Deleuze and Beckett: An Immanent Encounter

Deleuze and Beckett: an immanent encounter Abstract: Understanding the exact nature of Deleuze’s debt to Kant, forms a large part of contemporary Deleuzian scholarship, a project made all the more urgent since the publishing of Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism in 2007. These Kantian readings present Deleuze as someone who continues Kant’s transcendental project by reconsidering the nature of ‘immanent critique’. Immanent critique is no longer seen here as part of the critical enquiry into the possible conditions of experience, but as a staging of an encounter with the genetic principle constituting these conditions, the real condition common to both the human subject and the world in which he lives. Such is the implicit demand of genetic recasting: that critique in its immanent form is something we can experience and learn. Presented with this demand, the following essay addresses the problem of staging this immanent form of critique. It looks to Deleuze’s essay on the work of Samuel Beckett, ‘The Exhausted’, to suggest a possible site for such an encounter with constitutive principle. Specifically, in Deleuze’s discussion of …but the clouds… it finds a theory of the image, which can be understood in genetic terms, as a theory of the virtual. Thus the essay puts forward the thesis, that Beckett, in constructing the image through the exhaustive process, recreates the virtual plane, in its openness and flux. Keywords: Beckett, Kant, exhaustion, the virtual, the image. 1 I. Immanence The starting point for this essay lies with a claim made by Christian Kerslake in his 2009 study on immanence, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze. When negotiating between Deleuze, Spinoza and Hegel, he suggests that imagination, in its transcendental form, is something we can encounter, empirically speaking in the here and now. More so, he argues that for Deleuze, immanent critique consists precisely of such an encounter. He writes, It is the transcendental imagination, which is ultimately constitutive for human experience, and unless we learn the ‘hidden art’ of the imagination to which Kant alluded in his remarks on the Schematism, the human being is destined to remain enclosed in the constituted frameworks of its finitude. (Kerslake 2009: 20) In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the transcendental imagination is capable of a ‘hidden’ or, according to Pluhar’s translation ‘secret’, art (Kant 1996: A141 B180). It is able to mediate between the pure categories of understanding (as derived from Aristotelian logical judgements) and the pure forms of intuition (space and time) by producing ‘schemas’ of sensible concepts, rules according to which our intuitions are determined by concepts. Though as one of the conditions of possible experience transcendental imagination is essential for cognition, it itself cannot be known, as in, it is not something we can ‘divine from nature’ and ‘lay bare before ourselves’ (Kant 1996: A141 B180). Yet Kerslake seems to suggest that this ‘hidden art’ – this spontaneous productive capacity for schema – might be something we can ‘learn’. Indeed, if we do not acquire this kind of talent, we are not performing Kant’s critical project correctly. To understand more of the nature of Kerslake’s claim, we must further consider the context in which it is written. Despite Deleuze’s anti-Kantian position being well known, Kerslake’s account belongs to a strand in contemporary Deleuzian scholarship, which seeks to unfold the exact nature of Deleuze’s debt to Kant, a task all the more urgent since the publishing of Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism in 2007.1 Kerslake together with Daniel Smith (1996), Joe Hughes (2008 and 2009) Levi Bryant (2008 and 2009) and Edward Willatt (2009) sees 2 Deleuze as inheriting Kant’s critical project, to the extent that, like Kant, Deleuze wishes to perform ‘a critique of values upon which critique is founded’ (Bryant 2009: 32-33). However, for Deleuze, these founding values are not the kind described in the Critique of Pure Reason, comprising of the a priori forms of intuition, categories of the understanding and ideas of reason. Instead, he finds an alternative set of principles elsewhere, with an altogether different character. Hughes repeatedly quotes from Deleuze’s ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics’ (2009: 4; 2008: 17-18), The first two Critiques indeed invoke facts, seek out the conditions from these facts and find them in ready-made faculties. It follows that the first two critiques point to a genesis, which they are incapable of securing on their own. But in the aesthetic Critique of Judgement Kant poses the problem of the genesis of the faculties in their original free agreement. Thus he discovers a ground still lacking in the first two critiques. (Deleuze 2004a: 61) The reference now is to the way in which Kant describes transcendental imagination in the early chapters of the third critique, the second moment of the judgement of taste. Here the pleasure of beauty is different from the pleasure associated with the agreeable as it derives from ‘a state of mind’ in which the faculties of imagination and understanding are in ‘free play’ (Kant 1987: 217-19). In Desert Islands (2004a: 634), but also in Difference and Repetition (2004b: 180,183, 210) and other work on Kant (2008: 42-5), Deleuze emphasises how this free play of the faculties produces a ‘quickening’ or ‘furthering’ of powers. When free, imagination is that which ‘arouses’ understanding and understanding in turn is that which ‘puts’ imagination into ‘play’ (Kant 1987: 296). Such arousal is even more apparent in Kant’s discussion of the sublime, in which imagination’s confrontation with its limit is directly responsible for the ‘outpouring’ feeling of the suprasensible power of reason (Kant 1987: 226). Hughes, but also Kerslake, shows how Deleuze rewrites this kind of productive confrontation as genetic principle, not simply responsible for arousing feelings of the suprasensible, but responsible for the very constitution of our subjectivity, with all its associated faculties.2 Setting Kerslake’s argument into the above context, we begin to understand why he might consider transcendental imagination to be constitutive for human experience. 3 He subscribes to the view of Deleuze as a post-Kantian thinker, someone who responds to the demand for the ‘unconditioned self-grounding principle that must lie at the basis of knowledge’ (Kerslake 2009: 18). This he finds in Kant’s concept of the transcendental imagination, providing imagination is not reduced here to its function in the Critique of Pure Reason, as the mere schematic ‘transcendent application of its synthesis’, but is seen at its most productive, whether in Heidegger’s existential ontology of constitutive finitude or in the post-Romantics philosophy of the imagination. For Kerslake, imagination in this constitutive sense takes over the role usually granted to the Spinozian model of immanence, in which the world is seen to be the ‘expression of God’ and God’s ‘divine infinity’ is that in which the entire world participates (Deleuze 1992a: 176; Kerslake 2009: 34-6). We can also see why, if Kant’s critical project is to be continued correctly, it must uncover this kind of selfgrounding principle. Without learning more about the nature of transcendental imagination’s ‘hidden art’, Kant’s critical enquiry remains incomplete and we are destined to remain with the ‘simple conditioning’ of fact in ‘ready-made faculties’, rather than sure to discover the genetic ground of these faculties (Deleuze 2004b: 192). However, this kind of recasting of Kant’s transcendental project still leaves the question of immanent critique unanswered. What we cannot understand is how – how is such a principle to be uncovered? How is this hidden art of the imagination to be uncovered, encountered and learnt? This is the point at which my essay begins. I would like to suggest that Deleuze does indeed stage his immanent critique as an encounter with an unconditioned principle – in Kerslake’s terms, an encounter with a productive sense of Kant’s transcendental imagination – and he does so most profoundly in his late essay on the work of Samuel Beckett. I would like to propose ‘The Exhausted’ as a site for this kind of immanent critique (Deleuze 1998). II. The Exhausted At first glance, Deleuze’s essay might not seem the best site for such an encounter. ‘The Exhausted’ makes no direct reference to the concept of immanence and only broaches the question of the genetic principle indirectly, through the concept of ‘birth’. We learn for instance, that to be exhausted is to be exhausted ‘before birth’ 4 (Deleuze 1998: 152). Similarly, Deleuze describes the one who is exhausted – seated in darkness, ‘head sunk in crippled hands’ – as an original witness, present ‘before being born’ (1998: 155-6). However, the essay does not expand on these few comments and these comments taken by themselves should not be seen as evidence of immanent critique, though they remain quietly suggestive. Primarily, the essay is meant to serve as a postscript to the first French translation of Deleuze’s television plays and as such, represents Deleuze’s first serious discussion of these works. Although Deleuze had referred to Beckett prior to the publishing of ‘The Exhausted’ – notably in Difference and Repetition (2004b: 100) and in Cinema I (2005: 68-70) – it is only here and in the essay ‘The Greatest Irish Film (Beckett’s “Film”)’ (1998) that he examines the work in depth. Yet to see the essay as a piece of art criticism providing a necessarily introduction to Quad, Ghost Trio, …but the clouds… or Nacht und Träume is equally problematic. For one, we learn very little about the context of these works – nothing about where and when they were first staged, nothing of their actual staging, their complicated script and exacting camera work, nothing of their historical or critical background and nothing of their critical significance. Indeed we learn very little about them at all, except how they might pursue the concept of exhaustion. In this sense Deleuze essay is closest to how Levi Bryant describes Deleuze engagement with artwork in terms of a ‘new theory of aesthetics’ (2009: 33). According to Bryant, Deleuze looks to different artists, (as well as novels and of course, film) in order to show how these might be seen as ‘producing’ or ‘individuating’ different forms of sensibility (2009: 33). Taking his cue from Deleuze work in What is Philosophy, Bryant writes, The aim is not represent these artists or determine what they meant, but to analyse the percepts they invented, and uncover the capacities for affecting and being affected they have brought into the world. (2009: 33) Bryant’s interpretation would be convincing where it not for the fact that ‘The Exhausted’ does not uncover any such percepts or affects. It does not develop a theory of aesthetics any more than a theory of art and makes no reference to sensation, perception or experience of any kind. Instead we are simply presented with a concept 5 of exhaustion and then shown how this functions in Beckett work generally and in the television plays specifically. Thus the essay follows a very rigid structure and can be easily divided into three parts. In the first third, Deleuze identifies his central concept of exhaustion through contrast and comparison with the concept of realisation. He then shows how Beckett enacts this concept of exhaustion through the particular way he uses language in his novels, plays and radio and television pieces. In this second third of his argument, Deleuze attributes to Beckett a kind of meta-approach, a manipulation of the possibilities inherent in language. Finally, in the last third, he outlines the role of exhaustion in each of the television plays individually. Only this sense, can we see ‘The Exhausted’ as staging a kind of immanent enquiry, in that it provides an analysis of the principle of exhaustion first put forward or ‘contributed’ by Beckett (Deleuze 1998: 154). What then is exhaustion, this principle to which most of Beckett’s work is seen to adhere to? For Deleuze, exhaustion is one way in which we can approach the possible. Whereas in our everyday activity we tend to realise the possible by pursuing certain ‘goals, aims and plans’, in exhaustion these are renounced and all of possibility is affirmed (1998: 152). Deleuze also stipulates that only a truly exhausted person can perform this kind of logical exhaustion, as only someone truly exhausted can renounce all aims and plans. Thus logical exhaustiveness and physiological fatigue are closely linked (1998: 154-5). We can see how this principle might be relevant to Beckett’s work, if we think of Beckett as performing this kind of double exhaustion through his use of language. Once again, the same kind of distinction applies: whereas under normal circumstances we use language to name the various projects we wish to realize, Beckett renounces such familiar grammatical and syntactical structures precisely in order to affirm all possible permutations. This kind of meta-construction Deleuze calls language one and associates it most closely with the earlier novels and theatre pieces. And just as logical exhaustiveness is dependent on the person’s physiological fatigue, so it is that we cannot consider the exhaustion of words, without the accompanying exhaustion of the voices that utter them, including, necessarily and problematically, the writer’s own. This kind of self-silencing Deleuze calls language two and sees it as a feature of Beckett’s work from the Unnameable onwards. 6 More directly, we can also see how this same exhaustive principle might apply to Quad, Ghost Trio, …but the clouds… or Nacht und Träume, though in a somewhat different shape and form. All of these later works pursue what Deleuze describes as the third language of exhaustion, the exhaustive language of spaces and images. It is as if we had reached a point at which the previous exhaustions of language one and two opened up a space for the extra-linguistic, which can only now be adequately explored. In all cases, we are presented with either a space (Quad, Ghost Trio and …but the clouds…) or an image (…but the clouds… and Nacht und Träume) that is indeterminate in nature – that is not one realised possibility, but seems to affirm them all. So for instance, in Ghost Trio the protagonist does not sit in a particular room, but in a grey rectangular space. When the camera zooms in order to present the bed, the window or the door, they all appear as the same grey rectangle. Similarly, the face of the woman who appears to the protagonist of …but the clouds… is not the face of any particular female character, but a blurred close-up. Furthermore Beckett often seems to accentuate this ‘any-space-whatever’ and ‘indefinite’ image: in Quad, the four actors get to traverse all sides and diagonals of the square; in Ghost Trio the protagonist opens the door, opens the window and looks under the bed in successive order; and in …but the clouds… he lists all possible ways in which the woman had previously appeared to him. And it must also be added, that like with the exhaustions of languages one and two, this kind of more logical side of exhaustiveness is accompanied by physiological fatigue. In …but the clouds… and in Nacht und Träume we actually see the silent protagonist, sitting in the dark, head down on ‘crippled hands’ (Deleuze 1998: 155). III. Immanent readings But what then of the concept of immanence, with which I introduced this essay? How is this concept relevant to ‘The Exhausted’, when all that seems to be discussed is the question of exhaustion and the way in which this concept is played out in in literature, in theatre and television plays? Where can we find the transcendental concept of imagination, and with it, the staging of an immanent critique, in which the nature of this transcendental imagination is learnt? 7 First of all, it must be said that in ‘The Exhausted’ Deleuze’s debt to Spinoza is very much apparent. When Deleuze first distinguishes between the exhaustion and the realisation of the possible, he makes following remark on the exhausted person and his state of exhaustion, ‘That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me’. There is no longer any possible: a relentless Spinozism. (1998: 152) From this we learn that the point at which, we can no longer come up with further possibilities, is the point of ‘Spinozism’. Whatever exhaustion may or may not be, it remains Spinozian in character. But to begin reading ‘The Exhausted’ in such a way is somewhat problematic, because it involves us taking into account a reversal of terms. To understand more of this reversal, we need to return to Kerslake and the problem of immanent critique. Other than unfolding the exact nature of Deleuze’s debt to Kant, Kerslake is very good in showing how for Deleuze, Spinoza’s ontology foreshadows post-Kantian attempts to ground philosophy in genesis. According to Kerslake, Deleuze finds an equivalent to the kind of unconditioned self-grounding principle demanded by the post-Kantians, in Spinoza’s idea of expression. Because Spinoza’s God is that which ‘expresses itself in the world’ and the world in turn is the ‘expression’ of this God, we can construe the expressive nature of this divine being as a prototypical immanent principle (Deleuze 1992a: 176). Providing we keep to Kerslake’s post-Kantian discussion of immanence, the terms here are of the ‘real’ rather than ‘the possible’. The question is not of those conditions – what Deleuze identifies as the Kantian readymade faculties of intuition, understanding and reason – which allow for the possibility of experience. These he dismisses a mere conditioning (Deleuze 2004b: 192, 201, 216). Rather, Deleuze always aims to uncover genetic ground of the world shaped by these faculties, the ‘real’ ground that underlies our already constituted experience. Kerslake (2009: 18, 83) but also to an extent Hughes (2008: 17-8; 2009: 3-4) and Smith (1996: 29) point to the well-known passage from Difference and Repetition. 8 In fact, the condition must be a condition of real experience and not possible experience. It forms an intrinsic genesis, not an extrinsic conditioning. (Deleuze 2004b: 192) It might therefore seem strange that Deleuze alludes to Spinoza when identifying exhaustion with the exhaustion of possibility. ‘The Exhausted’ clearly states that relentless Spinozism is the ‘impossible’ moment at which the exhausted person exhausts the possibility as a whole. However, as Asja Szafraniec points out in her study of Beckett, Deleuze’s late essay calls for a reversal of these two terms (2007: 120-1). The ‘possible’ here is not the same as the Kantian ‘possible’, that Kantian world experienced under the conditions of the transcendental subject. In fact, it is closer to the original self-grounding principle associated with Spinoza, demanded by the post-Kantians and described by Kerslake. Or as Deleuze writes, God is the originary, the sum total of possibility. The possible is realised only in the derivative, in tiredness, whereas one is exhausted before birth, before realising oneself, or realising anything whatsoever (I gave up before birth). (1998: 152) We have encountered this concept of birth before, when first introducing ‘The Exhausted’. I have described it as quietly suggestive. We can now see how it might signify a great deal more, dealing with that originary state, which lies at the heart of any philosophical model seeking a genetic approach to the problem of immanence. Following on from this reversal of terms, we can also see how immanent critique might be staged as an encounter with this originary state. To pursue a course of relentless Spinozism – both logical and physiological exhaustion – to the point at which there is no further possibility, is to assume a state that in the Spinozian model is God’s only. This, in a sense, is what Beckett achieves in his work, a certain God-like presence. According to Szafraniec, just as Spinoza’s God exhausts himself to become everything he understands, the writer exhausts himself in the process of writing, ‘to be a flux, which combines with all other fluxes’ (2007: 120). Anthony Uhlmann argues something very similar in his 1999 study, although in this case, God does not represent ‘Absolutely everything’ but negatively, ‘Absolutely nothing’ (1999: 14). 9 Taking into account the three levels of Spinoza’s ontology, he suggests that Beckett’s exhaustion is the exhaustion of modes or individuated things, both in the attribute of extension and the attribute of thought. It is this exhaustion of modes that requires the merging with the plane of immanence, the univocity of Being or Spinoza’s substance or God. However, it must also be said, that to read ‘The Exhausted’ in this Spinozian fashion, is to follow a strand in Deleuzian scholarship, which tends to neglects its more Kantian aspects. Here I would like to turn to Audrey Wasser’s recent essay on ‘The Exhausted’, ‘A Relentless Spinozism: Deleuze’s Encounter with Beckett’ (2012). Like Szafraniec, Uhlmann and others, Wasser begins by pointing out the Spinozian element of ‘The Exhausted’. However, unlike other commentators, she emphasises the carnal or passional nature of Spinoza’s thought in the ontology of ‘sense’ rather than ‘essence’ or ‘substance’.3 For Wasser, it is not Spinozian God that is key to understanding Deleuze’s essay, but rather Spinoza’s definition of affect as indicating a bodily change of state. Specifically, she is interested in how such a definition of affect impacts our understanding of thought, as also capable of being affected. In her interpretation of Deleuzian transcendental empiricism, thought changes with every ‘sensible encounter’. She uses the term ‘encounter’ in a post-Kantian fashion, to describe thought’s confrontation with a sensible limit, familiar from the discussion of the sublime, especially of the generative role it plays in Deleuze’s recasting of Kant’s transcendental project. For Wasser, every time something is sensed, thought is forced to think, precisely because it is confronted with something exterior and independent of it. Such a ‘midpoint’ of thought is useful when considering the double concept of exhaustion, because the point of exhaustion – the point at which we no longer have any further possibility at our disposal – might also be construed as a confrontation with a limit. More so, it is a confrontation with a limit that has a bodily aspect. Just as in Difference and Repetition Deleuze might be seen as holding the respective ‘fatiguing’ of the faculties responsible for the transmission of shock to the final faculty of thought, in ‘The Exhausted’ physiological exhaustion is very much part and parcel of the exhaustive process.4 As Deleuze emphasises, it is only when we are ‘sufficiently disinterested’ to pursue our goals, aims and plans that we can arrive at the point of exhaustion (1998: 154). Thus for Wasser, Beckett’s is not so much a 10 ‘relentless’ but a ‘relenting’ Spinozism, which in orienting Spinoza towards the corporeal, serves to make this most abstract of universes a little more concrete (2012: 128-9). This allows us to make the tentative conclusion that constitutive principle invoked in ‘The Exhausted’ might be construed as a kind of productive confrontation with a limit, familiar from Kantian discussions of the sublime but also clearly at work in the exhaustive process. In this sense, we can understand his as an immanent critique in the Kantian tradition as ‘the critique of the values upon which critique is founded’ in that, this confrontation with limit is central to thought. Beckett by engaging with the exhaustive process presents such principle directly. Quad, which Wasser discusses in detail, would be once such instance of an immanent critique. Quad illustrates the constructive function of the exhaustive process, its players tiring at the four corners but exhausting the space in the middle (Wasser 2012: 129-30). Yet in light of the recent research carried out by Smith, Hughes, Bryant and others, Wasser’s interpretation is also incomplete. To further expand on how this might be the case, requires a far more detailed account of the genetic line that begins with sensibility and the material impression and proceeds via the creation of faculties to thought, and ultimately representation. To do so, I would like to turn to Joe Hughes, whose work on this problem of genesis in a Kantian context is exemplary. Both in Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (2008) and in his introduction to Difference and Repetition (2009), Joe Hughes convincingly argues that the midpoint of Deleuzian epistemology lies not with the violence of the sensible encounter but with the creation of the virtual. This is not to say that he dismisses Wasser’s kind of genetic account entirely. According to Hughes, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze does trace the principles of thought back to the initial violent meeting between the subject and the unrecognisable, fragmented object. Hughes would also agree that this shock results in the creation of thought appropriate to this wounding difference (and of course, the entire series of faculties, sensibility, imagination and memory, each dealing with the violence in its own way). However, for Hughes, it is important that the process Wasser describes culminates with the establishment of a future and open 11 state of ‘determinability’, more familiar to readers of Difference and Repetition as the ‘virtual’ realm of ‘multiplicity’ (2004b: 214-79). From Hughes we learn that Deleuze’s epistemology is always the story of two asymmetrical halves. In the first, we get to see how the virtual is established and the idea, progressively determined. According to the terms of Difference and Repetition, this process involves larval subjects, repetitions and passive synthesis and Wasser’s account is useful insofar as it shows how the force of the encounter both constitutes a series of ‘passive selves’ or ‘larval subjects’ and causes these genetic elements of unconscious subjecthood to be exceeded (Wasser 2012: 130-3). However, to complete this trajectory of thought, the idea must be brought back from its futuristic virtual horizon and actualized in the present. Otherwise, it is very clear how the violence of the sensible encounter might be seen to be disruptive of thought – indeed, responsible for its ‘mutation’ – but not how this violence might allow for determination. While this shift of midpoint might seem overly technical, it bears on the problem of unconditioned principle, in that it is the virtual and not the encounter, which ultimately determines our knowledge of the object. Furthermore, such a shift of midpoint also has an impact on the ontological aspect of Deleuze’s argument, especially as presented by Kerslake. Kerslake shows that Deleuze builds his concept of imagination on Spinozian ideas of God and his expression. Imagination in its productive form, takes over the role previously granted to Spinoza’s concept of God, as the one self-grounding principle. If there is a Spinozian aspect here, in Hughes’s argument, it can also be found in this discussion of virtual midpoint. We can rewrite the path that begins with the encounter and leads via the idea back to determination, as the story of how Being is ‘wrestled’ from unindividuated beings so that it may be restored to them as individuated.5 It takes place within the Nietzschean world of the will to power, in which the only difference is the difference in intensity. In such an intensive world, the point of determination occurs with the thought of the eternal return, this defined as the moment of awareness equal to the bodily experience of the world of intensity and violence.6 While Hughes draws comparisons with the Spinoza’s idea of substance as ‘that which is in itself and conceived through itself’ (2009: 64), we might see how the figure God also meets these criteria. 12 Does this however, impact our understanding of ‘The Exhausted’? Can we still see it as an immanent encounter, in the sense of Kantian immanent critique? If so, is it a pre-critical, metaphysical encounter with a Spinozian God? Or rather, do we come here face to face with the violence of the sensible encounter between body and material impression? And where, in these very different accounts, can we find a place for the virtual? IV. The virtual image Before answering, I would like to move away from these ontological interpretations to consider one aspect of ‘The Exhausted’ that these tend to overlook. Wasser, but also Bryden and Szafraniec, all seem to ignore the fact that Deleuze’s essay culminates with the theory of the image. As we have already seen, in the second part of his essay Deleuze shows how Beckett uses language to reach a state of exhaustion. Deleuze identifies the construction of three different successive meta-languages: the first consisting of the exhaustion of words, the second, of voices, and the third of the extralinguistic elements of space and image. Suggestively for our consideration of immanent critique, he describes the final state of exhaustion as ‘the point of “Imagination Dead Imagine”’ (Deleuze 1998: 158). When Beckett does manage to exhaust words so that it no longer is a question of ‘a combinatorial imagination’ imagining a whole of a series, and when Beckett does manage to exhaust voices, so that the ‘imagination sullied by memory’ is no longer pierced with ‘unbearable memories, absurd stories or undesirable company’ then he achieves this most difficult of points (1998: 158). At this ‘immanent limit of language’ appears the visual or aural image (1998: 158). It would seem then, if we wish to learn more about Deleuze’s concept of the transcendental imagination and how it may be encountered, we must examine the nature of this unsullied image more closely. The problem however, is that the nature of this visual or aural image is poorly understood. Many of the Spinozian accounts I have referred to tend to overlook the concept of the image in favour of the other extra-linguistic element mentioned in ‘The Exhausted’ and found in Beckett’s work, namely, the concept of space. We have seen how Wasser for example, focuses her discussion on Quad, in which Beckett’s 13 exhaustion of space is most apparent (2012: 129-30). Mary Bryden also ends both of her essays on ‘The Exhausted’ with a discussion of this work (1996: 90-1 and 2002: 89-91). Other commentators simply shift our attention to other texts. Szafraniec draws on Deleuze’s Cinema books (2007) while Uhlmann in his essay ‘Image and Intuition in Beckett’s film’ prefers a more Bergsonian approach (2004). The situation is not helped by the fact that Deleuze himself is very vague at this stage of the argument. Or rather, the image presents itself as vague. If we look briefly at the Deleuze’s treatment of the image in the second part of ‘The Exhausted’, we can see why the image might be accompanied by a sense of confusion. On the one hand, Deleuze presents the image as something ‘singular’, nothing more than ‘a woman, a hand, a mouth, some eyes’ (1998: 158). As the image is considered to be free of both words and voices, this kind of sense of singularity feels appropriate. On the other hand, Deleuze also describes the image as a ‘process’, something very much emphasised by Mary Bryden (2002: 86). These women, hands, mouths and eyes that appear after the exhaustions of language one and two, are not ‘objects’ (though they might appear this way from ‘the object’s point of view’), but ‘a process’ (Deleuze 1998: 159). However, Deleuze seems to be unclear as to what kind of a process the image is. At first, he describes the image as a ‘ritornello’, something that comes and goes, like the patch of sky in First Love (1998: 159). Once again we can see how such a definition of the image is appropriate to Beckett’s work, evoking for instance, the way in which the face of the woman appears and disappears in …but the clouds…. But then Deleuze also argues that the nature of the image is ‘selfdissipating’ (1998: 160). Thus the image is also known for its short-lasting, explosive character. It does not return but end, quite suddenly, in an explosion that ‘captures all the possible’ (1998: 161). However, if we consider this vague concept of the image in relation to the virtual, then many characteristics of the image become clear. Before engaging in such a comparison, let us first return to Hughes and his account of Deleuze’s genetic alternative to Kantian epistemology. So far, I have shown how the genesis of thought can be traced back to an initial encounter between the body and material object. The shock of this initial encounter is then transmitted through the various faculties in an attempt at interpreting this violence and here Wasser’s account is useful to understand 14 more of this process (2012). However, despite acknowledging the virtual’s constitutive role in the determination of the object, I have not yet described how this violence constitutes the virtual. In order to show the relation between the two – the image of ‘The Exhausted’ and the virtual of Difference and Repetition – we need to establish what happens after the moment at which all the attempts at interpreting the violence leading up to this breaking point are cast aside, together with all the passive selves and larval subjects. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze describes this virtual platform in the following way, The system of the future by contrast must be called a divine game since there is no pre-existing rule, since the game bears already upon its own rules and since the child player can only win, all of chance being affirmed each time. (2004b: 142) From this we learn that the virtual has two main characteristics. First of all, the system of the future has no pre-existing rule. A Kantian enquiry into conditions that allow for the possibility of experience will not discover in this Nietzschean world a priori forms of intuition, categories of understanding or idea of reason. The genetic set of principles – what in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze terms ‘ideas’ – must be constituted, each time anew.7 However, these are nothing more than mere ‘differentials’, valueless in themselves and only acquiring a value when they enter a reciprocal relation with one another (Deleuze 2004b: 216-9). Secondly, this system of the future has no subject, or at least, not the kind of subject familiar from Kantian philosophy. Instead, the subject of the future is appropriate to a system without pre-existing rules, a contingent or ‘aleatory’ point to the idea’s valueless differential (Deleuze 2004b: 247-51). The point at which the child player affirms all of chance and throws the pair of dice is the aleatory point at which differential ideas are placed a reciprocal relation with each other. While it might seem that this point takes on the role of Kantian apperception in that it lends thought the kind of unity comparable to the ‘I think’, we must remember that there is no 15 unified consciousness in Deleuzian epistemology. Here within the system of a ‘dissolved self’, the ‘I’ is always ‘fractured’ (Deleuze 2004b: 108-10). Keeping these characteristics of the virtual in mind, let us return to Deleuze’s theory of the image. The first characteristic of the image is its singularity. After the respective exhaustions of words and voices, Beckett leaves us with no more than ‘a woman, a hand, a mouth’ (Deleuze 1998: 158). These singularities might be understood as ‘indefinite’ because in becoming free of both voices and words, they retain nothing of the ‘personal’ of the imagination sullied by memory as and nothing of the ‘rational’ of the combinatorial imagination sullied by reason (Deleuze 1998: 158). Interesting enough for our comparison with the virtual, while these singularities can be described as indefinite (we do not know, for instance, what woman, who’s face, what mouth is being referred to here) Deleuze also describes them as ‘determinate’ (1998: 160). The indefinite/determinate state of image also helps us understand why Deleuze describes it as a ‘process’ and not an ‘object’. It is important to remember here that at stake in Deleuze’s essay, is an exhaustive process taking place on two different levels. This process is not easy; it is exhaustive; it is draining. As Deleuze writes, to reach this point of the image is ‘extremely’ difficult and very few painters, musicians, writers have managed to achieve it (1998: 158-9). Once however, it is achieved, this state is almost impossible to maintain. The effort required to keep the image free from all associations is simply too great. This is why the image tends to appear and disappear and eventually, to explode in an act of self-dissipation. Indeed, it is this image’s act of self-dissipation, which binds the third language of exhaustion most closely with the virtual sphere. As we have already learnt, the process of exhaustion takes place on two different levels. On the one hand, it consists of the logical exhaustiveness and we can see how its affirmation of chance echoes the description of the child player with its throw of dice found in Difference and Repetition. On the other hand, the affirmation of chance in logical exhaustiveness is dependent on the fatigue of the one who exhausts. As Deleuze argues, only someone who is ‘sufficiently disinterested’ can exhaust possibility in this way (1998:154). Therefore, we can see Beckett’s constructions of languages one, two and three as his 16 successive attempts at reaching that state of fatigue, which would allow for logical exhaustiveness. While in the language one of words we might still encounter characters responsible for the construction of ‘inclusive disjunctions’, the silencing of voices of language two has a direct impact on subjectivity. Again, as we have already seen, the narrator’s voice is one of the many voices necessarily included in the exhaustive process. In the language three of image however, Beckett dispenses with this the kind of agency associated with language one and two. No one exhausts the image; the image exhausts itself. V. … but the clouds… Without making any claims at this early stage, it is worth noting a couple of points. The concept of the virtual and the concept of the image seem to share some important characteristics. For one, both can be understood as a ‘principle’ (though the exact nature of this principle is yet unclear). The state of exhaustion in which the image participates, more than that, achieves, is described by Deleuze as ‘originary’, as the sum of all possibility. Realisation of determinate goals is, in this case, only the ‘derivative’ (Deleuze 1998: 152). Likewise, the virtual is that which ultimately allows for the determination of the object. Both the virtual and the image are characterised as ‘indeterminate’, either as ‘indefinite’ or ‘without pre-existing rule’ (Deleuze 1998: 158; Deleuze 2004b: 142). Both also achieve such an indeterminate state in the similar way, by dispensing with a certain kind of established subjective agency. The virtual subject is no more than an aleatory point – the exhausted person, ‘disinterested’ (Deleuze 1998: 154). We can however, learn more. The best example of this relation between the image and the virtual, can be found in the third part of ‘The Exhausted’, in Deleuze’s discussion of …but the clouds…. …But the clouds… is a short television play, first screened by the BBC in 1976 as part of a longer programme dedicated to the work of Samuel Beckett. The play follows the central character’s attempts at the recollection of a woman’s face. We see how he shuffles across a centrally lit stage, east to west and west to east, changes his clothes off-screen and eventually ends up in the ‘mental sanctum’ in the north, where the image had previously been seen.8 There, head in hands, he recalls how on other nights ‘she’ had appeared to him, to stay briefly, to linger and to mouth the words of 17 the Tower by W.B. Yeats, ‘but the clouds in the sky’ (Beckett 1984: 261). As we hear the protagonist’s account, the image of a woman’s face ‘invades’ our screen (Deleuze 1998: 170). As this kind of ‘sentimental’ examination of ‘loss love’ (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004: 77), it is not immediately apparent how ...but the clouds… engages with the more theoretical questions of the virtual. However, it worth noting that Deleuze introduces the play by suggesting that in this work, Beckett returns to the ‘postCartesian’ theories found in his earlier novel, Murphy (1998: 169). Specifically, he refers to chapter six of the novel, in which Beckett distinguishes between the various zones of Murphy’s mind. From the ‘riotous potpourri of many metaphysical systems’ that this chapter evokes (Fletcher 1965: 54), we learn that that within hollow sphere of Murphy’s mind the universe assumes three distinct forms. Beckett identifies the first form as the ‘actual’, the second as ‘virtual’ and the third as ‘virtual rising to actual’ or actual falling to virtual’ (Beckett 2011: 107). Already here we gain an initial insight. There is a virtual at work in …but the clouds…, and this virtual belongs to its protagonist’s earlier counterpart, Murphy. There is also a second point to be gained. Whereas Murphy has both mental and physical experience of the actual, the virtual is mental only. Though Murphy enjoys all three forms of his universe, if he wants to move from one zone to another – indeed, if he wishes to invoke the virtual state – he can only do so according to the ‘law of inversion’ (Deleuze 1998: 169), by keeping his body at rest. Indeed, I would like to argue that Deleuze uses this reference to Murphy to map the virtual/actual distinction onto the logical/physiological distinction of exhaustion he has developed so far. For Deleuze, the image is ‘virtual’ in that, like Murphy’s virtual universal, it is ‘mental’ in nature. This is the one aspect of the image that Deleuze emphasises in particular section of the essay that has no equivalent elsewhere. The sanctum in which the protagonists sits when invoking the image, ‘has only a mental existence; it is a mental chamber’ (1998: 169). Similarly, what ‘matters’ here is no longer the exhaustion of space, ‘but the mental image to which its leads’ (1998: 169). We can therefore conclude that the process of exhaustion is also such a mental activity. At the very least, both the logic of exhaustion and Murphy’s mental 18 acrobatics conform to the same law of inversion. Both require a physical or physiological exhaustion on the protagonist’s part. Such a mapping of one distinction onto the other becomes even more obvious in the following section, where Deleuze repeats many of his former claims about the image, but this time, keeping to his newly established mental framework. He still insists that the image of …but the clouds… raises ‘the thing or the person’ to the state of ‘an indefinite’ (1998: 170). He also argues that the image ‘cannot be separated from the process of its own disappearance’ because ‘the energy’ that the image carries results in its ‘self-dissipation’ (1998: 170). However, in this case he presents the characteristics of the image as part of a mental activity. When we first see the protagonist sitting at his desk, he states, When I thought of her, it was always night. I came in – (Beckett 1984: 259) But then immediately, he corrects himself, No that is not right. When she appeared it was always night. I came in – (Beckett 1984: 259) To raise something or someone to the state of the indefinite is to ‘call to the eye of the mind’ (1998: 170). The exhaustion of the image then, insofar as the image achieves a state that is both ‘indefinite’ and ‘self-dissipative’ (Deleuze 1998: 170), constitutes a mental process, which can be understood in virtual terms. When the protagonist ‘stops thinking’ and begins to ‘call to the eye of the mind’, he begins to engage with this kind of virtual mental process (1998: 170). However, we must also note that Deleuze evokes the virtual indirectly, through a reference to Beckett’s earlier novel, Murphy. It is still unclear how Murphy’s virtual relates to the virtual of Difference and Repetition. This relation between the two different forms of virtuality Deleuze only establishes later, in the final stage of his analysis, where he explains, one, more about kind of mental activity that Murphy engages in when he puts the law of inversion into action, and 19 two, the consequences for the protagonist, whose call to the eye of the mind is rewarded by the appearance and subsequent disappearance of a woman’s face. Regarding the state of exhaustion required of dissipating image, Deleuze writes, [The image] announces that the end of the possible is at hand for the protagonist of …but the clouds… […] There is no longer an image, anymore than there is a space: beyond the possible there is only darkness, as in Murphy’s third and final state, where the protagonist no longer moves in spirit, but has become an indiscernible atom, abulic, “in the dark … of … absolute freedom”’. (1998: 170) Once again Deleuze refers to the hollow sphere of Murphy’s mind to make his point, but this time, to the experience Murphy has of its actual, virtual and in-between forms. When Murphy first lies to rest, in order to travel through the different zones of his mind, he initially encounters a world that is very similar to our own, for which it acts as a kind of parallel. In this zone of ‘light’ Murphy can, for instance, enjoy mentally reciprocating a kick that he had received physically, when in the physical world. Providing he rests further, Murphy can then enter the second zone of ‘halflight’, comprising of ‘forms without parallel’ (Beckett 2011: 110). This second, more unfamiliar world he can only enjoy through contemplation, in the manner of Dante’s Belaqua.9 But Murphy’s ‘third and final state’ belongs to the third zone of ‘darkness’ in which there are no forms, whether parallel or otherwise. Beckett describes it as ‘a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms’ (2011: 112). There are ‘no elements or states, nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into fragments of a new becoming’ (Beckett 2011: 112). To engage in the mental activity productive of the image – to call something to the eye of the mind – is to therefore participate in this kind of state of flux. If we now compare the two different forms of virtuality – that belonging to Murphy and that of Difference and Repetition – their mutual resemblance becomes clear. When Beckett describes the third zone of darkness as a world ‘without element or states’, he also explains that these forms become and crumble into fragments of a new becoming ‘without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change’ (2011: 112). 20 While a Spinozian aspect cannot be entirely dismissed it is difficult not to see this world as resembling the Deleuzian virtual realm of multiplicity.10 Like the open system of the future, it has no pre-existing rule. And furthermore, like this system, it has a mathematical equivalent. Deleuze likens the idea to the reciprocally determined differential, Beckett, the flux of forms, to a ‘matrix of surds’ (Beckett 2011: 113). Similarly, Beckett’s description of Murphy evokes the kind of subjecthood Deleuze associates with the open system of the future and the progressive determination of the Idea. We have seen how the child player, free of any prior associations, rules the open system of the future. We have also seen how Ideas are progressively determined at a contingent or aleatory point. In Nietzschean terms, the thought of the eternal return is the moment of awareness equal to the bodily experience of the world of intensities. It is the ‘blind’, ‘acephalic’ (headless) and ‘aphasic’ (speechless) point, at which ‘powerlessness is turned into power’ (Deleuze 2004b: 249-50). Consider then the following of description Murphy at this point, Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. He did not move but was a point in the ceaseless unconditioned generation and passing away of line. (Beckett 2011: 112) In the third zone of darkness, Murphy loses the degree of sovereignty and freedom he found in zones one and two. He can no longer reciprocate kicks or contemplate beatitudes. This last zone is also not a zone through which Murphy can mentally traverse. Whatever its treasures, these are not the kind among which he can ‘move’. Rather, he becomes a point within the overall movement, reduced to a mote within the general freedom. VI. Birthplace From our comparison it would seem that the relation between the two concepts, the image of the third language of exhaustion and the virtual of Difference and Repetition, is quite strong. Both involve the construction of a mobile and fluctuating mental state in which the individual or the subject responsible looses a sense of agency. So much we learn from Deleuze’s reference to Murphy and his third and dark state, described 21 by Beckett in terms of the virtual. Nevertheless this still leaves one question unanswered, the question with which I began his exploration of ‘The Exhausted’. Does it follow that Deleuze’s is an immanent critique in the post-Kantian sense? Can we find in ‘The Exhausted’ an encounter with what Kerslake describes as the unconditioned self-grounding principle that lies at the basis of knowledge? Is this what Beckett manages to achieve with the making of the elusive image, the learning of Kant’s transcendental imagination, understood by Deleuze as a constitutive, genetic ground? In Kerslake’s Kantian terms, immanent critique would necessarily encounter selfgrounding principle in the guise of Kant’s transcendental imagination, the hidden power, which in Deleuze’s rewriting of Kant’s transcendental project assumes a major constitutive role. In ‘The Exhausted’ we encounter such real conditions in the concept of the self-dissipating image. For what else is the virtual with which Deleuze introduces …but the clouds…? This is Murphy’s virtual as presented in Beckett’s early novel, the third form assumed by the hollow sphere of Murphy’s mind, experienced as a mobile and dark world of continuous becomings. We can conceive this virtual as Spinozian world, the flux, which combines all other fluxes, as described by Szafraniec (2007: 120). We can also by following Hughes’s interpretation, present it as a midpoint of a trajectory that begins with the violence of the sensible encounter and ends with the determination of the object. As such, the virtual is constitutive of the actual world, an actual world that the Kantian would recognise as his own, the world of distinct objects, experienced by the individual subject. We can see how the virtual of the self-dissipating image might be construed as such a constitutive ground if we once more consider Deleuze’s remarks on God and origin. As we already know, Deleuze introduces the distinction between exhaustion and realisation by writing, God is the originary, the sum total of possibility. The possible is realised only in the derivative, in tiredness, whereas one is exhausted before birth, before realising oneself, or realising anything whatsoever (I gave up before birth). (1998: 152) 22 According to Spinozian interpretations of ‘The Exhausted’, this one original God, the sum of all possibility, is a Spinozian God, the one substance from which all emerges. Equally however, we can construe this originary God-like state as the virtual realm of Difference and Repetition. The virtual too is there ‘before birth’, in that it is before the determination of the world of distinct objects and individual subjects. Indeed Hughes’s account shows how this world of extension and quality must presuppose an altogether different world of intensities, without such extensions and qualities. However, it needs to be noted that this priority of the God-like state of the virtual – the exhaustion before birth – is constitutive, in that, it lies at the ‘origin’ of such an objective world. While ultimately all representation can be traced backed to the initial material encounter in sensibility, Hughes’s account has shown how this of itself is not sufficient for determination. Determination only occurs in that moment when violence erupts to establish the Nietzschean system of the future and with it, those ideas, which give rise to the principles of actualisation. We can also see how Deleuze’s discussion of the self-dissipating image might answer the post-Kantian demand for a self-grounding principle of subjectivity. When making the distinction between exhaustion and realisation, Deleuze defines the time and place prior to birth as both before ‘realising anything whatsoever’ and before ‘realising oneself’ (1998: 152). In Kantian terms, the one who actively realises different goals, aims and plans is nothing other than the individual subject, negotiating the world of distinct objects. Whereas the one who is exhausted, exists prior to the realisation and thereby prior to such subjectivity. In section II of this essay, I have mentioned two instances in which Deleuze refers to ‘birth’. In the first instance Deleuze makes his reference to the Spinozian God; in the second, he writes, Tiredness affects action in all its states, whereas exhaustion only concerns an amnesiac witness. The seated person is the witness around which the other revolves while developing all degrees of tiredness. He is there before birth and before the other begins. (Deleuze 1998: 155-56) Prior to such subjectivity is the ‘amnesiac’, who is witness to the ‘other’ and this other’s endlessly tiring activity. A very specific kind of subjecthood is at stake. 23 It is this very specific subjecthood of the seated person that embodies self-grounding principle. If we return to our discussion of the Deleuzian epistemology, this has shown that, just as the world of objects presupposes the world of intensities, the world of a unified, conscious subject presupposes passive and unconscious subjecthood. I have referred to Wasser’s essay as a particular good account of the series of ‘larval subjects’ and ‘passive selves’ that form the first half of Deleuze’s epistemological trajectory. Yet I have also argued that the type of figure dominating Beckett’s late work, notably, the seated protagonist of …but the clouds… or Nacht und Träume, resemble the fractures subjects and passive selves of Wasser’s account no more than they resemble the single unified consciousness of the Kantian subject. Instead, they are appropriate to the mobile, fluctuating world to which they belong. ‘Before birth’ and ‘before the other begins’ is the child player who throws the pair of dice, the aleatory point at which differentials enter a reciprocal relation with each other. Like Murphy in his third and final state, these subjectivities embody a Nietzschean kind of intense self-awareness, their power of determination arising from their seeming powerless. This is how we ought to understand the seated protagonists of …but the clouds… or Nacht und Träume: as those subjectivities sitting at the origin of determination, presiding over the virtual platform. Finally, we are in a position to discuss how ‘The Exhausted’ might stage its specific kind of immanent critique. Providing that we accept the virtual of ‘The Exhausted’ as the kind of self-grounding principle found in Kantian readings of Difference and Repetition, we can reconstruct Deleuze’s essay as an encounter with such a principle. Going through Deleuze’s argument systematically and beginning with the between exhaustion and realisation, we know that the possible is either something we realise by setting goals, aims and plans, or it is something we exhaust, precisely by renouncing these kinds of aims. Exhaustion incorporates ‘the sum total of possibility’, whereas realisation is only ‘derivative’ (Deleuze 1998:152). Mapping then the one distinction onto the other, the possible corresponds to principle or condition, and the real to that which is conditioned by this principle. In our terms, as derived from Hughes’s reading of Difference and Repetition, the affirmation of the possible as a whole corresponds to establishment of the virtual and, in the same way, the process of realisation to the actualisation of the virtual in the world of objects and subjects. Beckett by renouncing the aims associated with realisation, in fact renounces the 24 conditioned. The double exhaustion of logic and fatigue allows him to uncover what in normal circumstances is obscured, the principle of the conditioned. For Kerslake, this was the hidden power of Kant’s transcendental imagination; in our case, this is the virtual realm of multiplicity. Through this exhaustive process, Beckett uncovers that generative mixture of openness and flux, hidden by the qualities and extension of the object it actualises. Continuing our systematic analysis, we can see the construction of the three languages of exhaustion as Beckett’s way of staging his immanent critique. The distinction with which Deleuze began his essay once again applies. Just as Deleuze opposes the process of realisation to the process of exhaustion, he opposes the language associated with realisation with the type of language characteristic of Beckett’s late work. Under normal circumstances we use language to help establish the aims of realisation, to name these aims and to voice then. In other words, we use language to construct our actual world. Beckett on the other hand, first by exhausting words, then voices, and then finally those extra-linguistic elements, which appear in absence of both word and voice, disrupts the realising function of language to manifest the virtual. The protagonist of …but the clouds… and the female face, the series of television plays which includes …but the clouds… but also Quad, Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Träume, the third language of images and spaces: all can be seen as Beckett’s way of recreating the conditions of the virtual plane, without the actual that is conditioned by it. The following remark only seems to confirm such an interpretation, But the image is more profound because it frees itself from its object in order to become a process itself, that is, an event as a “possible” that no longer needs to be realised in a body or object, somewhat like a smile without the cat in Lewis Carroll . (Deleuze 1998: 168) We can therefore conclude that to encounter self-grounding principle is to encounter such a ‘smile without the cat’. Or rather, ‘The Exhausted’ places a demand on us: not to realise; not to name and voice; not even to think (as the protagonist of …but the clouds… makes clear, the woman appears not because she is thought, but only when invoked). We must renounce all that has to do with the realisation of possibility, and with this, a little of ourselves. If we loosen the grip of subjectivity sufficiently to 25 achieve that impossible tension of the image, an image no longer bound by reason or memory, then we are then free, like Murphy, to move among our mind’s treasures. VII. Conclusion In the Critique of Judgment, Kant brings to the concept of transcendental imagination a new aspect. Whereas the first critique presents imagination as nothing more than a ‘hidden power’, a spontaneous synthetic capacity thought necessary for cognition but ultimately unknowable, in the third critique, imagination assumes a more active role. In its free play with the faculty of understanding, it ‘quickens’ this power, and their mutual ‘arousal’ is something that can be felt. In ‘The Exhausted’ Deleuze shows how Beckett in the exhaustion of the image, reaches a state comparable to that of Kantian imagination (imagination here reassuming its productive ‘arousing’ role) in that Deleuze associates the exhaustion of the image with a certain kind of freedom. Just as there is freedom when imagination is no longer restricted by the determination in concept, there is freedom to be found in the virtual state, in the darkness of Murphy’s mind. Insofar that Beckett’s late television plays achieve the remaking of this virtual state, the productive imagination becomes something ‘learnt’. Thus we can conclude that ‘The Exhausted’ stages an immanent critique, in that we uncover something of a hidden constitutive power and we learn more about the nature of self-grounding principle. However we need to account for our own reversal of terms. That Difference and Repetition is a rewriting of the first critique from the point of view of the third is by now a well-rehearsed argument. In contrast, I have read the ‘The Exhausted’ in light of Difference and Repetition – Deleuze’s third critique from the point of view of the first – to show how it adds to our understanding of the virtual in the genesis of knowledge. In this sense, ‘The Exhausted’ performs its own kind of immanent criticism. 26 References Acheson, James (1993) ‘Murphy’s Metaphysics’, in S. E. Gontarski (ed) The Beckett Studies Reader (1976-1991), Gainesville: University Press of Florida, pp. 74-93. Ackerley, C.J. and Gontarski, S. E. (2004) The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press. Beckett, Samuel (1984) …but the clouds… in Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, London: Faber, pp. 257-62. Beckett, Samuel (2011) Murphy, New York: Grove Press. Bryant, Levi R. (2008) Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Bryant Levi (2009) ‘Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism, Notes Towards a Transcendental Materialism’ in Lee, Matt and Willatt, Edward (2009) Thinking between Deleuze and Kant, A Strange Encounter, London and New York: Continuum pp. 28-48. Bryden, Mary (1996) ‘The Schizoid Space: Beckett, Deleuze and L’Epuisé’ Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’Hui 5, pp. 85-95. Bryden, Mary (2002) ‘Deleuze reading Beckett’ in Richard Lane (ed) Beckett and Philosophy, New York: Palgrave, pp. 80-91. Deleuze, Giles (1991) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books. 27 Deleuze, Giles (1992a) Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughlin, New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Giles (1992b) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: The Antholone Press. Deleuze, Giles (1998) ‘The Exhausted’ in Essays Clinical and Critical, trans. Daniel L. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London: Verso. Deleuze, Giles (2004a) ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics’ in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina, ed. David Lapujade, New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Giles (2004b) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze Giles (2005) Cinema I, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Giles (2008) Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum. Fletcher, J. (1965) ‘Samuel Beckett and the Philosophers’ Comparative Literature 17, pp. 43-56. Hughes, Joe (2008) Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, London and New York: Continuum. Hughes, Joe (2009) Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, A Reader’s Guide, London and New York: Continuum. Kant, Immanuel (1987 [1790]) Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S, Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett. 28 Kant, Immanuel (1996 [1781,1787]) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S, Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett. Kerslake, Christian (2009) Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy, from Kant to Deleuze, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lee, Matt and Willatt, Edward (2009) Thinking between Deleuze and Kant, A Strange Encounter, London and New York: Continuum. Meillassoux, Quentin (2008) After Finitude: An Essay in the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier, London: Continuum. Mooney, Michael (1982) ‘Presocratic Scepticism: Samuel Beckett’s Murphy Reconsidered’ EHL vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 214-34. Murphy, P. J. ‘Beckett and the Philosophers’ in John Pilling (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press pp. 224-40. Oppo, Andrea (2008) Philosophical Aesthetics and Samuel Beckett, Bern: Peter Lang. Smith, David (1996) ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming Kantian Duality’ in Paul Patton (ed) Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, pp. 29-56. Szafraniec, Asja (2007) Beckett, Derrida and the Event of Literature, Stanford: Stanford Universtiy Press. Uhlmann, Anthony (1999) Beckett and Poststructuralism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Uhlmann, Anthony (2004) ‘Image and Intuition in Beckett’s Film’ SubStance 104, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 90-106. 29 Wasser, Audrey (2012) ‘A Relentless Spinozism: Deleuze’s Encounter with Beckett’ SubStance 127, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 124-36. Notes 1. See especially the first chapter of Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2008: 1-27), where the critique of Kant is first laid out and is at its most explicit. 2. We can also include Bryant in this list, who refers to Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1992b) to argue Kant’s critique is incomplete. Despite denouncing the transcendent, Kant does not show how the categories are a ‘result of a genesis’ (Bryant 2009: 32-3). What we require is a ‘genesis of reason itself’ as well as a ‘genesis of the understanding and its categories’ (Deleuze 1992b: 85). 3. That Deleuze’s is a philosophy of ‘sense’ rather than ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ is a central claim of his Kantian interpreters. See for instance, how Hughes introduces his phenomenological argument in Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (2008: 167). 4. Wasser draws on the account given in Difference and Repetition pp. 98-100. This is particularly appropriate, as Deleuze happens to refer to Beckett directly when defining fatigue’s role in passive synthesis and the constitution of time as a living present. 5. The epistemological slant of my essay prevents me from a more in-depth discussion of ontological difference. For further reading of the ontological argument in Difference and Repetition and the Deleuzian drawn trajectory of Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche see Hughes (2009: 53, 62-4). Badiou (1999) is another key interpreter. 30 6. Deleuze refers to the concept of the eternal return at various points in Difference and Repetition. See especially pp. 304-5 for the distinction he draws between the ‘thought’ of the eternal return and the ‘feeling’ of the will to power. 7. Deleuze shows how the ‘idea’ is constituted in chapter IV of Difference and Repetition (2004b: 214-79). He introduces the idea as a Kantian ‘problem’, proceeds through a discussion of modern calculus and develops the concept by referring to other mathematical, biological, Marxist examples. In this rather complex way, Deleuze aims to explain the precise nature of the new ‘ideal’ synthesis of difference. 8. Deleuze uses the term ‘mental chamber’ to describe the dark space in which the protagonist sits and evokes the image (1998: 169). In the play, the protagonist simply states ‘vanished in my little sanctum and crouched, where none could see me, in the dark’ (Beckett 1984: 259). 9. Belaqua of Dante’s Divine Comedy acts as a prototype, not only for Beckett in his characterization of Murphy, but also for Deleuze. Szafraniec notes the similarities between the exhausted person and his ‘predecessor’ Murphy, who both, like Dante’s Belaqua, do ‘nothing’ that can be ‘discerned’ (2007: 122). 10. See P.J. Murphy’s essay for an explicitly Spinozian interpretation (1994: 225-7). 31