'A fantastic decomposition of the self.' Deleuze on Individuation in 'The Exhausted', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Presentation:
'A fantastic decomposition of the self.' Deleuze on Individuation in 'The Exhausted', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Linking 'a fantastic decomposition of the self' with its individuation means that the self is disconnected from its established notions of itself in order to connect it with its own production. Deleuze's concern with the production of experience is developed in his engagement with Samuel Beckett in The Exhausted Hereafter 'TE'). He develops the continuity of production behind the discontinuity of what has already been produced. He finds that the latter, as discontinuous and countable, is exhausted or decomposed by the doubling of its own production in Beckett's work. This is effected through an art or science of exhaustion. A ‘fantastic decomposition’ is then a stage in the process of production or individuation that Deleuze is concerned with.

This presentation seeks to follow the stages Deleuze identifies in Beckett's uncovering of the production of real experience and to grasp the nature of this continuity behind the discontinuous. Our concern is with the account of individuation this provides and how this dissolution of produced or composed terms must in fact be presupposed.. In this way we find that for Deleuze composition and decomposition must form a couple that are inseparable.

Exhaustion is first specified as a rigorous purification that grasps the conditions for the production of experience. In order to explain this Deleuze straight away distinguishes it from tiredness. This point is crucial for the whole essay and for the account of individuation we are seeking to locate. The distinction is put succinctly in the following passage: 'The possible is only realised in the derivative, in tiredness, whereas one is exhausted before birth, before realising oneself, or realising anything whatsoever.' [TE, 152] Exhaustion is then a condition of experience's ongoing production, a condition in place before anything is established because it concerns a level that is pre-individual. It is a stage of the production that is always already underway. It is only after 'birth', or after the individuation of the self that is always ongoing, that realisation can be conceived. Realisation is derivative or a feature of what is already individualised because it concerns 'the sum of total possibility.' [TE, 152] Only already produced terms can form a sum because they are discontinuous and countable. Thus the possible is 'realised in the derivative' because it produces a tiredness that comes from our attempts to realise different possibilities concerning already produced objects and meanings, and according to the different preferences and goals we have accumulated. This is the sum of possibility that is tiring but restricts us to the realm of what is possible on the basis of what has already been produced. Exhaustion is much more profound because it invokes the horizon of a continuous production and allows Deleuze to conceive individuation in terms other than the realisation envisaged on the basis of a sum of possibility. Continuous production is also developed by Deleuze in terms of the notion of multiplicities. We find an elaboration of this production through continuity as it is opposed to discontinuity or discreteness that excludes this production through the internal resources of the multiplicity: 'Riemann defined as “multiplicities” those things that could be determined in terms of their dimensions or their independent variables. He distinguished discrete multiplicities and continuous multiplicities. The former contain the principle of their own metrics (the measure of one of their parts being given by the number of elements they contain). The latter found a metrical principle in something else, even if only in phenomena unfolding in them or in the forces acting in them.' [Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 39].
We also find here an echo of the first page of Difference and Repetition where repetition is distinguished straight away from generality. The latter involves resemblance and equivalence whilst repetition involves irreplaceable singularities. Deleuze argues that ‘To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent.’ [Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Paul Patton translation, Athlone edition- hereafter 'DR'), p. 1]. We shall see that for Deleuze exhaustion also attains a production of the singular and in this way is to account for activity.

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze identified the ideal game of the dice-throw as the horizon of the future which did not operate according to a sum total of all possibility:

'Nothing is exempt from the game: consequences are not subtracted from chance by connecting them with a hypothetical necessity which would tie them to a determinate fragment; on the contrary, they are adequate to the whole of chance, which retains and subdivides all possible consequences.' [DR, p. 283]

The continuity that replaces a sum of possibilities ensures that all the resources of the game are in play and nothing about the result is presupposed: '...a game which would be nothing else but play instead of being fragmented, limited and intercut with the work of men.' [DR, p. 283] In The Exhausted Deleuze develops Beckett's exhaustion in a way that echoes this earlier work strongly. It does not concern countable terms, or the sum of previously accumulated products but new distributions of the singular. In Difference and Repetition we find that between singularities or differences – which are the resources of the dice throw – there is a continuity which makes them distinct-obscure. In other words, their distinction and richness as distinct Ideas is realised through their relations, the obscurity that expresses their continual interactions. Throughout The Exhausted we witness a concern with attaining continuity by dissolving or decomposing forms but this must be the condition of new compositions or individuations. We find an echo of the distinct-obscure and the clear-confused of Difference and Repetition in composition-decomposition. They model the process of production, providing the resources of decomposition (as with obscurity or confusion) behind the singularities involved in an account of composition (as with distinction or clarity). Deleuze finds an account of the singularity in the ‘image’ which we will come to later. It is the horizon of exhaustion that is really productive for Deleuze and is behind the distributions and distinctions that allow us to conceive of a sum of possibility in the first place.

Deleuze finds in Becket an 'art or science of exhaustion.' It is an accumulation of what has been produced constituting a sum which must be exhausted in order to uncover the productive process. Deleuze writes: 'Beckett's characters play with the possible without realising it; they are too involved in a possibility that is ever more restricted in its kind to care about what is still happening.' [TE, p. 153] Exhaustion as an art or science proceeds through 'exhaustive series, that is, exhausting series.' [TE, p. 154] Deleuze writes that for Beckett there is to be an 'inventory' of the decomposition of the self. [TE, p. 155] This art or science of exhaustion sees different arrangements multiply, showing for Deleuze the openness of this horizon because all these permutations, this inventory, attains a level of continuity. The decomposition of the possible, of the sum of possibilities that make up the self and set boundaries to its relations, involves inclusive disjunction as the means of attaining continuity. This is the continuity of a common production shared by all terms but something which is preindividual and requires the ungrounding of compositions such that new compositions may arise.

We find this continuity through exhaustion in Beckett's novel Murphy in the following line: '“Yes or no?” said Murphy. The eternal tautology.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 27] If we took our bearings from a sum of possibilities we would not find this a tautology because the different and exclusive possibilities, the ‘Yes or no?’ would not have been exhausted. Realisation of possibilities proceeds through preferences and goals as it calculates with a sum that is tiring due to its enormity. Yet this sum is discontinuous and so unable to realise production through continuity that exhausts every term capable of being combined in a sum. It excludes the previous preferences and goals, closing off potentials that may otherwise be encountered and made use of. For Deleuze Beckett seeks to avoid this exercise of 'exclusive disjunctions' [TE, p. 153] by decomposing previous compositions in the continuous production that is common to each one. In Murphy the assortment of biscuits 'would spring to life before him, dancing with the radiant measure of its total permutability,...' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 57] The art or science of exhaustion is a matter of having 'learnt not to prefer any one to any other', making each interchangeable, as with Murphy's biscuits. Elsewhere in the novel Beckett writes: 'Murphy was one of the elect, who require everything to remind them of something else.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 40] Such continuity, where things are related by their production, rather than being isolated by an essential or fixed composition, establishes the 'fullness' that Murphy cannot partake in until all produced and subsequently established distinctions are exhausted. It is the fullness we find in a production that does not resemble its products, one that cannot be modelled on the accumulations or previous products which are discontinuous or a sum of possibilities. They find this when they cease to be a sum through their interchangeability and place in an exhausting/exhaustive series. They are continuous in a way that undermines distinctions and our use of distinct things in action for certain ends. However, this process must produce new compositions capable of new actions if it is to have a productive relation to individuation.

For Deleuze we must therefore see the potential 'springing to life' of Murphy's biscuits as a stage in the account of individuation. Exhaustion must not be a hopeless surrender to 'the undifferentiated, or into the famous unity of contradictories, nor is one passive: one remains active but for nothing.' [TE, p. 153] The ‘life’ in question is that of production with the horizon of continuity and not the discontinuity that prevents things from relating and having a common production. We don't find this if all differences are cancelled because then everything is related but by being the same and not through difference. On the one hand exhaustion attains a production which does not resemble its products – it is called 'Nothing' – and yet it must be productive through difference and in accounting for the production of the new. What is this Nothing? It is the 'Nothing, of which each thing is a modification.' [TE, p. 153] Nothing is continuity freed from the discontinuity that holds among produced or composed things. Each thing merges with its own production which is precisely 'Nothing' because it does not resemble any 'thing' that has previously been produced. Murphy's learning 'not to prefer any one to any other' means giving up the oppositions between composed terms that stand in the way of total permutability and continuity, a principle of production itself through which all things relate. Combination of cases shows what is between every case, what is behind their composition and qualified extension. Deleuze seeks in Beckett what is continuous behind the continued distributions of discontinuous terms and the activity, involving significations, objects, habits, goals and preferences, that this makes possible. This echoes Bergson's concern with the breakdown of the 'sensory motor schema' which Deleuze develops in Cinema 2 [cf pages 20 and 45]. In Beckett one is no longer able to stir one's limbs but one must not lie down because this is tiredness. To lie down is to be active in a way directed towards the getting rest and having energy for the next day. With exhaustion there is no such goal or preference because these are undermined by the scope of a production where nothing must be presupposed about what can happen next and no calculation made about the future.

How is 'the fantastic decomposition of the self' to involve the milieu in which individuation takes place? Exhaustion must be a process common to every term, one found by combination through inclusive disjunction to include every term and so exhaust their isolation. Deleuze writes: 'The combinatorial exhausts its object, but only because its subject is himself exhausted.' [TE, p. 154]In this way the difference between subject and object is to emerge from the production that exhaustion returns to. Actual activity has come to an end so that terms – subject, object, thing – may find their common production through their shared exhaustion, through their merging with the continuity of Nothing. This is again continuity in 'the formless and unformulated' that must nevertheless be coupled with the formed and formulated. This relates to Deleuze’s critical assault on language at the end of the essay – words are 'so burdened with calculations and significations, with intentions and personal memories, with old habits that cement together that one can scarcely bore into the surface before it closes up again.' [TE, p. 173] This emphasises how all subjective terms must be overcome. The subject is decomposed by the horizon of the future and milieu of individuation where the time of the future is played out again and again in new organisations of space, in new compositions enabled by continual decompositions. We have so far been concerned with the first way of exhausting the possible – 'forming exhaustive series of things' [TE, p. 161] – but we have already found that Deleuze finds further levels in Beckett.

According to Deleuze in Beckett’s work we find a language I that exhausts the possible with words, with exhaustive series, but we need a second language in order to exhaust words themselves as a further stage of exhaustion and decomposition. [TE, p. 156] This is the language of voices, characterised as blendable flows or waves by Deleuze. His notion is that Beckett exhausts words by relating them to Others who emit them. The Other is a possible world. Yet rather than existing as something given or unproduced this Other is itself accounted for by being exhausted. The possible world of the Other is 'Long since exhausted, without our knowing it, without his knowing it.' It is exhausted in its turn such that the Other forms with me 'the same dead foreign language'. [TE, p. 158] The Other and myself are the same character, both exhausted, as with subject and object, as with Murphy's biscuits. Again both 'merge with Nothing' in the sense of escaping all produced terms and their discontinuity. However, we see with the self and Other a structure involved in the production in experience of individuated or composed entities. This echoes Deleuze's notion of the Other-structure in Difference and Repetition which is a stage in the production of experience but takes its bearings from a production that is continuous. At Difference and Repetiton page 282 Deleuze elaborates 'The delineation of object, the transitions as well as the ruptures, the passage from one object to another, and even the fact that one world disappears in favour of another, the fact that there is always something else implicated which remains to be explicated or developed – all this is made possible only by the other-structure and its expressive power in perception. In short, it is the Other- structure that ensures individuation within the perceptual world.' Yet we must also go to '…those regions where the Other-structure no longer functions, far from objects and subject that it conditions, where singularities are free to be deployed or distributed within pure Ideas, and individuating factors to be distributed in pure intensity. In this sense, it is indeed true that the thinker is necessarily solitary and solipsistic.' Deleuze here argues that the Other-structure ensures individuation but he wants to preserve 'regions where the Other-structure no longer functions.' These regions are the continuous production in question but must nevertheless be productively related to the Other-structure. Deeper levels of exhaustion in Beckett concern very positive notions about regions prior to the Other-structure which we shall now move on to investigate.

Deleuze finds a critique of language of language in Beckett’s writings. He finds that words are bound to the particular and general for Beckett and will seek what is universal in the visual and aural. Yet the universality of a continuous production must not detract from its production of the singular, the production of new compositions through decomposition is via a process of exhaustion that brings us to the continuous again and again. Deleuze identifies a third language in Becket through which this stage of exhaustion is dramatised. This language is not concerned with combinable objects or transmitting voices, as were languages I and II respectively. It concerns Images and an 'any-space-whatever' which are respectively the time and space of production rather than of products. These are positive notions that are reached through exhaustion and so they are productive time and spaces that are behind produced times and spaces.

Let's concentrate first on the Image. It is said to 'ascend to the indefinite'. In Beckett's words, in Murphy writing about the character Celia, 'Then it was finished, the days and places and things and people were untwisted and scattered, she was lying down, she had no history.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 86] The Image is a ritornello and a process, making it independent of both objects and memories. The Image is then not a personal memory, It resounds and it colours, making it a process within experience itself. It cannot be a psychological property of the subject because subject and object have already been exhausted, their difference having been shown to be itself something produced. Now we are concerned with processes of production and not with attributes of an already produced entity. As Deleuze puts it – '...the image is more profound because it frees itself from its object in order to become a process itself, ...' As such it '...no longer needs to be realised in a body or object.' [TE, p. 168] The names, combined exhaustively in language I, and voices of the Other, exhausted at the limit in language II, are then interrupted by the pure Image. The Image attains the indefinite because discontinuous possibilities and the opposition of self and Other have been exhausted. Yet it remains completely determined. Its complete determination must arise through the continuity of the production of which it is part. It must realise its distinction through obscurity. It resounds or colours through the resources of a continuous, obscure-distinct, production. This allows it to operate and occur in the ongoing production of experience, rather than being bound to previous forms or being unproductive in experience. In Beckett's words, describing Murphy: 'He could not get a picture in his mind of any creature he had met, animal or human. Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as thought reeled upward off a spool level with his throat.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 141] These scraps are completely determined but belong to no body or object, they operate as a process in experience without presupposing the forms and compositions already built up.

Deleuze strongly identifies this re-thinking of the image in Beckett as affirming the production of the new. The Image must be the new and never set up a barrier to the new by conserving a content. With the image 'what counts is not its meagre content but the energy it has harvested.' [TE, p. 160] This shows that exhaustion is wholly positive insofar as it leads us to something other than a content that would accumulate as yet another composition. The image never lasts very long because it is singular, 'inseparable from the movement through which it dissipates itself.' [TE, p. 168] It is continuous with the production of the new and therefore will not accumulate or solidify a content because this would block the new images to come and its role as a process that makes different and opens a new horizon. They merge with 'the dissipation of their condensed energy' such that they are singular and do not prescribe contents but offer a new relation through which content can be composed differently. Rather than following from previous compositions of content according to a linear succession of time the image is an instantaneous production that interrupts this succession: 'There is a time for images, a right moment when they can appear or insinuate themselves, breaking the combination of words and flow of voices.' Yet this break must also exhaust combinations and flows, it must be 'a moment very near the end, an hour close to the last.' [TE, p. 161] This is a clearing of the space of composition through decomposition. This is also developed in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, see pages 80-84f.

If the Image were to have a different temporality it would have a different horizon and operation. It operates in the instant. We can refer to the problem-solution structure which means that a problem does not establish new form of individuation but establishes a horizon for forms of solution or individuation. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes 'The Idea of fire subsumes fire in the form of a single continuous mass capable of increase. The Idea of silver subsumes its object in the form of a liquid continuity of fine metal.' [DR 171] This is a continuousness that does not resemble what it produces, this having been exhausted. For this reason it must interrupt the course and succession of its products, forms of solution or individuation, rather than simply supplying it with ready made forms. We do not then copy the content of the image but realise new connections in the instant thanks to how diverse new images or potentials coexist in the Idea. One form of realising the Idea or image must not dominate because for Deleuze the actualisation of virtual Idea is differenciation rather than being marked by resemblance or generality. For this reason we find that Beckett's notion of falling preserves the necessary temporality of the image. Deleuze quotes the following passage from Beckett: 'The image is a pant, a breath, but it is an expiring breath, on its way to extinction. The image is that which extinguishes itself, consumes itself: a fall. It is a pure intensity, which is defined as such by its height, that is, by its level above zero, which it describes only by falling.' [TE, p. 170] Therefore in The Exhausted the dissipation of energy is shown to be positive – it ensures a singular Image and one occurring in the instant and therefore not being accounted for by the linear succession of time. Deleuze quotes Becket writing of 'the simple games that time plays with space, now with these toys, and now with those.' [Beckett, ‘Texts for Nothing’, p. 74] This captures the intervention of an instantaneous Image in space, the problems set for space to solve which draws upon a time of production. Thus one Image does not follow from another in a linear and actual succession but each occurs in the instant and relates in a non-linear and continuous time. It is what Deleuze elsewhere calls, borrowing the concept from Shakespeare, a 'time out of joint.' ['On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy' in Essays Critical and Clinical, also published as the Preface to Kant's Critical Philosophy]

The second aspect of the language III, 'any space whatever', does for space what the Image does for time. The 'any space whatever' is populated and well trodden – including by us and yet it is neither here nor there. Deleuze finds that in Beckett a manner of walking is a ritornello just as a Images are. Thus 'Any-character-whatever' 'traverses the square following a given course and direction.' This motor ritornello is a conveyor belt because it is a movement with no object. Here it is a question of exhausting space. Just as linear time is overcome by the instantaneous time of Images and their virtual coexistence, so qualified and extended spaces are overcome by 'any-space-whatever'. It is not organised by established representations, neither by words, objects or memories. Its potential organisation involves the instantaneous time of the image, the injection of problems which it responds to with solutions, precisely individuations or compositions of the self. Here elements are defunctionalised, homogeneous and are thus defined only as parts of a space, ensuring continuity as in the case of images coexisting in Ideas. This clears the ground because it ensures that forms produced in the past and accumulated do not determine how space can function in its encounter with the Image. This is space open the horizon of the future through its capacity to respond to the time of the image.

Developing the Nothing with which everything merges there is a ghostly dimension that further elaborates the continuous production Deleuze seeks in Beckett's work. The latter is ‘Nothing’ from the point of view of the produced, the actualised and with its sensori-motor schema. It is then ghostlike from this perspective, what Deleuze calls 'The ghostly dimension of an indefinite impersonal'. [TE, p. 166] Yet it involves a fullness attained through exhaustion, something Murphy saw as a potential in his biscuits. We reach the indefinite and impersonal through the exhaustion or decomposition of words, memories and objects. Images are played out when the time of Image is staged in the 'any space whatever'. We have 'a woman, a man and a child without any personal coordinates.' They are ghostly because they do not resemble already composed forms. Ghostlike is the life without the forms that define what has been composed and made personal. These Images are processes that trigger new forms, new solutions or individuations, and so must themselves ‘fall’ away rather than becoming established and must not prescribe a content. The impersonal and indefinite can effect any self through its own exhaustion or decomposition, they belong to no-one or thing and so are pre-individual. They do not resemble what they produce. They are the instances of a renewed problem and ghostly because they do not presuppose former solutions and do not resemble them. It is ghostly that the order of succession of what has gone before doesn't count because 'All parts of space plunge into the void, each revealing the emptiness, into which they are plunging.' [TE, p. 165] They reveal emptiness in their lack of reference to the organisation of space and time, abandoning all precedent or basis in a sum of probabilities.

It is in music that a continuity is to be found that avoids the terms Beckett is said to exhaust. It is adequate to the space we have reached so that:
'It is onto this ghostly frame that the music is hurled, connecting voids and silences, following a ridge line like a limit to infinity.' [TE, p. 167]
This is a ‘frame’ without established and personal coordinates. ‘Infinite’ here is the continuous production we have been concerned with. 'Void and silence' are connected by this continuity because they are its interventions in language and experience, they are singular or remarkable images connected by a continuous production. They are connected by a rhythm that orders their occurrence not according to linear succession but according to a non-linear production brought about by the coexistence and interaction of these images in a continuous production. Here difference relates to difference. The instantaneous images can be connected only through the production they are part of and this is expressed by rhythm rather than by given ways of connecting things. Rhythm is the time aspect of music and involves the grouping of units of time into larger and larger groups. All sorts of groupings and connections can emerge through rhythm and this makes a productive movement. This accounts for new distributions of words, subjects and objects in an ‘any space whatever’ because both time and space are free of presuppositions and able to respond with new compositions to the image that occur in the instant. These images must all be continuous but not according to their successive occurrences in a linear or chronological time. They relate through rhythm and its groupings, a ‘time out of joint’.

Deleuze writes that for Beckett: 'Music succeeds in transforming the death of this young girl into a young girl dies; it brings about this extreme determination of the indefinite like a pure intensity that pierces the surface,...' [TE, p. 173] Here 'this' thing which has a place in the succession of products, of words, of objects, becomes instead an Image, a process of death made singular. This is because the images occurs without being tied to any body or object, it is indefinite and impersonal, ghostly because it is preindividual. In this way all definite and personal terms are exhausted and this image emerges from its relation to all other images and relates what it produces in an 'any space whatever' to all other productions. In his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation Deleuze talks about the difference between 'distributive unity' and 'limitative unity.' [p. 84-85]The former is separation without isolation and expresses the continuity of production which is attained through exhaustion. This rhythmic being and union that separates the selves who are realised and makes them individual in very different and creative ways. Yet it does this by relating their singular production to the whole of production, through the unlimited continuity of this. Deleuze refers to Beckett's television work as using music or vision to loosen the grip of words, separating or even opening them up. This is when they encounter their outside, the continuity that produces them but also demands they make way for the new. This gives them a unity that distributes anew, breaking solidified orders. This means that Images can interrupt words and objects but rhythm ensures new distributions or groupings of images are always occurring and none is established. It means that whole of time is always brought into play. This is for Deleuze to clear the way for the ever new that is only realised through this whole: 'Visual image is carried along by the music, the sonorous image that rushes toward its own abolition. Both of them rush toward the end, all possibility exhausted.' [TE, p. 169]

Deleuze asks whether there is salvation for words in a new style where they open up by themselves. This would be 'A music proper to a poetry read aloud without music.' [TE, p. 173]The succession and the discontinuity we found with the sum of possibility would need to be overcome it the rhythm and an ‘any space whatever’ were to be realised in a style that overcame the solidified and habitual. Deleuze refers to Beckett's practice of boring holes in the surface so that 'what lurks behind' might at last appear: 'to allow for the emergence of the void or the visible in itself, the silence or the audible in itself...' [TE, p. 173] This void is continuous and so refers to the 'in itself' without division into forms or compositions. This echoes Deleuze concern in Difference and Repetition with how 'Ideas occur throughout the faculties and concern them all.' Deleuze suggests we take the social multiplicity or Idea – 'it determines sociability as a faculty, but also the transcendent of sociability which cannot be lived within actual societies in which the multiplicity is incarnated, but must be and can be lived only in the element of social upheaval (in other words, freedom, which is always hidden among the remains of an old order and the first fruits of a new).' [DR, p. 193] The faculties are structures involved in individuation and respond to the transcendent object, the Idea where the variety of 'the social' coexists ‘in itself’ and with the whole of time, suggesting again the distinction of Idea through their obscurity. Deleuze is concerned with the 'in itself' of the visible and the audible also in order to realise in individuation an images produced by the coexistence of all the varieties of the visible or of the audible.

Referring to Beckett's late works Deleuze characterises his style: 'Sometimes short segments are ceaselessly added to the interior of the phrase in an attempt to break open the surface of words completely, ... And sometimes the phrase is riddled with dots and dashes [traits] in order to ceaselessly reduce the surface of words,...' [TE, p. 173-174] This exhaustive process operates between the words to uncover their common production in the linguistic Idea or multiplicity. Deleuze argues that a new style is needed because of the problem of how visions or sounds are to be distinguished. This concerns the problem not simply of minimal distinction between sounds and visions but their differenciation, the production of very different sounds and visions through the audible in itself and the visible in itself. At this point the rhythm of a production that groups images in new ways, realising new connections between these processes, is operating. The surface is broken open or reduced in this new style such that we are closer to the Idea and its production of images by bringing together diverse visions and sounds into the common production that realises the ‘in itself’ in different ways. Finding the Idea in which the variety coexists is to find the point of exhaustion where new images are produced in order to give rise to new compositions or individuations upon an 'any space whatever.'

This conclusion has tried to draw together the ‘art of science of exhaustion’ through the theme of individuation. This theme seems to recur throughout Deleuze work and he seeks to account both for continuity and for the discontinuity that is a condition of action and relations between individuals. The account of the time of image and of the ‘any space whatever’ provides an account of how new singularities can be distributed. The problem of accounting for the non-exhausted or composed through exhaustion and decomposition are great and with in more depth in other of Deleuze’s writings. Indeed it is one of the productive problems animating his thought as a whole. However, it is in the space and time of production uncovered in The Exhausted that we grasp the potential for individuation provided by exhaustion just as we do find in other apparently destructive and negative terms elsewhere in Deleuze, from fractures and cracks to schizophrenia and discord.
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The discussion during the workshop was very rich and productive. One issue raised was about the value of exhaustion over a process of fragmentation. Isn’t a fragment more appropriate to Deleuze’s own mechanisms of production? This would suggest that a fragment is injected into the process of production. Another issue was the mention of the sublime at page 170 The Exhausted. If the sublime involves fear, awe and alienation does this equate with exhaustion? The sublime reaches a peak – the zenith of sensation. However, it was argued, for Deleuze exhaustion still involves sensation, it still involves a zenith but one that falls away such that the sublime is never established or fixed.

A connection was made to the move beyond action and the notion of the rhizome where everything is connected to everything else, this is where intensities happen. It cannot be put in an intentional, conscious or logical sequence.

The move beyond the possible to the production of the real led the question to be raised of whether exhaustion is positive in Deleuze but negative in Nietzsche, despite their common ground. Exhaustion in Nietzsche’s critique of morality involves being hypersensitive and involves alcohol, luxury and decadence, bring about reaction rather than action.

Deleuze philosophical notion of energy was related to his critique of entropy. This was referred to Derrida’s notion of dehiscence in the image of the bud of a flower bursting where most of what is released will die but all are of interest. The excess of dehiscence leads to chance driven encounters and avoids a linear and chronological succession or causality.

The example of an animal walking across a desert was suggested as a case where life will push until it drops. Exhaustion will only come with death. It was asked whether exhaustion is moral and humanistic in Deleuze or physiological. This echoes debates about whether the notion of ‘becoming other’ in Deleuze is human centred. This was related to Kantian structures, invoking a human anthropology, and the problem that it is contradictory for the subject to be got rid of in a specifically human way (cf. Keith Ansell Pearson Germinal Life [Routledge, 1999] especially pages 188-189).

Reference was also made to Beckett’s characters and how they keep returning in his work – he calls them all back and they keep moving all the time, reappearing.

Also mentioned with the collection of stones talked about in Anti-Oedipus, echoed in Beckett’s Molloy. Here the notion of constructing desiring machines out of a heap of stones is developed.

Is The Exhausted the closest Deleuze ever got to writing about death? Death is not the end because the life or singularity of the image comes from its fall or dissipation. It becomes a ballistic image, it was suggested. This was related in the point in Difference and Repetition where Deleuze talks about personal death and impersonal death. The latter is going on all the time in the life span of an actual entity, singular points composes the body and compose thought in relation to an environment and in relation to thought in the widest sense. Singular images each die or fall, intensity tends towards zero. As exhaustion death is impersonal and seems to go on continually. The life span between birth and death was discussed – we cannot make a whole of this series. Other series are multiplied by the complication of the whole. It was suggested that constituting a series is itself yet another event in a life and that we cannot therefore get to ‘the’ series.

The three languages which Deleuze finds in Beckett (page 156) were discussed and it was argued that the later texts of Beckett strongly emphasise the relevance of this model. Words come no longer to be used. It was suggested that triads come up a lot in Deleuze – yet it was also noted that we can find many four fold structures. Deleuze uses lists all the time, including the eight postulates of The Image of Thought at the end of chapter three of Difference and Repetition. However, it was suggested, we tend to expect lists to be exhaustive. The importance of more than two terms – such as actual and virtual – was brought out in relation to the danger of the actual falling into the virtual unless other terms involve the virtual in the actual, as individuation can be said to do, as can the doubling of spatio-temporal dynamisms in the emergence of an 'elementary consciousness' (something talked about in Difference and Repetition at page 220). Death is for Deleuze to clear the ground for the virtual production that is continually involved in actualisation.

Another area developed was the role of Klossowski given that Deleuze says he got the notion of intensity from him. Deleuze and Guattari saw ‘disjunctive synthesis’ as a way of describing the essential nature of Kossowski’s fictions. Klossowski’s work on Nietzsche’s wrestling with his own physiological states of sickness was developed and this revealed its deep relevance to Deleuze’s engagement with Beckett. It was a question for Nietzsche of whether he should be on the side of his body or his thought – they were in a battle against each other. Nietzsche’s aphoristic style expresses the incoherent forces going on beneath consciousness but without representing them. This develops a pathos of thought. Reference was made to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science where he criticises Spinoza for arguing that we need to understand rather than condemn. Nietzsche sees this as seeking a neutral position of understanding when neutrality can only be a temporary truce of the forces of the unconscious involving the lowest energy and no feeling. Yet in Deleuze exhaustion is correlated with a particular possibility of thought, a new distribution of images or singularities. For Nietzsche things can’t cancel out and Deleuze takes this over. Unconscious forces are all different in kind. The production of an agent, of a sensory motor schema, comes out of this unconscious. Exhaustion then is about getting beyond agency but to have individuation you have to get back to it too.

Deleuze's criticism of European Buddhism was raised because here the right balance, the right level of energy, involves disinterest. Beckett, it was pointed out, is often accused of nihilism. It was suggested that Deleuze’s anti-Kantianism leads him to affirm in Beckett the exhaustion of possible experiences. This again lead to the problem of whether we have the physiology of exhaustion or a specifically human exhaustion. Kant’s work in The Critique of Pure Reason was characterised as involving the exhaustion of the possibilities of cognition via the excessive movement beyond the limits of the rational that defines 'the human' in Kant.

It was argued that in Beckett there is a whole system of at work that keeps things moving.

The theme of the ‘any space whatever’ was related to Deleuze's Bergsonism and the notion in Bergson that you can only see the image when you are free of all movement. The image is what sets everything in motion.

Also discussed where passage in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra where Zarathustra is forced to lie down and how he is opposed to 'the philosopher of sleep'.


Bibliography:

Beckett, Samuel (1993) Murphy, Montreuil and London: Calder Publications.

Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, London and New York: Continuum Press.

- (1998) Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London and New York: Verso.

- (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: The Athlone Press.

- (1989) Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: The Athlone Press.

- (1988) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books.

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21 NOVEMBER 'CLAMOUR OF BEING' WORKSHOP - REPORT AND CONTINUING DISCUSSION

This week chapters 3 and 4 of ‘Deleuze: The Clamour of Being’ were under discussion. We continued our discussion of the mathematics used by Deleuze and Badiou and also explored feedback systems, the possible, the organic versus the abstract (or biology versus thought) and the ‘unequal odd’ virtual and actual halves of the object in Deleuze. References below to Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition' are to the older format of the Paul Patton translation, not to the new compact edition.

The ten minute presentation was this week given by Edward Willatt and began with Badiou’s focus on Deleuze’s critique of categories. At page 32 he argues that difference must not be imitative for Deleuze, no matter how multiple or flexible, since formal divisions or categories are general and distant from production. This seems to capture Deleuze’s concern that difference be productive and internal to the production mechanism, that it be expressive and not imitative. Also brought up was Badiou’s concern with ‘Deleuze’s philosophical language’ at page 33. He argues that an active-passive duality is commonly identified throughout Deleuze's work, giving rise to an image that Deleuze himself didn’t intend but encouraged through his philosophical language. This seems to demonstrate the corrective value of Badiou’s reading in that he wants to preserve the philosophical rigor of Deleuze’s work. His attack on the active-passive duality as an image of Deleuze's thought seems very relevant if we want to talk about, for example, individuation as a process without this appearing as a passive and actual receptacle of virtual creativity.

Badiou’s focus on Deleuze’s use of structuralism was also dealt with by the presentation. There is a concern that this aspect of his thought overbalances the system in going so far from the actual and determination that we don’t see how we can get back. Can we get back from the ideal operation of the empty square to an account of material individuation? Alberto Toscano in his 'Theatre of Production' poses just this problem when he focuses upon Deleuze’s treatment of the problem of individuation. He writes that in Difference and Repetition the disjunction between the virtual and the actual is a disjunction internal to, and generated by, the processes of ontogenesis themselves. He distinguishes this from the ‘Logic of Sense’ where a quasi-cause is needed. He argues that from the point of view of the problem of individuation we must emphasise Deleuze’s development of internal difference ‘as a process that requires the dramatization of internal multiplicity in intensive systems and spatiotemporal dynamisms.’ (p. 174-175) This analysis seem highly relevant when we note that as part of his reading Badiou argues that in Deleuze structure is simulacrum and as such does not enter into the sense that it fabricates or sustains. The problem with Deleuze’s structuralism seems to be its distance from other aspects of his system. Yet he wants to combine structure and genesis. He seems to want individuation to play a creative role in the process as well as Ideas, to balance the extremes that have opened up dramatically for us through our discussions of Badiou's ‘Deleuze: The Clamour of Being’.

Chapter four begins with Badiou’s argument that in Deleuze the two ‘nominal’ names of Being (actual and virtual) express the deployment of the One or univocal Being. The virtual is the ground of the actual. This was called into question in order to bring into play the actual processes that Deleuze seems to talk about. It was argued that the clear-confused seems to refer to individuation and the distinct-obscure to Ideas. These two extremes in Deleuze’s system – ideal and material – demand our attention. If you start with one extreme, as Badiou does and emphasises this through his focus on Deleuze’s structuralism, isn’t there a need to see if the other extreme fits in? If Deleuze’s system fails it is because he can’t fit in or hold everything together in a meaningful way. The difference between the two extremes is to be internal to the system. Badiou talks about the need for internal difference to operate but then to neglect it when collapsing the actual into the virtual in his reading of Deleuze. We have different parts of Deleuze work, even parts of the same book as we see in ‘Difference and Repetition’, threatening to go off in different directions. How does the empty square relate to the problem of individuation? The presentation used in the figure of the fractured self, as Deleuze develops it, has as three aspects: ‘I think’, ‘I am’ and time. Isn’t this the expression of Ideas and individuation respectively (in 'I think and 'I am' respectively), pure thought thinking itself and the material individuating itself whilst being related by the pure form of time?

Badiou describes Deleuze’s use of musical order as a metaphor at page 44, as he did with his use of maths in chapter 1. This seems to go against the notion that the music we write is pure production expressing itself, as with ‘I think’ and ‘I am’ as they emerge as aspects of the fractured self.

The presentation then took a critical stance towards Badiou’s assessment at page 45 that Deleuze is a classical philosopher – because the multiple needs a rigorous determination of Being as One - and so ‘does not submit to the critical injunctions of Kant.’ While Deleuze is highly critical of Kant for messing up the production mechanism he had discovered, Badiou’s statement needs to be questioned. Kant is seen by Deleuze as projecting products into the production, the empirical into the transcendental. He wants production to be pure, free of the Image of Thought or what is produced and then is taken as fixed and given. Yet Deleuze seems to value critique insofar as it seeks to keep the transcendental pure. This is a highly positive critical injunction if we don’t want the same to return and want to preserve heterogeneity in the production mechanism in order that it not resemble what is produced. Deleuze talks about ‘total critique’ in his ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ as a way to complete Kant’s work. Critique then has a role that needs to be explored. What we cannot talk about (theoretically) for Kant still operates in his system – it has practical reality. Deleuze wants to involve production but in a new way and so, like Kant, we must cease one discourse (the theoretical for Kant and the Image of Thought for Deleuze) in order to grasp the transcendental through its own expression (morality in Kant and differenciation in Deleuze).

Last week Matt Lee developed an analysis of Badiou’s reading of Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ where after critique, which limits what we can talk about, we have mysticism. This purification through critique seems to have similar connotiations to Deleuze's use of Kant. For Deleuze we can talk about ‘the noumena closest to the phenomena’ (‘Difference and Repetition’, page 222). What needs to be engaged with is Kant’s project of purifying the production of experience from theoretical givens and his giving it a practical reality. Some have suggested that ‘Anti-Oedipus’ can be read as Deleuze and Guattari’s re-writing of the Kant’s ‘Critique of Practical Reason’ (Daniel W. Smith made this case during his keynote paper at the Society for European Philosophy 2004 Conference here at Greenwich. He introduced this move by talking about investments of desire, in ‘Anti-Oedipus’, that are beneath the rational. The rational is a particular configuration of desires. He then argued that reading the second Critique is just like reading Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze dislikes the morality but models Anti-Oedipus upon The Critique of Practical Reason. Present in both books is a faculty with a causal relationship to its object. Desire is the cause of the actuality of its representations because desire is production. Deleuze likes this structure but makes it serve immanence instead of transcendence, thus Ideas must be immanent and synthesise desire. Kant’s desire is made immanent through the influence of Nietzsche, suggesting again that Kant’s critique is of value when extended through Nietzsche to a ‘total critique’). In both texts we can find the notion that desire creates its object. The gap between subject and object is overcome by desire or production, as something pre-individual and as the milieu of individuation itself. We must think the creation of objects through the desire or production that is prior to the self in its isolation from an object. Badiou is of course quite right to say that the moral law is invalid for Deleuze but he doesn’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

At page 46 Badiou refers to ‘the act of the one’ which he has emphasised through his reading of Deleuze’s structuralism. He identifies this as transcendence and finds in this a reason for his divergence from Deleuze in a contrasting form of classicism: the forms of the multiple are always actual and the One is sacrificed. Badiou wants ‘integral actuality’ where a multiple is a multiple of multiples.

At page 46 Badiou offers some clarifications of the virtual which Deleuze had offered in their correspondence. The first of these is that the virtual is the ‘there is’ that precedes all thought. This seems to expand the virtual in a way that we find in Deleuze’s very late work ‘Immanence: A Life…’ – here at page 27 he writes: ‘We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.’

At page 49 Badiou writes that ‘Actualisation breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle.’ He seems to be arguing that Deleuze’s Image of Thought is a process, just as reactive forces in ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ can be seen as a process. He argues that Deleuze breaks with this reactive process in favour of differentiation and divergence and from this draws the conclusion that the existent is a creation rather than a creature when considered in terms of the virtuality that it actualises.

At page 50 he talks about the notion of problems found in Deleuze and gives a very particular reading, extending his emphasis on the virtual. The virtual is ‘the real of the problematic in general’ – it is ‘the universal power of problems and their solutions’. He seems to neglect the problem-solution feedback that introduces two sides or powers of difference in ‘Difference and Repetition’. Whilst the Image of Thought is a reactive accumulation of solutions, there is a sense in which individuations as solutions to problems show the contribution of both problems and solutions to the progress of the system.

At page 51 Badiou deals with the problem of there being virtual and actual parts of the real object – ‘unequal odd halves’ (‘Difference and Repetition’ 209-10). Badiou argues that making parts of the object indiscernible – the object as the point of indiscernability between two distinct images – leads to a disorientated intuition and the indetermination of the actual. This follows from the complete determination of the virtual (page 53). For Badiou then we save the One by making the two unthinkable and thus collapsing the actual into the virtual. The virtual then determines the destiny of everything because the actual is irreal, undetermined and non-objective – it is simulacrum.

The discussion first focused upon the notion of a feedback system. It must create its components and so the actual solutions to virtual problems contribute components of the system rather than simply getting in its way. Problems with this were raised. What about the problem of ‘bootstrapping’ that gets the system going? Could it be a critical mass concept, a bifurcation? The concern was raised that a feedback system sounds Hegelian. The point was made that Deleuze seeks to avoid negation in the internal relations he uses, like that between problems and solutions. Against the notion of a feedback system it was suggested that the virtual is actualising and actual is ‘virtualising.’ Therefore both having a role as two powers of difference relating through their difference but not in the restrictive sense of being a feedback system. Can we talk about systems? Are these too strict for the divergence and differentiation that Deleuze labels ‘production’? This raised the issue of the status of Deleuze’s ‘technical models’ (Difference and Repetition page 220-221). They mustn’t fix the virtual, it eludes such a capture. They must be flexible and diverse as a true expression of production and not limit its expression by embodying an Image of Thought. However, they must capture the selection that takes place when pure virtual production is actualised. If there was no model or system of actualisation it is hard to see how the actual could be different from the virtual. No system can actualise all of the virtual, it is Open and constantly changing, but systems or models must produce actual states of affairs that do not resemble their production. The system enables solutions to arise by relating problems and solutions, it must express the scope of the virtual but in a singular form. We cannot pin down the virtual and yet it must be related to the actual, as problem is to solution.

We discussed how for Badiou one term become more important on the basis of the actual-virtual duality, this term (virtual) is real whilst the duality is formal. It is a ‘purely introductory’ ‘initial formalism’ at work in thought or intuition (‘Clamour’ page 34). At this point the difference between the actual and the individual was raised. It can be argued that for Deleuze the individual is freedom because it is in touch with the pre-individual (problems/Ideas) in its work of solution through its power of clear-confused. The actual perhaps refers to the determined terms that take their bearings from the process individuation through their relation (to the universal prior to all particulars and generalities - cf. ‘Difference and Repetition’ page 171).

Returning to the notion of a feedback system, the idea that actual solutions have the virtual within them and give rise to new problems was raised. This would be to elaborate the particular power of difference at work in individuation. This was made concrete by the intriguing notion that a problem field disappears in the deep sea because light isn’t there and so there is no problem of sight. This is the sense in which Ideas or problematic fields ‘occur here and there in the production of an actual historical world.’ (‘Difference and Repetition’, p. 190) In this sense actualisation has a role. The point was made that this is very compelling when we talk about the organic because here a dynamic relation between problem field and field of solution in each case is convincing. Yet, it was argued, in abstract thought there isn’t this constant resolution of a field but a break or cut, something quite unlike the organic. This was developed in relation to Deleuze ‘Negotiations’ where he talks about not writing for a period of eight years. Is this Hiatus virtual since from it a new book was produced at the end of this period? In response it was suggested that this model sound Freudian. It suggests the return of the repressed in one form or another. It suggests that the subconscious is operating.

A further point concerned Deleuze stated rejection of the notion of simulacrum and his adoption of the notion of rhizome. These are more organic and it was suggested that Deleuze’s thought works better using biology. The simulacrum is more abstract. This opens up an intriguing division in Deleuze that Badiou seems to neglect. The virtual-actual as structure works better as organic and Deleuze develops this, for example, in ‘Difference and Repetition’ chapter 5. The point was also made that the simulacrum, as it is used here, is a notion that Deleuze finds in Klossowski. He combines this with the virtual and this led the questions about whether he can hold such diverse things together, perhaps whether he can hold together what he appropriates from Klossowksi on the one hand and from Bergson on the other.

A further point was that in ‘Anti Oedipus’ Deleuze and Guattari have a notion of machines that only work by breaking down. Is this better than the notion of structure and the empty square? Ideal connections can be made – time is out of joint and we have free connectibility when the empty square affects everything. It was suggested that Deleuze’s structuralism here may be linked to Derrida’s work. Here aporia and aporetic moments are limits of impossibility within possibility. However, it was argued, Deleuze wants to go beyond these transcendental limits that are grounded in the impossible. In ‘Proust and Signs’ Deleuze argues that we mustn’t reduplicate the empirical – or project products into the production mechanism as he argued in his criticism of Kant. For example, a square circle is a limit of geometry and geometry is here mapped out in advance (as possibility). Derrida bases his work on this impossibility structure whereas for Deleuze the virtual is not the possible. He drops the possible-impossible opposition so that the virtual has no conceptual limits.

A further issue was raised around how for Deleuze each philosopher is singular, they create a new problem field. Therefore, how can you compare philosopher’s concepts as we usually do? The philosopher invents his concepts, they are completely his own. How can one philosopher follow on from another? A response raised to this problem was that each plane of consistency is cut out of all the others – it is available to all the others – the worlds of two philosophers are then related by strange nuptials. All are part of the problem field of ‘how to think’- a common, ideal field with a time out of joint that allows for ideal (non-linear) connections beyond those between passing presents.

Also discussed was Badiou’s stand on sets. He sees Deleuze as seeking to talk about things which he thinks cannot be listed in a set. For Badiou it is only the void or empty set cannot be listed, something that, ‘plead as I might’, Deleuze would not except (‘Clamour’ page 47). This is developed at page 48 in a challenge to Deleuze’s multiplicities. These seem rooted in pure variety, such as the pure biological or the pure social. ‘The Idea of fire subsumes fire in the form of a single continuous mass capable of increase. The Idea of silver subsumes its object in the form of a liquid continuity of fine metal. … Continuousness truly belongs to the realm of Ideas only to the extent that an ideal cause of continuity is determined.’ (‘Difference and Repetition’, page 171) This variable spread is behind the extension of forms of the biological, the social … Is this a romantic notion? Certainly Deleuze is resistant to multiples appropriated from set theory because they define things he wants not to define. The fluidity and permeability of Ideas – giving rise to the perplication of Ideas – is behind the extension and of series despite their actual distances and lack of relations.

In discussing Badiou’s multiples a point was made about his use of mathematics. To make the empty set or void productive we need to use a negation structure which is mathematical but not set theoretical. This raises questions about Badiou’s use of maths – can he justify his ontology solely through maths or does he not have to give philosophical reasons for taking set theory and adding to it to make it works the way he wants? In the recent colloquium by Brian Smith of The University of Dundee the move Badiou makes in adding a temporality to set theoretical operations that they don’t have by themselves was brought up.

Also discussed was the criticism beginning at page 51 of Deleuze’s actual and virtual ‘unequal odd halves’ of the real object. Badiou reads the two images involved – actual and virtual – as being simulacra for Deleuze. This makes an image of the virtual, a half of the object, untenable. The point was made that Deleuze is using ‘image’ in the sense in which it is used in Bergson’s ‘Matter and Memory’ and therefore Badiou’s argument is a strange one. He reads ‘image’ in a literal sense when it is in fact grounded in Deleuze’s Bergsonism. This seemed to be a sign of Badiou’s reliance on the simulacrum when it is an image used at one time and later abandoned by Deleuze. It is not his constant term for the actual. Badiou is keen to defend Plato in his own work and his emphasis of Deleuze’s Platonism of the virtual and emphasis of the Platonic term simulacrum seems to be a simplification.

We discussed the univocity Deleuze finds in Spinoza – it ensures there is no hierarchy, with actualisation always dividing and differentiating. Virtual multiplicity can always be divided, it is not to be confused with units. Its total permeability and coexistence is key. It seems as if sets move away from this. Yet a clarification was provided - sets are made up of rules or definitions and not of units. This explains the concern of set theoreticians that we ought not really to talk about sets as collections of things, although this is the easiest way to talk about them for the layman. Thus we get the an ideal rule with enormous depths. Further discussion of set theory revealed that for Badiou maths has shown us that we need to use new rules. It was argued that mathematical reasons are behind his use of set theory. The infinity of multiplicity was too simplistic according to mathematicians and so a more complex notion of infinity was needed. Our notion of infinity needs to be supplemented, according to set theory. Cantor’s continuum hypothesis emerges as a way of dealing with the infinite that set theory opens up.

The point was made that for Deleuze we find a bad infinite in Hegel and a good infinite in Spinoza because of the way they responded differently to calculus. The good response recognises the role of approximation in the sense that you can never get to the limit, invoking the infinitesimal. However – it was suggested – isn’t differential calculus still concerned with counting to infinity and so lacking the complex infinity maths demanded when it found the infinitesimal non-rigorous and wanted to establish its own foundations? Yet – it was argued – with dx/dy we don’t get counting but what Deleuze characterises as the problem of the signification of zeros (DR 171).

Developing the discussion of mathematics, a further defence was mounted of Deleuze’s approach. Maths is concerned with problems and solving them with rules. Without calculus you cannot deal with the world – engineering works in this way, dynamics are worked out to model structures. This is done without knowing what the numbers are, through approximation. It gives access to the virtual and the structure of actualisation for Deleuze. For Badiou the actual is already infinite and so you don’t need the virtual. Maths has its own world and so you don’t need the empiricism of the calculus. For him Being is a void – he asks what is Being (a Heideggerian question) and reads Deleuze as asking this too. Yet – its was argued - Deleuze wants to ask other questions and explicitly rejects the ‘what?’ question. He wants to ask about the remarkable, the interesting and the singular – things that concern practice rather than foundation. Thus in maths it is problems and solutions and not foundations that concern him. What is the relevance to the production of experience of that which isn’t practical, that isn’t a singular or limit point? This returns us to the argument that both Kant and Deleuze seek to overcome a theoretical perspective in order to get to what is significant in practice or the production realised through desire. Foundations aren’t modelled on production, they don’t take their bearings from it.

For Badiou everything is literally capable of being placed in a set of some sort. The point was made that for him set theory is a genuinely historical/revolutionary event of which there are few. They include Jesus, invoking St Paul’s fidelity, (love), the French revolution (politics) and set theory (science - our structural analysis). These are how we are conditioned today.

In this way we arrived at the opposition of the multiples of Deleuze and Badiou. For Badiou Deleuze’s multiplicities are dependent on the One when they try to avoid actual terms and reach for the spread and variability of the virtual. The ideal cause of continuity collapses the actual into the virtual. For Deleuze you cannot get to a virtual multiplicity by concerning yourself with units, you lose touch with the obscurity through which distinction emerges.

[1]At the end of the workshop the call for ‘more Kant, much more Kant’ was described as ‘the cry of the depraved’ by a man with a razor smile.

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