THE TIMES of DELEUZE: an ANALYSIS of DELEUZE’S CONCEPT of TEMPORALITY THROUGH REFERENCE to ONTOLOGY, AESTHETICS, and POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY by Robert W
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THE TIMES OF DELEUZE: AN ANALYSIS OF DELEUZE’S CONCEPT OF TEMPORALITY THROUGH REFERENCE TO ONTOLOGY, AESTHETICS, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY by Robert W. Luzecky A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy West Lafayette, Indiana August 2021 THE PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL STATEMENT OF COMMITTEE APPROVAL Dr. Daniel W. Smith, Chair Department of Philosophy Dr. William L. McBride Department of Philosophy Dr. Leonard Harris Department of Philosophy Dr. Henry Somers-Hall Royal Holloway, University of London Approved by: Daniel R. Kelly 2 This is dedicated to Charlene. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Daniel W. Smith, William L. McBride, and Leonard Harris. Each of you has been a friend, a teacher, a mentor, and an inspiration. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... 6 INTRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW OF DELEUZE’S PHILOSOPHY OF TIME ..................... 8 CHAPTER 1: THE BEGINNING OF TIME ............................................................................... 15 CHAPTER 2: TIME AND INDIVIDUATION — SIMONDON AND DELEUZE ON TEMPORAL ONTOGENESIS .................................................................................................... 56 CHAPTER 3: TIME IN THE LOGIC OF SENSE ........................................................................ 85 CHAPTER 4: THE REPETITION OF DIFFERENCE —KIERKEGAARD AND DELEUZE ON TEMPORAL VARIATION ........................................................................................................ 100 CHAPTER 5: THE MEMORY OF CINEMA............................................................................ 118 CHAPTER 6: TIME AND THE STATE — STOCHASTIC EVOLUTION, CO-EXISTENCE, AND INSTANTANEOUS VARIATION .................................................................................. 163 CONCLUSION: TIME IS CEASELESS CREATION .............................................................. 204 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 212 5 ABSTRACT I analyze Deleuze’s concept of temporality in terms of its ontology and axiological (political and aesthetic) aspects. For Deleuze, the concept of temporality is non-monolithic, in the senses that it is modified throughout his works — the monographs, lectures, and those works that were co-authored with Félix Guattari — and that it is developed through reference to a dizzying array of concepts, thinkers, artistic works, and social phenomena. I observe that Deleuze’s concept of temporality involves a complex ontology of difference, which I elaborate through reference to Deleuze’s analyses of Ancient Greek and Stoic conceptualizations of time. From Plato through to Chrysippus, temporality gradually comes to be identified as a form that comprehends the variation of particulars. Deleuze modifies the ancients’ concept of time to suggest that time obtains as a form of ceaseless ontological variation. Through reference to Deleuze’s reading of Gilbert Simondon, I further suggest that Deleuze tends to conceive of temporality as an ontogenetic force which participates in the complex process of individuation. A standout feature of this dissertation involves an analysis of how Deleuze’s concept of temporality is modified in his works on cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, temporality comes to be characterized as something other than the measure of the movement of existents. In his detailed analyses of Bergson — in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and Bergsonism — Deleuze suggests that time involves an actualization of aspects of a virtual past as contemporaneous with the lived present. While not an outright denial of the relation of temporal succession, Deleuze’s claim implies a 6 diminishment of this relation’s significance in an adequate elaboration of the nature of temporality. Further, I observe —through reference to Deleuze’s readings of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza — that (the explicitly temporal) change of societal forms of economic organization is non-reducible to that suggested by linear evolution. The claim is that putatively discrete modes of economic organization do not enjoy temporal displacement with respect to one another. This suggests that linear evolutionary models of societal development are inadequate. This further implies that temporality is non-reducible to the relation of temporal succession. In concrete terms, societal change is characterized as immanent temporal variation. Taken together, these analyses yield the conclusion that Deleuze tends to conceive of the nature of temporality as involving the ongoing realization of multiple — non-identical, sometimes contrary — aspects of a stochastic process of creation that is expressed in ontogenetic circumstances, social evolution, literary works, and filmic works. 7 INTRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW OF DELEUZE’S PHILOSOPHY OF TIME Perhaps there is no aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy as important as his nuanced thought on the nature of temporality. For Deleuze, the concept of temporality is non-monolithic, in the senses that throughout his works — the monographs, lectures, and those works that were co- authored with Félix Guattari — he ceaselessly returns to elaborations on the nature of time. It is as though temporality is the thematic refrain of Deleuze’s philosophy. Throughout his published works and lectures, Deleuze draws on a dizzying array of philosophers, occult philosophers (i.e., mystics), novelists, filmmakers, poets, anthropologists, ethnologists, and political revolutionaries to develop a philosophy of time that is utterly without precedent in the Western philosophical tradition. From Plato to the Stoics, from Aristotle through to Kant, Husserl, and Bergson, from Marx and Stalin alike, Deleuze traces a remarkable path from the lost time of Proust through to the divergent temporal series illustrated in the fiction of Borges. There is the suggestion —hinted at in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald and further developed in Deleuze’s reading of Marx — that time involves a stochastic progression. Through reference to Kierkegaard and Riemann alike, Deleuze develops the claim that time involves the repetition of axiological and ontological singularities (i.e., moments of creation). Deleuze’s elaborations on the nature of temporal expression in film reveal time to be of a wholly different nature than that suggested by the those who would claim that art tends to mimic reality. From his nuanced analysis of the Marxist prehistory of capitalism, Deleuze develops the claim that temporality is involved in the stochastic creation of the State, as well as associated modes of economic production. Taken together, Deleuze’s variegated analyses yield a concept of time that is not easily reducible to a single unifying feature, totalizing aspect, idea, or expressive trait — i.e., it is no more reducible to 8 hylomorphism than it is identical to a Kantian transcendental condition of reality; time is no more a pure ideation than it is merely a subsistent attribute of material existents; though time may enjoy expression as the linear succession of quanta, it also enjoys expression as immanent qualitative variation. For these reasons, there is no singular time of Deleuze. The aim of this dissertation is to elaborate on Deleuze’s multiple, sometimes competing, more often than not affirmative claims about the ontological, aesthetic, and political aspects of temporality. There are six chapters of argumentation. Each chapter elaborates on a crucial development of Deleuze’s thought about the nature of temporality or an aspect associated with the expression or realization of a particular concept of time. It should be observed that Deleuze produced no single great book on time, in the sense that there is no one text devoted exclusively to temporality among Deleuze’s numerous monographs and co-authored works. Rather than implying a paucity of substantive analysis, this illustrates a super-abundance of analyses — a philosophy of time is woven throughout virtually all of Deleuze’s publications; in both the monographs and co-authored texts, stunning insights about the nature of temporality abound. In this sense, the philosophy of time is the ambient theme of Deleuze’s philosophical career. Though the order of presentation of concepts in this dissertation roughly corresponds to the order of the publication of Deleuze’s major texts, conceptual coherence is also a substantive factor in the organization of the following chapters. Taken together, these arguments yield the claim that Deleuze conceived of time as a nuanced ontogenetic process that gains expression in aesthetics (of cinema and literature), and Marxian approaches to the evolution of modes of economic production. 9 The first chapter may be read as an extended analysis of the theory of time first hinted at in Empiricism and Subjectivity1 and further developed in Difference and Repetition.2 Here, I observe that Deleuze conceives of time as a heteronymous formation involving analytically discrete syntheses. I suggest that just as the syntheses of time are discrete from each other, temporality — conceived of as a whole — is independent to the temporal serialization evidenced in the lived experience of psycho-social entities. I present this argument by specifying