Skip to main content

Infinitisms in representation and in difference

This week I finished my course on Deleuze's D&R. We closed the reading with the contrast between representation and repetition - and how the privilege of the latter ushers in an ontology of the concrete. This contrasts with Leibniz' manoeuvre to make indiscernibility the ultimate criterion for identity in concreta - which amounts to taking concrete items in the same vein as abstract ones. Dressed repetitions (répétition vetue) is taken to be prior to naked ones (répétition nue). Representation bears on a repetition that exorcises deviation because it is not based on a genuine succession but on a masked simultaneity: that is, there is no diversity of media between the repetans and the repetanda. Naked repetition - that supports representation - doesn't really happen in concrete media; among concreta, where representation is secondary, repetition is always dressed because it wears the clothes of all sorts of other events that take place among concrete things. There is always a plurality of series in concreta and nothing makes sure that there is a convergence of all towards something. Dressed repetition takes place in a plane of immanence where contact and contagion rule. Abstraction comes after: naked repetition is subordinate to concrete repetition - repetition is ubiquitous among concreta, but it is primarily dressed.

In fact, Deleuze appeals to concrete, dressed repetition to place difference in an infinitist context. After criticizing the infinitist thoughts of Hegel and Leibniz because they appeal to the infinite to tame difference and make representation prevail, he presents the eternal return as his own version of infinitism. Repetition goes back to infinite because difference resides there and being is not in the maximal common factor between the repeated instances but rather in the difference that appears in the gaps of the repeated series. Repetition brings about what there is because it brings about difference - but only among concrete. In Leibniz, all repetition is naked (because everything is treated as representations). In Deleuze, difference is being because it resides in concreta and it is alien to representation. Infinitism here is tied to the univocity of being - as opposed to the analogical thinking connected to the naked repetition. Difference is infinite because of eternal return - infinite repetition brings about all chains and varieties of beings.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The underground of concepts: my talk at the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School Conference

In few minutes I'll be presenting this talk in the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School conference in the UCL. I can still change the text but this is how it looks like now. The underground of concepts: McDowell on the productivity of Anschauungen Hilan Bensusan 1. Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the idea that concepts do the productive work of thinking as a deception. It is not through a dynamics of concepts that conclusions are reached and it is not with the decisive intervention of them that conflicts between alternatives resolved. Lyotard compares the pretense that concepts think with the mystification that capital works. He argues that “what works is not the concept, […] the concept is [like] capital which pretends to work, but which [only] determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited” (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 13). This diagnosis, frequently lost in the middle of an ampler argumentation around t...
Post a Comment
Read more