(An essay on the art of implication)
Lasha Kharazi[1]
_____________________________________
Abstract. This essay examines the theme of a Deleuzian experience of philosophy sensed in-between the concepts of implication and explication. Philosophy primarily deals with a concept creation, as Deleuze himself pointed out repeatedly, but if such an act of creation is not preceded by the real experience of philosophy, is not potential value of a concept itself destined to be degraded into the vulgarized identity of opinion? While following the immanent consistency of this question, it becomes distinct that the Deleuzian philosophical system implicitlykeeps in itself the reserves ofthought, the ones left without actualizations and nevertheless intuited as the more real resources for philosophical experience than any possible domain of an actualized reality. In short, in a full parallelism with Deleuzian ontology, only implicated virtual of every philosophy gives the true tonality to the explicated series of an actual one.
After Deleuze, François Zourabichvili was the first thinker who expressed Deleuzian experience of philosophy in accordance with such a logic. While clarifying the explicated registers of thought, he never ceased to be a thinker of implicated depths and of intervals, thus and on this very risky passage intensifying the affect for Deleuzian experience of philosophy. The article below conceptualizes the singularity of such experience.
Key words: Implication, explication, Deleuze, virtual, actual, Zourabichvili, philosophy, intensity, experience
_____________________________________
Writing on Deleuze is a demanding experience of thought. Incessantly fluctuating processes of sense-development, rhythmic compositions heterogeneously distributed all along the syntactic spaces of expression, continuous resonations from the contracted philosophical material, acategorical voices of thought enveloped in-between the fragmentarily substantiated intervals, intuitive dynamisms and experimentations with pre-philosophical plane of immanence — all this makes it demanding to write on him. From this plane, laid over the chaos of the virtual, a philosophical sieve selects infinite movements of thought, thus giving the proper consistency (or the actuality) to the virtual itself.[2] Together with Deleuze confronting chaos —that is confronting an infinite speed of birth and of disappearance —becomes the true ethics of philosophy. Nevertheless, the very process of doing philosophy is never passively distanced from the dangers of chaos: it neighbors with it, gazes into its undifferentiated abyss, plunges into it, and only at this price extracts from it the conceptual variations, as the most valuable realities of philosophy.[3] Writing on Deleuze, with a potentiality of encountered sign becoming an act of writing him, senses itself as the real experience of a life, altogether disinterested with hermeneutical circles of interpretation, liberated from the phenomenological authority of lived experience.[4] What matters for a Deleuzian experience of philosophy is an intensity with its two quantitative principles to keep in mind:
1) To affirm even the lowest;
2) Not to be explicated too much.[5]
Hereafter paradoxical engine of the transcendental empiricism is activated; multiplicities of concrete sensibilities, signs of encounter imperceptibly forcing thought to move from sentiendum to cogitandum.[6] And indeed, from the distinctive points of the Deleuzian philosophy, one (that concerns the peculiar primacy of sensibility on the way of thinking) is of a singular importance.
Do not explicate oneself (too much) — Deleuzian experience of philosophy always keeps in itself the invisible surplus, a pure reserve of immateriality or of not yet and never to be actualized virtuality. Evidently not in order to economize a subjectively structured process of self-expression, neither in favor of constituting the transcendent symbol for the organized field of expectation, nor even for the sake of consolidating the dissymmetry between compounds of thought and limits of consciousness. An act of explicating too much distorts the very logic of thought, its immanent consistency to be in the midst of distinct, but of obscure ideas, between differential relations of actual and of not yet and never to be differenciated movements of a virtual.[7]
In the beginning, the eventality of every philosophy springs from the touch of sensibility with the virtual sensed in the implications of Other(‘s) philosophy. At this point, the principle of intensity, that of not explicating too much, is never the preventive institution of reason for confining the effects of vulgar voluntarism or a newly categorized imperative in favor of a “proper” use of the faculties. In reality, for Deleuze the foremost question being at stake here is that of a life. But to what kind of life does it concern? Spontaneously, but the desubjectifying immanence of Quinn from “City of Glass” seems to be in the closest approximation to this question:
“At a certain point, he realized that the more he wrote,
the sooner the time would come
when he could no longer write anything.”[8]
From the pure reserves of immanent life, an event, the fragment of complete beatitude is actualized, never posed as a property of one’s biography or as an a priori individualized feature of one’s own experience, but as an immaterial and instantaneous act of a touch sensed in-between of already actualized form of the lived life and of a life in its virtual infinitude.
It is in “Immanence: A life…”, in the most contracted essay of Deleuze, symbolically dramatized as the text published two months before his death, where the possibilities of writing on him become visible.
“A life contains only virtuals.”[9]
— It is never a question of achieving absolute homology between the empirical indetermination of a life and the life in its biographical materiality. Necessarily enough the principle of not explicating too much gains its ultimate glory here, with a corresponding indirectness giving a voice to the last great and very Spinozian formula of Deleuze — “A life is everywhere.”[10] Non-dialectical triad of a life ->> the plane of immanence ->>> the transcendental field is composed, together with the fourth element crowned as an imperceptible and impersonalized affect of philosophy, as the source for these three to resonate with each other, never fully authorized by either of them, but continuously implicated between their disjunctive intervals.[11]
If taken separately, each of these three lack an expression. Transcendental field devoid of any possible reference to consciousness necessitates a plane of immanence for actualizing a thought of the outside; the plane of immanence on its side is in a permanent need of a life firstly to be laid out and afterwards to reproduce itself. A life (with indefinite article to emphasize) becomes the real and yet immaterial consistency of the event and thus repeatedly defines the geometry of disposition between the transcendental field and the plane of immanence.
“A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence.”[12]
In the Deleuzian experience of philosophy, conventionally ordered dogmatic image of thought (authorized by four fundamental coordinates: 1) innateness of the idea; 2) a priori nature of concepts; 3) sincere nature of the truth; 4) universally shared good sense) is replaced by spatiotemporal dynamisms initiated by encountered sign and preceded by a pure relations of movements between intensive quantities of the life and a life in its infinite variations.[13]
And still, why to value intensity so much? An answer to this question without supplementary detours leads to the immanent vitalism of Deleuzian philosophy, to its intensified spatium or voyage in place, something he calls thinking.[14] In a Deleuzian logic of thought, to think in the most concrete way means to experience a life – there is a hard parallelism between these two, between a life with its sign of differentiating the virtual multiplicity of the idea and a thought with its power to differenciating the virtual multiplicities into the qualities and extensions of actualized series. This very shift from the virtual process of differentiation to the actualized qualities of differenciation is the moment whence the importance of intensity gains all its value. Intensity is the operator through which the engine of actualization keeps going.
“Intensity is the determinant in the process of actualisation.
It is intensity which dramatises.”[15]
What a philosopher truly seeks, according to the Deleuzian image of thought, is the reality of a virtual. Thought, contemplation, memory, sensibility all are the ways for acquiring the real experience of a life. Thus, intensity is an echo of actualized reality that is of explication, while explication in itself always and principally depends on the order of differential relations constitutive of the idea which defines the affective parameters of the world in the process of its making. This is why echoes of intensities of explication are differentially traced from the varying intensities of implication. For Deleuze, implication with its pure intensities always stands for something individual or individuating, something he designates as the structure of “Other”, something that keeps in itself the expression of the possible/implicated world, something that conditions the coming reality of a fractured I, the one interiorizing an empty form of time either as a result of the sudden encounter with a sign or due to the sovereign freedom born out from the gifts of an old age.[16] At this point the duration of implicating and of implicated life might become the reserve of pure intensities or of (an)Other, whose psychic singularity paradoxically expresses the world and simultaneously is itself expressed with it. One phrase taken from the poet’s experience in the best way resonates with the ethics of a life lived by a fractured I:
“The man who is unable to people his solitude
is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.”[17]
Populating a self with the world or self’s process of becoming-world intensifies implicated dimensions of real experience. Through the fractured I, that is an I with the imperceptible sense for the virtual, Other becomes interiorized with and by self, imperceptibly loosening its similarity and identity with the outside and thus bit by bit contracting the world of disparities. Other in its real possibility explicates the world, but the self implicates all the variations expressed by Other.
“The Other as the expression of a possible world.”[18]
What are needed are eyes to see the invisibilities of visible realities, a word to express the experiences of language. A possible world expressed in the structure of Other becomes the source of paradoxical beatitude, of something at once existing only in its expression and nevertheless something resounding from the depth of implicated intensities of a life. An affect is given a birth in this interval between explication and implication.
“The rule invoked earlier — not to be explicated too much — meant, above all,
not to explicate oneself too much with the other, not to explicate the other
too much, but to maintain one’s implicit values and multiply
one’s own world by populating it with all those expresseds
that do not exist apart from their expressions.”[19]
For Deleuze, two dimensions of heterogeneous concept of complication (that of implication and explication), before all the possible ontic determinations, constitute ways of living, or styles of life [des styles de vie], as he later named it. Whereas implication extracts affect’s imperceptible particles from the virtual, explication materializes experimental activity of thought. What distantly bounds them together or disjunctively synthesizes them with each other is intensity.
In the intensive machinery of implication/explication, the Deleuzian experience of philosophy leaps out in its essential expression. His philosophy given as a quadrant of differentiation-individuation-dramatisation-differenciation (being in a qualitative equivalence with the model of a world), in the register of psychic systems or in a triadic notion of expression (expressor, expressed, expression) proceeds through the synthesizing asymmetry between the explication and implication.[20] What matters in this regard is that experience of philosophy implicated in Deleuze’s oeuvre becomes differentially repeated function of a world itself. The logic or immanent consistency of the Deleuzian philosophy instead of restoring the jurisdiction of a method (as the supreme guarantor for correctness of thought), adheres to the heterogeneously complicated order of ideas and problems, to the actualized spatiotemporal dynamisms and serializations, to the individuations and virtual differentiations, thus and respectively from the backdoor reanimating the notion of a system. Philosophical system actualized, that is a philosopher laying out the new plane of immanence, registers and is registered ‘by’ proportion between explication and implication. The Deleuzian experience of philosophical system in paralleling multiplicities contracts and creates the blocks of historical thought and the intuition for the ones yet to be conceptualized. Even the concept of a “concept” as the specific and the most singular reality of philosophy, in the midst of the pathos of constructivism, as its model of realization, does not achieve its distinctive status unless sufficient portions of contractions and speeds of creative experimentations are not assembled in it. From this perspective, the Deleuzian experience of philosophical system becomes an open multiplicity, composed by various resonances between problems and ideas, differential repetitions and conceptual personages, degrees of contraction and intensities of creation, contemplations and experimentations. The proportion between individuating processes of implication and dynamisms of explication sets degrees for implicated intensities of affect and for explicated extensions of percept. Whenever the principle of not being explicated too much concerns the system of philosophy, Other as a function of implication obtains all its necessary visibility. In the beginning, one as (an)Other follows explicated threads of problems and questions posed in a concrete philosophy, navigating over its plane, encountering concepts populating it. Implicated depth as a pure reserve of thought or as a possible world stays completely out of touch, unless explicated sections of thought don’t loss their overwhelming significance. Loosing in this context in no way means stepping aside from the voice and sight of explication but something remotely neighboring with the art of forgetting, with a partial vividness of the pure past or with in-itself of the past times, where from the fragment of a virtual is glimmering — “the virtual object belongs to the pure past”[21]
At this point, first principle of intensity, that of affirming (even) the lowest is coupled with an ethics of implication. Matter of eternal return is composed in the vitality of given connection. To recollect the past times (past philosophies) not as a fact of empirically lived experience, of something that ever took place in empirical memory but to touch the past of every time [passé de tout temps], memorandum as the crystal of being of the past, becoming the power of an essential memory, together with sentiendum (crystal of sensibility) and cogitandum (crystal of thought) forming the disjunctive system of a transcendental empiricism.[22] In this paradoxical constellation, the value of transcendental is to concretize crystals, while the responsibility of empiricism is to ensure the living intensities of these crystals with experimentations.
“We are born in a crystal, but the crystal retains only death,
and life must come out of it, after trying itself out.”[23]
From this point of view, the Deleuzian experience of philosophy together with created concepts and intensities of repetition becomes the quasi-empirical equivalent or virtual object for his system itself. Deleuzian ontological variation of eternal return extracts a fragment from the power of essential forgetting in order to reconfigure the regime of non-philosophical disposition to philosophy and subsequently to lay out the novel plane of immanence.
“The genius of eternal return lies not in memory
but in waste, in active forgetting.”[24]
Forgetting gives voice to the repetition of return, but the very object of return is the process of becoming Other, — never the same or the forgotten object recollected in its similitude. Thus, doing philosophy with Deleuze, writing and thinking him by right poses the question about the real possibilities of forgetting as the condition for becoming the “-nth” power of memory, all along with its innermost path of actualization repeating only differences.
This is the point where from François Zourabichvili’s experience of Deleuzian philosophy pays one’s attention. There is something gravitating in this experience, not so much in the explicated registers of conceptualizations as in the depth of implicated dimensions of a philosopher living. Zourabichvili’s explicated register of Deleuzian philosophy is composed by two fundamental claims, those ones regarding the absence of ontology and the centrality of an event in Deleuze’s philosophical system. Implicated is always in-between words, phrases, punctuations, voices, signed with simultaneity of nowhere and now-here, haunted by an affective crystal for times yet to come. What gravitates in Zourabichvili’s experience of Deleuzian philosophy is a pure dynamism between implicated and explicated registers of thought. The consistency of a given dynamism is entirely constituted by the logics of continuation. Thought must be continued in its repetitive affirmation. Not to interpret but to affirm in difference, not to investigate but to sense the fragment of implicated intensity, not to follow the figuration of a phrase but to give the voice to the intervals dissolved in-between words — “the interval is substance”.[25] Zourabichvili’s image of Deleuze attracts thought in this interval of indiscernibility and yet of something being expressed in distinctiveness with Deleuzian experience of philosophy, given as a potentiality of thought to move infinitely in-between of explicated order of things and of virtual singularities of philosophy. In the first preface to his main work on Deleuze, Zourabichvili writes:
“Is he a Spinozist, a Nietzschean, a Bergsonian? (Is he good? Is he bad?)
What belongs to Deleuze and what belongs to others is hardly discernible,
and cannot be evaluated in terms of authenticity or influence.
By contrast, the new and anonymous configuration that is affirmed
in this free indirect oeuvre is distinct, and it can bear no name other
than that of Deleuze. And it is that which interests us here.”[26]
Zourabichvili’s Deleuzian experience before appropriating any kind of functional model for its actualization follows the affects for implicated registers of thought. “For Deleuze, the affect is truth”[27] — And this is so not for the purpose of depotentializing the value of truth — a mere inheritance of a vulgar nihilism, but for the sake of giving a voice to the productive power of perspectivism, to the multiple variations of truth. What matters at this point is that an affect as the image of truth, in no way presupposes reactive voluntarism of a subject-philosopher, but the one who singularizes the experience of implicated intensities of virtual, encountering the sign of the outside, contingency of Other(‘s) philosophy. An event of philosophical simplicity might occur at this place. Crystals of sentiendum, memorandum and cogitandum each in its distinctiveness emitting the signs of a life, multiplicities of virtual singularities, in the genitality of thought transfiguring the dynamism of a philosophical creation.
“It seems to us that the history of philosophy should play a role
roughly analogous to that of collage in painting. The history of philosophy
is the reproduction of philosophy itself. In the history of philosophy,
a commentary should act as a veritable double and
bear the maximal modification appropriate to a double.”[28]
In the explicated registers of thought Zourabichvili seems to be content with this formulation for the history of philosophy. Indeed, he reproduces and recombines fragments from Deleuzian philosophy, composing and disseminating veritable doubles of thought. And still, how far his entire experience of Deleuzian philosophy might be framed with this definition? Limited domain of explicated commentaries…? If affect becomes a truth, does not philosophy (in its expression) with it become an implicated crystal of the virtual, lightning between the fragmentary body of a life (philosophy of Deleuze) and commentaries (history of philosophy) on it? From this point of view every singularly expressed history of philosophy becomes the continuation of the implicated virtual for the actual one.
“The virtual is not a second world, it does not exist outside of bodies
even though it does not resemble their actuality. It is not
the ensemble of possibilities, but that which bodies implicate,
that of which bodies are the actualization. The abstraction
begins once bodies are separated from the virtual they implicate,
retaining only the disincarnated appearance
of a pure actuality (representation).”[29]
A philosophical body in its experimental condition implicates virtual or at least is attuned to do so. An act of implication is never the task limited by the censoring function of consciousness but is intensified by impersonally affirmative continuation. With the sign of encounter thinking is engendered in thought but encounter itself is always a touch with virtual singularities, with their quasi-immateriality — “an encounter is always inexplicable.”[30] Zourabichvili’s singularity around the Deleuzian body of work is first of all defined by impersonalized and pre-individualized ability to give a movement to the Deleuzian sense for a reality of the virtual, to follow its intensive becomings and all along this risky passage to constitute the new image and time for thought.
So, if Zourabichvili gives the voice to the implicated intensities of Deleuzian philosophy, how to think (about) the philosopher who himself wrote on Deleuze? What might be our perspective at this point? Justifying the explicated affinity between the two would be of interpretative value, organizing principle of which would inevitably lead us to the supreme authority of signification and therefore in the neighborhood to the dogmatic image of thought. Critically examining the Zourabichvilian resonations for the concepts created by Deleuze, would be of functional importance and nevertheless something marked with the portion of exhausted automatism of thought. The question to be asked in this regard concerns not to the psychologically stimulated motivations of a thinker or to the epistemologically licensed optics of one’s own interest, but to the pragmatics of philosophy in its infinite continuation. How to ensure continuation of philosophy? Where and how to pick up that Nietzschean arrow that gives the living necessity to the philosophical untimeliness?
Unmasking erroneousness of any philosophical tradition is never the solution here. Alliance between Nietzschean force of demystification as the principal function of philosophy together with Deleuzian imperative for concept creation all together steps aside from judgmental eyes of dogmatic image of thought. A philosopher-demystifier with the power of created concepts aims to experience philosophy in its actual necessity. Overcoming established order of things, valuing a life as the immanence of immanence, denouncing tyrannies and intensifying active compositions all are epiphenomenon of philosophically signed experience. In such constellation of things, philosophy becomes the materialized source for implicated energy of a life and the one who leaps into this dynamism of becoming-other crowns the process of infinite movement of thought.
“The question ‘what use is philosophy?’ is therefore especially poorly posed.
Philosophy is not a discourse on life but a vital activity,
a way life has of intensifying itself by preserving its passages,
of testing and evaluating its own divergences and incompatibilities
— in short, of becoming-subject, with all the ambiguity and instability
characterizing the disjunctive synthesis. In this respect,
nothing is more painful than the spiteful jeremiads
about the abstraction of philosophers and the little concern
they show for explaining and giving a meaning to “lived experience” [vécu].
In fact, they have better things to do. They have to live,
to become, and to live the becoming-subject of life.
The philosopher thinks only by virtue of signs encountered,
and we need not look elsewhere for his relation to his time,
his untimely presence today.”[31]
Even dictionary (something over-formalistic by its nature) of Deleuzian concepts written by Zourabichvili, affirms a philosopher’s highest virtue of becoming impersonality of a life. The language becomes the living material for the virtual, only distantly refracting the implicated intensities of thought in words. What if a logical movement of thought and a philosopher’s will for clarification proceeds through explicated variations of sense, whilst implicated singularities of virtual resonate from in-betweens of language? Understanding necessitates the operation of translation, while encountering the sensible sign of philosophy or the immanent affect for a life releases its incorporeal double in the midst of a pre-philosophical intuition of the language.
What if a life in its nonorganic power before all other systems summons the being of a language? For a philosopher who does not hesitate to philosophize it certainly does in the closest approximation. A philosopher in the wilderness of concept creation together with crystallized sensibilities for material movement of a word lays out the novel plane of immanence. For populating the pre-philosophical plane of immanence, language necessitates concepts of its own creation. This is why, in his very specific way Deleuze intensifies the productive alliance between a language and philosophy and Zourabichvili being from the first ones, who experienced implicated intensities of Deleuzian thought alongside with impersonalized sign of a philosopher.
From this point of view, François Zourabichvili’s main work on Deleuze, (Deleuze. Une philosophie de l’événement), is less a work of clarification than of an intervalized continuation. The object of continuation is a Deleuzian thought itself. New ethics for history of philosophy is one more time regained – The one being completely indifferent to faith in interpretations. Interpretations always come after, they are nearly everywhere. What matters for Zourabichvili are the real possibilities for encountering Deleuzian experience in affective tonalities of philosophy. Zourabichvili invents Deleuzian affect not primarily as an instrument for clarifying him but as the principal source for continuously affirming his philosophy into the repetitive infinitude of the same affect. Intensities of implicated breath, movements of thought in-between the proper names, crystals of sensibilities and infinite lines of disjunctive continuations all together saturate the Zourabichvilian experience of Deleuzian affect.
“Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words” [32]
Touching the implicated depth of a virtual and thus following the principle of not explicating too much inaugurates the logic of the event for this distinct and yet indiscernible regime of philosophy. Together with Zourabichvili doing history of philosophy becomes the sign of (an)Other as an actualized expression of a possible world.
“And in a certain respect, the world never ceases to produce signs,
is composed of nothing but signs, on condition that
we be sensitive to them.”[33]
Doing history of philosophy as the immanent continuum for affect creation. Encountering Deleuze in the midst of philosophical affect, whence dogmatism of representational mind unexpectedly fades away and thread of intuition becomes more real than any other form of actuality. Zourabichvili with his philosophical hour invites us into this singular temporality, the eventality of which springs from the Deleuzian experience of thought, the one from the very beginning signed with the hard necessity to do philosophy as the intensity coming from its infinitely immanent continuation:
“To seize the world or Nature in its eventality [événementialité],
to create signs in language that preserve its distinctions or singularities (concepts)
— this is what is proper to philosophy. The philosophical hour
is not that of general rather than particular questions,
but that of singular questions that seize the event as such,
or which seize things as events. A concept does not represent reality,
it neither comments upon it nor explains it:
it carves out pure dramas within what happens,
independently of the persons or objects to which they happen.
Thus the Other, space, time, matter, thought, truth, possibility, etc.,
can become concepts because they are treated as events.”[34]
Thus, philosophy in the circle of encounter between Deleuze and Zourabichvili, primarily experiences itself as an art of implication. There is a sense placed in the very depth of mentioned encounter, that before explicating a thing we need to possess the reserves of implicated intensities of a life, of those eventual complications that are never fully expressed and nevertheless, that are the only realities giving the true consistency to thoughts that we are.
_____________________________________
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities – Collected Essays in Philosophy. Translation by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
Baudelaire, Charles. Paris spleen. Translated by Louise Varese. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1970.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 2: The time-image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Caleta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columia University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translation by Hugh Tomlinson. London, New York: Continuum, 2002.
Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence — Essays on a life. Translated by Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guatarri Felix. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guatarri Félix. What is philosophy?. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles & Parnet Claire. Dialogues II. Translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Stevens, Wallace. Selected poems and a play. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Zourabichvili, François. Deleuze: A philosophy of the event together with the vocabulary of Deleuze. Translated by Kieran Aarons. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2012.
[1] Lasha Kharazi is a PhD student of philosophy department at the Tbilisi State University and an invited lecturer at the Caucasus University. His sphere of research is the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
[2] But how to define the plane of immanence and its disposition to the registers of the actual and the virtual? For the Deleuzian image of thought, this disposition is of strategic importance, insofar as the very experience of philosophy and the possibilities of creation in general are conditioned by it. So, let us ask the question, what is the plane of immanence? Together with Deleuze one rarely encounters the domain of fixed definitions, but of affirmative approximations hovering all over the objects of thought. In What is philosophy? we read: “The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought. It is not a method, since every method is concerned with concepts and presupposes such an image.” This fragment seems to be essential in understanding the disposition between the plane of immanence and the registers of the actual and the virtual. For Deleuze, every possible thought necessitates its own image through which it engenders the act of thinking within itself [anarchic pathos of A Thousand Plateaus, with its attempt to liberate thought from any kind of image at all, is not relevant in this regard]. But the thinker i.e. the one who thinks the thought never grasps the materiality of thought in its always already actualized reality [vulgarity of opinion?]. The process of engendering the act of thinking in thought — i.e. constructing the image of thought proceeds by the tiniest particles, i.e. the virtuals, — the ones occurring “in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable.” So, what is this virtual that encircles the relationship between the plane of immanence and the actualizations we experience? Stylistically in a very unusual text of Deleuze, The Actual and the Virtual, we read: “The plane of immanence, upon which the dissolution of the actual object occurs, is itself constituted when both object and image are virtual. But the process of actualization undergone by the actual is one which has as great an effect on the image as it does on the object.” The common characteristic between the chaos and the virtual is that both of them occur with infinite speeds and movements. Philosophy with all its powers of actualization proceeds through constructions made from the virtuality of the plane of immanence and the series of actualizations problematized within the actual. See Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What is philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 37, 118; Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, „The actual and the Virtual,” in Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 148, 149.
[3] Deleuze & Guattari, What is philosophy?, 118, 202.
[4] Difference between the life and a life constitutes the implicit and never fully conceptualized kernel of the Deleuzian philosophy. In a parallelism with the logic of difference between the actual and the virtual (developed in the endnote # I), the life can be identified as the equivalent of the individualized actuality (necessarily including animals and plants), while a life (with indefinite article) is implicated as the ontological equivalent of the anonymous and extra-biographical virtual, something singular by its very nature, “beyond” any possibilities of naming and symbolization. In his final essay, Immanence: Une Vie… (English translation of which very mistakenly lacks the sign of ellipsis in the name), we find the only fragment where the Deleuzian sense for a life is articulated. Let us quote the entire passage: “What is immanence? A Life . . . No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens, if we take the indefinite article as an index of the transcendental. A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a ‘Homo tantum’ with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude. It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject who incarnated in the midst of things that made it good or bad. The life of such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other. A singular essence, a life . . .” This very image of a life set as the immanent source for philosophical experience leaves no place for the philosopher being interested with the phenomenological norm of lived experience. What matters for the one is the intensity of implicated life itself. Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A life,” in Pure Immanence — Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 28-29.
[5] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 244
[6] Intensity with its two quantitative principles is only possible to be activated within the machine of transcendental empiricism. But what is the idea of transcendental empiricism? In the Deleuzian experience of philosophy, virtual as the infinite reserve of impersonal and pre-individual singularities is by nature transcending any kind of consciousness. For Deleuze personal (in the Kantian sense of the personal form of I) or impersonal (in the Sartrian sense of impersonal form) modality of consciousness never grasps the true meaning of transcendental. The reality of experience (and not its mere possibility that always already doubles the data of consciousness as in a Kantian version of transcendentality) is singularized by empirical manifestations and nevertheless, the transcendental is never merely traced from the empirical. As Zourabichvili explicates: “What it really means is that we can never speak in advance of every experience, except by missing its essential variation, its inherent singularity, and by applying to it a discourse so general as to leave the concept and the object in a relation of mutual indifference.” For Deleuze the real experience is the substance being principally independent from the modalities of consciousness. The short fragment from Giorgio Agamben’s ingenious text on Deleuze might be helpful in this regard: “From Descartes to Husserl, the cogito made the transcendental possible as a field of consciousness. But if it thus appears in Kant as a pure consciousness without any experience, in Deleuze, by contrast, the transcendental is resolutely separated from every idea of consciousness, appearing as an experience without either consciousness or subject: a transcendental empiricism, in Deleuze’s truly paradoxical formula.” Intensity as the material for the real experience to singularize itself is activated within the machine of transcendental empiricism. Simply following Deleuze it becomes clear that apprehending the crystal of the sensible or something that can only be sensed in the sensible, the real experience of a life proceeds through the differential elements in intensity: “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.” See François Zourabichvili, “The Vocabulary of Deleuze,” in Deleuze: A philosophy of the event together with the vocabulary of Deleuze, trans. Kieran Aarons (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 211. Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities – Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 225. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56-57, 141.
[7] For Deleuze ideas are the purely virtual multiplicities that are actualized by differenciation. Speaking otherwise, all the spatio-temporal dynamisms (species and parts, qualities and extensities) are actualized as a result of the idea being differenciated. And intensive field of individuation or simply intensity as Deleuze writes is the determinant in this process of actualization/differenciation/genuine creation. But the idea itself, in its own virtuality is undifferenciated, and nevertheless it must not be identified with something indeterminate. Ideas as the virtual multiplicities are differentiated i.e. they keep to be “real without being actual”. From this standpoint the quantitative principle of intensity of not explicating too much becomes the method for intuiting the virtual multiplicities of ideas. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 214, 279, 245, 247
[8] Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy, (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 128.
[9] Deleuze, „Immanence: A life,“ 31.
[10] Ibid., 29.
[11] In already mentioned “Immanence: A life…” the final essay of Deleuze, which can be considered as the text-contraction or the crystal-text reflecting the entire body of work of Deleuze (written under the utterly deteriorated health condition), the first time Deleuzian thinker is placed in-between the triadic circle of a life, the plane of immanence and the transcendental field. Whilst the transcendental field is defined as “a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self”, that is consciousness without any revelation or simply non-consciousness, the plane of immanence annuls any possible reference of transcendental field to the consciousness (even taken in a conceptual relation to the former) once and for all. Thus, the transcendental field being devoid of any form of consciousness opens the way to the plane of immanence, which in essence is the immanence always being immanent only to itself. A life for Deleuze is nothing more than an absolute immanence or the immanence of immanence. Something that is beyond subjective or objective determinations, never fully actualized in time-space and never grasped in the materiality of lived experience. It is a life of pure virtuals, of pure singularities which are never the datas of explicated biography but of implicated intensities experienced into the intervals of event. Philosophical affect understood in accordance with the Deleuzian image of thought becomes the vital material for this three to resonate with each other. See Deleuze, “Immanence: A life,” 25-33.
[12] Deleuze, “Immanence: A life,” 27.
[13] Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London, New York, Continuum, 2002), 103
[14] Ibid., 482.
[15] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 245.
[16] Ibid., 260-261.
[17] Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: A New Directions Book, 1970), 20.
[18] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 261.
[19] Ibid., 261
[20] The world and the psychic system inhabiting it functions in accordance with the quadrant of differentiation-individuation-dramatisation-differenciation. The generic passage of a thing born out from the idea begins from the virtual differentiations of pure intensity which is followed by the intensive field of individuation thus determining the multiplicity of relations incarnated in the spatio-temporal dynamisms expressed by the process of dramatization, which on its own, in case of species is being corresponded by the process of specific differenciation. Deleuze points out repeatedly that spatio-temporal dynamisms or an act of creating the space by the idea is always signed by the dramas they immanently possess. “The world is an egg, but the egg itself is a theatre: a staged theatre in which the roles dominate the actors, the spaces dominate the roles and the Ideas dominate the spaces. Furthermore, by virtue of the complexity of Ideas and their relations with other Ideas, the spatial dramatisation is played out on several levels: in the constitution of an internal space, but also in the manner in which that space extends into the external extensity, occupying a region of it.” See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 251, 216.
[21] Ibid., 102.
[22] Ibid., 140.
[23] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 86.
[24] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 55.
[25] Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 478.
[26] François Zourabichvili, “Deleuze: A philosophy of the event,” in: Deleuze: A philosophy of the event together with the vocabulary of Deleuze, trans. Kieran Aarons (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 43
[27] Ibid., 124.
[28] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, XXI.
[29] Zourabichvili, „Deleuze: A philosophy of the event,“ 107.
[30] Ibid., 57.
[31] Ibid, 130.
[32] Wallace Stevens, “Two figures in dense violet light,” in Selected poems and a play (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 85.
[33] Zourabichvili, “Deleuze: A philosophy of the event,” 67.
[34] Ibid., 130.