages of his Difference and Repetition:
while it may seem that the two presents are successive, at a variable distance apart in the series of reals, in fact they form, rather, two real series which coexist in relation to a virtual object of another kind, one which constantly circulates and is displaced in them /.../. Repetition is constituted not from one present to another, but between the two coexistent series that these presents form in function of the virtual object (object = x).(DR-104-105)
With regard to Billy Bathgate
the film does not "repeat" the novel on which it is based; rather, they
both "repeat" the unrepeatable virtual x, the "true" novel whose
specter is engendered in the passage from the actual novel to the film.
This virtual point of reference, although "unreal," is in a way more
real than reality: it is the ABSOLUTE point of reference of the failed
real attempts. This is how, in the perspective of the materialist
theology, the divine emerges from the repetition of terrestrial material
elements, as their "cause" retroactively posited by them. Deleuze is
right to refer to Lacan here: this "better book" is what Lacan calls objet petit a,
the object-cause of desire that "one cannot recapture in the present,
except by capturing it in its consequences," the two really-existing
books.
The underlying movement is here more complex than it may appear. It is
not that we should simply conceive the starting point (the novel) as an
"open work," full of possibilities which can be deployed later,
actualized in later versions; or - even worse - that we should conceive
the original work as a pre-text which can later be incorporated in other
con-texts and given a meaning totally different from the original one.
What is missing here is the retroactive, backwards, movement that was
first described by Henri Bergson, a key reference for Deleuze. In his
"Two Sources of Morality and Religion", Bergson describes the strange
sensations he experienced on August 4 1914, when war was declared
between France and Germany: "In spite of my turmoil, and although a war,
even a victorious one, appeared to me as a catastrophy, I experienced
what /William/ James spoke about, a feeling of admiration for the
facility of the passage from the abstract to the concret: who would have
thought that such a formidable event can emerge in reality with so
little fuss?" [3] Crucial
is here the modality of the break between before and after: before its
outburst, the war appeared to Bergson "simultaneously probable and
impossible: a complex and contradictory notion which persisted to the
end" [4]; after its
outburst, it all of a sudden become real AND possible, and the paradox
resides in this retroactive appearance of probability:
I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or, rather, at every moment, the possible insert itself there. Insofar as inpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past: this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible; but it is only at the precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always have been, and this is why I say that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges. [5]
THIS is what takes place in the example of Billy Bathgate:
the film inserts back into the novel the possibility of a different,
much better, novel. And do we not encounter a similar logic in the
relationship between Stalinism and Leninism? Here also, THREE moments
are in play: Lenin's politics before the Stalinist takeover; Stalinist
politics; the specter of "Leninism" retroactively generated by Stalinism
(in its official Stalinist version, but ALSO in the version critical of
Stalinism, like when, in the process of "de-Stalinization" in the USSR,
the motto evoked was that of the "return to the original Leninist
principles"). One should therefore stop the ridiculous game of opposing
the Stalinist terror to the "authentic" Leninist legacy betrayed by the
Stalinism: "Leninism" is a thoroughly Stalinist notion. The gesture of
projecting the emancipatory-utopian potential of Stalinism backwards,
into a preceding time, signals the incapacity of the thought to endure
the "absolute contradiction," the unbearable tension, inherent to the
Stalinist project itself. [6]
It is therefore crucial to distinguish "Leninism" (as the authentic
core of Stalinism) from the actual political practice and ideology of
Lenin's period: the actual greatness of Lenin is NOT the same as the
Stalinist authentic myth of Leninism.
And the irony is that this logic of repetition, elaborated by Deleuze,
THE anti-Hegelian, is at the very core of the Hegelian dialectics: it
relies on the properly dialectical relationship between temporal reality
and the eternal Absolute. The eternal Absolute is the immobile point of
reference around which temporal figurations circulate, their
presupposition; however, precisely as such, it is posited by these
temporal figurations, since it does not pre-exist them: it emerges in
the gap between the first and the second one - in the case of Billy Bathgate, between the novel and its repetition in the film. Or, back to Schumann's Humoresque,
the eternal absolute is the third unplayed melodic line, the point of
reference of the two lines played in reality: it is absolute, but a
fragile one - if the two positive lines are played wrongly, it
disappears... This is what one is tempted to call "materialist
theology": temporal succession creates eternity.
The Deleuzian notion of sign can only be properly grasped against the
background of his redefinition of what is a problem. Commonsense tells
us that there are true and false solutions to every problems; for
Deleuze, on the contrary, there are no definitive solutions to problems,
solutions are just repeated attempts to deal with the problem, with its
impossible-real. Problems themselves, not solutions, are true or false.
Each solution not only reacts to "its" problem, but retroactively
redefines it, formulating it from within its own specific horizon. Which
is why problem is universal and solutions/answers are particular.
Deleuze is here unexpectedly closer to Hegel: for Hegel, say, the Idea
of State is a problem, and each specific form of the state (Ancient
republic, feudal monarchy, modern democracy...) proposes a solution to
this problem, redefining the problem itself. And, precisely, the passage
to the next "higher" stage of the dialectical process occurs when,
instead of continuing to search for a solution, we problematize the
problem itself, abandoning its terms - say, when, instead of continuing
to search for a "true" State, we drop the very reference to State and
look for a communal existence beyond State.
Problem is thus not only "subjective," not just epistemological, a problem for the subject who tries to solve it; it is stricto sensu
ontological, inscribed into the thing itself: the structure of reality
is "problematic." That is to say, actual reality can only be grasped as a
series of answers to a virtual problems - say, in Deleuze's reading of
biology, the development of eyes can only be grasped as attempted
solution at the problem of how to deal with light. And this brings us to
sign - actual reality appears as "sign" when it is perceived as an
answer to virtual problem:
Neither the problem nor the question is a subjective determination marking a moment of insufficiency in knowledge. Problematic structure is part of objects themselves, allowing them to be grasped as signs (DR-63-4)
This explains the strange
way Deleuze opposes signs and representations: for the common sense, a
mental representation directly reproduces the way a thing is, while a
sign just points towards it, designating it with a (more or less)
arbitrary signifier. (In a representation of a table, I "see directly" a
table, while its sign just points towards the table.) For Deleuze, on
the contrary, representations are mediate, while signs are direct, and
the task of a creative thought is that of "making movement itself a
work, without interpositions; of substituting direct signs for mediate
representations" (DR-16).
Representations are figures of objects as objective entities deprived
of their virtual support/background, and we pass from representation to
sign when we are able to discern in an object that which points towards
its virtual ground, towards the problem with regard to which it is an
answer. To put it succinctly, every answer is a sign of its problem.
Does Deleuze's argument against the (Hegelian) negative not hold only if
we reduce the negative to the negation of a pre-existing positive
identity? What about a negativity which is in itself positive, giving,
"generative"?
For a Deleuzian Christology. How are we to grasp the (often noted) weird
impassivity of the figure of Christ, its "sterility"? What if Christ is
an Event in the Deleuzian sense - an occurrence of pure individuality
without proper causal power? Which is why Christ suffers, but in a
thoroughly impassive way. Christ is "individual" in the Deleuzian sense:
he is a pure individual, not characterized by positive properties which
would make him "more" than an ordinary human, i.e., the difference
between Christ and other humans is purely virtual - back to Schumann,
Christ is, at the level of actuality, the same as other humans, only the
unwritten "virtual melody" that accompanies him is added. And in the
Holy Spirit, we get this "virtual melody" in its own: the Holy Spirit is
a collective field of pure virtuality, with no causal power of its own.
Christ's death and resurrection is the death of the actual person which
confronts us directly with the ("resurrected") virtual field that
sustained it. The Christian name for this virtual force is "love": when
Christ says to his worried followers after his death "when there will be
love between two of you, I will be there," he thereby asserts his
virtual status.
Deleuzian repetition "is not an objective fact but an act - a form of
behavior towards that which cannot be repeated" (JW-33). This is why
there is asymmetry between the two levels - actuality of facts and
virtuality of pure differences - is radical: not only does the
repetition of pure differences underlie all actual identities (as we
have seen in the case of Schumann), i.e., not only do we encounter pure
virtual difference at its purest in actual identity; it is also that
"the repetition of actual identities is disguised in any determinate
idea of pure differences" (JW-28): there is no "pure" difference outside
actuality, the virtual sphere of differences only persists-insists as a
shadow accompanying actual identities and their interactions. Again, as
in the case of Billy Bathgate the virtual specter ("Idea") of the true novel arises only through actual repetition of the actual novel in the film.
The starting point of Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism" is that
there is always a hidden virtual aspect to any given determined/actual
object or process: actual things are not ontologically "complete"; in
order to get a complete view of them, we must add to it its virtual
supplement. This move from an actual given thing to its virtual
conditions is the transcendental move, the deployment of the
transcendental conditions of the given. However, this does not mean that
the virtual somehow produces, causes, or generates, the actual: when
Deleuze talks about genesis (of the actual out of the virtual), he does
not mean temporal-evolutionary genesis, the process of spatio-temporal
becoming of a thing, but a "genesis without dynamism, evolving
necessarily in the element of a supra-historicity, a static genesis"
(DR-183). This static character of the virtual field finds its most
radical expression in Deleuze's notion of a pure past: not the past into
which things present pass, but an absolute past "where all events,
including those that have sunk without trace, are stored and remembered
as their passing away" (JW-94), a virtual past which already contains
also things which are still present (a present can become past because
in a way it is already, it can perceive itself as part of the past
("what we are doing now is (will have been) history"): "It is with
respect to the pure element of the past, understood as the past in
general, as an a priori past, that a given former present is
reproducible and the present present is able to reflect itself." (DR-81)
Does this mean that this pure past involves a thoroughly deterministic
notion of the universe in which everything to happen (to come), all
actual spatio-temporal deployment, is already part of an
immemorial/atemporal virtual network? No, and for a very precise reason:
because "the pure past must be all the past but must also be amenable
to change through the occurrence of any new present" (JW-96). It was
none other than T.S.Eliot, this great conservative, who first clearly
formulated this link between our dependence on tradition and our power
to change the past: tradition
cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of ¾sthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. [7]
When Eliot writes that,
when judging a living poet, "you must set him among the dead," he
formulates precisely an example of Deleuze's pure past. And when he
writes that "the existing order is complete before the new work arrives;
for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole
existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the
relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are
readjusted," he no less clearly formulates the paradoxical link between
the completeness of the past and our capacity to change it
retroactively: precisely because the pure past is complete, each new
work re-arranges its entire balance. Recall Borges' precise formulation
of the relationship between Kafka and the multitude of his precursors,
from old Chinese authors to Robert Browning: "Kafka's idiosyncrasy, in
greater or lesser degree, is present in each of these writings, but if
Kafka had not written we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would
not exist. /.../ each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies
our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." [8]
The properly dialectical solution of the dilemma of "Is it really
there, in the source, or did we only read it into the source?" is thus:
it is there, but we can only perceive and state this retroactively, from
today's perspective.
Here, Peter Hallward falls short in his otherwise excellent Out of This
World, where he stresses only the aspect of the pure past as the virtual
field in which the fate of all actual events is sealed in advance,
since "everything is already written" in it. At this point where we view
reality sub specie aeternitatis, absolute freedom coincides with
absolute necessity and its pure automatism: to be free means to let
oneself freely flow in/with the substantial necessity. This topic
reverberates even in today's cognitivist debates on the problem of free
will. Compatibilists like Daniel Dennett have an elegant solution to the
incompatibilists' complaints about determinism (see Dennett's Freedom Evolves):
when incompatibilists complain that our freedom cannot be combined with
the fact that all our acts are part of the great chain of natural
determinism, they secretly make an unwarranted ontological assumption:
first, they assume that we (the Self, the free agent) somehow stand
OUTSIDE reality, and then go to complain how they feel oppressed by the
notion that reality with its determinism controls them totally. This is
what is wrong with the notion of us being "imprisoned" by the chains of
the natural determinism: we thereby obfuscate the fact that we are PART
OF reality, that the (possible, local) conflict between our "free"
striving and external reality resisting to it is a conflict inherent to
reality itself. That is to say, there is nothing "oppressive" or
"constraining" about the fact that our innermost strivings are
(pre)determined: when we feel thwarted in our freedom by the
constraining pressure of external reality, there must be something in
us, some desires, strivings, which are thus thwarted, and where should
these strivings come if not from this same reality? Our "free will" does
not in some mysterious way "disturb the natural course of things," it
is part and parcel of this course. For us to be "truly" and "radically"
free, this would entail that there would be no positive content we would
want to impose as our free act - if we want nothing "external" and
particular/given to determine our behavior, then "this would involve
being free of every part of ourselves"(Fearn 24). When a determinist
claims that our free choice is "determined," this does not mean that our
free will is somehow constrained, that we are forced to act AGAINST our
free will - what is "determined" is the very thing that we want to do
"freely," i.e., without being thwarted by external obstacles. - So, back
to Hallward: while he is right to emphasize that, for Deleuze, freedom
"isn't a matter of human liberty but of liberation from humanity" (139),
of fully submerging oneself into the creative flux of the absolute
Life, his political conclusion from this seems too fast:
The immediate political implication of such a position /.../ is clear enough: since a free mode or monad is simply one that has eliminated its resistance to the sovereign will that works through it, so then it follows that the more absolute the sovereign's power, the more 'free' are those subject to it. (139)
But does Hallward not
ignore the retroactive movement on which Deleuze also insists, i.e., how
this eternal pure past which fully determines us is itself subjected to
retroactive change? We are thus simultaneously less free and more free
than we think: we are thoroughly passive, determined by and dependent on
the past, but we have the freedom to define the scope of this
determination, i.e., to (over)determine the past which will determine
us. Deleuze is here unexpectedly close to Kant, for whom I am determined
by causes, but I (can) retroactively determine which causes will
determine me: we, subjects, are passively affected by pathological
objects and motivations; but, in a reflexive way, we ourselves have the
minimal power to accept (or reject) being affected in this way, i.e., we
retroactively determine the causes allowed to determine us, or, at
least, the MODE of this linear determination. "Freedom" is thus
inherently retroactive: at its most elementary, it is not simply a free
act which, out of nowhere, starts a new causal link, but a retroactive
act of endorsing which link/sequence of necessities will determine me.
Here, one should add a Hegelian twist to Spinoza: freedom is not simply
"recognized/known necessity", but recognized/assumed necessity, the
necessity constituted/actualized through this recognition. So when
Deleuze refers to Proust's description of Vinteuil's music that haunts
Swann - "as if the performers not so much played the little phrase as
executed the rites necessary for it to appear" -, he is evoking the
necessary illusion: generating the sense-event is experienced as
ritualistic evocation of a pree-existing event, as if the event was
already there, waiting for our call in its virtual presence.
What directly resonates in this topic is, of course, the Protestant
motif of predestination: far from being a reactionary theological motif,
predestination is a key element of the materialist theory of sense, on
condition that we read it along the lines of the Deleuzian opposition
between the virtual and the actual. That is to say, predestination does
not mean that our fate is sealed in an actual text existng from eternity
in the divine mind; the texture which predestines us belonmgs to the
purely virtual eternal past which, as such, can be retroactively
rewritten by our act. This, perhaps, would have been the ultimate
meaning of the singularity Christ's incarnation: it is an ACT which
radically changes our destiny. Prior to Christ, we were determined by
Fate, caught in the cycle of sin and its payment, while Christ's erasing
of our past sins means precisely that his sacrifice changes our virtual
past andf thus sets us free. When Deleuze writes that Èmy wound existed
before me; I was born to embody it,Ç does this variation on the theme
of the Cheshire cat and its smile from Alice in Wonderland (the
cat was born to embody its smile) not provide a perfect formula of
Christ's sacrifice: Christ was born to embody his wound, to be
crucified? The problem is the literal teleological reading of this
proposition: as if the actual deeds of a person merely actualize its
atemporal-eternal fate inscribed in its virtual idea:
Caesar's only real task is to become worthy of the events he has been created to embody. Amor fati. What Caesar actually does adds nothing to what he virtually is. When Caesar actually crosses the Rubicon this involves no deliberation or choice since it is simply part of the entire, immediate expression of Caesarness, it simply unrolls or 'unfolds something that was encompassed for all times in the notion of Caesar. (Hallward 54)
However, what about the retroactivity of a gesture which (re)constitutes this past itself? This, perhaps, is the most succinct definition of what an authentic ACT is: in our ordinary activity, we effectively justy follow the (virtual-fantasmatic) coordinates of our identity, while an act proper is the paradox of an actual move which (retroactively) changes the very virtual ÈtranscendentalÇ coordinates of its agent's being - or, in Freudian terms, which does not only change the actuality of our world, but also "moves its underground". We have thus a kind of reflexive "folding back of the condition onto the given it was the condition for" (JW-109): while the pure past is the transcendental condition for our acts, our acts do not only create new actual reality, they also retroactively change this very condition. This brings us to the central problem of Deleuze's ontology: how are the virtual and the actual related? "Actual things express Ideas but are not caused by them."(JW-200) The notion of causality is limited to the interaction of actual things and processes; on the other hand, this interaction also causes virtual entities (sense, Ideas): Deleuze is not an idealist, Sense is for him always an ineffective sterile shadow accompanying actual things. What this means is that, for Deleuze, (transcendental) genesis and causality are totally opposed: they move at different levels: