Symposium

Looking back at June, I see that posting here has dropped dramatically. I'm going to pin that on the various projects that I've taken on over the past year, several of which have (or were supposed to have deadlines) in June and July.

Nevertheless, I didn't write this post to provide excuses or reassurances (if you needed them...). Instead, I'd like to announce that I've take over as the book review editor for Symposium, the journal for the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. 

For the readers of The Notes Taken, this means that I will periodically be posting links to the book reviews that will be published in Symposium. The journal's policy is to publish their book reviews online in advance of publication. I think this should be the default position of any academic journal. In a sense, a review offers the reader both a preliminary discussion of the book in question and, perhaps, some motivation for reading it. If it's tucked away in a journal that either isn't online, or barricaded by a pay wall, it could be overlooked for a more accessible review. And for the author, let's face it: hardly any academic prestige accrues for book reviews, so you may as well have a readership.

That being said, the first review here fulfills some of the functions I just described. Rachel Loewen Walker's review of Paola Marrati's Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy makes the case that

it is within the Cinema books that we find the most developed politics of Deleuze’s work, a politics which refuses modernity’s obsession with agency as the freedom and action of the subject, and instead foregrounds movement and perception as contributors to the agency of thought. Hence cinema, as discussed through the movement-image and the time-image, becomes a primary frame of reference for the development of such a politics. 

While I'm not a Deleuze-and-politics kind of person, Walker's review left me with the impression that I ought to reconsider my view. If she talked me into reconsidering Deleuze's work on cinema, I'd say Walker makes a strong case for considering Marrati's book.

Transcendental Consciousness and the Dialectic of Need

By Caleb Heldt, University of Warwick

In the Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze credits Sartre with providing the definitive conditions which characterise a radically impersonal transcendental field in his 1937 essay The Transcendence of the Ego [1]. However, Deleuze immediately qualifies this encomium a few pages later, declaring that,

This field can not be determined as that of a consciousness. Despite Sartre's attempt, we cannot retain consciousness as a milieu while at the same time we object to the form of the person and the point of view of individuation. A consciousness is nothing without a synthesis of unification, but there is no synthesis of consciousness without the form of an I, or the point of view of the Self. What is neither individual nor personal are, on the contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution, radically distinct from fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of consciousness (LS, 102).

It is this rejection of consciousness in favour of a conception of pre-individuated singularities which marks Deleuze's decisive rejection of phenomenology – in particular the structure of intentionality – while retaining the conditions of the transcendental field marked out by Sartre [2]. From a Deleuzian perspective, Sartre's philosophical project went astray once his analyses abandoned the plane of immanence which he uncovered as the transcendental field in favour of a phenomenological conception of consciousness, allowing the perspective of the subject to be re-installed, a subject whose intentional awareness of transcendent objects (Ego and world) is the very condition of possibility and of transcendence (rather than the actualisation of virtual, or immanent potentialities) [3].

So why, we might ask, does Sartre – on the threshold of a theory of singularities – return to the subject in Being and Nothingness the way he does, as an investigation of transcendence upon which he never turns his back [4]? In all honesty, I think this is a badly posed question, one that loses sight of Sartre's most genuine philosophical commitments. In one way or another, Sartre repeatedly returns to the fundamental insights of The Transcendence of the Ego. Indeed, we must bear in mind that Sartre's early theoretical tome, Being and Nothingness, is a critical ontological inquiry [5]. It is a text which endeavours to describe the phenomena which render transcendence, free action, intelligible and to examine the various ways in which transcendence insufficiently limits itself, giving rise to transcendental illusions (NE, 532) which Sartre refers to as bad faith (mauvaise foi). Rather than pursuing this early revelation of the transcendental field as a plane upon which radically impersonal, pre-individuated spontaneities interact without egological interference, without the self-imposed illusions of bad faith – in the manner pursued metaphysically by Deleuze [6] – Sartre devoted himself to investigating the structures of human thought which give rise to these very illusions and, later, to the material conditions involved in such illusion-constitution.

In short, after opening the transcendental field (of consciousness) as a plane upon which pure (reflective) spontaneities (TE, 96) interact free of egological interpenetration – rendering actions radically impersonal or pre-personal – Sartre chose not to pursue this intuition metaphysically but rather chose to devote himself to an investigative project which would examine the conditions which veil this field in self-deceptive illusions. The project undertaken in Being and Nothingness, then, attempts to describe, phenomenologically, the formal conditions which render possible such illusion-constitution through the degradation of this spontaneity by the introduction into the plenum of Being (which is pure presence, a consequence of its self-identity, its being only what it is) a non-being, a being which 'is not'. Thus, consciousness constitutes present-being by an irremediable absence of (a particular) being, which is to say, by a lack of being. What ties this ontological critique of desire as lack in Being and Nothingness to the project undertaken in the Critique of Dialectical Reason [7] is precisely this conception of lack, although the concerns will shift from the formal considerations of ontology to material ones. As such, Sartre opens 'Book I' of the Critique with an examination of elementary individual praxis in which this ontological desire of Being and Nothingness is analysed in its most primordial ontic manifestation which Sartre calls need, i.e. material (biological) desire. As Sartre says, “Everything is to be explained through need (le besoin); need is the first totalising relation between the material being, man, and the material ensemble of which he is part” (CDRI, 80).

It is precisely because each individual consciousness “exists its body” (BN, 353) [8] as its unalterable facticity that it remains bound to its material environment and is consequently compelled to take a point of view on its material condition, and it is this taking a point of view which yields the possibility of departing from the radical immanence of the transcendental field. From a Sartrean perspective, this explains the way in which lack (or scarcity) becomes an ontological (and materialistic) category governing consciousness's interaction with its situation (or environment) transforming the nature of desire from abundance to a type of desire which is predicated upon lack (most fully elaborated by Sartre in BN and CDRI) [9]. We will spend the remainder of this short essay investigating this moment of departure from the immanence of the transcendental field (as the field of materiality) as Sartre describes it in the early pages of the Critique in the dialectic of need, the moment which we may perhaps call the birth of transcendence and the free project, or praxis.

So, what the dialectic of need unveils initially, in the first instance, is not an absence of a particular transcendent object which is apprehended as lacking in the environment, but prior to the constitution of a lack in the environment consciousness, or rather the (conscious) organism, finds itself in the presence of an environment which it constitutes co-extensively with its presence as need: “Need is a negation of the negation in so far as it expresses itself as a lack within the organism” (CDRI, 80; bold emphasis added). This consciousness of need is not a consciousness of a past need, but a consciousness of a present need through and through. The organism constitutes the lack it feels within its own being – hunger, for example – as a negation of its being which “threatens the organism as a whole with disintegration – the danger of death” (CDRI, 81). Need, in becoming elementary praxis, is posited as the negation of this negation. So, in the first instance, need-consciousness does not constitute its present environment by a particular lack but rather exists this lack in its own being as a necessity imposed by biological functions, which is to say, in the language of Being and Nothingness, its facticity. But “the negation of this negation is [only] achieved through the transcendence of the organic [of the organism's own being] towards the inorganic: need (le besoin) is a link of univocal immanence with surrounding materiality” (CDRI, 80). Initially, then, the organism “reveal[s] the material environment, to infinity, as the total field of possibilities of [the] satisfaction” of its need as the negation of the felt internal lack” (CDRI, 80) Or again:

As soon as need appears, surrounding matter is endowed with a passive unity, in that a developing totalisation is reflected in it as a totality: matter revealed as passive totality by an organic being seeking its being in it – this is Nature in its initial form. Already, it is in terms of the total field that need seeks possibilities of satisfaction in nature, and it is this totalisation which will reveal in the passive totality its own material being as abundance or scarcity (CDRI, 81).

This is significant because in the first instance of need the organism, as we have said, does not constitute the external environment by a lack, by scarcity, because – ontologically speaking – being-in-itself lacks nothing; it is what it is and it is pure presence to itself. However, this present-being becomes constituted by a lack, by scarcity, in the initial moment of elementary praxis insofar as for the organism “the material environment..., by not containing what the organism seeks, transforms the totality as future reality into possibility,” i.e. into an as yet non-existent state of (its) being (CDRI, 83; bold emphasis added). This is to say that the origin of possibility as praxis lies in the fact that the organism apprehends the present environment as incapable of satisfying its present need, so it posits a future reality, an end, which would satisfy its present need:

Need, as a negation of the negation, is the organism itself, living in the future, through present disorders, as its own possibility and consequently, as the possibility of its own impossibility [i.e. its own non-existence, or death]; and praxis, in the first instance, is nothing but the relation of the organism, as exterior and future end, to the present organism as a totality under threat; it is function exteriorised (CDRI, 83).

As such, the consequence of the failure of the organism's present environment to provide the requisite conditions for the satisfactions of its (biological) need is that transcendence, as elementary praxis, proves to be an adaptive function (the exteriorisation of its interiority, i.e. of its interior lack or negation) capable of being utilised by the (human) organism. By constituting its present environment by the scarcity of the “inorganic or less organised elements or, quite simply,...dead flesh, etc.” (CDRI, 80) which the organism lacks and as such threatens it with death, it is compelled to seek out a new environment which would satisfy its needs: “It is at this ambiguous level that the dialectical transition from function to actions can be seen. The project, as transcendence, is merely the exteriorisation of immanence” (CDR, 83).

And this analysis is completely consistent with the ontological explication of lack in Being and Nothingness where Sartre describes hunger, qua desire, as a state of the body, as a form of lived facticity in which,

the For-itself immediately flees...toward its possibles; that is, toward a certain state of satisfied-hunger which...is the In-itself-for-itself of hunger. Thus hunger is a pure surpassing of corporal facticity; and to the extent that the For-itself becomes conscious of this facticity in a non-thetic form, the For-itself becomes conscious of it as a surpassed facticity. The body here is indeed the past, the passed-beyond (BN, 409).

It is necessary to bear in mind, in this perhaps risky dialogue between the ontological and the material conditions of consciousness qua need and desire, that what is at issue in both of Sartre's analyses – and that of which Deleuze and Guattari are critical – is precisely the conception of lack and the understanding of desire and need in terms of lack. Whereas for Deleuze and Guattari, “Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counter products within the real that desire produces. [And as such] Lack is a countereffect of desire” (AO, 27), for Sartre this cannot be the case, at least not in the first instance. As he says, “We will not get out of the difficulty by making desire a conatus [10] conceived in the manner of a physical force. For the conatus...can not possess in itself the character of reaching out toward another state. The conatus as the producer of states can not be identified with desire as the appeal from a state” (BN, 111). Desire, for Sartre, is constituted (impurely) reflectively as lack as a result of, or rather co-extensively with need [11]. It is the appeal outward from a conscious state of need (hunger, for example) toward another as yet non-existent state of consciousness which would be a satisfied need (e.g. the In-itself-for-itself of hunger, or the ideal totalised totality of consciousness as satisfied hunger), which is to say, in the language of the Critique, need is the transcendence of lack by way of the exteriorisation of immanence, and it is this capacity, extended beyond its appropriate realms, which gives rise to (an array of) transcendental illusions.

While this no doubt would be the place to examine the constituent structures involved in a Sartrean conception of pure or non-accessory desire, we have already gone beyond the bounds of the present forum [12]. Let me conclude by saying that Deleuze's intuition regarding the fundamental nature of desire is Sartrean in spirit, only Sartre accords a greater significance to the role of negation and thereby transcendence than Deleuze is willing to allow. In any case, I would like to suggest that, in a sense, their respective projects can be viewed with a certain degree of complementarity given their mutual starting point, namely the transcendental field; their projects diverge, however, as Sartre sought to understand the ways in which human reality has veiled from itself its radical capacity to act spontaneously and impersonally, whereas Deleuze's project discarded these illusions at the outset in order to develop what he came to refer to as a 'transcendental empiricism'. So despite any disagreements as to what constitutes the proper field of study for an ontology or a metaphysics, the world-view of each ultimately returns to the transcendental field as a (possible) reality of lived (human) experience.

Caleb Heldt is a graduate student at the University of Warwick. His research (see here) focuses on the role of the imagination (what Sartre refers to as 'image consciousness'), affectivity and memory in providing the conditions of possibility for the phenomenon of self-deception or 'bad faith' (mauvaise foi) in Sartre's thought.

Endtnotes

1. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 98-99; hereafter LS. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991), hereafter TE.
2. LS, 105; Deleuze, 'Immanence: A Life' in Pure Immanence: Essays on Life, trans. Anne Boyman, (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 33 n2; Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 47.
3. Cf. 'Immanence: A Life', 25-33. As Sartre says in TE, “Potentiality is not mere possibility: it presents itself as something which really exists, but its mode of existence is potency” (TE, 71). But for Sartre, these potentialities really exist only because they belong to a transcendent object, namely the ego. In BN, potentiality is predominantly associated with present worldly objects. For a concise explication of Deleuze's position, drawn from the work of Henri Bergson, see 'The Actual and the Virtual', in Deleuze, and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007),148-152. For Sartre, Bergson's consciousness is fundamentally egological (cf. TE, 80). 
4. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, (London: Routledge, 2003), hereafter BN.
5. In his eulogy to Merleau-Ponty, published in Situations IV in 1964, Sartre referred to Being and Nothingness as his “eidetics of bad faith” [Sartre, 'Merleau-Ponty', Portraits, trans. Chris Turner, (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 442 n75]. Of equal import, in the Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre declares that, “The very fact that Being and Nothingness is an ontology before conversion takes for granted that a conversion is necessary and that, as a consequence, there is a natural attitude” [Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer, (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 6; hereafter NE]. Also, in the penultimate chapter of Being and Nothingness itself, Sartre states that the preceding investigation was aimed only at an accessory or impure reflective analysis, asserting that an analysis of purifying, ethical reflection was as yet to be undertaken (BN, 602).
6.  No doubt, many Deleuzians would resist this designation, asserting that the plane of immanence upon which virtual potentialities are actualised refers to a Deleuzian ontology. And this may well be so from a Deleuzian perspective; however, from a Sartrean point of view, even a conception of an absolutely pure reflective consciousness which never lapse into bad faith is a postulation that belongs more appropriately to a metaphysics. And it should not be overlooked that Deleuze said of himself in the Dialogues, “Je me sens pur métaphysicien” [cited in Beistegui, Miguel, Truth and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 221].
7. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Rée, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, (London: Verso, 2004), hereafter CDRI.
8. This a position Sartre maintained throughout his career, from his early writings on the imagination – in which Sartre emphasises the role which fatigue plays in the tendency toward image-consciousness [Sartre,  The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Johnathan Webber, (London: Routledge, 2004), 71.] – until the final years of his life, as can be seen in his 1975 interview with Michel Contat in which he declares, “For me, there is no difference in nature between body and consciousness” ['Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans', Situations X, (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 146 cited in Barnes, Hazel E., 'Sartre as Materialist' in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp, (La Salle, IL.: Open Court Publishing Company, 1981), 684 n11.]. 
9. For Deleuze's critique of desire as lack see Deleuze's seminar from 26 May, 1973 entitled 'Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance)', trans. Daniel W. Smith, Contretemps 2, May 2001, pp. 92-108, esp. 95 & 101: “it is true that Western philosophy has always consisted in saying: if desire exists, it is the very sign, or the very fact, that you are lacking something. Everything starts from that. A first wielding of desire-lack is brought about; from there, it goes without saying that desire is defined as a function of a field of transcendence' desire is desire for what one does not have” (101). In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari criticise desire conceived as lack in a similar capacity, albeit within the context of a critique of psychoanalysis and capitalistic mechanisms with their notion of 'desiring-machines' as productive of desire. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. 28n for a brief critique of Sartre's conception of scarcity; hereafter AO.
10. In the manner of Spinoza, to whose conception of desire Deleuze's is closely akin. See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, (New York: Zone Books, 1990).
11. A fact which many of Sartre's commentators fail to recognise, Deleuze (it often seems) included, is that the phenomenological and ontological descriptions in Being and Nothingness are intended to focus upon impure, or accessory reflective consciousness (BN, 602), which is to say the egological consciousness of The Transcendence of the Ego. This should be clear from the above characterisation of the conscious passage from one state to another, since states are transcendent unities of consciousness, which is to say they are fundamentally egological (cf. TE, 60-68). Sartre's examination of pure or non-accessory (reflective) consciousness appears in an introductory form in his discussion of temporality in Being and Nothingness, but this serves predominately to delineate the characteristics proper to psychic (or egological) temporality (BN, 177-193). Since Sartre associates pure or non-accessory consciousness with an ethical mode of consciousness – as it is free of egological interpenetration and aligns itself with the conditions he set out in The Transcendence of the Ego of a radically impersonal or pre-personal spontaneity – this modality of consciousness is not the subject of his 'eidetics of bad faith' in Being and Nothingness. Rather, it is that which he famously promised to study in a subsequent work on the final page of his phenomenological ontology, which did not appear in published form during his lifetime. Consequently, the best clues to what Sartre intended by this ethical, non-accessory modality of consciousness are to be found in the Notebooks for an Ethics. It is in this text where he makes the most explicit link between desire and non-accessory consciousness (cf. NE, 417).
12. I have written of desire in relation to the various modalities of (un)reflective consciousness elsewhere. See my 'The Magical and Bad Faith: Reflection, Desire and the Image of Value', in Sartre Studies International, Volume 15, Issue 1, 2009: 54–73,

Immanence and Atheism

I've been preparing, over the last month, for a talk I am giving at the University of Toledo on Deleuze and Spinoza. After finishing the penultimate draft of my MA thesis at the aforementioned university (in 2002; I defended in March 2003), I spent some time reading some of the more contemporary figures in French and Italian philosophy, which included Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and What is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari. I thought it would be appropriate to return to some of them when I return to give a talk in Toledo.

The talk I am giving next week deals in part with what Deleuze* calls the 'plane of immanence.' He argues that philosophy is the creation of concepts, which has become somewhat of a motto for some Deleuzians, but what is more difficult is figuring out what he means by setting out, instituting, or tracing, a plane of immanence. There are several problems with the proliferation of his 'modes', as it were, of explaining immanence but I am going to leave them aside just to mention one of the compelling reasons in favor of his argument.

The third example of What is Philosophy? reorders the history of philosophy from the point of view of the institution of the plane of immanence. Much of this history becomes a refusal of thinking immanence in favor of contemplation (of the Object), reflection (of the Subject) and communication ('with' the Other); each of those capitalized nouns representing a figure of transcendence. According to Deleuze, these transcendent figures are  reappear in philosophy because they are illusions that arise on the plane of immanence. The decisive move is to attach the problem of immanence to the problem of the revaluation of values. The conceptual link gives us a clear way to assess why immanence has been rejected by so many philosophers,  and why so many have attacked the naturalism of Spinoza to 'save' freedom, because from the standpoint of transcendent values, all other values appear nihilistic, while from the standpoint of immanence, all transcendent values are illusory.

My question is whether or not 'immanence' is the best approach to talking about the philosophical commitments of atheism. An atheist cannot have recourse to supernatural or transcendent explanations or values, and I think immanence captures this. Nevertheless, it seems that Deleuze's plane of immanence neutralizes the divine name while keeping the image of the One-All. It's not even clear if Deleuze maintains a materialist position (this is something like Hallward's critique), so even Spinoza's naturalism might be more strict and more minimal that Deleuze's philosophy. Atheism and materialism reject transcendence, but which concepts are required to think immanence if the One-All won't work? While I can't go into it here, there are at least two options: contingency and inconsistency. Or even possibly the often rejected concepts of necessity or determination. In addition, no matter which concepts 'work', so to speak, there remains the question of relinking these conceptual questions to historical materialism.

*I am leaving aside Guattari, not because I think his approach should be separated from Deleuze's, but because I am also going to critique Deleuze's work on Spinoza. François Dosse's Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, biographie croisée also claims that much of What is Philosophy? was written only by Deleuze (pp. 538-539).

An Interview with Todd May: Ranciere, Deleuze and Anarchism

In 2006, Todd May came to the University of Ottawa for a graduate student conference organized by the journal De Philosophia. He delivered the keynote address, “Difference and Equality in the Thought of Jacques Rancière,” and and was kind enough to spend some of his time afterward giving an interview conducted through email. It was originally published in De Philosophia, Volume 19, n. 2, pp. 1-4. May's most recent books are The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière and Death.

Devin Zane Shaw: In 1994, you published The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, a book which has taken on a life of its own. Anarchist circles took to the book because of the connection you draw between 19^th century anarchism and the concerns of French post-structuralism, despite their avowed political differences (for instance, Foucault rejects anarchism in the final lecture of Society Must Be Defended). However, the book does not stop there; it also proposes an ethics drawn from post-structuralism emphasizing innovative practices instead of the various ethics proposed in other philosophical circles. In retrospect, this book appears to have launched your trajectory of inquiry into creativity and innovation. Has the reception of this book influenced your subsequent line of inquiry?

Todd May: Certainly. Since the book's publication, I have gotten a number of invitations to speak in anarchist or anarchist-inspired venues. Most of these venues are intellectually exciting, in part because anarchism doesn't have the rich theoretical tradition that Marxism does, which leaves it more open intellectually. Perhaps foremost among the places I have been able to speak and converse is the annual Renewing the Anarchist Tradition in Plainfield, Vermont. In any case, the discussions at these events have been unfailingly fascinating. I've had my ideas challenged, extended, and twisted in unexpected ways. My work now on the thought of Jacques Rancière is a result of these discussions. I'm trying to use his work to help develop areas of radical democratic thought that were not addressed in the earlier book. In particular, I want to be able to frame a positive conception of egalitarian politics that is informed by the healthy skepticism of thinkers like Foucault.

Devin Zane Shaw: Before moving to your recent work on Rancière, we would like to raise a few related questions about the well-known representatives of French thought, such as Foucault. One criticism often addressed to such thinkers as Foucault or Deleuze, is that they lack a normative or positive conception of political action. For instance, it was noted in a recent review (in De Philosophia v. 19, n.1, by Stephen B. Hawkins) of your Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction that Deleuze's emphasis on experimentation, despite its exhilarating possibilities, could also lead toward a resignation “to the endless production of monstrosity.” I take it that the shift toward the thought of Rancière aims to remedy these problems regarding how to evaluate political actions?

Todd May: Exactly, although we need to be careful here in keeping the proper distinctions alive among different thinkers. Deleuze has a normative view. In fact, my book argues that his view is largely normative. It not only commends experimentation with the possibilities the virtual offers, but also and more deeply seeks to design an ontology that responds to his larger normative orientation. The problem cited by the reviewer, and I believe it has political bearing, is that Deleuze does not distinguish among those experiments or give any criteria for distinguishing the better and the worse. By contrast, Foucault's writing, while normatively inflected, does not offer an overt normative view. However, critique is all over the place in his writings, particularly the genealogical ones. Foucault was always reticent to speak in openly normative terms. I think this is because he worried about becoming another Sartre, addressing the world from on high. (My book on the moral theory of post-structuralism argues that this reticence is misplaced.) However, if one looks into his normative orientation, I think one will find that it can be taken in a direction of the kind Rancière articulates. Foucault's politics, in short, is radically egalitarian. What Rancière has accomplished is to think that egalitarianism through more rigorously.

Mark Raymond Brown: In the conclusion of French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Gary Gutting observes that the concern with individual freedom as a concrete lived reality has, more than anything else, maintained the distinctiveness of French philosophy throughout the twentieth century. This is certainly a debatable claim, but for the sake of argument I'd like to pose the following questions to you: as diverse as the thought of Sartre, Foucault, and Deleuze may be, the one thing that united them was their political activity, as on several occasions they found themselves involved in political protests. On each occasion they were protesting against the state. Yet, with these thinkers, aside from implicit or explicit criticisms of the state, one does not find any concrete political outline for a social organization that would foster individual freedom. Is such a proposal possible, or even necessary? Or can the idea of individual freedom be used only as a tool to critique existing social policies? Related to these queries is another: is there any positive relation between twentieth century French philosophy, as concerned with individual freedom, and democracy?

Todd May: I'm hesitant to introduce the idea of individual freedom as a goal of political activism for several reasons. First, in Deleuze's case, the concept of the individual as a centerpiece of politics is put in question. Deleuze's ontology has among its central purposes to make it a point of indifference whether to address organization at the level of the individual, pre-individual, or supra-individual. Foucault is less concerned with the individual per se than with the subject. One can read him as seeking to return from the subject to individual freedom (Pierre Hadot does), but I'm not sure that's an accurate interpretation. Foucault does speak of freedom, but the contexts in which he does so seem to focus as much on a collective creation as on individual freedom.

The question of democracy is a distinct one altogether. It makes a central appearance in Rancière's thought, although not so much in that of Foucault and Deleuze. I believe the latter two thinkers probably seek to avoid it because of the amount of baggage that concept brings with it, while Rancière instead takes as his project a redefinition. I mentioned above that I believe Foucault can be thought in terms of a Rancièrean democracy, although I would hesitate to say as much for Deleuze.

Devin Zane Shaw: Here I think it is appropriate to ask: how would you frame a positive conception of egalitarian politics through Rancière's redefinition of democracy? As Rancière frames it, democracy is not a particular regime, but an egalitarian presupposition which underlies any particular regime such as parliamentarianism.

Todd May: Rancière argues that the egalitarian presupposition does underlie all political regimes, but he also say something else that's important for understanding his thought. Political regimes tend both to presuppose and to deny the presupposition of everyone's equality. They presuppose it when they assume that people will be able to understand and carry out their orders; they deny it through the creation and maintenance of hierarchies that give orders in the first place. That helps offer a clue as to the redefinition of democracy. If political regimes--Rancière calls them police orders--are based on hierarchies, then democracy is based on the presupposition of equality, a presupposition that is expressed rather than denied. Taking matters this way, it can be seen that the creation of equality is a matter for the people, for those who find themselves at the wrong end of hierarchies. This does not mean that any particular class of people is the people. Just as a society has different hierarchies--racial, economic, gender--so it can have different democratic movements and different peoples. In Rancière's view, these democratic movements form communities, but they cannot form institutions without betraying their democratic character. I'm not sure he's right about this, but I'm not sure he's wrong either. He seems to think that as a matter of principle democracies cannot form institutions. I tend toward thinking that the question of democratic institutions can only be answered by experimenting with them and seeing what turns up.

Devin Zane Shaw: In your presentation at our conference, “Difference and Equality in the Thought of Jacques Rancière,” you expressed a hesitancy regarding Rancière's use of the concept of the speaking being. Unlike many of the other authors who appear in your work, and who we have already mentioned above, who are reticent regarding the 'speaking being,' Rancière engages this concept-- often associated with the work of Lacan-- to twist it in a new direction. This connection of political actors to language as speaking beings is central to the argument of Disagreement. Elsewhere, Rancière goes so far as to state that “Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his 'natural' purpose by the power of words.” (The Politics of Aesthetics, 39) By downplaying the role of speech (and I mean this in a broad sense, including both speech and writing), don't we lose something integral to Rancière's approach?

Todd May: It depends on what is meant by downplaying. If I were to say that speaking is not important, I would certainly be doing harm to Rancière's thought. My idea is to embed speaking into something wider. People are capable of creating meaningful lives in concert with others. This requires speech, but is not reducible to it. In the quote you offered above, if we replace the term literary with creative, and see the power of words as a centrally important way in which we are diverted, then I think we arrive at the point I'm trying to make. I don't want to reduce language and speaking to something else; I want to avoid a reductionism to language and speaking.

Devin Zane Shaw: Finally, I would like to return to your comment about democratic institutions. You have emphasized the role of experimentation, but I wonder how experimentation and institutional practices can be compatible. Yet, I would like to add, I don't know if radical approaches to politics can continue to insist that democratic practices must remain inimical to institutionalization. To put this in blunter terms, does not the constant emphasis on resistance accept that capitalist-parliamentarianism is the name of the game?

Todd May: I have this concern as well. If we define resistance in such a way as to preclude institutionalization at the outset, which Rancière seems to do, then resistance becomes in a strange way parasitical upon what it is resisting. This does not mean that things can't get better, but the horizon of their improvement is always the dominant political and economic structure. However, I don't think experimentation, on the other hand, is inimical to institutionalization. We can experiment with institution-building, seeking to discover what kinds of institutions under what kinds of conditions maintain the presupposition of equality. One can't say in advance what those institutions would look like; that's the point of a democratic politics. Democratic institutions must emerge from the political activity of those involved in struggle. But I don't see why they should be precluded at the outset. We don't know what they are going to look like and how or even whether they will work. If they do arise, what is important is that we maintain a Foucaultian vigilance about them: watch where they are going, what they are giving rise to, what other practices and institutions they are intersecting with and with what results.

A (belated?) review of Anna Powell's Deleuze and Horror Film

Anna Powell. Deleuze and Horror Film. Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

The notion that consumers of horror fiction and film are subject to a pathological condition akin to drug addiction has a venerable pedigree; it was an idea that S. T. Coleridge (whose opinion was of course informed by personal knowledge of such a condition) helped to popularize with his influential criticism of horror fictions as “powerful stimulants” in a 1797 review of M. G. Lewis’ infamous novel, The Monk. This analogy remains a stereotype of both popular and academic discourse on horror cinema; consumers and critics devoted to horror film continue to be represented as suffering from a sort of visceral, visual addiction. It is appropriate, then, that the autobiographical tone of Anna Powell’s introduction to her Deleuze and Horror Film comes close to taking on the confessional quality of a recovery narrative.

The intellectual addiction from which Powell admits to recovering is not, however, a crippling “horror film habit”. Rather, Powell’s therapeutic application of Deleuzian theory to horror cinema has allowed her to emerge from the nefarious influence of (in Deleuze and Guattari’s words) “the strange death-cult of psychoanalysis.” No newcomer to critical and philosophical work with horror films, Powell explains that much of her earlier work was preoccupied with Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalytic issues. Deleuze and Horror Film represents her radical departure from this paradigm.

The predominance of psychoanalytic assumptions in theoretical approaches to horror film, as Powell recognizes, verges on the hegemonic. Yet, as she persuasively insists, psychoanalysis is often “an inadequate key to unlock either the multiple levels of horror film, or [our] responses to them” (1), since, like theoretical approaches that privilege “representation and narrative structure,” it “neglect[s] the primacy of corporeal affect” which is so foundational for many horror films, and downplays “the affective dynamic of the films” (2). Deleuzian thought, on the other hand, features a receptivity to the cognitive possibilities of horrific affect, rooted in Deleuze’s development of Hume’s realization that “reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation”, and is thus a promising method of returning horror to its affective roots, which psychoanalytic, narratological, historical and ideological approaches tend to lose, or at least obscure.

The Freudian model of “Mommy, Daddy, Me” has also helped perpetuate the logic of disease which informed Coleridge’s criticism of Gothic fiction over two centuries ago, since, as Powell explains, “[p]sychoanalysis pathologizes horror and psychoanalytic film criticism uses either the text or the viewer as an analysand. It impels viewers to strengthen their ego defenses against the disruptive undermining of the id or the repressive pressure of the super-ego. From a Deleuzian perspective, however, madness in horror may be read in a more positive light. Anomalous states of consciousness in film are celebrated in Deleuze, both for their stylistic innovations and their effect on the audience who participates in the madness by affective contagion” (23).

The book’s first section, “From Psychoanalysis to Schizoanalysis,” opens with a strategic consideration of Hitchcock’s Psycho. In response to the extant preponderance of psychoanalytic readings of this film, Powell contends that such readings reveal “nothing about the film as an aesthetic or visceral experience” (23). In contrast, noting that Psycho is “permeated thematically by schizophrenia and aesthetically by schizoid lines of flight” (24), Powell produces a reading that attends to the numerous aesthetic transformations that the film involves the audience in, including Norman’s (simultaneously pathological and vital) becoming-Animal and becoming-Woman. This brings me to the first of two major problems with this otherwise electrifying book. Powell’s reading of the film, while insightful and provocative, moves so rapidly from point to point in its “rhizomatic” style of connective disjunctions, that her exploration comes to seem frenetic, and at times even perfunctory. Thus, while it usefully opens a line of flight that evades the psychoanalytic dogma that now scaffolds the film, it lacks the sustained development that made Slavoj Zizek’s study of Psycho so incisive and influential.

This rapid pace perhaps results from the fact that Powell’s intentions with Deleuze and Horror Film are so ambitious, since the book is meant to serve as both an intervention in discursive appropriations of horror films, and an attempt to extend Deleuzian thought by widening the range of cinematic works involved in its production of new concepts. Acknowledging that Deleuze himself only rarely engaged directly with “horror films” in the generic sense, Powell explains, “I want to extend the scope of that writing which keeps rigorously to those films actually used as examples by Deleuze himself. I test the use-value of Deleuzian theory to popular formulaic films as well as art-house approved works” (2). Powell therefore applies Deleuze’s conception of cinema as an embodied form of thought both to and through a wide range of horrific cinema. She avoids the notoriously problematic task of attempting or accepting a generic definition of horror, choosing to focus instead on horror as an affective element of the cinematic experience, explaining that “not all my texts fall into a strict generic category, but all contain horrifying material of an uncanny nature” (7).

This approach, while generally productive, evokes the second complaint I have about the book, in that it is often impossible to see Powell’s selection of films as anything other than tendentious. While she aptly links more “canonical” films like Wiene’s Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Lewton’s Cat People with both auteurist favorites like Argento’s Suspiria and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and more generic fare like Cammell’s Demon Seed and Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street, she too often relies on films, and elements of these films, which are obvious exempla of Deleuzian hybridity.

This occasionally results in readings that verge on the redundant, doing little to either illuminate a viewing of the film, or to advance the potential of Deleuzian thought. Perhaps the most notable example of this tendency is Powell’s frequent recourse to the films of David Cronenberg. Throw a theoretical rock in the general direction of Cronenberg’s corpus, and you are sure to hit an always-already-made example of a Body Without Organs, or a slimily desiring-machinic assemblage ripe for reterritorialization (a fact explainable to a large extent by the tremendous shared investment of French philosopher and Canadian filmmaker in the seminal writings of American author, William S. Burroughs).

Nevertheless, given Deleuze’s not infrequent reliance on “perversely literal embodiments of his own concepts,” that Powell’s project “takes twisted literalization much further” (7) is consistent with this method. In addition, Powell’s vital recognition that “[t]he horror film experience offers a particular quality of thought,” and her diverse and often novel celebration of “the dynamic, material congress of spectator and screen image” (204) in the viewing experience informs a stimulating conceptual-cinematic engagement. With its openness to a diversity of horrific films, its attention to the experiential aesthetics of horror, and its emphasis on thinking as an embodied process, Deleuze and Horror Film represents a welcome departure from the re-circulated Psycho-analyses and incessant generic re-situations which continue to dominate theoretical approaches to horror film. This makes it recommended reading for both critics and aficionados of horror cinema, and students and scholars of Deleuzian philosophy.

Freedom and Deleuze

From Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution:

The idea, touted in particular by some Americans, that Islamic radicals are envious of Western freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly hankering to sit in cafes smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze (p. 145).

I guess when you can't sit in on the course, reading is as good as it gets: