Pure Immanence

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Pure Immanence Pure Immanence Essays on A Life Gilles Deleuze with an introduction by John Rajchman Translated by Anne Boyman ZONE BOOKS· NEW YORK 2001 Introduction John Rajchman Gilles Deleuze was an empiricist, a logician. That was the source of his lightness, his humor, his naIvete, his practice of philosophy as "a sort of art brut" - "I never broke with a kind of empiricism that proceeds to a direct exposition of concepts:' I It is a shame to pre­ sent him as a metaphysician and nature mystic. Even in A.N. Whitehead, he admired a "pluralist empiri­ cism" that he found in another way in Michel Fou­ cault - an empiricism of "multiplicities" that says "the abstract doesn't explain, but must itself be explained:'2 Indeed, it was through his logic and his empiricism that Deleuze found his way out of the impasses of the two dominant philosophical schools of his genera~ tion, phenomenological and analytic, and elaborate a new conception of sense, neither hermeneutic no Fregean.3 He tried to introduce empiricism into his 7 INTRODUCTION PURE IMMANENCE very image of thought, and saw the philosopher as an yet singular," and so requires a "wilder" sort of em­ experimentalist and diagnostician, not as a judge, even piricism - a transcendental empiricism. of a mystical law. From the start Deleuze sought a conception of em- , " ... We will speak of a transcendental empiricism piricism that departs from the classical defmition that in contrast to everything that makes up the world of says that all our ideas can be derived from atomistic the subject and the object" he would thus reiterate in sensations through a logic of abstraction and general- the essay that opens this volume. Transcendental em­ ization. The real problem of empiricism is ra.ther ..tOJ piricism had been Deleuze's way out of the difficulties be found in a new conception of subjectivity that introduced by Kant and continued in the phenome­ acquires its full force in Hume, and goes beyond his nological search for an Urdoxa - the difficulties of "associationism" - the problem of a life. ~.life .in- _ "transcendental-empirical doubling" and the "traps of vOlves a different"~ of thesensibl~"than the consciousness:' But what does such empiricism have kind that makes possible the conscious self or person. ~-. to do with the two ideas the essay's title joins together "-----_.-Sens~tionhas a peculial' role in it, ani.Ire1~uz~Iafi.e<t - "a life" and "immanence"? of a "being of sensation" quite unlike individual sense We may think of a life as an empiricist concept in data waiting to be inserted into a categorical or discur­ contrast to what John Locke called "the self' 4 A life sive synthesis providing the unity of their manifold for has quite different features than those Locke associ­ an "I think:' The being of sensation is what can only be ated with the self - consciousness, memory, and per­ sensed, since there precisely pre-exists no categorical sonal identity. It unfolds according to another logic: a unity, no sensus communis for it. At once more material" J logic of impersonal individuation rather than per­ and less divisible than sense data, it requires a synthe- sonal individualization, of singularities rather than sis of another, non-categorical sort, found in artworks, particularities. It can never be completely specified. It for example. Indeed Deleuze came to think that art­ is always indefmite - a life. It is only a "virtuality" in works just are sensations connected in materials in the life of the corresponding individual that can some­ such a way as to free aisthesis from the assumptions of times emerge in the strange interval before death. In the sort of "common sense" that for Kant is supposed \ short, in contrast to the self, a life is "impersonal and by the "I think" or the "I judge:' Through affect and 8 9 PURE IMMANENCE INTRODUCTION percept, artworks hit upon something singular yet connections of subject and predicate and the sets and impersonal in our bodies and brains, irreducible to functions that Gottlob Frege proposed to substitute any pre-existent "we:' The "coloring sensations" that for them. It is a logic of an AND prior and irreducible Maurice Merleau-Ponty saw in Cezanne are examples to the IS of predications, which Deleuze first fmds in of such a spatializing logic of sensation, no longer David Hume: "Think with AND instead of thinking IS, dominated by classical subject-object relations. But instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had we must push the question of sensation beyond the another secret:'6 It is a constructivist!Qgi£ of unfin- ~~'~.---- ~""- ___ ,_"~n phenomenolOgical anchoring of a subject in a land­ ished series rather than a calculus of distinct, count- scape, for example, in the way Deleuze thinks cinema aore 'correcifons;aridldsgoverneaDy conventions introduces movement into image. allowing for a dis­ andprobleinatizations, not axioms and fixed rules of tinctive colorism in Jean-Luc Godard.s There is still a inference:-ftssenseis iIl~~p~rabkfrom plaY:aififi.Ce, kind of sensualist piety in Merleau-Ponty - what he fiction,-as;for example, in the case of Lewis CarroH's called "the flesh" is only the "thermometer of a be­ "intensive surfaces" for a world that has lost the con­ coming" given through "asymmetrical syntheses of ventions of its Euclidean skin. Transcendental em­ the sensible" that depart from good form or Gestalt. piricism may then be said to be the experimental \ Such syntheses then require an exercise of thought, relation we have to that element in sensation that pre­ which, unlike the syntheses of the self or conscious- cedes the self as well as any "we," through which is ness, involve a sort of dissolution of the ego. Indeed attained, in the materiality of living, the powers of "a what Deleuze isolates as "cinema" from the fitful his­ life:' tory of filmmaking is in effect nothing other than a In Stoic logic, Deleuze finds a predecessor for such ( multifaceted exploration of this other act of thinking, a view. But, at the end of the nineteenth century, it is this other empiricism. Henri Bergson and William James who offer us a bet-V In such cases, sensation is synthesized according to ter philosophical guide to it than do either Husserl or I a peculiar logic - a logic of multiplicity that is neither Frege. Indeed, at one point Deleuze remarks that the . dialectical nor transcendental, prior not simply to the very idea of a "plane of immanence" requires a kind world of subject and object, but also to the logical of "radical empiricism" - an empiricism whose force 10 11 PURE IMMANENCE INTRODUCTION " ... hegins from the moment it dermes the suhject: a cism" becomes possible, one concerned with what is hahitus, a hahit, nothing more than a hahit in a field of singular yet "in -human" in the composition ofourselves. immanence, the hahit of saying 1:'7 Among the classi­ Deleuze would find it in Bergson and Nietzsche, who cal empiricists, it is Hume who poses such questions, imagined a "free difference" in living, un -conscious and Hume who redirects the prohlem of empiricism to­ no longer enclosed within a personal identity. ward the new questions that would he elaborated by While Deleuze shared with his French contempo­ Bergson and Nietzsche. raries a suspicion about a constituting subject or con­ That is the subject of Deleuze's youthful Memoire. sciousness, in Hume he found a new empiricist way He sees Hume as connecting empiricism and subjec­ out of it, which he urged against phenomenology and tivity in a new way, departing from Locke on the ques­ its tendency to reintroduce a transcendental ego or tion of personal identity. In Locke's conception, the a material a priori. The real prohlem dramatized in self is neither what the French callie moi or ie je - the Hume's humorous picture of the self as incorrigible 8 lor the me. Rather it is defined by individual "owner­ illusion is how our lives ever acquire the consistency ship" (myself,yourself) and sameness overtime (iden­ of an enduring self, given that it is born of" ... delir- ( \ tity). Locke thus introduces the problem of identity ium, chance, indifference"9; and the question then is: and diversity into our philosophical conception of can we construct an empiricist or experimental rela­ ourselves. What the young Deleuze found singular in tion to the persistence of this zone or plane of pre­ Hume's empiricism is then the idea that this self, this subjective delirium and pre-individual singularity in " person, this possession, is in fact not Biven. Indeed the our lives and in our relations with others? self is only a fiction or artifice in which, through habit, Immanence and a life thus suppose one another. we come to believe, a sort of incorrigible illusion of For immanence is pure only when it is not immanent living; and it is as this artifice that the self becomes to a prior subject or object, mind or matter, only when, fully part of nature - our nature. H ume thus opens up neither innate nor acquired, it is always yet "in the \ the question of other ways of composing sensations making"; and "a life" is a potential or virtuality sub­ than those of the habits of the self and the "human sisting in just such a purely immanent plane. Unlike nature" that they suppose. A new or "superior empiri- the life of an individual, a life is thus necessarily vague 12 13 INTRODUCTION PURE IMMANENCE or indefmite. and this indefmiteness is real. It is vague social thought. In the place of the dominant idea of a in the Peircian sense that the real is itself indeterminate social contract among already given selves or sub­ 'r or anexact.
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