Williams (5.2) Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time, ‘Eternal return and death,’ summary

 

by Corry Shores

 

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[The following is summary of Williams, with boldface and bracketed commentary being my own additions. Note, I drafted this six years ago so it may seem discontinuous with current entries. For example, I do not in brackets here try to clear up what is said or note what I failed to understand.]

 

 

 

Summary of

 

James Williams

 

Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time:

A Critical Introduction and Guide

 

Chapter 5

Time and eternal return

 

5.2

Eternal return and death

 

 

 

Brief Summary:

The eternal return is not a recycling of identical things, because “then there would be no sense of return in them due to the lack of any way of telling there had been a return.” (119b) The eternal return also opens the third synthesis of time, which is thus somehow both circular while also having a before and after and an asymmetrical series. This is conceivable if we view it as the cycling of pure difference, which combines the features of return with non-identity. As conscious beings, we are to live time’s passage in such a way that we participate in the eternal return of difference, and if we fail in that, we die. Deleuze critiques the Freudian notion of the inorganic death drive, because the eternal return is not cycles of life and death. Rather, it is “the passing away of that which is inanimate in sameness and identity and the eternal return of multiple forms of difference.” (123bc) Humans in fact do not dread the inanimate state of death but instead that which makes all beings who are fixed in their identity pass away in time. We should distinguish this sort of death resulting from remaining self-same while time moves past us with the vital death involved in evolving, growth, and change where we affirm continuous differentiation and thereby participate in the eternal return of pure difference. Thus the third synthesis of time is tied both to death and eternal return.

 

 

 

 

 

Summary

 

 

The eternal return in its purest form also involves death, violence and “the most difficult tests put to living beings” (118c), and

 

Williams then gives an excellent formulation for why the eternal return is not of something similar or identical. “No two cycles of return could be internally identical, for then there would be no sense of return in them due to the lack of any way of telling there had been a return.” (119b) If we hold this view, we might suffer from two sorts of anguish, the anguish we feel as dear things pass-away, and the anguish about the return of things we do not want to see again. (119c.d) Anguish is what humans feel, but the eternal return is a process applying more broadly than just human experience. (120c) Deleuze writes that we must conceive eternal return as the selecting thought. (120d) But this does not mean it depends on our thinking to operate. (121a) It is the highest test to conceive eternal return as purely differential [perhaps because preexisting concepts will be inadequate?]. (121c)

 

Williams wonders, how can the third synthesis be both circular but also have a before and after and an asymmetrical series? “The answer is that the third synthesis is both an irreversible series and a cyclical return.” (122a) The third synthesis orders things that remain the same, but for pure difference it is the cycling of pure difference. As conscious beings, how are we to live time’s passage so that we participate in the eternal return of difference? (122b) Deleuze says that if we do not pass this test, we die, as would any being that did not pass the test. (122c)

 

Williams writes that there are different kinds of processes at work, those working towards an identity and those working in becoming and change, novelty, and transformation. (123a) So a process resisting change is doomed to fall out of existence.

 

Deleuze critiques Freud’s work on death and also he critiques “any definition of death as a return of the living beings to undifferentiated and inanimate matter.” (123b) For Deleuze, the eternal return is not cycles of life and death, but rather it is “the passing away of that which is inanimate in sameness and identity and the eternal return of multiple forms of difference.” (123bc) So death is not the inanimate state humans dread. It is rather what makes any and every being that remains fixed in its identity pass away in time. (123cd)

 

But death is not just about the passing of identities but also the survival of difference. Thus evolution and change are forms of death, because they involve the passing of certain beings but also “the moving towards new processes through difference in itself.” (124a) Thus there are two deaths, our personal one concerning the I and self, and the impersonal one that causes things to persist. (124b) “death as subject and death as difference affirming process”. (124b) Because the future is “the deployment and explication of the multiple” (Deleuze qtd 124bc) and because the eternal return promotes the death of all fixed things, we can see how the third synthesis is tied both to death and eternal return. (124bc)

 

 

 

 

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

 

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No Reign May Be: Infinite Unsaying in Clifford Duffy's 'around'

response to Clifford Duffy's poem, by Corry Shores
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All images are screen-shots of Duffy's work, from:
http://recalltopoetry.blogspot.com/2011/04/around.html
May I thank Clifford Duffy for sharing his creations.

No Reign May Be:
Infinite Unsaying in Clifford Duffy's 'around'

Without words, without things: so, what else would remain? Heidegger famously wrote, "where words break off, no thing may be." If we did not have the word-meaning for 'beside', would our world have things one-beside-another? If we cross-out all our word-meanings and grammatical functions (like predication, 'The tulip is a flower, is yellow,') can anything in our world remain? Not only would all the namable things be crossed-out, so too would the possibility of making designations; for, to designate something, we need to differentiate it from other things in its context or against which it would be counter-defined (we might need 'dark' to know 'light'). But without grammatical-functions like predication, negation, and prepositional relation (dark lingers before light), can we even begin to have a world of things?

How might we further this line of thinking? Regarding the sentence, "where words break off, no thing may be," let's draw our attention to no thing. We could think of it as nothing, or perhaps as a 'no-thing.' What would a no-thing be? It is not a thing, but it is not nothing, either. And from this sentence, we would assume that a no-thing appears when words 'break off'. It could be that the no-thing was there even while there were words, but we only notice it when the words break-off and leave the no-thing standing by itself.

Such observations might be of interest when we consider the mechanics of language. When driving and we see a stop signal, our feet hit the brake without a second thought. It is as if there is no need to translate the meaning of the sign: the same way that one gear need not think about another gear in order for them to turn one another, our bodies too are like gears that react automatically to the signs we see. But first recall when we initially learned how to drive. When we saw the red, we did not automatically stomp our feet without hesitation. There were so many possibilities available. Where exactly is the brake pedal? We have to hit it without looking for it? But is not the gas pedal right next to it? If we hit the gas accidentally, our situation could become unpredictably catastrophic. Our body does not yet have the word-thing 'red means stomp on brake'. Instead, we have something much more interesting. But after we learn the meaning of the sign, there is no longer anything there. We hit the brake without the red, the stomp, or the stopping entering our attention. These are all very concrete real things in our world, and they are so much a part of our world that we do not notice them. But before they existed, before we had the word-meanings for these parts of our world, they were so much more, they were infinitely more, they could have been anything! Red could very easily have meant catastrophe as much as total safety and orderliness. In this case, words broke-off, but there was not nothing, nor was there a concrete something. Rather, there was a no-thing, an infinite non-something, a something = x to the power of infinity, or we might say, a thing = x to the nth power.

Recalling again us first learning to drive, we had to learn a new language, of sorts, the language of traffic signs, both customary ones, like traffic-lights and official street signs and signals, and also contextual signs, like seeing a fluid on the road and knowing this signals to us to slow down so not slip-off the road. But when first acquiring this 'vocabulary', we learn that the language-meanings we already know do not always help. We need to learn the new language, yet we are lost at first because we try to apply the languages we already know. Perhaps we first considered those mechanical reactions we knew from the language of bike-riding, but back-peddling or gripping the steering wheel does not brake the automobile. So when first learning to brake the car, we exhaust all the 'words' we have in the 'languages' we know, running through all the things already in our world. That does not mean only nothing remains! There is an infinity at the edge of these limits!: catastrophe or safety from death, happening by so many unforeseeable ways. When we exhaust the words of our language and the things of our world, what remains is infinite no-thingness.

So let's not interpret this no-thing as an absence. It could hardly be so! How is something infinite also something absent? This means then that when Heidegger speaks of 'saying,' which is also an 'unsaying,' we need not think that language (in how we feel it immediately) has anything to do with something missing from it. When first learning how to brake a car, it is not that we face a nothing or an absolutely foreign otherness. Language becomes exhausted. All its possibilities have run-through and run-out. At last!: the birth of the full and immediate no-thing, the absolute thing = xⁿ. Please note the difference between thing = x and thing = xⁿ (or no-thing = xⁿ. Also consider the formulations sign = x and no-Sign = xⁿ.) An extensional meaning refers to the things in the set it refers to. Oedipus, recall, married his mother. So 'son of Jocasta' and 'husband of Jocasta' refer to the same thing, the same object in a set, which in this case is a set with one member, the thing we also call Oedipus. But what happens in our minds and bodies when we say to ourselves, 'The son of Jocasta is the husband of Jocasta'? This does not give us the same feeling as when we say 'Oedipus is Oedipus' or 'Oedipus is Jocasta's son', for example. This is because even though both 'son of Jocasta' and 'husband of Jocasta' extend into the same meaning-reference (Oedipus), they do not at all intend the same meaning. The words and propositions in our language have intensional meanings as well as extensional ones. It is hard to define what an intensional meaning really is, but we might think of it as the impulses and tendencies for a meaning to want to reach-out into different suggested or 'virtual' implications. It is implicit rather than explicit, and in a way, it is inexplicably implicit, because it is difficult to formalize (those with superb analytical philosophical skills can in fact formalize this, as for example the remarkable contributions Roger Vergauwen has made to formalized intensional logic and semantics). So 'thing = x' might suggest that there is an unknown thing, or an empty set; in the case of sign = x, we might at first think of it as an empty reference, or we may even regard it to indicate that at the core of all signification there is absence, in the sense that absence is always a prerequisite condition for representation (for otherwise, if the thing were present, it would be mere presentation and not representation). But this is to regard 'x' only in an extensional way. When however x is to the nth power, this means that while no extensional meaning is designated, there is an infinity of virtual intensional meaning. It is not just that the x is an empty place-marker meaning that it could be filled by anything, but rather that it virtually is tending with infinite power to mean a great variety of things, like how the no-thing/no-sign of learning to brake a car virtually implies so many meanings, ranging from utter disaster to complete safety to so much else that it may prove itself to mean.

So let's consider a Deleuzean reading of Heidegger's philosophies of language, rather than one that follows a more post-structuralist leaning (I tried that here). Perhaps we see such an approach suggested in Deleuze's essay, 'An Unrecognized Precursor to Heidegger: Alfred Jarry' (may I thank Miguel Paley for bringing this text to my attention and for offering his research on it). A closer analysis is forthcoming. For now, let's look at the final line:

The thing is the limit of language, as the sign is the language of the thing. When a language is hollowed out by its turning within language, it finally completes its mission: the Sign shows the Thing, and effectuates the nth power of language, for
"where word breaks off no thing may be." (98d)

Let's return to this for a deeper explanation another time, after we conduct a closer reading of the article. For now, I suggest we turn again to Clifford Duffy's works in our effort to understand language in a Deleuzean way, in this case, what might be a poetic unsaying to the nth power.

Duffy's poem, 'around', says to us things about rain. But consider when we watch rain falling on a puddle. It has a chaotic pattern of falling. In one way, it is completely redundant, because it's just drop drop drop, every time. But also, its chaos makes it continually unique, which can entrance us, much like how this happens when we watch the dance of fire tongues, always repeating, while always unique and singular. Rain, in a way, is continually exhausted, having done the same thing in seemingly every possible arrangement and combination, and yet also somehow always uniquely this particular fall of drops. Rain, like fire, can give us this experience of the no-thing = xⁿ. Having seen so much rain in our lives, we have exhausted all possible words to give what we witness. And yet, that does not mean we stop noticing the raindrop patterns. They keep giving to us something infinite, lying at the limits of language.

The falling of rain is cyclonic cycling, one that is as wild as a cyclone but cyclical in its self-exhaustive repetition, like the variational rhythm of these lines above, and the rhythm of space-text temporalizations, the breaks which make our eyes fall from line-to-line, word-to-word, in a rain-like way. This is rhythm in an intensive sense, as a something creating the feeling of motion by acceleration-changes. We do not feel motion when our train or car maintains the same speed. It is only when the speed changes that we feel ourselves move forward or backward. There is no such thing as a steady rhythm, at least it would not be a rhythm with any intensity.

The no-thing is not these gaps, nor would it be a sense that something is being left-out of these poetic lines. Where the words break-off is not the empty spaces. Those are words too, don't forget! Rather, the words here are in a continual state of self-breaking, of being cracked and self-differentiated. 'rain to rain' and 'rain on rain'. It is rain raining upon itself, as different unto itself. The word/thing 'rain' is self-broken from the beginning of its utterance/appearance. Rain unsays itself with each drop. That's how it keeps being rain. Something that repeats without changing has not actually reappeared. Something can only reappear if its next appearance is self-differentiated, so that it may stand-out from itself. This is not as simple as rain at time1 being different from rain at time2. Rather, rain1 and rain2 are found in time = 0; which is to say, rain varies from itself from the beginning and before any time has passed, and it is only on account of the tension, the intensity, of an imcompossible combination of differences between a self and itself that we get the power to create the motion of time. If there were no paradoxes right now, no contradictions, no things being themselves and not themselves, then everything will have stopped! There would be no power, no tension, no force for change. 'Becoming' is not a process of something moving from being itself to not being itself; no; rather; 'Becoming' involves something already from the start not being itself, and on account of that, it has the cause, reason, ground, motivation, and power to change itself.

Duffy's 'rains' here, are becomings: each is a self-difference upon itself; it is 'rain to rain' and 'rain on rain', where each rain is itself self-differential. And it is at least partly because each moment differentiates from itself that there is intensive rhythm and the unsaying of no-things to powers n-infinite (or put more simply, true becomings).

Following that first part is something like a pause in the rain or a calm before a storm, if you will. During such moments, we do not at all feel a lack, a lack of rain and storm. In fact, these are the moments we feel the weather most acutely, when it announces itself in its infinite no-thingness, in those moments we would exhaust all words to describe it, and instead just have a direct immediate affectual connection with the weather itself.

Now consider the raining of words to come.

Our eyes rain rhythmically down the text, again in self-differential repetitions. The poem goes through words we have that might exhaust the meaning of rain. It is a god, a faucet, a reigning, a goddess, a goddess raining by reigning /and/ reigning by raining, over the earth.

Loves have secret loves. Why is it each dropping is a repetition but self-differential? Like when watching fire, we love not just what we see, but the motions that continue arriving. We did not expect them, so the next moments we did not previously know that we loved. They are secret loves of our loves, and by giving to us each time these ever newer and newer secret loves, the rain repeats in a delightfully differential way.




Clifford Duffy. 'around.'
http://recalltopoetry.blogspot.com/2011/04/around.html

Gilles Deleuze. 'An Unrecognized Precursor to Heidegger: Alfred Jarry.' in Essays Critical and Clinical. Transls. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Narrative and Power in Scott Wollschleger’s Story Store

by Corry Shores

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[This entry is a comment to Scott Wollschleger's entry Scott Wollschleger's Sunday Afternoon Delirium and Further Thoughts About...]

What are the value of stories if they tell themselves and tell endless more? What gives a story power? Where do stories store their power?

Consider Aesop’s Fox and Grapes story:

A thirsty fox sees grapes dangling from high. He jumps and jumps. Finally, he stops. “They were sour.” He concludes.

A Deleuzean literary criticism would look for narrative intensities. I assess that the sharpest contraction of difference is to be found at the precise moment he stops jumping.

When differences are contracted into each other, this is an instant of intensity, and also an instant of becoming. At the moment a match is struck, it is both wood and fire. It is both wood and not wood, and it is both fire and not fire. It is both and neither, all at the same time, because there is an infinitely small duration when the transition is at its peak – when there is pure becoming.

Difference as repetition occurs when there is a change of dimension, domain, level, degree, and so forth. If desire becomes meaning, this would be repetition for Deleuze.

In the case of the fox, he began with a simple bodily desire for nourishment. While jumping, he did not give the grapes any meaning. Normally we do not give food meaning. However, when Catholic priests convert the bread to Christ’s body, there is not just a transition from one substance to another (a transubstantiation); it is not just bread to flesh. It is also matter to meaning. The bread is still bread. And it is flesh. And it is profoundly symbolic or meaningful. It became a symbol.

So the grapes began as being an object in an immediate relation to his bodily drives.

The next factor in a Deleuzean literary critique would be an analysis of the affirmation of chance in the moment of intensity.

An intensity is a tendency. At every moment, things are tending some way or another. But the way things are tending is not always where they go, because there is chance.

To affirm chance would mean to actualize a tendency at any one point, and to send the forces in that direction. At one point, the fox affirms the fact that by chance at that precise moment he did not obtain the grapes. He does not deny himself the grapes. He affirms the forces at work at that precise instant.

But by actualizing these forces, they explicate into a higher dimension. So at this moment, there were forces of desire directing him toward the grapes. But arbitrarily at one instant he affirmed the fall of the dice, that he did not at that moment attain the grapes. This causes the intensities to explicate, and hence it causes the grapes (and the fox's desire) to express themselves on a higher level. The grapes are no longer just objects in an immediate relation to his body. They become something more. The grapes are now expressed both as something that can be eaten, and as something meaningful. For now the grapes have been interpreted. Before there was not meaning ascribed to them. After the affirmation of chance, they become meaningful. They symbolize sourness. Or it could be said they obtained a property they did not previously explicitly express; for they now are sour. And the fox's physical desire now expresses itself as hermeneutic cognition.

So traditionally this story has been interpreted to mean that the fox rationalizes his failure by devaluing the grapes.

A Deleuzean read would come to a contrary conclusion. The fox creates value for the grapes, a symbolic value. The grapes in the moment of his affirmation of chance are becoming-symbolic. Or we could say that the fox’s desire is becoming-symbolic. It expands to a higher exponential power or dimension.

What I want to note is that in Scott’s story, the moments of intensity involve limitations that are overcome by narrational affirmations. For example, when the store clerk does not know the price of the oysters, there is sharp intensity in the narrative where anything could happen. The clerk affirms that by chance he does not know at that moment what the price of the oysters is. So that tendency toward determining the price expanded into a higher power, into the power of narration. He tells the story (he gives the account) that any oyster could have a pearl, which makes their value uncertain. The reason that the clerk does not know the value of the oysters is no longer because he failed to learn it. Rather, it is because there is a story about how the price was never determinable to begin with. Here ignorance became rational argumentation and knowledge of fact.

Now we have another moment of intensity, because the woman’s response could be anything. She could have called the clerk’s bluff. But instead at one moment she affirms that by chance the clerk’s story created a domain of narration, which she entered by telling her own story. She says that science has found a way to make any oyster produce pearls. No longer a rare commodity, the value of pearls becomes negligible, and so it does not matter whether or not the oysters have pearls or not. For, pearls would not increase their value anyway. Originally the woman was placed at the mercy of the clerk’s story. But she affirmed that by chance narration held power at that moment, and spun her own even more powerful story. Her position of narrative vulnerability became a positive position of narrative power, because she crossed a limit into another domain.

Now we enter immediately into another narrative intensity, because the clerk could do many things here as well, including telling a more powerful story. But he affirms that by chance the power of the woman’s story is overwhelming, and he affirms that by chance he is ignorant at that moment of the price. His ignorance becomes expressed at a higher power of factual knowledge when he finds the actual price of the oysters.

Again we encounter a narrative intensity, because the clerk could do many things at this point. But he affirms that by chance he is not a good grocer, and instead affirms his tendency towards being an artist. The grocer here becomes an artist.

He loses his job and his home, and faces another moment of intensity. He could do anything about his poverty and homelessness. What does he do? He creates a short story called, "It Is Because I have No Home That I Have the Greatest Power in This World" and he kills himself.

Then what happens? The story of his life is told by the taxi driver to Scott Wollschleger. The grocer became an artist and then became a story. Let’s examine this final part.

At the beginning, the grocer obtained power by telling the women a clever story about the price of oysters. In a sense, even as a grocer he is implicitly an artist. He is a story-crafter. When he loses his job, he crafts a story that somehow explains that his homelessness is a source of his power. We might also say that the loss of his job caused him to write a story that gave him power, all by means of the power of narration to create fictional realities in which one is secure and in power. But having power does not bring happiness. He has all the power in the world, but still loses hope. He then affirms that by chance he has chosen the wrong thing, narrative power, and sees no other solution, and kills himself. While it might seem that his suicide was a negation, it was instead a creative affirmation of becoming. Here the man affirms his proficiency as an artist, and dies in a legendary way, with the remarkable and curious story in his pocket. He himself thereby becomes a story, which is told by the taxi driver, then told by Scott Wollschleger, then told again by me.

Wollschleger ends by wondering about the relationship between internal limits and power. I offer the above literary analysis as material for a possible answer.

The man was a grocer, but implicitly in him was an artist. He needed to overcome internal limitations to become an artist. But this overcoming did not destroy his self as a grocer, because as a grocery clerk he had tendencies toward narrative creation. He merely expressed them more explicitly when becoming a creative short-story writer. But even as a writer, he was implicitly something even more powerful. He himself also was a story to be retold over and over long after his death, which in a way immortalizes him. By killing himself in a legendary way, he overcame these internal limits and expressed himself at a much higher exponential level. The narrator became narration.

There are many stories within stories stored in Scott’s story, and maybe many more are in store. Wollchleger’s story may continue to express itself at higher exponential powers, if by chance its implicit tendencies are affirmed.

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