The Eye is in Things: On Deleuze and Speculative Realism

ABSTRACT

Speculative realists have directed a radical critique towards what they call “correlationism,” the stance according to which we only have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. Both Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier have used Gilles Deleuze’s ontology as a paradigmatic example of correlationism. Instead of defending Deleuze from this accusation, I argue that we need to accept it, but that the correlation is drastically transformed when we take into account Deleuze’s panpsychism. I hence contend that Deleuze is a panpsychist, grounding my argument in (a) his theory of contemplations and (b) his account of the universe as a cinema in itself. This changes everything, since a panpsychist type of correlationism avoids the main problem that leads both Meillassoux and Brassier to try to overcome correlationism, namely, that of the possibility of existence before and after humans.

KEYWORDS:

• Gilles Deleuze
• Quentin Meillassoux
• Ray Brassier
• panpsychism
• correlationism
• speculative realism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The phrase “Speculative Realism” finds its origin in the name of an event held in April 2007 at Goldsmiths College, London. The presentations are collected in the third volume of Collapse (see Brassier, Hamilton Grant, Harman and Meillassoux 2007). The event was moderated by Alberto Toscano and included four speakers: Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux—considered “the four original members of the speculative realism group” (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011, 7). It is not our goal here to engage in a discussion about the accuracy of the term or lack thereof. Suffice to say, despite being an umbrella term that includes a variety of heterogeneous philosophical stances, it has been widely accepted by scholars (see, for example, Gratton 2014; Johnston 2014; Shaviro 2014; Sparrow 2014, and the whole collection of books “Speculative Realism,” edited by Graham Harman). On the other hand, they “all reject what Meillassoux calls correlationism” (Shaviro 2014, 65). Although Meillassoux prefers the term “speculative materialism” (Meillassoux 2008, 121; 2016, 133), Harman, referring to the “original group,” claims: “I still find it to be an effective term, one that draws wide attention to a fairly diverse set of philosophical programs by pointing accurately to key similarities among them” (Harman 2011, 21). For Woodard, “Speculative Realism can be seen as a response not only to the inadequacies of deconstruction and phenomenology but also to the increasingly loose deployment of the term ‘materialism’ itself” (Žižek and Woodard 2011, 406). As for Brassier, although he has later rejected the label (see Brassier and Rychter 2011), he uses it twice in Nihil Unbound (Brassier 2007, vii, 31), and Harman credits him for coining the expression (see Harman 2010).

2 Although we cannot discuss it here in detail, in a later text Meillassoux coins the term “subjectalism” to define “any metaphysics that absolutizes the correlation of being and thought, whatever sense it attaches to the subjective and objective poles of such a relation” (2016, 134). He distinguishes two types of subjectalism, namely, idealism and vitalism, and places Deleuze within the latter group. Deleuze’s name appears several times in the text (2016, 121, 122, 124, 132, 138, 152), and his ontology is construed as a refusal of anthropocentrism which “in fact led only to a most startling anthropomorphism that consisted, following the most classic illusion, of seeing in every reality (even inorganic reality) subjective traits whose origin is in truth all human” (126). Meillassoux is thus very clear in his refusal to accept any form of panpsychism: “No, we decidedly do not believe in this operation: to critique the subject only so as to subjectivate everything” (130). As for Brassier, he has also written on Deleuze elsewhere (see Brassier 2000, 2018), but the issues at stake in those texts are beyond the scope of this paper.

3 The term empirisme transcendantal appears in Différence et répétition (Deleuze 1968, 79, 80, 187, 192) and in texts referring to the ontology presented in that book (Deleuze 2003, 339, 359; 2015, 89–92). About this concept, see, for example, Bryant 2008; Kerslake 2009, 80–100; Rölli 2016; Sauvagnargues 2009; Somers-Hall 2013, 52–53; Williams 2012; Zourabichvili 2012; 209–212.

4 See Deleuze 1968, 103, 107, 129, 131, 146, 155, 156, 278, 283, 356.

5 If universal variation is virtual, one must nonetheless be careful not to conceive of living beings as purely actual, since this would eradicate the virtuality which persists through the actual. As Zourabichvili puts it, “the process of actualization is logically inseparable from the inverse movement of crystallization that restores to the given its irreducible virtual component” (2012, 216).

6 Even though a similar argument could be construed with Spinoza’s help, it is important to clarify that the correlation described here does not refer to the “parallelism doctrine,” the main differences being (a) that the loci of the correlation are the modes rather than the substance, and (b) that, since it is not a matter of identity between different attributes, a post-Kantian notion of synthesis is needed.

7 This work was supported by the CONICET’s Post-Doctoral Grant.

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Pablo Pachilla

Pablo N. Pachilla holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and the University of Buenos Aires. He is a researcher at CONICET (the Argentinian Comisión Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), professor at the University of Cinema (FUC), head of the research group Posnaturalismos, editor of Lo que fuerza a pensar (RAGIF, 2019), and author of La rupture du sens commun. Deleuze: lecteur de Kant (L’Harmattan, 2020), as well as many articles, book chapters, and translations. He was a fellow of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Embassy of France and the Region of Île-de-France.