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Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics Edited by Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian, and Julia Sushytska LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannery Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gilles Deleuze and metaphysics / edited by Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian, and Julia Sushytska. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7391-7475-3 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-7476-0 (electronic) 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. 2. Metaphysics. I. Beaulieu, Alain, 1940- editor. B2430.D454G535 2014 110--dc23 2014037493 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS Foreword: The Problem of an Immanent Metaphysics vii Arnauld Villani Introduction: Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics? 1 Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian, and Julia Sushytska 1 Leaving Metaphysics? Deleuze on the Event 17 Alberto Anelli 2 Mathematics, Structure, Metaphysics: Deleuze and Category Theory 45 Rocco Gangle 3 Difference and Speculation: Heidegger, Meillassoux, and Deleuze 63 on Sufficient Reason Sjoerd van Tuinen 4 The Physics of Sense: Bruno, Schelling, Deleuze 91 Joshua Ramey and Daniel Whistler 5 The Obscure Metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze 115 Julia Sushytska 6 Deleuze and Badiou on Being and the Event 137 Alain Beaulieu 7 Disanalogous Being: Deleuze, Spinoza, and Univocal Metaphysics 153 Adrian Switzer 8 Crowned Anarchies, Substantial Attributes, and the Transcendental 179 Problem of Stupidity Gregory Kalyniuk 9 Revolution and the Return of Metaphysics 207 Thomas Nail 10 Whence Intensity? Deleuze and the Revival of a Concept 225 Mary Beth Mader About the Contributors 249 Index 253 FOREWORD The Problem of an Immanent Metaphysics Arnaud Villani There is undoubtedly something twisted in the classical history of philosophy. Indeed, subject to the request, which I gladly accepted, to write a preface for a collection of texts about Deleuze and his immanent metaphysics, my immediate reflex as professional philosopher was to try to justify this last form of meta- physics, as if it were some fantastic figure in the contemporary landscape. On reflection, what I mean to show is entirely the opposite, that transcendent meta- physics, far from being a pleonasm, constitutes a monstrous requirement that is primarily in need of justification. We can feel this in the 1981 interview where Deleuze, on draft paper and with a green ballpoint pen, answers my question about the “end of metaphysics” and its “overcoming” in a few words: “I feel I am a pure metaphysician.”1 This could be understood as: “I feel that I belong to a line of thinkers that has, with Nietzsche and Whitehead, its great texts and titles. No need to argue, there is metaphysics. The ‘end of metaphysics’ only signifies ‘the end of the metaphys- ics that believes itself to be or pretends to be transcendent.’ But in reality, there has never been any other kind of metaphysics than an immanent metaphysics.” So if the burden of proof is to be inverted, what title could transcendent metaphysics produce to certify and grant it, if not a completely contingent fac- ticity of “turning” in history—the strategies and benefits of which need to be analyzed—then at least a simple right to exist? Indeed, one can think that what comes “after the books on physics” and, oddly enough, after the “First Philoso- phy” that implied no “beyond,” takes the name metaphysics; it is symptomatic of what happened, namely an extension of Pythagorism that nevertheless modi- fies its essence. Indeed, the acroamatic teaching of Pythagoras, even though it was grounded on Number, did not intend to eliminate the sensible, but rather, in the manner of all the Pre-Socratics, to deliver its Rule or Principle. The sover- eign abstraction that Plato believed he saw there transfers the “world to be put in order” to an abstract world composed of what escapes the sensible and time! As if a mathematical abstraction, even a “spermatic” one, could replace the living- vii viii FOREWORD concrete real! As if the real world becomes mute in an outgrowth of the Rule! One finds there, as Nietzsche would say, a “knack,” a sleight of hand. Eternal and unchanging as a mathematical symbol, the Idea takes the place of the real that it was supposed to put in order. But this science of the Idea never concerns the world; it is not a position regarding the world, but the world’s denial. Conversely, to feel like a pure metaphysician, to want at any price a meta- physics for our time and for all times, is to search in a more appropriate way for the principle that would allow the world to endure in its composition of the mul- tiple and to remain immanent instead of being submitted to the edict of inexist- ence. Metaphysics is linked to the immanence of a world that continues to exist despite the forces that are pulling it in opposite directions and tending to make it explode (polyplangtôn, says Parmenides, fragment XVI). Since the first Greek thinkers, the principle that allows the world to persist within immanence— whether it is a matter, after the Elements that are too elementary, of Number, Logos, Being, Love/Hate, or Noûs—is a balanced principle of organization, and never a principle of choice between the elements of the world, never a principle of exclusive judgment in the name of the Best that would permit, in all inno- cence, the rejection or crossing out of the real. Let us suppose, moreover, that we did not have in Plato the arguments in the Phaedo (67) against the body, or in the Republic on the exact line of exclusions desirable for trimming the fat from the City. The Ideas would then be the control points of the sensible, and not fortresses which supervise its exile or extermination. The Idea would be like a sketch, a model for improving the sensible: the prelude to an algebra of the sensible. Metaphysics would once again take up with a heuristic of the treasures of the sensible, with their ideal combinatory. Plato was preoccupied by presence in person: one can feel it in his defense of orality against writing. In fact, this is a crucial point. What is important is not the emergence of the individual, for which Hegel was hoping and which Plato would hinder. What is important is the irreplaceability of beings. The member of a traditional community is not an individual, and yet he is irreplaceable. He can be neither displaced nor replaced, because he has a place assigned in society and in the nature-universe. He is absolutely resistant to abstraction. Now, what is an idea or a theory if not what can constantly be displaced? One could draw upon an etymology of the word “immanent”: “what re- mains within, remains there, holds on firmly to its location.” This comes closer to the animal which is unable to leave the unity that its body forms with what models it and is modeled on it (Umwelt). The transcendent, in a general sense, is what detaches and unbinds itself (see the importance of the chain for Parmeni- des), as the supposed soul does in relation to the body. The gesture of transcend- ence, in its simplest and most foundational meaning, is the tearing-away, the annulment, so comparable to the conceptual, of adhesion to concrete situations. The “primitive” is in its place, it has the sense of the “earth,” because it is held in the diverse and confrontational concreteness of narrative, of dances and songs, of the clan, of the community, of nature, of the universe, of the Forces present everywhere and of the dead. How can one live the concreteness of THE PROBLEM OF AN IMMANENT METAPHYSICS ix situations (by definition a situation is always concrete) if one is displaceable and replaceable? The respect for concreteness—which needs to be substituted (in terms of philosophical importance) for finitude—consists in remaining tied to a body, to a port, to the dead. Ulysses comes back to Ithaca. Being is the opposite of floating, in empty liberty, nowhere. There are thus two reasons to assert that metaphysics is immanent: respect for the real understood as “this world,” and respect for the chance to enjoy a place and an irreplaceable. Conversely, we see that the transcendent respects neither this world nor irreplaceability. If one asks, with good reason, whether this concept of place is not too es- sentialist to suit Deleuze’s philosophy, one would have to answer without hesita- tion, in short, that the “place” of each difference is simultaneously constitutive of the fold and submitted to a thousand cuttings and buildings-up of waves that re-determine it while making it travel. In this way, these places, by creating a block while remaining nomadic, differ radically from any assigned location. In other words, they are relational and correspond to what Kant speaks of as the difference between Grenz, the boundary, and Schranke, the limit. But this world and irreplaceability carry difference along with them. This world is only well-balanced dosage of differences, and irreplaceability is the uniqueness of what has no equivalent and cannot be reproduced. Strangely enough, with the Myth of Thoth and the eviction of the imitators, we could say that Plato shares this conviction, except that number is a concept and the Idea is also a concept generalized to its higher level. Nothing distinguishes the concept from the Idea except height. A concept is only a resemblance, reality is only difference, “what cannot divide itself without changing its nature.” Immanent metaphysics is suitable to irreplaceability and to difference. And the living can- not escape, not even for a second, the situation that is a situs. Hence the necessi- ty of a topology of metaphysics, reproducing the a-topical and anomalous char- acter of situations. The earth, the here or there, the universal situs could then constitute a physis, could be the other name of different and irreplaceable occur- rences, the “always new.” This is what immanence is all about, the courage to endure in its place and in its role and its task. Stoicism, with its universal breath, its corporeality, its tactility. The non-transcendence, the irreplaceability, the difference, the situations, the enduring courage of finitude culminate in an “everything connects with eve- rything, elsewhere just as here” of reciprocal fittings. Leibniz, in Deleuze, is the logic of Deleuzianism. The discovery of the infinite rhizome. Language as or- der-word is a mere translation of the concept that tears away, de-localizes, and maintains in the abstract. Leibniz is the good fortune of a mathematician who wards off abstraction and reshapes it towards life. Parmenides was already refer- ring to the unity of what is, of the synechès, the synechesthai, the desmoi and peirata, the sunistamenon, of all these ways of making one on the unassailable basis of the multiple. But if all these characters obviously correspond to an immanence, can we say that they also correspond to a metaphysics? Metaphysics is above all a First
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