THE N O N - P H I L O S O P H Y OF GILLES DE

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THE NON-PHILOSOPHY
OF G I L L E S D E L E U Z E

GREGG LA IN/1 B E R T

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First published 2002

© Gregg Lambert 2002

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-8264-5955-2 (hardback)

ISBN 0-8264-5956-0 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lambert, Gregg, 1961-
The non-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze / Gregg Lambert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8264-5955-2 - ISBN 0-8264-5956-0 (pbk.)
1. Deleuze, Gilles. I. Tide.

B2430.D454 L35 2002

194-dc21
2001047582

Typeset by Aarontype Limited, Easton, Bristol

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd
 CONTENTS

List ofi v
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations viii

Preface On the art of commentary ix

Part One On the image of thought from Leibniz to Barges

('Time off its hinges')

1 Philosophy and 'non-philosophy' 3

2 How time places truth in crisis 11
3 The problem of judgement 19
4 The paradox of concepts 28

Part Two On the (baroque) line: an exposition of The Fold

5 'The mind—body problem' and the art of 'cryptography' 41

6 The riddle of die flesh and the 'fitscum subnigrum' 52
7 On God, or the 'place vide' 61

Part Three On the powers of the false

8 The baroque detective: Borges as precursor 73

9 How the true world finally became a fable 90
10 Artaud's problem and ours: belief in the world as it is 114
11 The uses (and abuses) of literature for life 132

Conclusion On the art of creating concepts 152

Notes 159
Bibliography 168
Index 171
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Diagram of the interior and exterior of the monad 45

Figure 2 The baroque house' (an allegory) 46
Figure 3 Resonance in the monad 50
Figure 4 Illustration of the 'gray point' (PS 61) 58
Figure 5 The 'gray point' and a series of colors (PS 61) 59
Figure 6 Illustration of 'non-symmetrical balance' (PS 44) 65
Figure 7 The soul's temptation (from Klee's diagram: PS 54) 67
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following editors of the journals and collections in
which previous versions of some of the chapters first appeared: Lisa Brawley, Ian
Buchanan, James English, Gregory Flaxman, Sydney Levy and John Marks. I am
particularly indebted to Gregory Flaxman for his support and comments
throughout the process of editing this volume, and to Jenny Overton. I would
also like to thank my editor, Tristan Palmer, for his support and his patience with
the occasional chain of queries. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude
to the following individuals whose long-standing support of my writings on
Deleuze has been a valued source of inspiration and encouragement: Reda
Bensmai'a, Constantin Boundas, Peter Canning, Tricia Daily, Jacques Derrida,
Alexander Gelley, Dorothea Olkowski, Gabriele Schwab, Daniel W. Smith and
Charles E. Winquist.
Every effort has been made to locate holders of copyright material; however,
the author and publishers would be interested to hear from any copyright
holders not here acknowledged so that full acknowledgement may be made in
future editions.
 ABBREVIATIONS

WORKS BY GILLES DELEUZE

B Bergsonism (1988)
CC Essays Critical and Clinical (1997)
DR Difference and Repetition (1994)
F Foucault (1988)
Fold The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993)
K Kant's Critical Philosophy (1984)
LS The Logic of Seme (1990)
MI Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986)
N Negotiations (1990)
Pli Le Pit: Leibniz et le baroque (1988)
P Proust and Signs (1972 [USA]; 2000 [UK])
S Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy (1988)
TI Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989)

WORKS BY GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI

AO Anti-Oedipus (1977)
ML Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986)
QP Qu'est-ce que laphilosophie? (1991)
TP A Thousand Plateaus (1987)
WP What is Philosophy? (1996)

OTHER WORKS

BR Barges: A Reader (1981)

C Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 5, The Captive and the Fugitive (1993)
FF Eisenstein, Film Form (1949)
H Duras/Resnais, Hiroshima man amour (1963)
L Borges, Labyrinths (1962)
M Leibniz, Monadology (1965)
PS Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (1968[1953])
T Leibniz, Theodicy (1985)
TR Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 6, Time Regained (1993)
W Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963)
 PREFACE

ON THE ART OF COMMENTARY

Most books of philosophy these days, particularly those written on other phi-
losophers, which claim to explain, to clarify, and even in some cases to rectify
the mistakes of the philosopher, all share in something deceitful and malicious.
Indeed, they are often written from a certain spirit of 'bad faith,' although,
certainly, not many commentators would admit that this is the source of their
inspiration. On the contrary, many commentators spend their time before the
reader's short-lived attention trying to persuade anybody who happens onto
their little tome (in the library or bookstore, or even today on the internet) that
it is absolutely worth the time it will take to read. They might argue that it will
impart some new knowledge, or a new twist on something already known;
perhaps it will serve other uses for the author.
Nevertheless, even while they claim to be providing a useful service to both the
author and the reader, in practice they are doing the opposite. The very existence
of a book that claims to clarify and explain another writer already makes the first
(so-called 'primary') writer redundant to his or her own efforts to say something.
We could say that all commentaries introduce a certain amount of 'stupidity'
into the relationship between the writer and the reader: the reader actually
becomes more stupid and dependent on another (the so-called 'secondary
writer') who will explain things; the writer becomes more stupid for the very
reason that he or she needs to be explained. Thus, every commentary performs
this dual relationship of stupidity and understanding, even if the commentator
makes every reasonable effort to avoid it. This is because the rules of represen-
tation are already laid down in advance, and even in those rare and exceptional
cases where the commentator does not choose to adhere to these rules, there will
be plenty of readers who will demand that they be enforced.
The function of commentary can be organized according to two distinct
moments: in the first moment, the commentary produces a 'forgetting' of what is
known in order that, in the second moment, it performs a recollection of what
was forgotten, which often takes the distinct form of revelation (or the simu-
lacrum of truth). It is not by accident that Deleuze locates this backward and
forward movement as a logic that governs Platonic reminiscence, that is, the logic
of representation itself. In Difference and Repetition, he writes:

For reminiscence only appears to break with the recognition model when in
fact it is content to complicate the schema: whereas recognition bears upon
X

a perceptible or perceived object, reminiscence bears upon another object,

supposed to be associated with or rather enveloped within the first, which
demands to be recognized for itself independently of any distinct percep-
tion. This other thing, enveloped within the sign, must be at once never-
seen and yet already-recognized, a disturbing unfamiliarity. (DR141-142)

Underlying this act of'representation,' which continues to be dominant these

days despite everything that has been said in the last four decades concerning the
evils of representation, are two distinct transformations on the level of sense.
First, sense is separated from its material expression, making these two things
appear easily distinguishable, as if their relationship is contingent or purely
accidental. (In other words, the singular marks that occur when a life makes
its passage through language are often reduced to the different vagaries that
surround the question of 'style.') Second, the primary writer is often turned
into a stammerer, a child, or a 'genius,' who thereafter requires the mediation
of another in order to be understood. Every 'secondary writer' is first in line to
accept this role and will denounce all the others who have gone before him or
her as impostures, opportunists, or mere block-heads.
At the same time, everyone knows that Deleuze himself has written a great deal
on other philosophers. Some might even go so far as to say that these are his best
works, the works of a true philosopher, and not to be mistaken for those some-
what bizarre manifestos he wrote with that other guy.1 However, even when he
wrote on other philosophers, Deleuze's books differed from the usual commen-
taries, since he claimed immediately and outright that he was not necessarily
performing a benevolent service for the author or the reader. His objective was
not to clarify or to explain the work of the particular philosopher they examined.
Deleuze himself described his approach to the genre of commentary by stating
that it was a kind of 'buggery' (enculage) and his intention in every case was to
take each philosopher from behind, 'giving him a child that would be his own,
yet monstrous' (N 6). Many of Deleuze's best commentators have tried to ignore
this statement, or have reveled in its iconoclastic energy (which amounts to the
same thing). Few have taken the statement seriously, preferring to understand
it to apply only to his 'enemies,' Kant, for example, and not also to his
philosophical 'friends' such as Nietzsche and Spinoza. Perhaps this is because,
particularly in the case of Nietzsche, it is hard to imagine making him more
monstrous than he already was for many.
What Deleuze is addressing here must be understood in the context of Platonic
anamnesis, the proper function of memory, which is sometimes likened to a
'proper birth' where the child resembles its parent. Derrida has also addressed the
issue of'bad or weak' memory within the concept of writing (I'ecriture), which is
'exterior' to the internalizing function of the former. 'Plato said of writing that it
was an orphan or bastard, as opposed to speech, the legitimate and high-born
son of the "father of logos." ' Consequently, the Derridean strategy of com-
mentary ('deconstruction') is premised on the exaggeration of this difference to
a hyperbolic degree; the function of commentary itself produces a repressed or
 F» F=* E 1= .A. C3 E Xi

marginalized representative by means of the powers accorded to a 'weak and

externalized' memory. In a certain sense, the Derridean method can be under-
stood to be the fullest deployment of the logic of representation itself, to the
point where representation exhausts itself thereby undergoing a strange reversal
around the principle of identity that underwrites this logic: the production of
the maximum of difference between the model and the copy.
By contrast, Deleuze does not follow this strategy of representation, even
though he seeks to liberate the copy from its adherence to a model by replacing
the weak notion of the copy with the power of the simulacrum, or the double.
'In the history of philosophy, a commentary should act as a veritable double and
bear the maximal modification appropriate to a double' (DRxxi). Something else
happens when the commentator functions as a 'double,' in die sense that Deleuze
has defined this role, and perhaps this definition restores to the art of com-
mentary a more upright and direct presentation. As I suggested in the beginning,
there is already something essentially 'under-handed' in the portrait of die
commentator as a dedicated disciple or pure 'sub-ject' of the author. Rather, we
might consider this conceptual persona according to the portrait that has been
provided by Henry James in his story 'The figure in the carpet,' where the
character of the commentator (or critic) will resort to any form of treachery in
order to wrest the author's hidden design as his own source of joy, including
designs on the author's daughter, only to end up a miserable wretch and loner.3
One has to admit, at least according to the portrait of the critic that James
provides us, including all the subjacent goals and the motives involved, that it is
not much of a life. After all, what could drive someone to devote a portion of
their life to deciphering the stirrings that take place in the soul of another?
Certainly not the truth, which is offered like hollow rationalization, an alibi
placed before the reality of desire.
And yet, it is not simply a matter of according the commentator a more
'realistic' or 'passionate' portrait of a rival claimant, a pretender, or a lover.
A question would have to be posed concerning the object under contention:
'What is being claimed?', 'Who is posing, who is pretending?', 'A lover of whom,
or what?' Unlike the fable by James, the object in question cannot be imputed to
the author, as the secret source of his joy, but radier concerns something else,
something 'impersonal' that is bound up with the movement of writing itself as
a kind of 'passage.' In his or her passage through the work of another, the
commentator performs a series of operations (textual, rhetorical, conceptual) that
amounts to 'working on the material' and causing a series of modifications to
occur, which Deleuze calls 'falsifications.' This can be easily demonstrated in
those passages where the commentator writes 'the author says,' 'the author
means,' or even more, 'the audior believes.' We should understand these moments
precisely as falsifying in the sense that the commentator creates a simulacrum of
the author's speech, causing the author to appear to be 'saying something' when,
in fact, it is the commentator who has been speaking all along. Thus, we might
conclude from this that all commentaries lie — and some more than others —
and perhaps this is the essential characteristic that belongs to the genre of
xii r» l=» ^ F= A cr E

commentary. And yet, Deleuze does not understand this process of falsification
morally, as a defect of representation, but rather vitally, as a supremely creative
act; it is by falsification that the commentary functions as a Veritable double'
and 'bears a maximal difference appropriate to a double.'
I prefer to think of the relationship enacted between the original work and its
commentary according to the logic of the fold that Deleuze has oudined in his
commentaries on both Leibniz and Foucault, where the act of unfolding, which
is often given as the metaphor of interpretation, cannot be opposed as contrary to
the gesture of folding. The fold and the unfold are not contraries, but rather, are
continuous. Deleuze demonstrates this in his concept of the baroque interior
where the fold of the inside is at the same time, on another surface, the unfold of
the outside and vice versa. In passing through the work the objective of unfolding
some aspect, notion, or passage is not to reach a point where the work becomes a
flat or empty space — the point of the complete unfold is impossible - but rather
to discern the writer's manner of folding (and unfolding) in order to maintain
what Leibniz called the vis activa (the living potential) that defines the force of
creation. As Deleuze writes, 'Reading does not consist in concluding from the
idea of a preceding condition the idea of the following condition, but in grasping
the effort or tendency by which the following condition itself ensues from the
preceding "by means of a natural force"' (Fold 72). Undoubtedly, this approach
to the task of commentary involves a notion of repetition that is distinctly
different from representation, which is premised on a too simplistic idea of the
fold (and of the unfold). The act of unfolding, of tracing the fold of another
mind, is a precarious exercise, one that is more of an art than a straightforward
representation of knowledge (in part, because the mind of another person is
infinitely folded). Today we have numerous examples where the commentary
fails, either by following too closely and failing to maintain the writer's manner
of folding somehow independently of the commentator's unfold (in which
case the commentary becomes a bad copy), or by losing the sense of the fold
entirely and thereby displaying the work on a flat and empty space as some-
thing inert or no longer actual, as a frozen or rigidified profile of an object of
the understanding.
It is ironic that every commentary already owes its existence to a more original
repetition in which it takes part, even without being fully conscious of it, drawing
both the work of the writer and the work of a commentary into a wave that lifts
them and carries them along helplessly. The cause of this original repetition is
difficult (if not impossible) to discern. In their last book, What is Philosophy?,
Deleuze and Guattari approach the question of the original forms of repetition
that have creased through the Western tradition of philosophy. For each epoch
they demonstrate the presence of distinct 'conceptual personae' each of which
introduces a new image of thought. Thus, we can point to a Platonic wave,
a Cartesian, a Hegelian, and even today a Derridean or Deleuzian wave, all of
which can be distinguished by the manner in which they remain enigmatic and
folded even while the incessant number of commentaries break around their
peak. In this sense, the image of thought and the conceptual personae that give
 •=" R E f= A C3 E xiii

rise to it can be likened to a signature of Warhol or Duchamp. What distin-

guishes one thought from another is a special kind of sign, which is often
associated with the 'author-function,' as when we say 'Hegelianism' rather than
'Kantianism' or 'Platonism'; however, what this sign refers to is a multiplicity
and also a manner of organizing a multiplicity. As Deleuze and Guattari state:

There are no simple concepts ... There are no concepts with one compo-
nent. Even the first concept, the one with which philosophy 'begins,' has
several components, because it is not obvious that philosophy must have a
beginning, and if it does determine one, it must combine it with a point-
of-view or a ground \une raison]. (WP 15)

Although repetition gives rise to a form that can be distinguished from other
moments, it is primarily to be understood by its force, by the manner in which
it maintains its fold even in die process of unfolding.
As I stated above, every commentary already presupposes a certain force of
repetition to which it belongs, even though this repetition is often understood
as a 'problem' for which there must be a response (e.g. 'God is dead,' 'Being is
One,' etc.), or a command that must be obeyed in the sense that 'one must' (as
the French say ilfaut) read diis or that philosopher or work of philosophy at
a given moment. Yet, all commentaries differ from one another precisely around
the specific 'problematic' that they try to take up, to articulate, even to pose as a
solution in their passage through the work of another philosopher. Finally, it is
for this reason that I wonder if there are, in fact, any commentaries; is there rather
the repetition of various problems that have been grasped under eidier too
general a concept of the representation, or too particular and individual a concept
of the author? In my own passage through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the
problem I have constandy engaged in the various essays that are assembled here is
die problem of 'non-philosophy' — a problem that encompasses the domains of
art, literature, cinema (as well as science, which is not treated here to the same
extent). It is around this point that today philosophy seems to enjoy no more
sovereignty than these other domains but rather, according to Deleuze's own
understanding, constitutes the 'relation of the non-relation' with other planes of
expression around the problem of a general co-creation. Another way of putting
this is that the relation between philosophy and 'non-philosophy' takes the form
of a general co-dependence and distribution among these other planes all of
which are attempting to gather a little bit of the chaos that surrounds us and
carries us along and to shape it into a sensible form.
A final aspect I would like to take up concerning the art of commentary is the
degree of clarity that is often accorded to the work under the logic of represen-
tation. Under this logic, a complete and clear understanding is already posed in
advance. Recalling the allusion to 'the figure in the carpet' in the story by James,
all that is needed is a certain angle of vision, or a moment of personal revelation,
to make it appear. On the contrary, it is because I do not believe that Deleuze has
already 'figured everything out in advance' that I do not consider that the task of
xlv

the commentator is to understand everything, to become a 'know-it-all,' or a

specialist of'Deleuze' (whatever that means!). Nothing could be further from the
truth and I take Deleuze very seriously around this point when he says that a
thinker does not proceed methodically, but more like a dog chasing a bone, in
leaps and starts. As an illustration of this, we might take many of Deleuze's
concepts where he resorts to a kind of poetic refrain: 'the Other Person as the
expression of a possible world,' 'Time off its hinges,' or 'real without being
actual, ideal without being abstract.' If Deleuze must resort to poetic expression
or refrain at these moments, in my view, it is because these concepts are not
concepts of the understanding (in the Kantian sense), but rather indicate
problems of expression. It is precisely at these moments that the problem of
expression in Deleuze's philosophy intersects with the art of concept creation,
and we must suppose that there are still concepts that Deleuze could not resolve
or express adequately and this might explain the repetition of various poetic
refrains throughout his writings, refrains that he called 'ritournelles.'
A ritornello is a 'short repeated instrumental passage in a vocal work, or of the
full orchestra after a solo' (OxfordEnglish Dictionary), and both definitions can
be employed to characterize the moments designated by the above refrains.5
In part, these refrains indicate moments where the problem of expression is most
acutely reached and Deleuze must resort to these refrains in order to mark an
incomplete passage, a potential interruption, or an ellipsis; to repeat a melodic
line in order to keep from getting lost, or from falling silent. In other words,
these refrains can also be understood as the points where Deleuze himself can be
heard 'to stutter,' and it is important to remark that these refrains are present
throughout his entire philosophical project, particularly from the period of
Difference et Repetition (1968) to the final period of Qu'est-ce que la philosophic?
(with Guattari 1991). Thus, if these refrains continue to remain obscure for us as
well, it is not because they hide some profound meaning, the secret source of the
author's joy, but rather because they express a more pragmatic problem of
unfolding a plane that Deleuze says constitutes the ground of concepts. This is a
ground that Deleuze remarked many times by the term 'immanence,' and he
cautioned that any concept that installs itself on this ground can only be partial,
or relative, to 'the base of all planes,' although 'immanent to every thinkable
plane that does not succeed in thinking it' (WP 59). Thus, 'incapacity' (defined
as the inability 'to unfold,' 'to become immanent to ...,' or 'to create a concept'
as a solution, even partial, to a problem of philosophy) is not an occasion for
criticism, which would assume that the problem is already in the state of being
solved (on some ideal plane) and it is only a question of correcting or perfecting
its expression. Rather, it is the case of a problem in which there have already been
multiple solutions in the history of philosophy, 'and each time we can say that
the solution was as good as it could have been, given the way the problem was
stated, and the means that the living being had at its disposal to solve it' (B 103).
In each case, therefore, it falls equally to the writer as well as to the commentator
to choose the best solution possible, assuming here that one of the possible
choices also includes those solutions that have yet to be invented, or created.
 PART ONE

ON THE IMAGE OF T H O U G t

FROM LEIBNIZ TO BORGE

('Tl IN/IE OFF ITS HINGE

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 1
PHILOSOPHY AND

NON-PHILOSOPHY'

If, as Heidegger said, every great philosopher is motivated by only one funda-
mental problem that remains 'unthought,' then we could say that everything
Deleuze has written (with himself, with Felix Guattari, with Claire Parnet, but
also with Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson) concerns the Idea of
difference that remains 'unthought' under die requirements of representation.
As Deleuze writes in the conclusion of Difference and Repetition,

Difference is not and cannot be thought in itself, so long as it is subject to

the requirements of representation. The question whether it was 'always'
subject to these requirements, and for what reasons, must be closely
examined . . . From this, it is concluded that difference in itself remains
condemned and must atone or be redeemed under the auspices of a reason
which renders it liveable and thinkable, and makes it the object of organic
representation. (262)

This statement is not reductive, since it is precisely the nature of a 'problem' to

create a field of questions that are coordinated and bear a certain univocal or
singular trait of organization. That difference remains an 'Idea' is what accounts
for its absence under the conditions of what Deleuze calls 'organic representa-
tion' since, as Deleuze writes, 'ideas are not given in experience, they appear as
problems, and unfold as objects of a problematic form' (LS 103). What are die
objects of a problematic form but the concepts by means of which philosophy
proceeds in the sense of making a little headway through die chaos of sensation?
Concepts comprise a properly philosophical means of understanding the chaos
that surrounds experience, and runs underneath it, in the sense that concepts
attempt to grasp the diversity that makes up the conditions of experience.
Therefore, philosophy progresses by means of its concepts, and there is no philo-
sophical understanding per se that does not also represent an advance in the art of
creating concepts. However, this constitutes only one-half of the equation, since
Deleuze immediately stipulates that philosophy does not only need a philosoph-
ical understanding, but a non-philosophical one as well. Philosophy needs both
wings to fly (N 139). As Deleuze argues, 'philosophy has an essential and positive
relation to non-philosophy: it speaks directly to non-philosophers' (N 139-140).
As an example of this duality, let us take up the question 'What is called
thinking?' Even in its effort to propose a new concept in response to this
4 THE N O IM - P H I L. O S O P H Y OF G I l_ l_ E S D E l_ E JJ Z E

question, or even a new manner of understanding the question, philosophy must

continue to presuppose an 'image' that defines thought, even though this image
is only the expression of a non-philosophical understanding of what it means to
think. Nevertheless, if it is to remain immanent, that is, to share a plane of
immanence that is occupied or populated by others, philosophy must presuppose
an image of thought that becomes the 'ground' of its concepts. This is because
only a non-philosophical understanding provides the absolute ground for phil-
osophy, and philosophy can differentiate itself from this ground only by passing
through it (or over it) in such a manner that its own image of thought becomes
modified.
'It is true,' Deleuze and Guattari write, 'that we cannot imagine a great
philosopher of whom it could not be said that he has changed what it means to
think,' that is, 'to have changed planes and once more found a new image'
(WP51). However, in What is Philosophy?, the plane of immanence is not
defined as being a concept, nor is it to be confused with the concepts that
populate it at any given time (such as the Cartesian cogito, Kantian 'pure reason,'
Hegelian 'spirit'). Rather, the 'plane of immanence' is given as the internal
condition of thought; it is thought's 'non-philosophical' image, which does
not exist outside of philosophy although philosophy must always presuppose it.
'It is presupposed not in a way that one concept may refer to others but in a way
that concepts themselves refer to a non-conceptual understanding' (WP40).
On an immediate level, this is the simplest thing to understand and subscribes
to a simple notion of pragmatism. In order for its signs and concepts to be
'recognized,' philosophy must occupy a plane that is open and populous. How-
ever, according to Deleuze, pragmatism begins to go astray when it confuses this
immanent plane with the representation of a common sense (cogitatio natura
universalis), under the false presupposition that the more simple and direct
understanding is for that reason more open, more gregarious, more 'democratic'
and, consequently, is considered to be more immanent thanks to the qualities
that define it. However, it is precisely this model of 'recognition' that Deleuze
most vehemently rejects from Difference and Repetition onward.1 Throughout
his interviews and his writings, he maintains that philosophy is not 'communi-
cation', that philosophy gains nothing from either argument or discussion with
the 'common man.' Does this mean, however, that philosophy, according to
Deleuze's understanding, simply abandons the idea of communication entirely
and leaves the field to information specialists and 'ideas men (WP 10)? Were
this the case, then it certainly would raise a problem for readers of Deleuze:
if philosophy no longer develops or refers its concepts to a plane occupied by
'common sense,' how should we understand this position? How will it commu-
nicate? Would a philosophy that rejects a certain notion of common sense not
risk becoming solipsistic, at least a little schizophrenic, or assuming the lofty
attitude of 'the beautiful soul'?
While classical philosophy (from Plato to Descartes) has traditionally grounded
its operation and its 'image of thought' on the ground of non-philosophy, the
ground was often determined as common sense (cogitatio natura). In this sense,
 PHILOSOPHY AND 'NON-PHIl-OSOPHY' 5

the philosopher's image was always extracted from an idiot's point-of-view, the
bastard child of natural consciousness. By positing a vulgar and common image
of thinking, more often defined by 'error' or 'falsehood' than by stupidity,
philosophy was able to differentiate its own image of thought, often by means of
a special faculty that only philosophers possessed. 'In this sense,' Deleuze writes,
'conceptual philosophical thought has as its implicit presupposition a pre-
philosophical and natural image of thought, borrowed from the pure element of
common sense' (DR131). However, what is distincdy modern about the style
of philosophy that appears after the Second World War (even though we can
find certain forerunners of this style in certain exceptional or untimely thinkers
such as Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Nietzsche and Spinoza) is that common sense no
longer offers a sufficient ground for the philosopher's conceptual activity; die
statement everyone knows no longer marks the commencement or recommence-
ment of the dialectical movement between truth and its negatives (DR130).
Consequently, the modern idiot is no longer the child of'natural man,' but is
the one who is deceived or the one who deceives (that is, the one who feigns
idiocy while all the time pursuing his own ends in the world of action under the
mask of a more sovereign ignorance). Deleuze himself suggests this in his seminal
essay 'Plato and the simulacrum,' where he shows that the classical figure of evil,
shaped by 'finitude' or 'natural error,' has been supplanted by the appearance of
this new idiot. His character is less likely to be found in the figures of the com-
mon soul in either Plato's dialogues or Aristotle's DeAnima, than in the dramas
of Shakespeare.2 In place of the childish ignorance of the natural idiot, instead
we awaken to a world that is populated by figures of an overpowering 'will to
stupidity' in such characters as Hamlet or Lear, or die 'malicious cunning' of
Macbedi, Edmund, lago and Richard III, who would prefer to blot out die eye
of the world and steal away dirough the hubbub of the chaos tliat rises up in
dieir wake. Of course, there are other idiots that can be found to populate
Deleuze's philosophy, such as the figures of Artaud or the enigmatic 'Bartelby'
from Deleuze's last work Critique et Clinique (1993).3 However, Deleuze will
differentiate the latter from 'die terrifying models ofpseudos in which the powers
of the false unfold' (DR128).
Deleuze asks: 'Can we, flailing in confusion, still claim to be seeking the
truth?' (N 148). In other words, it is not from 'common sense' that the greatest
problems can be posed, but rather from a more radical stupidity, or from a
recalcitrant being that refuses to be rectified by the concept of reason, even to
the point of willing the impossible and the unthinkable. We have an example of
this in what Deleuze calls a 'primary nature,' illustrated by Kleist's Penthesilea
or Melville's Ahab, as 'innately deprived beings who make nothingness an object
of their will' (CC 79-80). Behind the dumb-show of idiocy, for the situation
confronted by contemporary philosophy there is another power that must be
accounted for, a power that has the appearance of a strange and malevolent
desire, the 'cunning of reason' itself, or as Deleuze suggests later on in his des-
cription of'a society of control,' the effects of a powerful automaton, or a nearly
impenetrable and concerted organization that is discovered to be operating deep
6 THE N O N-R H ILOSO P H Y OF G I 1_ I_ E S D E 1- E U Z E

within the order of things.4 Perhaps this is why common sense or the error
caused by finitude does not comprise the plane of immanence for philosophy
today, because there are new and more imposing problems that have emerged,
as well as a different species of illusions that must be addressed.
If philosophy 'institutes' a plane, as Deleuze said, by 'presupposing' this plane
in a certain sense as a position it already occupies, then the image of thought will
be quite varied depending on the plane that philosophy presupposes as its
condition. For instance, although classical philosophy grasped this plane of
immanence as the representation of the idea within natural consciousness, we
cannot help but notice that today philosophy constructs its concepts upon other
planes, most notably the planes expressed by science, art, literature and, most
recendy, modern cinema. We say that common sense is no longer posed as the
beginning of a philosophical construction, in the sense that it no longer provides
the ground of philosophy itself. Rather, as Deleuze writes, contemporary
philosophy has taken on other measures - even those measures that 'belong to
the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness
and excess' (WP41). For example, it is a characteristic unique to modern
commentaries on Descartes to highlight the passages in The Meditations on
madness, or even to refer to the philosopher's dreams, including the dream that
mysteriously ends with the inexplicable and strange gift of a water-melon.5 How
can we explain this except to point out the fact that there is something in this
surreal, enigmatic water-melon that seems closer to determining the ground of
our existence than the propositions concerning die cogito as a foundational
certainty. In fact, it is precisely the cogito itself that appears to us now as a
fantastic and illusory premise. Deleuze responds to this illusion when he argues
that the possibility of thinking can no longer be understood as something innate
or predestined for the cogito — that the mere possibility of thinking in no way
guarantees the presence of a subject who is yet 'capable' of it.
What does the above observation concerning the image of thought imply for us
today? On one level, it implies that to an even greater degree contemporary
philosophy erects itself on the ground of 'something that does not think' — for
example, although it could be said that the unconscious thinks, it is certainly not
an image of thought that we could say is rational. Thus, this something that does
not think in us returns as a question concerning the possibility of thought itself,
the possibility that 'I am not yet thinking' (a Heideggerian statement that Deleuze
frequently employs to indicate the horizon of the greatest problem that phi-
losophy must confront, but which it is incapable of confronting if it remains
within the boundaries of the logic of representation). And to a greater and
greater degree, contemporary philosophy poses its own ground in what is 'other
than consciousness,' or what stubbornly remains outside the powers of represen-
tation, whether this is defined as the subject of the Unconscious (Freud), as the
subject of a virtual linguistic structure (Saussure and Hjemslev) or of the 'Being
of Language' as such (Heidegger), as a determinate moment within the economic
sphere of production (Marx), the series or Markov chain in modern biology, or,
more recently, in terms of the brain that is just beginning to be discovered by
 PHILOSOPHY AND ' NO N-P H IL O S O P HY • 7

neuro-physiology. These can be described as the different 'spiritual automatons'

(Deleuze) that have assumed the position of the ground for contemporary
philosophy, or could be variously described as the avatars of one great spiritual
automaton which modern philosophers have sought to determine as the form of
an immanence that is immanent to itself alone — as either pure consciousness or
as a transcendental subject from which nothing, neither internal nor external,
escapes (WP46).
On a second level, if philosophy can no longer extract its image of thought
from simple common sense, and can no longer illuminate or correct the simple
'error' of the understanding, then its orientation both to natural consciousness
and to higher principles (such as the 'Good') is exposed to a more profound
disorientation. The creation of the concept of the fold in Deleuze's philosophy
after the 1980s is precisely a diagrammatic figure of this extreme disorientation, a
state of suffering that Leibniz once described as a dizziness or even a 'swooning'
(I'etourdissement) which occurs when the external and internal attributes of an
object are confused and the soul loses its ability to orient itself to either the
external world of perception or the interior domain of psychological represen-
tation (memory, dream, fantasy, etc.). The crucial significance of the Baroque is
that it provides a more precise understanding of a new image of thought that
corresponds to how the mind is folded with the body (or le corps), that is, of an
absolute 'inside,' which is deeper than any interiority, which is co-implicated
with a pure 'outside,' which is further away than any external object of percep-
tion. In fact, I will argue that by turning our attention to the state of extreme
disorientation that 'the Baroque' often represents, we might be able to orient
ourselves to the peculiar cause of our own state of suffering.
As Deleuze asks, 'if "turning toward" is the movement of thought toward
truth, how could truth not also turn toward thought? And how could truth itself
not turn away from thought when thought turns away from it?' (WP 38). Here
we note a precarious movement which, first of all, admits the possibility of a
more profound disorientation than error or falsehood, which is the disorien-
tation of thinking itself and, as a result, the point where the relation of thought
and truth essentially assumes the form of non-relation. It is a turning-away from
one another 'which launched thought into an infinite wandering rather than
error' (WP51). This sounds uncannily like die Heideggerian interpretation of
the profound 'Error' of the metaphysical tradition descending from Plato; at the
same time, something striking (and distincdy non-Heideggerian) occurs if we
accept from this the possibility that this 'non-relation' becomes the only form of
the relation between truth and thought. Therefore, it is only by tracing this
paradox that we are able to discover the contours of an event that caused - and
continues to cause - their mutual disorientation. Can we not see, in the modern
period, that each and every manner by which thought loses its way (including
deception and madness) becomes precisely the means of locating the missing
relation to truth?
The above observations imply that the false becomes a special 'power' that
orients for us today the (non-) relation between thought and truth: the false is the
8 THE NON-PHIL.OSOPHY OF CSII-L.ES D E l_ E U Z E

force that causes us to think the relation to truth as a (non-) relation. Turning once
more to the question of those other regions where contemporary philosophy
attempts to ground its concepts and to 'institute a plane of immanence with the
world' — since 'Philosophy is at once concept creation and institution of a plane'
(WP 41) - Deleuze defines a non-philosophical understanding as rooted in what
he calls 'percepts and affects,' which points to the special relationship that
philosophy entertains with literature, modern cinema and the arts. As Deleuze
writes, 'percepts aren't perceptions, they're packets of sensations that live on
independently of whoever experiences them. Affects aren't feelings. They're
becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives dirough them (thereby becom-
ing something else)' (N 137). As the domain proper of percepts and affects, the
question of art can no longer be subordinated to die specialized or minor
analytic of aesthetics; therefore, it is not surprising that Deleuze revitalizes this
bastard form of philosophy (following Kant) and gives back to it a more vital
sense of 'non-philosophy.' In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes:

It is strange that aesthetics (as science of the sensible) could be founded on

what can be represented in the sensible. ... Empiricism truly becomes
transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we appre-
hend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being
of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as
the reason behind qualitative diversity. (57)

'Affects, percepts and concepts are three inseparable forces, running from art
into philosophy and from philosophy into art' (N 137). For Deleuze, therefore,
art now occupies the position of a pre-philosophical understanding that was
formerly reserved for natural consciousness or common sense. It could easily be
demonstrated that much of a certain tradition of contemporary philosophy can
be remarked by a fundamental encounter between itself and the domain of the
modern arts. We have several prominent examples: Heidegger and poetry,
Merleau-Ponty and painting, Derrida and literature. The question remains as to
why? Why are philosophy and the different domains of modern art inevitably
drawn toward an encounter with each other and, at the same time, to a point
'outside' of common perception or intuition? It is as if both are under the spell
of another point or dimension of the real which is hidden precisely because it is
too open and chaotic, that is, too near for the power of intuition (or imagina-
tion) and too far for the power of perception (or concepts of the understanding)
to represent?
The first response to this question would be that there is a relation between
this outside and time. If time is the form of subjective intuition in Kant, then
Deleuze remarks that point where the classical subject is no longer capable of
grasping time as the form of its own interiority (the form of an 'inner sense'),
and thus is no longer equal to the task of representing 'What happened?' or
'What's going to happen?' (two locutions that I will employ for the past and
future, in order to render more vividly as subjective problems of orientation in
 PHILOSOPHY AND 'NON-PHILOSOPHY' 9

time). That is to say, there is the excessive character of an 'event' which has
caused time to shatter its cardinal frame of representation, and, simultaneously,
which has outstripped the subject's power to synthesize a temporal space of the
given, exposing the subject of representation to 'something = x' that, on the one
hand, is outside its powers to render thinkable, livable, or as an object of possible
experience (that is, 'organic representation') and, on the other hand, is also the
determinate condition of both knowledge and communication: the being of the
sensible.
Contrary to the metaphysical tradition, which always grasps thought as an
object of representation (in the form of the 'idea' in Plato, 'reason' in Kant, or
'spirit' in Hegel, for example), Deleuze situates this object of non-relation on
the plane of expression. The concept of philosophy, as Deleuze and Guattari
address it in What is Philosophy?, becomes nothing less than a diagram of the
brain (le cerveau) diat is traced from the limits of sensibility to the condition of
thought, 'du debars au dedans^ attempting to discover in the perceived a
resemblance not as much to the object of thought, but rather to the force that
causes us to think: the condition of sensibility and no longer the representation
of its sense. Here again, we might discern the special power that is accorded to
the role of art, literature and cinema in Deleuze's philosophy, since the condi-
tions of thinking this form of immanence can no longer be said to be common
or innate to the Ego, but can only be approached by means of a constructivism.
Art researches the conditions for rendering this plane of immanence discernible
by making the bare possibility of feeling more intensive and raising the minimal
powers accorded to perception and intuition into a form of Vision.' Conse-
quently, the false is trans-valued into a special and positive power that is now
charged with the discovery of new percepts and affects, that is, with researching
the conditions for restoring at least the possibility of immanence to the powers
of philosophical discernment.
Deleuze argues that if philosophy is to survive it is only through a creative
engagement with these forms of non-philosophy — notably modern art, litera-
ture and cinema. In other words, philosophy today can only hope to attain the
conceptual resources to restore the broken links of perception, language and
emotion. This is the only possible future left for philosophy if it is to repair its
fragile relationship of immanence to the world as it is. In its attempt to think the
immanence of this world, which is neither the 'true' world nor a different or
'transformed' world, philosophy has returned to its original sense of 'ultimate
orientation' as its highest vocation and goal. However, something new, and
distinctly modern, occurs in the philosophy of Deleuze when we recognize that
the sense of ultimate orientation is no longer described in terms of verticality —
a dimension of transcendence that Deleuze takes great pains to avoid - but
rather in terms that are essentially horizontal, or terrestrial.
As Paul Klee once wrote, 'If the vertical is the straight line, the uprightness, or
the position of the Animal, then the horizontal designates its height and its
horizon - and each one is entirely terrestrial, static.'6 Consequently, one concept
that I will highlight in my commentary of Deleuze is the concept of 'the Other
1O THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I L- L E S DELEUZE

Person' (Autrui), which appears in Difference and Repetition and, finally, in What
is Philosophy? The creation of the concept of the Other Person represents perhaps
the most profound and yet most subtle transformations in Deleuze's entire
philosophical system, and it is not by accident that the concept of the Other
Person is given as the first concept in What is Philosophy? — a place usually
reserved for the concept of God as 'first principle' in traditional metaphysics
(particularly the scholastic philosophy of Duns Scotus who bears a special
importance for Deleuze). In other words, Deleuze's philosophy 'begins' with the
creation of the concept of the Other Person, and in Deleuze's attempt to orient
thinking purely in terms of the horizontal relationship that is introduced by the
problem of the Other Person, perhaps we have no better indication of the over-
turning of transcendence as the highest problem for contemporary philosophy.7
 2

HOW TIME PLACES TRUTH

IN CRISIS

Certainly one of the most enigmatic points of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy is the
poetic statement 'time off its hinges.' This statement receives its most succinct
formulation in the preface to the English edition of Cinema 2: The Time-Image
(1989) where Deleuze introduces the reader to what he calls the 'adventure of
movement and time' in modern cinema:

Over several centuries, from the Greeks to Kant, a revolution took place in
philosophy: the subordination of time to movement was reversed, time
ceases to be the measurement of normal movement, it increasingly appears
for itself and creates paradoxical movements. Time is out of joint: Hamlet's
words signify that time is no longer subordinated to movement, but rather
movement to time. (Tlxi)

Sometimes it is in the nature of poetic saying to obscure rather than to clarify, and
here we find only the announcement that 'something happened' that caused time
to fall off its hinges, to increasingly appear for-itself (to engender sensory-motor
paradoxes). This event will signal a point of irretrievable crisis for philosophy
itself since, as a result of this reversal, 'every model of truth collapses' and its
models will ultimately fail in discerning the new relationships between the real
and the imaginary, or to differentiate between true and false pasts (TI131).
If we accept the premise that the role of classical philosophy was to 'fix time,'
that is, to save truth at all costs (since time itself is the fundamental problem of
philosophy), then we need to ask 'How is it that time can place truth in crisis?'
'What happened?' Taking up these questions, the following discussion will
attempt to clarify the relationship between the statement 'time off its hinges'
and what Deleuze will call the crisis of truthful narration by tracing the contours
of the event where the classical categories of time, truth and world enter into a
'zone of indiscernability,' where these categories undergo a strange reversal and
the very 'possibility' of philosophical narration begins to be governed by what
Deleuze calls 'the powers of the false.' In this sense, the false becomes a power
that orients the thinker's relation to truth and to the world from this point on.
As Deleuze argues, 'The power of falsity is time itself, not because time as
changing contents but because the form of time as becoming brings into
question any model of truth' (N66).
12 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G IL L E S D E l_ E U Z E

Before getting too far ahead of ourselves, however, let us first return to
our guiding question and ask how is it that time can place truth in crisis?
In response, we might notice that there is something in this event which corre-
sponds to the nature of time discovered by chaos theory as a pure force of
becoming, and Deleuze and Guattari resort to the figure of chaos in What Is
Philosophy? to show that it 'is characterized less by an absence of determinations
than by the infinite speed by which they take shape and vanish' (42). The figure
of 'chaos' that Deleuze and Guattari invoke might give us a modern under-
standing of the dinamen that also appears at the basis of Lucretian physics, which
Michel Serres has described by the figure of the atomic 'spiral' or 'cyclone.'1
Rather than standing in as another form of time - time is fundamentally 'an
excessive formlessness [Unformliche}' (DR91) - its figure marks the event where
time 'over-turns' and 'empties out' the simple form which was deployed to
represent or contain it. As Deleuze and Guattari write, 'chaos makes chaotic and
undoes every consistency in the infinite' (QP42).2 At the same time, we must
also recognize that the figure of this event is precisely 'nothing new' and cannot
completely clarify the qualitative difference that we spoke of above in terms of
the crisis of contemporary philosophy that, according to Deleuze's statement, is
supposedly caused by an 'irreversible' declension between movement and time.
As Deleuze writes in Cinema 2, 'if we take the history of thought, we see that time
has always put the notion of truth into crisis. Not that truth varies depending on
the epoch. It is not the simple empirical content, it is the form or rather the pure
force of time which puts truth into crisis' (TI130). Therefore, following more
closely Deleuze's arguments concerning this notion of time in crisis, let us ask
'how,' or rather 'why,' this comes about?
First, according to an argument that appears earlier in Bergsonism ([1966]
1988), because time is a constant becoming, which simply means that it refuses
to 'be'; the whole of time is never 'given.' Second, because all 'becoming' first
appears as abnormal, monstrous and lawless; '[and in its 'becoming,' time] is
actualized according to divergent lines, but these lines do not form a whole on
their own account, and do not resemble what they actualize' (B 105). Third,
because Deleuze (employing Bergson's notion of an elan vital] must admit to
the existence of 'false problems' or places where the apprehension of time itself
gets botched, where its concept loses its way and leads to an impasse. It is the
nature of all solutions to be temporary and partial, philosophical solutions
included; 'and each time, we will say that the solution was as good as it could
have been, given the way in which the problem was stated, and the means die
living being had at its disposal to solve it' (B 103).
According to Deleuze one such impasse occurs when time is confused with
space, which leads us to think that the whole of time is given at a certain point,
even if this point is 'idealized' and reserved for a God or a superhuman intelli-
gence that would be able to see the whole of time in a single glance (B 104).
In The Fold, Deleuze illustrates this episode with the Leibnizian concept of the
monad which, 'having no doors or windows,' proposes an absolute difference
(or exteriority) between the luminosity of soul and the visibility of matter, or
 HOW TIME PLACES TRUTH IN CRISIS 13

between thought and perception. In other words, as I will discuss in more detail
in the next part, the Leibnizian construction first posits an irresolvable difference
or confrontation between two forms of difference, and then, as Deleuze shows,
resolves this confrontation in the most bizarre of manners: the creation of God,
who occupies the position of the central monad, and of the a priori expression of
a 'pre-established harmony' (harmonia praestabilita) which Deleuze likens to an
automaton. In other words, Leibniz solved the problem of time by constructing
the series of incompossible worlds where divergent series could be developed
without suffering contradiction; he saved truth 'but at the price of damnation'
(that is, by creating aborted becomings and cast-away worlds where certain
singularities were assigned to spend eternity). However, invoking the third
characteristic of time given above, Deleuze asserts diat the Leibnizian solution
could only have been temporary and 'the crisis of truth thus enjoys a pause
rather than a solution' (TI131). Why?
First, we can say that if the Leibnizian solution gradually led to an impasse
and failed to solve the problem of time, this is because he retained the classical
function of God (or Scientia Dei) and, thus, spatialized time from the point
where God could see the whole of time stretched out across incompossible
universes in order to choose the world that was the 'most ripe' with possibilities.
Second, the Leibnizian solution was still dependent on what can only be phrased
as the ethical 'character' of God's judgement; that is, he believed in a God who
knew the difference between good and evil, and who could choose the world
that exists on the basis of this innate knowledge of 'the best one.' Without this
principle of belief m the ethical criteria of judgement, of the innate 'good nature'
of reason itself (which itself rests only upon the belief that the idea of God
contains 'perfect knowledge' and there is nothing unknown or unconscious in
the nature of this knowledge), the world that exists would be exposed once again
to the possibility of the most egregious 'error' (non-truth, falsehood). In the
modern period, when the idea of God becomes predicated on a knowledge of
'History,' there were bound to appear inexplicable accidents, detours, dead-ends
and, worst of all, stale possibilities and boring truths; explanations that failed to
justify 'what happened,' or 'what's going to happen.' One might conclude that
it was only a matter of time before time returned again to place truth into crisis.
Turning now to the second guiding question, in light of die foregoing obser-
vations, we must ask once more: What happened? What could have happened
to place truth, again, into crisis? Taking our cue from the preface of the second
cinema study, The Time-Image, we might reply: 'The War!' In its wake, we are
all survivors; our memories are stricken by an irretrievable trauma. The earth is
laid waste by a paralysis of memory and zones of impossibility: death camps,
burned-out cities, atomic sink-holes, summer fields yielding each year a new
harvest of corpses. Today, we find ourselves in the age of Auschwitz, on which is
superimposed the age of Hiroshima, under the shadow of a horrible decision,
a botched and burned-out world. Although I am employing these names in a
drastically abbreviated manner — that is, as signs of a kind of universal or world
memory - the events they designate remain sombre and cast their shadow over
14 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GILLES D E L E UZ E

the idea of reason that existed prior (or a priori). In fact, they mark a caesura
or eclipse of reason itself, as a result of which 'before' and 'after' are no longer
equal and time undergoes a profound declension and suspense. Certainly, these
events were enough to condemn the Leibnizian God for a terrible error in judge-
ment — certainly this could not be 'the best of all possible worlds!' 'We must
have taken a wrong turn somewhere!' If philosophy appears today as perhaps the
most impoverished of narratives, it is because its own image of perfect reason
('the true world') ultimately led to its own self-abdication and guilt, a problem
exacerbated by the fact that the nature of judgement remains grounded in the
classical image of reason. If the modern period has been described an age of
'criticism' (Octavio Paz), it is because all truth must come under the suspicion
of harboring an evil genius or another holocaust, and it is not simply by chance
that our age has witnessed the countless times when the 'character' of the
philosopher himself has been placed on trial. As in the cases of Nietzsche and
Heidegger, the philosopher has been brought before his own tribunal of reason
to receive judgement. It is as if reason itself suffers a deep splitting (Spaltung),
and as a result of a primordial cleavage within the 'image of thought,' gives
birth to its own double that returns a critical glance against the philosopher's
own logos.
We might detect this event already in the infamous figure of the malin genie
(an 'evil genius') whom Descartes conjures up in the Meditations in order,
finally, to extract the truth of the cogito as a foundational ground of certainty.
Ultimately, this was a sleight of the hand; by creating its own 'double,' the
Cartesian solution already guaranteed its momentary triumph over uncertainty
and the problem of error simply by the fact that this demon remained a mere
'fiction' (hypothetically posited at the moment of crisis for the dialectic of
reason). Therefore, even behind this phantasm of a 'subject who deceives con-
sciousness,' we can detect the profile of a more malevolent demon, one who can
be posed no longer in relation to consciousness, but primarily in relation to
the subject of desire or of will. After Nietzsche's concept of 'the will to power'
(Der Wille zur Macht), at least, we find the possible existence of a subject who
deceives not only a rational proposition but, even more, a probable ground of
truth and a fundamental cause of uncertainty.
Today, beneath the shadows that are cast by the names of 'Auschwitz' and
'Hiroshima,' philosophy has become, employing Blanchot's fine phrase, 'the
writing of a disaster.' If the Leibnizian solution were adequate to determine the
best of all possible worlds, then Auschwitz and Hiroshima would have been
banished to incompossible worlds, instead of the death-zones that have emerged
within our own. Moreover, under its classical image of reason, philosophy
would have to assume the task of justifying these as 'the best of all possible
worlds,' something it could not do. Rather than offer another 'sufficient reason,'
it simply left the stage of history and retired into the silence of pure logic
(Wittgenstein), or pure poetry (Heidegger). Can we not read Heidegger's
famous statement that 'only a god can save us now' as perhaps the most radical
philosophical renunciation of philosophy itself?
 HOW TIME PLACES TRUTH IN CRISIS 15

Nevertheless, we must admit that the 'end of philosophy' is itself a

philosophical moment, since philosophy has risen from its own ashes countless
times before. This event of crisis could also signal for us that point where
contemporary philosophy folds back and takes itself as an object of the most
radical critical operations. Here we could point to the work of French philos-
ophers Emanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida as being exemplary of this
moment of auto-critique. For both philosophers, the classical image of reason
and the system of judgement it employed have been found in default, causing
the general decline of philosophical sovereignty in the West, since the image of
reason can longer be identified with the classical cogito, but rather must allow for
a radical alterity in the heart of judgement, a 'passive synthesis of the ego'
(Husserl). According to Levinas, it does this precisely by situating itself as the
subject of time, so that the truth in crisis is the only image of its own
transcendence over time.3 This moment emerges when the symbol of judge-
ment that characterizes the image of classical thought is exposed to the most
ferocious self-criticism, whereby the tribunal of judgement becomes a mode of
'hyperbolic doubt' (Derrida) or returns against itself within a discourse of ethics
(Levinas). Because the crisis of philosophy marks the default of its concepts of
'identity and 'universality,' it becomes vulnerable to the point of losing its power
to identify with the image of'reason,' which is subordinated to the character of
an alterity that animates its history. It is in this sense that we might understand
Derrida's ferocious and unforgiving interrogation of the history of philosophy,
which also entails a form of its repetition and 'deconstruction.' The Derridean
repetition which is different from an Heideggerian repetition of 'ontological
difference' since the latter, in the earlier works at least, still holds out a possibility
for a 'return' or 'homecoming' of philosophical reflection to a proper form of
'thinking' (Denken). Therefore, we should also take seriously Levinas's critique
of Western reason, different from but related to Derrida's, which submits
the language of philosophy to the primordial critique launched by a discourse
of ethics. The radical objective of this gesture must be understood as the
'un-making' and silencing of a philosophical language of Being, an unmasking of
the transcendental Ego and all its adjacent discourses of knowledge (history,
politics, science, anthropology). As a result, the philosophical genre itself under-
goes a positive molting of its own image of reason which now appears 'otherwise
than being or beyond essence' (Levinas).
A third possibility is represented by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze where
the inability of contemporary philosophy to identify with its classical image of
reason is pushed to its extreme, to the point of threatening to silence it altogether.
What is this silence that strikes against the very upright and good nature of the
classical philosopher's logos, if not the logic of reason itself? As Deleuze writes
very early on, 'perhaps writing entertains a relationship with silence that is
altogether more threatening than its supposed relation with death' (DRxxi). The
loss of identity suffered by the philosophical reason and the silence (i.e. 'non-
sense') that its language undergoes in the modern period is caused by nothing less
than that the very notion of the 'possible' (which marked its relation to the
16 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G1L.LES DELEUZE

future) has itself become impossible. Contemporary philosophy, in other words,

represents the default of the concept of the possible (with which it can no
longer represent time, and therefore itself), since the possible has become
impossible a. priori. However, against those who would be inclined to pronounce
a death-sentence on the future of philosophy because of its shadowy past, I must
underscore the fact that although Deleuze sees the modern predicament as
signaling the loss of philosophical identity and the abdication of its classical
language and concepts — that is, as having lost the classical 'image of thought'
the philosopher no longer knows how to identify the movement of thought with
a categorical form of intuition that is equal to the sensibility of time - he
absolutely does not renounce its role or its significant importance for the future.
This is something that he underlines again and again, particularly in What is
Philosophy? which returns to the question of philosophy itself to sift through
the ruins of the classical picture of reason. The repetition of the 'question of
philosophy' now progresses like the 'selective' operation of the dream-work or
the powers of discernment that belong to Nietzsche's concept of the Eternal
Return. In the wake of a catastrophe, the philosopher moves by a process of
decoupage, picking things up along the way, anything that might prove useful
to resolving this modern predicament of philosophy. All of Deleuze's work has
this fragile and strategic sense of working its way through a fundamental
problematic, the default of reason, as if the resort to the expressions of non-
philosophy (art, literature and science) was the only way of infusing philosophy
with new variables of a future.
Even as early as Difference and Repetition, Deleuze speculates on the future of
the philosophical genre by stating that its narrative mode must become 'in part a
species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction' (DRxx). We can
immediately recognize here that each of these genres of 'story' is directed toward
two regions of temporality: the past, the future. Their object, however, is not the
past or the future as such, but rather 'something unknown or unknowable' that
takes place in these nebulous zones (or folds) of time. 'What happened? What's
going to happen?' These questions are aimed neither at some discrete content
of the past, nor at some future state of affairs. Their object is much more
fundamental and, therefore, consonant with the philosophical method Deleuze
invents to unfold the differential character of temporal events:

What Happened? In other words, what causes the past to become 'the past'?
What's Going to Happen? 'What are the conditions of an event that causes
the future to become 'the future'?

The research of this fundamental duality conditions the description of tem-

porality in the concept of 'becoming' that characterizes the entire Deleuzian
problematic around difference and repetition.4
'To research the conditions of an event whereby the future becomes future' is
the principle to which Deleuze submits contemporary philosophy. These condi-
tions can appear in philosophy only by introducing new variations and by
 HOW TIIUIE PLACES TRUTH IN CRISIS 17

launching new connections with the forms of 'non-philosophy.' In this sense,

the statement 'time off its hinges' describes the modulation of the philosophical
genre itself and underscores the original inter-disciplinary character of a
philosophy of difference and repetition. Deleuze had announced this approach
as early as 1968 when he wrote:

It seemed to me that difference and repetition could only be reached by

putting into question the traditional image of thought... [and] the time is
coming when it will be hardly possible to write a book of philosophy as it
has been done for so long: 'Ah! The old style ...'. The search for a new
means of philosophical expression was begun by Nietzsche and must be
pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain other arts, such as the
theatre or the cinema. (DRxxi)

Nearly twenty years later, in the preface to the English edition, Deleuze returns
to underscore this task again, this time adding to the semiotic constructions of
art (the creation of 'percepts and affects') the 'functions' of science as well:

Every philosophy must achieve its own manner of speaking about the arts
and sciences, as though it established alliances with them. It is very difficult,
since obviously philosophy cannot lay claim to the least superiority, but can
create its own concepts in relation to what it can grasp of scientific
functions and artistic constructions ... Philosophy cannot be undertaken
independently of science and art. (DRxvi)

In the statement, 'obviously philosophy cannot lay claim to the least superior-
ity,' can't we discern the appearance of a new idiom very different from that
of Kant, where philosophy claims the supreme right to 'judge' the other
faculties, including those of science; or of Hegel where philosophy is responsible
for the full deployment of scientific logic through the labor of the dialectic?
On the contrary, what is proper to contemporary philosophy is the establish-
ment of'alliances' and 'nuptials' with the powers of science and art; the princely
role of the classical philosopher is subordinated to the mediatory role of the
diplomat or the 'intercessor' - in the creation of concepts (of understanding)
from the primary materials offered by scientific 'functions' and by artistic con-
structions of 'percepts and affects' — revealing, finally, a philosophy of conjuga-
tions, of becomings effected by a kind of 'passive synthesis' with the forms of
non-philosophy.
Having either lost or abdicated its former sovereignty and classical 'image of
thought,' philosophy can only appear BETWEEN these earlier forms (which no
longer have actuality) and the forms of non-philosophy it is now coupled with:
science, technology, literature, cinema, history, ecology, or madness. At this
point, we can clearly discern the basis of Deleuze's solution in two senses: first of
all, it is not in the sense that philosophy, after the war, itself returns as science,
literature, theater, painting, or cinema. Rather, it implies that the thinking
a

of time appears first in these other regions, and philosophy must resort to these
'other planes of immanence and expression' in order to develop its concepts.
I cannot phrase this more strongly for the moment than to say that in the
contemporary period, the plane of expression that philosophy occupies is no
longer immanent to the world as it is; the 'questions and problems' that classical
philosophy poses (of 'the Good,' of 'truth,' of the 'beautiful') no longer help
to clarify the situation at hand. This situation constitutes the 'problem of
expression' for philosophy today. In fact, the 'questions and problems' of classical
philosophy itself have become too abstract and too general and, in consequence,
have themselves fallen into the miserable state of needing constant explanation or
justification ,As a result ,philosophers have become responsible for introducing
a zone of indiscernibility both with regard to lived experience ,but also with regard
to the powers proper to philosophy itself. Instead, a traditional understanding of
philosophy has limited itself to the formal examination of the problems of logic
or to repairing old categories (that is to say, problems that it has some assurance
of being solved prior to taking them up or proposing them). The second sense
addresses the formula 'everything is impossible a priori' which can be found in
the numerous writers Deleuze refers to in the course of his work - but particu-
larly Kafka's 'guilty a priori!' Once this is accepted as a 'given,' then everything
must follow and this must be understood in an affirmative and Nietzschean
sense. If philosophy has abdicated the classical image of reason, then it can only
resort to other planes of expression in an effort to escape from its impasse, which
is somehow equal to the impasse of the 'world' itself after the events of
'Auschwitz' and 'Hiroshima.' Henceforth, philosophy itself must become a phi-
losophy of 'the event.' The fact that the active powers formerly accorded to the
classical cogito (judgement, doubt, negation, criticism) are found to be absent
from Deleuze's description of the modern philosopher's role serves only to
underscore the newness of the situation in which philosophy finds itself after the
war, a situation which irremediably alters the 'character' of the philosopher,
which is nothing less than the character of truth itself.5
 3

THE P R O B L E M OF J U D G E M E N T

'Obviously,' Deleuze writes, 'concepts have a history [une histoire]' (QP23).

That is, each concept has a story to tell, although it may be the kind of story
told by idiots, 'full of sound and fury.' Understood in this light, we might
see that philosophy presents its own history as a narrative of concepts, a fable of
thought that must recommence each time from the beginning in response to the
innocent and childlike question 'What is x?' For example: 'What is philosophy?'
'A person?' 'An animal?' 'A hero, or a god?' 'A day, or an hour, of the week?'
'What is death?' Or, 'What is an event?' Faced with such questions, the classical
philosopher-storyteller might exhibit a kind of blank expression, a gesture of
fatigue, or a look of inscrutable mystery, prefacing his response with 'Here begins
a long and perhaps inexhaustible story.' This statement introduces the listener
to a duration that has nothing to do widi the so-called 'age of philosophy.'
Although it is as old as the hills, perhaps even as old as 'time' itself, following
Kant philosophical knowledge (rigorously conceived) has been divorced from
wisdom and gains nothing from an accumulation of experience. The problem of
the story's duration is that its episodes are not simply divided between several
epochs (the Greeks, the Schools, the Enlightenment), or between several distinct
actors or conceptual personae (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Heidegger).1 Accord-
ing to Deleuze, after the philosophy of Leibniz it is also divided between several
possible worlds; therefore, in recounting each particular event or episodic
encounter in the concept's history ('Adam eats of the poisonous fruit in the garden,'
'Jesus Christ is betrayed by Judas Iscariot,' 'Caesar passes the Rubicon,' 'Rome falls to
tyranny'), the classical narrator must calculate all its possible versions and
variations in order to render to reason the existence of 'the best one,' which is
given the pseudo-factuality of the past as well as the quasi-insistence of necessity.
I have characterized the age of our classical narrator only to highlight the
sense of fatigue and resignation that inevitably accompanies the evidence of
History, which only motivates him to render an account of die reasons that
belong to what Deleuze calls the economic or legal connections which come
together to form a dominant system of judgement.2 It was primarily the result
of an ancient (mythic) accord between the image of reason and the epic
representation of the law that the classical philosophical narrative took on a
juridical function and the philosopher himself often appeared as a jurist. (For
example, the Platonic figure of the philosopher-jurist is itself derived from die
mythic court depicted in The Meno and The Gorgias where the dead judges
2O THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GDLLES D E I- E U Z E

appear 'without eyes and ears' and, no longer inhibited by the veil of the senses,
can peer directly into the souls of the accused.) The language associated with
this function often produced the ethical tautologies and the imperative modes
of description with which we are most familiar, as well as a kind of patriarchal
and summary conclusion: It happened thus and, therefore, it was necessary.'
The meaning of an event would be deduced from a system of calculation
(or jurisprudence) that handed the real over to the possible by making it a
pure expression of what Nietzsche called 'the past and its "It was."' 'Then the
sleight of hand becomes obvious,' Deleuze writes concerning this moment in
Bergsonism: 'If the real is said to resemble the possible, is this not in fact because
the real was expected to come about by its own means, to "project backward"
a fictitious image of it, and to claim that it was possible at any time, before
it happened?' (B98). For each case there could only be one possible ending:
an Adam eating the poisonous fruit and expelled from the garden, a Sextus
dethroned and in exile, a Caesar passing the Rubicon and betrayed by Brutus, a
Christ crucified and buried. After everything is said and done we find that the
classical philosopher is after all nothing but a narrator of legal fictions (les
romans policiers) whose only problem was phrasing a proposition in such a way
that it provided an adequate discernment of the principles that would rule the
final disposition of each case.
For Deleuze, the fundamental problem of judgement concerns the nature of a
certain decision that determines the conditions of any possible world. But what
does it mean 'to decide?1 What is a 'decision?' Who 'decides?' In response, we
should recall that the criteria of certainty, as the dominant characteristic of think-
ing, commence with Descartes, who invented an 'image of thought' that was
itself the symbolic equivalent of an action. As Deleuze describes this moment:

If I say: Descartes! That's the type of philosopher with a very sober concept
creation. The history of the cogito, historically one can always find an entire
tradition, precursors, but there is nonetheless something signed Descartes in
the cogito concept, notably (a proposition can express a concept) the propo-
sition: 'I think therefore I am,' a veritable new concept. It's the discovery of
subjectivity, of thinking subjectivity. It's signed Descartes.3

To decide, to pass judgement, to doubt, is to act decisively concerning the matter

to be thought. Within the Cartesian method, this 'action-image' represents the
decisiveness of doubt: the power to exclude sensation, belief, understanding and
existence in order to arrive at a point of absolute certainty. Yet, how did the
criteria of certainty come to resemble the perfection of reason — becoming its
aim (telos) as well as its ideal image? One could argue that this was itself the result
of a certain decision, or action, that bears the proper name of Descartes himself,
whose heroic gesture was to create an image of thought that was essentially active
(negative, critical) in such a way that, after Descartes, the image of thought itself
was represented by Descartes's action-image as dramatized by the Meditations.
 THE PROBLEM OF JUDGEMENT 21

Here, we have a good example of a series that fails to express the condition of
every other series, since die image of thought can exist only if it bears a
resemblance to the concept of cogtto that Descartes created, or invented, to
express the relationship between thought (God, or pure Ego) and perception.
In The Fold, Deleuze lays down die essential coordinates for responding to
diis problem in his analysis of the Leibnizian concept of the vinculum substantia,
which can be defined as a kind of dominant or dominating fold that functions
as an 'ideal causality' and defines a substantial predicate, or category. For
Deleuze, however, the substance of the vinculum cannot be understood as being
'essential' or 'substantial,' but rather as 'sticky' or Viscous': that is, as a plane of
consistency. It is the adhesive that holds everything together and pulls it
along — not the center of envelopment (world), but all the points of its ad-hesion
(plane). Because of this, it resembles nothing but a thin and imperceptible film
which covers everything and would allow signs to stick to objects, descriptions
to individuals, or persons to statements; its viscous membrane does not compose
individuals and subjects, but rather encompasses singularities and events. It is in
this sense that one could say that a certain function of the fold is 'essential' or
'necessary,' but only under the following conditions: first, that it founds the
double articulation of thought to the body and the body to thought; second,
diat it gives to the body its unity across a flux of the material present and its
point of adhesion in sensible space; third, that it functions as the non-localizable
connection between a constant and its variables. This is what gives it the ability
to disengage from the descriptions of objects and beings in which it is
incarnated and which belongs only to the status of events.4
In the Theodicy, the concept is represented by a God who rules this fold and
possesses, in principle (en droit), the right to decide upon the series that will
'ripen' into the best of possible worlds (T§218).5 This is because, at the
moment of creation, a decision will have been necessary, a decision that would
allow only one possible world to be realized; without such a decision, according
to Leibniz, there would only be an infinite number of equally indeterminate
points of God's eternal reflection. A universe that was not ruled by the principle
of incompossibility would correspond to a chaos or labyrinth in which every
point or perspective would be equally indeterminate and every path would lead
nowhere, since there is not a series that is actualized and gives order and
direction to all the rest. Therefore, the law of necessity, which is expressed here
by the requirement that there be only one world that is actualized, appears to be
the highest principle (or law), even higher than the Leibnizian God who, in a
certain sense, is compeled to choose. (Although in his analysis Deleuze seems to
lighten this command by turning the Leibnizian universe into a game of chess in
which the laws only function as contractual arrangements between players rather
than descriptions of force, or natural laws.) God must decide at each moment
on the inclusion or incorporation of one series, and this decision necessarily
excludes or disposes of all the others, which fall like the damned into the base
of the chosen world to function as its material, 'releasing an infinity quantity of
progress' (Fold 74). In order to justify the statement that 'everything real is
22 THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF GS I l_ l_ E S DELEUZE

rational,' then, Leibniz had to posit the existence of a God who calculates while
the world unfurls. And because God is not limited by time and space, he would
be able to completely follow the full realization of all possible worlds before
choosing the one that is best. It is only on this condition that the 'real appears
rational,' since everything that happens will appear against the image of this
total ratiocination which infuses the real with the appearance of perfect reason-
ing. The accuracy of God's calculation necessarily presupposes the power of
a Reason that is equal to the whole of time and such a presupposition is
represented by the Leibnizian certainty concerning the criteria of'the best.' This
criterion must be distinguished from the criteria of 'the Good' of Plato and
'the most perfect of which a more perfect cannot be conceived' of Aquinas.
As Deleuze writes, 'the best of all possibilities only blossoms amid the ruins of
the Platonic Good' (Fold 68).
Paradoxically, according to Leibniz, the series that God always finds as the
best is always the one that leads to deadi (Sextus Tarquin, Jesus Christ), since a
fundamental axiom that Leibniz discovers in the Theodicy is that 'a possible
world' can constitute its possibility only from the necessary exclusion or murder
of certain singularities. This is why, for Leibniz, in each and every world there
exists 'a vague and indefinite Adam' who is defined only by a few predicates (to
live in the garden, to be the first man); however, there is only one world in
which Adam has sinned (Fold 64). Likewise, while there are several possible
worlds containing a Sextus Tarquin, a Judas Iscariot, a Julius Caesar, a Jesus
Christ, there is only one where Sextus is dethroned and sent into exile, or where
a Christ is crucified and buried. There are as many possibilities as there are
possible worlds; however, there is only one that is realized. For Leibniz,
therefore, creation was a terrible decision, one that placed God in the position of
having to choose 'some Thing over against nothing' (Fold 68). In order to
justify this terrible act, Leibniz wrote the Theodicy where he appears as God's
defense lawyer. 'Of course,' he pleads, 'God is a priori guilty for the existence of
evil, for the suffering of the damned, and for the murder of certain singu-
larities — but, look, he had his reasons! We cannot know what God's reasons
are, nor how he applies them in each case, but at least we can demonstrate that
he possesses some of them, and what their principles may be' (Fold 59—60). But
why does Leibniz choose the word 'ripen' to represent the process whereby a
principle is chosen as 'the best one' to rule a given chain of causality that will
unfold into a 'world'? Does this also imply that the world is grounded in reason,
or that the series that 'ripens into an ideal causality' necessarily expresses the
realization of the 'best of all possible worlds'? For example, employing a famous
example from the Theodicy, the name 'Caesar' is of little interest in all possible
worlds; only in the one where he passes the Rubicon does the possible pass into
the real as Rome falls into tyranny. This is because in the series that develops
into the world that is chosen, the inscription of the predicate 'passing the
Rubicon' onto the name of 'Caesar' is over-determined and poses between
the event and history (local and global) such a strong connection (or becoming)
that it 'ripens' into an ideal causality which appears, de facto and dejure, the result
 THE PROBLEM OF J U D G E IU1 E23
I

of divine jurisprudence. We can infer God's unrealized speculations from the

point where he assigns each event to its place within a possible world, and
discards those that are incompossible to other worlds - that is, effectively
banishes them as false and spurious versions, bad copies, as illegal connections,
fakes and forgeries.
It is around the criteria used for arriving at such a terrible judgement that
Deleuze's response swerves from Leibniz's optimistic assertion that die world
that is actualized is the 'best of all possible worlds.' The Leibnizian assertion
assumes that the criterion for realizing certain worlds and letting others fall into
chaos is itself reasonable, in addition to being 'necessary' (a justification of 'what
happened'). That is, this assertion supposes that the decision that causes the
passage of this world from being merely possible to being actual and existing is
itself grounded in reason, rather than simply being grounded in die world that
exists. At this point it may be important to recall that, for Deleuze, nothing is
natural or that everything happens either by a species of construction, conven-
tion or by some other artificial means — God or the Other, time, the world, you
and I. This also applies to the characters of judgement and decision in the above
image of thought which touches, too, upon the fundamental condi-
tions of fiction; therefore, 'everything here is purely fictitious (romanesque),
including theory, which here merges with a necessary fiction — namely, a certain
theory of the Other' (LS 318). One explanation for the importance that Deleuze
accords to the concept of the Other is because there is a special (or intimate)
relationship between the concept of the Other (or God) and the 'image of
thought,' as I will discuss in the next chapter. In the encounter with the Other
traditional philosophy has attempted to grasp thinking as an object which is said
to be either 'innate,' as in Plato, or a common faculty, as in the case of Kant.
In either case, thought takes on a fictional or mythic characteristic of some-
thing (an idea, a category, a faculty) that is placed 'into' the subject before
birth and, thus, the history of thought can be represented as the progression of
the dominant fictions that represent the idea of the Other. Part 'story' (histoire),
part natural history or 'diagnostic novel,' philosophy expresses the Other (as the
condition from which it draws its own 'image of thought') by means of
die various symptoms which mark definite breaks and ruptures in all of its
necessary fictions.
In his account of this pure fiction of a God who calculates while the world
unfurls, Deleuze suggests that the original 'character' of judgement is not
grounded in reason and may even be formed and 'subsist' by means of an
irrational and perhaps most absurd of factors (B 108). In Bergsonism, Deleuze
addresses this problem under the name of 'virtual instinct,' which he regards as
the origin of myth, or 'the story-telling function of society.'

Take, for example, obligation: It has no rational ground. Each particular

obligation is conventional and can border on the absurd; the only thing
that is grounded is the obligation to have obligations, 'the whole of obli-
gation'; and it is not grounded in reason, but in a requirement of nature, in
24 THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF G I l_ l_ E S D E L E UZ E

a kind of Virtual instinct,' that is, on a counterpart that nature produces

in the reasonable being to compensate for the partiality of his intelli-
gence. (B 108)

The 'story-telling function' of society originates on the same surface that condi-
tions the mechanism of thought. This surface articulates a small inter-cerebral
interval between society and intelligence, but also an infinitesimal crack that
occurs when the surface of sexuality (or instinct) folds back upon the 'first sym-
bolization of thought' producing a doubling effect: on one side of the mirror's
surface, a passionate and affective body or emotional thought (i.e. intensity); on
the other, a Virtual instinct,' a fictive and fabulous reason. What is said in this
passage concerning the nature of obligation could equally be true for the nature
of Leibnizian God. Likewise, we could say the same concerning Descartes's
requirement that the most perfect expression of thought must also bear the
attribute of 'clear and distinct perception.' This requirement is not grounded in
reason itself, but rather in the nature of the cogito, that is, the concept that
Descartes invents to represent a new image of thought remarked for its clarity.
It was Leibniz, in fact, who accused Descartes of submitting the 'idea of
reason' to a partial representation with the requirement that all clear and distinct
perception is also certain knowledge. This is because the image of reason must
express the 'whole of clarity,' which includes all the degrees of obscurity as well,
and this clarity cannot be represented by the clarity of external perception, but
must also touch the clarity of the idea itself that arrives through intuition and is
not dependent upon any existing object, except the sudden insight that arrives as
if from the mind of God. Each monad expresses a certain portion of this
intellectual activity that takes place in the brain (le cerveau) of God. God's
ratiocination spans the entire duration of this world, even accounting for others
that do not exist, and his thought and knowledge of everything that happens,
has happened already, and will happen encompasses the totality that unfolds the
order of the series selected. The relationship between the image of thought that
takes place in God's mind and the ideational activity that occurs in the monad is
explained by the argument that each thought already bears the signature of
God's intellection, as if the thoughts that occur are the works produced by one
great artist whose connection and resemblance to the total work of art can be
conceived along the lines of its characteristics of expression, style and compo-
sition. However, just as the signature does not resemble the work, but only
represents the idea of its belonging to the total series of a creator's oeuvre, each
thought is connected to the 'idea of reason' by an invisible thread that runs
through all the monads and links them together in a total expression of a
maximal intelligence. The Leibnizian fable of the God who calculates while the
world unfurls may represent the purest expression of this virtual instinct 'which
will stand up to the representation of the real which will succeed, by the inter-
mediary of intelligence itself, in thwarting intellectual work' (B 108). We can
understand this by the way in which this 'conceptual actor' provides the border
 THE PROBLEM OF JUDGEMENT 25

or guard-rail that protects this world from sliding into chaos by preventing
certain singularities and events from becoming realized, excluding others as
illusions and simulacra that approach from beneath the screen separating the
chosen world from a chaos swarming at its base. In his essay on Pierre
Klossowski in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze argues that the principle of this God is
founded upon the disjunctive syllogism, and all thought that is founded on this
principle makes a negative and exclusive use of the disjunctive (Leibnizian
'incompossibility,' Cartesian 'doubt'). In accordance with mis principle, it is the
philosopher's role to render to reason (ratio rendere), since everything that
happened, is happening now, and will happen in the future is essentially
ordained by God's eternal de-dsion. We could understand this as the origin of
the maxim 'everything happens for the best,' meaning that everything that
exists, exists only on the condition and only so long as its existence has been
selected according to the criteria that God uses to calculate the world that is
chosen. As we noted in the beginning of this chapter, this constitutes the tauto-
logical form upon which the classical image of reason is grounded, one which
submits all thought to the requirement that it obey the same representation of
reason, a representation that is also guaranteed a 'quality' (quale) that belongs
to the real.
And yet, even by the means of this fiction, of all the classical philosophers
Leibniz comes closest to the truth when he shows that 'what is called thinking'
does not belong to the spontaneity of the ego, but rather becomes 'subjecti-
vized' — employing Foucault's word — within the human in order to compensate
for its partial intelligence. 'Thinking always come from the outside (that outside
which was already engulfed in the interstice or which constituted the common
limit)' (F 117). Therefore, the capacity to think is always already 'put into' the
human as the condition of the mental-object's sociability as well as the objectivity
of a common 'Inside.' Within the history of philosophy, the form of thought's
'interiorization' (DR261) has been expressed in many ways, all of which con-
stitute the essential fictions of the 'eventuation' of thought: the Platonic doctrine
of the Ideas and the theory of reminiscence, the Cartesian idea of infinity which
appears in the third and fifth meditations, the Leibnizian notion of Pre-
established Harmony (by way of the vinculum substantia), the Heideggerian
concept of an original temporality inaugurated by the event of 'thrownness'
(Geworfenbeit); finally, the concept of the 'Outside' (Debars) as it is conceived
respectively by Blanchot (as 'the interiority of expectation'), Foucault (as 'point
of subjectivization'), and Deleuze (as 'the fold'). Whatever form this event takes,
whatever concept is invented to express or to trace its eventuation, all these
fictions share a common presentiment: that what is called thinking embodies
the residue or trace — even a 'signature' — of a power that causes the world to
unfold and to encompass all beings within a common 'Inside'. And this 'Inside'
will bear no resemblance to the subjective interiority of the empirical ego;
rather, it is the interior surface of an 'outside' which is folded within the self,
and it is only by means of this all-encompassing fold that all the individual
2S THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I L L ES DELEUZE

monads can be said to include the same world. Hence, the 'outside' is not a
place as much as it is a force that is related to the force that causes us to think;
'the thought that comes from an outside is farther away than any external world,
and hence closer than any internal world' (F 117).
This last statement is a formula that Deleuze employs constantly throughout
his later works — owing to his confrontation with the 'baroque' philosophy of
Leibniz in the early 1980s as I will discuss in the next part - in order to indicate
the position of the 'unthought' in his own philosophy, but also, as Deleuze
claims, the unthought of philosophy itself. 'We will say that THE plane of
immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which
cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought' (WP 59). Therefore,
the concept of the 'outside' cannot be said to belong exclusively to Deleuze's
philosophy. Rather, the 'outside' is time itself that no longer forms an interior
(of the Subject), nor a common thread of a space partes extra panes that can be
traced by representation, but rather a force that has creased the Subject of repre-
sentation in such a way that it can no longer be said to occupy a point of
immanence. Perhaps this is why Deleuze describes THE plane of immanence as
that which is 'most intimate in thought and yet the absolutely outside' (WP 59).
Although it sometimes appears that 'the outside' and the 'plane of imman-
ence' are two distinct terms in Deleuze's philosophy, following Deleuze closely
on this point, the 'absolutely outside' IS 'the plane of immanence' from the
position of a subject that is no longer capable of orienting itself in thought, and
is exposed to what Blanchot (following Artaud) describes as a radical 'unpower'
(unpouvoir). 'If there is an "incapacity" of thought,' Deleuze writes,

which remains at its [thought's] core even after it has acquired the capacity
determinable as creation, then a set of ambiguous signs arise, which
become diagrammatic features or infinite movements and which take on a
value by right, whereas in other images of thought they were simple,
derisory facts excluded by selection: as Kleist or Artaud suggests, thought as
such begins to exhibit snarls, squeals, stammers; it talks in tongues and
screams, which leads it to create, or try to. If thought searches, it is less in
the manner of someone who possesses a mediod than of a dog that seems
to be making a series of uncoordinated leaps. We have no reason to take
pride in this image of thought, which involves much suffering without
glory and indicates the degree to which thinking has become increasingly
difficult: immanence. (WP55)

'Immanence' (= 'the outside') assumes the figure of a strange and contorted

fold, of two infinities that run in two different directions at the same time, as
the two sides of the chaos that today haunts the possibility of thinking. The
bi-directionality of this fold recalls the character of disorientation I noted earlier
concerning the relationship between thought and truth; it is the force of this
disorientation that now defines the modern image of thought itself. 'The first
 THE PROBLEM OF JUDGEMENT 27

characteristic of the modern image of thought', Deleuze writes, 'is, perhaps,

the complete renunciation of this relationship so as to regard truth as solely the
creation of thought, taking into account the plane of immanence that it takes
as its presupposition, and all this plane's features, negative as well as positive
having become indiscernible' (WP54).
 4

THE PARADOX OF CONCEPTS

Yet, Deleuze says, there's a new narrator in the village. He can be identified, in
one sense, with the new idiot who appears in What Is Philosophy? (with Kierke-
gaard, or 'a Descartes who goes insane in the streets of Moscow'). In another
sense, he can be recognized in the description of the new archivist announced in
the opening pages of Foucault, 'who proclaims that henceforth he will deal only
with statements and no longer propositions' and even, perhaps, with only the
most absurd of statements: 'I am a bug or an earthquake,' 'I have an unconscious
toothache,' or, 'It is raining. It is not raining' (F I).1 For example, Deleuze and
Guattari write:

The ancient idiot [Descartes, for example] wanted the kind of evidence he
could arrive at on his own; in the meantime, he would doubt everything,
including 3 + 2 = 5; in this way he would place all the truths of Nature in
doubt. The new idiot is not concerned with all the evidence, will never
'resign' himself to believe that 3 + 2 = 5; he only wants the absurd — it's
not even the same image of thought! (QP61—62)

While our classical narrator was only concerned with rendering each account to
reason, our new narrator seeks to multiply each version — that is, to open each
'past' to an infinite number of possible variations — in order to invent new cases
previously unaccounted for in the history of philosophy. 'The ancient idiot
wanted the truth, but the new idiot wants to make the absurd the highest power
of thought, that is, to create' (QP61). However, because he is still essentially
concerned with 'the problem of judgement,' the new idiot often appears in the
role of a lawyer for the defence who pleads his case by narrating the story of each
victim of History. Here, we might recall in this context the style of Foucault
who fashioned his philosophy by narrating the stories of lunatics, criminals,
children, animals and bad poets.
One might argue that this role was already prefigured with the appearance of
the philosopher-arbiter in The Republic, even though Deleuze and Guattari reject
this association outright: 'Assuredly, it's not the same character, there has been a
mutation' (QP61). Consequently, in the various conceptual narratives Deleuze
invents to illustrate this new image of thought (for example, the conceptual
narrative of the Leibnizian Baroque, or the progression and crisis of the
movement-image in modern cinema), what is called an 'event' now corresponds
 THE PARADOX OF CONCEPTS 29

to a central problem on the plane of narration, a 'concept' to the differential

calculus of partial solutions, and a 'thought' to a jurisprudence in which the
cases proceed in a kind of zig-zag fashion and without reflective criteria of
judgement. As an example of this new conceptual narrative, let us take up an
episode to which Deleuze frequently refers, an episode that is drawn from
Borges's 'The garden of forking paths.' In this story, there is a central character by
the name of 'Fang,' who has become a 'conceptual character' in Deleuze's
philosophy. Unlike the name of Caesar for Leibniz, however, the name of'Fang'
cannot find an historical (public) year, since it refers to the recurrent fragment
drawn from Borges's fable. The fable concerns the story of Fang and an intruder,
an intruder who is thus named, although still unknown (or anonymous),
approaching from the outside, from 'beyond the turn of experience' (Bergson).
In the fable the intruder is both inside and outside, in die past as well as in the
future. Deleuze establishes these two locutions analogously - signaling an event
(a death, a murder) that is for this reason already accomplished, but also
predestined and still to come. Fang hesitates and from this hesitation (to kill or
not to be killed) several diverse series prolong and can develop to resonate with
other series: Hamlet and Claudius, Caesar and Brutus, Sextus and Lucretia,
Christ and Judas Iscariot, Robinson and Friday, Gregor and his family, or K. and
the Inspectors. '[W]ith its unfurling of divergent series in the same world,'
however, 'come the irruption of incompossibilities on the same stage, where
Sextus will rape and not rape Lucretia, where Caesar will cross and not cross me
Rubicon, where Fang kills, is killed, and neither kills nor is killed' (Fold 82).
Of course, some might want to localize this fable's 'effect' by proclaiming that
it's not much of a problem after all because it belongs to a simple fiction. And
yet, fiction offers the occasion for speculation which, in some manner, can be
compared to the interval of the brain which cannot be mapped and followed in
a concrete duration, but rather spins and bifurcates, synapse upon synapse, path
upon path, producing mirroring upon mirrored effect.
As an illustration of this effect, we might further develop this episode of the
Deleuzian concept and read it as if it were a cinematic 'shot' - as the 'close-up'
of Fang's face filled with pure elements of sound and light, marking the
spontaneous instant of association with flashes of insight, memory, association,
emotion. As in cinematic space, the longer the duration of the 'shot,' the more
the face begins to lose its contours, as if the skin becomes too loose for it,
becoming a pure surface of speculation (e.g. 'What can he or she be thinking
now?') or the expression of a 'sign' marking the production of a new emotion
never before possible (which, for that reason, may not even be human in the
strictest sense). In our example, this shot would depict the moment when Fang
realizes that the intruder is knocking and this shot is frozen on a close-up of
Fang's face, which captures the hesitations that immediately occur in the 'mind
of Fang.' Thus, we have the picture of Fang sitting in his room, on the side of
the bed (or, perhaps, under me sheets like Beckett's Molloy). Fang is gazing in
the direction of the closed door, his attention focused on the stirrings of the
stranger on the other side, or perhaps upon the relationship of the secret he
3O THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF G ILLES DELEUZE

holds to the intruder's intentions. (We could study and analyze this shot in this
manner.) It is not just a prosaic description of a room, but also a direct
presentation of the mind of Fang, full of hesitations: If this, then this or this, but
also the possibility that, or perhaps even that as well. 'Nothing happens' except
the hesitations that diagram Fang's thoughts while he speculates, and these
speculations develop to follow the fractured lines of a crystalline event.
Perhaps the significance of this event can best be explained by referring again
to the poetic formula, 'time off its hinges,' which implies that time is no longer
connected and resolved through the organic coordination of the motor-sensorial
schema. According to Kurt Lewen, whom Deleuze cites in Cinema 2, all schema
are 'hodological.' In other words, the schema are the 'hinges' of time; they
develop and coordinate time by inferring movement from an action that is
absent, but which orders and coordinates all temporal events from the point of
its beginning or conclusion. Now, it is true that the incident of 'Fang' can be
mapped and developed according to a schematic arrangement; however, this
would depend on something quite striking since the narrative would be ordered
by an action-image that is absent from the fable itself. Consequently, it would
only be from the perspective of this 'action' (to kill or be killed, in short, to
decide) that several possible outcomes can be inferred. (Of course, this already
assumes that only one outcome will have been possible.) The action, then,
functions like a 'lever' in the unfolding of the narrative. It pulls and develops the
event immediately into denouement, like a cause from which all the different
possibilities would crystallize afterward as its unrealized effects. In this sense, the
fable presents an indirect image of time than can be inferred from the action
that is posited, but not in-Being. From this position of not-Being, or Non-Being,
this action organizes and directs the whole of time. It deploys the possibilities in
the image of a certainty that there is a resolution to this crisis and that it has
been ordained in advance, that something will have taken place — the intruder
will kill or be killed, and Fang will or will not escape with his life.
We can see now why this fable is not just a 'fiction.' Or, rather, we can
understand how this indirect image of time is essential to all fiction and occurs
within a very Aristotelian determination of tensions and resolutions, whereby
space is inferred from the movements that extinguish it, and time is contracted
into one duration that pulls everything under its wing. Throughout his work,
Deleuze speculates concerning what would happen if a certain decision were no
longer possible, that is, when the symbol of judgement no longer had the power
to pull everything into its wake, and time no longer rushes for the door, seeks to
resolve itself, to 'actualize itself or become realized in one duration. To rob
possibility of itspotentia activa (that is, the power to actualize itself in a subject or
a world) is something that Leibniz accomplished, but only under the condition
that all the monads express, or infer from their perceptions, the same 'brand' (or
species) of possibility and all include the same world. Of course, this might leave
the decision of which brand of possibility up to who-knows-what-God-of-
history. After all, someone must decide and, once decided, each decision leads, as
every decision eventually must, to a matter of life or death. But something
 THE PARADOX OF CONCEPTS 31

different occurs (as it happens in Borges and not in Leibniz) when the event
designated by the above statement introduces into 'the brain' (le cerveau) of
Leibniz's God a small crack — almost like a stroke — which splinters and bursts
on the surface of his reflection. It would change die nature of decision, or 'die
image of thought,' which recalls the image of the mirror filled with cracks and
splinters; Deleuze often uses this image to represent the mind filled with
hesitation, which multiplies possible worlds like the fractal lines of a crystal-
event. In this respect, we can now see that, contrary to its earlier determination,
the 'close-up' of Fang's mind presents us widi the direct image of time as 'the
garden of bifurcating paths.'
This image of the cerebral interval constitutes a positive inversion of the
earlier schema in so far as the powers of the labyrinth (i.e. the powers of
speculation, or 'the powers of the false') are no longer held back in the shadows
of decision, but rather given a positive expression of 'actuality.' As Deleuze
writes, 'we now find ourselves before another inter-cerebral interval between
intelligence itself and society: Is it not this "hesitation" of the intelligence that
will be able to imitate the superior "hesitation" of things in duration, and that
will allow the human, with a leap, to break the circle of closed societies' (B 109)?
The initial response to this question is 'No,' since man often leaps in the name
of an essential egoism that he seeks to preserve against social obligation, and the
human intelligence often liberates itself from one circle (or closed society) only
to find itself die progenitor of another. Yet something positive occurs, nonethe-
less, which is the appearance of 'something in this interval between intelligence
and society.'
In Deleuzian philosophy, this 'something = x' has been given many names —
e.g. 'intensity,' 'becoming,' 'the variable' or simply, 'the new.' In Bergsonism,
for instance, 'what appears in the interval is emotion' (B 110); not the emotion
of egoism, however, which is 'always connected to a representation on which
it depends,' but rather a new 'creative emotion' which is purely potential
(en puissance), and 'in fact, precedes all representation, itself generating new
ideas' (B 110). In other words, it is not a new image of action that finally breaks
the vicious circle of judgement, but rather the appearance of a new 'being' who
makes use of the play of circles in order to break into the closed circuit between
the dominant image of judgement and the passive nature of intelligence. It is
precisely at this point that we might locate the conjugation between philosophy
and non-philosophy.
As a result, Deleuze writes, 'the play of the world has changed in a unique
way, because it has now become the play that diverges':

Even God desists from being a Being who compares worlds and chooses
the richest compossible. He becomes Process, a process that at once affirms
incompossibles and passes through them ... Beings are pushed apart, kept
open through divergent series and incompossible totalities that pull them
outside, instead of being closed upon the compossible and convergent
world that they express from within. (Fold 81)
32 THE NON-RHIUOSORHY OF GILLES DELEUZE

In the fifth chapter of The Fold, entitled 'What is the event?', Deleuze proposes a
concept of contemporary philosophy that corresponds to Borges's labyrinthine
construction, which is now defined as a field of bifurcations and divergences in
what Deleuze has called in many places the 'ideal game' (jeu ideal). The first
rule of this game is that there is divergence, rather than opposition, between
compossible and incompossible worlds; the second rule is that there is variation,
rather than inclusion, of events. As a result, the concept now belongs to an order
of events before belonging to a logic of propositions. This becomes a major
axiom in die philosophy of Deleuze which he refers to as the paradox of concepts:
'the true object of a concept is an idea whose reality cannot be unfolded
empirically; an object, consequently, that is both outside experience and can
only be represented within a problematic form' (DR 219).
In order to provide an example of this paradox, let us take up one of
Deleuze's primary concepts, the concept of the 'Other Person' (Autrut), which
appears in the final chapter of Difference and Repetition ([1968] 1994) and
then twenty-five years later in the opening pages of What Is Philosophy?
([1991] 1996). In one sense, the Other Person vividly portrays the problem of an
interior that is 'outside' the powers of representation. The Other Person is a
surface pushed up against me, a surface that remains nonetheless deeper than
any subjective interior and, at the same time, further than any external object of
perception. We should recall at this point that the Freudian topology of 'the
Unconscious' can be defined precisely as the effect that this interior surface of
the other person introduces into the perceptual field of the subject, and, at the
same time, as an exterior surface of an object upon which the partial or negative
qualities of projection and illusion unfold. The effect of the Other Person,
therefore, is that of a distortion within the perceptual field, but a distortion that
at the same time takes on the characteristics of the fold whereby the interiority
of the other person also becomes, on the other side, the expressed condition of
another possible world.
According to Deleuze, the concept of the Other Person is made up from
several components that function like the morsels or cut-ups of other concepts,
and that must suppose several diverse fields present at each point of the
concept's history. However, it is said to have three distinct and inseparable
components: a possible world, a face and actualized language (or speech). 'The
Other Person is a possible world, such as this world exists in a face which
expresses it, and effectuates itself in language which gives it reality' (QP 23).
Each of these components, in turn, is drawn from other concepts, cut up from
diverse and divergent fields that have intersected around the problem of the
Other Person, or are even responsible for its creation as a fundamental concept
of philosophy: the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger from which the
concept draws its distinction between Welt and Umwelt; the structuralism of
Levi-Strauss and the passage in Sartre's Being and Nothingness which is die
first to apply the discoveries of a structural science to the appearance of the
Other Person in the famous key-hole scene; the psychoanalysis of Lacan with
particular attention to the structures of perversion and psychosis; the literary
 THE PARADOX OF OOMCEPTS 33

vortices and cartographies of Tournier, Borges, Joyce, Gombrowicz; finally, the

philosophy of Leibniz where the concept draws its formula for the expression of
a possible world.
In the final chapter of Difference and Repetition, on 'asymmetrical synthesis of
the sensible,' Deleuze first introduces the Other Person as a 'special object'
which cannot be thought according to the requirements of representation, in
which the relationship between the Other and a possible world is dissolved and
is reduced either to the status of a peculiar object or to the status of a special
subject (the T). What is lost or becomes imperceptible (insensible) is what
Deleuze calls the singular 'expressive value' that defines the relation between the
Other Person and a possible world, which instead is erased in favor of a general
representational value. In other words, when die positive encounter widi the
Other Person has already been reduced to the status of another 'I,' it has been
stripped of its real expression, which is that of a problem introduced into the
field of the subject. As Deleuze writes, 'it is not the other which is another "I,"
but the "I" which is an other, a fractured "I"' (DR261). This problematic
condition is particularly revealed by the encounter with a lover, or with the lie as
the condition of the possibility introduced by the Other Person in language.
'There is no love which does not begin with the revelation of a possible world as
such, enfolded in the other which expresses it' (DR261). The representation of
the Other Person as another subject, or of the intention of the other's expression
in language by a convention of truth as a shared moral sense, is in fact a fore-
closure of the possibility that the existence of the Other Person first introduces.
Therefore, we might conjecture that under the requirements of representation,
there is no real distinction between others, and thus no differences between one
other and the next. What remains 'unthought' and 'outside' representation is
precisely the difference that is implicated and enveloped (interiorized) in the
idea of another possible world that the Other Person expresses as a reality.
Because the Other Person designates the exceptional case of an object whose
exterior cannot be fully explicated, of a subject whose interior cannot be
enveloped by the 'I,' it cannot be approached by traditional ontology, but only by
a special and 'artificial' means. 'That is why, in order to grasp the other as such,'
Deleuze writes, 'we are right to insist upon special conditions of experience,
however artificial — namely, the moment at which the expressed has (for us) no
existence apart from that which expresses it' (DR261). Here, we might —
again — discern the importance that Deleuze accords to the various domains of
art (literature, painting, cinema) all of which fulfil these 'special conditions
of experience' in a unique way, where the expressed can no longer be separated
from its expression. Consequently, it is important to note that Deleuze grasps
the position of the 'other person' only from the appearance of the face and from
an instance of speech that confers upon this other possible world a reality.
As Deleuze argues in Foucault:

statements are not directed toward anything, since they are not related to a
thing any more than they express a subject but refer only to a language,
34 THE MOW-PHILOSOPHY OF GS I 1- L. E S DEL.EUZE

a language-being, that gives them unique subjects and objects that satisfy
particular conditions as immanent variables. And visibilities are not
deployed in a world already opened up to a primitive (pre-predicative)
consciousness, but refer only to a light being, which gives them forms,
proportions and perspectives that are immanent in the proper sense - that
is, free of any intentional gaze. (F 109)

The very possibility of these statements reverses the usual direction of its
'actuality.' Therefore, it is not a question of reading the statement and assigning
it to the duration of a fiction, which is to say, annihilating any possibility of
expression that is accorded to a face. On the contrary, that it does not face me in
someone, does not mean it speaks from nowhere, but rather that it expresses
a relation that I am not yet capable of comprehending or expressing myself.
In fact, it is sufficient that it is 'expressed,' even though its expression does not
yet have existence outside the one who expresses it, in order for there to be 'the
expression of a possible world.'2 Given these special conditions of experience in
which the expressed can no longer be separated from its expression, the role of
the art as the discovery of new 'percepts and affects assumes its full sense of non-
philosophy, as the new ground for the creation of concepts.
But why are these 'special conditions of experience' necessary for instituting
a new ground for philosophy, one no longer determined by representation?
On one level, the significance that Deleuze attaches to the concept of the Other
Person can be understood as a revision of Kant's formula concerning the 'highest
principle of all synthetic judgements' which reads: the conditions of the possi-
bility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of
the objects of experience. It now reads: the condition of all perception, for others
as well as for ourselves, but also the condition of passing from one world to
another one, is at the same time the condition of the Other Person as the concrete
expression of the possible as such. As Deleuze writes, 'In every psychic system
there is a swarm of possibilities around reality, but our possibles are always others'
(DR260 - my emphasis).
What is the difference between these two formulations? In Kant's formula-
tion, according to Heidegger's influential commentary in Kant and the Problem
of Metaphysics ([1965] 1990), transcendence is described as the 'act of orientation
which lets something take up a position opposite to ... [and] forms the horizon
of objectivity in general.'3 This primordial act or orientation is bestowed upon
the Subject of representation, which can be described as a precursory power of
'turning toward ...' and lets something become an ob-ject (and therefore must
be pre-disposed at all times to becoming an ob-ject of representation). Therefore,
even though the power of representation is revealed by Kant to be essentially
dependent, finite, 'receptive' rather than 'creative,' it is still defined as a precur-
sory orientation 'which alone constitutes the possibility of pure correspondence,'
that is, the possibility of truth, provided that truth means 'the unconcealment of
(Unverborgenheit von)!1 The crucial significance of this passage, as Heidegger's
commentary highlights, is that representation is accorded with a general power of
 THE PARADOX OF CONCEPTS 35

orientation that precedes all empirical truth and renders it possible, as happens
when Kant says that ontological knowledge is given an 'empirical use' that serves
to make finite knowledge possible.5
In Deleuze's formulation of this power of orientation, on the other hand, the
Other Person becomes 'the condition of all perception, for others as well as for
ourselves' (WP 18). Under this condition, 'not only the subject and object are
distributed but also figure and ground, margins and center, moving object and
reference point, transitive and substantial, length and depth' (WP 18). Hence,
the primordial act of'orienting to,' which functions as the condition of truth as
well, is no longer accorded to a transcendental structure of representation, but
rather to the reality of the effect that is introduced into the perceptual field of
the subject by the Other Person. If it did not function, as Deleuze says,
transitions and inversions would be abrupt and we would always run up against
things. In short, there would be no breadth or depth of the perceptual field, and
therefore, no possible world. Perhaps this is why Deleuze reasserts at several
points that 'the concept of the Other Person ... will [also] entail the creation
of a new concept of perceptual space' (WP19). In contrast to the Kantian
formulation, the power of orientation is 'derived' from the empirical plane,
which is then given a transcendental use - 'we will consider a field of experience
taken as a real world no longer in relation to a self but to a simple "there is"'
(WP 17) — and it is from this use that the perceptual field (and by extension, the
world) is OPEN to redistribution, each time, as to its margins, its center, its
length and its depth. There is no longer an a priori or transcendental perspective
from which a world is given from an ideal perspective that totalizes all other
perspectives and orients them. The famous transcendental unity of space and
time is derived from an empirical plane, not from the transcendental unity that
belongs to a subject of representation. Therefore, the Other Person is given the
status of 'an a priori concept from which the special object, the other subject,
and the self must all derive, not the other way around' (WP 16).
Although we have explained the 'reversal' of the conditions of experience
introduced by the concept of the Other Person, one last problem concerns us,
which is why the conditions introduced by the Other Person are always
described in terms of a 'multiplicity.' This question immediately returns us to
perhaps the problematic of contemporary philosophy: the existence of multiple
worlds, since 'we are dealing here with a problem concerning the plurality of
subjects, their relationship and reciprocal presentation' (WP 16). For his part,
Deleuze locates the origin of this problem of multiplicity precisely in the
baroque period, when the principles that organized the world were shattered to
bits and philosophy itself suffered a schizophrenic episode. (It is interesting to
note that Deleuze defines the period of philosophy that followed under the term
'neurosis,' particularly with regard to the philosophy of Kant.)

We can better understand in what way the Baroque is a transition.

Classical reason toppled under the force of divergences, incompossibilities,
discords, dissonances. But the Baroque represents the ultimate attempt to
36 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I LLES DELEUZE

reconstitute a classical reason by dividing divergences into as many worlds

as possible, and by making from incompossibles as many possible borders
between worlds. Discords that spring up in a same world can be violent.
They are resolved in accords because die only irreducible dissonances are
between different worlds. (Fold 81-82)

It is precisely the creative or productive nature of the baroque solution that

marks Deleuze's definition of philosophy as 'the creation of concepts.' However,
from the passage above, we are perhaps also in a better position to understand
Deleuze's constant demand for a thought of multiplicity. As Deleuze once said
regarding the Leibnizian statement concerning the principle of sufficient reason,
'the real is rational,' it would be wrong to understand this as a proposition.
Rather, it was Leibniz's cry. It was the Leibnizian demand that everything be
rendered to reason, at the point of philosophy's greatest crisis when the world
itself was being threatened by disillusionment and the principles were about to
be toppled. Creation, therefore, is an action always taken in the last resort, as a
kind of scream. As Deleuze remarks in a seminar on Leibniz:

In some ways, the philosopher is not someone who sings, but someone who
screams. Each time that you need to scream, I think that you are not far
from a kind of call of philosophy. What would it mean for the concept to be
a kind of scream or a kind of form of scream? That's what it means to need a
concept, to have something to scream! We must find the concept of that
scream. One can scream thousands of things. Imagine something that
screams: 'Well really, all that must have some kind of reason to be.' It's a
very simple scream. In my definition, the concept is the form of the scream,
we immediately see a series of philosophers who would say, 'yes, yes'! These
are philosophers of passion, of pathos, distinct from philosophers of logos.
For example, Kierkegaard based his entire philosophy on fundamental
screams. But Leibniz is from the great rationalist tradition. Imagine Leibniz,
there is something frightening there. He is the philosopher of order, even
more, of order and policing, in every sense of the word 'policing.' (In the
first sense of the word especially, that is, the regulated organization of
the city.) He only thinks in terms of order. But very oddly in this taste for
order and to establish this order, he yields to the most insane concept
creation that we have ever witnessed in philosophy. Disheveled concepts,
the most exuberant concepts, the most disordered, most complex in order
to justify what is. Each thing must have a reason.6

Perhaps, by analogy, we can now understand Deleuze as 'the thinker of

multiplicities,' as a different cry — everything is multiple, everything must be
different, and only in this way can it also be found to be in accord - posed today
in a world that is on the brink of being swallowed by difference understood as
irreducible divergence, opposition: a world fashioned by the negative and by
 THE PARADOX OF CONCEPTS 37

representation in which real differences are fated to annihilation, and all that
remain of these differences are the various ghosts and phantoms.
In conclusion, therefore, let us try to formulate a provisional axiom from the
above observations. For Deleuze, it has never been a question of 'breaking out' of
the world that exists, but of creating the right conditions for the expression of other
possible worlds to 'break in' in order to introduce new variables into the world that
exists, causing the quality of its reality to undergo modification, change and
becoming. The discovery of this 'something = x,' in other words, engenders the
condition of'the new': the various concepts that Deleuze has invented in order
to excavate the 'outside,' the sensible surface from which he will extract new
assemblages of visibilities and statements that combine to create new 'signs' that
have never before existed on the face of the earth (a process that is illustrated in
the frequently cited Proustean signs of 'madeleine' and 'Combray'). Conse-
quendy, the domains of literature (with its esoteric word and its paradoxical
statements), cinema (with its images of movement, action and time), and finally
the architectural fragments of the Baroque (with its internal, monadological
spaces and its infinite fafades) provide material for the production of new
surfaces and new sensible signs that diagram an essential 'indecision' in the
mind of God, a 'hesitation' in the nature of movement, and a 'stammering' in
the proposition. Indecision—hesitation-stammering - these are the special
forces that are combined to introduce a new brand of repetition into time, a
species of repetition that will find its source in new arrangements of possible
intuitions, a poetics of chaos.
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 PART TWO

ON THE (BAROQUE) LINE

AN EXPOSITION OF THE f= O L. D
This page intentionally left blank
 5

'THE MIND — B O D Y PROBLEM9

AND THE ART OF

'CRYPTOGRAPHY'

Ecrire et dessiner sont identiques en leur fond. (Paul Klee)

Obviously, the highest, if not the final, aim of philosophy is absolute knowledge.
Yet, this means something very different in its Platonic, its Epicurean and, finally,
its Hegelian epochs. After Descartes, at least, a certain tradition of contemporary
philosophy has understood 'absolute knowledge' as the subject of'representation'
(Vorstellung), although this only fulfills and exacerbates a certain Platonism and
perverts the very sense of knowledge by misrepresenting its essence as adequatio
(truth as certitude, rectification with 'a state of things or affairs'). In taking up
the critique of Western philosophy after Descartes, Deleuze is not that far
removed from Derrida, although each expresses the critique of representation
in radically different terms. For Deleuze, any critique of negativity (for example,
'deconstruction') still grasps the question of knowledge from extrinsic and,
therefore, representational terms. On the contrary, absolute knowledge — if it is
to become adequate to a knowledge of the process of creation — must be under-
stood from a creator's point-of-view. (This remarks the strange alliance between
Leibniz and Nietzche.) According to this view, the final goal of knowledge is
die discernment of the principle by which 'life' is implicated with matter;
knowledge is die discernment of the method by which the soul is folded with an
animal's body. Thus, the fields of embryology and cryptography may offer a
better image of the Leibnizian philosopher's logos than mathematics. Moreover,
this principle of discernment has a practical and ethical outcome as well, since
all knowledge must have a practical application in that it guides us in discerning
the best principles for determining 'how one can live.'
In The Fold ([1988] 1993), this method is presented as 'cryptography.' Deleuze
writes: 'A "cryptographer" is needed, that is, someone who can at once account
for nature and decipher the soul, who can peer into the crannies of matter and
read into the folds of the soul' (Fold 3). Here we might discover the allegorical
significance of baroque architecture for Deleuze, which takes the crypt as its
foundation and prima. principia. of construction and gives a different notation to
the function of a 'key,' which I will address below. Deleuze presents the concept
of the 'Baroque' in the same way that he might present a problem in architecture;
that is, where the formal possibilities of the design are inseparable from die
42 THE NOIM-PHIL.OSORHY OF GIL-LIES DEL.EUZE

possibilities (and 'incompossibilities') enfolded within each material component.

Specifically, the problem of design issues from the existence of two distinct kinds
of infinities that make up the universe, which Deleuze describes as two hetero-
geneous and irreducible types of fold ('enfre les plis et les replis) that run through
the baroque construction. In turn, this problem is further complicated by the
presence of a third term which exhibits a tendency to 'fold between these two
folds,' a tendency that Deleuze identifies with the Leibnizian concept of the
monad. What occurs under the term 'baroque,' therefore, no longer refers in its
essence to an historical and epochal concept, but rather to a process (oAN EXPOSITION OF THE f= O L. Dperatio):
to something that expresses this proclivity to fold and un-fold, or to 'endlessly
create folds.'
In so far as cryptography is 'the art of inventing the key to an enclosed thing,'
Deleuze refers to the baroque line as the problem of what is called a 'crypt,' as
well as to the proliferation of its random combinations that are like the twisted
coils of matter surrounding the living beings that are caught in blocks of matter.
However, if the crypt holds the key for deciphering both Leibniz and 'the
Baroque', it cannot be understood as a content, or an essence, but rather as a
dynamic instability produced by the scission that runs between mind and body:
'a scission which causes each of the two split terms to be set off anew' (Pli 40-41).
This entails a notion of the fold that runs between the mind and the body that
can no longer be figured in terms of opposition and, thus, is much more complex
than that of Descartes. As Deleuze argues, Descartes was unable to reconcile the
body and the soul because he was unaware of the body's own inclination and
'tried to find content's secret running along straight lines and liberty's secret in
the uprightness of the soul' (Pli 5).1 Deleuze locates the principle of this scission
in the monad itself, and the problem of architecture refers to complete construc-
tion of the concept from its initial premise, 'no doors or windows.' This unfolds
the autonomy of 'an interior without exterior,' which can be figured no longer
as the result of a simple opposition, but as the distinct product of the two
infinities that run through the living being and which separate the absolute
interiority of the monad from the infinite exteriority of matter. (This division
also results in the creation of the two facades of Leibniz's philosophical system,
which comprise independently of one another the metaphysical principle of life
and the physical law of phenomena.) In other words, this forms a 'distinction in
kind,' following Bergson's phrasing of the distinction between matter and
memory, a distinction that figures prominently in Deleuze's reading of Leibniz.
And it is by means of this distinction that Deleuze locates in both Leibniz and
'the Baroque' a nearly schizophrenic tension between open fafade and closed
chamber; specifically, the absolute scission caused by the incommensurability
and incommunicability of two kinds of fold that require, in order 'to trace the
thread through the labyrinth,' a more distinctive order of procedure (or operatio)
than has been represented either by mathematical clarity, or by the distinctness
of the object as it appears to the senses.
On the conceptual plane shared between philosophy and mathematics, this
solution will require a new division of labor other than the one, still present
 a 43

in Kant (at least, the Kant of The Critique of Pure Reason], which relegates
to philosophy the use of concepts and their regulation through a process of
jurisprudence, even though reason draws die construction of concepts from
mathematical knowledge.2 Although the concept of the fold in some ways
resembles the problem of inflection in mathematics, it cannot be reduced to a
madiematical problem, since it concerns many other fields as well including
biology, economy, language and the arts (hence, Deleuze's kinship with die
problem faced by Leibniz concerning the new ground of philosophical concepts,
the ground of 'non-philosophy'). As a result of this diversity in relation to die
genesis of ideas, according to Deleuze, what is required is an 'entirely new
regime of light' (Ph'44), that is, a philosophical construction drawn from the
possibility of its own art of creating concepts, using whatever light can be
fabricated without reference to any objective facade, or the profile of a contour.
Here, the notion of the problem that Deleuze employs in order to read this
central proposition of Leibniz also finds an analogy to a problem of contem-
porary music in its search for new harmonies by means of an extended range of
dissonance. It is Leibniz, according to Deleuze, who 'makes Harmony a basic
concept' of philosophy (N 163). We might immediately add, however, that
harmony can only be understood as a solution to the problem of multiplicity,
or, in Leibnizian fashion, the problem of multiple and potentially incompos-
sible worlds.
The thematic of dissonance is treated in The Fold as indicating the horizons
of incompatible worlds encrypted within the monad; thus, Deleuze imports its
concept from the domain of musicology in order to account for the use of the
crypt within a baroque architecture and to decipher the problem introduced by
the Leibnizian notion of'incompossibility.' There is a cryptic dissonance within
the monad, caused by the horizons of 'incompossible worlds,' which will allow
Deleuze to problematize the notion of harmony within a Leibnizian construc-
tion that is founded on the prepositional identity. Instead, Deleuze employs a
more modern conception of harmony that is present in certain modern writers,
'like one finds with Joyce, or even with Maurice Leblanc, Borges or Gombrowicz'
(Plilll), in which several divergent series, or incompossibles, can be traced
within the same virtual 'chaosmos,' rather than excluded to entirely different
worlds. As a result, the Leibnizian notion of a central harmony (or principle
of sufficient reason) undergoes a fundamental change that is best exemplified in
the domain of modern literature: in place of the subject as identity of the
proposition we have the subject as an envelope of the type 'Finnegan' (Joyce), or
Tang' (Borges); in place of the predicate as attribute, we have the event: to
wake, to attend one's own funeral, to mourn and be mourned, to shed a river of
tears, to sing a lullaby, or 'to have a secret,' 'to kill or not to kill the stranger.'
This will become an important consideration when we analyze below the role
that Leibniz assigns to the concept of God within an absolute order of inclusion
(or compossibility).
According to both notations of the problem outlined above, the Leibnizian
proposition 'no doors or windows' functions as a central contradiction in a
44 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GILLES DELEUZE

philosophical system whose newly invented task will no longer be the suppression
of the dissonance it produces (as, for example, what happens in Aristode who
reduces it to a species of contradiction, or Hegel to the negative), but rather the
multiplication of its principle. According to Deleuze, this proposition will also
function as a 'wild-card' that Leibniz draws from his sleeve in order to effect a
complete change in the rules of the game. This is what Deleuze refers to as the
Leibnizian revolution, which is the transformation of the concept of Right into a
universal jurisprudence, whereby principles are given a reflective usage, and the
philosopher will have to invent the principle that rules a given case (Pli 91). This
accords to the philosopher a new distinction, never known before Leibniz, from
which he derives his concepts by a method of inventio and no longer adequatio.
It is at this point that one understands the importance of this transformation for
the new role of philosophy defined as 'the artful creation of concepts'; after
Leibniz, the philosopher must invent the 'best conditions' in order to justify any
presentation of truth. Since principles are no longer given, nor do they fall
ready-made from the sky, they must be created, which is to say they must be
fashioned by hand.
Returning to the question 'What are crypts for?' — moreover, against the
usual notion that crypts are used for hiding, for repression or exclusion -
Deleuze often defines the crypt by the special type of reading that occurs within
the monad. The crypt designates both die place of reading in the monad (the
reading-room sealed up in light, or the book) and an operatic, that is, the 'act'
of reading itself (the art of cryptography). In short, it is at once crypt and cipher,
secret passage and 'the shortest path through the labyrinth.' This movement
creates what the poet Yves Bonnefoy once described as the integral 'movement of
interiority' within the Baroque, and signals a point of light that is both infinitely
divided shadow and light rising up from an obscure background within the
monad itself, a light defined by its damp luminosity, like the glow of large animal
hides or the skins which drape the walls of the crypt and provide whatever light
there is for reading. At the same time, we should recall that the crypt accounts for
the creation of the concept in Leibniz's philosophy as an extreme movement of
scission by which he encrypts all perception, that is, the force engendering the
subject of perception along with the unity of the perceived, within the monad in
order to follow its principle 'fold after fold, fold upon fold.' According to
Leibniz, because they are finite, all monads must unfold their own predicates
according to a prior order laid down by God's point-of-view (Aiigenblick).
However, Deleuze often employs the poetic statement, 'fold upon fold, fold after
fold,' to show what happens when the vertical series of folds stacked on top
of one another, representing the scholastic conception of God (Scientia Dei),
fall back upon (se rabat sur) the horizontal series formed by the monads — like
'a dance of particles folding back on themselves' (N 157). By constructing the
relation of these two series via the concept of the fold, Deleuze improves upon
the Leibnizian construction by effectively creating a 'diagonal line' in order to
avoid the vertical line of transcendence. (In short, Deleuze renovates 'la maison
baroque in order to make it follow more modern principles, even tastes, which
 a 45

would include die rejection of the transcendent as a dominant factor.) As for the
vertical line, it is curved to echo 'the pleats of matter.' Thus, what Deleuze refers
to as a 'cryptography,' and Leibniz simply as 'the act of Reading,' is a new
method invented to discern the process by which the life is enfolded/unfolded
within the body of the monad, thus forming an analogy to the tensions that
make up the scission between exterior and interior, between perception in
matter and reading in the soul. As an aside, Deleuze gives the relevance of this
method of 'reading' for our contemporary situation in Negotiations, where he
says the following: 'The move toward replacing the system of a window and a
world outside with one of a computer screen in a closed room is taking place in
our social life: we read the world more than we see it' (N 157-158).

Figure 1 Diagram of the interior and exterior of the monad

In order to better comprehend what Leibniz understands by an 'act of reading

in the monad,' and Deleuze by 'cryptography,' therefore, it will be necessary to
follow the various diagrams that Deleuze develops to theorize the baroque
construction of the conceptual pair: reading—seeing. The first diagram offered by
Deleuze, 'la maison baroque (an allegory of the monad), presents us with a
building that is comprised of two levels: above, a closed private room, draped
with cloth 'diversified by folds' lit from below, where we find a common room
that receives light 'from a few small openings' that designate the five senses (Pli 7).
The problem of the upper room, in which all luminosity has been sealed in,
can be posed in terms of the classical relation between natural perception and the
source of light to which Plato responded with the doctrine of the Ideas. Here,
there is no such continuity and the direction has been reversed. It is no longer a
matter of forming any continuity between perception and the ideational, since
there is no relation between the two; neither is it a question of light raised to the
level of the idea, nor of the idea descending to a level of a common perception, or
a
nor even an opposition, but rather, 'a whole new regime of light.'
As Deleuze recounts, the second figure (or diagram) that was created to
explore the interiors of the baroque construction is the chambre obscure, which
functions like the small chamber in the apparatus of a camera, and is linked in the
process of photography to the dark-room where an image is developed. At first,
the dark-room has only a small, high opening through which light enters, passing
46 THE N O N - P H I l_ O S O P H Y OR <5 I l_ l_ E S D E l_ E U Z I

Figure 2 "The baroque house' (an allegory)

through two mirrors, the second of which is tilted to follow the page upon which
light will project the unseen objects which are to be drawn. And yet, as Deleuze
argues, this schema will not prove adequate for an explication of the baroque line,
which, first of all, necessitates the separation of the line of light from an optical
diagram. Leibniz, according to Deleuze, is the first to liberate the fold as a pure
formal element: 'a fold that unfolds all the way to infinity' (Pli 5). Perception is
grasped from a point where it is no longer dependent upon the metaphor of light,
which effaces the importance of contour. The point of light will no longer be
situated as the cause of perception, and the monad is not to be confused with a
surface onto which an object projects its shadow, nor somewhere beneath this
first surface, with the shadow of an internal space for mental representation.
Concerning these shadows, Michel Serres writes:

My knowledge is limited to these two shadows; it is only a shadow of

knowledge. But there is a third shadow of which the two others only pro-
vide an image, or a projection, and which is the secret buried deep within
the volume. Now it is probable that true knowledge of the things of this
world lies in the solid's essential shadow, in its opaque and black density,
locked behind the multiple doors of its edges, besieged only by practice and
theory. A wedge can sunder the stones, geometry can divide or duplicate
cubes, and the story will, inevitably, begin again; the solid, whose surfaces
cannot be exhausted by analysis, always conserves a kernel of shadow hidden
in the shade of its edges.

Contrary to this infinite analysis of shadow and the kernel of shadow, the
superficial shadow (or edge) and the shadow of depth (interior of a solid), in
the case of Leibniz die subtraction of die 'point of light' from the external world
 •THE MIND — B O D Y PROBLEM' *V7

of objects corresponds to the new determination of the realitus objectiva (or

ob-jectum, in the sense of what stands opposite, or over against, as pure possi-
bility) that, for Leibniz, is merely passive. In Theodicy, Leibniz writes:

It is true that Form or the Soul has this advantage over Matter, that it is the
source of action, having within itself the principle of motion or of change, in a
word, ta autokinaton, as Plato calls it; whereas matter is simply passive, and
has need of being impelled to act, agitur, ut agat. But if the soul is active
of itself (as indeed it is), for tliat very reason it is not itself absolutely
indifferent to action, like matter, and must find in itself a ground of deter-
mination. According to the system of Pre-Established Harmony, the soul
finds in itself, and in its ideal nature anterior to existence, the reason for
its determinations, adjusted to all that shall surround it. That way it was
determined from all eternity in its state of mere possibility to act freely, as
it does, when it attains existence. (T §323)

What is important to note from the above passage is that Leibniz makes the
distinction of possibility—actuality derivative of what he calls vis activa (power),
which designates the pure capacity of the soul for some act, as well as its capacity
to undergo becoming, or to allow something to be made out of itself. The vis
activa thus corresponds to what Deleuze will later define as 'the virtuality of the
idea' (inclination), that is, the power that belongs to the soul and is expressed
by its tendency to action and by the act itself as die ultimate actualization of
the action.
As Leibniz writes, 'Aside from this interior principle of change within the
monad, there must also be a particular trait of what is changing, which produces,
so to speak, the specification and variety of monads... and within each monad,
a plurality of affections and relations, [even] though it has no parts' (M §11—13).
Leibniz's statement that monads are simple, 'meaning, they have no parts,'
implies that the relation part—whole cannot be predicated to them since predica-
tion entails die possession of an attribute. Yet, because monads possess no parts,
they cannot enter into aggregation or composites as parts, or be determined from
the perspective of a whole as a portion that is interior to the whole. Hence, 'there
is nothing that might be transposed, nor can there be any internal movement
which could be excited, commanded, or diminished between monads' (M §7).
But how, then, do monads communicate with one another? This immediately
poses the critical problem of the communication between monads in terms of the
movement between apartments, or the passage between the compossible and
incompossible worlds that each monad includes at its base. According to
Deleuze, the passage between monads can only be deciphered by the operations
of allegory and by the forms of secrecy that are particular to the baroque artifice.
Both the allegory and the secret are founded upon the condition that no direct
communication is possible. It is precisely in response to this incommunicability
(which Leibniz calls 'incompossibility') that allegory and secrecy attain communi-
cation by an indirect means. Allegory is constituted on the principle that there
48 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I ULES DELEUZE

can be no direct presentation, or transposition, of the perceptual; therefore,

perception itself must become a sign, and the sign must become a text that must
be read, deciphered. The secret is constituted on the condition that no direct
discourse is possible, and so communication must take place in relation to a
certain 'absence of a Third,' which (as linguist Emile Benveniste reminds us)
founds the distinction between language and code that determines the particu-
larity of human language as 'free indirect discourse.'
But something quite striking occurs in this composite of the allegory and the
secret, which corresponds to the formation of the crypt in architecture and the
cipher in language, that is, the composite of ecrire—dessiner (writing-designing)
in the baroque artifice. In the absence of light, perception takes place in the
design, and must be constructed, piece by piece, apartment by apartment. This
allegory of perception corresponds to the function of the crypt as topological
region in the monad and is defined by the activity of reading. The monad is a
book or a reading-room. But the visible and the legible, the exterior and the
interior, the fafade and the room are not two different worlds, because

the visible has its own way of being read (like die newspaper for Mallarme),
and the legible has its own kind of theater (its theater of reading). Thus,
the combinations of the visible and the legible constitute the emblems
or the allegories that were dear to the Baroque ... and we are always being
led back to a new correspondence or mutual expression, 'inter-expression,'
'fold following fold.' (P1144)

If we have found that the secret indicates the situation of light as a 'problem'
within the monadological construction, it is precisely the sense of a crypt placed
in perception and of a type of incorporation (or inclusion) which is not as much
an enclosure of the thing, but rather a process which turns perception itself
into an allegory.
There is a danger here of perceiving both too little and too much from this
state of affairs. For instance, there is a danger of reducing allegory to the
composites made up of the emblems and small interior decorations that are
fabricated to replace an external view. This is the case of the newspaper, in
which the interval between perception and memory is founded on the analogy
with perception in only one of its aspects: brevity. On the contrary, in its very
act of encryption, the secret indicates a point of perception that is not
continuous with its 'figure,' and a limit that cannot be resolved by perception
(or the understanding associated with it), but rather by a formal power to extend
itself infinitely. It is for this reason that perception is not capable of deciphering
(unfolding) a secret, and it is a pure prejudice that the understanding takes the
secret to be a content corresponding to its own formal limitation. In turn, this
immediately leads us to a second danger, referred to above under the function
of a doxa (the origin of common sense and opinion) that makes the secret
an expression of ideology (an allegory of power). However, this conception of
power would violate the sanctify of the crypt, which cannot be thought of on
 •THE MIND — BODY PROBLEM' 49

the basis of the inclusion of a foreign idea or perception, since the monad
contains the whole world immanently, and since Leibniz outlawed that anything
could pass between monads in the form of influence (Einfluss). This is explicitly
stated in the following proposition:

It is impossible also to explain how a monad can be altered, that is, inter-
nally changed, by any other creature. For there is nothing in it which might
be transposed, nor can there be conceived in it any internal movement
which could be excited, directed, or diminished. In composites this is pos-
sible, since the parts can interchange place, but monads have no windows
through which anything could come in or go out ... In consequence of
what has been said, the natural changes of the monads must result from an
internal principle, since no external cause could influence their interior.
(M§7and §11)

Here, the notion of the crypt evoked above cannot be reduced to an already
constituted notion of the Unconscious: as a closed and sealed-off room, or a
variable key invented by an alien occupant. In place of this, Leibniz constructs
a topography where room and occupant, world and monad, would be entirely
inside, and the door would be on the outside, and would shut only from the
outside. In other words, the Leibnizian crypt is utterly, one might even say
infinitely, open. Thus, it follows that there is no need of doors that lock or invite,
of windows that shut out or illuminate.
But how can we account for this apparently bizarre and ludicrous description,
this topography for lunatics — all background, as if forming a there without a
corresponding here, a front without a back? Nevertheless, this would be necessary
deduction of die statement, 'no doors or windows.' In effect, this would entail a
conception of the monad as cryptic enclosure, the crypt being both the supreme
'contradiction' and the founding principle of the Monadology because it produces
the very form of the scission referred to above. Consequently, it is not a matter of
a representation, because the monad can never come to its own limit, but falls
from level to level, by occupying a present that consists of a contracted point and
an infinitely dilated bottom section, or a basement 'hollowed by other basements'
(Pli 6). What is missing is precisely the foreground, the object of consciousness.
The monad never becomes an object to itself, and does not represent itself
objectively, but rather becomes an objectile, the material support or canvas.
In this way, the body serves as the base for drawing up the shadows that emerge
with greater intensity from an even-more obscure background, since whatever
light there is plunges ceaselessly into shadow.
Returning to Deleuze's diagram of the monad (or 'baroque house'), the lower
levels are 'pierced with windows' or small openings, while die upper level is 'sealed
and sightless.' At the same time, die upper room is described as being 'resonant,'
a sounding box that will 'render audible the visible movements coming from
below' (Pli 7). The attribute of the crypt belongs only to the upper level 'sealed in
whiteness,' while the lower level remains infinitely open, both divided and
so THE N O N - P H I 1_ O S O P H Y OF G I L L. E S D E L E UZ E

infinitely divisible. The monad is that infinitely contracted point which is

differentiated from an infinitely divided space. Hence, the concept of closure
must be revised. We cannot say, for example, that the upper level is closed off
from the other, since die attributes of closure ('doors and windows') are said to be
completely lacking within the monad. Thus, Leibniz's concept of an interior can
neither find analogy with a content of perception (or a psychological datum), nor
be based upon the composition of geometrical solids in which content is also
what lies behind the representation of three facing sides, as the fourth side which
can be extrapolated only as an geometrical solution of the first three. Therefore,
what I referred to above as 'shadow' is composed neither of light nor of darkness,
but rather by the movements of the visible that oscillate or vibrate from the
matter below; it is by a process of resonance in the monad that the visible
movements in matter become audible. This is why there is no analogy of percep-
tion between the soul and matter, since there are two very different kinds of
receptivity involved: the receptivity of matter to the visible movements created by
die light streaming in from small openings, producing movements that spiral
upwards, becoming audible, resonating within a new series that has its own
material consistency. What is perceptible on one level becomes legible on another
through a melange of different material, and only by an essential 'graphism,' or a
diagram of light that is made completely from movement, can there be anything
like communication between the two levels.
The crypt functions as the echo chamber by which the visible movements in
matter are converted into an audible series without any notion of projection or
any continuity established between the two levels. Any communication between
interior and exterior must pass through the crypt which resonates with the visible
movements which take place below in matter. The crypt remains a breach, or
scission, nonetheless, and there can be no isomorphism established between
what is visible in matter and what is readable in the soul. It is important to see
the combination of two different aspects in the process of perception illustrated
in Figure 3: at one end, that of blurred vision caused by movement, sometimes

Figure 3 Resonance in the monad

 'THE MIND—BODY P H O B L E IUI ' 51

creating a series of images, like the movement of an athlete in slow motion; at

the other end, the point where a clear sound trails off and is obscured by
dissonance, or emerges from a background of noise. Light is not a cause of per-
ception because perception is essentially constituted by the fuzzy, the opaque,
the indeterminate or the blurred motion occurring in matter. Neither is it the
question of a clear and distinct note in the soul that would produce an echo,
because the monad can already be described as a chamber full of echoes and it is
from this cacophony of echoes that the possibility of a single note first arises.
(This is simply because a single note never occurs without the series that
conditions it.) Both aspects, lacking in the distinct clarities of the visual field
and the audible field, seem to blend and indicate how there is communication
between the two levels of the monadological construction through a process
of reverberation.
We already commented above on the construction of perception in the
Baroque as profoundly allegorical. Suffice it to say that the figure of the crypt that
Deleuze detects in the Monadology allows him to enlist the Leibnizian philosophy
within a certain logic of sense inspired entirely from the domain of empiricism,
'which knows how to transcend the experiential dimensions of the visible
without resorting to ideas' (LS32). Consequently, Deleuze sees in Leibniz's
philosophy the onto-genesis of ideas by means of the function of allegory, ideas
being only the macro-hallucinations that are produced and animated by the
micro-movements that occur below in matter. This does not mean that
the visible movements in matter are the cause, since reverberation describes
more the proclivity of the interior to resonate widi itself, that is, its capacity
(potentia activa) to fold, re-fold, mani-fold. Therefore, ideas can only be shaped
from the resonance of a thousand tiny perceptions, and it is because of this that
their contours appear fuzzy or vague, or can be described as without contour
since they are entirely without an object, but instead are only composed of
smaller folds 'right down to the minuscule folds of the atom.'
 6

HE RIDDLE OF THE FLESH

AND THE

'FU3CUM S UBNIGFt UIW'

In the Monadolagy the problems as well as the possibilities for the construction of
the monad, or 'the baroque house,' are derived from a melange of two distinct
materials: the number or algebraic function inscribed on papyrus, and the heavy
blocks of marble and stone borrowed from the geological strata (representing the
resistance of materials in an architectural construction). Matter resists infinity
according to its own material 'consistency,' which in turn, produces the charac-
teristics that are particular to it (M §7). In order to solve 'the riddle of the flesh'
(or animal body), Leibniz chose to combine the heaviness and density of a geo-
logical stratum with the fragile exoticism of papyri, which even after the writing
has been rubbed away still bears an impression. He did this, according to
Deleuze, in order to avoid the Oriental line that constructs an infinite and empty
space from a simple paper fold — a fold that could be seen to influence the
Occident via the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, or Cartesian Geometry. The baroque
Leibniz, however, did not believe in emptiness, and according to Deleuze, 'it is
profoundly characteristic of the Baroque to set itself in confrontation with the
Orient' (Pli 51). Consequendy, the singularity of the monad, its tensions, as well
as its politics, is inseparable from the object-matter (ob-jectile), and the way in
which this matter undergoes folds that constitute its textures, and give rise to the
resistances that are peculiar to the living body. It is owing to this principle that in
Leibniz's writings, particularly the Theodicy, the most unassailable structures
appear to tremble, or seem to be on the verge of toppling, either as expressing a
central 'imbalance' that could be considered the result of a flaw or error in the
design, or as expressing their perfection, even their 'glory,' depending upon one's
perspective. This is particularly true within the domain of baroque sculpture,
which offers Leibniz the greatest quantity of examples, apart from architec-
ture, where apparently intractable figures always seem to be falling or getting up,
or otherwise appear to be suffering from spells of dizziness and vertigo
(I'etourdissement). According to Deleuze, this 'trembling' (either out of intense
joy or extreme suffering) expresses the state of 'crisis' that marks the baroque
period in particular. Deleuze writes: 'The baroque itself already marks a crisis
in theological reasoning — a final attempt to reconstruct a world that's falling
apart' (N161).
 THE RIDDLE OF THE FLESH 53

The book of the idea forms the common walls of the monad, or baroque
house, and the facades themselves are unearthed from dieir strata through a
process of leafing. The monad is both book and reading-room, paper and stone,
as well as the rumour of a life that takes place between the two, in the fold
between the two other folds. What constitutes the specificity of this fold can be
enumerated under the problem of the flesh, which is why light is not adequate to
the 'luminosity' of an interior that it cannot reach to unfold. In other words, the
flesh is presented as a 'problem' that cannot be explicated by too simple a notion
of light, or by mathematical extension, since it encompasses the meaning both
of a crypt, the architectural motif, and of a cipher, which is difficult to discern
without knowing the 'key.' The 'act of reading,' introduced above, corresponds to
what life ciphers in the body, to the riddle of life itself, which can only be
deciphered in each individual by following all the predicates (perceptions) that
belong to it, and each monad can possess these predicate-perceptions only to the
degree that it can express diem clearly.
To illustrate this, let us take as an example the problem of 'having a body,'
which Deleuze treats in Part Three of The Fold. It is normal to express one's
relation to one's own body as a form of 'possession' and, therefore, to define the
body as a form of'property.' However, as Deleuze argues, the 'right to possess
my own body' is an order that is in no way 'natural,' but is rather a 'moral
requirement' (Pli 113). On one level, it is an order articulated by a social typol-
ogy of statements which condition the form this right will take as well as the
constraints and limitations that qualify this right due to the demands of social
and cultural institutions (e.g. childhood, gender, ethnicity, class and economy).
Second, this right 'to possess' is an order that results from a command that in no
way can begin with the individual. What is only apparently the most intimate
and 'natural' of liaisons is itself the issue (pragma) of a command: 'I must have a
body, it's a moral necessity, a "requirement" ' (Pli 113). In the form of'having,'
of possessing, which radiates into all the sensible predicates that I can associate
with my body (its shape and feeling, its movement, its sensorial perceptions, its
age and sex), are all the secondary predicates of a primary order that has been
folded upon me and that allows me to possess them as mine — that is, to possess
them, but also to express and articulate them in a series of perceptions that trail
in and out of consciousness. It is only because of this primary order that I am
capable of having a body.
And yet, precisely because the condition of my 'having a body' first arrives to
me in the form of a command, it somehow also distinguishes me from my
body - which is both 'mine' and 'not mine' - and thus makes 'me' responsible
for 'it.' Consequently, because my relation to my body is given in the form of
a command, I can possess my body only in as much as I obey this command,
and so long as I follow this order which, in turn, is linked to the forms of
law and social institutions that articulate it historically (definitions of property,
legal and illegal appropriations, the forms of domination, usury and theft).
Without this distinction, there could be a confusion of the two determinations of
'property' and this would lead to the most dreadful consequences: cannibalism,
54 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF CS I L U E S DELEUZE

necrophilia, slavery, molestation, rape, self-immolation. Therefore, it is not

merely by accident that the two fundamental prohibitions that Freud found at
the base of civilization (incest and cannibalism) are both determined by this
fundamental distinction, which is why he saw those neuroses that exhibit a
'primary narcissism' as a collapse of this distinction. Eating one's own faeces
is cannibalism or the eating of a corpse; masturbation is symbolically a form of
incest with oneself, or a member of one's own family.
Does this mean that I possess my body, so to speak, passively? Am I possessed
by it in possessing its attributes (such as my hair, the color of my skin, my sex)?
Yet, 'I must have a body.' Why? This could be phrased as a tautological com-
mand that lies at the origin of the notion of property and, in a fundamental way,
echoes the tautology of instinct. I must possess my own body because I (as a
subject) must be able to possess, pure and simple, that is, to possess something
rather than nothing. Deleuze describes this tautology by the degree of'obscurity'
that it presents to our consciousness and he portrays the fundamental gravity and
density of our feelings of anxiety concerning the possession of our own bodies.
According to Deleuze's formula of this anxiety, 'I must have a body because
there is an obscure object in me' and not the other way around: that because the
body is obscure, I must possess a more clear and distinct perception of myself as
a subject.
What is the source of this obscurity? Earlier we discovered that the notion of
the crypt designates a region of the monad and 'cryptography' describes the
activity of reading that takes place there, as the manner by which the monad
takes possession of the predicates, or events, belonging to its substance. At this
point we discover that there are secrets only to the degree that every monad must
possess a body, and that predicates circle around the attributes of possession in
the sense that they pose a problem of having rather than being. The monad does
not have an outside as predicate, in the sense that 'every perception must have a
relation to the body,' and what is 'outside' expresses no such relation of necessity
to the interior of the monad. The fafade, even pushed up against the monad,
does not express a relation or have the same formal properties that belong to that
entity which is in every case mine. It is in this sense that the body becomes the
cipher by which the monad reads the world it includes. It turns the statement
around and expresses a positive condition of possession, of 'having a body,'
which it possesses to the degree that there is 'an inside' that remains obscure.
The image of the body as a kind of container is here replaced by an obscure
background, fuscum subnigrum, where the events form a series from a present
whose line goes in both directions, both toward the future and toward the past.
Consequently, the body corresponds to this moral exigency, this task, for each
monad to develop all its perceptions. Deleuze writes:

In a certain sense, one that is more restrained, more intrinsic, one can say
that a monad, when it is called upon to 'live,' or even more when it is called
reason, unfolds within itself this region of the world that corresponds to its
 THE RIDDLE OF THE FLESH 55

own interior zone of clarity: it is called to develop all its perceptions, that is
its task. (PlilOl)

Or, as Leibniz writes:

It is necessary that entelechies (monads) differ from one another or not be

completely similar to each other; in fact, they are the principles of diversity,
for each differently expresses the universe from its own way of seeing. And
precisely this is their peculiar task, that they should be so many living
mirrors and so many concentrated worlds.

For Leibniz, therefore, the body is more than a simple crease in the skin,
a hem-line, sutured with organs, and perhaps the entire Monadology is con-
structed to account for it. If we have posited a relation to the body as exemplary,
perhaps it is because tliat it is folded by another distinction that cannot be
exposed by light without destroying its true nature. The very notion of a
'content' implies a space that is coextensive, even though it remains hidden, or
unexposed. Yet, what we have discovered is a measure no longer continuous with
perception, or with the profile of an object (the destruction of all contour, the
subtraction of the point of light). The body does not correspond to its objective
or physical representation, but rather to 'a pure feeling': it is the form under
which the datum is folded in a subject. For this reason, it may even be misleading
to refer to this 'image-matter' as body, since this would be a body without facade;
that is, without ob-jectum, which bears no relation to the body that can become
object (the other's body, or the body as object of knowledge, or the body as
component of the mass in politics). In this sense there is an extreme disassocia-
tion of the body from the space it occupies, which in turn can be represented
and coordinated with other spaces by becoming a location, a point, a numerical
sign which can be easily tabulated and manipulated by representational systems.
Hence, the concept of the crypt represents the very solution to the problem
of freedom in the Monadology, a solution that even approaches the meaning of
'liberation.' It refers to the formal power, or tendency, by which each monad
steals away by means of die crypt that it includes, foiling every attempt to grasp
'its own relation,' and only to the degree that the monad is able to maintain
possession of its own body. And yet, the body is not the monad either; rather, it
is a riddle (or cipher) extracted from a background that lies somewhere at the
interior of the monad in which there remains something obscure.
If to live is to fold, to decipher the imperative to unfold all of one's perceptions,
and if the secret is defined by the pure affirmation of 'having a body,' then how
can we account for its negative representation, as the anxiety surrounding its loss,
as the shadow of 'what one does not possess,' but is possessed by others?
According to Deleuze, this corresponds to the image of container, which we have
interpreted simply as a type of fold that remains imprisoned in a rigid materiality,
unable to grasp its own formal element. Although the realitus objectiva, as
56 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GILLES D E L. E U Z E

defined above, corresponds to pure possibility, it would be a contradiction to

the first principle of the Monadology to bestow upon it the power to 'enfoldthe first principle of the Monadology to bestow upon it the power to 'enfold
itself,' or to encrypt itself in the interior of the monad, since it does not have
this formal attribute of power (vis activa) which belongs only to the soul. Thus,
we might account for the negative representations as the various phantasms that
assign an 'un-reaT attribute of power to an external agency, even a non-existent
one, and this will be the entrance of evil into Leibniz's system. Here is Leibniz's
puzzling axiom: the monad contains the entire world within it, and there can be
no exercise of influence, power or 'possession' between monads; yet, even so,
between monads there is only a relation of exclusion, or resistance, as if each
monad is haunted by the secret of all the others that it carries somewhere within
itself. These 'others' can be expressed in several ways. They might appear as
expressions of bifurcation and divergence ('I have multiple pasts'), as the pleni-
tude of possibilities that the monad must choose from at each moment ('I am
pregnant with future selves'), or as the self that it includes but leaves 'unrealized'
('I am another'). In a sense, in each moment all others appear as variations of a
past or a future that die monad cannot unfold. Here, in this sense of temporal
divergence or the multiplicity of selves (which appear as others), we are perhaps
approaching the purest source for die conception of 'the unconscious,' one even
envisioned by Freud as Deleuze himself remarks, prior to allowing this concept
to be occulted by 'familial' personalities and by infantile politics.
If I have referred to the 'shadows' traced in the monad by all the others that
make up its open base, it was only in order to extend the vertigo (I'etourdissement)
of inclusions that make it difficult for the monad to unfold the predicates that
belong to its own special region and bring them to expression. We might also
extend the definition of these shadows in order to account for chaos-cacophony
of voices, stray thoughts and the interior poly-logue that always bubbles up from
its obscure base and seems to threaten consciousness from an indeterminate point
that is felt to be somewhere on the inside. As an aside, we might identify this
interior cacophony as the absolute condition of speech, and it is important to
note that there is neither a voice belonging to the monad, nor anything like
silence in the interior. The monad is already a chamber of whispers, and expres-
sion occurs then only as the synthesis of these whispers into a chorus in which
the monad itself might appear like a conductor. What this dissonance represents
is nothing less than the ceaseless activity of expression by all the other monads,
that is, the joy of possessing their own attributes and developing their own
perceptions which constitute the various movements and vibrations that form
the somber background of the monad itself. At the same time, it is also from this
background that it draws its own hints and clues to deciphering all the signs that
swirl up from its obscure base.
The monad perceives with and by means of the act of folding, by drawing
perception out of its obscure background, a process closely approximating hallu-
cination. Again, this does not imply that it perceives by means of projection,
since the monad itself is entirely without surface, while perception, almost hallu-
cination, remains without an object. Thus, according to Deleuze, the Baroque
 THE RIDDLE OF THE FLESH ST

replaced the operating distinction, form—content, with that of form—material

(form being understood here as the infinite potential which the very concept of
the fold implies). Here, Deleuze is very close to Heidegger's reading of monad as
drive (Drang), which also bears a relation to 'trigger,' or die 'bent bow.'5 The
fold refers to primary form in the soul, to the vis activa, and the form being the
actuality, which is the 'material expression' shaped by the singular characteristics
that the fold takes up. The fold describes the power to maintain the fold while
folding, and at the same time taking up new materials that will form the
characteristics and textures specific to the variety within each fold.
On the other hand, the fold dien must also be understood from its passive, or
material, aspect, and not simply relegated to the status of a verb (that is, to refer
its figure to language alone).6 Texture is also active, but in a sense its 'act' is also
a passion (a potentia passiva), since the act of folding is conditioned just as much
by the material that submits to this operation and, at the same time, gives to
the fold its own characteristics, its singular tensions and vibrations that create
the texture of the living body. In this context, we might recall that the specific
matter that composes the body determines its capacity to be folded by language
or permeated by light. This would also apply to the matter of the secret as
well, whose different figures could be understood as being caused by the matter
of expression, since tliere is no secret in general; each and every secret is both
formed and limited by the material in which it is embedded ('Origami,
'Embryology,' 'Geology' = paper, flesh or tissue, stone or strata), since each will
be constituted by the folds proper to it. Resemblance does not result from the
same fold that runs through each unfolding them as the contingent predicates of
one infinite fold; rather, it is the divergence, the material difference, that will
allow one fold to be captured within another, creating a resonance that is the
condition of harmony.
Finally, resonance (or what Leibniz calls Harmony) returns us once more to the
'communication' between orders or levels, that is, between two different types of
folds: between the coils of matter, which correspond to a multiplicity of materials
(as many as there are folds), and the folds themselves, which correspond to the
variable of powers in the soul. Resonance is already a rhythmic shadow produced
in matter and corresponds to the very problem of expression by liberating
expression to another plane. This is the distinction that Deleuze refers to with the
two phrases that are repeated throughout his study: fold following fold, and a
fold between the two folds, 'entre les replis etlesplis.' The case of resonance here is
thus between two systems - between paper and flesh, between the flowing mane
of a horse and the crest of a tree-line seen from the distance of a observer — in
which a variation in one system finds itself becoming a variable of another.
However, the relation is still not one of identity, since paper will not bleed when
it is cut and the mountain will not shake blocks of ice from its mane. Rather,
there is simply a resonance (or harmony) between the two systems, or series. In
order to illustrate this, let us return once more to the diagram of the 'baroque
house' with its upper and lower levels. The upper level sealed in whiteness, which
could be expressed as simply an absence of color (since the folds in the soul are
58 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I 1_ 1_ E S D E L E UZ E

immaterial folds composed of power); while below light spreads out, becoming
dimmer, invaginated by shadow (fuscum subnigrum). It is not a matter of the
absence of light, but rather an excess of color, movement and depth. It is for this
reason that Deleuze identifies Klee, Fautrier, Dubuffet and Bettencourt as
baroque painters, since they follow the same fold, or method, of beginning with a
dark canvas and adding texture, density, adding color as if through mixed media
(cloth, metal, wood, hair, teeth, shit = pale mauve, rust, blond, hazel, green,
brown). If white is seldom used, it is because it is the most difficult color to reach,
since one would have to pass through all the materials to liberate the immaterial
fold. White, therefore, does not express the absence of color, since nature abhors
a vacuum, but expresses the immaterial vibrations of all the folds, or what Paul
Klee has referred to as a 'gray point.'
As Klee defines it, die 'gray point' is the 'conception non-conceptual of the
non-contradiction' between that which becomes and that which dies; 'gray
because it is a non-dimensional point, a point between the dimensions and at
their intersection, at the crossroads.'7 Contrary to philosophy up to Hegel, which
motivates the dimensions by the relations between point, line and plane, Klee
sees them motivated by three series of polarities: a temporal dimension expressed
between white and black, a tonal dimension expressed between height and base,
and a caloric dimension expressing all the degrees between hot and cold. Thus,
temperature and degree of imbalance caused by the center of gravity upon an
affective body must be taken into account within any abstraction of perceptual
space-time.

Figure 4 Illustration of the 'gray point1 (PS 61)

In the above diagram, the gray point corresponds to a mobile equilibrium, a

center of balance, suspended over a veritable chaos of sensations. For Klee, this
balance or pendulum is nothing less than the symbol for the unity of time.
In constructing the concept of the 'gray point,' Klee first abandoned any linear
conception of color (represented by the natural phenomenon of a rainbow) and
with it any pathetic conception derived from the domain of the human, the
higher animal, with its tragic struggles between the body and the soul. In place
of this, Klee constructed a series of six colors, grouping them in three couples, or
opposing diameters, running back and forth from red to green, from blue to
orange, and from yellow to purple, all three diameters fixed at a point (the
center of the chromatic circle) which expresses the gray point. Klee proved his
theory of color by conducting two experiments, as described below.
 THE RIDDLE OF THE FLESH 59

Figure 5 The 'gray point' and a series of colors (PS 61)

The first experiment observed that the effect left upon the retina by the
sudden withdrawal of red after a long exposure was not red, but green (hence
the couple red—green will constitute one of the three diameters), thus proving
that there are two complementary colors alternatively engendered in the eye,
and between them, the point gray where they are equally mixed. Gray is not a
color, then, but the expression of the principle of homeostasis and represents the
balance movement and counter-movement along each diameter.
The second experiment is where we find the monadological construction of
color. It consists of a piece of paper folded into seven compartments with
gradations from pure red to pure green, in 'movements and counter-movements.'
This causes a center to appear: the central gray, compartment four. Klee writes:

The reciprocity or alternation of the scale red-green returns us to the pendu-

lum between movement and counter-movement. It also recalls the mobile
balance which will finally immobilize itself at the intersection of the gray.
This in no way signifies that red and green are captured in a static repre-
sentation, with all the red on one side and all the green on the other. Such
a representation would not suggest the simultaneous alternation, since it
would be necessary to pass by leaping from one term to the other
(construction).8

Here again, we must hold onto the diagram at the point of its extreme con-
tradiction where the body can be described as a shadow, or point of adum-
bration, even though the conditions that normally determine the possibility of
shadow are lacking. It is neither a shadow of an object (the interior not perceived
by the senses), nor projected by a point of light. Hence, die quality of shadow
does not refer to light but to color - as gray as granite, an uncarved block of
marble, or the flesh. It is from this point that Klee motivates the entire spectrum
of color and his construction of the gray point resembles the process of perception
within the monad and must, as Leibniz says, be differentiated from appercep-
tion and consciousness. 'The passing state which comprehends and represents
BO THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF GILLES DEI.EUZE

multiplicity in the unity or simple substance is nothing but what is called

perception ...' On this point the Cartesian doctrine has been defective (M §14).
If we discovered a determination of the object above as objectile, or the
'material support' (juscum subnigrum), perhaps here we discover a new deter-
mination of the subject as the mobile unity of a passing state, as a point of
equilibrium between movement and counter-movement. As in Klee's diagram
above, the gray point is a 'mobile balance' between two terms that must be
constructed by a process of leaping from one term to the other. The subject now
designates the temporal unity of a 'point-of-view,' but only on the condi-
tion that every point-of-view is centered on variation, as in the examples offered
by Klee. As Deieuze writes:

The status of the object has profoundly changed, so also is that of the
subject ... Such is the basis of perspectivism, which does not mean
dependence in respect to a pre-given or denned subject; to the contrary, a
subject will be what comes into view, or what remains in point-of-view.
That is why the transformation of the object refers to a correlative trans-
formation of the subject: the subject is not a sub-ject, but as Whitehead says,
a 'superject.' Just as the object becomes objectile, the subject becomes
superject. A needed relation exists between variation and point-of-view; not
simply because of the variety of points of view ... but because every point-
of-view is a point-of-view on variation. (Fold 20)

In Leibniz's system, therefore, the point-of-view can no longer be conceived as

a static center in a configuration of perspectives, but rather is described as a
problem of expression: the need to find the best point-of-view 'without which
chaos would reign' (Fold 22). Consequently, if the world can be described as an
infinite number of perspectives in variation, approaching chaos, then point-of-
view would correspond to the secret order of these perspectives that, according
to Leibniz, each monad includes. Ultimately, this is why Deieuze refers to
perception in the monad by the art of cryptography, since each monad includes
a unique variable (a key, or cipher) whereby the labyrinth can be ordered from a
single point-of-view, and this point-of-view will have important consequences,
finally, for the role played by God in Leibniz's system.
 7

ON GOD, OR THE 'PLACE VID

One final problem concerns the role assigned to the concept of God, or 'the
central monad,' in Leibniz's philosophy. This is important for our overall
argument, since Leibniz's concept will prepare the way for Deleuze's later treat-
ment of the problem of transcendence, which I outlined earlier, and even provide
him with the principle for solving this problem, and precisely by means of the
concept of 'the fold.' Despite the supposed importance that God plays in
Leibniz's system, it may well be that what distinguishes Leibniz's philosophy
from everything that has preceded it is that the concept of God is relegated to a
pure function. This is a particularly modern characteristic and prepares the way
for a notion of structure, although here we are speaking of an infinite structure of
inclusion (or coimpossibility), rather than a certain image of structure that
derived from a linguistic model. Here, the notion of a 'function' essentially
follows Frege's argument on the cipher which can be formulated by the following
proposition: there is something of the order of the function only where there is
not, or not yet, something of the order of an object, since the expression of the
object bears no relation to •A. place vide. The function, then, is the purest expres-
sion ofaplace vide, and here, as Frege remarks, 'we touch on something so simple
that it permits no logical analysis.'1 God can therefore be defined as the most
indeterminate element that belongs to all possible worlds, as the most dilated and
de-contracted state of the monad; he can also be likened to a continuous note of
an organ with a punctured valve (also called a cipher), which becomes the key by
which all the monads harmonize. Concerning this condition of harmony,
Deleuze writes, 'At its limit the material universe accedes to a unity in horizontal
and collective extension, where melodies of development themselves enter into
relations of counterpoint, each spilling over its frame and becoming the motif
of another such that all of Nature becomes an immense melody and flow of
bodies' (Fold 135). Some might immediately object that this would reduce God
again to pure spirit; on the contrary, Leibniz reduces the concept of God to
pure possibility.
The place vide can in no way be defined as empty, a null set, or even 'the set
of sets'; rather it designates an 'undefined or indefinite space,' not because it is
empty, but because it is full of all possible determinations. As Deleuze notes,
it is a space replete with multiple definitions and types of multivarious folds.2
This essentially concerns Leibniz's argument with Descartes who defined all
space negatively as the projection, the oudine, of the most indefinite object equal
to consciousness. In this sense, all space is literally cut from the same mold,
62 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I LLES D E L E UZ E

made-to-order, or as Heidegger posited, 'ready-to-hand' (Zubandeldt). Yet, for

Leibniz, space cannot be determined from its limit (extensio), but only by its
tendency to remain indeterminate and infinite, always productive of more and
more, always in surplus of its most minimal determination. Thus, fas. place vide is
another name for the pure 'background' from which the monad will draw all its
determinations in order to decipher its own obscure depth, or to distinguish itself
from all the others that populate it. In other words, Leibniz designates space not
by its form, but by its pure proclivity to fold, in-fold, un-fold, mani-fold (which,
in turn, must be distinguished from the particular infinity that belongs to matter,
which can be sub-divided, as Leibniz says, panes extra panes). And yet neither
infinity succeeds in attaining the interior principle, the formal dimension of the
fold that comprises the soul, which is 'unable to unfold all at once all its folds, for
these go on to infinity' (M §61). Leibniz designates this interior principle by the
function of the central monad, or God.
At this point, Leibniz's argument becomes rather difficult, even treacherous,
since one could easily comprehend a space that is replete with all possible
determinations by an image of 'latency,' in which every possible determination
is 'already installed' and 'ready for use' (in the same manner that a mainframe is
installed with certain programs that can be operated according to a given appli-
cation or problem of calculation). This is an error that often happens when the
function of the central monad, or the principle of God in the Monadology, is
conceived on the basis of its resemblance to the Scholastic notion of the Scienta
Dei, where God represents the highest of totalities and can synthesize every
perspective in a static unity of the One. Thus, the Leibnizian God is often repre-
sented as the 'wealthiest' of all the monads, and every other monad can only
possess its own perception as a representation of what, from time immemorial,
will have already been preordained (and previewed) in the mind of God. It is
in this way that Lyotard, for example, still understands Leibniz's conception
of the central monad, according to a static synthesis of possible perspectives that
founds every system of representation, which is why he so quickly dismisses
the Monadology?
Beginning with Leibniz, however, infinity no longer corresponds to eternity,
but only to the indefinite, the variable. Therefore, according to Leibniz's descrip-
tion, it is important to see that the central monad is perhaps the most improper
of all the monads: poorer than the poorest of the poor, but without an accom-
panying state of suffering derived from the loss of possessions; and wealthier than
die wealthiest, but without ever having possessed anything of its own. This is due
to the fact that 'God alone is entirely bodiless' (M§72). If we have already
discovered that each monad is defined by a necessary relation to its own body, to
its own perception (from which it receives the imperative to develop its percep-
tions following the world it includes and according to the cipher, something like
a singular point-of-view that it extracts from its base), then God can have no such
relation of necessity to a body. It is by the metaphor of 'nudity' that Leibniz
described the poorest of the monads, and while God expresses the very possibility
of 'nudity,' he cannot possess this nudity as his own; that is to say, he cannot
 O N G O D . O R T H E ' f > Z . X I G E y / D e ' B3

realize it. This is why he remains an expression of pure possibility within all possible
worlds, a beautiful and alien thing. However, it would also be a mistake to
conclude from this that God is therefore without time (or duration), since this
would simply confuse, as Leibniz often says, 'a long swoon with death.' God
suffers the longest duration of time, brought about by vertigo and the fainting-
spells he gets from spinning around in all directions and all perspectives of all the
possible worlds and in all times. There is a certain diabolical humor in Leibniz's
description of God, who appears in a state of constant intoxication, always
suffering from a little too much of time in its pure state.
It is important to recall here that this resembles the anxiousness that afflicted
the man-of-the-Baroque, and which accounted for his allegorical constructions.
Here we might recall a similar expression of dizziness and vertigo (L'etourdis-
sement) that is suffered by the individual monads. If we were to describe this state
of dizziness, it might be perceived as faint 'Brownian motion,' a blur, or as
Leibniz says, 'a squirming of fishes.' The monad already encounters this feeling
of vertigo from an indeterminate point that is already located in its interior, even
though this interior is also identified with the Anteriority of the world it includes.
However, this feeling is what appears to threaten it with the loss and dispos-
session of all its perceptions, of its 'own relation' to this world; and in response, it
must, if it is to live, develop all die infinitesimal perceptions into a perception
that is ordered by what Deleuze calls a crible (a screen, or a filter), and what I have
been calling a 'cipher.' If this dizziness is the effect of what was referred to above
as the place vide, then this indicates that the point of 'indetermination' is where
the monad and the world are related through the function of the central monad
to an inside in general, to time in its longest duration. This duration (or 'Inside')
would necessarily include the entire range of intervals or perceptions, from the
smallest to the largest, which constitute infinity, or time in general. We can see
here that the principle of inclusion follows precisely the proportion of the fold by
which the furthest dimensions converge; where the molecule is equal in propor-
tion to the whole of the universe, and a single moment is equal to the whole of
time. In fact, Leibniz considers the moment itself as equal to time in its longest
duration, as only the most contracted point, which is why, given enough time,
the monad can unfold (that is, express) all its predicate-events to a degree of
perfection: 'Consequently, every body experiences everything that goes on in the
universe, so much so that he who sees everything might read in any body what is
happening anywhere, and even what has happened or will happen. He would
be able to observe in the moment what is remote in time and space, sumpnoia
pantd (M§61).
Returning to the notion of 'cryptography' posited in the beginning of my
exposition of The Fold, we can now see why the notion of the crypt represents this
point of indetermination in Leibniz and the Baroque, as the expression of a
moment stacked with other moments, piled up like shelves in a columbarium, or
opening through a trap-door into a basement 'hollowed out by other basements.'
It is only due to this structure of inclusions that it could be said to be virtually
bottomless (Abgrund) — that is, constructed upon a principle that is without
Sa THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GlLL.eS DELEUZE

grounds, a fantastic premise, a fiction — so, for instance, it could be speculated

that one could travel through the interior of the moment without ever attaining a
surface, that is, the limit of a facade that would close it off. In so much as this is
a fiction, however, it must be relegated to the order of fictions that Kant would
call 'necessary'; if there is to be anything like time at all, then there must be such
a moment. In fact, this moment is the pure function of time and I have already
compared it with the valve of a cipher that is stuck in its open position, or
the mouth-point of a bladder — blown out, so to speak — one that fills all the
monads with a long and continuous note like the thread they all share, the base
upon which they harmonize. Its function is to release the pressure of time within
the monad; it is the means by which time becomes sensible and this pressure is
the cause of the activities of folding (reading) and unfolding (perception).
What Deleuze calls Leibniz's 'liberation of the fold' is nothing less than the
release of the pressure of time within the monad. Leibniz effected this liberation
by a radical means, which again concerns the concept of God. He did it by the
splitting apart of the two senses of cause that belong to the principle of God up
to this point, but are particularly determined by Christian philosophy: God as
'efficient cause' (causa efficiens), and God as 'final cause' (causa finalis). Leibniz
encrypts the efficient cause on the inside, as the interior principle of the crypt,
and protects it from any undue influence by the final cause. Again, this trans-
formation concerns what Deleuze calls the new usage that Leibniz accorded to
the role of principles, and here corresponds to the splitting (Spaltung) of God
into two distinct entities in the Monadology (and also later in the Theodicy):
God as efficient cause (the principle of architecture), God as final cause (the
principle of law). The latter represents the principle of clarity that is already
built into the establishment of the sign, that is, an already established order of
signification that would prohibit a priori an expression of indetermination by
reducing it to a form of nonsense (which becomes the obscene, the derogatory
and offensive within an existing order of significations). The danger that Leibniz
perceived in a system that was ruled by an exclusive use of this principle was
what he referred to as a 'system of extreme Vengeance'; such a system would
conceive of any vagueness as the absence of meaning, as an offense that could be
restored by a system of writing, that is, by a disciplinary order that incarnates
these moments of 'nonsense' within determinate and identifiable subjects, which
can then be persecuted or even annihilated.
Leibniz showed that the experience of what would provisionally have to be
called 'nonsense' was, in fact, the expression of an event that could be reflected by
these divergent principles, or two different expressions that bear on the same
point of non-determination. Referring again to Frege's definition of the place
vide, since all signs comport some definition and a definition associative of a
meaning or denotation, where meaning and denotation are totally in default,
'then one can no longer properly speak of a sign or definition.' This can be
illustrated by using two mirrors, or a double-sided mirror interposed between
words and things, since there are no things without perception, and perception
is often likened to a mirrored thing. Each side reflects this space according to its
 ON GOD, OR THE 'PLACE VIDE' 65

own principle: one from the perspective of causa, finalis, which finds a definitive
object lacking and the destruction of the conditions of the sign; the other from
the perspective of causa efficiens, which discovers in this non-determination
a background 'that causes the entire world of series to communicate in a
"chaosmos" ' (Pli 111). Leibniz discovered in the direct confrontation of these two
principles an expression of extreme antagonism and a tendency, expressed by
opposition, to annihilate one another. This is the regime of 'representation'
evoked earlier on, which can be characterized as the type of repetition in which
two doubles enter into the destruction of each other by their very resemblance.
Thus, representation is linked to the realization of a system that persecutes all
nonsense as contradiction, and through opposition reduces all difference to
identity, to the repetition of the same. This can be vividly illustrated by what
happens when two mirrors face one another vertically: there is neither space nor
time in either mirror, only the event of their vanishing — the point where both
mirrors explode into pure nothingness or emptiness. What remains is only the
point of their infinite absence, like an empty image of eternity (nunc stans), or of
an indefinite set (perhaps even 'the set of all sets'), both of which have been
introduced into the world by the logic of representation as purely 'negative states.'
Leibniz's solution, therefore, was the turning or tilting of each mirror
horizontally to follow the principle of the fold, which sets the destructive violence
of opposites apart into the division between the two levels (upper and lower, the
soul and matter) as a way of balancing this scission through the creation of a
mobile point of equilibrium, or what Klee called a 'point of non-symmetrical
balance' (PS 44).

Figure 6 Illustration of 'non-symmetrical balance' (PS 44)

Of course, the precedent for this distinction is already found in Genesis 1:2,
which describes creation of these two levels by God's face moving over the surface
of the waters. He laid the mirror flat, like a tableau or a surface that reflects, above
and below, like air and like water, two completely different folds. This very
movement, or proto-movement, follows the curvature of the distinction between
the two folds, between the act of reading and the receptivity of perception, since
all perception must be developed, must be read, must be deciphered in relation to
the individual concept. As Deleuze writes, The Divine Reader is a veritable
66 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I L. l_ E S D E I. E U Z E

passage of God into the monad (a little like what Whitehead described as
a passage of Nature into the place).' Moreover, each monad is a passage of God:
each monad has a point-of-view, but this view is the 'product' of God's reading
or view-point, which passes through and coincides with that of die monad
(Pli 99). In turn, the monad draws something like the shadow of God's passage
from its obscure base in order to differentiate something from the nothingness
that haunts it, the chaos that seems to press up from underneath. In much the
same manner, God created the world by moving across the face of the waters,
separating the upper and lower realms, which distinctly echo the two levels of the
baroque house. In this way, Leibniz portrays the God of creation, the architect, in
a schizophrenic accord with the God as legislator — and according to Leibniz,
'the former must "satisfy" in all respects the latter' (M §89). This is the precise
meaning of thejunction of Harmony in the Leibnizian system; the pair higher—lower
resolves the tension introduced by the scission between inside and outside, since there is
no longer a content of perception, but an image-matter, and no longer a form, but a
formal power, an operatio, namely, a 'process.' Moreover, it was by means of this
creative process — of tilting transcendence (represented by a purely vertical line)
in order to harmonize with immanence (represented by a purely horizontal
line) — that Leibniz overcomes the crisis of theological reason, as Deleuze writes,
'giving way to human reason pure and simple' (N 161).
Concluding our commentary on The Fold, if we have discovered a strange
and even bizarre logic that comprises the fold, or the baroque line, this is
because what Leibniz calls the soul actually represents an infinite dilation of the
fold, which has often been confused with the representation of a pure empty
space, or the eternity of a nunc stans (hence, all the misconceptions of God as an
entity who contains the totality of perspectives, such as in the School's concep-
tion ofScientia Dei). On the other hand, matter represents what is actually a pure
facade, although because it is composed of infinite textures, it might offer the
illusion of an infinite, dark cavernous depth (something that Deleuze sees in the
block of marble with its flanges, its swirling crests, like the surface of a great
ocean). There is a danger, however, of reading the soul, or time, as a pure vertical
line, and the fa9ade, or space, as a pure horizontal line. Rather, the vertical is
precisely what is presented as time's greatest temptation - and perhaps here we
might discern a few brush-strokes of Leibniz's Christ, afflicted by the intoxi-
cations of helium.
Phenomena, according to Leibniz, may be a pure fafade, but a surface is
already a torrent or swirling of points, even though it is without depth. And it
is from this proposition that the entire ocean can be distilled from a single drop
of water. One can trace the profound and 'diabolical' humor in Leibniz by
noticing that the principal characteristic of die monad is an extreme vertigo, or
dizziness, brought on by extreme heights even though it lives in a room located
on the second floor, one without any windows. Perhaps the innate knowledge of
its position makes the soul want to climb down from its podium, and this forms
the attraction to all the obese bodies below which are coiled up and sleeping
encompassed by thick blocks of matter. Deleuze constantly refers to this virtual
 ON tSOD, OFI THE -PLACE VIDE' 67

state of suffering within the monad as a potential counter-point to the Heideg-

gerian concept of Geworfenheit as well as the feeling of dread that accompanies it.
By contrast, here the state of the soul's 'throwness' is nearly identical to the
physical description of its beatitude, or state of blessedness as a feeling of vertigo
like a physical phenomenon of weightlessness. This characterizes the baroque
conception of'Glory,' a term used by Germain Bazin to characterize the state of
anxiety particular to baroque constructions and also the atmosphere from which
Deleuze will draw the philosophy of Leibniz. Thus, it is not a division of the
body and the soul that is the cause of suffering, but rather the expression of
the soul's 'inclination' to fall upwards, to lose itself infinitely - something that it
must resist at all cost\ In response to this temptation, the soul would desire matter,
color, movement, in order to escape from its own 'line of abolition,' which is
represented by Leibniz as the Cartesian line of the Orient. It is for this reason that
the soul could be said to lie on the floor of its small chamber, with its ear to the
floor, listening hard, trying to decipher the stirrings that are going on below.
I will not digress further into the Theodicy, but will end by noting that there is
something particularly modern in all these figures; it concerns an extreme
resistance to verticality, a tendency one can also find in many commentaries
concerning the influence of the Baroque on a modern sensibility. As Deleuze
writes concerning a formula that is drawn from Beckett: 'it's better to be sitting
than standing, and better to be lying down than sitting. Modern ballet brings
this out really well: sometimes the most dynamic movements take place on the
ground, while upright the dancers stick to each other and give the impression
they'd collapse if they moved apart' (N 53). Thus, verticality is presented as one
of the most difficult problems for a modern sensibility to confront, something
that can be confirmed by a major proposition by Paul Klee concerning the
origin of human tragedy: 'It is this contrast between power and prostration that
implies the duality of human existence ... TO STAND DESPITE ALL
POSSIBILITIES TO FALL.'6

Figure 7 The soul's temptation (from Klee's diagram: PS 54)

Perhaps the origin of this problem can be found in the singular constructions of
allegory, a problem whose solution the Baroque maintains as its own secret, since
it is precisely in the invention of a secret as its highest problem that the Baroque
can be said to have chosen 'something over nothing.' That is, hopelessly wrecked
68 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I LUES D E I- E U Z E

by identity, at the point of losing his very objectivity in a vague mist, the man-of-
the-Baroque renounces his search for his essence; 'incapable even of seizing its
existence, he seeks to apprehend the object, no longer by its resemblance, since
he has ceased to believe in this possibility from the perspective of the real, but by
its detour of the double, the analogy, the metaphor, processes proper to poetry,
as well as rhetoric. This suggests that the Baroque refers no longer to the limited
determination of a historical concept, but to a cryptic solution whose prin-
ciple continues to distort the fields of perception-consciousness of the modern,
which continues to be founded on the representation of the clear and the distinct.
It may sound somewhat 'fantastic,' even grandiose, to suggest that the secret of
the fold is nothing more than a baroque cipher encrypted within the perceptual
field of the modern; however, Deleuze himself suggests diis as well when he says
that die problem that often goes by the name of the Baroque is our situation too
if we take account of the new way 'things are folded with matter' (N 157).8 This
makes the situation confronted by the 'man-of-the-Baroque' exemplary for our
current situation today. It is as if by renouncing his own identity and the truth of
the object, by the detour of allegory, the man-of-the-Baroque can make a little
headway through the chaos that threatens him on all sides: from die deepest
point of his own interiority to the most remote distances of the universe, from
the world itself which is made up almost entirely by the noise from all the other
worlds that are pressing up underneath it. He does this by means of a secret —
a secret so perfect, so glorious, that he must even keep it from himself — if only so
that he might be able to hang onto the world as it is. Of course, this does not
concern all secrets, or the secret in general, which the Baroque itself destroys in
favor of the minimal secrets of the fold.
Following Leibniz, we have been able to identify this secret as the multiple, the
possibility of multiple worlds, each of which must have its own reason. Here, in
the invocation of the Leibnizian cry 'Everything must have a reason!', we might
hear an echo of Deleuze's own cry, 'Everything must be multiple!' However, it is
not at all the case of each philosopher (or rather, both philosophies) 'saying the
same thing,' since I have already shown that although Leibniz affirms the
possibility of multiple worlds, of multiplicity per se, he still resorts, at least in
principle (en droit), to justify a God who chooses one world over an infinite
number of others, and who condemns difference to suffer under the require-
ments of representation (under the principle of incompossibility), even though
this regime of judgement now allows for the existence of evil as well. Thus, even
though both philosophies can never be heard in unison around this point,
it is precisely here that we might discover the condition by which both philos-
ophies can be said to harmonize, and I might even venture that it is through the
repetition of Leibniz's philosophy that was effected by Deleuze in The Fold, that
the Leibnizian system has, in a certain sense, been redeemed. Here is a case, as
Deleuze described this method very early on, of 'the pure repetition of the
former text and the present text in one another (DRxxii), of the fold. It is by
means of this repetition that Deleuze takes up and re-fashions Leibniz's 'basic
concept of Harmony' as the supreme justification of the principles of difference
 ON GOD, OFt THE 'PLACE VIDE' 69

and multiplicity which he has sought ever since first announcing this goal in the
opening pages of Difference and Repetition. From this point onward (but then,
which point?), die highest task of philosophy becomes 'die production of har-
monies,' and what is die goal of the activity defined as the creation of concepts if
not creating harmony, as it is also with music? 'Music — are philosophers friends
of music too' (N 163)?
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 PART THREE

ON THE POWERS OF

THE FALSE
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 8

FHE BAROQUE DETECTIVE

BORGES AS PRECURSOR

In 1988, Deleuze published Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque which I have argued

signals a radical turning point; at least a 'solution' had been found concern-
ing a problem that had preoccupied him for more than twenty years since the
publication of Difference et Repetition in 1968. The problem can be posed in
the following manner: How does one live in a world without principles, a world
in which all principles have been shattered to bits? Another way of posing the
same question, although more in the terms of classical or Platonic philosophy, is
how does one live in a world amidst the ruins of'the Good'? In other words, the
problem that preoccupied Deleuze during this period concerned nothing less
than the default of 'the Good' as the highest principle of Reason - something
that can be situated under the modern critique of the Enlightenment — in the
sense that the 'Good' by a kind of default can no longer function as the highest
principle of reason and that the nature of reason itself is suspected of harboring a
much more malevolent nature which would include the possibilities of treachery
and deceit, a suspicion diat today can be ascribed to the concepts of 'Ideology'
and 'die Unconscious.'
'But what happened in this long history of "nihilism,"' Deleuze asks in 1988,
'before the world lost its principles?'

At a point close to us human Reason had to collapse, like the Kantian

refuge, the last refuge of principles. It falls victim to 'neurosis.' But even
before, a psychotic episode must have been necessary. A crisis and collapse
of all theological Reason had to take place. That was where the Baroque
assumes its position: Is there some way of saving the Theological ideal at a
moment when it is being contested on all sides, and when the world cannot
stop accumulating its 'proofs' against it, ravages and miseries, at a time
when the earth will soon shake and tremble ... ? The Baroque solution is
the following: we shall multiply principles — we can always slip a new one
out from under the cuff — and in this way we will change their use. We will
not have to ask what available object corresponds to a given luminous
principle, but what hidden principle corresponds to whatever object is
'given,' that is to say, to this or that 'perplexing case.'... A case being given,
we shall invent its principle. (Fold 67)
74 THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF CSIL.LES D E L. E U Z E

In order to understand this passage, we need to define what Deleuze means by a

'principle'; perhaps the best way to define a principle is to say that it is a rule not
unlike those found in games. Let us take the example of chess, which Deleuze
resorts to many times in order to address the function of principles. Chess is
defined, literally carved out of time and space, by the rules of play; as a result,
'the play not only internalizes the players who serve as pieces, but the board on
which the game is played, and the material of that board' (Fold 67). At the same
time, all of the little pieces that serve as players have been endowed with singular
characteristics. (We might even call them personalities.) A knight can only move
two squares forward, then one square left or right. If it moved any differently,
then it would no longer be a knight. It would be a bishop, a pawn or a queen.
Here, we can see that the clearest definition of a principle, or a rule, is what pro-
vides the possibility of identity, that is, for a knight to be a knight. Therefore,
a rule cannot be understood as a kind of command, or coercion, which would
force each piece to correspond to its identity, which would put into these little
"pieces of wood a kind of homunculus, a subject of desire, a relation to freedom
which is strictly impossible for wood.
From this example, we might begin to infer why the loss of principles would
signal the 'end of the game': the inability to make a move, the sudden or stupefy-
ing moment when everything is frozen in a terrifying death grimace. Not only
would the game stop, the board itself would become incomprehensible, and the
differences would cease to signify the possibilities of play. Applying our analogy
to the foregoing problem, for philosophy to lose its principle of Reason would
imply that it could no longer go on being itself, but rather would turn into
something else such as literature, poetry or ethics. Here, the 'end of Metaphysics'
is no longer such a lofty and impenetrable concept, but rather the simplest thing
to understand: the moment when philosophy lost the rule of reason and could no
longer go on playing the 'game of truth' according to the same old rules. At this
point our aging philosopher was faced with a stark alternative: either invent new
ones, or abandon the game altogether. Briefly put, this is the fundamental
problem that Deleuze's work addresses throughout his entire oeuvre, or at least
from the first pages of Difference et Repetition to the publication with Guattari of
Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? in 1991.
From the period of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze's earlier solution to this
crisis was to couple himself to Nietzsche and to Mallarme, for whom the end of
the game is affirmed in a 'throw of the dice.' The solutions offered by Nietzsche
and Mallarme, Deleuze reflects later in 1988,

have rewarded us with the revelation of a Thought-World that throws dice.

But for them the world lacks principle, has lost its principles. That is why
the throw of the dice is the power of affirming Chance, of thinking of
chance in sum, which is above all not a principle, but the absence of all
principles. Thus Mallarme gives to absence or nothingness what issues from
chance, what claims to escape it all the while limiting it by principle: 'The
world is the anonymous domain of absence, from which things disappear
 THE BAROQUE DETECTIVE 75

and into which they appear ... The apparition is a mask behind which no
one exists, behind which nothing really exists other than nothing.' Nothing
rather than something. To think without principles, in the absence of God
and in the absence of man himself, has become the perilous task of the
child-player [the litde demiurge, or infant God] who topples the old master
of play, and who makes incompossibles enter into the same world, shattered
(the board is broken to bits ...). (Pli 67)

This solution represents what Deleuze earlier calls 'the Ideal Game' (lejeu ideal),
but it is also a solution that could be said to belong to the long history of
'nihilism.' In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to be clear
concerning the meaning of nihilism that is given in the above passage. Nihilism is
what happens when die subject encounters a loss of the highest principle and
'Nothing' is affirmed in its place: nothing is affirmed in place of something. This
can be taken as the formula for nihilism. With both Mallarme and Nietzsche, for
example, the affirmation of the 'empty space of nothingness' is itself the space of
freedom that is left open to Chance — to the terror of absolute play, on the one
hand, or to the freedom of an absolute automaton, such as language, on the
other. For Mallarme, we might think of this 'empty space' as what the absolute
poem introduces into Language; for Nietzsche, the 'empty space' inserted into
time is the affirmation of the Eternal Return. Yet, by affirming chance in each
instant, the board (that is, the world) is also exposed to being shattered, sending
all the pieces flying into chaos, which is why Deleuze would later abandon this
solution as potentially false and inherently risky.
Here is how Deleuze described this moment in 1968:

To every perspective or point-of-view there must correspond an autono-

mous work with its own self-sufficient sense: what matters is the divergence
of series, the decentering of circles, 'monstrosity.' The totality of circles
and series is thus a formless ungrounded chaos that has no law other than
its repetition, its own reproduction in the development of what diverges
and decenters. (DR69)

The above passage should immediately recall Borges's description of 'The library
of Babel' (1962). There we find a series of hexagons; each containing twenty
shelves, five shelves to a side except two where there is a hallway (widi two small
closets to the left and to the right, one for sleeping and the other for depositing
'one's faecal necessities'), leading to the next hexagon which has the same exact
dimensions, contents and facilities. As if this horrible symmetry is not enough,
Borges adds that each shelf contains thirty-five books, each book is 410 pages
long, each page contains forty lines and each line is eighty characters in length. In
his account, Borges also mentions a spiral staircase that rises and descends from
each passage, so that when one of the occupants of the Library dies, he is simply
tossed over the rail into die void that surrounds each staircase where his body falls
76 THE NON-PHIUOSOPHY OF GIL_I_ES DEL.EUZE

through an infinite and groundless space, until 'it will gently decay and dissolve
in the wind generated by die fall' (BR52). Here, we see many of the same
elements that appear above in Deleuze's affirmation: first, a series of divergent
units (circles or hexagons, the architectural details do not matter); second, a cer-
tain groundlessness (or the dissolution of all content into a great nothingness),
all of which is summarized by the following principle: 'The Library is a circle
whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is
inaccessible' (L52).
Yet, there is also a fundamental detail that distinguishes between Borges's con-
frontation with the problem of repetition and Deleuze's early allusion. In Borges's
description of'The Total Library' (absolute knowledge), the architectural details
form a kind of monotonous 'Eternal Return of the Same' which seems to strike
everything with an unbearable evacuation of difference. (After all, what other
purpose is the installation of toilets in each cell if not to signal for us the principle
of evacuation of all content?) In the final paragraph of 'The Total Library,'
however, we find a new principle expressed in the statement that 'The Library is
unlimited and cyclical.' That is, 'If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any
direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the
same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order)' (L58).
We must ask what has just happened? That is, what is the difference between the
classical principle of architecture, 'the Library is a circle whose exact center is
any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible' (one might also
say 'impossible'), and the new principle announced by the second statement that
'the Library is unlimited and cyclical.' The difference emerges, according to
Borges, when we understand that the second principle offers a determination of
the 'infinity' that now belongs to the Library. If in the first proposition, the
exact center of the Library is any one of its chambers, then we might speculate
that the whole (the circumference) is present but in a manner that is infinitely
remote or even 'inaccessible.' In the second, the whole is defined as 'disorder'
(which is still a kind of order, and perhaps even the Order), one that suddenly
causes the Library to become de-centered and without circumference. In a
footnote that Borges adds to this final sentence, he remarks that this in effect
qualifies and completely changes the architectural principle of the Library, since
the entire edifice could in principle be compressed into a single volume, con-
taining an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves (which a seventeenth-century
writer described as 'the superimposition of an infinite number of planes'), each
page unfolding into the next, although the inconceivable middle page would
have no reverse (L 58). Here, we might already see that Borges has prefigured the
solution that Deleuze later discovers in The Fold, since the circumference has
disappeared and in its place we have the principle of the Zwischenfalt, the middle
fold, or a fold in between folds in such a way that the principle of the fold (lepli)
becomes inseparable from the species of repetition that is deployed by a process
of reading that now belongs to the concept of modern literature.
In his famous entry on 'The analytical language of John Wilkins,' Borges
reveals the presence of an ideological flaw or error that structures the former
 THE BAROQUE DETECTIVE 77

library in the arbitrariness of all universal schemes: 'obviously there is no classi-

fication of a universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very
simple: we do not know what the universe is' (BR142). Still, this last statement
does not cause Borges to capitulate to the position of 'nihilism,' which again
is the affirmation of Nothing in the place of Something. In this case, we might
see that the principle of a correspondence, which relates a system of classifica-
tion (the library) with the organization of the real (the universe), is broken by
the declaration of a purely arbitrary or chance relation. This is the same crisis of
principles that Leibniz had also encountered in the seventeenth century, which
is why die Leibnizian solution holds a privileged place in Borges's reflections as
it does for Deleuze. If this correspondence is purely arbitrary, then nothing
could be affirmed in the real that would henceforth be the condition of any
possible knowledge; die order of language and signification would simply close
upon itself as a universal automaton, a labyrinth which shares no corresponding
principle that would refer outside itself to the order of nature or the universe.
(To even refer to 'an order' of the universe would already be a false ascription
of a notion of 'order' that refers only to the closed system of classification.)
Here, we have a profound expression of schism, since if there is no rational
element in the real, then every system of classification that pretends to find a
correspondence is a simple 'fiction,' an 'artificial universe' which would be fore-
closed from the real. If we take up one of Borges's primary metaphors to
describe this relationship, we would have the Library, and outside the Library,
the universe; between them, there could be no unifying principle, no possibility
of reference, no possible truth as correspondence.
To illustrate this point, we might recall a similar crisis in Saussure's
announcement of the 'arbitrariness that determines the relationship between the
signifier and signified.' In the wake of this announcement, this led many to
proclaim that the relation is total and all-encompassing in the sense that every
order of the signifier is completely arbitrary; therefore, every relation is poten-
tially false, and the signifier itself despotic. Such a view led to many exaggerated
and naive statements concerning 'the arbitrariness of the signifier' that has
recurred often in the history of postmodernism, and has evolved into similar
statements concerning 'text' and 'textuality' by those associated with deconstruc-
tion early on (i.e. 'there is no signified,' 'no meaning,' 'nothing outside the text,'
etc.) most of which betrayed a certain manic polarity between jubilation and
despair. Yet, much of this exaggeration might have been avoided if these same
critics had chosen to read Saussure further on this point; they would discover that
while the relationship between signifier and signified was 'arbitrary in principle'
(my emphasis), it was at the same time 'absolutely necessary.'2 Here, at this
moment, Saussure affirms Something over Nothing, which takes the form of
'necessity,' that is the historical unfolding of a signifying chain through time, so
that 'the community itself cannot control so much as a single word; it is bound
to the existing language.
Taking up Borges's commentary on this same crisis nearly two centuries before
Saussure, it is interesting that he immediately turns to the somewhat gnostic
78 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I 1_ L E S D E I- E U Z E

solution by one of his baroque contemporaries, David Hume. This world',

wrote Hume,

was only the rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it,
ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work of some dependent, inferior
diety, and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of
old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and ever since his death
has run on ... (Hume quoted BR143)

In the above passage, we might notice a contradiction in Hume's description

of the litde demiurge who is simultaneously described as an infant and as
'the production of old age and dotage.' This is because Hume still holds out
for the possibility that the order of knowledge can be likened either to the mental
production of an infantile and primitive consciousness, or to a product of senility
and old age; in other words, he still leaves room for the advent of a development
of reason that would be corrective and diagnostic - in a word, perfect. If there is
a perceptible derision in Hume's tone, this can be likened to gnosticism, to a
spirit of criticism of and hatred for the world as it is (as a botched or 'bad'
creation), and to an 'other-worldly' idea of reason as perfect — a pre-sentiment
of idealism is already present in Hume's scorn. As Borges says, however, we
must go further than the solution that is offered by gnosticism, or its contem-
porary avatar, idealism. The baroque solution still retains the minimal criteria of
a rational element in the universe. To put it differently, faced with the monster
of chaos, the baroque solution still chooses Something over Nothing, and this
'Something' can be defined as something of a secret. Thus, Borges goes further
than the gnostic solution in that while he completely rejects the notion of the
universal 'in the organic, unifying sense that is inherent in that word,' he still
retains the idea of a hidden order that takes the form of God's secret dictionary.
Thus, contrary to the sentiment expressed by the statement 'Everything is
arbitrary,' or by the gnostic sentiment that everything is botched and corrupted,
Borges holds up the example of Wilkins's analytical language that does not
rest upon 'stupid, arbitrary symbols.' Rather, every letter is meaningful, as
the Holy Scriptures were meaningful to the Cabalists. To summarize, while the
divine scheme of the universe is impossible, says Borges, 'this should not
dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware they are
provisional' (BR143).
In the last statement, perhaps we have the most direct example of affirming
something in place of nothing. For Borges, this something takes on the order of a
secret, of a secret that is not divine but rather a purely human design, which is to
say, something that is produced by the arrangement of litde letters in a signifying
series. Because there is something of a secret, which is at the same time purely
historical, the universe retains a relationship to truth that avoids the chaos
ushered in by the statement 'Everything is arbitrary,' or the nihilism of the
underlying assertion that reality is generated by stupid, arbitrary symbols. For
 THE BAROQUE DETECTIVE 79

Borges, on the contrary, the exemplary system of Wilkins refers to this moment
when the arbitrariness of the 'system of grunts and squeals' is nevertheless
affirmed as capable of a relation of truth; that is, despite its complete arbitrari-
ness, Wilkins produces his system of classification in the 'belief that an ordinary
civilized stockbroker can really produce out his own inside noises which denote
all the mysteries of memory and the agonies of desire' (BR143). Therefore, what
was originally the profound defect of language turns out to be its condition of
possibility: the possibility of expression which is only possible, finally, from die
arbitrariness of its initial principle that die relation between the signifier and the
signified is not fixed, not even in the mind of God, but is only provisionally
determined and thus open to new expressive modulations through time. Even
though this system assumes the nature of a labyrinth that is made up by the
infinite combination of twenty-six letters, it is a labyrinth whose possible
combinations can never be totalized, and must admit the constant quantity of
new passages and new signifying relations.
Perhaps the best exemplar of diis process is die figure of Pierre Menard, whose
affirmation can be read in the context of the following sentence: 'He dedicated
his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an
alien tongue' (L44). The principle diat governs Menard's process, which Borges
comments on in detail, is neither translation nor copying, but rather corresponds
to the creation of what Deleuze calls a 'simulacrum.' What differentiates the
simulacrum from the simple copy or the translation is a principle that returns to
the Leibnizian axiom that only what differs can begin to have a resemblance. The
'difference' one finds in the tale of Menard is the following: 'To compose
the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable under-
taking, necessary and perhaps unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is
almost impossible' (L41). However, the difference that governs and determines
the undertaking for Menard is defined as 'impossible.' 'Impossible' in what sense?
The answer to this question is given earlier in the sentence which describes die
composition of the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century as a
natural act, perhaps even one diat was 'necessary and unavoidable.' At the
beginning of the twentieth century, however, we must determine this act to
be something unreasonable, that is, completely avoidable. Menard's gesture is
an act that runs against die grain of his time - it is impossible a priori. On the
other hand, according to Borges, Cervantes's 'genius' was something thoroughly
inscribed in die possibility of his time, almost to die extent diat this negates
Cervantes's singular importance as the author of the Quixote, since if he didn't
write it dien someone else certainly would have, by necessity. Thus, we can
take the comparison of die two passages that Borges gives us to substantiate
his claim of their fundamental difference, passages that on first inspection are
exactly identical:

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness
of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and future's counselor
BO THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I 1_ L_ E S DEUEUZE

and:

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds,

witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and future's
counselor. (L43)

Upon first glance, both versions appear identical; however, Menard's version
highlights the importance of history as the mother of truth. In other words, in
Menard's version history is identified not with what happened, but rather with
what we judge to have happened. As a result of this change of emphasis, the
difference between Menard's passage and that of Cervantes is profound; they
don't say the same thing! Between them, something has changed and this change
of 'origin' is historical, 'the mother of truth.' What is different for us is that,
today, there can be no Quixote without Menard; this could be said to be Borges's
relation to the 'tradition of all of Western literature,' which is established by the
principle of repetition. No Quixote without Menard!! That is, only what differs
can begin to have resemblance, but this 'resemblance' will only appear from the
second instance that repeats die first. That is, Quixote will resemble Menard,
more than Menard will resemble Quixote; or 'Cervantes' text and Menard's are
verbally identical, but the second is infinitely richer' (L 42).
Here, I want to suggest that we find the same principle that motivates
Deleuze's solution to die loss of principles, to the shattering of the tables of
representation, in his turn back before this moment to die philosophy of Leibniz,
although in a manner that was strictly possible for someone from our time, and
diis would necessarily entail bodi a repetition and a difference inserted into his
reading of Leibniz. In short, Deleuze abandons the 'ideal game,' the game of
chance; instead, he affirms the principle of creation, which he later with Guattari
infuses in What is Philosophy?, with the definition of philosophy itself as a
creation of the first order, a creation of concepts. The relevance of Borges is diat
Deleuze himself solves this problem by turning to Leibniz in a manner that
closely follows Borges's own solution, even though Deleuze himself would not
see the correspondence exactly in these terms. Borges also turns to the seven-
teenth century in a manner that prefigures and anticipates Deleuze, so much so
that I would define Borges as precursor in the same sense we find in 'Kafka
as precursor' and 'Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.' The above can be
described as the doctrine of repetition that founds Borges's literary process, and
can be discovered to underwrite every individual reflection or plot. For example,
we find it again in his note on 'Kafka and his precursors,' where we have another
version of this uncanny repetition of 'Kafka' in such figures as Aristotle,
Kierkegaard, Leon Bloy and the English poet Robert Browning. 'In each of
these texts,' writes Borges, 'we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser
degree, but if Kafka would have never written a line we would not perceive this
quality; indeed, it would not exist' (L201). Hence, this proves that by a kind of
repetition that appears only in what essentially differs, 'his work modifies the
 THE BAROQUE DETECTIVE 81

conception of the past, as it will modify the future.' Moreover, it is this theory of
repetition that Borges shares with Deleuze, or which Deleuze lifts from Borges as
early as Difference and Repetition, which cites Menard in the preface as a supreme
justification to his philosophy of difference and repetition.
Like Kafka, Borges's signature underwrites philosophical projects of Deleuze,
Foucault (hence the citation which occurs in the preface to The Order of Things)
and Derrida (can one even conceive of the process of'deconstruction' of the text
of Western Metaphysics without the precursor of Borges's 'total library'?).
Restricting our comments to the understanding of Borges's process, we should
not underestimate its importance for the situation of the post-colonial writer in
relation to the literature of the West, and those who have entered into the field
of culture too late, due to some historical accident or political fatality. However,
for Borges, this subject occupies the privileged position of being the 'second.'
This is why Borges finds the representatives of this position less in the personage
of the author than in the figures of the critical reader, the scholar or the baroque
detective — that is, those figures who always arrive on the scene of knowledge
second and who are, for that reason, superior to the author (in the case of the
book) or the criminal (in the case of crime).
In 1937 Borges was employed as a first assistant in the municipal library,
where he spent 'nine years of solid unhappiness,' until 1946, his 'season in hell' as
he would later describe it. In the account from which I read this information, the
biographer quickly adds some Kafkaesque brush-strokes. Above him, he had not
only the director but three officials. In due time, 'Borges would ascend to the
dizzying heights of the third assistant' (BR346). The other assistants were only
interested in 'pornography, rape and sports,' according to the biographer; and to
avoid their hostility, Borges had to agree to catalogue no more than 100 titles a
day. (On the first day, he had ambitiously catalogued more than 400, and
received rage and enmity from the other clerks.) Borges only acquired some
status from 'the women who worked there and who were interested in society
gossip,' when it was soon discovered that he was a friend of Elvira de Alvear,
'a beautiful and despotic woman whom he loved hopelessly and who was at
that time in Buenos Aires an arbiter elegantiarum' (BR346).
When I first read this, I was immediately suspicious of all the Kafkaesque
flairs: the director and the three assistants; the vulgar tastes of the assistants for
'pornography, rape and sports'; the gossip of the women co-workers; the phrase
of a 'beautiful and despotic woman'; and finally, the phrase 'hopelessly in love'
(which, to my mind, is too much of an instance of the 'Kafkaesque' to be
believed). At the same time, there is odier evidence to support the assertion of
Kafka as precursor to this period. It was during this time that Borges read Kafka,
and even edited and prefaced an edition of his stories in Spanish. It is also said
that Borges, during his days in the Library, would sequester himself in the
basement or on die roof to write, and in this period some of his best stories were
produced including 'Death and the compass,' 'The library of Babel' and others
in the collection of 'The garden of forking paths,' and finally, the two drafts of
'The (new) refutation of time,' which he penned in 1944 and 1946 respectively.
82 THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF G I L L ES D E 1- E U Z E

Borges himself, we might conjecture, could not have failed to notice the
uncanny repetition of certain details from Kafka's work in his own experience
and this must have shaped his understanding of the singularity of his own
experience as precisely having the strange character of a repetition that he will
pursue throughout his entire body of work. It is a species of repetition that he
demonstrates in the above stories as well as in the famous 'Kafka as precursor'
and 'Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,' which were also written during this
same period. However, one conclusion that we might draw from this analogy,
according to Borges's own theory of repetition, is the identification of the
Library as a problem that bears (and precisely due to its difference) a repetition
of the same problem that determines the position of die Court in Kafka's own
work. This assertion, although obvious, is still undefined; and in both cases, the
court and its officers, apparatus of the Law, and the Library, and its personages,
apparatus of knowledge, are shrouded in a certain 'mystery' — this is die exact
word used by both writers to describe their respective objects of interrogation —
that is, by a certain secrecy that they both attempt to resolve in the most direct
of manners, by the means of the most precise analytical instrument each has
forged in his own way — the instrument of a fiction, of literature.
Like the court, the Library is an infernal machine. Borges himself describes it
as a kind of'minor hell.' All that is required is a series of little letters, of signifiers,
to generate an infinite space and time. To illustrate this possibility, we might use
die following formula that Borges cites from Leucippus: 'A is different from N in
form; AN from NA in order; Z from N in position' (BR94). Thus, following
this postulation of three series of differences (that of form, order and position) we
can construct an infinite library from twenty-six letters. A universe can be
generated from this simple formula, since each species of difference can include
others: an elephant is different from a bird or a fish in form; the relation between
today and yesterday is different from the relation between today and tomorrow
in terms of order; and finally, noon is different from midnight in terms of
position. As Borges recounts, the Library (as some call it, die universe) includes
the total combinations possible, so that in the modern period, Huxley conjec-
tured that six monkeys with typewriters could, given a few eternities, reproduce
all the volumes in the British Library (although Borges provides a notation that
in principle only one absolute monkey would be required). At the same time, we
find another series in Borges: the series of four letters that make up die unspeak-
able name of God; each letter will signify a certain point in time, a place, the
first letter in the proper name of a victim, a position in the zodiac calendar.
These are the four letters that Erik Lonrott traces from the pages of ancient
volumes in the library of one of the victims, through the streets of Buenos Aires,
to the exact point of his awaited death. Or, in 'The garden of forking paths,' it is
the secret name of 'Albert,' which also signals the target of a German bombing
raid during the war. The second series is set in opposition to the first: in the first
we have an infinite number of combinations which makes each seem purely
arbitrary and insignificant; for the second, there is a singular combination, a
'secret' series of letters, for which there is only one possible solution. Or rather,
 THE BAROQUE DETECTIVE 83

there is a singular arrangement of three letters, which is punctuated by a fourth,

which completes the series and marks the exact and indisputable solution of a
mystery. This could be the axiom of Borges's process, the baroque detective, to
resolve the mystery by the most direct of means. I would not be the first to
suggest that human beings, for example, are composed of three letters as well;
however, what is remarkable is that for each there is only one possible solution,
or cipher. The mystery is one of singularity, which causes a life to diverge from
all the others. At the same time, because God is unconscious of this perspective,
a point-of-view which is that of the Library itself, he necessarily 'misses' the
singular - by default. It is through this gap in the architecture of knowledge
that the unconscious of God enters the universe at the same time that it is from
the 'absence of the singular' from his point-of-view or perspective that disorder
or difference is introduced into die Library.
In response to this problem, Borges deduces six axioms or codes which
function as the principles of the detective genre, and in turn, applies these codes
to his investigation of the European library. In other words, it is by the appli-
cation of this literary machine (or process), which very much resembles Kafka's
discovery of a set of similar codes which will function to distinguish the solu-
tion of the shorter works (the letters, the animal stories) from the novels, that
Borges invents a discrete formula by which all of knowledge (that is, the library
itself) can be submitted to an ongoing interrogation, or investigation. This
investigation of the Library may well be interminable, just as Kafka's investi-
gation of the Court, its anterior and adjacent bureaucracies, its agents and its
victims, which seem only to multiply and proliferate until, in the end (which,
I remind you is only the end of 'K.' in The Trial and of a certain abandon-
ment by Kafka himself in the case of The Castle), the court is revealed to be
total. In a similar manner, for Borges, the investigation in the total library will
always unearth new investigations that will later be abandoned in course, or
punctuated by the mystery of a given solution (e.g. 'Death and the compass'),
and like Kafka's juridical apparatus, also reveals itself to be somewhat of an
infernal machine.
Every instance of accepted knowledge can, through Borges's literary machine,
become an item for the investigation; all that is required is the purely formal
subscription to the following five axioms: (1) a discretionary maximum of six
characters; (2) the resolution of all loose ends to a mystery; (3) a rigid economy of
means; (4) the priority of how over who; and finally, (5) necessity and wonder in
the solution (BR72). There is no reason to believe that Borges could not have
invented more principles (or laws) to rule on this or that occasion or in this or
that story according to his needs, but here I highlight only these five in order
to underline the character of what Deleuze and Guattari define as 'a literary
machine.' What we are dealing with here is the creation of a purely formal and
somewhat arbitrary series of codes that determines the conditions of enunciation
from one occasion to the next. Once this series is established, however, to violate
it would result in the loss of form and, at the same time, would produce the
conditions for judging the outcome as somehow botched or a failure. Therefore,
84 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF C3 I L L E S D E L E UZ E

each of these laws must be rigorously followed, and for each there is always a
notation of illegal or bad moves, as in a game of chess. (Examples of the various
illegal solutions, for instance, include the uses of 'hypnotism, ingenious pseudo-
scientific tricks, and lucky charms' [BR72]). The fifth law is the most inter-
esting one to comment on for our purposes, since it demands two things
simultaneously: first, that die mystery is determined (that is, it is fit for only one
possible solution) and; second, that the reader must marvel over the solution
without resorting in any way to a supernatural explanation. When this law is set
within the Library, the fifth law gives us a key to understand Borges's theory of
ideology: the agent, or criminal, must be found to be of purely terrestrial, one
might say 'historical,' origin (which, after Menard, is 'the mother of all truth').
In other words, the solution itself must never take the form of (a Universal)
myth or superstition to solve the problem of the 'mystery.' (Consequently,
Borges's solution would be different from Freud's.)
If we apply the fifth axiom to one of Borges's most famous stories, 'Death and
the compass,' what do we find? That the solution is determined, following the
first of the criteria, in that the solution arrived at is the only one possible to
resolve this mystery; at the same time, we might notice with marvel that the
detective's solution to the mystery of the murders at the same time means his
own. It is almost as if the detective sacrifices himself to such a perfect criminal
design in order to guarantee that his solution will remain that much more
something to marvel at, as if the perfection of his knowledge of the mystery must
make of his subject its final and summary execution. Thus, the mystery which is
traced through four letters of the unspeakable name of God, in the end becomes
the bullet from the revolver that finds its target at precisely that point in space
and time where his solution of the mystery and the path of the bullet meet at the
bull's-eye of Lonrott's body. What it is crucial not to miss (no pun intended) in
this perfect conjunction of the detective's intellectual process and the unfolding
of process that is located in the real is that they are, even for a second, perfectly
symmetrical and that one proves the accuracy of the other. In other words, there
is nothing arbitrary in the order of signifiers that the detective follows, but that it
allows him to trace a commensurate path in the real. In short, the detective saves
the truth and certainty of his 'reading,' even if he achieves this truth at the price
of his own death; the detective Lonrott critiques the deadly mystery that was
created by Scharlach. It is not perfect enough, he announces, looking straight
into Scharlach's eyes. He utters the now famous line: 'In your labyrinth you have
three lines too many' (L86).
At this point, some might be reminded of Kafka's solution at the end of The
Trial, where K.'s investigation of his own guilt or innocence ends with his
execution. In this case, I think there is something different from what takes
place in Borges, since while the 'sentence' finally lands on K., nothing is
determined by this, K.'s death appears like something completely arbitrary, and
the law itself is still wrapped in a cloak of mystery. Thus, Kafka's solution is
indeterminate, and the reader is left not feeling 'marvel,' but disgust and dread
at the fact that K. dies 'like a dog.' This gives us a clue concerning the nature of
 THE BAROQUE DETECTIVE 85

the 'secret' in Borges: first, it must be entirely terrestrial (which is to say 'hellish'
or 'infernal'); second, it leads, as in 'Death and the compass,' straight to the
death of the subject, although in a manner that does not leave its shroud of
mystery intact.
If the literary machine that Borges created has often been likened to a game,
this is because it violates this order of death in a very special way. A game, by
contrast, is infinitely reversible; thus it is a special case of exception that is created
in time. This is what gives a false and pathetic character to all games. (For
example, Baudelaire observes that gambling emerges precisely in order to restore
to the game its temporal nature, which is that of irreversible loss.) In a letter to
Remond (January, 1716), Leibniz rejects games of chance for the sake of chess or
checkers; games of position and games of emptiness or Void' for the inverted
games of solitaire; and finally, games modeled on battle for the sake of the
Chinese games of non-battle (consequently, the game of Go is preferred over
the game of chess) (quoted in The Fold 152/2). In turn, we find the exact
preferences repeated by Borges who, as we know, found both the game of lottery,
or the principle of chance, to be indeterminate and abysmal, leading to an
annihilation of the subject. Concerning the game of chess, we find this stanza in
the poem of the same name:

It was in the East, this war took fire.

Today the whole earth is its theater.
Like the game of love, this game goes on forever.

And finally:

God moves the player, he in turn, the piece.

But what god behind God begins the round
Of dust and time and sleep and agonies. (BR280-281)

Borges' preference for the solitaire of the detective and the scholar expresses
the principle of a duel with an absent player, an intellectual process that must
assume the position of the 'Other,' whether the mind of the criminal or the
figure of the author-God. Following Deleuze's observation we can easily detect
in the labyrinthian and divergent series, as well as in the line of the Orient that
runs through Borges's entire work, a preference for a Chinese principle of non-
battle, 'this network of times which approached one another, broke off, or
forked, or were unaware of one another for centuries' (L28), a game which
embraces all possibilities at once, and different futures, where in one you are my
enemy, and in another, my friend. As Deleuze writes, if Borges invokes
the Chinese philosopher-architect Ts'ui Pen rather than Leibniz, it is because he
wanted 'to have God pass into existence all incompossible worlds at once rather
than choosing one of them, the best' (Fold 62). And yet, Deleuze here would
have Borges violate one of his own rules, perhaps the most important as we have
seen, which is that there be only one possible solution to 'a mystery,' the solution
86 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I 1_ 1_ E S DELEUZE

that leads most direcdy (one might say singularly) to die subject's own death.
How do we account for this discrepancy? That is, Deleuze makes Borges affirm
Nothing over Something, even though here Nothing takes the form of all
incompossible worlds, whereas Borges affirms just the opposite. Deleuze either
refuses or fails to recognize that in turning back to the solution of 'a certain
baroque Leibniz' Borges had already been there before him, that Borges is now in
a certain sense a precursor to Leibniz. In other words, no Leibniz without Borges!
This could be the fundamental axiom that will determine the entire argument
concerning the seventeenth-century philosopher in The Fold.
In The Fold, Deleuze defines the Baroque as a kind of schizophrenic order of
creation (the multiplication or invention of principles) that resolves the crisis
of theological reason in his reading of Leibniz. What marks the definition of a
schizophrenic order of creation for Deleuze is a litigation, even a war, over the
principle of reason; the schizophrenic rages against the order of God's creation,
the closed universe of the symbolic order. Thus, Deleuze outlines the following
problem as the fundamental basis for the Baroque: 'How to conjoin freedom
with the schizophrenic automaton's inner, complete, and pre-established deter-
mination?' (Fold 69). We might see this as the same problem that Borges takes
up with regard to the determination of the Library. Yet, although I noted the
passage of time, I want to underline the fact that this question was possible only
in the seventeenth century; whereas its reappearance in our twentieth century
bore something new, a character of repetition that will necessarily diverge from
Leibniz's solution. In a manner similar to the baroque solution that is
discovered by Deleuze - that of multiplying principles, one for each case,
inventing new ones for exceptional cases — we might think of Borges's solution
to the problem of the Library (i.e. the architecture of knowledge).
Borges seems to move through the European library, inventing new editions
(so-called fictitious volumes) whenever he runs into an impasse. It is this
movement, this process of invention, or creation, that defines the concept of
literature in Borges. Thus, the procedures of archivization and critique that an act
of reading entails constitute the architecture of Borges's work; by which the
'Library' becomes, under the axiom of Borges's solution, a labyrinth. Here, we
have two readers which are opposed in a direct confrontation: God, the author,
who sees everything at once through a giant telescope and gathers all perception
into a central eye, and the reader in the labyrinth who follows a trail that may
eventually lead through the labyrinth, but must also necessarily include in his/her
trajectory points of impasse, detours, traps, blind alleys, wrong turns and failures.
This is an important consideration, since 'knowledge' - both in the form of its
pre-supposition and in the material organization or architecture of the 'Library'
which classifies, separates into distinct locations, and creates a taxonomy of
memory traces that have a pure and non-individual repetition to insure that they
can always be found by everyone — must now include the points of confusion,
the misunderstanding and the formal 'blindnesses' that are the result of what
the God-reader misses, and which constitute his profound unconscious. It is the
Unconscious of God that, in turn, forms the architecture of the Library.
 THE BAROQUE DETECTIVE 87

As Deleuze shows, Leibniz creates in The Theodicy a trial in which a lawyer

defends God's principles against the evidence of reality, which can be summed
up in one simple word: 'misery.' However, as more recent and less pious scholars
have observed, to 'defend' God's principles is not the same thing as defending
God. In Leibniz et Spinoza (1975), Georges Friedman insists on Leibniz's phi-
losophy as a thinking of Universal anxiety: the Best is not a Vote of confidence
in God; on the contrary, Leibniz seems to be defying God himself (Fold I52n).
O. J. Simpson was not the first defendant to go down in history as an
ambiguous client for the defense; Leibniz had already laid the precedent, by
separating the character of God from the principle of law (i.e. what is really
at issue). Consequently, today in crime dramas on TV, we often witness a scene
in which the defense lawyer knows his or her client to be guilty of the prosecu-
tion's complaint - guilty to die teeth! - but must present a case to the best of
his or her ability in order to salvage something from the loss of the 'Good.'
What is salvaged is the principle of law, that is, to save its possibility for the
future. This marks what Deleuze calls Leibniz's cry, that 'Everything must be
rational.' That is, for each event there must be a principle, and his entire
philosophy proceeds from the insane demand that the real be rationalized, that
Something rather than Nothing must be affirmed for each event and being, that
in cases where the principle is not known it be created and adjudicated right
down to the smallest molecules.
I want to call attention to the fact that we can find exactly the same cry in
Borges, although it is no longer issued by a philosopher but by a 'man of letters'
(in every sense implied by this phrase, including, I might add, 'a true man of the
seventeenth century'), that is, a being who emerges in the heart of the Library,
who spends all eternity there, who rages against its imperfect order and who
dreams, deliriously, of perfecting it in the following statement:

In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does

not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the
universe. [Borges adds the following axiom: 'it simply suffices for such a
book to be possible for it to exist.'] I pray to the unknown god that a man -
just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! — may have examined
and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them
be for the others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be
outraged and annihilated, but for just one instant, in one being, let Your
enormous Library be justified. (L57)

In this passage from 'The library of Babel,' we can detect the cry of a man of faith,
even though his place be in hell. Like Leibniz, his cry is that there is one
creature - who may have existed thousands of years ago, or who may not yet
exist (although this doesn't matter, since the Library contains all possible times
and it is sufficient to posit his existence for all these times, regardless of past or
future with respect to the present) - who has read the book and for whom the
universe is completely and perfectly justified.
88 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I ULES DELEUZE

Here, again I want to be clear, it is as if the whole universe (the Library)

receives its entire justification in this one moment, in this one being. This is
astounding, that the whole universe, in principle, can receive its justification in
one singular reading; that, in principle, it is this event that becomes the
condition of its possibility — even though this total sense, which excludes me
(that is, Borges, Leibniz, Deleuze, you and I), assigns us all to an eternity of
waiting, of leafing through all these dusty volumes in hell. The game of
knowledge exists only to be completed in this one moment; in the meantime,
God can be condemned a thousand times over, history can be discovered to be a
farce or a nightmare, Borges, you and I can dissolve into night or be revealed as
imaginary beings, simple fictions like in the dream of Chuong Tsu and the
butterfly. This does not matter, because the game may not be for us, but, as
Borges writes, 'for the others.' (In a certain sense, this might recall for us die
statement that Kafka once made to Max Brod: 'There is in the universe some-
thing like hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.') What is interesting,
however, is that Borges, following this pious declaration, refers to an 'other,' the
impious and reasonable. He writes:

They speak (I know) of 'the feverish Library whose chance volumes are
constantly in danger of metamorphosizing into others and affirm, negate,
and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.' These words, which not
only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their
author's abominable taste and desperate ignorance. In truth, the Library
contains all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the 25 orthograph-
ical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. (L 57)

It is, of course, interesting to note for the record that the impious and
reasonable author whom the narrator at this point cites and rejects as a person of
'abominable taste and desperate ignorance' is none other than Borges himself,
who penned these very lines a few years earlier in the essay 'The total Library.'
It seems clear from the above passage that we have found the principle that Borges
struggles for: the 'sense of sense,' or the 'secret order of disorder.' To salvage
something of a 'sense,' if not something of an 'ultimate meaning' from the
arbitrary and ignorant combinations of the signifier — that was the hidden
principle in Borges's struggle! - since for him, every signifier is filled with both
tenderness and fear, and every word is, in some language, the name of God.
(Thus, every word, in as much as it is expressed, is at the exact center of die
universe. It necessarily supports the universe, in the same way that for Saussure
each instance of speech [la parole] supports the whole of Language.) It is this
hidden principle that gives him the faith and the courage to go on, even though
he spends his time in hell, outraged and annihilated by the order of knowledge
that exists, and which condemns him to his artificial and fictional interventions,
to merely 'literature' (and this, I remind you, was often Kafka's despair as well).
The principle that Borges discovers is that of 'repetition,' a repetition that he
creates and that must be understood as an artificial creation that is inseparable
 THE BAROQUE DETECTIVE 89

from the technique of literary creation or process he forges, whereby the library
is opened to an infinite number of various readings that diverge and bifurcate.
It is by means of this creation that Borges can descend into the seventeenth
century, that he can correct the imperfections of Berkeley and Hume, in other
words, that he can avoid the errors and false solutions of Idealism (which leads
straight to Hegel) and of the subject of nihilism that comes after, perhaps in a
way that prefigures something that is now possible for us as well.
In my discussion of Deleuze and Leibniz, what I argued is something so
simple and at die same time Borgesean, diat in conclusion I want to return to
emphasize it again: that Borges is the precursor of Leibniz; that it was not
possible for Deleuze to read Leibniz without Borges. This is something so simple
and yet evident, that Deleuze himself did not often see it, or did not choose to
see it exacdy in that way, perhaps due to an anxiety of influence, and this caused
him to locate Borges still in terms of his own earlier reading of Borges as a player
in the absolute game of chance, 'the game without rules' (Fold 63). However,
this claim does not prove to slight Deleuze in any way, since he could only claim
that he was not Borges, and could have seen the exact same thing in his own way.
At the same time, returning to this subject of Borges himself, let me remind you
that we are talking about a man, a Jew, who received a litde notoriety as an
Argentinian writer of the Spanish literary tradition, whose own relation to this
tradition was marked by the nebulous situation of what today is called 'the post-
colonial.' However, even despite this situation (and not, I would argue, because
of it as with so many others who are defined by this situation in the Library
today) it also describes the infamy of an author whose few books (or rather
fictions) have been worthy enough to claim a place on the shelves of the Library
for posterity (although we must state categorically that the name of Borges may
be forgotten at some point, and necessarily so). All of these things are true and
could be defined as the predicates of 'Borges'; however, these are not encom-
passing, since there is this 'other' Borges as well. It is diis one who 'went further'
than the former, who claimed that there was one and only one solution to the
problem of the universe, that there was in other words a straight line that ran
through the labyrinth, and who took it upon himself to seek this line, and most
of all, to claim that he had a right to solve the mystery of the universe. If we
compared these two beings, Borges and his double, there would be nothing that
could account for or justify such a delirious desire (except, that is, the somewhat
arbitrary, on first glance, principle that is the condition of the Library as well).
This form of repetition he creates is absolutely simple, and yet by means of it, he
can make all the difference; so that we can say that Menard is the precursor to
Quixote, or that today, Borges is our only true precursor. In different universes it
may be possible to imagine a Library without the name of this other 'Borges,' but
I want to remind you, not for us. Therefore, our only consolation is that the
Library that exists (for us) - or as some call it, 'the universe' - is infinitely richer.
 9

HOW THE TRUE WORLD

FINALLY BECAME A FABLI

Deleuze argues that the world had to wait for Borges who corrected the
Leibnizian solution and rectified time. However, if the Leibnizian solution saved
the world for truth at the terrible cost of damnation, it is Borges who saves time,
but at the cost of dispensing with truth. This produces a fundamental paradox in
the history of the concept of time. Consequendy, we could say that die Borgesean
solution is not a philosophical one, but rather 'non-philosophical,' and belongs
to the field of modern literature. Borges proposed two things. First, he con-
structed a labyrinth that is composed of a single straight line; however, as the
force of chaotic time, that is, as paradoxical, '[the straight line] is also a line which
forks and keeps on forking, passing through incompossible presents, returning to
not-necessarily true pasts' (TI131). Second, Borges replaces the fictional identity
of a God with the conceptual personage of the 'forger.' Both of these elements,
according to Deleuze, signal the emergence of a new status of narration, whereby
'narration ceases to be truthful, that is, to lay claim to the truth, and has become
fundamentally falsifying' (TI 131).
This is not at all the case of 'each has his own truth,' a variability of
content. It is die power of the false, which replaces and supersedes die form
of the true, because it posits the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or
the co-existence of not-necessarily true pasts. Crystalline [or 'falsifying']
description was already reaching the indiscernibility of the real and die
imaginary, but the falsifying narration which corresponds to it goes a step
further and poses inexplicable differences to die present and alternatives
which are undecidable between true and false to the past. The truthful man
dies, every model of truth collapses, in favor of the new narration. (TI 131)

Taking up this Borgesean fragment, which Deleuze uses to signal a partial

solution to the crisis of philosophy, the fact that the philosopher can no longer
identify with himself may underscore the appearance of the 'forger' as die avatar
of the 'last man.' Deleuze writes in the original preface to Difference et Repetition
(1968) that the forger signals a form of repetition which is 'identical' although
much more rich.

It should be possible to recount a real book of past philosophy as if it were

an imaginary and feigned book. Borges, we know, excelled in recounting
imaginary books. But he goes further when he considers a real book, such
 HOW THE TRUE WORUD FIIMALUY BECAME A FABLE 91

as Don Quixote, as though it were an imaginary book, itself reproduced by

an imaginary author, Pierre Menard, who in turn he considers to be real.
In this case, the most exact, the strictest repetition has as its correlate the
maximum of difference. (DRxxii)

Thus, the Deleuzian philosopher as forger repeats by treating the 'history of

philosophy' as an imaginary novel; this constitutes a certain categorical impera-
tive at the basis of Deleuze's work: 'Write as if the past itself was a supreme
fiction. How then would you make it more usable for the future?' It is in copying
this novel (the virtual) that richer details are incorporated and new variables are
introduced. ('Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second
is infinitely richer.') This solves the problem we began with, that of 'time off its
hinges,' since it signals the advent of multiple pasts, new variables, and a new
regime of narration under 'the powers of the false.' Philosophy becomes its
double: 'the pure repetition of the former text and the present text in one
another' (DRxxii).
In order to give this new species of narration its full conceptual force, it will be
necessary for us to locate the personage of the 'forger' who occupies the moment
when narration ceases to be truthful and becomes fundamentally falsifying.
According to Deleuze, the forger appears precisely at that moment when the
philosophical pretension to 'truth' (i.e. will to truth), on the one hand, is revealed
to harbor within itself another hidden motive (i.e. will-to-power) and, on the
other hand, when this discovery of the form of truth and the philosophical
personage who embodies its force of identification was, in fact, itself simply a
species of 'falsehood' (a discovery which inevitably must pass through its nihil-
istic stages). 'Even "the truthful man ends up realizing that he has never stopped
lying," as Nietzsche said' (TI133). Finally, this leads to the positive discovery of
a notion of the false beyond its moral-juridical determination which belongs to
the system of judgement this new narration has displaced; 'the power of the false
exists only from the perspective of a series of powers, always referring to each
other and passing into one another' (TI 133). Consequendy, if the philosopher
is revealed to be in reality a forger, then 'the forger will thus be inseparable from
a chain of forgers into whom he metamorphoses' (TI 133). However, recalling
our previous discussion, this second revelation can happen only as the result of
an event which makes the idea of the 'true world' impossible a priori; at the very
least, making its concept 'useless' for distinguishing the imaginary and the real
with regard to perception, or for discerning the true and the false with regard to
the past. In other words, the concept of truth is itself found in default, 'out of
use,' failing to clarify the future and the past both of which remain equally
impenetrable and indiscernible. A new method must therefore be sought,
signaling a new clarity and a form of discernment. Yet, this task does not
necessarily entail the creation of a new model of truth, as we will see below.
Although Borges occupies the episodic moment of the appearance of the
forger, in point of fact it is actually Nietzsche who first gives this moment its
critical acumen:
92 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I L- U E S DELEUZE

We have not mentioned the author who is essential in this regard: it is

Nietzsche, who, under the name of the 'will to power,' substitutes the
power of the false for the form of the true, and resolves the crisis of truth,
wanting to setde it once and for all, but, in opposition to Leibniz, in favor
of the false and its artistic, creative power .. . (TI131)

Deleuze ends this statement elliptically, which is characteristic of his style in

those passages where the thought is interrupted and remains in need of further
clarification. In this case, we might infer that in another context the Nietzschean
desire to settle the crisis of truth once and for all would itself be scrutinized by
Deleuze as an expression of a 'will-to-power' that violates the two fundamental
axioms in Deleuze's philosophy concerning the nature of problems and resolu-
tions: (1) that all resolutions are necessarily partial and cannot be taken as final;
(2) that time returns constantly to put the concept of truth again into crisis.
The entire argument contained in the chapter 'The powers of the false'
in Cinema 2 is, in fact, narrated through Nietzsche's aphoristic fragment
from Will to Power, 'How the "true world" finally became an error.' Deleuze
situates the full development of the Nietzschean concept of will to power within
the domain of cinema, recalling the relationship between philosophy and non-
philosophy discussed earlier, thereby substituting for each stage in the Nietz-
schean commentary a particular director — e.g. Welles, Robbe-Grillet, Lang,
Godard, Cassevetes, Perault, Clark, Passolini, Jean Rouch and Alain Resnais —
who works over the concept of the 'will-to-power' under the name of the power
of the false. Thus, the directors themselves appear as 'forgers' who participate
in narration of the concept of truth as the history .of an error. The domain
of cinema with its production of movement- and time-images, its creation of
perspective or 'point-of-view,' and its invention of story with its objective and
subjective facades are taken up by Deleuze as the place where the problems of
truth and falsehood are equated to the technical problems of narration in
cinema: What is a story? What is character? What is the real? What is the past?
Or rather, how can the past be represented as being also substantial and a force
of causality (whether from the perspective of subjective character, or from the
perspective of world-memory). All of these questions appear as problems that
are resolved, each resolution being only partial, each director and representative
body of work passing into relationship with the other directors and works that
add a new approach, element or technique to resolve the crisis of truth that
seems immanent to the history of cinematic narration.
In his aphoristic account, Nietzsche shows the stages that the concept of truth
undergoes to reach its penultimate modern expression of nihilism, representing
that stage where the true world is vanquished but drags in its wake the world of
appearances as well. He shows the progression from its origin in the identification
with the truthful man, represented by the Platonic world and corresponding to
die natural figure of the sage-philosopher. Truth is accessible to the sage, the
virtuous and religious man; 'it lives in him, whose figure is identical to the true
world qua expressed: "I, Plato, I am the truth." ' This stage is then followed by
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 93

the several avatars (or forgers) who substitute for this original identification of
truth with the 'character' of the sage-philosopher, the truthful man. In the second
stage, represented by the Christian world which succeeds the Platonic world
of ideas, the 'true world' is inaccessible in the present, but is permitted to the sage
and virtuous man through suffering and penance. (Augustine would be the
corresponding image of thought.) In the third stage, the 'true world' becomes
both inaccessible and undemonstrable; it cannot be promised - even in the
after-life - although it can be imagined, and this in itself becomes a kind of
consolation. (The philosopher and image of thought that corresponds to this
stage would be the Kantian wisdom where 'the Good' can only have an analogy
and the product of the faculty of the imagination.) In the fourth stage, the
inaccessibility of the 'true world' becomes itself open to question, and philosophy
immediately finds itself offended by the idea that the source of obligation and
truth would derive from an unknown and unconscious source. (The conceptual
personage would be the philosophy of Locke and Hume, the 'birds of
positivism.') Finally, in the fifth and sixth stages, the idea that was found
offensive and contradictory in the fourth stage, now appears useless and no
longer bears any power of obligation; it is no longer worthy of belief or of faith.
It is Nietzsche himself who represents both these moments under the name of
Zarathustra, a moment which bears a Janus-face that casts a glance both forward
and backward and encompassing the entire unfolding of 'truth as a history of
error.' Thus, the character of Zarathustra represents the twilight of the concept of
truth, the death of the 'truthful man,' and the collapse of every model of truth
(that is, the entry into the long night of insomnia, pessimism and even nihilism);
however, on the other slope, his appearance also marks the dawn that breaks into
a long night of insomnia and promises the return of good sense and a spirit of
happiness and joy (that is, the affirmation of this world which comprises the
meaning of the Eternal Return). The apparently contradictory senses that can be
ascribed to these last two stages — or rather, this last stage split into two
aspects — are summarized in Nietzsche's final aphorism that with the vanquish-
ing of 'the true world' the world of appearances vanishes as well.
If Deleuze adopts this Nietzschean account to narrate the history of cinema, it
is not to develop the relationship between the concept of truth in philosophy and
its representation in cinema by analogy or metaphor; rather, cinema takes up the
problem of truth and attempts to resolve it by purely cinematic means and
Deleuze simply traces its 'problem-solving' faculty step by step. What is cinema,
after all, but a world constructed by pure appearances? However, it is precisely
the relation between this world of pure appearance and the so-called 'real and
true world' that recapitulates the philosophical problem recounted above in a
striking way; each director and 'film-maker' must, therefore, take up and resolve
this problem in a singular manner, although using the materials and technical
means that are made available by others who have preceded him or her.
According to Deleuze, it is precisely at that moment in die history of cine-
matographic narration when the movement-image is abandoned in favor of the
time-image that cinema resolves the problem of its dependence upon the 'the real
94 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I U l_ E S D E L. E U Z E

and true world.' That is, cinema no longer seeks to represent the latter through
the movement-image, which 'is linked to (real) sensory motor descriptions,' or
through truthful narration, which is 'developed organically, according to legal
connections in space and chronological relations in time'; but rather, as in
Godard, 'moves from pure descriptions to falsifying narration from the point-of-
view of the direct time-image' (TI132—133). As Deleuze writes: 'Here is the
essential point: how the new regime of the image (the direct time-image) works
with pure crystalline optical and sound descriptions, and falsifying, purely
"chronic" narration. Description stops presupposing a reality and narration
stops referring to a form of the true at one and the same time ...' (TI 134—135).
From the above statement we might establish a direct connection between the
time-image and the concept of the forger. Post-war cinema resolves the problem
of truth by purely technical means, that of no longer positing a 'true world' as
the basis of its narration; at this point, as Deleuze writes, 'description becomes
its own object and narration becomes temporal and falsifying at the same time'
(TI 132). The representation of a truth in itself is revealed as a purely conven-
tional means of establishing the relation between terms or elements of a given
narration. In other words, it can be seen as the formal perspective of an else-
where which is posited as being exterior to the plane occupied by appearances,
and which sets all appearance qua appearance in movement around its position
which remains virtual: '[T]he elsewhere may be close to a here, and the former of
a present that is no longer' (TI 132). From this topographical perspective the
'truth' could be seen as a vectoral dimension which coordinates all appearances
and causes them to unfold according to an order of time that is laid down in
advance, coordinating every there with a corresponding here and every present
with a formerly that is absent as a content of narration but reappears as either its
term or its referent. However, in the absence of this elsewhere, cinema discovers
a new means of producing description that, although it unfolds in the proximity
of 'a world' or a 'subject,' does not find itself organized and coordinated by the
terms that are located there, as if cinema has found the means of disconnecting
itself from this 'true world' and becomes immanent to itself, a world of pure
appearances.
Perhaps this corresponds to the exact meaning of Nietzsche's earlier discovery,
since when the 'true world' is no longer posited as the point external to the plane
occupied by appearances, as either their real term or their point of reference, then
the notion of appearances themselves no longer bears a secondary and derogatory
value of them as 'unreal' or 'false.' Consequently, at the very same moment that
cinema is disconnected from 'the true world,' the notion of the false itself is
'disarticulated' from its moral-juridical sense.
Deleuze addresses this relationship between these two events in the following
manner:

The formation of the crystal, the force of time and the power of the false
are strictly complementary, and constantly imply each other as the new
co-ordinates of the image ... Narration is constantly being completely
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 95

modified, in each of its episodes, not according to subjective variations,

but as a consequence of disconnected places and de-chronologised
moments. (TI133)

We might assume from this description that, initially, a certain 'dizziness' results
from the loss of the 'true world' as the anchor and referent for 'the world of pure
appearances,' the shattering of the cardinal points of space and time upon which
the elements and terms of classical narration were coordinated and ordered, and
finally the collapse of the sensory-motor schema which oriented a description of
the world that unfolded in the proximity of the subject - in short, all the traits
or characteristic attributes that Deleuze finds operating in the new type of
narration-description of post-war cinema with its 'irrational cuts,' 'hallucinatory
perceptions,' 'false movements' and 'crystal-images.'
Would this not constitute a vivid illustration of the statement, 'time out of
joint,' which corresponds to the adventure and crisis of contemporary phi-
losophy? ' [I]n becoming, the earth has lost all center, not only in itself, but in that
it no longer has a center around which to turn' (TI 142). More specifically, we
might refer to what Deleuze calls the 'spontaneous Nietzscheanism in Welles,'
which is nothing less than the radical change to which the very notion of center
is subjected: 'Welles, through his conception of bodies, forces and movement,
has constructed a body which has lost all motor center or configuration — the
earth' (TI 142). Yet, as Deleuze cautions more than once - 'Pay attention! This
is cinema!' In other words, it would be a mistake to conclude that cinema
has solved the crisis of representation, since it has only solved the crisis of
'movement-image' in cinema with the invention of a new means of narration,
new characters and new technical procedures for producing images and story.
Moreover, each solution that a given director achieves is partial and must
be taken up again by other directors, or even by the same director in later
productions (as in the case of Resnais, or even Welles), because the problem of
representation is never settled 'once and for all' (which already characterizes
a certain 'action-image' which proceeds from the judgement of the 'past and its
"it was"'), but rather each solution is given immanently and leads only as far as
the next move.
At the same time as cinema discovers the new narrative possibilities that
belong to what Deleuze calls 'crystalline description,' it also finds in the charac-
ters of the 'man who lies' and 'the forger' its own double; that of the artificer,
whose account is therefore not simply a variation or even betrayal of the constant
and immutable version of the 'real' implied by the presence of the truthful man,
but rather the 'nth degree' of a power of fabulation which must be at the origin of
every possible story. Deleuze's statement regarding Robbe-Grillet's The Man
Who Lies can, thus, be accepted as a general description of the significance of this
character for cinema itself: 'this is not a localized liar, but an unrealizable and
chronic forger in paradoxical spaces'; and it is only on the basis of this strong
identification that Deleuze's statement that 'the forger becomes the character of
the cinema' (TI 132) can be properly understood. What are directors, after all,
SB THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I I- L- E S DEUEUZE

but the forgers of characters who, in turn, are the forgers of stories (excuses,
accounts, alibis, treason)? In this regard, we might think of the recent film The
Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) which has for a central character the nefar-
ious Kaiser Sozja, who is completely forged from the various scraps and posters
on the wall of the interrogation room where the film's central plot is spun.
Consequently, the descriptions that Deleuze offers of the narration specific to the
forger, or the metamorphosis of specific characters into a chain of forgers, or
rather 'die perspective of a series of powers always referring to each other and
passing into each other,' can be taken as immanent to the movement of narration
that cinema discovers as its own 'story-telling function' (TI133).
As Deleuze writes, 'perspectives and projections — these are neither true nor
false' (TI 144). Therefore, the false can no longer be understood simply as a
'modification' of a truth that is limited to subjective variation or 'point-of-view.'
Returning to the history of the crisis of truth which passes between Leibniz and
Borges, post-war cinema can also be situated within this same problematic,
which it has resolved to some degree by discovery of an 'irreducible multiplicity'
as the condition of each character, each perspective, or 'point-of-view.' If time is
described as the force which enters to throw truth into crisis, each stage or passage
then implies a point where a 'character' of truth failed to resolve this crisis either
in terms of perception or in terms of action (decisive will); but in each case, this
impasse is revealed from the perspective of another, more powerful character who
can project its own version across the state of things and affairs. The force of time
is in each case equal to the power of a narrative that binds truth to the identifi-
cation with a certain perspective and gives this perspective the positive expression
of a character. It is for this reason that the forger implies multiple worlds
(perspectives), even though these perspectives cannot be understood as simple
variations of the same world, organized and coordinated around a common
center. Why? As Deleuze responds to this question, it is because 'the forger exists
only in a series of forgers who are his metamorphoses, because the power itself
only exists in a series of powers which are its exponents' (TI 145). The answer to
this question simply corresponds to the situation of the concept of truth already
outlined, since if man will always already have discovered the truth to be lying
from a certain 'point-of-view,' then every truthful narration must in turn be
discovered to be falsifying from another perspective which, in turn, is capable of
being betrayed by a third and a fourth perspective. Yet, the classical represen-
tation of a truth that is 'in itself cannot exist in a world where everyone must be
discovered to be lying from a certain perspective; in short, its concept suffers a
fatal contradiction and finally becomes useless. The truthful man invokes a true
world, but the true world in turn implies the truthful man. 'In itself, it is an
inaccessible and useless world ... Thus it is not hidden by appearances; it is,
on the contrary, that which hides appearances and provides them with an alibi'
(TI 146). Again, we come back to the situation when the truthful narration
ultimately fails to discern the relationships between the real and the imaginary,
or to resolve undecidable alternatives and inexplicable differences between true
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 97

and false perspectives; in a world already full of lies and treason, falsifying
narration may be the only mode that is adequate to time.
In order to illustrate this last statement, I would like to show how the col-
lapse of truthful narration and the positive emergence of the powers of the
false are vividly dramatized in the Alain Resnais production of Marguerite
Duras's Hiroshima Mon Amour ([I960] 1963). To begin, it is important to
see Duras's story as a certain 'war-text' that is launched against a certain type
of truthful narration: 'to have done with the description of horror by horror'
(H 9). This attack can be discerned on three distinct levels. On the first level,
Hiroshima has been chosen as an exemplary sign of a past that has been reduced
to a banality - it is a monument of emptiness. Thus, it is not a special or rarefied
sign, but rather indicates a certain class of signs: the classification of the signs
'Hiroshima' and 'Auschwitz' as signs of history which designate their char-
acteristic function of globalized or epochal representation. It is this global
character that underlines the species of 'recollection-images' that appear in
conjunction with these signs, as if these images were themselves the memory
associations of a certain 'age of the earth' (Resnais) or a vast 'world-brain'
(Deleuze). Banality expresses the kind of repetition which occurs when some-
thing is repeated a thousand times a day all over the world in which what is
repeated bears both a minimum of difference and a maximum of amplitude.
Therefore, banal repetition, or the 'description of horror by horror,' sees nothing
since it represents a kind of representation that is too general, vague and
amorphous. From the technical perspective of'story,' Duras strategically chooses
the place of Hiroshima as a means of reviving the most exhausted and fatigued of
plots or the most conventional and artificial repetitions of a certain tale of love
and traumatic memory. Hiroshima Mon Amour is, after everything has been said,
simply a 'love-story.' It is important to see, however, that Duras inserts another
banal repetition on the level of plot ('the one-night affair'), but the fact that this
affair takes place at Hiroshima implicates one level of banality in another,
producing variations within each order of repetition, and causing an entirely
different series to unfold around the name of Hiroshima.
On the second level, the place of Hiroshima can be characterized as a
'monument of emptiness' (as Duras describes it in the prologue to the script) in
the sense that its place-name designates the purely conventional and artificial
forms of historical representation that have come to determine it as a sign. Here
we might even discern a resemblance between the representation of the past that
characterizes Hiroshima in Duras's description and in Nietzsche's 'monumental
form,' except that there is also the presence of a negative function of monu-
mentalizing that is specific to the 'age of Auschwitz and Hiroshima,' and which
Nietzsche himself could not have foreseen. In the beginning of the film, Resnais
utilizes the documentary footage and still-shots of the horrors of Hiroshima
within the convention of the 'flashback' (as if from the psychological viewpoint
of personal memory) to underscore the impasse of this artificial construction as
well as its global character as a perspective or point-of-view which belongs to
98 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I l_ l_ E S DEL.EUZE

world-memory. Thus, the opening dialogue that takes place between the French
actress and the Japanese man presents us with the collapse of a certain kind of
truthful narration in die series of opposing statements made by each character -
specifically, the failure of the 'recollection-image' to adequately present 'what
happened' at Hiroshima.

HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.

SHE: I saw everything. Everything.

SHE: Listen ... I know. / know everything.

HE: No. You know nothing.

Within this series of declarative statements that threaten to annihilate one

another, which are spoken over the series of 'recollection-images' (the docu-
mentary footage, some of it fictionalized, of days that followed the atomic
explosion, the archival records contained at the museum at Hiroshima), we are
directly confronted with a situation of inexplicable differences concerning
imaginary and real (She: 'I didn't make anything up'; He: 'You made everything
up'), and non-decidable alternatives between true and false pasts (She: 'I saw
everything'; He: 'You saw nothing'). Consequently, the character of Riva, the
French actress, can be understood as an avatar of forger: she has 'forged' a direct
relationship to Hiroshima (for example, by occupying the position of an eye-
witness), but only through the most indirect of means, a fact which is made all
the more scandalous in view of the way mat she has made her presence to
Hiroshima, in a certain sense, absolute. Could we initially ascribe her motiva-
tions to the role of an actress who has come to make an 'enlightening film'
(Duras) on peace at Hiroshima? After all, do not all actors lie? This would be one
possible interpretation, of course, if we were not also immediately presented with
the traces of a more profound causality that motivates her desire to forge a direct
experience with 'what happened' at Hiroshima.
The statements of the Japanese man initially function to negate her attempts
of appropriating the 'past of Hiroshima' for her own line of flight (i.e. as a
means of escaping her own past at Nevers) and serve to foreground this dilemma
by opening her character to a certain suspicion of impure motives behind her
attachment of personal memory to the name of Hiroshima. In a certain sense,
they function to place her character on trial, in the minds of the spectator, as
an incredible witness whose testimony must be discovered as falsifying. Yet, are
we to infer from the negative judgements of the Japanese the presence of the
'truthful man,' thereby ascribing to his perspective the trudi of 'what happened'
at Hiroshima? Not necessarily, since such an ascription would be prejudicial and
even moralistic in two senses. First, it would be a prejudice to confer a privileged
'point-of-view' and true knowledge of the past to his character simply by the
fact of his national identity (an identity, moreover, which the spectator has no
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 99

knowledge of in the first scene, and which, thus, could only be assigned retro-
actively) . This kind of inference represents a symbolic, or even an allegorical,
projection of a species of the past that is both singular and non-presentable, being
the equivalent of a 'true world' that becomes inaccessible since any possible
relationship that approaches it through the present has been singularized and
belongs to the individual notion that expresses it as one of its attributes (for
example, 'my past,' or the organic unity of a past that belongs to a particular
'people'). In the second sense, the Japanese offers no positive representation of
the past that would correct her 'inauthentic,' and possibly deceitful, private
appropriation; nevertheless, his negative and 'unbearably impersonal' (Duras)
statements serve to deny the access of all appearances to the true perspective of
'what happened' at Hiroshima. In other words, through the purely formal
judgements made by the Japanese, the truth of 'what happened' at Hiroshima is
projected elsewhere than on the plane occupied by appearances, or recollection-
images, as being a past that is in itself inaccessible and unknowable in the pres-
ent. Resnais uses the formal and negative to introduce a crisis in the repre-
sentation of the past by means of the 'recollection-image,' since her statements
are accompanied in a contrapuntal manner by the images from documentaries
and archival footage which are immediately negated by his statement 'You see
nothing.' Consequently, this general crisis or dilemma of representation is shared
by the spectator who also sees and knows nothing, even in the very act seeing
the series of images that unfold against the characters' dialogue, or knowing
what these images signify by referring them to the artificial conventions of the
recollection-image deployed by the 'made-to-order documentary' (Duras) or
historico-dramatic film.
At this point, we must turn to a general question concerning the recollection-
image itself. How does this mode of representing the past participate in the
crisis of truthful narration discussed above? In his discussion of the problem of
the 'recollection-image' in Cinema 2, Deleuze regards Resnais as the purest
disciple of Welles; it is Resnais who resolves the problem of the 'recollection-
image' which was only given as a certain direction in Welles. Thus, Deleuze
recounts the different stages of Resnais's solution where each film is grasped
only from the function of providing more data to resolve the mechanism of
the 'time-image,' which ends in the solution of finally doing away with the
recollection-image altogether and the discovery of new techniques for presenting
the pure recollection of the past. However, as Deleuze writes concerning the
abandonment of the recollection-image, 'this inadequacy of the flashback does
not stop his whole work being based on the co-existence of sheets of past, the
present no longer even intervening as center of evocation' (TI122). But we must
ask why the 'recollection-image' ('the flashback' in cinematic technique) emerges
as the fundamental problem in the discussion of Resnais and Welles? First,
because the recollection-image establishes a false relationship between present
and past, since it gives the past as representation. Accordingly, the image of what
is past appears as an optical effect of die recollection-image, rather than signi-
fying the event of memory that is expressed in the form of the recollection-image
1OO THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I L l_ E S D E L. E U Z E

which cannot be said to resemble the past in any way (any more than the event
designated by the statement 'I remember' can be adequately represented by a par-
ticular object of recollection). Here, Deleuze takes up the Bergsonian distinction
to argue that the past can never resemble the recollection-image, but withdraws or
diverges from its representation as its profound cause. Secondly, the recollection-
image is inadequate because Deleuze himself comes to the striking conclusion
'that memory is no longer the faculty of having recollections'; but rather,

it is the membrane which in the most varied ways (continuity, but also
discontinuity and envelopment, etc.) makes the sheets of the past and the
layers of reality correspond, the first emanating from an inside which is
always already there, the second arriving from an outside which is always to
come, the two gnawing at the present which is now only the point of their
encounter. (TI207)

If the past cannot be the object of representation, because it functions as its

profound cause, then any attempt to construct a series of recollection-images in
order to gain access to 'what happened' at Hiroshima, in short to 'Remember
Hiroshima,' necessarily leads to an impasse — as Duras writes, 'Nothing is truly
given at Hiroshima' (H 9) - and actually projects a false image or a sterile double
of the past that is evacuated of all of its force (that is, the duration that connects it
to the living body of the present), producing instead its corpse, or an empty and
dead zone in time.
On the third level, the artificial and conventional sense of the recollection-
image and of Hiroshima itself as a site of 'banal repetition' is further reinforced
by the insertion of the documentary within the film and the appearance of Riva's
character in the uniform of a nurse, thus providing us with a certain air of
fantasy, that of the role (or mask) in the world-historical drama that Hiroshima
has become for the rest of the world. In the synopsis of the script, Duras sug-
gests that it is precisely an aspect of male fantasy, that of Riva's appearance in
the white uniform, 'the official uniform of official virtue,' that initially attracts
the Japanese. In this sense, it may be more or less accurate to compare the type
of perception that appears in the recollection-image with the dream vision, since
both dream and recollection-image lack a distinct 'point-of-view' in relation to
which vision unfolds, emerging rather from that point where the subject who
sees is already found to be elsewhere (for example, as what happens when some-
one wakes and recollects the perception-images that reappear from a vague and
indeterminate region of the past). Duras herself refers to this sense of mas-
querade, as well as the air of fantasy that fills Hiroshima with a kind of
dreamlike quality, as a 'baroque parade,' a festival procession of the world —
dogs, cats, idlers, students protesting, children chanting - as if describing a
canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. Thus, in her staging instructions, Duras places
special emphasis on the fact that each time we are shown the 'peace square'
at Hiroshima where the documentary is being filmed, we always witness the
disassembling of the stage and the various props being removed. 'The
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 1O1

cameramen are moving off (whenever we see them in the film they're moving
off with equipment). The grandstands are being dismantled. The bunting is
being removed' (H 11). This is clearly presented in Duras's synopsis that begins
in Part Three of the script:

It's four P.M. at Peace Square in Hiroshima. In the distance a group of

film technicians is moving away carrying a camera, lights and reflectors.
Japanese workers are dismantling the official grandstand that has been used
in the last scene of the film.
An important note: we will always see the technicians in the distance and
will never know what film they're shooting at Hiroshima. All we'll ever see is
the scenery being taken down. (H 39)

In the scene to which this last statement refers we come upon the French actress
asleep under the bunting of a grandstand while die set of the film is being
dismantled. The character of Riva is sleeping, which signals a duration that
interrupts the point where she is acting. Thus, she is the actress asleep while she
remains in her role as the character of the other film. As Deleuze writes, 'It is
under these conditions of die time-image that die same transformation involves
the cinema of fiction and the cinema of reality and blurs their differences'
(TI155). In the next scene, we are presented with a duplication of one of the
earlier scenes of the documentary on International Peace, the students' protest
march, this time with the stagehands taking the place of the actors who played the
protesting students: 'Stagehands are carrying the posters in various languages —
Japanese, German, French, etc. - NEVER ANOTHER HIROSHIMA' (H39).
There is a certain irony present in diis moment since aldiough we might believe in
the intention of the film about Hiroshima as 'enlightening' (Duras), the form of
diis 'enlightenment' violates its message in the sense that it creates the possibility
of Hiroshima happening again an infinite number of times. Thus, 'NEVER
ANOTHER HIROSHIMA' in actuality means FOREVER ANOTHER
HIROSHIMA.
Analogous to the role of Riva, the French actress who plays 'the eternal nurse
of an eternal war' (H 10), Hiroshima itself is essentially 'played' rather than
remembered; it is played again and again, and represents something like a broken
chrono-tape of world-memory. In fact, we could argue that the past of Hirosh-
ima is the past of 'pure representation,' the past of its montage, the moment just
after it has been placed on film; the moment it ends, when it is disassembled and
then assembled again, as Duras states, 'for all eternity.' Hiroshima is a moment
eternally repeated. 'It will begin all over again. Two hundred thousand dead.
Eighty thousand wounded. In nine seconds. These figures are official. It will
begin all over again' (H 24). Thus, memory itself is reduced to its banal statistics,
information, figures, images, duration. The event of Hiroshima would last nine
seconds, or even an infinite number of nine-second loops. As a result, we might
define it as a nine-second interval that is repeated eternally. Everything that
happens, has happened and will happen at Hiroshima occurs as if in a past
1O2 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I L [_ E S OELEUZE

that has never been present, or rather, has been present countless times. Both
alternatives amount to the same structure of time: pure past, or pure repetition.
In other words, an eternal day of judgement: the origin of the world, the end of
the world.
It is against this eternal return of the Same that Duras incorporates another
kind of repetition that grasps Hiroshima from the point-of-view of Riva's past.
Riva sees Hiroshima from the perspective of Nevers, almost in the sense that
Hiroshima becomes the double of Nevers. It is from the perspective of her point-
of-view that another Hiroshima unfolds; however, this double of the past
functions in a different manner from the recollection-image since it forges a
living connection with the present at Hiroshima (particularly from the perspec-
tive of the Japanese) and, moreover, bears a hypnotic trance-like vision, like
the glowing eyes of the cat in the cellar of Nevers which Duras uses to figure the
quality specific to Riva's perception.
More accurately, we might even say 'projected.' The past of Nevers is pro-
jected onto the present of Hiroshima, or even, it is through the lens of Nevers
that Riva sees 'everything' at Hiroshima (which, in a sense, clarifies her
statements at the beginning of the film). Resnais uses Riva's gaze as a hidden
point of projection that rivals the 'objective' view-point of the camera and
provides each scene with the 'feeling' of double exposure, as an effect of what
Eisenstein called Visual overtonal montage.' This is first established in die
montage sequence early in the film when Riva watches the Japanese man asleep,
his arm outstretched behind him and his open hand visible, and suddenly falls
into a trance over the confluence of this image with the hand of her dying
German lover in the past of Nevers. ('While she is looking at it [the hand of the
Japanese], there suddenly appears, in place of the Japanese, the body of a. young
man, lying in the same position, but in a posture of death, on the bank of the
river, in full day-light' [H 29].) A small detail, but pivotal nonetheless — again,
the word 'hypnotic' may even be a more accurate description - since it is from
this point onward that the present at Hiroshima becomes haunted by the past at
Nevers. Hence, the view-point of the camera falls under the spell cast by Riva's
vision in such a manner that both perspectives are folded into contorted angles
that confront each other violently, producing in the scenes a shock or disturbance
in the coordination of the angle of projection with the characters' point-of-view.
(I will return to further discuss the significance of this below.) It is by these 'two
hands' that the past of Nevers and the present of Hiroshima are suddenly
'stitched together' in Riva's perception, in a manner that is strikingly similar to
the function ofwhat Lacan described as ^ne. point de caption ('the quilting point').
The apparent contradiction between Duras's description of 'hands' in the film-
script and the film's presentation of only one hand is resolved when we
understand that the hand of the Japanese is doubly exposed in Riva's vision.
Moreover, this expresses the idea to the spectator that the Japanese himself is
doubly exposed, being from this moment onward two men in one, his presence
at Hiroshima completely possessed (or captured) by the presence of Riva's dead
German lover at Nevers.
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 103

Finally, the mechanism of this over-tonal conflict that occurs in the visual
layers of the image allows us to understand more clearly why the landscape of
Hiroshima can be said to be 'haunted,' since it is illuminated from two angles
and visibly 'glows' from die point where it is now seen from Nevers. It is from
this 'glowing' that we might perceive the power of Riva's vision which bears two
distinct senses: first, as we have already illustrated, a kind of hypnotic point of
vision which illuminates (or irradiates) the present of Hiroshima; second, an
eternity (a dead or empty form of time) which empties every perception of this
present into a pure past that refuses to be, or rather, whose being itself is pure
repetition (for example, the repetition of Nevers in Hiroshima). It is because of
this second sense that we cannot say, any longer, that Nevers is a past in relation
to the present of Hiroshima, any more than we can say that the place of
Hiroshima can henceforth be distinguished from the place of Nevers.
On a more general level of interpretation, we might link these descriptions
of the type of vision (or 'seeing') that appears from Riva's point-of-view to
Deleuze's comments concerning the quality of perception and the 'new race
of characters' that emerge in post-war cinema who belong to spaces that we no
longer know how to describe: spaces that Deleuze calls 'any-space-whatever'
(espace quelconque) and a mutant race of characters he describes as being reduced
to pure functions of vision, as 'seers' (Tlxi). The novelty that Resnais intro-
duced around the emergence of these new spatial and perceptual situations,
according to Deleuze, is 'the disappearance of the center or fixed point.' Without
a fixed and immutable point of reference to which it is related, 'the present begins
to float, struck with uncertainty, dispersed in the character's comings and goings,
or is immediately absorbed by the past' (Til16). This can be immediately
ascribed to the function of the present in Resnais's direction of Hiroshima Man
Amour, whether we are speaking here of the voice-over, the image, the use of
flashback, or even the progression of scenes. As Deleuze writes, for Resnais

[djeath does not fix an actual present, so numerous are the dead who haunt
the sheets of the past ('9 million dead haunt this landscape' [in reference to
the landscape of Auschwitz], or '200,000 dead in 9 seconds' [in reference
to Hiroshima]) . . . In short, the confrontation of the sheets of the past
takes place directly, each capable of being present in relation to the next:
for the woman, Hiroshima will be the present of Nevers; for the man,
Nevers will be the present of Hiroshima. (TI117)

We might discern several things from the above statements. On the one hand,
Resnais's characters do not occupy a present, or, rather, we can say that they
exist outside the present defined chronologically, a fact that is supported by the
nature of the affair, or 'one-night stand,' which temporarily interrupts chrono-
logical time, and installs in time a pause, or an 'in-between' of duration. This is
further reinforced at the end of the film, when the characters return to the room
in which, as Duras recounts, 'nothing happens.' 'Both are reduced to a terrifying,
mutual impotence. The room, "The way of the world," remains around them,
1O4 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OR GSH.L.ES DEL.EUZE

and they will disturb it no more' (H 13). This gives us a vivid illustration of the
earlier statement that cinematic description stops presupposing a reality that
precedes the filmed moment, because the world remains outside the duration
they share together. It does not exist for them, or perhaps, it is because they —
that is, who they were for the odiers — have become lost to the world that is
populated by others. Therefore, who they are — or more accurately, who they are
becoming — exists only within the duration that unfolds at Hiroshima, and only
from the singular direction of each other's gaze. (In the last scene of the film,
Duras writes: 'They look at each other without seeing each other. Forever'
[H 83].) We must imagine that if they were to turn away and avert their glance,
even for a second, they would be doubly lost: a first time to the world, a second
time to each other.
On the other hand, we cannot infer from this that they are purely absent
either, but rather that they occupy two points on the sheets of the past, pasts
which are present to each other through the intersection of Hiroshima-Nevers.
In this manner, for her, he becomes the present of Hiroshima; for him, she
becomes the present of Nevers; as if all of the present has been encompassed by
the present that exists at Hiroshima and all of the past by the past at Nevers,
and the whole of time is stretched between these two points. This is why the
Japanese must learn everything he can about her past in Nevers, since it is only
because of 'what happened' at Nevers that she exists and becomes present to him
at Hiroshima. Duras writes, 'she gives this Japanese — at Hiroshima — her most
precious possession: herself as she now is, her survival after the death of her love
at Nevers (H 112). Thus, in response to Riva's question concerning why the
Japanese wants to know about her past life at Nevers, Duras provides Resnais
with three statements in the film's script, each of which designates Nevers as
that point where time forks or bifurcates into different pasts. Rather than choos-
ing just one, Resnais presents us with all three alternatives.

HE: Because of Nevers. I can only begin to know you, and among the
many thousand things in your life, I'm choosing Nevers.

HE: It was there, I seem to have understood, that I almost... lost you ...
and that I risked never knowing you.

HE: It was there, I seemed to have understood, that you must have begun
to be what you are today. (H 51)

As we can see in these statements, it is not by accident then that Duras employs
'Hiroshima' as the catastrophic twin of 'Nevers,' since both signs, or place-
names, designate the moment where time forks into incompatible worlds;
therefore, the story that unfolds between Riva and the Japanese addresses in a
striking way the same problem that was first taken up by Leibniz and then again
by Borges (Tlxii).
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 10S

Recalling the earlier description of the time-image that concerns us in this

example, 'forking-time' can be defined as die moment when time could have
taken a different course. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze first comments on
the nature of forking time under the concept of the caesura (Holderlin). This
marks what later would appear as die succession of the 'movement-image' by
the 'time-image,' in which the subordination of time to movement is overturned
and time itself appears as an empty and pure form — i.e. time itself unfolds
instead of things unfolding within it. This can be described as belonging to an
order of time which no longer 'rhymes,' because it is distributed on both sides of
an event that causes beginning and end, before and after, to no longer coin-
cide. Thus, 'we may define the order of time as this purely formal distribution of
the unequal in the function of the caesura ... The caesura, along with the before
and after that it ordains once and for all, constitutes the fracture in the I (the
caesura is exacdy the point at which the fracture appears)' (DR89). Therefore,
the caesura marks the appearance of an event which splits the whole of time into
unequal parts, causing it to fall out of joint (or cardo), to appear different from
itself, although this difference will continue to remain unequal, meaning that it
will belong to an order of repetition radier than to representation. Since it causes
the whole of time to be redistributed and to change sense, the symbol of its action
must be understood to be adequate to time as a whole. 'Such a symbol adequate
to the whole of time', Deleuze writes, 'may be expressed in many ways: to throw
time out of joint, to cause the sun to explode, to throw oneself into a volcano, to
kill God or the father' (DR89).
Here, in the second of these possible symbols, 'to cause the sun to explode,' we
can immediately recognize the classification of Hiroshima under the category of
the caesura. In other words, we can see that Hiroshima functions as a pure order
of time, diat is, a time that 'orders' the series of before and after. There is the age
of Hiroshima, which divides all of time into two parts: there is the world before
Hiroshima; there is the world after Hiroshima; between them, there is a
modification that remains unconscious and unknowable. 'What happened?' This
is why the kind of repetition one finds there is characterized by 'banality,' a time
in which nothing happens, without content. Time itself is no longer a form in
which empirical events unfold, but rather a formlessness at the 'end of time,'
a bare and empty repetition (repetition of the Same) which is both abstract and
general and is thus equal to the whole of time. On die first level, therefore, we can
see that it is by analogy to this pure formal repetition of an event that modifies
and orders the series before and after that she finds at Hiroshima the conditions
for the unfolding of Nevers. She repeats the empirical events of Nevers at
Hiroshima, because from a formal perspective of time itself, the form of repeti-
tion and what is repeated are identical. Yet, there is also a repetition to be located
on his side. She repeats Nevers at Hiroshima; he repeats Hiroshima at Nevers.
What in the beginning was the 'absolutely subjective' becomes objectified in
these two repetitions, making a mutual object of memory, what Deleuze calls a
'memory for two,' becoming finally 'ages of world memory.' Deleuze writes con-
cerning Resnais's creation of 'ages of the world' as distinct cinematic characters:
1OB THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GIULES DELEUZE

The idea of age tends to take on an autonomous political, historical, or

archeological range ... There are constants: each age, each sheet, will
be defined by a territory, lines of flight and blockages of these lines [signi-
fied, for example, by the statements 'I have seen everything,' 'You have seen
nothing'] ... But the distribution varies from one age to another and
from one character to another ... Throughout Resnais' work we plunge
into a memory that Overflows die conditions of psychology, memory for
two, memory for several, world-memory, memory-ages of the world.
(Til 18-119)

It is the passage of this purely subjective past that overflows the conditions of
a limited psychological view-point, forming the condition of a shared memory,
a memory for two, or a memory-age of world, that allowed us to take up the
example of Hiroshima Man Amour; specifically the intersection of Nevers/
Hiroshima, the folding of Nevers upon Hiroshima as the superimposition of
two sheets of the past that are stitched together through the present-point desig-
nated by each sign. What we are thus presented with is two incommensurable
regions of the past, Hiroshima and Nevers, which are like two unconnected
places in world-memory that undergo transformation by being placed in a direct
relation to one another (a relation that is vividly represented by the final image:
'They look at each other without seeing each other. Forever.'). Here, memory is
topologically understood which resolves, in a different sense from the solutions
offered by Leibniz and then by Borges, the opening of the world to the existence
of multiple pasts as well as different possible futures. Topological memory: die
encounter of two different sheets of past that are designated by the signs
Hiroshima—Nevers signals a transformation of the whole continuum of the past
through its vital re-arrangement. Deleuze describes this transformation that
takes place on two separate sheets of the past in terms of what mathematicians
call a 'Baker transformation,' where in the smallest region of a square surface,
two infinitely close points will be plied apart and separated, each allocated to
one-half of a new square, 'with the result that the total surface is redistributed
with each transformation' (TI119).
A final problem that should concern us is the character of judgement that is
attached to certain signs that might bear a global or world-character of memory.
On the level of narration, the particular qualities that come to be attached to the
names of Hiroshima and Nevers result from a system of judgement that differenti-
ates them by assigning their referential function and distributing the actualization
of each sign along a gradient that runs between the real and the fictional. In other
words, 'Hiroshima' is a real name, evoking a real place, an historical event, a locus
of world-memory; consequendy, the point-of-view here is the most impersonal
spectator - the world itself, the 'age of Hiroshima.' At first, it is from this
perspective simulating a general subject of world-memory or an objective cor-
relate of the real that Nevers might appear as a pure fabulation and an imaginary
sign whose relation to the sign of Hiroshima is a form of improper signification,
a construction of Riva's madness (delire); it either evokes a singular repetition of
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 1OT

events, or designates the locus of another world that is encrypted within the
world of 'Hiroshima.' Thus, it bears the topological attribute of a subjective
region of the world that is singularized and unfolds within the interiors of one
perspective; consequently, it is opposed to the 'objective' sign of the Hiroshima
that unfolds within the interiors of a 'world' populated by others.
As we have discussed above, the camera occupies and mimics this 'objective'
view-point in as much as it 'transcends' the purely subjective view-point and
folds the two surfaces of vision into the movement-image (the sequence of
shots): thus, the camera sometimes sees from the character's perspective through
a series of highly stylized and artificial mechanisms that create the feeling of the
purely subjective vision (soft memories, fuzzy and oblique angles, moving and
contorted shots); at the same time, the camera 'sees' the character from the
exterior and signals this 'objective' surface through an equally artificial means
(clear and distinct resolution of the scene, high or direct angles which could not
be occupied by the character such as the scene where she is walking along the
river of Nevers). Then, a second perspective (or 'point-of-view') is introduced
by the mechanism of the film within the film, of the documentary on peace
within the film of their story, which reinforces the doubling that Hiroshima
undergoes by being seen from the perspective of Nevers, or as the perspective of
Nevers is 'projected' onto Hiroshima. In this manner, Resnais and Duras resolve
this problem of equally falsifying perspective by making the camera itself appear
within the frame of the film, as well as the apparatus of props, set constructions
and, most importantly, the technicians and workers who are always shown
carrying equipment in and out of the frame.
Otherwise, why would Duras place so much importance on the visibility of
the machinery, of the identity of the 'technicians' and die 'Japanese workers,'
of the system of exchange that motivates the production of modern film as an
industrial art, if not to reveal the irony of the money system that conditions the
production of what is essentially a fiction set at Hiroshima? The irony of an
entire international economy (Franco-Japanese) funded to tell a personal story
signals, perhaps, a more profound narrative of 'world-peace.' As Duras writes,
'the personal story always dominates the necessarily demonstrative Hiroshima
story' (H39).
If this premise were not adhered to, this would be just one more made-to-
order picture, of no more interest dian any fictionalized documentary. If it
is adhered to, we'll end up with a sort of false documentary that will probe
the lesson of Hiroshima more deeply than any made-to-order documen-
tary. (H 10)
Following this premise, the mechanism of the 'film within the film' is much more
complex than a simple mise-en-abime since the entire medium of the film itself
becomes an aspect of the problem of memory and point-of-view. In other words,
the film apparatus or camera itself is invested with a point-of-view that is some-
times confused between subjective (personal) and objective (real), revealing the
'analogy' between subjective personal memory and objective collective memory
10S THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF G I 1_ l_ E S DELEUZE

that the apparatus of film enacts. Because the apparatus of the camera is what first
exteriorizes and distinguishes the cinematic image from simple mental image
by placing the memory-image in relationship with external objectified space
and providing it with an identifiable form (or genre), the indiscernibility of the
actual point of projection results in an irresolvable confusion around which film
is actually being shot at Hiroshima (particularly since Riva's 'point-of-view'
occupies the same place as the production of the documentary on Hiroshima
and uses the same equipment). Finally, it is this sense of confusion that illustrates
the capture of Hiroshima by Nevers, that is, of the necessarily demonstrative
documentary by die narrative plot of Riva's story. Does this mean that the
'personal' is simply laid over the 'desert' city of Hiroshima, the subjective
captivates the objective, distorts or perverts its true reality? No. Rather, her past
is projected onto the past of Hiroshima, causing it to undergo a metamor-
phosis, ultimately falsifying perhaps. Yet, all this reveals is that the locus of
projection that constitutes the so-called 'true reality' is itself a supreme fiction,
a convention that is made in order to avoid or 'to turn away' from the subjective
condition of mutual past moments all of which converge around an artificially
constructed present.
Once again this touches on the function of a species of 'banal repetition' that
often characterizes the moral intention of the documentary. We might also
invoke the images of concentration camps, the filmed sequences showing the
piling of bodies in open trenches, in order to signal this dilemma as integral to
the crisis of memory that concerns us here. What is the logic of their represen-
tation? How does the infinite 'representation' of Hiroshima — the 'description of
horror by horror' - prevent the event from repeating itself, from happening
again? That is, how does the content of this representation (information of'what
happened,' whether this 'information' arrives by purely visual or discursive
means), prevent the future actualization of the event that such information
cannot dispel or explain in a preventative manner? This is a central question that
touches the kind of representation that has become naturalized by its moral
purposiveness and supposedly prohibitive function, a question which we cannot
take up here at length, but which might cause us to interrogate the physio-
psychological presuppositions concerning its effect on the subject who becomes,
in a very definite sense, its addressee. We might therefore expose the logic of
this kind of representation to its inevitable contradiction; although it intends to
prevent the event that it represents from being actualized, it must nonetheless
assert the 'nullity' (the horror) of this event by reducing it to information that can
be endlessly repeated without touching the place where the past actually resides.
As Deleuze writes:

All the documents could be shown, all die testimonies could be heard, but
in vain: what makes information all-powerful ... is its very nullity, its
radical ineffectiveness. Information plays on this ineffectiveness in order
to establish its power, its very power to be ineffective, thereby [becoming]
all the more dangerous. (TI269)
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 1O9

We might understand the 'ineffectiveness' of this form of representation in

simple psychoanalytic terms, in the sense that what is repeated is not remem-
bered: Hiroshima is impossible to remember, which would entail that it also
must be 'forgotten,' so that it must be repeated endlessly. What we have here
is an abstract repetition of a 'past' without the possibility of memory, a past
that does not pass into the past. In fact, what is repeated is the unconscious
of the representation itself: that is, the powerlessness of the spectator to be
involved, the distance and the impersonality of the type of recollection involved
in the alibi, '[Y]ou know nothing, you have seen nothing.' As Duras suggests in
the 'synopsis,' the infinite and impersonal representation of Hiroshima, the
species of moral prohibition that produces a 'description of horror by horror,'
may in fact represent a will to forget, to distance oneself from 'what happened'
at Hiroshima. In order to follow Duras's own solution to this problem, I am
emphasizing the problematic nature of this type of representation which is the
dominant approach taken up in the post-war period and which Resnais himself
utilizes in a contrapuntal montage at the beginning of the film. Yet, one might
also understand the profound intention of this type of representation that
Duras calls tautological representation, the 'description of horror by horror,' in
a different sense. What if we were to understand its objective as installing itself
completely 'on the sheet of the past,' to occupy precisely that moment 'when
time could have taken a different course,' even if it only ends up memorializing
this moment with an image of eternity? Perhaps the failure of this type of
representation occurs precisely from its pedagogical and prohibitive function
which it projects upon 'future actors' even though the image of the future
it provides is vague and indeterminate, in fact, is only the negative or inverse
side of the past it confronts passively. This passivity is both the source of its
'made-to-order' representations of the past as well as its 'ineffectiveness' con-
cerning the future.
If we accept that the endless representation of Hiroshima may itself consti-
tute a fundamental form of forgetting, why then is it that the powers of 'fiction'
or 'imagination' are prohibited from the site of Hiroshima? That the type of
memory that Duras allows to 'break in' to the zone of Hiroshima, to attach
a personal perspective and point-of-view to the work of memory that takes place
through her fable, and the consequent moral prohibitions this type of 'falsifying
representation' of Hiroshima involves, only point to the moral-juridical quality
of this other type of representation? It is odd, therefore, that the attachment of
a 'personal perspective' would be condemned as a moral concupiscence, as deceit,
betrayal or as a will-to-forget. The word 'sacrilegious' is used by Duras in the
synopsis to evoke the aura of judgement that surrounds the film's story at
Hiroshima. Why this word? 'Sacrilegious' denotes a transgression and offense of
a sacred site whose ritual function involves both memory and repetition. For
example, it is sacrilegious to lie with a corpse, to touch the dead, to profane a site
of burial, a site consecrated in the memory of community and reserved as 'outside
the boundaries' of certain forms of interest and sexual desire. There is an irony
implicit in Duras's use of sexuality to open the question of the erotic relationship
11O THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF G I 1_ l_ E S DELEUZE

between memory: the desire to keep Hiroshima 'pure' and 'untouched' is itself
presented in contrast to her desire to Violate' Hiroshima in the most personal
way. 'Everywhere but at Hiroshima guile is accepted convention. At Hiroshima
it cannot exist, or else it will be denounced' (H 10). By setting up this extreme
opposition, Duras highlights the moral-prohibitive determination of the kind of
memory that Hiroshima represents: it is forbidden to touch the dead. It is sacri-
legious to incorporate love with the crypt, to make love to die dead (necrophilia),
to love the dead. Instead, Duras asks, is this not the ultimate sacrilege against
'Life'? Is not Hiroshima itself sacrilegious? In the opening scenes, is it offensive
that they should be making love at Hiroshima, rather than being offensive that
Hiroshima must always signify for us a place of death, a topical representation of
horror? 'This is one of the principal goals of the film: to have done with the
description of horror by horror,... but to make this horror rise from its ashes by
incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special ...' (H9). We might
hear in Duras's phrase an echo of Artaud's famous dictum: 'To have Done
Finally with the Judgement of God.'
Concerning Resnais's own relationship with 'the age of Auschwitz and
Hiroshima,' Deleuze writes the following:

Rene Predal has shown the extent to which Auschwitz and Hiroshima
retained the horizon of Resnais' work, how close the hero in all of Resnais
is to the 'Lazarean' hero that Cayrol made the soul of the new novel, in a
fundamental relation to the extermination camps. The character in Resnais
cinema is 'Lazarean' precisely because he returns from death, from the land
of the dead [the characteristic trait of 'philosophical identity']; he has
passed through death and is born from death, whose sensory motor distur-
bances he retains. Even if he was not personally in Auschwitz, even if he
was not personally in Hiroshima ... he passed through a clinical death,
he was born from an apparent death, he returns from the dead. (TI 208)

By passing through all these stages represented by the journey that is enacted
from Riva's point-of-view, Hiroshima is thus transformed from the name of
death to the proper name of a love that survives the horror of its own past.
Thus, the story is that of a survivor, one who survives the end of the world and
who must live after Hiroshima. In telling her story, she offers a way out of
Hiroshima by filling the place of Hiroshima with a love that is 'wonderful,' as
Duras writes, 'one that will be more credible than if it had occurred anywhere
else in the world, in a place that death had not preserved' (H 9).

Between two people as dissimilar geographically, philosophically, histori-

cally, economically, racially, etc. as it is possible to be, Hiroshima will be
the common ground (perhaps the only one in the world?) where the
universal factors of eroticism, love, and unhappiness will appear in implac-
able light. (H 10)
 HOW THE TRUE W O Ft L D FINALLY BECAME A FABLE 111

Does this last statement imply that the only successful 'working-through' of the
past is through its eroticization and disguise in the kind of repetition deployed
by transference? In a certain sense, yes. Deleuze argues tliat what the selective
game of transference discovers is nothing less than the positive principle of a
form of repetition (the death instinct) which gives the past 'an immanent
meaning in which terror is closely mingled with the movement of selection and
freedom,' becoming at one time 'the source of our illness and our healdi, of our
loss and our salvation' (DR19). Concerning this necessary presence of trans-
ference (i.e. the eroticization of memory) within any 'living relation' to the past,
Deleuze writes that

it is necessary to seek out the memory where it was, to install oneself in the
past in order to accomplish a living connection between the knowledge
and the resistance, the representation and the blockage. We are not,
therefore, healed by a simple anamnesis, any more than we are made ill by
amnesia. Here as elsewhere, becoming conscious counts for little. The
more theatrical and dramatic operation by which healing takes place - or
does not take place — has the name of transference. Now transference is
still repetition: above all it is repetition. If repetition makes us ill, it also
heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us, terrifying in both
cases by its 'demonic' power. All cure is the voyage to the bottom of
repetition. (DR18-19)

By situating the absolute character of the past on the level of transference,

signaling the character of an event that causes the past to become past, we see no
more than a little 'demonic' trait in the type of repetition she introduces. She
'possesses' Hiroshima (meaning both the place and the Japanese, singular and
plural nominative), in such a way that all of Nevers possesses all of Hiroshima.
She 'obsesses' him; in the end, he has no will of his own, nothing but what
she has given him - to live on, to survive after Hiroshima. ('Impossible, not
to come,' he declares as he returns to her room in the hotel the next morning.)
Thus, what begins as a simple interruption ends by becoming an entire duration.
What is 'demonic' but the emergence of a transference that authenticates the
roles they play? 'In transference, repetition does not so much serve to iden-
tify events, persons and passions as to authenticate the roles and select the
masks' (DR 19).
Set against the role she plays for the documentary on international peace is
the more profound role that she is assigned through the repetition of Nevers,
a role that causes him to finally abandon any pretension to know himself except
through the role of Hiroshima that this eternal game of repetition provides. And
might we not perceive the entire drama of Hiroshima Man Amour as the theater
where these two types of repetition of the past confront one another and threaten
to destroy one another? The logic of the documentary, the archive, 'the descrip-
tion of horror by horror,' operates on the level of a simple anamnesis. Although it
provides us with the visual and discursive layers of a past event, the fact of which,
112 THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF G I 1_ l_ E S DELEUZE

that is, its quidfacti, or 'it happened,' is given as the content of its representation,
as the informative side of the image; however, in truth, such information heals
nothing, gives us no knowledge of what happened, is both representation and
blockage of a relation to the pure past. Here, I recall the statement by Duras
which becomes the axiomatic principle of the kind of representation she invokes:
'In truth, nothing is given at Hiroshima.' The representation of the past that
belongs to banal repetition maintains the image of a past that is in-itself and
projects it elsewhere — that is, outside or transcendent to a plane of immanence
where the living dwell. Rather than constituting a living connection' with the
past, its representation is always already a blocking and annihilation of such a
connection, a 'dead-and-empty' connection which places a barrier or frontier
between the living present and the dead past, a death zone that can never be
crossed, understood or most importantly 'lived through,' gotten to the end of,
which is why it launches an infinite repetition that becomes an age, a world.
If the objective of a 'world-peace' can only be achieved by a 'settling of
accounts' with the past, or by an act of atonement for a past action, then perhaps
we must recognize the impasse of the recollection-image and the documentary,
the description of 'horror by horror,' which simply functions as another
judgement of a God - the creation of an infinite debt to a past that cannot be
atoned for or lived through. Contrary to this, we might see in her 'story,' as well
as in his, a certain living connection' that is established with the past: the desire
to seek out the memory of Hiroshima where it was — at Nevers — and to estab-
lish a living connection that is signaled by the transference of the past of Nevers
onto the past of Hiroshima. Perhaps it is by means of their mutual story of'what
happened' at Hiroshima, which becomes a shared memory, a memory for two,
that Duras is suggesting another narrative of world-peace. In other words, Duras
shows us the truth of memory's global character in the sense that subjective
memory, in a certain way and from a visible perspective, or distinct 'point-of-
view,' is also a world-memory. Hiroshima is only an extreme example that Duras
uses to make her case. Could we not say, then, that the structure of world-
memory evolves and undergoes vicissitudes (divergences, abnormal and false
movements, accidents) in a manner that can have a topological analogy ,to the
subjective structure of time? What are Hiroshima and Auschwitz if not fatal
events that cause a temporal series to diverge or bifurcate?
Yet, we must be careful at this point not to reduce ontological time to its
psychological tropes, but rather to show how each is 'implicated' in the other,
'co-implicated,' and how the latter is 'deployed' in the first. We might under-
stand, therefore, that the memory of the Japanese man and the memory of the
French woman cannot be limited to a psychological view-point, but overflow
this, and the nuptial (Duras says 'marriage'): the memory they create around the
past at Hiroshima causes the entire volume of the past to undergo a rearrange-
ment. This is why Deleuze raises the possibility that in their each forgetting his or
her own memory and making a memory together, memory itself was detached
from their persons and was now becoming world-memory. As Duras writes,
'it was as if all of Nevers was in love with all of Hiroshima' (H 9). This is also
 HOW THE TRUE WORLD F I N A l_ i. Y BECAME A FABUE 113

why their personal identities undergo a transformation as well, as if through the

transformation of nothing in common to the common memory of Hiroshima—
Nevers, the Japanese are present to the French, the East to the West. 'For in fact,
in each other's eyes, they are non-one.' But since these people are no one it raises
the chance of seeing film as the story-telling function of a new society, of a
'people to come,' the world-survivors of the age of Hiroshima and Auschwitz.
They are names of places, names which are not names.

SHE: Hir-o-shim-a. Hir-o-shim-a. That's your name.

HE: That's my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Nev-ers-in-France. (H 83)
 10

ARTAUD'S PROBLEM

AND OU RS

BELIEF IN THE WORLD

AS IT IS

In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze takes up Sergei Eisenstein's earlier

argument that what is directly realized in cinema, the movement-image, was only
indirectly present in the other arts. 'Because the cinematographic image itself
"makes" movement, because it makes what other arts were restricted to demand-
ing (or to saying) . . . ' (TI157). The weakness of the shock (the montage-effect)
such as it occurs in theater, according to Eisenstein, precisely describes the
architectural parameters of theatrical space itself which limits the possibilities
proper to montage. The visual image and the aural image cannot accede to new
arrangements; the visual image is limited to the confines of the stage, and the
aural image to the speech of actors, or to the noise of props. Moreover, theatrical
construction is limited by bodies, highly artificial conventions that have
historically determined the possibilities of perception, for example, the 'role' of
the actor in relationship to the audience as well as to the action itself. The
'outside' is reduced to a small opening in theatrical space by means of a referent
(the world, reality) and the action-image appears as an oblique (or indirect) angle
of reflection 'on everyday happenings,' as Brecht said. As a consequence of its
indirect relationship with the whole, the 'shock' effect becomes overly didactic,
since its power is mediated by a command structure that is often identified with
the expression of political will. We should recall Benjamin's argument con-
cerning the strategic and political effect of 'shock' upon the audience in Brecht's
epic theater, although in this case 'alienation' (or Verfremdungseffeki) becomes
the dominant affect of theatrical montage. Here, 'the truly important thing
is to discover the conditions of life. (One might say just as well: to alienate
[verfremden] them.) This discovery (alienation) of conditions takes place through
the interruption of happenings.'
A fundamental principle that one can find at work in both Brecht's epic
theater and in Artaud's 'theater of cruelty' is therefore the destruction (or
'fissuring') of theatrical space itself (or at least its classical automatons), where the
effect of 'alienation' entails the 'suppression of all protective barriers' and strikes
against the mental automatons of artificial and exterior mimicry 'that cast the
mind [not only of the spectators, but also the actors and creators as well] into an
attitude distinct from force but addicted to exaltation.' The 'goal' would be a
 AFtTTAUD'S P R O B 1_ E 1WI AND OURS IIS

spectacle acting as a force on rather than as a reflection of external happenings;

for Artaud, as for Brecht, this would position the spectator in the center with the
spectacle surrounding, the distance from the spectacle no longer abstracted from
the totality of the sensory milieu. Yet, as in Brecht's 'gestic' theater, this cannot
truly occur where thinking is presented (or rather, represented) by the demand
for movement that is still virtual and not yet actualized in the image, since the
image remains external to the movement, is still over there (representation), and
has not yet touched the very cortex of the spectator. As Deleuze writes, 'it is only
when movement becomes automatic that the artistic essence of the image is
realized: producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex,
touching the nervous and cerebral system direcdy' (TI156). Here we find the
dynamic principle of 'nooshock.' The cinematographic discovery of a higher
faculty of'emotion,' the figure of desire that is represented by the 'I feel' of the
movement-image, is that which causes movement of the 'spiritual automaton'
within the spectator; in other words, it causes the already constituted and partial
subject to be surpassed in favor of another subject which is capable (or incapable
as it were) of thinking, desiring or willing the Whole. This 'Whole,' Deleuze
writes, is the 'subject' of modern cinema; '[t]he cinematographic image must
have a shock effect on thought, and force thought to think itself in as much as it is
thinking the Whole. This is the very definition of the sublime' (TI 158).
But why does Deleuze compare here the effect of shock upon the nervous
system of the spectator to the concept of the sublime? This is a very subtle
comparison, but one which radically re-envisages the Kantian sublime from the
modern perspective of the brain in its confrontation with chaos. Deleuze's
interpretation of the Kantian sublime concerns the infamous violence experi-
enced by the faculty of the imagination when confronted by a formless and/or
deformed immense power and, as a result, is thrown back on itself as upon its
own limit (or in an important phrase which echoes the original Kantian
description, utilized prominently in Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere, 'se rabat sur,'
that is, 'falls back' or 'recoils upon itself). This phrase represents the uniqueness
of Deleuze's intuition around the function of the imagination in the Kantian
analysis, which he reconfigures by resolving the impasse of the imagination no
longer in terms of a principle of representation (as Kant did) but in terms of the
Bergsonian definition of the brain as a pure interval (or 'gap'), opening onto a
'virtual whole' that is actualized according to divergent lines which 'do not form
a whole on their own account and do not resemble what they actualize,' since
the 'Whole is never "given"' (B 104-105). This comparison returns in the
closing chapter of What is Philosophy? where the original Kantian faculties are
reconfigured under the three sources of representation: science, art and phi-
losophy. 'In short, chaos has three daughters, depending on the plane that cuts
through it - art, science, and philosophy - as forms of thought or creation ...
The brain is the junction - not the unity - of the three planes' (WP 208).4
In the Critique of Judgment, however, it is reason which appears in the role of
power and the figure of formlessness is itself the direct presentation of failure
of the imagination 'to unite the immensity of the sensible world into a Whole
IIS THE N O N-F> H I L O S O P H Y OF «3 I L 1_ E S D E I. E U Z E

(K51). The figure of formlessness or deformation is, in fact, the sensible

manifestation (let us say 'embodiment') of the relationship between reason and
imagination which is experienced as contradiction (or conflict), as dissension, as
pain. Yet, it is only within this very conflict that a relationship first emerges, and
it is only on the basis of this feeling of pain that pleasure first becomes possible.
'When imagination is confronted by its limit with something which goes beyond
it in all respects it goes beyond its own limit itself, admittedly in a negative
fashion, by representing to itself the inaccessibility of the rational Idea [of the
Whole] and by making this very inaccessibility something which is present in
sensible nature' (K51).
For Kant, the feeling of the sublime opens a 'gap' (ecart) in experience through
which the idea of 'subject as Whole' is engendered (literally given birth) as
'something which is present in sensible nature.' The faculty of desire is given an
object, even though this object is immediately inaccessible, and a destination,
even though this destination is 'suprasensible,' since 'the suprasensible destina-
tion of the faculties appears as that to which a moral being is predestined' (K 52,
original emphasis). Therefore, as Deleu/e writes,

in the sublime there is a sensory-motor unity of nature and human, which

means that nature must be named the non-indifferent, since it is apparently
Nature itself that issues the demand for unification of the Whole within
the interiority of a subject and it is by reacting to this demand that we
discover that which is fundamental to our destiny. (K 52, my emphasis)

Art in the West — at least from the baroque period onward - can be said to be
founded upon this demand in as much as through it the faculty of desire gives
birth to the presentation of a 'higher finality' which is symbolized by the unity
of the art-work. This underscores the significance of the Baroque for Deleuze and
the importance it bears for establishing the direction and the problem of artistic
and political representation in the modern period. The effect of 'alienation'
(Verfremdungseffekt) and the different conceptions of 'shock' that we have been
analyzing can therefore be understood as figures of the 'discordant-accord'
(Deleuze) between finite, a-posteriori imagination and a spontaneous, a-priori
power that belongs to the idea of the Whole. Thus, the feeling of'alienation,' the
aesthetic principle of modern political representation, can itself be understood
to reproduce a central tension that belongs to the sublime in as much as the
feeling of suffering that it immediately engenders in an audience of spectators
also gives birth to the suprasensible idea of itself as another nature, that of a
spontaneous collective subject, or 'a people.' Hemmed in and confined by the
limit of theatrical space, however, a limit which fuses with and partially institutes
the concrete and historical limits of the imagination itself, such a 'supra-sensible
idea' must first appear as a negative or critical force which breaks open the frames
of classical representation and spills over to link together thought and action,
causing the base-brain or 'spiritual automaton' of a mass to undergo a change
of quality.
 A RT A U D ' S PROBLEM AND OURS 117

Whether this force takes the form, as in Brecht, of an 'interruption' of sym-

pathetic identification (estrangement) or, as in Artaud, of 'cruelty' and even
'absolute sadism,' it marks the ferocity of desire for a higher finality that belongs
to the nature of modern political theater, and of certain experimental traditions
of modern art in general. To inflict a symbolic violence in perception, language,
opinion, character, mood; to destroy common sense and wage a war against all
forms of cliche internal and external; to bathe the prose of the world in the syntax
of dreams; to wash the image in the grain of light or to evacuate it in favor of a
pure 'blankness' that lies underneath — these are the hallmarks of modern art.
We might understand these as figures of the 'negative apprehension' of an idea of
the Whole that the art-work bears within itself like a seed, which marks both the
temporal nature of its duration and the manic desire for total achievement which
characterizes every finite attempt to express this nature in one formal unity.
Within the contemporaneousness of the present that defines the current stage of
its achievement, however, the idea of this nature is expressed as an internal
dehiscence or bears the aspect of 'danger' (Artaud) like the violent frenzy of a
wounded animal. Consequently, in the sensible appearance of this ferocious and
violent nature, we might also see a mise-en-scene of the sublime itself. First, the
perfection of the work of art represents the overpowering nature of a demand for
the 'subject as Whole' and reproduces this demand within the inter-cerebral
interval between stimulus and response, between image and reaction, or, as Kant
defined this interval in classical terms, between apprehension and comprehension
(that is, between the presentation of the art-work and the comprehension of the
spectator). Second, in as much as the Whole of this interval extends beyond its
own powers to actualize within a complete circuit that would run between image
and brain (what Deleuze calls a 'sensory-motor unity'), a certain figure of
'formlessness' appears which comes to symbolize this unity in a negative manner
and also to characterize the appearance of the art-work generally.
It is this moment of'failure' that also characterizes a certain cyclical movement
(the 'cyclone,' or spiral) through which modern art 'recoils' from manifesto to
cliche, then from a state of inertia (or fossilization) to its renewal in the next
movement, the next manifesto, the next style, each promising to discover the
means of restoring the vital connection between nature and human. In other
words, the cerebral interval becomes a deep 'gap' or 'void' that it cannot fill, an
immense distance or abyss that it cannot cross, emerging instead as the crack or fissure
that creases its body and constitutes an 'outside' which cannot be expressed in language
or present in the image: 'deeper than any inferiority, further than any exteriority'
(employing a formula that Deleuze adapts from Foucault), the outside describes that
mute and formless region that appears at the center of the modern work of art and
becomes the principal cause of its 'deformation' and even appears as its defect, its
symptom or its neurosis. This characteristic quality of 'deformation' or 'formless-
ness,' however, cannot be understood simply as an aspect of the style of the
modern art-work, but rather belongs to the 'total physiological sensation' (or
'I FEEL') that defines the experience of modern experimental art, in particular,
and is caused by the failure to attain the 'action-image' it posited as its higher
118 THE M O M -P H I L O S O P H V OF <3 I L l_ E S DELEUZE

finality. That is to say, the sensation or 'feeling of formlessness' gives us an

indirect representation of the Whole that, although it can propose an image of
it in a negative manner, remains outside the powers of art to realize.
The event of this repeated failure whereby art comes to a. limit and recoils
upon itself can be understood to lie behind two principal tensions that can be
found in the movement of art. First, the sense of 'recoil' can be expressed as the
schism between the 'culture' of the artist as creator and a mass or popular cultural
subject, underlying the tendency of modern art to withdraw and to enclose itself
in an aristocratic social form. This 'schism' characterizes the relationship between
the 'spiritual automaton' of modern art and the major-brain or mass subject
which is mediated by the forms of conflict, opposition and even disgust; at the
same time, it expresses the quantitative degree of its failure in the sense that its
power (or 'nooshoctl} is capable of affecting only the minor-brain of an elite
or aristocratic class comprised mostly of artists themselves. The second sense of
the 'recoil' of modern art can be figured as its obsession over the idea of self-
achievement and of conceiving the work of art as a total movement that passes
historically through uneven stages of development in order to reach an absolute
expression (e.g. Mallarme's 'Absolute Poem') or to restore it to an immanent
relationship with the movement of life itself (e.g. Artaud's 'theater of cruelty').
The duration occupied by each art-form must be conceived from the perspective
of this idea of this Whole in such a way that each successive 'failure' also repre-
sents the possibility of teleological renewal in its progress toward achieving a final
'goal.' Eisenstein's dialectical theory of the art-work that finds its penultimate
expression in the emergence of modern cinema participates in this teleological
image of the modern art-work.
As Kant wrote nearly two centuries earlier concerning a kind of 'knowing'
(thinking, apprehending) that is specific to the experience of art, one which
breaks with the conditions of a knowledge that is immediately connected to a
mental image of'action' (as in the cases of science and handicraft): 'Only that
which a human, even if he knows it completely, may not therefore have the skill
to accomplish belongs to art' (K146). But how does the emergence of cinema
change this state of affairs? Let us recall that, for Eisenstein, the movement-image
promises 'the subject as Whole' (that is, to represent the synthesis of image and
thought in a sensory-motor unity). How is this subject different from that of art?
As an industrial art-form, the cinematographic subject of knowledge is distinct
from that of the fine arts (or from the kind of knowing that belongs to art as Kant
defined it above) in that it comprises, at least potentially, a synthesis of science,
handicraft (skill) and art. Therefore, in its confrontation and struggle with chaos
(i.e. 'formlessness'), cinema behaves like a science when it knows how to slow
down and place limits on this chaos by providing it with a reference, the 'Open,'
by which it makes the Whole appear indirectly as the 'object' of the movement-
image; at the same time, cinema behaves like an art when it allies itself with the
force of chaos in order to forge new visions and new sensations which it uses in its
struggles against the pre-established cliches and ready-made linkages of image
and thought (including those cliches, as we have seen above, that belong to the
 ARTAUD'S PROBLEM AND OURS 119

field of art itself). Under this second aspect, what formerly appeared as chaos
here becomes a 'fourth dimension' which cinema discovers through its know-
ledge of the process of montage as 'the inexhaustible storehouse, as it were, of
laws for the construction of form, the study and analysis of which have immense
importance in the task of mastering the "mysteries" of the technique of form' (to
cite again a passage from Eisenstein's 1935 speech). As a synthesis of these two
aspects of knowledge, therefore, Eisenstein's theory of cinema appears both, like
science or handicraft, as a set of 'functives' (or axioms) that comprise a machinic
assemblage for the construction of cinematographic form and, like art, as a
'monument' of sensation, or 'compound of percepts and affects.' Deleuze defines
this distinction in the following manner: 'Art takes a bit of chaos in a frame in
order to form a composed chaos [or "chaosmos"] that becomes sensory, or from
which it extracts a chaoid sensation as variety; but science takes a bit of chaos in a
system of coordinates and forms a referenced chaos that becomes Nature, and
from which it extracts an aleatory function and chaoid variables' (WP206).
Recalling the Kantian statement above, contrary to the other arts, cinema both
posits or thinks the Whole and, at the same time, is capable of — or at least posits
for itself— the knowledge and technical skill of realizing it as well.
If the 'realization of the Whole' becomes the highest task of classical cinema,
this is because in a certain sense it is already completely given. 'The material
universe, the plane of immanence, is [itself only] a machinic assemblage of
movement-images,' as Deleuze writes earlier in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image
(MI 59, original emphasis). A question only remains concerning whether this
realization will be accomplished by the primacy of montage or by the technical
perfection of the movement-image itself. By situating this achievement within
the region of the sublime, Deleuze is also suggesting the emergence of a new
subject which categorizes space-time: a purely cinematic subject, or I THINK,
which is interposed between the brain and the world, or between the brain of
a supra-intelligence and the 'Open' through which the Whole itself undergoes a
dialectical 'conflagration' (TI 159f£). However, because this subject necessarily
bears the character of an absolute knowledge, we might discern here the portrait
of what Deleuze calls a 'cinematographic Hegel' in Eisenstein's theory of cinema
as die dialectical automaton in the service of social realism. If according to Hegel,
'Spirit [or mind] is alienated' and must pass through the stages of the dialectic in
order to become reunited with its own form of expression, then for Eisenstein
this passage is accomplished by the cinematographic technique of montage,
which breaks open the historically 'alienated' forms of perception, language and
character in order to reconnect thought to its primordial immediacy and imman-
ence for the subject. As Deleuze writes, '[a] circuit which simultaneously includes
the author, the film, and the viewer is here elaborated':

The complete circuit dius runs from die sensory shock which raises us from
the images to conscious thought, then the thinking in figures which takes us
back to the images and gives us an affective shock again. Making the two
co-exist, joining the highest degree of consciousness to the deepest level of
120 THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF G I 1_ L E S D E UE UZ E

unconsciousness: this is the dialectical automaton. The Whole is constantly

open [the spiral], but so that it can internalize the sequence of images
[within the subject], as well as becoming externalized in this sequence [as
total object, or world]. The Whole forms a knowledge, in the Hegelian
fashion, which brings together the image and the concept as two move-
ments each of which goes towards the other. (TI161)

It is only by technically achieving this dual movement between the most

unconscious region of the image and the most abstract region of thought that
cinema will construct a knowledge of the Whole as the condition of montage and
will gradually become equal to the task of realizing the true promise of the
dialectic which Hegel had earlier defined for philosophy as 'Spirit thinking itself
as Subject.' It does this by gradually mastering the dialectical progression between
image and concept, or, using Eisenstein's terminology, between 'pre-logical,
sensual thinking' and the highest forms of symbolic logic, thus surpassing both
forms and uniting instinct and reason in an image of thought that at the same
time discovers at the 'deepest level of the unconscious' the conditions of action
for the historical subject (thereby becoming 'action-thought,' or what Eisenstein
refers to elsewhere as the 'habit logic of the future').6 This constitutes the highest
goal of the culture of montage, according to Eisenstein, which is to present within
the vivid immediacy of the movement-image the unity of the 'Subject as Whole,'
that is, to individuate the perceptions of the masses so that the consciousness of
the spectator no longer appears isolated, but rather as the collective subject of his
or her own reaction, or even as an objective force of nature itself. Nature appears
on the side of the subject of cinema (becoming 'the non-indifferent'); cinema
appears on the side of the masses (becoming spirit or 'I feel' of a people to come).
This is why Deleuze refers to Eisenstein's theory as essentially monist. 'Action
thought simultaneously posits the unity of nature and human, of the individual
and the mass: cinema as the art of the masses' (TI 162, my emphasis).

Cinema, art of the masses! If this slogan sounds a bit hollow, like a modern
advertising jingle, it is because something has happened in the interval that has
made us extremely skeptical of all such beliefs concerning art. It is around the
nature of belief that Deleuze's teleology of modern cinema diverges significantly
from that of Eisenstein, and he must resort to Artaud and to Blanchot in order to
situate the relationship between thought and cinema in its modern period, after
the belief in a pure or revolutionary cinema has remained unrealized; or, much
worse, after the discovery of cinema's potential to attach itself to the cortex and
to touch the cerebral system directly has been perverted and 'has degenerated
into state propaganda and manipulation, into a kind of fascism which brought
together Hitler and Hollywood, Hollywood and Hitler' (TI 164).

Hence the idea that cinema as art of the masses, could be the supremely
revolutionary or democratic art, which makes the masses a true subject.
But a great many factors were to compromise this belief: the rise of Hider,
 ARTAUD'S PROBLEM AMD OURS 121

which gave cinema as its object not the masses become subject, but the
masses subjected; Stalinism, which replaced the unanimity of peoples with
the tyrannical unity of the party; the break-up of the American people,
who could no longer believe themselves to be the melting-pot of peoples
past nor the seed of a people to come. (TI 216)

This does not come about because cinema fails to accomplish everything that
Eisenstein dreamed it would, but rather it is that the dynamic principle upon
which it was founded, the movement-image, succeeds in the worst manner.
The optimism with which Eisenstein originally held the muscular syntax of
inner-speech and the forms of 'sensual, pre-logical thinking' as primary sources
for montage and of a 'habit logic of the future' also harbored the possibility of
fascism, manipulation and the infinite alienation of the masses. Thus, rather than
breaking through to achieve a form of thinking that would give birth to the idea
of 'a people' as a collective and international subject, instead it revealed a dead
and mummified 'sensualism' and an archaic and familial unconscious as its
wellspring. (Like both Artaud and Bataille before him, Deleuze rejects the
Surrealist and Modernist definitions of the unconscious and the dream as sources
of liberation.) The dream, as it turns out, was a false source of profundity; and
the unconscious, rather than constituting a true depth and wellspring for the
creation of forms, was a basement filled with junk. Even worse, when these are
attached to an apparatus of mass projection they give birth to a world filled with
mummies, ghouls and vampires. Thus, the ideological force that finds its privi-
lege in the cinema of the modern period can be seen as the 'return of these archaic
norms and laws of conduct' (the murderous impulses that belong to racism,
genocide and nationalism) which are provided with newer and more effective
eidectic combinations through the cinematographic inventions that surround the
development of the movement-image in the first and second waves of cinema.
The state finds in the dominant principle of classical cinema (the action-image)
the very means of breaking into the 'storehouse of primitive or sensual thinking'
and new techniques for establishing these patterns of habitual thought or
normative laws toward the achievement of its own desire for finality (totality,
absolutism, immanence). Hitler becomes the 'spiritual automaton' who gives
birth to the German people in the Nazi period, 'the subject as Whole.'
Eisenstein himself had also perceived this danger in what he called 'psycho-
logical retrogression' where cinema becomes subordinated to the automaton of
'sensual, pre-logical thinking' which can suddenly become a 'dominant' even in
the most complex of social constructions, since the margins between the higher
phases of intellectual order and the primitive and baser instincts are extremely
mobile, are volatile, and often undergo sudden shifts at each stage of development.

This continual sliding from level to level, backwards and forwards, now to
the higher forms of an intellectual order, now to the earlier forms of
sensual thinking, occurs at ... each phase in development ... The margin
between the types is mobile and it suffices a not even extraordinarily sharp
122 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GIL.LES DEE-EUZE

affective impulse to cause an extremely, it may be, logically deliberative

person suddenly to react in obedience to the never dormant inner armory
of sensual thinking and the norms of behavior deriving thence. (FF 143)

The common example he gives for the above is that of a girl who tears the photo
of her beloved into fragments 'in anger,' thus destroying her 'wicked betrayer'
by destroying his image in an act of magical thinking (based on the early
identification of image and object) (FF 143). In other words, development does
not proceed in a straight line, on the level either of the individual or of die whole
social construction: e.g. 'the regress of spiritual super-structures under the heel of
national-socialism' (FF 145). However, rather than recoiling in fear and thereby
avoiding further research into these early forms which comprise the basis of
any possible action-image (or 'habit-logic'), Eisenstein sees in the cinematic
apparatus the potential of a dialectical progression that maintains the pursuit of
highly complex intellectual forms and processes and, at the same time, the
'analysis' of the early forms of sensual thinking.7
This represents Eisenstein's wager: to invent not merely a rhetorical cinema,
but an analytical cinema, a cinematographic science of thinking. Cinema must
achieve by means of technical montage and the contrapuntal method what
Engels had earlier defined as 'the third stage' in the construction of thinking
through which humanity must pass: neither the primitive and diffuse complex of
sensual thinking of die first stage, nor the formal-logical stage which negates die
former (perhaps even 'forecloses' it in the psychoanalytic sense), but rather
the 'dynamic perception of phenomena' which dialectically absorbs the first two
'in photographic detail' (i.e. social realism). It is for this reason that Eisenstein's
theory of cinema is founded upon a dynamic principle of conflict with these two
odier automatons. It must avoid becoming too sensual, on the one hand, and too
formal and abstract, on the other, always seeking as the principle of its develop-
ment a certain balance (in a Whiteheadian sense). Here, die total process achieves
the figure of a dialectical circle or a 'spiral,' as Deleuze calls it, following a 'dual-
unity' in which the highest form of art has as its correlate the deepest form
of subconscious.

The effectiveness of a work of art is built upon the fact diat there takes place
within it a dual process: an impetuous progressive rise along die lines of the
highest explicit steps of consciousness and a simultaneous penetration by
means of the structure of the form into the layers of profoundest sensual
thinking. The polar separation of these two lines of flow creates that
remarkable tension of unity of form and content characteristic of true art-
works. Apart from this there are no true art-works. (FF 145)

Of course, we do not need to demonstrate that Eisenstein lost his wager for a
cinema which maintained a certain balance that could insure both a higher form
of satisfaction (intellectual complexity) and, at the same time, a higher form of
'feeling' (passionate sensibility), the achievement of which repairs the broken
 ARTAUD'S PROBLEM AND OURS 123

accord between conscious perception and thoughtful action. The unfolding of

history and the development of the cinematographic art in the modern period
give us ample evidence to forgo a demonstration, and I have already underlined
the major points of this evidence above. Such a balance could only describe an
ideal cinema, that is, one that grew from the seeds that were planted in the soil
of another world and would require for its actualization an entirely different
nature than that of the masses, that is, a wholly 'other' brain. These, moreover,
would have to be prerequisites or initial conditions of the cinema that Eisenstein
describes, rather than its 'products' or even its 'revolutionary effects.'
Concerning the existence of such an ideal cinema, Artaud probably said it best:
'The imbecile world of images caught as if by glue in millions of retinas will never
perfect the image that has been made of it. The poetry which can emerge from it
all is only a possible poetry, the poetry of what might be, and it is not the cinema
we should expect' (cited in TI165). The primary reasons Deleuze gives for this
failure are quantitative mediocrity of products and fascist principles of produc-
tion; these are generalized as the shortcomings of author and audience. Again,
'Hollywood and Hider.' 'Popular cinema' and 'Nationalist cinema.' In the for-
mer, we find a figurative cinema based upon the automaton of vulgar sensualism
(cliches of sex and violence); in the latter we find a cinema based upon the
automaton of the state (cliches of history and action). Here again, in Eisenstein's
defense, we should recall the earlier discussion of the 'fourth dimension" of
intellectual cinema and the contrapuntal method in the approach of the sound
film, since both were conceived as preventative measures to avoid precisely the
above state of affairs from determining the future of the cinematographic form.
First, by linking the montage process to an 'outside' which could not be deter-
mined by simple visual or aural images, Eisenstein hoped to avoid the situation
where the 'focus' of the visual image would be trapped on the surface of already
composed and defined bodies (whether of objects, persons, already divided sexes,
or even peoples). Second, by means of the contrapuntal method, he hoped to
liberate the sound-image from a situation where its 'sense' would be determined
mono-linguistically, or bound too closely to the literary and dramatic conven-
tions that might define a single national character or cultural imagination. These
aspirations underlie a truly international cinematographic vision (an aspect often
overlooked, even willfully ignored, in Deleuze's reading of Eisenstein), although
it is a vision, perhaps even an 'inner-monologue,' that is often hidden or
obscured in the official rhetoric of the speeches and lectures that had to pass
under the gaze of the Soviet censors and, in general, had to be concealed from the
race of impudent masters Eisenstein's films were to serve. In fact, Eisenstein came
under direct criticism of the Stalinists several times, particularly around the
improperly dramatic treatment of the action-image in the heroic portrayal of
Alexander Nevsky, which was judged as being too 'Hamletian' in proportion and
not an adequate vehicle for collective sentiment of the Soviet people.8
But then, this underscores a third reason — the most obvious one, perhaps —
which even conditions the first two in the sense that the art of industrial cinema
depends for its existence less on genius than on the interest of modern
12d THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I LLES DELEUZE

institutions and their systems of majority, either in the form of the state or of a
culture industry, and this distinguishes it from the other arts (with the exception
of architecture) and even predisposes it to assume an overtly ideological shape in
its classical period or, in the modem period, frequently causes it to confront the
limit of its internal presupposition, that is, money. 'The film is movement,'
Deleuze writes, 'but the film within the film is money, is time':

Modern cinema thus receives the principle which is its foundation [what
causes it to exist in the first place]: endlessly relaunching exchange which
is dissymetrical, unequal and without equivalence, giving image for
money, giving time for images, converting time, the transparent side,
and money, the opaque side, like a spinning top on its end. And film will
be finished when there is no more money left ... (TI78)

In the current period especially, not encountered by Eisenstein, Capital assumes

the force of the Whole, as that power which is equal to the 'Being' of the Whole;
at the same time, it apportions the limit to this representation precisely at that
moment where the money runs out, which is also where the forms of desire (or
interest) and imagination encounter their own internal limits as well. This final
reason marks the 'no-exit' of modern industrial cinema which can become pure
and disinterested only at a price, which can be tangibly measured and even
calculated in advance as a condition of its production; however, the only place
where it is really free (that is, from the pressures of these institutions) is that
place, or those places, where it doesn't exist. A cinema of pure possibility, or 'of
pure poetry,' as Artaud said, but one we shouldn't expect - not an art of the
impossible, but merely an impossible art.

Deleuze argues that two dominant responses to loss of the idea of a just world in
the West have been the creation of two spiritual ideals. The first is the
revolutionary (or critical) ideal which responds to the loss of the true world by an
active engagement of science, politics and art in the destruction of the previous
world and the 'fabrication' of a new world that will replace it. This amounts to
the belief in a principle of creation (or negativity) that would be able to intervene
between human and nature in order to set right, rectify or even radically to
transform this relation. The other ideal Deleuze calls 'catholic' which amounts
to spiritualizing the human in the hope of a transformation (through an act
of conversion or mysticism) into another nature. (Here, we might perceive an
implicit kinship between Catholicism and Buddhism.) The former can be
illustrated by Eisenstein's image of revolutionary cinema to intervene into the
very brain of die human and thereby to transform its nature, which is the nature
of its perception-consciousness system (or the spiritual automaton within us).
Although Deleuze underlines a deficiency in Eisenstein's 'monism,' as well as
in his tendency to express the conflict between these two spiritual automatons in
terms of opposition, in actual fact, there is less difference between their theories
of cinema than one might expect. Their 'goal' is identical: that is, a total
 ARTAUD'S PROBLEM AND OURS 125

provocation of the human brain. Where is the point of divergence to be located?

On the first level, it can be located in simple chronology. Eisenstein conceived of
the possibilities of cinematic art in its earliest stages, and his experience belongs
to the first and second periods of the 'old cinema.' On the other hand, Deleuze
defines his earliest experiences widi cinema in the period that runs immedi-
ately before and after the Second World War. As already outlined above, his
experience occupies a moment of transition not encountered by Eisenstein, when
something happens that robs cinema of diis total provocation (or 'nooshock') as
the dynamic principle of the achievement of cinematographic art as an art of the
masses, something which causes the belief in the revolutionary nature of cinema
now to appear as an overly naive and even fantastic premise, worthy of a museum
filled with the lost aspirations of the golden age of art in the West.
On the second level, intimately bound up with the first, the point of diver-
gence can be located in the 'image of thought' that defines as its goal the total
provocation of the brain (i.e. the principle of'nooshock'). Simply put, the differ-
ence is between thought identified as a power that would be placed in a circuit
with the automatic image to effect a change in the Whole, and thought that
appears deprived of this power a priori and, in fact, reveals a subject that is
haunted by the automatic character of movement that animates it as well as by
the source of images it is given to think. A qualitatively new monster emerges
in the world at about the same time as it becomes a frequent character of modern
cinema (particularly science fiction): an alien who latches on to the human face,
smothering its victim without letting it die, and at the same time who lays eggs
inside the victim's mouth. These eggs are the physical, optical and auditory
cliches — the 'little organs' of the reproductive imagination - to which the
spiritual automaton of modern ideology gives birth.

Nothing but cliches, cliches everywhere ... They are the floating images
which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one
of us and constitute our internal world so that everyone possesses only
psychic cliches by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being
himself a cliche among others in a world which surrounds him. Physical,
optical, and auditory cliches and psychic cliches mutually feed on each
other. In order for people to be able to bear themselves and the world,
misery has to reach the inside of consciousness and the inside has to be like
an outside ... How can one not believe in a powerful concerted organi-
zation, which has found a way to make cliches circulate, from outside to
inside, from inside to outside. (MI 207-208)

Here we can discern the figure of a crisis that interrupts the achievement of the
movement-image and which is already foregrounded in the above passage from
the conclusion of Cinema 1. Instead of opening to the birth of thought, the
achievement of the movement-image in cinema not only hastens its own death,
but opens the subject to the moment when the possibility of thought itself can
be 'stolen away' by force and this only deepens the subject's passivity before this
126 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G 1 1_ L E S DELEUZE

possibility that appears like a 'powerful concerted organization' installed at the

deepest point of its Anteriority. Ultimately, this crisis will lead to an absolute
break in which modern cinema recoils from its desire for higher finality,
understood in terms of the 'action-image/ and even renounces its power to give
birth to 'the subject as whole,' understood in terms of the movement-image.
As Deleuze writes, 'this is the first aspect of the new cinema' that follows, which
is 'the break in the sensory-motor link (action-image), and more profoundly in
die link between human and the world (great organic composition)' (TI173).
The above reflections on the inner mechanism of the movement-image offer us
the occasion to understand more clearly the direct relationship between modern
cinema and Ideology. If we find an implicit analogy here between die crisis of
die movement-image and the crisis of the imagination in the encounter with the
sublime, it is because Deleuze uses this analogy to figure the relationship between
the 'failure' of classical cinema and the 'deformation' that die power of reason
suffers in die advent of the modern notion of Ideology. Consequendy, there has
never been the possibility of a non-ideological cinema and it is not simply by
chance that modern critiques of ideology have found in the appearance of film
one of the principal culprits in the reproduction of political, class and racial
ideologies. However, many of these critiques pursue a false distinction, believing
that the subject of ideology is qualitatively distinct from the movement-image
and appears 'behind it' or 'speaks through it' like a homunculus (reinforcing a
classical mind-body dualism), rather than forming die material basis of the
image and the laws of association peculiar to 'sensual thinking' as Eisenstein
discovered. Likewise, such critiques must propose an 'inside' of conscious
perception that is also qualitatively different from the 'inside' of the image as if
there was first a subject whose perceptions were clear and distinct, and then where
the transparent waters of consciousness were muddied over by false projections,
illusions, lies and cliches. In other words, they must believe in a subject that is not
already composed of a tissue of cliches ('the veil of Maya'); such a subject must
appear as composed of another nature, whether as an original nature like that of
God, or pure cogito, or as the final nature of a transformed human (whose
apotheosis becomes the shared goal of science, art and politics in the "West).
On an historical level of the concept of knowledge, this situation addresses the
problem faced by post-Enlightenment philosophies generally, in which the idea
of Reason, radier than guaranteeing to the subject of knowledge the certainty of
its link with the world, becomes deformed and reappears in die guise of opinion
(doxd), even as transcendental opinion (or Ur-doxa). However, in die life of the
conscious subject this feeling of disbelief points to what Deleuze calls a 'real
psychic situation' that both ideology (as the modern concept of truth) and
cinema (as die modern concept of art) share as a formal condition of represen-
tation; the suspension of any verifiable link with the 'true' world happens at the
same time that human appears as the subject of purely optical and aural
situations. As Deleuze writes, The Modern fact is that we no longer believe in
this world. We do not even believe in die events which happen to us, love, death,
as if they only half concerned us' (TI 171). And if the 'real' subject cannot believe
 ARTAUD'S PROBLEM AND OURS 127

in the world that is presented, it is because the world has become nothing but bad
cinema, and the subject has become a pure voyeur who regards his own being as
well as the being of others, like in an episode of The Jerry Springer Show, as 'stock
characters' in a psychic drama which unfolds from the hidden perspective of a
real that, although external to the subject, is somehow internal (or necessary) to
the world as it is.

The sensory-motor break makes the human a seer who finds himself struck
by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something
unthinkable in thought. Between die two, thought undergoes a strange
fossilization, which is as it were its powerlessness to function, to be, its
dispossession of itself and the world. For it is not in the name of a better
and truer world that thought captures die intolerable in the world, but, on
the contrary, it is because the world is intolerable that it can no longer
think a world or itself. (TI171-172)

The figure of Artaud occupies die moment of this break where the 'image of
thought' instead of becoming identified with the power of the Whole, that is, the
power of a subject capable of externalizing itself in a series of images by which
the Whole Undergoes change, becomes fissured and more receptive to a funda-
mental powerlessness which testifies to 'the impossibility of thinking diat is
thought' (Artaud). 'It is indeed a matter, as it was for Eisenstein, "of bringing
cinema togedier with the innermost reality of the brain," but this innermost
reality is not the Whole, but on the contrary a fissure, or crack.'9 Here, thought
does not accede to a form that belongs to a model of knowledge, or fall to the
conditions of an action; rather, thought exposes its own image to an 'outside' that
hollows it out and returns it to an element of 'formlessness.' We might conceive
of this event in terms of the notion of formlessness that we explicated above in
relation to modern art or literature, or even in terms of Eisenstein's discovery of
the 'fourth dimension' (although here, separated from its 'dialectical auto-
maton'), except in this instance the relationship to the Whole is not even given a
negative expression, but rather undergoes an absolute break, which in the subject
takes the form of a permanent and irreparable state of disbelief. Thus, the
problem of ideology receives its most authentic expression from Artaud when he
cried: 'my body was stolen away from me before birth'; 'my brain has been used by an
Other who thinks in my place.' Artaud experienced and gave expression to this
problem in its most extreme form, as if suffering from the memory of a physical,
mental and spiritual rape — that is, the cry of schizophrenic man. However,
'rape' is not being employed here as simple metaphor, but rather as the most
direct translation of Artaud's complaint; it reveals the nature of'die total physio-
logical sensation' of the automaton that enters to violate the subject even before
birth.10 In response to this intolerable situation, our question must then become
how it is possible to distinguish between all the images that comprise the subject's
existence in order to choose the right one, or how to extract thought from all its
128 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I L L ES DELEUZE

various cliches in order to set it up against them. According to Deleuze, Artaud

experienced this question as the problem of thinking, which can be summarized
in the following manner: the impossibility of not thinking, the impossibility of
thinking, the impossibility of thinking differendy. Commenting on the first
part of this triad, 'the impossibility of not thinking,' in relation to the subject of
cinema this concerns the automatic character of thought which it shares with the
movement-image, since even my refusal to think only signals that place where
another thinks in my place. Not thinking, consequently, appears to Artaud as
impossible a priori. Likewise, the second and third concern thinking as a power
or quality that belongs to the subject which are impossible a priori, the first in the
sense that all thinking is composed of cliches, the second in the sense that
thought itself (or 'What is called thinking?' represented either as a common
notion, an opinion, or as a kind of dominant image) must ultimately be deter-
mined as transcendental cliche, or an Ur-doxa.
It was only because the automatic character of thought already found a
resemblance with the automatic character of the movement-image that cinema
discovered the dynamic principle by means of which it could appear as the force
that causes the subject to think. The dominant image of thought appears in this
resemblance as a power in accordance with the power of Nature, or with the
order of techne by which knowledge intervenes to disturb, 'work over,' and to
fundamentally transform the interval between Nature and Culture. According
to this dynamic representation, thinking is a Power which has as its begin-
ning a point of projection (a subject) and as its end a transformed nature or a
fabricated object (a world); between these two points there is a certain direc-
tionality or orientation by which thought is translated spatially from subject
to object, from culture to nature and back again; and temporally from idea of
Whole to the Whole transfigured. It is because of this mere resemblance that
the movement-image acquires a certain power to determine the Whole, and
the appearance of this power is then consolidated as a specialized technical
knowledge, that, finally, the whole problem of the resemblance between the
movement-image in cinema and the ideological images deployed by the appa-
ratus of the state ensues. And it is only on the basis of this resemblance that
Virilio's thesis is correct, namely that there has been no diversion of the
movement-image to ideological ends, but rather the 'movement-image was from
the beginning linked to the organization of war, state propaganda, ordinary
fascism, historically and essentially' (TI165).12 However, this resemblance in
fact only implies that the problem of ideology was already implicit in the 'image
of thought,' that is, it was already latent in the subject and was simply awaiting its
final birth: the automatic character of thought as a power, as either an 'habitual'
or a transformative force, one that could internalize the Whole within a subject,
and externalize the subject as a Whole (a world, a state, a national conscience).
Should the failure of a classical cinema founded upon the movement-image,
such as its goals and aspirations were formulated by Eisenstein, not be inferred
from an image of thought that was still attached to this problematic resemblance?
Did this resemblance not condition Eisenstein's belief that cinema will eventually
 ARTAUD'S PROBLEM AND OURS 129

achieve by perfecting its knowledge of movement-image the means to repair the

broken interval that appears as the cause of the subject's collective fragmentation?
To unify the subject by crossing in both directions die gap between instinct and
intelligence, and between thinking and action — both would amount to absorb-
ing the interval into the synthesis of the movement-image. Because diis perfection
was understood primarily in terms of the action-image, conceived as the solution
to art's neurosis and to collective fragmentation suffered by 'a people who is
missing' (both of which are conceived as figures of'negative apprehension'), it is
ironic to see that it was precisely this conception of the action-image itself which
was the cause of this neurosis. All movement through space is constructed by
cliches, and the 'action-image' was itself a cliche of a special type; to evoke the
'revolutionary' potential of the new cinema seems contradictory since it consti-
tutes a cliche of the highest order, an Ur-doxa, which posits either the total
transformation of the Whole or the 'subject as Whole.' It was, in fact, a false
solution that only furthered the break between the human being and the world,
even realizing this impasse as an absolute and giving it an objectified form of the
purely optical and sound situations in which thought appears to be trapped.
As a result of these situations, as Deleuze writes, 'the spiritual automaton is in
the psychic situation of a seer, a true visionary who sees better and further than
he can react, that is, think' (TI172). Deleuze's thesis is that this is precisely the
'no exit' that the new cinema founds itself upon. Nihilism, therefore, is not a
spirit that is restricted to philosophy alone. At the same time, he suggests, there
may still be hope and the example of Artaud's relationship to cinema offers a
way of 'thinking through cinema by means of cinema.' Beginning from this
situation and even affirming it as the fundamental condition of the modern
subject, to make the interval appear directly is the solution that Artaud offers:
not to attach thought to a motor image that would extinguish it in action, or
absorb it in knowledge, but to attach it directly to the interval itself so that
thought would find its cause no longer in the image, but rather in what within
the image refuses to be thought. In other words, if the whole problem of
thought was that it was attached to an image that represented it, then Artaud
turns this problem around to reveal its true experience for the subject. What this
experience reveals is precisely the automatic, habitual and instinctual character
of the thought that diinks me, interpolates me and determines me as a subject.
One might still define diis experience as 'total provocation' or 'nooshock'; yet,
the nature of this experience with the cause of thinking has undergone a radical
change. Under its previous image, shock, the neuronal messenger, simply travels
along the same path that was opened, according to Artaud's cry, by a more
fundamental power, thus referring the shock-effect that appears as die basis of
the projects of art and ideology to an event that occurs before my birth. But this
implies that the cause of thinking remains unconscious in principle, since it can
never really emerge as a motive of conscious understanding or to become the
condition of deliberative action. Instead, thought leaps over the interval to
become, in principle, the condition of an action that remains fundamentally
unthought, like an involuntary reaction, habitual response or nerve impulse.
13O THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I I- l_ E S DELEUZE

Under its new image, this dynamic representation of thinking as a force is no

longer 'the goal,' and the problem is no longer in attaining an 'image of
thought' that would be equal to the force of the Whole (i.e. the perfection of
'the action-image'), but rather, according to Artaud, it is this 'image' of thought
as a force or a power that itself is suddenly revealed as the problem of thinking.
It reveals precisely the shock that 'I am not yet thinking' or that 'what is called
thinking' is a power that belongs to a subject who 'I am not.' The effect of this
awareness bears a certain 'dissociative force' which pries thought from its image,
at the same time as it cuts the image off from the world, and exposes it to what
Deleuze calls its 'reverse proof,' the fact that we are not yet thinking.1^
Both cinema and ideology are expressions of the same broken interval between
the human and the world, an interval that has reduced the link to only what the
subject hears or sees; moreover, both have participated in the transformation of
the world into an object of belief - even if this belief should prove illusory. It is
precisely because everything that I see and hear is capable of being false, the
expressions of deceit or trickery, of false oaths and betrayal, that only my belief is
capable of reconnecting me with what I see and hear. This situation that I have
been oudining as the basis of both the cinematic mechanism and the mechanism
of ideology amounts to an extreme Cartesianism, however, one without any
recourse to die principle of God who provides the subject of the cogito with
fundamental certainty of knowledge. This is because, under the axiom of I = the
Other, the subject I feel myself to be in perceiving, willing, desiring, can always
be an 'Odier.' As Deleuze writes, 'It was already a great turning-point in
philosophy, from Pascal to Nietzsche: to replace the model of knowledge with
belief (TI172). Likewise, modern cinema by reducing the world to the image
can only intervene into the fold that runs between the human and the world; it is
by changing the signs and affects of perception and consciousness that it is alone
capable of provoking a change in the nature of consciousness itself. After all, what
is a human being but the totality of her conscious perceptions, her affective
qualities and her memory signs. The loss of the direct relation to the body, such
as Artaud experienced it, is only the ultimate expression of a universal predica-
ment. Thought is full of cliches, memory is not to be trusted, and perception is
made-to-order. It is ironic, then, that the only means we have of restoring a
connection that has been broken or damaged is by the very means that has
caused our separation, by means of perception-images, memory-images, sounds
and statements. This is why modern cinema, in particular, will be concerned
with rendering an experience or connection between the body and the world, of
creating new visual and aural images that might 'give back' the body's relation-
ship to the world which has been lost in a chaos of cliches. Therefore, as Deleuze
argues, although cinema cannot intervene directly into the world, or cause diis
world to be transformed into another, it may be the one and only means we
have of restoring our belief. A strange optimism, which can be formulated as
follows: to continue to believe in cinema, despite everything, despite even the
repeated 'failures' of cinema itself, is to believe in the actualization of the world
as it is.
 ARTAUD'S PROBLEM AND OURS 131

Now, Eisenstein's belief in the power of'revolutionary cinema' is well known

and we have underlined many of its principles above. In Artaud, however, we
have the figure of a 'true believer' in the cinema, who had to suffer through the
stages of renouncing a too-simple faith in cinema in order to discover a more
profound reason to believe. 'The nature of the cinematographic illusion has often
been considered,' Deleuze writes, '[and] restoring our belief in diis world - this
is the power of modem cinema (when it stops being bad). Whether we are
Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe
in this world' (TI172). The situation we face today only expresses this fact to an
extreme degree, which underlies the radical uncertainty when the appeal to
earlier models of knowledge and reason is exposed to the accusations of 'bad
faith.' Nevertheless, the affirmative principle expressed by Nietzsche (but also by
Kierkegaard before him) can be understood as being the most sobering response
to this predicament: to believe in the world as it is, neither in a transformed world
nor in another world, and to provide an image of thought that thoroughly
belongs to this world which is ruled by the powers of the false; moreover, to raise
falsehood to a positive principle in the service of diose who choose to live in this
world and not in another. In either case, what we have been calling the 'modern
subject,' for lack of a better name, is faced with a terrible choice: either to
continue to live in such a way that he or she can no longer believe anything he or
she sees or hears (resulting in the loss of any connection to die world), or actively
to cultivate the reasons to believe in this world of which fools, confidence men
and tricksters are a part. Restoring our connection to the world, but also
assuming a constant vigilance over cliches and ready-made linkages — these are
the tasks of the cinema that emerges today from this new situation of thought.
 11
THE USES (AND ABUSES) O

LITERATURE FOR LIFE

In the introductory essay of his last work, Critique et Clinique (1993), the
translation of which was published in 1997 under the title Essays Critical and
Clinical, the plane of immanence upon which the question of literature is
unfolded is defined simply as 'Life.' Deleuze defines literature as 'the passage of
life within language that constitutes Ideas' (CC 5), somewhat in the same manner
that Whitehead had earlier spoken of Ideas themselves as the 'passage of Nature'
into the location of a place (Fold 73). Thus, it is only on the plane of immanence,
that is 'Life' itself, where we can discover a point situated outside the critical
representation of literature; and it is from this point or vista that we might begin
again to pose the question(s) proper to literature itself. Keeping this in mind, that
is, the strategic necessity of situating the question of the critical from a point
'outside' its historical representation (or representative discourse), I will turn
to this introductory essay in order to interrogate the above passage, since it is
from this point that Deleuze describes what happens when the questions of living
are bound up with 'the problems of writing.' In this essay Deleuze outlines four
criteria for defining the relationship of literature to life. Because these criteria
may provide a good approximation of the 'uses of literature for life,' in the
following passages I will illustrate each criterion.

FIRST CRITERION

Literature is a passage of life that traverses outside the lived and the
liveable. (CC 1).

This is what Deleuze means by the first sentence that begins the leading essay of
Essays Critical and Clinical, 'Literature and life': 'To write is certainly not to
impose a form of expression on the matter of lived experience' (CC1). This
statement recalls a question first proposed by Proust: 'If art was indeed but a
prolongation of life, was it worthwhile to sacrifice anything to it? Was it not as
unreal as life itself?' (C339). Before Deleuze, Proust is probably the greatest
apologist for the 'duty' of literature. 'How many have turned aside from its task,'
he asked, lacking the instinct for it, which is nothing less than the instinct for life
itself?' (TR298). On the other hand:
 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR LIFE 133

Real life, that is, life at last laid bare and illuminated — die only life in
consequence to which can be said to be really lived - is literature, and life
thus denned is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less
than in the artist. (TR298)

For Proust, therefore, literature is the most 'real' of all things, since the ideas
formed by pure intelligence may be logical, but are not necessary; moreover,
perception or knowledge which is common or general is likewise not necessary,
because it has not been deciphered, developed, worked over, that is, created. (In a
famous description, Proust writes that for most people memory is a dark-room
containing too many negatives that have not been 'developed.')
Therefore, literature is life

... remote from our daily preoccupations, [the life] we separate from
ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge we substi-
tute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very
easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply,
our life. (TR 298-299)

According to this principle, certain literary works often take the opposite path: to
discern beneath the merely personal die power of the impersonal. Thus, literature
sometimes concerns the question of living in the sense that the writer struggles
with the problem of life in order to extract movements and becomings that are
inseparable from the question of 'style.' 'Style,' however, does not reflect the
individuated expression or personality of the artist or writer. As Proust argues:

[A]rt, if it means awareness of our own life, means also the awareness of
the lives of other people — style for the writer, no less than color for the
painter, is not a question of technique but of vision: it is the revelation,
which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the quali-
tative difference, the uniqueness in which the world appears to each one of
us, a difference which, were it not for art, would remain the secret of every
individual. (TR299)

In the passage that traverses both the lived and the livable, the identities of the
terms do not remain the same, but enter into a process of mutual becoming;
Deleuze calls this process a 'capture,' a kind of repetition that causes both to
become unequal to their former definitions, and enter into a relation of becom-
ing. Such a becoming, however, concerns the immanence of a life, and only in
certain cases does it emerge to touch upon the immanence of a life diat is lived
and livable by others. We might ask then, what makes the life posed by literature
exemplary; in other words, what causes its critical expression to pass over to the
side of the clinical? It is upon this question that the value of the literary enterprise
is posed, whether it receives justification and a 'use' or falls into a miserable state
of its own univocity. This is where the question of 'passage' receives a definite
134 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF OIULES DELEUZE

qualification: literature concerns the passage of a life into language. It is only

through this passage that Life itself can achieve the repetition of a higher power,
and the personal can be raised to the condition of a language.
Deleuze often remarks that the plane of life surpasses both the lived and the
livable; the writer's encounter often proceeds from an encounter when life,
defined in terms of the lived and the livable, becomes impossible, or when this
encounter concerns something that is 'too powerful, or too painful, too beautiful'
(TI51). Accordingly, the writer often returns from the land of the dead and
is 'a stranger to life' (TP 208). In other words, the writer does not simply write
from experience or memory, but also from something too painful for memory
or too light for experience, perhaps even 'an unbearable lightness' as in Kundera.
It is for this reason, second, that the act of writing and the figure of the writer
always entertain a relationship with a fundamental stupidity (betise), which is
not simply a lack of experience as the fictionalizing factor, as well as with a
fundamental amnesia or 'forgetting,' which is not simply a weak memory as the
factor of an overly active imagination. (The recits of Marguerite Duras are
exemplary in this regard.) Both stupidity and forgetting are the forces that
define the writer's strangeness and estrangement from 'the lived and the
livable.' For example, is there not a stupidity proper to Kafka's relationship with
women that initiated the desire of the bachelor (hence, his famous state-
ment, 'Prometheus was a bachelor'), or a forgetting of language and speech that
one finds in Artaud, Beckett and Joyce? As in the famous case of the 'jeune
homme schizophrene' (an earlier essay on which is included in Essays Critical and
Clinical), the relationship to a maternal language has undergone a funda-
mental trauma and dispossession and must be either invented anew (as in the
case of Joyce and Proust) or pushed to its extreme limit to the point where
Language itself confronts its impossibility (impouvoir, using Blanchot's term)
and comes into contact with its own outside. The latter can find its various
strategies in Artaud (where the outside is the cry beyond words), or in Beckett,
who pushed the language of the novel to an extreme repetition that unravels
into tortured fragments at the same time that his characters devolve into partial
objects (e.g. a mouth, a head, an eye, a torso, a stomach, an anus).
Perhaps we can illustrate the immanence of a life with the following state-
ment taken from Primo Levi which implicitly points to the example of Kafka:
'The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?' (CC I). Here,
'shame' defines the fundamental trait of a life that is not simply the life of Kafka,
but of a 'situation' particular to his case. For Kafka, moreover, the problem of
writing is posed within an immanent relation to the escape from a 'situation'
of shame. Benjamin had earlier perceived this shame as the 'elemental purity of
feeling,' which is fundamental to Kafka's writings and, consequendy, 'Kafka's
strongest gesture [gestus]' (Benjamin, Illuminations, 25). What is the 'shame of
being human'? For Benjamin, shame is primarily a social feeling: it is something
one feels in the presence of others, something one feels for others. Because of
this origin, the individual is innocent and cannot be found to be its cause.
Consequently, in Benjamin's reading, the situation of shame always returns to
 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR LIFE 135

the character of the law and its officers (the judge, the father, the mother,
even the son and the daughter, or the sister); the character of law is that of
an incredible filth that covers everything and everyone — a defilement of being.
The father in 'The judgement' wears a dirty nightshirt; in 'The metamorphosis,'
the father's uniform is covered in filth; in The Trial, the Examining Magistrate
pages through a dusty volume of the Law which, when K. discovers its contents,
is filled witli dirty pictures. One might think this is a characteristic particular to
the fathers and the officials only; however, nothing could be further from the
truth. In fact, the son has become the embodiment of filth; he is vermin. Neither
does woman escape, since, as many have noticed, she is touched with the filth
of the law that defiles her own sex, and appears as a slut, a court prostitute, or
a hunchback among the assembly of harpies who assemble on the stairs outside
the painter Titorelli's studio. Shame — i.e. the shame of being human — is
nothing 'personal,' but rather belongs to an unknown 'family' which includes
bodi humans and animals alike. And Kafka writes concerning his indefinite
relationship to this family: 'He feels as though he were living and thinking under
the constraint of a family ... Because of this family ... he cannot be released.'

SECOND CRITERION

To write is not to recount one's memories and travels, one's loves and griefs,
one's dreams and fantasies; neither do we write with our neuroses, which do
not constitute 'passages,' but rather those states into which we fall when our
desire is blocked or plugged-up — consequently, 'literature then appears as an
enterprise of health.' (CC 2-3)

We might ask why Deleuze seems to love children and writers so much?
Or rather, why are writers so often described in the process of'becoming-child'?
Kafka's letters often demonstrate this directly, particularly those to Felice where
he takes a child's point-of-view in talking about her 'teetli' or in day-dreaming
over the idea of curling up in her dresser drawer next to her 'private articles,' or,
finally, in the passages where he describes a thousand agitated hands fluttering
and out of reach, which can be understood as prefiguring of Gregor Samsa's
thousand tiny legs waving helplessly in front of him. In addition to Kafka, we
might think of Beckett as well, particularly the trilogy, where the transformations
of the characters - Molloy, Malone, Jacques, Mahood, the Unnameable — all
undergoing incredible and hilarious journeys and transmigrations, are haunted
by endoscopic perceptions. The answer, it seems, would be simple enough:
because the child knows how to play (to experiment), and the writer in the
process of 'becoming-child' does not imitate children but repeats a block of
childhood and allows it to pass through language. However, to avoid allowing
the notion of'play' to remain too simplistic (since most will say they know what
'playing' is), we should turn back to Freud who entertained an original intuition
of the child-at-play in his 'Creative writers and day-dreaming.'
136 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GIULES DELEUZE

First, Freud noticed that the child, contrary to the adult, plays in die full light
of day, plays openly, and even causes his or her creations to transform the
external world of perception. Byway of contrast, the adult can only play in secret
and often actively hides his or her creative activities (perhaps even from himself
or herself). Adults are, first and foremost, guilty; consequently, they have lost the
innocence of play, have repressed it, meaning that they aggressively prohibit all
'public displays' of such an activity, transforming the nature of play itself into an
unconscious source of pleasure. Freud used this distinction primarily to dis-
tinguish the play of the child from the fantasy life of the adult; to show that the
origin of the phantasm itself has this sense of 'hiding,' a guilty source of
satisfaction for the adult who can only play in secret (and alone). At the same
time, even Freud noticed that the artist constitutes the exceptional case to this
internalization and continues to play out in the open. What's more, Freud
exclaims with a certain amount of surprise, society allows it! Even if the artist
must usually pay the price in terms of a suffering that compensates for the artist's
enjoyment and seems to satisfy the cruelty of society itself toward the artist
for enjoying too much and in a manner that civilization first of all demands to be
sacrificed, cut off. This economic arrangement of cruelty and pleasure, according
to Freud, is the guarantee that the creative writer and artist have to exist.
Returning now to emphasize diat the writer, like the child, plays openly and
in the full light of day, this would seem to imply that the nature of the activity
cannot find its source in the secret, internalized and guilty affects of the adult.
As Deleuze writes, 'we do not write with our neuroses' (CC 3). Wouldn't this
imply that we should look for the sense of the process on the surface of the
writer's activity, for a process that seeks to hide nodiing? It seems odd, dien, that
often the function of interpretation is to reveal or to expose a 'secret' behind the
appearance of the literary effect, underneath the more overt and all-too-evident
transformations: to locate the 'figure in the carpet' or the figure of ideology.
Is there any difference? Couldn't this activity be seen as an extension of the earlier
repression: to transform what is out in the open, on the surface, to what is hidden
and secret? Wouldn't this transform the very intentionality of the writer, so that
the figure itself would appear to have been ferreted away, and desire becomes the
desire of the phantasm? This is why interpretations of ideology begin with a false
premise: that the writer was hiding anything to begin with. Perhaps this is why
Deleuze and Guattari choose to highlight the most problematic of writers from
the perspective of an adult morality (Carroll and his love for little girls, Faulkner
and Melville's racism, or that of Celine, the misogyny of Miller and Burroughs,
Proust's 'closeted' homosexuality, Artaud's mania and crypto-fascism, Kafka's
bachelor-desire, Woolf's frigidity, etc.), as if to say, 'Well now, there's nothing
hidden here!' 'All perverts - every one of them!' Or perhaps, 'If we are to judge,
if we must arrive at a judgement, then we must find a better evidence; but at
least, we must find something more interesting to say.' But dien 'perversion'
may not be the right word. Again, this evokes the sense of symptomatology,
since the writer 'plays' - openly, without shame, or guilt - with what the adult
chooses to keep 'secret,' even though secrecy makes these symptoms no less
 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR LIFE 137

determining of a life and perhaps even more so. How many times lately have we
had to suffer the moralism of perverts, racists, misogynists and pederasts who
choose to persecute others for their own most secretive desires? Thus, the
publicity with which the writer plays with his or her desires is not perverse in the
least; rather, the function of 'perversion' describes the position of a normative
morality under the condition that enjoyment either remains 'a dirty little secret'
of the individual, or undergoes a strange reversal into sadism and cruelty.

THIRD CRITERION

'Health as literature, 'as writing, consists in fabulation, which Deleuze defines

as 'the invention of a people who is missing; thus, 'the ultimate aim of literature
is to set free, in the delirium, in this creation of a health, in this invention of a
people, the possibility of a life.' (CC 5)

Under this criterion, we should recall the three characteristics that belong to the
concept of 'minor literature': first, a certain situation occurs when a major
language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization; second,
everything is political and the 'individual concern' or 'private interest' disappears
or serves as a mere environment or background; third, everything takes on a
collective value. From these three criteria, we can locate the specific conditions
that give rise to what Deleuze calls 'fabulation.' The concept of'fabulation' first
appears in Bergsonism (1966) and then disappears almost entirely until it is high-
lighted in the later writings, particularly in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989)
and again in the interviews conducted between 1972 and 1990 that appear in
Negotiations (1990), where Deleuze makes the following pronouncement:
'Utopia is not a good concept, but rather a "fabulation" common to people and
to art. We should return to the Bergsonian notion of fabulation to provide i
with a political sense' (N 174). In light of our effort to understand this concept
in view of a generalized literary clinic, we might understand the concept of
fabulation as having two sides: creation and prognosis. Fabulation is the art
of invention as well as a conceptual avatar of a 'problem-solving' instinct that
remedies an unbearable situation - particularly with regard to the situation of
'the people who are missing' (CC4). The goal of fabulation, understood as a
process, is where the writer and the people go toward one another (TI 153ff.); in
this sense they share a common function. Deleuze writes, 'To write for this
people who are missing ... ("for" means less "in place of" than "for the benefit
of")' (CC4). That is, they share a process, a vision beyond words, a language
beyond sounds. In this sense, fabulation could be said to resemble the function
of dream work and, by extension, the moments of selective rearrangement that
mark historical discontinuities. What is power unleashed in revolution but the
ideal game deployed within what is essentially a fiction; that is, the power to
select and reorder the objects, artefacts and meanings that belong to a previous
138 THE MOIM-PHIUOSOPHY OF G I 1_ L E S O EL E UZ E

world? Utopia, then, rather than designating a static representation of the

ideal place, or topos, is rather the power of the 'ideal' itself, which can bifurcate,
time and create possible worlds. This is why Deleuze calls 'fabulation' a better
concept than 'utopia,' since it designates a power or a vital process rather than
representing a static genre - an ideal form of repetition rather than the repeti-
tion of an ideal form.
Fabulation entails a 'becoming' that happens from both directions — it is
both the becoming-popular of the creator or intellectual, and the becoming-
creative of a people. In many ways, this movement echoes the description of the
cultural process of nationalist or post-colonialist art first examined by Frantz
Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), which can be used to illustrate the
concept of fabulation. First, in Fanon's analysis, the function of fabulation that
determines the writer's cultural presence in colonial culture and the forms of
'socialization' and identification that underlie the perspective of the modern
'creator' are both explicitly developed:

At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create
a cultural work he fails to realise that he is utilising techniques and
languages which are borrowed from the stranger in his country. He contents
himself with stamping these instruments with a hallmark he wishes to be
national, but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism. The native
intellectual who comes back to his people [as Fanon previously qualifies,
'whatever they were or whatever they were or whatever they are'] by way of
culture behaves in fact like the foreigner. Sometimes he shows no hesitation
in using a dialect in order to show his will to be as near as possible to the
people; but the ideas he expresses and the preoccupations he is taken up
with have no common yardstick to measure the real situation which the
men and women of his country know. (W223)

This incommensurability, which underscores the initial appearance of the colon-

ized intellectual, also belongs to a preliminary phase in the creation of national
conscience of culture in Fanon's reading. It must be followed by other stages,
which reconfigure the attributes (or 'property') of culture between its contingent
and exterior genres and its interior collective expression of'inner truth' (W225).
(Fanon articulates die latter as culture's muscularity, in relation to political
action, and rhythm, in relation to ethnic and regional identities.) In a post-
colonial culture's incipient phase, however, these attributes are uncoordinated
and this non-coordination can be seen to inform the very appearance of hybridity
in the image of the cultural producer and his or her creative work. From the
perspective of the post-colonial 'people' - who, at this stage, 'are still missing' -
comes the initial schizoid image of culture, one which is also manifested in the
appearance of the colonized intellectual as the result of the mutilating psycho-
logical effects and dehumanization of the colonizing situation. This addresses the
problem of becoming from the perspective of the native intellectual and writer,
where 'going back to your own people means to become a dirty wog, to go native
 THE USES (AMD ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR LIFE 139

as much as possible, to become unrecognisable, and to cut off those wings that
before you had allowed to grow' (W221). Part native and part stranger, near and
distant at the same time, the creator only 'appears' to manifest a characteristic of
proximity by imitating native dialects and speech patterns; however, this creator's
'ideas' are at first both unfamiliar and strangely distant from a people's per-
ception of dieir own image.
Fanon himself accounts for this hybridity by assigning it two causes. First,
hybridity results from an appearance of 'culture' itself that is uncoordinated
with political and national conscience (i.e. a direct consequence of the colonial
process that 'alienated' and even 'negated' any relationship between these two
sites of mentality). Second, this appearance of the indigenous cultural producer
and the national conscience of culture precedes the actualization of political
revolt. This peremptory and premature appearance gives the creator and the
cultural work die characteristics of 'a-temporality' and 'affective remoteness' in
the minds of the people themselves:

The artist who has decided to illustrate the truths of the nation turns
paradoxically toward the past and away from actual events. What he ulti-
mately intends to embrace are in fact the cast-offs of thought, its shells and
corpses, a knowledge which has been stabilised once and for all. But the
native intellectual who wishes to create the authentic work of art must realise
that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities. He must go on
until he has found die seething pot out of which the learning of the future
will emerge. (W225)

This diagnostic and therapeutic narrative structures the dialectical stages that the
creator (and die 'people') must pass through in order to arrive at the synthesis of
collective political and cultural expression. Fanon traces these stages from
alienation of an internalized cultural identification with the colonizer; to the
spark of an original memory (which Fanon compares with die return of infantile
and maternal associations); to a period of malaise, nausea and convulsion
(expressions of Vomiting out' the poison of the earlier cultural identification);
and at last to the final stage of combat in the martyrological expression of a true
popular culture, where the writer becomes 'the mouth-piece of a new reality in
action' (W 223). Thus there is a deep analogy between the ethnography of a
'people' and the story of the coming-to-conscience of the creator's voice, die
manifestation of a culture's essential 'property' and authentic expression of its
innermost nature. At the end of the dialectic of culture outlined by Fanon, the
'mental space of a people' that had been distorted by the instruments of coloni-
zation gradually draws close to itself in the image of the creator and remembers
in the voice of the poet the sound of its own voice. The final image of proximity
occurs when the creator and the people become one mentality in which culture
thinks itself in - and as — the substance of its own ideational life. The 'organic
coordination' between the poet's plastic expression and the people's inner
thought achieves such a synthesis of muscularity and natural rhythm that those
140 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF <3 IU U E S DEUEUZE

who before would never have thought to compose a literary work 'find
themselves in exceptional circumstances ... [and] ... feel the need to speak to
their nation, to compose a sentence which expresses the heart of the people, and
to become the mouth-piece of a new reality in action' (W223).
We could see here in Fanon's description of the process between the margina-
lized writer and 'a people who are missing,' an echo of a lesson from Kafka that
Deleuze often emphasizes in the context of his discussion of fabulation:

The author can be marginalised or separate from his more or less illiterate
community as much as you like; this condition puts him all the more in a
position to express potential forces and, in his very solitude, to be a true
collective agent, a collective leaven, a catalyst. (ML 221-222)

This is the solitude that Kafka addressed in terms of impossibility, where the
'problem of writing' is fundamentally related to a collective impossibility: the situ-
ation of a people who either live in a language that is not their own, or who no
longer even know their own and know poorly the major language they are
forced to serve (ML 19). To use an expression that is invoked throughout
Deleuze's work, and is primarily inspired from Blanchot's writings, the writer's
solitude cannot be reduced to a normal situation of solitude in the world, to an
experience of being-alone and apart from others. This is because the figures
above do not experience their aloneness from the perspective of this world, or
of this society, or from the presence of others who exist, but rather from the
perspective of another possible world or another community that these figures
anticipate even though the conditions for this community are still lacking. Often
this desire or longing, which brings about the condition of solitude, is expressed
in the discourse of love as in the case of Kierkegaard with Regina, or of Proust
with Albertine. In the latter case, Marcel is haunted by the fact that no matter
how close he comes to Albertine, or no matter how he draws her near him even to
the point of holding her hostage, he is always haunted by the fact that behind the
face of Albertine, there always lies another Albertine, a thousand other Albertines
each breaking upon one another like waves of an infinite ocean. Thus, it is this
experience of solitude that burns into his mind the impossible and delirious
desire of capturing each one, of 'knowing' all the possible Albertines, as the
highest goal of Love.
Returning to the case of Kafka, according to Deleuze, the solitude of the writer
is related most profoundly to the situation of the people who are missing. This is
why the solitude of certain writers is in no way a private affair for Deleuze, and
why the concept of 'solitude' must be qualified to evoke the uncanny experience
of inhabiting a strange language, a language that is not and may never be one's
own, where the very act of speaking brings with it the feeling of self-betrayal, or
of 'falsifying oneself,' and where the alternative of remaining silent bears the
threat of extinction. It is in this sense that the position of the writer is virtual to
that of the collective, and, therefore, the so-called 'private' is immediately
collective as well, that is, 'less a concern of literary history than of a people.'
 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR LIFE 141

Deleuze writes concerning this situation which was specific to Kafka's predica-
ment, but which can describe the situation of other writers as well (such as
Melville or Woolf), that 'the most individual enunciation is a particular case of
the collective enunciation' (ML 84). Moreover, 'this is even a definition: a state-
ment is literary when it is "taken up" by a bachelor who precedes the collective
conditions of enunciation' (ML 84). This last definition appears to reclassify the
entire sense of die literary as emerging from 'a bachelor-machine,' a concept that
Deleuze draws from the figure of Kafka but that also can be found to refer to
the figure of Proust; however, the condition of a 'bachelor' can be redefined,
outside its gender determination, to describe or refer to a situation in which one
prefers the state of being alone (i.e. exceptional, singular, anonymous) rather
than 'taking on' the identity of a subject one is assigned by the majority. The
situation of preferring to remain a bachelor can find affinities, for example, with
the situation of a Jew in eighteenth-century Europe, with that of a woman in
nineteendi- and twentieth-century societies, or with the situation of minorities
in America today.

FOURTH CRITERION

Finally, literature opens up a kind of foreign language within language. (CC 5)

This invention has three aspects: (1) through syntax, the destruction of the
maternal language; (2) through delirium, die invention of a new language which
carries the first outside its usual furrows (habitus), and which, in turn, entails a
second destruction: the cliches of visibilities and statements which, although not
completely reducible to language, are nevertheless inseparable from it, being the
'ideas' and 'habits' that determine the forms of seeing and saying; (3) in the third
aspect, as a result of the destruction of the maternal language and of the cliched
statements and stock visibilities (which are like its ghosts), the literary process
bears the former language to its limit, turning it toward its own 'outside,' which
Deleuze describes as its inverse or reverse side made up of visions and auditions,
which 'are not outside language, but the outside of language' (CC 5). The final
aim of these three aspects, according to Deleuze, is the concept of literature
defined as 'the passage of life within language that constitutes ideas' (CC5).
Taking up the first aspect, through the destruction of the maternal language,
literature functions as a war machine. 'The only way to defend language is to
attack it' (Proust, quoted in CC4). This could be the principle of much of
modern literature and capture the sense of process that aims beyond the limit
of language. As noted above, however, this limit beyond which the outside of
language appears is not outside language, but appears in its points of rupture, in
the gaps, or tears, in the interstices between words, or between one word and the
next. The examples of writers who define dieir relationship to language under
die heading of diis principle are too numerous to recount, although I will provide
a few significant examples for die purposes of illustration. First, we might point
142 THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF G I I-L E S D E I-E U Z E

to the poet Paul Celan, for example, whose poetry is precisely defined as the
systematic destruction of the language of Goethe and Rilke in the sense that
die poem itself expresses a word that no German mouth can speak (the deter-
ritorialization of language from the teedi and the lips). In Celan, the poem itself
is nothing less than a materialization of the mother's corpse that is gradually
interned within the German language and given a specific place of mourning;
thus, the image of the mother is a shadow of the lost object by which Celan draws
the entire German language into a process of mourning. This is Celan's pro-
cess: the 'passage' of die Mother's death into the German language; die passage of
the living German language into an encounter with his Mother's death and, by
extension, with the murder of his maternal race. The use of color in Celan's
poetry gives us a vivid illustration of the Deleuzian and Proustean notion of
vision. The poet is a true colorist who causes colors to appear as nearly
hallucinatory visions in die language of the poem; however, in Celan's poems,
the descriptive and neutral function of color is poetically transformed into the
attributes of his mother's body — her hair, or her skin, her eyes; the green of a
decaying corpse. It is as if each enunciation of each color will henceforth bear
a reference to his mother's body, that the German language is modified to incor-
porate this cryptic reference into its poetic and descriptive functions. Thus, the
green is the color of summer grass, but it is also the color of my mother's
decaying shadow; blue is die color of die sky, but it is also die color of the sky die
day it wore my mother's hair; red is the color of the tulip, but it is also the color
of the silent one who that day 'comes to behead the tulips'; finally, yellow is the
hair of Marguerite, but it is also the color of my mother's star, the star that
marked her for extinction.5
Kafka also approaches the German language with the statement of his
swimming champion, 'I speak the same language as you, but don't understand a
single word you're saying' (quoted in CC 5), and at the same time draws on the
resources of the ail-too vernacular and deterritorialized Czech-German and
the ail-too symbolic and allegorical Yiddish ('a language of the heart') in order to
purify the German language and the syntax of Goethe from its own cultural
signification. In other words, as Deleuze often recounts, Kafka 'creates a kind of
foreign language within language' (CC 5) that, although it bears an uncanny and
perfect resemblance to the major language, it no longer bears the significance for
German culture and emerges as a kind of war machine within its majoritarian
sense. As Deleuze and Guattari write, by a kind of schizo-politeness hidden
beneath an almost too-perfect German syntax, 'he will make the German take
flight on a line of escape ... he will tear out from the Prague German all the
qualities of underdevelopment it has tried to hide; he will make it cry with an
extremely sober and rigorous cry ... to bring language slowly and progressively
to the desert... to give syntax to the cry' (ML 26). This marks the importance of
animals in Kafka's shorter works - die musical dogs that appear in 'Investiga-
tions of a dog,' the singing mouse-folk in 'Josephine, the mouse-singer,' the song
of the Ape in 'Report to the academy,' the low-cry of the Jackals in 'The jackals
and arabs' — but also the musical auditions of the other fabulous creatures that
 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR LIFE 143

Kafka creates, such as Odradek in 'Cares of a family man' whose laughter bears
the airy sound of dried leaves, or the silence of the Sirens in the tale of the same
name. In all these cases, we have examples of pure sonorous auditions that are
introduced into the German language. It is through die deterritorialization of the
human that die German language passes through a becoming-animal, that
animals introduce die notes of a strange music that has never been heard before
in German literature, that Kafka introduces new possibilities into the German
tongue, 'a music made up of deterritorialized sounds' (ML 26). In themselves, as
pure sonorous material, these sounds may have already been possible: the melody
of a dog's howl, the shrill silence of a mouse, the low moan of the jackal.
However, the form they take in Kafka's language - for example, the first song
that the Ape learns from a drunken sailor, which becomes his primitive language
lesson - becomes an 'idea' in its passage through language, an 'audition' of a cry
of humiliation and oppression that Kafka first introduces as such into the
German ear. It is in this manner that he both escapes the oppressive, classical
harmonies of the German language and, at the same time, institutes a pedagogy
of syntax in which he teaches the German language to cry.
Taking up the second aspect, the invention of 'a delirium, which forces it out
of its usual furrows' (CC 5), we should recall that one of the principal axioms of
Anti-Oedipus is that desire always invests or is immanent to the social field
of production, in order to apply this axiom to 'the desire to write.' The desire
to write, at one level, is a delirium that is immediately social. How could we
otherwise explain the institution of criticism that has secreted around the work in
the modern societies based upon writing if not as an effort to submit this
delirium to the identifiable categories of a 'proper delirium' that functions as the
basis of the group? At the same time, if we were to attempt to grasp 'the desire to
write' from its immanent perspective within society, we would need to conceive
of the function of writing in all its occasions: from the legal or juridical and the
legislative, to its hermeneutic and confessional modes. Perhaps, then, die figure
of the writer emerges to 'represent' this delirium and, thereby, to isolate the
'problem of writing' to rare and exceptional cases we call 'writers,' almost in the
same manner that Derrida had illustrated around the function of the pharmakon.
It is as if society, which itself is constructed by and from writing, must also
produce a being who embodies in order to protect itself from the madness that
belongs to its own order of possibility. Is there any wonder then why the writer
has so often been defined by the attributes of illness or bad health? Again, this
may explain Deleuze and Guattari's selection of the series of problematic writers
to combat this definition. To close the work off by applying these symptoms to
the ethical or psychological character of an author, and thereby to 'psychologize'
or to 'impeach' the writer, is to alienate the critical function of diese writers —
that is, the 'lens' they offer to perceive what otherwise remains obscure and
misapprehended by its individuated or psychological forms. Recalling again the
second criterion, the principal distinction is the incredible 'openness' these
symptoms receive in the writing, which must be set against the usual secret forms
that determine the expression of unconscious fantasies, or individual symptoms.
144 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GSILLES DELEUZE

Here, the Borgesian formula of 'Fang has a secret' often recounted by Deleuze
can be used paradigmatically of this moment of turning, or decision, in which
nothing is guaranteed. That is, 'Fang has a secret' and 'there is a stranger at the
door.' In order to illustrate the paradigmatic value of this formula, we could
substitute for the nameless identity of the stranger the forces signalled by the
emergence of a life based on silicon, the formation of the capitalist in the final
stages of planetary deployment, the deterritorialization and crisis of disciplinary
regimes and their reterritorialization by mechanisms of the 'control society,' the
emergence of racialized identities and new fascisms of the flesh. In turn, each of
these 'strangers' marks turning points for the human form, as well as a fullness
of time, a time pregnant with possibility, the moment of a 'dice-throw.' (These
are the sombre precursors spoken of in Difference and Repetition.) That is, each
arrangement presents us with diverse possibilities, with possible futures that
bifurcate, tracing the curve of the present that goes toward the future announced
by the new assemblage of Life that appears on the horizon. Borges, for example,
discovered a possible means of escaping a colonizing relationship with the past
through a comic procedure of overturning the European library and parody-
ing the God of European history in its colonial situation. Kafka discovered
through the fictional personage of'K.' a manner to research the diabolical assem-
blage of law and the institution of the state-form. Burroughs diagnosed the secret
filiation of the alien, the homosexual and the junkie as victims of the paranoia
unleashed by the 'bio-power' of the modern state that defines its internal enemies
in terms of a virus. And there are countless more examples of these 'sombre
precursors' in Deleuze's work (Buchner's Lenz, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Welles's
Kane, Melville's Ahab or Benito Cereno, Duras and Resnais's Hiroshima).
In Anti-Oedipus, it is with the discovery of the production proper to the
schizophrenic that Deleuze and Guattari find a degree-zero of the delirium that
the schizophrenic shares with society: 'he hallucinates and raves universal history,
and proliferates the races' (AO 85). Thus, the schizo refers to the function of a
delirium as the principle of 'desiring-production' that society itself uses to
'distribute races, cultures, and gods' - in short, to 'make itself obeyed' - on the
body without organs (i.e. the full body of the earth [AO 84]). In Deleuze and
Guattari's use of the concept of delirium we might detect a certain cosmological
theory of madness (i.e. the thesis of 'madness as work' or a style of 'grande
politique which they share in some ways with Blanchot and Foucault), which was
first presented by Freud in his famous commentary on Daniel Schreber, who
created a universe with his delirium and then proceeded to populate it with gods
and with demi-gods (or demons), as well as with new races and sexes. These were
the personages of Schreber's fabulous delirium; however, the structure of this
delirium also describes the origin of the prohibitive mechanisms that society itself
produces. In other words, the language of madness simply locates in the 'story-
telling function' of figures like Schreber the very same mechanisms that society
itself uses to engender a world populated with gods, cultures, races and peoples.
Given the conservative function of this 'myth-making' faculty, we might ask
how, according to the major diesis of Anti-Oedipus, the delirium proper to
 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR LIFE 145

schizophrenic production and social production can lead to the potential of

fabulation as a relay to revolutionary force. This is the point around which many
commentaries on Deleuze and Guattari's use of the schizo fall into error by
taking the clinical entity of the schizophrenic as a kind of model creator, a turn to
romanticism. However, the equation of the fabulation of the clinical schizo-
phrenic with social fabulation has the subde effect of rendering social production
the truth of the clinical equation, since the clinical personage of the schizophrenic
constitutes that point where desiring-production is blocked, falls into an impasse,
becomes reactive or sick. If the clinical entity of the schizophrenic is identical
with society, then we find the true subject of schizoanalysis, which is social
production. Within the literary process therefore, delirium undergoes a positive
'transvaluation' (Nietzsche) which differentiates it from its repressive or conser-
vative functions in madness and society. That is, if the world itself 'is the set of
symptoms whose illness merges with man,' it is by means of this process that
'literature is a health' (CCiv).
Finally, concerning the third aspect of these criteria, Deleuze writes: 'the final
aim of literature ... is the passage of life within language that constitutes ideas
(CC5 — my emphasis). In Foucault (1988), Deleuze situates this aspect that
belongs to modern literature in what is essentially a psychology of the fold,
whereby language is disarticulated from the 'grand unities of discourse' (Foucault)
which structure the possibilities of enunciation. In Essays Critical and Clinical,
Deleuze recalls the above formulation when he describes the event of literature as,
'in effect, when another language is created within language, it is a language in its
entirety that tends toward an "a-syntactic," "a-grammatical" limit, or that com-
municates with its own outside' (CCiv). Deleuze locates this aspect of modern
literary practices in an analysis that owes much to Foucault's stubborn persistence
to privilege the question of literature in a time when it was being subordinated to
the forces of the negative (work, communication, information, identity), particu-
larly to privilege the possibilities of resistance that are potential in the recent and
overt tendency of modern writers to uncover a strange language within language.
Accordingly, modern literature creates within language a non-linguistic stam-
mering that inclines toward 'a-typical expression' and 'a-grammatical effects'
(e.g. Berryman, Celan, Queneau, Cummings, Mallarme).
As a result of and from this process, ideas emerge as what Deleuze calls visions
and auditions — these are the forms of seeing and hearing that are specific to the
literary process in its passage within Language. As Deleuze further describes,
however, these ideas appear only when the literary process achieves its aim and
breaks through the limit of language, a limit that is not outside language, but
rather the outside of language which language alone makes possible. 'These
visions are not fantasies, but veritable Ideas that the writer sees or hears in the
interstices of language, in its intervals' (CC5). Although they bear a certain
hallucinatory quality specific to the literary effect (e.g. Proust's 'madeleine,'
Gombrowicz's 'hanged-sparrow,' Melville's 'white whale,' Silko's 'spider-web'),
they cannot be reduced to the psychological fantasies of the author nor to
'ideologemes' of a collective unconscious, since they take place, as Kafka said, 'in
146 THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF <3 I L. L E S D E L E UZ E

the full light of day' and not 'down below in the cellar of structure.'
Consequently, it is often through words or between words that is the implicit
aim of the literary process; this desire on the part of the writer is accompanied
by a certain destruction of the stock forms of visibilities and statements, of
linguistic and syntactical habits, cliches of the quotidian and common utter-
ances, stock and made-to-order descriptions and categorical prescriptions that
all too often imprison what is seen and heard in a fog of nothingness.

This labor of the artist, this struggle to discern beneath matter, beneath
experience, beneath words, something that is different from them, is a
process exactly the reverse of that which, in our everyday lives in which we
live avoiding our own gaze, is at every moment satisfied by vanity and
passion, intellect and habit, extinguishing our true impressions that are
entirely concealed from us, buried underneath a junk heap of verbal
concepts and practical goals that we falsely call life.' (TR 299-300)

In a certain sense, then, we might say that modern literature creates the
conditions for 'good habits' of language use. 'What are we but habits of saying
"I"?' Deleuze first proposes this question in his study of Hume (Empiricism and
Subjectivity x). The question of language that both philosophy and literature
expound upon in different manners, therefore, is one of developing and promo-
ting 'good habits' of language usage and diagnosing 'bad or destructive' habits.
Philosophy has always concerned itself with the 'uses and abuses' of language for
the purpose of living (and dying) well; however, this image of good sense is not
an object of logic, but of ethics or even etiquette. Nietzsche understood this as the
essence of logic, as well as an image of philosophy as 'the transvaluation of values'
which, first of all, include linguistic values, or 'signs,' whose proper sense can
only be the object of a genealogical study, such as Foucault later described in his
essay 'Nietzsche, genealogy, history.' Consequently, we find in Foucault's work
an original relationship of language to the 'body' (the materiality of the self), a
relationship which is given an historical and diagnostic expression. Habits
(habitus), understood as the modern form of repetition, stand for those institu-
tions of the statements that interpolate us and which define us by determining
the possible attributes that can belong to the 'I.' As a certain species of repetition,
moreover, habits achieve a degree-zero of memory (where the particular equals
the universal), producing the condition in which 'what we do not remember, we
repeat' (DR19). Thus, certain uses of language can be defined as the cause of our
illness, since they lead to a botched form of life, self, individuality, power, etc.
We must recognize the effects of these 'habits' upon the process of thinking as
well, particularly in the sense that the 'interiority of thought' (the grand circuit
of associations, signs, concepts, memory and feeling) is 'limited' (contracted or
disciplined) by the external forms of discourse and language. It is not a question
of thought that is without language, but rather of thinking which appears in its
most extended circuit, which enters into combinations with the elements of
 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR l_ I F E 1*7

seeing and speaking that are 'exterior' to a language defined by formed statements
and the visibility of objects. Consequently, we can define this problematic as a
part of the Deleuzian critique of representation, since the particular form of
repetition that belongs to this order and determines the habits of language-use
also determines the unconscious of our representations.
On the other hand, certain modern literary practices, rather than being
founded by their representational function, can be understood as a profound
experimentation that reveals the positivity and the limits of our language-habits
(our addiction to saying T). In the statement 'I love you,' for example, why is the
T meaningless, as well as 'love'? Perhaps one might attempt to explain the first by
the power of the shifter and the second by the privilege of the performative
statement. On the other hand, we can understand this as a particular species of
repetition, which has become abstract and too general, in the case of the first, and
meaningless and too particular in the case of the second. What Deleuze refers to
as 'the curve of the sentence' can be understood as a profound experimentation
that reveals the limits of certain expressions, negates their abstractness for a 'new'
positivity of language. Deleuze writes as early as Difference and Repetition that the
event of positivity occurs necessarily in the advent of die 'new* diat introduces
variables into a previous repetition. Statements such as Kafka's 'I am a bug' or
Fitzgerald's 'I am a giraffe' lead to the discovery of the nonsense that belongs to
the statement 'I am a man' (TP377). Consequently, the first two statements
repeat the last one and at the same time introduce a new predicate, causing the
statement 'I am a man' to be lacking definition and, in a certain sense, in need
of rectification. In other words, the statement 'I am a man' leads to nothing
and can be criticized as a bad use of definition. It defines no one and, thus,
makes the 'abstract' predicate of man possible as a real relationship. Rather than
representing, Kafka's proposition 'selects' and corrects the imperfections of the
former definition. It reveals the limits of the statement as well as the visibility of
the language-predicate; it introduces new variables into old habits of being,
clearer and more definite articulations, new possibilities for the passage of a life
into language.
In conclusion, we should return to situate the question of literature as one
of the principal themes of the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
In order to do so, it would be necessary to pay more specific attention to the
status of the literary that occurs in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. When and
in what manner is it evoked? For example, in the cries of poor A.A., the stroll of
Lenz, the sucking-stones of Molloy, Kleist's Marionettes or Michael Kohlhaas on
his horse. In each case, literary expression is allied to a 'war machine,' which
means it draws its force directly from 'the outside.' Deleuze and Guattari
constantly pit this condition of literary enunciation against any representation
diat subjugates it to a form of interiority (whether that of the subject-author, the
private individual, a culture, or even a race). It is not by accident that the lines
from Rimbaud are always recited like the lyrics of a favorite song: 'I am a bastard,
a beast, a Negro.' The relationship of the concept of literature to a war machine is
14B THE MOM-PHILOSOPHY OF GSIL-LES DELEUZE

essential, and we should note that many of the examples of the war machine are
drawn from writers (Artaud, Buchner, Kafka and Kleist), as well as philosopher-
artists such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. In A Thousand Plateaus, the conflict
between the literary war machine and the critic as 'man of the state' is first
attested to by the confrontation between Artaud and Jacques Riviere (although
not a man of the state, he was, according to Deleuze, not the first or last critic to
mistake himself for 'a prince in the republic of letters'), who found Artaud
incomprehensible and poorly organized, and he made no hesitation in giving
his advice to 'pauvre A.A.' — 'Work! Work! If you revise, then soon you will
arrive at a method (Cogi.ta.tio Universalis) to express your thoughts more
directly!' (TP377). Next, the literary war machine is attested to by Kleist's
conflict with Goethe ('truly a man of the State among all literary figures'). In the
case of the figures like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, there is the conflict between
the 'public professor' and the 'private thinker,' although Deleuze qualifies the
latter notion in order to argue that, in fact, the 'private thinker' may not be a
good term, since it too closely follows the reductive notion of the 'private
individual,' and is too simple of a form of interiority where the so-called spon-
taneity of thought is said to occur. Instead, Deleuze argues that the 'solitude'
one approaches in the writings of Nietzsche, or in Kafka, is a solitude that is
extremely'populated' (TP467).
The concept of literature we have been discussing above fundamentally invokes
a situation of language where the collective subject of enunciation (different from
the official enunciation of a 'people,' or of a 'national consciousness') exists only
in a latent or virtual state that cannot be located in the civil and juridical language
of statutes and laws, the 'paper language' of bureaucracy, the technocratic and
vehicular language of administrators, entrepreneurs and capitalists. It would not
be an exaggeration to assert that most technical and administrative language, even
in the first world, bears an historical relationship to the early techniques invented
by colonial administrations — a language composed purely of 'order-words' (les
mots d'ordre), a language of command in which the law finds its purest expression,
just as Sade discovered the essence of Enlightenment reason, not by accident, in
the categorical imperatives of pornographic speech: 'Do this!', 'Submit!', 'Obey!'
Concerning the status of this language, as Fanon asserts, we have every reason to
believe the colonizer when he says, 'the colonized, I know them!' since he [the
colonizer] has created the categories that were installed at the deepest point of
their interiority by the colonizing process, categories that continue to legislate
their own knowledge of themselves as 'a subjected people.' Moreover, Fanon
writes, 'colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and
emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic,
it turns out to be the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and
destroys it' (W210). Deleuze refers to this as the condition by which a 'people as
Subject' falls to the condition of a 'people-subjected' (ML164ff.). As we have
witnessed many times, the question of 'identity' is always a dizzying and even
treacherous problem from the position of the colonized, leading often to the very
'impasse' from which this category was created, underscoring an 'intolerable
 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR LIFE 149

situation,' since the identity they assume in speaking, in saying 'I (the colonized)'
has been essentially fabulated and only serves to subject them further. This
intolerable condition of enunciation is a condition that is specific to the concept
of'minor literature.' At the same time, we must take inventory of the fact that the
history of literature in the West is full of examples of this impossible situation; for
example: Hippolytus and Phaedra, Antigone; in Kafka's 'metamorphosis,' there is
Gregor who cannot speak, but rather emits a shrill note that can barely be
discerned; bui also in Melville, we have the character of Babo in 'Benito Cereno'
who refuses to speak 'as the accused' and chooses to remain silent (therefore, in
full possession of his speech), but also in the figure of Bartleby with his intractable
formula, '/ would prefer not to ...'
Why does this situation appear as a fundamental problematic, if not to signal
something genetic to the literary enunciation: the problem and the power of
'falsehood,' of the fictional status of the enunciation that essentially haunts the
situation of writing? Taking up the notion of the 'public sphere,' such a concept
already refers to the particularly 'striated openness' (Oejfentlichkeit) which is
established when the dominant institutions of language and culture reflect the
pre-conscious interests of the nation-state or class. In such a condition, the literary
machine itself has already been 'reterritorialized' and now functions to reflect the
genius of the national character or the spirit of Kultur. Thus, we might refer to
this moment, one that has prepared the way for the strictly ideological represen-
tation of literature in the academy today, which is reduced to a sub-compartment
of the 'political unconscious' or to the poetics of the State-form. This represen-
tation of literature is necessarily one-dimensional, and must sacrifice the variable
relationships that originally belonged to the production of the art-work, and
above all, must repress the whole question of art often by reducing it to the
category of aesthetics which can, in turn, be prosecuted for its falsifying pro-
duction. Here we might refer to the process of this reterritorialization, again
using the analysis of the relationship between the 'war machine' and the 'State-
form' outlined earlier. When a literary machine is captured by the State-form and
provided with an end, what is that end except a war directed against 'the people'
in the form of national memory and an official story-telling function? However,
the very taxonomy and organization of literature soon repeat the rank-and-file
order of major and minor tastes, as well as the striated organization of the story-
telling function into a form of a canon. On the contrary, the writer does not often
seek to represent the truth since, as Deleuze remarks, the 'truth' is often the
category invented by the colonizer and the oppressor. Rather, citing another
anecdotal phrase that Deleuze often employs, the writer seeks to raise the false to
a higher power, that is, beyond the moral-juridical opposition of true-false that
is maintained by the model of truth. To raise the false to a higher power is to
discover the principle of fabulation that governs even truthful representation,
to turn this principle into a critical force which addresses the intolerable situation
of'a people who is missing.' Accordingly, literature bears within its fragmented
body — scattered, torn to pieces, or 'dispersed on the four winds' — the seeds
of a people to come. These seeds are the germs of a 'collective assemblage of
ISO THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF O I 1- L E S D B I- E U Z E

enunciation,' which, as Deleuze often declares, are real without necessarily being
actual and ideal without necessarily being abstract.
Today, Deleuze and Guattari situate the conditions for the emergence of
minor literature in a world where the forms of collective enunciation and national
consciousness are breaking down on several fronts, as a result of the immigration
patterns and displacement of national labor forcesj and the decline of the 'State-
form' itself.

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no
longer, not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language
that they are forced to serve? This is a problem of immigrants, and especially
of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of minor litera-
ture, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away
from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it
follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an
immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? (ML 19)

In understanding the above passage, in order to determine the status of the

'literary,' the primary emphasis must fall upon the absence of a particular collec-
tive enunciation from official and public institutions of language and national
culture. In the absence of a distinct majoritarian formation of the 'public sphere,'
which gives enunciation weight and reference — which 'orders reality,' in so
many words - a body of literature assumes the shadowy and non-essential region
of a collective enunciation, a 'minor public' whose existence is always haunted by
the 'imaginary' (or fabulous) nature of its agora (its open space). But, as Deleuze
and Guattari write,

The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-
come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine
alone is determined to fill the conditions of collective enunciation that
are lacking elsewhere in the milieu: literature is the people's concern.
(ML 17-18)

In order to strip this last statement of any romanticism in association with the
nationalist or ethnic entity of a people invented during the nineteenth century,
I should stress that without specific attention to the position of enunciation that
is evoked here, we lose both the status of what Deleuze and Guattari call the
'literary machine' and the specific relationship that is being drawn up between
a collective enunciation and the concept of minor literature. Here, the status of a
minor literature is the problem of its multiple forms and locations, since it does
not have an institution that organizes and disciplines its forms. This does not
mean that it is formless, but rather that it has its organization of collective
enunciation, which is dispersed across several registers of the major language it
inhabits (legends, private letters, songs, heated conversations, stories, fables, etc.)
 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF LITERATURE FOR LIFE 1 5 1

and has the character of dream-language in the various operations it performs

upon the form of visibilities and on the organization of statements. Only when
these criteria of minor literature are fulfilled can we begin to understand the
statement that 'literature is a concern of the people' — a concern that may
demand a new definition of the uses of literature for life.
 CONCLUSION
ON THE ART OF
CREATING CONCEPTS

Earlier, I proposed that the current relationship between philosophy and non-
philosophy can be premised on the observation that, to a certain degree that has
not yet reached a level of generality, the philosopher's conceptual activity is no
longer founded on a notion of'common sense.' The statement 'everyone knows'
does not provide the commencement of a philosophical dialectic which then
mediates between error and correct reasoning. Of course, this statement is not
true of a certain tradition of analytic philosophy that continues to proceed by
posing the nature of problems and questions first in the realm of common sense,
which are then taken up and 'worked over' by logic. However, from as early as
Difference and Repetition, particularly in the chapter on 'the image of thought,'
Deleuze's understanding of the role of philosophy, and with the 'beginning' of
the philosopher's procedure of 'questions and problems,' can in some ways be
posed in a direct confrontation with this tradition.
My second thesis has concerned the encounter between philosophy and 'non-
philosophy' among several modern thinkers, particularly where this encounter is
situated in the domain of the arts (formerly subsumed under the category of
'aesthetics'). This definition must be qualified to understand the exact nature
of the creation involved and, primarily, to take account of the fact that it is only in
its encounters with non-philosophy that, following Deleuze's assertion, the task
of concept creation can be proposed anew. It would not be difficult to propose
that many modern philosophers extract their concepts from other semiotic
regions (and from literature, the plastic arts and cinema, in particular), Deleuze
being exemplary of this new approach. A precedent for this approach can also be
found in the philosophy of Foucault who, in The Order of Things, system-
atically demonstrates that the contemporary philosophy no longer grounds its
operation on the priority of resemblance, but rather on a profound dissemblance
between the order of words and that of things (les mots et les chases). This
dissemblance points to a certain baroque legacy highlighted in Part Two, 'On the
(baroque) line,' and to a moment when the world of things threatened to become
unreal and to topple over into a dream, that is, where representation no longer
found a prior relationship with reality and where its categories (including that of
 CONCLUSION: ON THE ART OF CREATING CONCEPTS 153

the 'Subject') were exposed to a certain loss of the power to discern the relation-
ship between the order of words and die order of things.
It has been my argument that Deleuze is one of the first to have observed this
as a constitutive moment within the genre of contemporary philosophy, and his
turn to 'certain other arts' was devised as a strategy or tactic that was employed
to repair the broken interval with the world as it is. Again, I cite the passage
from the preface of Difference and Repetition where this 'program' is clearly
announced: 'The search for a new means of philosophical expression was begun
by Nietzsche and must be pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain
other arts, such as theater and cinema' (DRxxi). Perhaps this modulation in die
genre of philosophy is, in part, due to the problem of expression that philosophy
shares with the field of modern art and literature, which has to do with breaking
through a chaos of cliches, common perceptions and ready-made representa-
tions in order to restore a broken connection with immanence, to institute its
image of thought on another plane. This other plane that contemporary
philosophy is in search of would not, for that reason, be more ideal or more
transcendent, but rather more 'intensive' and it is precisely the role of art to
produce the conditions for experience becoming more intensive. As Deleuze
claims, 'Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic
discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only
be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and
difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity' (DR57). The
formula (or ritornello] that Deleuze cites many times to describe the conditions of
experience that art reveals is drawn from Proust: 'Ideal without being abstract,
real without being actual.'
And yet, if it was simply a matter of creating new expression, new visibilities
and new statements, or new percepts and affects, then the role of the philosopher
would be interchangeable with that of the artist, the writer or the director. This
could be said to be the greatest temptation for contemporary philosophy, the
temptation for the philosopher to become an artist or a writer, a poet or a drama-
tist. We have several examples of this temptation, beginning with Nietzsche's
Zarathustra or Heidegger's pedantic poetry, the results of which could be judged
to have been mixed. In the case of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, or his 'Hymn to
friendship,' we might wonder if these moments represent the creation of a
philosopher, a theologian, or a prophet (albeit of the 'Death of God'). In the case
of Heidegger's Denker als Dichter, perhaps the less said about it the better. If both
occasions are exemplary, they could be said to abdicate the duty of philosophy, or
the problem of expression that is specific to philosophy defined as the creating of
concepts. As Deleuze wrote many times, particularly in the later works, the only
proper domain for philosophical creation is the domain of concepts. Thus, 'the
question of philosophy is the singular point where the concept and creation are
related to each other' (WP 11). Surveying Deleuze's entire corpus we have a
vivid illustration of the philosopher's frenetic creative activity, from the opus of
A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari) to the sheer number of concepts introduced
by the cinema studies alone. It seems that everything that the philosopher sees
154 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF G I 1_ L E S DEI.EUZE

or touches is destined either to become a concept, or to comprise a support or

partial plane that is combined with other concepts in a general co-creation. What
is called a concept then becomes the signature and the most remarkable trait of
this philosopher's vision.
In the last book written with Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Deleuze defines
the philosopher as the true friend of the concept. 'The philosopher is the
concept's friend; he is the potentiality of the concept .,. Because the concept
must be created, it refers back to the philosopher as the one who has it
potentially, or who has its power and its competence' (WP 5). However, such
a definition immediately raises a question concerning what is 'a true friend,' and
calls for a method to distinguish between true and false friends {faux amis). This
returns us again to perhaps Deleuze's most seminal text on the idea of
philosophy, 'Plato and the simulacra,' where Deleuze describes the earlier agon
(struggle, conflict) between different 'pretenders,' all of which lay claim to being
the true friend ... of the truth, of virtue, of love or of'the Good' (taAgatbon).
Deleuze makes an even stronger claim: that the concept belongs to philosophy by
right. 'The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy' (WP34).
Here we can perceive a bit of an organizer in Deleuze, a trait which can be linked
to Kant despite his own protests to the contrary, and here we recall that Kant had
earlier defined the role of philosophy in comparison to other activities within a
veritable division of labor, by relegating to the different faculties their own
proper duty and precinct. This is nowhere more apparent than in The Conflict of
Faculties where Kant determines this division of labor within the historical
faculties themselves in order to intervene into the conflict between the higher and
lower faculties. Accordingly, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze partitions the new
faculties in terms of art, science and philosophy: to art belongs the extraction of
percepts and affects; to science, the invention of junctions; but to philosophy 'and
only philosophy' belongs the creation of concepts.
At the same time, like the Kantian conflict, we might understand Deleuze's
claim as essentially a defensive one; it is usually the weaker party in a conflict that
lays claim to ownership de jure, if only because such ownership is not de facto.
Therefore, according to this possibility, we might ask who lays claim to the
concept today? Two pretenders whom Deleuze identifies as the greatest rivals of
the philosopher today are the modern journalist and the market advertiser
modeled after the conceptual artist (e.g. Andy Warhol as the new avatar of the
'concept-man'), each of whom claims to be the best friend of the concept, or the
'true creator.'

In successive challenges, philosophy confronted increasingly insolent and

calamitous rivals that Plato himself would never have imagined even in his
most comic moments. Finally, the most shameful moment came when
computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines
of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: 'This is
our concern, we are the creative ones, the ideas men? We are the friends of
the concept, we put it in our computers! (WP 10)
 CONCLUSION: ON THE ART OF CREATING CONCEPTS 155

Although this seems to be a somewhat frivolous antagonism — certainly there are

more serious and threatening rivals? - what is implicit in this identification of
these other pretenders is Deleuze's warning that philosophy itself is in danger
of abdicating its only proper role, the creation of concepts, by becoming a kind of
mass marketing, on the one hand, and performance art, on the other. Deleuze
expressed his antagonism against the former very clearly in an interview he once
delivered against 'les nouveaux philosophes:

Journalism, in its alliance with radio and television, has to be learned to a

greater and greater degree of its own powers to create an event. And while
they still must refer to external events, which they themselves have created
for the most part, this need is often ameliorated by referring any external
analysis to journalists themselves, or to characters like 'the intellectual,' or
'the writer': journalism has discovered within itself an autonomous and self-
sufficient image of thought... This is a new kind of thought: the thought-
interview, the thought-conversation, the thought-minute.

It is not that modern journalism and advertising care or even know that much
about their conflict with philosophers, but rather that the desire that conditions
the fields of interests and commodities in late-capitalist societies is effecting a
change in the philosopher's own expression, and the concept is beginning to
look more and more like a product made to satisfy a particular demand.

Marketing has its own particular principles: First, it is necessary to talk about
a book, rather than having the book itself offering anything on its own
behalf. Ultimately, there must be a multitude of articles, interviews,
colloquies, radio and television spots to replace the book, which could very
well not have existed at all ... Second, for marketing purposes, the same
book or project must have many different versions, in order to include every-
one: a pious version, an atheistic one, a Heideggerian, a leftist, a centrist,
even a Chiracian or neo-fascist, or even a version for the 'union of die
Left,' etc.2

As Deleuze warns in Negotiations, this is not creation proper, which in fact

should stimulate a desire for something we didn't know we desired beforehand.
Moreover, these modern pretenders to the art of the concept cannot be under-
stood simply as definite individuals who belong to different regions outside
philosophy, but rather as a combination of forces that are emerging within the
genre of philosophy itself and are beginning to cause its expression to become
modified in order to meet particular ends. Whether these ends flow back to
the individual or to a corporation of interests, they amount to the same form.
As Deleuze writes,

Philosophy has not remained unaffected by the movement that replaced

Critique with sales promotion. The simulacrum, the simulation of a packet
156 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF GIL.LES DELEUZE

of noodles, has become the true concept; and the one who packages the
product, commodity, or work of art, has become the philosopher, con-
ceptual persona, or artist. (WP 10)

In contrast to this new conceptual persona of the philosopher, therefore, we

might return to an earlier text where Deleuze outlines another image of the
philosopher which can be offered in direct contradistinction to this image,
Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy. It is there that Deleuze defines the three virtues
of the philosopher: poverty, chastity and humility. Although these virtues may
now seem a bit outdated, they underline the importance of a stoic understand-
ing of pragmatism as a wisdom for Life; the goal of the philosopher's exercise
has always been the question how to live (and to die) well. Thus, as Deleuze
comments, these virtues 'are not moral ends, or a religious means to another life,
but rather the "effects" of philosophy itself. For there is absolutely no other life for
the philosopher' (S3). This defines the possibilities of a life no longer based on
needs, but rather 'in terms of means and ends, but according to a production,
a productivity, a potency, in terms of causes and effects' (S3). Here again, the
nature of creativity is emphasized as a fundamental ethos of the philosopher.
How is this ethos different from the philosopher who creates in terms of
means and ends, or on the basis of needs? But then we might turn the question
around and ask whether 'to create on the basis of needs' is really creation
proper? Does it really 'make' anything? As Deleuze writes, 'To create concepts
is, at the very least, to make something' (WP7). On the other hand, to create
out of need is to conform to already established notions of'the subject' (whether
individual or corporate), of 'desire'; one does not create anything in this sense,
but merely replenishes an already existent need with an object whose outline was
already known beforehand. The object is like an answer posed at the level of too
general a question of the type 'What do the people want?' or 'What does woman
want?' In each case, because the question was badly posed, the concepts that are
offered as solutions like morsels of food could not satisfy the reality of the
questions themselves. This is very different from the concept of creation that
Deleuze has in mind, in which the answer is not presupposed in advance, and
causes the subject to enter into a movement of 'becoming equal to' the task of
creating both questions and answers that are singular or specific to die passage
of a life: immanence.
I argued above that Deleuze's cry can be understood as a cry for multiplicity,
but the condition of every multiplicity is singularity. 'Every creation is singular,
and the concept as a philosophical creation is always a singularity. The first
principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves
be explained' (WP7). From the above statement, we might discern the oudine
of his incessant cry against Universals, whether we are speaking here about his
cry against the concept of DESIRE framed by psychoanalysis, or the concept of
CONSENSUS that determines the possibilities of communication. Today,
what Deleuze seems to be horrified most by is the incredible monotony of
creation (or the lack thereof), by the machines for producing Universals, by the
 CONCLUSION: ON THE ART OF CREATING CONCEPTS 137

apparatus of consensus, which he defines as the current inter-subjective idealism

that determines the Universals of communication that 'provide rules for die
imaginary mastery of markets and media' (WP6—7). Consensus, consensus, every-
where, but not a singularity to be found.
Where there is no singularity, Deleuze argues, then the conditions of
philosophical creation are found to be lacking as well, since the periods known
for a thriving philosophical activity are primarily recognized for the sheer
number of concepts that were created, which continue to exist well after the
societies themselves have vanished. This marks the importance of Greece for
Deleuze in his last book with Guattari, in the sense that it populated the earth
with concepts, concepts which continue to spread out, problematically perhaps,
a plane of immanence that defines the internal history of 'the West' diat some-
how reaches its penultimate point in the globalized markets that have replaced
the territories of nation-states. This is our problem today, as much as it was
for the Greeks. As Deleuze and Guattari write, 'Only the West extends and
propagates its centers of immanence' (WP I0l). Imperialism, colonialism, capital-
ism, all express the same problem at different moments, in as much as these
moments are themselves the different expressions of the problem of immanence
specific to 'the West.'
To conclude, let us return once more to the concept of the 'Other Person,'
which I argued above is perhaps Deleuze's first concept of philosophy. If every
concept refers to or encompasses a singularity, then there can be no concept of
the 'other person in general,' understood either as a category of the subject (T),
even as a universal subject ('Thou'); or as a peculiar object that emerges within
the perceptual field of the subject, but assumes the same form. Every other person
encompasses a singular expression of universe, contains a singular point-of-view,
which is why there must be as many concepts of the Other Person as there
are others. This is Deleuze's profound Leibnizianism, but also is inspired by his
apprenticeship with Proust who taught him that the name Albertine can in no
way be understood as referring to an individual, or to another person somehow
different but related to Marcel, but to the expression of a finite number of
singularities (a look, a certain moment, the figure of someone sleeping, a walk on
the beach, at Guermantes, or not at Guermantes) the problem of which is how to
compose all these singularities into a concept that expresses the secret face of
Albertine, the face that expresses the possibility of Albertine's love. Therefore,
before diis hidden face of Albertine, the face of God pales in comparison.
It seems appropriate, then, to end my commentary by citing a long passage
from Deleuze's study of Proust on the concept of creation that runs between
philosophy and non-philosophy:

The world has become crumbs and chaos. Precisely because reminiscence
proceeds from subjective associations to an originating view-point,
objectivity can no longer exist except in the work of art; it no longer
exists in significant content as states of the world, nor in ideal signification
as stable essence, but only in the signifying formal structure of the work, in
58 THE NON-PHILOSOPHY OF Ci I l_ l_ E S D E LE UZ E

its style. It is no longer a matter of saying: to create is to remember — but

rather, to remember is to create, is to reach that point where the associative
chain breaks, leaps over the constituted individual, is transferred to the birth of
the individuating world. And it is no longer a matter of saying: to create is
to think — but rather, to think is to create and primarily to create the act
of thinking within thought. To think, then, is to create food for thought.
To remember is to create, not to create memory, but to create the spiritual
equivalent of the still too material memory, or to create the view-point
valid for all associations, the style valid for all images. It is style that
substitutes for experience in the manner in which we speak about and the
formula that expresses it, which substitutes for the individual in the world
the view-point toward a world, and which transforms reminiscence [or the
fulcrum of representation] into a realized creation. ( P i l l )
 NOTES

In these notes, full bibliographical entries are given for works that do not appear in the
Bibliography, but a shortform (author's surname + abbreviated title + date) is used if a full entry
appears in the Bibliography.

PREFACE

1 For example, there has been a tendency in the French reception of Deleuze's work, to
present a clean and shaven portrait of the philosopher which has amounted to extracting
a purely philosophical Deleuze from its admixture with the presence of Guattari. This
can be detected in the work of Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, which even
goes so far as to relegate the more iconoclastic image of Deleuze, the thinker of 'fluxes
and multiplicities,' to the status of a misinterpretation which has too often been
promulgated by Deleuze himself. Badiou writes, 'This "purified automaton" is certainly
much closer to the Deleuzian norm than were the bearded militants of 1968 [including,
I might add, Badiou himself] bearing the standard of their gross desire.' Alain Badiou,
Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 11.
2 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981), p. 12.
3 James, 'The figure in the carpet,' in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories (1986),
pp. 355-400.
4 The question of commentary is already doubled in the case of the works by Deleuze and
Guattari where each already functions as the double of the other. As Deleuze remarks in
Negotiations (1990): 'When I work with Guattari, each of us falsify the other, which is to
say that each of us understands in his own way notions put forward by the other' (N 126).
Thus, to comment on these works is already to enter into a series of falsifications.
5 On the concept of ritournelles, see Charles J. Stivale's excellent discussion in The Two-
fold thought ofGilles Deleuze (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 174ff.

1 PHILOSOPHY AND ' N ON- P HI LO SO PHY'

1 For Deleuze's critique of common and good sense, see especially Chapter 3 of his
Difference and Repetition (1994), pp. 129-167.
2 Gilles Deleuze, 'Plato and the simulacrum,' Appendix One of The Logic of Sense (1990),
pp. 53-266.
3 For a description of these new idiots and their relation to the modern question of
literature in Deleuze's thought, see my 'The subject of literature between Derrida and
Deleuze: law or life?', ANGELAKI, 5, 2(2001), 56-72.
4 See Deleuze, 'Postscript on control societies,' in Negotiations (1990), pp. 177-182.
5 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
(New York: Pantheon, 1965); Derrida, 'Cogito and tie history of madness,' in Writing
1 SO NOTES

and Difference (1978). On the dreams of Descartes, see Gregor Sebba and Richard A.
Watson, The Dream of Descartes (Urbana: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).
6 Klee, Tbeorie de I'art modeme ([1920] 1964), p. 107.
7 After all, what is the concept of the fold in Deleuze's thought but a vertical line
(transcendence) which has been declined horizontally to follow a plane of immanence
that is implicated by others? At the same time, perhaps this represents not as much an
'over-turning of Platonism,' which still retains a dimension of verticality even by its
famous inversion as in Heidegger, as the conditions of what Deleuze calls its 'reversal.'
This reversal can also be found at the basis of the systems of other modern philosophers
such as Derrida and Levinas, each of whom replaces transcendence with the problem of
immanence introduced by the 'Other.' Around this point, it could be said that Deleuze,
Derrida and Levinas share the same problematic, or image of thought, although each
begins to treat this problem by means of different concepts (Derrida's differance,
Levinas's visage), and these concepts, in turn, are led back to other concepts and thus
produce a different history of the concept of the Other Person, or what Deleuze calls a
different 'combination' (chiffre). See 'What is a concept?' in What is Philosophy? (1996),
pp. 15-16.

2 HOW TIME PLACES TRUTH IN CRISIS

1 Serres, 'Lucretius: science & religion,' in Hermes (1982), p. 121.

2 In Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze describes this event by employing
Holderlin's figure of the caesura., where the expression 'out of joint' can be understood as
the moment where time is itself divided between two unequal distributions which no
longer 'rhyme' before and after the event that marks its declension. Thus, 'Holderlin said
it no longer "rhymed" because it was distributed unequally on both sides of the caesura,
as a result of which beginning and end no longer coincided. We may define the order of
time as this purely formal distribution of the unequal in the function of the caesura"
(DR89).
3 Emanuel Levinas, Philosophic comme transcendance,' in Noms Propres (Paris: Galilee,
1987).
4 For example, in Bergsonism ([1966] 1988) this fundamental duality, or 'difference in
kind' (Bergson), motivates Deleuze's inquiry into the Bergsonian division between
matter and memory; thus, the importance he places upon the difference in memory
which is not equal to the difference in perception.
5 As Deleuze writes, 'contrary to the form of the true which is unifying and tends to
identification of a character (his discovery or simply his coherence), the power of the
false cannot be separated from a positive multiplicity. "I is another" ["/<• est un autre"]
has replaced Ego = Ego' (Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1989], p. 133). Therefore, 'it is
not an other which is an other I, but the I which is an other, a fractured I' (Difference
and Repetition (1994), p. 261.

3 THE P R O B L E M OF J U D G E M E N T

1 Although it is not entirely accurate, I have sometimes resorted to the word 'actor' for the
original term personnage conceptuel, and at other times employ 'character' (Massumi) or
'persona' (Tomlinson, Burchell), in order to highlight the problematic aspect of the
'double' which is characteristic of dramatic presentation, and to underline the ambiguity
that occurs when we identify the figure of the philosopher - or, by extension, the image
of thought itself - with its quasi-fictional character in the narrative of philosophy. This
ambiguity can be illustrated when we refer to Aristotle, Descartes or Hegel not in the
 NOTES 161

sense of their persons, or even their works, but rather in the sense that their names
signify a certain event or quality that seems to characterize a distinct image of thought or
to mark an episodic moment in the history of philosophy. Thus, the term can be
understood to have a relationship with Foucault's definition of the 'Author-function.'
See Foucault, 'What is an author?', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1977),
pp. H7-138.
2 See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1990), pp. 318-320.
3 Gilles Deleuze, 'Seminar on Leibniz' (15 April 1980): www.imagenet.fr/pinhaus.html
4 See Deleuze, The Fold (1993), pp. 76-82. See also Bruno Paradis, 'Leibniz: un monde
unique et relatif,' Magazine litteraire, 257 (September 1988), 26-29.
5 See Christiane Fremont's remarkable analysis of necessity and ideal causality in relation
to the problem of evil: 'Complication et singularite,' Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale,
1 (1991), pp. 105-120. However, it appears that Fremont concedes to Leibniz's God
his necessity (which corresponds to the justification or, better, rationalization of a
necessary evil of sacrifice in the Theodicy), since the labyrinths offered by Gombrowicz
and Borges would ultimately lead nowhere and prevent the possibility of any new series
from extending into the real. Consequently, Fremont retains the language of a jurist
(essentially descriptive and economic) which leaves the event within the domain of the
law to unfold (or not), or to express clearly and understand completely.

4 THE PARADOX OF CONCEPTS

1 Deleuze suggests that atypical statements may reveal the inherent problems of other
common utterances such as 'John will arrive at 5:00pm,' or 'Tomorrow there will be a
naval battle,' or 'This evening there will be a concert'; all of which are contingent upon
the series that actualizes them and reveal a moment when time can place truth in crisis
just as effectively as, for example, in the statement from Beckett's The Unnamable: 'It is
raining. It is not raining.' See Chapter 6, 'What is an event?', in The Fold (1993),
pp. 76-82.
2 For a discussion of 'the crystalline surface of narration' (i.e. 'the time-image') see 'The
powers of the false,' in Cinema 2 (1989), pp. 126-155.
3 Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics ([1965] 1990), p. 123.
4 ibid.
5 ibid.
6 Gilles Deleuze, 'Seminar on Leibniz' (15 April 1980): www.imagenet.fr/pinhaus.html

S 'THE M I N D - B O D Y P R O B L E M ' A N D THE

ART OF 'CRYPTOGRAPHY'

1 According to the French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, opposition should not to be

conceived as a maximum of difference; rather, it is a very singular species of repetition in
which two doubles enter into the destruction of each other by virtue of their very
resemblance. See Tarde, Les Lois Sociales (1921), pp. 70f. Deleuze evokes Tarde, from as
early on as Difference et Repetition (1968), as 'next to Leibniz, one of the last great
philosophers of Nature.' In fact, it is Deleuze's early reading of Tarde's 'Microsociology'
that prepares for the evaluation of Foucault's later works. With regard to the question
of opposition above, I cite a footnote on Tarde from Difference and Repetition:
'Opposition, far from autonomous, far from being a maximum of difference, is a
repetition minima in relation to difference itself (DR264«).
2 See Kant's statement in the 'Transcendental doctrine of method,' in The Critique of Pure
Reason, ed. Werner S. Pluhar (London: Hackett, 1996), Chapter 1, Section 1. Also see
162 NOTES

Heidegger's explication in 'Leibniz's doctrine of judgment,' in The Metaphysical

Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
1984), pp.78f.
3 This diversity forms a constant preoccupation through all of Deleuze's work and can be
traced to his early description of the role of ideas within phenomena in Difference and
Repetition (figured under the notation of 'an object = x' which is drawn from several
diverse fields: biology, economy, literature), as well as to Foucault, which takes as its
central project a cartography of the different historical (or epochal) formations of the
couple savior/pouvoir.
4 G. W. von Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, Vol. 2 (Boston: Reidel Publishing
Co., 1969), p. 433.
5 This is the metaphor of light that Derrida postulates both in 'The white mythology" and
in 'The double session' where the act of reading in philosophy constitutes itself by a
catachresis in order to establish itself as a higher order of perception. This allows for
a usurpation of the eye by the 'point of light' placed at the level of the idea in Platonic
philosophy, which causes the series formed by perception, echoing the position of a
'common sense,' to defer to a latent series traced by the conceptual path of the phi-
losopher who represents an anamnesis of the Idea. Hence, Derrida shows that the
movement of logo-centrism is inseparable from the establishment of a 'vulgar series' in
the social field, which entails the production of cliches as well as the social and
conceptual personages to embody them. See Jacques Derrida, 'The white mythology,' in
Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
pp. 207-273; 'The double session,' in Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 173-227.
6 Sarah Koffman, 'L'Usage de la chambre obscure a Gravesande,' in Camera Obscura
(Paris: Galilee, 1973), pp. 79-97.
7 Serres, Hermes (1982), pp. 93-94.
8 Inclination, from the Greek clinamen, is used throughout the Theodicy to denote the
determinateness of the will within a free act and is set against a condition that Leibniz
refers to as 'mere possibility.' See Leibniz, Theodicy (1985), §324-327.
9 Emile Benveniste, Problemes de Linguistique generate, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966),
pp. 258—266. I cannot pursue this further here than to indicate the striking resemblance
between some formations of the secret and those of indirect discourse. Both indicate a
transcendental status of human speech by introducing the possibility of a reference to
a third term which is both inter-subjective and temporal.
10 It may be important to clarify terms, specifically around the resemblance of the secret to
the problematic first introduced by the psychoanalytic perspective. Here, the secret
could correspond to what Guy Rosolato has called the 'object of perspective' which
emerges in the Freudian theories of infantile sexuality in the constitution of die Phallus:
the capability of the infant to compose an unreal object in place of a void, and equally
the capability to negate this object in favor of its substitutes which will have a central
function in the imaginary as the objects corresponding to the partial drives. See Guy
Rosolato, 'L'Objet de perspective dans ses assises visuelles,' Le Champ Visuel, Nouvelle
Revue de Psychanalyse, 35 (Spring 1987), pp. 143-164.

6 THE R I D D L E OF THE FLESH AND THE

'FUSCUM SUBNIGRUM"

1 Nowhere is the articulation of this relationship between 'having a body' and the form of
the command more clear than in Kant who, in the first formulation of the 'categorical
imperative,' must immediately articulate the distinction between die 'property' of the I
of 'elective or arbitrary will' (Willkuhr=arbitrium) from the body as 'property,' the
 NOTES 163

'man in my person.' Thus, in the hypothetical contemplation of 'suicide' (in the 'wish,'
Wunsch, to dispose of my life by striking against the man in my person), Kant provides
a guard-rail in the prohibition, 'I cannot dispose of man in my person by maiming,
spoiling, or killing.' The body then, for Kant, is not a static thing, but represents the
'other in me as other than me,' or in Kant's metaphysical system, as 'the humanity in the
form of my person' which maintains an interest in determination of the body as its
'property,' as a representation of an end-in-itself. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for a
Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper, 1948), pp. 97ff.
2 Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Lettres, p. 530 (see Chap. 5»4).
3 See Deleuze and Guattari's famous criticism of the Freudian concept of the
Unconscious, that is, their accusation that Freud botched the concept by insisting on
the representation of parental figures and infantile associations, in 'One or several
wolves?' (A Thousand Plateaus [1987], pp. 26-38).
4 This could give us a more precise illustration of the crypt as the body without organs.
On the question of perception as hallucination, see Le Pli (1988), Chapter 7, 'La percep-
tion dans les pits,' pp. 113-132.
5 Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984), p. 78.
6 In her Cities Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Dorothea Olkowski also struggles
with phenemenology over the question of'orientation,' the logic of sense, which can be
understood outside the question of sense that is already established by an order of
signification, or language. This goes hand in hand with the objective of gaining access to
a principle of creative individuation that is not already made or composed by fixed social
and psychological schemes, hexagonal solids, hard bodies, static or 'cold' identities.
Here, the question of perspective, or rather point-of-view, is as crucial to Olkowski as it
was for Deleuze in The Fold. The question is 'How do we look?' What is the form of
vision and feeling that is not already reduced to the 'subjective,' to the 'in there,' which
is opposed or appears over-against (Gegenstand) the world 'out there'? This question is
doubly important as well divided when it comes to representing the experience of
women as different, yet already within the frame or scheme which reduces this difference
to identity, that is, to the category of representation itself. It is around this question of
orientation that Olkowski follows Deleuze's criticism of phenomenology for
maintaining the last vestige of the scientific cogito, and thus perhaps for not being
philosophical enough, for not achieving the purity of the concept of visibility without
already reducing the visible to the infinite murmuring of LANGUAGE. See Olkowski,
Giles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (1999).
7 Klee, Theorie de I'art moderne ([1920] 1964), p. 56.
8 ibid,

7 ON G O D , OR THE 'PLACE VIDE'

\ Gottlob Frege, Ecrits logique et philosophique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971), p. 92.
2 This is essentially Deleuze's argument against Badiou, who he says begins with a
'neutralized base' or 'any multiplicity whatsoever.' See Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamour of
Being, pp. 23-28; also Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1996), pp. 151-153.
3 Lyotard, 'Time today,' in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 58-77.
4 Frege, Ecrits p. 82« (see above, »1).
5 On the relation of the Baroque to other areas of modern sensibility, see Tom Conley's
very suggestive discussion in the translator's foreword to The Fold (1993), pp.ix-xx.
6 Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (1968[1953]); pp. 54, 11.
7 Germain Bazin, 'La Gloire,' in Figures du Baroque (Paris: Presses Universitaire de
France, 1983), p. 55.
164 NOTES

8 Concerning its economic significance, Deleuze often reminds the reader of Le Pli about
the frequent association of the Baroque to the structures of late capitalism along the axis
of 'inclusion'; hence, the complete inclusion of the world within die monad finds its
analogy in the entire circuit of exchange comprehended within each instance of capital.

8 THE BAROQUE DETECTIVE: BORGES AS PRECURSOR

1 In Deleuze's Proust and Signs, Plato and the contemporary status of the 'Agathon is read
by none other than Proust; therefore, one might invoke Proust's Platonism in the sense
diat for Proust to learn is still to remember. However important its role, memory
intervenes only as a means of apprenticeship that transcends recollection both by its
goals and by its principles. The search is oriented toward the future, and not to die past.
Proust and Signs (1972), p. 3.
2 De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1959), p. 69.
3 ibid., p.71.
4 The information is provided by Emil Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid in their
notes to 'The total library,' in Barges: A Reader (1981), pp. 346ff.

9 HOW THE TRUE WORLD FINALLY BECAME A FABLE

1On die concept of 'crystalline narration,' see also Rodowick's very comprehensive
reading of die cinema books in Giles Deleuze's Time Machine (1997).
2 Eisenstein, Film Form (1949), p. 70.
3 See also the chapter on 'Any-space-whatevers' (espace quelconque) in Deleuze, Cinema 1:
The Movement-Image (1986), pp. 111—122.

10 ARTAUD'S P R O B L E M AND OURS: BELIEF IN THE

WORLD XI S IT IS

1 Walter Benjamin, 'What is epic theater?', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 150.
2 Artaud, The Theater and its Double (1958), p. 10. Cf. also Derrida's exposition of this
principle in 'The theater of cruelty,' in Writing and Difference (1978), pp. 232-250.
3 It is interesting to note that the argument that Deleuze makes for the cinematographic
image, here, is exactly the same argument for the function of the drug in the section
'Becoming molecular' from A Thousand Plateaus; consequendy, there is an implicit
connection between a dynamic representation of the sublime (i.e., the principle of
nooshock), the experience of the drug, and what happens within the brain (and body) of
the cinematic spectator. Eisenstein himself had first commented in 'Film form: new
problems' on this relationship, which he identifies with the forms of pre-logical, sensual
thinking. 'That is, that art is nothing but an artificial retrogression in the field of
psychology toward the earlier thought-processes, i.e. a phenomenon identical with any
given form of drug, alcohol, shamanism, religion, etc.' (FF 144).
4 In fact, the manner in which chaos is figured will depend upon how it is 'cut up' by the
three planes (a process resembling montage): each plane engages chaos from its own
distinct procedures and problems and diis causes chaos to appear differendy within
each. See What is Philosophy? (1996), Part Two, 'Philosophy, science, logic, and art,'
pp. 117-218.
 NOTES 16S

5 As I will return to discuss below, however, the direct realization of this force between the
unification movement and the action-image, or between politics and art, also addresses a
problematic relationship that Benjamin discovers at the basis of fascism. See especially
'The work of art in the mechanical age of reproduction,' in Illuminations, pp. 217—251
(see above, «1).
6 Eisenstein writes: 'The point is that the forms of sensual, pre-logical thinking, which are
preserved in the shape of inner speech among the peoples who have reached an adequate
level of social and cultural development, at the same time also represent in mankind at
the dawn of cultural development the norm as of conduct in general, i.e. laws according
to which flow die processes of sensual thought are equivalent for them to a "habit logic"
of the future' (FF131).
7 However, contrary to Deleuze's assertion, Eisenstein's 'goal' appears less Hegelian and
more Whiteheadian in his aspiration to draw up more primitive states of satisfaction and
emotion into higher orders of intellectual satisfaction and complexity; the aesthetic or
artistic dimension of the cinematographic process figured in this process as the achieve-
ment of 'balance' between the two forms. See Whitehead, Process and Reality (1978),
especially 'The higher phases of experience,' pp. 256-280.
8 This criticism is the sub-text of his 1935 speech'Film form: new problems' (FF 122-149).
9 Deleuze, Cinema 2 (1989), p. 167. On the nature of this 'crack' or caesura in thought,
see Peter Canning's important discussion of this Deleuzian topic in 'The crack in time,'
which appeared in Giles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas
and Dorothea E. Olkowski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 73-98.
10 I could apply this event to two different discursive regions of modern knowledge in
order to validate the statement that Artaud's expression of spiritual rape is integral to the
problem of ideology. The first region is that of psychoanalysis where, in the Freudian
concept of the primal scene, this event, although not explicitly attached to the notion of
ideological automaton, takes on the character of something that occurs outside or before
consciousness life. It becomes the temporal form of a 'trace' (like the shadow of an
earlier force) that returns to disturb and even to deform perception and thought. The
second region would be contemporary forms of ideology critique where the figure of
rape, this time as 'metaphor,' is frequently used - particularly by feminism (e.g. Pratt,
Mohantry, Suleri) and post-colonial theory (e.g. Fanon) - to represent the nature of
psychic violence that is suffered by the subject, and to signal the affective disturbances
of memory and thought (feelings of disconnection, splitting or 'dual-consciousness'
[Fanon], parodistic or hybrid forms of socializing this crack or splitting of the subject,
even as prescriptions for resistance [Bhabba]). My argument (which represents a reading
of Deleuze around this point) is that Artaud's expression clarifies the affective image of
powerlessness which appears as the problem of thought in the modern critiques of ideol-
ogy, even perhaps addressing a 'universal' condition of the modern subject - that,
indeed, Artaud's problem is also ours. On this last point, it is interesting to note that most
of criticism around the subject of Artaud (pauvreAA.') has concerned precisely, if not
exclusively, whether his experience represents either an 'exemplary,' or merely an
'exceptional,' case. On this point, see particularly Derrida's 'La parole souffle,' in Writing
and Difference (1978), pp. 169-195.
11 This is a formula I have adapted from Kafka and it represents a problem that modern
literature has discovered as well, which can be proposed in terms of movement. As both
Kafka and Beckett can testify, any movement is infinitely treacherous and is filled
with hallucinations of motor-coordination and the false hopes of arriving somewhere.
As Beckett asked, 'Where now, who now?' - that is, 'Where would I go if I could go,
who would I be if I get there?' On the one hand, as Kafka proposed with the character of
Gregor Samsa, it is better not to move at all, 'to lie on my back with a thousand tiny
hands waving desperately in fronr of me'; however, Gregor discovered that this solution
was too unbearable, if not already impossible, since he was already moving in his nature
and this 'metamorphosis' was a movement that he could neither remember willing nor
-166 NOTES

was it something he could control. On the other hand, this is Beckett's proposal in the
characters of Molly, Malone and the Unnameable: he could achieve another means of
movement; thus, if he could not walk, he could crawl, if not that, he might roll, if not
that, then what? Likewise, this solution became impossible, even when he found himself
without arms or legs, just a floating head in a barrel, he was tortured by the organs of
thought that moved within him.
12 Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986).
13 Deleuze borrows this formulation from Heidegger's famous statement which occurs in
What is Called Thinking?: 'the most thought provoking thing that we are given today to
think is the fact that we are not yet thinking.' See Martin Heidegger, What is Called
Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1952).

11 THE USES (AND ABUSES) OF

LITERATURE FOR LIFE

1 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 25 (see above, Chap. 10»1).

2 Freud, 'Creative writers and day-dreaming,'in The Standard Edition (1963), pp. 143—153.
3 Kafka, Diaries (1948), p. 149.
4 It is here, I would suggest, that we might seek to understand the affiliation or nuptial,
which has recently occurred between feminism and the work of Deleuze and Guattari.
In other words, the significance of their work for many feminists including Elizabeth
Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, Moira Gattens and Dorothea Olkowski I would argue has less to
do with the so-called authority or representative value of their philosophy for feminism
(an explanation that only repeats, in the most traditional sense, the history of philosophy
as masculine); rather it has to do with a certain alliance that can be said to occur from
the fact that more than any other so-called modern philosophy the work of Deleuze and
Guattari is founded upon one of the most powerful historical critiques of both
psychoanalysis and phenomenology. In other words, we might begin to understand this
difficult association or this often 'unholy alliance' by the historical convergence of two
very different 'problematics' around a common or shared antagonism with 'the history
of philosophy' (including phenomenology), on the one side, and with 'the institution of
psychoanalysis', on the other - and by the fact that each of these critical discourses
shares the same philosophical urgency concerning what, in her book, Olkowski defines
as 'the ruin of representation.' At the same time, to converge around the same prob-
lematic is not the same thing as to incorporate one representational system of concepts
into another, or to invoke the authority of one philosophical system to secure the
objectives of a second, and this is where the true sense of the 'problematic' that the work
of Deleuze and Guattari shares with feminism today usually gets lost; it gets lost precisely
by treating this phenomenon in representational terms. Situating these observations in
the context of Olkowski's argument, if phenomenology does not confront the difference
of 'point-of-view' but rather baptizes a generalized and objective point-of-view that is
impervious to the question of sexual difference, would sexual difference then be the
name of this force of exteriority, of the 'Outside' that Deleuze has thought this region of
our experience? Would the thinking of 'sexual difference' (the thought of the effects
of sexual difference upon the organization of statements and visibilities, the thinking of
feminist philosophy) not in fact have the greatest chance of entering in to break open the
phenomenological subject, to reopen this ancient polemos, which had been resolved or
pacified too precipitously? And already, has not a feminist 'point-of-view' been most
responsible for bringing this second figure of Being, this power-Being, most clearly
into view? 'From epistemology to strategy' - would this not already be the slogan for
much of feminist philosophy today? See Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of
Representation (1999).
 NOTES 167

5 Paul Celan, Poems (1972), p. 53.

6 Kafka, Diaries (1948), p. 148.

CONCLUSION: ON THE ART OF CREATING CONCEPTS

1 Gilies Deleuze, 'A propos des nouveaux philosophes et d'un probleme plus general,'
Faut-il bruler les nouveaux philosophes? Le dossier du 'proces,' established by Sylvie
Bouscasse and Denis Bourgeois (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Oswald, 1978), p. 190.
2 ibid., pp. 188-189.
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Deleuze, Gilles ([1966] 1988) Bergsonism, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (trans.),
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(1967) Presentation de Sacher-Masoch: le froid et k cruel, Paris: Minuit.
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([1970] 1988) Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy, San Francisco: City Lights Books.
(1972) Proust and Signs, Richard Howard (trans.), New York: George Braziller. UK
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(1984) Kant's Critical Philosophy, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (trans.),
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(1988) Foucault, Sean Hand (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(1988) Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, Paris: Galilee. (For English-language edn, see
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(1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (trans.),
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(1989) Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, New York: Zone Books.
(1990) The Logic of Sense, Constantin V. Boundas et al. (trans.), New York: Columbia
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(1990) Negotiations, Martin Joughin (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press.
(1991) Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature,
Constantin V. Boundas (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press.
(1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Tom Conley (trans.), Minneapolis: Univer-
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(1994) Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton (trans.), New York: Columbia University
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(1995) 'Postscript on control societies,' in Negotiations, Martin Joughlin (trans.), New
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(1997) Essays Critical and Clinical, Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco (trans.),
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Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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(1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Dana Polan (trans.)> Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
(1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Masumi (trans.),
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(1991) Qu'est-ce que la philosophic?, Paris: Minuit.
(1996) What Is Philosophy?, Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (trans.), New
York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1978) Writing and Difference, Alan Bass (trans.), Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Descartes, Rene (1986) Meditations on First Philosophy, John Cottingham (trans.), Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Duras, Marguerite and Resnais, Alain (1963) Hiroshima Man Amour, Barbara Bray (trans.),
1st edn, New York: Grove Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei (1949) Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, Jay Leyda (trans.), New York:
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Fanon, Frantz (1963) The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington (trans.), New York:
Grove Press.
Foucault, Michel (1977) 'What is an author?', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell
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Morale, 1, 105-120.
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Ernst Jones (ed.), New York: Grove Press, pp. 143-153.
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(trans.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
James, Henry (1986) The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books.
Kafka, Franz (1948) Diaries, Max Brod (ed.), New York: Schocken Books.
Kant, Immanuel (1951) The Critique of Judgment, J. H. Bernard (trans.), New York: Hafner
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(1965) Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, Paul Schrecker and Ann Martin
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(1985) Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of
Evil, E. M. Huggard (trans.), La Salle: Open Court Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1997) 'On the advantages and disadvantages of history for life,' in
Untimely Meditations, R. J. Hollingdale (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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Olkowski, Dorothea (1999) Giles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Proust, Marcel (1993) In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 5, The Captive and the Fugitive, C. K.
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(1993) In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 6, Time Regained, Andreas Mayor and Terence
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Rodowick, D. N. (1997) Giles Deleuze s Time Machine, Durham, NC: Duke University
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Saussure, Ferdinand de (1959) Course in General Linguistics, Charles Bally and Albert
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Series, Michel (1982) Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, Josu£ V. Harrari and David Bell
(ed.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tarde, Gabriel (1921 [1898]), LesLois Societies: Esquisse d'une sociologie, 8th edn, Paris: Libraire
Felix Alcan.
Whitehead, Alfred North (1978) Process and Reality, David Ray Griffin and Donald W.
Sherburne (ed.), New York: Free Press.
 INDEX

Note: Where more than one sequence of notes appears on a single page, notes with the same
number are differentiated by the addition of letters a, b or c.

absurdity 28 and representation 115

action-image see also aesthetics
and Cartesianism 20 auditions 145—6
and literature 30 automatons
and modern cinema 95, 114, 117—18, dialectical 119-20, 127
120-3, 125, 129-30 language as 75, 77
action-thought 120 spiritual 6-7, 114-16, 118, 121, 124-5,
advertising 154-6 129
aesthetics
and literature 8, 149 Badiou, Alain 159 n.la, 163 n.2b
and philosophy 8, 153 balance, non-symmetrical 58-9, 65
affects, and non-philosophy 89, 17, 34, 153, banality, and repetition 97, 100-1, 105,
154 108-9, 112
alienation 114, 116, 119, 121 Baroque 28, 152-3
allegory, and perception 47-8, 51, 63, 678 and the arts 58, 116
anamnesis see memory and baroque detective 81, 83-5
anxiety and chambre obscure 45-6
and the body 54, 55, 63, 67 and the crypt 41, 42-4, 48-51, 53-5,
Universal 87 63-4, 163 n.4
appearance, and cinema 93-6, 99 and disorientation 7, 66-7
Aquinas, St Thomas, and God 22 and end of reason 52, 73—8, 86
architecture, baroque 37, 52, 57-8 and folding/unfolding xii, 7, 42-6, 48,
and the crypt 41-4, 48-51, 53-5, 63-4, 51, 52-3, 56-8, 65-8
163 n.4 and form and material 56-7
Aristotle 5, 44, 160-1 n.lb and interior/exterior xii, 35—6, 42, 44—5,
Artaud, Antonin 5, 110, 115, 121, 123-4, 48-50, 53, 66, 68
136 and la maison baroque 45, 46, 49—50,
and ideology 127 52-3, 57-8, 66
and literature as war machine 148 and light 45-6, 49-50, 53, 55, 58-9
and the 'outside' 134 and multiplicity 35-6, 37, 60, 68
and theater of cruelty 114, 117, 118 and the Orient 52, 67, 85
and thought 26, 120, 127-31 and writing-designing 48
arts Bataille, G. 121
baroque 58, 116 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre 85
and cinema 118-25 Bazin, Germain 67—8, 163 n.6b
cinema as art of the masses 120-1, 123, Beckett, Samuel 67, 134, 135, 165 n.ll
125 belief, and knowledge 13, 130-1
modern 117-26 Benjamin, Walter 114, 134-5, 165 n.5
and philosophy 6, 8-9, 17, 33-4, 152-4 Benveniste, Emile 48
and play 136-7 Bergson, Henri 12, 29, 42, 100
172 INDEX

Berryman, John 145 Celan, Paul 142, 145

Bettencourt, P. 58 certainty
Blanchot, Maurice 14, 120, 140, 144 in Descartes 6, 14, 20-1, 25, 130
and the 'outside' 25-6, 134 in Leibniz 22
body Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 79-80, 91
and folding 55-7, 130 chance, and loss of principles 74-5, 77, 80,
and/uscum subnigrum 54-5, 58, 60 85, 89
and language 146 chaos 37, 78
in Leibniz 46-7, 49, 52, 55 and cinema 115, 118-19
and mind 7, 41-51, 52-60, 66, 126 and concept creation 3
as property 53-5 and immanence 26
as shadow 59 and possible worlds 21, 23, 25
and suffering 67 and repetition 66, 75-6
and thought 21 and time 12
Bonnefoy, Yves 44 see also formlessness
Borges, Jorge Luis 32, 33, 43, 81-9, 161 chaosmos 43, 65, 119
n.5a child, and play 135-6
'The analytical language of John Wilkins' Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze)
76-9 and action-image 126
and the baroque detective 81-2 and belief 130-1
'Death and the compass' 81, 83, 84-5 and Borges 90
and games 85, 88, 89 and cinema as art of the masses 120—1,
'The garden of forking paths' 29-31, 81, 123
82 and death 110
and infinity 76 and fabulation 137
'Kafka and his precursors' 80—1 and the forger 90-2, 95-6
'Kafka as precursor* 80, 82 and literature and life 134
Labyrinths 79-80, 85, 87-8 and memory 100, 106
'The library of Babel' 75-6, 81, 87-8 and movement-images 114—15, 128
'The (new) refutation of time' 81 and Nietzsche 91-2
'Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote' and perception 103
80, 82 and recollection-images 99-100
as precursor of Leibniz 85-6, 89, 90 and representation 108
and repetition 80-2, 86, 88-9, 91 and spiritual automaton 129
and secrecy and mystery 78—9, 82—6, 89, and die sublime 115
144 and thought 127
and time 29-30, 90, 91, 104, 106 and 'time off its hinges' 11-13, 30, 91, 95
The total Library' 76, 88 and time-images 94-5, 104-5, 124, 161
and truth 78-80, 90, 96 n.2b
Braidotti, Rosi 166 n.4 and the Whole 119-20
brain, and imagination 115 cinema
Brecht, Bertholt 114-15, 117 as art 118-31
Buchner, Georg 148 as art of the masses 120-1, 123, 125
Burroughs, William S. 144 and emotion 115
and flashback see recollection-image
caesura 14, 105, 127, 129-30, 160 n.2, 165 industrial 123-4
n.9 and movement-images 28, 92, 95, 105,
Canning, Peter 165 n.9 107, 114-15, 118-21, 125-6,
capital, and cinema 124 128-9
causality and philosophy 6, 8-9, 17, 33, 37
in cinema 92 and theater 114
efficient cause 64-5 and thought 122, 125-31
final cause 64-5 and time 11, 28, 29-30, 92, 93-109,
in Leibniz 22-4, 64 124, 160 n.5
 INDEX 173

and truth 93-99, 108, 126 decision see judgement

and will-to-power 92 deconstruction
cipher 41, 49, 53, 54, 60, 83 and arbitrariness of the sign 77
place vide as 61—4, 68 and Borges 81
classification, and collapse of reason as commentary x-xi
77-9 critique of 41
cliche of history of philosophy 15
in cinema 117, 118-19, 123, 125-6, deduction, in Borges 83
128-31 Deleuze, Gilles
and language 141, 146 Bergsonism 12, 20, 23-4, 31, 115, 137,
in philosophy 153 160 n.4
closure 50 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image 119,
cogito 4 125
and certainty 6, 14, 18, 201, 24, 130 as commentator x—xi
and matin genie 14-15 and concepts 28-37
color, and 'the gray point' 58-9, 60 Critique et Clinique 5, 132-5
commentary Empiricism and Subjectivity 146
Deleuze on ix-x, xi Essays Critical and Clinical 132—4, 136,
Derrida on x, 2-3, 159 n.2a 137-51
as simulacrum ix, xi-xii Foucault 25-6, 28, 33-4, 144, 162 n.3
as unfolding xii—xiii and judgement 19-27, 29-31
common sense Kant's Critical Philosophy 115-16
as doxa 45, 48 The Logic of Sense 23, 25, 51, 161 n.2a
and philosophy 4-7, 152 and non-philosophy xiii, 3-10, 16-17
communication 'Plato and the simulacrum' 5, 154
between monads 47-8, 51, 57 Proust and Signs 157-8, 164 n.la
philosophy as 4 'Seminar on Leibniz" 20, 36, 161 n.3a
concepts, philosophical Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy 156
and conceptual personae xii-xiii, 19, and time off its hinges xiv, 11—18, 30, 91,
29-30 95
creation of xiv, 3-5, 8-9, 17-18, 36, 44, see also Cinema 2: The Time-Image4,
69, 80, 152, 153-7 Difference and Repetition; The Fold;
history of 19 Leibniz and the Baroque;
in Kant 43 Negotiations; Le Pli: Leibniz et le
in Leibniz 43, 44 baroque
and marketing 154-7 Deleuze, Gilles (with Guattari)
paradox of 28-37 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Conley, Tom 163 n.5b Schizophrenia 115, 143, 144-5, 147
consensus 156—7 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 140-1,
constructivism 9 142-3, 148, 150
creation Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? 12, 28, 32
and God 65-6 A Thousand Plateaus 134, 147-8, 153,
in Leibniz xii, 41 163 n.3, 164 n.3c
and philosophy 36, 80, 154-7 see also What Is Philosophy?
principle of 124 delirium, in Deleuze 144-5
schizophrenic order 86 Derrida, Jacques 159 n.5b, 165 n.10
critic, as man of the state 148 and Borges 81
cruelty and commentary x, 2-3, 159 n.2a
and pleasure 136 and critique of representation 41
theater of 114, 117, 118 and history of philosophy 15
crypt, baroque 41-4, 48-51, 53-5, 63-4, and light 162 n. 5
163 n.4 and literature 8, 143
cryptography, art of 41-51, 53, 54, 60, 63 and theater of cruelty 164 n.2c
Cummings, E. E. 145 and transcendence 160 n.7
174 INDEX

Descartes, Rene 160-1 n.lb egoism, and emotion 31

and body and mind 42, 60 Eisenstein, Sergei 102, 114, 118-29, 130-1,
and certainty 6, 20-1, 24, 25 164 n.3c, 165 n.6
and dreams 6 emotion, and egoism 31
and geometry 52 and cinema 115, 165 n.7
and infinity 25 empiricism 8, 51, 153
and knowledge 24, 41, 130 Engels, Friedrich 122
and madness 6, 28 Enlightenment, critique 73, 126
and matin genie 14 ethics, philosophy as 15, 74
and space 61 I'etourdissement 7, 52, 56, 63, 66-7
designing, and writing 48 evil, in Leibniz 56, 68
desire, and writing 143 experience
difference and knowledge 19
as folding 57 special conditions of 33-5, 153
in Leibniz 12-13, 79 expression 17-18, 33-4, 37, 56-7, 60, 79
and multiplicity 36-7 and concept creation xiv, 9
and repetition 16-17, 65, 68, 76, 80, 91, and lived experience 132-5
105
and representation xi, 3, 8, 32, 68 fabulation 95, 106, 137-8, 140, 145,
sexual 166 n.4 148-9
Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) xiv, 161 fajade, baroque 37, 42-3, 53, 54-5,
n.lb, 162 n.3 64, 66
and the arts 152 falsification
and common sense 4—5 in Borges 90-1
and falsification 5, 90—1 and cinema 92, 94-99, 109
and formlessness 12, 75 and commentary xi-xii
and language use 144, 146—7 and fiction 149
and loss of principles 73, 74-5 in Nietzsche 91-2
and non-philosophy/cinema 17 and thought and truth 7-8, 9, 11, 90,
and the Other Person 9-10, 32-4, 130-1
160 n.5 Fanon, Frantz 138-40, 148
and the past 111 Fautrier, J. 58
and reminiscence ix-x, 25 feminism, and Deleuze 166 n.4
and repetition 81, 90-1, 111 fiction
and representation 3, 8 and falsification 149
and role of philosophy 15, 16, 68-9, 152 necessary 23, 63-4
and simulacrum xi past as 91, 109
and thought 25 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Deleuze)
and time 105, 160 n.2 and the body 53, 66
discernment 41, 91 and Borges 85-6
disorientation, and thought 7, 26, 66-7 and cryptography 41, 63
dissonance 43-4, 51, 56 and games 74, 89
divergence 32 and harmony and dissonance 43, 61
dizziness (I'etourdissemeni) 7, 52, 56, 63, and the ideal game 32, 85
66-7 and Ideas 132
double see simulacrum and Leibnizian monad 12-13
doxa 45, 48, 126 and multiplication of principles 73, 85
dreams and point of view 60
and Descartes 6 and possible worlds 21-2, 29, 31, 68
and modern art 117, 121 and reading xii
Dubuffet, Jean 58 and reason 35-6, 87
Duns Scotus 10 and repetition 76
Duras, Marguerite, Hiroshima Man Amour and thought 26
97-113, 134 and vinculum substantia 21
 INDEX 175

fold/folding xiii, 21, 24-6, 32, 160 n.7 as final cause 64

and die baroque xii, 7, 42-6, 48, 51, as function 61
52-3, 56-8, 65-8 and image of thought 23-4
and the body 55-7 and knowledge 130
and commentary xii and law 66, 87
and disorientation 7, 26, 66-7 in Leibniz 13, 14, 21-5, 30-1, 43, 60,
and form and material 57 61-9, 86-7
and language 145 loss of 73-5
and middle fold (Zwischenfali) 76 and necessity 21-3
and movement 65 as Other 23
and time 16, 63-4 and possibility 13, 21-5, 30, 61-3
and transcendence 61 as process 31
'forger' and time 12, 13, 14, 63-4
in Borges 90-1 Godard, Jean-Luc 92, 94
and cinema 94-6, 98 Goethe, J. W. von 142, 148
in Deleuze 92-3 Gombrowicz, Witold 33, 43, 145, 161 n.5a
forgetting 134 Good, the
form, and material 56-7 in Plato 22, 73
formlessness 12, 105, 115-16, 117-18, 127 and reason 73
see also chaos 'gray point' 58-9, 60
Foucault, Michel 117, 144, 159 n.5b, Grosz, Elizabeth 166 n.4
160 n.lb, 161 n.lb Guattari, Felix x, 159 nn.la,4a
and Borges 81 Guattari, Felix (with Deleuze)
and literature and language 145-6, 152 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
and narrative 28 Schizophrenia 115, 143, 144-5, 147
and subjectivization 25 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 140—1,
fragmentation of the subject 129 142-3, 148, 150
freedom Qu'est-ce que la philosophic? 12, 19, 28, 32
and chance 75 A Thousand Plateaus 134, 147-8, 153,
and determination 86 163 n.3, 164 n.3c
in Leibniz 55 see also What Is Philosophy?
Frege, Gotdob 61, 64
Fremont, Christiane 161 n.5a habit-logic see action-image
Freud, Sigmund 6, 54, 56, 84, 135-6, 144 habits (habitus], of language use 141,
Friedman, Georges 87 146-7
function, God as 61 hallucination, and perception 51, 56, 95,
fiiscum subnigrum 54-5, 58, 60 100, 145
future 8, 16, 144 harmony
multiple 106 in Deleuze 57, 61, 64, 68-9
and past as fiction 91, 109 in Leibniz 13, 25, 43-4, 47, 57, 66, 68
health, writing as 137—41
games hearing, as auditions 145
in Borges 80, 84, 85, 88, 89 Hegel, G. W. F. 9, 17, 44, 89, 119-20,
in Deleuze 21, 32, 74-5 160-1 n.lb
ideal game 32, 75, 80, 137-8 Heidegger, Martin 14
in Leibniz 85 and Error 7
Gattens, Moira 166 n.4 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 34
geometry, Cartesian 52 and language 6
gnosticism 77-8 The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic
God 161-2 n.2, 163 n.5
in Borges 87-8, 90 and monad as drive 57
and causality 22-4, 64 and phenomenology 32
and creation 65-6 and poetry 8, 14, 153
as efficient cause 64 and space 61
-ire INDEX

Heidegger, Martin (continued) intelligence

and thought 7, 166 n. 13 and instinct 120, 129
and thrownness 25, 67 and society 24, 31
Hiroshima Man Amour (film) 97-113 interpretation
history and secrecy 136—7
and philosophy 13-14, 19, 25, 28, 92, as unfolding xii—xiii, 3
160-1 n.lb intuition
and truth 79-80, 84 in Deleuze 8, 16, 37
Hjelmslev, Louis 6 in Leibniz 24
Holderlin, J. C. F. 105, 160 n.2
house, baroque see baroque, and la maison James, Henry xi, xiii
baroque journalism, and creation of concepts 154-5
Hume, David 78, 89, 93 Joyce, James 33, 43, 134
Husserl, Edmund 15, 32 judgement
and belief 13
idea in cinema 106-7, 111-12
and literature 132, 145 in classical philosophy 19-20
Platonic 9, 25, 45, 52 problem of 19-27, 28-30
and representation 3 and reason 13-15, 19, 23-5, 43
virtuality of 47, 51
idealism, and Hume 78, 89 Kafka, Franz
identity, colonial 148-9 and a priori 18
ideology 48, 73, 149 and Borges 80-4
in Borges 84 and hope 88
and cinema 121, 124-5, 126, 127-30 and language 142-3, 147, 149
and interpretation 136 and life and literature 134-5, 136, 144
idiocy, new 5, 28 and literature as war machine 148
imagination and movement 165 n. 11
and reason 8, 115-16, 124, 126 and solitude 140-1
and shock 115 and visions and auditions 145-6
immanence Kant, Immanuel x, 154
and cinema 112, 119 and art 118
as condition of thought xiv, 4, 6-9, 18, and the body 162-3 n.l
27, 156-7 and concepts 17, 43
in Leibniz 66 and knowledge 19, 35, 43, 118
and literature 132-4, 153 and necessary fiction 64
and movement-images 119 and reason 4, 9, 43, 115
and 'the outside' 26 and representation 34-5
inclination 47, 162 n.8 and the sublime 115, 116
incompossibility and thought 23
and Borges 85-6 and time 8
and Deleuze 29, 31-2, 35-6, 68 key see cipher
and Leibniz 13, 21, 23, 25, 43-4, Kierkegaard, Soren 28, 36, 131, 140, 148
47-8 Klee, Paul 9, 41, 65
indetermination, and place vide 63, 64-5 and human tragedy 67
indiscernibility 11, 18, 90, 108 and theory of color 58-9, 60
infinity Kleist, Heinrich von 5, 26, 147, 148
in Borges 76 Klossowski, Pierre 25
in Descartes 25 knowledge
in Leibniz 62-3 absolute 41, 119
'Inside' 7, 8, 25-6, 63, 126 as adeqtiatio 41, 44
instinct and belief 13, 130-1
and intelligence 120, 129 in Borges 75-6, 86-8
virtual 23-4 and cinema 118-20, 126, 128, 130-1
 INDEX 177

and experience 19 and thought 25

and the fold xii and time 12-13, 14, 104, 106
in Kant 19, 35,43, 118 and truth 44, 90, 92, 96
in Leibniz 13, 41, 44 and vinculum substantia 21, 25
and shadow 46 and vis active, xii, 47, 56-7
Koffman, Sarah 162 n.6 see also monad
Levi, Primo 134
labyrinth Levi-Strauss, Claude 32
in Botges 31, 77, 79, 84, 86, 89, 90, 161 Levinas, Emanuel 15, 160 n.7
n.5a Lewen, Kurt 30
in Deleuze 42, 44, 60 life
Lacan, Jacques 32, 102 and literature 132-5, 137, 146-51
Lambert, Gregg 159 n.4b see also immanence
language light
as automaton 75, 77 in Deleuze 45-6, 48-51, 53, 58-9
and communication 48 in Derrida 162 n.5
and fold/folding 145 literature
foreign 141-51 as foreign language 141-51
and habits 146-7 health as 137-41
and literature 133-4 and life 132-5, 137, 146-51
and Other Person 32, 33-4 minor 137, 149-51
and the outside 134 and philosophy 6, 8-9, 33, 37, 43, 74,
and philosophy 6, 9, 146 90, 153
and play 135-7 in Proust 132-3
and territorialization 137, 142-4, 149 uses and abuses of 132-51
and thought 146-7 as 'war machine' 141-2, 147-8, 149-50
see also classification; expression; see also Borges, Jorge Luis
signification Lyotard, J.-F. 62
law, principle of 19-20, 87
Leblanc, Maurice 43 madness 6, 7, 28, 144-5
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von xii, 5, 19, Mallarme, Stephane 48, 74-5, 118, 145
33 Markov, Andrei Andreevich 6
and I'etourdissement 7, 52, 56, 63, 66-7 Marx, Karl 6
and the baroque 26, 28, 42, 46-50, 52-3, material, and form 57
162 n.4 mathematics, and philosophy 41, 42-3, 53
and body and mind 46-7, 49, 52, 55, matter
59-60 and memory 42
and Borges 85-6, 89, 90 see also body
and difference 12-13, 79-80 Melville, Herman 5, 136, 141, 145, 149
and disjunctive syllogism 25 memory (anamnesis) 48, 130, 158, 160 n.4
and games 85 eroticization 111
and God 13, 14, 21-5, 30-1, 43, 61-9, and habits 146
86-7 and matter 42
and Harmony 13, 25, 43-4, 47, 57, 66, and recollection-image 99-103, 105-13
68 and representation x—xi
and infinity 62-3 and world-memory 105-6, 112
and knowledge 23, 41, 44 and writing x, 134
and loss of principles 77 Menard, Pierre, and Borges 79-81, 84, 89,
Monadology 49, 51, 52, 55-6, 62-4, 66 91
and non-philosophy 43, 157 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and the arts 8
and reason 24, 36, 43, 66, 68, 86-7 Metaphysics, 'end of 74
and space 61-2, 66 mind
Theodicy 21-3, 47, 52, 64, 67, 87, and body 7, 41-51, 52-60, 66, 126
162 n.8 in Leibniz 62, 66
178 INDEX

monad and reason 52, 66

central see God and truth 5,11
and communication between monads Nietzsche, Friedrich x, 5, 14, 17, 18, 131
47-8, 51, 57 and Eternal Return 16, 75, 93
and the crypt 42-4, 49-51, 53, 54 and knowledge 41
in Deleuze 42-6, 49-50, 60 and language 146, 148
in Heidegger 57 and nihilism 74-5, 91, 92-3
in Leibniz 12-13, 24, 26, 30, 44-5, 47, and the past 20
49, 52-3, 55-6, 59-63 Thus Spake Zanzthustra 153
and possession of a body 54-5, 62 and truth 91, 92-3, 94
and resonance 50-1 and will-to-power 14, 92
and thought and perception 12-13 nihilism 73-8, 89, 91, 92-3, 129
and the unconscious 49, 56 Non-Being 30
and vertigo 52, 56, 63, 66-7 non-philosophy xiii, 3-10, 16-17, 43,
Monegal, Emil Rodriguez and Reid, Alastair 152-3, 157-8
216 n.4a and emotion 31
montage 102, 109 114, 119-23 and percepts and affects 8-9, 17, 34, 153,
movement 154
and color 58-9 and truth 90
and folds 65 'non-sense', in Leibniz 64-5
and ideas 50-1 'nooshock' 115, 118, 125, 129
movement-image 28, 92, 95, 105, 107, nothingness, and nihilism 74-8, 86
114-15, 118-21, 125-6, 128-9 'nudity', and God 62—3
in theater 115
and time 11-12, 105 objectivity 25, 34-5, 157
multiplicity xiii, 96, 156 and the body 55-6, 68
and the baroque 35-6, 37, 60, 68 and cinema 106—8
and harmony 43 in Leibniz 47, 55, 60
and the past 56, 91, 106 obligation 23-4, 32
and possible worlds 30-1, 35-7, 68 obscurity, and the body 54-5, 56
of principles 73, 86 Olkowski, Dorothea 163 n.6, 166 n.4
of subjects 35-6, 56 'Open, the', in cinema 118-19
music see dissonance; harmony operatio, cryptography as 42, 44, 66
orient, and the Baroque 52
narration, and falsification 11, 90-1, orientation, and representation 9, 34—5,
94-9 163 n.6
narrative Other Person (Autrui} 9-10, 32, 131, 157
conceptual 28-9 and Borges 85
of philosophy 16, 19-20 and language 32, 33-4
nature as possible world xiv, 23, 32-5, 37
and cinema 120, 124, 128 'Outside' (Dehon) 7, 37, 54
primary 5 of language 134, 141, 145-7
necessity and Other Person 32
in Borges 83 in theater and cinema 114, 117, 123, 127
in Leibniz 21—3 and thought 25-6
in Saussure 77 and time 8-9, 26
Negotiations (Deleuze) x, 69 see also immanence
and concept creation 155
and fabulation 137 pain, and pleasure 116
and the fold 44, 68 Paradis, Bruno 161 n.4a
and harmony 43 past 8, 16, 19-20, 28, 144
and non-philosophy 3 as fiction 91, 108
and percepts and affects 8 multiple 56, 91, 108
and reading 45 and recollection-images 97—112
 INDEX 179

Paz, Octavio 14 and God 66

perception and la maison baroque 45-6, 49—50
and allegory 45-8, 51, 63, 67-8 and Leibniz 43-4, 46, 65
and cinema 124, 126, 130 and loss of principles 73-5
in Deleuze x, 46, 50-1, 54-6, 103 and the Orient 52
in Descartes 21, 24, 60 and perception 163 n.4
and doxa 45, 48 point of view 75, 157-8
in Leibniz 44, 45, 48, 50, 53, 59-60, and cinema 92, 94, 96-103, 106-10,
62-4 112
and reading 65-6 of God 44, 66, 83
and secrecy 48, 55, 57, 60, 68 and phenomenology 166 n.4
percepts, and non-philosophy 8-9, 17, 34, and variation 60, 62
153, 154 possibility
personae, conceptual xii-xiii, 19, 29-30 cinema of 124, 125
perspectivism 60 and God 13, 21-5, 30, 61-3
perversion 136-7 and mind 47
phenomena, in Leibniz 66 and Other Person xiv, 23, 32-5, 37
phenomenology 32 and reality 20-3, 25, 29-35, 43, 68
critique of 163 n.6, 166 n.4 and time 15-16, 63
philosophy post-colonialism 81, 89, 138-9, 165 n.10
and common sense 46, 45, 48, 152 power
and concepts xii-xiii, 3-5, 17-18, 19, of capital 124
28-37 and secrecy 48-9
as creation of concepts xiv, 8—9, 36, 44, as vis activa 47, 56-7
69, 80, 152, 153-7 will-to-power 14, 91-2
in Descartes 61 pragmatism 4, 156
and 'end of philosophy" 14-16 Predal, Rene 110
ground of 6-8 present, and recollection-images 97-108
history of 13-15, 19, 25, 28, 91, principles
160-1 n.lb definition 74
and language 6, 9, 146 loss of 72-6, 80
and modern art 8 multiplication of 73, 86
and non-philosophy xiii, 3-10, 17, 31, projection 56, 102, 108, 112, 126
152-3, 157-8 property, body as 53-5
and the Other 23 Proust, Marcel 37, 136, 153, 157,
and zone of indiscernibility 11, 18, 91 164 n.la
place vide 61-4 and language 134, 141
Plato and literature and life 132-3
and the Good 22, 73 and solitude 140, 141
Gorgias 19-20 and visions and auditions 145, 146
and Ideas 9, 25, 45, 52 psychoanalysis
Meno 19-20 and feminism 166 n.4
Republic 28 Lacanian 32
and thought 5, 23 and primal scene 165 n.10
and writing x and secrecy 136, 162 n.10
Platonism, overturning 160 n.7
play, and writing 135-7 Queneau, R. 145
pleasure
and cruelty 136 reading
and pain 116 and Borges 86
Le Pit: Leibniz et le baroque (Deleuze) as cryptography 44-5, 48, 53, 54, 64
and the body 53, 54-5 and Deleuze xii
and capitalism 164 n.8 and seeing 45, 50, 65
and the crypt 42, 48-9 realism, social 119, 122
180 INDEX

reality Robbe-Grillet, Alain 92, 95

and possibility 20-3, 25, 29-35, 37, 43, Rodowick, D. N. 164 n.lb
68 Rosolato, Guy 162 n.10
and rationality 21-2, 25, 36, 87
reason Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness 32
and certainty 14, 20-2, 24 Saussure, F. de 6, 77, 88
eclipse of 14-16, 18, 35-6, 52, 73-8 schism, in modern art 118
and the Good 73 schizophrenia 144—5
and imagination 8, 115-16, 124, 126 Scholasticism, and StientiaDei 10,44, 62,66
and judgement 13-15, 19, 23-5, 43 science
in Kant 4, 9,43, 115 and philosophy 6, 17, 154
in Leibniz 24, 36, 43, 66, 68, 86-7 and representation 115
recognition sculpture, baroque 52
and immanence 4 Sebba, Gregor and Watson, Richard A.
and reminiscence ix-x 159-60 n.5b
'recoil', of modern art 118 secrecy 47-8, 55, 57, 60, 68
recollection-images 97-112 in Borges 78-9, 82-6, 89, 144
reminiscence ix-xi, 25, 157-9 in Freud 136, 162 n.10
repetition seeing
and banality 97, 100-1, 105, 108-9, 112 and reading 45, 50, 65
and Borges 76, 80-2, 86, 88-9, 91 as visions 145
and 'capture' 133 sensibility 9, 16, 122
and chaos 75-6 Serres, Michel 12, 46
commentary as xii-xiii shadow, and monads 46, 49-50, 56, 58, 59
and Derrida 15 Shakespeare, William 5
and difference 16-17, 37, 68, 76, 80, 91, shame 134-5
105 shock 114-16, 119, 129-30
and fabulation 106, 138, 140 sign, in Leibniz 64-5
and habits 146-7 signification, as arbitrary 77-9, 82, 84, 88
and representation xii-xiii, 65, 92-109, simulacrum 79, 154, 155, 160 n.lb
111, 147 in cinema 102, 104
and transference 111-12 commentary as ix, xi-xii
representation and reason 14
and absolute knowledge 41 and repetition 65
and the baroque 68, 116 society
and cinema 92-112, 126 and the body 53
and commentary xi-xii, xiii-xiv and intelligence 24, 31
and difference 3, 8, 32, 68 solitude, of writer 140-1, 148
in Leibniz 65 soul
and orientation 9, 34-5, 163 n.6 in Leibniz 62, 66-7
and the Other Person 33, 34-5 as 'thrown' 67
and reminiscence ix-xi space
and repetition 65, 92-109, 111, 147 and the body 55, 66
tautological 109 and cinema 103, 108
and theater 115 in Descartes 61
and thought 6, 9, 26, 157-8 and folding 62
and time 9 in Leibniz 61-2
resistance, literature as 145 theatrical 114-16
Resnais, Alain 92, 95, 97-9, 102-7, 109-10 and time 12-13, 26, 30, 35, 66
resonance 50-1, 57 spectator, and cinema and theater 109,
Return, Eternal 16, 75-6, 93, 101-2, 109 114-17, 120
Rimbaud, Arthur 147 speech
ritournelles, in Deleuze xiv, 153 absolute condition of 56
Riviere, Jacques 148 and writing x
 INDEX -181

Spinoza, Baruch x, 5 and time-images 92, 93-4, 99, 101,

state 104-5
and cinema 120-1, 123-4 and truth 11-18, 30, 92, 96-7, 161 n.la
and literature 149-50 see also repetition
Stivale, Charles J. 159 n.5a Tournier, Michel 33
structuralism 32 transcendence
stupidity (betise) 134 in Deleuze 9, 61
subject in Kant 34
cinematic 115, 118-21, 126-7, 129, in Leibniz 66
131 overturning 9-10, 44-5, 160 n.7
fragmentation 129 and representation 34-5, 112
and malm genie 14 transference, and repetition 111-12
as mobile unity 60 truth
multiple 35-6, 56 in Borges 78-80, 90, 96
and the Other Person 33-4, 130, 157 and cinema 93-9, 108, 126
and possession of a body 54 as correspondence 34-5, 77-9
as Whole 115-18, 120-1, 125-8, 129 and the 'forger' 90, 91-6
subjectivity, in cinema 107-8 and history 79-80, 84
sublime, the 115-17, 119, 126, 164 n.3c in Leibniz 44, 90, 92, 96
in Kant 115, 116 and literature 149
suffering, and body and soul 67 in Nietzsche 91, 92-3, 94
and orientation 34-5
Tarde, Gabriel 161 n.lb and thought 5, 7-8, 26-7
theater and time 11-18, 30, 92, 96-7, 161 n.la
and cinema 114
of cruelty 114, 116, 118 Unconscious
'gestic' 115 and cinema 121, 129
thought of God 83, 86-7
and body 21 as ground of philosophy 6, 73
and cinema 115, 122, 125-31 and monads 49, 56
and common sense 4-7, 152 and Other Persons 32
and concepts xii-xiii, 3-5, 8-9, 17-18 unfolding
and disorientation 7, 26 interpretation as xii—xiii, 3
eventuation 25 of perceptions 55, 56, 64, 107
image of 23—4, 30—1 of time 105-7
interiorization 25, 146-8 'unthought, the' 3, 26, 33
and language 146-7, 153 Ur-doxa 126, 128-9
and 'outside' 25—6 Utopia 137-8
and perception 21, 24, 45
and representation 6, 9, 26, 157-8 variation
and truth 7-8, 26-7 and infinity 62
and the unthought 3, 26, 33 and point of view 60, 62
thrownness, in Heidegger 25, 67 verticality 52, 56, 63, 66-7
time vinculum mbstantia. 21, 25
and Borges 29-30, 90, 91, 104, 106 Virilio, Paul 128
in cinema 11, 28, 29-30, 92-109, 124, vis ttctiva. xii, 47, 56-7
160 n.5 visions 145
and falsity 11, 94
forking-time 104-5, 112 Warhol, Andy 154
and God 13, 14, 63-4 Welles, Orson 92, 95, 99
and the 'gray point' 58 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari)
and movement 11-12, 92, 105 and chaos 12, 115, 119
as 'outside' 8-9, 26 and concepts xii—xiii, xiv, 4, 8-9, 80, 153,
and space 12-13, 26, 30, 35, 66 154-7
182 INDEX

What Is Philosophy? (continued) Wilkins, John 78-9

and idiocy 28 Wittgenstein, Ludwig von 14
and immanence xiv, 4, 7, 26 writing (lecriture)
and multiplicity 35 and designing 48
and non-philosophy 6, 8 health as 137-41
and Other Person 10, 32, 35 and life 132-5, 137, 146-51
and reason 16, 74 and memory x, 134
and repetition xii-xiii and philosophy 15
and thought and truth 7, 27, 74 and play 135-7
and the unthought 26 and solitude 140-1, 148
Whitehead, A. N. 60, 66,122, 132, 165 n.7
Whole, the 115-21, 124-30 Zwischenfalt (middle fold) 76