Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy

Introduction

1. Noology

1. Concepts

“Philosophy is the art of posing the right problemsand developing the conceptsby means of which such problems can be solved.” (Beistegui, p. 5)

“[the creation of concepts is] an effort to extract from the sensible the singular points at which the constitution of a phenomenon, whatever its nature, is being decided. In that respect, whilst created, concepts are the concepts of the sensible itself” (Beistegui, p. 6)

“transcendentalempiricism” (Beistegui, p. 6)

“Philosophy is concerned with experiencing, and experimenting with, the transcendental itself, thus indicating the sort of work involved in the creation of concepts.” (Beistegui, p. 6)

“‘conceptual characters’ (personnages conceptuels)” (Beistegui, p. 7)

“Far from requiring friendship and benevolence, then, genuine thought presupposes something like a bad will (a mauvaise volonté, which is not to be mistaken for a volonté méchante) and a certain discord.” (Beistegui, p. 8)

“a proper name, or a signature” (Beistegui, p. 8)

“The philosopher, Deleuze and Guattari claim, distrusts the concepts inherited from other philosophers, and tries to create his or her own.” (Beistegui, p. 8)

“the creative pole of the question regarding the being of philosophy, or the meaning of thought […] comprises three elements: concepts, conceptual characters, and the proper name” (Beistegui, p. 8)

2. The Image, the Plane

“If philosophy indeed beginswith the creation of concepts, the image of thought is where that thought really originates. The image is what institutes that thought as the thought that it is, with its concepts and notions. It designates the horizon from which it thinks, and so something like its unthought.” (Beistegui, p. 10)

“the planis both behind and ahead, both a background and a plan” (Beistegui, p. 12)

“Consistency is not mere coherence: whereas the latter, I would argue, has to do with the relation between concepts, the former is concerned with the place or space from which a given thought unfolds.” (Beistegui, p. 12)

“the plane of immanence is ‘the image of thought’” (Beistegui, p. 12)

“Deleuze’s own concepts, then, can be seen as an attempt to draw a plane, but one that would have no other goal than to bring out its own image, to bring to the surface the image that simmers beneath all concepts, and that makes such concepts possible in the first place.” (Beistegui, p. 12)

“Deleuze’s own image of thought is characterised by a twofold trait.” (Beistegui, p. 13)

“First, as I’ve already suggested, Deleuze believes that thought is external to what it thinks: its ideas, its concepts are not generated from within, but from without, as a result of an encounterthat comes from the sensible.” (Beistegui, p. 13)

“This is the extent to which Deleuze is an empiricist” (Beistegui, p. 13)

“At the same time, he claims that thought is entirely immanentto what it thinks, immanent, that is, to the real that provokes it.” (Beistegui, p. 13)

“Deleuze retains or reformulates a version of transcendentalism” (Beistegui, p. 14)

“transcendental field” (Beistegui, p. 14)

“The transcendental in Deleuze’s sense amounts to a double twisting free, therefore: first, of transcendence, whether as God, being, or consciousness; second, of the problematic regarding the conditions of possibilityof experience and knowledge in general, irreducibly complicit with the logic of resemblance. Instead, Deleuze privileges the standpoint of immanence and the problematic of genesis: transcendental empiricism is concerned with isolating the genetic and immanent conditions of existence of the real.” (Beistegui, p. 15)

“The singularity and difficulty of Deleuzian thought lies in the double axiom constitutive of its image: exteriority andimmanence, or ‘exogenesis’ and ‘endoconsistency’.” (Beistegui, p. 16)

“What the recognition of the difference between image and thought, between plane and concept, requires is the relentless and always renewed creation of concepts that testify to the horizon of immanence of thought.” (Beistegui, p. 17)

“three different types or levels of presuppositions have emerged” (Beistegui, p. 17)

“First, we can question a given thought with respect to its beginning, that is, its desire to do away with what Deleuze calls all objectivepresuppositions” (Beistegui, p. 17)

“Then, we can identify the remaining subjectivepresuppositions of the thought in question. […] I referred to such an image, or plane, as the originof thought.” (Beistegui, p. 17)

“Finally, a third level of presupposition has emerged, the level that would designate philosophy as such and as a whole, and which Deleuze would have set out to extract, thus making philosophy absolutelypresuppositionless. This is the plane of immanence proper.” (Beistegui, p. 17)

3. The Greeks, the Moderns

“the historical (and geographical) point of departure of philosophy in Ancient Greece, which we could call its birth, thus adding another sense of beginning to our list” (Beistegui, p. 18)

“[Immanence] signals at once the plane of matter (or physical nature), the social and political organisation that makes its questioning possible (democracy), and the questioning itself (philosophy).” (Beistegui, p. 19)

“the history of philosophy is ‘the hypertext where the affirmation of immanence and the illusion of transcendence ceaselessly oppose one another’” (Beistegui, p. 20)

2. Ontology I: Genesis

1. Transcendence and Illusion

“[the task of philosophy] is the quest of a lifetime, a quest in which life itself is at issue, and in which life, in so far as it mine, dissolves and expands at the same time, in order to become alife, that is, the anonymous and impersonal life of immanence itself” (Beistegui, p. 24)

“Following Kant’s vocabulary, Deleuze characterises the constant resurgence of transcendence as the transcendental or objective ‘illusions’ of thought itself” (Beistegui, p. 24)

“Hegel’s audacity [audace] is the final and most powerful homage rendered to the old principle [of identity and transcendence].” (Beistegui, p. 25)

“the negative is always derived and represented, never original or present: the process of difference and differenciation [which is the process of the real as involving processes of individuation from virtual differentiation] is primary in relation to that of the negative and opposition” (Beistegui, p. 26)

“The critique of the negative is radical and well grounded only when it carries out a genesis of affirmation and, simultaneously, the genesis of the appearance [in the sense of semblance: apparence] of negation.” (Beistegui, p. 26)

“transcendental physical illusion” (Beistegui, p. 27)

2. Spinoza: Immanence and Univocity

“With [Spinoza], in a way, there is no longer a difference between the plane of immanence and the concepts of thought, between the horizon of thought and thought itself: thought has become truly infinite.” (Beistegui, p. 28)

“the levelling (or the ironing out) and the flattening – the aplanissementand aplatissement – of a vertical and hierarchical structure, of a sequence of concepts: there is no hierarchy, no sequence between the attributes, or between thought and extension, but a single fixed plane on which everything takes place. This is what Deleuze calls the plane of immanence.” (Beistegui, p. 29)

“the problematic concerned with identifying the realand immanent conditions of experience, and this means, for Deleuze, the geneticconditions of reality itself – a goal that requires the invention of philosophy as transcendental empiricism, and the defence of ontology as univocal” (Beistegui, p. 29)

“the concept of expressionis precisely the one that enables Spinoza to achieve the standpoint of absolute immanence in philosophy” (Beistegui, p. 30)

A. Emanation

B. Expression

“creatures differ from God in both essence and existence, and yet, at the same time, formally, God possesses something in common with the creatures, namely, the attributes. The modes implicateor envelopthe attributes, whereas God is explicatedin them. Attributes are univocal forms of being, forms that do not change in nature when changing ‘subjects’.” (Beistegui, p. 34)

“It is with the Spinozist conception of immanence that univocity finds its genuinely philosophical formulation: God is said to be the cause of all things in the very sense(eo senso) that he is said to be his own cause.” (Beistegui, p. 35)

“As essence, substance is natura naturans, that is, nature in its infinite power of expression. As existence, however, it is natura naturata, that is, nature realised or actualised – expressed – in this or that manner, as this or that mode. At the same time, ‘the existence of God and his essence are one and the same’.” (Beistegui, p. 36)

“expression comprises two movements: one from substance to attribute, the other from attribute to mode. The first is qualitative expression, through which substance renders itself determinate in certain (infinite) forms. The second is quantitative expression, through which these forms express themselves in turn through the production of particular modes. Expression comprises both determination and differentiation.” (Beistegui, p. 37)

“Meaning itself coincides with this developmentof the sign as the sign coincided with the involutionor the envelopmentof meaning. As for Essence, it is the third term that dominates the two, their ‘sufficient reason’: essence complicates the sign and its meaning; it complicatesthem by putting one in the other.” (Beistegui, p. 39)

3. Expression and Differentiation

“what Difference and Repetitionidentifies as its own method of ‘dramatisation’, and the twofold principle of ‘différent/ciation’ it locates at the heart of being, is a direct equivalent of what the book on Spinoza refers to as ‘expression’” (Beistegui, p. 40)

“What Difference and Repetition recognises as a crucial move in the thesis regarding the univocity of being is a threefold possibility” (Beistegui, p. 40)

“the possibility, first of all, of a unified ontology through the recognition of an essential ontological sameness between not just God and the human, but all things.” (Beistegui, p. 40)

“Paradoxically, then, univocity opens directly onto an ontology of difference. This is the second possibility, and one that is not explicitly developed in Spinoza” (Beistegui, p. 41)

“Being, or Nature, is seen as involving a twofold movement of different/ciation equally real, yet not equally actual. Only the latter type of differenciation coincides with a process of actualisation. The former, on the other hand, coincides with the distribution of virtualsingularities across an intensive field, the differential potential of which forces a given system (anysystem) to resolve or actualise itself through the creation of divergent and bifurcating lines.” (Beistegui, p. 41)

“Finally, with univocity and expressionism, differences are no longer simply in quid, attributable to being as to the identity of a concept, but actually determining and, above all, individuating.” (Beistegui, p. 42)

3. Ontology II: Cartography

“two different, equally legitimate and compatible projects” (Beistegui, p. 48)

“The first project, which Deleuze develops at length in Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense, and in his readings of Spinoza, Kant and Bergson, can be described as ontogenetic.” (Beistegui, p. 48)

“the method of transcendental empiricismalso involves the possibility of experiencing the virtual world of intensive singularities. To such a possibility corresponds the concept of becoming, which we will see at work in Logic of Senseand, more significantly, Anti-Oedipus.” (Beistegui, p. 48)

“Memories of a Plan(e) Maker [planificateur]” (Beistegui, p. 48)

“‘Perhaps there are two planes, two different ways of conceiving the plane.’” (Beistegui, p. 49)

“those two planes, or those two ways of envisaging the plane of immanence, or nature, will turn out to be not just compatible, but complementary. They will designate two sides of the same coin (Nature), two ways or flows which, depending on the phenomenon in question, will be characterised as genesis and becoming, evolution and involution, stratification and destratification, etc.” (Beistegui, p. 49)

1. Plane of Organisation and Development

“In the first instance, the plane can be understood as something like a principle, a hiddenprinciple that allows us to see what we see (donne à voir ce qu’on voit), to hear what we hear, etc. It is a principle that accounts for the given as such, for the fact that it is given, in this or that state, at this or that moment. In this characterisation, we recognise the classical principle of sufficient reason, or ground.” (Beistegui, p. 49)

“What is most significant about this plane is that it is itself never given as such, but only in and through what it gives: it can only be inferred or induced from what it gives, whether simultaneously or successively, synchronically or diachronically. In so far as it is both at once, it can be characterised as a transcendental horizon as well asan empirical field, as a plane of organisation as well asof development.” (Beistegui, p. 50)

“Ideas are virtual multiplicities. A multiplicity is a set of singularities engaged in relations of determination through differentiation. What characterises the elements of a multiplicity is the fact that they are a) inseparable from an ontological potential, in such a way that ‘being’ is understood as a horizon of virtual tendencies, and not as an actualised and locally individuated being; b) determined by reciprocal relations; and c) actualised or incarnated in a variety of termsand forms. As such, the Idea (or the multiplicity) is both structure and genesis, both the principle of organisation of the real and its principle of development, or explication” (Beistegui, p. 50)

“The Idea, or the Problem, is […] an event.” (Beistegui, p. 51)

“trans-descendence” (Beistegui, p. 52)

“Because the plane of organisation is hidden, or never given as such, ‘it exists only in a dimension that is supplementary to that to which it gives rise (n+ 1)’.” (Beistegui, p. 52)

“Whereas the model that enabled Deleuze to think the realm of the problematic, or of the virtual, was mathematical, and was captured under the notion of differentiation, the model that serves to formalise the movement of actualisation from the virtual to the actual is biological, and very much thought through Bergson, although only up to a point. It is that of differenciation, that of the manifestation of the new, of species and organisms, from a series of divergent moves or bifurcations.” (Beistegui, p. 53)

“What is most peculiar to the process of differenciation is that, whilst actualising virtual tendencies, it also tends to equalise, reduce or negate in actuality those very differences constitutive of the process itself. Such is the reason why, in experience, we know only forms of energy that are already localised and distributed in extension (extensum, étendue), differences that are reduced or identified, and so intensities (intensio, intensité) inseparable from their own extensity (extensio, extensité) and developed within extension” (Beistegui, p. 54)

“God, or nature, expresses itself by stratifyingitself” (Beistegui, p. 55)

“Geology of Morals” (Beistegui, p. 56)

“the organism is not at allthe body, or the BwO, but only a stratumon the BwO: it consists of ‘a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences’. But the BwO itself is that ‘glacial reality’, that plane of immanence, ‘where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism occur’.” (Beistegui, p. 58)

2. The Plane of Consistency, Immanence, or Nature

“an altogether different plane, namely, the plane of consistency, or immanence” (Beistegui, p. 59)

“a different way of drawing out the plane of immanence: […] qua disorganisation, becoming and destratification” (Beistegui, p. 59)

“We need to distinguish, then, between being as genesis, or as the development of forms and subjects, and being as pure becoming (or pure virtuality), in which forms and subjects dissolve, not into pure nothingness, but into a type of individuationthat bypasses what Difference and Repetitioncalled actualisation, or differenciation.” (Beistegui, p. 60)

“The difference between the two is a matter of direction, or inclination: whereas the first traces actual phenomena back to the world of pre-individual and impersonal singularities, from which they originated, and so accounts for their genesis, the second points to the possibility of the reversed process, and the manner in which singularities themselves constantly come about, exceeding, traversing and opening forms and subjects onto their own becoming.” (Beistegui, p. 60)

“‘smooth’ space” (Beistegui, p. 62)

“body without organs” (Beistegui, p. 62)

“effondement” (Beistegui, p. 63)

“[the proliferation of material] is an involution, in which form is constantly being dissolved, and in so doing frees speeds and affects, longitudes and latitudes” (Beistegui, p. 63)

“we do not know what a body is capable of, what a body can do. As an individuated, organised body, we know exactly what it can do. But as a plane of consistency, as a virtual, anorganic body, the possibilities are infinite” (Beistegui, p. 64)

“the plane of consistency of Nature is compared with ‘an immense abstract, yet real and individual Machine’” (Beistegui, p. 65)

“its parts must be understood […] as assemblages, that is, as the various individuals that ‘group together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations’” (Beistegui, p. 65)

“machinism” (Beistegui, p. 65)

3. The Connection between Planes

“There never is just one plane. The two planes co-exist, and are always engaged in undoing one another.” (Beistegui, p. 67)

“whilst absolutely distinguishable in principle (de jure), smooth space and striated space are in fact always intertwined” (Beistegui, p. 67)

“Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, whereas striated space is filled with formed and perceived things. Smooth space is a space of affects, whereas striated space is a space of measures and properties. Smooth space is intensive (Spatium) rather than extensive (Extensio): a body without organs as opposed to an organism and a plane of organisation.” (Beistegui, p. 67)

“The question[…] is one of knowing how a breakthrough can avoid turning into a breakdown, how the body without organs can avoid total closure, and catatonia.” (Beistegui, p. 69)

“[thought] needs to create the conceptsthat map the manner in which, at any given point, chaos is being ordered and order is being carried away into chaos” (Beistegui, p. 70)

“Thought must learn to move freely and effortlessly between the sphere of pure Chaos, in which all things originate, but which also harbours the danger of madness, and the sphere of fully individuated substances, facts and states of affairs, which harbours the danger of ossification and lifelessness.” (Beistegui, p. 71)

4. Logic

“expression as what designates the operation of sense” (Beistegui, p. 77)

“To think sense without transcendence presupposes that we cease to think of it as buried or veiled, and think it instead as the object of an encounter, that is, as something essentially produced.” (Beistegui, p. 77)

1. The Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle

“[the condition of truth] ought to be something unconditionedcapable of assuring a real genesis (and not a merely possible conditioning) of the other dimensions of the proposition, namely, denotation, manifestation and signification. The condition of truth would then be defined as genuine sense, and no longer as mere conceptual form of possibility.” (Beistegui, p. 81)

2. Husserl’s Transcendental Logic

“No longer mylife, but alife.” (Beistegui, p. 87)

3. Sense and Expression

“a structure must conform to the following minimal conditions. First of all, one needs at least two heterogeneous series, one determined as ‘signifying’ and the other as ‘signified’. […] In addition, each series has to be constituted by terms that exist only through their reciprocal relations. To these relations, or rather, to the values of these relations, correspond specific ‘events’, that is, ‘singularities’ that can be assigned in the structure.” (Beistegui, p. 87)

“As structuring power, sense is this ‘symbolic’ element that accounts for the genesis of signification, manifestation and denotation, of the subject as well as the object. It is the genuine transcendental subject, but a subject that cannot be thought so long as it is envisaged in its actuality.” (Beistegui, p. 87)

“Structure is a system of differences that always has a certain reality, an actuality, but one in which what actualises or embodies itself, here and now, are this or that relation, this or that differential, and not the structure or the system as a whole, which can be defined as the totality of its idealdifferences. It is a kind of ideal reservoir or repertory, where everything coexists in its virtualstate.” (Beistegui, p. 87)

“sense or meaning always results from the combination of elements that are themselves not meaningful” (Beistegui, p. 88)

“a meaninglessness or significationlessness of sense, a nonsense of sense” (Beistegui, p. 88)

“an excess of sense in relation to signification” (Beistegui, p. 89)

“an ‘object = x’: a symbolic or ‘zero’ value that circulates within the structure and enables it to function as such, and which, in a way, is also produced by it, but only as an optical or positional effect” (Beistegui, p. 89)

“[sense] is the differentiator of difference itself, or its ‘paradoxical instance’: sense manages to bring together the two series it runs through by constantly keeping them apart. As a word = x, it runs through a determinate series, that of the signifier. But as an object = x, it designates another series, that of the signified. Neither signifier nor signified strictly speaking, it is simultaneously more and less than both.” (Beistegui, p. 90)

“It is this structuralist approach that breaks down in the face of the language of schizophrenia. For the schizophrenic, there is no longer a surface. The surface has split open. Things and propositions no longer have a fixed frontier between them, precisely because bodies have no surface.” (Beistegui, p. 98)

“Body-sieve, fragmented body, and dissociated body – these are the three primary dimensions of the schizophrenic body.” (Beistegui, p. 98)

“In [schizophrenia], a language-affect is substituted for the effect of language.” (Beistegui, p. 99)

“language without articulation” (Beistegui, p. 99)

“body without organs” (Beistegui, p. 99)

“The surface seriesof the ‘to eat/ to speak’ type have really nothing in common with the poles of depth of schizophrenia. The two figures of nonsenseat the surface, which distribute sense between the series, have nothing to do with the two dives into nonsensewhich drag along, engulf and reabsorb sense (Untersinn). We must avoid confusing the nonsense of Unsinnand the non-sense of Untersinn, nonsense and infra-sense.” (Beistegui, p. 100)

5. Ethics

1. Ontology and Ethics

“By mode, then, we need to understand a certain essence (understood as a degree of power and a singular expression of substance), which has the capacity of being affected by other modes, and is thus characterised by specific affects, which define its existence.” (Beistegui, p. 106)

“For any given mode, then, the question is one of knowing what its powers are, what it can do, or of what it is capable.” (Beistegui, p. 107)

“what [Deleuze] calls transcendental empiricism is not just a theoretical or ontogenetic enterprise, but one that is also immediately practical or experimental” (Beistegui, p. 113)

“[desire] is the practical or ethical testing ground of the ontology of immanence, expression and production” (Beistegui, p. 114)

“schizoanalysis” (Beistegui, p. 115)

2. The Three Syntheses of the Unconscious

“two decisive features of the syntheses of the unconscious” (Beistegui, p. 122)

“First, they are all syntheses of production.” (Beistegui, p. 122)

“Second, we need to note that Deleuze and Guattari equate this productive machine with schizophrenia, not as a clinical entity and reality, but as a process.” (Beistegui, p. 123)

“The first synthesisis that of production per se, or that of connection. Its law or rule stipulates that all desiring-machines are binary, that is, coupled with another. In other words, the productive synthesis is essentially connective. The grammatical law of desiring-machines is first and foremost that of the ‘and . . .’, ‘and then . . .’.” (Beistegui, p. 123)

“Beyond or, better said perhaps, beneaththe productive-connective desire, and its libidinal energy, which produces organs and partial objects, there is another type of desire, a purely fluid and free desire, flowing without interruption.” (Beistegui, p. 123)

“the body without organs” (Beistegui, p. 123)

“the death drive” (Beistegui, p. 123)

“a dynamic, force or drive that is itself wholly unproductive, if not counter-productive” (Beistegui, p. 124)

“the economy of desire as a whole can be reduced to the various ways in which desiring-machines, their drive towards connection, and their libidinal energy, relate to the body without organs, and its aversion for organicity” (Beistegui, p. 124)

“The two operations or modes of production co-exist, precisely in so far as the body without organs is the necessary surface, or the quasi-cause, on which the process of production of desire as a whole is recorded” (Beistegui, p. 125)

“production is not recordedin the same way that it is produced. In other words, to the law of connection that defines the first synthesis we need to add a second law and a second synthesis, which is one of distribution. Connective syntheses were all of the type: ‘and then . . .’. Disjunctive syntheses, by contrast, are of the type: ‘soit. . . soit’.” (Beistegui, p. 125)

“From the point of view of the body without organs (BwO), or the surface on which everything glides, the syntheses between organs or parts – the productive connectionsbetweens machines – amount to the same thing. They are entirely compatible, or compossible. They amount to a sliding ‘grid’ (quadrillage) placated on the surface of the BwO.” (Beistegui, p. 126)

“a shift, or even a transformation, in energy: where the libidocharacterises the connective ‘work’ of the desiring production, the Numendesignates the disjunctive energy of inscription and distribution” (Beistegui, p. 126)

“the schizophrenic or ‘miraculating’ machine amounts to a different relation between the desiring-machine and the body without organs, a different mode of production, in which the body without organs is a force of attractionfor the desiring-machine, rather than the latter being an object of repulsionfor the body without organs” (Beistegui, p. 126)

“the three machines co-exist. The body without organs records the entireprocess of production of desire, in no specific (whether chronological or logical-dialectical) order.” (Beistegui, p. 127)

“The final synthesisis that of ‘consumption’, ‘voluptuousness’, or ‘enjoyment’.” (Beistegui, p. 127)

“Deleuze and Guattari suggest that this moment of reconciliation, or this final synthesis, be referred to as ‘celibate machine’. This ‘new alliance’ between the desiring-machines and the body without organs signals the birth of ‘a new humanity’ and a ‘glorious organism’.” (Beistegui, p. 127)

“It reveals human life as a life of intensive quantities.” (Beistegui, p. 128)

“As the final synthesis, in which the very opposition between the first two is maintained, the synthesis of consumption produces a ‘subject’ – the subject of desire in the strong and real sense. In a moment of sudden and retrospective illumination, the subject grasps itself as the residuum of the desiring-machine as a whole, and is able to say to himself: ‘So that’s what it wasall about! That’s whatwas going on.’” (Beistegui, p. 128)

“The final synthesis is one of conjunction, and it takes the form of a retrospective recognition (‘so that’s what . . .’). If Deleuze and Guattari qualify it further as a synthesis of consumptionand consummation, it’s because the machine that it designates involves a voluptuous, autoerotic (or ‘automatic’) energy (Voluptas), beyond the energies of repulsion and total attraction; it is the energy of self-recognition and auto-affection.” (Beistegui, p. 128)

“jouissance” (Beistegui, p. 128)

“What exactly does the celibate machine produce? What that synthesis produces is intensity, or ‘intensive quantities’.” (Beistegui, p. 129)

“the Eggo” (Beistegui, p. 129)

3. The Problem: Oedipus in Psychoanalysis

A. Before Anti-Oedipus

“The three syntheses of time are the passive syntheses of the living present in Habitus; the synthesis of Eros and Mnemosyne (or of Freud-Lacan and Bergson), which coincides with the active synthesis of the ego and the passive synthesis of the past, or with the imaginary, real and symbolic objects, on the one hand, and the virtual objects, on the other; and, finally, the synthesis of empty time, which Deleuze identifies precisely with the death instinct.” (Beistegui, p. 130)

“Deleuze sees the death drive as an experience of pure time, or pure form without matter” (Beistegui, p. 131)

B. The Freudian Legacy

“[Freud] discovers the productive, machinic, essence of desire, but proceeds almost immediately to turn it into a force of representation, centred on the ego and its libido, and played out like a family drama” (Beistegui, p. 133)

C. The Lacanian Legacy

“The three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and signifier. It is one and the same error, an idealism that forms a pious conception of the unconscious.” (Beistegui, p. 134)

4. The Solution: Schizoanalysis

A. The Destructive Task of Schizoanalysis

“If Oedipus does indeed crush and repress the unconscious, if psychoanalysis generates a metaphysics, and instances of transcendence, which smother desire, then schizoanalysis will consist of a relentless struggle against that new religion.” (Beistegui, p. 140)

“Kafka’s operation consists in dismantling a certain assemblage, an abstract machine (the transcendence of the Law), and offering another in its place, infinitely more real: desire.” (Beistegui, p. 142)

B. The Constructive Task of Schizoanalysis

“First, and by contrast with the neurotic, the problems of the schizophrenic are ‘real’ problems.” (Beistegui, p. 146)

“The second aspect of schizophrenia, already implied in the first, is that the ‘stage’ on which schizophrenia is played out is precisely not a stage, especially not that of the family, but the world itself and as a whole, and this includes non-human as well as human life, history, society, etc.” (Beistegui, p. 147)

“The only question, then, becomes one of knowing how to prevent the breakthrough that schizophrenia signals from collapsing into a breakdown, how, in other words, to distinguish a becoming-schizophrenic from a being-schizophrenic.” (Beistegui, p. 148)

“to become is not to reach another form, but to identify the zone of proximity, or indiscernibility, such that we can no longer distinguish ourselves from awoman, ananimal, or amolecule. It has to do with this experience of the impersonal, yet an impersonal that is far more vital than my own life; it has to do with Life – not my life as a fixed, organic totality, but as an intensive field of virtual changes or becomings that cannot be anticipated.” (Beistegui, p. 150)

“the schizophrenic body is constituted by axes and gradients only, by poles, potentials and thresholds – in short, by purely intensive determinations” (Beistegui, p. 150)

“Whether schizophrenic, paranoid, masochistic, or intoxicated, the body is engaged in experiments of the transcendental, in transformations of the real, and not in fantasies fuelled or structured by lack.” (Beistegui, p. 151)

“The question […] is one of finding out how to constitute one’s own BwO, how to find one’s own regime, lines of flight and deterritorialisation.” (Beistegui, p. 152)

6. Aesthetics

1. Proust

2. Bacon

Conclusion

“We are always on two planes at once – or rather, in the Fold where the two meet.” (Beistegui, p. 194)

“Immanence: alife” (Beistegui, p. 195)