國立臺灣大學文學院外國語文學系 博士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts
National Taiwan University Doctoral Dissertation
菲利浦羅斯與大衛福斯特華萊士中的 德勒茲式內在性創造
Deleuzian Immanent Creation in Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace
李書雨 Shu-yu Lee
指導教授：廖咸浩博士 Advisor: Hsien-hao Liao, Ph.D.
中華民國 106 年 5 月 May 2017
Acknowledgements
This dissertation would not have been possible without the professors whose classes I had the pleasure of attending during my PhD program. Professor Kirill Thompson showed me the importance of sharing and interaction in the academic environment. Professor Hung-chiung Li inspired me to always aim for the highest standards in writing and thinking. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee—Professor Pin-chia Feng, Professor Chien-chi Liu, Professor Hsin-Ying Li, and Professor Li-Chun Hsiao—for their constructive comments and thoughtful advice, which helped me improve my work significantly. I am deeply indebted to my supervisor and mentor, Professor Hsien-Hao Liao, for his scholarly insight and wisdom and for setting up a perfect example of what an academic should aspire to be. Nothing sustained me more during my work on the dissertation than the love and support of my family. Most importantly, I am grateful to C. H. Fong for being there for me throughout the years.
摘要
創造向來被認為是來自超越這個世界的另一境界。在超越性思想中，本體創 生來自於非物質領域；美學創作是超越主體作用在被動的物質上，倫理則是應用 現有的規範和原則。菲利浦羅斯與大衛福斯特華萊士的小說質疑超越性本體論並 表達內在性創造思想。在他們的許多作品中，創造是一個源於物質的體現 (embodiment)過程，並具有無法預測的實驗性質。本論文從德勒茲內在性創造理 論的角度閱讀羅斯與華萊士小說中關於創造的描寫，認為主體更新是由不可感知 的自生性物質所驅動，藝術創作非等於再現而是促使世界改變，倫理則在於實現 自己和他者的主體再生。
本論文第一章概述德勒茲哲學中的內在性創造，並討論主體作為一個不斷流 變的過程。第二章探討羅斯和華萊士小說中的體現和主體性，以及羅斯和華萊士 如何挑戰現代人文主義和後現代科技的去身體化，重新將主體思考為不同物質的 連接與斷裂。第三章聚焦內在性美學，討論羅斯小說中的非再現式故事編造如何 引發作家本身和世界的本體更新，以及華萊士的敘述風格如何激發讀者的主體再 生。結論部分探討內在性本體論、藝術，與倫理學的對等性，並說明羅斯和華萊 士的想像力倫理如何使生命成為藝術作品。
關鍵詞：菲利浦羅斯、大衛福斯特華萊士、德勒茲、創造、內在性
Abstract
Since antiquity in the Western world, creation has been considered to originate in a transcendent realm out of this world. In transcendent thought, ontological creation has its foundation in an idealist sphere, aesthetic creation is the work of a transcendent, autonomous subject on passive matter, and ethics is the application of preexisting rules and tenets. All these assumptions have seen vigorous rebuttal in the novels of Philip Roth and David foster Wallace. In many of their works, creation is an embodied process originating in matter and takes an experimental course with neither preconceived telos nor predictable results. Employing Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, which conceptualizes matter as alive and inventive in itself, this dissertation argues that in Philip Roth’s and David foster Wallace’s novels, the renewal of subjectivity is driven immanently by imperceptible, self-creative matter, artistic creation consists not in representation but in bringing change into the world, and ethics lies in enabling subjective regenesis in oneself and others.
After the introduction, which discusses the origin of the project and the concepts fundamental to the methodology of the dissertation, the first chapter presents an overview of immanent creation in Deleuzian philosophy and investigates the ontogenesis of the subject as an ongoing process of the vitalist matter. Chapter Two explores embodiment and subjectivity in Roth’s and Wallace’s novels to show how Roth and Wallace challenge modern humanist and postmodern technological disembodiment respectively and how they conceptualize the renewal of subjectivity as the connecting and disconnecting of diverse material forces. Chapter Three turns to the aesthetics of immanence to demonstrate how, in Roth, non-representational story-making induces the ontological renewal of the artist and of the world and how
Wallace’s narrative style exercises the ability of art to effect the regeneration of subjectivity in the reader. The conclusion examines the adequation of ontology, art, and ethics in immanence and shows how Roth’s and Wallace’s ethics of imagination is an immanent ethics that makes life a work of art.
Keywords: Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Gilles Deleuze, creation, immanence
Contents
Introduction . . . 1
Chapter One: Immanent Creation in Deleuze Section One: Immanence in Deleuze’s Philosophy . . . 28
Section Two: The Ontogenesis of the Subject . . . 48
Chapter Two: Ontology of Immanence and Embodied Creation in Roth and Wallace Section One: Embodiment: Crossroads between Roth, Wallace, and Deleuze . . . 72
Section Two: Regenesis of Subjectivity in Wallace’s Infinite Jest . . . 94
Section Three: Roth’s The Human Stain and Creative Lines of Life . . . 113
Section Four: Ontological Creation Through the Probe-Head in Roth’s ‘Eli, the Fanatic . . . 127
Section Five: Boredom and Creation in Wallace’s The Pale King . . . 143
Chapter Three: Aesthetics of Immanence and Literary Creation in Roth and Wallace Section One: Power of the False . . . 155
Section Two: Wallace’s ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’ and Crystalline Narration . 166 Section Three: Wallace’s Style and the Becoming of Language . . . 184
Section Four: Roth’s Aesthetic of Creative Fabulation . . . 203
Conclusion: Ethics of Immanence . . . 226
Works Cited . . . 233
Abbreviations Works by Deleuze
B Bergsonism
C2 Cinema 2
D DR
Dialogues II
Difference and Repetition ECC Essays Critical and Clinical
EPS Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza FB
FLB KCP LS N NP PI PS SPP
Francis Bacon
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Kant’s Critical Philosophy
The Logic of Sense Negotiations
Nietzsche and Philosophy Pure Immanence
Proust and Signs
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
Works by Deleuze and Guattari AO
ATP WP
Anti-Oedipus
A Thousand Plateaus What is Philosophy?
Works by Roth AL
AP EG GW HS IMC
The Anatomy Lesson American Pastoral Exit Ghost
The Ghost Writer The Human Stain I Married a Communist
Works by Wallace IJ
PK
Infinite Jest The Pale King
Introduction
In his well-known commencement speech, “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace urges graduating seniors to imagine themselves as working adults driving home in a traffic jam when a massive SUV overtakes them and blocks their way. Instead of cursing the driver, they can consider the possibility that the driver inside is a recovering victim of a traumatic auto crash or a father rushing to get his sick child to the hospital. This, Wallace emphasizes, is not an exercise in compassion or other virtues, but learning to think, which means “altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered”. An ethical way of everyday living lies in this ability to imagine the lives of others. This ethical approach to others is shared by Philip Roth. In The Ghost Writer, he had the protagonist, writer Nathan Zuckerman, rehabilitate the historical figure of Anne Frank.
As Zuckerman engages in a “sympathetic attempt to fully imagine her,” Frank is freed from sanctification by people using her name to buttress their moral dogmas (“Novelist’s Obsession”). To the question “what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people?” Roth has Zuckerman answer: to imagine them (AP 35).
Roth and Wallace, born 30 years apart and growing up in different cultural environs—a Jewish immigrant community in Newark, New Jersey, and the predominantly white Midwestern state of Illinois respectively, nevertheless have in common the writerly ethics of imagination, an ethics in sharp contrast to moral propriety. Morals, which involve judgment according to inviolable transcendent norms, were not their concern. What they care about is how people act in real situations. That is why Wallace gives his array of morally questionable characters,
with drug dealers, murderers, and traitors among them, sympathetic portrayals that show an author’s willingness to imagine how characters are shaped by their environment and in turn change that environment. It is also why Roth had Zuckerman, the writer-narrator of nine of Roth’s novels, try to understand the Swede, the stigmatized father of a teenage terrorist in American Pastoral, and Coleman Silk, the college professor ostracized for apparent racism in The Human Stain, not through the prism of moral codes but by imagining how they interact with the changing economic, political, racial, and sexual forces in their society.
The ethics shared by Roth and Wallace expresses a pre-conceptual orientation of thought toward immanence, and the accompanying refusal to accept established doxa and moral principles with which to judge people. This ethics of immanence “calls on us to attend to the situations of our lives in all their textured specificity and to open ourselves up to responses that go beyond a repertoire of comfortably familiar, automatic reactions and instead access creative solutions to what are always unique problems” (Lorraine, Deleuze and Guattari’s Immanent Ethics 1). Roth’s and Wallace’s novels express the ethics of immanence, which does not teach lessons of morality—a code of behavior transcendent of lived experience—but endeavors to experiment with how people affect and are affected by each other and their environment. The immanent ethics in Roth’s and Wallace’s fiction can be understood fully form the perspective of Gilles Deleuze, who distinguishes ethics from moral principles. In Deleuze’s philosophy, “Ethics . . . replaces Morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values” and “system of judgement” (SPP 23).
Following Spinoza, Deleuze defines ethics as ethology, the study “of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterizes each thing” (“Ethology” 60).
Affective relations within this world without transcendent values are exactly what Roth and Wallace explore through their respective fictional universes.
Roth’s and Wallace’s shared immanent ethics provided a point of departure for the present research project. Since the ethics of immanence has its roots in an immanent ontology, and, in Roth’s and Wallace’s fiction, dovetails with an aesthetics of immanence, the project was expanded to also examine the ontology and aesthetics of immanence in the works of the two writers. In all the three aspects—ontology, aesthetics, and ethics of immanence—“creation” is the keyword. When immanence orients ontology, aesthetics, and ethics, these areas of thought break free from transcendent criteria and become discrete aspects of creation. Questions of what being is, what art is, and what is right or wrong are replaced by questions of how anything comes into existence and what kind of conduct promotes such creation. With its focus on processes of change and creation, Deleuze’s philosophy is uniquely equipped to provide a theoretical framework for the current project. This dissertation argues that, in Roth’s and Wallace’s fiction, the creation and renewal of subjectivity is driven immanently by imperceptible, self-creative matter, artistic creation consists not in representation but in bringing change into the world, and ethics lies in enabling subjective regenesis in oneself and others.
At first glance, Roth and Wallace may seem an odd couple to be placed in the same dissertation. In fact, Wallace has specifically criticized Roth alongside John Updike and Norman Mailer as a prime example of what he calls the “Great Male Narcissists” generation (“John Updike”). In this 1997 essay, Wallace accused the three veteran writers of solipsism: their persistent focus on the self, expressed through protagonists and narrators who markedly resemble the real-life authors themselves.
In his influential 1993 essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,”
Wallace had already distanced himself from Roth’s generation of writers and the postmodernist irony they exhibited. As a feature of the postmodernist aesthetic, irony for Wallace means self-consciousness, self-referentiality, and metafictional reflexivity.
Although it served as an effective form of “ground-clearing” in the 1960s and 1970s, liberating fiction from mimesis, irony failed to install something new in the empty space (67). Wallace therefore calls for fellow writers to rebel against postmodernist irony by having the unfashionable courage to “endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles” (81).
Wallace did not mention Roth by name, but many of Roth’s works epitomize the postmodernist irony he criticized. The multi-framed The Counterlife is a postmodern ironic metafiction par excellence, and so are American Pastoral and The Human Stain.
Irony is even more conspicuous in Deception, whose protagonist, “Philip,” is the author of the Zuckerman books. Operation Shylock: A Confession, narrated by one Philip Roth, takes the ironic self-reflexivity even further by claiming to be factual account in its “Preface” while averring its fiction status in “Note to the Reader.” Even The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography is not immune to irony, as it incorporates the fictional Zuckerman to undermine the credibility of the supposed memoir.
Ironic self-reflexivity, as Brian McHale argues, is a major characteristic of the ontological problematic that defines the postmodernist fiction. It works to highlight
“the textuality of the text” by creating the “ontological tension” between the world of words on the page and the extra-textual world (Postmodernist Fiction 146, 145).
Having fictional characters talk back to their authors, as The Facts does, “foregrounds ontological boundaries and ontological structure” (35). Incorporating “real-world
figures” into fiction, as Operation Shylock does, violates the ontological boundaries separating fact and fiction (85).1
In ontology lies the departure of postmodernist fiction from modernist fiction.
According to McHale, the dominant focus of the modernist novel is “the mind in its engagement with the world,” that is to say, epistemology (Cambridge 14). This can be seen in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, in which multiple narrative perspectives act to interrogate how we obtain knowledge of the world and whether we can be certain in our knowledge (14). While the modernist novel takes for granted the world where the epistemological pursuit is played out, the postmodernist novel brings that world to the foreground to investigate its construction. The postmodernist novel thus makes ontology its dominant problematic. “Postmodernism multiplied and juxtaposed worlds; it troubled and volatilized them” (15). A prominent instance is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, where epistemological quests collapse as the world in which they take place loses its stability, multiplying into alternative realities (16).
If Roth accords squarely with the postmodernist preoccupation with ontology, Wallace, a self-appointed rebel against Roth’s generation, surely must have made a move beyond the ontological? This is not the case if one looks at Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King, published in 2011. As “Philip Roth” did in 1993 in Operation Shylock,
“David Wallace” claims in “Author’s Foreword” that the book is a “nonfiction memoir” and yet contradicts that claim by including the typical fiction disclaimer on
1 In an interview following the publication of Operation Shylock, Roth insists the book is non-fiction.
the copyright page (PK 73).2 The postmodern preoccupation with ontology and the instability of the fiction-fact boundary is still very much alive in Wallace.
Wallace’s most obvious engagement with postmodernist metafiction is the short story “Octet.” It is composed of a number of vignettes in the form of “pop quizzes”
that expose their own statuses as pop quizzes, with the last quiz reflecting on the textuality of the previous quizzes. In this last quiz, the narrator asks the reader to step into the shoes of the “fiction writer” of “Octet” and figure out how to convey the
“urgency” of the subject matter explored in the previous quizzes to readers in metafictional form while preventing them from viewing such narratives as a “cute formal exercise in . . . S.O.P. metatext” (147).
The self-reflection of “Octet” on the reflexivity of fiction adds complexity to the ontological problematic foregrounded by postmodernist fiction but hardly signifies a departure from it. It marks “an intensification and mutation within postmodernism”
rather than a project “absolutely foreign” to postmodernism (Nealon ix). While postmodernist fiction like Roth’s effects “a form of ontological flicker between . . . two worlds,” post-postmodernist fiction like Wallace’s gives the ontological structure of the worlds a further jerk (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction 90). In this sense, there is not a rupture between Roth and Wallace, but an aesthetic continuum. This dissertation contributes to both postmodern scholarship and post-postmodern studies by exploring the aesthetic continuum—in particular, a shared expression of immanent creation—
connecting two of most influential novelists of their respective generations.
To do so, I will present a Deleuzian reading of relevant works selected from Roth’s immense oeuvre—mainly the Zuckerman books—and Wallace’s more mature
2 An extended comparison between Operation Shylock and The Pale King in terms of metafictional framing can be found in Boswell.
fiction, published since the 1990s. Such selection is necessary because both Roth’s and Wallace’s oeuvres defy totalization and it would be too facile to claim Roth and Wallace as Deleuzian novelists. Therefore, the aim of the dissertation is to tease out the intersections between Roth, Wallace, and Deleuze. Although ethics is an undercurrent running through all three’s works, few of their writings deal directly with ethics. For this reason, this dissertation will present Deleuzian readings of Roth and Wallace in areas of ontology and aesthetics directly, through close textual analyses of the novels in juxtaposition with Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, and then discuss how Roth’s and Wallace’s ontological and aesthetic commitments evince an ethics in keeping with the philosophy of immanence.
By enlisting Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence for the interpretation of Roth’s novels, I hope to bring to light the philosophical aspects of Roth’s works. Despite the abundance of Roth scholarship, philosophical engagement with his works remains scant. Fortunately, the last few years saw an increased academic interest in the philosophical implications of Roth’s works. In “Sartrian Nothingness: Roth’s The Ghost Writer, The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman Unbound, The Prague Orgy, and Exit Ghost,” James Duban interprets five of the nine Zuckerman books as the dramatization of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. According to Duban, Roth’s books depict the existential flight that the transcendent consciousness takes toward creative possibilities, thereby negating facticity. In his 2014 monograph, Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, and a series of essays predating the book, Patrick Hayes argues that Roth was deeply influenced by Nietzsche to seek in literature a will to power beyond “the ethical turn,” the recent trend among intellectuals to restitute “humanistic relevance of literature from the influence of deconstruction (493). For Hayes, Zuckerman’s literary art is an expression of the will to power not to be constricted by moral codes.
The present study complements Duban’s and Hayes’ work on the philosophical richness of Roth’s works. By reading Roth through the perspective of Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, this dissertation aims to bring Roth up to date and into dialogue with contemporary theory. The affinity between Roth and Deleuze can already be glimpsed in Hayes’ “‘The Nietzschean Prophecy Come True’: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife and the Aesthetics of Identity,” where Hayes alludes to Deleuze regarding the aesthetic evaluation of identity to show the similarity between Roth’s characterization of Zuckerman and Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche (498).
Without negating the possible indebtedness of Roth to Nietzsche in aesthetics, this dissertation will demonstrate a strong affinity between Roth and Deleuze not only in aesthetics but also in ontology and ethics.
A dissertation on Roth would not be doing its job if it did not tackle the concept of subjectivity, which Roth himself has claimed as his subject (Sheppard qtd. in Shostak 3). In Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives, one of the most influential monographs on Roth, Debra Shostak traces the dialogue between Roth’s different books surrounding the concept of subjectivity. Within the nine Zuckerman books, different ideas of subjectivity are in evidence. Subjectivity are variously depicted as embodied, a construct of language, or determined by history (46).
Derek Parker Royal, also a prominent Roth scholar, has shown subjectivity in The Counterlife to be “an open-ended and always ongoing process” (“Roth” 30;
“Postmodern” 427). Roth’s metafictional devices further strengthen the sense of subjectivity as a construct (“Postmodern” 424). Regarding the ethnic subject in American Pastoral, Royal similarly argues that it is “an ongoing project, a negotiation of possibilities,” a conception similar to R. Radhakrishnan’s “post-ethnic” subject,
which derives from the Derridean deconstructionist concept of différance (“Fictional Realms” 12).
By adopting the Deleuzian concepts such as processual subjectivity and assemblage for an interpretation of subjectivity in Roth, I agree with Royal and Shostak on the open-endedness and multifacetedness of the Rothian subjectivity.
However, the perspective of immanent philosophy will allow this dissertation to shed more light on how subjectivity goes through autopoiesis in Roth and to demonstrate that, for Roth, art is a vehicle for the regeneration of subjectivity.
In the burgeoning yet still nascent Wallace scholarship, few critics have dealt directly with Wallace’s ontology. One exception is Ryan David Mullins’ “Theories of Everything and More: Infinity is Not the End.” Mullins argues that Infinite Jest, Wallace’s 1079-page tour de force, exhibits a “metaphysical pluralism,” the belief in an infinite number of worlds or domains, and a “fractal ontology,” which claims there is no world of all worlds (224, 230). While agreeing with Mullins on the infinity of Being, I will emphasize, by means of Deleuzian philosophy, the immanence and creativity of the universe, which is precisely what gives the universe its infinity.
Much more widely discussed in Wallace scholarship is subjectivity, a topic profoundly associated with ontology. On this point, a number of critics have discovered an emphasis on connection over unity as the nature of subjectivity in Wallace. In her much-cited essay on Infinite Jest, N. Katherine Hayles finds in the novel a reconceptualization of the liberal humanist subject as connections. It exposes autonomous selfhood as an illusion, as each presumably autonomous subject is actually enmeshed in recursive loops that form systems comprising “profound interconnections that bind us all together, human actors and nonhuman life forms, intelligent machines and intelligent people” (“Illusion” 696). Elizabeth Freudenthal
takes up Hayles’ critique but emphasizes the importance of embodiment to subjectivity in Infinite Jest. According to Freudenthal, the novel portrays subjectivity as what she calls “anti-interiority,” “a paradoxically dynamic thinghood between material and subjective realms” breaking the mind-body dualism of liberal humanist subjectivity (192). More recently, Wilson Kaiser also takes up the posthumanist position in interpreting Wallace’s characters as body-milieu, affinities, and networks.
In another posthumanist reading of Infinite Jest, Brian Douglas Jansen replaces the concepts of subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, with Latournian
“imbroglios” and “gatherings,” a hybrid of human and non-human entities (64, 71, 74). In Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture, Jeffrey Karnicky presents a highly original, Deleuzian reading of Wallace, arguing that “breakdowns in representation” in Wallace’s novels “lead to new configurations of subjectivity” (121).
However, with its prodigious emphasis on the importance of stasis to subjective transformation, Karnicky’s analysis left unexamined the dynamic, constructive power of reading, without which there would be no emergence of subjectivity. With Deleuze’s philosophy of creation as its methodology, this dissertation hopes to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the ways in which Wallace rejects humanist conception of subjectivity while stressing how Wallace’s works dramatize the regenesis of subjectivity as immanent and material and how his narrative style promotes such ontological creation.
Immanent Creation
In What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari defines what they termed the
“image of thought” as “nonconceptual understanding” that precedes and predisposes thought (40). It is “the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought” (37). As Miguel de Beistegui
explains, the image of thought subtends and orients thought, showing that “there seems to always be something pre-philosophical at the heart of philosophy, and something, which, furthermore, signals the internal conditions of philosophy” (10).
Traditional philosophy is characterized by the transcendent image of thought, such as the “good sense” exhibited by Descartes, as the cogito presumes that the “I”
naturally think the truth (Deleuze, DR 132). Whatever is conditioned by a transcendent image of thought believes in a fixed center, such as God in the Christian religion and the human being in humanism, surrounded by a hierarchical array of beings. Whatever creative acts take place in the universe, this center transcends it and remains eternally unchanged. The telos and principles of this specific transcendent center map out the path of thought in advance and thus preclude genuine invention.
There is only theology, not creation. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, “whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion;
and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence” (WP 43). Philosophers, who create concepts immanently, are not to be confused with priests and sages, who think in compliance with a transcendent entity, a higher order (43). Genuine creation originates not vertically from a sacred authority above who exists on a different stratum than thought, but horizontally from an outside. This outside is not exterior to thought, as God is, but rather a topological outside that can be folded inside. The plane of immanence is thus “the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside—that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought” (59-60). With the plane of immanence, thought is always beside itself, being forced to think the unthought.
As James Williams notes, immanence refers to relations of “in,” whereas transcendence refers to relations of “to” (“Immanence” 128). God is transcendent in
that embodied beings are related to God, and yet God is independent of embodied beings. In transcendence, there are thus higher and lower types of beings with different ontological statuses. Immanence, on the other hand, is based on univocity, which means “that Being is said in a single and same sense . . . of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. . . . Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself ” (Deleuze, DR 36). In the universe of immanence, each individual expresses the same Being without hierarchy.
For Deleuze, creation is not the realization of the possible but the actualization of the virtual, which is an immanent process. The possible is realized according to its resemblance to and limitation by the real, which is the possible that has an added existence (Deleuze, B 97). In the realization of the possible, only what already resembles the real is allowed to acquire existence, to become real. Therefore, the possible is a “false notion” because it renders everything “already completely given”
(98). The real transcends the possible, dictating what it can be. This is why Deleuze said that the possible “has been abstracted from the real once made, arbitrarily extracted from the real like a sterile double” (98). Produced retroactively from the real, the possible is unable to create anything new.
The actualization of the virtual, on the other hand, is an open process with neither planning not telos. The virtual, as Deleuze illustrates with Jorge Luis Borges’
“The Garden of Forking Paths,” is the sphere of infinity. In the story, a Chinese philosopher named Ts’ui Pen has written a fiction with all the alternative plot lines proceeding simultaneously. “Fang, for example, keeps a secret; a stranger knocks at his door: Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, several outcomes are possible: Fang can kill the intruder; the intruder can kill Fang; both of them can escape from their peril:
both can die, etc. In Ts’ui Pen’s work, all outcomes are produced, each being the point of departure for other bifurcations” (Borges qtd. in Deleuze, FLB 62).
“Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract,” the virtual is a realm of incompossible multiplicities in excess of and underlying the actual, empirical and intelligible sphere of experience (Deleuze, DR 208). The virtual is the pre-empirical that conditions experience and the supra-empirical that generates new experience.
However, virtual does not remain unchanged as it actualizes itself. If it does, it would be a transcendent realm just like the real in relation to the possible. On the contrary, as the virtual actualizes, the actual also reshapes the virtual in a dynamic relationship.
Imminent creation is characterized by the unpredictability and radical novelty inherent in the actualization of the virtual.
Time as Subjectivity
The key to understanding Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence lies in his theory of time, and, particularly, his interpretation of Bergson’s and Kant’s concepts of time.
Bergson’s first paradox of time is “the contemporaneity of the past with the present that it was” (Deleuze, DR 81). The present does not wait to become past. Instead, the present must do so immediately, when it is still present. Otherwise the present present would never pass and the new present would never arrive. Both the present and the past that it is going to be are therefore in the now as well as in the immediate past. A logical correlative of this is that the past and the present are not two consecutive moments but two coexisting elements.
Therefore, the second paradox, “the paradox of coexistence,” states that “If each past is contemporaneous with the present that it was, then all of the past coexists with the new present in relation to which it is now past” (DR 81, 81-82). There is a “pure past, a kind of ‘past in general’” into which the present continuously pass (B 59). The
relationship between the past and the present is not that of two neighboring points on a straight line. Evoking the image of the Bergsonian cone, Deleuze claims, “each present present is only the entire past in its most contracted state,” the tip of the cone (DR 82).
This leads to the third paradox, the “paradox of pre-existence,” which states that the entire past pre-exist the present (DR 82). The passage of the present present and the arrival of the new present presuppose the past. The past “is the in-itself of time as the final ground of the passage of time. In this sense it forms a pure, general, a priori element of all time” (82). The cone of the pure past thus cannot be said to exist, as in an empirical moment, but it con-sists with the present present while in-sisting with the present that has passed as a precondition.
Another implication of the Bergsonian cone makes up the fourth paradox: the co-existence of the entire past with itself. All the cross sections, or different non-chronological levels of contraction and relaxation, that compose the conic past coexist and each layer “includes . . . the totality of the past” (Deleuze, B 60).
The Bergsonian paradoxes of time, as Deleuze elaborates in Cinema 2: Time Image, indicates a fracture or doubling of the subject. “Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself along with a virtual existence, a mirror image. Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other” (Bergson qtd. in Cinema 2 79). The doubling split of the subject is that of time itself. Each moment in time is split into the preserved past in general and the passing present—the entire cone of pure past and its maximally contracted tip. In Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson,
“the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time, grasped in its foundation”
(Deleuze, C2 82). Deleuze will go so far as to claim that “Subjectivity is never ours, it is time” (82).
To argue that time constitutes subjectivity, Deleuze enlists Kant’s conception of time. For Kant, time is the interiority of the subject. Kant’s argument unfolds as a criticism against Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. In declaring that “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes assumes that two I’s are one and the same, and the determination, “I think,” of the undetermined existence, “I am,” is made instantaneously, outside time.
However, Kant argues that time is the form in which anything is determinable. Any object is knowable only within time. The determination of the I that exist as a thinking thing must take place in time (Deleuze, KCP viii; Deleuze and Guattari, WP 31). The statement, cogito ergo sum, involves two moments, one of determination and the other of the undetermined. Time is how the active I comes to determine the passive Ego. It is the form in which the subject affects itself. This self-affection made possible by time defines the subject. Although I and the Ego can be considered two positions in time, the time that serves as the condition of the determinability of the self is not puncta-linear time, or the empirical time as the measurement of movement, but a
“pure and empty form.” Time is therefore the “form of interiority,” which “means not only that time is internal to us, but that our interiority constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us into two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end. A giddiness, an oscillation which constitutes time” (KCP ix).
Itself being paradoxical, time makes the subject a paradox too. Time makes the I affect itself yet separates it from itself. “I and the Self are thus separated by the line of time, which relates them to each other only under the condition of a fundamental difference” (Deleuze, ECC 29). The determination of the Ego by the I manifests time’s double capacities as a divider and a joiner of the subject. This fracture of
self-affection is internal to the self and it is what makes thinking possible. The I is never self-identical, but always split/double in time. Time forms the interiority that binds the I and the Ego, enabling “the affection of self by self” and gives rise to thinking (Deleuze, C2 82-83). Moreover, time, the “form of the determinable,”
“makes the determined Self represent the determination to itself as an Other”
(Deleuze, ECC 30). The passive Ego necessarily experiences thinking as the activity of an Other (Deleuze, KCP viii-ix; Deleuze and Guattari, WP 31-32). Kant’s paradox of inner sense consists in this constitution and alienation of the subject in time, which Deleuze formulates in Rimbaud’s poetic trope, “I is an other” (Rimbaud qtd. in Deleuze, ECC 29).
How does time as a “pure and empty form” leads to the immanence of the subject? To answer this question, one must first look at how the ontology of transcendence entails a theory of time as dependent on transcendent entities, such as Heaven and God. Time in antiquity is considered a system of measurement for the movement of celestial bodies. Time, in this scheme, is circular (see Voss 213-14). It is also cardinal, as it designates the quantity of movement traced by objects passing specific fixed marks, such as cardinal points. These objects, which precede time, are organized in a hierarchy according to their proximity to God, Platonic forms, or any other transcendent beings. By making time one of the a priori conditions of intuition instead of a measure of things in themselves, Kant renders time pure and empty, a form without content. Kant’s move also emancipates time from its fealty to transcendent beings. Circular time thus uncoils into a straight line fracturing the subject. It is as if “Time is out of joint,” as Deleuze alludes to the famous line from Hamlet (ECC 27). It is no longer cardinal but ordinal, a pure order that stipulates a before and an after but has no content.
Deleuze illustrates how the ordinality of time constitutes the form of subjectivity with Holderlin’s Kant-influenced concept of caesura. “The caesura, along with the before and after which it ordains once and for all, constitutes the fracture in the I (the caesura is exactly the point at which the fracture appears)” (DR 89). In Holderlin’s analysis of Oedipus Rex, the caesura marks the moment of Tiresias’
revelation that Oedipus is the murderer of his own father and the husband of his own mother. For Oedipus at this moment, “there exists nothing but the conditions of time and space” (Holderlin qtd. in Voss 233). With the appearance of the caesura, time ceases to “rhyme” (DR 89). In Deleuze’s interpretation, the caesura is a “pure instant”
that “distributes a non-symmetrical before and after” (Deleuze, “Cours Vincennes 21/03/1978”). The past and the future do not cohere; they are non-sequential. As Voss explains, Oedipus “can no longer be and resemble what he has been before. In fact, the caesura is not only a break in time, but also a split of Oedipus’ self. Oedipus is other to himself. He experiences this internal difference in the pure present” (234).
Oedipus becomes other on account of the caesura, which functions to carry out his self-affection.
In the caesura, the active I determines the passive Self as the image of a
“formidable action” (Deleuze, DR 110). Using Hamlet as the example, Deleuze argues that the before of the caesura is the time when the Self is not equal to the act:
when Hamlet considers the act of killing the king and avenging his father “too big for me” (89). The caesura proper is “the present of metamorphosis, a becoming equal to the act, and a doubling of the self, and the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act” (89). In Hamlet, the caesura proper takes place in the sea voyage, at the end of which Hamlet announces, “Yet have I in me something dangerous,” an uncharacteristic pronouncement signaling he has been transformed and is now capable
of the overwhelming act (5.1.229). The self has become equal to the determination by the I. The caesura constitutes the double and split subject. Importantly, the past and future unevenly distributed by the pure present of caesura are not empirical but parts of the caesura itself; therefore, there is, strictly speaking, no before or after until the appearance of the caesura (Batra 183). The past and future are by no means chronological. Hamlet carries out his “formidable action” after the caesura, whereas Oedipus completed his long before Tiresias’ revelation. However, it is still Tiresias’
revelation that marks the caesura, where Oedipus becomes capable of patricide.
The “after” cut out by the caesura is the future. However, it is a future independent of the past and the present. “As for the third time in which the future appears, this signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; that they turn back against the self which has become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth: what the self has become equal to is the unequal in itself” (Deleuze, DR 89-90). For the future to occur, the self that went through the metamorphosis instituted by the caesura, the self that has become equal to the momentous act, must be destroyed in the act. Otherwise, the future would not be a genuine future. It would not be radically new, since the “actor”
remains the same one. Now that the self that has undergone the past and the caesura is destroyed, it does not equate the self of the future. The newly constituted subject is thus completely new, so novel that Deleuze describes it as “the man without name, without family, without qualities” (90). It is also the Nietzschean Overman, the thinker of the eternal return (90). Only the Overman is capable of the annihilation of the identity that had led up to the moment of the caesura and thus become open to the completely new.
The eternal return is “the future as such” (90). In Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the eternal return is not the recurring of identical entities and events in a circular time, but the return of difference. “It is not the ‘same’ or the ‘one’ which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs” (NP 46). It is not difference as non-identity:
instead of being difference from something else, it is difference in itself. As such, it cannot be represented in discourse much further. “The eternal return has no other sense but this: the absence of any assignable origin—in other words, the assignation of difference as the origin, which then relates different to different in order to make it (or them) return as such” (DR 125). The difference that returns is pure and originary (125). As Cisney notes, it is not experiential differences, as in “different things, limits, oppositions, and so forth” but “difference as such.” It is not a lack of identity but “a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild, untamed differences; a properly differential and original space and time” (50). Eternal return in this way ensures that the future is change and contingency. Time, in this formulation, is no longer a full circle but an excentric circle, eternally breaking the previous path and tracing a new trajectory. Time is difference in itself, this originary spatio-temporality, which gives birth to the subject and ensures its unceasing renewal. The subject formed though time—the time out of joint rather than the circular time of antiquity—is a subject of immanence.
Aesthetics of Immanence
The concept of immanent time as the originary difference or eternal return has important implications for aesthetics. There is no transcendent being to guarantee the circularity of time, nor is there any truth to serve as the foundation of art. The eternal return is itself creative. In fact, it is the only source of art. “The philosophical doctrine
of the eternal return (i.e. the return of that which differs, of difference-in-itself) is precisely what undermines the privilege of identity and the model of representation”
that have been the cornerstones of the will to truth in art (Voss 247). While the will to truth implies judgment from a transcendent position and ultimately refers to the one God and his moral tenets, “The eternal return affirms difference, it affirms dissemblance and disparateness, chance, multiplicity and becoming” (Deleuze, DR 300). By affirming becoming rather than being, eternal return frees difference from its subordination under representation as identity, resemblance, opposition, and analogy (288). In its alterity to truth and representation, eternal return is identified with the power of the false (Voss 247). Liberated by the absence of truth and the death of God, art consists in “the creation of falsehood” (Zepke 19). For art to be genuinely creative, it has to exhibit “the power of the false,” which “replaces and supersedes the form of the true” (Deleuze, C2 131).
In narrative art, the power of the false means that “narration ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying” (C2 131). Unlike truthful narration, which preserves the illusion of the unity and identity of self throughout chronological time, falsifying narration is founded on an immanent ontology where time out of joint is the subjectivity: “contrary to the form of the true which is unifying and tends to the identification of a character (his discovery or simply his coherence), the power of the false cannot be separated from an irreducible multiplicity, ‘I is another’ has replaced Ego=Ego” (133).
The power of the false affirms difference as the immanent genesis of life. This is in contrast to the will to truth, which considers the world of appearance as deceptive and posits a transcendent ideal world that is epistemologically true at the same time as it is morally good (Rodowick 135). As Rodowick points out, such “seeker-of-truth’s
strongest desire is not to be fooled” (135). Deleuze overturns this Platonist position by rethinking simulacra. As Deleuze wrote, “the eternal return concerns only simulacra, it causes only such phantasms to return” (DR 126). In Plato, the Idea holds the transcendent place of being the purest identity, followed by copy as a good imitation, which is in turn followed by simulacrum as a failed derivative. The copy is defined as
“instance of the Same, the Similar, the Analogous and the Opposed” in relation to the Idea (265). Simulacra, however, are such bad copies of the Idea that they cannot be recognized as related. Deleuze identifies simulacra as the originary difference-in-itself.
Unlike the Idea that “is nothing other than what it is,” simulacra are always other than what they are, as it is what returns as difference in the eternal return (126).
Art as simulacra is characterized by paradox. It exerts its falsifying power in four ways: the incompossible, the indiscernible, the inexplicable, and the undecidable (Deleuze, C2 131). In narrative art, these would be, for example, the coexistence of
“incompossible presents,” “the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary,” and the inexplicability and undecidable alternatives between the true and the false (131-132).
These instances are able to exert “a power of the false as adequate to time, in contrast to any form of the true which would control time” (132). These paradoxical narratives drives time out of joint, out of its subordination to any transcendent being and redefine it as the excentric circle of the eternal return.
With such a fundamental ontological import, the power of the false is not to be confused with pluralism. It is not “a question of tolerating equally possible yet incomplete and contradictory perspectives on the true” (Rodowick 85). In the pluralist thinking, there is still truth reigning over falsehood. To exert the power of the false, the artist has to understand that there is no pre-existing truth to represent. The artist is the “creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has
to be created” (Deleuze, C2 146). Truth is no longer the transcendent truth. “There is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence” (147). The truth to be created in art is the immanent difference, the simulacra that are their own model.
Art and Ontogenesis
The work of the power of the false does not stop at the creation of new works of art. Its operation extends to the creation of new thinking and thus new subjectivity.
The power of the false renews thought and subjectivity by creating signs, a word that in Deleuze’s technical use refers to whatever frustrates thinking and in this way paradoxically kindles its regeneration. The confrontation with baffling yet captivating signs, material intensities that cannot be sensed by sensation, is what Deleuze terms an “encounter,” in which the subject is forced to interpret the sign, which in turn generates thinking (Bogue, Deleuze on Literature 52).
The concept of the encounter holds a crucial place in Deleuze’s formulation of the subject as an ongoing process immanent in the material realm. The subject is always embodied but not necessarily within the human body. Avoiding the traditional association between the subject and the human, Deleuze constructs his ontology around the “individual,” a relatively stabilized state of relations and interactions between forces but one that retains the potential for further transformation. No individual transcends these forces, be they biological, social, or cultural. Rather, individuals are immanent in them.
Ontogenesis is the ongoing process comprising difference-in-itself, the originary, evanescent material realm; the determination of Ideas in the virtual; the individuation of these virtual tendencies into actual states of affairs; and the counter-actualization reverses the production of the individual to start the process over again, leading to the
metamorphosis of the individual. The individual is not only the product of this process but also denotes the process itself.
The process from intensity to extensity, from the virtual to the actual, is a four-fold process of “differentiation-individuation-dramatisation-differenciation”
(Deleuze, DR 251). Differentiation determines virtual Ideas, which are made up of differential relations and pre-individual singularities. “Individuation is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualized, along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates” (246). Intensities, differences of potential in the environment, are individuating factors. They perform the drama of spatio-temporal dynamisms, generating actual, differenciated individuals.
An individual retains the potential for further individuation because of the material intensities implicated in the individual like a fold. Re-individuation, or the renewal of subjectivity, is initiated by the encounter. Deleuze argues, “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter” (DR 139). Art with the power of the false can induce encounters, where the individual is forced to interpret signs, which pushes faculties outside of their current state, and thereby generates a renewed individual.
Creative Ethics of Immanence
The ontology of immanence entails an ethics free of moral judgment and transcendent centers. As mentioned before, ethology deals with the affective capabilities of a body, or “what a body can do” (ESP 218). Here “body”, a term that Deleuze uses synonymously with “individual,” refers to a network of relations, whether ideal or material. The immanent ethics of ethology does away with transcendent judgment of good and evil, replacing it with “the qualitative difference
of modes of existence (good-bad)” (SPP 23). Ethology endeavors to discover what is good or bad for different bodies in their encounters: whether body x gains loses in power, or affective capabilities, in its encounter with body y and vice versa. However,
“you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination” (125). Such knowledge cannot be gained a priori but only though embodied experimentation, by actually engaging in relations with other bodies. The ethics of immanence is thus creative. It is what keeps the universe creative.
Outline of Chapters
This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter, “Immanent Creation in Deleuze,” presents an overview of immanence in Deleuzian philosophy and discusses what constitutes immanent creation. The first section of the chapter,
“Immanence in Deleuze’s Philosophy,” looks at immanence in noological and ontological terms. It discusses the pre-philosophical, dogmatic image of thought and its suppression of difference under identity. It then introduces Deleuze and Guattari’s critical image of thought, where thought is free from transcendent presuppositions and therefore able to think difference as an immanently generative force. This section also dwells on Spinoza’s concept of univocity, Bergson’s “duration,” and Nietzsche’s
“eternal return,” to show how they influence Deleuze’s ontology of immanence.
The second part, “The Ontogenesis of the Subject,” presents an overview of the critiques against the modern humanist subject before discussing Deleuze’s ontology of the subject as a process. It demonstrates the ontogenesis of the subject from the pure difference in itself through the three syntheses of time to virtual Ideas, the actual individual, and the encounter with the sign that restarts the process. Since it aims to unpack Deleuze’s speculative ontology, this section will necessarily be technical in
nature, and, at first glance, seems less pertinent than it is to the literary analysis that defines the goal of this dissertation. However, to fully appreciate the immanent creation of subjectivity in the literary texts examined in later chapters, it is of paramount importance to explicate Deleuze’s technical language and philosophical arguments first.
Equipped with the conceptual tools from Deleuzian philosophy, Chapter two,
“Ontology of Immanence and Embodied Creation in Roth and Wallace” begins to look at the ontological significance of Roth’s and Wallace’s works. The first segment of the chapter, “Embodiment: Crossroads between Roth, Wallace, and Deleuze,”
discusses how Roth and Wallace challenge modern humanist and postmodern technological disembodiment respectively, before examining Deleuze’s redefinition of the body that emphasizes the embodied nature of subjectivity.
The second section, “Regenesis of Subjectivity in Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” opens by demonstrating that the Wallacian subject is a process, a becoming rather than being.
It goes on to argue that the renewal of subjectivity in tennis training requires making oneself what Deleuze terms a body without organs (BwO), which allows the actual individual to give up sovereign subjectivity, loosen up the existing organization of their body, and thus access the virtual and its creative resources. This section also examines addiction as the manifestation of the empty BwO, where the body, through connecting to a fixed object in an exclusive manner, has lost the power to form assemblages with other bodies.
The third part of the chapter, “Roth’s The Human Stain and Creative Lines of Life,” argues that, upholding the modern humanist subjectivity of individualism and autonomy, Coleman Silk’s passing and Zuckerman’s reclusion are self-creations on what Deleuze and Guattari call the rigid line of segmentarity and thus destined to
ossification and sterility. In contrast, the 71-year-old Coleman’s transformation after meeting Faunia and Zuckerman’s revitalization through an impromptu dance with Coleman illustrate the immanent regeneration of subjectivity creation on the “line of flight.” Unpredictable and experimental ontogenesis on the “line of flight” increases an individual’s affective capacity, enabling further creation.
The fourth part of chapter two, “Ontological Creation Through the Probe-Head in Roth’s ‘Eli, the Fanatic,’” looks at the renewal of subjectivity through bodily gestures and sartorial experiments from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the abstract machine. The secular Jewish Eli Peck’s experimental use of traditional Hasidic garb constructs the abstract machine of the probe-head that helps him break out of fixed signifying subjectivity within the social hierarchy of his community.
The fifth and final part of chapter two, “Boredom and Creation in Wallace’s The Pale King,” interprets the dynamic between the boring and the interesting as the creative excentric circle of chaos and chaoid. Any creation, whether that of a piece of information or a work of art, requires one to cast off one’s transcendent subjectivity and immerse oneself in chaos as intensive matter.
Chapter three, “Aesthetics of Immanence and Literary Creation in Roth and Wallace,” discusses how Roth and Wallace challenge the traditional notion of art as representation and demonstrates how their works express the transformative power of art. The introductory section of the chapter, “Power of the False,” presents an overview of Deleuze’s concept of the power of the false, which will provide the framework for the textual analyses of Roth’s and Wallace’s works in later sections.
The second part of chapter three, “Wallace’s ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’ and Crystalline Narration” approaches Wallace’s frustratingly desultory story from the perspective of Deleuze’s concept of the crystalline narration to show how the
mirroring between the factual and the imaginary, the real and the oneiric, and the present and the past refutes the model of truth and representation and ultimately compels the renewal of thinking and the regenesis of subjectivity in the reader.
The third section of chapter three, “Wallace’s Style and the Becoming of Language,” turns to Wallace’s narrative style, showing that, on the level of notes, vocabulary, syntax, and voice, Wallace’s fiction “deterritorializes” language, contributing to the regeneration of language itself. Fundamental to my analysis is Deleuze’s concept of style not as personal distinction but a use of language that enables its becoming. This section also dwells on how the chaotic plots of Wallace’s works thwart representational reading and prompt readers to read experimentally.
The fourth part of chapter three, “Roth’s Aesthetic of Creative Fabulation,” deals with the anti-representational concept of writing in the Zuckerman books. Reading The Ghost Writer and The Anatomy Lesson from the perspective of Deleuzian fabulation, a form of story-making free from the conditions of truth, this section argues that Zuckerman’s stories about Anne Frank and Milton Appel enable him to create new possibilities of life.
In the conclusion, I will return to the ethics of immanence, the point of departure of the present project, to discuss the adequation of ontology, art, and ethics in immanence. Roth’s and Wallace’s ethics of imagination is an immanent ethics, “an ethics of the virtual” that, through connecting with others on the level of material intensities, induces counter-actualization of individuals and makes life a work of art (Bogue, Deleuze’s Way 11).
Chapter One
Immanent Creation in Deleuze Section One
Immanence in Deleuze’s Philosophy
In Deleuze’s philosophy, immanence has two roles. Immanence is a method of noology, without which there would be no genuine thinking or philosophy. Secondly, immanence is ontological. It is how beings are engendered and renewed. The key to understanding immanence as noological lies in the third chapter of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Titled “The Image of Thought,” the chapter adumbrates the traditional conception of thinking as a representational image, which posits something transcendent and prior to thinking. “The image of thought is what philosophy as it were presupposes; it precedes philosophy, not a nonphilosophical understanding this time but a prephilosophical understanding” (Deleuze, N 148).3 As a representational image, thought is detached from the creative movement of the world. For this reason, Deleuze opposes the traditional conception of thought.
“Thought is not set over against the world such that it represents the world; thought is a part of the flux of the world. To think is not to represent life but to transform and act upon it” (Colebrook, Understanding xxiv)
When philosophy starts with the activity of thinking, it begs the question of what thinking is. Deleuze cites Descartes’ Second Meditation as an example of the logical fallacy. By defining man as thinking being, Descartes presuppose that the meanings of thinking and being are self-evident, that everyone knows what is meant by these terms.
3 For detailed discussions on Deleuze’s concept of the image of thought, see Lambert, In Search of a New Image of Thought 1-24 and Dronsfield, “Deleuze and the Image of Thought.”
In other words, the definition of man as cogito is built on the pre-philosophical opinions about what thinking and being means (DR 129). There is thus an implied
“distribution of the empirical and the transcendental,” where thinking and being are viewed as iterations of their models on a higher level (133). In contradistinction to the presupposition-laden philosophy like Descartes’s, “a philosophy of immanence is a philosophy that does not appeal to anything outside the terms and relations constructed by that philosophy” (Kerslake 2). By understanding the image of thought that turns thinking into representation—an understanding that Deleuze equates with noology, one receives a “prolegomena of philosophy” (N 149).
For thinking to be creative, it has to think the new. For Deleuze, the new is not the more recent in time. It is the “unrecognizable terra incognita” (DR 136). However, the image of thought turns thinking into the identification of the already recognizable.
Deleuze shows how thinking is traditionally prevented from creativity through a discussion of eight postulates of the dogmatic image of thought. The eight postulates have in common that they commit the paralogism of “elevating a simple empirical figure to the status of a transcendental, at the risk of allowing the real structures of the transcendental to fall into the empirical” (154). In other words, they mistake something empirical for the transcendental, leaving it an unquestioned premise for philosophical inquiries (Hughes, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition 71). Postulates have an insidious effect on philosophy, because, unlike propositions, which can be philosophically examined and then accepted or rejected, they are implicit, hiding behind philosophical discourse and left unexamined (131).
The first postulate is “the double aspect of a good will on the part of the thinker and an upright nature on the part of thought” (Deleuze, DR 131). This refers to the assumption that everyone has a natural aptitude for thinking and that thinking always
seeks out the true. The thinker naturally desires truth and thought “formally contains truth” (NP 103). By applying the concepts of goodness and uprightness to thinking, this postulate makes morality the transcendent guiding principle of thinking (DR 132).
The second and the third postulates are about subjective identity and objective identity respectively. On the part of the subject, all the faculties—sensibility, memory, imagination, and thought—work together harmoniously as they are directed toward the object. The supposed common sense, or the unity of the subject, has a correlate in the “model of recognition” in accordance with the unity of the object (DR 134).
Therefore, the third postulate states that it is the same object that is sensed, remembered, imagined, and thought by the subject. Thought is rendered secondary to a primary world of identical and unchanging subjects and objects. To experience the object is thus to recognize it, to confirm what it “really” is. Thus “thought is but a provisional process, destined to fill the distance separating us from the object; it lasts exactly as long as it takes to recognize” (Zourabichvili 48).
The fourth postulate is representation, defined by “identity with regard to concepts, opposition with regard to the determination of concepts, analogy with regard to judgement, resemblance with regard to objects” (Deleuze, DR 137). Deleuze is here alluding to Aristotle’s Categories, in which a species is classified according to its genus and differentia.4 Categories, as the concepts that are appropriate to all objects of possible experience, are related to each other analogically. Their generic difference is cast as different ways to consider the self-same Being. On the lower tiers are genera, each of which retains its identity despite being divided into species.
Specific difference is rendered oppositional predicates, different only with regard to
4 The categories are: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection (Aristotle, Categories 4; ch. 4).
