<<TRANSMATHOME

BETWEEN THE SEEN AND THE SAID Deleuze-Guattari's Pragmatics of the Order-Word Bruce McClure

Contents Abstract Abbreviations

 

1. An Image Held Us Captive

1.1 The Role of Philosophy

This chapter lays the groundwork for the investigations that follow, taking a number of our key preoccupations in turn. The first, and most important (while at the same time being the most general) is the overriding concern with the struggle between creation and change on the one hand, and stability, control and order on the other. This seemingly simplistic opposition will turn out to be central to the role of philosophy, and to our particular concerns with language, consciousness, and social control[1]. The two key figures for this chapter are Bergson and, later, Kant, who (along with Spinoza and Nietzsche) are perhaps the most important canonical reference-points for Deleuze. It is in his work Bergsonism[2] that Deleuze first mentions the notion of the order-word (although in a less sophisticated form than it will later appear in his work with Guattari, as we will see in later chapters), and he mentions it in a context that could hardly be less central to the present work — that of the formation of philosophical problems.[3]

In order to explain why the opposition mentioned should play a role in questions of the nature of philosophy, it is necessary to examine Bergson’s accounts of what metaphysics is, and what it should be. Bergson, often dismissed as a mystic because of the misunderstood notion of the Élan Vital, sought change through philosophy in several ways, not simply because he saw change (as opposed to unity, permanence and totality) as the underlying fact of existence, and hence as a necessity for any approach interested in what is actually there.[4] If there is an element of mysticism in his work, it is in the notion that through a heightened attention to the Real (via the rigorous method he names ‘intuition’), we can reach absolutes of existence, absolutes with implications for how we live our lives. Philosophy is not a ‘simple game’ — ‘it can be a preparation for the art of living’[5]. An ethics/aesthetics of living in this sense must be strenuously distinguished from morality or moralism — the two are opposites, the latter a commitment to transcendent rules of behaviour (the archetype of which is the abstract form of morality itself in Kant’s categorical imperative), the former a shedding of rules, of received ideas, and an immersion in, and submission to, the immanence of the Real. As we will see, this commitment to the real is the attempt to examine, not merely the conditions of possible experience, but the conditions of real experience, where the conditions are found to be entirely immanent to the conditioned (as opposed to forming some ‘other world’ of transcendent cause(s) of the visible world).

In order to make clear the connection with Deleuze-Guattari in this regard (for it is their accounts of such an ethics with which we are concerned throughout much of the following — in terms that will be clarified below, the pragmatics of the order-word is at once an ethics of the password), the idea of an ‘art of living’ appears in Foucault’s Preface to their AntiOedipus. Foucault proposes reading the book not simply as ethics, but as ‘an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life’, where fascism is

not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini — which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively — but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us (AO xiii).

Of course, Foucault’s rhetorical use of the term ‘fascism’ in this context borders on the fatuous, which, were it to be combined with our initial opposition between creation and order, would imply that order and control are intrinsically fascistic, intrinsically about domination and exploitation. The line taken here, however, is that the world we inhabit is precisely this interplay between order and control, the processes Deleuze-Guattari call stratification, and those of escape and change. We begin already necessarily embedded within the strata, and rather than it being a question of gesticulating rebelliously at the ‘fascists’, it is instead one of mapping or diagramming stratification, the immanent processes by which our world is formed and arranged, and attempting to discover whether there is any possibility of things being otherwise. To this end, we will now examine the way Deleuze refigures the notion of the possible.

1.2 Possible/Real versus Actual/Virtual

Another problem to signpost at the outset is that of the risks in proposing a guiding light for philosophy in the Real — in what ways is this different from its previous illustrious guarantors, such as the Good and the True?  This question opens the terrain of immanence and transcendence, and gives us an initial approach to the problem of representation. What Deleuze-Guattari call ‘the magic formula’, ‘PLURALISM=MONISM’ (TP 20 — inscribed elsewhere as ‘Nietzsche=Spinoza’, e.g. N 135) is central to this question. The notion of immanence is the notion of ‘a’ real in which we are always already immersed. It is opposed to the notion that there is another, better world somewhere else, whether this world is Heaven, the realm of Platonic forms, or the True or the Good that we must always do our best to approximate — such notions are illusions of reason, yet this is not to say that there is therefore a world of illusions that exists in parallel to this world. As Bergson suggests in The Creative Mind, the problem is mistaking more for less: in setting up an opposition between the immediately given world of our perceptions, intuitions and intellections, and something else we imagine might be lying behind or above it. Having been convinced by this dream of a beyond as distinct from the immediate, we then find ourselves having to explain the immediate. The question Bergson wants us to ask is: Why should this idea of a beyond be so compelling, that it leaves us forever oscillating between the two poles of immediate and beyond, subjective and objective, phenomena and noumena, mind and matter?

The reason is to be found in the very nature of life, which, in Deleuze’s words, ‘is essentially determined in the act of avoiding obstacles, stating and solving a problem. The construction of the organism is both the stating of a problem and a solution’ (B 16). To see life in terms of problems, and to consider them as something ‘stated’ and ‘solved’, is not to be read as exporting a linguistic or philosophical model back to the origins of the organism. By ‘stated’ is meant ‘actualised’, or called into existence, not ‘uttered’ — though as I will try to show in the chapters to follow, utterances or statements are themselves instances of actualisation in exactly this sense. Problems are sets of relations or engagements in a state of turmoil or conflict; solutions are the crossing of thresholds which retroactively affect the whole. The philosophical problem, is, on one level, not essentially different from the problem of the creation of oxygen through photosynthesis in the primeval soup, or of relieving subterranean pressure build-up through a volcanic eruption — they are each moments in the play between the actual and the virtual, terms we will explain momentarily.[6]

‘Reality,’ writes Bergson, ‘is global and undivided growth, progressive invention, duration: it resembles a gradually expanding rubber balloon assuming at each moment unexpected forms’ (CM 96). We may quibble that there is no incontrovertible ground for assuming that this invention is ‘progressive’ in a strong sense (i.e. getting nearer to some perceived ideal or goal), but the weak sense of progression (where what is meant is insofar as we can pick out abstract states, we can see that consecutive states are intimately and intrinsically connected with one another) is an entirely plausible, and perhaps necessary, claim. Indeed, the error of the intellect that Bergson diagnoses in the traditional problems of metaphysics, is to assume there is some backdrop, a void or empty space, against or within which the balloon of reality inflates. Having posited Nothingness, we are then trapped in the unanswerable question of why anything should exist at all. But this Nothingness, insofar as it drives us off on the endless search for causes and causes of causes, is an illusion. Bergson writes,

“Nothing” is a term in ordinary language which can only have meaning in the sphere, proper to man, of action and fabrication. “Nothing” designates the absence of what we are seeking, we desire, expect. Let us suppose that absolute emptiness was known to our experience: it would be limited, have contours, and would therefore be something. But in reality there is no vacuum. We perceive and can only perceive occupied space. One thing disappears only because another replaces it. Suppression thus means substitution. We say “suppression”, however, when we envisage, in the case of substitution, only one of its two halves, or rather the one of its two halves that interests us; in this way we indicate a desire to turn our attention to the object which is gone, and away from the one replacing it. (CM 97)

This tendency, to hang onto what was or what will be in the face of what is, is entirely appropriate for most of our daily dealings, propelling us to struggle to maintain or create what we want. However, when applied to metaphysics, the tendency to conceal from ourselves the nature of this operation (whereby we concentrate on the no-longer-there or the still-to-come rather than what is) means we imagine that the very notion of nothing somehow makes existence itself in need of explanation. Bergson shows firstly that this ‘nothing’ is the intellect’s attempt to suppress everything; secondly that all suppression is necessarily a substitution; and therefore that Nothing (as a substitution which is somehow not a substitution) is logically self contradictory, and psychologically a matter of self-deception.

In other words, this so-called representation of absolute emptiness is, in reality, that of universal fullness in a mind which leaps indefinitely from part to part, with the fixed resolution never to consider anything but the emptiness of its dissatisfaction instead of the fullness of things (CM 98).

The Nothing is simply the All with the addition of this act of will or operation of thought (it is more rather than less than the All).

This mistake appears again in the notion of the possible, which Deleuze-Guattari wish to supersede with the opposition of actual and virtual. This pair is to be understood in contrast to possible/real, where the former pair exhaustively comprise the Real, while the latter pair posits an outside to the real — but one which is nevertheless modelled on it — an abstraction by the mind that is some aspect of the Real plus the mental operation of displacing it in time, back to before it appeared, or forward to where it is yet to appear. Again, we mistake this ‘more’ for the ‘less’ of the supposedly non-existent or not-yet-existent, and imagine we then have a problem of ‘why this rather than that possibility?’  In contrast, the actual and virtual are both entirely real. Insofar as certain relations or engagements can be said to be virtual, they are not to be taken to be existing on a plane other than that of reality. There is but the real, and every (conceivable and inconceivable) element or relation subsists within it. The notion of possibilities, of possible worlds or events, is refigured as unactualised worlds or events which are distinguishable at all only insofar as they have real effects in this world (whether in the domains of fiction, dreams and speculation, or in those of ontogenesis, thermodynamics or quantum mechanics).

What does it mean, then, to say that certain organic mutations, certain social formations, certain chemical bonds are possible or impossible?  If we recognise them as possible (using the resources of the appropriate discipline) it means that we recognise their possibilities (whether ever actualised or not) as aspects of the relevant processes — virtual (i.e. unactualised) relations or processes the reality of which can be demonstrated by experiment, or testified to by history. If we argue for their impossibility, it is most likely we are talking about processes so extremely unlikely or difficult to countenance that it would obviously be a waste of time expecting them to happen, and in this respect we may turn out to be mistaken, or we may be protecting our interests by preventing them. In any case, even to get as far as declaring something impossible is already to have posited a relation on the level of the operations of thought, and hence to have actualised it on that level (if on no other) — and the relation can therefore be seen as virtual insofar as its reality (as impossibility) serves in guiding research programmes, allocating funding and so on.[7]

1.3 True and False Problems

What was said above about the ‘stating and solving of problems’ being a pertinent description of what matter does, of what the Real consists in, can now be clarified. All problems are not alike; indeed the discussions above of the possible, or of Nothing, testify to the existence of false problems. The falsehood of such problems bears not simply on their being blind alleys down which metaphysics has been led, due to its confusion of the practical and the intuitive (a confusion we will explore more deeply shortly). Another key example of a false problem is that of Oedipus, which, far from being a cul-de-sac we can simply reverse out of, is an all-pervasive and powerful myth the strength of which can be seen in every appeal to the importance of the Family and of Normal sexuality and behaviour. Deleuze-Guattari show that the oscillation between Oedipus-as-structure and Oedipus-as-crisis is not simply one of Freud’s many errors or flights of fancy, any more than the importance of Christ can be reduced to the texts of the Gospels. Just as Christian Messianism had precursors in a variety of religions, the Oedipus of Freud (in its various forms) and of his successors served to articulate (in far from homogeneous fashion) a set of demands on the human individual to become-subject in certain limited, predefined ways, and served also to unite the bourgeois values of the Family and the discourses on madness and sanity.[8]

The way in which Oedipus can be seen as a false problem is instructive, because it shows how discerning true problems (for example, anOedipal notions of subjectification) is a radical project which can disrupt overarching structures, or at least shore up the means by which they
protect and maintain themselves. It also allows us to trace a path through the first half of AntiOedipus, showing how it relates on the one hand to the picture of matter, the actual and the virtual (with respect to the question of the subject), and on the other to the opposition between creation/change and stability/control. Finally, it lays out a space in which to examine the issue of language more directly, and begins to show why approaches to language based on representation, information and signification, derive from false problems and present the dangers and restrictions for thought that this entails.

1.4 The Image of Thought

Fig. 1 The Image of Thought

False problems, and false problematics, need to be seen in two ways, the first being as ‘pictures that hold us captive’[9] — actual structures that restrict and delimit thought, presuppositions of common sense that must be challenged. Secondly, they are epiphenomena of real problems/ problematics: the task is to ‘break open’ the false problems and reveal the real problematics which generate them. The most important sets of false problems for our purposes are those to do with the construal of language and thought in terms of representation. For both perspectives, the central texts of Deleuze are those on what he calls the Image of Thought, the intertwined ideas grounded in the Same and the Similar that infest common sense and good sense, and to which he opposes the notion of ‘thought without image’ (DR 167).

The key passage in this respect is Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition, and it specifies as the location of the problem that which, supposedly,  ‘everybody knows’ (DR 129-130) — for example, Descartes’
 presuppositions about what it is to think and to be, which allow him to present ‘I think therefore I am’ as a basic proposition in need of no further explanation. As Deleuze argues, while apparently foregoing objective presuppositions (such as there is a world, there are bodies, etc), the philosopher merely substitutes them with subjective presuppositions (there is thought, there is existence). And ‘Everybody knows, no one can deny,’ Deleuze writes, ‘is the form of representation and the discourse of the representative’ (DR 130), or more simply, it is the archetypal speaking-for, speaking-on-behalf-of, not one or several other individuals or groups, but for all humankind. This starting point for philosophy is precarious, however, because all that is needed to disrupt it is a lone voice ‘with the necessary modesty not managing to know what everybody knows, and modestly denying what everyone is supposed to recognise’ (DR 130).

At first glance, this runs the risk of looking like a denial of the possibility of any such statements (there is thought, there is existence), which it is not. Deleuze is not denying what we could initially describe as the possibility of such objective statements; indeed, Deleuze-Guattari talk enthusiastically in AntiOedipus of the capacity of ‘revolutionaries, artists and seers’ to be content to be ‘objective, merely objective’ (AO 27). What the Image of Thought material is attacking is not philosophy’s pretensions to objectivity over and above a subjectivity we are supposedly imprisoned in; rather, this very dichotomy is the problem, as is the idea that we must forever oscillate between these two poles. The problem with the ‘objectivity’ of the Image of Thought is not that it purports to be objective, but that it shapes and controls the type of objectivity available or desirable to us. It takes for granted that objectivity is necessarily a function of ‘what everyone knows’. In contrast to this, the objectivity of revolutionaries, seers, visionaries and true philosophers, is a much rarer commodity, characterised not by whether everyone agrees with it, but by its consistency with a particular milieu, with the number of affective connections it begets/springs from within and between milieus.[10] The importance of the lone voice raised in opposition is that it can create/give voice to these connections, such as are closed down by the harnessing of thought to the Same and the Similar.

What is the first thing at which such a voice would express bewilderment?  It is the founding principle of common sense, the assumption of Cogitatio natura universalis, that the thinker is naturally upright and of pure intention, and that thought is a faculty with a natural affinity with the true (DR 131). This need not be explicitly stated; it is unquestioningly assumed, with the result that

it matters little whether philosophy begins with the object or the subject, with Being or with beings, as long as thought remains subject to this Image which already prejudges everything: the distribution of the object and the subject as well as that of Being and beings (DR 131).

Before philosophy has even gotten started, then, and regardless of whether it goes on to question whether truth is attainable or not, it has already perpetuated judgement (with respect to the True) and morality (with respect to the Good) as transcendent, guiding principles. And this is likely to be the case wherever common sense is not explicitly challenged and its presuppositions explicitly critiqued.

In an echo of many other stages in Deleuze/Deleuze-Guattari’s thought, the point is not to set up an opposition between the pre-philosophical and the philosophical (as with pre-Oedipal and Oedipal, with pre-signifying and signifying, and so on), but rather to find an outside to the opposition from which both terms are shown to be poles of a false problem which can then be denounced as non-philosophical (DR 132) or illegitimate (AO 110). The bipolar structure common to false problems is what Deleuze-Guattari call double articulation, the ‘double pincer’ movement from which it is necessary to find a diagonal that escapes both pregiven outcomes.[11]

How then to critique this in-principal element of common sense?  It will not do merely to cite empirical examples of imbeciles or reprobates; it must be tackled on the transcendental level of the principle itself. It is necessary to spell out the model or map this principle carries with it, and this model is that of recognition, which Deleuze defines as ‘the harmonious exercise of all the faculties [concordia facultatum] upon a supposed same object: the same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined, or conceived’, giving the famous example of Descartes’ wax (DR 133).[12]  Thus, the unity of the subject (the harmony of the faculties) guarantees the identity of the object (common sense). This is the Image of Thought because it is thought contenting itself with its most banal instance (recognition), representing itself to itself as that which recognises. Its critique, therefore, must take the form of a demonstration that, despite the fact that ‘thought and all its faculties may be fully employed therein’, recognition ‘has nothing to do with thinking’ (DR 138). ‘The form of recognition has never sanctioned anything but the recognisable and the recognised’ (DR 134).

1.5 Deleuze’s Critique of Representation

Fig. 2: The Form of Representation

REPRESENTATION ‘The ‘I think’ is the most general principle of representation’ (DR 138)
‘I conceive’ identity with regard to concepts ‘constitutes the form of the Same with regard to recognition’ (DR 137)	‘I imagine/I remember’ opposition with regard to the determination of concepts ‘implies the comparison between possible predicates and their opposites in a regressive and progressive double series...’ remembrance/ imagination as re-creation (DR 137-8)	‘I judge’ analogy with regard to judgement ‘bears upon the highest determinable concepts’, and/or ‘the relations between [them] and their respective objects’ ... ‘calls upon the power of distribution present in judgement’ (DR 138)	‘I perceive’ resemblance with regard to objects ‘relie[d] upon [by the object of the concept] as a principle of continuity’ (DR 138)
‘difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to
a conceived identity,	an imagined opposition,	a judged analogy,	or a perceived similitude.’ (DR 138)
‘Having discovered the superior or transcendent exercise of the faculties, Plato subordinated this to the forms of
identity in the essence	similitude in reminiscence	analogy in the Good	[and] opposition in the sensible’ (DR 142)

What form does this demonstration take?  There are two principle sides to Deleuze’s attack — on the one hand, his reformulation of the doctrine of the faculties, and on the other, his account of what it is to think. From these two perspectives, we can home in on the crucial notion of intensity. First of all, his reformulation of the notion of faculties serves to make them function separately, each travelling to its limit, to the point where it is dissolved, rather than (as in the Kantian picture) having each resonate with the others under the principal faculty of thought in the unity of the Cogito. What are the faculties?  For Kant, they consist in the trinity of imagination, reason and understanding. Kant offers three different ways in which these faculties resonate (corresponding to the three Critiques). In the first two cases, one faculty provides the form or model of the Same, with which the other two collaborate: understanding in the case of knowledge, reason in the case of moral sense. In the third case of aesthetics, the faculties attain a free accord, but without ever breaking with the rule of the appropriate variety of common sense. For Deleuze, Kant’s account of the faculties is riven with problems because it traces them on empirical notions of thought. Instead, the list of faculties must be open-ended, and the behaviour of each must be the subject of detailed investigation, ‘For nothing can be said in advance’ (DR 143) — besides those such as thought, sensibility, imagination, there are those such as language[13], vitality, sociability, and who knows how many more.[14]

The point of the doctrine of the faculties, then, is as a focal point for transcendental empiricism, Deleuze’s attempt on the one hand to pick up where Kant left off in the exploration, ‘not of another world, but of the upper or lower reaches of this one’ (DR 135) — in other words, of the ‘prodigious domain of the transcendental’ (ibid) —  and on the other hand, to do so through empiricism, considered not as ‘a simple appeal to lived experience’ but as ‘the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard’, where the concept is the ‘object of an encounter, as a here-and-now, or rather as an Erewhon from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed ‘heres’ and ‘nows’’ (DR xx; see also 285, 333n7). So far, so inspiring and poetic, but can the notion of transcendental empiricism be expressed in more down-to-earth language?  Indeed it can, and with particular regard to the faculties. The transcendental field for Kant was a zone accessible by critique, where could be found the conditions of possibility of experience; the fundamental structures necessary for existence of selves. However, he was content to trace these structures from the ‘empirical acts of a psychological consciousness’ (DR 135) (namely, his own), with the result that his own epistemological, moral and religious preoccupations are raised up to the level of the conditions of possibility of thought itself.

In contrast, for Deleuze, the faculties are engagements with intensity. This difficult notion lies at the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy — it is the repetition of difference and difference-from-itself of repetition; the ‘internal genesis’ of matter that constitutes the orders of ‘extrinsic differences and intrinsic conceptual differences’, where ‘conceptual’ pertains not to the level of concepts as Deleuze-Guattari will later formulate them (as multiplicities —see, for example, What is Philosophy? (127), where concepts and functions are distinguished as different types of multiplicity), but instead to the notion of representational concepts of the understanding. Intensity is ‘pure difference in itself’ (DR 144, my emphasis) and it can only be intensity that can take the faculties to their limits, for anything other than pure difference in itself is somehow mediated by the forms of the Same and the similar, and therefore pertains to an already established Image of Thought, or Doxa (modelling the nature of thought on the moral and political concerns of the age, rather than on the primal, prehuman encounters from which it begins). In contrast, then, to the in-principle organisations of common sense/good sense, Deleuze posits an in-principle difference that ‘is both formal and in kind’, between the new, the ‘unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita’ (DR 136), and all that is amenable to recognition. On this point, Deleuze cites Nietzsche as having shown that the new is never established: ‘The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new, just as the established was always established from the outset...’ (DR 136).[15]

As long as we are content to understand the faculties as pertaining to already-established empirical relations between subjects and objects, subjects and subjects, subjects and ideas and so on, we continue to trace the transcendental on the empirical, making it not a ‘prodigious domain’, but a ‘sterile double’. If we are to think difference in itself, or indeed the very possibility of creation; if we are to prevent thought being strangled by Doxa before it begins; if, indeed, we are to find a way through the compelling mysteries of existence (and distinguish true from false problems), we must pursue this notion of the new. It is for these reasons that the faculties must be thought at their very limits, their ‘superior or transcendent exercise’ (DR 143) rather than in their banal everyday exercise. In this way, the terms of the doctrine of the faculties, as the attempt to understand the manifold ways in which bodies can engage with one another, is transformed from those of psychological, anthropological accounts of what humans actually do, to the immanent criteria of real (rather than ‘possible’) experience. The superior exercise of the faculties (the typology of which may be radically transformed in the process) is their unhinging through an encounter with the new, where the very hinge is common sense itself, as that which ‘causes all the faculties to function and converge’ (DR 141).[16]

To approach from the other side — that of what it means to think — is to flesh out the notion that recognition has ‘nothing to do with thinking’. Instead, thinking is necessarily this involuntary encounter with the new, with the differential element or ‘dark precursor’ (DR 119).[17] It is through this notion that Deleuze frees thought from the human, since thought is redefined as the communication between series in a system, any system (where both ‘system’ and ‘communication’ are defined in terms of difference):

A system must be constituted on the basis of two or more series, each series being defined by the differences between the terms which compose it. If we suppose that the series communicate under the impulse of a force of some kind, then it is apparent that this communication relates differences to other differences, constituting differences between differences within the system. These second-degree differences play the role of the ‘differenciator’ — in other words, they relate the first-degree differences to one another (DR 117)

The three stages, or syntheses, of this process, Deleuze here describes as

adequately expressed by certain physical concepts: coupling between heterogeneous systems, from which is derived an internal resonance within the system, and from which in turn is derived a forced movement the amplitude of which exceeds that of the basic series themselves (ibid).

These three syntheses are covered in detail (but from quite different perspectives) in both Difference and Repetition and AntiOedipus, as we will see below. The central point here, however, is that it is through the notion of the ‘dark precursor’ (‘difference in itself or difference in the second degree’ (DR 120), the ‘paradoxical element or perpetuum mobile’ (LS 66)) that Deleuze shows identity and resemblance (raised up to the highest position in the Image of Thought) are ‘inevitable illusions — in other words, concepts of reflection which would account for our inveterate habit of thinking difference on the basis of representation’ (DR 119) — themselves the effects of difference in itself. The key formula is ‘only differences are alike’ (DR 116), which, though it sounds similar, is the opposite of ‘only that which is alike differs’. The latter makes difference subordinate to resemblance, the former makes resemblance an effect of difference.

1.6 The Empty Form of Time

How many of us have reached, as Deleuze-Guattari appear to say of themselves in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I’ (TP 3)?  Whether important to us or not, most of us indeed still say I, yet the very notion of the I had already been fractured by Kant in the first Critique.[18] In their beautifully concise account in What is Philosophy (29-32), Deleuze-Guattari claim that Plato founded everything on the realm of forms or Ideas (i.e. the only things which are what they are, as opposed to the things of our world which compete to participate in particular forms to a greater or lesser extent). Then Descartes’ scepticism introduces the concept of the Cogito, removing Plato’s pre-existent harmonious unity of the forms, and substituting it with the self-founding subject of ‘I think therefore I am’. But Kant reintroduces time into the Cogito, on the basis of the distinction between two sides of the I (the ‘I think’ and the ‘I am’). [19]  ‘Kant therefore “criticises” Descartes for having said “I am a thinking substance,” for nothing warrants such a claim of the “I”’ (WP 31). The undetermined existence of the ‘I am’ as ‘a passive and phenomenal self, an always affectable, modifiable and variable self’ (ibid), is determined by the active self as the Other: 

The cogito now presents four components: I think, and as such I am active; I have an existence; this existence is only determinable in time as a passive self; I am therefore determined as a passive self that necessarily represents its own thinking activity to itself as an Other that affects it. This is not another subject but rather the subject who becomes another (WP 31-32).[20]

This progression is given a slightly different emphasis — turning, this time, on the role of time — by Deleuze in ‘On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy’.[21]  Kant’s “criticism” of Descartes marks the former’s transformation of the form-content relation of Plato, retained in Descartes, where there is an amorphous content (the Self) which is given form by the active principle of the I. Rather than the I being the form instantaneously and unilaterally imposed on the self, seemingly making the statement ‘I am a thinking substance’ possible, Kant shows that a third term is required to explain the possibility of a relation between undetermined and determination.[22]  This third term is the ‘medium’ through which the cogito is constituted — namely time. This is not time understood in terms of movement or succession — to base time on these is to subordinate it to them. Instead, time as the form of inner sense is radically distinct from space: nothing but

a thread, a pure straight line [...] Everything that moves and changes is in time, but time itself does not change or move, any more than it is eternal. It is the form of everything that changes and moves, but it is an immutable form that does not change — not an eternal form, but precisely the form of what is not eternal, the immutable form of change and movement (CC 28-29).

It is wrong, therefore, to see time as ‘eternal’ on this view, because eternity is only thinkable under the determination of time itself as empty form. Eternity as a notion ceases to make any sense — there is only the finite, as determined by the immutable form of time.[23]

What distinguishes the subject, then, is the fact that it represents to itself this determination. For Kant, Descartes’ formula tells the story of the birth of self-reflexivity — the ‘me’ is reflected at itself through thought, recognises itself as the thinking thing, and as the thing doing the recognising, and as the thing recognising the recognising (and so on to infinity), but at each twist, the mirror is time. Why, then, need this be the split running from end to end of the subject, that Deleuze-Guattari so need it to be?

The key, as Deleuze argues, is in Rimbaud’s formula ‘I is another’ (CC 29; cf. the seminar cited in fn38).[24] The critique of the Cartesian, self-founding cogito, if it is to make any difference, works by doing precisely that — making the difference between I and self, active and passive, determining and determined, a real and absolute difference. The self, as totally unsynthesised, unconditioned and passive, ‘prior’ to its representation to itself by the I, is constituted as self only in this act of representation, the affection of self by I. Consciousness, or at least cognisance, can only occur ‘in time’ — i.e. consciousness of difference. If we attempt to think this purely spatially, as Descartes did, we have no way of explaining what on earth this thinking substance can be, except simply as a unity maintained through the benevolence of God. But by making time precisely the medium through which this affect of reflexivity occurs, we at once have an account of consciousness, the unity of the subject as that which continues or persists through time by representing its own thinking to itself. Kant, therefore, ‘deduces’ time as the condition of possibility of inner sense (self-affection or thought).

It is this introduction of time as the form of inner sense into the subject that marks the emergence of the transcendental. The empty form of time for Kant is a necessary condition of all inner sense, that is, the capacity for the subject to be affected, to experience and to represent itself experiencing to itself. The subject is already determined or conditioned, then, by a representational model of thought, for which this active thinking (as representing) is primary, and without which there can be no individual, no thought and no stability, only ‘indifferent black nothingness’ (DR 276). The empty form of time plays a key role in Deleuze’s discussion of the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition, which we will examine in the next section.

1.7 Repetition For Itself

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze reformulates this fracture in the self to challenge the move by which Kant manages to ‘resurrect’ the self in spite of its split. His first move is to extend the notion of the passive self, to dissolve and disperse it across the whole of matter, and emphasise its primacy over the active self which inserts representation into the heart of being. This is Deleuze’s formulation of the first synthesis of time, that of Habit.

Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our “self” only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says “me” (DR 75).

At the heart of each contemplation is repetition, the repetition of difference, at each point, a certain ‘questioning’ of (if you like) being, which in turn sets up the problematic of the individual.[25]

Deleuze’s first point against Kant, then, is to argue that the passive component of the cogito is the multiplicity of larval selves, which themselves are nothing but the contractions-contemplations of matter — as opposed to being the purely unsynthesised and unconditioned mess that awaits the active synthesis of reason. For Deleuze, it is only on the basis of synthesis of contractions-contemplations that active synthesis can come about. This active synthesis, then, amounts to what Count Korzybski called ‘time-binding’[26] — the appearance of artificial signs through active synthesis, which allow representations of past and future in the present, as opposed to the natural signs of the passive synthesis, which refer ‘only to the present in which they signify’.[27]  This synthesis, with its dual aspects of passive (questioning) and active (the problematic) can also be seen as chronogenesis, the immanent creation of time relative to these larval selves, and the immanent formation of the organism through the accretion of habit in this interaction between larval selves and environment. By showing how both time and the organism grow out of passive, molecular synthesis, Deleuze prevents the Subject becoming a cause or a goal of these material processes, but rather, makes it a side-effect or epiphenomenon.

But, says Deleuze, there must be another time in which this first synthesis can occur. The first synthesis is indeed the foundation of time, or rather times, but this must be distinguished from its ground. The ground of time is to be found in the second synthesis, that of memory, which (following Bergson) is of a completely different order to that of habit. Where the latter is material, contractions of past-present, the former is spiritual, the pure past that has never been present — it is the backdrop against which the vast array of contracted past-presents of habit accumulate, coexist, and communicate with one another, such that different lives can replay one another at different levels, ‘as if the philosopher and the pig, the criminal and the saint, played out the same past at different levels of a gigantic cone’ (DR 83).[28]

The key to these two characterisations of memory is the presence in the former of representation as hierarchical ordering of present over past, in contrast to the interplay between past and present in the latter as comprising a ‘block of becoming’. Once the ordering of present over past is dismantled, the pure past is refigured as an active component of the present, which is nothing more than its moment of greatest contraction. The relation is not one of images recalled by the self-reflexive subject, but rather one of contraction-dilation, speed and slowness.

The first two syntheses of time, then, Deleuze names Habit and Mnemosyne, the latter relating to Plato’s world of forms, since it must be accessed through the curious mechanism of ‘reminiscence’, whereby the philosopher does not so much discover Truth as remember it.[29] Yet this synthesis, that of the pure past, is transformed by Deleuze via Bergson. Plato’s forms, it could be argued, will always bear a striking resemblance to their inferior counterparts in this world — indeed, having established that everything from Justice to hair and dirt have their forms, we are left with the impression that the Platonic Idea is nothing but a mythical, sanitised abstraction from this world. This enormous error, the installation of a transcendent realm or supplementary dimension that is modelled on the empirical, is the key to the Deleuzian critique. Instead of Platonic reminiscence then, Deleuze posits the ‘remembrance of lost time’, again a passive (involuntary) synthesis, the recovery of a past that was never present, and once again, it is only on the basis of this passive synthesis of memory that the active synthesis of memory can occur. Again, it is the active synthesis which begets representation, in that (unlike involuntary memory) the active representation of the former present in the present necessarily involves the representation of the present in the present (‘It is of the essence of representation not only to represent something but to represent its own representivity’). In contrast, Proustian memory testifies to the coexistence of the pure past and the present, of the entire past being in communication with the present as the virtual is to the actual. Bergson’s cone (mentioned above in relation to the philosopher and the pig) takes what we could disingenuously refer to as a God’s-eye view of the passage of time (as duration or real movement), with the present as the most contracted point on the cone. Involuntary memory occurring in this present is, then, the ‘telescoping together’ of present present and past present, with the proviso that this telescoping reduces it to neither present (an irreducibility that distinguishes memory and habit).

In summary, then, Deleuze distinguishes (in terms that recall our discussion above of ‘true and false problems’) legitimate and illegitimate accounts of this synthesis. The illegitimate or representational account of the first synthesis (that of the past-present and present-present) is that of Kant, which makes the active synthesis primary and reduces the passive synthesis to undifferentiated sludge. To this Deleuze contrasts a foundational contraction-contemplation of the multiplicity of larval selves, over which the transcendental self-consciousness of the active synthesis, the I, is installed as ruler — although this rule is destructive (or conservative, depending on your viewpoint), in that it harnesses the dissolved self to the ‘I’ of representation, an I which is, however, already fractured, already an Other. The second synthesis, of the memory or the pure past, has its illegitimate aspect in the platonic notion of reminiscence, the seeking after of an immutable world of forms — the archetype of transcendence — which Deleuze contrasts with the Bergsonian picture in which the past subsists in the present: ‘all levels and degrees coexist and present themselves [...] on the basis of a past which was never present’ (DR 83).

There is, however, a third synthesis of time, which transforms the first two. We have already encountered its illegitimate figure in Kant’s notion of time as the form of inner sense. It is primarily to this that Deleuze contrasts his version of the Eternal Return as the empty form of time, drawing largely from Klossowski.[30] This return is precisely not the return of the Same, it is characterised variously as the return of the future, a belief of or in the future (DR 90) — as well as by the phrases ‘to throw time out of joint, to make the sun explode, to throw oneself in the volcano, to kill God or the father’ (DR 89). This time the distinction between illegitimate and legitimate forms of the synthesis is of a different order, for what Deleuze’s Nietzsche has discovered in the Eternal Return is the lived fact of nothing less than the destruction of self, world and God in both their transcendent and transcendental guises, and therefore, of the very possibility of representation. ‘It eliminates the presuppositions of representation, namely the Same and the Similar, the Analogue and the Negative. For representation and its presuppositions return, but only once; [in contrast to the ‘every time’ of the return of the return] they return no more than one time, once and for all, thereafter eliminated for all times’ (DR 301).

On this view, the eternal return is linked to repetition not of the whole of time (return of the same), but to the notion firstly that the repeated is always different, and moreover, that therefore the only thing that returns is difference. This formulation allows Deleuze to say that eternal return is ‘the same of the different, the one of the multiple, the resemblant of the dissimilar’ (DR 126) — in a phrase that we will return to in relation to the Plane of Consistency, it is that which things with nothing in common, have in common. The power of this notion is to fill the place formerly occupied with some notion of origin or telos (that would clearly be a prime example of transcendence) with an immanent principle of creative difference:

The eternal return has no other sense but this: the absence of any assignable origin — in other words, the assignation of difference as the origin, which then relates different to different in order to make it (or them) return as such (DR 125).

1.8 The System of the Transcendental Ideas

In the interests of clarifying these notions, it is clearly necessary to go round this strange loop again, except differently. This time, Kant will again feature prominently — appropriately enough, since each time we come across the figure of three syntheses in Deleuze, regardless of whether he is dealing with Kant directly, it is no doubt a reference to Kant.[31] We must plunge into the first Critique, and for reasons that will be made apparent, to the ‘First Book of the Transcendental Dialectic’, ‘The System of the Transcendental Ideas’ (CPR 322).

Fig. 3: System of the Transcendental Ideas (Concepts of Pure Reason)

All transcendental ideas can be arranged in three classes:
the absolute unity of the thinking subject	the absolute unity of the series of conditions of appearance	the absolute unity of the condition of all objects of thought in general.
These correspond respectively to
psychology	cosmology	theology
for which pure reason furnishes the ideas for
a transcendental doctrine of the soul	a transcendental science of the world	a transcendental knowledge of God
With Deleuze*, these are superseded by
a logic of neutral meaning	a metaphysics of incorporeals	a thought of the present infinitive

*as rendered by Foucault in ‘Theatricum Philosophicum’, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, tr. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977: 176

Before we can understand, even something as rudimentary as a syllogism, deduces Kant, there must be a concept or concepts embedded in reason itself, which make this possible. Since the essence of the syllogism is the derivation of a specific conclusion from some kind of universal (e.g. ‘all men are mortal’), Kant decides that ‘the transcendental concept of reason [that concept which is necessarily prior to the exercise of the understanding] is [...] none other than the totality of the conditions for any given conditioned’ (CPR 316) — and the totality of conditions is itself necessarily the unconditioned. We need to grasp the unconditioned, or unconditionally or a priori true, to establish the truth of any given syllogism.

The number of pure concepts of reason will be equal to the number of kinds of relation which the understanding represents to itself by means of the categories. We have therefore to seek for an unconditioned, first, of the categorical synthesis in a subject; secondly, of the hypothetical synthesis of the members of a series; thirdly, of the disjunctive synthesis of the parts in a system. (CPR 316)

In other words: reason is defined by three Transcendental Ideas which are the unconditioned of the three categories of relation (substance, causality, community) of the understanding that relate to inner sense (the empty form of time). In each case, the unconditioned can be reached by travelling backwards up a syllogism — as Kant puts it ‘ascending, in the series of conditions, to the unconditioned, that is, to principles’ (CPR 325) — that is, to the Ideas that in each and every case, govern the attribution of one of these three categories (see Fig. 3). Pure reason, then, furnishes the governing Ideas for three posited transcendental sciences: from the categorical synthesis we arrive at the ‘thinking subject,’ the ‘transcendental doctrine of the soul’ and the corresponding discipline of psychology; from the hypothetical synthesis we arrive at ‘the sum-total of all appearances’ and the corresponding discipline of cosmology; and from the disjunctive synthesis we arrive at the ‘thing which contains the highest condition of the possibility of all that can be thought (the being of all beings)’ and the corresponding discipline of theology. Kant goes on to state explicitly why the transcendental Ideas must be thus and so:

...in treating of the transcendental concepts of reason, which, in philosophical theory, are commonly confused with others, and not properly distinguished even from concepts of the understanding, we have been able to rescue them from their ambiguous position, to determine their origin, and at the same time, in so doing, to fix their precise number (to which we can never add), presenting them in a systematic connection, and so marking out and enclosing a special field for pure reason (CPR 326).

What exactly are the status of these transcendental Ideas?  Self, world and God have become nothing more than regulative ideals — markers of the very limits of knowledge. In carrying out the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant has shown once and for all time that these a priori limits are imposed on us by the very nature of reason itself. While pure reason cannot give more ‘substance’ (so to speak) to these notions, it nonetheless legislates that we must proceed as if there was a unity of the soul, a unity of the world and a unity of all that is possible for all time as determined by the ultimate unconditioned, the existence of God. Kant writes

.

..the regulative law of systematic unity prescribes that we should study nature as if systematic and purposive unity, combined with the greatest possible manifoldness, were everywhere to be met with, in infinitum. For although we may succeed in covering but little of this perfection in the world, it is nevertheless required by the legislation of our reason that we must always search for and surmise it; and it must always be beneficial, and can never be harmful, to direct our investigations into nature in accordance with this principle. (CPR 568)

‘To anyone who asks: “Do you believe in God?” we should reply in strictly Kantian or Schreberian terms: “Of course, but only as the master of the disjunctive syllogism...”’[32]  Eliding Kant and his schizophrenic compatriot Judge Schreber is characteristic of Deleuze-Guattari’s happy hostility towards Kant. Crucial to this is the attempt not so much to overthrow or dismantle his system, but to willingly take it onboard as the account of Occidental rationality it claims to be — yet at the same time, opening up its underside, bringing to the fore that which it excludes. In a paper appended to The Logic of Sense, Deleuze draws again on Klossowski to make this explicit.[33] His refiguration of the ‘philosophical Christian God’, defined as Omnitudo realitatis,

has no other sense than that of founding this treatment of the disjunctive syllogism, since distributive unity does not allow us to conclude that his Idea represents a collective or singular unity of a being in itself which would be represented by the Idea. In Kant, therefore, we see that God is revealed as the master of the disjunctive syllogism only inasmuch as the disjunction is tied to exclusions in the reality which is derived from it, and thus to a ­negative and limitative use (LS 296).

Here we return to the third synthesis of time, in its illegitimate (i.e. ‘negative and limitative’) use. To this God of exclusions, of the either/or of identity, Deleuze-Klossowski oppose the Antichrist of inclusions, of the ‘either...or...or...’, where everything (philosopher and pig, criminal and saint alike) must pass through every position in the eternal return of return. Instead of everything resolving into its right and proper identity, the same for all time (thus subjugating difference to the Same), reality becomes an ever-open field of problems or problem-fields. The disjunctions of the Kantian God have not gone away, but the idea of an originary reality has — and the point is, we are well shot of it. Rather than being the sludgy, indifferent morass that Kant worried about, the order of the Antichrist is infinitely more finely differentiated.

The disjunction is always a disjunction [but] Rather than signifying that a certain number of predicates are excluded from a thing in virtue of the identity of the corresponding concept, the disjunction now signifies that every thing is opened up to the infinity of predicates through which it passes, on the condition that it lose its identity as concept and as self (LS 296).

This is Eternal Return as principle of selection; what must be affirmed is change, transformation and difference, i.e. all things, everything, considered not as a distributive unity but as an infinitely diverse in-finity. What is necessarily destroyed in this process are the exclusions and limits that belong to representation, of the idea that transcendental of self, world and God.

1.9 Immanence of Criteria

The debt of AntiOedipus to Kantian critique is huge. As Deleuze-Guattari put it,

In what he termed the critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as appeared in metaphysics. In like fashion, we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysics — its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution — this time materialist — can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis  (AO 75).

In this section I will summarise the appearance of the three syntheses in AntiOedipus, not so much to focus on what they are ostensibly presented in relation to (namely, the tired myths of psychoanalysis), but rather by way of explaining why the disjunctive synthesis has been seemingly demoted to second place, apparently superseded in importance by the conjunctive synthesis.

The connective synthesis of AntiOedipus takes us to the visceral flows of the machinic unconscious, a diabolical world of connections, of flows and their interruptions: ‘It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks’ (AO 1); the ‘larvae and loathsome worms’ (AO 9), the ‘fields of anuses’ and barrels of rats, the ‘amniotic fluid, spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, or urine’ (AO 70).   But under the metaphysics of Oedipus, these impersonal, non-specific flows, so-called ‘partial objects’ that do not lack a wholeness (precisely because they are not already whole), are taken as always already subject to the triangulation of ‘mommy-daddy-me’: ‘a definable and differentiable ego in relation to paternal images serving as co-ordinates (mother, father)’ (AO 70). Oedipus, as a regulative ideal, tells us what we are not allowed to do (i.e. identify with either parent too much and risk killing one and sleeping with the other — or any of the endless range of symbolic equivalents of these acts) — and then assumes for all time that this is all we wanted to do in the first place. ‘In reality, global persons — even the very form of persons — do not exist prior to the prohibitions that weigh on them and constitute them’ (AO 70), write Deleuze-Guattari, giving us some insight into a possible response to the Kantian monolith. As with Oedipus, the extent to which we are governed by the Kantian model is the extent to which we are constituted by its prohibitions. The Deleuze-Guattarian schizo is content to get on with other things. Since he does not recognise himself either in Oedipus or in the transcendental doctrine of the soul — he would not even recognise himself in a bloody mirror — they have no power over him.

The disjunctive synthesis as figured in its Oedipal use as restrictive or exclusive (and in full accord with the Order of God) is the mechanism whereby you are determined in terms of successful avoidance of or collapse into one of the three ‘familial neuroses’: ‘the phobic person can no longer be sure whether he is parent or child; the obsessed person, whether he is dead or alive; the hysterical person, whether he is a man or a woman’ (AO 75). Here is the Oedipal equivalent of the horrors of undifferentiation, that await anyone who fails to fall on one side of the disjunction or the other — pointing to the bigger and nastier disjunction that underlies all the others, the ‘either/or OR ELSE!’ that keeps us back from the brink of supposedly inevitable catatonic, abyssal undifferentiation. The Deleuze-Guattarian schizo, in contrast, escapes both undifferentiation and exclusive disjunction:

He does not reduce two contraries to an identity of the same; he affirms their distance as that which relates the two as different. He does not confine himself inside contradictions; on the contrary, he opens out and, like a spore case inflated with spores, releases them as so many singularities that he had improperly shut off (AO 77).

The conjunctive synthesis is characterised as the consumption of intensive quantities (affects), setting the ‘I feel’ as prior to the ‘I see, I hear’ of hallucination and the ‘I think’ of delirium. (This ‘I feel’ involves not the I of the subject, but a fleeting I of presubjective sensibility, the encounter that begets thought: ‘In effect, the intensive or difference in intensity is at once both the object of the encounter and the object to which the encounter raises sensibility’ (DR 145).) The conjunctive synthesis sees two versions of the realisation, ‘So it’s me!’  In psychoanalysis, this is the recognition of the self in the mythical form of Oedipus. Everything — all familial, racial, political conflicts and alliances, all the states through which we pass — has supposedly been shown to relate to the name of the Father. For the schizo, this is not identification once and for all but the investment in a series of masks, of simulacra, with no one true identity being formed or revealed, and if it has anything to do with the Father it has as much to do with every other relation any of us are engaged in:

...everything commingles in these intense becomings, passages and migrations — all the drift that ascends and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical designations, even miscellaneous news items. (I feel that) I am becoming God, I am becoming woman, I was Joan of Arc and I am Heliogabalus and the Great Mongol, I am a Chinaman, a redskin, a Templar, I was my father and I was my son (AO 84-85).[34]

1.10 Concluding Remarks: Fourth Person Singular

The problem that was posed at the end of Section 1.5 was how to relate the uses of notions of synthesis found in different moments of Deleuze/Deleuze-Guattari, and my provisional answer is as follows. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition and the three syntheses of desiring-production in AntiOedipus; instead, tendrils run back and forth between the two series in a movement of mutual complication. What is crucial in both series is the distinction between the transcendent or ‘illegitimate’ uses (illegitimate from the point of view of the machinic unconscious, and unable to withstand the Eternal Return of Return) and their immanent, legitimate or schizophrenic uses. The three syntheses of time combine to shatter representation; at least on the level of transcendental philosophy (thereby challenging certain strains of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, psychoanalysis, linguistics and many other disciplines); while the three syntheses of desiring-production build on this to initiate a full-blown positive pragmatics under the (admittedly problematic) name of schizophrenia. However:

It is not a question of opposing to the dogmatic image of thought another image borrowed, for example, from schizophrenia, but rather of remembering that schizophrenia is not only a human fact but also a possibility for thought — one, moreover, which can only be revealed as such through the abolition of that image (DR 148).

We have seen the abolition of that image both through the three syntheses of time, and the three syntheses of desiring-production. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze-Guattari reappraise what we have called true and false problems (or legitimate and illegitimate syntheses) in terms of stratification: the field of the true problem is the Plane of Consistency, false problems (representation, recognition) are the illusions of the strata (though nonetheless pernicious for being illusory). In the next chapter, through an engagement with Judge Schreber, we explore the interplay between the two sides of the strata (content and expression) and movements between the strata and the Plane.

The possibility that has been repeatedly raised in this chapter was that we can get by without representation, without identity. These themselves are, as I have shown, dependent on the unmediated immanence of the contractions of our larval selves, the preindividual singularities, intensive quantities, partial objects or desiring-machines that comprise the zone of intensity or difference in itself, or the ‘fourth person singular’ (LS 141).[35]  Fourth person because it is prior even to the They, way before You and knows nothing of the I think or I perceive of representation, but only a flowing, intensive, presubjective ‘I feel’ — which if we are to go along with Deleuze’s relentless optimism on this point, can never do anything but affirm, to ‘sing the glory’ not of God, but ‘of the heavens, the goddesses and gods’ (DR 75) which are at once the demons, nerves-rays or breaths-spirits of the Order of the Antichrist.

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