The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts LOVE, DESIRE, INDIVIDUATION: INTERSECTIONS OF PLATO, SCHELLING AND DELEUZE A Dissertation in Philosophy by Sara Dawn Eimer © 2010 Sara Dawn Eimer Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2010 ii The dissertation of Sara Dawn Eimer was reviewed and approved* by the following: Dennis Schmidt Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and German Chair of Committee Dissertation Advisor Nancy Tuana DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy Director, Rock Ethics Institute Graduate Program Officer for the Department of Philosophy Leonard Lawlor Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy Jeffrey Nealon Liberal Arts Research Professor of English Charles E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University Special Member *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT Using an ontological framework derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Gilbert Simondon, my dissertation reinterprets the accounts of love found in Schelling‘s Ages of the World and Plato‘s Phaedrus and Symposium. My overarching aim is to produce an account of love that does not invoke the functions and structures of subjectivity (as conceived by much of Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy). In doing so, I hope to explain an event (love) which is itself formative of, and hence excessive to, human or even divine subjectivity. Within this context, I attempt to articulate the precise relationship between two forms of love especially prominent in the Western philosophical tradition, namely agape and eros. Analyzing Schelling‘s concept of ―divine love‖ and Plato‘s concept of eros, I argue, first, that there are important isomorphisms between the two forms of love; and second, that in each case, love can best be understood as an emergent feature of a larger system in which the experiencing subject is caught up. Finally, I show how and why the experiencing subject‘s epistemic grasp of the larger system is constitutively limited, arguing that these limitations have important ethical consequences. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………….…1 Chapter 1: Ontological Love……………………………………………………….….14 Itinerary…………………………………………………………………..…….….14 An Admittedly Lengthy Note Concerning Two Concepts of Difference……...…..16 Metastable Being……………………………………………………………..........28 Die Weltalter: A Divine Prehistory…………………………………………….…..34 Onto-genesis…………………………………………………………………….…47 Love…………………………………………………………………………….….59 Chapter 2: Eros and Assemblage…………………………………………………….…70 Transition……………………………………………………………………….…..70 Some Preliminary Remarks on the Ontology of Deleuze-Guattari…………….......72 (Re)constructing Greek Eros…………………………………………………….…80 Deterritorialization in Socratic-Platonic Erotics………………………….…….…..94 Conclusion: Still Looking for Love.…………………………..…………………..125 Chapter 3: Individuating Eros…………………………………………………..……..128 Transition………………………………………………………………………..…128 Lover, Beloved and the Language of Eros……………………………………..….129 Erotic Individuation…………………………………………………………….…146 …But Does It Work? The Case of Alcibiades………………………………….….172 Conclusion: Love, Desire, Eros…………………………………………………....187 Conclusion: From Ontological Love to Friendship…………………………………....195 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….…..208 1 INTRODUCTION This project took its initial orientation from the problem of love. Such a strange and varied aggregate of experiences and phenomena, of rituals and affects, utterances and texts and relationships, falls under this name: how does it all work together, if it works at all? For example, what does the love attributed to the divine have to do with the love of finite beings? Can the name ―love‖ be applied unequivocally to these two cases? In what ways is philosophy an act of love, and how might we best philosophize about our experiences of love? Conversely, what kind of ontology do our experiences of love themselves seem to imply or presuppose? In the process of formulating these questions I encountered Gilbert Simondon's work on individuation, and found particularly intriguing his claim that there are important structural parallels or isomorphisms between different individuating systems. From the point of view of genesis, he argues, a salt crystal, a rat, a human being, and an ethical system might have a great deal more in common than we might think. As I read Schelling's Ages of the World and Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, looking for love, I came to focus more and more upon the processes of individuation described by these texts. For both Schelling and Plato, love and desire seemed to play an important role in the development of the individuating systems in question. This led me to wonder whether and to what extent the appearance and function of love and desire might be constant across these very different individuating systems; and whether this might give us a way to understand the relationships between the many different things we call ―love‖. Throughout this investigation I relied upon an ontology drawn from the work of Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari, finding it to be most productive and congenial for asking the theoretical and practical questions that interested me. Several features of this ontology will therefore feature 2 prominently in my project. First of all, the distinction between virtuality and actuality, and the understanding of reality as something continually produced in the interactions of intensively differentiated systems,1 are central to my understanding of love and its role in processes of individuation; I discuss these concepts in the first chapter, but draw upon them throughout the book. Secondly, Deleuze-Guattari's articulation of systems, especially social systems, in terms of assemblages animated by dynamics of deterritorialization and coding, provides the framework for the discussion of erotic love in the second and third chapters. Finally, the ontology of desire in Deleuze-Guattari gives us the tools not only to describe human love, but to grasp how it might relate to the ―ontological‖ love at work in Schelling's Ages of the World. This should suffice as an indication of the basic elements of and sources for this project. My task for the remainder of this introduction is twofold. I will begin with an outline of my argument, mapping the unfolding of the questions of individuation, desire and love in the three major parts of this book. I will then say a few words about the nature of my project as a whole, and attempt to answer certain questions or objections the reader may have. The first chapter follows and retells the narrative given by Schelling in the third version of the Ages of the World, with frequent digressions to explain and apply the other concepts— drawn from Simondon and Deleuze—that feature in my variation. Arguing that we can read the God of the Ages of the World as an intensively differentiated individuating system of the kind described by Simondon, I attempt to track the appearances of love and desire in this system. What we find is that although desire is a primordial component of the divine nature, love is not: it emerges, rather, at a very special systemic threshold, namely, the opening of space and time that takes place when divine freedom enters into relationship with necessary nature and freedom. 1 Although these ideas recur throughout Deleuze's solo work and persist in his collaborations with Guattari, I rely most heavily upon their presentation in Difference and Repetition. 3 Its emergence also seems to be contemporaneous with and implicated in that of a dimension of virtuality. Although the concept of ontological love will prove problematic, this association of love with virtuality will serve as an important key to understanding love in a human context. The second and third chapters explore the question of human erotic relationships. For reasons explained below, I restrict my inquiry to a particular social and historical milieu (Athens of the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.E.) and even a specific type of relationship (pedagogical pederasty, both in its traditional forms and with the modifications outlined in the Phaedrus and Symposium). The second chapter opens with an outline of Deleuze-Guattari's assemblage theory and ontology of desire, which provide the framework for my understanding of erotic phenomena: traditional pederasty, I argue, is best understood as a distinctive mechanism of social production,2 that is, a way of harnessing flows of desire within the Athenian socius so as to produce individuals (citizens) of a certain type. The problem, however, with the traditional pederastic mode of civic production is its unreliability; it is at least in part as a response to this problem that the reformed ―philosophical‖ pederasty of the Phaedrus and Symposium should be understood. Throughout the second chapter I examine the ways in which the interlocutors of these two dialogues propose and enact the deterritorialization and decoding of erotic flows, processes transforming both erotic practices and poetic or literary forms of expression. Ultimately, the dialogues propose to ―solve‖ the problem of pederasty by liberating (or deterritorializing) eros from the sphere of politics and political production, offering in place of these a reminder of the integration of eros in a more general cosmic economy, and an invitation to lovers not only to participate in this economy at the