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. . . . . . • Organs without Bodies - Gilles Deleuze • |
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The ontological opposition between Being and Becoming
which underpins Deleuze's notion of the virtual is a
radical one in that its ultimate reference is pure
becoming without being (as opposed to the metaphysical
notion of pure being without becoming). This pure
becoming is not a particular becoming OF some corporeal
entity, a passage of this entity from one to another
state, but a becoming-it-itself, thoroughly extracted
from its corporeal base. Since the predominant
temporality of Being is that of the present (with past
and future as its deficient modes), the pure becoming-
without-being means that one should sidestep the present
- it never "actually occurs," it is "always forthcoming
and already past." [1] As such, pure becoming suspends
sequentiality and directionality: say, in an actual
process of becoming, the critical point of temperature (0
degrees Celsius) always has a direction (water either
freezes or melts), while, considered as pure becoming
extracted from its corporeality, this point of passage is
not a passage from one to another state, but a "pure"
passage, neutral as to its directionality, perfectly
symmetric - for instance, a thing is simultaneously
getting larger (that it was) and smaller (than it will
be). And, is not the ultimate example of the poetry of
pure becoming the Zen poems which aim merely to renderthe fragility of the pure event extracted from its causal
context?
The Foucault closest to Deleuze is therefore the
Foucault of The Archeology of Knowledge, his underrated
key work delineating the ontology of utterances as pure
language events: not elements of a structure, not
attributes of subjects who utter them, but events which
emerge, function within a field, and disappear. To put it
in Stoic terms, Foucault's discourse analysis studies
lekta, utterances as pure events, focusing on the
inherent conditions of their emergence (as the
concatenation of events themselves) and not on their
inclusion in the context of historical reality. This is
why the Foucault of The Archeology of Knowledge is as far
as possible from any form of historicism, of locating
events in their historical context - on the contrary,
Foucault ABSTRACTS them from their reality and its
historical causality, and studies the IMMANENT rules of
their emergence. What one should bear in mind here is
that Deleuze is NOT an evolutionary historicist; his
opposition of Being and Becoming should not deceive us.
He is not simply arguing that all stable, fixed entities
are just coagulations of the all-encompassing flux of
Life - why not? The reference to the notion of TIME is
crucial here. Let us recall how Deleuze (with Guattari),
in his description of becoming in/of philosophy,
explicitly opposes becoming and history:
Philosophical time is thus a grandiose time of coexistence that does not exclude the before and after but superimposes them in a stratigraphic order. It is an infinite becoming of philosophy that crosscuts its history without being confused with it. The life of philosophers, and what is most external to their work, conforms to the ordinary laws of succession; but their proper names coexist and shine as luminous points that take us through the components of a concept once more or as the cardinal points of a stratum or layer that continually come back to us, like dead stars whose light is brighter than ever. [2]
The paradox is thus that transcendental becoming inscribes itself into the order of positive being, of constituted reality, in the guise of its very opposite, of a static superimposition, of a crystallized freeze of historical development. This Deleuzian eternity is, of course, not simply outside time; rather, in the "stratigraphic" superimposition, in this moment of stasis, it is TIME ITSELF which we experience, time as opposed to the evolutionary flow of things WITHIN time. It was Schelling who, following Plato, wrote that time is the image of eternity - a statement more paradoxical than it may appear. Is time, temporal existence, not the very opposite of eternity, the domain of decay, of generation and corruption? How then can time be the image of eternity? Does this not involve two contradictory claims, namely, that time is the fall from eternity into corruption AND its very opposite, the striving for eternity? The only solution is to bring this paradox to its radical conclusion: time is the striving of eternity to REACH ITSELF. What this means is that eternity is not outside time, but the pure structure of time "as such": as Deleuze put it, the moment of stratigraphic superimposition which suspends temporal succession is time as such. In short, one should oppose here development WITHIN TIME to the explosion of TIME ITSELF:time itself (the infinite virtuality of the transcendental field of Becoming) appears WITHIN the intra-temporal evolution in the guise of ETERNITY. The moments of the emergence of the New are precisely the moments of Eternity in time. The emergence of the New occurs when a work overcomes its historical context. And, on the opposite side, if there is a true image of fundamental ontological immobility, it is the evolutionary image of the universe as a complex network of endless transformations and developments in which plus ça change, plus ça reste le même:
I became more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history. It was Nietzsche who said that nothing important is ever free from a 'nonhistorical cloud.' /.../ What history grasps in an event is the way it's actualized in particular circumstances; the event's becoming is beyond the scope of history. /.../ Becoming isn't part of history; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to 'become,' that is, to create something new. [3]
In order to designate this process, one is tempted to use a term strictly prohibited by Deleuze, that of TRANSCENDENCE: is Deleuze here not arguing that a certain process can transcend its historical conditions by way of giving rise to an Event? It was Sartre (one of Deleuze's secret points of reference) who already used the term in this sense, when he discussed how, in the act of synthesis, the subject can transcend its conditions. Examples abound here from cinema (Deleuze's reference to the birth of the Italian neorealism: of course it arose out of circumstances - the shock of World War II, etc. - but the neorealist Event is not reducible to these historical causes) to politics. In politics (and, in a way, reminiscent of Badiou), Deleuze's basic reproach to conservative critics who denounce the miserable and even terrifying actual results of a revolutionary upheaval is that they remain blind to the dimension of becoming:
It is fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It's nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable. [4]
Becoming is thus strictly correlative to the concept of
REPETITION: far from being opposed to the emergence of
the New, the proper Deleuzian paradox is that somethinmg
truly New can ONLY emerge through repetition. What
repetition repeats is not the way the past "effectively
was," but the virtuallty inherent to the past and
betrayed by its past actualization. In this precise
sense, the emergence of the New changes the past itself,
that is, it retroactively changes (not the actual past -
we are not in science fiction - but) the balance between
actuality and virtuality in the past. [5] Recall the old example provided by Walter Benjamin: the October
Revolution repeated the French Revolution, redeeming its
failure, unearthing and repeating the same impulse.
Already for Kierkegaard, repetition is »inverted memory,«
a movement forward, the production of the New, and not
the reproduction of the Old. "There is nothing new under
the sun" is the strongest contrast to the movement of
repetition. So, it is not only that repetition is (one of
the modes of) the emergence of the New - the New can ONLY
emerge through repetition. The key to this paradox is, of
course, what Deleuze designates as the difference between
the Virtual and the Actual (and which - why not? - one
can also determine as the difference between Spirit and
Letter). Let us take a great philosopher like Kant -
there are two modes to repeat him: either one sticks to
his letter and further elaborates or changes his system,
as neo-Kantians (up to Habermas and Luc Ferry) are doing; or, one tries to regain the creative impulse that Kant
himself betrayed in the actualization of his system
(i.e., to connect to what was already "in Kant more than
Kant himself," more than his explicit system, its
excessive core). There are, accordingly, two modes of
betraying the past. The true betrayal is an ethico-
theoretical act of the highest fidelity: one has to
betray the letter of Kant in order to remain faithful to
(and repeat) the "spirit" of his thought. It is precisely
when one remains faithful to the letter of Kant that one
really betrays the core of his thought, the creative
impulse underlying it. One should bring this paradox to
its conclusion: it is not only that one can remain really
faithful to an author by way of betraying him (the actual
letter of his thought); at a more radical level, the
inverse statement holds even more - one can only truly
betray an author by way of repeating him, by way of
remaining faithful to the core of his thought. If one
does not repeat an author (in the authentic
Kierkegaardian sense of the term), but merely
"criticizes" him, moves elsewhere, turns him around,
etc., this effectively means that one unknowingly remains
within his horizon, his conceptual field. [6] When G.K. Chesterton describes his conversion to Christianity, he
claims that he "tried to be some ten minutes in advance
of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen years
behind it." [7] Does the same not hold even more for those
who, today, desperately try to catch up with the New by
way of following the latest "post-" fashion, and are thus
condemned to remain forever eighteen years behind the
truly New?
And, this brings us to the complex topic of the
relationship between Hegel and Kierkegaard: against the
"official" notion of Kierkegaard as THE "anti-Hegel," one
should assert that Kierkegaard is arguably the one who,
through his very "betrayal" of Hegel, effectively
remained faithful to him. He effectively REPEATED Hegel,
in contrast to Hegel's pupils, who "developed" his system
further. For Kierkegaard, the Hegelian Aufhebung is to be
opposed to repetition: Hegel is the ultimate Socratic
philosopher of rememorization, of reflectively returning
to what the thing always-already was, so that what Hegel
lacks is simultaneously repetition and the emergence of
the New - the emergence of the New AS repetition. The
Hegelian dialectical process/progress is, in this precise
Kierkegaardian sense, the very model of a pseudo-
development in which nothing effectively New ever
emerges. That is to say, the standard (Kierkegaardian)
reproach to Hegel is that his system is a closed circle
of rememoration which does not allow for anything New to
emerge: all that happens is just the passage from In-
itself to For-itself, that is, in the course of the
dialectical process, things just actualize their
potentials, explicitly posit their implicit content,
become what (in themselves) they always-already are. The
first enigma apropos of this reproach is that it is
usually accompanied with the OPPOSITE reproach: Hegel
deploys how "the One divides into Two," the explosion of a split, loss, negativity, antagonism, which affects an
organic unity; but, then, the reversal of Aufhebung
intervenes as a kind of deux ex machina, always
guaranteeing that the antagonism will be magically
resolved, the opposites reconciled in a higher synthesis,
the loss recuperated without a remainder, the wound
healed without a scar remaining... The two reproaches thus
point in the opposite directions: the first one claims
that nothing new emerges under the Hegelian sun, while
the second one claims that the deadlock is resolved by an
imposed solution which emerges as deus ex machina, from
outside, not as the outcome of the inherent dynamic of
the preceding tension.
The mistake of the second reproach is that it misses
the point - or, rather, the temporality - of the Hegelian
reconciliation. It is not that the tension is magically
resolved and the opposites are reconciled. The only shift
that effectively occurs is subjective, the shift of our
perspective (i.e., all of a sudden, we become aware that
what previously appeared as conflict ALREADY IS
reconciliation). This temporal move backwards is crucial:
the contradiction is not resolved; we just establish that
it always-already WAS resolved. (In theological terms,
Redemption does not follow the Fall; it occurs when we
become aware of how what we previously (mis)perceived as
Fall "in itself" already was Redemption.) [8] And,
paradoxically, although this temporality may seem to
confirm the first reproach (that nothing new emerges in
the Hegelian process), it effectively enables us to
refute it: the truly New is not simply a new content, but
the very shift of perspective by means of which the Old
appears in a new light.
Deleuze is right in his magnificent attack on
historicist "contextualization": becoming means
transcending the context of historical conditions out of
which a phenomenon emerges. This is what is missing in
historicist anti-universalist multiculturalism: the
explosion of the eternally New in/as the process of
becoming. The standard opposition of the abstract
Universal (say. Human Rights) and particular identities
is to be replaced by a new tension between Singular and
Universal: the Event of the New as a universal
singularity. [9] What Deleuze renders here is the (properly Hegelian) link between true historicity and eternity: a
truly New emerges as eternity in time, transcending its
material conditions. To perceive a past phenomenon in
becoming (as Kierkegaard would have put it) is to
perceive the virtual potential in it, the spark of
eternity, of virtual potentiality which is there forever.
A truly new work stays new forever - its newness is not
exhausted when its "shocking value" passes away. For
example, in philosophy, the great breakthroughs (from
Kant's transcendental turn to Kripke's invention of the
"rigid designator") forever retain their »surprising«
character of invention.
One often hears that, in order to understand a work
of art, one needs to know its historical context. Against
this historicist commonplace, a Deleuzian counter-claim
would be not only that too much of a historical context
can blur the proper contact with a work of art (i.e.,
that, in order to enact this contact, one should abstract
from the work's context); even more, it is, rather, the
work of art itself which provides a context enabling us
to properly understand a given historical situation. If,
today, someone were to visit Serbia, the direct contact
with raw data there would leave him confused. If,
however, he were to read a couple of literary works and
see a couple of representative movies, they would
definitely provide the context that would enable him to
locate the raw data of his experience. There is thus an
unexpected truth in the old cynical wisdom from the
Stalinist Soviet Union: "he lies as an eye-witness!"
NOTES
[1] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensei>, New York: Columbia
University Press 1990, p. 80.
[2] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,What is
Philosophy?, New York: Columbia University Press 1994, p.
59.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiationsi>, New York: Columbia
University Press 1995, p. 170-171.
[4] Deleuze, op.cit., p. 171.
[5] When, in 1953, Chou En Lai, the Chinese Prime Minister,
was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the
Korean war, a French journalist asked him what does he
think about the French Revolution, and Chou replied: ,,It
is still too early to tell." In a way, he was right: with
the disintegration of socialist states, the struggle for
the historical place of the French Revolution flared up
again. The liberal Rightist revisionists try to impose
the notion that the demise of Communism in 1989 occurred
at exactly the right moment: it marked the end of the era
which began in 1789. In short, what effectively vanished
from history was the revolutionary model which first
entered the scene with the Jacobins. François Furet and
others thus try to deprive the French Revolution of its status as the founding event of modern democracy,
relegating it to a historical anomaly.
[6] Authentic fidelity is the fidelity to the void itself -
to the very act of loss, of abandoning/erasing the
object. Why should the dead be the object of attachment
in the first place? The name for this fidelity is death
drive. In the terms of dealing with the dead, one should,
perhaps, - against the work of mourning as well as
against the melancholic attachment to the dead who return
as ghosts - assert the Christian motto "let the dead bury their dead." The obvious reproach to this motto is: what
are we to do when, precisely, the dead do not accept to
stay dead, but continue to live in us, haunting us by
their spectral presence? Here, one is tempted to claim
that the most radical dimension of the Freudian death
drive provides the key to how are we to read the
Christian "let the dead bury their dead": what death
drive tries to obliterate is not the biological life, but
the very afterlife - it endeavors to kill the lost object
the second time, not in the sense of mourning (accepting
the loss through symbolization), but in a more radical
sense of obliterating the very symbolic texture, the
letter in which the spirit of the dead survives.
[7] G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius
Press 1995, p. 16.
[8] For a more detailed account of this move, see Chapter 3
of Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, Cambridge: MIT
Press 2003.
[9] This holds even if we reformulate the Universal in the
Laclauian sense of empty signifier caught in the struggle
for hegemony: the universal singularity is not the empty
universal signifier filled in - hegemonized by - some particular content. It is almost its obverse: a
singularity which explodes the given contours of the
universality in question and opens it up to a radically
new content.
Slavoj Zizek's Chronology
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