THE HERMETIC DELEUZE

Philosophy and Spiritual OrdealBy Joshua Ramey

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5215-0

Contents

List of Abbreviations………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xiIntroduction: Secrets of Immanence…………………………………..11. Philosophical Modernity and Experimental Imperative…………………112. Dark Precursors: The Hermetic Tradition……………………………323. The Force of Symbols: Deleuze and the Esoteric Sign…………………824. The Overturning of Platonism……………………………………..1125. Becoming Cosmic…………………………………………………1486. The Politics of Sorcery………………………………………….1717. The Future of Belief…………………………………………….200Coda: Experimental Faith……………………………………………219Notes…………………………………………………………….225Bibliography………………………………………………………275Index…………………………………………………………….283

Chapter One

Philosophical Modernity and Experimental Imperative

Ordeals of the Mind

Early modern philosophy, whether rationalist or empiricist, tended to starkly oppose rationality to affective, imaginative, and spiritual modalities of mind. Despite this situation, Deleuze argues in several places in his books and lectures, modern philosophers such as Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume were nevertheless inspired by enigmas that challenged the framework of propositional and syllogistic thinking. From Deleuze’s perspective, modern thought was inspired by certain unthinkable notion of the infinite, of the absolute, and of God, and the analytical rigor of modern philosophy belies an inherently experimental character that should not so quickly be presumed separable from affective and even distinctly spiritual modes of apprehension. In a lecture course held on Spinoza in 1980, Deleuze associates this secular, atheist, or at least nontheological usage of the concept of God with the mannerist movement in the early Baroque period.

With its exaggerations, elongations, and distortions, mannerism might be understood, in very general terms, as the attempt within representational painting to present the unrepresentable, to make the invisible visible, and to render the infinite in the finitude of lines and color. Deleuze notes that mannerism brings an extraordinary energy into painting, and that this energy has a striking parallel in modern philosophy.

In a sense, atheism has never been external to religion: atheism is the artistic power at work on religion. With God, everything is permitted. I have the distinct feeling that for philosophy it’s been exactly the same thing, and if philosophers have spoken to us so much of God … [it was from] a joy arising from the labor they were involved in. Just as I said that God and Christ offered an extraordinary opportunity for painting to free lines, colors and movements from the constraints of resemblance, so God and the theme of God offered the irreplaceable opportunity for philosophy to free the object of creation in philosophy (that is to say, concepts) from the constraints that had been imposed on them … the simple representation of things. The concept is freed at the level of God because it no longer has the task of representing something … It takes on lines, colors, movements that it would never have had without this detour through God.

For Deleuze, the modern conceptions of God as nature in Spinoza, as necessary illusion in Hume, or as limit idea in Kant form the conditions within which reason immanently breaks with representation. For the early moderns it is not, as perhaps it was for the medievals, the reaching of the mind to God, but the paradoxical necessity of an idea of the infinite within the finite mind that demands creative assimilation. With post- Cartesian philosophy, the idea of the infinite came to signify not the abundance of divine plenitude, but the inability of the mind to reach rational closure, to think reality as a whole. In this sense the infinite, as a limit of sensation or cognition, is a force that disrupts the faculties, defies categories, and destroys the framework of representation. With its nontheological conception of God, modern thought approaches the infinite as an unthinkable thought.

However, this thought, for Deleuze, becomes the moment at which reason is challenged to construe that which cannot be comprehended. To put it in Deleuze’s language, with the idea of God, the unthinkable becomes positively problematic, rather than an impasse or a prelude to skepticism. Deleuze argues that the idea of God is not a problem among others but is, in a certain way, the transcendent source of problems, a provocation within the modern mind that invites modernity not so much to doubt its ability, as to be provoked into conjecture, and to conceptually invent. As he puts it with Guattari in What Is Philosophy?, a profound shift in the parameters of thought emerged in the passage from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth:

What manifests as the mutation of light from the “natural light” to the “Enlightened” is the substitution of belief for knowledge, that is, a new infinite movement implying another image of thought: it is no longer a matter of turning toward but rather one of following tracks, of inferring rather than grasping or being grasped. Under what conditions is inference legitimate? Under what conditions can belief be legitimate when it has become secular? This question will be answered only with the creation of the great empiricist concepts (association, relation, habit, probability, convention). But conversely, these concepts, including the concept of belief itself, presuppose diagrammatic features that make belief an infinite movement independent of religion and traversing the new plane of immanence (religious belief, on the other hand, will become a conceptualizable case, the legitimacy or illegitimacy of which can be measured in accordance with the order of the infinite). (WIP, 53)

When Deleuze and Guattari assert that the meaning of belief in the modern era is contingent on new diagrammatic features, what they mean is that even if modern belief names “God” as its object, the movement such beliefs inspire trace out unforeseeable directions of thought and practice, vectors of which religious practice would become only one among many. The problem is not how to distinguish the religious as opposed to the irreligious, the pious from the impious, but rather to discern the effects of different practices of belief. As Deleuze will put it in Cinema II, the criteria of belief in the modern era is not whether it is in the right object, but whether it produces the right effect—whether, that is to say, it renews our belief in the world by expanding our receptivity against the deadening effects of habit and the quest for control.

In short, with modernity’s experimentalism, religious faith is no longer the paradigm of belief. The model, rather, becomes the ordeal—at once epistemic and ethical—of living in a world whose ultimate structure remains inaccessible to thought, and yet forces thought to conceive it, much after the fashion of how the mannerist painters addressed the infinite in the finitude of color. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari assert that the early modern mannerist impulse nevertheless reached its apex in two religious thinkers, Pascal and Kierkegaard. These men were “concerned no longer with the transcendent existence of God but only with infinite immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes God exists” (WIP, 74). Deleuze and Guattari note that Kierkegaard’s knight of faith and Pascal’s gambler are personae extracted from the Old Testament, brought forth in philosophy to rival Socrates’s ironic stance with one that is humorous, even absurd (WIP, 74). If Socrates is ironic because, tragically, he knows something that in some sense cannot be said, Pascal and Kierkegaard face the comic necessity of saying something that cannot in fact be known, let alone understood. In their break with pure reason, and in the way they marshal archaic, mythical personae against the complacencies of philosophical discourse, there is a kind of defiance to Pascal and Kierkegaard. Deleuze and Guattari assert that these Christian existentialist thinkers “recharge immanence.” That is to say, they reenergize the gesture of exposing the mind to a series of essentially unsolvable problems: Who am I in the face of an unknown God? Where am I in a decentered world? What am I in the face of my obscure material potencies? With their vertiginous view of faith, and with their refusal to indulge metaphysical comforts, Pascal and Kierkegaard are paradigmatic for modernity (WIP, 74). Beyond their particular religious commitments, they exemplify the liberating power of thought when it has foregone reassurances of a systematic order, and submits itself more fully to the infringement of the infinite upon existence.

Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks here hearken back to some of Deleuze’s earliest ideas. As early as a 1956–57, in a lecture course titled Qu’est-ce que fonder? (What is grounding?), Deleuze describes the origin of thought as a creative repetition of the mythological founding of human societies (WG, 2). As Deleuze points out, to found a city or establish a nation is to mark out and define a territory. But such marking necessarily involves a confrontation with powers and potencies that give the hero or heroine the right to a territory. Ulysses must undertake an odyssey to recover a household. To ascend the throne of Thebes, Oedipus must defeat the Sphinx, just as Cadmus had himself founded Thebes by destroying its autochthonous monster, the serpent. Moses, to establish the Hebrew people, must defeat the Egyptian magicians. Deleuze points out that even in the founding of kinships, the process of making a claim upon a bride, an ordeal is involved: “For example: in claiming the hand of the daughter … one takes as arbiter the father who is the third, the foundation. But the father can say: undergo an ordeal, kill the dragon. That which grounds is an ordeal. To confront the foundation is not without danger; the pretenders have neither Penelope nor power” (WG, 4).

In mythical founding ordeals, there is no guarantee. To fail is to die. As power of the Theban ground, the Sphinx poses a problem, a riddle Oedipus must solve or be destroyed. Responding to the question, What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?, Oedipus correctly answers, “human beings,” and thereby undoes the enigma of the Sphinx (who, now answered, destroys herself). However—and this point is crucial for Deleuze—the successful founding act does not mean that the riddle of human existence is resolved, let alone that society is made completely secure. On the contrary, through his ordeal Oedipus riddles the state, and simultaneously becomes a problem to himself. In solving the riddle, Oedipus discovers the enigma of his own (in)humanity, discovering too late that he is the man destined to murder his father and commit incest with his mother (DR, 195). To found is thus to confront destiny, and to go to the limit of one’s power in that confrontation. Thus Deleuze says that every ordeal of grounding is a “conciliation between the will and what ought to be,” a conciliation that remains incomplete and whose enigmatic character becomes reflected in the anxiety of civilization about its own ungrounded nature. As Deleuze observes in Difference and Repetition, when Oedipus asks Tiresias why the city is cursed, the answer is too much for him; it is overwhelming. “The event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self … 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” (DR, 90).

In the “What Is Grounding” lectures, Deleuze goes on to argue that there is a repetition of the ambiguity inherent to the act of archaic founding in the problem of grounding in modern philosophy. Just as the city seems constantly threatened by the inchoate ground on which it is founded, so does modern reason seem threatened by the forces it is incapable of conceiving and yet is forced to think. In his mature work, Deleuze attempts in some sense to obviate this often-repressed dimension of the unrepresentable in thought. As he puts it in Difference and Repetition, “It is not a question of acquiring thought, nor of exercising it as though it were innate, but of engendering the act of thinking within thought itself” (DR, 114). And it is clear in Difference and Repetition that the mythical ordeal of founding is germane to the intellectual act of grounding. Throughout Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that the birth of thought takes place within the uncanny and the unrecognizable, in the sensible and the affective, in the element of a transcendental indiscernibility. However, the unthinkable or indiscernible—that which must but cannot be thought—is not the contingently inchoate, but a properly transcendental opacity germane to reality itself. Thus, ideas for Deleuze are not simple unities but imbricated multiplicities, reflections in some sense of the density of the real itself.

What matters then, in an idea, is not its ability to represent reality, but the range of experimental possibility it opens onto. Deleuze argues that what marks an idea is a simultaneous distinctness and obscurity, since it is a distinct apprehension of as yet unrealized, inchoate potency. In some sense the enigmatic or the uncanny is the singular condition of each idea, a condition approached as such, according to Deleuze, only in moments when the mind is confronted with its own limits and sundered from itself. As Deleuze puts it, “Thought is determined in such a manner that it grasps its own cogitandum only at the extremity of a fuse of violence which, from one idea to another, first sets in motion sensibility and its sentiendum, and so on. Ideas, therefore, are related not to a Cogito that functions as ground or as a proposition of consciousness, but to the fractured I of a dissolved Cogito; in other words, to the universal ungrounding which characterizes thought as a faculty in its transcendental exercise” (DR, 194).

At stake in this insistence upon a peculiar opacity at the heart of thought is what could be called Deleuze’s intensive naturalism, his view that mind is a particularly “involuted” dimension of nature. Prior to the development of distinct concepts, there is a dramatic encounter with a region or domain of potential sense, which Deleuze calls a “plan(e) of immanence.” These planes are multiple, and can be laid out within color, in painting, in sounds, even in scientific functions or philosophical concepts. In this way, art, science, and philosophy all have peculiar modes of thought. Each setting out of a plane or plan is experimental and hazardous, subject not only to historical contingency, and to the aleatory and stochastic dimensions of nature, but to the active risking or redoubling of chance that thought represents. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write of the necessarily hazardous and heretical dimension of thought, evoking the surly and twilit legacy of outlying realms of experience.

Thinking provokes general indifference. It is a dangerous exercise nevertheless. Indeed, it is only when the dangers become obvious that indifference ceases, but they often remain hidden and barely perceptible, inherent in the enterprise. Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. Even Descartes had his dream. To think is always to follow the witch’s flight. (WP, 41)

A traditional and rationalistic perspective must be puzzled by this connection between thought and witchcraft, between the Dionysian excess of the moonlit hours, and the sober reflections of the day. In a key chapter of Difference and Repetition, “The Image of Thought,” Deleuze argues that in the history of philosophy the ordinary parameters of perception—the relatively stable nature of quantities and qualities, the subject and predicate terms of opinion and habit—have always been implicitly taken as transcendent reference points for thought, as if it were self- evident that the world ultimately consisted in some kind of unity, regularity, and harmony, and as if thought consisted, after all, in being a mirror of that world (DR, 129). This “image of thought” as well-grounded (whether in stable ideas or consistent natural phenomena) implicitly presupposes that all thought, no matter how elaborate, will return us to a recognizable world, and restore the mind to a sense of being well placed. But Deleuze argues that thought has its genesis in problems and questions that are themselves manifestations of imperceptible intensities, forces, and dynamics unapparent to perception. Thinking in this sense is identical to learning. As Deleuze puts it, “learning evolves entirely within the comprehension of the problem, as such, in the apprehension and condensation of singularities and in the ideal composition of events and bodies. Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element, which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheardof world of problems. To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language?” (DR, 192).

(Continues…)

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