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Abstract
This article explores the foundational place of disharmony in Deleuze's metaphysics and examines the consequences of this for the ethics that can be drawn from his work. For Deleuze, the space in which difference manifests itself is one of discord, monstrosity and violence. This becomes evident in his revision of Leibniz's notion of harmony in which he offers a “new harmony” based on the violent discords of differential relations, his evocation of the monstrosity of difference, and his theorization of the violence of thought. This paper addresses the critically neglected juncture between Deleuze's violent metaphysics and the kinds of speculative ethics that this metaphysics calls forth.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
I am grateful to Jessica Murrell for her careful reading of this manuscript and also to Ken Ruthven and Mandy Treagus for reading sections of this article in another form. I would also like to thank the participants of the 2011 Australian Society for Continental Philosophy conference for their comments on this paper, particularly James Williams who asked me about liberty.
1 Deleuze's analysis of Hegel in the first chapter of Difference and Repetition can be seen as the realization of his work on the history of philosophy, which systematically demonstrates that there is another philosophy of difference whose legacy operates counter to the Hegelian dialectic. Deleuze argues that Hegel conceived of difference as infinitely large by figuring it dialectically as contradiction, which posits it at its absolute maximum (Difference 44).
2 This does not mean that dissonance is not present in Leibniz, but instead to acknowledge that there is a particular way that harmony achieves resolution in his work. For further discussion of this point see Mogens Laerke.
3 In one of his lectures on Leibniz, Deleuze points out that reality is not engendered by differential calculus. For although “Leibniz relies enormously on differential calculus” he treats it as “only a symbolic system” and “a way of treating reality” (“Leibniz 22/04/1980” n. pag.).
4 Smith points out that although the mathematics of calculus provides Deleuze with a model for the concept of difference to which he appeals in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze's imperative is to develop a philosophical model rather than either a “metaphysics of calculus” or a “philosophy of mathematics” (“Condition” 9).
5 It should be noted, of course, that Leibniz, Hegel and Deleuze were all working on differential calculus at different moments in its historical development. For a discussion of how their philosophical systems were affected by this history see Duffy, Logic and “Mathematics,” and Somers-Hall.
6 According to Duffy, Deleuze developed an alternative history of mathematics as well as of philosophy, which creates a continuity between infinitesimal calculus and modern differential calculus (“Schizo-Math” 199). Duffy's argument rests on the place of the infinitesimal in the historical development of calculus. The infinitesimal had been present in seventeenth-century theories of calculus such as Leibniz's, but had subsequently been devalued. Duffy locates this matter historically, in the work of Karl Weierstrass, who in the late nineteenth century removed every reference to infinitesimals from his work on calculus. This became the dominant model of calculus until the 1960s, when Abraham Robinson reintroduced infinitesimals (“Schizo-Math” 203). Duffy suggests that this renewed interest in infinitesimals prompted Deleuze to develop his Leibniz-inspired alternative history of mathematics (“Schizo-Math” 212).
7 Although Deleuze makes this statement in relation to Antonin Artaud, the echo of Marcel Proust is also evident. In Remembrance of Things Past Proust writes in relation to thought (and in particular memory):
What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. To seek? More than that: to create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day. (62)
8 The complete list can be found in Difference and Repetition (167).
9 Deleuze insists that although the dark precursor has an identity, it is “indeterminate” (Difference 119) and cannot be “presupposed” (120). He also describes it as “invisible and imperceptible” (119). These factors make it very difficult to define.
10 In The Logic of Sense, the concept that is commensurate with the dark precursor is the “quasi-cause,” which is the convergence point for a divergent series. In the translation of Deleuze's presentation of his thesis to the Reunion of the French Society of Philosophy in 1967 (which was published in English as “The Method of Dramatization”) the dark precursor is rendered as the “obscure precursor” (Deleuze, Desert 97; emphasis in original).
11 In The Logic of Sense Deleuze refers to disjunctive synthesis to evoke the communication of differences (174).
12 We can take Manuel DeLanda's example of the change to the sedimentation of rock, which manifests from an external influence, as an illustration of how the posing of problems works in nature. In this figuration, the external change is the “problem” and the result is the way that the rock “responds.” Deleuze also describes an organism as “nothing if not the solution to a problem, as are each of its differenciated organs, such as the eye which solves the light ‘problem’” (Difference 211).
13 Evens refers to Deleuze's differential as “a problematic power, the power to problematize” (108). For Deleuze the problematic is “the ensemble of the problem and its conditions” (Difference 177).
14 It is important to note that although an Idea can be differentiated, it can never be differenciated (Deleuze, Difference 187).
15 Here, Olkowski refers directly to Deleuze's statement that “[d]isparity – in other words, difference or intensity (difference of intensity) – is the sufficient reason of all phenomena” (Difference 222).
16 For a very recent example see Jun and Smith.