Somers-Hall, (1.6), Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, ‘1.6 Nietzsche (36–7/45–7, 40–2/50–2, 52–5/63–7)’, summary

by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. All boldface, underlining, and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so please forgive my typos and other distracting mistakes. Somers-Hall is abbreviated SH.]

Summary of

Henry Somers-Hall

Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition:
An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide

Part 1
A Guide to the Text

 

Chapter 1. Difference in Itself

1.6 Nietzsche (36–7/45–7, 40–2/50–2, 52–5/63–7)

Very brief summary:

A Nietzschean univocal view of reality would say that there are not primarily independent beings choosing to exercise power morally or immorally. Rather, there are nothing more than competing forces in flux, all exercising their power purely affirmatively, since each force is exerted to the fullest it can be. This is a univocal understanding, since all being is understood as power. And, it is based on difference and affirmation.

Brief summary:

If we understand ‘being’ as power rather than as substantiality, then we can grasp it as univocal and affirmative. Deleuze builds from Nietzsche’s notion of subjectivity being a fabrication created by the weak in order to externalize blame for their weakness. In reality there are just competing forces expressing themselves at their fullest and finding relative value in their competitions. This is a nomadic understanding of what makes up the world. It sees the world as made of pure difference, that is, exclusively of differential relations between competing forces. And it is affirmative, since these powers are understood as being as great as they can be and never arbitrarily self-limiting. They are expressions of a pure affirmative will.  A sedentary understanding would instead section off regions in this field of differential power relations and say we have substances with different moral values, depending on how they seemingly choose to dominate others. This sees one thing as being defined by the limits that separate it from other things, thus it is based on negation rather than affirmation. Also, it can only come after the more basic differential field of change and becoming.

 

Summary

[We previously examined Spinoza’s univocal understanding of being. There is one substance (being/God), but it has an infinity of intensive modal variations/determinations and an infinity of essences. SH will now look at a critical problem Deleuze finds in this, which is that it still in a sense is like Aristotle’s genus-species predicative structure and thus may have its problems of representation. For Aristotle, the genus is a predicate to the species. For example, “Man is (a type of) animal).” Also, the genus is like a substance and the species are like determinations of it. So, an animal can be more determinately a man, a dog, etc. Spinoza’s system still places modes as determinations of being, and in that sense takes this form of (predicative) judgment and thus of representational thinking. I will venture a guess at how this might look. For example maybe we could say something like: ‘this modal variation in the attribute of extension, specifically, myself, is a modal variation of being’. In that way, being still functions like a genus to which we are a predicated determination.]

Despite the fact that Spinoza represents an advance over the work of Scotus, Deleuze claims that for Spinoza, ‘substance must be said itself of the modes and only of the modes. Such a condition can be satisfied only at the price of a more general categorical reversal according to which being is said of becoming, identity of that which is different, the one of the multiple, etc.’ (DR 40/50). Deleuze’s point is that the relation of modes to being is still structured like the terms of a judgement. The modes are said of being, in the same way that we might say of a man that he is rational, and so we still understand being as if it were a subject, even if we know that in reality it is singular rather than one, and thus different in kind from the object of a judgement.
(SH 38)

[While Spinoza (and similarly Scotus) provided an intensive understanding of difference, he still in a sense places being (God/substance) as the highest term in the hierarchy. So we turn now to Nietzsche.] “In order to overcome this limitation, we need somehow to replace our account of | being as the highest term in our hierarchy with difference, whilst retaining the insights given by the intensive understanding of difference; it is Nietzsche, Deleuze claims, who provides the means to do this” (SH 38-39). Although SH will return to Nietzsche later, he will in the following locate two parts of Nietzsche's writings that Deleuze bases his argument on: 1) section 13 of Essay I of Genealogy of Morals, “where Deleuze sees Nietzsche as opposing the subject–property view of reality,” and 2) aphorism 341 of the Gay Science “where Nietzsche presents the eternal return.” For Deleuze, Nietzsche’s eternal return is a univocal principle (SH 39).

In section 13 of Essay I of Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche contrasts “two basic attitudes towards the world, that of the lamb and the bird of prey” (SH 39). The lamb is weak, and it views its predator birds as evil, since they gain dominance and advantage over the lambs. Whatever is opposite to the birds, that is, whatever is more like the lambs, would then be good in the eyes of the lambs. Their values then are not based on some intrinsic value to the birds’ traits and behaviors, but rather based on whatever is superior in power and more threatening to them. Consider instead good and evil from the perspective of the birds. The predator birds do not in this relation see any threats or superior powers. So there is no evil here. And in fact, the lambs are delicious to them. So lambs are not evil but rather good. [I am not sure if this next point is inferable from the prior ones we just made, but the next idea we move to in the Nietzsche quotation is that there are no subjects or actors. This is a mistake we make by using language (and its conceptual structures, like subject-predicate) to understand how events transpire.  For example, we see lightning and its flash. We conceptualize it (in certain Western languages) in a formulation like, “The lightning flashed.” This grammatical structure leads us to conceptualize the lighting as distinct from its flash, as if there is an actor that may choose one action or another. In reality there are just competitions of power operating according to quantities of force (drive, will, action). Perhaps in the case of lighting, we do not have a subject, lighting. Rather we have a competition of positive and negative charges, and as a result of that struggle of force quantities, there is the event of lightning-flash. But I am not sure if I am picturing this properly, since in this illustration, we seem to have two distinct actors, namely, the competing forces or ‘charges’. At any rate, the relevance here is that in reality there is an amoral situation. The powerful force prevails over the less powerful. But both are reciprocally determined in their mutual conflict, so more basically there is just force-differentiation. Language misleads us to misunderstand the situation. We think that there is a dominating party acting immorally upon a dominated party. We hold a supposed subject responsible for the immoral act. But really as we said there is no blame to be given and no subject who could receive blame anyway. Another idea here is that the more powerful side of the conflicts does not really have a choice to be less powerful. This may be because again there is no such actor who might have that option, or perhaps it is because the weak cannot help but be weak and similarly the strong cannot help but to be strong.]

Nietzsche presents a contrast between two basic attitudes towards the world, that of the lamb and the bird of prey [the following up to citation is quotation of Nietzsche Genealogy of Morals]:

There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb, – is good, isn’t he?’, then there is no reason to raise objections to this setting-up of an ideal beyond the fact that the birds of prey will view it somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: ‘We don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb’ . . . A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this driving, willing and acting, and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it), which construes and misconstrues all actions as conditional upon an agency, a ‘subject’, can make it appear otherwise . . . no wonder, then, if the entrenched, secretly smouldering emotions of revenge and hatred put this belief to their own use and, in fact, do not defend any belief more passionately than that the strong are free to be weak, and the birds of prey are free to be lambs: – in this way, they gain the right to make the birds of prey responsible for being birds of prey. (Nietzsche 2006a: §13)

Nietzsche is here presenting an argument which combines moral and ontological aspects. The natural state of affairs is that of the bird of prey, who exercises his strength, and sees itself as good. The lamb, however, sees the bird of prey as evil, and therefore sees itself as good. The symmetry between these two positions is misleading, however, and each rests on fundamentally different ways of seeing the world. For the bird of prey, its action is simply an expression of its strength, or, in more Nietzschean terms, we might say that the bird of prey itself is an | expression of strength: ‘It is just as absurd to ask strength not to express itself as strength . . . as it is to ask weakness to express itself as strength’ (Nietzsche 2006a: §13).
(SH 39-40)

[The next paragraph continues ideas made in our prior bracketed commentary regarding grammar and subjectivity.]

The lamb’s reaction is a moral reaction, and one that is made possible by an illusion fostered by grammar: it posits a subject who is responsible for exercising its strength. Nietzsche gives the further example of lightning. When we say that ‘lightning strikes’, we are forced by the structure of language to posit a distinction between a subject (‘lightning’) and an act (‘striking’). Now we might recognise in this case that in fact there is nothing other to the lightning than its striking itself – there is no hidden subject behind the act – but language opens up a way of thinking of the world in terms of agents and actions. Once the lamb understands the bird of prey as an agent acting, he can posit the (illusory) possibility of the agent withholding this action. Thus, the bird of prey, once it is seen as a subject, becomes culpable for what it does.
(SH 40)

SH will now use this distinction [I think, between a subject-structured understanding of events and a force-conflict understanding] to explain Deleuze’s other distinction between sedentary and nomadic distributions. A distribution is a way “of thinking about what something is essentially, or more generally, what kinds of things the world is composed of” (SH 40). [Perhaps it is considered a ‘distribution’ because it is concerned with how compositional parts are arranged.] Our attention in the following will be working for a while on sedentary distributions, regarding which Deleuze writes, “‘A distribution of this type proceeds by fixed and proportional determinations which may be assimilated to “properties” or limited territories within representation’ (DR 36/45)” (SH 40). We are here reminded of Aristotle’s system of division which differentiates things on the basis of clear defining limits that define what is special and proper to each thing. In the above bird/lamb illustration, the lamb would be working with sedentary distributions, since it regards itself and the birds as different actors with distinct traits that have very different moral values (40).

We also note that in this Aristotelian sedentary conception, limits serve to define what makes one thing what it is and what makes something else not that thing but rather something different entirely. This notion of delimiting then makes us conceptualize notions spatially, as if one could occupy one part of conceptual space and have a limit, outside of which it does not belong but in where other concepts do [think for example of Venn diagrams]. It also involves a concept of negation [since we understand each concept in terms of how it is not the others, and vice versa]. [This conception also would have us judge the degree to which an actual instance fits with its proper concept. Perhaps for example we might characterize something as more typical or exemplary of its class.] “Finally, it provides ‘a hierarchy which measures beings according to their limits, and according to their proximity or distance from a principle’ (DR 36/46); in other words, according to how closely a being conforms with its essence or is a degenerate instance of it” (SH 41). This means that the sedentary distribution regards the world on the basis of opposition and negation.

A sedentary distribution therefore is a way of ordering the world that is hierarchical, and proceeds by the delimitation of the world according to oppositional determinations. The notion of difference is grounded in negation and operates according to a spatial metaphor.
(41)

The Aristotelian system regarded difference as being a matter of ‘this and not that’. Yet we saw how for Scotus and Spinoza we may regard difference not as difference in kind but rather as intensive qualitative variation, that is, having more or less a degree. We are not in these cases working with “a spatial conception of organisation” (41). Thus “Deleuze introduces the univocal conception of being in order to explain those features of the world which escaped something like an Aristotelian conception of the world” (41). [I do not completely grasp the next quotation about Oedipus. Perhaps it is similar to the idea we examined before that for Scotus, there is just an intensive difference between God’s infinite being and our own finite being, but still we make a difference-in-kind distinction between the two. Or we might also think that the difference between ice and water is quantitatively (and intensively) a small change, but qualitatively it is a complete difference in kind.]

Deleuze introduces the univocal conception of being in order to explain those features of the world which escaped something like an Aristotelian conception of the world. The nomadic distribution is intimately connected to this univocal conception: ‘Oedipus’ chorus cries: “which demon has leapt further than the highest leap?” The leap here bears witness to the unsettling difficulties that nomadic distributions introduce into the sedentary structures of representation’ (DR 37/46).
(SH 41)

[The next part is a bit confusing for me. My impression is that it is a reference to Deleuze’s Spinozistic notions of ‘what a body can do’, limit, and perfection. In this talk here Deleuze discusses the difference between spatialized limit and the limit of power or action. There is more discussion of ‘what can a body do’ here, and also in this and this talk. And see again especially Deleuze’s commentary on Spinoza’s correspondence with Blyenbergh regarding the perfection of essence and modal expression. It seems in the quoted Deleuze passage that instead of limit being understood spatially, we are to understand it more as a limit of action or power, a limit of what one body can do. One main idea in the Blyenbergh correspondence is that everything is doing everything that it can do in any given moment. If it seems to be weak, that is because it finds itself in a certain relation of forces, including the competing forces within it and also including the competing forces between itself and other external competing forces, in which it is expressing the fullest power it is able to have in that moment. Deleuze gives the example of meditating in the dark, and someone turns on the light suddenly. The person loses power, since the light dazzles them and makes them lose meditative concentration. The person is still functioning at their optimum even when blinded, but just under these circumstances the optimum is relatively lower than before. If however the person were looking for their glasses in the dark, and someone gradually turns up the light so they can better see them, then their power is increased relatively given that situation. These fluctuations in power are not however fluctuations in perfection. All is equally perfect in a sense, since everything is operating at its maximum (and also, from the perspective of substance itself, nothing is being subtracted from it even though its modal parts are varying in power in relation to one another). It is perhaps for this reason that Deleuze says in the quote to follow that “the smallest becomes equivalent to the largest”, in that all are equally affirmative of the power they have in any given situation. The point SH seems to be making here is that we do not think of the world as being made up of things that choose whether or not to exercise their power but rather we have competing forces in a world of fluctuating changes. SH’s further points become slightly more difficult for me to grasp. The next point is that for Deleuze, negation results from affirmation. To get to this point, perhaps we first recognize that the substance-property based ontology which fixes subjects who perform actions and express properties is based on negation, since it depends on definitional limits. But if we follow Deleuze’s Nietzschean-Spinozism, we would say that more primarily there are competitions of forces, whose limits are not spatially substantial but are rather intensive degrees of moreness or lessness. This is purely affirmative, since everything expresses its power in complete fullness, given the affective circumstances of their situation. Then secondly, on account of feelings of powerlessness, we externalize blame to subjectivities we fabricate in this indeterminate field of forces. (I still cannot make my account consistent regarding how it is that  we can have entities which place blame on other entities they fabricate but supposedly there never were any entities to begin with). So first the world in its basis is affirmative (in that there is will to express power in fullness each moment) and composed of pure difference (in the form of differential relations between competing forces). Only secondly and on a less fundamental level do negations arise in the form of fabricated or conceptualized limits between supposed agents wrongly understood to be making moral choices of whether or not to artificially limit their own power.]

If a sedentary distribution is fundamentally tied to an understanding of the world in terms of subjects and properties, how are we to understand this notion of a nomadic distribution? The key point is Deleuze’s claim that everything goes to the limit of what it can do. He elaborates on this as follows [the following up to citation is quotation of Deleuze]:

Here limit [peras] no longer refers to what maintains a thing under a law, nor what delimits or separates it from other things. On the contrary, it refers to that on the basis of which it is deployed and deploys all of its power; hubris ceases to | be simply condemnable and the smallest becomes equivalent to the largest once it is not separated from what it can do. (DR 37/46)

When we separate the bird of prey from its action, or lightning from its striking, we institute the two moments of an ontology of judgement: the subject and the property. This moment of separation of something from what it can do is what gives us the Aristotelian idea of a world of fixed things. If something is not separated from what it can do, then instead of an ontology of being, we have an ontology of forces, or becoming. There are not static points from which movement originates, but rather just movement itself. We can tie together a number of results at this stage. Just as Scotus shows that analogy can only operate within a prior univocal framework, Nietzsche shows that the point of view of the lamb is derivative of that of the bird of prey. Deleuze similarly argues that ‘negation results from affirmation: this means that negation arises in the wake of affirmation or beside it, but only as the shadow of the more profound genetic element – of that power or “will” which engenders the affirmation and the difference in affirmation’ (DR 55/67). Difference is therefore primary in this scheme. This leads us to the last aspect of Deleuze’s discussion of univocity: how are we to conceive of a univocal conception of becoming?
(SH 41-42)

 

 

 

Citations from:

Somers-Hall, Henry. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2013.

Or if otherwise noted:

DR:
[Deleuze] Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994/London: Continuum, 2004.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (2006a), On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.