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Terence Blake
DIFFERENCE, EVENT, INTENSITY, AND IMMOBILE VOYAGE in a short text by Deleuze and Guattari
In this post Blake discusses some passages from chapter two of Deleuze & Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (See p.41 of the English and p.44 of the French). The part at the end about Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the fourth person singular is especially interesting:
I think it may be useful to pay attention to the particular words used. The passage begins:
Thinking provokes general indifference.
This “indifference” is a sort of de-differentiated doxa, that just after the passage cited, in the same paragraph, Deleuze and Guattari call “opinion”. “Difference” is a key word for Deleuze, and we know that each intensity envelops an internal difference. So indifference means also without intensity, without affect, what Badiou calls the a-tonal world of democratic materialism. “Thinking” renders what in the French text is called “penser”, i.e. the infinitive “to think” (Note: I am not criticising the translation, but merely pointing out other conceptual latencies contained in the original French). The infinitive is associated by Deleuze and Guattari with the event. Here they are talking about the event of thinking, as a rupture with the doxa and a departure on an immobile voyage. This is echoed later when they say “We head for the horizon”. In French the text reads “On court à l’horizon”. The subject is not “we” (nous), but “one” (on), what Deleuze and Guattari call the fourth person singular, and which they propose as the impersonal subject of the event. The verb is not “head for”, a fairly neutral moving in a particular direction, but “run”. So the notion of speed, of more than normal intensity of movement, is present in the French.
(Terence Blake, boldface is mine)
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