Pli 19 (2008), 1-29
The Expression of Meaning in Deleuze's
Ontological Proposition
RAY BRASSIER
Philosophical modernity pivots around the question of meaning: Is th~
world inherently meaningful, or is meaning projected onto the world by
humans? Or to put it another way: Is the world to be explained in terms of
meaning, or meaning explained as an aspect - but only one aspect - of
the world? Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that this is indeed the
fundamental issue at stake in modem philosophy. If so, then perhaps the
most profound philosophical divide would be the one between those who
insist on taking our experience of meaning as the incontrovertible datum
that explains intelligibility, thereby providing the fulcrum for
epistemology and ontology; and those who believe that meaning is not
co-extensive with intelligibility, but is to be accounted for in terms of
processes whose comprehension does not depend upon their being reinscribed within the realm of meaning. The former are those who hold
meaning to be primary, and hence to be the condition for the secondary
distinction between the intelligible and the unintelligible; the latter are
those convinced that we must first begin by explaining how intelligibility
is possible before going on to explain how meaningful phenomena
emerge from intelligible yet meaningless processes.
At first sight, it would seem that we have merely reiterated the
familiar opposition between idealists and materialists. But in fact, neither
position can be straightforwardly mapped onto eith~r term of this
alternative. For, just as an idealistmay prioritise the intelligible over the
sensible without privileging meaning, a materialist may appeal to the
intrinsic intelligibility of 'matter' - however the latter be defined - in
order to account for the origin of meaning. Consequently, everything
2
Pli 19 (2008)
depends on how meaning and intelligibility are articulated. For
materialism hardly represents an advance over idealism if it is only able
to account for meaning by postulating an originary principle of
intelligibility in matter. Thus it is not only meaning's emergence from
meaninglessness that must be accounted for; it is also the emergence of
the intelligible from the sensible. The first is an ontological problem
about what meaning is, the second is an epistemological problem about
how intelligibility is possible in a world whose structure does not depend
upon thought. It is imperative not to elide these two, on pain of
mystifying both the nature of meaning and that of thought.
It is Kant who is supposed to have discredited the metaphysical
postulate of an originary isomorphy between thought and being by ruling
out appeals to intellectual intuition. In doing so, he carried out a decisive
redistribution of the relations between meaning, sensibility, and intuition.
The intelligible is neither intuited intellectually nor passively imprinted
upon the mind by sensibility. Mediating between reason and sensibility is
the understanding as the faculty of judgement, which weds concepts and
intuitions into representations whose objectivity is a function of their
propositional content or 11leaning. By placing the power of judgement at
the heart of the machinery of cognition, and by construing the objectivity
of representations in ternls~of their propositional content, Kant turns the
theory'.oof meaning into the key that demarcates the boundary between the
intelligible and the unintelligible.! Thus, in Logic of Sense, Deleuze
credits Kant with discovering a properly transcendental dimension of
meaning as that which overturns the metaphysical intuition of 'essence':
"It is true to say that meaning [Ie sens] is the discovery proper to
transcendental philosophy, replacing the old metaphysical essences."2
Cf. Robert Hannah, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford:
OUP,2001).
2 Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), p. 128, hereafter LS. At this
stage, a point of clarification is necessary. It is important to insist that, for much of
the time, when Deleuze is talking about 'sens' he is simply talking about
'meaning'. Granted, the French word 'sens' can also mean 'direction', a semantic
nuance which Deleuze frequently exploits in order to bring out the specifically
topological aspect of his concept of meaning, as exemplified by the fact that it is
deployed upon a 'surface'. And no doubt it is in order to retain this nuance that
Deleuze's translators have opted to render 'sens' systematically as 'sense' rather
than as 'meaning'. But this laudable desire to preserve an undeniably important
philosophical nuance comes at the cost of occluding the extent to which Deleuze's
RAY BRASSIER
3
~~~__
Yet, as early as his 1954 review of Hyppolite's Logic and
--Exist€mce/ Deleuze is already suggesting that the Kantian problematic of
representation has not completely revoked the privileges of essence,
because the disjunction between phenomenon and noumenon simply
reiterates the distinction between being and appearing. In order to
consummate the critical displacement of essence by meaning, Deleuze
_insists, it is necessary to absolutise the immanence of this world in such a
way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we
know them and as they are in themselves, and hence to abandon the
representational framework which continues to construe meaning as the
key that unlocks the intelligible realm, rather than as that which dispenses
with the latter altogether: "To say that this world here is self-sufficient is
not only to say that it is sufficient for us, but that it is sufficient unto
itself, and that it does not relate to being as to an essence beyond
appearance, or to another world which would be the realm of the
Intelligible, but rather that it relates to it as to the meaning of this world."4
Consequently, Deleuze continues: "That there is no 'beyond' means that
there is no beyond of this world, (because Being is nothing but meaning),
and that there is no beyond of thought in the world (because it is being
that thinks itself in thought), and lastly, that there is no beyond of
language in thought itself."s
14 years later, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze will re-assert
this interpenetration of thought, being, and meaning in the claim that
"[t]here has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is
univocal."6 Univocity entails that "Being is said [L 'Etre se dit] in a single
and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is
concern with the logic of sense constitutes an engagement with what we are here
calling the fundamental problematic of philosophical modernity: the problem of
meaning. Thus, wherever possible, I will translate 'sens' as 'meaning' in order to
emphasise the overlap between Deleuze's concerns and those of the more
'mainstream' - I use the word without endorsement - post-Kantian tradition. It is
precisely this overlap which is needlessly obscured by the tendency to fetishize the
word 'sense' at the expense of 'meaning' in a way that encourages the widespread
perception of Deleuze's work as wilfully eccentric.
3 Jean Hyppolite, Logique et existence. Essai sur la Logique de Hegel (Paris: PUF,
1953); Logic and Existence Tr. L. Lawlor and A. Sen (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1997).
4 Gilles Deleuze, 'Jean Hyppolite, Logique et existence' in L'ile deserte et autres
textes. Ed. D. Lapoujade (paris: Minuit, 2002). pp. 18-23, p. 20, hereafter JH
5 Ibid.
4
Ph 19 (2008)
said differs: it is difference itself."7 'L 'etre se dit', writes Deleuze, and the
accusative 'se' bears underlining here: it implies not only that 'being is
said' but also that 'being says itselj'. Being says itself because thinking is
not exterior to being, as it is for the philosophies of representation: rather,
the difference between thinking and being is intrinsic to being insofar as
the latter is nothing but difference, or better, differentiation. Thus in his
review of Hyppolite, De1euze writes: "The external empirical difference
between thought and being gives way to the internal difference of Being
thinking itself [ ... ] .Thus, in logic, there is no longer what I say on on6
hand and the meaning of what I say on the other, as there is in the
empirical [ ... ] My discourse is logically or properly philosophical [ ... ]
when I say the sense of what I say and Being thereby says itself."s This is
why ontology (from the Greek on (gen. ontos) 'being' (prp. of einai 'to
be') + logia 'writing about, study of) must take the form of a proposition:
it is the discourse ojbeing, where the genitive is as much objective as
subjective. And this univocal discourse entails a transcendental logic of
meaning precisely insofar as being does not say itself as the identity of
essence but rather as the difference of sense (i.e. meaning).
But why is sense a function of difference rather than identity? Why
is meaning a locus of-differentiation rather than identification? To
understand why, we must bear in mind the crucial role played by the logic
of e~pression throughout Deleuze's work. A remark from the last page of
Deleuze's ExpreSSionism in Philosophy: Spinoza is particularly
illuminating here. Deleuze writes there: "The expressed is meaning:
deeper than the relation of causality; deeper than the relation of
representation."9 According to Deleuze, it is the triadic structure of
expression that provides the key to understanding Spinoza's rationalism:
"substance expresses itself, the attributes are expressions, and essence is
expressed."lo The three moments of expression will be articulated in
terms of the expressive mode, the attributive expression, and the
6 Gilles Deleuze, Difference e/ repetition (Paris: PDF, 1968); Difference and
Repetition. Tr. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). p.
52/35, hereafter DR
7 Ibid., p. 53/36
8 JH, p. 21
9 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et Ie probleme de I 'expression (paris: Minuit, 1968), p.
311, hereafter SPE.
10 Ibid., p. 21
RAY BRASSIER
5
expressed essence (substance). But the entire impetus of Deleuze's
interpretation of Spinozism consists in insisting that it is substance that
orbits around the modes, rather than the reverse ll . Thus, the critical
destitution of substance turns the latter qua expressed into a function of
the expressive mode. Moreover, it is because being expresses itself as
meaning that it can be grasped without invoking intellectual intuition.
This was already hinted at in Deleuze's review of Hyppolite, where he
commended Hegel's version of absolute rationalism for dissolving the
metaphysical dualism of being and appearing l2 . Accordingly, the
dissolution of representation consummates the critical destitution of
substance in such a way as to entail that being expresses itself as
meaning, but only insofar as meaning qua expressed must be grasped as
entity, which is to say, as event rather than as substance. The expressed
meaning 'insists' or 'subsists' in the proposition that expresses it, while
remaining irreducible to the signifying word or the designated thing.
Thus, in Logic· of Sense we find Deleuze asserting that "meaning is the
expressed of the proposition, the incorporeal at the surface of things, the
irreducible complex entity, the pure event which insists or subsists in the
proposition."13 (1969: 30) By the same token, Deleuze's fundamental
ontological proposition in Difference and Repetition constitutes a
'complex entity' in which being expresses its 'own' meaning: "In the
proposition considered as complex entity we distinguish between
meaning, or what is expressed in the proposition; the designated (what
expresses itself in the proposition); and the expressive or designating
factors, which are numerical modes, that is to say, differential factors
characterising the elements endowed with meaning and designation.,,14
The expressive factors that differentiate being are its numerically, which
is to say, quantitatively distinct modes or individuating differences, while
the attributes are expressed as its qualitatively distinct meanings: "The
attributes effectively operate as qualitatively different meanings, which
relate back to substance as to a single designated; and this substance in
turn operates as an ontologically unified meaning relative to the modes
which express it, and which subsist within it as individuating factors or
inherent intense degrees."15
11 Ibid., p. 59
12.JH, p. 20
13LS, p. 30
14DR, p. 52/35, tin
15 Ibid., p. 59/40, tin
6
Pli 19 (2008)
But why should the auto-expression of being as meaning depend
upon the distinction between quantitative difference at the modal level
and qualitative difference at the attributive level? There is a fundamental
difficulty here: on the one hand, Deleuze assures us that being expresses
or thinks itself through thought, while on the other he insists that
"meaning is never a principle or origin; it is produced"16. How then are
we to reconcile the claim that being expresses itself as meaning with the
claim that meaning is a consequence rather than a cause, a product rather
than a principle? This is the challenge confronting anyone trying to make
sense of Deleuze's exceptionally ambitious but also extraordinarily
difficult proj\'lct. But we can begin to see how these apparently conflicting
claims may be reconciled by distinguishing between two different levels \
at which Deleuze's philosophy of difference operates: On the first level,
differentiation is ontic (in the non-Heideggerian sense of the word as
'pertaining to existence or being', rather than in contrast to 'ontological')
and is elaborated in terms of the theory of temporal individuation which
lies at the heart of Difference and Repetition. This is Deleuze's account of
modal difference as quantitative distinction: individuation provides the
sufficient reason for actualisation and hence for modal different/ciation.
On the second level, differentiation is logical (in the sense of 'pertaining
to logos or discourse', ra!l:ter than a particular technical discipline) and is
explained in terms of the transcendental topology of the sense-event
proVided in Logic of Sense. And it is here that Deleuze provides us with
an account of the origin of qualitative distinction at the level of attributive
expression: it is the production of meaning that explains how symbolic
differentiation generates qualitative difference at the attributive level. But
it is important to note that both levels of this ontico-logical distinction
encompass the distinction between virtual differentiation and actual
differenciation: both virtual and actual dimensions are fully operative at
the ontic and logical levels. In this regard, the relationship between the
ontic and the symbolic, or between time and meaning, suggests that
Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense may be connected in a way
that echoes in an odd and entirely unexpected fashion the link between
Hegel's Phenomenology and his Logic. Thus it is necessary to
recapitulate Deleuze's account of ontic differentiation in Difference and
Repetition before considering how it might be connected to the account of
logical differentiation proposed in Logic of Sense.
16LS, p. 90
RAY BRASSIER
7
***
Difference and Repetition proposes an ontology of temporal difference: it
is precisely being as time that is "said in one and the same sense of all its
individuating differences or intrinsic modalities"17. And it is because
those individuating differences or intrinsic modalities express divergent
rates or 'tendencies' of duration that being cannot be conceptually
comprehended as an intuitable object. Already in 1956's 'Bergson's
Conception of Difference', Deleuze is arguing that to conceive of being
as pure self-differentiation is to conceive of it in Bergsonian terms as
duration: "Duration, tendency, is self-differentiating; and what differs
from itself is immediately the unity of substance and subject.,,18
Difference and Repetition will qualify and complicate this claim that
duration is the 'immediate' unity of substance and subject, or being and
thought, by suggesting that this unity cannot be represented as an identity;
it must be generated through a synthesis which simultaneously joins and
disjoins substance and subject, thought and being, via an involution of
temporal difference that renders it in and for-itself.
Thus, Deleuze uses the scalpel of a refined Bergsonism to
rearrange the body of Kantianism. Representation is subjected to a
critique which annuls the mediating function of conceptual understanding
vis-a-vis reason and sensibility. In Difference and Repetition the tripartite
structure of the first Critique ostensibly undergoes an involution which
folds the Transcendental Dialectic directly into the Transcendental
Aesthetic. The mediating role of the Transcendental Analytic is
supplanted by an account of spatio-temporal individuation which provides
the sufficient reason for a non-conceptual synthesis of reason and
sensibility. With the unifying function of the understanding suspended,
the aesthetic manifold need no longer be subjected to conceptual
subsumption; it now incarnates the dialectical structures of ideal
multiplicity. Rather than being specified via the representational logic of
subsumption, wherein the concept is always too 'baggy' to fit the
particular object, the individuated entity is the actualisation of a virtual
multiplicity; and it is individuation as ultimate determinant of
17 DR, p. 53/36
18 Gilles Deleuze, 'La conception de la difference chez Bergon' in L'ile deserte et
autres textes. Ed. D. Lapoujade (paris: Minuit, 2002). pp. 43-72, p. 52
8
Pli 19 (2008)
actualisation which ensures the exact coincidence of the ideal and the
real, and hence a precise fit between ideal genesis and empirical actuality.
In seeking out the ideal conditions capable of generating the individual
entity of actual experience, rather than the particular object of possible
experience, Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism' treats the concept (i.e.
the Idea as virtual multiplicity) as the object of an encounter which isno
longer governed by the logic of recognition: thus Deleuze declares,
"concepts are the things themselves, but things in their free and untamed
state, beyond "anthropological predicates"."19
Ideas are characterised as both distinct and obscure. They are
distinct insofar as they are perfectly differentiated - via the reciprocal
determination of relations and the complete determination of points - but
obscure because they are not yet differenciated - since all Ideas coexist
with one another in a state of virtual perplication. By the same token,
intensities are at once clear and confused. They are clear insofar as they
are enveloping and confused insofar as they are enveloped. Thus the
clarity of enveloping depth is inseparable from the confusion of
enveloped distance. Accordingly, in individuation, the perplication of
ideas is expressed by the implication of intensities. Enveloping depth
clearly expresses distinctreJations and points in the Idea, while enveloped
distance confusedly expresses their obscure indifferenciation. Moreover,
enveloping depth constitutes the field of individuating differences, while
enveloped distances constitute the individual differences. Intensity is
individuating precisely insofar as it expresses the Idea; but this
expression20 is a function of thinking:"To the distinct-obscure as ideal unity corresponds the clearconfused as individuating intensive unity. The clear-confused is
not a characteristic of the Idea but of the thinker who thinks it
or expresses it. For the thinker is the individual as such."21
19 DR, p. 3/xxi-xxii, tm
20 For accounts of the role of 'expression' in Deleuze's thought which differ from the
one presented here see Len Lawlor (1998) 'The End of Phenomenology:
Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty' in Continental Philosophy Review,
Vol. 31. No.1, 15-34; and Simon Duffy (2004) 'The Logic of Expression in
Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza: A Strategy of Engagement' in
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 12, No.1, 47-60.
21 DR, p. 325/253, tm ...
RAY BRASSIER
9
Intensity as spatio-temporal dynamism implies an individual thinker
precisely insofar as it is the expression of an Idea. Thus, Deleuze insists,
the Idea finds expression in the realm of the sensible because intensity
thinks and is inseparable from thought; albeit a thought that is no longer a
function of representational consciousness:"Every spatio-temporal dynamism marks the emergence of an
elementary consciousness which traces directions, doubles
movements and migrations, and is born at the threshold of
those singularities condensed relative to the body or the object
of which it is the consciousness. It is not enough to say that
consciousness is consciousness of something; it is the double of
this something and each thing is consciousness because it
possesses a double, albeit very distant and very foreign to it.,,22
Yet what precisely is the relation between the elementary consciousness
that emerges in every spatio-temporal dynamism and the body or object
which it 'doubles'? What is the nature of this enigmatic 'doubling'? The
answer lies in the correlation between intensity as 'expressing' and the
Idea as 'expressed'. The movement of actualisation corresponds to a fork
in being between the intensive individual's clear-confused thought as
'expressing' and the distinct-obscure difference in the Idea as
'expressed,23. In actualisation, univocal being splits between the
expressing thought of the intensive thinker - the 'larval subject' of the
spatio-temporal dynamism - and the expressed Idea. This is why the
difference between thought and thing, thinking and being, is not a
transcendent condition of access to things, as it is for the philosophy of
representation, but is rather internal to things themselves. In actualisation,
each thing is at once the expression of an Idea and the thought through
which that Idea is expressed: "Every body, every thing thinks and is a
thought insofar as, reduced to its intensive reasons, it expresses an Idea
whose actualisation it determines.,,24 Things themselves determine their
own actualisation insofar as they are the loci of spatio-temporal
dynamisms inhabited by larval subjects whose thought is the clearconfused expression of a distinct-obscure difference in the Idea. The
larval subject of spatio-temporal dynamism is the thinker of individuating
difference insofar as it clearly expresses a distinction in the Idea. Thus,
22 Ibid., p. 316/220, tm
23 Ibid., p. 326/253
24lbid., p. 327/254, tm
10
Pli 19 (2008)
individuating difference is the thought that 'makes the difference,25. It is
the 'differenciator of difference', the 'dark precursor', through which
difference in the Idea communicates with difference in intensity26. The
intensi,-:eindividual or larval subject is the thinker whose clear expression
of distinct relations and points in the Idea generates the individuating
difference through which the virtual is actualised.
Ultimately then, individuation determines actualisation, which
unfolds accordIng to the fork in being between expressing thought and
expressed Idea. This fork is a function of the nature of intensity as
enveloping and enveloped. Consequently, the distinction between
individuating and individual difference depends upon Deleuze's account
of intensity as essentially implicating. Moreover, not only is the larval
subject of spatio-temporal dynamism the catalyst for individuation, and
hence for actualisation, since it is his clear expression of a distinction in
the idea that 'makes the difference'; it is the larval subject that provides
the conduit for this fork in actualisation insofar as it is at once the patient
of individuation, or the expression of the Idea, and the individuating
agent, or the expressing thought.
If time qua duration pertains essentially to mind ('esprit'), it is
precisely the mind of the larval subject, whose thinking of individuating
difference detennines the actualisation of the virtual as a contraction of
memory. Thus, for Deleuze as for Bergson, matter is to be understood "as
the dream of mind or as mind's most dilated past.'>27 The larval subject of
spatio-temporal synthesis dreams matter into being through the
individuating difference of his thought insofar as it clearly expresses a
distinction in the Idea.
But actualisation occurs through an individuating difference which
is the determination of a differentiation in the Idea; not the specification
of a difference in the concept. Thus actualisation is the determination of
the difference between two differences: the extrinsic difference between
instants contracted in the present and the intrinsic difference between the
degrees of contraction of memory. The difference between the past and
25 Ibid., p. 43/28
26 Ibid., p. 1541117
27 Ibid., p. 114/84, t:riJ.
RAY BRASSIER
11
the present resides in the difference between these two contractions of
difference - between the repetition in extensity of extrinsically related
successive instants (partes extra partes) and the repetition in intensity of
internally related co-existing levels of the past2 8 .
Moreover, actualisation as determination of the difference between
.• the contraction of habit and the contraction of memory implies a third
synthesis; and it is the latter that institutes a correspondence between
expressing and expressed, thought and Idea. Between the determination
of thought in the passive self ofthe larval subject and the indetermination
(i.e. indifferenciation) of problematic being in the Idea lies the pure and
empty form of time as the transcendental condition under which the
indeterminate becomes determinable 29 . It is 'pure' because it is the
exclusively logical time internal to thinking, rather than the chronological
time in which thought unfolds. It is 'empty' because it is devoid of
empirical content (the living present of habit), as well as of metaphysical
substance (the contractions and dilations of ontological memory). And it
is 'transcendental' because it ensures the a priori correspondence between
thinking and being as expressing and expressed. Accordingly, it
establishes the correlation between the determination of thought as
individuating difference borne by the intensive thinker, and the
determinability of being as differentiated but undifferenciated preindividual realm. Thus it is the third synthesis of time which accounts for
the genesis of ontological meaning as that which is expressed in
thought,30 and which relates univocal being directly to its individuating
difference as the expressed to its expression. In this regard, it is
indissociable from the transcendent exercise of the faculties through
which the Idea is generated3!. The third synthesis is the properly
ontological synthesis which determines actualisation as the
different/ciation that generates the future through the division between
past and present. Moreover, as actualisation of the future, it conditions the
actualisations comprised in the past and the present because it generates
the correspondence between thought and Idea which is already
presupposed in them. Thus, the third synthesis not only generates the
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 220/169
30 "Meaning is like the Idea which is developed through sub-representative
determinations." (Ibid., p. 201/155, tm)
31 Ibid., p. 251/194
12
Pli 19 (2008)
specifically ontological difference between two sorts of difference - the
extrinsic difference that separates instants contracted in the present and
the intrinsic difference that separates the contractions of memory - it also
brings together what it separates since it establishes a correspondence
between the larval thought contracted in the present and the Idea
embodied in the degrees of contraction of ontological memory. The
'fracture' of pure and empty time conjoins thinking and being even as it
separates the past and the present which are retained as degrees of
contraction in the Idea: "For just as difference is the immediate gathering
and articulation of what it distinguishes, so the fracture retains what it
splits, and Ideas also retain their sundered moments."32
Accordingly, thinking for Deleuze is never the actIVIty of a
constituting consciousness. Likewise, transcendental synthesis is not
anchored in the subject of representation. Rather, both thinking and the
subject of thought are engendered through the empty form of time that
fractures the 'I' which is supposed to lie at the origin of thinking and
correlates it with the larval consciousness which crystallises through the
contractive contemplation of pre-individual singularities (the undifferenciated 'groundlessness' of the Idea):"It is the empty form of time that introduces and constitutes
" Difference in thought; the difference on the basis of which
thought thinks, as the difference between the indeterminate and
determination. It is the empty form of time that distributes
along both its sides an I that is fractured by the abstract line [of
time - RB), and a passive self that has emerged from the
groundlessness which it contemplates. It is the empty form of
time that engenders thinking in thought, for thinking only
thinks with difference, orbiting around this point of
ungrounding. ,,33
Between the determination of the passive self and the indetermination of
the I fractured by the Idea lies the difference generated by thinking; and it
is through the latter that the pure form of time establishes the correlation
between expressing intensity and expressed Idea34 . Thus the key
32 Ibid., p. 220/170, tm
33 Ibid., p. 354/276, tm
34 Ibid., p. 332/259
RAY BRASSIER
13
distinction (though it remains unstated in Deleuze's text) is that between
the specifically ontological different/ciation carried out by thinking and
the clear~confused thought of the larval subject who expresses that
difference. Yet thinking is an act; precisely "the most intense or most
individual act,,35 insofar as it overthrows the identity of the I and the
resemblance ofthe seI:r6.
Deleuze associates this act with the 'caesura' of pure and empty
time. The caesura of time effects a selection wherein repetition in
intensity and differentiation in the Idea are separated from the repetition
of habit and the difference in the concept. It marks the point at which
difference in itself is repeated for itself. The future as unconditioned or
absolute novelty emerges through the fracture of time that allows
individuation to rise up to the surface of consciousness in the gap
between its specific form and its organised matter. But it is the caesura
that generates this fracture in consciousness and hence the act of the
thinker that produces the new. Thus it seems that the act through which
consciousness is fractured by the form of time in such a way as to
introduce novelty into being is a peculiar privilege of complex psychic
systems. Only consciousness can be folded back into its own preindividual dimension; only the psychic individual can become equal to its
own intensive individuation. It is the thinker - the philosopher-artist who is the 'universal individual'.
Ultimately, the caesura of thinking, the fracture of time, the
affirmation of recurrence, and the experience of death through which the
psychic individual becomes re-implicated in individuation, all point
toward a fundamental ontological conversion wherein consciousness frees
itself from the strictures of representation to become the catalyst for the
eternal repetition of difference-in-itself. For it is through the caesura of
thinking that the implication of intensity is finally prised free from its
explication in extensity and intensive difference finally becomes liberated
from extensive repetition.
***
35 Ibid., p. 285/221
36 Ibid., p. 283/219
Ph 19 (2008)
14
Deleuze distinguishes between physical, biological, and psychic systems
by virtue of the order of Ideas incarnated in them, their rates of
individuation, and their figures of actualisation. But they are also
distinguished by the fact that they express increasing degrees of
compleXity. Deleuze defines the latter in terms of what he calls the
'values of implication' or 'centres of envelopment' present within a
system as it undergoes individuation and actualisation37 . These centres of
envelopment "are not the intensive individuating factors themselves, but
their representatives within a complex system in the process of its
explication."38 They have three characteristics. First, they are signs,
flashing between two series of difference in intensity; the latter
constituting the 'signal system' which generates the sign39. Second, they
express the meaning of the Idea incarnated in the system. And third,
insofar as they envelop intensity without explicating it, these centres
testify to local increases in negentropy, defying the empirical law of
entropic explication. Thus what distinguishes complex systems is their
incorporation of individuating differences: though the latter are never
directly expressed in the extensity whose actualisation they determine and
in which they are partially explicated, they are enveloped within it insofar
as they subsist in a state of implication in signal-sign systems. The latter
constitute the centres of envelopment for intensive difference within an
extensive system; or a:tDeleuze puts it, the phenomenon closest to the
intensive noumenon40 .
'.'-
Accordingly, the complexity of a system in extensity can be
measured by the extent to which its individuating factors become
discretely segregated from the pre-individual continuum and incorporated
within it as signal-sign systems. Where the intensive factors that
individuate physical extensity remain extrinsic to the latter, so that the
physical qualification and partitioning of a system occurs 'all at once' and
only at its edges, those that individuate biological systems are -enveloped
within the organism (as genetic factors for instance) so that the
specification and organisation of the latter occurs in successive stages,
through influxes of singularities involving dynamic interaction between
37 Ibid., p. 329/255
38 Ibid., p. 3291256, tIn
39 Ibid., p. 286-7/222
40 Ibid., p. 3291256
RAY BRASSIER
15
the organism's internal milieu and its external environment. 41 Thus,
Deleuze concludes, "the living pays witness to another order; one that is
heterogeneous and of another dimension - as though its individuating
factors or atoms considered individually according to their power of
mutual communication and fluent instability, benefited from a superior
degree of expression in it."42 For Deleuze, the intensive factors enveloped
in living organisms enjoy a 'superior degree of expression' because their
biological incorporation implicates them in extensity without exhaustively
explicating them. Centres of envelopment harbour an un-explicated
residue of implicated intensity. Consequently, Deleuze considers the
complexity exhibited by the living to be fundamentally 'heterogeneous' to
the inorganic precisely insofar as the former 'expresses' intensity to a
higher degree than does the latter. Here as throughout Difference and
Repetition, Deleuze's use of the term 'expression' is quite specific.
'Expression' is explicitly defined as "that relation which essentially
comprises a torsion between an expressor and an expressed, such that the
expressed does not exist apart from the expressor, even though- the latter
41 "Unlike the physico-chemical sphere, where the 'code' that underlies forms or
qualities is distributed throughout the three-dimensionality of a structure, in the
organic sphere this code becomes detached as a separate one-dimensional
structure: the linear sequence of nucleic acids constituting the genetic code."
Manuel De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, (London:
Continuum, 2002), p. 163-4. While this is in many ways a very useful gloss, the
claim that individuating factors constitute a 'code' is problematic on two counts.
First, it seems to ignore Deleuze's distinction between individuating and individual
differences, which is the distinction between enveloping intensity as clear
expression of a distinct difference in the Idea and enveloped intensity as confused
expression of the Idea's obscure perplication: "Two individuating intensities may
be abstractly the same by virtue of what they clearly express; they are never the
same on account of the order of intensities which they envelop or the relations
which they obscurely express." (DR, p. 326/253, tru) This irreducible variability in
the correlation between individuating differences and pre-individual singularities
would seem to indicate an order of complexity which is difficult to codify in an
information-theoretic register. Second, it is not clear how individuating factors
could become detached as a 'separate one-dimensional structure' without
themselves becoming individuated. Intensive individuation was supposed to
provide part of the 'sufficient reason' for actualisation (Ibid., p. 285/221), not its
cause in extensity, and if the individuating factors invoked in order to account for
actualisation are themselves already individuated then the virtual-actual distinction
collapses and an infinite regress looms.
42 Ibid., p. 329/255, tru
16
P!i 19 (2008)
relates to the fonner as to something entirely other than it.,,43 (Deleuze
1968: 334, 1994: 260 tm) As we have seen, the expressive torsion
between expressor and expressed is articulated in the correlation between
individuating intensity and pre-individual Idea generated through the
fractun~'of time. More precisely, the ontologically 'expressive' relation
between univocal being and its individuating differences is a function of
the correlation between intensity in sensation and meaning in ideation
which is effectuated through the caesura of thinking. Thus the
'expression' of intensive difference provides the obverse to its
'explication': where the latter corresponds to its degree of dilation in
physical space, the fonner corresponds to its degree of contraction in
psychic time. Accordingly, only in the psychic dimension does the
expressive relation between sensible repetition and ideal difference attain
its consummate realisation. It is in the psyche, and in psychic
individuation more particularly, that intensive difference achieves its
fullest expression. The psychic realm not only represents an exponential
increase in complexity vis-a.-vis the domain of the living, but rather the
definitive potentiation of intensive difference precisely insofar as it is in
psychic individuation - as exemplified by the third synthesis and the
caesura of thinking - that the expressing becomes commensurate with the
expressed.
" However, though the expresslOn of intensive difference
concomitant with ontological repetition emerges from bio-physical
repetition as a result of the transcendent exercise of cognitive faculties
possessing a well specified empirical function, there is a sense in which
this maximal psychic repetition of difference is already latent in the
habitual repetitions carried out by the larval subjects of passive synthesis.
Thus, although ontological repetition arises out of bio-physical repetition,
it ultimately eliminates its bio-physical basis by bringing about a
definitive separation between bio-physical explication and the psychic
expression of difference. Once again, it is Deleuze's empiricist appeal to
the primacy of 'experience' that provides the rationale for this separation
between entropic explication and negentropic expression in the third
synthesis. Instead of presupposing consciousness as a unitary locus of
experience, Deleuze atomises it into a multiplicity of larval subjects. But
in so doing, not only does he render an elementary fonn of consciousness
ontologically ubiquitous, thereby endorsing a variety of panpsychism; he
43 Ibid., p. 3341260. tm
RAY BRASSIER
17
also injects intensive duration into physical extensity by making the
psychic contraction of difference into the precondition for spatial
repetition. Though intensity is implicated in space, its nature is essentially
temporal as the multiplicity which cannot divide without changing in
nature. 44 Thus Deleuze finesses the Bergsonian dualism of temporal
heterogeneity and spatial homogeneity by implicating the former at the
heart of the latter in the shape of elementary psychic syntheses which
precede constituted individual organisms as well as the individuated
subject of consciousness. The claim that intensive difference originates in
an elementary form of psychic contraction is the crucial empiricist
premise (derived from Deleuze's reading of Hume) which will allow
De1euze to attribute a transcendental function to time understood as
intensive difference and to construe the latter as the precondition for
space construed as extensive repetition:"In each instance, material repetition is the result of a more
profound repetition which unfolds in depth and produces it as a
result, like an external envelope or a detachable shell, but one
which loses all its sense and all its capacity to reproduce itself
once it is no longer animated by its cause or by the other
repetition. Thus it is the clothed that lies beneath the naked, and
that produces or excretes it as the effect of its secretion. ,,45
The repetition which unfolds in depth is the intensive repetition between
the virtually coexisting degrees of difference in ontological memory. Thus
the clothed or intensive repetition of duration inhabits bare or physical
repetition as its enabling condition. Accordingly, it is the empiricist
premise that time implies the psychic registration of difference, and hence
that temporal difference is a function of psychic contraction, that provides
the precondition for the transcendental claim according to which the
intensive noumenon furnishes the sufficient reason for the extensive
phenomenon. Consequently, it seems at least initially that the vitalism
which Deleuze will quietly but unequivocally endorse toward the close of
Difference and Repetition - 'the living bears witness to another order, to a
44 "The indivisibility of the individual pertains exclusively to the property whereby
intensive quantities cannot divide without changing in nature." (Ibid., p. 327/254,
tm) The latter is precisely Bergson's definition of duration as qualitative
multiplicity, which he contrasts to the quantitative multiplicities proper to space.
45lbid., p. 370/289, tm
Pli 19 (2008)
18
heterogeneous order, and to another dimension' - follows from a
panpsychism which is rooted in a form of radical empiricism.
Yet there is a fundamental ambiguity concerning the relation
between the organic and the psychic in Difference and Repetition. On one
hand, De1euze seems to attribute a fundamental status to the larval thinker
as 'universal' intensive individual and to thought itself as ultimate
individuating factor: "every body, every thing thinks and is a thought
insofar as, reduced to its intensive reasons, it expresses an Idea whose
actualisation it determines."46 To reduce something to its 'intensive
reasons' is to reduce it to its constituting spatio-temporal dynamisms, of
which the larval subject is at once the patient and the agent whose
individuating thought catalyses the actualisation of Ideas47 . Assuming that
not every body or every thing is organic, this would then imply the
absolute ubiquity of larval subjectivity and hence the existence of passive
syntheses proper to the inorganic realm. Yet this does not seem to be the
case, for all the textual' evidence indicates that the passive syntheses
executed by larval subjectivity are peculiar to the organic domain.
Consider the following three passages:"[I]in the order oLQQl1stituting passivity, perceptual syntheses
refer back to organic syntheses as to the sensibility of the
'senses, to a primary sensibility which we are. We are made of
contracted water, earth, and light, not only prior to recognising
or representing them, but prior to perceiving them. Every
organism is, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in
its viscera, a sum of contractions, retentions, expectations."48
"What organism is not made up of elements and cases of
repetition, of contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen,
carbon, chlorides and sulphates, thereby intertwining all the
habits of which it is composed? Organisms awake to the
sublime words of the third Ennead: all is contemplation! ,,49
"A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves
and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to
46 Ibid., p. 3271254, tm
47 Ibid., p. 156/118-9
48 Ibid., p. 99/73, tm
49 Ibid., p. 102175
RAY BRASSIER
19
contract a habit. This is no mystical or barbarous hypothesis.
On the contrary, habit here manifests its full generality: it
concerns not only the sensory-motor habits that we have
(psychologically), but also, before these, the primary habits that
we are; the thousands of passive synthesis of which we are
organically composed [ ... J
Underneath the self which acts are little selves which
contemplate and which render possible both the action and the
active subject. We speak of our 'self only in virtue of these
thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is
always a third-party who says 'me'. These contemplative souls
must be assigned even to the rat in the labyrinth and to each
muscle of the rat."so
These and similar passages, which constantly reiterate the intimate
connection between larval subjectivity and the organic domain, strongly
suggest that Deleuze's claims concerning the necessary role of passive
synthesis in the constitution of the present, and of larval subjectivity in
individuation, point not towards their ubiquity across the organic and
inorganic realms, but rather toward the much stronger vitalist thesis that it
is insofar as everything is ultimately organic and/or 'living' in some
suitably enlarged sense that everything 'thinks' in some equally expanded
sense. Despite initial appearances, Deleuze does not anchor his
endorsement of vitalism in panpsychism; his assertion of panpsychism is
rooted in his commitment to vitalism. Deleuze's claim is not, contrary to
what one might expect, that some minimal form of consciousness is
implicated even in the inorganic realm, and that this provides the
precondition for the emergence of organic sentience; the latter being
understood as a complexification of this more primitive inorganic
'prehension' (of the sort envisaged by panpsychists like Whitehead, and
more recently, David Chalmers).sl Rather, Deleuze seems to assert 1) that
a primitive form of organic time-sentience, understood as the psychic
expression of temporal difference - as effectuated in the correlation
between thought and Idea - provides the precondition for the actual
experience of individuated extensity; where 'actual experience' is
50 Ibid., p. 101-3/74-5, tm
51 Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, (London and New York: The
Free Press, 1978); David Chalmers 'Is Experience Ubiquitous?' in Chapter 8 of
Chalmers' The Conscious Mind, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
20
Pli 19 (2008)
understood as simultaneously comprising an unconscious or sub-~
representational level and a conscious or representational level, and
'individuated extensity' is construed in terms of the physico-biological
explicati9n of intensity; and 2) that the psychic expression of temporal
difference concomitant with this time-sentience only attains it ultimate
ontological dignity in a specifically psychic dimension of individuation.
Within this continuum of experience that runs from the subrepresentational to the representational level, organic contraction provides
the originary juncture between the virtual dimension of the pre-individual
and the actual realm of constituted individuals. Thus the contraction of
habit yields the originary organic synthesis from which the two divergent
continua of empiria, i.e. ideality and sensibility, derive. More precisely,
given the two diagonal axes around which Difference and Repetition is
structured, ideal-sensible and virtual-actual, organic contraction marks the
point of inception of difference in experience from which these two
diagonals originally diverge before ultimately converging again in the
ontological repetition which generates the transcendental difference that
splits experience by separating psychic expression from physical
explication.
Nevertheless, Deleuze's insistence on casting psychic expression as
the s~fficient reason for physical explication puts him in a position where
he is "constantly equivocating between the claim that he is providing an
account of the genesis of actual experience and the claim that he is giving
an account of the genesis of actuality tout court. The two are not
coextensive. In'response to Deleuze's claims that the synthesis of the
present (organic contraction) constitutes extensity in actual experience,
and that the psychic expression of difference determines the physical as
well as the biological actualisation of Ideas, it is necessary to point out
that, for all its much vaunted audacity, Deleuze's excavation of the subrepresentational and unconscious dimensions of experience still leaves
vast tracts of actual reality completely unaccounted for. For even if
organisms are composed of contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chloride
and sulphates, these elements are not themselves composed of organic
contractions - thus the neutrinos, photons, gluons, bosons, and muons
which compose physical space-time cannot plausibly be construed as
contractions of organic habit. Nor can g3J.axies, gravitational fields, or
dark matter. Whatever their ultimate ontological status - whether they are
patronised as usefU11dealisations or admitted as indispensable
RAY BRASSIER
21
constituents of actuality - these are precisely the sorts of physical entity
that cannot but be ignored by the empiricist bias of Deleuze's account of
the constitution of space and time. It might be objected that these and
other supposedly 'theoretical' entities do enjoy a real generative status for
Deleuze as the ideal components of virtual multiplicities. 52 But the only
reason for confining them to the domain of ideality - unlike the heart,
muscles, nerves, and cells to which Deleuze ascribes a privileged role as
the loci of passive syntheses - is the empiricist prejudice that insists on
contrasting the putative 'concretion' of experience to the 'abstraction' of
cognitive representation. Deleuze radicalises empiricism, widening the
ambit of actual experience to include sub-representational and
unconscious depths; nevertheless, it is precisely the assumption that
experience invariably comprises 'more' than whatever~can be cognitively
represented and the ensuing contrast between conceptual abstraction and
perceptual concretion that encourages him to include muscles and water
within the ambit of actual experience, but not galaxies and electrons. It is
because the actual extensity whose genesis Deleuze attributes to the
operations of passive synthesis has been circumscribed as a domain of
experience, and hence necessarily tethered to the organic, that the
muscles of rats are deemed more appropriate sites for the larval subjects
of spatio-temporal dynamisms than are electrons. And it is Deleuze's
empiricist bias toward the genesis of actuality as constituted in experience
that explains his restriction of the ambit of passive synthesis to
differences that can be organically registered. In this regard, it is
important to note how the autonomy Deleuze attributes to the realm of
ideality as virtual reservoir of pre-individual singularities is nevertheless
anchored in the empiricist claim that temporal difference presupposes
psychic contraction and that contraction requires an organic substrate. For
it is the organic contraction effected by the larval subject that is
responsible for the expression of the Idea: "Larvae bear Ideas in their
flesh, while we are still at the stage of the representations of the
concept."53 The speculative audacity with which Deleuze upholds the
rights of virtual ideality should not blind us to the curiously conservative
nature of this empiricist premise.
52 De Landa (2002) proposes a reading of Deleuze wherein virtuality becomes the
preserve of theoretical entities such as phase spaces and dynamic attractors. But, as
Alberto Toscano has pointed out, he does so at the cost of eliding Deleuze's
fundamental distinction between virtuality and possibility. Cf. Alberto Toscano,
The Theatre o/Production, (Basingstoke: Pal grave, 2006), p. 184-7.
53 DR, p. 203/219, tm
22
Pli 19 (2008)
***
Ultimately, the vitalism which is endorsed at the close of Difference and
RepetitiQT:1 is indissociable from the empiricism which is .embraced at its
opening, and the epistemological shortcomings of the latter are
aggravated rather than ameliorated by the considerable conceptual
ingenuity displayed in pursuing the ontological ramifications of the
fonner. Vitalism mayor may not be compatible with physics; but it
behooves the vitalist to make at least some sort of attempt to reconcile
them. Yet although discussions of biology abound in Difference and
Repetition - notably developmental biology - physics is conspicuously
under-represented, and where it is invoked, albeit metonymically in the
fonn of thennodynamics, this is only in order to be lambasted for
consecrating entropy. In this regard, it is important to note that Deleuze's
characterisation of entropy as a transcendental illusion presupposes his
account of the implication of intensive difference through the synthesis of
memory - it is the latter which implicates time as uncancellable
difference in actual extensity. But this is based on an account of time as
duration which remains vitiated by the empiricist premise that insists on
locating the constituting syntheses of time and space at the juncture
between the organic andpsY9hic realms.
In the absence of any physicalist corrective to vitalist hubris,
biocentrism leads infallibly to noocentrism. Physical qualification and
partitioning is determined by the correlation between intensity and Idea,
larval thought and ontological memory. Thus Deleuze's account of spatiotemporal synthesis begins by ascribing a privileged role to organic
contraction in the 1st synthesis of the present, proceeds to
transcendentalise memory as cosmic unconscious in the 2nd synthesis of
the past, and ends by turning a form of psychic individuation which is as
yet the exclusive prerogative of homo sapiens into the fundamental
generator of ontological novelty in the yd synthesis of the future. Matter
is relegated to 'a dream of the mind', whose representation in extensity
presupposes its animation by a temporal difference that generates
inanimate extensity as its blockage. The empiricist premise that the life of
thought must already be implicated in insensate matter insofar as the
latter is experienced underlies Deleuze's vitalist claim that physical
space-time harbours an impetus toward complexification belying the
RAY BRASSIER
23
reign of entropy in actuality. The contrast with which Deleuze presents
us, between actuality as an entropic junkyard yoked beneath the iron
collar of representation, and an actuality transfonned into an
inexhaustible reservoir of ontological novelty as the result of what
effectively amounts to an idealisation of matter, continues to assume that
the experience of time is irreducible to the objectifying representation of
space.
Deleuze dissolves the Bergsonian dichotomy of space and time,
quantity and quality, at the cost of reabsorbing the fonner into the latter in
what ultimately amounts to an idealist monism. Psychic individuation in
the act of thinking defines the point at which experience is transected by
pre-individual singularities in the Idea and impersonal individuations in
sensibility. Psychic individuation marks the moment wherein time, i.e.
being, is folded back into itself. Transcendental access to the meaning of
being is internalised within experience through the transcendent exercise
of the faculties, which generates Ideas as the correlates of larval thought
(albeit a 'meaning' which is indissociable from non-sense).54 As we have
seen, it is the transcendent operation of the faculties, provoked by the
encounter with individuating intensity as the unthinkable proper to
thought, which gives birth to the act of thinking through which the Idea is
generated:"It is nevertheless true that Ideas have a very special
relationship to pure thought [ ... ] The para-sense or violence
which is transmitted from one faculty to another according to
an order assigns a particular place to thought: thought is
detennined such that it grasps its own cogitandum only at the
extremity of the fuse of violence which, from one Idea to
another, first sets in motion sensibility and its sentendium, and
so on. This extremity might just as well be regarded as the
ultimate origin of Ideas. In what sense, however, should we
understand 'ultimate origin'? In the same sense in which Ideas
54 "Meaning is the genesis or production of the true, and truth is merely the empirical
result of meaning. [ ... J Nevertheless, the Idea which traverses all the faculties is
not reducible to meaning. For it is just as much non-sense; and there is no
difficulty reconciling this double-aspect through which the Idea is constituted by
structural elements which have no meaning in themselves, while constituting the
meaning of everything it produces (structure and genesis)." (Ibid., p. 2001154, tm)
Pli 19 (2008)
24
must be called 'differentials' of thought, or the 'Unconscious'
of pure thought, at the very moment when thought's opposition
to all forms of common-sense remains stronger than ever.
Ideas, therefore, are related not to a Cogito which 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 characterises thought as a faculty
in its transcendent exercise."55
Thus the Idea in which the meaning of being is expressed is the
unconscious of pure thought understood as ontological memory. The
double genesis of thought and being in the encounter with intensity which
gives rise to the act of thinking produces the divergent lines of
actualisation in the real according to the distinct meanings via which
thinking expresses being. Thus Ideas have an attributive status as
expressed in actualisation, yet ideal meaning is generated by the act of
thinking. Deleuze uses Bergson to reconcile Kant's discovery of the
transcendental status of time with Spinoza's monism. \Vhile Spinoza
cannot deduce the number and nature of fundamental differences in
substance, which he calls 'attributes', Kant deduces these differences,
which he calls 'categories', by de-substantialising them and yoking them
to representation. But the Bergsonian 'method of intuition' offers Deleuze
a way of identifYing the wellspring of ontological differentiation by
characterising differences in nature in terms of divergent series of
actualisation. Moreover, these divergences in actualisation are not merely
empirically given since they are engendered in and through thinking as
expressed meanings of being. Being is said in a single sense of everything
that is, yet everything that is differs, and this modal difference in
everything that is is a function of divergences in actualisation
corresponding to the distinct senses (or meanings) in which being is
expressed in thought: the Ideas. Thus, for Deleuze, the key to grasping
ontological differentiation, or the real differences in being, lies in seizing
the differences in actualisation; but this in turn hinges on grasping the
way in which the larval subject of spatio-temporal dynamism is the bearer
of individuating diffeninces, clearly enveloping distinct differences in the
Idea, as well as individual differences, ""hich confusedly envelop the
Ideas' obscure perplication. Yet the individuating expressions of being
occur in and as thought: from the germinal thought of the larval subject to
55 Ibid., p. 2511195, till
RAY BRASSIER
25
the fully potentiated thinking of the fractured 1. For Deleuze then, being is
nothing apart from its expression in thought; indeed, it simply is this
expression, which is distilled in the crystallisation of meaning.
***
This crystallisation is the focus of Logic of Sense. Deleuze distinguishes
between three dimensions of the proposition: designation, whereby it
refers to some individuated states of affairs; manifestation, indexing the
beliefs and desires of the speaking subject; and signification, comprising
the system of inferential relations between concepts. Attempts to ground
the meaning of the proposition in anyone of these dimensions quickly
unravel when it becomes apparent to what extent they each presuppose
one another: thus designation cannot be carried out independently of the
beliefs of the speaking subject; manifestation relies upon the validity of
inferential signification between conceptual beliefs; and conceptual
inference cannot be dissociated from the designation of some initial
premise. Meaning cannot be deduced from any of these aspects of the
proposition: rather than being construed as a function of empirical
designation, subjective manifestation, or conceptual signification,
meaning must be assumed as the ideal element which ensures the real
genesis and functioning of each of these three other dimensions. Meaning
is the ideal genetic element animating the internal structure of the
proposition and securing the correspondence between names and
qualities, adjectives and properties, verbs and attributes 56 . Thus it is
meaning that establishes the originary correlation between what is
expressed by the proposition and the corresponding attribute of the
designated state of affairs as the obverse and reverse faces of a singlesided topological surface or Mobius strip continuously twisting around
itself. To say that being is univocal is to say that being is the coincidence
of what is expressed by propositions and what happens to bodies:
"Univocity means that it is the same thing that happens and that is said:
the attributable of every body or state of affairs is the expressible of every
proposition. Univocity signifies the identity of the noematic attribute and
the linguistic expressed, event and meaning."57
56LS, p. 30
57 LS, p. 211
26
Pli 19 (2008)
Yet, how can De1euze insist both that meaning is constitutively unconscious58 and that it is a nqematic expression? HusserI defined noema
as the correlates of intentional consciousness' sense-bestowing noetic
acts.59 But what is noematic sense the correlate oJif, as Deleuze insists,
consciouSness is not 'of' something but rather is that something? It is not
the correlate of a constituting consciousness because, as saw above,
'everything thinks and is a thought', and hence has no need of intentional
consciousness to be expressive of thought. But the fact that thought is unconscious does not render the claim that everything is thought le~s
gratuitous. For Deleuze, meaning is something because everything is at
once expressive thought and expressed thing so that meaning is the
identity-in-difference of thought and thing, thinking and being. This is the
veritable meaning of univocity. Thus, when Deleuze describes the
production of the surface of incorporeal meaning, he does so precisely in
terms of the distribution of ordinary and singular points which he had
used to characterise the differentiation of the Idea. The topology of
meaning coincides with the internal structure of the Idea. The question
then is: Is Deleuze mathematising meaning and hence breaking with the
doxas of transcendental anthropology; or is he semanticising mathesis in
a way that ultimately reasserts the transcendental sovereignty of the
meaningful over the intelligible and that re~subordinates the Idea to
anthropological predicates'!'
In order to address this question, we must consider Deleuze's 1967
text 'How Does One Recognise Structuralism ?'60 In this text, which can
be seen as providing a succinct preCis of Logic oj Sense much as 'The
Method of Dramatisation' schematises Difference and Repetition,
Deleuze fastens onto the Lacanian triad of real, imaginary, and symbolic,
holding up the latter as privileged retainer of the objectivity and
autonomy of meaning beyond the proposition's real and imaginary
aspects - which is to say, beyond its designation of empirical reality and
its signification of imaginary representations. It is because the symbolic is
the domain of structure and structure is defined in terms of the primacy of
58 Cf. LS, pp. 124-5
59 Cf. Husser!, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. Tr: F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1982), esp. p. 214.
60 In L 'fle diserte et autres textes, ed. D. Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2002), pp. 238269.
RAY BRASSIER
27
differential relations over identical elements that meaning must be
understood as an effect of difference. But meaning remainsindissociable
from meaninglessness, since the differential elements which produce
meaning are themselves a-signifYing. Consequently, if "[m]eaning .is
never a principle or origin; it is produced', this is because 'meani11g is
always the result of a combination of elements which do not themselves
signify."6J The proper remit of transcendental philosophy, Deleuze
suggests, is to accOLmt for the genesis of meaning by unlocking the
workings of a symbolic register governed by a-signifying and nonpropositional yet perfectly intelligible processes. Thus the elements of the
symbolic and their combination index a dimension of intelligible
difference which encompasses and generates meaning: that of
differentiation as the reciprocal determination of indetenninate elements:
ydy + xdx == 0 or dy/u,,= X/y.62 Ultimately, it is the mathematical cOllception
of the differential and hence the mathematisation of difference that
provides the key to grasping the structure of the symbolic: mathesis
unlocks the symbolic matrix for the genesis .of meaning. 63 And.it is the
serial organisation of reciprocally determining differential elements that
constitutes stfllcture. The catalyst of serialisation and the instance that
causes divergent series of differences to resonate is a supernumermy
signifier or 'paradoxical' element which is at once stmcture's permanently
empty place and its perpetually placeless element. For Deleuze, it is this
pm:adoxical coincidence of stmctmaLlack and excess that constitutes nonsense as the 'object=X' that differentiates diffel'ence. Thus, not only does
non~sense produce sens~, it provides th~ originary dimension of
intelligibility within which sense unfolds. This 'object' is the veritable
'subject' of structure in the sense of being the dynalllic'quasi-cause' that
transfonns one structure into another.
The thesis of the intelligibility of non-sense allows Deleuze to
reconcil~ his acknowledgement of the transcendental status of meaning
with his endorsement of Spinozisl11'smost radical thesis, 'the thesis of
absolute rationalism', which is founded upon "the adequation between
our understanding and absolute knowledge", an adequation that "requires
the total intelligibility of God, which is the key to the total intelligibility
61 Ibid., p. 244
62 Cf. Ibid"p. 246
63Ibid.
Pli 19 (2008)
28
of things.,,64 This is of course precisely the thesis that the Kantian critique
of metaphysics is supposed to have rendered insupportable. The tension
between the 'absolute' rationalist thesis according to which being
expresses itself as meaning and the transcendental-critical thesis
according" to which meaning is always an effect is neutralised by
converting the intellectual intuition of essence into the production of
meaning as event. Hence Deleuze's claim that structuralism necessarily
entails a practice since "it is not only inseparable from the works it
creates but also from a practice relative to the works it creates. Whether
this practice be therapeutic or political, it designates a point of permanent
revolution or transference.,,65
By the same token, the dichotomy that pitted mathematised
meaning against semanticised mathesis is defused by the claim that being
expresses itself as meaning, but meaning is always an effect generated by
meaningless yet mathematically intelligible processes. However, this
resQlutiohcomes ata price. Although he establishes a basis for meaning
in
autonomous domain of symbolic intelligibility that transcends the
d()llu:lin of language, Deleuze does not seem to register' the need for an
account of how the symbolic itself is originally instituted or indeed how
thought is able to access it This would of course be part of the remit of
an epistemological agenda which, like Heidegger before him, Deleuze
has effectively foresworn. But it is not enough to show how sense is
conditioned by non-sense if relativising the autonomy of meaning
depends upon absolutising the autonomy of mathematical intelligibility.
Deleuze has merely shifted the burden of explanation from that of the
origin of meaning to that of the origin of mathesis. The latter cannot be
defined independently of thought and the nature of thought cannot be
explained without some attentiveness to the evolution of minded
creatures. If post-Darwinian modernity entails that neither thought nor
mindedness can be taken to be originary, one cannot forego the obligation
to explain the emergence of the latter on pain of regressing to some premodern paradigm. Curiously, Deleuze's transcendental predilections seem
to have blinded him to the binding nature of this intellectual obligation
and inadvertently precipitated him back toward the pre-modem myth of
an originally intelligible and hence enchanted world. Thus, when Deleuze
writes "It is certain that all designation presupposes sense, and that one
an
64 Ibid., p. 216
65 Ibid., p. 269
RAY BRASSIER
29
must install oneself in sense from the outset in order to carry out every
designation,,66, he seems to ignore the possibility that the relation of
reference might be founded from the bottom up and the outside in, which
is to say, within the element of reality, rather than from the top down and
the inside out, which is to say, within the element of ideality. By
beginning from the fully-formed proposition and ontologising meaning as
sine qua non for the proposition's designative dimension, Deleuze
continues to operate within the confines of a 'top-down, inside-out'
approach to meaning whose veritable alternative is not materialism - a
doctrine every bit as liable to transcendentalise the intelligible as idealism
- but the methodological naturalism whose refusal to subordinate science
to ontology goes hand in hand with its insistence. on separating ontology
from semantics. Only by upholding this modern separation can one hope
to provide a non-mystificatory account of the connection between
meaning, mind, and intelligibility.
66LS, p. 28