‘A Sacred Affirmation’

Abstract

Despite the growing body of writing that explores the productive collisions between immanent thought and theatre/performance, there would appear to be important work still to be done in developing the notion of an ‘immanent performativity’. Immanent performativity can be understood to be affirmative given the processual ontology that Deleuze proposes to be constituted by a continuous affirmation of difference. Initial forays into the relationship between Deleuze's work and performativity have suggested the latter term to be generally unsalvageable for immanent use on account of its genealogy in the study of language and have instead proposed other-than-linguistic approaches to concerns implicated with performativity such as queer theory. This need not be the case. By starting with Difference and Repetition – a text in which Deleuze develops a complex discussion of the emergence of representation, subjectivity and thought – an exploration into a Deleuzian affirmative and ‘immanent performativity’ can find particularly rich and relevant material upon which to draw. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze takes up Kant's notion of schematization and resituates it as one element along a performative chain or series – a genetic or constitutive line of performative dynamics that eventuates with the kinds of performativities of bodies and languages with which our contemporary theorizations are more familiar. In this article I propose that there are in fact other moments along such a reciprocally determining performative chain that accompany or even precede ‘dramatization’ within Deleuze's presentation of the genesis of representation and self in Difference and Repetition. This article raises important questions about how this ‘receded’ perspective on an immanent and affirmative performative can be understood to problematize and extend the work of other theorist of the performative, such as Searle, Derrida and Butler.

Notes

1 Various commentators understand Deleuze's reading of Bergson to involve a wholesale adoption of Bergson's perspective of a pre-existent virtual field. It is very useful to understand here that Deleuze proposes that the virtual is actually produced.