Living Mirrors of the Universe: Expression and Perspectivism in Benjamin and Deleuze After Leibniz
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Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy Kingston School of Art Kingston University, London Living Mirrors of the Universe: Expression and Perspectivism in Benjamin and Deleuze after Leibniz Noa Natalie Levin Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy November 2019 Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which Men are part both in the inch and in the mile. —Wallace Stevens, ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ ‘In the windswept towers of the Eiffel Tower, or better still, in the steel supports of a Pont Transbordeur, one meets with the fundamental aesthetic experience of present-day architecture: through the thin net of iron that hangs suspended in the air, things stream–ships, ocean, houses, masts, landscape, harbour. They lose their distinctive shape, swirl into one another as we climb onward, merge simultaneously.’ Sigfrid Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich (Leipzig and Berlin) p.7. In the same way, the historian today has only to erect a slender but sturdy scaffolding – a philosophical structure – in order to draw the most vital aspects of the past into his net. But just as the magnificent vistas of the city provided by the new construction in iron (again, see Giedion, illustrations on pp. 61-63) for a long time were reserved exclusively for the workers and engineers, so too the philosopher who wishes here to garner fresh perspectives must be someone immune to vertigo – an independent, and if need be, solitary worker. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project ii Acknowledgements There are many people who provided guidance and inspiration for this project, to whom I owe my deepest gratitude. I am extremely grateful for the encouragement, patience, thoughtful comments and discerning critique of my first supervisor, Peter Osborne. I am thankful for his truly introducing me to the philosophical métier and teaching me most of what I know about philosophical argumentation and critically approaching the history of philosophy. I wish to warmly thank my second supervisor, Éric Alliez, for helping me believe in my ability to venture into uncharted territory, and for his valuable comments and suggestions. I also would like to thank Lucie Mercier, who accompanied the project over the four years of its development with perceptive comments and thoughtful suggestions. In my first year at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) I had the honour and pleasure of being a teaching assistant in two memorable courses; Étienne Balibar’s course on Spinoza’s Ethics and Stella Sandford’s course on Kant’s First Critique. I wish to thank them, as well as Howard Caygill, Peter Hallward, Catherine Malabou and Andrew Benjamin, for their continuous support. My fourth year of writing was spent on an exchange in Berlin. I wish to thank my generous and welcoming hosts in the city; Daniel Weidner from the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL), Anne Eusterschulte from the Institut für Philosophie at the Freie Universität, and Katia Genel from the Centre Marc Bloch (CMB). They have all taken time to read and reflect on my work and I have benefited from the multiplicity of their perspectives. I am grateful, too, for the help and guidance of Jakob Vogel and Aurélie Denoyer from the CMB. Ursula Marx from the Walter Benjamin Archive has made me feel at home at the archive from my first visit. Many of my ideas were developed thorough conversations and debates with friends and colleagues. I would like to thank Tom Vandeputte, Nassima Sahraoui and Stephano Marchesoni for organising two wonderful workshops in which I had the pleasure of taking part, on the concepts of ‘perception’ and ‘intensity’ in Walter Benjamin’s writing. I also would like to thank Chris Law, with whom I co-organised the workshop ‘On Expression: Benjamin and Leibniz’ at Goldsmith University, London, and Frank Müller, co-organiser of the workshop ‘Übersetzungen von Gewalt. Walter Benjamins “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”’ at CMB. Both of these were stimulating and inspiring occasions for the exchange of ideas from which my own work profited. I would also like to warmly thank Alexandra Richter, Philip Eckhardt and Ilit Ferber iii for their guidance and feedback; and Eli Friedlander who first introduced me to Walter Benjamin during my BA studies. My gratitude goes to Orna, Gidi and Dan Hadari and to Amira and Alexander Goehr who hosted me generously in their beautiful homes during intensive writing periods. I am deeply thankful to my friends in Berlin, Tel Aviv and London; in particular Peter Taoussanis, Daniel Nemenyi, Daniel Weizman, John Douglas Millar, Marie Louise Krogh, Isabell Dahms, Tamara Micner, Josh Weiner, Dafna Sharabi, Alex Cocotas, Matan Nahaloni, Tamar Kay and Zehavit Zaslanski. I would also like to thank my family; especially my father Gabriel, who bought me a copy of Benjamin’s Arcades Project for my sixteenth birthday and read many a draft of my dissertation, my mother Anat, and my brother Boaz – for their loving encouragement, sensitive readings and warm words. ** My dissertation was generously supported by a Kingston University scholarship between 2015–2018; a scholarship from The Studienstiftung des Abgeordnetenhauses von Berlin during 2018–2019; and a grant from the Centre Marc Bloch between October and December 2019. iv Abstract This thesis argues for the significance of G.W Leibniz’s concepts of ‘expression’, ‘force’ and ‘perspective’ to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze. By triangulating the philosophical projects of Benjamin, Deleuze and Leibniz, as has not yet been done, the thesis opens up new perspectives and provides new readings of all three. Designating a structure of relations in which every simple substance or monad serves as a ‘living mirror’ of the universe, Leibniz’s concept of ‘expression’ denotes virtual inclusion or immanence. His concept of ‘force’ denotes the self-incurred drive that motivates the monad to action, while his ‘perspectivism’ defines the monads individuality through their infinite points of view on the world. Deleuze and Benjamin, I suggest, appropriate Leibniz’s concepts as part of their respective critiques of epistemology, which target Kant’s conception of experience as a hierarchic relation of representation, allowing them to redefine experience as non-hierarchal, de-centred and embodied. At the same time, for both, Leibniz’s philosophy serves to criticize historicist views of chronological time. Leibniz’s perspectivism is reformulated by Deleuze and Benjamin as part of their respective critical theories of the image, culminating in their later formulations of the ‘dialectical’ and ‘crystal’ image, respectively. The conclusion however, highlights the diverging paths formed by their returns to Leibniz. Benjamin develops a politically effective ‘historical perspectivism’ in which the discontinuity of history enables ‘true historical time’ to replace chronological time. Deleuze, on the other hand, opts for an a- historical pure form of temporality, his ‘mannerist perspectivism’ describing a continuous, perpetually repeated ‘becoming’. v Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................. 1 1. THE PROBLEMS OF EXPRESSION IN LEIBNIZ, BENJAMIN AND DELEUZE ......................................................... 1 1.1 Refiguring Experience ............................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 The Structure of Expression: Immanence, Perfection and Destruction ................................................ 10 1.3 Cartographies of the Baroque ............................................................................................................... 17 2. DELEUZE AND BENJAMIN READ LEIBNIZ: A PRELIMINARY OUTLINE ........................................................... 19 2.1 Deleuze reads Leibniz ............................................................................................................................ 19 2.2 Did Benjamin read Leibniz? .................................................................................................................. 22 CHAPTER ONE: EXPRESSION ...................................................................................................................... 28 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................................... 28 1. LEIBNIZ’S TWO LABYRINTHS ....................................................................................................................... 31 1.1 The Free and the Necessary .................................................................................................................. 31 1.2 Continuity .............................................................................................................................................. 32 1.3 Monad .................................................................................................................................................... 34 1.4 Expression .............................................................................................................................................. 35 2. DELEUZE ON EXPRESSION ............................................................................................................................ 38 2.1 A Forbidden Tradition ..........................................................................................................................