(1) on the one hand, the logic of sense, of the immaterial becoming as the sense-event, as the EFFECT of bodily-material processes-causes, the logic of the radical gap between generative process and its immaterial sense-effect: "multiplicities, being incorporeal effects of material causes, are impassible or causally sterile entities. The time of a pure becoming, always already passed and eternally yet to come, forms the temporal dimension of this impassibility or sterility of multiplicities." [2] And is cinema not the ultimate case of the sterile flow of surface becoming? The cinema image is inherently sterile and impassive, the pure effect of corporeal causes, although nonetheless acquiring its pseudo- autonomy.

(2) on the other hand, the logic of becoming as PRODUCTION of Beings: "the emergence of metric or extensive properties should be treated as a single process in which a continuous virtual spacetime progressively differentiates itself into actual discontinuous spatio-temporal structures." [3]

Say, in his analyses of films and literature, Deleuze emphasizes the de-substantialization of affects: in a work of art, an affect (boredom, for instance) is no longer attributable to actual persons, but becomes a free-floating event. How, then, does this impersonal intensity of an affect-event relate to bodies or persons? Here we encounter the same ambiguity: either this immaterial affect is generated by interacting bodies as a sterile surface of pure Becoming, or it is part of the virtual intensities out of which bodies emerge through actualization (the passage from Becoming to Being).

And, is this opposition not, yet again, that of materialism versus idealism? In Deleuze, this means: The Logic of Sense versus Anti-Oedipus. EITHER the Sense- Event, the flow of pure Becoming, is the immaterial effect (neutral, neither active nor passive) of the intrication of bodily-material causes, OR the positive bodily entities are themselves the product of the pure flow of Becoming. Either the infinite field of virtuality is an immaterial effect of the interacting bodies, or bodies themselves emerge, actualize themselves, from this field of virtuality. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze himself develops this opposition in the guise of two possible modes of the genesis of reality: the formal genesis (the emergence of reality out of the immanence of impersonal consciousness as the pure flow of Becoming) is supplemented by the real genesis, the latter accounting for the emergence of the immaterial event-surface itself out of bodily interaction. Sometimes, when he follows the first path, Deleuze comes dangerously close to "empiriocriticist" formulas: the primordial fact is the pure flow of experience, attributable to no subject, neither subjective nor objective - subject and object are, as all fixed entities, just secondary "coagulations" of this flow. This is the standard description of the basic philosophical position of Bogdanov, the main representative of Russian "empiriocriticism," best known as the target of Lenin's critique in his Materialism and Emplrlocrltlcism from 1908:

If /.../ we assume that the ultimate elements of experience are sensations, it is obvious that what we ordinarily think of as the world of experience would not have arisen without a process of organization. /.../ what we regard as the material world, nature, the common world, is the product of collectively organized experience, having a social basis. That is to say, the common world as experienced has been progressively formed in the course of human history out of the raw material of sensation. /.../ in addition to the world which is basically the same for all, there are, so to speak, private worlds. That is to say, in addition to collectively organized experience there is organization in the form of ideas or concepts which differ from person to person or from group to group. There are different points of view, different theories, different ideologies. [4]

Bogdanov emphasized that the flow of sensations precedes the subject: it is not a subjective flow, but neutral with regard to the opposition between subject and objective reality - they both emerge out of this flow (i.e., "empiriomonism," one of the self-designations of the empiriocriticists - is this term not also an adequate designation of Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism?"... not to mention Bogdanov's "mechanism," his "machinic" notion of development...). Lacan versus Deleuze: again, dialectical materialism versus empriocriticism? Deleuze - a new Bogdanov? In a proto-Deleuzian way, Bogdanov accused the defenders of Matter as an objectively existing Thing-in-itself to commit the cardinal metaphysical sin of explaining the known in terms of the unknown, the experienced in terms of the non-experienced - exactly like Deleuze's rejection of any form of transcendence. Furthermore, Bogdanov was also a radical Leftist, keen on machinic experiments: his basic attitude was precisely that of uniting the "vitalism" of the flow of sensations with the machinic comblnatolre. Although Bogdanov supported the Bolsheviks against reformist opportunism, his political stance was one of the radical Leftist striving for organizations which form themselves "from below," and are not imposed from above by some central authority. [5]

When, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze deploys the two geneses, transcendental and real, does he not thereby follow in the steps of Fichte and Schelling? Fichte's starting point is that one can practice philosophy in two basic ways, idealist and Spinozean: one either starts from objective reality and tries to develop from it the genesis of free subjectivity, or one starts from the pure spontaneity of the absolute Subject and tries to develop the entirety of reality as the result of the Subject's self-positing. The early Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism goes a step further by claiming that, in this alternative, we are not dealing with a choice: the two options are complementary, not exclusive. Absolute idealism, its claim of the identity of Subject and Object (Spirit and Nature), can be demonstrated in two ways: one either develops Nature out of Spirit (transcendental idealism, a la Kant and Fichte), or one develops the gradual emergence of Spirit out of the immanent movement of Nature (Schelling's own Naturphllosophle). However, what about the crucial new advance achieved by Schelling in his Weltalter fragments, where he introduces a THIRD term into this alternative, namely, that of the genesis of Spirit (logos) not out of nature as such - as a constituted realm of natural reality - but out of the nature of/in God himself as that which is "in God himself not yet God," the abyss of the pre-ontological Real in God, the blind rotary movement of "irrational" passions? As Schelling makes clear, this realm is not yet ontological, but, in a sense, more "spiritual" than natural reality: a shadowy realm of obscene ghosts which return again and again as "living dead" because they FAILED to actualize themselves in full reality. [6] To risk an anachronistic parallel, is this genesis, the pre-history of what went on in God before he fully became God (the divine logos), not effectively close to the quantum physics notion of the state of virtual quantum oscillation preceding constituted reality?

And, effectively, what about the results of quantum physics? What if matter IS just a reified wave oscillation? What if, instead of conceiving waves as oscillations between elements, elements are just knots, contact points, between different waves and their oscillations? Does this not give some kind of scientific credibility to Deleuze's "idealist" project of generating bodily reality from virtual intensities? There is a way to conceptualize the emergence of Something out of Nothing in a materialist way: when we succeed in conceiving this emergence not as a mysterious excess, but as a RELEASE - a LOSS - of energy. Does the so-called "Higgs field" in contemporary physics not point precisely in this direction? Generally, when we take something away from a given system, we lower its energy. However, the hypothesis is that there is some substance, a "something," that we cannot take away from a given system without RAISING that system's energy: when the "Higgs field" appears in an empty space, its energy is lowered further. [7] Does the biological insight that living systems are perhaps best characterized as systems that dynamically avoid attractors (i.e., that the processes of life are being maintained at or near phase transitions) not point in the same direction, which is towards the Freudian death drive in its radical opposition to any notion of the tendency of all life towards nirvana? Death drive means precisely that the most radical tendency of a living organism is to maintain a state of tension, to avoid final "relaxation" in obtaining a state of full homeostasis. "Death drive" as »beyond the pleasure principle« is this very insistence of an organism on endlessly repeating the state of tension.

One should thus get rid of the fear that, once we ascertain that reality is the infinitely divisible, substanceless void within a void, "matter will disappear." What the digital informational revolution, the biogenetic revolution, and the quantum revolution in physics all share is that they mark the reemergence of what, for want of a better term, one is tempted to call a post-metaphysical idealism. It is as if Chesterton's insight into how the materialist struggle for the full assertion of reality, against its subordination to any "higher" metaphysical order, culminates in the loss of reality itself: what began as the assertion of material reality ended up as the realm of pure formulas of quantum physics. Is, however, this really a form of idealism? Since the radical materialist stance asserts that there is no World, that the World in its Whole is Nothing, materialism has nothing to do with the presence of damp, dense matter - its proper figures are, rather, constellations in which matter seems to "disappear," like the pure oscillations of the superstrings or quantum- vibrations. On the contrary, if we see in raw, inert matter more than an imaginary screen, we always secretly endorse some kind of spiritualism, as in Tarkovsky's Solaris, in which the dense plastic matter of the planet directly embodies Mind. This "spectral materialism" has three different forms: in the informational revolution, matter is reduced to the medium of purely digitalized information; in biogenetics, the biological body is reduced to the medium of the reproduction of the genetic code; in quantum physics, reality itself, the density of matter, is reduced to the collapse of the virtuality of wave oscillations (or, in the general theory of relativity, matter is reduced to an effect of space's curvature). Here we encounter ANOTHER crucial aspect of the opposition idealism/materialism: materialism is not the assertion of inert material density in its humid heaviness - SUCH a "materialism" can always serve as a support for gnostic spiritualist obscurantism. In contrast to it, a true materialism joyously assummes the "disappearance of matter," the fact that there is only void.

With biogenetics, the Nietzschean program of the emphatic and ecstatic assertion of the body is thus over. Far from serving as the ultimate reference, the body loses its mysterious impenetrable density and turns into something technologically manageable, something we can generate and transform through intervening into its genetic formula - in short, something the "truth" of which is this abstract genetic formula. And, it is crucial to conceive the two apparently opposite "reductions" discernible in today's science (the "materialist" reduction of our experience to neuronal processes in neurosciences, and the virtualization of reality itself in quantum physics) as two sides of the same coin, as two reductions to the same third level. The old Popperian idea of the "Third World" is here brought to its extreme: what we get at the end is neither the "objective" materiality nor the "subjective" experience, but the reduction of BOTH to the scientific Real of mathematized "immaterial" processes.

The issue of materialism versus idealism thus gets more complex. If we accept the claim of quantum physics that the reality we experience as constituted emerges out of a preceding field of virtual intensities which are, in a way, "immaterial" (quantum oscillations), then embodied reality is the result of the "actualization" of pure event-like virtualities. What if, then, there is a double movement here?: first, positive reality itself is constituted through the actualization of the virtual field of "immaterial" potentialities; then, in a second move, the emergence of thought and sense signals the moment when the constituted reality, as it were, reconnects with its virtual genesis. Was Schelling not already pursuing something similar when he claimed that, in the explosion of consciousness, of human thought, the primordial abyss of pure potentiality explodes, acquires existence, in the middle of created positive reality - man is the unique creature which is directly (re)connected with the primordial abyss out of which all things emerged? [8] Perhaps Roger Penrose is right: there is a link between quantum oscillations and human thought. [9]

NOTES

[1] I follow here Alain Badiou, on whose reading of Deleuze I rely extensively; Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000.

[2] Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, New York: Continuum 2002, p. 107-108.

[3] Manuel DeLanda, op.cit., p. 102.

[4] Frederick Copleston, Philosophy In Russia, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1986, p. 286.

[5] It is easy to ridicule Lenin's Materialism and Emplriocrltlcism, its utter philosophical worthlessness, yet the book's "political instinct" for the class struggle in theory is unerring and 100% right. We all recall Lenin's remarks on the edge of Hegel's Logic, apropos of Hegel's statements such as "the immanent deployment of the concrete wealth of the universal as the self-development of the eternal divine Idea," in the style of "the first line profound and true, the second line theological rubbish!" - one is tempted to jot a similar remark on the edge of Materialism and Emplriocrltlcism: "the deployment of the political overdetermination of philosophy - profound and true, the inherent philosophical value of the book - rubbish!"

[6] F.W.J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, Albany: SUNY Press 2000.

[7] For a more detailed reference to "Higgs field," Chapter 3 of my The Puppet and the Dwarf, Cambridge. MIT Press 2003. For a popular scientific explanation, Gordon Kane, 5upersymmetry, Cambridge: Helix Books 2001.

[8] F.W.J. Schelling, op.cit.

[9] Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, Oxford: Oxford.

University Press 1994.